"I always felt a little guilty about living in Drafi"

Yearning burning earning

4 November 2007. I recognise, as should all who think they can watch this wicked problem from some position of moral safety, that these problems are inflamed - literally - by desire for Greek land that exists among Greek citizens but starts far beyond Greece, in internationally stirred yearning for Greece, in a global market for an idea of place that feeds on and desires to consume Greece. Every commodifying exercise, internal and external, every sexy landscape image in glossy spreads, the posters and pamphlets at conference stands and, of course, on the web, enlivens the market for matches and turns the gaze of the profiteer towards the temptations of dry tinder. Yearning leads to burning leads to earning. This is a problem for me, for everyone. If Greece finds solutions, the world finds solutions. Hurling imprecations at the corrupt may be personal therapy. It's not politics.

Parnitha 2007

Malcolm Brabant has just confessed on BBC Radio 4 that he "always felt a little guilty about living in Drafi." In July 2007, after fires had devastated the Parnitha forests, a cartoon was drawn by the foremost Greek cartoonist Yannis Kalaitzis - Γιάννης Καλαϊτζής - in Ελευθεροτυπία Eleftherotypia - and see Ab Irato.

The problem is relatively simple but politically and administratively complex. Forests are protected in the Hellenic Constitution. But the land on which they grow is not legally protected by strict zoning laws of the kind that exist, for instance, in the UK and older European countries.

The Greek government is introducing a cadastral system, but until it's completed, Greek forests are only forests while they have trees. Burn them down; avoid getting caught; let a carelessly discarded cigarette-end do its work. The land ceases - effectively - to be forested. In the UK, if a forest burns the land remains zoned as 'forest'. It must be recovered as forest; a tradition of government land-use law that goes back nine centuries to the Domesday Book.

Land registration incorporated into Regional Spatial Strategies, succeeding Structure Plans, involving prolonged consultation, won't stop the persistent land profiteer but it forces them to work harder than in Greece, where they get further help from the weather.

The goals of the forthcoming Greek equivalent - the Hellenic Cadastre - are listed below. The ones that matter in challenging yearning-burning-earning are in italics.

To secure the real property of citizens

To adjudicate, irrevocably, state and municipal property, forests and coastal zones

To limit bureaucracy and simplify real property transactions

To improve protection of the environment by limiting encroachment and unauthorized development of land

To establish an absolutely secure environment for investments in the real estate market

Forcing through the Hellenic cadastral will require great political will and greater probity among Greek planning professionals and greater opportunities for inspecting the public sector - more figures like Leandros Rakintzis, General Inspector for Public Administration whose website encourages citizens to report corruption.

* * * Betty at Walsall Road Allotments who wrote to Cllr Martin Mullaney on our behalf, has just copied me this email from Adrian Stagg:

Betty, the Cabinet Member for Leisure Sport and Culture has asked me to reply to your email about the Victoria Jubilee site. When Allotment Officers visited the site in May, we were told that the scheme would be completed by the end of July. There have been delays due to bad weather and there have been problems regarding the boundaries between the allotments and the adjoining sports pitches which are at different levels.

The developer has presented a revised programme of works that suggests completion by the end of September, though there is likely to be a further delay before the pavilion is installed - once that is done we can inspect the works, identify any snagging problems and eventually accept handover. There is also a legal matter involving the land transfer to the City Council and whilst we have urged priority, this will take as long as it takes and I have no real idea of timescale. We cannot therefore occupy the allotments until we are legally entitled to do so (my italics).

Allotment Officers can only do so much and delivery remains in the hands of the developer and other City Officers. There are still plots available if people want to go on the waiting list. Adrian Stagg, Allotments Finance & Records Officer Parks & Nature Conservation 303 3038

Rocking la roche tremblante

My friend Nick Booth chats directly and through cyberspace - more public than the phone and e-mail - about how one gets involved. We were discussing How to build a village by Claude Lewenz. I got to thinking how vexed I'd been by the much publicised Channel 4 TV thriller Britz, especially the concluding episode, as its talented creators and actors took us on the personal journey of a young British Muslim women from frustrated public protest to a series of actions that concluded with her strapping on a pregnancy belt full of explosives and detonating them in a crowd at an open air concert beside Canary Wharf as the credits arrived. It was riveting viewing but failed to explain either the character of democratic action or the phenomenon of killing yourself for a cause - a road Nassima chose after abandoning the former. My argument is artistic. I cannot understand a real suicide bomber - here or abroad. My cautious suggestion is that Peter Kosminsky, an artist of talent, has not made Nassima's journey convincing. That may be my problem.

Kosminsky doesn't mess around. His CV of success in film and TV is extraordinary. For Britz he was supported by a team of researchers led by Ali Nausahi, daughter of immigrants from Bradford. To get evidence to support Kominsky's film they visited a British Muslim neighbourhood, interviewing people between eighteen and thirty five. Britz' cast and many of its crew were from the same background and faith. Kosminsky had access to a MI5. His screenplay deals with the multiplicative consequences of crassly ignorant treatment by officials of individuals better educated than themselves.

I understand the principle of dying for a cause (regardless of whether I'd have 'the spittle for it'). I read in the yellowing obituary in a 1940 Times for my aunt's fiancé - Bobby Jeff - that his fighter had last been seen diving towards a formation of hundred bombers over the English Channel. His body was never found. My grandmother once played me a recording of Churchill on 78 rpm records, so that she could let me hear, with her who'd heard them fresh in the war: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'" or on 4 June 1940, "...we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" (He mentions "our Island" - I can almost touch the capital 'I'. he speaks of beaches, fields, streets and hills - impregnably and specifically imaginable in their detail to individuals - and then comes Churchill's way of saying 'we shall never surrender' - avoiding over-emphasis on 'never', avoiding bravado, leaving a choice as to who shall be 'we'. For one who's never had to be a soldier, this "we", this "shall", this "never surrender'' tap my ribcage like a drum across 68 years, touching the primal trigger that draws a feral growl from the sweetest dog*)

[The most resonant account of why someone might fight to the death against a threat to the flawed disoriented mess that can't and doesn't care about whether its flag hangs the right way up is Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy, especially his final chapter. "Thank you, sir," she said, and took my hand in hers. And then, looking at me again, she said after a pause, "I see they got you too."]

Had our country fallen to the Nazi; had we been occupied so that guerrilla war became our resort, or what some now call asymmetric conflict, then I can imagine though not embrace the choice we were shown in Britz. But I found it quite impossible, as I think did Kosminsky, to understand why Nassima abandoned democratic action so quickly. What did they think the latter involved? Britz certainly underrated the idea - juxtaposing a brother, Sohail, deeply engaged in the hi-politics of the state and a sister initially committed to the politics of civil protest over the treatment of British Muslims. Did no-one in this production understand that in such politics - the politics of democracy - you are always losing until you win and you may never win? The blows may be unendurable but you never never kill for democracy if the choice is still available to you to die for it. Few champions for any great principle live to see its realisation. Did Wilberforce see emancipation? Did Mary Wollstonecraft see female franchise? Did Martin Luther King see his dream realised before he was murdered? Did any campaigner for a principle who lived to see it recognised in law, not also see it blemished as Ghandi, wanting to see Indian Independence, saw the massacres of Partition and suffered the deadly hatred of Hindu nationalists? Democracy is no rose garden. It's often a poisoned chalice. It is, as Churchill observed (and many others know), the worst form of government - except for all the others, or as my ancestor Henry Maine noted 'just a form of government' arguing against its deification as an ideology, like the monarchist's faith in Divine Right. Yet it's still worth defending to the last - even when it's for the rights of a jackaltub of Sun reporters [Yet see Theodore Dalrymple stepping out of the mainstream 'In no country has the process of vulgarization gone further than in Britain: in this, at least, we lead the world. A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and antisocial attempts to satisfy them.'] Britz ended, as other critics observed, suggesting that its main female character had not just chosen one way versus another. The tragic ending was more like that of Romeo and Juliet, only the conflict between two opposing houses was relived as a slowly sundered sibling bond abruptly reunited in death. Nassima was the object of disrespect. But I could not see the sequence of arrest at a demonstration, casual racist insult, slightly scornful professional request to remove a hijab (not a niqab) in an operating theatre, suicide of a dear friend, rejection by an angry father or death of a lover (after her course was chosen) as reasons for abandoning democratic action, let alone reasons for killing, unless her script team wholly failed to grasp the vicissitudes of democratic campaigning that Nassima decided to abandon for something else. It may not, for the majority, lead to Calvary (or its equivalent), but its substance contains a lot more sweat and tears than Nassima shed before she decided to blow herself up in the middle of a crowd. What lessons should be taught about political action? How do you combine a warning about the difficulties with a message of hope and invocation to endurance and courage? All my starting points - Beaudesert Road, Handsworth, Lozells, Birmingham - and all my points of leverage seem to present with such tiny opportunities, that the most I can ever do is help rock the local boat on Democracy Street, like an enormous stone I once encountered in Brittany which was said to be movable. It was ten metres long and nearly three high but balanced, so as to allow a human being to make it stir. I was confounded until I saw a local bend down beneath one end of the great stone and press up with his back. I watched bemused at the futility of his action – then as he beckoned me over, I placed my hand on the stone and realised it was gently but invisibly rocking. I had a go. Pressed up with my back. Nothing. tried again. Nothing. Tried again and then – delayed action – the mighty rock had begun to rock ever so gently like some enormous sea swell in the deep ocean that is too low to see but whose length carries the weight of vast acreages of water. I could feel but not see. I was exhilarated but I needed to be shown how to do it by the local Frenchman, who was palpably as delighted as I at my success. I needed to believe it was possible and that it was possible for me to do it. I needed time. In local politics I have been involved with two projects – Handsworth Park and the Victoria Jubilee Allotments. These involved many others. My participation started over 20 years ago. These projects continue. They rock. Now there are others that for the moment seem as immovable as that rock. I've loaded a photo of someone a lot smaller than me demonstrating the technique and the spirit that rocks ‘La Roche Tremblant’ at Huelgoat. [I did not take the photo, so please, anonymous photographer, allow me your permission, and thanks too to the rock mover. May you move the world, mam'selle.] * * * Isn't it amazing in this world of 'celebrities' when we turn from the communal dish in a locality from which we can gaze up at the stars to a dish on the roof to see the latest 'stars'? Thank goodness that the web via narrowcasting can be used to counter the distortions in perceptions of value and worth created by broadcasting. As celebrity chatter fills the airwaves, people far less known are more quietly but effectively campaigning on the complex issues of land use, sustainability, first world-third world dynamics, drawing on science and political skill on the ground. Here for instance is a piece about Farzana Panhwar. See also my blog on Prof Eleni Briasouli-Kapetanaki who also fights the good fight! What is so needed in Greece is a land register supported by high quality and easy accessible maps and a regional spatial strategy supported by law. This is the route to breaking the 'yearning, burning, earning' cycle that some now call Greece's version of 'disaster capitalism'. There is more political attention being given to this problem in Greece than ever. It is not just Greece's problem. Her land values are created by international yearning to own a place under the Greek sun. [Petition to Save the Forests of Greece] * * * On Friday morning I was working with the help of WiFi in a city centre coffee house including taking a look at some extracts from another Channel 4 programme - Undercover Mosque [A piece of investigative journalism about Grumpy Old Muslims (again I concur with Theodore Dalrymple) to counterbalance C4's recent barrel-scrape reputation]. In comes an old friend who promotes the 'crime and grime' programme here, started by the previous administration in 2003. I thanked him for the day his colleagues had organised for my Japanese students on various elements of community reassurance (note: June 2010. The new government is revamping links like this, abandoning some terms and substituting others). I said I was - at that moment - blogging my comments on Britz. He nodded, mentioned a previous day's meet with the Home Secretary on youth crime and a wrap-up today, gesturing towards a couple of suited senior police officers with who he was sharing a coffee. We got on to how het-up the Americans were about terrorism. I took it this had come up at the meeting in London, as it had when I chatted with one of the soldiers over here supporting the struggling Governorate of Basra back in 2005. 'Yes I know. Most of them don't have this assumption we've grown up with, that you could be having a chat over a cuppa about ordinary things and some educated person will blow you and your companions to little bits.' People think the USA is violent. It is - in parts. I was in Michigan and Pennsylvania including 'murder-city' Detroit for several years and I never saw a gun - except well holstered on the occasional police officer - nor a second of violence all that time. Read about it. Saw it on TV and in films. But the places I worked - near campus in Ann Arbor, Detroit and Philadelphia - was key-in-the-front-door land. True, I've not seen direct violence here either, but I've got friends of friends killed or injured by bombs. My son's been mugged a few times as are most teenagers in the inner-city. We've had burglaries. Lin's had two cars stolen. I was clubbing the night of the 1972 bombs in Birmingham. Close. My friend reminded me of the 1400 bodies stacked below the Council House, close to where we sat, after one WW2 blitz on the city. A colleague was on but not hurt on one of the tube trains on 7/7. I never stop touching secular wood, but we're almost instinctively acclimatised to this sort of thing. So of course are some Americans, but great numbers of them, especially in their vast steppes and hinterlands, live in tranquility - making violence, when it does happen, more horrifying. I've been desensitised from the times when, as a child, it made me almost nauseated to see a picture of the crucifixion - all that blood! To many American observers (not New Yorkers, whose experience is in a different category) the atrocity of 9/11 must have been traumatising, helping explain the insecurity that brought to power the gang of clever fools currently failing to lead the free world. I mentioned our pleasure that A. was joining the police as a West Midlands Community Support Officer and my friend bought over the Assistant Chief Constable he'd been with. We chatted about the close working of PCSOs, Specials and f/t Police Officers in the area '...and we've got a lot more officers on bicycles and out of pandas. CSOs like your daughter don't have powers of arrest in the WM which gets them closer to the public while saving them from getting tied up with paperwork.' 'My Marxist friend' I said ' thinks this networking between agencies and partners (but see earlier note on webpages rejigged post-general election 2010) is sinister.' Grins all round. I headed home having bought Dh's printer on Amazon ready for his move to campus lodging at the weekend.

_________________ *A rebuttal of the myth that Churchill's speeches were only made in parliament and later spoken by an actor on the radio.

Bad building on Corfu

Sunday 23 Sept. This morning while Lin, who doesn’t do morning food, slept I made myself toast and very lightly scrambled fresh eggs, a mug of tea and orange juice and enjoyed breakfast under the veranda, having placed a pot of basil beside me to keep flies away. Later we went into town to bargain for flowers to put beside Kiria Leftheris’ who’s promised to water them with hers, thus hiding the stump of the external steps amputated by the previous builder. Bad things are being done to houses here – bad rebuild, bad new build. Roof joists of grossly impractical form with unnecessarily heavy purloins and ill judged joints; hollow higgledy-piggledy brick work; walls without insulation likely to leak in winter; incompetent work hidden by render, plaster, filler and paint; ungraceful imitations of Venetian arches – things that would never pass building regulations or planning rules in UK, blighting the island’s architectural traditions – most of it driven by the migratory fantasies of plump northern geese. Long ago Jack* said to me ‘if you move, go somewhere already ruined’. This advice has suited us fine in past years. This house, as we knew when we bought it, comprised two properties joined together with surpassing incompetence by a local British builder who took its vendors for what they had, which is probably why we were able to buy it. We are removing the shoddy and enabling what remains of the good to emerge. As we do this it grows on us that incompetence can, unintentionally, reveal ingenuity. There is a wood stove in what was once a single storey house. The builder ran a flue through the wooden beams of his upper floor which almost broke through his new roof tiles. He thus created, simultaneously, a fire hazard and a leak. He nailed sub-standard floor boards without tongue and groove to the new floors. They lean and creak under foot. None of his doors close. His unfixed skirting board bowed from the scuffed walls and will be good for kindling. His roofs had no insulation nor waterproof membrane. His breeze block bunkers encroaching on the side lane were his inept means of disposing of rubble from an unnecessarily demolished external staircase and balcony. These filled with rain from his ill fixed gutters forcing damp into the walls, while the removal of side stairs left the side door unsheltered. Rain drove under and round it. In the upper floor of the older two storey house he cemented up a window that looks towards the sunrise. Sometimes we imagine the misery of the previous owners as these faults came to light during the Corfu winter. It was perhaps for warmth they put lino on the fine tile floors, but why did they cut down the vine and the lemon and orange trees to put up a dish aerial? Possibly seeing England via BBC and ITV helped keep their minds off the disappointing mismatch between their hopes for Greece and the cold, wet winter, the dark strange foreign village, the wasps and flies of summer, but I don’t really know and I’m not sure they did either. If Greece wounded George Seferis, how must it have hurt our predecessors.

In the Manner of G.S. (1936) No matter where I travel, Greece wounds me still. On Mt. Pelion amid the chestnut trees the shirt of the Centaur slid among leaves to wind about my body as I mounted the slope and the sea followed me mounting also like mercury in a thermometer until we came on mountain waters. In Santorini as I touched the sinking islands and heard a flute play somewhere on the pumice stone an arrow suddenly flung from the confines of a vanished youth nailed my hand to the gunwale. At Mycenae I lifted the huge stones and the treasures of the Atridae and slept beside them at the inn of The Beautiful Helen of Menelaus they vanished only at dawn when Cassandra crowed with a-cock hanging down her black throat.

[Back to the future: June Samaras of Kalamos Books circulated a story in the Miami Herald, 24/12/07 with the comment 'Use the URL to see the awful photograph (12/07/08 this image has now been removed) this guy is using to state his case ... If he thinks THAT is a true scale model of the Parthenon, it is no wonder the British Museum does not choose to take things seriously... A plea for 'Marbles' in Parthenon (see 'missing commentary' above in this blog]

* * *
We are beginning to grow accustomed to the sounds and smells and shapes of this home – the warmth stored in its walls in the evening and its cool in the day, the bougainvillea, the green rushes and the lemon and orange trees and the immense panorama of Albania and Greece at sunrise and the violet evenings and the wind ruffled sea in the afternoon, Vido island and the olive covered mountains as far as the eye can see and the crags behind us. I could move around it with eyes closed. It is so quiet in the mornings even with cocks crowing, charter flights rumbling, dogs barking, scooters buzzing along the side roads, the conversational chorus between our neighbours at the start of school, the chat outside in the evening and occasional yells of fury at children and the miaoing of Bubble hoping for affection and milk.
* * *
 Saturday 22 September. Most flies and wasps that get in the house want to get out and their freedom can be arranged. But certain small flies sunbathe on my keyboard, hover over my tea and do not accept the offer of an opened window or door, so must be stalked and swatted. My impulse is to protect insects, especially the innocuous spiders that commute discretely along ledges and other interior surfaces. Lin found several 12cm centipedes upstairs and drowned them claiming ‘they bite and were really nasty’. Is this so? We argued. ‘I don’t want them breeding in my house’. She wouldn’t mind them outside. I think there’s a treatise to be written on what living things are accepted by different peoples in their homes, in their gardens and in the world and how acceptance and even welcome varies between people, between individuals, between Lin and me. The cat Bubble has rediscovered us. She’s in a poor state with a cough and will not now cross our threshold. Since we left in April she’s learned – no doubt at the end of several brooms – that she’s a village cat not a household one. * * * I doubt we’ll get that cruise this stay. There’s too much unfinished here that’s not been done since we arrived. ‘Welcome to Corfu’ said V at CJs with sympathetic resignation. L and I have done much and the house is liveable and we eat and sleep here happily enough and receive guests, but winter will come and other jobs we need to do that we can’t, until the electrics are fixed and after which there’s plastering to do and joinery. Last night over several chilled lagers D said ‘don’t worry. I’m a stickler for things. You relax. While you are away me, and B and Mgl will see the whole lot done. You won’t be disappointed.’ D has looked after Summer Song and been something of a guardian to us over the year from the moment he raised our spirits from the depression we were in on first arriving in Ipsos and seeing the musty condition of the boat we’d bought. ‘There’s a list we’ll make and get her up to scratch.’ This happened then and could now.
* * *
The half moon last night shone among strange cloud formations like the striations of agate – not visibly moving. Through the night at this time of year comes the regular drone of the northern geese arriving and departing.
* * *
Last night I lost my SIM card for phoning home. What sense would that have made ten years ago. Why are we searching the house for a 25mm x15mm plastic strip on which has a 12mm x13mm golden chip next to a 19 digit numbers on one side and a corporate logo on the other next to the words ‘if found call 0800317720’. It could be smaller but for the need for human fingers to pick it up and insert it inside their phone. It has this vital function. It ties me to the company who provide the service that enables me, for a payment made automatically by my bank, to phone England. We also have a similar card from a different company that we can use in Greece but which is made useable, after it has been inserted in the same phone, by being ‘topped up’. This done by buying a card locally which if scratched reveals a unique number which when keyed into my phone tops up its credit by about €20. If I used this to make international calls it would swiftly run out of credit, but it is useful for receiving such calls. Were I to use the other card for receiving such calls they would be ‘roaming’ calls for which I, and not the caller, must pay. Furthermore if I call locally using this card the person I call also ends up paying for my call as though it were from abroad – even though the person I call is a kilometre away. These circumstances mean we are frequently shifting chips in the phone. Wiser people might keep two phones for local and long distance, setting up a bar on roaming calls to the international chip. It must have been during one of these substitutions that I mislaid a chip. This morning I came downstairs and found that before she’d come to bed, after I’d fallen asleep, Lin had found it – in a corner of the kitchen floor. I describe this because accounts of daily events leave out matters so mundane, yet I find a detail of how you might reserve a seat on a stage coach and how pay for a ticket on one intriguing. No Victorian fiction I’ve read mentions how such a transaction occurred. We are simply told ‘they took a coach to Dover’. Yet the matter of currency, credit and the flow of information on paper or electronically and its loss and recovery are vital to us. Without credit one becomes a stranger – hence the term ‘credit’ from the latin term ‘credo’ - a statement of principles or beliefs, especially one that is professed formally, faith, dogma, doctrine. We are even when dreaming of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence, only made rendered free by secure location in a matrix of trust validated by international credit-reference agencies and state bureaucracies. A lost digit on a short circuited computer can see freedom evaporate - we become unbelievable. Another human can see us with their eyes, but the classification system that guarantees what that other human being must know to allow us freedom to pass or purchase cannot. We have disappeared. Our connection with Corfu is a matter of the heart, but it is also about our tax number, and the electricity and water accounts on 208 Democracy Street - meters on the wall and at the bottom of our property. We learned, last night, that my Mum, bound for a long anticipated holiday in France, has to return from her point of international departure, Birmingham, to Inverness, because somewhere between those two airports she mislaid her passport – a thin burgundy docket 125mm x 88mm constituting her permission to travel outside the UK – her ID, her permit, her authorization - her credit. Until I lost the chip yesterday, I was reproaching her for her absent mindedness. Thank goodness Amy and Richard were able to drive over to the airport hotel where she was ensconced in limbo to succour her as loving grandchildren. *Jack Hargreaves who brought me up - my stepfather