Up the Adriatic

The mainland mountains from Corfu 'each wearing its cracked crown of snow'

Southerly blow through the Straits of Otranto - a glimpse of the Karaburun Peninsular

A sturdy blow from the south as the ferry rolls gently north, all but immune to weather.

Adriatic afternoon - 24 hour voyage from Igoumenitsa to Mestre

The night before we arrived in Igoumenitsa on the small ferry from Corfu, we slept at a guest house. Earlier we’d walked from the Zygos Hotel opposite the main ferry terminal along a kilometre of excavated road as the project to develop the port advanced – dug since we were here on 2 January.
“Will this bring prosperity?”

A respite for pedestrians along Igoumenitsa's harbour-front carriageway - Οδός Εθνικής Αντίστασης -

“No” said Lin
We wandered at the new places that would front the landscaping. Plate windows, big lettered neon signs, prominent graphics, large stage-lit cafés with shiny chrome, glass tables and vinyl banquettes in garish colours – all the opposite of the muted intimacy I prefer. Numerous travel agencies dot the town’s uncompleted frontage; lit even more brightly; occasional people sitting at counters, in one or two places a customer.
“It’s Edward Hopper country. Without the danger.”
“Who uses these places?” wondered Lin
“Why all these travel agents? Especially now when you can buy tickets on line or by phone”
Sign upon sign – Minoan, Anek, Blue Star, Endeavor Lines, Agoudimos, Superfast, Grimaldi…

One of numerous travel agents in Igoumenitsa

“They can’t all own each other. Wherever we travel they're always two-thirds empty or carrying trucks that would hardly need travel agents…or are they all laundering money like the tanning shops round Naples? Yet if you want a ferry between the Ionian Islands there are none. You always end up having to go via the mainland, unless it's a  day trip to Paxos from Corfu or to Levkas from Kephalonia. Island hopping without a yacht is impossible."
“Perhaps’ suggested Lin “people use the offices to set up larger scale freight contracts; plan distribution round the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Black Sea and beyond”
When we finally came upon some back streets we searched vainly for a tavern; one we’d enjoyed a few year back; lit by bulbs with lampshades; family-run with chicken and pork on a spit sizzling over embers; cosy interior with wooden seats and tables; no photos of dishes in several languages.
“It’s gone, hasn’t it?”
“For sure”

INSTITUTION OF CONCRETISATION OF ORGANISM OF PORT OF IGOUMENITSA S.A

Heading back along the clawed up highway, which for once afforded generous space for people on foot – not something Igoumenitsa’s new port designers seem to have considered (see the maquette for the development on display in the ferry terminal) – we glimpsed a place I’d have chosen were it not now too late in the evening – Emily’s? Timos?, the one with the painting of a schooner, half-felled tree and chaffinch, both weeping - a reference to the great population exchange - ἡ ἀνταλλαγή - between Greece and Turkey in 1922.

I’d had a snack there on my own early one morning in winter 2012 enjoying a friendly doggerel chat with the owner. He'd asked where I was from.
“Corfu”
“No but where are you from?”
“Ah yes. From England”
I was laughing inwardly at the reply – unspoken - that had sprung to mind at his question
“I’m not foreign. I’m English” <Δεν είμαι ξένη. Είμαι αγγλικά> That’s us in nutshell.

The air-seats on the Anek ferry Audacia were occupied by only a few foreigners on the floor in sleeping bags, equipped for going without a cabin – probably Balkan but not Greek. Ha!
“This is civilised”
I’d noted that all the tipping seats had arm-rests that could be raised allowing us to lie along them to sleep. On most ferries this is impossible.
“They don’t like people not buying cabins to be too comfortable" Camped here and not in the saloon amid tactically placed luggage, politely refusing waiter service – after one small cup of coffee at €3.

Igoumenitsa 7.00am

I snoozed for an hour after Audacia left Igoumenitsa and its friendly collarless dogs roaming at ease through barriers we need papers to pass, wagging their tails - on the road, inside the terminal, along the concrete quay watching the big boats come and go with their churning, rumbling echoing clangs. I read for a while. I got up and climbed the iron stairs to the Solarium deck – vast as a soccer pitch, marked for helicopter landing. In the early light we were entering the Corfu Channel, the closer shores speeding by either side.

Ano Korakiana - centre below steepening Trompetta

I took a reverse photo of the familiar scene from our balcony when I watch the ferries gliding in and out of the straits - Ano Korakiana a small wavy strip of rubble against the darker sides of Trompetta, soon hidden by the narrows as the ship drives past the sullied slopes between Nissaki and Kassiopi where the Junta allowed the Lopakhins to hack roads and ledges for Corfu’s rich north western suburbia. Gripped by schadenfreude I contemplate horizon pools now subject to tax and even worse...

...a tale of delightful woe told by a friend who works on them – a horizon pool jolted by an earth tremor – a slight subsidence making it no longer spirit-level horizontal, so it leaks at one end.
“Short stay visitors will hardly notice as they enjoy the pool, but if it’s yours the tiny decline from perfect is an ever-present irritant"
A blemish in the dreamed perfection of a photograph. An island in the sea should need no swimming pools. They steal water and often end up polluting the sea as they are emptied into it when cleaned.
“You put it right, make it horizontal again, but ever after you’re wondering if the same thing will happen again”
“Couldn’t we” suggested Lin “start a business marketing gimballed swimming pools?”

I was amid a 360° panorama. The tails of southern Albania, and northern Epirus and north east Corfu - shores close enough to make out buildings and outcrops of rock reaching into the sea. The chill tempted me indoors but for a wish to watch our curving route through the channel. Another ferry surged by southward.

The distant sides of the mountain behind Corfu Town held a dawn glimmer in a drear landscape that seemed to hang over the land weeping opaque columns of driving rain; the heights of Corfu dwarfed by the peaks to the east – bleak precipices veined with snow, peaks lost in the drenching overcast. Ugly and uninviting 'desolate and repudiating stone'; hemming the city of Saranda to starboard. Ismail’s Kadare’s depthless Albania of winter rain.

Saranda in Albania

Now, well astern, I saw the ferry that had passed turning almost sideways to us to enter the narrows before disappearing between headlands. I had not realised how the Corfu channel closes behind a ship passing through, so that entering it uninformed, a sailor sees a deep inlet rather than the entrance to the Sea of Kerkyra.
In the saloon people were watching one of the many large screen TVs with extra attention as we were shown fractured roads and collapsed buildings - a second and larger earthquake below Kephalonia, but no dead or seriously hurt. A headline that won't sell papers came to mind.
"It'll be good in the end" said Lin "Lots of construction work. Jobs. People helping one another."

Passing through the Giudecca Channel on my way to Corfu with John Richfield in 2007 - a view that's discouraged

I’d said I’d wake Lin the next morning as we entered Venice. Our ship, instead of gliding, under tow, through the channel between Giudecca and the city, so we could gaze down on the hallowed architecture of Venice...

Seaward entrance to the Grand Canal

J M W Turner 

..delivered us instead to the Port of Marghera via a fogged avenue of sea markers between mudbanks and barren gravelly ground recovered from the lagoon...

...until we reversed into a container depot laced with service roads and long quays as efficient in transhipment of goods through Europe and beyond as Venice is in handling its freight of tourists like us.

Protesters swim in the Giudecca Canal to block cruise ships inside the port  Photo: Getty Images

"It's not at first romantic" I said "but it's a stunning place. Goodness knows what activities, what busy-ness, what ambition and depravity, tragedy and excitement is spread around this great stew of sealed boxes shipping to and from the rest of the world...and it's good that big ships are excluded from the Giudecca channel, if that's the case rather than Anek seeking a cheaper berth."
I hope the restriction is the result of protests against the damage big vessels have been doing to Venice. Our ferry - Audacia - is just of 25,000 tonnes. Some cruise liners visiting Venice exceed 100,000 tonnes.

Port of Marghera

As the small cargo of trucks disembarked, there was a free minibus waiting to take us - just five passengers on foot - from our ferry to the many platformed railway station at Mestre, about a kilometre and a half away, from where, for under €2 from a ticket machine, we took the ten minute journey on one of the many trains into Venice St.Lucia.
"Hm" said Lin "I do think the ferry company should have given us free tickets into Venice"
*** *** ***
Using copies of hand written lists in Greek and English made by Angeliki I've typed out a first draft of a list of the works of Aristedes Metallinos in chronological order and e-mailed them as a nine page file to Irini S, Effie S and John P.

Hoopoe Ο τσαλαπετεινός - 1977

Makarios Μακάριος - 1974

In Ano Korakiana

These days on my own will become more like a dream - experiences unverified by the presence of another. I know this. It’s why ascetics go to the desert, not to commune with themselves but with someone not there. To whom does our grandson speak inside his mum? He'll never say but he'll recall in some part of his being the timeless swim before his clock begins - probably late in life, unless he's inclined to hermitry or becomes an artist and needs to go to places such people need to go - what Proust said of writing - to be conscious of dreaming without waking yourself up. I’ve known this condition only by mistake, when at sea alone for a few days. It happens in recollection; unexercised awareness; wakeful reflection as on a sunny day below a hedge somewhere. Mark described last night at supper under this sun we are having in Corfu, sat between working, half-asleep, nodding. Did I dream this particular stream of ordinary things; sleeping, eating, cleaning, tidying, going to and fro like a dog left in the house on its own, without the presence in easy reach of anyone with whom one is accustomed to share the greater part of daily life? That errandless ship - a tramp - floating anchored, calm as the blue brush-strokes on a Delft tile. My mother has a special liking for St Jerome, an etching - a very good copy of Dürer's picture - on her bedroom wall with family photos.

"Why does he have the lion lying there?" she asked me
"It's about taming the flesh isn't it, mum. You remember him in the wilderness too."
"So what about the dog?"
"I think that's just a nice animal to have around when you're working on your own"
"The skull? I know"
Mark and I were discussing last night the way we chat with our dogs... and they with us. I'd been telling him of my lovely long walks with Oscar and Lulu in the Highlands just the other day. I'm sure that's right. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels...the animals could as well be angels, see...

Bartolomeo Cavarozzi's version of St Jerome's companions

*** ***

East Midlands Airport

Getting here Lin drove me to New Street station to catch a train to Derby just before 6.00am; a cold bus to the airport. I flew away on a crisp frosty morning; Ryanair - efficient cheap - to Venice Treviso, then bus to Venice...

Cannaregio

...from where, after 36 hours...

Venice from the railway station - a protest about night rail cutbacks is on

...I boarded a train - of a proper kind compared to the unclassy world of UK rail (getting better as our affair with the automobile and its so-called freeways turns into a loveless marriage of convenience) - sped me, with a change at Bologna, 820 kilometres down the Italian peninsular to Bari (pastrami picnic with fresh bread and chianti), where I took the superfast ferry to Igoumenitsa; was woken from a snooze in the noisy bar - newsak game show static - at 6.00am to take one of the small ferries to Corfu - Theodora....

The blue

...From the bus station a few hundred yards from the port I took a green line bus the 12 kilometres to Ano Korakiana, to arrive in the village like a character in a Michael Cacoyannis movie (such pleasing self dramatisation - the ascetic, the traveller, the lone stranger), calling to the driver to stop at the path below the house, trudging up past familiar barking dogs, through the long grass and weeds to 208 Democracy Street, letting myself into the quiet sunlit house, making a cup of tea (having bought milk on the way).
While waiting for the Corfu ferry I escaped the chill - as cold here as in Venice, even colder than a few days ago in the Highlands - in a taverna where, alone but for its owner, I sipped a coffee and read an engaging police procedural, The Return, by Håkan Nesser. On the wall was a picture of two dark figures hacking at a weeping tree, observed by a weeping chaffinch, a schooner, sea and islands.

*** ***
Global Voices reports the closing stages of the prolonged trial of those accused of the murder of Hrant Dink:

Five years and 25 hearings later, the trial to convict those responsible for the murder of Hrant Dink...

Good man down

...a Turkish-Armenian journalist, has come to a close. The gunman, 17-year-old Ogün Samast, as well as over a dozen others accused of involvement in the gunning down of Dink in Istanbul in January 2007, were caught almost immediately afterwards. However, according to Dink's family, friends and lawyers, the case is linked to Turkey's so-called deep state structures and the real perpetrators, meaning those who masterminded the crime, have not been brought to justice. While Samast was sentenced to 22 years in prison last year, yesterday's verdict, which ruled that three other defendants acted as individuals rather than as part of a criminal organization, was a disappointment many had seen coming. From the pre-hearing statement of the group 'Hrant's Friends' to the lawyer's statement after the verdict, and throughout a procession from the Beşiktaş Court House to Agos, the newspaper Dink edited, one sentiment stood out...Journalist Yavuz Baydar summed up that feeling. "Dink davasına doğru, yolda. Karar çıkacak herhalde, ama bu dava bitmeyecek...On my way to the court. Seems like a verdict will be issued today, but this trial will not end here."

Procedurals

Befogged in Venice we met people also awaiting passage south. One fitted the picture of a Greek citizen I’ve only read about. His parents had been on the side that lost in the Civil War and earlier in the resistance – “my father, part of the andartiko” - exiled to iron curtain countries, brought up doing Marxist-Leninism at primary school, disallowed Hellenic citizenship until the 1980s, acquiring Bulgarian and other middle European languages alongside his parents’ Greek, serving in the merchant marine, marrying an Englishwoman, living in the Midlands, eventually being able to come home with full citizenship. A novel biography. We ate and drank together in a pizza place on Lista di Spagna and talked – a lot. The wife is English with roots in Poland, not speaking her birth language. “He taught me to speak Polish” she said. We joked at our struggle to learn Greek. “It’s difficult,” she said “I thought I’d never get it, then one morning I woke up and I could speak Greek.” We wish. Oh how we wish.

Our hotel was phoned before first light; the fog cleared. We joined the ferry and stood on the top deck looking at the passing scene as with the help of a squat tug, occasionally churning mud from the bottom of the canal, our ship headed out to sea, the deck speakers streaming multilingual safety instructions between bursts of muzak while all who needed to hear were focusing on watching and photographing the city - La Serenissima.
*** ***

So we're in Ano Korakiana again. The ferry, a rattling behemoth, dropped us in Corfu in weather too warm for the clothes we'd worn for the chill at dawn as we rumbled by the snow topped Albanian mountains south of Vlorë under a clear sky, the smudge of Erikoussa of the Diapontian islands, looming first to starboard and soon the familiar shape of Pantokrator, strewn across the dawn horizon. First we met Yianni who was waiting with our car. Stop. First I put a hand flat on the concrete jetty to touch the blessed place and saw a text on my Greek mobile from Paul and Lula “Welcome home. X.”

Driving out of the harbour we parked and walked to Alpha Bank behind the Liston to get cash and pay Yianni. All the staff seemed new. We were gently shunted between desks and asked to provide more than the usual amount of information to confirm we weren’t laundering money. “Yes” said Lin “this is all part of the tightening up.” Being good on paperwork we'd all we needed and were allowed notice on what we hadn’t provided like the deeds of the house, a marriage certificate, birth certificate and the address of the local shop in Ano Korakiana, how many times a week we…
So we drove north stopping to get essentials at Lidl before coming to Ano Korakiana up Democracy Street where we hugged and kissed our dear neighbours and found the house aired, ready for us; the landscape waiting to be admired from our balcony.
*** ***
I’m going to have a go at Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić, translated from Serbo-Croat. This book is, at first sight, a 300 page joke, serious in intent, promising hard work, given that, intrigued by the Balkans – an Ottoman collective term for fuzzily bordered nations that adds insult to centuries of self-injury – I’d far prefer to read novels like Kadari’s and the wonderful story by Ivo Andric The Bridge over the Drina, that explain things, without resort to magic realism. Pavić’s book circles round the vanished Khazars, a tribe living somewhere between the Black and Caspian seas on the edge of Russia, destroyed in the 9th century after their ruler had invited three of the greatest scholars of the day – Christian, Muslim and Jewish – to debate which of their religions he and his people should adopt. 6oo years later, in 1689, three different people – also Christian, Muslim and Jew - encounter each other during a battle near the mouth of the Danube and at the same time die. Hm? 300 years after this, in 1982, three scholars – Muslim, Jew and Christian – meet in Istanbul to reconstitute a book published in 1691 – The Khazar Dictionary of which but one survives. Two of them die. This is Pavić’s invented history. To add to the vexing whimsy my book is the ‘male edition’ of the dictionary, differing by one paragraph from the 'female edition' - see the easily discovered spoiler. With its constant cross-references to Christian, Muslim and Jewish sources in the book’s three main sections, DoK is probably best read digitised with hypertext x-references, so one can jump around inside it as with a dictionary or encylopaedia, but we’ll see.
I prefer writers who describe mystery rather then writers who mystify me, but I’ve enjoyed surprises. Just finished Graham Hurley’s One Under. This is how an artist takes a medium – in this case police procedural – and as le Carré does with spying - transforms the small scale squalor of an ugly universe and the banality involved in policing the jacqueries of human nature stirred by global connectedness into something that stands on a shelf beside Conan Doyle, Simenon, Camilleri, Mankell, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Dibden, Paretsky, Chandler, McBain, Chandler, Dickens and Dostoevski. What are the ingredients? I’ll no doubt find who coined the term ‘police procedural’, but it’s for me the ordinariness of police work, its jargon, bureaucracy and politics, alongside imaginative depravity of the kind that stops people talking about their work when they come home. Suppose Dante had been a policeman, returned from his tour of hell disinclined to talk or write about it. I recall Sue as she lay on the deck of our little boat in the middle of the Atlantic long ago working through The Inferno - the first book of his Divine Comedy - as our boat self-steered through the Trades. “It’s not so bad at first. But after a while it grows on you. The relentless awfulness of hell.” A police procedural should take you there. Banality of evil.
I’m hearing a hint in the casual tales our beloved daughter describes of events in her working life when, as we sit together as the evening before Lin and I left for Greece, she tells a typical tangled tale of a husband phoning the police as a last resort. His wife – separated amid divorce proceedings – had phoned him to say she couldn’t cope with their baby, in her care. He being in a custody dispute with his wife was not supposed to have the child with him unsupervised. No threat of abuse but these are the rules. The wife had phoned social services but they despite promises to come back to her before the end of the day, had not, nor even phoned. Wife takes child to husband who knowing he’s not supposed to have the child alone phones his solicitor who advises phoning police. Police, now knowing an illegal situation has been logged, must act. Police try to contact social services to get temporary fostering. “We can’t exactly put the baby in a cell” smiles Amy. Trying to sort this out tied up three officers through most of their shift. “So what happened?” I ask our Amy half-knowing I’m not going to see rolling credits. “We don’t know. I finished work.” It’s soap, serial, picaresque with her. Nothing’s ever sorted.
Hurley would take this material and make it into a narrative with at least the vestiges of a beginning, middle and end and I’d finish it in 24 hours of concentrated reading, in this case on the ferry from Venice to Corfu, only putting it down now and then so as not to finish too soon. Ingredients: create a place – Paris, Rome, London, Pompey?; know the argot of the police; know the jargon including the acronyms of the bureaucracy; include hi-politics as it affects mere mortals on street and front desk; think constantly of budget restrictions; know the fuzzy line between formal and informal rules; know the dystopian universe, the mean streets and a moral being who walks them; be bleak, existential to the tune of sacred music and faith’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.
I had this picture the other night of Moses Dawkins descending from the heights of Mt. Sceptic to find his chosen people - I among them - have, in his absence, abandoned trust in atheism and herded themselves into Magdalene Chapel to listen in jubilant awe to the Matthew Passion. “F*ck” he mutters. Bursting past the crowded door, pushing through the surging congregation; “Out, out, craven apostates” he cries, silencing the orchestra, scattering the scores, dispersing them, the players and choir and their audience into Oxford’s wintry passages, turning to me "Really Simon, I'm disappointed. Come on down to the Eagle and Child and share a pint of Old Rational."
** **
I thought for a while I had discovered someone else who’d made contemporary recordings – at a time when VHS recorders were not so widespread – of my stepfather’s broadcasts of episodes from Out of Town and Old Country in the early1980s or before, but a couple of days ago I got this email:

Re: Jack Hargreaves. Hello, Simon. I am sorry to have taken so long to reply (I have only just gone on-line and seen your message) and to have to disappoint you but I no longer have the video recordings. Some time ago, the tape had disintegrated to the point where it was not only unplayable but un-repairable as well and I threw it away, albeit very reluctantly, along with several other (unrelated) tapes. I can assure you that if I had thought that it could possibly have been any use, even if only in part, I would have kept it and would have been delighted to be in a position to pass it on to you but I am afraid that this is not the case. I do hope that you will have more success with your search elsewhere. I can't believe that I was the only person to record some of the episodes and, with a bit of luck, someone else has and subsequently took better care of the tapes than I did. You know better than I what a great man your step-father was. Not only were his broadcasts and books a pleasure but also an inspiration to me and, no doubt, a great many others. All the best. Paul Chignell

" the horizon beginning to stain at the rim of the world" Lawrence Durrell Prospero's Cell

Fog in Venice

Fog covers the Veneto for hundreds of square miles. The big Anek ferry from Greece waits beyond the Lido unable to take up a tow through the basin of St Marks and the Guidecca Canal to the Port of Venice. So we are staying a second night in the city, wandering through misty passages beside limpid canals, waiting for the weather to change so we can travel south to Greece. On Monday night Lin and I strolled from Piazzale Roma to St.Mark's Square, taking a free boat along the Grand Canal back to our hotel. Next morning we took the new People Mover to the port. It dropped us in the middle - so it seemed - of nowhere. We needed to drag our cases half a kilometre through the fog beside concrete blocks, chain link fences and vast warehouses disappearing into cloud. Lin ahead of me in her raincoat made the front cover of a Balkan thriller. At last in the warmth of the departure building we were told 'There is no ferry and we don't know when there will be." We waited for hours, read, wandered among the waiting truckers and journeymen, stood outside for an occasional smoke peering into the mist listening for a big siren, sipped coffee, gossiped with strangers, read and snacked, and eventually returned to our hotel in a shared taxi with a promise from the company - one conscientious lady with a clipboard - they'd call if the weather improved. Now at 6am peering from the window of our bedroom it looks as if the air's clearer, so perhaps we shall be in Corfu by Thursday.

Constitution Bridge

Getting back to work at Democracy Street

On Monday evening, having flown via Frankfurt - where security, along with the other usual precautions, had me remove my belt - to Venice Marco Polo, we rolled our cases to Casa San’Andrea, 100 metres from Piazzalle Roma, then strolled over the Scalzi bridge to the station and along the busy street following signs to Rialto, sharing a pizza. We noticed a lad sat by the canal chatting to a girl, her face filling the screen of the laptop on his knee.
Early Tuesday we took the one-stop vaporetto run - €2 each – to the rail station and after a short row about tickets (“Which of all these is for a train?’ “Isn’t it obvious” “No”) found reservations on a eurostar to Rome, but sat beside a loquacious mobilista choosing a remote conversation to one with his travelling companion. At Bologna we changed trains for Ancona. A fellow passenger worked on her laptop preparing a presentation about Balkan borders, getting up to quiet someone down our coach playing their MP3 without earphones. Civil space. The countryside was flat intensively farmed with vines and orchards between large box warehouses. Now and then a brick farmhouse with blank windows, tiles clumped precariously on sagging rafters flashed by. “Will we ever make beautiful buildings again?” asked Lin. “You should see some of the new ideas in the glossy architectural books – cities mingled with greenery, trees in the sky, skyscrapers embraced by vines, exchanging energy from sunlight and wind, seeking alliance with nature. (See Greenhouse Britain)

The Superfast ferry – Europa Princess - left Ancona at 1800 and delivered us to Igoumenitsa, via the Corfu Channel, at 0900 Wednesday. We slept fitfully in run down aircraft seats in an almost empty pullman lounge sharing the eleven storey vessel with few others – truck drivers, and some car drivers. The system’s not set up for people who walk on and off. We watched Corfu rising in the south and passed on by to the mainland. The ships TVs showed news stories about Skopje’s claim on the name ‘Macedonia’


A €5 ride taxi got us, with seconds to spare, from the main terminal at Igoumenitsa to the apron - a kilometre down the vast jetty - where ferries leave for Corfu. The ticket collector - €6 each - followed us up the escalator, our big bags left in a cuddy by the stern door. Nearly there. Kostas’ son waited for us with a car at the jetty in Corfu to take us to do the papers at the office where Kostas, waiting, offered Lin a peony from his garden. So on to Ano Korakiana driving by the blossoming Judas trees and blooming wildflowers. All was in order. Bubble greeting us heavy with expected kittens.

Saturday morning seems to have come swiftly. We’ve woken to the desultory two-finger typing of rain. On Thursday it came stronger, with hail heaping on the balcony. Lightning flashed and thunder smashed. Our main roof kept us dry, but water still evaded the paltry seal between that and the rear roof. Aln said that was his next job. Meantime we have been working at repairing our upstairs floor, removing the damage caused by a previous electrician who’d got his wiring under a finely carpentered floor with a circular saw; working all Friday inserting three new strips of tongue and groove cypress – from a woodyard in the south of the island where to buy hardwood we had - rightly - to give a tax number. Offering up, marking up, whittling, sawing and screwing down went on between sandwiches, tea and coffee and steady acrimony. Around 6.00pm, after struggling like Galapos tortoises with standing up and sitting on the floor, we were admiring our work, ready to finish two smaller areas in the morning, having learned a little about laying a floor. “It’d have been easier to start from scratch” said Lin. The new planks, like the old, are screwed down with joins well separated. The trickiest job was filling the last space between new and old boards. This entailed sharpening or even removing the tongue on one side, cutting away the lower lip of the grooved side with chisel and knife, and then coaxing the carved and slightly warped plank into place with our combined weights and blows from a lump hammer cushioned with a small piece of wood to prevent bruising the parts of the cypress that remained proud. The last creaks from these now smooth lying boards were removed by tightening countersunk screws at carefully judged intervals, holding our floor to the aged pitch pine beams beneath them. In the evening we tidied up, lit the fire, ate supper.

The sun appears above the mountains of Epirus, while on deck I notice a man pacing with his mobile and catch the words 'stin Ellada'. He is smiling. '"What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any more than I would Question a window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it.' William Blake A Vision of the Last Judgement. I am sure Blake would have taken greatest joy from Elytis' Axion Esti. Elytis was once described as the 'sun drinker'