Canadian Odyssey

'We have been on some rough roads, hit some pretty big holes etc but both bikes are standing up to the rigours really well and are comfortable to ride. I am riding a Vivente World Randonneur and John has a Kona Sutra'...my friend John Martin, justly proud of hitting the 7000 kilometre mark on his and his friend Alistair Walker's cycle ride across great Canada in search of what makes rural communities work - or not (scroll down for a map of their route on this page of Democracy Street)

About the study: This summer I will be travelling across Canada, west to east, visiting small rural communities in ten provinces to learn about the ways in which people in these places have adopted sustainable living practices. Like small rural communities across Australia Canadian communities are also dealing with significant change relating to economic, demographic and environmental factors. People in these rural communities typically work together in creative and innovative ways to secure their viability and liveability. I am interested in how they organise themselves to do this, how they relate to other communities in their province and with the Federal Government to ensure a sustainable future. Prof John Martin, University of LaTrobe, Bendigo

Meantime my fellow Corfu blogger hums in print the praises of Ken Block - a celebrated petrol head for whom some benighted agency of government was prepared to give the freedom of the city to make skiddy noises:

Have I shoved this latest Ken Block wheelie freak-out in here, or just in my Facebook which has overtaken my blog for the true test of temperatures and times. The man has crazy skills, and clearly crazy contacts because for whom else would they close the place down. One snotty-nosed kid to sneak out the backyard to see what's going on ... round comes Ken sideways in a cloud of dust ... all they'd find would be a splodge of snot on a pot plant.

Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle? ~ Flann O’Brien  

The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart. ~ Iris Murdoch  

When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle. ~ Elizabeth West  

Small mammals

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. ~ H.G. Wells 

The bicycle is a vehicle for revolution. It can destroy the tyranny of the automobile as effectively as the printing press brought down despots of flesh and blood. ~ Daniel Behrman

When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day’s sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay’s call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamourings of work, leave all the mind theatres behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilisation. The world is breaking someone else’s heart. ~ Diane Ackerman 

… the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon ~ Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist

Last day of the Tour de France

*** *** ***
On Thursday the Cultivation to Consumption event under pouring rain on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments was lovely.

Chani, Aftab, Chris, Simon, Emma, Danni, Jeevan, Abdul

It began with Aftab wandering around the site collecting vegetables from our sodden plots. I gave cabbage, broad bean, spring onions and potatoes. Nothing to the contributions from the more experienced gardeners like Wesley, Danni, Micheal and Vanley. The cooks were Aftab but also Chani who'd only been recruited at the 'rehearsal' on Wednesday when he'd turned up looking for a plot. As it was he bought an extra cooker, more food, an extra table and his skills.

Food from mine and other's allotments cooked by Aftab on the spot

I'd brought a gazebo from home - a welcome shelter for cooking and eating. Others, turning up in dribs and drabs in the grisly weather, sheltered happily chatting, preparing veg, having tea, and eating in the humble VJA clubhouse. We had three stoves, the extra one bought by Chani to heat oil to fry pakora. alongside the big pot of vegetable curry cooked by Aftab and another burner for the chapatis.

The freshest salad in the world

The rain was unceasing increasing dripping off the edges of the gazebo, bedraggling any who stayed in the open. The sky was greyer than dusk. Everyone helped out digging crops, cleaning and preparing food, cooking and serving it on a steady supply of plastic plates - the young lads from the Bangladeshi Youth Forum in train with Abdul set to with easy enthusiasm peeling, depodding, chopping, helped by Ashok and Jeevan who made up gram flour dough. Amid the gentle bustle and happy fuss things fell in place - an orchestra first dotted with separate tuning, hazards a tune or two and then altogether starts to play. There was food for all; hardly anything left - perhaps some spicy basmati rice at the bottom of one big pot; all else scraped clean, with vegetable preparation trimmings bagged for compost.

Under the gazebo

Aftab and I feel the whole thing went very well, the first of two, with another in the later summer. For this some of Thursday's participants were pushing for a BBQ that could include meat as well as vegetable. One piece of feedback "Get a bigger tent!" Did people learn as we hoped? Difficult to say. Carole from LegacyWM checking on the whole process collected evaluations from the thirty people there.  Our purpose - from the application for the £200 financial support for two events...

...a pilot project in partnership with Victoria Jubilee Allotments and Legacy WM.  The aim is to raise awareness of recycling, composting, growing food and cooking them.  It will work with young people from the Bangladeshi Youth Forum and older people from B'ham Asian Resource Centre to demonstrate what can be done in people’s gardens and how food can be prepared.  We will host two cooking events in the Victoria Jubilee Allotments and raise awareness of the benefits or eating organic food and encourage people to take similar initiatives in their own homes.  It will also look at the negative impact of fast food on health.

I learned and I enjoyed myself. Fixing the learning, working out how far it worked is less clear, but it's the first event other than our very small Diamond Jubilee Picnic held on the Victoria Jubilee since we began in June 2010. I judge it a good start.
*** ***
Amy and Guy and Liz are in the Highlands; the first time my mother has seen Oliver, another great grandson
"Will you get a photo of you with Ollie"
"He's a such a cheery little soul" she said "I've arranged to buy four chickens from Macpherson, down the road - a pair of Light Sussex and Rhode Island Reds. We can collect them when you come up."

Near Milton of Culloden on the Moray Firth

What the Greeks went through

Dylan Thomas wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1938 a letter from England which included the paragraph

...I think England is the very place for a fluent and fiery writer. The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colours I like trying to mix for myself out a grey flat insular mud. If I went to the sun I’d just sit in the sun; that would be very pleasant but I’m not doing it, and the only necessary things I do are the things I am doing. Unless by accidents, and my life is planned by them, I shall be nearer Bournemouth than Corfu this summer.

Jim Potts mentioned these observations on his blog recently, and in a note to me this morning, included the sentence:

It's extraordinary what the Corfiots (and the Greeks generally) went through in the 1920s and 1940s.

This made me think of suggestions that Corfu's beauty, tranquillity and wealth is enervating, not a place for an artist to be creative...

Dear Jim. Indeed. At the time Kostas Apergis identified those initials carved by a boy in 1957 he said Marcos was still living in Ano Korakiana...It’s knowing what the Greeks went through in the ‘20s and ‘40s that puts the lie to the idea of the ‘enervating.... bucket of Greek sun’ drowning the creative muse, as compared to colder climates...an error of Dylan Thomas and even Cretan Kazantzakis who described Corfu as 'fatal for a fighting soul'. A picnic on the Lazaretto?...

The shame and cruelty of the young men and women being taken out under 'a bucket of sun' to that pretty green place; Theodoraki’s laments for his brother and others who died there; gentle Despina Bebedeli, Δέσποινα Μπεμπεδέλη, singing 'Sleep My Little Angel’...

Κοιμήσου αγγελούδι μου, παιδί μου νάνι - νάνι
Να μεγαλώσεις γρήγορα, σαν τ αψηλό πλατάνι
Να γίνεις άντρας στο κορμί και στο μυα - λό
Και να σαι πάντα μεσ το δρόμο τον καλό

You know this is not a lullaby to a baby, but a dirge, τα μοιρολόγι, for a youth in the ground of Execution Island. 

Greece, marketed as sun, sea and sand for fifty years, with ruins thrown in, is an image of the country that deceived even Dylan Thomas and no doubt other intellectuals (tho' I can compile a rebuttal inventory starting with Robert Graves and D H Lawrence, Camus, Hemingway and Leigh Fermor - it’s not just Greece but the decadent sun of the olive belt) who need, or feel their muse is further north, as though Greece is winterless. 

Lazaretto ~ each flower marks an executioner's bullet (photo: Jim Potts)

Corfu is full of ghosts; worse - spectres. She overlooks, as you well know, a peaked landscape of the imagination stretching from Saranda to beyond Levkada. Things were done on Corfu by the signorini that are lost to all but family history, even then reduced to small anecdotes that hide the larger oppression. 

What of the Jews, Greek citizens, taken from their city so near the end of the war, to join the thousands of others from Ioannina, Athens and Thessaloniki? It’s true that the skulls are not on the surface as they are in the Mani, but they lie in similar numbers beneath the beloved island’s green turf. The flaw in the 'ennervation thesis' is that so many northerners know almost nothing of modern Greek history. They know little even of the time before that - of the loss of Constantinople Κωνσταντινούπολις. 

I sent two birds to the red apple tree, of which the legends speak. One was killed, the other was hurt, and they never came back to me. Of the marble emperor - το Μαρμαρωμένο Βασιλιά - there is no word, no talk. But grandmothers sing about him to the children like a fairy tale. I sent two birds, two house martins, to the red apple tree. But there they stayed and became a dream.

There are refugees via Cyprus and Crete on Corfu, some in Ano Korakiana, who hold the memory of the marble emperor and the loss of Greece’s Byzantine capital. E.M. Forster met Constantine Cavafy in 1918 in Alexandria living off a narrow street in a flat above a brothel - 10 Rue Lepsius. Alexandria. Or was it in a letter Cavafy wrote to Forster? The poet told Forster that the Greeks and the English were almost exactly alike, but for one crucial difference: 

"We Greeks have lost our capital -- and the results are what you see. Pray, my dear Forster, oh pray, that you never lose your capital." 

Some suggest he referred to financial privation. Forster knew it was Constantinople. Northerners are confused by a hazardous semi-knowledge of what has happened here in the last 200 years. Greece's classical history - tho' in detail as exactingly complicated and messy as the modern one (see the actual alliances involved at Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae for a start or the conditional liberties of Athenian democracy) - is so tremendous; fills such a vast part of educated people’s mental DNA, there’s hardly room for the utterly unfamiliar morally complicated Balkan mayhem of the Greek War of Independence.
“Wasn’t Byron involved?”
And what of the Souliotes betrayed by Pelios Gousis? ...πως ο Εφιάλτης θα φανεί στο τέλος. What of the women of Souli?
THe great schism? The big idea? The burning of Smyrna? The exchange of populations? What are they? Noble Kolokotronis at Dervenakia, Venizelos, Theotoki, Kapodistria, Mavromikali? Who are they? Klefts? The dance of Zalongo? Distomo? Kalavryta? Kommeno? The famine of Athens? Blokos?  The holocaust of Viannos? The dekemvria? The white terror, the red terror? Metaxa?
“Oh yes Metaxas, Very nice after a good meal”...

...and I haven’t got to the Stone Years, τα Πέτρινα Χρόνια. The Junta. (See Mazower's After the War was Over) And not only the 20th century but far further back. Thucydides: 

It was in Corcyra that most of these audacious acts were first committed and all the crimes that would be perpetrated in retaliation by men who had been governed tyrannically rather than with good sense and had the chance of revenge, or that would be unjustly designed by others who were longing to be relieved of their habitual poverty, and who above all were animated by a passionate desire for their neighbours' property; crimes too that men commit, not from greed, but when they assail their equals and are so often swept away by untutored rage into attacks of pitiless cruelty

Another bolster for the enervation thesis is that for the Durrell’s, Corfu was a childhood paradise. They wrote with unsurpassed brilliance about happiness. Their joy may have aroused envious critical suspicion; an inclination to treat them as fantasists or, if telling the truth, describing a lotus eating haven that eats creativity. Edmund Keeley wrote Inventing Paradise. His word ‘invention’ captures the point.
I cannot subscribe to the enervation thesis on the grounds of landscape alone - a place with panoramas that elude the painter perhaps, but cannot fall short of the Netherlands or England for inspiration. Just because I’ve been so happy on the island doesn't make it enervating in my book, but then I have no book. I rest my case. Best, Simon

*** *** ***

Public or private dentistry?

I needed an extraction, some cleaning and some tidying. I went to a private dentist and met a nice and competent seeming surgeon. His estimate after an examination came to £5803. I went to an NHS dentist and talked to another nice and competent seeming surgeon. His estimate, after examinaton, was £208. The difference? The first dentist would replace my extracted tooth with an implant, and possibly another - the process completed by December. The second offered a small denture - the process completed in the time it'd take to make the denture - just over a week. I could afford to go private but I've got better things to do with £5959. I spoke to Lin and worried the matter for a week then went to the NHS where they made a mould in ten minutes. I came back in a week, had a local anaesthetic. The tooth was out so quick I hardly noticed. I was cycling home, my gadget in place, within half an hour. My three little false teeth are finely wrought and comfortable, and give my mouth a better appearance than it's had for years, but I'm not a toothy smiler anyway.
*** *** ***

Saturday afternoon Richard showed Amy around his flat in town and we went to the Bull Ring, to Jamie's Italian where I bought them a rather too expensive late lunch and Richard and I both managed to hold Oliver without dropping him or making him weep.

Later Amy inveigled me into Gap where there was a 45% off sale, except her choices of baby clothes were not in the sale. Next door Apple was packed but a figure waved to me from the crowd - Niko, our tutor. We embraced.
"When can we have our next lesson?"
"I've been very busy. Christina and I our getting married in September"
"Oh no! We'll be in Greece"
"I'll send dates for us to get together"
I introduced him to Amy and showed him my grandson, fast asleep in the odious hubbub of the shopping centre.
Strolling up crowded New Street Amy bumped into two of her police colleagues on duty.
We walked on.
"Just after I went on maternity leave" she said "Operation Paragon started belt tightening. My area will have changed when I go back. It's larger."
**** ****

Scholarship on two wheels! John Martin and Alistair Walker with Annie Guthrie filming as they go, continue their great shared cycle ride across Canada, studying sustainable communities; writing their thoughts as they go, every sentence is the tip of an iceberg, with a hundred elaborations and examples to be pursued on the way to explanation and insight on the habits that make for sustainability.

John, Annie, Alistair

The metaphor of a community on a journey becomes more powerful as the reader realises that their propositions are emerging from a transcontinental bicycle odyssey. Every working community is indeed unique yet governments and individuals seek the guidance and even the shock of admonition derived from general principles. Uniqueness is the watchword. Creativity is vital. They're explorers composing, as they travel, a sophisticated yet practical map of imaginative intellectual territory that for many currently in power has been illustrated by exotic beasts and blank spaces. Their new map will assist more and more people and communities to make more and more unique journey’s towards sustainability, helping more and more to join ‘the long conversation’, spurring more and more negotiation with the dominant economic paradigm. The final map won't be overwhelmingly burdened with data, with acronyms and endless statistics. They will know all this of course as they noticed and felt, in the seat of their pants, the rich detail of the endless surfaces over which they pedalled. They’ll have breathed it all in. Their exposition will be more like those ingenious ‘mud maps’...

...the aboriginals use, which in context reveals more truths than the precise measures of modern ordnance survey about a place and its inhabitants

Given the requisite variety of communities there is an infinite number of ways of achieving sustainable outcomes. Each journey is unique. Every community is concerned about its success and continuity. The way they achieve this is an individual journey, at a point in time influenced by both externalities and the capacity and commitment of the people who constitute each community to adopt new ways of working. We have seen many communities in our journey across Canada, some more closely than others. Some are doing well, some not so. The question we are often asked is: what makes for a sustainable community? ‘Institutionalising’ or incorporating sustainable living practices into the formal regimes of society is, I believe, an essential outcome for building sustainable communities.A key success factor in this continuity is the extent to which...

*** ***
It's clear that the onion fly has been causing harm across the VJA site. I've been getting advice from other plot-holders planning for future crops of onions and leaks on the use of nematodes. I've clearly got a world of understanding ahead of me with these. One snag is their cost. During a rare sunny patch I harvested more spring onions and broccoli from the plot.

***** *****
On Sunday afternoon, Linda and I completed Wednesday's Handsworth Helping Hand's work in the Church Vale Triangle, laying out plants donated via Freegle, including perennial Geraniums, Lilac, Hypericum, Big Leaf Periwinkle and Alpine Strawberries. Three of the seventy or so Pelargonia we planted on Wednesday have been pinched. We replaced them.

*** ***

Letter from a friend on holiday in Corfu. She had asked for advice on places to visit while there with her daughter. I cautioned her on a general truth about contemporary Corfu - in this case the despoliation of Paleocastritsa - while describing the possibility of exquisite places to be discovered close by - especially on foot or bicycle:

Simon. Greetings from beautiful Paleo. Your bespoke guide has been invaluable. I carry a printout in my beach bag. Thank you. We are here for another 3 of our 14 days. It  has been delightful. We have only had a problem with the weather - a heatwave! Really - can't believe I am complaining but sometimes too hot to move from our shaded cove. Everywhere a noticeable lack of people which is great for us but not for the locals. We didn't hire a car so have been walking everywhere. We recommended guests to your friend Sally's hacking tours and they loved the trek. Monastery great - after all the awful half empty coaches have left for he day. Glorious dusk. Restaurants good. London prices unfortunately. xxx Beach just perfect. We also like being able to find different spots to explore and enjoy the peace and cicadas. We are celebrating. My beautiful daughter, Genevieve has got a First in her Part 1 Tripos - English. She got the news here so I think Paleo will always hold precious memories for her. Greek Champagne is delicious! love Fiona

Genevieve in Corfu

"They will live with what they choose"

On the 28 May, just before we left Greece I said goodbye to Sally

"There'll have been some water under the bridge by the last week of August?" I said
"Greeks will decide" she said in her matter-of-fact way "If they vote for SIRIZA they mean to go back to the drachma and take the consequences; if for New Democracy they will have chosen more austerity. They will live with what they choose."

Key points at 2239 GMT ... with 80% of votes counted, interior ministry projections put New Democracy on 29.9% of the vote (130 seats), Syriza on 26.7% (71) and the socialist Pasok on 12.4% (33).

• A pro-bailout party, New Democracy, seems set for victory by a slim margin in Greece's election

• New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras has called for a national salvation government

-
• New Democracy's likely main partner, Pasok, has called for radical leftists Syriza to be included

• Syriza came second on an anti-bailout platform and seems unlikely to join a new government

• Germany continues to insist Greece must abide by the terms of its international bailouts

All times in BST (GMT: -1 hour, Greek time: +2 hours

So it look as if a majority have rejected the Tsipras gamble and voted for continued austerity. This will please other European leaders. Despite wobbling, the famous first domino hasn't fallen - so there's breathing space for Spain and those just behind her. There will be the opportunity - if the current mood continues - for leaders at the next EU summit on 28th and 29th June, to work directly and indirectly on banking union and pooled sovereignty and anything else to improve the stability of the Eurozone.

In Ano Korakiana:

Kafeneio Kefalloniti in Ano Korakiana

«Στα ίδια  μέρη…» συναντιόμαστε μετά από ένα περίπου μήνα, για τη δεύτερη προσπάθεια επίλυσης (?) του πολιτικού προβλήματος της χώρας, που φαντάζει εξίσου σημαντικό  με το οικονομικο-κοινωνικό. Βουλευτικές εκλογές για μία ακόμη φορά σε σύντομο  διάστημα, σε ένα καλοκαίρι με πυκνό πολιτικό χρόνο, που δεν μοιάζει με κανένα  από τα σχεδόν ανέμελα, προηγούμενα… Αναζητώντας τη λύση «στο παλιό ή στο νέο», με οδηγό «το φόβο ή την ελπίδα», με «εκείνο ή με το άλλο», με όλα τα διλήμματα μιας διαλεκτικής, που και αυτή μοιάζει ανεπαρκής να εκμαιεύσει το μέλλον.

Έξω από το καφενείο Κεφαλλωνίτη, θα συγκεντρωθούν από το πρωί παρέες, στις συζητήσεις των οποίων θα κυριαρχεί η πιθανολόγηση του εκλογικού αποτελέσματος και η δυνατότητα σχηματισμού κυβέρνησης. Βέβαια, λόγω του ζεστού καιρού, αρκετοί άλλοι θα προτιμήσουν να περάσουν το πρωινό τους στην παραλία...

Ραντεβού, το βραδυ, αντιμέτωποι με την αλήθεια, που από αύριο, δεν θα την μάθουμε απλά, αλλά θα την ζούμε...

“Here we are in the same place…” meeting again after roughly a month, for a second attempt at resolving (?) the political economic and social problems of the country via Parliamentary elections, once more in a short interval in a summer charged with intense political activity unlike any of the previous almost carefree times...… wondering if solutions lie with the 'old or the new'; with 'fear or hope'; with 'one or the other', amid every puzzling argument, without any confident sense of the future. Outside Keffalonitis' Kafenion, people will gather from early morning debating and conjecturing the outcome of the election and the prospects of forming a government. Of course, because of the heat, many will prefer to pass their Sunday morning at the beach…meeting again in the evening to learn not only what's happened but the reality with which we will live..."

...and a storyin the New York Times from another village Touthoa Τουθοα in Arcadia, Αρκαδία - I saw it once long ago...

a quiet hamlet, which sprang to life on Election Day as descendants of the 30 or so grandparents and parents still living here gathered to participate in the latest expression of democracy that they hoped would deliver the country from its troubles....Far from the grim atmosphere gripping Athens, Touthoa teems with silver-tipped olive groves, sun-kissed vegetable gardens and flocks of sheep, living testaments to the centuries-long natural wealth of this resilient nation....

Election results - Ministry of the Interior

The poll in Kerkyra where SYRIZA was ahead - 34% to ND's 24%
**** ****
Earlier in the day....

Yanis Varoufakis (2.30 on the clip below)"The negotiating card is not either we have a deal that is workable or we get out of the euro. No no. It’s very very simple....Don’t threaten the Europeans with an exodus. Simply say guys I’m not going to take the next instalment. That’s it...and sit down" 

Polling day musing. If Greeks vote for continued austerity Samaras style, the bail-out which follows this August involves paying it all back to creditors, rather than into what remains of the declining Greek economy. Threatening to leave the euro is crazy...well think about it. This is like saying "If you don't do your homework, my daughter, I will stop breathing until I die."
If as a result of a Greek rejection of the bailout planned for mid-Aug 2012, Greece is thrown out of the Eurozone, then the Eurozone goes down too. Yes? No? This is the Tsipras gamble he's shared pre-election. This is like 'prisoners' dilemma' but with only the lose-lose and win-win options. If Europe and Greece can co-operate in some way not yet explored there might be a win-win, or the start of a win-win solution to what has for a good while looked like a seriously lose-lose one. Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis seems to be saying that the win-lose, or lose-win options of the dilemma aren't available. Is he just playing Ulysses, the crafty? If Greece votes for continued austerity she loses, but no-one else wins - indeed the whole world may lose. If she votes against austerity she also doesn't win, but nor does anyone else. This is one of SIRIZA's advisors explaining himself. PSI, by the way refers to the theory of  Private Sector Involvement in the problem.

• 
  

  Alec Mally Simon I just can't take his "Europe will save us because it needs us" and "its not our fault" attitude anymore. He really isn't that smart. Other comrades that have dealt with him in the blogosphere call him arrogant and closed minded. I rarely post anything on his page.
  

  4 hours ago · 
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  Simon Baddeley Historians now show us how the first world war began with mistake in a highly charged context. The murder in Sarajevo and the subsequent July memo from Austria-Hungary to Serbia called in all sorts of treaty agreements between different European states which ended up taking sides, and mobilising their armies. That what was initially a diplomatic exchange between governments became a devastating war had much to do with people's ignorance of what war involved, and predispositions to nationalistic fervour. Why the Tsipras gamble is safer now is that the sociological conditions do not make specific incendiary incidents anything like as inflammable. It's not just Europe will save us because it needs us, but more like 'if you go on doing austerity you may create the conditions in Greece and further afield that you fear" No population is more aware of how austerity and humiliation can drive civilised peoples to madness than the Germans. All the Greeks I know admit a great deal of fault, Alec, but how far do you think it's safe to press the punishment? Only a few people are near starving so far and the suicide rate has increased a little (a lot by Greek standards). AT present the main starvation is of expectation, but after that...??
  

  4 hours ago · 
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  Alec Mally Simon, its NOT punishment. To ask a country to live with the aggregate output it generates is not cruel and unusual, and the repayment for Greece's debt has been cut way back. So what do they want? Total debt forgiveness, budget support and no reform commitments? They have got to deliver some kid of reform or they will be abandoned by Europe. An angry no is not the answer.
  

  2 hours ago ·  · 1
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  Simon Baddeley But the whole school *is* being punished for the crimes of an identifiable few. I don't necessarily agree with Tsipras or this economic adviser and I fully agree (with many many Greeks) that the corruption, patronage and nepotism that the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms addressed in the UK in the 1850s must be exorcised from Greece. The corruption around medical attention in Greece is obscene. The radical Ilias Zervos who campaigned for Ionian Independence failed to prevent enosis and in 1880 wrote of connection with Athens ‘the pollutant of political corruption, which has brought this miserable nation to its present deterioration and produced as many unscrupulous exploiters as a decaying corpse produces worms." You don't have to say anything to convince me of this. I know of no European country in which corruption is so endemic, so normal. That has got to change. But I disagree with you about the target of blame. I'm not even arguing for compassion. But Justice is another matter. Have you seen that brilliant Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross in which a bunch of realtors are being bullied into selling sub-prime loans? It came out long before Katerina and the sub-prime scandal in the US tipped all of us into recession. Greece's political class has been a portal for just this kind of predatory money lending and it's not just or wise to insist on claiming back the ridiculous interest now impossible to repay from people who didn't ask for these loans in the first place. (cue an argument about human nature? They didn't ask but they sure went mad with the plastic 'money' that became available from the mid-80s on...etc ..to which, continuing the justice argument, I will reply "who was corrupting who?").

*** ***

Yesterday after a walk with Lulu, I drove my mother down to the Farr Community Hall on the edge of Inverarnie where all ages were having a good go at celebrating the Diamond Jubilee, she greeted friends, some she'd not seen for ages, and had look at the various images of the Queen she, with help from Richard, had chosen for a display inside the hall

Strathnairn celebrates Jubilee.

On another wall was a projection of the 1953 Coronation procession. I watched it in black and white between helping with a village fête while my mum and Jack sat soaking and chill on a stand in the Mall "I've never been so cold" said Mum. The weather now wasn't different from the weather sixty years ago, but then I expect this in the Highlands along with the midges that keep tourists at bay.

[Back to the future - 9 July'12: Story in the Herald Scotland about the advancement in Scots' support for keeping the Union - it resonates with Greek popular support for staying in the Eurozone]
*** ***
Circular from Linda to other members of the Handsworth Helping Hands 'team':

Hi All. I've completed the accounts from when we took over the finances. Current bank balance is £14,539.76, which tallies with my balance brought forward on sheet 4. The 14th June cheques are still to go through. I've asked for places for Denise and I at the Midland Heart 'Meet the Buyer' open day next Friday. If anyone else has a burning desire to go, please let me know asap.
I suggested next Thursday or Friday for the Church Vale cleanup. Friday is now out, as there won't be enough volunteers if we get the Midland Heart places.  Do we want to do the Church Vale work on Thursday 21st June or would it be better to leave it until the week after? Please let me know what you want to do asap. Lin

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From last December's blog - Marylebone Station pub: I maintain vigorous hope for a revival of sustainable communities - clusters of villages and smaller provincial towns; a global trend to be observed if sought in India, Australia, Canada and much of Europe including Greece.
 To survive and even thrive in villages it is neither possible nor feasible to revert to the past whose grinding conditions so many sought to escape; nor is it possible in some straightforward way to revert the attitudes and values of a globally urbanised world to villages. The ideas, techniques and values essential for survival and success in these small linked communities have not yet been assimilated or in some cases even invented. The new ideas and practices exist but only in certain places unique to particular critical clusters of people. Every small community is different and unique and there is so simple generic set of guidelines on how to make villages or clusters of villages work for their inhabitants. The ideas are out there - hardly realised, evolving, their originality, difficult, even impossible, to distinguish amid the suffocating noise of present crises  and current understandings of the world. There are communities dotted around the world which seem to be working (some we know, some we don't and wouldn't know what we were seeing of they were evolving in front of us because of our urban globalised preconceptions). I very much doubt if the centralised governments of large modern states are capable of helping such new ways of living too evolve, and certainly the past for all our nostalgia about it has little to teach us in this matter (notwithstanding sources of wisdom in our species that have always been present in, and at, different and unpredictable places and times. The work of Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Prize 2009) is helpful but there are many many other sources of inspiration. We cannot look to Athens. London, Berlin or Washington, nor Delhi, Beijing or Rio for answers and inspiration. Though it may be that men and women who will support and can lead, and are leading, these other ways of living, will come from the heart of great cities - not escaping, not refugees but pioneers
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Right now Professor John Martin and Alistair Walker are cycling 7500km across Canada while doing a study tour of the sustainability of communities including the agricultural finance initiatives that exist across Canada

John and Alistair (more pictures by Annie Guthrie)

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Excuse metonymy, but pornography is getting a bit above itself. In the sensible opinion of Mrs Pat, it's starting to "frighten the horses." It does this, now and then, donning a familiar variety of transparent disguises – the ubiquity of the sexual drive, the harm of repression, freedom of speech, fear of being thought prudish, liberation. Blah. Such altruism! Such enrichment for broadcasters and publishers pitching their tents beneath the current New York Times fiction list…an inexperienced college student falls in love with a tortured man who has particular sexual tastes…"ooh er missus"…the first book in a trilogy…"Phwoah" etc.  This is impudent. In the kingdom of the flesh a degree of hierarchy works rather well, not censorship, suppression, nor 'decent reticence', but a recognition of place...and, just possibly, love

...All day, the same our postures were,
  And wee said nothing, all the day...