Lunch with Richard Pine - pondering Ballybeg

 Avignon © Bert Smith

A woman in Perithia, seeing my car with a hire company badge on the driver's door, wandered over to peer in my window and saw Richard sat beside me.
"Oh! It's you. I thought you might be lost"
"We are, We are!" said Richard
"Aren't we all?" she called over her shoulder

Richard P

I drove over the mountains behind Ano Korakiana down to the north coast. We ascended then, from Perithia, where Richard had been waiting for me near the post office, to Loutses and on up the bumpy winding road to Old Perithia, parking on the rough gravel beside other cars and a coach; treading carefully down the steep cobbled slope into the village, until we were below the village's view towards a patch of sea below the high Albanian mountains. We sat at a wooden table covered with a red and white gingham table cloth, dappled with sunlight through an awning vine that brushed my shoulder. 

Two fizzy waters served us for drinks; along with a basket of fresh bread to whet our appetites. Half an hour into our conversation Tomas served us our order, grilled livers in their own gravy topped with fried onions surrounded by richly browned chips and a rationed garnish of chopped tomatoes. We dipped our forks into a wooden bowl - a shared salad of rocket and lettuce dressed with olive oil, sprinkled with grated pecorino. Our conversation as we enjoyed this lunch touched on Richard’s about-to-be-published book, The Disappointed Bridge. 

“Don’t buy it! It’s going to cost £70”
But I will. Richard’s writing is a struggle I welcome. Sometimes more than half the time I don’t understand what he’s getting at, but then a grasp of an original and unfamiliar understanding emerges. Of Brian Friel it was how a village - Ballybeg - could contain everything; how an artist can make the ordinary heroic; weaving plots from the threads of routine. It was Richard who told me that Chekov’s stories came from what he saw through his window. Where I see a fascinating view with sounds and colour and movement, he – as with all genius - could create a proscenium for the rest of us and raise a curtain on the unforgettable doings of eternal personalities – who are yet us; me even. I’m intrigued by the colonial story and how it reads into the present. The preoccupying issue of the current local and European elections is bound up intimately with the implosion of the continent’s separate empires. Enoch Powell in his brilliant, sad and ugly speech in 1968 had called allowing a total of 50,000 immigrants into the UK ‘literally mad’. It’s well agreed that current figures are unreliable - according to the final chapter of Andrew Marr's excellent History of Modern England...

...but the annual net arrivals from other countries to the UK in the 2000s has been closer to 165,000 a year, while more than one in ten of those with British nationality – five and a half million – live abroad, joined in that British diaspora by over a thousand more emigrants every day – some in despair at here, hoping their choice of there will be better. What an astounding rejigging of old ideas and experience of place, identity, and the meaning of life!
Humans have always moved about but this mêlée involves a vaster mélange of humans across  a land mass mapped to the centimetre whose outlines alter with the melting of ancient ice, rising seas and dying bees. I want to read what Richard has to say about ‘what happens to an emerging nation after it has emerged’ and what is understood by the ideas of ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’. 
Lin will insist “You can order it from the university library”

This original study is the first major critical appraisal of Ireland’s post-colonial experience in relation to that of other emergent nations. The parallels between Ireland, India, Latin America, Africa and Europe establish bridges in literary and musical contexts which offer a unique insight into independence and freedom, and the ways in which they are articulated by emergent nations. They explore the master-servant relationship, the functions of  narrative, and the concepts of nationalism, map-making, exile, schizophrenia, hybridity, magical realism and disillusion. The author offers many incisive answers to the question: What happens to an emerging nation after it has emerged?

It was Stephen Dedalus - James Joyce's disguise - who used the term 'disappointed bridge' of a seaside pier - the south arm of the harbour at Dún Laoghaire;  not really a pier in my book. Richard's book cover bears a picture of a slightly different 'disappointed' bridge at Avignon, a small silhouette placed at the broken end that must have fallen into the swift snow-melt waters of the Rhône, which for a few seconds we looked up to from Danica as Chris and I swept by on our way to the Mediterranean - in the company of a surly pilot who we'd been required to pay to join us at Lyons, where we'd arrived via the gentler Saône on our inland voyage through France. A pier is intentional, but the famous Pont D'Avignon is a truer disappointment; that no stone bridge could long survive the force of the Rhône in winter flood; rebuilt several times men finally gave up on it.

From Richard's preface to his latest book: 

...When freedom comes, men and women explore each other in a new light, as citizens and as lovers, but above all they explore freedom itself. Attitudes to land, society and sexuality take on new perspectives and are subject to new descriptions. Narratives alter both subtly and violently.Many emergent countries continue to live in the shadow of their history. But with autonomy comes an unfolding of a range of attendant freedoms and responsibilities which engage the imagination in acts of cultural, sexual and spatial emancipation...The interstitial space between colonisation and full autonomy is a very dangerous place, as relationships are redefined and new forces, previously impossible or inconceivable, become visible, articulate and active....All the lines must be redrawn, all the characters redefinedThe moments immediately following freedom are the most dangerous....

He and I discussed the Greek political landscape; the possibility of a General Election if Samaras’ coalition with PASOK becomes too weakened in the light of SYRIZA’s successes in the latest local elections. We touched on the research on Golden Dawn’s infiltration of the country's army, church, police and judiciary. 
“I was chatting to an Englishman the other day" said Richard "He scoffed at the idea of Golden Dawn as a threat to him. I said ‘Look if they become powerful you are one of the foreigners who’ll have to leave Greece. Your property here forfeit” 
But it was like trying to imagine something too far outside experience. 
“We never think it’ll happen to us!” 
We spoke about Ano Korakiana’s laic sculptor, Aristides Metallinos; what happened to his dream of making a gift of his work to the village. 
“You must write a book about him. It’s a fascinating story.” 
We mused on bad writing about sex. 
“Well it’s just as bad for many people even talking about it” I said “I don’t mean prudery. Rather the opposite.” 
“Hm” 
“One thing. The young get embarrassed even a little disgusted by their elders, particularly parents talking about coition, affairs, passion. Goodness! My mum drew my attention to Donne’s The Ecstasy when I was about 16 - pointed up favourite lines in the poem. 

...So must pure lovers' souls descend

         T' affections, and to faculties,

Which sense may reach and apprehend,

         Else a great prince in prison lies.

To'our bodies turn we then, that so

         Weak men on love reveal'd may look;

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

         But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,

         Have heard this dialogue of one,

Let him still mark us, he shall see

         Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.

I was almost repelled by her delight in these. Now I celebrate his line ‘else a great prince in prison lies'  Then it was ‘Yuk!’ I suspect a reflex working of the incest taboo. I also think that writing about sex is so often gross, unlike Donne's; why I like the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards drawing 'attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.'
“I want " I added "to be able to show how Ano Korakiana's self-taught sculptor – taking up hammer and chisels in his old age - expressed the theme in stone and marble, but English, failing an improvement in my prose, is too medical or too brash, so that the words that do at first seem right turn out sheepish euphemisms. Aristedes Metallinos* is - when depicting his wife, oblique, yet more assured, more laic; their wedding memorialised in traditional finery, full of love...a marriage to Angeliki who bore him a son and a daughter. 
How they gaze into each other's eyes. How he swaggers with cane and turn of knee in princely plumage and she, with her white mountain flower, face unveiled, now dotes upon him; touching each other's hands with intimate promise, both hearts leaping. 
'Love's mysteries in souls do grow'...'and yes I said yes I will Yes'.

.A Lord of the Ionian Islands. Aristides Metallinos 1981 - shown with respect and gratitude to Andrea (sculptor's son) and Anna (daughter-in-law) Metallinos. 

The tree of life - Aristides Metallinos

'The tree of life' - Το Δέντρο της Ζωής - brought to mind L'Origine du monde - the title rather than than Courbet's image and the surrounding gender politics; the action of Deborah de Robertis on 29 May at the d'Orsay Museum in Paris. Something according to Aristedes brought detached ascetic Diogenes almost leaping from his ceramic pithos!

Diogenes came out of his pot - Aristides Metallinos 1981

I believe 1981, when the sculptor was 73 - old as his Diogenes - might have been an especially important year for his' work; some confident juncture of his life and the universal at which every artist aims - even unconsciously. Aristides rejoices, with every chip of his chisel, at the memory of his second marriage in the 1950s, his children and ageless Angeliki - bride, mother, lover.

Aristides Metallinos - relief carved in 1981 

St Stylianos is famed for curing childhood illness, hence the reference in the Papas' book to 'γιατρός - doctor' - Aristides Metallinos 1981  

We talked on, over Tomas’ complimentary apple pie and cinnamon cake, about ageing; about losing dear friends; missing them terribly; on trying to stave off senility. We ordered Greek coffee – a skirto and a metrio. I added a Metaxa. 
“My mother” said Richard “speaks of holding on until she’s a hundred in 3 months time, and then she’s ready to go.” 
“My great grandmother died in 1969. In her 90’s she complained 'I’m losing my mind. It takes me over half-an-hour to do the Times crossword’”
"Where did you get the picture on the cover of your latest book?"
"In brief...Bert Smith is a prof at the Baltimore School of Design, which is associated with the Lawrence Durrell Society in the USA. When the LDS held its conference in Avignon, he designed a poster - the diminutive figure is Lawrence Durrell...the muffler in the wind is the giveaway, but he has captured the man's essence perfectly in such a tiny image. I asked for permission to use it since the bridge is, well... disappointed."
Richard’s next book – writing to keep the brain at work he said – will explore the odd sensibilities that in some people’s minds separates high literature – the canon – from popular writing. We both had a go at Leavis. Not our favourite person. Richard enjoys stories to be read in winter beside a log fire “in a panelled room…” 
“..with Mrs Hudson preparing toasted muffins” 
Of course! Sherlock Holmes, but also John Buchan and – what – anything about an adventure that moves from the dark rainy streets of a British capital – though probably not Cardiff - to somewhere east of Prague, a small almost unknown principality with a castle and a railway that began from the edge of the channel. 
"A quest"
"And a maiden in distress"
I mentioned Alan Furst. Richard mentioned Ian Fleming. He enjoys James Bond, which except for the earliest films – especially From Russia With Love - I don’t enjoy. Richard didn’t like the lugubriousness of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander (“He eats so much junk food”), whereas Lin and I enjoy the dyspeptic policeman. We discussed other Scandinavian successors. 
“What about Italian – Aurelio Zen – and Donna Leon’s Brunetti?” 
“Definitely. And Camillarri in Sicily, and the Greek one – can’t remember his name.” 
“Inspector Haritos. Petros Markaris"
"I wish his latest was translated into English, the one about the murders of millionaires in Athens. Anyway, Richard, I’m still struggling to get you a Wikipedia entry. It’s a matter of your notability”

“What about Seamus Heaney?” He’d shown me a quote from a personal letter whose pronouns the poet, before his death, had permitted Pine’s publisher to rejig  as a recommendation 

‘Your (Pine’s) strength as a commentator comes from your (his) meditative, associative, habit of mind. Your (His) readings constantly deepen our sense of complexity and modernity.” 

Try googling my name plus ‘Irish literature’ or ‘Brian Friel’ and see how many hits you get. “I’ll persevere” I promised “If Conchita Wurst can be in Wiki…”

I’d driven to Perithia over the mountains – up the bends to Sokraki, down to Zygos; round the hairpin in the centre of that village, and a climb to the T-junction just north of Sgourades –  enjoying the lively verges of flowers, waving in the breeze, with, behind them, the shade of olive groves, and glimpses, in the villages, of red and purple Bougainvillaea, mauve Wisteria, white and red roses, the early flowering of Oleander. I was watching too the gradients and thinking of the next time I cycle this way. The road from Sgourades north to Episkepsi is downhill more or less all the way to Acharavi, from where there’s a 5 miles run on a wide road to Perithia. That’s probably the best way to cycle to the north coast - but how to return? From Roda to Troumpetta via Livadakia and Kalimanatika?

From the house we hear the cuckoo and, a few days ago, a crescendo of buzzing as a swarm of bees approached over the rooftops, descending towards the bottom of the village. The caged dog, some houses away, moans and barks day and night. Now and then we hear the eagles that hunt from the warm air that rises up the greened crags behind us. With hot weather, planes come and go, rumbling off the runway in town; passing overhead and climbing before disappearing over the ridge behind the village. Aircraft about to land are more relaxed, seeming to wander south – high for a northward turn back to the runway or lower if the wind is in the south. The silence between their passage – not so frequent as to vex – is punctuated in the day by the sound of strimming, digging, hammering, cats defending their patches, chickens in the back garden a few houses away, chat between the houses beside us, occasional cars along Democracy Street, the loud-speakers of the grocer and fishmonger as, in their vans, they work their way through the village, and the lament of the hopeless dog. Holidaying visitors to the island  come and go, though there are few in Ano Korakiana. We note them on the beach at Ipsos or wandering along the pavements through Dassia, on dune buggies on the Sidari Road or cyclists working their way up the hill to Agios Markos from the sea. Their time here is brief compared to our sojourns. Though even now, as our latest stay nears its end, I can feel my senses turning to England and all the things to do there, regretting departure yet knowing that this to-and-fro life - πέρα δόθε - suits us, for the pleasure of arrival, and re-arrival, and the sadness of leaving over and over. 

On Sunday we sat chatting with Mark at Piatsa an hour, enjoying wine and cold beer and souvlaki grilled just across the narrow road along which cars backed up...

Polling jam on Democracy Street

...on the way to and from the polling station for the European elections and to settle the race – under proportional voting -  for the Mayoralty of Corfu** (which was won by SYRIZA's Kostantinos Nikolouzos - of whose success a friend commented "...so that means ND have been ousted here. I'm delighted that the malaka Trepeklis has gone, he was an A1 shit. This new guy at least has to pretend that he cares about people, even if he turns out to be just a politician. Trepeklis never cared, and showed it."

Yesterday I went out again on Summer Song. Dave and his dog came too. There was too little wind to fill a sail, so we motored across Dassia Bay to Dafnilia Bay and practised testing depth and anchoring.
“I want to be able to take the family on short day-trips, bringing a picnic, visiting a beach” 
On the way back we skirted the shore of Dassia beach where the sea is shallow, commenting on the hotels and their beaches full of loungers and umbrellas and moored pedalos as we slowly passed. In the last half hour the jib was unfurled. We enjoyed the quiet of sailing back to Ipsos. 
I made a list of things  and jobs for the boat – a better pump for the dinghy, a plug for the auto-steer, a bucket for the anchor chain at the bows, a lead line, a stern anchor, life jackets and a life belt, a repair to the connection between stove and gas (“So we can make a cup of tea”), a water container, another coat of varnish for the cockpit woodwork, tidying and whipping the jib sheets where they connect to the clew, depth marks on the anchor chain, tidying the stern mooring, a compass if one become available second hand, repair to the bimini, and of course the new arrangement that will let me roller reef the main from the cockpit. The 'new' engine performed well, using hardly 3 litres of fuel an hour. The motor started instantly whenever needed, was quieter and more powerful. 
“Blimey! This has taken a while” I said “Near three years from when the idea of a replacement engine was muted”

On the jetty at Ipsos, Russell was working on organizing the rigging and spas on his and Shauna's Westerly, readying it for setting her up to sail. I’d sent him a photo of my gunter rig from 1965. 

Leaving for America. Young Tiger in the Solent

He’d studied that. 
“We had to start this from scratch” he said. “The spas were in the hedge. Bare. No running rigging.” 
Locals unfamiliar with the gunter rig had told him he needed a back stay. I’d reassured him on that score “so long as you don’t let the sail put over much pressure on the aft shroud, but even then they're more than adequate.” 
To my chagrin though I didn’t know exactly how the lazy-jacks fixed to the mast. Did they stay divided all the way to the mast or was it right to have them joining a foot or two short of the mast. I couldn’t see how the the gaff could be raised high enough with them like that but I could not remember. 
“Even so” I said “I doubt there’s another gunter rig on a boat this size, within hundreds of miles.” 
Russell’s concerned that the ropes in the luff and foot of his mainsail will not easily slide into the grooves on the gaff and boom” ... even using silicone spray to ease the process.

Hi Russell and Shauna. My overview - I will ask someone in England just where the running rigging should go to ensure the gunter works. I know the gaff relies on two halliards – one, the peak, that hauls from a pulley at the mast head and is used first when raising the main and which attaches to, and slides up and down a braided steel wire running almost the whole length of the gaff, attached to it by stainless steel straps at either end…(sorry you know this but I’m thinking aloud)...and another halliard, the throat, running from a pulley three quarters of the way up the mast, which is used once the first halliard is secured, and fixed to the gaff next to its jaws. This throat halliard allows the gaff, once the parrel beads are tied round the mast to hold the gaff jaws in place, to be hauled up and above the top of the mast. The gaff is held close to the mast by the peak halliard which has a slide where it attaches to the steel wire on the gaff. Hauled upwards by the throat halliard the gaff slides upwards on the steel wire to set the full main. When reefing the main you do not touch the peak halliard, which fixes to a cleat at the foot of the mast. You slack the throat halliard – which I’m almost certain should lead back to the cockpit. You use a smaller rope wound round the drum at the boom’s gooseneck to reef the main as many times round the boom as you decide. Only for a last reef – lowering the main completely - do you release the peak halliard. That job can be done without climbing on deck in a sea. You poke yourself through the forward hatch and release it from there.  “Once you get this rig going you’ll love it” I promise, but I can see why some people find it initially complicated and apparently unwieldy, compared to a Bermudan rig. The advantage of the gunter is that it's so easy to reef the main from the cockpit, with the gunter spa aiding the lowering of the sail. Thus you reef both main and roller jib without clambering around on deck. I’m confused though as to where the reefing cord for the jib runs. I wonder if Sue (my transatlantic crew) and Phil’s W22 called Vicky is gunter-rigged. They can tell the details if so and I’ll pass them on. All the best (hope to catch you before we leave) (Do you have a phone number I could keep?). Simon

And an email from Wales:

hello Simon and Lin - yes Vickie is gunter rigged and I simply could not for the life of me explain how she rigs, especially since she's down in Neyland as we speak having a bit of a refit as after 50 years and us not getting younger it would be nice to have heads that worked again, portholes that didnt leak and so forth - but when I can get hold of Phil (who is out and about just now) will ask, and also I think we just may have the original brochure with drawings etc, so can copy and post if so. So this is just a 'coming shortly'reply email to yours, and how lovely to be in Corfu not in wet chilly Wales where we have had a bit of a fine Spring but in only 3 weeks the nights will start to draw in again and summer has definitely not yet come! hey ho! Love xxxxx S

Vickie - Sue and Phil's Westerly 22

*** ***

*The sculptor Aristedes Zacharias Metallinos (Άριστείδη Μεταλληνοῦ), brother to Spiros and Xthoforos, one of three sons of Zacharias and Eleni Metallinos, was born in 1908 (no official record of birth date) and died at 79 on 19 May 1987. He spent the greatest part of his life working as a general craftsman in the village of Ano Korakiana on the island of Corfu in Greece. Despite early evidence of his imaginative talent as a carver of stone, Metallinos was prevented by poverty from artistic training. He did not begin his work as a self-taught sculptor until 1973, when at the age of 67 until his death in 1987, he fulfilled a long held intention of creating, in local stone and marble, a unique record of the fast changing social life of the village’s pastoral economy, emphasising the role of the family and traditional customs. To this the sculptor carved, as his work evolved, a commentary on human nature and the world - one that was often pungent, erotic and at times ribald. His work of over 250 pieces, nearly all completed in the last 12 years of his life, is kept together in a family museum in Ano Korakiana - a museum he built himself, intending it as a gift to the village. Aristedes' first wife, Eleni, died childless. The sculptor was married again, late in life, to Angeliki, who bore him two children, Andreas and Maria. Andreas and his wife Anna continue to live in Ano Korakiana in the museum that houses a unique collection of work largely unknown outside the village in which it was created.

**Αλλαγή σκυτάλης τόσο στο Δήμο Κέρκυρας, όσο και στην Περιφέρεια Ιονίων Νήσων. Νέος Δήμαρχος Κέρκυρας ο Κώστας Νικολούζος και νέος Περιφερειάρχης Ιονίων Νήσων ο Θόδωρος Γαλιατσάτος, με ποσοστά που κυμαίνονται στο 60% περίπου.

Το κλίμα αυτό αποτυπώθηκε και στο χωριό, όπου σύμφωνα με τα τελικά αποτελέσματα:

Α. για το Δήμο Κέρκυρας

Ψήφισαν: 744, εκ των οποίων 47 «Άκυρο-Λευκό»

Έγκυρα: 697

ΝΙΚΟΛΟΥΖΟΣ: 466 (66,9%) και

ΥΔΡΑΙΟΥ:         231 (33,1%)

Β. για την Περιφέρεια Ιονίων Νήσων

Ψήφισαν: 744, εκ των οποίων 78 «Άκυρο-Λευκό»

Έγκυρα: 663

ΓΑΛΙΑΤΣΑΤΟΣ: 399 (60,2%) και

ΣΠΥΡΟΥ:          264  (39,8%)

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

*** *** ***
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

*** ***
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.

Η γάτα είναι εφτάψυχη

Among the regularly shifting family of cats that live between our houses, using their claws to make effortless ascents of walls and trees, Linda had taken a liking to the ginger kitten which has been around since April. It was killed by a car on Democracy Street the other evening. Katerina, her sister Nectaria and Vangelis and a couple of other children, used to the same cats as us, were standing around in the dusk looking down at its small broken body lying in gouts of congealed blood close against the corner of Lefteris’ house. The children drew our attention to it as we came up the steps to the street the other evening on the way to supper with friends.
“Oh no” said Lin
We looked down in the gathering dark on the little corpse. I contemplated collecting it up.
“If it’s still there when we get back I will”
We walked on. The body had been removed when we came home.
“I could never get near that kitten, you know. It was so wary, yet it was hit by a car”
The cats – our cats – are of course not ours. They’re feral, uncollared, living among us, valuing us for the food we give them, alley cats κεραμιδόγατος.
When we come to the door they will sometimes gather looking up expectantly tails high, waving. If they are nowhere to be seen we will tap a plate against a wall and cry “Γάτα! γάτα!” or “Naps! Ναπς!” Drawing out the ‘a’ – “naa-aaps!” - so that they gather for our gift, imparting the suggestion that we have influence in their lives.
It is a duty to feed a dog that is of your household, as much as to feed a child. In the case of cats we are making offerings. The pet food marketing people figured this out years ago and wrote copy that repeated an ancient distinction in the contrasting ways humans viewed cat and dogs. Dogs whether treated well or abominably, as some are, belong to people. Cats invoke superstition in humans. They are household divinities, seen by some as familiars, “which is why” I read in some study long ago “humans when cherishing dogs will love them like their children and when cruel to dogs will abuse them as some humans abuse children; while humans when cherishing cats will come close to worshipping them or, when cruel, will torture them in inventively brutal ways.”
Cats are not parasites. The presence of these beautiful beasts around our cluster of houses is encouraged by gifts of food. They are never allowed inside houses.
“Έξω! exo!” we cry to the bolder kittens that haven’t learned about thresholds, crying out “cat in the house” and chasing them out. Most understand and obey this convention despite exhibiting intense curiosity about the interiors of our homes. Once I found the desiccated skeleton and pelt of a kitten that had hidden and got trapped in the house when we’d left for England for three months. An awful fate. Now we take more care to check rooms for cats on departure.

A queen and her kits in Venetia

Two adult cats presently allow themselves to be stroked, even purring and looking up ecstatically with half-closed eyes when gently scratched and caressed. I don’t understand why these particular cats decided to be trusting.
“There's a family I know” said a British friend the other day “who paid €500 to have a cat’s broken leg set, and to take her and her kittens to England. It’s a bit over the top when there are families trying to live on €30 a week”
“They have a way of dashing out in front of the car” added her husband “and as we miss them I mutter, ‘there goes one more of your nine lives’” In Greece the British saying is altered - they have just seven lives - Η γάτα είναι εφτάψυχη.
I don’t worship cats. I delight in the look of them. I’d be fascinated to learn more about their habits, especially how they determine each other’s rank and territories and how far different cats roam the village - their beat as it were - and where they live in the cold and wet of winter.
We see them growling at each other, slashing out at other cats to defend their space and we hear, and now and then see, them screeching during violent mating. I’m pleased they kill the occasional rats; less so that they leave their small savaged corpses near our front door as misguided gifts.

When we came home the ginger cat’s body was gone. In the morning young Katerina explained that she and Vangeli had wrapped it up and ‘taken it away’. Only a small map of dried blood remained in the gravel at the side of the road.
“I really liked that cat” said Lin.
*** ******
There came a local wind – in the heat of the midday – that lasted hardly a minute as though some great tree had fallen or rock had tumbled displacing air. It blows across the village, gusting through and around the houses slamming loose doors - close and far – momentarily raising our curtains like streamers, moaning through the roof, sending a plastic bottle poppity along the alley, lifting loose paper; gone as abruptly as it arrived. A portent from the north. Yesterday these great gusts were coming at regular intervals blowing up little dust storms along the mole at Ipsos.
A catamaran we knew was in sound condition but whose owner died has been shifted from its original mooring in the harbour, where it had sat unattended for over five years. It's been beached on the shore where it lies forlorn - a desolate sight - halliards loose, its jib unfurled, slowly shredding, its dirty hull half in and out of the sea, at the mercy of waves from a southern storm.

I'd been down to inspect Summer Song, to check her moorings and cover. As Lin and I sat on a bench I noticed a new boat in the harbour, moored cosily among small fishing boats - of all things a Westerly 22, and not only that - with a gunter rig. I suspect these coincidences. This useful rig is so rare on anything but dinghies and I've not seen another boat of this kind all the time we've been in Corfu; yet here it was in Ipsos harbour only yards from our own boat. I made enquiries and by evening knew her owner and how she came to Corfu - sailed all the way from England.

I was entranced and filled with pleasant nostalgia, even a little envy, to see in such good condition a small boat of exactly the same type and rig as I and a friend had sailed across the Atlantic in 1965-66; a boat I'd know my way about in pitch darkness. Lin and I had been lent the same kind of boat in 1975. We'd sailed her from near Bristol to the Scilly Islands and back over a wet and stormy August. In the wiki piece I wrote about the man who taught me about the way to sail and attend to a small boat at sea, Denys Rayner - nickname 'Ben' his RNVR call sign during convoy duty - inventor of the Westerly 22:

...Ben Rayner's greatest peace time contribution lay in his approach to designing, building and selling such small craft. A fascination with making model destroyers at school evolved into the making of Robinetta in which for a few years he voyaged for pleasure - a pleasure which, after his long war service, he made available to thousands. Starting with Robinetta - based in 2006 on the River Orwell near Harwich and still sailing, and then the rebuilt Orchid to share with his youngest son, Rayner graduated via the one-off Corvette to the Westerly 22, to the Westerly 25, the Westerly 30, the Windrush (a re-worked W25), and the Nomad (a re-worked W22). Applying the husbandry, and inventiveness, that characterised his years as a professional sailor, Rayner applied design and techniques, including the crucial process of curing now recognised as so vital to enduring fibre glass construction, to products that sold themselves. In the recent words of one of his sons, "He was delighted when the butcher, the baker and candlestick maker arrived at the London Boat Show in the early 60s and put down deposits in cash. Boats at that time were produced by 12 men at 6 vessels per annum. With 12 men we built 50 a year. Their yachts cost £6,000. Ours were on a trailer for £1800." But if these small craft were swiftly made and so affordable, none left Rayner's factory unfit for the sea, of which he wrote "neither cruel nor kind ... Any apparent virtues it may have, and all its vices, are seen only in relation to the spirit of man who pits himself, in ships of his own building, against its insensate power."...

*** ***
The other evening, with Lefteris and his grandson and Adonis, I helped crush a 1000 kilos of red and white grapes for next years wine. Lin peeked at us over the garden fence as she cooked supper.

This evening after decanting the first fermentation the press will be applied to the crushed grapes, and the pomace composted.
*** ***
WiFi'd Amy who'd driven up to the Highlands with Oliver and Guy to be with her grandmother, and my sister Bay now at Brin Croft with mum after her flight from New York. I was showing Lin some pictures of Mum when she was a young woman and a girl. For all my pleasure in leafing through large books or drawers full of photos, it's good to have technology which so swiftly recovers a couple of pictures I had in mind - ones I scanned only a year or so ago.

My mother in the lower meadow at Mill End on her horse Oyster. The shadow of the photographer, my grandmother Bar. This must have been sometime in the mid-1930s. Another during a haymaking - mum and her sister with Gypsy, taking a mouthful from my mum's pitchfork.

Gypsy was still around when I was born at Mill End and old enough to be perched on his back in straw hat against the brightness of the sun. Yesterday afternoon I was skyping Amy and Guy, with my grandson Oliver sat between them, in the conservatory at Brin Croft.
There's a Greek philosopher whose name I can't remember. He was, I'm sure, one of the Stoics, a school of thinking - στωικισμός - that emerged, with other guides to life, after militaristic hubris had ended everything that made that brief brilliant era begun with the victory at Plataea, with the fragmentation of city states - the polis - entities which imparted identity, structure and meaning to their citizens; giving commonality to the Golden Age. The philosophy of stoicism is a richer vein of thought and feeling than the simplistic definition contained in our present notions of that word. As those organic societies withered, Greeks had to find an individuality separate from the body politic. It must have been dreadful - for all the liberties the loss of community may confer on people previously fixed in the amber of custom and tradition.
Human life, said this Stoic, could be compared to a great crowd toiling in a vast quarry from which, now and then at random intervals, a cutting out party would select an old man or woman, a mother, wife, father, husband, brother, sister, a suckling child, maiden or youth and take them away, never to be seen again. This image comes to me - one who delights in my surroundings in Greece, in England, in Scotland - with the words of Matthew Arnold

...for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain...

No place means anything without the people in it that you love, your dear neighbours and friends; the most sublime, most beautiful landscape on land or sea, whether the close-ups of exquisite detail or the distant prospect of mountains and plains at the rising of the sun or its going down, enchanted by moonlight as was the sea below the cliffs of Dover Beach, as Arnold strolled in the sweet night air with his new wife; none of this affords an iota of consolation when the cutting out party arrives in the quarry for someone you love.