My best Christmas present?

Drab monotonously wet weather persists, twirling the garden windmills, swaying tall leafless trees between the houses. The buffeting wind has become the sound of the city; its mechanical rumble muted - by recession, migration and privacy. The sodden faded greenery between the houses is abandoned, a march for crows and pigeons and the small birds that visit the seeds and nuts hanging outside our kitchen window.
On Christmas evening I was ill with norovirus, confined myself to bed and home between bouts of stomach wrenching vomiting, recovering on water and cups of tea and porridge, feeling frail. Lin caught this a few weeks back; Richard's Emma had it a day after me, and then Lin's Dad, back in Cannock, came down. Thanks to our diverse population Richard found a chemist open - Calstar Pharmacy on Lozells Road. She sold us loperamide hydrochloride - Diah-Limit - to calm my insides and oral electrolytic powder - Dioralyte - to replace water and salt. When your weak it's difficult to imagine being strong but within 24 hours I was fine - but not feeling like eating any left over turkey.
 "It might have been those oysters you had on Christmas eve" suggested Lin.
"It won't put me off oysters. That place serves the best in Birmingham and it's the first time I've ever felt ill after eating them. More likely someone with the virus didn't wash their hands"

For presents, Linda gave me a knapsack full of foreign procedurals, marmite and a remaindered library book Stories from Greek History by Marguerite Desmurger with a note inside...

Glancing through them I recall the enchantment of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, the words and the rich illustrations...

When Jason, the son of the dethroned King of Iolchos, was a little boy, he was sent away from his parents, and placed under the queerest schoolmaster that ever you heard of. This learned person was one of the people, or quadrupeds, called Centaurs. He lived in a cavern, and had the body and legs of a white horse, with the head and shoulders of a man. His name was...

Good Chiron taught his pupils how to play the harp ~ Edmund Dulac

Why do people want drugs when this stuff's legal, damn near free and keeps you high for the rest of your life. A bat squeak of glee at setting Hawthorne's 'queerest schoolmaster' among the semantic pigeons)

Jason appoints Tiphys to be helmsman ~ Edmund Dulac

*** *** ***
Maria Strani-Potts has published her latest book on-line - an e-book, When The Sun Goes Down - Island Stories. I want to read, but I yen for the heft of a book. Corfucius writes a review:      

I declare an interest: I know Maria and to sit and talk to her is an enjoyment separate from the powerful solitary pleasure of reading her. She is the most unwriterly writer I know: talk is talk, writing is writing; she gets the job done. I still treasure her Cat of Portovecchio [Η Γάτα του Πορτοβέκιο] as one of the most stunning novels I have read. Barely fiction for the pulses it taps; I live in Corfu and it opened my eyes and heart to my paradise home. This collection is short stories and her pacing is spot-on. I've worked in the book business and touted short stories by famed novelists who just haven't pulled it off in the challenging discipline of condensing it down. The PR puff talks of capturing 'the atmosphere and distinctive character of several different islands in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.' Piffle. No 'capture' about it; the reader is right there. As with the best movie scores, you don't notice the expertise and talent because you're engrossed in the world of the story.

SWIMMING IN BERMUDA: Tourist meets local. They talk in perfect pitch, Strani-Potts nailing the patois and the poshois. Like an onion, dark truths unpeel.

REHEARSING I DO: light-as-a-soufflé humour set on a French island, letting the deft words do the humour, no canned laughter, nothing rammed in your face . I wouldnt be surprised if readers who didn't 'get it' read this right thru, still enjoyed it, and wondered what had glided over their heads.

THE EXPLOITATION OF PANOREA: familiar to all who read 'To Poúlima tns Panoraías' [Το πούλημα της Πανωραίας], the no-punches-pulled exposé and battle-cry against the disgraceful desecration of our environment, in this case the ruthless exploitation of 'an island in the Ionian'. No guesses. 

ON THE BEACH: Tight and merciless. Women enjoying lulling and lolling over the usual evening ouzo, Suddenly a floating dead body. In the midst of pampered leisure, Life - red (in this case, bloating) in scale and claw. A wake-up call that Strani-Potts keeps local, makes universal. 

A remarkable collection. If I was handed them as separate sheaves, I'd not swear them as by the same nib. Chameleon brilliance. Mark of a bred-in-the-bone writer. Deserves to be spotted by some alert editorial assistant in one of the major houses and given the international readership Ms Potts deserves, and will achieve.

*** *** ***
Greek Reporter rounds up news stories of 2012 - a miserable inventory...
...There was such a tsunami of trouble for Greece that there literally was almost no good news because the real heroes: NGO’s helping the poor, the soup lines set up by the Greek Orthodox Church as the government abandoned people, doctors providing free clinics and services, volunteers reaching out the disenfranchised and disaffected, people coming together to create social grocery stores and help each other were back page stories as the media concentrated on the obvious mega-stories....and Amalia Melis cries out in an essay of passionate anger at her country's corruption and depravity Screaming From Inside the Sealed Vault:

I have traveled as north as Canada, as east as Japan, as South as Australia but the diagnosis is the same: Heart Greek, Mind American. What are the odds that I will find a cure? None. The thread always leads back to here the only place that makes sense to me: the island village my family is from: Apikia in Andros. With this disease ever present, I choose to live in a country that is undergoing one of the most turbulent changes to its social and financial makeup. You all know which one I mean: Bad, bad Greece...
....Greece has survived the brutality of the Nazis, the wrenching hatred of Civil War which followed. Parts of Greek society allowed a seven year military dictatorship to take hold, further tearing the country apart. Foreign powers were happy to frolic in the same bed with Greek dictators in the name of lucrative business deals. Greece was given hope when the Socialists were ushered into power with the winds of Change–those words brought me here in 1981 as a single young woman eager to discover the country my family comes from. It was a historic time when anything was possible. Anything; and the public, from left wing to right, would have supported that Prime Minister’s vision. That historic moment echoes inside me still; precisely because it was made barren, depleted, robbed, rejected, lost, forgotten by the ones whom I thought knew better.
While the rest of us regroup, cut back on superficial things like going out to a taverna, travel, extra trips to anywhere, my husband and I seriously focus on how to keep our eleven year old car running, how to maintain our home which was bought by paying off two bank loans to acquire it, school tuition, our teen’s needs and wants. How will we pay all the new extra taxes added on to other new taxes we have already paid on everything we own? We are not alone. Our friends are in the same boat and there is no end in sight to what the near future might hold for all of us.
I am thankful that I am not hungry. Yet. I still believe I can contribute to this new situation in Greece by looking for a ray of light...
...Even as I become poorer each day I also become richer. I have crossed paths with so many creative minds who linger here even against all odds. Something tells me I should keep plowing ahead by gathering writers from all over the world to come to Andros each summer to write and be part of a writing community I created with much love and dedication. I will continue to open my arms and welcome them to this country, this island that has inspired so many and will inspire new stories from the richness that is Greece. Something tells me I should linger with my daughter to listen to island songs played by my uncle’s santouri, by our friends’ tsambouna, laouto, violin at our village feasts. Something tells me I should give my daughter blog posts to ponder, give her reason to question political choices each of us makes, that she will one day make. While Greece undergoes growing pains, looks into the mirror to see its ugly and strong side, something tells me I must write to exist.

Amalia's diatribe brought to mind the words of the Ionian rizopasti Ilias Zervos, contemplating the consequences for the seven islands - the Septinsular Republic as might have been - embracing enosis with a Greece governed from Athens.

Zervos’ of Cephalonia believed Britain's power over lonian affairs did not decrease with the end of the Ionian Protectorate in 1864, instead the islands became ‘a Pandora's Box’ for British influence on Hellenic politics (*Calligas p.300). Zervos found himself opposing his radicalism to that of Zante's Constantinos Lombardos with his popular and nationalistic triumphing enosis with 'Mother Greece'. Instead of ‘freedom’, Athens had given Corfu and her sisters:

...the pollutant of political corruption, which has brought this miserable nation to its present deterioration and produced as many unscrupulous exploiters as a decaying corpse produces worms.

Eleni Calligas on p.301 of her thesis, quoting from Elia Zervos’ autobiography Βιογραθία Ηλία Ζερβού Ιαχωβάτου Συντεθείσα παρ αυτού (1880) edited by Ch. S. Theodoratos, Athens 1974

*** *** ***
There's a BBC Radio 4 programme on Lawrence Durrell in a few days

Is he being consigned to the memory of those who first encountered and were entranced by his writing - as I dip now and then into Prospero's Cell, invariably finding something I missed before - or is he a writer who might attract the attention of new readers? I read the Alexandria Quartets when they were passed on to me by my stepfather in the early 1960s. I don't recall my reading preferences at the time but I know I'd already enjoyed Joyce's Ulysses, been slowed down by Finnegan's Wake, been through just about all of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and read Lady Chatterley's Lover, A Passage to India, Lord Jim and loads of other wonderful stuff, Bond books, P.G. Wodehouse, Ernest Thompson Seton and The Lord of the Rings and and and...Durrell's four connected novels were breathtaking, my first encounter with the idea that there could more than a single first person narrative in one epic - Justine's, Balthazar's, Mount Olive's and Clea's. It was a baptism in the greater reality of subjectivity and the way genius could shape-shift - gender, age, ethnicity etc.

How many such works had been written in this way? Probably plenty but I hadn't some across anything like this before. In those days too I had all of Russia yet to go. It was not until I was 31 I read War and Peace and another decade before Don Quixote during a ramble along the coast of Galicia in 1975.
*** *** ***

Linda's posted this on Handsworth Helping Hands Facebook page (ref - scroll down here):

We are making preparations for using our Community Chest grant to help individuals in our area. Assistance is available to residents who are unable to do the required jobs themselves due to age, infirmity, medical problems or lack of necessary financial resources.
The work we envisage doing includes garden and rubbish clearance, home security measures such as fitting doorchains and window locks, small DIY jobs such as simple repairs and putting up shelves, supply and fitting of low energy light bulbs, emulsion painting of sitting room or client's bedroom.
Two levels of assistance apply:
1. Free work for residents requiring assistance and on low income.
2. Subsidised work for those requiring assistance on the grounds of age,
infirmity or medical problems.
APPLICATIONS OR REFERRALS BASED ON THESE CRITERIA ARE INVITED - RING 0845 250 1276 OR MESSAGE US VIA FACEBOOK
Please note that assistance is only available for those genuinely in need of help and the criteria will be vigorously applied.

Minutes from our last meeting:

MINUTES: Tue 18 Dec 2012, 1900 at 34 Beaudesert Road
Present: LB, DF, SB, MT (chair) 1.     Apologies and approval of minutes for 16 Aug’12: Minutes approved. Apologies from JR and LP
 2.     Finances and van MOT: On 4 Dec’12 MT phoned Sira Motors Ltd on Crompton Rd - 523 2603 - re them carrying out this year’s MOT on the transit van. They referred MT to Villa Cross Garage Ltd, 12 Heathfield Rd B19 1HB on 554 4963. Mike will arrange.                                                                      LB reported that the £4000 Community Chest Grant cheque was received in October and paid into HHH’s Unity Bank Account – giving us a credit balance of £16,947 3.     Training in use of power tools: SB described regulations surrounding the public or ‘official’ use of power tools by HHH and the legal challenges relating to Health and Safety and Public Liability. All and any public use of our tools will require us to invest in training to obtain essential accreditation. It was discussed whether we should sell the more dangerous power tools. It was agreed to delay training for the time being and continue to store the project’s power tools.
 4.     Community Chest grant progress: There was a discussion of work opportunities in line with the goals of the project. LB would seek contact with local places of worship, e.g. St Mary’s, Handsworth? United Reform Church? Sister Helen at the Lozells Neighbourhood Forum. SB would contact Andrew Simons. MT will ask NS to check his church. Rachel Chiu was suggested as a point of contact and source of information. We recognised that we need to generate work without generating demand we cannot fulfil.
There was discussion of identifying skilled local handypersons with liability insurance who’d passed CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) checks who HHH could employ to do work requiring skills we do not have.
It was suggested that HHH tidy at the top end of Livingstone Road allotments; tidy planters on Putney Ave, Leslie Rd and Church Ave, possibly printing notices saying ‘work done by HHH – find us on Facebook’. MT identified a request by a resident – Carol Reid – in Maxwell Ave to do work for them. SB would make contact.It was agreed to meet at 1200 noon next to the Wellington Road embankment on Thursday 3 January 2013 to do litter picking and bulb planting.
 5.    AOB: Next meeting to be on 3 January at 1900 at 34 Beaudesert Road. 

*** *** ***
I've posted one of my usual passing grumbles on Birmingham City Council's Grounds Maintenance website now their contractor has returned to the vexing habit of using herbicide on our grass verges.

I am Chair of Beaudesert Road Residents. 10 years ago we submitted a petition to the contractor responsible for mowing the grass verges on both sides of this street signed by every resident asking that there be no use of herbicide on street obstacles (trees, power poles, notices, etc). This has been been well observed until now. The effect of using herbicide to control the small amount of growth that is not cut by the mowers that normally maintain these verges was never a source of complaint, unlike the large spreading muddy bald patches round the many trees and notices on Beaudesert Road damaging the street scene, in some cases removing over 50% of the grass on some verges. I do not want to have to collect another petition on this. There are very few grass verged streets in Handsworth. We've gone to considerable trouble to persuade visiting motorists not to park their cars on the grass verges and we have our own voluntary litter picks from time to time. (SB 27 Dec 2012)

*** *** ***

This is when I may be ambushed by bruising sadness; when I'd be getting ready; my tickets bought; food packed for Oscar and my picnic on the journey, a good book to enjoy on the day-long train journey to Inverness to spend Hogmanay in Strathnairn. A friend wrote:

What I wanted to say was how marvellous your mother sounds. So elegant and delightful. so intelligent, interesting, compassionate. Funny and always right! What a wonderful woman to have as your own mum. How lucky you are to have her genes. I know how sad you must be feeling. I still talk to my dear father - who died in 1988 - every day. Such a super memorial tribute - even in note form on your blog. Since we began our discourse you have walked your daughter into marriage, seen the birth of Oliver , and watched your beloved mother die. How blessed are you? Most of us don't overlap with our loved ones...Probate is so dreary, I agree...You clearly have the best of both your mother and father within. And a supportive wife. So onwards and outwards we must go. Love and a hug

Strathnairn in winter from Mains of Faillie

*** *** ***
Our loveliest Christmas card, sent from the Greek side, The Entry of The Mother of God to The Temple, Εἴσοδος τῆς Παναγίας Θεοτόκου. The High Priest stands on the bema at the entrance to the curtained sanctuary, receiving the Mother of God, Her parents, Anne and Joachim follow just behind; behind them, almost invisible, young women hold tapers. The shadow of the pillar sets off the light that shines from the holiest part of the temple.

There are golden birds, buds and flowers on the carved surround topped by the mandylion - a cloth not-made-by-hands - acheiropoietos αχειροποίητα - the whole crowned by cherubs. This painting was made over two centuries ago in the Ionian Islands. A mystery indeed. I thought it showed Mary and Joseph bringing the boy Jesus to the Temple. Instead our Christmas card shows an event observed as one of the holy days in the Orthodox Church - 21 November I think. It's an episode in the life of Mary told in the apocryphal Book of James more or less suppressed by Latin Christianity, product, apparently, of curiosity among early Christians about the life of Christ's parents and grandparents. This text demonstrates a revelatory mix of  fear and wonder at the idea of bringing a female, even a young woman into a place from which they have been immemorially excluded....

...And the child became three years old, and Joachim said: Call for the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let them take every one a lamp, and let them be burning, that the child turn not backward and her heart be taken captive away from the temple of the Lord. And they did so until they were gone up into the temple of the Lord.
And the priest received her and kissed her and blessed her and said: The Lord hath magnified thy name among all generations: in thee in the latter days shall the Lord make manifest his redemption unto the children of Israel. And he made her to sit upon the third step of the altar. And the Lord put grace upon her and she danced with her feet and all the house of Israel loved her.
And her parents gat them down marvelling, and praising the Lord God because the child was not turned away backward.
And Mary was in the temple of the Lord as a dove that is nurtured: and she received food from the hand of an angel...[The Book of James: 7.2 -8.1]

I'm curious as to when the sorting, censoring and selection went on that determined what texts were to be labelled canon and what apocryphal. I can sort of see why a venerable set of scholars might have decided that the Book of James was a little 'iffy'. It's not that the canon shys at violence and sex but I can see the problem when Salome, Mary's midwife, checks - with her finger - that even after the Saviour's born Mary remains a virgin and Salome for her doubt finds her hand burning.

...and Salome made trial and cried out and said: Woe unto mine iniquity and mine unbelief, because I have tempted the living God, and lo, my hand falleth away from me in fire. [Book of James 10.1]

But an angel tells her to hold the baby. Salome is forgiven; her hand restored. That does sound a wee apocryphal. Nonetheless in this text, the Orthodox Church preserves an account that tells more about Mary then anything I've encountered in the Latin canon. It's true that Titian depicts the young Mary entering the temple, so I suspect the Book of James has wider currency, but how well these two depictions of the event exemplify Leigh Fermor's essay in Mani - chap 15 - on the contrasting way artists, West and East, depict the foundational events and figures of Christianity - the west emotive, expressive and individual; the east, hieratic, symbolic, universal. In the Christmas card Mary is untouchable mysterious ineffable hardly mortal, a small adult; in the Titian, she's a young vulnerable but heart-achingly confident girl who might be my daughter or young sister. In the Ionian icon Mary, parents and priest hold their arms and hands in a codified way eschewing the expression and naturalism of the Titian where Mary approaches the High Priest a little like Victorian Lord Fauntleroy's first meeting with the Earl of Dorincourt. It's interesting that the Ionian Icon is dated around 1700 long after  the influence of humanism and secularism had led western religious portraiture away from the formalism of this icon, in such contrast to its wooden frame - carved as free flowing and naturalistic. The icon is unsigned, its form predetermined, a means to worship and reverence; deliberately eschewing emotion or sentiment. Mary is no the longer a mortal young girl but a small sacred adult, not a human woman but part of a sacred assemblage, free of time and space. Titian has painted a story to display in an academy of sculpture, painting, and civil architecture, fluid, colourful, lively, evocative of a real event in space and time, a spectacle to be enjoyed and explored. The icon, like all true icons, is meant to be a kind of enchanted surface through which, like a dark looking glass, a worshiper may approach, and pass through, to the mystery beyond. Which of the two pictures seems most dated?

The Presentation of the Virgin Mary by Titian (1534-38) Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

Liverish weather

...Tomorrow at 1230 the Chancellor will announce details of the Comprehensive Spending Review. I gave blood for the ninety second time today at the donor centre in New Street. Two nurses did a sort of double act routine around me, cheering me up as they practised calming nervous donors. The sky was clear as I cycled home, only clouding over in the afternoon, rain growing heavier with the dusk.
Yesterday we got round to lifting and removing part of our kitchen top. Its imitation wood grain formica has lifted  off the slab of chipboard we installed twenty years ago. Washing up water has been soaking into it for years. It's become a disintegrating sponge covering a damp fetid space. We detached its heavy soggy mass. Pieces of it detached and fell on floor, smelling like leaf mould. Several rather beautiful nacreous slugs had attached themselves to the underside of the sodden work surface. I dumped the mess on our driveway beside pulped masses of paper set aside for recycling. Our road and its damp green verges is full of litter blown from recycling boxes put out for today's collection. Rain has soaked the litter pasting it to the ground amid caked decaying leaves. The air is clammy and chill. It's not that cold, certainly not freezing, yet I find it difficult to keep warm. I've got a toothache and no dental appointment until Monday. I'm in a condition that used to be called liverish, where the weather outside matches an interior feeling of torpidity.
In pursuit of learning more about the Balkans, I've bought The Bridge over the Drina by Ivo Andrić, recommended to me by a Serbian couple I spoke to in the shop on the top of Mount Pantokrator a month ago. I've also ordered another Ismail Kadare - The Successor. I'm engrossed in Maria Strani's The Cat of Portovecchio. This is an author I've met and spoken to; a Corfiot and a Greek who feels as strongly about the island as anyone I know or don't know. Born and raised on Kerkyra Maria knows what others have discovered; not a disappointed returnee griping at the desecration of an invented paradise, but raging eloquently against the despoliation of her birthplace - not by foreigners but by her neighbours and countrymen. She only hints at such feelings in The Cat, a book which, without sentimentality or nostalgia, records in absorbing, sometimes compelling detail, the worst and best of life in Portovecchio - a barely fictional Corfiot village - 60 years ago, just before the world changed forever.

Maria just sent me a message on Facebook: Please do send me five words that explain your love for Corfu; just words, nor phrases.

Me: Πέντε λέξεις; Το χωριό, ελιές, φιλοξενία, τραγούδι, θάλασσα...but you know that I am so blindly in love with Greece from my youth as to be a useless critic. The place makes me cry just to hear it spoken of when I'm not there and I count it my greatest good fortune to have the privilege and joy of living in part of it. So if you want any sort of sensible thought about the government or the economy better wash your hands of me, dear Maria. xx Simon Σάïμον και Λίντα (If you'd given me a 6th word I would have added Linda my wife even when we are arguing as we often do)

When I said ελιές I meant τα ελαιόδεντρα - the olive trees - the canopy of green and silver leaved trees which in their abundant enveloping proliferation, thanks to ancient Venetian incentives to the country people of Corfu, are the island's signature, matched in the colour of doors, shutters and railings.

and when I said το χωριό - village - I meant especially Democracy Street - Οδός Δημοκρατίας  - in Ano Korakiana where gradually we are becoming friends, and when I said τραγούδι I really meant the music as well as the singing, and when I said τη θάλασσα I meant...

And when I said 'the sea' I meant...

...and I've liked to have added μαγείρεμα - cooking. Maria in the Cat writes like Homer about the exquisite detail of preparing meals, for pleasure, for distraction, for love...and when I said η φιλοξενία - an untranslatable melding of kindness, friendship and hospitality - my heart becomes too full of remembered and anticipated happiness to write with more than borrowed words:

εαν ταις γλωσσαις* των ανθρωπων λαλω και των αγγελωναγαπη δε μη εχω, γεγονα χαλκος ηχων κυμβαλον αλαλαζον. και εαν εχω προφητειαν και ιδω τα μυστηρια πανταωστε ορει μεθυστανην. αγαπην δε μη εχωουδε ημη. η αγαπη μακροθυμηη αγαπη ου ζηλει, η αγαπη ου περπερευεται, ου φυση ουτε. η αγαπη παντα στεγει, παντα πιστευει, παντα ελπιζει, παντα υπομενειη αγαπη ουδεποτε εκπιπτει ειτε δε προφητειαι καταργηθησονταιειτε γλωσσαι παυσονταιειτε γνωσεις καταργηθησετε Νυνη δε μενει, πιστις, ελπις, αγαπη, τα τρια ταυτα, μειζον δε τουτων η αγαπη.

*The music link above is the 'Song for the Unification of Europe' composed by Zbigniew Preisner, sung in Greek by Elżbieta Towarnicka - an abridged version of 1 Corinthians:13, from the soundtrack of Krzysztof Kieślowski film 'Bleu'.
** **  ** **

House of Commons 20 Oct 2010: ' Today we have naming of parts...'

Damp and grey

Thursday was damp and grey and stayed so most of the day. I rather like such weather. With my folding bicycle, cleaned and oiled, I walked it a hundred yards down the narrow path below our house to the bus stop on the lower road. Just after 9 the bus arrived. Someone at the bus stop had already counted out the €1.70 from small change in my palm. Another reminded the driver to load my bicycle in the hold.

After these typical small kindnesses I just sat back and read up the Kallicrates Plan for Hellenic local government reorganisation in Athens News and in 20 minutes we were in town from where I cycled to the Liston, after getting a few good photographs of the magnificent Kapodistrias statue. Jim Potts had kindly agreed to let me run by him, my chat about the Lord High Commissioners next week. We met at Zisimos on the Liston, a delectable bar of old wood, mirrors and glass with a high ceiling that had looked a bit too exclusive. Just before 11-o-clock I entered hesitantly, parking my Brompton by the umbrella stand, then chose a table amid conversation among older people and no piped music. Jim arrived within minutes.

We enjoyed coffee, chocolate, mezes and a long and fascinating chat about his new book – the first recent well sourced popular history of the Ionian Islands and Epirus that I’ve come across, and due out in a few weeks. Jim had copied me a chapter on ‘The Lord High Commissioners’ (pp.201-209) from a 1969 book by Arthur Foss on the Ionian islands – very encouraging and helpful.

We had ouzos, met other regulars and were then, to my delight joined by Jim’s wife, Maria Strani whose writing includes the apocalyptic story of The Pimping of Panorea. When I praised her for it, she remarked gently that it made no difference, reminding, even as I mentioned many recent concerns about the environment in Greece, of the saying that “Knocking at the door of someone dead brings no response.”

Thoroughly content with further introductions to English and Greek customers, one of whom – Dr Spyros Giourgas – gave me his card and promises to gain me access to the old Ionian Parliament building, I left for the Green Bus station, caught the smaller 2-o-clock bus to Sokraki, since the one to Ano Korakiana didn’t leave until until four. Again my bicycle was loaded and unloaded for me. In just under 40 minutes - my fare €3.40 - we were past Ipsos and Pirgi, heading up 30 hairpin bends below Pantocrator and in the mists beyond Spartillas at the left hand turn down to Zygos where another bus awaited us. Everyone but me and the driver got off in Zygos and, with me as a lone passenger, the bus headed slowly up into deeper mist, dropping me by stretch of road in Sokraki just above the twenty nine hairpin bends that led down to Ano Korakiana.

In the quiet an eagle mewed. Muffled by mist, I could hear children playing somewhere in Sokraki. I freewheeled contentedly down the finely constructed serpentine route to Ano Korakiana, bend by bend by bend, until abruptly dropping below cloud cover above little Agios Isadoras, I saw sunlight on a patch of green far below. I could even make out the city I’d left an hour earlier. I was home for tea in Ano Korakiana a few minutes later.

** ** **

Ionian radicalism during the British Protectorate 1815-1864

Inequality unexpressed is accepted as the way of things. Good masters can even make good servants. Oppression, until it is perceived and named, is endured, sometimes evident in madness. Thus it seems to have been on the Ionian islands - dull unrecorded animosity until the emergence of the rizospastai gave voice to a philosophy of criticism and eventually direct resistance, through armed action, futile and easily dealt with by the soldiery, and then effective political activity - overt opposition in rhetoric and text, satire, cartoon, and more covert acts of subversive impoliteness – refusing to observe public rituals to celebrate the status quo, absenting from ceremonies of government, mutterings and murmurings.

The soil for radicalism in the Ionian Islands was fertilised by the socio-economic structures of the Venetian era, beginning to dissolve with the decline of Venice, then abruptly disrupted at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries by the occupying forces of French revolutionary republicanism under Napoleon, but partly recovered under the British, whose Protectorate extended first to protecting the pre-revolutionary status quo, though the British disappointed those prominent families who hoped this included preserving their exclusive powers.

The British, in Corfu and London were concerned about maintaining control of one of their possessions in the face of the jealous interests of co-signatories – Russia, Prussia and Austria – of the Treaty of Paris which had agreed Britain’s accession to the Ionian Protectorate. They did this in what was then the normal way, through conferring patronage on different groups within the Ionian polity, at the same giving sometimes more, sometimes less, support for the emergence of a gradual form of liberal parliamentary franchise to replace what had decayed into an archaically exclusive aristocracy of Venetian landowners in a caste society where the upper classes spoke Italian and lived off a peasant majority who did not.

On Corfu, the Grand Assembly of the cittadini had once been open to all prosperous members of island society. Eleni Calligas’ 1994 thesis reports how this body gradually lost its ‘demotic element’:

Increasingly specific qualifications were required for membership. Each island Assembly elected a smaller Council to conduct the business of government and appoint officials, it was composed of 150 members in Corfu and, eventually, Zante which, although a smaller community, was very prosperous, and limited to thirty in Cerigo. To protect the power that such exclusive franchise conferred, the Corfiot cittadini began closing their ranks, constituting themselves into a separate social class of signorini [nobles], limiting the families allowed to participate in the Assembly and, to avoid confusion, introducing the Libro d'oro in 1572.

Via representations to Venice the Corfiot nobility refined its privileges. By 1641 those who did not own city homes were excluded from the Assembly. Although being an apothecary, goldsmith or mercier (σωποπωλης) was viewed as compatible with nobility in Venice, the land owning Corfiot signorini:

...looked upon any form of mercantile activity with unrestrained aristocratic contempt. Citizenship…involved furnishing proof that a particular individual, as well as his father and forefather, were the issue of a legitimate marriage, inhabitants of their own city residence and not contaminated by the practice of any menial occupation. [Eleni Calligas pp 9-10 whose rich references on this alone include G.Mavrogiannis, 1889, History of the lonian Islands 1797-1815, 2 Vols., Athens (Ιστορία των Ιονίων Νήσων αρχομένη η Ενωση της Επτανησου) and L. Zois 1955, History of Zakinthos (Ιστορία τως Ζακυθνου)]

It may have been expressed nationalistically as a British-Hellenic issue, but the strongest source of animosity towards the British, as a small number of High Commissioner’s, especially John Colborne Lord Seaton, but also Lord Nugent and Gladstone, recognised, lay in perceptions among the poor majority of the islands that the British were allies of the landed aristocracy, their successors and allies among the middle classes; that they worked through them and encouraged them through patronage. Such opinions were realistic. On those occasions when the poor reacted - sometimes violently - against those who effectively owned them, British were seen to apply justice in the interests of the propertied. Thus were the rizopastai, given further encouragement by the ideas of 1848 and the success on the mainland of the Hellenic Revolution against Turkey, able to turn class injustice into a philosophy part nationalistic, part revolutionary, against the British ‘occupiers’.

Over half a century, some British governors resisted this process vehemently, others sought to channel it into their own vision of a mature democracy, some pragmatically, some idealistically, until wider events focused their attention on achieving a dignified abandonment of the Protectorate.

** ** **

The Kallicrates Plan for the reform of local government ~ 2010

Greece is divided administratively into nomes, which are further separated into eparchies. Lefkas and Zante are nomes; the nome of Cephalonia includes Ithaca as an eparchy. Kithira is now attached to a non-Ionian nome, and the eparchy of Paxos is part of the nome of Corfu.

This is an extract from a short description of local government in our area of Greece. All this seems to be about to change. What will happen to Demos Faiakon and the other island municipalities including Demos Kerkyron and the Ionian Eparchies under PASOK’s recently proposed Kallikrates Plan for reforming Greek local government? These measures, are, like the local government reorganisations set in motion by our Redcliffe-Maud Report in 1974, based on a managerial philosophy, not so much antagonistic towards local democracy as distrustful of its claims to be democratic.

Kallikrates seems designed to address the suspicions of the already powerful in Greece that many of its smaller units of local government, far from being local democracies – efficient, transparent, representative and accountable to the local population - provide havens for self-interested factions habituated to dipping into the purses of that local population to feather the nests of those able to buy influence over local decisions. We see, as a consequence, contempt for government – as much among its corrupting beneficiaries as among those excluded. We see the resentment caused by local government officials who ignore complaints about a noisy neighbour who won’t control his dogs, a business that plays illegally loud music at anti-social hours, a householder who let’s rubbish accumulate and spread from his property, a developer who pours concrete, bulldozes trees and builds despite planning prohibitions.

This isn’t just a Greek problem, though Greece may have recognised it later than some other European countries. It’s a problem of modernity – where the definition of community is no longer self-evident and where the idea of local councils which can assess local needs in a professional way and formulate, through debate and participation, the voice of the communities they are meant to govern, is a novel idea, requiring new methods of measurement and new sets of values about the meaning of local democracy.

In our fragmented mobile world it isn’t easy to define ‘community’, measure ‘need’ and express a unique local ‘voice’ and so, as in the UK, it has proved easier to resort to rational centralised solutions that rely on market forces and privately provided services to a more individualised population of consumers rather than voters.

Across Europe there seems to be a slow retreat from representative democracy. Policy develops away from centres of elected political authority. Even the most senior politicians are constrained by decisions being made by shadowy figures whose relationship to democratic government has altered from being agents of government to being its principals - to steal a quote from my colleague Prof Chris Skelcher - an expert on the subject of democratic deficit.

Most of us have little idea how this works. We struggle to find ways to research the process - avoiding conspiracy theory for its one tenth accurate silliness. The Kallikrates Plan is presented for public consultation on the web with a view to creating blueprint that can be voted into law by MPs in May 2010, and implemented over six months, in time for municipal elections in November. It involves abolishing Greece’s 54 Prefectures and 22 other administrative units including eparchies. In their place will be 7 regional unelected agencies, their chiefs appointed by central government. These new regions will be responsible for policies on immigration, waste disposal (not collection), public works and highways as well as land use in town and country and the management of EU funding in each region - referred to as ESPA infrastructure development funds. The regional chiefs will appoint deputy regional chiefs with authority similar to current prefects. 1034 existing municipalities will be reduced by two thirds -1034 to 370 - responsible for civil protection, welfare, public health inspections and building permits. There will be something equivalent to our Audit Commission, checking regularly on local expenditure – the State Auditor’s Council - and something that looks like a scrutiny function based in Athens to maintain oversight of local policies – measures aimed at increasing public understanding of things are being done, what is often called ‘transparency’.

No names of specific councils are mentioned in the consultation document, - an obvious and sensible move to avoid contention during consultation - so I’m not sure just when the actual Kalliktrates plan will be presented for Parliament. What a tremendous test of the political will and weight of Papandreou’s still new government.

** ** **

Corfucius keeps me in touch with all I want to know of our previous PM and his encounter with the Chilcot and the Thomas Cook Corfu case.

To the Highlands

Waiting at Glasgow Queen Street Station for a train to Inverness

Slipped the surly bonds of New Street with my book to read - High Albania - and my DVDs to watch - An Exile in Paradise - a picnic of goodies around two baguettes of smoked salmon and cream cheese made up for me by Lin, and Oscar of course, on his lead and in and out of his igloo, used by now to long train journeys. All day we head north, almost a routine; getting at mid-afternoon to handsome Glasgow Central Station; then a walk - sunny and warm, drawing my bag across dry pavements at last - to Glasgow Queen Street, then three and a half hours more via the magic ladder - Stirling, Dunblane, Gleneagles, Perth, Dunkeld & Birnham, Pitlochry, Blair Atholl - then beside the road and the rivers through steep Drumochter Pass - on to Dalwhinnie, Newtonmore, Kingussie, Aviemore, Carrbridge, from where I phone my mother's house to announce that I'll arrive at 7.34 in Inverness. "What! You said 31 July. Get a taxi." Minutes later as the train scurries downhill in a great wide circle over the viaduct above the Clava Stones, she relents and we're met by Sharon at the station and so up the A9 to Strathnairn and with Oscar squeaking with excitement up the dirt track to Brin Croft and the greeting terriers.

** ** **

In the Town Hall, Liverpool

Over the last few days Charlie and I have been helping run meetings in Liverpool. The idea is to help managers and politicians and other community representatives in the city’s five official, and relatively newly defined neighbourhoods, to work better; promoting clearer understanding of roles and responsibilities among members and officers, assisting officers to apply their professional expertise to politically led agendas, helping councillors get the best from their officers, identifying barriers and challenges being experienced, and thinking together about ways to improve communication and relationships. Each programme, over a couple of hours, has involved:

Welcome and introductions; objectives and ground rules (Chatham House), the reasons people are here; a look at the Liverpool context – councillors and officers initially at separate tables seeing how much they know about the governance arrangements in the city; how well people think they know one another – a mapping exercise (example from elsewhere) putting faces to places and roles with flip charts, photos of members and a plan of the city. "What don’t you know?" "Does it matter?"What do you need to know?” I give a talk on managing at the political interface, sharing my research across local government, with emphasis on working at the point where politics, management and professionalism converge – or fail to.

Then politicians and managers worked together on typical problems – critical incidents – talking around solutions but also around vision, values and skills. How do we make neighbourhood government work?

Charlie and I took notes for a summary to be circulated to everyone involved and in a morning off - successive workshops were afternoon and evening - I was a tourist, travelling by underground from Lime Street, surfacing beyond Birkenhead's seafront, crossing the top of the Wirral to West Kirby where I sought the street where Denys Rayner had lived when he got married. Under a turgid sky I cycled along the front - a brisk north westerly encouraging the wind surfers and dingy sailors on the marine lake where Rayner had taught his eldest son, Martin, to sail before WW2. Back on the train I got off at Hamilton Square and took the Royal Iris from Woodside a few minutes across the Mersey to its pier below the Liver Building.

* * *

I like it when names and actions mix. I've recently given high marks to a thesis by one of our students, Susanna Farmer, Town Clerk of Wisbech Town Council, here, with her father Reginald Phillips, on Graduation Day 14 July 2009. She's written a Master's thesis about ways councils like hers can pursue their duty under the 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act to protect and encourage local food growing. What delighted me was her analysis of the astute way the council, with its limited powers and even fewer resources, has found inventive ways to get local land brought back into cultivation as allotments and how as the officer of the council she's been able to help its elected members pursue that policy.

* * * Iason Athanasiades released from Iranian detention after being arrested, beaten and interrogated has written down a list of the books he'd like to have had in prison along with the hand annotated Holy Quran he was allowed and the copy of his mother Polymnia's PhD thesis on Julian the Apostate brought to his cell by the Greek Ambassador in Teheran and swiftly confiscated by his guards.

18 July 2009 ATHENS — Jail cells — alongside yoga studios — are the last bastions of true inner peace. When I became the first foreign journalist in decades to be thrown into Iran's notorious Evin Prison I was exposed to a mixture of intense interrogations amid long stretches of nothingness. Stripped of my laptop, cell phone and all human contact, I was forced to confront my ego and get used to spending time with me, myself and I.

The only printed matter in my jail cell was a copy of the Holy Quran. It was a previous inmate’s well thumbed edition that had come loose from its hardback spine. A neat hand had written several religious aphorisms in Arabic on its pages. Imagining I was resting against the thick pillar of one of the beautifully-carpeted Ottoman mosques of Istanbul, my adopted city, I spent hours reading the handwritten calligraphy.

On the second week the Greek ambassador was finally granted a 10-minute meeting. Leaving, he presented me with a copy of my mother’s Oxford Ph.D. thesis whose Greek edition he had happened to be reading. My guards confiscated it for “inspection” and I never saw it again. Perhaps they thought the perfidious Greeks had gone to the trouble of printing a book for their man containing disguised instructions within its unfamiliar alphabet.

Those were the only two books I saw. For the son of two academics who grew up in a house with floor to ceiling bookcases and whose only indulgence is haunting the aisles of secondhand bookstores in Boston, London and Istanbul, denying me reading matter was more painful than torture. Every day, I called the jailers and requested my mother’s book. Some of them visibly struggled with the concept that a woman could have written a book and looked at me as if I were trying to trick them. Others promised to convey the message but promptly forgot about me.

So I made reading lists in my head (see the list with hyperlinks to the books)

Several are recommendations by my Ministry of Intelligence interrogators. Others are themed on incarceration and were suggested by my friends.....

How I can relate to the 'torture' of being bereft of books, yet I have been in homes of people who's company I enjoy where there are none. These things vary greatly. For some to be deprived of TV might be 'torture' while, for me, such deprivation could be a small compensation for losing my freedom.

Perhaps the most telling book on Iason's list is: Ervand Abrahamian's Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Iran. Written in 1999 Athanasiades described this as 'the definitive book on torture both in the Islamic Republic and under the Shah. The book lays out in fascinating detail and with extensive documentation how torture in Iran differs from elsewhere: victims are brutalised until something other than information is obtained — a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim whose honour, reputation and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide. Recent examples of confessions include: Iranian-Canadian sociologist Ramin Jahanbegloo’s interview to a state-run news agency following his release(see this re the 'confession' and see also); Haaleh Esfandiari’s televised confession in a hotel room presented in documentary format on state-run television; and Roxana Saberi’s signed confession in prison.' And see this, with the 'before' and 'after' images from Global Voices about the trial of the moderate reformist Mohammed ali Abtahi

* * * I'm engrossed in Kadaré's Broken April. Stark writing of a stark landscape, full of the intensity and detail of a world where one tiny action can change everything. There are moments in the book where I hear the weather among the mountains and see the words of its characters punctuated by powerful music.

... "at once terrible, absurd and fatal, like all the important things." "Like all the really important things," she repeated ... "Yes" Bessian said "because to an Albanian a guest is a demi-god."(p.77).

Like all great writing, unlike film, the artist has not purloined the reader's imagination. Kadaré sets it galloping. I have an intimation that my thoughts have turned with enthusiastic curiosity towards Albania because there is a key to understanding a queue of confusions I've entertained about Greece and her neighbours.** ** ** On 26 July I commented on a blog by the Corfu author Maria Strani-Potts containing her parable The Pimping of Panorea

I do not regard the pimping of panorea as only the fault of the locals. There are national and vaster forces - international traffic in the abuse of Panorea

Sunday 2 Aug:

Dear Simon. You are right, but honestly when I see what the Corfiots and the international operators/exploiters do on a daily basis, what else can I think? I live here, I am a Corfiot, I love my birthplace, and I appreciate its unique values; I want my compatriots to have good health care, good mains water to drink, better means of transport. If they have to own a car it would be nice to have a place to park it. I would like to see the Corfiots use the land in an appropriate manner, and getting rid of the rubbish in a sensible way. My book Panorea was about Corfu. I have lived in many more countries than an average person and I do know the strengths and weaknesses of different countries' policies and strategies, but I do care passionately about this island, and everyday I am shocked by the shortsightedness and incompetence of our local politicians. I work in the hospital as a volunteer and I am dreading the day that I might end up there. I think am correct in comparing many of my compatriots to pimps, because this is what they are vis-a-vis the unscrupulous exploitation of the island. They are greedy and insensitive and we all have to suffer the consequences. My heart bleeds to see what has happened to this island. Kind regards Maria

Reply by return:

Dear Maria. Thanks for taking this newcomer seriously. Like a chicken who’s egg is hatched by a duck then tries one day to swim – to the dismay of both species - I was hopelessly imprinted on Greece by my father John, who married an Athenian, Maria, at a little church in Hermou Street long ago. (The Greek Orthodox Church accords you a second chance which, since they had both been divorced, was much appreciated in 1949). Both he and Maria are gone. They left me almost incapable of faulting Greece. I'm aware of the burden imposed on Greeks by Philhellenes like me, and so, thank goodness, have been willing to study the flaws of a beloved land, especially in Corfu, now Linda and I spend so much time there. Your writing on this turned out to be a beautifully crafted account (and that’s only the English version) of a tragedy affecting the whole world. Yet without humans landscapes and soundscapes are pitiless nature. With them they can be loved and, as you know too well, destroyed - the aboriginal story of the Fall, in modern terms, the Tragedy of the Commons. I would never forgo the apple (tho’ cowardly as Adam, I might blame it on ‘the woman’ - as men do) but what a Pandora’s Box* was released (blaming it on the woman again!) when men first doted on Kerkyra. If we can sort ‘our’ (the pronoun is intended – ‘our’ not ‘your’) problem on Corfu - a race between our nature and our intelligence - we might just be able to sort it out in other places. There are good brave people everywhere ...When your heart bleeds for your home, you are weeping in Corfu over the harm our flawed species is doing to the whole world. Best wishes. Simon

*It never was a box. it was a jar. Pandora's πιθος. But I read this tale as a child - probably before I read Genesis. I remember Arthur Rackam's picture of Pandora.After Prometheus stole the secret of fire, Zeus ordered Hephaestus to create Pandora as just part of his punishment for men. Pandora, among other gifts, such as curiosity, had been given a large jar. She was told by Zeus to keep it closed. She opened it. I would. All of the evils mankind had not known escaped from the jar. It seems obvious now that Zeus knew Pandora would take the lid off the jar. Why leave Hope at the bottom?