My best Christmas present?

Drab monotonously wet weather persists, twirling the garden windmills, swaying tall leafless trees between the houses. The buffeting wind has become the sound of the city; its mechanical rumble muted - by recession, migration and privacy. The sodden faded greenery between the houses is abandoned, a march for crows and pigeons and the small birds that visit the seeds and nuts hanging outside our kitchen window.
On Christmas evening I was ill with norovirus, confined myself to bed and home between bouts of stomach wrenching vomiting, recovering on water and cups of tea and porridge, feeling frail. Lin caught this a few weeks back; Richard's Emma had it a day after me, and then Lin's Dad, back in Cannock, came down. Thanks to our diverse population Richard found a chemist open - Calstar Pharmacy on Lozells Road. She sold us loperamide hydrochloride - Diah-Limit - to calm my insides and oral electrolytic powder - Dioralyte - to replace water and salt. When your weak it's difficult to imagine being strong but within 24 hours I was fine - but not feeling like eating any left over turkey.
 "It might have been those oysters you had on Christmas eve" suggested Lin.
"It won't put me off oysters. That place serves the best in Birmingham and it's the first time I've ever felt ill after eating them. More likely someone with the virus didn't wash their hands"

For presents, Linda gave me a knapsack full of foreign procedurals, marmite and a remaindered library book Stories from Greek History by Marguerite Desmurger with a note inside...

Glancing through them I recall the enchantment of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, the words and the rich illustrations...

When Jason, the son of the dethroned King of Iolchos, was a little boy, he was sent away from his parents, and placed under the queerest schoolmaster that ever you heard of. This learned person was one of the people, or quadrupeds, called Centaurs. He lived in a cavern, and had the body and legs of a white horse, with the head and shoulders of a man. His name was...

Good Chiron taught his pupils how to play the harp ~ Edmund Dulac

Why do people want drugs when this stuff's legal, damn near free and keeps you high for the rest of your life. A bat squeak of glee at setting Hawthorne's 'queerest schoolmaster' among the semantic pigeons)

Jason appoints Tiphys to be helmsman ~ Edmund Dulac

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Maria Strani-Potts has published her latest book on-line - an e-book, When The Sun Goes Down - Island Stories. I want to read, but I yen for the heft of a book. Corfucius writes a review:      

I declare an interest: I know Maria and to sit and talk to her is an enjoyment separate from the powerful solitary pleasure of reading her. She is the most unwriterly writer I know: talk is talk, writing is writing; she gets the job done. I still treasure her Cat of Portovecchio [Η Γάτα του Πορτοβέκιο] as one of the most stunning novels I have read. Barely fiction for the pulses it taps; I live in Corfu and it opened my eyes and heart to my paradise home. This collection is short stories and her pacing is spot-on. I've worked in the book business and touted short stories by famed novelists who just haven't pulled it off in the challenging discipline of condensing it down. The PR puff talks of capturing 'the atmosphere and distinctive character of several different islands in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.' Piffle. No 'capture' about it; the reader is right there. As with the best movie scores, you don't notice the expertise and talent because you're engrossed in the world of the story.

SWIMMING IN BERMUDA: Tourist meets local. They talk in perfect pitch, Strani-Potts nailing the patois and the poshois. Like an onion, dark truths unpeel.

REHEARSING I DO: light-as-a-soufflé humour set on a French island, letting the deft words do the humour, no canned laughter, nothing rammed in your face . I wouldnt be surprised if readers who didn't 'get it' read this right thru, still enjoyed it, and wondered what had glided over their heads.

THE EXPLOITATION OF PANOREA: familiar to all who read 'To Poúlima tns Panoraías' [Το πούλημα της Πανωραίας], the no-punches-pulled exposé and battle-cry against the disgraceful desecration of our environment, in this case the ruthless exploitation of 'an island in the Ionian'. No guesses. 

ON THE BEACH: Tight and merciless. Women enjoying lulling and lolling over the usual evening ouzo, Suddenly a floating dead body. In the midst of pampered leisure, Life - red (in this case, bloating) in scale and claw. A wake-up call that Strani-Potts keeps local, makes universal. 

A remarkable collection. If I was handed them as separate sheaves, I'd not swear them as by the same nib. Chameleon brilliance. Mark of a bred-in-the-bone writer. Deserves to be spotted by some alert editorial assistant in one of the major houses and given the international readership Ms Potts deserves, and will achieve.

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Greek Reporter rounds up news stories of 2012 - a miserable inventory...
...There was such a tsunami of trouble for Greece that there literally was almost no good news because the real heroes: NGO’s helping the poor, the soup lines set up by the Greek Orthodox Church as the government abandoned people, doctors providing free clinics and services, volunteers reaching out the disenfranchised and disaffected, people coming together to create social grocery stores and help each other were back page stories as the media concentrated on the obvious mega-stories....and Amalia Melis cries out in an essay of passionate anger at her country's corruption and depravity Screaming From Inside the Sealed Vault:

I have traveled as north as Canada, as east as Japan, as South as Australia but the diagnosis is the same: Heart Greek, Mind American. What are the odds that I will find a cure? None. The thread always leads back to here the only place that makes sense to me: the island village my family is from: Apikia in Andros. With this disease ever present, I choose to live in a country that is undergoing one of the most turbulent changes to its social and financial makeup. You all know which one I mean: Bad, bad Greece...
....Greece has survived the brutality of the Nazis, the wrenching hatred of Civil War which followed. Parts of Greek society allowed a seven year military dictatorship to take hold, further tearing the country apart. Foreign powers were happy to frolic in the same bed with Greek dictators in the name of lucrative business deals. Greece was given hope when the Socialists were ushered into power with the winds of Change–those words brought me here in 1981 as a single young woman eager to discover the country my family comes from. It was a historic time when anything was possible. Anything; and the public, from left wing to right, would have supported that Prime Minister’s vision. That historic moment echoes inside me still; precisely because it was made barren, depleted, robbed, rejected, lost, forgotten by the ones whom I thought knew better.
While the rest of us regroup, cut back on superficial things like going out to a taverna, travel, extra trips to anywhere, my husband and I seriously focus on how to keep our eleven year old car running, how to maintain our home which was bought by paying off two bank loans to acquire it, school tuition, our teen’s needs and wants. How will we pay all the new extra taxes added on to other new taxes we have already paid on everything we own? We are not alone. Our friends are in the same boat and there is no end in sight to what the near future might hold for all of us.
I am thankful that I am not hungry. Yet. I still believe I can contribute to this new situation in Greece by looking for a ray of light...
...Even as I become poorer each day I also become richer. I have crossed paths with so many creative minds who linger here even against all odds. Something tells me I should keep plowing ahead by gathering writers from all over the world to come to Andros each summer to write and be part of a writing community I created with much love and dedication. I will continue to open my arms and welcome them to this country, this island that has inspired so many and will inspire new stories from the richness that is Greece. Something tells me I should linger with my daughter to listen to island songs played by my uncle’s santouri, by our friends’ tsambouna, laouto, violin at our village feasts. Something tells me I should give my daughter blog posts to ponder, give her reason to question political choices each of us makes, that she will one day make. While Greece undergoes growing pains, looks into the mirror to see its ugly and strong side, something tells me I must write to exist.

Amalia's diatribe brought to mind the words of the Ionian rizopasti Ilias Zervos, contemplating the consequences for the seven islands - the Septinsular Republic as might have been - embracing enosis with a Greece governed from Athens.

Zervos’ of Cephalonia believed Britain's power over lonian affairs did not decrease with the end of the Ionian Protectorate in 1864, instead the islands became ‘a Pandora's Box’ for British influence on Hellenic politics (*Calligas p.300). Zervos found himself opposing his radicalism to that of Zante's Constantinos Lombardos with his popular and nationalistic triumphing enosis with 'Mother Greece'. Instead of ‘freedom’, Athens had given Corfu and her sisters:

...the pollutant of political corruption, which has brought this miserable nation to its present deterioration and produced as many unscrupulous exploiters as a decaying corpse produces worms.

Eleni Calligas on p.301 of her thesis, quoting from Elia Zervos’ autobiography Βιογραθία Ηλία Ζερβού Ιαχωβάτου Συντεθείσα παρ αυτού (1880) edited by Ch. S. Theodoratos, Athens 1974

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There's a BBC Radio 4 programme on Lawrence Durrell in a few days

Is he being consigned to the memory of those who first encountered and were entranced by his writing - as I dip now and then into Prospero's Cell, invariably finding something I missed before - or is he a writer who might attract the attention of new readers? I read the Alexandria Quartets when they were passed on to me by my stepfather in the early 1960s. I don't recall my reading preferences at the time but I know I'd already enjoyed Joyce's Ulysses, been slowed down by Finnegan's Wake, been through just about all of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and read Lady Chatterley's Lover, A Passage to India, Lord Jim and loads of other wonderful stuff, Bond books, P.G. Wodehouse, Ernest Thompson Seton and The Lord of the Rings and and and...Durrell's four connected novels were breathtaking, my first encounter with the idea that there could more than a single first person narrative in one epic - Justine's, Balthazar's, Mount Olive's and Clea's. It was a baptism in the greater reality of subjectivity and the way genius could shape-shift - gender, age, ethnicity etc.

How many such works had been written in this way? Probably plenty but I hadn't some across anything like this before. In those days too I had all of Russia yet to go. It was not until I was 31 I read War and Peace and another decade before Don Quixote during a ramble along the coast of Galicia in 1975.
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Linda's posted this on Handsworth Helping Hands Facebook page (ref - scroll down here):

We are making preparations for using our Community Chest grant to help individuals in our area. Assistance is available to residents who are unable to do the required jobs themselves due to age, infirmity, medical problems or lack of necessary financial resources.
The work we envisage doing includes garden and rubbish clearance, home security measures such as fitting doorchains and window locks, small DIY jobs such as simple repairs and putting up shelves, supply and fitting of low energy light bulbs, emulsion painting of sitting room or client's bedroom.
Two levels of assistance apply:
1. Free work for residents requiring assistance and on low income.
2. Subsidised work for those requiring assistance on the grounds of age,
infirmity or medical problems.
APPLICATIONS OR REFERRALS BASED ON THESE CRITERIA ARE INVITED - RING 0845 250 1276 OR MESSAGE US VIA FACEBOOK
Please note that assistance is only available for those genuinely in need of help and the criteria will be vigorously applied.

Minutes from our last meeting:

MINUTES: Tue 18 Dec 2012, 1900 at 34 Beaudesert Road
Present: LB, DF, SB, MT (chair) 1.     Apologies and approval of minutes for 16 Aug’12: Minutes approved. Apologies from JR and LP
 2.     Finances and van MOT: On 4 Dec’12 MT phoned Sira Motors Ltd on Crompton Rd - 523 2603 - re them carrying out this year’s MOT on the transit van. They referred MT to Villa Cross Garage Ltd, 12 Heathfield Rd B19 1HB on 554 4963. Mike will arrange.                                                                      LB reported that the £4000 Community Chest Grant cheque was received in October and paid into HHH’s Unity Bank Account – giving us a credit balance of £16,947 3.     Training in use of power tools: SB described regulations surrounding the public or ‘official’ use of power tools by HHH and the legal challenges relating to Health and Safety and Public Liability. All and any public use of our tools will require us to invest in training to obtain essential accreditation. It was discussed whether we should sell the more dangerous power tools. It was agreed to delay training for the time being and continue to store the project’s power tools.
 4.     Community Chest grant progress: There was a discussion of work opportunities in line with the goals of the project. LB would seek contact with local places of worship, e.g. St Mary’s, Handsworth? United Reform Church? Sister Helen at the Lozells Neighbourhood Forum. SB would contact Andrew Simons. MT will ask NS to check his church. Rachel Chiu was suggested as a point of contact and source of information. We recognised that we need to generate work without generating demand we cannot fulfil.
There was discussion of identifying skilled local handypersons with liability insurance who’d passed CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checks who HHH could employ to do work requiring skills we do not have.
It was suggested that HHH tidy at the top end of Livingstone Road allotments; tidy planters on Putney Ave, Leslie Rd and Church Ave, possibly printing notices saying ‘work done by HHH – find us on Facebook’. MT identified a request by a resident – Carol Reid – in Maxwell Ave to do work for them. SB would make contact.It was agreed to meet at 1200 noon next to the Wellington Road embankment on Thursday 3 January 2013 to do litter picking and bulb planting.
 5.    AOB: Next meeting to be on 3 January at 1900 at 34 Beaudesert Road. 

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I've posted one of my usual passing grumbles on Birmingham City Council's Grounds Maintenance website now their contractor has returned to the vexing habit of using herbicide on our grass verges.

I am Chair of Beaudesert Road Residents. 10 years ago we submitted a petition to the contractor responsible for mowing the grass verges on both sides of this street signed by every resident asking that there be no use of herbicide on street obstacles (trees, power poles, notices, etc). This has been been well observed until now. The effect of using herbicide to control the small amount of growth that is not cut by the mowers that normally maintain these verges was never a source of complaint, unlike the large spreading muddy bald patches round the many trees and notices on Beaudesert Road damaging the street scene, in some cases removing over 50% of the grass on some verges. I do not want to have to collect another petition on this. There are very few grass verged streets in Handsworth. We've gone to considerable trouble to persuade visiting motorists not to park their cars on the grass verges and we have our own voluntary litter picks from time to time. (SB 27 Dec 2012)

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This is when I may be ambushed by bruising sadness; when I'd be getting ready; my tickets bought; food packed for Oscar and my picnic on the journey, a good book to enjoy on the day-long train journey to Inverness to spend Hogmanay in Strathnairn. A friend wrote:

What I wanted to say was how marvellous your mother sounds. So elegant and delightful. so intelligent, interesting, compassionate. Funny and always right! What a wonderful woman to have as your own mum. How lucky you are to have her genes. I know how sad you must be feeling. I still talk to my dear father - who died in 1988 - every day. Such a super memorial tribute - even in note form on your blog. Since we began our discourse you have walked your daughter into marriage, seen the birth of Oliver , and watched your beloved mother die. How blessed are you? Most of us don't overlap with our loved ones...Probate is so dreary, I agree...You clearly have the best of both your mother and father within. And a supportive wife. So onwards and outwards we must go. Love and a hug

Strathnairn in winter from Mains of Faillie

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Our loveliest Christmas card, sent from the Greek side, The Entry of The Mother of God to The Temple, Εἴσοδος τῆς Παναγίας Θεοτόκου. The High Priest stands on the bema at the entrance to the curtained sanctuary, receiving the Mother of God, Her parents, Anne and Joachim follow just behind; behind them, almost invisible, young women hold tapers. The shadow of the pillar sets off the light that shines from the holiest part of the temple.

There are golden birds, buds and flowers on the carved surround topped by the mandylion - a cloth not-made-by-hands - acheiropoietos αχειροποίητα - the whole crowned by cherubs. This painting was made over two centuries ago in the Ionian Islands. A mystery indeed. I thought it showed Mary and Joseph bringing the boy Jesus to the Temple. Instead our Christmas card shows an event observed as one of the holy days in the Orthodox Church - 21 November I think. It's an episode in the life of Mary told in the apocryphal Book of James more or less suppressed by Latin Christianity, product, apparently, of curiosity among early Christians about the life of Christ's parents and grandparents. This text demonstrates a revelatory mix of  fear and wonder at the idea of bringing a female, even a young woman into a place from which they have been immemorially excluded....

...And the child became three years old, and Joachim said: Call for the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let them take every one a lamp, and let them be burning, that the child turn not backward and her heart be taken captive away from the temple of the Lord. And they did so until they were gone up into the temple of the Lord.
And the priest received her and kissed her and blessed her and said: The Lord hath magnified thy name among all generations: in thee in the latter days shall the Lord make manifest his redemption unto the children of Israel. And he made her to sit upon the third step of the altar. And the Lord put grace upon her and she danced with her feet and all the house of Israel loved her.
And her parents gat them down marvelling, and praising the Lord God because the child was not turned away backward.
And Mary was in the temple of the Lord as a dove that is nurtured: and she received food from the hand of an angel...[The Book of James: 7.2 -8.1]

I'm curious as to when the sorting, censoring and selection went on that determined what texts were to be labelled canon and what apocryphal. I can sort of see why a venerable set of scholars might have decided that the Book of James was a little 'iffy'. It's not that the canon shys at violence and sex but I can see the problem when Salome, Mary's midwife, checks - with her finger - that even after the Saviour's born Mary remains a virgin and Salome for her doubt finds her hand burning.

...and Salome made trial and cried out and said: Woe unto mine iniquity and mine unbelief, because I have tempted the living God, and lo, my hand falleth away from me in fire. [Book of James 10.1]

But an angel tells her to hold the baby. Salome is forgiven; her hand restored. That does sound a wee apocryphal. Nonetheless in this text, the Orthodox Church preserves an account that tells more about Mary then anything I've encountered in the Latin canon. It's true that Titian depicts the young Mary entering the temple, so I suspect the Book of James has wider currency, but how well these two depictions of the event exemplify Leigh Fermor's essay in Mani - chap 15 - on the contrasting way artists, West and East, depict the foundational events and figures of Christianity - the west emotive, expressive and individual; the east, hieratic, symbolic, universal. In the Christmas card Mary is untouchable mysterious ineffable hardly mortal, a small adult; in the Titian, she's a young vulnerable but heart-achingly confident girl who might be my daughter or young sister. In the Ionian icon Mary, parents and priest hold their arms and hands in a codified way eschewing the expression and naturalism of the Titian where Mary approaches the High Priest a little like Victorian Lord Fauntleroy's first meeting with the Earl of Dorincourt. It's interesting that the Ionian Icon is dated around 1700 long after  the influence of humanism and secularism had led western religious portraiture away from the formalism of this icon, in such contrast to its wooden frame - carved as free flowing and naturalistic. The icon is unsigned, its form predetermined, a means to worship and reverence; deliberately eschewing emotion or sentiment. Mary is no the longer a mortal young girl but a small sacred adult, not a human woman but part of a sacred assemblage, free of time and space. Titian has painted a story to display in an academy of sculpture, painting, and civil architecture, fluid, colourful, lively, evocative of a real event in space and time, a spectacle to be enjoyed and explored. The icon, like all true icons, is meant to be a kind of enchanted surface through which, like a dark looking glass, a worshiper may approach, and pass through, to the mystery beyond. Which of the two pictures seems most dated?

The Presentation of the Virgin Mary by Titian (1534-38) Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

Out of Town

'Here, long after I'd left home, is my stepfather on set, relaxed in the 'shed' he invented for the programme, a yoke of studio lights reflected in his glasses...

Jack Hargreaves ~ Out of Town 

...Growing up with Jack I spent a lot of the time we weren't out of doors, in a shed - watching him, sometimes helping him, always listening. It was a comfortable space suffused with the aroma of Gallaghers Honeydew and a bench rather than a desk next to tool racks and an accumulating plethora of useful odds and ends that would have cluttered a studio.'
I've just prepared this paragraph as a comment on a Southern Television studio photo in family files taken, I suspect, in 1980 when Jack must have been touching 70, about to leave the company, knowing it was almost certain to lose its franchise in the latest round of ITV bidding. I'm working with Ian Gilcrist at Delta who are preparing some images and texts to go with their release of 34 original Out of Town broadcasts.

These are as far as we know the only complete episodes of Jack's Out of Town programme that survive. The set that Charles Webster of Delta, who I've been working with over the last three years, plans to release later in the year. His 'box' will include an account from me of the search for this material and one from Simon Winter of Kaleidoscope of the extraordinary mix of luck and wisdom that unearthed them, with a short accompanying website, in which my stepfather's portrait will feature.

1951 ~ Gallagher's Golden Honeydew

I probably know as well as anyone how accurately Out of Town transferred my childhood to the tele’. In that posed studio photo he sits at a desk with the Falcon pipe he’d draw on through count-down - a concession to indoor smoking that even as early as 1980 had to be negotiated. He’d rest the pipe gently on the desk as he went on air, relighting it with the credits.  There was in the end surprisingly little difference between Jack’s carefully devised set and the shed next to our house; little difference between Jack Hargreaves as a natural on TV and Jack in a real shed being a dad to die for. He chatted as he worked. I was endlessly entertained, understanding, years later, why he sub-titled his book - Out of Town - ‘a life relived on television’. I'm sure that was because of, rather than despite, the artifice. Never am I so reminded of the fancy that we invent our lives, or at least our biographies.

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I don't wish recession on anyone but this is nectar:

ATHENS, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Greece's dire economic plight has forced thousands of businesses to close, thrown one in five out of work and eroded the living standards of millions. But for bicycle-maker Giorgos Vogiatzis, it's not all bad news. The crisis has put cash-strapped Greeks on their bikes - once snubbed as a sign of poverty or just plain risky - and Greek manufacturers are shifting into fast gear. The high cost of road tax, fuel and repairs is forcing Greeks to ditch their cars in huge numbers. According to the government's statistics office, the number of cars on Greek roads declined by more than 40 percent in each of the last two years. Meanwhile, more than 200,000 bikes were sold in 2011, up about a quarter from the previous year. Shops selling bicycles, and equipment ranging from helmets to knee pads, are spreading fast across the capital, popping up even between souvenir shops on the cobbled pedestrian streets of the touristy Plaka district. "They're sprouting up like mushrooms," said Vogiatzis, who designs and builds tailor-made bicycles in his workshop on the Aegean island of Rhodes....

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To my delight the chickens have arrived. Four healthy looking two year old hens. Two Suffolk Lights and two Rhode Island Reds. They were delivered to their run and coop on one side of Brin Croft at 7.45 Wednesday morning...

...kept in there for 24 hours. Friday afternoon three are out on the grass basking in  unaccustomed sun, wings outstretched, and Blanche seems to be broody in the laying box. "I doubt we'll have any eggs for a while. They need to settle in" said my mother, who sees them first on my computer...

...and names them, Blanche, Edith, Rhoda and Gladys - Edith the Suffolk with black speckles on her cape, and Rhoda, the Rhode Island with darker feathers on her back. I bought back a large bag of laying pellets and a water feeder from Harbros on Harbour Road in Inverness.The doctor and nurses have been dropping in, courtesy of the NHS to check on Mum who's not feeling so good. The arrival of hens and relatives cheering her up a little. Her grandson, my sister Bay's son, Antony, has taken a house in Tomatin for a week and is there with that side of the family. I've been ferrying Bay over the 14 miles to Inverarnie to check on our mum and confer with Sharon, her wonderful carer, and calm collected Doctor Sweeney who's mother's also in her 90s. Bay got our mother to a window to have a first gaze at her new chckens...

...and  my great niece came round with her mum keen to try feeding them...

Sydney with her grandma and the chickens

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I've been taking walks in jocund grazings playground for hundreds of small butterflies - Scotch Argus - myriad small insects, bees large and small, tiny moths fluttering between storks amid the rich greenery along the silvery Farnack...

The Farnack

...heading above this pleasant Highland bocage, on above the forestry line to scan the Strath in all its beauty - a panorama on these clear days to Ben Wyvis in Easter Ross beyond the Moray Firth winding away to Cromarty until it disappears beyond my middle ground, eastern slopes of serried pine, leading south to my point of reference - Brin Rock.

Time travel, like riding a bicycle the first time or skipping, is a mix of chance and craft. My daily biography runs to random slides amid the sounds of the moment; no track for smell. Dipping my nose into a flower, a patch of greenest sphagnum, rotting leaves, an errant pine branch, a handful of long wet grass to hold a living fish going back where it came, broken earth; I flick through a worm hole - momentarily effulgent with joy; sometimes its opposite stench, equally evocative. Possession is immeasurably brief, far outside conscious attention, an elusive sense animating the images and sounds, even the tastes, of lost times - του χαμένου χρόνου. How we mock noses, the part that resists all but teasing poetry. Yet the terriers, all dogs, share an environment of smells and taste. With their wet noses and little lolling tongues they survey and map the walks we take.

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À la recherche ... in Ano Korakiana

A swimming expedition of Korakianers to Dassia - before the they built the big road along the shore

"Η μυρωδιά της τηγανητής μελιτζάνας και πιπεριάς καθώς και η φρέσκια σάλτσα ντομάτας μου θυμίζουν έντονα τα καλοκαιρινά μας μπάνια όταν ήμασταν παιδιά! Από τα χαράματα με ξύπναγαν οι μυρωδιές που προανέφερα. Ήταν η μέρα που θα οδεύαμε προς Δασιά μεριά. Αρκετή η απόσταση όταν την κάνεις πεζή. Όσοι είχαν γαϊδουράκι ήταν τυχεροί. Εμείς δεν είχαμε! Ξεκίναγε η συντροφιά με τα φαγώσιμα κρεμασμένα στα ''σκαρβέκια ''του γαϊδάρου...

The smell of fried aubergines and peppers as well as the smell of fresh tomato sauce reminds me intensely of our summer bathing when we were children. These smells awoke us from daybreak. It was the day we were going to travel to the seashore at Dasia - a considerable distance on foot. Those who had a donkey were lucky. We didn't. Our group set off with the picnic food hanging from the wooden parts - σκαρβέκια - of the Jenny's saddle..."

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I thought this interesting - from John and Alistair cycling across Canada right now. Looking at what makes a community work -

John and Alistair in Tatamagouche

Sustainability and the Entrepreneurial Spirit: It is the most obvious thing that is missing in communities that are stagnant or in decline. In these places no one is able to refer to any one individual or a group of passionate and committed citizens who are taking action....Business entrepreneurs are the cornerstone of successful small communities. It may not take many, just a handful working on their own business. Together they recognise the efforts of others who also take this risk and they form an important cohort in the community around which others will follow to build a sense of place...
...and another cycle odyssey with a purpose - described in The Carbon Cycle. In 2006 Kate Rawles cycled 4500 miles from Texas to Alaska, following the spine of the Rocky Mountains conversing with people she met about climate change – from truck drivers to the Mayor of Albuquerque – to find out what they knew about it, whether they cared, and if they did, what they thought they could do. I've bought the book...and extract from Kate's blog. I like the fine grain, the small things, the ubiquity of unique individuals, talents I'll never encounter, the amount I miss in the wider world:

25th june '06...wonderful couple of days. great evening at neighbours' yesterday. when we arrived at john and anne's, just us and them. i was imagining a sit-down formal dinner. then another couple arrived, then a car-load, then another. cars kept arriving. soon the house was full of three generations, wandering inside and out, drinking beers, cokes and margheritas. i spoke with a geologist specialising in hazardous waste retraining as a nurse specialising in anaesthesia. (an anaesthetist with a geological time-frame, what a thought! let me put you to sleep for a hundred thousand years....).   his view on global warming was a) climates have always been in flux and this is just another flux and b) in any case talking about global warming isn't a good way to get people to act differently. it's too big and distant. focussing on the geo-political situation and the desirability of energy independance would be much more effective. i spoke with a solar astrophysicist who'd been studying the sun's output since 1970. we can't blame the sun's output for global warming anymore, he said. it's now certain that the output has been constant for the last 30 odd years. and yes, i certainly believe global warming is happening. i spoke with anne who showed me her little black and white cat panda's two kittens and told me a bear had eaten all their chickens bar one last night - and had a go at the hummingbird feeder. (bears? already? goodness!). best of all i spoke with heidi. small and slender, skin tight jeans, beautiful boots, pink and white shirt and white cowboy hat over a long pale plait, large blue eyes with a calm, grounded sort of look. heidi has a very large ranch in utah. in the summer she rides the ranch checking on cattle and fences, sleeping out for five or six nights at a time and then coming back for an occasional bath before setting out again. a real cowgirl (cowperson?!) - and a grandma! what an inspiration. (being a cowgirl is a long-standing fantasy of mine, tho its never sat entirely easily with being a vegetarian). we talked about arabs versus quarter horses (she uses quarter horses), how travelling in an rv cuts you off from so much of what you are travelling through, and how useful dogs are. "they make for lazy cowboys but take the pressure off the horses. they're about 5% useful: most of the time the cattle are chasing the dogs rather than the other way around." tom and rosalind told me later how heidi on form was an extraordinary dancer, known, amongst other things, for tap-dancing on tables and throwing truly wild parties which people would cross states to get to. and she invited me to come and visit! oh my. somehow i must find a way to make that happen.

****** ** ******
I've only just read Richard Pine's latest Letter from Greece in the Irish Times of 3 August 'Living with bribery and tax evasion as normal as the azure sky'...

I plead guilty. Last month I colluded in tax evasion and paid a bribe. I was buying stationery costing €105. The shopkeeper asked if I wanted a receipt. No thanks. “Then that will be €90 – cash, of course.” Of course. I saved €15 and he avoided paying VAT. Collusion. Everyone does it...Meanwhile, the coalition government in place since late June appears to be doing nothing except mouthing empty rhetoric about the need for reform and renegotiation of the bailout. There are reportedly 110 bailout conditions on which no progress has been made, thus imperilling payment of the next tranche of the loan. Government prevarication has registered with the voters: a recent opinion poll indicated that 50 per cent of voters are dissatisfied with the inaction of people who have the power – but not the motivation – to effect change. This is the same percentage that voted for the anti-austerity, anti-bailout parties on June 17th. A house divided, indeed. A visitor, looking at an aquamarine sky, asked: “Where else would you see a sky like that?” To which the answer is: Portugal, Spain, Italy – all the “bad boys” of southern Europe. It isn’t simply a matter of doing business in these countries in a quite different way to those of the north, but a cultural difference. A country in which clingfilm is called “diaphanous membrane”, and where boys are still named Aristotle, Hercules and Perikles, and girls Aphrodite, Urania (sky) and Agape (love), isn’t quite the same as one in which children are called Nigel and Ingrid, and where clingfilm is, well, clingfilm.

The other evening I asked my nephew, who's senior enough in knowledge of economics and finance, to have an opinion I value, about Greece
"You know how I feel. What of the future?"
"Greece will leave - will have to leave the Euro" he said very quietly; a little reluctantly.

"And Spain, and Italy and Portugal and...?" I asked amid a crowd of chatting relatives in my mother's sitting room. He looked at me eyebrows raised knowing I was seeking reassurance.
"Well?"
"They'll pull through"

Olympic debt race - Sophia Mamalinga 2 Aug'12

"What's the difference?" He shrugged and made a small spread of his arms. It was like pulling small teeth.
"Is it corruption?"
"Hm"
"Why Greece? Why not the others? You know how bad things are in Athens" I ran through my present list of harm and spreading misery.
"There's no capital left" He paused and looked away then back at me "Nothing there" Another pause "A dreadful mess."
He wanted to talk and think about something else. I didn't pursue, just felt a small ache in the pit of my stomach. (Telegraph 7 Aug'12: Greek exit from euro is 'manageable’ says Jean-Claude Juncker)

The family came to say 'Goodbye"

Η γεωγραφία της φοροδιαφυγής

A fascinating and methodologically sophisticated piece of research published in April - Tax evasion across industries: soft credit evidence  from Greece by Nikolaos Artavanis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Adair Morse and Margarita Tsoutsoura, 
 University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and NBER (who've a strong record of research on tax evasion), Chicago Booth Research, 11 April 2012 [Updated Draft, June 2012]

Abstract: We begin with the new observation that banks lend to tax-evading individuals based on the bank's perception of true income. This insight leads to a novel approach to estimate tax evasion from private-sector adaptation to semi-formality. We use household microdata from a large bank in Greece and replicate bank models of credit capacity, credit card limits, and mortgage payments to infer the bank’s estimate of individuals’ true income. We estimate a lower bound of €28 billion of unreported income for Greece. The foregone government revenues amount to 31% of the deficit for 2009. Primary tax-evading occupations are doctors, engineers, private tutors, accountants, financial service agents, and lawyers - professions heavily represented in Parliament. Testing the industry distribution against a number of redistribution and incentive theories, our evidence suggests that industries with low paper trail and industries supported by parliamentarians have more tax evasion. We conclude by commenting on the property right of informal income.

'Ο κόσμος το χει τούμπανο και μεις κρυφό καμάρι'

The authors used post codes to plot tax evasion across the Republic. Darker colours denote the worst. In the middle of the circle on the map is Larissa, an area where there are, according to news reports, the largest number of the German Porsche Cayennes in Europe - from a Greek forum:

 'Πολύ ενδιαφέρον άρθρο που χρησιμοποιεί τις τραπεζικές εκτιμήσεις εισοδημάτων -σε αντίθεση με τα δηλωμένα εισοδήματα- για να εκτιμήσει τη φοροδιαφυγή. Η εκτίμηση είναι πως υπάρχει >28 δις εισόδημα που δεν δηλώνεται και οι top στην φοροδιαφυγή είναι: γιατροί, μηχανικοί, "ιδιαίτερα μαθήματα", λογιστές, χρηματοικονομικοί, και δικηγόροι. 

Table 11 on p.47 compares the distribution of occupational backgrounds of MPs in Greece and Canada. Columns 4 and 7 ("Density") present the percentage of members of parliament in each occupation and columns 5 and 8 present the cumulative density. The authors exclude lawyers 'as the default profession for politicians.'

See earlier on Democracy Street: 'the horror ~ how corruption works'
*** *** ***
To London to see Charles Webster of Delta Leisure about progress on the sales of my stepfather's re-issued Out of Town programmes on DVD. Lunch at Seafresh; London charged with pre-Olympic buzz; tiresome commercials from corporate sponsors. I feel detached. I'd like it all to go well and for the 'legacy' side to succeed. I also like the elision of Olympics and Paralympics - the latter clearly no longer a side-show for the main event, with some of those competing in the para-Olympics using prosthetics that make them faster, higher or stronger than those competing in the former. The weather stays grey. I made it back to Euston just as the clouds opened yet again, having bought myself, on the way back, a jacket from Oxfam.
"You smell like a tramp" said Amy the other day.
I'm not good to my clothes - especially jackets. I pick them from charity shops; wear them everywhere until they grow threadbare with worn sleeves, split pockets, threads hanging loose, lining separated. The sweat of my labours from digging mingles sourly with the smell of dog and prolonged periods of rain damp. I excuse myself that the time I spend in the open, refreshes the cloth but Amy was sat close when we went for lunch on Monday. Even I could catch my whiff - which must have reminded my daughter of the derelicts she's often attending to on her urban beat. "Does he smell trampy or just old?" added Richard at the time.

Rain at Euston

The weather in Greece

Richard Pine's latest letter from Greece in the Irish Times reminds me the extent to which people on the island and our village and Richard's had supported SYRIZA and were surpised to find the lead taken by New Democracy in the last week of the June election campaign. He comments on the doleful state of Corfu's tourism and makes reference to Paul Krugman, Nobel winning economist, who argues that 'the origins of this disaster lie further north, in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin, where officials created a deeply – perhaps fatally – flawed monetary system, then compounded the problems of that system by substituting moralising for analysis.' (My American friend Tony on the role of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US)
I have no illusions about the need for government reform in Greece - especially in health, taxation - it's cheaper to bribe the taxman than to pay the tax...

In December 2011, the head of the Greek Anti-Tax Evasion Unit, publicly described the 4-4-2 system in which the default rule between Greek tax collectors and tax evaders is that 40% of a taxpayer's assessment of evasion would be forgiven; 40% would be paid to the tax agent; and the remaining 20% would be paid to the state...(p.27 op.cit.)*

...and planning, but a whole population is suffering because of habitual corruption in the ruling class of the republic - in which I must include doctors, engineers, private tutors, accountants, financial service agents, and lawyers. The 4-4-2 system has been described personally to me by an acquaintance of someone who speaks of its normality.

But even if the matter of tax evasion begins to be solved, there's the larger problem of an economic ideology which traps intelligent people. I pray there is a solution that selectively feeds the possibility of credit into the thousands of small businesses - including those that rely on tourism - the life blood of the Hellenic economy. But first it seems those in charge of the present drive to absolute austerity must acknowledge that there is 'a fatally flawed monetary system'. It's not just Greece that suffers from that (and I'm not arguing for an ideological Keynesian). I suspect there must be fiscal union. There must be a greater and wider surrender of sovereignty - so that we move towards a united states of Europe, with the most assiduous attention to states rights.

*The main Law Enforcement Agencies combating economic crime in Greece, are the Finance and Economic Crime Unit (SDOE), the service of Economic Police of Hellenic Police (HP) and the Hellenic Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). The government has established other institutions and authorities with powers to combat economic crime - Public Taxes Services (DOY), the Custom Offices, the Controlling Centers, the Economic Inspectors and the Hellenic Coast Guard (HGC)... extract from Korontzis Tryfon 'The Prosecution of Economic Crime in Hellas', International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 2 No. 5; March 2012. Tryfon's conclusion acknowledges 'Hellas allocates many controlling mechanisms, however their results in the combating the phenomenon of criminality cannot be considered as satisfactory.'

[Back to the future - 26 July'12 Athens News 'Record rates of tax evasion on islands']
*** *** ***
Danny, a superlative gardener, came to look at our allotment.
"It's kempt" she said.
I beamed with pleasure...There's so much to do and learn but praise is sweet.

"It's kempt" - plot 14 enjoying sun for a few hours on Wednesday

ΚΑΤΑ ΜΑΡΚΟΝ 7:28...ἡ δὲ ἀπεκρίθη καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ· (ναί), κύριε· καὶ τὰ κυνάρια ὑποκάτω τῆς τραπέζης ἐσθίουσιν ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων τῶν παιδίων, καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ διὰ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον ὕπαγε, ἐξελήλυθεν ἐκ τῆς θυγατρός σου τὸ δαιμόνιον.καὶ ἀπελθοῦσα εἰς τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς εὗρεν τὸ παιδίον βεβλημένον ἐπὶ τὴν κλίνην καὶ τὸ δαιμόνιον ἐξεληλυθός. 

This has long puzzled me; an astonishing exchange, replete with an understanding of context - much lost to us; an exemplary moment. I'm very moved by the Greek woman's earnest wit, the mother's persistence, on behalf of her afflicted child and Christ's gentle and astonishing breach of contemporary social, racial, cultural and spiritual conventions. Dogs! "...cast it unto the dogs""Yet the dogs..." Μεγαλύνει ἡ ψυχή μου τὸν κύριον

But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs. Ἄφεσ πρῶτον χορτασθῆναι τὰ τέκνα, οὐ γάρ ἐστιν καλὸν λαβεῖν τὸν ἄρτον τῶν τέκνων καὶ τοῖς κυναρίοις βαλεῖν.
And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs. Ναί, κύριε· καὶ τὰ κυνάρια ὑποκάτω τῆς τραπέζης ἐσθίουσιν ἀπὸ τῶν ψιχίων τῶν παιδίων. It's a most risky joke between two people. If one missed the point it would fall cruelly flat. I wonder if those listening got it - until much later.

*** *** ***
A sweet email from someone I last saw when I was 19.

Hallo Simon, I have always found that Time, the expression, is misleading. People will insist on measuring, splitting and counting. As far as I can see, things are. Above all, what you are, what you do or make, is. How do you split that into increments? So I will happily take up a conversation of yore! Great pictures of you. I looked at the face under the cap and there in your mouth was our Simon...Best!

Lymington 1962...

Corfu 2009...