A day to go north

The terrier's pointing to the wind from the south bringing rain and deep grey sky - the first real signs of winter after a summer reaching into November. This morning as we packed our cases and ticked our check-list, it felt a little easier to leave.

The full plane bounced upwards through grey-white to the familiar blue again; no land to be seen beneath undulating plains of cloud all the way to England; then a train to Victoria and coach to Birmingham, and taxi home to Handsworth; on our kitchen table a lemon I picked this morning in our garden on Democracy Street.

Fireworks were exploding somewhere behind the roofs, in part for November 5 but, in Handsworth, mainly for Diwali - from the third to the seventh of the month. We'd enjoyed 'November 5' in Greece, combining it with Halloween, last Saturday evening, down at our friend Sally's stables a kilometre below the village...

...a fire of eucalyptus, foliage and leaves, the distinctive scent mixing with the enticing smell of meat grilling over carefully tended charcoal, to be enjoyed with cowboy beans, corkscrew pasta, and village wine; above us stars and a glow to the east as a young moon coasted the Trompetta Ridge. After the fire had died down Lin and I walked back to the village, its twinkling lights above us on the dark road, the air growing warmer as we climbed one of the narrow paths up to Democracy Street. Before sleeping we added a few touches to our wardrobe project, having stripped all the paint and filled cracks and holes.

But for detail - nearly done!

We cannot complete the work without drawer and door handles and some more trim and a new pane in one of the 'windows', but we're pleased with what we've made over the last two months. We find ourselves just sitting on the bed enjoying looking at our handiwork - recalling problems and solutions, recalling what we'd learned since building a dresser downstairs during April three years ago.....

The construction of a dresser with doors and shelves inside the ever uneven tilted alcove of our dining room presents Linda with especial problems. Being inclined to precision, more mathematical than I, she prefers the objectivity of the set square and the spirit level to the subjectivity involved in creating an illusion of symmetry and straightness through a willing committment to the uneven. What squabbles this engenders! How invaluable the breaks for gardening, cups of tea, coffee and sweet cakes - brought round by an amused, and slightly bemused, Leftheris observing "Problema?" [Back to the future 22 April '10 dining room  cupboard completed]

Before we left, the evening before, we walked in the village. Lin saw a beautiful snail working its way gracefully over a low wall, feeling the air with its tentacles.  These are its 'eyes' but they made not the tiniest flinch from the camera's flash.

Winter in England

I’m starting to imagine myself back to England – cycling into the city centre with Oscar running beside me along the Soho Loop, and the mainline canal towpaths, catching a train to London or York from New Street, chinese lunch with Richard and Emma, buttered baked potato from the Rag Market, fish and chips with curry in the dark cold evenings, working our allotment, thermal underwear, neck warmer, turning on an electric blanket as we do in the winter here. As it is we still sleep beneath just a sheet; Lin without her nightie. The weather these last weeks in Greece has been as high summer in the north so that I’m almost apprehensive at the cold we’ll meet in the arrivals building at Gatwick – an edgy chill I’d normally welcome with British winter.
“The car thermometer’s reading 4°” said Amy, on patrol in Moseley, when I phoned yesterday to thank her for words about mum..

A year ago today I lost a very special person, my Grandma. Thankfully I haven't lost any of the wonderful things she taught me! She will live on forever in the knowledge and wisdom she imparted on all those who were lucky enough to meet her... Doesn't stop me missing you though Poppet x

Archipelago of the clouds - the hill of the Church of the Prophet Elias at dawn

The only mark of the season here, apart from longer dark, is the ground mist that gathers across the island, a haar so thick at times, Prophet Elias Προφήτη Ηλία seems like an island assailed by ocean swells. I walked up there to see Ano Korakiana in the distance. Lopakhin has blocked the walking route up the hill to the church that marks one of the village boundaries.

<Δεν μπορείτε να κλείσετε τη διαδρομή προς την εκκλησία του Προφήτη Ηλία!>

I slipped through a gap between hedge and new steel gate, climbed the new concrete gradient, ready to argue, rehearsing in Greek...
 “You cannot close the path to the Church of the Prophet Elias”
In a hundred metres the concrete gave out as I glimpsed a semi-completed monster of a villa with swimming pool below...

39° 42.114', 19° 48.693'

On bad and ugly building

...my ascent crossed cropped grass sward strewn with dewy webs and clumps of pink cyclamen winding up between olive trees to the oak that overhangs the ruined church.

I sat on the steps in front of the church. The mist dissolved. A church bell rang in the village. I reached the cord for the single bell of Elias and rang it - twelve times.
I wasn’t returning the way I’d come. Pondering another descent, I headed west until the grove in front of the church came to an end in undergrowth. I edged, as when lurching a short cut from a forestry track in the Highlands coming to a short drop – an old olive grove terrace - and so gingerly descended through leaf mould sliding on my behind into cypress woods, hollyoak shrubbery, ivy, and bramble...

...peering for long unused paths in the bright lit underwood. The woods opened onto a small meadow.

I heard voices, then a car driving off and so found the road. I strolled back to where I’d started in clear sunlight.

I headed home and on an impulse, headed for Angeliki’s house. I needed a phone number and address. Outside on the village outskirts I tried the gate bell. No answer. Then she drove up; asked me in for coffee and so I got another view of the village from the top of her home as I sipped a Greek coffee and asked more questions about her grandfather - Ano Korakiana's sculptor.

“I saw you in the church on Monday” she said.
Lin had said she’d seen Angeliki in the village band, playing trumpet.
“I saw, from one corner of my eye, that you cried when the national anthem* was playing”
This was true and I was unembarrassed.

In St George's Ano Korakiana on «'Οχι» Day (ph: Thanassis Spiggos)

“I wasn’t crying for sadness so much as for everything I love about this country”
“You are more Greek than…”
I had heard this about myself before and denied it.
“It is the love of a foreigner for another country, these feelings I have for Greece. I’m proud to be of my own country, but I also know that when we were alone in 1940, Greece, of all who might have been with us, stood to be counted against the same enemy – mono Ellada. That’s why your anthem moves me so.”
I didn’t say all that, just ‘mono Ellada’.
I learned more in our conversation about Aristedes her grandfather. How he was to people about him; how he loved his village; how he went about his work.
“I will only write about this with discretion” I said “I will run my thoughts by you and your mother and father”
What an incredible step forward this last fortnight has been in my opportunities to witness the work of Aristeidis Metallinos Αριστείδης Μεταλληνός, after waiting for so long and more or less abandoning hope that I’d ever see more than a sample of his work.
“It has been thirty years” said Angeliki "Now must be a good time to make a new start with my grandfather.”

Aristedes' last sculpture - an unfinished self-portrait in 1987

*Ὕμνος εἰς τὴν Ἐλευθερίαν
*** *** ***
We have almost completed it - our wardrobes-cum-cupboards-cum-shelves – in our bedroom. Now it’s a matter of filling and stripping the wood and adding finish and four more turned wooden drawer handles.

Now we must remove the painted doors and strip them to their fine wood

But for the two uprights beside the ‘french windows’, all materials, but for trim, glue and screws, are recovered from old wood; old parts of other furniture.
I love the way this has all come together. First the doors we found years ago and kept in the apothiki. Then the window we thought we’d have to throw away after using it’s twin in the dresser downstairs. The messy old drawers from Brin Croft Lin used to pack things for the journey from mum’s house to Birmingham and then fitted in our hold baggage, with more things for Greece; then the two small doors I found in separate places by the road which just happened to fit below the windows. The shelves that were the drawer fronts on the rubbishy chipboard chest of drawers that fit exactly in the middle, and the old pine wood from that rotting table on waste ground near the house that made the bottom drawer, and the luck we had finding three large sheets of chipboard – shop display screens - abandoned by the derelict sports field below the village.

The centre of an abandoned table makes a matching front for our bottom drawer - four from Scotland, one from Greece

The bottom drawer

Work

The wardrobe that we are making in our bedroom, from a mix of new and old wood, has been added to. A window frame found by the roadside and stored in our apothiki is now in place. Yesterday I picked up a small cupboard door by bins below the village and that too is now part of our construction. We await one more pine drawer from England. It should arrive with other furniture brought from Brin Croft next Tuesday afternoon, courtesy of Daniel Blom. There's lots more to be done including stripping all the white paint from the old wood.
*** ***
So we visited the Metallinos Museum and were entranced.

The sculptor and his granddaughter Angeliki Metallinos

Αριστείδης Μεταλληνός - the man sits at work on a ram (a photo of him in the background of my picture) wearing a shepherd's woollen hat - as we see on countless images of the island saint. His art is almost unknown, even on Corfu, let alone the wider world. It seems he never wanted to sell his art, meaning it for and about his village, Ano Korakiana. The proliferation of stone and marble pieces in three small spaces on floor and shelves is overwhelming. The man was entirely self-taught. I'm only starting to take it in, but I understand that this work was only begun when, aged 67, Metallinos having been a craftsman -  cobbler, and maker of furniture, ovens and olive millwheels - found the time to become a sculptor. He continued on his collection, creating 250 pieces, before his death in 1987.

Aristedes Metallinos the cobbler

Puncture makers

Every time I wheel my bicycle down the public path from Democracy Street, beside our house, to the lower road to cycle south I need to check my tyres for small puncturing thorns – pretty flowers like small yellow daisies grow into soft green seeds....

Tribulus Terrestris - a most appropriate name passed on to me by Annie Hawkins on Facebook

... that dry, tenacious hard and multi-spiked strewing themselves along the rocky path beneath the greenery of the ground cover, attaching themselves to my tyres, breaking off, if not removed, and working their way through to inner tubes.

The spiked seeds attach themselves to the tyre and break off, leaving one thorn to work its way into the inner tube

“We’ll just have to drag it all up”
“But there’s so much of it”
“I know and I thought it was so attractive”
“It must spread on shoes and paws. When there were sheep and goat around these little spikes must have worked into their hooves. Horrid if you’d try to walk this path barefoot.”
“We’ll not only have to unroot this stuff. We'll have to sweep up all the seeds that are mixed up in it and on the ground”
“I could use another path to and from the lower road but ours is the only one I know that doesn’t have steps”

On Monday the weather turned grey, cooler and humid, a steady south wind streaming the new Greek flags on the crags above the village.

By noon increasingly jaundiced overcast released a soaking downpour that continued for an hour, interrupting Lin’s work remaking the uneven narrow steps between our garden and the terrace beneath the balcony.

With the SDS drill set on hammer using a broad chisel I shattered two small chunks of obtrusive stone, leveled the front of some steps and eased off plaka from two more.
“I do like using this thing”
“Your man-drill.”
“Yes indeed, And it’s 5 minutes to 2. I’m done, so no noise in siesta”
I went back to the wardrobe project in our bedroom while Lin continued on the steps. By the end of the afternoon our bedroom was untidy with tools and the support I was making for four fine old pitch pine drawers that we’d recovered from Brin Croft and brought in our hold luggage was not coming together as we’d planned.

The space we’re filling has no right angles. Even the floor and wall are less than horizontal and vertical. The ceiling beam to which the completed doors are attached starts 55 cms from the wall and is 10cms closer at the other end of the bedroom, whose ceiling is 5 cms higher at one end. The whole beam is inclined at a medial angle. There’s no point of reference. My prototype chest for the drawers seemed to sit neatly to the left of the wardrobe door upright; but more careful offering up, checked with spirit level and eye told a different story; everything vexingly out of kilter. I summoned Lin to help. She was soon using galling past tense imperatives.
“You should have made up the whole chest of drawers framework freestanding, and then fitted it in”
“Yes well I didn't”
“As I suggested in the first place”
“No you didn’t”
“Yes I …”
Even as we argued the framework started to collapse.
“I hate the ruddy thing. I’d like to start from scratch”
“No need. I’ll do it”
“Then you’ll see how difficult it is”
“It’s very simple if you just follow instructions”
“Hrmmf”
I gave up, tidied the tools and vacuumed sawdust. Reculer pour mieux sauter.
“Tomorrow we need to get ready for having people to supper. It’s tidy-up day.”
A week ago Lin and I were at Belissimo’s in Limonia, a small platea off  Nikiforou Theotoki. We’d caught the 1300 bus from Ano Korakiana. €2 each to the city and the bus to ourselves but for one other passenger all the way to town. I’d asked at the information kiosk at the bus station about the new timetable.
“It should be by the weekend. It will be decided which buses will be elim-in-ated”
I walked a little ahead of Lin.
“I’m going this way” she called continuing on Zavitsianou to make a dog-leg into Theotoki while I continued via Vellisariou and Solomou, losing her amid a bustle of visitors from the three cruise liners in port.
I was sat next to the door beneath a shade just before 2.00 asking for a fourth chair. Richard, slightly stooped, entered right, and the waiter seeing him, a regular guest, heading my way, acknowledged our table and me with the minutest of nods. Then Lin followed
“Did you run?”
“No I did not. You dawdled”
Can it be only this year that Lin and I were walking round the rim of Vesuvius, when she fell and cut her mouth and had stitches in the A & E above Torre del Greco and we walked on to catch the train to Herculaneum; mum already dead two months and Richard P back from near fatal illness? It was warm then, blue and sunny enough for ice cream. And in mid-May was it that we – Lin, I and Chris - met with Richard at Harry’s in Perithia, discretely shaken at how he’d altered?
“Tell me” asked Richard, who’d filled the minutes before Chris’ arrival with an account of the final revisions of his latest book “the difference between hip-hop and rap”
Chris, who would know exactly, diffidently obliged. We were reflecting on the term hip-hop in Roger Cohen’s op-ed in the NY Times - 'Why Greece Is Not Weimar' - which called Pavlos Fyssas ‘a leftist hip-hop singer’.
“The eggvolk killed Fyssas for what he sang – rap – not for how he danced – hip-hop”
“But I’m unsure” said Richard “that he was their original target...Fyssas was with friends. There was an argument in a place, a bar in Keratsini, with one Golden Dawn member. He called up followers on his phone. A score arrived and in the ensuing attack Fyssas was stabbed”
We ordered village sausages, roast chicken, chips, and, for Richard, tomato and taramasalata and lettuce and we shared a Greek salad; the feta one thick square on top. I passed the bowl to Lin to break the cheese and dress with oil.
“There’s no salt or vinegar on that so add it to your plate” said Lin. Bread came crusty and soft.
“Narrative, Richard! I just saw a film called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. When I watched black and white cowboy films they were all black and white. Then we had the guilt films”
“Little Big Man”
“Dancing with Wolves much later, and lots more. Then we started to get films where there was always a chronicler, a journalist sending stories of the Wild West back East, making it up as he went along. Unforgiven? W.W.Beauchamp? George Hearst in the Deadwood series. This last film with Brad Pitt as Jesse James was all about making the myth with the events depicted being staged and debated by some of the participants and their audiences in Manhattan. Deconstruction used to be a complicated idea teased and dismissed as academic la-la, now it’s in the multiscreen franchise movie houses….These days you don’t even need an idiots’ guide. For all Richard Dawkins’ contempt, it’s become common sense. Even boring.”

I was getting at Richard P’s writing; not his newspaper articles about Greece but his books, the one I’m tackling on Brian Friel. This latest one will be a difficult I’m sure – about colonialism, but that’s like saying a novel written in Russia is “about Russia”.
Later Chris, as he’d offered, drove us back to Ano Korakiana, else we’d have taken the Sidari bus and walked from the junction 2 kilometres up to Democracy Street. Later he wrote:

‘R was much better, wasn’t he?...what a lovely wife you have. I don’t mind saying it knowing you will let Lin know because she is hard headed and the right kind of cynical and quiet…sceptical might be the better word…I had something else to say but it’s gone.’ He added advice ‘no more capping…I have decided to try not to cap others' stories. do you realise how much of our chat is capping? I am the worst offender and I notice my frustration. My father never capped. It is a pleasure being able to focus and keep track of the speaker. They are grateful and in my case surprised. I love the discipline. What a bore I have been all these years. It’s insecurity but wrong because with silence and attention comes power and quiet satisfaction.

Dr. Johnson suggested, or was it Boswell himself made the remark? “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over...” So there is a moment in conversation when something hitherto absent is unaccountably yet undoubtedly present; like an original idea; initially invisible since without reference or context.