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.
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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.
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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."
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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

The realm of wonder

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Yesterday we started clearing the small garden, to see what lay beneath. I opened the gate onto the path to the lower road. Neighbours brought a house gift. Our builders arrived to measure up the roof for an estimate of complete repairs as well as removing the concrete rubble blocks that the previous owners had set up beside the house to stack rubble and which have brought damp into the lower rooms. A young woman from the house behind when asked said “It was very nice” leaving unfinished her view that improvements had been unsuccessful. We agreed. An outside staircase to a balcony had been removed. I cycled back to Ipsos and Lin came down in the car. Shared a lager and an altercation with itinerant topers whose game is to ask questions, top the answer until someone remonstrates and then say ‘sorry’. We were part rescued by a friend who’d winked across the space at the bar into which this couple had barged.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Summer Song lies near the end of the seaward arm. of Ipsos Harbour. The owner of the little yacht moored next to ‘Summer Song’ until February, sailed for Italy while we were away, but Magnus, her skipper, is now in hospital there after he became ill while crossing the Straits of Otranto. The Italian Coastguard came alongside his drifting boat but in trying to lift him from his boat he dropped into the sea from which they only finely rescued him after two hours in the water.

We went into town and drew money from our bank behind the Liston, bought bedding, shower curtain and paint in the Evraiki [Back to the future reference: Look out for a forthcoming book by Marcia Haddad to which I was referred on 27/7/07 by Stan Boardman-Jacobs' 'The Day My Heart Broke']
We drove to Democracy Street - the back way, turning off the Sidari Road along roads lined by the pink blossoms of Judas trees, to gaze from our balcony at the sea and the woods and the village above and below and discuss plans for the house. I checked the shop nearby could receive our mail. “Yes, two or three times a week it comes.” I said the bread was good there. The owner said he used to have a bakery there. The wood meant the bread lasted 5-6 days, “but I don’t want to talk about that.”

Monday, 9 April 2007 Ano Korakiana, Easter Monday
We visited 208 Democracy Street and met the builders. It may be necessary to redo the whole roof rather than just repair parts of it. Ano Korakiana’s Easter Monday procession gathered round the bend by Little Venice. We had a coffee – skirto and nescafe – at the kafenion and gingerly wandered up Democracy Street to the ravine bridge where we waited. The drums started. The procession moved off. A troop of cub scouts, cross bearers and then the Ano Korakiana band. Woodwind – clarinets and flutes – to spice the grander sound of the swaying trombones, trumpets and the drums. They were playing San Tomasso. Solemn but not sad. Then three ranks of dignified women in suits with purple ties – part of the choir. Then passed – St.Peter and St.Spiridon and St Michael on banners, then priests. One saw us and nodded and said “Christos Anesti, Where from?” “From England.” I should have replied "Anethos Anesti".



We waited a little and than strolled on, wary to follow, but not join the procession as it played down Democracy Street. We visited some friends at the bottom of the village. Later on the low road past olive trees, Lin stopped the car and we could hear bees not yet recruited to the killing labour of monocultivation, doing voluntary work among the wildflowers.

Edward Lear, Corfu, 1871, w/c & gouache. Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA

Saturday, April 7, 2007


The big ferry from Bari sailed hardly a 100 metres by the corner of north east Corfu in the dark and on to Igoumenitsa where we landed and trollied our luggage a kilometre along the seafront to the Pantokrator. We remembered how when we'd come this way the previous November a south wind had blown with such strength off the shore our ship had been unable to dock for two hours - a wait that had given us a new friend in Hy from Ayios Markos who'd ridden home with us once we'd made it to Corfu.



She was very full, convivial chat drowning the noise of unwatched TVs in the familiar saloon. One family, at least, had brought a whole lamb for Easter. It lay wrapped beside them but as the crowd increased was stowed below their seat. 'One vast realm of wonder' (Canto 88 Byron's 'Travels of Childe Harold') - words of a lover, blind to flytipped refuse, strip mall development, bleached menus selling 'pise and ships', UK redtops and eurotrash porn, dumb t-shirts, fuming traffic, wall-to-wall football on TV and shaven lads with rosy bellies. But Greece makes me blind. I get a lump in my throat as I see it twinklng below from a late night plane or rising from the sea from the deck of a ferry.

The air was crisp as the ship headed north west over a flat sea. At the Port of Corfu by mid-morning Kostas' boy met us with a car. We left it outside his office with our luggage and strolled towards the Liston until we were standing tightly surrounded by people of all ages below fine balconies packed with onlookers, some preparing to drop terracotta pots on the marble streets below. As even larger pots appeared in the windows above we "ooh'd" and "aah'd" in anticipation. At noon the cascade began. 'Crash" "huraaaaaa" "crash" "huraaaaa". The water in the pots, as well as holding the sins of the preceding year, ensures shards don't explode among the onlookers. The sun shone bright. the crowd was civil and happy. A few minutes later with bands playing we strolled through pottery strewn streets, eating roast lamb, onion and tomato on pita bread.

Friday, April 6, 2007
All seats to Bari from Rome were reserved. At Termini by 8.30am we walked through the bustle and boarded a Eurostar for Bari hoping for the best. Another passenger, a young teacher, Valerian, helped translate, asking the guard if sitting on our luggage would be OK. He nodded. A young woman ran to catch the train as it started and the guard opened the door so she could hop aboard with a broad and slightly out-of-breath smile of gratitude. In a spacious lobby at the end of the last carriage we could gaze through glass at the receding lines as our train sped south.



The snack trolly was a door away. We enjoyed hot chocolate and espresso. Later Lin made a picnic – bread and wine. Cassino, Caserta, Foggia and then some seats came free. We ate, chatted and read. The train was clean and roomy; the passengers civil without needing words. No-one sought our tickets or made announcements.
At Bari we left our luggage at the station and soon found ourselves in a Good Friday procession through the high sided streets following or being followed by a brass band in grieving sonour swaying amid a procession of saints carried on biers behind Jesus - ecce homo - bearing a cross to Golgotha by crowded pavements, shops (few shuttered) bars (none closed) a nunnery and commuters in their cars queueing to get out of town.