“Του λογαριασμού!”
“Terrible meal!” says Mark to the young man who’s been serving us at Panorama in Ag Markos “Call the manager! We’re not coming here again”
Mezes, Greek salad, saganaki, grilled aubergines, baked courgettes, tzadziki, bread, then pancetta for three of us and a pork steak off the grill. Sweetmeats after, and village wine after Ionian beer as we’d sat down a couple of hours earlier, while there was still twilight enough to see village walls, tiled roofs, in different shades, above the muting greenery below, and, close by, a full bloom Jacaranda tree, its sapphire challenging the dusk - fading into resplendent lapis lazuli.
Four friends eating in a place we know, served by people we like, sat together by a Corfu green railing, which, with winter screens folded for summer, lines a balcony hovering over a space that embraces the edge of Albania, follows the mainland coast into haze, back to the crooked bow of the island’s night shore; the dark sea between sending scented zephyrs.
“See those lights over on the mainland? They’re fish farms, strung along the coast. And over there, the lights of Igoumenitsa.”
Halfway through our meal a red-yellow ghost of a waning full moon rose, and disappeared behind distant cloud. When we looked again it hung bright above our view, silvering the sea.
“Look! A plane coming into land at Kapodistria.”
12 miles away from us, two bright wing lights hovered almost over the sparkling city for a minute before sinking behind Avrami Hill, between us and the runway.
Our greetings – handshakes for men, a kiss on both cheeks between men and women. Toasts, tapping one another’s glasses, contented and sincere exclamations at the pleasure of meeting and the meal we’ll enjoy together. Sad it must be when these touchings are just forms. Our conversations. Ah well. The utterly immediate miseries of the whole world on intimate screens, an ever tolling bell. We spoke of the world’s waste.
“They’re at last getting a compactor at the Lefkimmi tip” Facebook forums are fuming with grumblers who just want all the rubbish made to disappear.
1st June near the Old Port
“Stopping fly-tipping, littering and illegal dumps is not the answer. We’re trapped in blaming miscreants – anti-social people, crooks, feckless rogues, or attacking such abstractions as ‘our consumer economy’. Stopping the 'baddies', if that were possible, and ‘disappearing’ what we currently produce; shipping it somewhere else, shoving it in landfill, incinerating it... Instead of focusing on making it 'disappear' we have to work out why and how we make this stuff ‘appear'... Consider everything's disposabiliy from the moment it's made! Our species has to make decisions about this modern midden we've been building. Our waste is no longer just animal bone, excrement, mollusc shells, sherds - fascinating to archaeologists. In a few millennia the current waste most of us produce will lie in a thick stratum researched, in our absence, by highly evolved rats and cockroaches."*
2nd June 2018 - city centre trash. Just one of many such stinking piles
Ipsos 2nd June 2018. This is a not just Corfu's problem, nor Greece's. Being an island gives emphasis to a global crisis.
“This salad is so good”
“But there’s this new law about olive oil. You can’t just have it on the table with the vinegar, salt and pepper anymore”
“Why not?”
** ** **
“Anyone want that last slice of aubergine?”
“Yeah, there was a crash down at Doctor’s Bridge. A driver – probably Brit - turned into the wrong lane at the T-junction. I saw some of the debris swept on the verge”
“Anyone hurt?”
“So will the strike be over tomorrow? Yes, but there are people only booked for a week who’ve lost three days of their stay. Got their money back but lost half their holiday before another flight was laid on”
We spoke of childhood; how things were; always ready with the four Yorkshiremen sketch.
“You were lucky!” “I’ve written a love letter to Lin, addressed envelope. Licked flap. Bought a stamp. Put it in the post to her at Tzavros yesterday”
“Aaah”
“Same for my grandson. I’d like to think when he’s older and I'm gone he’ll have a look at one of my handwritten letters. Not sure if he can read joined up writing yet. This time I enclosed a couple of blue wing feathers I’d plucked from a road killed jay”
“You were lucky!”
“We are! We are!”
"Ton logariasmo, please"
"When are we doing this again?"
Looking north from Corfu
*Sunday mid-morning 3 June I was aware enough of a smell of something burning to look about for smoke. This was not a barbecue. I could see no signs across the landscape above or below the village. The smell lasted two hours or so. I wonder if this was a fluke draft of wind that might have brought remnants of the smoke of the burning rubbish on Paxos (over 40 miles south of Ano Korakiana) - waste set unofficially alight, as on other Greek islands; a desperate resort in the absence of other means of disposal.
Like other responsible citizens I place my waste neatly bagged at the bottom of our village - where someone else will have to make it disappear.
Waste on the road below Ano Korakiana - 4th June 2018
I've struggled to get into my head that as our governments have backed off regulation, UK rail fares have been increasingly subjected to 'sophisticated pricing strategies'. As I wipe egg flecks from my face this morning, a small satisfaction is that I have the flexibility - not being a bereaved relative needing to attend a funeral or travel across country to attend a sick parent - to ensure that team klugscheißer in charge of yield-management for CrossCountry Rail don't get their paws on my mulla, but at New Street at 0803 I had to send an e-mail to a friend's office in Winchester - thanks to WiFi in the station concourse:
Dear M. We're going to have to find some other way to meet up. I was vexed to find that X-Country are charging - even with my senior rail card - £69 return to Winchester; nearly £40 if I arrive after midday. The coach fare which I just checked is £26 but takes near 6 hours. I should have played the advance booking market months ago and probably got a better deal. I'm just learning to do this. It was I who sought this meeting so I'm especially sorry to be changing my plans so abruptly. Best, Simon
To quote from one of many bulletins I should have studied more - this one several years old:
HOW AIRLINE STYLE PRICING CAN BE APPLIED IN THE RAIL SECTOR. Changes in the regulation of rail fares open the way for train operating companies to further develop the kind of sophisticated pricing strategies used to maximise profitability in air transport. Success with such strategies depends on detailed analysis of customer preferences and demand patterns. This bulletin explores the economic principles that underpin 'airline-style pricing' and the ways in which they could be applied to passenger rail services in the UK.
Meantime a text message from my friend:
Simon. no problem. We can set up a meeting in May or June in London. Thanks. M
* * *
How does a small island dispose of the rubbish we humans create? It's a most intractable problem. A group in Temploni are campaigning against the way waste is being dumped, untreated and uncompacted, on a permanent site at Temploni in Corfu. This is a podcast that attempts, respectfully, politely and responsibly, to counter claims that there's no problem here:
One of Corfu's MPs, Ms. Angela Gerekou, (she's an architect - see also NISEA piece) supports Temploni residents' campaign and the Mayor of Corfu, Sotirios Micallef, has, according to this podcast, said he'll not order MAT against local protests at Temploni as has happened at Lefkimmi. This second video from AFTONMOSTV, producer of increasingly competent narrowcasts, shows a shrewdly arranged encounter with Danuta Hübner, an EU Commissioner who seems to have 'dropped in' to the island during an official visit to the regions of Ipeiros and Ionia Nisia between 25-28 February '09.
* * *
Many years ago my stepfather, in a provocative moment, remarked that watching football, as opposed to playing it, was "about the same league as glue-sniffing." Note at 1.09, on this YouTube clip about a disrupted 2nd division soccer match in Corfu between PAS Giannina (notorious for its fans 'fervour') and AO Kerkyra, the youth delivering the most insulting of Hellenic gestures (μούντζα) with the evident approval of a parent, and here's the wonderful Rena Vlachopoulo, from Ano Korakiana, delivering a swift double moutza to a driver in London for an Aegean Airlines commercial. When signalling 'thanks' or the number five, I try to remember to take care to hold my palm towards me to avoid being misunderstood.
* * *
Try Organoponicons! Cuba, forced by US blockade and the end of the Soviet Union, to abandon monocropping and pursue agricultural self-sufficiency is turning out to be a model for how, under - for the moment - less urgent conditions, we might change our ways of farming for food, especially in cities (BBCi Playerprogramme about Cuban farming this Sunday afternoon - doesn't play outside UK tho'). See submission to Birmingham's Big City Plan (BIG) on urban agriculture
* * *
Teacherdude, my favourite citizen journalist, English but firmly embedded in Thessaloniki has been attending the Documentary Festival there and is again critical of mainstream media in Hellas, myopic about 'alternative forms of information and Democracy':
...Most blogs are less than two years old and thousands discovered them just months ago. On the other hand there were bloggers and other contributors who went out into the streets in December, talked to those taking part in the protests and disturbances at a time when most mainstream coverage consisted of long distance pictures and analysis by those who were even further from the scene. The media formed a closed system, almost entirely self-referential...In a sense they reminded me of Hitler and his high command locked away in their bunker...cut off from the madness flowing around them giving orders to armies that no longer existed. A fantasy of war and of command. Similarly, the media talked and analysed the riots and protests that swept Greece last December using fragments of evidence, endless discussions based on a single act or image but with no background, nobody thought to go out and ask the most obvious question...
I guess this is why though I wasn't in Greece I had a Greek student friend in Birmingham who was following events and I made contact with and stayed in touch with a number of people on the ground, conversed with them on the net, followed their blogs and studied their images, which was how I came across Teacherdude's close observations and first got my head round the concept of the citizen journalist, now exemplified in the AFTONMOSTV clips from Corfu.
* * *
25 March 2009 in the capital 'People of Athens fight for green space':
ATHENS (AFP) — It is one of the most built up cities in Europe. Now fed-up residents of Athens -- enraged by the pro-development attitude of their politicians and emboldened by recent anti-government riots -- are taking matters into their own hands. Residents of the bohemian district of Exarcheia have scored a rare victory by turning a carpark into a small but much-needed park almost overnight.
The stories of environmental action in the Hellenic Republic are coming in fast nowadays. When I started this blog in 2007 Greek environmental politics was near invisible on the internet, with such sites as could be identified often moribund. No longer.
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
“I’ve written a love letter to Lin, addressed envelope. Licked flap. Bought a stamp. Put it in the post to her at Tzavros yesterday”
