Carpentry, cake and democracy

This morning Mrs Lefteris came to our door with a delicious cake made from a squash (kolokithi), warm from the oven - moist, dotted with raisins, topped with pieces of orange and sesame seed. Three slices disappeared from a red plastic plate that sat between us as we got ready for another day on the cupboard. Our tustle with this has lasted ten days. We've still to strip down to the wood, wax it, paint inside and replace a pane of glass. This amateur joinery is a parable for my attitude to democracy - a system of government marginally superior to the others, easily distorted by populism, based on that hallowed invention of Classical Greece which excluded women and the slaves, on which their economy, and the leisure that allowed a relative minority to take part in politics, depended.

We could hear young Leftheris trying out his new trumpet and high in the sky glimpse one of the first contrails since the volcanic eruption in Iceland grounded planes across the continent. "If Iceland can send south this chaos as revenge for allowing it to go bankrupt, what could Greece send north as a commensurate threat to the bankers in Brussels?" asked Richard Pine at supper in town.

Henry Maine wrote about democracy as 'popular government', suggesting that idealists could not accept the idea of democracy as 'just another form of government'. Instead they had a way of speaking of the 'divine right of the people' that sounded suspiciously like those monarchists who claimed the same ridiculous rights for a king. I hope I could fight to the death, or at least be prepared to die for the marginal difference that makes democracy better than totalitarianism, but I'm aware that, like fitting separate pieces of recovered woodwork into an uneven hole in the wall to create something that holds together, serves a useful purpose and looks good, democracies require regular redesign, repetitious tweaking, good will, perseverance, tolerance and all the gifts of diplomacy. I suspect that some of our neighbours feel compassion for us, assuming we are unable to afford to buy a new cupboard or have one fitted by a professional. The idea that we actually enjoy giving all this attention to recovered wood and old fittings may seem bizarre - ditto those who strive to make democracy work.

Meantime from England I had a nice briefing of the current situation in the run-up to our General Election on 6 May.

I don't know how many votes there are for our expiring administration in whistling up a couple of aircraft carriers and restaging Dunkirk but this turns out to be a very good time to be in the UK, not least because both politics and nature are conspiring to stand the world as we know it (TWAWKI) on its pointy head. By this afternoon it had dawned on both major parties that the electorate (aka the Great Dismissed) has chosen to pile onto the Clegg/Lib Dem bandwagon as a way of stiffing PAU (Politics As Usual). As a consequence the Tory backwoodsmen are re-emerging (cometh the hour, cometh the Tebbit) instructing Their Dave to cancel tonight's mega-expensive party political (which Dave's done) and unleash the attack dogs on the proper target. Which will play exactly into the Lib Dems' hand. Glorious stuff. And about time too....

My reply begins:

Dear G. It's briefings like this that keep me in touch so that I sound as if I know what I'm talking about when running a session on 'political nous' the morning after I get back from Corfu in May. Thanks. If the Lib Dems show up significantly in a new Parliament they'll push, as they did during the brief Lib-Lab pact, for proportional representation. Few in England understand PR (especially as there are so many versions - ever been cornered by a PR anorak. Run. I wouldn't as it's my bread and butter and probably not you 'cos you're a writer) yet voters still sense PR's fairer than first past the post and would be good for the multiplicity of TWAWKI (an acronym I'm stealing along with PAU). PR's proved popular in Scotland after start-up problems two years ago....

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On Paul and Cinta's house - a present from their opposite - neighbour Nico, there's a bi-lingual sign in bright fresh colours:

This street, running about a mile, through the centre of Ano Korakiana, from Venetia westward, only got its name in the time of the Colonels when we were told by Kostas Apergis, soon after we bought our house here, and I started this web diary, that a message - a directive - came from Athens to the villages and towns, to give names to streets that celebrated the regime - names like Οδός 21ην Απριλίου 1967 - a date still celebrated by some in Greece. Ano Korakiana's response, if I understand correctly, was, in those dangerous times, an exercise in practical wisdom (Μῆτις). They chose the name Οδός Δημοκρατίας - a Odyssean response to a dilemma that has lasted well. In fact the places in the village are still known - like Venetia, to the east on the Sokraki road - by their local names. Thus Natasha says our part of the village has long been known as 'the bear'. I give our address as 208 Democracy Street but no mail is delivered to our house, nor has it a mailbox. Our letters go, with most others, to the shop 30 metres from us at one of Democracy Street’s slight bends, where cars can pass, opposite a cake shop with a shade and and alcove where familiar people will often be standing or sitting, chatting and musing, greeting passersby, in the morning and evenings, a few yards from a Venetian arch leading into shade down steps to the lower road. Like all small shopkeepers, Stamatis Savvanis, competes with foodsellers whose vans drive through the village on weekdays announcing themselves through loudspeakers, and many main road supermarkets from Tzavros on – Sconto, A&B, Lidl. His shop sells bread from the village’s bakery – warm and crispy. Open weekdays from 10.00am to 2.00pm and 5.00pm to about 9.30pm. It's sensible to reserve bread on Saturdays as it leaves the shelf even more swiftly for the weekend.

Σταμάτης Ζαββανης

Joinery

Building a dresser. We've found it hard work. Except for a level floor, the alcove into which we are building it is without a straight line - vertical or horizontal. We began work about seven days ago when we found the window and frame by bins on a road out of the village and took it home, cleaned it up and found it fitted the alcove almost exactly. Almost. Fine-tuning the fitting of the frame seemed to go on forever. It seemed easiest at first to remove the windows and work with just their lighter frame. After getting what seemed a neat fit we replaced the windows and found the frame, on its own, too distorted to accept the windows. We switched to working with the heavier ensemble, offering up repeatedly, after planing frame and, chipping plaster and stonework from the alcove - the latter covering everything in the dining room, including us, in fine white dust. At last the fitting was done and held with a mix of glue, foam, finished off with plaster. Next came the drawer - the one we'd recovered full of woodworm and a couple of mouse holes from a derelict in Venetia. Sanded it looked fine, even venerable, but to fit it we needed guides that matched fixed on sidewall and drawer. This entailed measuring, cutting and glueing tapering wedges to the wall on the right and to the drawer on the left, sanding them, offering up, sanding again, offering up, sanding again….until after about an hour the drawer slid easily in and out.

That sorted we turned to using part of another recovered window frame to fill the space below the drawer. That went fine as our capacity to judge the odd angles of the space were, by the third day's work, quite improved. "It's beginning to look like a dresser. Let's have some wine and watch a film of death and destruction."

Day four and we've found some large pieces of cardboard on a flytip to use as templates for three sturdy plywood shelves cut out of the larger sheets we'd used for the front room wall in February. Economic. Each shelf was different of course, with the additional complication that rather than making them all horizontal - our preference - we needed two of them lined up with the window divisions which were not. "Bugger!" ""Come off it. So long as a marble doesn't roll what's a little slope matter?" Each shelf support was carefully lined up and glued on before drilling into the unpredictable stone wall. Bottom shelf was easy enough. The next two were trickier as the right dimension for the space they were supposed to go wasn't for the process of edging them into place. Indeed once the supports for the highest shelf were in place they prevent the middle one being put in place, so we had to make various small adjustments, like cutting out a corner to get it in place and glueing the corner back on again once the shelf was in place. Phew. Day five we are making the bottom doors, using pieces of shallow skirting to edge pieces of plywood. These needed to be mitred, their curved edges chamfered into a smooth angle and a centre line grooved down one door with the male rebate.

"I'm quite proud of those two." "I'll drop down to the shops and get some hinges. All ours are too large." 20 kilometres later staring to fit the hinges. "I've bought all left hand hinges! Malaka!" Another 20 kilometres to get replacements and we're on our way, except that the neatly cut in hinges screwed onto door and frame leave the doors way out of line. "There are people out there who know how to do this." Day 6 and we've bedded the hinges in fast setting glue and no screws, and done some undercoating of the shelves - along with lots of other little jobs in other places while waiting for glue and filler to set. The doors, which fit their space perfectly are gently opened and we add the screws and scrape away excess glue. Success! On one door at least. Day 7 we'll take a break and finish door two in the afternoon - but look at that rebate! It works. Nearly. After that there's more sanding, filling and painting and a window pane to replace, the room to be cleaned, and then we can start using this thing we've made, recovering our lives, learning deep appreciation of the art and craft of the true carpenter, thinking of all the things we'd do if we ever tried this again, and all the wrinkles a professional joiner could have passed on to us that we haven't even imagined.