Rain

We are surrounded by mist, thunder, and the pleasant sound – for us who trust our roof – of rain pattering, occasionally drumming, on the tiles, flecking the windows, drops dribbling at random down the pane, water streaming from the gutters down the paths to the drains. I get up with a light heart to do easy routines – restarting the stove until it roars merrily, wearing my long raincoat to rescue a lineful of washing from the garden, spinning it and hanging it to dry on a frame by the stove, bringing in wood kept covered and dry and feeding the fire that is no longer smoking, cleaning a pan that had soaked overnight in the kitchen, making myself porridge topped with dark sugar and cream, and calling Lin to wake for a mug of coffee. There’s a Bal Masque for in the Agricultural Co-op tonight on the lower road. We’d seen chairs being delivered. Natasha showed us her costume as we chatted over the fence yesterday. Then on 14 February there will be Carnivali in the village.

Yesterday Lin and I started work filling in the staircase in preparation for closing it altogether from the room through which it passes which we are making into a bedroom. The room next to the kitchen is to be a downstairs dining room, conveniently next to the kitchen and cooler in hot weather.

* * *

Lee Southall at Handsworth Park has circulated a nice poster advertising one of my history tours of the Park on Sunday 21 March. I fear he and his colleagues are under terrific pressure to make and take big cuts in their budgets, and their own jobs. I've written to local councillors across Handsworth and Perry Barr:

Dear Councillors and friends

Handsworth Park under threat from new

proposals for re-organising Ranger Services

These proposed changes to the management of Birmingham’s treasured parks – in particular Handsworth Park - are very troubling, especially as they include reduction in the Ranger Services.

As someone involved in writing the history of Handsworth Park and, with many others, campaigning for its restoration since the 1980s, I learned a lot about the contribution of parks to city life – especially their indirect contribution to health and education and the resulting contribution to community safety. It did not take long for my researches to catch up with something that the public has long known, that you cannot realise the public good of parks without park keepers – now the Ranger Service. Crime, like fire, prevented is very difficult to measure, thus the peacekeeping role of the Rangers in all our parks cannot, in a time of desperate purse tightening, be accurately assessed against the cost to the city of their wages. That failure in accounting practice will bear very directly on all who have come to enjoy what for the last 10 years has seen a renaissance in public parks.

As an almost daily visitor to Handsworth park before and after the Rangers arrived about ten years ago I, and others in my position, can attest to the 1001 incidents that might have gone from petty to serious which have been nipped in the bud merely by the presence of a ranger patrolling, let alone their many direct interventions that have prevented crimes in the park. In addition, our Rangers, in liaison with teachers, local police and community support officers, have participated in a whole range of actions with schools designed to catch potential problems long before they become those that once allowed our public parks to deteriorate into spaces from which the larger public – young and old - were barred by crime and anti-social behaviour.

We hope very much that local councillors and our MPs will be able to come together to press for damage limitation, especially as it was understood as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund grant for the restoration of Handsworth Park that revenue for its continued maintenance and staffing was guaranteed for at least 10 years from the time of the grant. There are still still a few years to run, By cutting back on services especially the ranger service in Handsworth Park the Council may be acting contrary to its agreement with the Heritage Lottery Fund. Can councillors please make urgent enquiries this and make appropriate representations?

I would also appreciate knowing whether we must anticipate any collateral impact on the opening and managing of the new Victoria Jubilee Allotments next to Handsworth Park. Best wishes, Simon

* * *

My talk at the Durrell School about relations between the British and the Ionians in the 19th century went well mainly because an indulgent audience of friends put up with me struggling to cover more information than needed for a 20 minute talk about Lord High Commissioners and the British Protectorate. I managed to cover all but Gladstone, whose role was well filled in during questions by Richard Pine who'd invited me to do the talk. Despite my detours we had a good hour of discussion about character and motives of quite a few of the participants in that 48 year episode in which the Ionians hoped they'd got a Protectorate while the British, with notable exceptions (Nugent, Seaton, Gladstone) assumed they had a colonial possession, getting down to why the British were here in the first place and whether the British, when they left in 1864, were pushed or chose to jump, and the shrewd politics of the Ionian Radicals about whom I’ve learned so much from Eleni Calligas’ work

Slides for my talk - pause the film to read the small writing; click on the image to get full screen on YouTube

Paul came with Lula. There were at least two other Greeks in the audience, which was good, as well as Irish. I felt I’d traversed some mined ground unscathed with kind remarks from a full house on a chilly winter’s evening. The thing is the honour of being invited to give such a talk after being here only a few years. The subject gets richer as I learn more about it. On the way back to our car in the Spaniada we heard a Scops owl hooting right over our head in one of the trees that line the esplanade. Lin, to my relief, said “That wasn’t too bad. I could've kicked you when you went off on one of your diversions.”

Afterwards Richard took us for a meal. “Nothing special. Just basic” “Suits us” Lin sat in a corner by a shuttered window onto Theotoki Street. “That's where Lawrence Durrell used to sit” said Richard. A French tourist had once thrust a copy of Prospero's Cell through this window and asked the author to sign it. We had beef and potatoes, chicken and chips and the local red. “So what of the economy?” I asked.

“Papandreou, having consulted with Samaras, spoke to the country on TV last night. ‘We are in for very tough times. We must all work together otherwise – the abyss.’” We realized the biggest cuts must be in the Hellenic public sector. “KKE won’t buy this. They have significant seats in parliament.” “So?” With a left unwilling to back a one nation response to the problems of the economy there'll be demonstrations. The EU watches; the Greek diaspora too. I mentioned my concern at the news that Birmingham City Council is to make big cuts in its Park Ranger Service. “Well they’ve done that in California...and without rangers the state might close Yosemite National Park”.

* * *

DEMOCRACY STREET AS SHARED SPACE

On main roads people drive fast, tailgate, overtake on bends and hoot to hurry up dawdlers, yet when Lin stops the car on Democracy Street, in a spot even narrower than the rest of the road through the village , above the steps down to our house so we can unload before she goes on to a parking space, other drivers who happen to come along – in either direction - will invariably wait politely. All along Democracy Street, as it winds through the village, drivers have learned just where to give way (wider spots we now know), wave another car on or proceed themselves, making judgements about width, sometimes folding in their mirrors to clear a wall, yet very seldom inconveniencing those on foot. Democracy Street, along with the narrow sinuous main streets of other villages is a shared space – an idea about roads being laboriously recovered in settings where for decades politicians and professionals have favoured the view that roads are for cars and sidewalks or pavements for those on foot – building in traffic lights and occasional crossing spaces to allow pedestrians to enter, at least briefly, a space separated off for people in cars. Thus it is on Corfu’s main roads and indeed on their pavements where despite prohibitions drivers, who would noisily resent a similar encroachment by walkers on their space, will often park their cars. In the middle of many villages here there are often no pavements. Network of narrow streets are often plaka’d to remind visitors that the space between houses are to be shared by everyone on foot, cycle, scooter, car, truck and bus; that indeed walkers are also ‘traffic’ - a word that in the years of the combustion engine has defaulted to exclude cyclists, horses, donkeys and people on foot, moving, sitting or leaning on walls. Everyone can own the street and it generally works, with opportunities for regular acts of civility as people negotiate their way through. Civility that is the essence of this process is largely abandoned on main roads. The human-to-human negotiation of Democracy Street is replaced by automatic regulation of the highway. It was long ago discovered that you can’t use eyes to engage politely with another human once both of you are likely to be passing each other above a certain speed – about 15mph maximum. Thus is the shared space of the village abandoned to the individualised space of the open road. Human eye and the repertoire of non-verbal language that lubricated social interaction was replaced by traffic lights, warning signs, designated crossings, barriers and remote surveillance by camera. What was worse, though it hasn’t happened in many villages here, is that the so-called ‘open road’ instead of just running between communities, was often forced through them, and motorised traffic was encouraged to speed through newly widened and straightened roads between demolished homes, getting their drivers more swiftly from A to B but blighting those settlements that lie between (see: community severance and shared space). * * * * Lin, unable to sleep in the early hours, rose and watched the dawn. That very bright light on the Albanian shore had been out for several days but is there again now.

All of a sudden the fine weather's here

Last Wednesday the sun had moved far enough south to miss the steep slopes behind us, warming the village an hour earlier than the previous morning, steaming off months of exceptional damp in less than half an hour. How this island shows its fabled beauty, mystery – the greater for the contrasts between the former and the blemishes we, with frail lack of resolution, bring to it. Herodotus knew, and also Thucydides that we alone of the world's species foul our own nests.The pleasure of being able to access the internet sitting in the shaded yard outside Sally and Mark’s home, five minutes down Democracy Street. Who could be be so fortunate in their friends and neighbours...family Leftheris, Katherina, Sofia and Nico, Mark and Sally, soon Mark’s brother Paul, Katya and Thannassis Spingos, Kostas Apergis…and on the internet Liana and Corfucius - who just reminded me this Sunday was my name-day, Simonos!

Only the other day I re-entered the world of the Quennells – not read since childhood history lessons and then unappreciated, but the introduction was made, the books with their fascinating pictures were implanted, and of course Jack prized them {I'm pleased to learn they turned their attention to 'Everyday things in Ancient Greece'] At a recent table top sale in Kontokali I picked up for €2 two perfect volumes of their four volume 15 year project – A History of Everyday Things in England. Of C.H.B.Quennell who died in 1935, a friend and teacher, Frank Roscoe, wrote:

His chief characteristic was an unquenchable enthusiasm for things that are “beautiful and of good report”. He would journey for miles to see a well-built farm wagon or any good example of handicraft. He had about him no trace of self-assurance nor any of the windy rhetoric used by self-styled connoisseurs on art or architecture. Sometimes he would say, with a rueful smile, that he was too ignorant to understand the meaning of modern developments, but in truth he understood them well enough, and formed shrewd estimates of their worth.

I venture to believe that the Quennells would have liked Democracy Street. We’d certainly have enjoyed them. The same goes for Dorothy Hartley - who I met for an hour in London long ago. To quote her DNB entry, she shared the Quennells' fascination with 'the minute details of the relationship between an object and its function—the scythe to the height of wheat cut, the exact width of a linen sheet to the dimensions of the linen press.' She toured the British Isles by bicycle and car, with pen, pencil, and camera, writing weekly articles on country people and their trades - horse-ploughing, bread making, clog making, influenced by the poet farmer Thomas Tusser, gleaning material for her joint project with Margaret Elliot between 1925 and 1931 - Life and Work of the Peoples of England - and, better known, Food in England (1954) and Lost Country Life (1979) (Ref: Mary Wondrausch in the DNB). ** ** ** The other day Mark took us for a stroll in the woodlands near Sally’s stables, promising to show us a wild tortoise in its habitat. “Some people are nervous of walking here. Snakes. If you stay quiet you can hear them getting out of your way.” The land, tinder in summer, was richly embroidered with foliage, grasses and flowers - oak trees in place of more familiar olives. We meandered along green paths made by Sally on rides with the horses, collecting the tips of wild asparagus, Teal questing around us in the dog dimension brought Mark a tortoise – the first wild one I’ve seen in my life. We looked and returned it gently to the deep grass “Some here treat them as pests. They get into their vegetable patches.”A tile on the floor is πλακάκι, on the roof κεραμίδι. When I was trying to remember the word, Nick, who rejoices in the tens of thousands of English words rooted in Greek, said “Ceramic – don’t get it muddled with onions – κρεμμύδια.” We like the old Corfu tiles but they aren’t easy to lay, each being unique to the varied shape of the human thighs over which they were formed and the thumbs that smoothed them. Newer versions were made by hand on a standard form. Hand was replaced by a press mould, but the problem remained of ensuring an efficient overlap when roofing – one tile down, one up. Today machine moulding guarantees seamless overlap.To lay a roof with the old tiles – some of them over a century old - imagine making a neat job of tiling a floor in a room with uneven shaped tiles that shatter if you try to chip them to fit or even using an angle grinder with a stone cutting disk. A roof, especially one with hips, presents a variety of challenges. The new tiles being uniform, cuttable and reliably waterproof are much easier to lay and more efficient. As it is, tiling our apothiki with the old tiles is still relatively straightforward – two square sides of roof and an existing ellenite roof that’s already waterproof and sound without tiles. They are, in other words, as unnecessary as designer stubble, jewellery, perfume, lacy underwear, high heels and bottom pinching. (See Corfucius for double entendres on laying tiles) Division of labour involves me mixing mortar, and passing it up to Lin who’s placing Nick's tiles on the corrugated surface of the ellenite – no need of course for laying tiles under and over as laid by Lambros on our house roof this time last year. Experienced roofers, like him and his mates, throw tiles up to each other. I pass them up to Lin in a plastic bag on a hook on the end of a length of 1 x 2, having soaked them in a bowl of water after wire-brushing moss and earth from inside them. Lin selects shorter, longer, thinner, wider tiles from the pile under the veranda and lines them up for me. The trickiest ladder work is done and she's worked out how to get the mortar to stick to both tile and roof, sat on a cushion on the ellenite – calling out occasional instructions to me - wider, longer, shorter...more mortar, more water. Once Lin’s selected one for the space where she wants to put it, she wets the lower tile with a sponge, puts a dollop of mortar where the wide end will go, a smaller dollop at the other, lays the tile, removes any mortar squeezed out the lower end of the tile and points the crescent gap between it and the tile below. The tiles cannot be walked on, and once laid, the edges cannot take the weight of a ladder leaned on them. Work must proceed in ways that won’t make any part inaccessible. “They look beautiful – πολύ ωπαία (or was it ‘ωπαίος’ – comely)” said one of our neighbours as she walked by.

I rigged up a rope to stop her sliding off

* * *

Animals, like thoughts, are ever present – of course the cats, amiable roaming dogs, the spiders – outdoors and indoors - and hornets (occasional), wasps, bees, ants, shieldbugs, rose chafers (ungainly flying buzzers that Fran calls ‘flying olives’ - searching for holes to nest; called cetonia aurata, the beetle made famous by Gerald Durrell in his description of the 'Rose Beetle Man', a strange island peddler of wild animals, who tied strings around the beetles, attaching a host of them to his hat - an unattractive thing to do*), butterflies (tho’ no moths), mosquitoes, fruit flies, horse flies, house flies, crickets and fireflies. The other evening I asked Angele to catch us some, so’s I could put them in a paper lantern to show little Estelle, having supper with us, and Nancy and Nick, her parents, and Sally and Mark – but I suspect she’s already got the T-shirt on these insects which to us, from the north, are enchanting. “You could read by them,” said Nick “…so long as you keep blinking." Birds: eagles over the crags, gulls, turtle doves, pigeons, sparrows, swallows, a blue headed bird - name unknown - greenfinches, jays, a lesser spotted woodpecker. At night we hear skops owls, and some bird that brays - possibly a nightjar - and, especially at dawn, cocks crowing. For reptiles, the delicate lizards with brick coloured throats and now we’ve seen a tortoise and, very briefly, a snake wriggling into a drain hole; too many dead on the roads. The other day we found, in the house, a spider that seemed to have lost two legs. “That should be out of doors – a garden spider” Honey told us. Lin caught it in a spoon and let it out. Sounds: scooters, strimmers, airplanes – in greater numbers since 1 May – cars and trucks, grocers and fishmongers in vans with loudspeakers driving slowly through the village crying their wares, (Our street - Democracy Street - exemplifies shared space; no signs, road markings, traffic lights, or pavements, so whether sweeping a porch, walking, cycling, or driving, all negotiate their share of the street and it seems to work. See also 'Naked Streets'), the rare sound of a siren (ambulance? police, fire? The authorities checking a bonfire - illegal after 30 April?), a chainsaw (logs for winter), children at play, parents calling them, people chatting, musical instruments being practised on, the distinctive tone of the neighbour’s phone, barking dogs (some chained and bored), cats screechingly defending their territories from other cats, pottering sounds from next door’s garden, the muted mumble of a TV, and now and then - thank goodness, rarely – the disquieting vibration of aural graffiti, amplified sound from a passing car, and far away the grumbling hup-hup-hup and scrape of a mechanical digger - the acoustic landscape of the island.

*Gerald Durrell: One afternoon Mother and I, in a fit of extravagant sentimentalism, bought up his entire stock of rose-beetles and, when he had left, let them all go in the garden. For days the villa was full of rose-beetles, crawling on the beds, lurking in the bathroom, banging against the lights at night, and falling like emeralds into our laps.

Empty ships in Salamis

Why am I apprehensive about the recession; about the decline of the West? Obviously it's because it's hurting people (there's no poor world-rich world disconnection) - people in Greece, people in general and people I know, friends, relatives and neighbours. If it weren't for such contradictions, I'd be rejoicing, celebrating a yovel, the hammer of justice on a bell proclaiming 'liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ... a jubilee...returning every man unto his possession, every man unto his family (Lev 25) and the cancelling, by the rich of the debts of the poor. As my friend Kim said in October "it may ruin us but it might save the world". Fewer flights, fewer big cars, less fuel burned, less demand for bio-fuel and the forest clearance it demands, (even less NASCAR), fewer miles driven in metal boxes, less noise, death and injury on the roads (tho' perhaps not in China, India or other societies for whom the car remains an uncompromised object of desire); more people willing to travel by train; more travelling slow by cycling and walking. Less tourism, less cement - one of Greece's staple industries - over remaining green spaces. Less domestic waste, less consumption, less packaging, less material to be dumped in land-fill or less fossil fuel used incinerating it. Less water extracted for hot tubs and swimming pools from the deep aquifers that once fed vibrant streams. Empty cargo ships are anchored in Salamis roads. A slumping shipping industry could mean less safety and even more pollution, but there's a chance it will mean fewer oil drenched shorelines. People might buy less meat, reducing the volume of crops grown to feed the animals we eat and the vast areas of land given over to rearing livestock; all this, plus a more politically mature environmentalism; the techniques of sustainability more widely known; of greater interest to many more in the first world. Less consumption for consumption's sake; less energy given over to finding the credit needed to console the constantly stoked anxieties of materialism; return to planet earth from planet finance; more voluntary work; greater kindness between strangers. For the first time in human history the opportunity to be frugal is not only forced on us by events, it is something many want. Given the novelty of such a convergence, is it surprising that so many are surprised and confused by contradictory impulses? Saint's traditionally wear hair shirts, but didn't Francis of Assisi offered poverty and chastity say "yes, but not yet". We speak of ordinary people - like me - willing to be freed of the avarice engendered in them since birth, inherited from their parents, conditioned in circumstances described by Elliot Currie, as ones in which market economies have become market societies, where:

Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future (1993)

Harry Tsoukalas, focus of some insular animosities, wrote to me in October: 'I tell my wife and to the Corfiots that at least when my son asks me in the years to come what I have done about our huge problems in this paradise I could look at him straight in the eye and answer. How many people can say the same? It's all has to do with the future generation I think, it's too late for us.' Or one of the last observations of Bruce Chatwin about the smile of a 'poor' old woman in the desert, that smile he lived with ‘like a message from the Golden Age' teaching him 'to reject out of hand all arguments for the nastiness of human nature. The idea of returning to an "original simplicity" was not naïve or unscientific or out of touch with reality. Renunciation, even at this late date, can work.' * * * * Karen came with her daughters to stay and she went down to Handsworth Park to look at the trees. I cycled down later to join her but she wanted the park, as much as possible to herself. It's what I like about our park - the way you can both share it - with great numbers - and the way that, at times, you can have it for yourself - the landscaping of so comparatively small a space allowing that illusion. K took a picture of me by the fence between the park and the space beyond, yet to be laid out as allotments and playing fields.I groaned inwardly at the damage caused off Holly Road where the south park gate and pillar had been wrecked by a drunkard in a metal box careering up Thornhill Road and at similar damage at the parks eastern noundary, where the Hamstead Road fence and wall had been breached by yet another driver treating our streets as their domain for playing dodgems. The sooner we can all agree that 20mph is a sensible maximum for motorised urban traffic the better. It won't stop these drivers, though both were caught. I hope they're loss of no claims bonus hurts them and the thousands charged their insurers will add to the hurt, helping us all towards a culture where a mix of internal regulation and shared respect, will allow those who walk and cycle to share city space that motorists have been encouraged to appropriate for too long. Until very recently street design has segregated other road users from cars, telling those in cars that roads, with a few exceptions, like pedestrian crossings, are theirs. Traffic lights are for the convenience of drivers - only secondarily an aid to walkers. Slowly, ever so slowly, this is changing - but there'll be many more killed and injured, park gates smashed, house walls destroyed, pavements mounted, shop windows shattered, whole streets closed off to people on foot, communities severed by free range motoring tarmac, before cars are tamed. You still buy, for yourself and your passengers, a swaith of other people's liberties when you get a car. I don't want to see this goal achieved via regulation with yet more CCTV and cluttering signage. It must come from design over time with lots of debate - hence the long wait for impatient people like me to enjoy shared space on the roads of the city.

... The most recognizable characteristic of shared space is the absence of conventional traffic signals, signs, road markings, humps and barriers - all the clutter essential to the highway. The driver in shared space becomes an integral part of the social and cultural context, and behaviour (such as speed) is controlled by everyday norms of behaviour.

[Back to the future to the past: 19/01/09 Richard Risemberg posted the YouTube URL for a 1950 Disney cartoon on 'the transformation of a normal fellow into a self-centered, violent slob when he gets behind the wheel of the car...pretty funny, and pretty telling. Nearly 60 years ago!'] * * * An exchange on the language of anarchy - in the statement and comments. There's a suggestion that the problem is not bad Greek or bad English but that the language is not really meant to be used for communicating outside the circle, indeed is deliberately playfully confusing adopting fantasy terms familiar to Harry Potter readers. The quoted paragraph from the Levellers stands out as a model - not widely followed though:

Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom...we do now hold our selves bound in mutual duty to each other, to take the best care we can for the future, to avoid the danger of returning into a slavish condition. Levellers, An Agreement of the People, 1647

Back to the future 02/01/09: Malcolm Brabant on the state of Greek shipping Back to the future 14/01/09: Shipping rates hit zero across the world.