Sandra, Anthony, Simon and Lulu, my mum Barbara, Bay, Raef, Susie
Relatives have been visiting Brin Croft, renting a farmhouse down the Strath at Croachy - my sister, Bay, her daughter, Susie with her husband David, and her son, Anthony with his wife Sandra, now with a son, Raef. We run from 8 weeks to 92 years.
I drove my mother to Cromarty. In the Firth a lobsterman went out to check his pots. We ate his catch at the Cromarty Arms Inn, with chips and local real ale.
On Friday I set off on a roundabout ride to the Field Sports Fair at Moy via Drynachan with Oscar initially in my bicycle but much of the time jogging on the empty roads behind me. The first leg was past Littlemill through the tunnel under the A9 to Daviot War Memorial with lists of people who died long ago so that I could enjoy 67 years of peace, then up past Craggie on the Sustrans route to Inverness until the turn near the Clava Stones and the railway viaduct, where, instead of turning north,
I headed on to Galcantray, Bareven to Little Urchany Farm where I turned south on the single track signed to Dulcie Bridge, turning right where the road forked - Dulcie to the left, Drynachan to the right 4 miles - leaving farmland; cycling through moorland. Email to Lin:
I fell in the Findhorn wading across with my bike at Shenachie. There goes another phone but the chip's OK. Oscar’s had a lovely walk. By the time I got to Moy via Ruthven I was almost dry. Oscar swam both ways across the river, without hesitation, but to dry himself after rolled in a cowpat, covering himself in khaki stripes like Rambo. Luckily he was so hot and thirsty he laid in a puddle and cleaned himself up. Now he’s having a rest. I ache – knees and hips - trudging like an old bloke. Hold on I am an old bloke. Seriously tho’ it was a lovely ride - 30 miles - and I picked wild raspberries by the road, had the whole route almost to ourselves. I saw a red squirrel, several roe deer, buzzards, rabbits, lots of young pheasants, grouse and even partridges and a V of geese passing overhead honking.
I took the wrong route at one point and climbed too high up a brae and then saw the path below and had to lug the Brompton down several hundred feet through heather, but I discovered in a fold of the mountainside a lochen with a tree overhanging surrounded by moss and granite, which I’d never have found if I’d followed the proper route. I stopped there (well covered in midge repellent) and had my picnic. Utter quiet.
At Moy on Saturday Oscar actually raced to the end (terrier racing from 2.22 on this 2007 YouTube) of the arena instead of peeling off from chasing after a stuffed black sock for a chat with another dog.
We went together to picnic at Coignafearn for the afternoon, driving over the Garbol Road from Strathnairn. My niece's husband David Roskelly took pictures. I sent one to Lin in Birmingham. She thought it made me look scruffy - especially the stains on my waistcoat from that Arbroath Smokie I enjoyed at Moy.
A herd of red deer grazing along the ridge above us, two sets of antlers silhouetted against the sky and the terriers far behind set a hare running along the track beside us.
By phone Lin and I discussed news of police in Birmingham F1 facing brawls between separate demonstrations on Saturday. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the blogosphere have carried many narratives instead of just 'the News'. Hurry Up Harry, and so on. Amy said she'd never felt in danger. "Dad! there were 400 riot police." One twitterer had called for policemen’s heads on sticks, recalling Broadwater Farm. I told him off. He asked me a favour.
I have a bitchin' Ph.D proposal (more in the field of Law or criminology) but whenever I send it to Universities (yes I've toned down the anti-Popo rhetoric) they are initially "right-on" but go cold. Where am I going wrong? Or is it truly a police state?
Wait a mo you were just threatening to have my daughter's head on a stick and now you want me to vet your PhD proposal. We haven't even had a first date yet...If you want me to have a look at it send via Google docs (give me a URL) or get my contact details from my blog. I don't do supervision but I might have a go at answering your question "is it you or the system?' and I might be able to point you to individuals. First give my child a break...
Thanks. I could probably suss out who would be interested at Birmingham (if anyone). Alright how about "Kill all plod - except Sibadds kid"?
I’ve doubts about reports of an 'organised and peaceful march' being disrupted unless you think of an Orange walk up the Garvaghy Road. The ‘casuals’, whose presence as the ‘organisers’ and participants are famously natural successors to the notorious Birmingham Zulus plus text messaging. As for the Muslim youth who turned up to mingle with an Anti-Fascist counter-demo. Well yes. There are plenty of young men. to be ganged up to defend the ummah by the same twittering, supported by people who see all in blue uniform as class enemies, and even those like me who wonder why candidates for membership of the white master-race look so unqualified; a Saturday brawl to interrupt shopping in recession hit malls, but, to those participating, a skirmish on one another's front lines. With a part of my family part Jewish - the ones in the Highlands now - it doesn't add to my capacity to be objective about anti-semitic chat from confused souls, who tie themselves in knots supporting Israel against Arabs.
Congratulating Oscar at Moy
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MeantimeHarry Tsoukalas draws my attention to the continuing mess near the village of Temploni in the centre of Corfu. A clip from AftonomosTV - (2016 - now disappeared) an independent Corfu podcasting channel riding on YouTube - shows what looks like illegal attempts to destroy forest north of the tip. It looks as if the authorities were alerted...but to what effect?
Even with this news, it's good to hear Greek spoken and catch a glimpse of the island. We'll be there soon.
On 29 December 2008 AFTONOMOSTV, a Corfu narrowcasting channel started posting on YouTube, with Greek and English podcasts going back five years and more - part uncontentious local interest, part political comment, describing, for instance, concerns about investment - or lack of it - in the island's infrastructure. Harry Tsoukalas has made the bold decision to put his head even further above the parapet by putting these films on YouTube. Earlier in 2008 Malcolm Brabant, a good reporter but not knowledgeable about public finance, reported that Tsoukalas was campaigning for 'autonomy' for the island. Tsoukalas refuted this, repeating the point that he wished to draw reasoned attention to the social and economic consequences for Corfu's infrastructure of inequitable central-local funding. As a businessman participating in the island's economy, he has an interest in its health, but in proposing cures he draws unwelcome attention to the woes of an economy whose chief harvest is its visitors.
A piece about the British Cemetery in Corfu that ends with a collage of black and white images referencing the Corfu Channel Incident of October 1946.
Tsoukalas makes a connection between road crashes in Corfu and under investment in highway maintenance.
A film about practical ways to meet the EU's requirements on landfill and waste disposal and reduce Corfu's notorious flytipping problem.The last third of the narrowcast is about a recent event at the British Cemetery in Corfu. Following a moving speech by George Psailas who looks after the cemetery, the British Consul makes a presentation honouring Psailas' 55 year stewardship.
Aftonomostv credits are shown at the end. As well as Tsoukalas, they include Hilary Paipeti. Sarah Wood, who we met in Acharavi (if she's the same) when we started seeking a house in Corfu in 2006, provides 'secretarial services'; report by Roz Kershaw; research by Katie Martinou, Spiros Spingos and Alexandros Merikis; editor and studio director Yiannis Sakkos; camera Harris Andriotis, Kostas Michalaros and Yiannis Hitiris; programme advisor John Payne and subtitles by Marilena Sfaeliou.
Why am I apprehensive about the recession; about the decline of the West? Obviously it's because it's hurting people (there's no poor world-rich world disconnection) - people in Greece, people in general and people I know, friends, relatives and neighbours. If it weren't for such contradictions, I'd be rejoicing, celebrating a yovel, the hammer of justice on a bell proclaiming 'liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ... a jubilee...returning every man unto his possession, every man unto his family (Lev 25) and the cancelling, by the rich of the debts of the poor. As my friend Kim said in October "it may ruin us but it might save the world". Fewer flights, fewer big cars, less fuel burned, less demand for bio-fuel and the forest clearance it demands, (even less NASCAR), fewer miles driven in metal boxes, less noise, death and injury on the roads (tho' perhaps not in China, India or other societies for whom the car remains an uncompromised object of desire); more people willing to travel by train; more travelling slow by cycling and walking. Less tourism, less cement - one of Greece's staple industries - over remaining green spaces. Less domestic waste, less consumption, less packaging, less material to be dumped in land-fill or less fossil fuel used incinerating it. Less water extracted for hot tubs and swimming pools from the deep aquifers that once fed vibrant streams. Empty cargo ships are anchored in Salamis roads. A slumping shipping industry could mean less safety and even more pollution, but there's a chance it will mean fewer oil drenched shorelines. People might buy less meat, reducing the volume of crops grown to feed the animals we eat and the vast areas of land given over to rearing livestock; all this, plus a more politically mature environmentalism; the techniques of sustainability more widely known; of greater interest to many more in the first world. Less consumption for consumption's sake; less energy given over to finding the credit needed to console the constantly stoked anxieties of materialism; return to planet earth from planet finance; more voluntary work; greater kindness between strangers. For the first time in human history the opportunity to be frugal is not only forced on us by events, it is something many want. Given the novelty of such a convergence, is it surprising that so many are surprised and confused by contradictory impulses? Saint's traditionally wear hair shirts, but didn't Francis of Assisi offered poverty and chastity say "yes, but not yet". We speak of ordinary people - like me - willing to be freed of the avarice engendered in them since birth, inherited from their parents, conditioned in circumstances described by Elliot Currie, as ones in which market economies have become market societies, where:
Harry Tsoukalas, focus of some insular animosities, wrote to me in October: 'I tell my wife and to the Corfiots that at least when my son asks me in the years to come what I have done about our huge problems in this paradise I could look at him straight in the eye and answer. How many people can say the same? It's all has to do with the future generation I think, it's too late for us.'
Or one of the last observations of Bruce Chatwin about the smile of a 'poor' old woman in the desert, that smile he lived with ‘like a message from the Golden Age' teaching him 'to reject out of hand all arguments for the nastiness of human nature. The idea of returning to an "original simplicity" was not naïve or unscientific or out of touch with reality. Renunciation, even at this late date, can work.'
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Karen came with her daughters to stay and she went down to Handsworth Park to look at the trees. I cycled down later to join her but she wanted the park, as much as possible to herself. It's what I like about our park - the way you can both share it - with great numbers - and the way that, at times, you can have it for yourself - the landscaping of so comparatively small a space allowing that illusion. K took a picture of me by the fence between the park and the space beyond, yet to be laid out as allotments and playing fields.I groaned inwardly at the damage caused off Holly Road where the south park gate and pillar had been wrecked by a drunkard in a metal box careering up Thornhill Road and at similar damage at the parks eastern noundary, where the Hamstead Road fence and wall had been breached by yet another driver treating our streets as their domain for playing dodgems. The sooner we can all agree that 20mph is a sensible maximum for motorised urban traffic the better. It won't stop these drivers, though both were caught. I hope they're loss of no claims bonus hurts them and the thousands charged their insurers will add to the hurt, helping us all towards a culture where a mix of internal regulation and shared respect, will allow those who walk and cycle to share city space that motorists have been encouraged to appropriate for too long. Until very recently street design has segregated other road users from cars, telling those in cars that roads, with a few exceptions, like pedestrian crossings, are theirs. Traffic lights are for the convenience of drivers - only secondarily an aid to walkers. Slowly, ever so slowly, this is changing - but there'll be many more killed and injured, park gates smashed, house walls destroyed, pavements mounted, shop windows shattered, whole streets closed off to people on foot, communities severed by free range motoring tarmac, before cars are tamed. You still buy, for yourself and your passengers, a swaith of other people's liberties when you get a car. I don't want to see this goal achieved via regulation with yet more CCTV and cluttering signage. It must come from design over time with lots of debate - hence the long wait for impatient people like me to enjoy shared space on the roads of the city.
... The most recognizable characteristic of shared space is the absence of conventional traffic signals, signs, road markings, humps and barriers - all the clutter essential to the highway. The driver in shared space becomes an integral part of the social and cultural context, and behaviour (such as speed) is controlled by everyday norms of behaviour.
[Back to the future to the past: 19/01/09 Richard Risemberg posted the YouTube URL for a 1950 Disney cartoon on 'the transformation of a normal fellow into a self-centered, violent slob when he gets behind the wheel of the car...pretty funny, and pretty telling. Nearly 60 years ago!']
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An exchange on the language of anarchy - in the statement and comments. There's a suggestion that the problem is not bad Greek or bad English but that the language is not really meant to be used for communicating outside the circle, indeed is deliberately playfully confusing adopting fantasy terms familiar to Harry Potter readers. The quoted paragraph from the Levellers stands out as a model - not widely followed though:
Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom...we do now hold our selves bound in mutual duty to each other, to take the best care we can for the future, to avoid the danger of returning into a slavish condition. Levellers, An Agreement of the People, 1647
After midnight, Amy and Guy were waiting at Birmingham Airport to pick us up. Lin was annoyed. "You're both supposed to be at work really early". I was relieved and grateful, knowing we had missed the last bus when the taxi fare doubles to £40 - and we were not going to pay that to get back to Handsworth. The journey home had been on a calm sea via Igoumenitsa and Ancona from where we took a stopping train to Rome Termini, and another to Fiumicino for our flight home. I scanned a UK newspaper full of financial panic stories I'd already seen on the web while in Greece. Home was tidy, with a pile of mail, no unwelcome letters and a couple of £50 Premium Bond wins. The university server was down and is still down at 0915 this Wednesday morning. I shall get on my bicycle and go to campus.
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Far off by Vido as the dusk gathers a liner departs. We can watch its progress north from the balcony until it passes up the straits behind Pantokrator.
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At the top of the thirteen shallow steps on the short path that leads by 208 onto Democracy Street, Faiakon Council has - as in other places in the village where there’s a drop - put up a deep green railing, by which people chat in the street. It is one of the sounds here, along with the cars slowed by the narrows, negotiating with other cars various unmarked broadenings. Lads on scooters, unaffected, often speed by at over the marked 20kph limit. The road is at last open again but the new drains haven’t reached us yet, and we’re unsure whether we want to pay the service charge for connection when they do. Our cesspool seems to work fine – especially now that we, unlike the previous owners, are not putting bleach and other disinfectants down the sink or loo.
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Down at the harbour we’ve had Summer Song’s mast down, replaced halliards, repaired the masthead lights, and the worn pulley wheel that had made it so tricky to raise and lower the jib. Between us, Dave’s wife Trish and I filmed him and Ben, their son, as they went through the tricky process of getting the mast down and back up. Until at least one halliard was safe, no-one was going to risk using the existing tackle to go up the mast and do repairs without this operation. Now if any more work needs doing someone can go up on a new rope. I feel the better for having seen what’s happening up there. It’s saved us money doing the job at her berth in the harbour, rather than going to a yard and paying for a crane.
Lin has painted a Greek phonetic version of Summer Song on an old tyre - ΣΑΜΕΡ (oops! she put an 'R' instead of a 'Ρ') ΣΟΝ - which I cut to shape. Dave screwed it to the end of our mended jetty. Τhe 'R' can be made a 'P' with some black paint, meantime pedants can enjoy pointing out the mistake.
Before we left I tidied the boat. For a minute or so an insufficiently tightened jubilee clip had meant a cooling water pipe coming loose. Starting the engine to turn the boat between lowering and raising her mast, I'd seen no water coming out of the exhaust - a routine check I mightn't have made a year ago. The only harm was having to pump and sponge a couple of buckets of seawater out of the bilges.
* * *
Dave has hand sewn the head of Summer Song's furling genoa where it ripped. It'll work, but there's another problem. From top to bottom - head to clew - along the leech of the sail - its' outer edge - there is meant to be a strip of light blue sail about a 9" wide which acts as a sun shield it when it's fully furled on its rollers. This 'sacrificial' strip has become very tattered. Dave suggests unpicking it entirely. The sail now goes up and down so easily that I might as well lower, detach and store it after each sail. That's an idea. Having the strip removed and replaced professionally could cost as much as a new sail; far more than a useable secondhand one. Just before we left, Mark, who came, with Sally and her brother, to supper at 208, kindly agreed to take the sail away and see what could be done about repairing it before we returned.
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Blue recycling bins have appeared round about. Fran and Dave told us of one near them in the village and Dave mentioned a new recycling site nearing completion at Temploni. Pleasing. There are no blue bins yet on Democracy Street but we are sorting out plastic, tins, paper and bottles before getting rid of our rubbish in ones further away. How well the new bins are being used I'm unsure. They have separate holes on the top for different items which are get mixed together inside, with the lids often so loose, or just left open, that people are chucking in sacks of current recyclables still mixed up in plastic bags. Misuse of recycling bins seems to be the norm whenever they are first introduced. Their survival, and the spread of recycling habits, depends on councils or their contractors getting tougher and cleverer about preventing and educating, combining stick and carrot. Fix My Street is a good example in England.
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I bumped into KostasApergis yesterday in the shop further down the street, while collecting our electric bill. Told him I’d visited St.Elias; that I would definitely search for the rumoured petition from the village elders to the High Commissioner in the 1860s asking the British not to abandon the Protectorate. There is a grumble at the moment among some local politicians, part fueled by post-Olympic resentment at money famine for local government across the country. Too much that needs repair is falling into disrepair. Too much foreign money spent in the island leaks out of the economy or never gets into it in the first place. It doesn't help that Athens has introduced a 10% income tax on the first €10,000 of Greek residents' earnings - previously exempt.
[Back to the future: January 09 - the government has withdrawn this tax]
Harry Tsoukalas speaks of candidates standing on an 'independence for Corfu' ticket at local elections in two year's time, seeking through bravura to renegotiate the balance of funding between centre and locality. A Greek rebuttal on YouTube includes the title 'British rubbish' - no doubt because Tsoukalas' views on the 'huge problems in this paradise' received serious attention from the BBC and The Guardian. There's history here.
The prospect of 'faction' sent shivers through the British polity in the aftermath of our civil war, invoking passionate charges and counter-charges of treason and sedition. It wasn't paranoia. it was terror at the prospect of a return to the 'heart of darkness' ("The horror! The horror!"). That was 360 years ago. Civil War in mainland Britain is off the public's radar. In Greece civil war is just 60 years old; in the memories of many still alive. Wounds are unhealed; the subject is only just entering Greece's history books for grown-ups. It's not safe yet for primary school texts. Volatile feelings, including many contrary interpretations of what went on between 1945 and 1950 and the 'stone years' - πέτρινα χρόνια - that followed, are lodged in the popular psyche. Talk of 'autonomy' or 'independence' can prompt visceral reaction, outside the appreciation of those for whom bloody civil strife is more remote.
Corfucius - British with inherited colonial sensibilities as erratic ('I love writing and I love hiding behind words.' 20/4/08) as mine (Sir Henry Maine on the Council for India and Master of Trinity Hall; Sidney Baddeley, military secretary to the Governor-General of Madras; another grandfather and father earning CMGs) - makes some choice comments on the silliness of the imputation that GB could have the slightest interest in - let alone the capacity - for such an initiative - and it wasn't mentioned by Tsoukalas who speaks sensibly in Greek and English.
In The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960, Robert Holland and Diana Markides wrote - between pages 13 and 80 [Chapter 2 - Gladstone and the Greeks: The Extraordinary Mission to the Ionian Islands, 1858-1859, and Chapter 3 - The Abandonment of the Ionian Protectorate, 1849-1864] about Gladstones' visit to Greece, especially Corfu, between 24 November 1858 and 19 February 1859. This consummate politician had the delicate task of finding a way to extricate Britain from a Protectorate that had become a costly entanglement - given Malta's availability as a strategic naval base - without making it look as if our departure was an abandonment of the responsibilities that had led us to take up the role of Ionian Protector, a betrayal of our allies on the island, or a retreat forced on us by those keen for union with independent Greece. Gladstone found himself utterly absorbed 'in the affairs of these little islands...The complexity of the case is inversely (so to speak) as the extent of the sphere.' (William Gladstone Diary, 31 Dec 1858)
Eleni Calligas is the current expert on this subject - much quoted in other academic studies of these events. Her 1994 doctoral thesis is titled The `Rizospastai' (Radical-Unionists): politics and nationalism in the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands 1815-1964. [Calligas, E., 1994, A9m British Library ShelfmarkDX187456 Ph.D., London, London School of Economics, 44-9204]
ABSTRACT: When the Ionian Islands were placed under British Protection in 1815, they were granted the right to regulate their internal affairs, but in the resultant 1817 Constitution political power emanated from the High Commissioner and was exercised through an authoritarian system of government. Ionian opposition acquired salient nationalist connotations during the Greek War of Independence although in the 1830s it was mostly confined to demands for liberal constitutional reform expressed by the so-called Ionian liberali. As the British introduced a reform programme that met many of the liberals' demands during the 1840s, a more radical opposition group emerged in Cephalonia, the largest and poorest of the seven islands. These political activists, who became known as the `Rizospastai' (Radical-Unionists), challenged the legitimacy of British Protection and favoured major internal socio-political changes on the basis of the right of national self-determination and the principle of popular sovereignty. Although they were involved in various popular demonstrations of discontent, they remained parliamentarians rather than revolutionaries and promoted their ideology through the press, political clubs and parliament, which they first entered in 1850. The growing popularity of the Rizospastai led the moderate liberal majority to co-operate with the High Commissioner in an effort to eradicate radicalism and exclude its representatives from the islands' polity. Most energetically pursued in Cephalonia, this governmental policy temporarily silenced the old radical leadership. However, a new leadership emerged from Zakynthos and, in the altered circumstances of the late 1850s, it redefined radicalism on purely unionist lines and carried most of the popular base with it. The `old' radicals, still considered heroes by a rather bewildered popular following, were isolated during the last years of the Protectorate and adamantly opposed the terms on which the Ionian Islands were finally ceded to Greece in 1864.
Calligas, Markides and Holland remain intrigued by the history of these years, not least because the dynamic tensions between different groups within the Ionian and mainland polities which Gladstone and his successor Sir Henry Storks in Corfu, Sir Henry Elliott in Athens, Lords Palmerston and Russell in London tried to understand, navigate and exploit, exist but slightly transmuted to this day - they are in the Hellenic grain. I hope there's another book there. I like Calligas's reference to a 'rather bewildered popular following'. Holland and Markides suggest that the way the British government extracted themselves from Corfu served as a precedent for colonial departures to come. What this talented Greek-English authorial collaboration call the 'abandonment' of the Protectorate, was an early model for finessing imperial withdrawal - one that the British have been doing quite well for over a century, and which the English are now doing from Scotland and Wales, after grim practice in Ulster (my talk in Tokyo - "England: her own last colony").
Giving up power is no less fraught than taking it, but there's a more pervasive moral underlying these proposals and rebuttals, interpretations and counter-interpretations of what happened when Corfu and Britain separated - Holland's and Markides' theme being continuing relations between the British and the Hellenes. This is less dry - a matter of passionate inconsistency among all parties; an enduring affaire, full of rumour, misinterpreted motives, hidden agendas, exaggerated simplifications, curses, tearful embraces, forgiveness, anger, reproach, estrangement and reconciliation. Sounds like family.
Anyone seeking real political leverage; any possibility of access to the hi-politics of present Corfu in its relations with Athens, needs to have spent time networking in Brussels and Strasbourg, not to mention building links with other Ionian polities. Kefalonia played the rebel against the Protectorate in the 1860s (MirantaPaximapolou-StavrinouRebellions of Cephalonia in the years 1848 and 1849, Athens 1980). The British executed twenty one men there in 1849.
I respect those trying to make sense of the issues that surround the landfill at Lefkimmi, characterised by secrecy, confusion, miscommunication and now violence. (Lefkimmiblog.forum - in Greek and ditto Lefkimmiblog and ΧΥΤΑ ΛΕΥΚΙΜΜΗΣ and Lefkimmi Demos - the local council.)
Born in Corfu and growing up on the island before emigrating to Australia, Harry Tsoukalas returned to Corfu, enthusiastic from experience in Australia about what could be done in Corfu about 'going green'. He's a civil engineer, a successful businessman directing a Corfu estate agency specialising in selling old houses for renovation. He started the Corfu Heritage Preservation Foundation, using it to get attention from UNESCO to some of Corfu's oldest villages. With his brother, Lefteris, he advises incomers who've bought properties on how to renovate them in ways that respect Corfu's great architectural tradition. In last year's April edition of The Corfiot he announced the first of three recycling yards, charging €50 to receive rubble which, at 20 cubic metres per truckload, would normally cost ten times as much taken to a municipal site. I understand that one of the new recycling sites is near Kontokali on the inland inner road close to Danilia junction [info@petracon.biz 6947269112 or 6932606332]. I've not checked these details. My sources are, in many cases, from Tsoukalas himself, and from Hilary Paipeti, his partner and enthusiatic promoter, but Tsoukalas and his allies (in addition to island jealousies) face conservative inertia on care for the environment that is not special to Greece. Now he is challenging Athens. New ideas start small. Tsoukalas' capacity to cope with threats, ridicule, even contempt, will be a measure of the man and his growing political experience. I realise that we, as EU citizens, can vote in local elections in Corfu.
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26/9/08 Environment Commissioner on climate change BRUSSELS (ANA-MPA/M. Aroni): Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas, replying to a question by the press shortly after his meeting in Brussels with Polish Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki, expressed confidence that the European Union will not back down on the commitments it has undertaken to combat climatic changes as a result of the fiscal crisis. "…the crisis of climatic changes is permanent and it is threatening the planet. It is not permissible that targets should be changed because a crisis has broken out this month or because some other one will break out in the next." See his page on landfill and associated issues - Green Cities for Life - and his warning to Greece earlier in the year.
We went together to picnic at Coignafearn for the afternoon, driving over the Garbol Road from Strathnairn. My niece's husband David Roskelly took pictures. I sent one to Lin in Birmingham. She thought it made me look scruffy - especially the stains on my waistcoat from that Arbroath Smokie I enjoyed at Moy. 
