Work

Draining rainwater off the bottom of Plot 14

I'm up to the ears in a variety of things against a background - ominous - of weather that would have a sensible man laying planks for an ark. It’s not as if we are not now used to prolonged and relentless rain as in Jan and Feb in beloved Corfu, but there lies - almost stationary - across our latitudes such a massive swathe of rain-bearing cloud as to make us forget the shape of the sun and the colour blue. I’m counting our blessings that no home of ours is on a floodplain. It’s also good that our allotment, though not shaded by it, sits in the lee of a large sycamore, as well as on a good slope, into which, with a few digs of the mattock, rain puddles can be ditched off the plot. By some oddity of ground some plots on the same site are waterlogged. My problems are minor compared to others trying to grow food with so little sun. I even get quite cheery about my progress as a gardener, despite the onion fly and the climate change elephant lurking diffidently in every exchange about weather. Droll. Pornographic books are leading the New York Times best seller list, while there's deep prudery and self-censorship on the subject of man-made limate change - journalists, broadcasters, politicians - people who ought to know better - fearful of stirring the merchants of doubt.

Relationships that make government

East of London, I left the film I've made in Thurrock compressing, and cycled from my hotel - Formule1 - to find the muddy Thames, downstream of the Dartford Tunnel, just above Tilbury. I could see the river on my map, but the seawall was elusive.

The cycle routes on my map were lock-gated or just not there. I probed various roads heading south. The long trucks passing to and fro, in and out of broad concrete parks inside security gates, might have been under the guidance of robots. The landscape full of human activity seemed unpeopled. Wildflowers, grass, shrubs and low trees  pressed against sturdy security fences watched by roving cameras, in a soundscape of distant trains, planes and automobiles and a panorama of pylons, radio masts, chimneys, warehouses, flaking hoppers, silos dominated by the venting upperworks of Proctor and Gamble's vapourous refinery under which I spied a church tower approached by a private road.

I parked my bicycle and wandered through its graveyard, peered through the clear leaded windows into the restored interior.

St Clement's Church

I waved to a cyclist with earphone exiting the works. Friendly, as fellow cyclists in Leadville tend to be, pointed me to a footpath between nettles and elder. It wound for a hundred yards past little piles of urban drinking trash and boulders covered in graffiti to the edge of the Thames, and a vista of ruffled brown water at half-tide; about three more hours of ebb; already fifty bare yards of gripping anaerobic mud; shopping trollies embedded at intervals like lobster traps. A concrete slab footpath edged the harbour wall with iron steps - over which I carried my Brompton - leading round corners at intervals.

The footpath along the river that goes by Proctor & Gamble

I followed it for a mile. It began to rain. The path might have continued eastward but I turned inland on a narrow weedless path between a wall and fence that threaded back between factory land towards Grays, ending up in the car park of Morrisons from where I cycled three miles back along the uneven London Road, edged by small shops and dolls house terrace homes and pinch points until I came to Shampaan, sat down with Leigh Fermor's Mani picked up from the free shelves at Sally's in Ipsos, (Vikram Seth was too heavy for my bike pannier carrying filming gear) and ordered a delcious sequence of poppadoms and spices, a Cobra to quench my thirst, King Prawn Sag and stuffed paratha.
*** ***

Church Vale - 3 years ago. New houses fill the lower space

Wednesday morning. I collected the Handsworth Helping Hands van from the park compound to help dig over and plant a flower bed near us. Last Tuesday - 26 June - a group of us, Mike Tye, John Rose, Denise Forsythe, Lurleen Salmon, Linda and I  swept and cleared litter from the small triangle called Church Vale where Robert Road and Hutton Road meet Church Vale. The City Council sent along a big refuse truck and crew to pick up discarded furniture and building waste. In the Googlesat image there's a bare space in the lower part of the area where a pub was demolished some years ago. I struggled to reacll its name. The Dovedale was there one day, rubble the next; anything but 'a local' it had ceased to be the haunt of regulars long ago and went as far as I know, unregretted, since mainly used for drug transactions, not even trying the standard methods of advertising wide screen sport, karioki nights or a 'beer garden'. In its place seemed to spring up about half-a-dozen redbrick terrace houses with plastic doors and windows, at their end, facing the Vale, a 'flowerbed' soon thick with well rooted nettles, dock and rose bay willow.

Cleaning up in Church Vale

This familiar urban puzzle - ambiguous space - probably owned by the builder. He died on site; a heart attack during construction said a neighbour over the way - Stephen Lee. His largely absent son has so far allowed the nettles to thrive - good for butterflies and cover for the beercans tossed among them. Was this bed's existence a condition of the original planning permission; part of a general intention to keep a sense of Church Vale as a place? It would have taken a while to trace let alone chase someone to do the right thing, so we agreed at our meeting on 28th June to dig over the bed, remove the weed roots, and plant flowers and shrubs. Lin phoned and emailed around seeking offers of plants, digging a few from out own garden. Allen Broad of Birmingham Parks and Nurseries at the Park compound asked where I was off to this time with van and when I told him gave us a hundred Pelargoniums, loading them himself in the back of the van. They were a batch surplus to requirements from an order of thousands for the park. Our Pelargoniums, unlike the same perennial flowers in Corfu, can't survive the UK winter outdoors and must be dug up and greenhoused or they're effectively annuals but it was still a most welcome gift.

The rain, ever present, stopped for a while on Wednesday and we assembled with plants, tools and van to do our good work. We all know the potential futility -
"it'll be full of rubbish in a few weeks"
"People will steal the flowers"
"They'll just knock'em down"
and even "what's was wrong with the nettles? Kept people off, didn't it?"
We bantered back about searching for buried gold and did passersby want to pick up a spade and have a share of it. These chance remarks and thoughts passed like ripples. Several others passed by and raised their hands in palpable delight
"Good work, good work!"
We're old hands when it comes to doing the local citizen thing. You never give up. It helped, we reckoned, to have plenty of photos posted on the social web and a few poses with our local councillors, especially on this occasion Hendrina who stayed all along planting and tidying and chatting, so that we got to know her much better.
"I'm really getting to like Hendrina" said Lin later.
Waseem dropped by and chatted with me about progress on the drive to complete the S106A on the Victoria Jubilee Playing fields. He has Ghaz Hussein in the City Planning Department striving to give the matter impetus after years of delay.
"Adrian Goldberg is giving me a minute's air time on BBC WM" I said "It was going to be today but that lovely bloke Eric Sykes died mid-morning, so it'll be tomorrow."
We all went on about the weather.
"Do you remember blue? That shiny thing that used to hang in the sky; what was it called?"

With Councillors Waseem Zaffar and Hendrina Quinnen

We enjoyed ourselves. Rajinder Rattu dropped by to give moral support, suffering at the moment and unable to do physical work,
"I don't believe in anti-biotics. I'm letting it clear itself"
John did much digging, then headed off to a meeting to do with his Credit Union responsibilities; Steve Lee came out of his house to help place the flowers and shrubs. Steadily the bed was filled. Hendrina was sweeping the pavement, Lin and Mike digging in a few more plants. I was piling up roots and rubbish and laying our tools and gloves back in the van...and for a moment or two the sun came out.

E-mail from Lin on 6th July to City Waste Services Manager at our local depot:

Dear Nick. As you know, our organisation, Handsworth Helping Hands, did a street clean-up in the Church Vale Triangle area last week and were very appreciative of the help you arranged for us. This week we planted a raised bed along one side of the Triangle. The Triangle is now starting to look a little better than before.
The actual 'Church Vale' road leading to the Triangle, however, is still a terrible mess, with rubbish in the gutters, fly tipping on the pavement and black bags and green bags uncollected, probably having been put out on the wrong day. This road is a constant rubbish blackspot. I regularly walk along there, and find it demoralising and depressing.
As you know, the more rubbish there is, the more will probably be dumped. Would it be possible to consistently target Church Vale for extra cleaning for a while, and try to break the cycle? Also regular attention around the Triangle gutters by the street sweeper would be much appreciated.
The waste bins around the Triangle are well-used (often for bags of household waste, I suspect), but are often full to overflowing, with more bags of rubbish dumped around them.
There are four waste bins in the Triangle area, but none of them is on the side of the Triangle where the row of shops, including two take-aways and two shops selling confectionary, is the source of a lot of the street litter. Would it be possible for another waste bin to be located on the shop frontages area, where the pavement is very wide and there's plenty of space for one - or maybe even two?
Yesterday I walked through Church Vale accompanied by a friend from another area of Birmingham, and I have to say that I felt ashamed of the state of our streets. We would welcome any advice you can give on how we can assist you in encouraging residents to dispose of litter, household waste, bulky items and building waste in a responsible and appropriate manner. Perhaps you might be able to attend a meeting of our Committee at some time in the near future, to discuss what can be done?
Handsworth was once a very up-market area of the City of Birmingham. I hope you will be able to help us in our attempts to make Handsworth an area to be proud of once again. Yours sincerely, Linda Baddeley, Treasurer, Handsworth Helping Hands

Church Vale flowerbed by Handsworth Helping Hands

**** ****
The excellent journalist, Nick Malkoutzis blogger at Inside Greece, op-ed writer and deputy editor of Kathimerini - Greece's only daily newspaper in English, and writes a balanced piece 'Mythmakers and problem solvers' on how far the Republic is and is not working to restructure its economy, deploring the derogatory half-truths about what's being achieved:

...Greece has given the world abundant reasons for criticism both in the run-up to this crisis and in trying to deal with its fallout. It has failed, among other things, to close down superfluous public organizations, slash waste in the state sector, implement the liberalization of closed professions, reduce bureaucracy, speed up its justice system and overhaul its tax code. This, however, does not justify those who regularly give the impression that nothing is being done.

*** ***
I don't want the Euro to go. I want Europe to work. I want a solution to the insane crisis that has revolved around so-called rich bailing out so-called poor Eurozone nations, when, as seems obvious all involved depend on one another. We do not speak of Michigan, Ohio, Washington or Pennsylvania 'bailing-out' Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississipi or Alabama - to juxtapose some rich and poor states in the US. They have the Federal Reserve's control over the exchange rate of the US dollar. So we should move towards an assiduous recognition of states-rights within a united Europe. These events - from confederacy to federacy - occurred in America, though not without a terrible civil war. In Australia six separate self-governing colonies of Britain became the Federation of Australia - a peaceful but contested process that lasted decades. This statement, referring to decisions to be made by 9 July 2012, was issued from the EU Summit on 28th-29th June.

EURO AREA SUMMIT STATEMENT - Brussels 29 June 2012

• We affirm that it is imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns. The Commission will present Proposals on the basis of Article 127(6) for a single supervisory mechanism shortly. We ask the Council to consider these Proposals as a matter of urgency by the end of 2012. When an effective single supervisory mechanism is established, involving the ECB, for banks in the euro area the ESM could, following a regular decision, have the possibility to recapitalize banks directly. This would rely on appropriate conditionality, including compliance with state aid rules, which should be institution-specific, sector-specific or economy-wide and would be formalised in a Memorandum of Understanding. The Eurogroup will examine the situation of the Irish financial sector with the view of further improving the sustainability of the well-performing adjustment programme. Similar cases will be treated equally.
• We urge the rapid conclusion of the Memorandum of Understanding attached to the financial support to Spain for recapitalisation of its banking sector. We reaffirm that the financial assistance will be provided by the EFSF  (European Financial Stability Facility until the ESM becomes available, and that it will then be transferred to the ESM (European Stability Mechanism), without gaining seniority status.
• We affirm our strong commitment to do what is necessary to ensure the financial stability of the euro area, in particular by using the existing EFSF/ESM instruments in a flexible and efficient manner in order to stabilise markets for Member States respecting their Country Specific Recommendations and their other commitments including their respective timelines, under the European Semester, the Stability and Growth Pact and the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure. These conditions should be reflected in a Memorandum of Understanding. We welcome that the ECB has agreed to serve as an agent to EFSF/ESM in conducting market operations in an effective and efficient manner.
• We task the Eurogroup to implement these decisions by 9 July 2012.

**** ***
Jan Bowman came round on her electric bicycle to try to finish a portrait of Richard. Jan did one of me in return for a bicycle about a year ago - complicated exchange after Dhiaa had left me his bike on joining the government of Iraq. Richard's likeness has been eluding her. She thought having him in our kitchen amid the clutter might help.

Jan and Richard

Amy, Oliver and Guy came round for lunch. We left Jan and Richard indoors so's we could enjoy an interval of sun in the garden.

*** ***
In the afternoon I was on the allotment with Oscar, trimming grass verges, weeding and sowing some more onions. I sowed some beetroot, some carrot. Nearly everyone's onions have fallen to an insect that bores into the onion's heart. Mine cannot be unaffected.
A plot holder this afternoon told me
"I've thrown away all my onions. They look OK on the outside, but the onion fly goes right inside"
He told me the fly was also on the Victoria Jubilee last year. I'm wondering what can be done. Danny who helped me with sowing other plants a few weeks ago is suggesting nematodes. It may also be necessary to grow onions under fine mesh.
Aftab has sent me a circular for the event we're planning on the allotments...

‘Cultivation to Consumption’ 5 to 7pm - 19th July 2012 Come and enjoy freshly grown food by Victoria Jubilee Allotment members and get involved in preparing the food with ‘Aftab Rahman’ Director of Legacy and Chef (director) at Bay Leaf (www.bayleaf-restaurant.co.uk)

"I'm on the train"

Heading south to London and from Euston on via Kingsway, Aldwych, Strand, down Fleet Street over Farringdon up Cannon Street to St Paul's Cathedral.

From Monument I asked directions to Fenchurch Street Station, down a narrow street before Crutched Friars tucked below rhombic offices,  to take a train to Grays where I'm leading a session on navigating Political Space for senior managers at Thurrock Council, invitation - some months ago - of their CEO, Graham Farrant. I'll be teaching on Thurrock's Learning Campus, which sounds fine - indeed I'm really looking forward to it - but for the time spent, with knock-on effects - literally - obeying a technical manager's request that I have my presentation kit passed as safe, via a  Portable Appliance Test (PAT) as required by the legislation of specific relevance to electrical maintenance under the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974, the Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999, the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989, the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, 'which places a duty of care upon both the employer and the employee to ensure the safety of all persons using the work premises.' This includes the self employed - which I guess approximates to me though I'm actually at Thurrock this morning as a part-time visiting lecturer from Birmingham University. I'd guess that getting my laptop, its power cable, external hard-drive and external speakers tested - for free on campus by Roy at the Estates office - entailed about eight e-mails and as many phone calls over as many weeks with the most vexing problem arising when I borrowed Lin's car to make a swift journey to campus - I usually cycle - to squeeze in an appointment with Roy between another errand and someone bruised the skirt of Lin's bumper while I was parked, requiring remedial T-cutting and a some skilled splicing of bodywork by Guy and a few choice threats from Lin about 'ever borrowing my car again'. Anyway I've got little green stickers with a test date on all my kit, so - touch wood - I, and my students and all with whom I come into contact at Thurrock are - actuarially speaking a few percentage points freer of risk - in this uncertain world. Fingers crossed.
From Grays near the Thames I take trains back to London and onto Birmingham International where I plan to meet up with Richard to fly to Inverness, both of us uncertain as to whether the airspace between us and Scotland will allow us to fly this afternoon.

Fenchurch Street - what a beautiful railway station

*** ***
The morning at Gray's was a real pleasure. I had a generous introduction. An interested and involved and astute collection of local government managers explored ways of learning to work with an unpredictable political arrangement.

I began with the more abstract principles; touching on the default tension between bureaucracy and democracy, the conflict between members' and officers' roles that was too easily attributed to intransigent personalities, the subtle process of finding agency and poise at the conjunction of politics, management and professionalism; the wisdom required to negotiate the political-management overlap. People enjoyed the film I used to prompt discussion, making shrewd observations about how generalisations applied to the special personalities and political dynamic of this council.

**** ****
At last I'm reading Ivo Andrić's The Damned Yard and other stories, a present sent from Belgrade last Christmas by our friend Danica. Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina still echoes, and I've been saving up this collection. Aljo Kazaz, silk merchant of Travnik in central Bosnia when during the 18th and 19th centuries that city was the military centre of the Ottomans in the Balkans, finds himself the lone delegate of a group of fellow merchants who the night before, emboldened by drink and companionship had sworn to bring a complaint to the Vizier. In front of the guards at the Vizier's gate he begins in humiliation and fear to ingratiate himself with them. 'Dželalija's soldiers, hardened professional murderers, watched him with a smirk on their dull faces.' It's a small reminder of how it might be to live under occupation, and when out of curiosity, using the normal techniques, of the internet, I jump forward  170 years to a web group called soc.culture.croatia and find an account from the Croatian Information Centre for Collecting Documentation and Processing Data on the Liberation War, Opaticka 10, Zagreb, Croatia.

In the village of Batinska Rijeka, near Ljuban Dzelalija's abandoned house, four unidentified persons dressed in camouflage uniforms and armed with automatic guns with silencers intercepted and imprisoned eight civilian residents on May 11th, 1994, around 10:00 pm...

and as young Lula gazed into the darkness of a dry well, I peer into a seething archive of narratives, recriminations, evidence and counter evidence of human depravity, discovering the Final Report  of the Commission of Experts introduced by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, on 24 May 1994 following UN Resolution 780 reaffirming Resolution 713.

The final report of the Commission includes a survey of the Commission's work since its inception, its mandate, structure and methods of work, its views on selected legal issues of particular significance in the context of the former Yugoslavia, a general study on the military structure of the "warring factions" and the strategies and tactics employed by them, and substantive findings on alleged crimes of "ethnic cleansing", genocide and other massive violations of elementary dictates of humanity, rape and sexual assault and destruction of cultural property committed in various parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  On the basis of the information gathered, examined and analysed, the Commission has concluded that grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law have been committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia on a large scale, and were particularly brutal and ferocious in their execution. The practice of so-called "ethnic cleansing" and rape and sexual assault, in particular, have been carried out by some of the parties so systematically that they strongly appear to be the product of a policy, which may also be inferred from the consistent failure to prevent the commission of such crimes and to prosecute and punish their perpetrators. The final report includes several annexes containing reports of investigations and studies, which as a whole constitute an integral part of the report. In his letter to me of 6 May 1994, the Chairman of the Commission requested that the annexes be published, although for cost purposes and given their volume (approximately 3,000 pages) it was suggested that they be published in English only and funded from the remaining surplus in the Trust Fund of the Commission of Experts.

Велика Србија, Velika Srbija - the intellectual and his agent

It's good news that Ratko Mladic - confederate of those political leaders who 'violated the obligation to prevent genocide', Radovan Karadžić and the late Slobodan Milošević, promoting the toxic vision of a Greater Serbia - has been captured and will be held accountable for his crimes as a General of the Bosnian Serb Army from May 1992.  I've memo'd myself to get The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

 'When your fight has purpose – to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent – it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unravelling – when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event – there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it...'

Watch found in a mass grave believed to contain Srebrenica victims

'Dželalija's soldiers, hardened professional murderers, watched him with a smirk on their dull faces.'

Back to the future - 2 June '11: Max Levenfeld writes to his friend in A Letter from 1920 explaining in the 1920s why he has to leave Bosnia for ever - a short story by the great Serbian writer Ivo Andrić:

...I know that the hate, just as rage, has its function in the development of the society, because the hate gives strength and rage sparks movement. There are ancient and deeply rooted injustices and misuses that only rivers of hate and rage can uproot and remove. And when those floods fall down, there is only a place for freedom, for creation of better life. The contemporaries see the rage and hate much better, because they suffer from it, but their children will see only the fruits of power and movement. I know that well. But what I’ve seen in Bosnia is something else. It is hate, but not as a moment in a flow of human development and necessary part of the historic process, but a hate that takes stage as an independent force, which finds within itself its own purpose. A hate that gets a man against man and then equally throws them into misery and misfortune or takes underground both opponents; hate as a cancer in organism spends and eats all around itself, so that itself would die in the end, because such hate, as flame, has no permanent face nor own life, it is but a weapon of a drive for destruction or self-destruction, exists only as such and only until it completes its task of complete destruction.

*** ***
The other day, prompted by Mark in the village I emailed a note:

Can someone at Shooting Times kindly ask Nick Fisher if he'd be interested in the story of Jack Hargreaves' 1970s Out of Town programme featuring an 'exploding' (spring loaded) ground bait box, which has led to me discovering a large archive of his country life 16mm films stored in South West Film and Television Archive? If Nick is not really interested - no problem of course, but one of his regular readers and a good friend who lives in Corfu and subscribes to ST and to whom the boxes' designer, Richard Hill gave the original box, suggested that  Nick might find the device interesting and possibly a subject for an article. I'm Jack Hargreaves' stepson. Best wishes Simon B

I just got this reply which I forwarded to Mark:

Dear Simon. thank you so much for sending me the link to the exploding bait dropper. What a fantastic bit of kit! I loved it and loved watching the old show. The boat, the fashions, the glasses, the hair cuts and the smoking - God, brought back a serious wave of nostalgia. I'd love to do a feature on the device. Oddly, I just wrote a piece about black bream fishing recently in which I mentioned a modern stainless steel equivalent, which is very clever but doesn't have the sheer class of Richard Hill's invention. There is a real tradition of angling engineers; guys who loved to fish but who also loved to invent tackle and devices. sadly a tradition that is dying out as Chinese made tackle is so cheap and so everywhere. i'm intrigued at the sound of the huge archive too. I'd forgotten just how natural a talker JH was. It's easy to remember TV shows fondly and then be disappointed when you see them again. There's so many old shows available on DVD now that we can so easily go back and see the things we once thought were fantastic - monty python, etc only to find them rather cronky and embarrassing - this clip really stood the test of time. thanks so much for bringing it to my attention. always love to hear more. best wishes Nick 

Mark's reply:

Hi Simon , Would be great if he does do an article on it especially for Richard Hill. We had another lamb on the spit last night down at the stables this time though for Richard ( dutch richard , house by the swings) as it was his 60th birthday and he had pre arranged with us for a party down there , it was huge success again with around 20 people their , alot of his friends coming over for a week . I feel slightly hungover today, not sure why. Enjoy Scotland with Richard and your Mum , please send her our regards. Keep up the good work. Best wishes Mark. 

Mine to Nick:

Dear Nick. ...Your reply went winging off to our good friend Mark in Ano Korakiana, who now has the baitbox in question, and at the risk of making a story out of a story I'm logging the exchange on my blog (say if you prefer not), which I've also been using to keep a record of the slow navigation and excavation of my stepfather's films about the British countryside - partly as a family project, and partly because there may be people of all ages who'd share your view that this material doesn't date as much as you'd expect, and because there are others over 60 who'd like to see some replays of films that gave pleasure and perhaps prompted them as youngsters to take up activities that now run through their lives. So what could I tell you more about Jack or the 'exploding' baitbox and Richard Hill and his wife Wendy who make a mean fish pie and who when I'm in England I enjoy visiting, so long as they continue to offer me their hospitality?  My research into JH's work has led me to put together an informal JH Committee to help with my enquiries after archives. Some of these are hunter-gatherers enjoying the rarer opportunities to do the same things Jack enjoyed; some are TV experts with an interest in helping sort out the evolving differences between methods of recording and storing film and tape, picture and sound. One is gradually building up an archive of every broadcast via correlations with old TV schedules in newspapers and magazines. Like all research, it's a process of using one finding as leverage for another, along with sparks of serendipity, as when someone phoned back after looking in their attic, and found original 16mm film of a broadcast going back to Jack's first Gone Fishing broadcasts for Southern TV when making tentative steps into a media still new to him, after a career on Fleet Street. So the search goes amid many other activities.  If you'd like to speak to Richard Hill I think he'd be delighted to hear from you. I now cherish one of Richard's beautiful carved fish; one he gave to Jack in the 1970s, which I inherited. It was attached to the top of his bed and was flat on one side. I took it to Richard many years later (when we met at his home to view the baitbox film from SWFTA)...as a gift to me he carved the other side. It's from the the recovered taffrail of an old Isle of Wight ferry on which Richard worked. Best wishes. Simon (in the Highlands for a week. No mobile signal) 

Roach and Crucian Carp at Richard and Wendy's home

*** ***
Thanassis reports in an entry under telos apographis on the Ano Korakiana website that despite some trespassing by census takers from other villages into areas that are actually within our boundaries, Ano Korakiana's head count - Απογραφής - has reached or exceeded the 1000 required to ensure the village's continued standing as a settlement able to maintain influence in the governance of Corfu. Phew!:

Η απογραφή πληθυσμού του 2011, ολοκληρώθηκε χθες … Παρά τα προβλήματα της προηγούμενης βδομάδας με τις αποχωρήσεις απογραφέων, το «σώμα» ανασυντάχθηκε και συμπληρώθηκε με καινούργιο αίμα και ρίχτηκε στην προσπάθεια προκειμένου οι απογραφέντες στην Δημοτική μας Κοινότητα να ξεπεράσουν τους 1.000, προκειμένου αυτή να διατηρηθεί.

**** ****
And we have the lovely news that Professor Minoti Chakravarti-Kaul who's been visiting her daughter at St Andrews University near Dundee and who visited my mum last year, will be coming up by train to Inverness to visit Theodora - as she calls her using the original name she likes - and will meet Richard and me as well. She's promised this time to cook us some Indian meals while staying at Brin Croft. I so like meeting people off trains.

Minoti and Theodora in 2010

********
Prime Minister George Papandreou is floating the idea of a referendum to test his country's support for  continued austerity measures prior to a second IMF bail-out. Richard Pine's take in The Irish Times - 25 May '11 - on the current situation in Greece and Ireland. 'Greeks might pull plug rather than play hardball with Merkel'...

Greece’s problems are deepening rapidly, as the apparently inescapable choice must be made between an additional €60 billion bailout (making €170 billion in all) or a debt restructuring which would have colossal knock-on effects for the euro zone as a whole....

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian asks if 'defaulting is really political suicide?' Of this argument  - bandied around by journalists he writes:

To us a technical term, it's balls. More precisely, it's the sort of everyone-says-it-so-it-must-be-true balls that's been a hallmark of European policy-making ever since the banking crisis broke out...

As Richard Pine says of the people in his village, the common mood is one of bewilderment. At least they know they don't know what's happening. Meantime, I'm proud to read this story in the local press about a briefcase containing €25000 and about £1980 plus a passport and mobile phone being found on the outskirts of Corfu Town after it had fallen unobserved off the back of a businessman's motorbike, which was handed in to the police by the woman who found it, a British tourist - Ανεύρεση και παράδοση μεγάλου χρηματικού ποσού Κέρκυρα...Μία Βρετανίδα προχθές το μεσημέρι βρήκε και παρέδωσε στο Αστυνομικό Τμήμα Παλαιοκαστριτών, έναν χαρτοφύλακα που περιείχε μεγάλο χρηματικό ποσό.
Goodness is more normal and frequent than might be believed. Studies of public honesty which have involved leaving wallets around with money in them and an address have shown that in many countries more than 50% and often more than 80% of such 'lost' valuables are returned to their owners as a result of being found by strangers.