Context

Before first light the parched island is soaked by a drenching downpour, a timely damping down of hectares of tinder. We lie in bed surrounded by unaccustomed gloom, lightning flashing through the curtains, crashes of thunder, constant rumbling. Mountains and sea are obscured; our forested foreground, now grey-green under a drifting overcast. The trees beside the house are wrung by the wind. Pouring rain spatters our windows, its fall muffled on the roof tiles, echoing in the downpipes. Water spills over the gutters splashing on the common path. Where I left a small gap in the kitchen windows, the counter’s wet. Water glosses the plaka under the veranda, the decking and concrete of our balconies, dribbling from the  yellowing leaves of the wisteria, soaking the green and red of the bougainvillea, bowing its branches. Abruptly a quilt is welcome on the bed and I switch to shirts with long sleeves and socks. I wear underpants again; even a jumper in the evening.

From this day of rain a fortnight follows of clear blue skies. The mountains in the east – rising in Epirus and the southern tip of Albania – return, during these unexpected days of early autumn , to their Wedgwood blue haze. The strip of sea between Corfu and the mainland could be mistaken for a placid lake, our green hills along its western shore, barer land over the strait.  

After weeks of washing clothes by hand – no great problem - we’ve bought a washer to replace the old one Lin couldn’t mend. Mark took it away for scrap after I’d unbolted its concrete steadying weights. I've carried them down to the garden where they stand as modernist shapes. From the same store on the road to Lefkimmi we’ve also bought a new wood stove – exact match of the one that came with the house 12 years ago. Age and misuse had warped the old stove's lid; its body leaked smoke from cracks at each corner. I manhandled three hundred weight of cast iron down the balcony steps, through the apothiki, to the garden where, filled with soil from the compost heap, the old stove sprouts a young bougainvillea we’ve bought.   

In search of context I’ve been reading a school text describing British economic and  social history from 1700. It ends in 1975 when I was 33 - just starting to live in a grown up way so it seemed; helping me to try understanding the next 44 years – my small life's window that included marrying Linda, her having our two children, getting our own house, the job I’ve had until I left the university a few years ago; my bicycles and my travels on them, the advent of Mrs Thatcher, the routing of the public sector, privatisation, the ending of the narratives and ideologies of modernism with its vision in many dimensions of 'one society'. About ten years ago I was strolling, with my folding bicycle, along the slab pavement of the Thames South Bank in London. Under my feet I found a commemorative plaque celebrating the Festival of Britain - marking its centre. For a millisecond I caught a full-body memory of a 9 year-old holding mum's hand in just that spot pausing amid many people - an enthusiastic crowded space - in 1951. "I have no wish to return to that time. I'd rather be in the now and the future" I thought. But I liked the thought of having been there long ago. 

So...the changing fabric, population and demography of our city, Birmingham, and other cities, the implosion of empire, the blatantly diverging fortunes of rich and poor, automation, artificial intelligence and the spreading role of decisions by algorithms indecipherable by their authors, the vast harvesting of personal data, the end - almost - of posting letters in mailboxes, the ubiquity of screens and roving phones, the hours spent dealing - over the phone - with energy service companies, the world wide web which I entered only in 1995, personal data harvesting, the dilution of place as a product of vast increases in the ease of transience "I'm both somewhere and anywhere",  identity politics "I'm a type on a bureaucratic check list which is useful to know, and I'm not at all which is also a lesson"; the tsunami of superficial distraction, but also my allotment, my continuing work with family, on getting the work of my stepfather  - Jack Hargreaves - restored and published, and also our project with his descendant family ("such a privilege") to give a a wider profile to the laic sculptor of Ano Korakiana, Aristeidis Metallinos (1908-1987), my involvement with local campaigns especially Handsworth Park, the Victoria Jubilee Allotments...

With our grandson, Oliver, on Plot 14 of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (photo: Tim Hamilton)

... Black Patch Park and our small charity Handsworth Helping Hands,

Handsworth Helping Hands committee meeting

...our encounters with the law, my membership of 1000Elders and participation, as a subject, in research into healthy ageing, the growing up of our children, the arrival of our grandchildren, our homes in Handsworth, the Forest of Dean and Corfu, the boat Summersong, and, the long association with the Highlands from a childhood Christmas at Fasnakyle through the time my mother married again and went to live near Inverness for forty years, to go back to the 35 years before 1977, my childhood, my abrupt encounter aged 12, on a desk in the study of a schoolfriend's father of black and white photo's, in a hard backed book, of thin bodies bodies piled on trucks and being pushed by a bulldozer into a pit, and youth, my old travels on land and sea, sailing the Channel...

Sailing to France in Two Pearls in 1963 (photo: Barbara Hargreaves)

... the coast of Brittany, the Mediterranean from France to Greece, across the Atlantic in Young Tiger from the Canaries to the Caribbean, my time in America, the faces of those who loved me and taught me, long dead but ever in my mind, the panoply of art, literature, poetry, film, music, sculpture, design, architecture that educates me, and enriches my understanding, my ever-present confusions, vexations and perplexities…

I’m also re-reading – much more closely than in earlier years - Out of Town: A Life Relived on Television by Jack Hargreaves. Published in 1987

‘...this book, like my programmes – is concerned with those times, with the feeling of the old, small-farming life and the know-how of it’. The story my stepfather tells is of the time when his mother and father met in 1889 to 1929 when Jack would have been 18 - ‘until I left the farm to go to London University and read Veterinary Science’  

*** *** ***
There can hardly be a citrus tree on the whole island of Corfu that is not now infested and blighted by citrus scale insects, which over the last two years have settled in numberless scores on the underside of every young leaf, sucking its sap to access its sugar, bringing black mould to the leaves' upper surfaces. We are almost entirely bereft of once plentiful oranges and lemons. We see no end in sight for this grievous blight.

Our orange tree struggling against citrus scale insect infestation, beside three more similarly affected lemon trees

Some cut down their citrus trees. Others pollard them severely. Many paint the tree trunks with asvesti (white wash) but these insects do not travel up the trees from the ground. They move through the air on broad vectors across large areas. The insects, sometimes in a symbiotic relationship with ants, return as soon as new leaf shoots appear. Some spray with insecticide, which works temporarily but is not good for the fruit. We try regular spraying of non-toxic olive oil soap solution under the leaves. It works a little. So far we have avoided the blackened waste that has afflicted some trees we see in passing. We've heard that Bayer have a systemic insecticide applied to the soil around the roots which kills to insects leaving the fruit 'safe' after 3 weeks, and lasting a year. We are considering this option. Meantime we maintain the soap solution spraying with a pump action garden spray. Naturalist friends say there may be a chance of the trees learning to resist the harm caused to the vital photo-synthesis of leaves by insects and mould. They also say that a predator on scale insects may emerge. This is a low visibility catastrophe affecting tens of thousands of lemon and orange trees on Corfu and surely elsewhere. I'm always pleased when travelling on the island I see, now and then, a citrus tree bearing fruit, it's leaves unaffected and healthy. I saw a tree full of oranges in a garden on high ground in a village west of Agros a few days ago. Is it are resistant species? Have the pest insects not yet arrived? Waiting like a evil character in the wings is the olive tree plague Xylella Fastidiosa.

'Recalled to life'

Jack Hargreaves 1911-1994 with his stepson Simon Baddeley born 1942 (photo: Barbara Hargreaves)

My stepfather delighted in reading Charles Dickens. He could recite first lines of the novels

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...

"Opening lines are fascinating. They contain all that’s to follow”. I like the phrase 'recalled to life' from the first chapter. Dickens, after setting the scene - France and England in 1775 - for A Tale of Two Cities, describes the Dover Coach toiling up Shooter’s Hill. The night is stormy. To ease the horses, passengers have been asked to get out and trudge through the mud. Here's a place perfect for ambush and robbery. A lone rider is heard galloping in pursuit. It's Gerry Cruncher, messenger from Telsons Bank. Rider and coach halt, Jerry facing a wary driver's blunderbuss. Jarvis Lorri, banker, stands beside the coach. Jerry hands him an envelope.

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side and read - first to himself and then aloud; “ ‘Wait at Dover for Mam’selle.’ It’s not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, Recalled to Life.”

Recalled to life. Old 16mm film smells of vinegar. The cans in which it's stored are brown with rust - many over forty years old, films made by Jack's cameraman Stan Bréhaut for the Southern TV series Out of Town. at risk of wasting in our garage.
But by Christmas 2019, my licensee, Network on Air, will be publishing 6 episodes selected from the archive of recovered Out of Town material, sitting in our garage for ages, recovered by Jack from a warehouse some unknown time after Southern TV lost its licence in 1981. There were 100s of cans of 16mm film with added library sound effects and a similar number of flat cardboard boxes containing ¼” reel-to-reel sound tapes of Jack’s commentaries, which, left to Southern TV’s successor Meridian, had sat in their library, cherry picked as background – without Jack -  for country-themed programmes, becoming disordered. Jack had moved on, to do successful broadcasting on Channel 4 for three years, delivering sixty episodes of Old Country in the same style and format as OOT, using the same ‘shed’ – the set he’d used at Southern, set up in the Old Schoolhouse in Meonstoke. Jack Hargreaves - the invention of the camera from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
The recovered OOT material was stored on racks in his workshop beside Raven Cottage. When domestic DVD players proliferated, Jack selected 28 reels of film from this archive. The film had magnetic sound strips containing the sound effects – fish splashing, hammering, wind, atmos, and so on - added post-production. See Dave Knowles, Jack's sound technician, on the next clip between 00.47 and 1.46 explaining the characteristics of the film in the archive.

Jack Hargreaves ~ moving the collection from Plymouth to Birmingham from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

Although an executor of my stepfather's estate, I knew nothing of the ‘archive’ until 2009. Well before he died Jack had entrusted the unwieldy collection of film and tape to his friend Nick Wright, a media academic. Thank goodness! In 1994, when Jack died, such a collection would have burdened me. I might have discarded it and surrendered all rights –  a condition for gifts - to the BFI.
I remained unaware, until Richard Hill, filmed for an OOT episode on sea angling in the early 70s, wrote and asked if he could have a copy of the episode in which he and his friends appeared.

Jack Hargreaves tries out Richard Hill's patent 'exploding' bait box from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

His computer literate neighbour, with a touch of OCD, had traced the archive to Plymouth, then to Jack’s stepson, Simon Baddeley, as the likely owner of rights.
Some time after Jack died Nick Wright had moved house. Lacking storage in his new home, he’d passed Jack’s gift to the South West Film and TV Archive, where it had stayed over 10 years. Via Paul Peacock, who was writing Jack's biography, Paul and I met Nick in Leeds. Over a meal and a pint, Nick explained the unwieldy nature of the JH archive.
“These are not complete episodes of Out of Town broadcasts, Simon. They’re Stan’s location footage with sound effects. You’d first have to match film with sound tapes of Jack’s commentaries. There are no titles, no theme tune, no credits. Footage where Jack spoke from his studio 'shed' have vanished”
I learned later that, until the end of the 1970s, the only way such footage would have been recorded was on v expensive swiftly re-used Quad tapes.
The mishmash nature of the OOT archive had one positive – it was generally perceived as useless. Nick said he’d looked through it and could do nothing with it. His gift to me was a signed letter he’d sought from a senior employee, Cathy Meacock, of Endemol International, declaring, in writing, that despite Endemol’s ownership of so much old Southern media (bought speculatively, overriding, so they claimed, Jack’s informal reclamation of OOT film), they had ‘no further interest in the material’. Nick was free to do with it as he - and therefore I - wished. Nick was clear the archive at SWFTA, passed to him by Jack, was mine.
I phoned Jenny at SWFTA and gave permission for Richard Hill’s episode to be assembled and sent to me to take to him on a DVD as an MPG file. By train and cycle I took a day trip to the edge of Southampton. Richard now grey-haired was over the moon. We enjoyed Wendy Hill’s cups of tea and fish pie.
“If it hadn’t been for you, Richard, I’d not have discovered my stepdad’s archive”.
I learned from Jenny the work her husband Roger Charlesworth had done to make Richard’s DVD out of the archive material available, finding the sound tape that went with the episode, digitising sound and picture, splicing them, inserting stills of Jack in the absence of studio ‘shed’ footage; pro bono.
I took a train from Birmingham and met Roger and Jenny in the old naval yard in Plymouth, viewed the ‘JH archive’ stacked on dexion, and met the manager of SWFTA. He put out feelers about rights in return for SWFTA making more episodes. I said I’d think about it, taking home his blank waiver.
Time passed.
What could be done with the archive if neither Nick nor the archive technicians could spin this treasured straw into an episode of Out of Town? Would still pictures or random footage run as background to Jack’s voice? A friend suggested, with a clever example, of how Jack’s voice could be added to his animated picture. Not quite recalled to life though.
Meantime I was supporting publication by Delta of those full episodes of Out of Town that Jack had made for VHS in 1987, speaking from his workshop at Raven Cottage – not even Southern TV broadcasts, though they contained the location footage Jack had recovered from the archive.
In 2010 SWFTA wrote to say that without my waiver giving them rights to any work they could not afford to store the JH archive. With my neighbour, John Rose and the borrowed use of a van, we drove to Plymouth and collected the films and tapes to store in our garage.
In 2012 Kaleidoscope’s David King unearthed 30 episodes of Out of Town broadcasts made in 1980-81. These were published by Delta as “The Lost Episodes”. Endemol had been about to throw them out. Once they realised my hopes for them, they claimed copyright, as for all the Southern TV media over which they claimed ownership. After several attempts to contact them, their CEO emailed me “Simon. You can have all OOT material we own for £10,000 ‘take it or leave it’”
I found the cash. I co-signed a novation agreement transferring their licence with Delta to me plus an addendum rights transfer for the OOT episodes saved by David. I went to Endemol's HQ in Shepherd's Bush and put the masters I'd bought on my bicycle rack

Collecting my OOT master tapes

After Jack’s death his solicitor with whom I shared the executorship along with Isobel of the will, said he had no doubt that Jack wanted this material to belong to me, that it almost certainly did, but “their lawyers have more time and money than you can afford”.
For about three years I was making train visits to London, cycling around the city to meetings. With advice from Charles Webster of Delta, now my licensee, I got a rights lawyer. James Greenslade of Simons Muirhead & Burton in Soho. £600 an hour! He cut me pro bono advice, going through Endemol’s contract with his platinum toothcomb.
I was about to recover my outlay in royalties from Delta’s sales of two OOT DVD box sets, when Charles texted me that Delta had gone into administration.
Charles and I had been working enthusiastically on ways of restoring the archive but seeing the way the wind was blowing he'd left Delta. He and I had meetings at a fish and chippie near Victoria Station to continue exploring ways to restore the archive. I hired Francis Niemczyk up Kilburn way to start restoring the films Lin and I had matched with their sound tapes, adding Frazer Ash, Digital Transfer Manager of British Universities Film & Video Council off Oxford Street.
Charles and I drifted apart, he, vexed that I’d made an agreement he’d cautioned against, with Chris Perry of newly formed Big Centre TV based in Walsall, to broadcast existing OOT episodes on a new local TV station, in return for getting the services of a reputable film restoration company in Wardour Street, Soho, restoring the archive. The long and short of that embarrassing episode, drawn out over a year of constant emails and excuses, was that the OOT episodes were broadcast in the West Midlands, but Perry failed to fulfil his side of our agreement, got summarily fired from the company he’d started, whose new director, after some wriggling, agreed to pay me a symbolic £1500 of compensation.  So few people watched this local TV company little was lost. I was an irritated fool.
After turning down offers for Jack’s material from a couple of the companies circling Delta’s administrators, there came, a surprise approach from Talking Pictures that went nowhere, and another from Network on Air. I liked their CEO Tim Beddows.
I signed an Acquisition Agreement with his company in 2017. Tim Beddows was keen to republish all that Delta had published plus extras featuring Jack. Even more pleasing was Tim’s offer to restore and publish the whole archive if I would fill in for Jack where his introductions had gone missing. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t spent enough time humming and haa-ing over options for filling in where Jack was missing. With trepidation I agreed. Tim drove a first batch of old footage with sound tapes to be restored by his company in Canary Wharf  where, after tapes and films had been matched and digitised, they were stored as HD – “better than when Jack saw them” said Tim. I relayed a link to the first batch of restorations to Ian Wegg, Southern TV’s amateur local historian. Ian dated them and alerted me to footage already published by Jack when he cherry-picked location film for his 1987 VHS issue of OOT. From this base selection, I picked 16 suitable 12 to 6 minute sequences which, put together, would give us 3 hours viewing in 6 half hour episodes, made up of 15 parts.
Tim assured me “That’ll be enough to start. This will be Network’s Out of Town Vol 3, ready for Christmas 2019”. But there were more slips twixt cup and lip, not least a Pandemic, which delayed the publication until the start of July 2020 by which time the new DVD, also on Blu-ray, had been  renamed Further Out of Town.
Tim had contracted film-maker, director and producer, Paul Vanezis to make the film insets of me introducing each restored OOT episode. With the restored OOT footage, now digitised in HD, loaded to his hard drive, Paul and I met up on my allotment in Handsworth, where between my shed and fruit cage we spent two sunny July mornings filming introductions.

Paul Vanezis films inserts of me introducing Further Out of Town on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments in Handsworth

 I’d spent two months rehearsing after digesting Jack’s recorded introductions without picture and the location footage to be used - trying not to imitate Jack but to find a suitable version of Jack's relaxed style in front of a camera.

I practised for a day with my friend Michael Livesley at his studio in Liverpool ...

and spoke on my own to Photobooth on my laptop...

So, over 11 years after I learned of the existence of the ‘JH Archive’ we are lined up to publish the following films introduced by me.

Episode 1. Garden Pests/Red Squirrels/Country Flowers
Episode 2: Planting a Vine/Sheep Fair
Episode 3: Southall Market/Fishing in the Hebrides/Peeler crabs
Episode 4: Andalusian Horses with Brassy Searle and son
Episode 5: Mr Cuckoo/Sea Bream/Stocking a lake
Episode 6: Butterflies/North wind fishing/John Bass lake

Before they are scanned, Paul Vanezis checks old opening titles of Further Out of Town

A chance to talk about my stepfather

Michael Livesley asked me, out of the blue, to come up to Liverpool, and talk to him in 'The Livo Lounge' about my stepfather, Jack Hargreaves and the work being done to serve his legacy and make his films and books available. This is on Youtube too by the way.

https://www.facebook.com/TheLivoLounge/

I am quite pleased. I even enjoyed watching myself. Lots more to do of course.

Jack and Simon c.1951 (photo: Barbara Hargreaves)

Michael Livesley and Simon Baddeley in the Livo Lounge  (photo: Mark)

Tasks

I’ve clambered through the kitchen window to weed the small gulley between our house and the neighbour’s wall, lopping their overhanging fig branches to give light to WC and kitchen windows. I’ve tightened my Brompton’s front wheel that was beginning to wobble on its bearings – something I noticed as I freewheeled down the zig-zag road from Sokraki, stopping only to sit for a few moments in the cool quiet of the tiny church of Ag Isadoras on the ninth bend up from Ano Korakiana.

Ag. Isadoras above Ano Korakiana

Done the washing of course – sun dried underpants, shirts, socks and nightshirt. I’ve taken my sickle to the path below the house curbing invading thorns, and greenery happy to take over our route to the bus stop on National Opposition Street – three minutes’ walk below. I’ve hand dipped into the WC basin to give it a good scrub, leaving slices of lemon in it for a day, peeing the while on the compost piling up with my clippings from the Wisteria and other parts of the garden. I’ve cycled in and out of town to check I can still get there and back on my large bike, stopping at Technomart for more cheap paint brushes, and taken the bus into town with my folded Brompton, ideal for roaming the streets of the city, and completed our nil tax returns. Said Eleni when I arrived at her small efficient office off Alexandros
“You are the first!”
I’ve checked our bank account to bring our statement up to date and ensure payment of our standing orders for water and electricity. Cycling home I stopped at Rolando’s shop in Kontokali to have a look at his electric bikes. He insisted I try one. Out of curiosity I did. You peddle. The bike takes off on its own, gently, soundlessly and powerfully. Very tempting but – apart from prices of €2000+ - I don’t want one. Peddling starts the battery driven motor. Once going I’d stop relying on my own faltering strength, whose testing is two thirds the joy and a third the pain of cycling. If an ascent is too hard I’ve the time to get off and walk.
I work through books – Mia Gallagher's Hellfire, Edna O’Brien's The Little Red Chairs, Katie Hayes' Lindbergh’s Legacy, Michael Wood's In Search of Shakespeare, James Herbert’s The Secret of Crickley Hall.
Harder work, for longer perusal and reference, is a book, found for me by my friend Mark, authored in 2017 by the Swedish biologists, now living here, Marie and Bo Stille The Herpetofauna of Corfu and Adjacent Islands. The book cost me €30. Far from being simply a catalogue of species - comprehensive though it is on that score - the book goes far beyond that, comprehending with charts, maps and descriptions of habitats – geology, geography, climate, vegetation - describing, also, the human culture including environmental legislation and three finely written pages on ‘Humans, snakes and fear’. That such fear is instinctive remains despite years of research, unproven. The authors suggest fear of snakes is more likely the product of ideas than genetics.

The positive thing with a behaviour transmitted by ideas and not by genes is that it is relatively easy to change one idea for another when new knowledge becomes available. Consequently the fear that makes us indiscriminately kill snakes, including those that are not harmful to us, should in most cases be easy to overcome. However, oral tradition still has a stronghold in many cultures and old stories of snake dangerousness keep on spreading. (pp 315-316)

Two years ago a part-time neighbour here was kind enough to walk up to our house and warn me, for the sake of the children he emphasised, that there were snakes on the path between our homes. He held up, for my inspection, a jar containing two beheaded slow worms. The other day a friend told me he’d killed two snakes on his plot.
“I knew because they had that black stripe down their backs”
We found a picture in the Stilles’ book
“That’s it!”
It was, as clearly illustrated in the book, a juvenile Anguis graeca or Greek Slow worm Ελληνικο χονακι ‘completely harmless’.
The Stilles' book can be bought with an accompanying poster - €3 - showing pictures of all Corfu's snakes and slow worms, too often mistaken for and often killed, along with other harmless snakes. One snake, only, on Corfu is venomous - the horned viper - a creature no more dangerous than its cousin, the British Adder. Potholes offer greater hazard.
This book is about faith, hope and love. I judge it as significant for the missionaries and disciples of our spreading belief in the world's environment, as St Paul's Letters to the Corinthians in the New Testament was, and is, to Christianity. When I was 16 in 1958, my stepfather, amid one of our many long conversations during my growing up, suggested that a ‘new religion’ was emerging across the world; one that held as its central tenet, that the survival and salvation of mankind depended on his stewardship of the earth - a faith supported by science but, being near unprovable, still a ‘faith’.
“It’s called ‘environmentalism’. It grows from a move away from drawing up lists of natural species to understanding their ‘ecology’ - our own included!”
I remember this, while having little understanding, at the time, of what Jack was talking about.

Using the multi-tool to smooth a windowframe

There are louvred exterior window shutters that are near indestructible, their colour running right through like words in 'Brighton Rock'; to be bought on the internet, delivered by courier; maintenance a damp cloth. On our house some of our windows are metal, but others are wooden with hard wood shutters at least forty years old, perhaps much older. Louvre slats increase their surface area. Stand back, and I can see the joiner’s small variations during their making, increased by repairs.

One of my gravings

Looking close, the surfaces have many variations as a result of maintenance over the years - mainly after periods of neglect when roasting sun, wind and rain have blistered and hardened surface paint, undercoat and primer, raising all layers to the original wood, which, being exposed for too long, becomes split along the grain. Some joints may open. Looking at one pair of shutters on the house, I can see that with louvre slats and cross-pieces there are 286 of these - to shrink and expand.

Where rain has stood and perhaps seeped into the footing joints, there may be patches of dry rot, which I, and previous workers, have cut out, repairing the damage with gravings of old wood - which, once sanded, filled and painted, are almost as invisible as the dents an auto-mechanic can tap out of a metal body panel. Old wood is easily found, cut from shutters left by wheelie bins.
It takes time to maintain wooden shutters. Lifted from the pintles on their wooden frames (those too need maintaining), I lay them on a plastic sheet under the veranda. I sand the roughest looking surfaces down to the wood, and, where necessary, replace rotted parts; apply filler in cracks and small holes; let it dry then wipe down with white spirit and apply colourless preservative which serves as primer and holding for undercoat on surfaces where the old paint is sound. After the undercoat comes the pleasant labour of applying Corfu green surface gloss. Each of two coats takes 24 hours to dry. I leave it longer.

New gloss paint exposed to Greek sun comes up in blisters that can raise the underlying paint layers to bare wood. I learnt that the first time I went through this routine - over enthusiastic to rehang my work and admire it in place.  Now I make sure I’ve other jobs to do, while waiting. The wooden shutter frames are also maintained the same way, and hinges – male and female – oiled, with wandering paint scraped and sanded from them. I repaired, repainted and rehung three pairs of shutters and frames this last fortnight since Lin went back to England.
** ** **
With my friend Dave I’ve replaced a beam supporting our wooden balcony. When we walked there last year Lin and I saw a dip in the decking and assumed a normal settling. Then Mark, visiting, noted how one of two supporting beams had fallen four inches, where it entered the centre of one of its brick support columns. He inserted an Acrow prop to secure the balcony over the winter.

We measured and ordered a treated composite beam, planed to size, and delivered from Duroxil’s yard at Velonades near Sidari.

Dave arrived a few mornings ago; surveyed the job. Mark who’d replaced and renewed all the balcony’s main beams and laid decking across them had done a sound job.  His long sturdy screws had to be undone beneath a decking plank, which, with two balcony support brackets had to be lifted, to get to longer screws through shims into the old beam. A power drill with screwdriver in reverse took those all out in minutes. Zzzzzzzzz- done, Zzzzzzzzz- done, Zzzzzzzzz- done…We lifted and laid a sturdy plank from the apothiki under the cross beams, a foot back from the damaged support beam; moved the Acrow swiftly beneath one end of the plank, screwed up tight. The plank stayed while Dave sawed, to the same length as the Acrow,  an old beam also from the apothiki; lifted it against the other end of the plank, using a car-jack at one end to pump it upwards, until the whole balcony was lifted a few inches clear of the damaged beam.

On a stepladder Dave sawed through the centre of the damaged beam. Both pieces slid easily from the support columns, to be lowered to me. The cavity at the top of one of the column harbours an ants’ nest, whose inhabitants in their constant activity had reduced one end of the beam to a splintered stub, which, if it had given any further would have led to the collapse of one half of the balcony.

Ant work

Heartless, I pour two kettles of fresh boiled water on the teeming nest. Dave cleans out the support cavities at both ends; checks the soundness of the other beam ending next to the ants' nest.
“Seems they’ve left that alone. But keep an eye.”
We lift the new beam into place; tap away some old mortar; perfect fit; unscrew the Acrow, and lower the jack, deftly catching the substitute plank, as the new beam starts its job.

From above, it’s the power drill with screw driver again -  zzzz zzzzz- done, zzzzz zzzz- done, zzzz zzzzz - done; the shims and decking replaced; the decking now pleasingly level; job completed in 3 hours. Cups of tea had helped us through the morning. Now we broke two cans of lager.
“Finished in the cool of the morning, Dave. You made it look easy!”
***** *****
It’s not the best idea to ‘battle’ against nature. For the first time in ten years we experience the deprivation of abundant fresh oranges and lemons - one of the delights for a northerner in Greece. Since last spring, citrus scale insects have infested the under surfaces of the leaves on our two lemon trees and one blood orange.

Not a disease - an infestation

Minute insects gather in thousands on the underside of every leaf. These encourage - we don’t understand the process, but some form of excretion of honeydew which seems to penetrate the leaves. On the honeydew, on the top of the leaf, a black mould grows which stops photosynthesis. The trees are being strangled. They’ve not blossomed this year. Where a few flowers do appear, they drop off in wind and rain.
Scale insects are a pest familiar in the citrus industry. They occurs in the USA and all over southern Europe. Not all citrus trees are affected. On walks we’ve see many unaffected trees, bearing the abundant lemons and oranges we had come to take for granted. Last spring, on advise, Lin mixed dissolved bars of olive soap in boiling water, mixed with oil to hold the olive solution on the foliage. We sprayed as widely as we could reach with a hand pump sprayer lent by Mark. The insects turned to black mush which dried up. On new growth the scale insects return, the male insects travelling, the female clustering and immobile once on their leaves. We sprayed and sprayed at regular intervals. Still new insects return; in small numbers at first, but in clusters that visibly increase. I have watched them gathering. As well as spraying, I’ve hung sticky fly papers in the branches. In days they’re covered, sometimes, to my regret, with a trapped lacewing or bee, but mostly thousands and thousands of scale insects. My neighbour’s orange tree has no fruit nor blossom, but seems clear of scale insects. What’s their vector? Where are they coming from? Why are they on some trees and not on others? Some people here have pollarded their trees drastically. Others have even felled them – which might work for disease but can have only limited effect on spreading insects. Others have employed pest controllers who’ve applied traditional toxic sprays as for other pests, but this like our non-toxic olive soap solution, kills the insects only for more to return. I long for signs of the arrival of predator insects, enjoying scale insects as a welcome feast. Many ants roam the branches but they’re lapping the honeydew in the mould, leaving the under leaf pests unmolested. They may even, as I've read, have a symbiotic relationship with the scale insects, moving them about to new trees, or replacing them on leaves we've temporarily cleared by spraying.
“We need Ladybirds” says Lin.
I cannot just leave the trees alone, hoping that nature will take its course – since with all leaves coated in black mould preventing photosynthesis I will be watching our trees die.

While I can, I’m spraying once or twice a week, replacing the sticky papers as soon as they are covered – which takes less than 10 days. Perhaps now I should also buy some ant bands to deter ants and so try to intervene in the many million year love affair between scale insects and ants - if such it is.

Symbiosis of ants and other insects: One of the most common is the herding or farming of sap feeding insects 'homopterans' such as aphids, scale bugs and mealy bugs. ... By stroking the back of some aphids with their antennae, the ants can induce a honeydew droplet. The ants may move the insects to areas on the plants with the best sap.

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On the 1st May I was standing on the balcony and a neighbour saw me and called ‘Kronia Polla. Proto Maio!” I’d clean forgotten. I went foraging for flowers from verges, walls and abandoned gardens returning with flowering garlic, violets, a pink mallow flower, yellow and white daisies, sprigs of jasmine and wild sage called Lantana Camara - dry thorny stalks bearing bunched florets of many tiny multi-coloured flowers. I found roses, wall flowers, and from a flourishing Bird of Paradise plant, two orange azure flowers like parrots’ heads, sweet peas, clover, blue flowered comfrey prickly to pick, a lily from our garden and a deep purple leafed plant bearing a tiny pink flower. I fixed these with green string in granny knots to a wired circle of long stalks from the invasive pelargonium on the wire fence in our small garden.

Spring 2018 - all my own work

By lunchtime both my neighbour and I had wreaths hanging high on the walls of our houses, visible from Democracy Street. Lin usually makes our Mayday wreath. In her absence I was proud of mine. It will swiftly wither and dry. On mid-summer day its remains will be collected with others; laid in a pile on the war memorial platea or the villages's lower road and set alight, girls and boys leaping over the smoke and flames - Λάμπατα στον Άη-Γιώργη.

Λάμπατα στον Άη-Γιώργη - 22 June in Ano Korakiana

I've heard gossip that our new Papas is not entirely approving of this pre-Christian celebration. It's pagan. But that's just a rumour. I find the Greek Orthodox Church eclectic, even relaxed - perhaps a sign of its health and strength. Long ago - 1949 - my Dad and his new wife, my Greek step-mother, Maria, both divorced, were allowed to marry with full blessings in the small church of Panagia Kapnikarea in Hermou Street off Syntagma in Athens.
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On a Sunday I cycled to Dukades – 5 kilometres west, as the crow flies - to sit in the platea in the shared shade of a Jacaranda and a Lime tree sipping chilled village wine with two of my neighbours, absorbing languid conversation, noon sun seeping through the greenery, sparkling our glasses.
“Look how the sunlight dapples my white wine. If a cloud comes it doesn’t seem as good. Go away cloud!”
Our talking turned on gender fluidity, so normal but with vexatious implications for architecture and competition; vulture capitalists feasting on Greece. How much profit, if any, seeps into the surroundings of these grand hotel projects? Morecambe! Where my neighbours knew one another in primary school. Solar energy - why isn’t Greece’s free resource, so much scarcer in the north, being tapped into by everyone? Will they ever sort out the ethical programming of driverless cars? Who will the software save first, the children in the car or the old couple who walk out in front of it? “Hm? That’s a bit of a no-brainer”; peculiar neighbours and the kindness of strangers; bitcoins and the end of money “Monitor every transaction and human ingenuity will invent alternative ways of doing business”; fake news, filter-bubbles, ‘likely stories’ and urban myths;  and letters to Agony aunts.. 'Dear Marge. I’ve suffered from dropsy since childhood. An orphan, abused by carers, my relationships end in desertion. Help…’ ‘Dear Marge. A servant on one of our yachts persists in wiping the condensation off the champagne before removing the cork with such a noisy pop. Help’ …’Dear Marge. Can you help us with scale insects on our lemon trees? They’re spoiling our lives….’
A Sunday afternoon torpor, impossible north of the olive belt.
“We’ll go home and light the BBQ. Will you join us?”
They headed off by car, while I descended from the village via the road down to Paleo, pedalling away towards Doctor’s Bridge, but long before there, I spied a left turn down a narrow road signed ‘Corfu Donkey Rescue’. At last I’d found, after instructions from Mark, a road that went direct, if curvedly, to Skripero, with hardly an ascent.

I cycle gently between green hedges, trees forming shady tunnels, passing gaps through which I see meadows of flowers stirred by the afternoon breeze from the mountains. If I hold my breath the sound of bees comes from everywhere. I see butterflies, small birds, and, gliding on thermals, two eagles, mewing at one another where their separate circling intersects. In the distance, spread across the slopes beneath Trompetta, I see the separate parts of Ano Korakiana – Mougades, the Bear (where we live), and Venetia. An aeroplane passes over ahead, ascending northward
“Poor sods”
One of the difficulties of not believing is that I have no-one to thank for such happiness, so I do anyway, following pagan instinct - 'pagan' being the old name, so I was told by Richard Pine, for a villager.
“Blessed Mary, mother of God, pray for this sinner, now and at the hour of my death" and I, a Protestant.
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On another Sunday Mark, John and Karen and I had Sunday lunch at ALS by the shore at Pyrgi. I cycled there through Ag Markos. Clouds with rain and wind and even some thunder during the night were clearing, leaving the shallow sea lapping the gravel beach near our table, limpid yet still blue over white and grey round stones, slightly ruffled so far as the horizon that underlies the mountains of Epirus across the Sea of Kerkyra.

Mark, John, Karen and Simon

In a month I’ll be finding it too hot this close to the shore, but now the climate was perfect, on a par with high summer in England, nearly shirt-sleeve weather.
“I passed you on the way” said Mark, who’d promised to drive me back later, bike folded in the back. We had beer, for me the green topped Ionian Beer I like, and later village rosé in a big carafe. Starters: courgette balls, saganaki - fried cheese, squid, and garlicky mashed potatoes - skordalia, and a rocket salad with balsamic vinegar and shavings of strong cheese. Bread too, fresh for Sunday; then, after just the right interval, whole sea bass twice, similar sea bream, and veal in wine sauce - sofritto.  All around us, Greek families and friends. Though visitors are arriving, planes and coaches coming and going, the holiday season has yet to speed up. People are still preparing premises, smartening frontages, laying planks on jetties, raising flags and signs.
On the way home Mark took the low road one which I cycle and walk, becoming a gravel track through deep woods, undergrowth and overhanging greenery.
“You do know there’s been a landslip ahead?”
When we got to where rain had washed away the ground supporting a concreted stretch of our road, he went on foot to inspect. Then before I had time to be a sensible coward drove over the stretch at risk, making mock panic noises.

Rain-made landslide undercutting the rough track between Pyrgi and Ano Korakiana

“The concrete has a metal grid reinforcing it. They’ll need to build a supporting wall and in-fill. Quite a job and expensive.”
Near where our route turned up to join the Ag Markos road, Mark steered suddenly left along a gravel track I’d not noticed before and brought us to a church low on the eastern edge of Ano Korakiana whose cemetery was covered in poppies, white daisies and delicate blue flowers, almost hidden beneath, the whole waving in the wind among the white marble gravestones with their artificial flowers, photos of the departed and small lamps.

We drove on, and stayed until after dark, sitting quietly in the garden at Karen's and John's below the village. A mass of grey cloud came charging over the mountains, surging before a north west wind, but still no rain. The trees rustled and bent. The air grew almost chilly.
“Home?”
Back in the house I slept early. The street lights were out, the village in darkness. Shapes and tones and now and then lightning and thunder

A windy evening at 208 Democracy Street

'Restored to Life'

"So perhaps there's a small part of the past here, that won't pass away". Two years after I terminated Delta Leisure's licence to retail my stepfather's Out of Town DVDs, on grounds of 'breach of contract' - have to get the legal language right - and their 'insolvency', I have signed an Acquisition Agreement with Tim Beddows on behalf of Network Distributing Limited, to relicense not ony the existing DVDs in a revised format with new artwork by our son Richard, but to include with this material more of my stepfather's films that have been recently unearthed, and most exciting of all, and more significant for me and others interested in Jack Hargreaves' work including Network's MD, to recover scores of 16mm films and 1/4" sound tapes of Out of Town episodes that Jack stored in his shed at Raven Cottage, Dorset, (more details here) and, after perambulations, are stacked on dexion shelves in our Birmingham garage.

Jack Hargreaves - the invention of the camera from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.

29th Apr 2017: message from Julian Schmechel  Simon. You are far too modest to agree with this I know, but perhaps without realising it, you have become the guardian of Out of Town, and Jack's other work, recording a now vanished rural way of life. Speaking as one who grew up in this 'Former Culture', and who well remembers taking part in many of the activities catalogued, I am aware of the immense debt owed to you. You may think my words melodramatic; but consider. When you and I are both dust, future generations, (living in the 'cracks between the concrete') will be able to view Jack's programmes, and have insight into the rural past. This is due almost entirely to your efforts, and for that, 'Thank you'
30/4/17 Dear Julian. I was going to get in touch now the days grow longer and you have real sun instead of that helping domestic light. Your words are lovely and not, to me, melodramatic. They do not embarrass me even if I cannot embrace them alone as I've had such help in the project you praise so eloquently - Linda my wife, my son (recall the draft art work), Paul Peacock who wrote J's biography, and now - he prefers to stay in the background - the businessman Tim Beddows from Network Distributing with whose company I'm about to sign a contract (we've been meeting on and off for two years), Simon Winters from Kaleidoscope, many people whose thought and words on these pages have reminded me that there is a legacy to be cherished, the presence of Jack in my head - alive from when I was a 6 year old, and after he left us, Tony Herbert and Ian Wegg who know so much about Southern TV and the date and origin of so many specific episodes of OOT, friends I've not named who've helped in the storing of the old film and sound tape in my garage and its transport in earlier years, Dave Knowles (able to find his way around the Southern TV studios, at Northam Southampton, in the dark) with his re-introduction of Old Country from which he's hardly recovered his investment (a labour of love from one of Jack's original technical team at Southern), Dean Hoffman in Maryland USA who has helped create restorations in draft of the OOT archive and sent them back to me across the Atlantic, Dave King who rescued old OOT recordings from storage shelves that mighty Endemol wanted cleared, their contents discarded - forever; Francis Niemczyk who first took on the recovery of the archive films and tapes and Frazer Ash from BUFVC, who now continues this with Francis, learning all the time. Charles Webster, ex-Delta, who for a long time kept my chin up on the 'Restored to Life' project when it seemed to be going nowhere. You are probably right (I'm not that modest) in saying that I have a co-ordinating role among these friends and helpers and inspirers, and thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to make this list of our 'team'. I, like Jack, value my past. I, following him, respect the past, but not uncritically, sentimentally or other than slightly nostalgically. I'm not one who believes in what the late Zygmunt Bauman referred to as 'retrotopia', in a world where so many find it increasingly impossible to reside faith or hope in the future. I think Jack wavered between optimism and the pessimism he seemed to express in that ode from whose last lines you quote about love of country (not nation, but the countryside and all that it had been and could be). As he said of dying, it didn't scare him too much; what really vexed him about no longer being around was 'not knowing what happened'. I think we perhaps feel the same. Much affection and good wishes, Simon (in Corfu enjoying the sun of beloved Greece and loving the contemplation of dust - ingredient of that unknown substance that we and the world need - humus).

Our son, on a surprise visit, works on graphics for the new Out of Town DVD issue

Vol 1 Out of Town to be released 31 July 2017. Art: Richard Baddeley

Hugely popular and fondly remembered to this day, Out of Town saw Jack Hargreaves exploring rural life in Britain – reflecting on its character, traditions, history and folklore, and the skills that had passed from generation to generation. With his extensive experience, knowledge and love of the countryside, Hargreaves' easygoing presentation style enthralled both rural and urban viewers – the series becoming so popular it ultimately ran for over two decades. An unsentimental record of a bygone time, Out of Town set the bar high for all "country matters" series that followed in its footsteps. This volume contains the 35 editions that remain from 1980/1 – including the unbroadcast 21st anniversary special and an episode never previously released on DVD - being the last episode of Out of Town Series 22 (of the total 23 OOT series) in which JH warns, in an episode broadcast in Sept 1980, that there will only be one more series, and signals that 'it's time to go.' (My stepfather saw the writing on the wall for the future of Southern TV!). No-one had a complete version of this OOT episode on record, but it was discovered that one half of it was held by Ian Wegg and the other half by Jack's great cameraman, Stan Bréhaut. Stan's widow, Marion Bréhaut, and Ian Wegg gave their two halves to Simon Coward of Kaleidoscope. He has put those two parts together and remastered the whole episode for Network. It's not the only extra on this new OOT issue, but I'm so glad it's resurfaced and so grateful to Stan's wife and Ian. Other material on Network's OOT Vol 1 DVD, includes Oliver Kite's Summer in Kite's Country, as well as Jack's Learning to Fish, a B & W film he made in in 1966. More material in this volume is, as yet, unannounced by Network. 

Hod Hill, Stourpaine now - a landscape from the OOT clip our son used to create the DVD cover (photo: Graham Beddow)

*'Restored to Life' - our restoration project takes a name from a phrase in a novel by Jack's favourite author, Charles Dickens, in this case 'A Tale of Two Cities', who's first lines J could recite with such pleasure. 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.'....

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Saissetia oleae colonies extract large quantities of sap, causing general host debilitation and build-up of sticky honeydew deposits on nearby surfaces. The honeydew may attract attendant ants. Sooty moulds grow on the sugary deposits. Badly fouled leaves may be dropped prematurely. The older insects are usually quite easy to see as dark grey or brown-to-black lumps on leaf undersides and stems.
As a result of some pest-on-predator imbalance, perhaps caused by an exceptionally cold spell in March, citrus trees all over the island - and probably beyond - are affected by a plague of black scale insects. The females settle on the underside of a leaf and attach themselves to it, sucking sap; weakening - possibly fatally so we have been warned - the whole tree. The males fly between leaves and tree spreading the blight. This is the first sight we've had of this problem in 10 years.
"I assume the females also fly" said Lin "until they attach themselves"
The female insects, once clustered under a leaf, exude honeydew which attracts the spores of the same damp sooty mould that settles on many surfaces during winter. The mould, covering the top-side of the infested leaves, prevents photo-synthesis. Columns of ants march up and down trunks, branches, twigs and over leaves, feasting on the honeydew, but serving no purpose other than to satisfy their appetite for the sweet stuff.

Sooty mould on the topside of leaves of one of our lemon trees colonised on their underside by scale insects

We had hoped that new growth would surmount the problem, but swiftly the insects began colonising new young leaves. No-one we asked quite knew the best way to treat the problem, or they came up with chemicals of uncertain safety and doubtful efficacy.

A culprit colony on a shed lemon leaf - killed with insecticide soap spray. Is that white stuff honeydew?

I think I understand this hesitancy; that this scale insect infestation – common in many other parts of the world - which I had thought to be a regular local occurrence which our trees, over the 10 years we’ve been here, had been fortunate in avoiding, is new to Corfu. It's just arrived from somewhere else. Hence the relative puzzlement as to what it is and how to treat it. Last night over a drink at Piatsa, Mark who deals with trees, among other skills, told us he’d not come across this before. I stand to be firmly corrected on this surmise. 

Lin studied the problem on the internet and selected her choice of spraying recipe - dissolving, in a gallon of water, a bar of olive oil soap, bought in N.Theotoki Street, with which she mixed two tablespoons of corn-oil for leaf adherence, a teaspoon of wine vinegar and a teaspoon of ground red pepper to deter future pests. We spent a couple of days laboriously sawing and lopping away excess and dead growth from the centre of our trees and off the ends of longer branches - the leaves, thousands of them covered in scale insects and mould, bagged and disposed of; twigs and branches cut up for kindling.
Mark lent us a back-pack sprayer, pressured by hand, with a reaching-wand. After the heat had gone out of the sun the other evening, we began spraying the underside of every citrus tree, working upwards on a stepladder, and by sitting on the apothiki roof and eventually reaching from the balcony where we let a helpful breeze carry liquid to the furthest leaves.
"We have to try to kill the lot in one go" said Lin.
The soaked leaves dripped soapy insecticide onto the ones below, and on us. Testing the effect on a couple of soaked leaves, the insects had turned into a black paste. Our lemon trees and one orange are treasures; not fruit that for all their proliferation here, we, from north of the olive belt, could ever take for granted.
"This mix only works while the leaves are wet"
"They should stay that way at least overnight" I said "I sort of want these little bastards to suffer as well as die"

We used 5 gallons of Lin's insecticidal soap mix on the Citrus Scale Insect infestation

In the days that followed it looks as if the cure has worked.
"At least temporarily" says Lin.
New growth is clear. On old leaves, the killed insect colonies, from turning black mush, are drying into dust that slowly falls away.

A shed, but treated, lemon leaf showing what's left of the Scale Insect colony that killed it

We keep our fingers crossed.