Gradually essential work gets done

Eiderdowns hang from our Handsworth washing line. No Ionian wind to sun-dry and ventilate them. Instead I watch carefully to bring them in if the clouds grown darker and heavier.

They came from Rock Cottage; in sacks of soft things I'd was tempted to skip when Adam and Jack cleared the cottage garden of building waste two weeks ago, but which Lin insisted on bringing here to wash, dry, fold and store, cleansing them of the overwhelming smell of old damp.
"The eiderdowns are feather-filled. They won't go in the washer" said Lin "Air them"
I've smelled them. The airing seems to have worked. They're lovely. A crime to throw away. The washing line's supported with one of the two hazel poles with V-ends that I lopped - one for us one for Denise - and brought back to Birmingham from a hazel coppice in our garden at Rock Cottage.

My attempts to win sympathy on the basis of age-related absentmindedness has no traction with Lin.  She knows very well, that how many milk cartons are in circulation in the kitchen is low on my 'to do' list.
"What forms of annoyance do you reserve for genocide, people trafficking, child abuse...or Adolf Hitler?" I plead, uselessly.
These things matter to her, she is Kali of Small Things; in especial abundance while Guy and Amy, Oliver and our new born grand-daughter, live with us as their own home is extended - work, as might be guessed, is lasting longer than their builder projected.
To choose one of many tasks more or less at random, I'm tidying up the gates and doors at the front of our house, starting with the hefty alleyway door that, after old repairs to an original gate made 80 years ago, is falling apart.
"Just disassemble the tongue and groove and remake it" says Lin.
The door fittings are rusting into rot. Lin's part right. It could be recovered, but at what time and effort given all the other jobs to be done? If it were anything but a purely functional gate I'd give restoration consideration. I took the whole door - the flaking paint layered rusty T-hinges cut through with the angle-grinder, the remains levered off until I could get a heft on the old slot screws - to a local carpentry shop. I also removed handles and a couple of cabin hooks I'd added about twenty years ago, and with Guy's help, dragged the old gate to the HHH van and took it to Atlantic Joinery on Hamstead Road. I pay for this use of the project's vehicle with a fuel donation - all registered in the van log.
"Make me a gate like this but slightly lighter, Mr Bogal"

The old gate goes as a model to Atlantic Joinery

A week later, for £182 I have a new raw door made of treated wood, ready to be primed, undercoated, painted and re-hung wit a new pair of sturdy galvanised T-hinges from Doorfit in Hockley

Once that's in place I'll clean up the garage doors, sand, undercoat and repaint them.
"£182!" said Lin "They saw you coming"
I like the feel of the new gate. I like imagining how the whole will look when the work is done. But it'll be at least another week with all the other things we have in hand - not to mention the constant duties of grand-parenting.
Things are happening at Rock Cottage. The HHH committee agreed to let me borrow the van to collect the 'old' kitchen from Guy and Amy's house and take it down to Lydbrook where Adam and Jack borrowed the relevant parts up Bell Hill to install in the kitchen at the cottage

At the same time as the kitchen is recovered at Rock Cottage, Martin has been sizing up what needs to be done on the bathroom, left unusable by the previous builder.
I left this for Martin and Lin to discuss.

The old cast iron bath will go back, but the other way round, so we can have a shower installed....

...One wall will be dry lined - plaster board fixed to a frame over a sheet of polythene. That will be behind the bath - and tiled. The old WC can go back as also the basin but its plumbing will be replaced
"I don't know how your bath ever drained itself" said Martin.
He made other suggestions - a better placed heated towel rail and radiator for instance. Once the kitchen, the bathroom and one upstairs bedroom are made good, we can stay in the place and continue the work. Martin ran through a range of other jobs to be done. Meantime the old kitchen units and tops were taken down Bell Hill to go in the van and, with other rubbish collect from the streets  of Handsworth taken to Holford Drive recycling depot where they will disappear into land-fill or be incinerated - so primitive still are Birmingham's contract locked techniques for dealing with waste.

Denise and I down-load scavenged rubbish to the dry bay at Holford Drive Recycling Centre

iPhone from Adam this w/e:

Hi simon. Rock cottage progress today
1.we have finished off the work tops in the kitchen
2. We have sorted a lot more stuff out in the living room (some taken up stairs) created a lot more room :)
3. We have cleared the bathroom and brushed down all the walls ready for re-pointing and sealing
4. Also in the hall by the old front door has been emptied and all cleaned down ready for repair work etc
5. We have bagged up some plaster that was on the floor which the old builder knocked off and taken with us to discard of at the works skip
I think we are getting closer to starting some plastering works. Also the bathroom is ready to go so I will have a word with my dad and will get in contact soon :) Thanks, Adam 

He attached pictures.  This regular updating by email with images is so reassuring, allowing discussion at a distance, checking; easing the iron rule about never leaving even the most trusted of builders to work in your absence.
*** *** *** ***
I'm getting lessons on the intrusive range and depth of viral marketing as Oliver, while having nappies changed, eating morning toast, sitting on his pot, is allowed to watch one or another laptop or even smart phone, as a supplement to baby-sitting. He watches adults but also children selling global toys, his favourite Lightning McQueen, an animated car from films by Disney. These clips are mainly on Youtube. Some are professional animations. Some are well crafted amateur-looking chats about things, where, in front of a relaxing voice-over, and lift-music, toys are unwrapped from cellophane and various plays with the objects enacted. Often there are animated games advertising software for the actual game that last for minutes at a time, with frenetic voice-overs and sound effects - skidding tyres, gun-fire and crashes. These are in English - US and UK - in Japanese and Russian and I'm sure many more. The repertoire is immense and continuous, as one clip leads conveniently to the next, advertising interspersed with advertising, overlaid with muzak and disarming many-accented commentaries.
I don't like this one little bit but it's so bloody convenient.
Oliver is kept entertained while essential domestic tasks get done, but he's being seduced for future consumption. I'm pleased that when we're in Greece our lack of Wifi will have conveniently excised this umbilical. I'm ashamed of relying on it; impressed at its ingenious intrusiveness - the core dynamics of consumerism in the heart of the home, more present then ever via the social web; all things I knew would happen when I wrote about 'micro-marketing' and the 'internal polity' back in the early 90s. Thus capitalism, with its astonishing reach, reproduces its processes even more intimately than when my children were small, or when parents and schools of the 1940s worried about the effect on me of comics.

I realise that this exposure can also be a vaccination. Much depends on what else Oliver does in his daily life; on the negotiation between him and his family and the global market; about what we will allow to be commodified. Authoritarian regimes seeks non-negotiable ways into a child's mind. At least in a democracy we have choices, but as the truism goes 'the price of freedom is eternal vigilance'. At the moment Oliver's relations with the web is more or less one-way with him as spectator. The wonders, hazards and utility of the social web are yet to come.
On Plot 14 Hannah made her first visit yesterday.

Winnie, Dennis, Oliver, Amy and Hannah - her first visit to plot 14

I have recruited Winnie to help dig over the plot. She brought her son Dennis who often helps us collecting rubbish on the van with Handsworth Helping Hands.

Between us we are working over, yet again, ground that needs, weeding and enriching with compost as well as further de-stoning. I've decided to use carpet tiles - recovered in large numbers from where they were fly-tipped into a Handsworth back-garden - to trace out paths that divide the plot into manageable sections. I'd like to make patterns; perhaps a Union Jack. The tiles need not be permanent  if enough of our walking on these paths compresses the ground enough to make new weeds less welcome. I'm also installing gutters to collect rain from the two slopes of the shed roof.

I have now accepted unashamedly that my allotment is a bourgeois hobby...

The benefits of allotments are both tangible and intangible and include a space for recreation, exercise and, if desired, an opportunity to network. However, allotments also offer a space for contemplation and/or solitude and the chance to indulge in the hobby of growing one's own food in an idiosyncratic way and for personal reasons. Allotments and other urban agriculture projects also offer an opportunity for excluded groups or individuals to participate and become involved in a project. In this way, allotments can contribute to a sense of self as well as community and, accordingly, they can help to shape lives and encourage social integration. Acton, L 2011. Allotment Gardens: A Reflection of History, Heritage, Community and Self. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 21:46-58, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pia.379

So feel less guilty about the money I pay for help and the parts I buy, like the 65mm shed guttering from Wickes which is a devil to assemble at the joints.  I eventually gave up trying to 'click' in joiners and end pieces lined with a stiff rubber washer, stripped these out, and substituted silicone from a nozzle; but the whole set of bits and pieces - gutters, down pipes, gutter brackets and the rest - cost me £44. Crazy! The decent thing would be to look out for things that people have discarded and make shift. Scavenging with Handsworth Helping Hands gives as good an opportunity as any to avoid paying at the till from retail superstores.

Place

We're all in the kitchen here, Amy. Liz, Oliver, Lin and I, with Flea watching us making lists...

Going back to an afternoon in 2009 on the other side of the world:

Meanwhile in the small town of Newstead, in Victoria, population according to Wikipedia, 487, I was taken to a community meeting in the main street coffee shop where there was a Sunday afternoon get together to discuss the implications of Social Networking with an invited academic, Barry Golding from Ballarat University, gently expressing his reservations about the difference between real face-to-face contact and that offered by, for instance Facebook or Twitter, and reminding us just what en enormous part of the global population has never made a phone call let alone having access to the world wide web, while someone working for the State of Victoria, Ben Hart, suggested - with equal politeness - the potential of the medium. We had WiFi where we met and after the Q & A session I couldn't resist asking to have myself pictured 'in country' by a page of Democracy Street blog.

It's not that I'm out of touch with information technology, nor anything but fascinated by inventiveness, No amount of communication via the vast but invisible stringing and switching of the internet can impart the sense of place I'm not at. I scan the Ano Korakiana website and follow a couple of Facebook sites on Corfu - one proving very popular among ex-patriats for buying and selling, co-ordinating searches for missing dogs and cats and finding accommodation - Corfu Grapevine - and another - Only Corfu Society started by our friend Aleko Damaskinos - for exploring facts and and sharing fictions about the island, and of course there are many others in many languages, not to mention panoramic photographs of beloved places and unique Corfucius. There's skype and email and ordinary telephone and of course memories I've streamed on Youtube and Vimeo. None impart the sense I associate with the places from which I'm absent in a way that consoles me for not being there. A place is touch, smell, sound but above all direct human contact and in a smaller but important way the anticipation of those in imagination, a kinaesthetic sense of things akin to the absolute reality of a dream. Music can evoke it; a sudden burst of a familiar sound on radio or TV  and I know - as if an internal sluice is opened, my chest flooded with such fullness, I suffer a momentary difficulty of speech.

Mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra in winter

"Violence cannot be fought with violence"

The dog Λουκάνικος, Bangers, successor to Κανέλλος, Cinnamon

Adam Schatz London Review 19 December 2008:

The police, curiously, have retreated from confrontation with the street-fighting anarchists, preferring to chase down protesters at the tense but mostly peaceful daytime rallies. Amnesty International has reported that two of its Greek members were beaten with batons, and accused the police of engaging in ‘punitive violence against peaceful demonstrators, rather than targeting those who were inciting violence and destroying property’. (Riot police emptied 4600 tear gas canisters, and had to make an emergency request to Germany and Israel to replenish their reserves.) But when the cities were burning at night, the cops were scarcer than firefighters during the great forest blaze: after midnight the cities belonged to anarchists, arsonists, looters – and, it seems, to hooded agents provocateurs with iron clubs. The stated objective behind this ‘defensive posture’ was to avoid further casualties, but many Greeks wonder whether the government had struck a tacit deal with the rioters. ‘We let you torch and plunder to your hearts’ content, and you let us continue pretending that we are in charge’ was the wording suggested by Michas Takis, a journalist at the liberal newspaper Eleftherotypia. [quote ~ Panagiotis Stathis, spokesman for the national police "Violence cannot be fought with violence."]

In one film, from a fixed camera above Syntagma Square, I viewed a road nearly empty of vehicles, campaigners standing in separate clusters on the broad pavements, and near the top of the square a pair of evzones in brown winter uniforms doing their traditional march at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in front of Parliament. On one forum a visitor to Athens leaving his hostel to visit the Acropolis writes that:

...we hit up the shopping area and people watched. then i saw a tv reporter setting up and asked if i could get a photo of her pretending to interview me. well, me and my big mouth, b/c she asked if she could interview for me, about the presence of police in large numbers around the christmas tree and pedestrian mall. so at least my photo is now genuine. look for me on the AP greek story regarding athens resembling a police state now. i didn't say that i had just come from israel and am used to it, but 'twas fun all the same. tomorrow will be ancient sites day, and at night olympiacos versus some team that will lose badly. fingers crossed for no rain. nap time now.

I was talking, this evening, to Amy who'd dropped in with Liz. She looked at some of the street action on the many videos of events in Athens, and referred me to current thinking in her work books on policing public disorder. I've started looking again at the way the Athens police are deploying, grouping and regrouping and begun to notice patterns in the fog. Having already had intuitions about symmetry in the dynamics of these dramatic scenes - not quite velvet, more like dralon. Amy's pointed me to a missing part of this puzzle. Of course it's been mentioned by others - the limited number of injuries among rioters and police, the minimal use of guns (none authorised) or even baton rounds, the shock aroused by the 'second shooting' - a spent bullet striking a young man's hand rendering it numb; the absence indeed of blood letting except that of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, whose death is unreservedly deplored by the government. These guys (and some women) have been on workshops and courses, taken notes from slide presentations, discussed scenarios introduced by senior officers who've attended international conferences on the management of urban riots. I know the police have training - of varying quality - but I hadn't realised how far practice had advanced informed by global experience. The Wikipedia entry on riot control is solely about weaponry - and daunting though that is - omits the volume of knowledge accumulated and diffused about crowd behaviour and its implications for policing. The arts of reaction and counter-reaction have been refined and must have spread - notwithstanding the low wages and lack of training that Greek police complain about - to the uniformed men I'm seeing in the gassy flaming streets of Athens. Riots judged as 'failures' by professionals, are those where violence is escalated or even provoked by police action; especially when police attack violent demonstrators - either because provoked, or because officers who enjoy violence are given rein, or because violent men have been planted in the crowd to provoke ill-trained and undisciplined police and/or because one or more politicians sees advantage in escalation. e.g. Berlusconi in Genoa. These acts of violence against violent mobs have either played into the hands of those who desire violence - on either side - and have diverted the police from directing their control measures against the violent, so that they end up playing into the hands of the violent, either by attacking peaceful elements in the crowd or killing or injuring aggressive demonstrators who's fate wins the sympathy of moderates, increasing animosity towards the police. I think Machiavelli would have at least reviewed some of his thoughts on the proper application of ruthlessness in the light of research on crowds since Le Bon's pioneering work in the 1890s. According to the text books on this subject, the worst thing the police can do is to return violence with commensurate violence. Blimey! For a testosterone charged male kitted up in riot gear that's counter-intuitive. The police have to avoid being drawn into violence without appearing to appease or permit violence. Those who seek confrontation among the rioters understand this, as do those who wish the same among the police, in collaboration with those in government or with aspirations to government, who seek confrontation to achieve their ambitions. The police have to be wise, as do those who give them orders - if peace is to be waged. So all those millions going into the Bloody Sunday Enquiry are, as well as being a search for truth, an investment in the competence of those handling mass disorder. The situation is complicated by the likelihood that many rioters, some with parental connections in government, including those who steer the police, are reading (a variety of social web links to virtual environments) the same manuals. Given that proportionality has been normal in cold war manoeuvring most of my life, how unsurprising that similar dynamics apply to conflict in civvy street - tailored to the circumstances of Greece. * * * *

A man cries "shame"; a woman claps

[photo: Teacher Dude's Grill and BBQ, in some of the most intimate records of these weeks, captures mixed reactions]

Observations by the citizen-journalist Teacher Dude who's been posting images and comments from Greece on Flickr: There were times over the last two weeks when what I witnessed seemed taken from the script of an outlandish movie, the kind where everyone tuts and says, "That is just so Hollywood. That would never happen in real life". William Goldman, the writer of movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once said that there were things taken from real life he couldn't put in his scripts as nobody would believe them. Here is a selection of the few I remember from the riots and protests that I covered over the last two weeks. The two guys wearing masks are ready to charge the bank, all set on smashing the security camera and disabling the ATM. However, there is a young woman there, oblivious to the mayhem around her who is taking out her money. The masked men wait, politely ask her if she has finished, then set about the cash machine with hammers. A march goes past a van, inside two tiny Shetland ponies stuck in a space not much bigger than they are. The protesters, enraged by this discuss what to do. In the end they take down the number plates as to....report the owners to the authorities. Just a few metres behind them riot police approach menacingly. 50 kids, one no more than 10 years old pelting the central police station with rocks as bewildered shoppers seemingly unable to grasp what is happening gawp while pieces of paving stone clatter around them. The quasi - military riot police up against tweenies Walking along Egnatia Boulevard lit up by at least a dozen fires, acrid smell of tear gas and burning plastic everywhere. Two middle aged bystanders argue over whether the anarchists about to firebomb a bank are doing the right thing. The older, white haired guy, says, "What do you care? It's not your money". An old woman buttoning holing a passing masked teen, scolding him about what has been happening. Others join in a passionately debate what has been happening over the last few days. A smartly dressed woman, shopping bags around her, waiting at the bus stop claps and cheers masked protesters marching by. The man next to her shouts out "Shame, shame on you" [Teacher Dude, citizen journalist, originally from England, living in Northern Greece, teaches English as a Foreign Language (EFL)...writes of loving photography...cpwefl2003@hotmail.com. His comment below - following a request from me for permission to use his words and this photo - refutes my remote observation but confirms some shared awareness of history among potential assailants 'As far as escalation of violence is concerned I think both sides realise that would quickly spiral out of control as there are literally millions of guns in circulation.'] [Big Fat Greek Summer - 13/12/08 - eye witnessing the ordinary and the dramatic were mingling in central Athens]

* * * * The Tango Team: Tango stands for Tactically Aggressive and Necessary Gambit of Options. This team goes forward and 'dances' with the crowd. The Tango Team can bring to bear the entire spectrum of use-of-force options-from command presence through deadly force-in a controlled, self-contained package. * * * * Last night - Saturday - Lin beckoned me round the other side of the kitchen table from where I was street watching Athens to see the last dance on BBC iPlayer of the Strictly Come Dancing final - between Tom and Camilla (see 32.50 on) - who she knew, though she'd missed the live show, had won. They were good - even I could see.