Collecting the collection

John Rose, me, David and Jenny Knowles

I'm back in Birmingham with my step-father's films and tapes in the back of our transit van ready to be taken on to safe storage in the city centre. John, my neighbour in Handsworth, and I left for Plymouth at eight this morning. At Royal William Yard by the sea at Plymouth we met up with Jenny and David Knowles and immediately began trolleying the films and tapes of the Jack Hargreaves Collection from their long resting place on shelves in the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA) out of the building and into the transit van for the 200 mile journey home. David picked out boxes bearing his writing that he'd not seen for over twenty years - tapes from  Old Country, the series he did with Jack for Channel 4, successor to Out of Town. These he'll check over at his home in Hythe.

"The past is passing away in the English countryside at a rapidly accelerating speed. The change is amazing" said Jack towards the end of his life. The films he talks about in this clip were stored on shelves in the shed next to his home in Dorset. They are silent 16mm films, some going back to the early 1970s, all shot by his long-term cameraman, Stan Bréhaut. They were transferred from that shed at Raven Cottage after Jack's death in 1994 by his friend Nick Wright, who stored them in his own house for nearly a decade. When Nick moved home and no longer had room for the collection, he transferred the films to the archive at Plymouth. We collected them from there today - their cans somewhat rusty after so many years.

"This one's from 1974! "(photo: Dave Knowles)

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Friday 13th:  Richard Pine has just circulated his latest piece on Greece in the Irish Times - 'Greece undone by toxic blend of clientelism and corruption' - anticipating the Greek general election in early May, comparing the collusion of politicians and populace in the corruption of public life, in both Greece and Ireland - a reminder that "my friends, we all ate at the same table" "Τα φαγαμε ολοι Μαζί"

...In the build-up to the general election to be held in early May, the two major parties, Pasok and New Democracy, have fragmented, with eight or nine minor parties in the field, each of which (except the Communist Party) has a chance of featuring in what will almost certainly be a coalition government.
Defections from Pasok have led to the creation of Democratic Left and Social Pact, while New Democracy’s defectors have set up Democratic Alliance and Independent Greeks. Laos (the right-wing Popular Orthodox Rally) and Syriza (Radical Left Coalition) and the communists have largely been immune from this fragmentation. To these must be added National Unity League, founded last year by former army officers, and Golden Dawn, a group of self-professed anti-Semitic and xenophobic fascists.
Parallel to this has been the growth of illegal organisations, following the dispersal of 17 November, the terrorist group that dictated the rhythm of Greek political violence from 1975 until the arrest of its leaders in 2002. The successor was Revolutionary Struggle, which emerged in 2003, followed by the Sect of Revolutionaries (a splinter from the former) that assassinated a journalist in 2010.
Others are Urban Guerrilla War, Lambros Fountas Guerrilla Group, Revolutionary National Socialist Front and the Terrorist Guerrilla Group. By far the most active in recent times has been the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, which in 2010 sent a spate of letter bombs to foreign embassies and is suspected of the bomb that killed an aide to the law enforcement minister.
Leaving terrorism aside, Greece and Ireland have much in common. Fintan O’Toole’s assessment of the Mahon tribunal report (March 24th) rings horribly true to Greek ears. He portrays 'the great silence' of a complacent electorate* who allowed themselves to be fooled by politicians into 'passive collusion', while 'corruption affected every level' and 'undermined the rule of law'. Substitute Greek names for Irish, and you have the situation here: Greeks in general enjoy the same tolerance of bribery and clientelism.
Media commentators here continually refer to similar levels of corruption in public life, and the Greek people’s capacity to condone it....

*Fintan O’Toole: The really tough thing about the Mahon report is that it strongly implies that few of us were really that naïve. It suggests that the issue with corruption in Ireland is not innocence but wilful ignorance, not just wrongdoing but passive collusion. What happened was not belief in Bertie Ahern’s lies but something more subtle and more characteristic of Irish culture: a suspension of disbelief.
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Good Friday in Ano Korakiana...

...a rainy day of mourning; a re-enactment of the crucifixion across Greece. A picture of Christ is on the Epitaphio, its edges dressed with carnations. From the church, boys carry lowered standards, followed by villagers, the choir behind, along Democracy Street, everyone carrying candles. When the funeral procession is back in the church, people take carnations home.
...and a taste of what we're missing arriving late - The Liston in Corfu on Easter Saturday this time last year. Είναι όλοι τους εξαιρετικοί

"The past is passing away..."

'The past is passing away in the English countryside at a rapidly accelerating speed. The change is amazing'. 

My stepfather uses a visit to a farm sale, where a family that's lived in the same place for centuries is leaving their farm, selling their home to a market in which such places now change hands, on average, every seven years; selling off their agricultural equipment - old and new - to buyers who want them for museums, as garden and pub decoration. In an episode made over twenty years ago for the Southern Television series called Old Country, often using film from the earlier long running series Out of Town, JH shows some of the reels of 16mm film - now in the South West Film and Television Archive - on shelves in his shed that contain the record that he, and especially his cameraman Stan Bréhaut, were making of a rapidly disappearing social economy - a countryside that existed as he grew up but whose vestiges are now in archives, in museums, in the texts and illustrations of local historians and the memories of a passing generation.

Stan Bréhaut - I knew him

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Before I caught an afternoon train to Esher to work with Mark Palmer on a seminar for officers from Elmbridge Council I spent a morning on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments treading the damp and sticky earth with Edmund Branch and Chris Hryniuk his helper acting for the Central Handsworth Practical Care Project. As a local pensioner I was glad of their two hours' paid work carting a couple of tons of earth and stones to level up the foundations for the shed we're putting up on our plot. Getting that done before we fly to Venice, then ferry to Corfu is a weight off my mind.

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Mark's brother Paul, who also lives on Democracy Street in Ano Korakiana, has just sent me a link to a posting on the web about various developments including wind farms on Corfu that were agreed just before the old Corfu Demos was wound up at the end of 2010.
I struggle with opposing wind farms. In a few decades there will be a generation of young people who will say "you had the sun, the wind, the waves, and access to geothermal energy in the earth and you had damn near incontrovertible evidence that climate dislocation was being added to by human political choices to stick with fossil fuel and its toxic emissions, and yet you always found reasons to resist investment in renewables, constantly sabotaging innovation, continuing to resist the choices that had to be made and the experiments that could wean human economies off centuries of dependence on fossil fuel ripped from the earth. Why, grandfather, grandmother, did you do this when you were aware there was such a crisis? Why didn't you take up the challenge, so that even when an innovation was imperfect and possibly ill motivated you were coming up with better ideas to achieve sustainability, instead of standing obstinately against the changes so urgently needed?
Modern Barbati it is claimed will be spoiled by the proximity of wind turbines on the slopes above it, yet modern Barbati is one of the most depressing scars on the Corfiot landscape - a village without villagers. Furthermore if wind farms stop people building private homes in the middle of the island's remaining forest lowering the value of trespassing homes that should never have been built, I'll swop that loss for turbines, which, if well maintained, make nothing like the noise the story in this link claims. The noise from the fossil fuelled generators next to the two telecommunication aerials on the slopes above Ano Korakiana is greater -  breaking the quiet of the eastern edge of the village on windless nights.  We hear them on evening strolls in that direction. It's important that the arrival  of wind turbines should bring significant sums of money into surrounding villages for use by their communities, doing things that may encourage more people to buy, build and restore homes in existing villages rather than build their dreams amid desecrated olive groves. I watch the great turbine blades turning a mile off the Garbole Road on the heights above Strathnairn whenever I visit the Highlands. They look serene, magnificent and hopeful even as they feed a regular and generous stream of revenue into the coffers of the local community council.
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Working in Esher, thinking of Egypt

The feedback from the work with Elmbridge via SEEMP with Park Palmer has been excellent. Our approach had allowed for people new to government starting from scratch in grasping the particulkar dynamics of a political-management organisation, but as it was these were largely experienced and skilled at recognising the challenges of making a small democracy work well for its electorate in a complicated world.

Workscreen for a seminar on managing in a political environment