Yacht Summer Song for sale

Simon on Summer Song a few years ago

Selling Summer Song. I’ve been putting it off. Procrastinating for months, but here goes....

For sale in Greece - Yacht Summer Song Snapdragon 27 sailing yacht with possibility of local mooring in Corfu. Length 8.28m, 27’2”. Beam 2.59m, 8’6”. Tonnage 7.5. Draft 1.40m, 2’9”. Bilge keels. Roller reefing foresail. Reefing cringes on mainsail. GRP construction. 5/6 berths. Full inventory. Reconditioned 16hp Yanmar diesel auxiliary engine. Registered Poole UK. Certificate of British Registry SSR01977.  Third party insured to Oct 2018. New 2m inflatable tender.
Corfu is a beautiful island, famous for sailing holidays and friendly weather, lying a few nautical miles from mainland Greece, both shores dotted with safe harbours, coves and beaches, many with jetties for tavernas. Summer Song is a sturdy seaworthy boat, sailed from England to Mediterranean Spain, to Turkey and back to Ionian Greece. She has given her present and previous owner, and their families, much enjoyment. ‘Summer Song’ can be seen almost any time by arrangement.  €4,990 ONO (please no time wasters) or part-exchange, for smaller yacht, to suit my age. Contacts: Simon  07806 816730 simon@baddeley.be or Dave 0030 6994895948 daveincorfu@gmail.com

How did we come by this boat? 12 years ago, our daughter, Amy, sitting at our kitchen table in Birmingham, drew our attention to an ad on eBay for Summer Song. I phoned the owner in Corfu. 
Pauline answered “Hullo?”

“Hullo. I’m Simon phoning from UK. We’ve seen your ad. Can I ask why you want to sell your boat?”

“I don’t”

“Oh?”

“It’s my husband, Norman”

After brief further enquiries, I clicked on ‘Buy now’.

Now I’ve arrived at a decision for someone else to make about Summer Song's future

Simon and Lin on Summer Song

Our grandson Oliver sailing to Pirate Island

Summer Song's interior - photo taken yesterday - 11 May 2018

Basic diagram of Snapdragon 27. We don't carry a spinnaker though

The Youtube clip is of Lin and I and friends on Summer Song up against a typical katabatic headwind on a summer afternoon. We had to motor-sail to make any progress. It was then I decided to buy and install a reconditioned and more powerful engine. 

Moored at Agni, Corfu

Reconditioned engine

Out of the water for repairs and antifouling two years ago

'The cold outside'

"Welcome home" said Mark over my phone "A beer at Piatsa?"

It was long before the film of Zorba the Greek, a few weeks before Easter 1957 - ours had been on April 8th (I checked on Google). Greeks held theirs on April 21 that year. I was 16. By the time my train got to Larissa, it was hours after midnight. I was half-asleep; a compartment to myself – the seventh day of a rail journey from London via Paris and Venice where I’d spent two days in an elated stupor breathing the smell of damp paving.
Abruptly the door of the compartment was slid open. A wedding guest party surrounded me, chatting, gesturing, drinking. Vexed by their thoughtless invasion of my space I signalled them to quieten down “pleease!”.
Used to exercising weight, tutored to being in authority, I probably missed an initial hint of displeasure across the carriage of this Greek train on Greek soil. I do recall their amusement. There was the offer of a drink (tsiporo?) and gestured encouragement to join in. Surrounded  by happy laughter, not mockery, I turned, irritated, towards the darkness beyond the steamed window of the train rumbling down to Athens.  There, at dawn, on a low platform, the Greek side of my family awaited with joyous greetings, and many disturbing hugs and kisses. Through a tiny window from the loo of yia-yia's flat in Kolonaki I saw the Parthenon - no longer the familiar schoolbook illustration, the real place!
Five years later I was with a friend. We’d sailed on a small boat from England drifting ahead through August heat for landfall. After a swift reach from Sicily. sunrise on the third day, the good wind abandoned our small vessel on a limpid mirror. Fifty years later the moment remains as dreamlike as at the time; glimpsing the forms of land melded to white sky and coppery sea - a way to the mainland of Greece between Cephalonia and Zakinthos into the Gulf of Patras, 170 miles from Piraeus and the city to which I’d determined to return.
I spent my first twenty five years in a fog of schooled and inherited insensibility, almost impervious to the wisdom of generous parents – English and Greek - who probably knew that, as perhaps for them, only time would tell me.
In 1968 I was with one side of my family again. They’d flown on to Greece. My dad wanted a car while we were there. Over four days I drove his small Hillman through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy and by ferry to Greece (Patras? Igoumenitsa?) sleeping one night in a field above the sea, a few yards from a narrow road. From Piraeus I took another ferry to join the Greek side of my family in Aegina. We returned to Athens for a day, where, with my diplomatic family, I attended a house party somewhere near Vouliagmeni, hosted by a man whose bald head I glimpsed for a few seconds, Colonel Stylianos Pattakos
It was only in Detroit, married a year later, meeting American Greeks - and Greek exiles from the Junta - that I grasped the discomforting notion of ‘sides’, of Greece as a polity, of animosities and moral positions, words and facts and opinions that left the paper-fragranced sentences of my superlative education – in one ear as others' thoughts, out of my mouth as words for conversation and essays, and out of the other ear unedited.
Though it seems so in memory, I could not have been quite that one-dimensional, except perhaps at my mother’s breast. My CV, by the time I was thirty, was enough to ease me into academia where, mostly fuddled, time did begin at last to tell and I began to listen.
It was 25 years before I came to Greece again.

Flying to Greece - Amy, Linda, Richard

Standing in the cockpit of our Airbus (full of screens and no joystick) where passengers could – pre-9/11 – still be invited for a pilot’s glimpse of the world ahead, I stood behind my family (now my second marriage), as with Linda, Richard and Amy, we flew high over the border of Greece; able to see to port the glow of Thessaloniki; ahead the greater glow of Athens; to starboard a moonlit Ionian Sea and far below, in inky blackness, clusters of tiny glittering diamonds - villages in the foothills of the Pindos.
“Children! There’s Greece”
In the dim cabin tears welled from my eyes with the delight – and the idea – of sharing ‘my’ Greece with my wife and children. I could not speak for a moment.
Met by our relative’s driver we were swept into Athens towards Kifissia. My half-Greek half-brother and his family were with us. He too hadn't been back to Greece for a long time. Shopping malls flashed by; showrooms with glistening new cars behind picture windows, furniture shops displaying stainless steel and leather, fashion boutiques, a bright neon frieze.
“Amazing!” said George “It’s a modern European city”
I was presented with a Greece that was without the strange and magical difference that had struck me and fixed itself in my memory decades earlier. Air travel had taken away distance. All seemed lit by the familiar light of common day, modern, grown-up, no longer enchantable, respecting routine, far less dumb, a man who’d returned to meet the boy who several times had left Greece seduced by something that had been other and exotic.
I noticed blemishes – ugly architecture, urban rubbish. We enjoyed our holiday immensely. I was delighted and relieved my family liked this familiar Greece as much as I - even if not as I had first seen the place - climbing up to the Acropolis together tho’ by then the inside was fenced off to tourists, strolling in the Agora, taking the train about the city, driving through great mountain ranges of the Peloponnese via Sparta and Kalamata to Pylos, picking our way through the ruined fort of Methoni crumbling battlements and sudden chasms unhindered by health and safety warnings, sipping from the Pierian spring by the Roman temple of Corinth, where we plucked fresh figs, visiting islands in the Aegean.
Life went on. My dad died long ago. My mum, who’d divorced him years before then (hence his second marriage to an Athenian and my Greek family), remained the bridge to yet another country – the past, in which I’d not lived, an unknowable land of fantasy and invention, and the landscapes of the Highlands and its clear peat waters.

River Farnack in Strathnairn with Oscar

Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Κέρκυρα να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος...

We could talk about our separate experiences, my adventures as novel to her and hers to me.
My Greek stepmother Maria had, like this modern Greece, become part of an ordinary present, older, almost British, no longer part of the wondrous seduction of that distant land where I’d arrived by rail, sea and road so long ago.

Coming back to Greece - painted in 1970. Hung until she died above my mother's bed. Now I'm unsure where to put it.

I come aged 66 to the morning around our kitchen table in Handsworth. My beloved daughter, Amy, tells her mum she’s seen a yacht on a free mooring for sale in Corfu on ebay. I bought it, on an unwise impulse that brought Linda and I to Greece to buy a small house in the village of Ano Korakiana.
Beforehand, our very first evening in Corfu, hire car from the airport, having seen the boat and been disappointed but resigned to our purchase; considering the possibility of ‘making a list’ of things to be done, we went to an English bar on the cluttered strip-front of Ipsos, looking over the Corfu Sea to the bare mountains of Albania and Epirus. Our fellow customers were British. Notices, including our menu, were in English. In amiable company we had our first meal in Corfu – fish and chips with mushy peas; vinegar beside HP sauce. Above the bar a flat screen played desultorily watched news of the world delivered with loud familiar voices by familiar faces interspersed with pop and football. On shelves in a corner were popular paperbacks to be exchanged; below them a week-old British newspaper, headlining an event in the public life of a celebrity. We inhabited ‘modern times’.
No longer do I leave ‘here’ to arrive ‘there’, separated by poste restante mail and, in emergency, complicated phone calls by appointment. Here and there is now everywhere.
I can sample the 'other'; what is different, exotic, foreign but welcoming – what I experienced and enjoyed in Greece at 16 – I can take a cycle ride in Handsworth in my England and see and greet men and boys in djellabas leaving their mosques, women in black wearing veils over all but part of their face, Sikhs in turbans from their Gurdwaras, woolly hats in the national colours of Jamaica, dreadlocks, weave, ....

Soho Road, Handsworth

....Somalians, Eritreans, Kurds, Iraqis, Syrians escaping war and poverty in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, and, since EU enlargement, Poles, Roma from Rumania, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Turks, even Moldovans, also Christians from Vietnam, and, on our allotments, a Chinese family. On the Soho Road, a short walk from home, the few small supermarkets are outnumbered by the high street shops serving Handsworth’s bouillabaisse. Near home I overhear myriad languages and dialects, beginner’s English, Brummie accented.

Birmingham New Street

But since no-one would yet – or ever - consider Handsworth or its sibling inner suburbs encircling our city’s centre, a touristic, or even a gentrified destination unlike London's Brick Lane, here’s no threat to personal autonomy and human dignity as a result of visitors’ objectifications of local cultures; no more risk of having our encounters ‘commodified’ than in Anatolian Smyrna or 19th century Alexandria; no likelihood our place will be ‘spoiled’.
Here among my good neighbours...

On our street

...is crime, ill-health, mental illness, deprivation, disappointment, sadness and loss. Part of the population is transient, waiting, amid the wealth of successful immigrants planning to leave for new homes far from the centre. Here is village life in the city - a littered place of ill-repute where some strangers fear to visit - more so after dark - and indentured sociologists write semi-scanned policy papers for government. Where we’ve lived for forty years.
"Welcome home" said Mark over the phone to me in the village the afternoon of our arrival in Ano Korakiana.
I don’t think of Greece as a place where I have a second home, as might families of a certain prosperity and provenance. All over Handsworth are families of our imploded empire who make return visits to their natal villages – in Pakistan, Kashmir, the Punjab, the Caribbean, as also the villages and towns of Eastern Europe. We are nearer to them in our transhumance – returning home now and then.
Time to return to the pages of fairy stories? 'Once upon a time….there was a town, a little house, a great dark forest'

….I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost daybreak and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little café, whose glass doors were shut. The café reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because of the cold outside....

Warsan Shire ~ 'Home'
no one leaves home unlesshome is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Late October in the village

Dawn over the mainland - an October morning in Ano Korakiana

As the time to leave the village and return to the distant city grows closer I find myself playing down here; playing up there. It’s the same for those long departed swallows. As they assembled on village power lines beside their fledglings, emptied nests growing stale under tiled eaves of a village in Greece, twitching for the flight south; reversing the excitement of Easter’s arrival, fretting for a village in Africa.
 “You’ll like it”
 “Are we there yet?”
I’m balancing regret and anticipation; a slight time vacuum that matches this weather; poised between late summer and gentle autumn; sounds and smells evoking life as a planet in a universe of parents, their story my sun, sensations and images evoked by wood smoke, slight chill, misty evenings, lit windows into glimpsed interiors; the quiet of this village strewn along a mile of mountainside with its wide precise focus on the scrubbed mainland hills of Epirus. Here is a warmed space in which to be absorbed uninterrupted by clues to the present; so the click of burning wood in the stove is both now, and long ago, a reminder to feed the fire. I roam in time, occupied by beloved presences long gone from the earth, places past, still ineffaceable. So will we be for our children I hope - an indelible frieze. I’ve been employing my imagination on the recovery of Rock Cottage, assisted by Martin’s regularly forwarded pictures from Gloucestershire. He and Sandra and Adam have been travelling down to the Forest of Dean at weekends from their home near Worcester - equipped with first aid for our first second home, plus Jack and other helpers – ‘Team Ward’ Martin calls them. I’m nearly ready to imagine us being able to stay again in the Forest of Dean – but there’s tiling, painting, carpeting yet, and the hope that the problem of upstairs damp will be solved, by adding gutters, burning logs, clearing drains, living there…

Hi Simon. Paul examined the heating system today, re-filled and charged the system, and got it all up-and-running. The boiler has withstood the ravages of time and lack of use quite well. There is only one issue and this is some corrosion on the diverter valve and pipework.
He estimates the boiler is ten years old, and has a lifespan of 15 years. He estimates this corrosion will last the life of the boiler, and messing about with it at this stage in its life would only cause more problems.
I have been discussing the damp problems with Paul, and he has had similar problems with a cottage in Wales. After many surveys and so-call expert advice - most of the problems turned out to be condensation. I note the new windows have no trickle vents, and other than the chimney flue upstairs - there is no ventilation at all. When we got there this morning, the windows were steamed up on the inside !
I've opened all the windows one tiny gap, and left the heating on for the week, turned down to 15°C - so it will only come on at night. I'll see how it goes for just this week, and note any improvements. Talk more about this when I see you both next. Regards, Martin X

Adam mending the guttering

Sandra on the windows 

Martin's lit the fire to help dry the house ~ 'Team Ward' at work

There’s the allotment, plot 14 on the Victoria Jubilee, from which I’ve pledged these last years, I’ll supply vegetables for our next Christmas lunch. Winnie’s been sending reassuring pictures of well prepared soil, sprouting winter onions…

Plot 14 England (photo: Winnie Hall)

There’s walking and cycling on the canals with dog Oscar, who, while we’ve been away, has been shared between our neighbours and Amy. There’s a host of work to be done on the house in Handsworth; continuing work on the Jack Hargreaves archive sat in that slatternly lock-up on the Tyburn Road; see what Francis in London has done by way of further digitising film and tape, synchronising sound and image. Second day home – Monday after next – I’m giving an evening talk about the history of Handsworth Park to Barr and Aston Local History Society in Great Barr Memorial Hall. And there’ll be seeing the grandchildren again; familiar after an interval of just a fortnight since they were with us in Corfu...

Lin, Hannah, Amy, Oliver at Ipsos

... a fortnight since Guy and I went out on Summer Song; Dave our guardian.
“Let’s go to Lazaretto Λαζαρέτο”
“Where?”
“Gouvinon Island”
He was still puzzled.
“Execution Island”
I’m averse to the name. A cloud shadowed the mountains. We motored out of Ipsos into a calm sunlight sea. No chance to sail…
”Unless those two big clouds come together, then we might need Gouvia as a bolt hole” said Dave as we passed close by Cape Kommeno.
But the sun shone on us between them. The island came closer.

We slowed near the old jetty, took a second pass to avoid shallows, and went in nose first, Dave mooring us with a knot shoved into a slot between a pair of rough stones, our bow covered in fenders touching the water. The clouds moved across the sun.

I’d been here a over four years ago, expecting now to see the museum announced in 2007 completed; a place to tell the story behind the walls scarred by the impact of many bullets; serried ranks of crosses a few yards up a slope from the jetty; memorials for young men and women shot during the Civil War - bearing dates between 1947 and 1949.

A Museum of Medical History and National Reconciliation is to be built on the historic islet of Lazaretto, Corfu. The old leprosy hospital, which has been listed for preservation, is set for restoration and the surrounding area will be refurbished and made fully accessible to the public, according to a Corfu Municipality architectural study that has the approval of Deputy Environment Minister Stavros Kaloyiannis.[Long history of Corfu isle honoured with a Museum February 24, 2007]

But someone and something doesn’t want the history yet. Can’t tell it. Won't tell it. The Occupation executions perhaps yes, but not the fratricidal killings that came after. When I was here in May 2009, the new building looked smart, ready to be used for visits, lectures, exhibitions. The older buildings including the old and perfectly shaped small church, were readied for restoration, scaffolding erected, walls being stripped, some re-plastered. Now the whole place lay besmirched with neglect, mossed, mildewed, rusting, streaked with gutter dripping. In a clearing was a large stack of hardened sacks of cement, paper peeled.

“There’s a €1000 of cement gone to waste there” said Dave.
"It could have been stored under cover surely?"
The notice I’d seen before showed the starred Euro-symbol and the amount dedicated to creating this memorial - €314,000
“That’s gone somewhere else” we muttered.
 “There’s some rain” I said, feeling speckles between the pines. Someone had been strimming and lopping recently or all would have been disappearing into the shrubs, saplings and trees decorating the rest of the island. There were also roughly squared boards bearing more names, listed without dates or other identification. We'd been going to sit and eat our sandwiches. Instead we headed back to Summer Song, passing another notice, the only one that speaks a little of what happened here.

“What a great place for a taverna!” said Dave “A proper jetty. You could have a to-and-fro ferryboat from Gouvia”
“Yes. An open air grill. Souvlaki  lamb, pork, kokoretsi, chicken breasts and legs and beer and wine” “It would be a cracker of a place”
"Singing, dancing..."
Remembering. Someone told us an old man they knew saw soldiers with rifles bringing prisoners to the harbour.
“Young men and women from the prison marched to the old port to board a boat to the island. They were shouting and singing as they walked!”
We got back on Summer Song and motored around the island before heading back to Gouvia Bay. Guy had phoned Amy.
“They’ll meet us at the jetty there in an hour”
The clouds passed as we closed the shore by the old Venetian shipyard, tied up beside the caïque moored there and strolled ashore as Lin drove up with Amy, Liz, Sophia, Hannah and Oliver. Dave had brought small life jackets, and fitted one to Oliver.
“We’ll meet you at Ipsos” said Amy.
Liz and Oliver came with us on Summer Song, clambering over the decks of the caïque to board the old yacht.

Summer Song leaving Gouvia Pier (photo: Linda Baddeley)

Oliver with his dad "What's that noise?"

With Oliver aboard the 'Boyhood of Raleigh' flashed in my mind...an image nursed in imagination since I was a boy, lived in my youth...the model ship, the arm pointing to the Spanish Main, so so long before I was - with thousands of others who need to know their history - grappling with post-colonialism.

A breeze got up off Kommeno again. For a quiet half hour, before calm returned, we sailed under the foresail, Liz at the helm. Moored again in Ipsos, tidying the boat, turning the handle that pumps grease into the stern gland, I thanked Dave
 “That was such good outing. Your reassurance made it so”
Oliver had spent most of our return journey exploring inside the cabin, observing as we approached Ipsos “Look at the lovely water” A boy's memory of the sea.

Meeting up at the harbour in Ipsos

*** *** ***
The Co-op is gearing up for this winter's olives. On a walk with the family, we dropped in on Sebastiano Metallinos, and his helper Harry, overseeing the oil processing machinery. Sebastiano gave Amy and Liz a tour of the plant from the delivery of olives, twigs and leaves, to the cleaning washing hopper, to the oil tap at the other end

One of the two olive oil centrifuges in the village co-op

Douglas Adams would have used the name of a town, Roget might have a clue for me, and the Germans, a suitable compound adjective to describe the bitter-sweet experience of having the house to ourselves, now Liz, Sophia, Guy, Amy, Oliver and little Hannah have flown back to England. They left - eventually - in wet grey weather, which is always better, except the plane that should have taken them home was struck by lightning somewhere on its approach to Kapodistria. It landed with everyone safe, but sat on the runway effectively unusable, while Easyjet announced they were sending a replacement jet, which would mean everyone waiting in the airport for the rest of the day. (Other travellers fared worse). I was grandpa childminder helping with the children until at last they trooped into security just before nine in the evening and I headed back to Ano Korakiana in the dark.

"I don't see how they can get any compensation" said Lin later, reading the cancellation and delay leaflet everyone had been been given at the airport "It's hardly Easyjet's fault if they get struck by lightning"
“When we get home…”
“Home?” I’m of two minds on this, at least two, thinking of a way to return in January when the internet – outside the popular months for travel - becomes useless and Lin and I rely on local knowledge.
“Do you know anyone who knows about travelling to and from Albania?” I asked Pastor Miltiades at the Lighthouse.
“I do”
“Wow! We’d like to go to Dubrovnik, perhaps Split and on to Albania without having to go back to Italy first”
The crow flight from the bottom of Croatia to the top of Albania is hardly 100 kilometres. No coach or ferry is promoted between the countries…
“Not that we can see”
“From Dubrovnik there is a coach or ferry to Durrës. From Durrës - in Greek we call it Dyrrhachion Δυρράχιον - you take a coach to Saranda” said Pastor Militiades
“Right opposite us!”
“From Saranda you take a ferry direct to Corfu. I will give you some places to stay in Albania next Saturday”
So then I’m trying to work out how to get to Dubrovnik for under the ridiculous £1000 price three change 12 hour flights thrown up by flightscanners.
“They’re useless for economy flights in Europe.” says Lin “They’re for cheap tickets to Thailand, Hawaii, Australia…I’ll do some searching on Ryanair, Easyjet, Whizzair”
Meantime I’m phoning Viamare in London for their access to winter ferry routes to Croatia from Italy.
Says Alina “Bari-Dubrovnik? Wait a mo’…checks her computer...they start in April”
“Anything in January?”
“Wait a mo’…Ancona-Split. I’ll email details”

Dear Mr Baddeley. Further to our telephone conversation with regards to a ferry crossing from Italy to Croatia or Albania. Please note that I can offer a ferry crossing from Ancona – Split , Jan 2015 however time table is still not available, it should be available in mid/end November 2014. At the moment I can offer: Bari-Durrës – 10 Jan 15 – 23:00 arrives 08:00
2 passengers in seats = €116
2 passengers in 2 bed inside cabin with shower and wc = €168
Please note the ferry runs every day at 23.00
Best regards. Alina. Viamare Ltd. Reservations Dept.

***** *****
Kobanê...Just when the politicians and military of the West have learned about fighting assymetric war they find themselves confronting a force claiming aspirations to fighting symmetrically in the style of the warrior prophet. Kobani  an undoubted place, a concept avoided in asymmetric conflict, is being fought over these last weeks. I suspect the 'West', working the old military option of patience - if only they'd done this after 9/11 - will, with the learning of the last 10 years, out-manoeuvre this unwieldy occupation of ravaged middle eastern deserts. As for the Kurdish diaspora - this must be a moment in history.
*** ***
By incomparable Tolstoy’s first line in Anna Karenina, his response to Madame Bovary perhaps, we ought, in order to be interesting, to be less than fully happy. Yet to avoid too much derivative plotting, clichés even, I wouldn’t want to paint a picture of enviable harmony masking an emerging tale of depravity…(from the prompt box – frantic rotations of fingers and a finger slashing the throat)
No no, seriously tho’, don’t bloody do those fake gaping yawns, you know how real writers can compress time; painters define foliage with hardly two deft strokes or composers hit a three note phrase that says it all…
The trouble with all this is that I try to agree with my stepfather, a master of the television anecdote. He didn’t think you should ever take your audience behind the proscenium; “Don’t share the tricks of the trade”…
I suspect that these last few weeks will show up on our tree rings, or whatever Lysenko projected was the physiological medium by which experience attached itself to genes, as a time of richly harvested joys. Yet didn’t Tolstoy also show that his hero Levin – same novel – in even his happiest moments contemplated suicide. It’s something about mixing; an alchemy in which grown-up joy is the more real through being spiced with homoeopathic dilutions of misery, depravity, despair, extinction and failure. These are dreams I have, waking to find myself among my children, beside my wife, in my home bed. Koestler implied it with the image of a walled cottage garden orchestrating an array of gentle perfumes and colours, sounds and lovely things to touch and taste, surrounded, if you lift your gaze, by a panorama of barbed wire, where Homer’s rosy fingered dawn is become a blood streamed firmament.  Wasn’t I right to cry out with revulsion when Uncle Mac on Children’s Hour sang about the bells with that finale...

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head
Chip chop chip chop - the last man's dead.

...or Strewwelpeter’s to little Conrad suck-a-thumb … ‘he comes he comes’ –  the big red scissor man.

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out - Oh! Oh! Oh!
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast;
That both his thumbs are off at last.

...just little red stumps - in that famous cautionary children’s book.
“Oh! The crying and the wailing of children!” I smiled in mock despair to our neighbours Vasiliki and Lefteri and family around their table for Sunday lunch. Foti smiled at me
“You need King Herod” he muttered with a grin.
I missed his meaning for a moment
“Massacre of the Innocents!” said Natasha to cries of horrified laughter. Ah yes indeed.

The children in Corfu 

*** ***
A new shop - for goods, coffee and drinks - has opened in the village's last kafeneon καφενείου Κεφαλλωνίτη. Crescendo run by Spiro and his brother Dimitri Vlachos, opened with the blessing of Pappa Kostas last week...

Εγκαίνια στο "Κρεσεντο" - 26/10/14

Χθες, παραμονή του Αγίου Δημητρίου, το σούρουπο, πραγματοποιήθηκαν τα εγκαίνια ενός νέου καταστήματος στο χωριό, από δύο νέους ανθρώπους, τα αδέλφια Σπύρο και Δημήτρη Βλάχο. Το κατάστημα άνοιξε στο χώρο του πρώην «καφενείου Κεφαλλωνίτη» επί του κεντρικού δρόμου, έναντι του Δημοτικού Σχολείου του χωριού και είναι πλέον πανέτοιμο να προσφέρει τρόφιμα, καφέ και γλυκά, στον ειδικά διαρρυθμισμένο χώρο του. Τα εγκαίνια έγιναν με τον συνηθισμένο για την περίσταση αγιασμό από τον παπα-Κώστα, με την παρουσία της οικογένειας των ιδιοκτητών, φιλικών τους προσώπων και αρκετών χωριανών, ενώ μπροστά από την είσοδο υπήρχε μπουφές με κεράσματα. Ευχόμαστε καλές δουλειές…και προπάντων με «κρεσέντο»!!!

At last

Monday afternoon into the evening our sky was covered with high and unfamiliar mackerel clouds. On Wednesday morning the weather at last changed. Abruptly cold drinks are nectar; shirt sleeves sensible.

Insects and spiders are out, and everywhere.

This morning after I'd hung the washing I drove down to the harbour at Ipsos and took Summer Song out, to rehearse the new engine - with a phone call to Dave to ensure exact procedure - and once outside the harbour turned off the engine and using just the jib jaunted up and down the Ipsos shore, before returning and docking without incident. The gadgetry for furling the main from the cockpit has yet to be installed but I want to get used to sailing again - and I want to become accustomed to our boat's renewed engine. I'm pleased enough to do a selfie of a selfie.

Yet just before I went out I spotted the crew of the old Westerly with whom I shared the harbour. I introduced myself; Shauna and Russell. ...

They'd heard of me via Cinty and Paul who'd told me the tale how this 22' gunter-rigged twin keel GRP yacht came to be in Ipsos, after being sailed to Greece from England. Russell generously invited me on board.
"No no, you're busy"
"No come on. Really."
I leaned forward to board and as I stepped onto her bow, I tripped - arse over tip; this on a boat I thought I knew in my sleep! I didn't hurt myself, and as for bruised esteem, I'm now too used to being an old fool on small boats. They make me feel my age more than anything. Russell had done a lovely restoration job on the little boat. She was as ship-shape as you could have asked. Denys Rayner, her designer, would have been so delighted to see how his first fibre glass creation has lasted the fifty years since she, and her sisters, were came off the Waterlooville production line in the early 1960s.

Jogging along off Ipsos

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Richard Pine, who we'll be seeing tomorrow in Perithia, has published a piece about Greece's recent local elections in the Irish Times:

On my terrace, the breeze lifts the olive leaves from green to silver; at night, the garden lit up by teeming fireflies, I hear the mating call of the skops owl. It’s difficult to think that upcoming local and European elections are causing heated debates just 200 metres up the lane at the village bar.
Greeks can be very argumentative. The raised voice and clenched fist are merely ways of saying, vehemently, “Sorry, I don’t agree with you” or “What kind of eejit are you?” Only in extremely divisive situations, such as led to the civil war in the 1940s or the military junta (1967-74) does it provoke violence. These days, there isn’t enough energy to drive an ideological buggy, let alone a war.
Actually, Greeks hardly care about the European side of it. But they have a greatly diminished voice in local affairs: in Corfu, where I live, the 13 municipalities were amalgamated, with a single mayor who doesn’t even know where our village is. The roads are so bad, we need a “pothole candidate”. So they care deeply about how they are represented locally.
The outcome of these elections will be a barometer of public opinion, and Prime Minister Antonis Samaras may decide not to go the full stretch to 2016.
At national level, Greeks’ disillusion with all political shades has been reflected by the parliamentarians themselves, sensing their own impotence as decision-makers, and leading to a fragmentation of the larger parties.
Since 2010, at least nine splinter parties have been formed, some by principled MPs who could no longer support the government, others by careerists who are far from principled. Very few have any hope of gaining the 3 per cent of the national vote which is the threshold to parliament.
In 2012, necessity threw together the traditional rivals, New Democracy (ND) and Pasok, into an unholy coalition: it started with a sizeable majority, which disaffection has reduced to a mere two seats, due to voting on a multi-purpose law forced through at the insistence of the troika. This law, much feared by vested interests, provides for deregulation of protected professions and increased efficiency and redundancies in the public service. The coalition’s “satisfaction” rating has sunk to 20%.
In a general election, the party with most elected MPs is awarded an extra 50 seats and is asked by the president to form a government. Opinion polls depend on who is calling the tune for the way they describe the political spectrum.
But in general terms, ND and the chief opposition, left-wing Syriza, are neck-and-neck on 20% to 21% apiece. If this held up in a general election, it would give the winner 60-63 seats, plus the 50-seat bonus, still 40 short of even the slimmest majority.
The issue would then focus on a coalition partner. Pasok, which for decades was regarded by many as embodying the postwar state, has sunk so low (less than 4%) that its chances of forming any coalition are negligible. Like Fianna Fáil, in similar circumstances, it is desperately trying to rethink its identity and its relationship to the people.
Until very recently, the fascist party, Golden Dawn (GD), was running in third place: at the height of its popularity, it had 12% of the vote, but its involvement in criminal activities (including murder and arson) and a report highlighting its infiltration of the army, police and judiciary, has seen it drop to 8%. The rise of the very new “Potami” (River) Party, on about 9%, seems to have pushed GD into fourth place.
Of the other new parties, only Independent Greeks (4%) and Democratic Left (which quit the coalition last year, and is now on 3%) are in the frame. “Burning Hot Greece” (I kid you not) and EPAM (United Peoples Front) are among those without a snowflake’s chance in hell.
Most voters are apprehensive that GD might hold the balance of power in a new parliament, without necessarily being in government. But they are equally aware that the highly principled and well-intentioned Potami, with what seem to be sensible, popular policies, is completely lacking in political experience. This may appeal to those who are fed up with the current politicians, but it is not a great recipe for pragmatic government.
The increasing European phenomenon of popular support for right-wing parties will not be entirely reflected in this month’s polls in Greece: there is an undercurrent of discontent with the present political spectrum, which would hope to see other methods of determining Greece’s return to stability, self-confidence and self-respect. Personally, I’d support the Firefly Party: it makes no promises, only comes out at night, and lives a mere two to three weeks.

Day after elections

I know that one of the things I'll want to ask Richard about is the report about Golden Dawn's infiltration of key Hellenic institutions. The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, a research foundation with a branch in Athens since October 2012, came out with a Greek authored report that mentioned the church, the army and the police and most troubling, the judiciary.

A detailed study into the intrusion of ultra-right ideology into four key state institutions in Greece has found that while there is an obvious problem in the military, police and Orthodox church, the issue is most problematic when it comes to the judiciary.
The report says that while the situation in all "four institutions is quite dangerous ... the hardest case is the Greek judiciary" because of its constitutional status and also because of the generally deeply conservative worldview of its members, which is reflected in many of their judgments.
"What we found out is that, of course such penetration exists in terms of ideology, but we are certain that you also have enclaves, where this ideology transforms the informal structure," the report's editor, Dimitris Christopoulos, associate professor of political science at Athens' Panteion University, told EnetEnglish.
He adds that the complex interrelations between right-wing extremism and the Orthodox church, police, army and justice "reveal the imperative need and remaining challenges to democratise the Greek state and society".

The report was published in Brussels in March 2014

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Our neighbour Katerina has an estancia near Skripero on which she keeps the chicken whose eggs she's given us on three recent occasions; small eggs, muddied with strong shells which break to reveal firm yokes. Yesterday morning I grated an onion and potato, cut small pieces of bacon. Fried them and added three eggs to make an omelette to die for. Sprinkled with parsley, Lin and I shared it for breakfast.