Dimitra's birthday party

Two years ago the garden across the path from our house was overgrown, full of bits and pieces, dominated by a spreading fig tree. Since then Effie and Adoni who own the house attached to it have rebuilt their apothiki, tidied the garden, planted flowers and vegetables, laid out a small hard surface for dancing and allowed a large walnut tree to spread in place of the fig, whose wood we've already used to heat us over winter. The place has become lovely for eating in company, open to the views from the village, shaded from the sun.

Adding our third table a banquet is soon ready. On Sunday it was Dimitra's 16th birthday - daughter of Natasha and Foti, grand-daughter of Vasiliki and Lefteri (Λευτέρη Ιωνά), sister of young Lefteri. The family plus uncles and aunts and parents-in-law gathered, plus us - the neighbours - and sometime during the afternoon, in the village's style of spontaneous invitation to strangers, a couple from Paris who were strolling along Democracy Street, just above.

Dimitra's birthday party from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

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Richard Pine of Perithia, in one of his regular pieces for the Irish Times, referred to some northern Europeans seeing Greece as 'a two-dimensional holiday destination'; England’s Coney Island, Hellas-on-Sea. It’s not so specious a view, given the contribution of tourism to a country that didn’t have a proper industrial revolution. 'Proper industrial revolution'? There are many countries that have imported only the end products of that slow trauma that Britain led, gaining her an empire greater than Rome’s, greater than any before or - if marked by colours on a map of the world - since.

Our industrial revolution isn’t just steam, smoke and chimneys, the architecture of manufacture on a scale previously unknown, accompanied by a vast military, fleets, mighty ports, roads, waterways and railways across continents, telegraph encircling the globe.

The Black Country as it was

A professor of electricity in 1895 explains cables to a new recruit “They are the nervous fibres of the world, conveying intelligence from one continent to another, just as the nerves of your body send the impressions of the senses and the wishes of the brain to every limb.” It is also the social forms, the values, the human organisations that grew by habit, hazard, invention, reform and chance as part of the phenomenon I was taught as a child in class to call an industrial revolution – peopling it with a cast of 18th and 19th century inventors - Boulton, Watt, Murdoch (their remains in our local church in Handsworth) Stephenson, Arkwright, Brindley, Crompton, Cort, Hargreaves, along with soldiers, sailors, writers on ‘how we live now’ and reformers, political and artistic, rueing urban immiseration, drawing and writing the consequences of commodification and disenchantment – creators and narrators of that gigantic hegemony, along with nameless teeming populations of labourers, seamen, soldiers, colliers, coolies, navvies, migrants, immigrants, settlers, colonists.

A wise writer, Athina Rachel Tsangari, in the recent Greek film Attenberg – which Lin and I liked a lot, watching it twice a few weeks ago – says, through the mouth of one of its main characters, Spiro, as he gazes over an ekistical Doxiades settlement laid out in Euboea –

“bourgeois arrogance…especially for a country that skipped the industrial age altogether…from shepherds to bulldozers…from bulldozers to mines, and from mines, straight to petit-bourgeois hysteria…we built an industrial colony on top of sheep pens and thought we were making a revolution.”

Greeks through their diaspora have been as much part of the continuity of the industrial age – and that which follows - as the population of any nation. Their individual repute as artists, academics, managers, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists in the van needs no advocacy; but Greece, the country, the wondrous land, is outside the industrial club. Its magnificent built projects are an expensive refinement of the bizarre airfields and offices that feature in Melanesian cargo cults. Greece skipped the slow burn we call our industrial revolution. It never evolved the social forms, values, and human organisation that accompanied the spread of Satanic mills. Greece has its smoking factories and gouging quarries...

Attenberg - final scene

...often used against grey rainy backgrounds in films by Greeks to refute the two-dimensional Greece of Shirley Valentine...

...and innumerable series set in a sun-sea Republic – but these projects landed here, hurled by centrifuge from industrial heartlands. As it says on the film, there are cities, factories, quarries, railways and of course ships – a vast fleet created and owned by Greek dynasties – but the managerial and bureaucratic revolution that was part and parcel of our industrial revolution did not happen. The artifacts of industry were, as in so many countries that were predominantly as agrarian as Britain in the 17th century, plonked 'on sheep-pens', their paperwork processed by men hardly a generation from their village.
By contrast, look at me! But for my wonderful eccentric maternal grandmother who left Mayfair to make the dairy farm where I was born...

I'm on the horse called Gypsy

... I descend from near 200 years of bourgeoisie, grown by the age of industry, iron-master, mill owners, academic, librarian, archivist, journalist, soldiers, civil servants and businessmen in South America, Portugal and India, diplomats and spies, a publisher, a political cartoonist, television producer, broadcaster, plus a lawyer, an accountant and somewhere, more remotely, a bishop and an actress. We are urban urban urban. This is why I hold such respect and admiration for those who - like the monks who preserved writing, text and thought into the Renaissance – had fathers and mothers who still worked the ground and made a living from the land and just managed to pass their craft to their city bound children.
Antaeus Ἀνταῖος was a giant of immense strength which he drew from having his feet on the ground, on mother Earth, Gaia. When Hercules Herakles, as one of his labours, lifted and held Antaeus so he could not touch the earth, he was finished.

Zola’s Earth demolished the rural idyll, mocked ‘back to the land’. John Berger, a century later, called it Pig Earth; that working the land is no refiner of character. I do not need land to recover a spiritual dimension missing from the city. I need to meet and negotiate with the land to learn not to destroy it with my voracious urban greed - putting the world at risk. I'm the first person in our family to try my hand at the land in six generations - and I'm more or less hopeless at it.

Back to the future ~ 10/6/12: 'In Greece, a painful return to country roots; -

KONITSA -- Thirteen years after abandoning rural Greece for a career in graphic design, Spiridoula Lakka finds herself in the last place she expected to end up - watering a patch of lettuce and herbs in her sleepy village...

Back to the future ~ 5/6/12: I've come to a blog called Breach of Close by Stefanos Christoforos. One page 'Tells of Loss' refers to Yannis Kounellis’ work at the Museum of Cycladic Art - 'a response to the turbulent times in which the Greek people are living':

...For Kounellis, however, the problem is not the economy but identity. He says we have lost our sense of who we are. It is broken, like the shattered cast of an ancient statue. Some would argue it was not the crisis that broke it but the cultural estrangement wrought in the hyper-materialist decades that preceded and precipitated the crisis. Not everything has been lost, though. “They said the same thing after the war and then again after the civil war,” he says, “but the country survived.” Perhaps, as Cavafy wrote, the gods are not dead, though the statues may have been broken and the gods driven out of their temples....

Γιατί τα σπάσαμε τ’ αγάλματά των,
γιατί τους διώξαμεν απ’ τους ναούς των,
διόλου δεν πέθαναν γι’ αυτό οι θεοί ...

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Coming up the hill from Pyrgi I put a wheel in the verge and tipped over.

Before they came to help me up - unnecessary but appreciated - a walker with a camera took a picture and later emailed it - a record of how well I'd fallen; unhurt, unbruised, unflurried. A perfect fall like the young champions do on ice and jockeys from their galloping horses on the TV. I felt Pooter-proud to have relaxed at just the right moment
"Because" observed Carrie "you were coming back from Nisaki where you'd been drinking with Aleko. That's why you fell over. That's why you didn't hurt yourself."

Meanwhile I'm scrubbing moss and dust off old Corfu tiles, a gift from Nick in Skripero, while Linda continues to lay them on the apothiki - a beautiful job, these tiles, each unique, made long ago over the thighs of women whose thumb marks are visible in the clay.

Cricket

Handsworth Park

Some humans feel diminished by discoveries which make reality more rather than less mysterious, as though magic and religion were never about mystery or faith or even consolation but only about propitiation and explanation. Last Sunday Amy, Guy, Richard and I strolled over with Oscar to watch the cricket, organised by Sted Wallen for the two day Sports and Cultural event in Handsworth Park. Sted, amid the bustle around the pavilion, invited us for food in the guest tent, and mentioned he'd had a word with our Lord Mayor, Councillor Anita Ward, about Persimmon Homes' extended delay providing playing fields, including changing rooms and children's playground next to the Victoria Jubilee Allotments under their S106A with Birmingham City Council. "We must hurry that up" she said. Fingers crossed. We bumped into Amy's Godmother, Sonia Hyman.

Lunch was curried goat, rice, salad. How pleasing that I could sit here in this park I care about so much among closest relatives, and, but for Sonia, be sat, hardly a fortnight earlier, with the same people, same dog, in the committee tent of the Highland Field Sports Fair at Moy.

Amy, Simon, Oscar, Sonia and Guy at Handsworth Sport and Culture Day

Tuesday morning, Lin and I coached to London, thence by train to Gatwick, for our flight to Corfu, arriving in humid warm darkness at 11pm, collecting the car from Yianni, getting into 208 Democracy Street after kisses and hugs with our neighbours sitting outside - Vasiliki, young Lefteri and his mother Natasha. We aired the house; began to unwind after the work of the last months.
When I woke before dawn, the sky clay, I could scarcely move. The muscles at the base of my spine had rebelled against digging our allotment - on Saturday spreading a big polythene sheet across one third of the plot weighed with slabs - tidying the flat - my contribution far less than Linda's - pre-departure chores with their hassle.
"You need to lie flat on a wooden floor" said Lin, disinclined to sympathy, but who had, after a chat with our neighbour Paul, obtained from him some locally available tablets called Arcoxia which, when taken after a meal, brought relief.
Even so I spent Wednesday indoors, philosophising about the impossibility of doing more housework, utterly engrossed in Zola's powerful demolition of the pastoral idyll - Earth - whose first English translation was banned in England and America.

A novel as heart gripping as The Bridge on The Drina. Later we swam, enjoying the blue,  stirred into cobalt by katabatic wind down the hot slopes of Trompetta, as light blue velvet is napped cobalt with the heel of a fist.

Nick and Nancy's pool yesterday evening

The writer intended, when he put arguments in their mouths, that Job’s helpers demonstrate the limits of common sense. All Job’s sufferings – real enough in the world - are invented to explain acceptance and faith in goodness amid the worst of suffering – loss of children, the death of beloved companions, and the least of it, a banged shin, a stubbed toe, my aching back. Common sense invents a commentary that suits the actuarial calculation of insurers; the narratives of litigants before a jury. How profoundly, unlike the Book of Job, it fails to explain why bad things happen to good people.

Cutting back the Bougainvillea and Wisteria at 208

While Lin read, I dropped round to see Mark and Sally, unwilling to wait to see them. Mark knowing my interest in the scythe, showed me an article written nearly 30 years ago - he collects such things for himself and for me - about billhooks and how they differed across the land. Imagine the variants across Europe and beyond.

Early Sunday morning a mosquito found us. I got up and addressed myself, lying headlong on a rubber mattress, to cleaning a large cerise stain spread across the bottom of one of the kitchen cupboards. I worked back to the white surface, reaching deep into the cupboard, twisting and turning in my efforts. After less than half-an-hour the space was pristine; my back no longer hurting, just the memory of its ache.
On Thursday we went to Foros, Ο Φόρος, at Palia Perithia for a long lunch of conversation with Richard Pine and his daughters, Emily and Vanessa, bringing back a bag of figs picked from one of his trees and the anticipation of a forthcoming book on Corfu created around his regular articles about Greece - and Ireland - for the Irish Times. 

Richard Pine at Palia Perithia

Cycling the towpath - in distinguished company

My rainy route to work Originally uploaded by Sibad.

I can cycle to the University by joining the towpath of the Soho Loop off the Birmingham Mainline Canal where it runs parallel to Clissold Street in Hockley - a mile from home - and following it almost to the top of Farmer's Locks where I cross a bridge and take a right onto the Birmingham and Worcester Canal, passing the edge of the country's greatest waterway intersection, and heading westward to Edgbaston, leaving the canal a hundred yards or so further on from this picture and surfacing via the steps up to Somerset Road.
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Who cycles? Power and influence sometimes work best - for good or evil -when unseen to most of us. Do you know how many ministers, academics,barristers, surgeons, senior civil servants and other establishment figures are navigating our urban streets by bicycle? More than you might imagine. The car is increasingly the chariot of the masses and the object of proletarian desire. It therefore has a powerful resonance in a democracy which makes moves against this sacred artifact something best kept under the radar. Recall too that for a public figure to be associated with walking or cycling is to risk the inference that such ways of getting about are preferable to motoring. In other words to cycle or walk is not simply a choice it is frequently interpreted as a public political gesture. Any public figure who becomes associated with cycling or walking will be transferred within months or less to the ranks of the slightly odd or the amusingly eccentric with every public statement they make thereafter on any subject under the sun prefixed with the words like "the well known 'pedestrian'" or "the '(insert age) year old cycling enthusiast'". Even an obituary headline will contain some similar reminder of their distinctive association with their preferred way of getting from A to B. This is not a call to apathy, just a reminder that power is sometimes most effectively exercised behind the scenes or by quiet example. That said, Jeremy Paxman cycles the capital. "It is easily the quickest way around London, faster than bus, tube or taxi. You can predict precisely how long every journey will take, regardless of traffic jams, tube strikes or leaves on the line. It provides excellent exercise. It does not pollute the atmosphere. It does not clog up the streets." Vivienne Westwood regularly bicycles through the streets of London wearing a mad-looking pair of shoes from Balenciaga and Gilles Tapie's recent book of photographs of the dancer Sylvie Guillem shows she’s an urban cyclist. Eric Clapton collects and rides Italian road bikes while Bea Campbell wrote "In the context of debates about identity politics - are you gay or straight, nationalist or republican, British or English and so on - I would ask, 'Do you ride a bike?' I love everything about the machine - the sensation of the tyres on the road, the mobility - and I love the fact that you have this intimate relationship with the elements, and the landscape." Michelle Pfeiffer cycles. Madonna rides with Guy Ritchie and little Rocco and no doubt a procession of reluctant but well paid heavies. Robin Williams owns lots of road bikes and rides with his friend Lance Armstrong. Ex-Shadow Secretary of State Bernard Jenkin drives to his London home on Sunday evening and cycles the rest of the week: "...everywhere, every day - to Westminster, to meetings in the West End and the City, to the Albert Hall, to the Royal Opera House. Cycling offers a huge financial advantage and it keeps me fit." Des Lynam wrote in the Telegraph: “I decide on the spur of the moment to fly home...I see my loved ones and ride my bicycle in the fresh Sussex air.” Jarvis Cocker cycles in town. Jeff Banks and Paul Smith are avid cyclists and Smith's business has sponsored cycle teams. We may yet see them design proper day clothes for cycling in the city (:)). Sheryl Crow, a singer but also Lance Armstrong's girlfriend,rode close to 70 miles at the recent Ride for the Roses in Austin and speaks of writing a song about cycling. Jon Bon Jovi is a mountain biker sponsoring an MTB team and even though Jeremy Clarkson is rude about cyclists in general he and his wife keep fit on Raleigh Pioneers. "Don't listen to what I say, watch what I'm pedalling (?)" Grateful Dead rent studio space from Marin and their guitarist Bob Weir is a mountain biker, and often rides with mountain bike co-founding father, Gary Fisher. Weir said: "Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls." Sir Rocco Forte took up cycling when his love of endurance sport led him to triathlons. Of all the sports he pursues cycling is "the thing I love best...I am addicted." John Kerry (remember him?) is a keen road cyclist, owning a Serotta Ottrott. God help me, even President Bush took up mountain biking in 2004 "Nothing compares to getting your heart rate up to 170-something, riding hard for an hour-twenty, getting off and not hurting, as opposed to 24 minutes of running, at the end of which I hurt. When you ride a bike and you get your heart rate up and you're out, after 30 or 40 minutes your mind tends to expand; it tends to relax." Yes well. That's one of the most coherent sequence of words I've ever heard from those lips. I've passed Jon Snow on his Dutch city bicycle near Trafalgar Square. He probably persuaded Paxman it was the best way to get around London. I've used Snow's advice about getting cool in the studio after a fast ride. Apply an ice cube to the temples and back of the neck. Snow says his "... whole day is built around meetings that can be achieved around bike rides. My contract actually offers me a free car from my home to my office and back, but I suppose I am addicted to cycling." Alexei Sayle may write about cars in the Independent but he commutes by bicycle and, with Jon Snow, is a customer of Condor Cycles along with Adam Woodyatt, Jill Halfpenny, Mick Jagger, and Chris Tarrant and wife who've bought a tandem. Retired Treasury mandarin Sir Steve Robson always rode to work and still gets off road in the Sussex Downs sometimes. Boris Johnson MP cycles to and from Parliament and has argued for cyclists being able to use mobile phones on the road as they only endanger themselves unlike drivers doing the same thing. The Prime Minister of Belgium, is a cyclist and a fan of cycle-sport. He said: "In politics, one can learn some things from cycling, such as how to have character and courage. Sometimes in politics there isn't enough of those things.” Lee Iacocca ("when you die, if you've got five real friends, then you've had a great life") former boss at Ford and then GM, invented the the SUV, repented and is now into electric bikes and rides his company's products. He said: "After 50 years in the auto business, I'm bringing you the future of transportation - and it's electric!" Kraftwerk's 1980s Tour de France album is a classic and they do other bicycle things though they are a bit reclusive, which brings me back to my original point. I agree that most of these people are celebs rather than people in government or the professions - but I would be undermining my case if I started on another list here. I though Belgian PM and a Conservative shadow minister would be OK though (:)), though I can't resist my favourite European politician, Romano Prodi, one of Italy's most successful post-war politicians, lives in Bologna and goes to work on his bicycle. In my v.small way, I never ever advocate cycling or walking in the lectures I give around the UK about local government, but in one corner of the room there's always a folding bicycle and when I submit my expenses there's always the reference to "20p a mile for the journeys I've done by cycle", and when I sign into hotels the space for a car number plate remains in-your-face blank, and some may even notice that for a 65 year old I look in rude health cutting quite a figure in the suited self that emerges from my wet wear on a rainy winter morning. My favourite famous cyclist is Emil Zola but he never went on about it. He fought for justice and wrote like an avenging angel - and happened to love cycling.