How the weather changes over Corfu

In the early hours I woke to the rumble of heavy rain, the house vibrating under the downpour, continuous lightning flickering through cracks in the shutters, thunder far and close from every direction. I jumped out of bed to close a window left open in the sitting room. Lin got up to to watch the storm. Back in bed, I relished listening, in the dark, to the noises around us – warm and safe. Now and then in the longer flashes I glimpsed Lin in her scarlet kimono gazing through the French windows, rain spattering the other side of the glass. One of my delights is to be safe in the midst of a storm. It may seem odd, but even at sea in rough weather, off-watch in one’s bunk, in a well-found vessel this is possible, the cradle rock of waves adding pleasure, and moments of apprehension caused by a breaking crest or harder gust calmed by confidence in crew and boat – thus do small seabirds ride out the tempest heads tucked beneath a wing. In the morning the sky was clear for a few hours; our veranda below the balcony almost entirely dry except for a patch where rain had driven in, fast drying under the sun. But during the morning rain clouds, born on the south wind, spread from the Trompetta Ridge to fill the sky, relentlessly surrounding the diminishing blue. This is, at first, odd. I should know how it works but I forget. The warm grey wet thundery weather appears to come from the north, from over the mountains behind us, taking over the blue weather from the south. In fact, quite the reverse. The wind blows warm from the south evaporating water from the sea, carrying it north, forming clouds as it rises over Trompetta. On the highest ridge these thicken, back up and spread, encompassing the sky. A southward advance of grey darker edged phalanxes encircles the blue; in the van a great reverse crescent, one wing advancing along the mainland shores of the Sea of Kerkyra, the other along the mountain cliffs of the island’s western coast, until this wide pincer movement has advanced to the whole southern horizon, covering the sky mottled grey.

It is strange gazing on this defeat of the blue to gaze up from the village at the rear ranks of so overwhelming an attack and see the clouds overhead drifting swiftly north – almost as if a victorious army were returning in triumph. It's easy to sidestep the 'water-cycle' we learned in primary school, and imagine animate conflict. It's even more interesting.

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In anticipation of soon receiving an electricity bill containing, not just the existing tax on our property, quite small relative to the charge for power, but a much higher emergency property tax introduced by the government, we’ve just taken a tape measure to our house. The electric company estimates our home’s footprint as 77 square metres. 

Our calculation this morning put this at 64.3 square metres, based on a length of 8.22m and a width of 7.55m, suggesting we’ll paying the new tax on 12.7 square metres we haven’t got. Stamatis at the shop says the charge in the village will be €3.50 a square metre – equalling an extra on our next electric bill of €270 on top of the cost of our electricity. I find it difficult to imagine such an increase being anything but impossible for some people to pay, even with concessions. 

[Back to the future: 18 Oct: Advice - don't appeal against the electric company's estimate of house area. It's based on traditional measures that might have shifted to our disadvantage if we sought re-assessment,  i.e. people used to live upstairs and keep their stock - chicken, sheep, donkey - downstairs.]

The ill-news is backed by constant stories in the newspapers of the world - typical of these 'Greece is slipping into the abyss' from a British resident in Athens...

But we are only at the start of this crisis. What will happen next year when unemployment doubles and people lose their homes? The Communist calls for revolution don’t look nearly as far-fetched as they did six months ago. While civil war doesn’t look likely, a return to the military days must be a possibility. If the Greek people reject their entire political system and the state falls apart, what will be left? The great danger is that the people are being pushed so far that the unthinkable becomes possible.

or from America, 'for Greeks the future is void'...

anger and helplessness dig deep in the Greek psyche. Joblessness is climbing and essential services such as health care and policing are losing resources. The crisis may pale beside the bloody conflict or poverty in Libya or Afghanistan, but the hardship is as much psychological as economic. It is the shock of undercut expectations, the loss of benefits and prospects once taken for granted as part of the European contract. The mood now resembles the plot of "Groundhog Day," a 1993 movie about a man who wakes up to the same day over and over again.

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Richard House sent details of the letter in the Daily Telegraph, 24th Sept '11, which I co-signed about the blighting of childhood in UK

SIR – Five years ago, your newspaper published a letter signed by more than 100 experts, arguing that children’s well-being and mental health were being adversely affected by modern technological and commercial culture. Since then, several high-profile reports on the state of childhood in Britain have agreed that our children are suffering from a relentless diet of "too much, too soon" – with UNICEF finding Britain to have the lowest levels of children’s well-being in the developed world, and Britain coming out near the top of international league tables on almost all indicators of teenage distress and disaffection.
Although parents are deeply concerned about this issue, the erosion of childhood in Britain has continued apace since 2006. Our children are subjected to increasing commercial pressures, they begin formal education earlier than the European norm, and they spend ever more time indoors with screen-based technology, rather than in outdoor activity.
The time has come to move from awareness to action. We call on all organisations and individuals concerned about the erosion of childhood to come together to achieve the following: public information campaigns about children’s developmental needs, what constitutes "quality childcare", and the dangers of a consumerist screen-based life-style; the establishment of a genuinely play-based curriculum in nurseries and primary schools up to the age of six, free from the downward pressure of formal learning, tests and targets; community-based initiatives to ensure that children’s outdoor play and connection to nature are encouraged, supported and resourced within every local neighbourhood, and the banning of all forms of marketing directed at children up to at least age seven.
It is everyone’s responsibility to challenge policy-making and cultural developments that entice children into growing up too quickly – and to protect their right to be healthy and joyful natural learners. Top-down, political approaches to change always have their limitations, no matter how well-intentioned. It is only by coming together as a unifying voice from the grass roots, therefore, that we can hope to interrupt the erosion of childhood, and find a more human way to nurture and empower all our children.  Yours etc., Dr Richard House, Department of Psychology, University of Roehampton (the Open Letter’s organiser)...and many more.

When I was a child - fishing on the Kennet at Woolhampton (sketch: Fritz Wegner)

Our letter make lots of sense but when it comes to how such ‘erosion’ might be halted I come to a halt. Part of what made my childhood special and indeed what other people of the same age share with me, is the great amount of time we seem to have had to ourselves, unsupervised, able to roam, explore, invent and take risks. Much of what was good - allowing for flawed memory - was unknown, secret, not determined by any theory of child rearing supported by government or parents. Imagine the field day the risk assessment folk would have with allowing today's children such freedom (but see this sensible stuff from the HSE), not to mention the protests of many parents at any public figure seeming to advocate policies that might allow it. To make sure I’m not varnishing my childhood with nostalgia; for 18 months in the late 40s, my mother having become single and wanting a career - demonstrating the doggedness needed by a woman to achieve that in those post-war days - entrusted me and my sister to what she believed was an idyllic country boarding school. Charles Dickens would have enjoyed naming the head of this benighted institution near Brimpton in Berkshire, but he really was called Mr.Hart. Many years later, in middle age, I did a little research into this school, Lindfield, and even visited the building - Hyde End - now an attractive private house, in which we lived - a place about which my 94 year old mum still feels guilt. I got in touch by phone with a local lad who’d been a day-boy at the same school in which Bay and I were boarders.
“Oh yes” he said recalling the place "Hart only beat the boarders.”
I did not suffer that much, but watched others. Possibly my parent was considered just a little too potentially influential. Such a school with such a head would, in today’s world, have been dealt with by the child-protection authorities quicker than Hart could raise his busy cane. In those immediate post-war days such schools and their staff enjoyed the same freedoms and rights to privacy our letter against the erosion of childhood suggests be restored to contemporary children. Dilemma! By way of a happy ending, I was rescued from that awful prep school and went to another that was like day to night in comparison, and which indeed allowed us, within a wisely structured syllabus (we planned our own lessons each day but had to include so many sessions doing the subjects we found trickiest like maths, Latin, English grammar, French) rather than just art and history and English literature) a liberal amount of free time to roam a large wooded estate near Handcross in Sussex, to be children in charge of our own adventures. No doubt in today’s litigious world this amount of freedom to risk life and limb climbing tall trees, building houses in them, roaming through rhodedendron undergrowth chasing predatory monsters (I played a man-eating tiger lurking in the brush in one adventure I’ve recalled just this moment) with sticks and other missiles, would be near impossible. I hope not.

Jackdaws are still my favourite birds. Of all the crows they seem most to enjoy being close to humans and Jim was a great pet. Until he flew off to mate he was my mate. I found him as a fledgling fallen from his nest unable to fly and he stayed around with me for about 6 months in 1951. My mum took this picture on a visiting weekend at my boarding school in Sussex - Ashfold. Jackdaws enjoy playing with shiny objects and other small household items, which gives them a reputation as thieves. My impression is that they are actually always checking out whether this or that trifle might be suitable for a nest. The Jackdaw mentality in humans refers to a tendency to collect trivia in the fruitless hope that all may come together to solve the meaning of life.

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I mentioned this in May. Carol, a lovely woman, kind and enterprising, asked me to mention again that at The Lighthouse - ὁ Φάρος - in Kontokali at its border with Gouvia, there's a big table top sale every Saturday from 1000 until 1300, soon to be extended until 1400. Upstairs there's soft drinks, tea, coffee, snacks, WiFi and computer games and a children's library and supervised play area. Local phone - 6982458157

On such a day as this

Round about now – before we go to England for fourteen weeks with the various tasks awaiting there – I start to preen my pinions for departure, thinking of pleasant things to compensate for the hurt of leaving the village. Seeing our children, being reunited with Oscar dog, getting to work on the allotment, cycling again (I could do it here but the time hasn’t seemed right), working on Central Handsworth Practical Care Project - next meeting 19 May - with Edmund and the others involved, rejoining the Friends of Black Patch Park, going to the Highlands, walking there and making more films of my mother’s memories, continuing the project to find more of my stepfather’s programmes, tending the garden in Handsworth….watching the days pass until our return to dear Ano Korakiana looms closer.
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I call my construction a 'Zorba table' with no slur on Hellenic joinery - which we recognise as second to none - but because this convergence of an old set of table legs we found deep in nettles and abandoned floor planks amid greenery below our garden, imitates Z’s enthusiasm for impulsive imperfect contrivance as well as being a souvenir of the a fine day, the only sunny day in an April fortnight fourteen years ago, when we enjoyed a picnic by the sea in Crete. It was in a location that had recognisably - for anyone who'd seen the film - been used by Cacoyannis and now overflowed with eponymous tributes – Zorba’s Hotel, Zorba’s Taverna, Zorba’s taxis, Zorba’s whatever. At that time of the year we had the shore to ourselves and found to our delight a sunburnt shack with a rickety veranda on which stood a whitened table rimed with sea salt and a set of chairs similarly aged and there, under a cloudless sky and a chilly sea sparkling on the pebble beach still littered with last year’s plastic waste Linda, myself and my mum enjoyed cheese, bread, olives, tomatoes (with salt) and, retsina (fake of course but with a hint of the old resin).
“Put your table where we need it in the garden” said Lin “Let the summer sun go to work on it.”
It's strange to think that in a few weeks I'll be off to the Highlands to distress a vanload of new Barbour jackets being paid a generous fee to hang them on local barbed wire fences where they can be elbowed by Highland cattle, beaten with birch twigs, bombarded with sheep dung and genuine Scottish mud, trailed through the braes, steeped in peaty water, left in the game larder with some well hung game from 12 August on, so that by next winter they can be worn with pride by families collecting their children from schools between Highgate, Blackheath and Kew.
** ** **
This morning the weather’s jocund. A brisk warm wind has the sea bustling with white tops, slamming unattended doors, rattling shutters, jostling our washing as we hung it out to dry.
“My knickers only need one peg, yours need two”
“I have pants”
“Same difference”
“No way. What’s sexier? Off with your pants, or off with your knickers?”
“Take off your kecks?”
“Your kecks?”
“That’s a northern word”
“Hm. I like it”

Contented as we are on shore, it would be a joy, on such a day as this, to set sail for a day enjoying a steady breeze, seeing the passing coast as we head for a place to eat, a shoreside taverna or a cove to picnic and swim, but we’ve neglected our boat Summersong; lost our enthusiasm for sailing her. I who prided myself on my seamanship, who once sailed smaller boats across oceans alone and with a crew, have grown older, more nervous of the sea than when I’d set out on my open 17 foot gaff cutter to explore the Solent. Lin, whose sailed with me here and, shortly after we met in the early 70s down the unfriendly north Devon coast to the Channel Islands, during a summer of gales and in swells that hid a fishing boat a hundred yards away, is less confident of my competence now than she was. I’m loth to delegate any responsibility for this sad circumstance to Summersong, a 27” sloop boat that’s brought such happy adventures to its previous owners – Norman and Pauline who’d spent a decade coast-hopping her from Spain to Greece and beyond - and which after we’d bought her impulsively on eBay, brought us here to live, to make new friends and know new and lovely places. A bad carpenter and so on. Summersong is a safe sturdy boat but she’s not in an ideal condition to be taken out on a tideless sea subject to calms, zephyrs and local squalls – her rig, though in good repair and renewed, not handy for swift reefing, her engine untrustworthy. Engines and I have not been friends on sailboats. I prefer to sail from mooring to mooring, wait for a breeze, lie to or run before strong weather, but my age, the need to moor stern or bow to, the long calms and the need when short waves blow up to motorsail to get home before nightfall on a day out with friends, makes a stronger more reliable engine than then the rusty old 9hp Yanmar in Summersong essential. Apart from being difficult to start, the engine’s so old now, she probably delivers under 5hp.
I mentioned this to Mark. He said “Why not let Ollie have a look?” and arranged for his friend and workmate to look at Summersong at her mooring.

I was a little shamed to have Ollie see our old boat in the condition she's in after we've left her unsailed for a year, but here he was, standing on our cabin sole, assessing prospects. Lin and I waited for a verdict – he being an Australian navy trained marine engineer working for one of the finest-run yacht charter businesses in Greece. It came – modestly presented – as music. Something could be done, given hull, sails and rigging were in good repair; not at once, as until winter O was totally preoccupied with his work. "This engine's seen it's best days"  We needed a new one - or a good second hand one - in the region of 16 to 18 hp. He’d install it, replace the stern gland and tidy up its electrics. He suggested we buy engine and spares in UK, possibly on ebay; have them shipped here; a Volvo Penta MD2020 or a Yanmar 2YM16
"There are easily available spares around here for both of those"
“So what’d this all cost…and what can we do and what can you do?”
O mentioned a rough figure. I looked to Lin. She nodded.
“How long would it take?”
“The whole job could be done in a day and a half.”
“Blimey!” Kerkyra kelpies at bay, we could have a serviceable Summersong by next spring.
*****
Along the edge of Corfu’s five kilometers of dual carriageway between a large T-junction at Tzavros and the city lies the linear concretion that almost invariably gathers along big roads for motorized traffic making it difficult to identify places along the coast with which we’ve now become familiar.  The visitor, in the season, leaving the city to head up the east coast of the island, is treated, often amid hurrying trucks, coaches and cars, to a magnificent vista of mountainous Epirus and the edge of more precipitous Albania – peaks whitecapped into April. Between the mainland and the island lies the sea of Kerkyra, broadening to the south where even on clear days the mainland disappears into hazy distance, narrowing to the Corfu Channel to the north, where hardly a mile of water separates the two – the foreign shore almost treeless, rising bare and scrubby with few buildings, the other sprouting houses vying for the view amid thick groves of olives and clusters of tall cypress trees, the spinach green of Corfu, subject for a philippic against bad building and corrupt planning.
Along this shore – sometimes nicknamed Corfu's 'Kensington' for its wealthy and English reputation, it is possible, when sailing, to detect the unfortunate aesthetic effects, not of over-popularity which is utterly understandable, but of ill-judged architecture. The green complexion of Corfu, like so much of the Mediterranean littoral, is the victim of an infection, often not visible from the shore, especially from the terraces that afford such coveted views. From the sea it is possible, as did Gulliver on the delicate skins of Brobdingnagian royalty, to see budding wens, pustulant cysts. The rocky land, which once grew olives, extrudes concrete, attached to scarred escarpments as new tracks for cars rip zig-zag amid wrenched olive trunks, and pretentious new walls encroach upon ancient rights of way. The ass that carried olives is replaced by the tracked hydraulic digger. These are not the finely wrought mansions and outhouses of the signorini – houses that long ago created their own genius loci, but like the homes of the nobles amid their estates they are built isolated from villages, in which people who want to enjoy Corfu, could find a hundred lovely houses but which in the minds of those who encroach on the islands greenery present insufficient opportunity for display, the parking of many cars and the digging of swimming pools – yes water-appropriating swimming pools on the sea girt gem of Corfu (Alan Barratt several years ago applied his inventiveness to finding a substitute for these chemically made baths that would allow a rich home to enjoy its own clear water). These suppurating Lopachkin constructions coarsen the landscape of Corfu as once its signorini exploited the island’s peasantry.  Callousness towards people becomes callousness toward land. These injustices are not separate. Memories, conscious and unconscious, of inferiority, humiliation and poverty inform the aspiration of new builders, who unable to do what the signorini could do by way of dominating their ancestors, have determined instead to dominate the rural landscape, gradually, but remorselessly, turning it into a tree lined suburb of isolated mountebank mansions owned by absentees.
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I don’t need to be reminded that ugly buildings don’t make ugly people - there's no connection. I’m from Birmingham for goodness sake. At Kontokali, where it blends with Gouvia there’s an unpromising peninsular of newish building between the old road that once connected separate villages, and the short motorway out of the city.

Here at number 24 on The National Road of Paleokastritsa, has been since this January, The Lighthouse, Ο Φάρος, a new community centre, its undistinguished front on the main road across from a Mercedes showroom, and its back on the old road. It’s financed and managed by the Greek Evangelical Church of Corfu, Πνευματικό Κέντρο, Ελληνυκής Εναγγελικής Εκκλησίας Κέρκυρας   – www.geccorfu.gr.  Carol Murphy would nowadays be described - probably not her preference - by that superflous compound, an ‘active citizen’. Among many other things she organizes table top sales at weekends which is how we’ve been coming across her since arriving in Corfu. She told us of The Lighthouse.

Carol Murphy at The Lighthouse

The other Saturday we visited a bazaar there. The church and its congregation including Carol have initiated an impressive new facility – providing open house to all faiths and – as Carol said “no faith too. All welcome.”  On two spacious floors the place is open mornings and afternoons all week except Sunday and Monday, with evenings reserved for events, which the Pastor, Miltiades Pantelios, Μιλτιάδες Παντελιός, told me would make the place self-financing.

Pastor Miltiades Pantelios

There’s a lecture room with audio-visuals which can also be a function room for exhibitions, meetings, seminars, parties and weddings. There’s a well furnished drop-in space with comfortable chairs, sofas and tables with WiFi and computer consoles with games, table tennis, a music player and children’s library with a serving area for coffee, tea, orange drinks and light snacks. There’s also a secure space for young parents and their children with a play area monitored with CCTV. We liked the filter coffee there, the lack of blaring musak allowing us to make phone calls and do our email and sit and chat with Carol and briefly with the Pastor. It’s a good place and these are pleasant good people with an especial concern for young people who may be at a loose end or indeed anyone seeking succour in this busy fragmented world. I hadn’t realised that the Greek Evangelic Church had been around so long, the first founded in Athens in 1858. The Corfu Ministry was started nearly 80 years ago by women. Under the leadership of John Boukis it grew and spread believing in the Nicene Creed but with no allegiances that maintain the old filioque disagreement that has so long separated Latin and Greek Christians welcoming all who are tired, disappointed and scared. The Pastor told me of the Church where he holds regular services at 1100 on Sundays in the city at 3 lakavou Polila Street near the seafront of Garitsa Bay, services in Greek with simultaneous translation.
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So the UK referendum on Alternative Voting has ended with a continued preference for the existing First-past-the-post system. Results. And see via Corfu Blues what Bagehot has to say.