September in the village ~ Σεπτεμβρίου στο χωριό

“I wish we could take Amy and the family to this island” I said to Lin "With Oliver going to school" – his first day on Friday - "their visits here will be even more hemmed by the airfare pricing” 
"They can’t come when the ferry runs” Only July, August and September. 
"Yeah! Fares gauged to school dates!"

Vido

Lin and I were on the ferry to Vido - a sturdy caique that chugs hourly between the Old Harbour and a jetty on Vido, a kilometre opposite. We walked with our swimming things on a rough track to a cove we know with a jetty and a narrow shore to lay out our picnic blanket and wade into the clear warm water. “It’s so easy to float!” 

I drew long breaths bobbing gently, awash in the sea, sun piercing my closed eyelids. Later, drying in the breeze, we read until our beach slipped into the shade of overhanging pines. Behind the bar opposite the city an Englishwoman, northeast accent, speaking Greek with ease, remembered us. 
“Hullo again” she smiled, serving a cold beer and coke.  

We asat with others among the pink brown trunks of tall pines. Amid sparkling wavelets ships of every size plied back and forth. A cruise liner called sonorously for her passengers’ return from the city. After a while its enormous bulk was slipping soundlessly out to sea. A blot appeared in the dazzling sea, resolving into a shape 
“A rowing boat?” 
“That’s our ferry” said Lin 
“No it isn’t” 
“Yes it is. Look” 
The silhouette of a wedge had grown into our caique returning with lots of people to land, taking fewer of us back to Corfu.

The next day, Sunday, we rose late. 
I get up, empty the bins into a plastic bag, wee in the compost just topped with a swept heap of summer-shed leaves and blackened lemon husks. 

Wasps are everywhere. Their ceaseless buzz has an edge, different from bees “Not one of ours?” We’ve both been stung. After the first pain stings become an itch. Milder than English wasps. I sweep the space under the balcony; play bountiful with the cats that beg at the door, casting them handfuls of dried pet food – comforting routines. I’ve been cutting back wisteria, forever trying to play constricting serpent with our wood balcony; also tall soft-spiked branches of bougainvillea insinuated between the decking. From the public path where it’s piled, with gloved hands I stuff big black plastic sacks with chopped stalks and leaves. Six sacks. I take them to the top of the steps to Democracy Street; collect the car and fill it with green waste to dump in the first empty wheelie bin I find, outside the village beside the Sidari Road.

“Last day we have the car. Let’s go to Mon Repos, to the beach there”

Lin was in a vexed study. Tired out from responsibilities in England. I irritated her. We didn’t speak, driving through town to the Kanoni road, not easy to find, but we know the route so well. Parked by the gates to the palace, we strolled a broad shaded zigzag drive, past the lovely house, and then by a roundabout route, since we’d missed the direct track, we came to a strand deeply covered in dead dry seaweed, absorbing sound. All along a narrow stone jetty, reaching 80 metres out to sea, were Greeks with colourful towels resting on Sunday afternoon; one I saw, stood near the end of the jetty, ample flesh shaking a little. I waited for a resounding splash. She poised herself, splayed feet washed by gentle waves, and entered the water with a perfect dive, supple as a seal, disappearing, surfacing, disappearing, surfacing further than I’d have expected, shaking her wet black hair, diving again, heading seaward where the shores of the mainland stretched south, a hazy outline of flawless blue china. Mother Greece. 

The jetty below Mon Repos

Others on the Mon Repos jetty read, listened with earphones, sunbathed, chatted on their phones and to each other. A man like the charioteer came down on his bicycle, lent it against a tree, washed himself in the water of the Kardaki spring at the back of the beach. I stumbled clumsily into the water by the shore, made my way around the length of the jetty and stumbled back out. Lin sat and read. 
“Shall we go now?” I said 
“If you like” 
We ascended by the easier route through old woods of acacia , eucalyptus, scots pine and cypress. On the Paleo road home towards Ano Korakiana we stopped at Emeral for ice cream – mine dark bitter chocolate, Lin peaches and cream. 
“I’ll take the car back tomorrow. Come back by bus” 
“I’ll give you the money”

*** ***

Monday down at the airport I handed in our little hire car, paying with an envelope of cash, took my pannier and bike from the rear-seat, unfolded and pedalled into town, stopping at the new Green Bus Station to get the latest timetable. The way into the city, unless you stick to the pavement – which, if you’re on foot, gives out, ejecting you into a busy road - is blocked by a sturdy concrete central reservation on the short dualled carriageway that was Ethniki Odos Lefkimis. Impassable. Logic? Unassailable. Who would want to bring a cycle into a bus station? 
“I’ve a folding bicycle. It fits easily in the luggage space with passengers’ bags and pushchairs” 
“What did you say?” 
“Forget it” 
I’m not playing victim over so irritating a triviality. I cycle gently among pedestrians until the reservation ends, cross carefully to the centre to join motorised traffic heading up the gentle slope of Dinatou Dimolitsa, into Mitropolitou Methodiou and so, amid increasing bustle, to San Rocco Square, jostling with buses, cars, vans, scooters, into G.Theotoki, until across a barrier I’m bumping along the cobbles of newly pedestrianised Evgeniou Voulgareos, dotted with spring planted municipal trees. I pass among bright coloured strollers who shift like swimming fish at the sound of my tuneful bell as I weave elegantly up the narrow way to broader Kapodistriou behind the Liston, then down N.Theotoki – a flâneur on wheels amid noon’s contrasts of light and shade and the conversations of hundreds of people. Now and then a great plane rumbles overhead, glimpsed from the ground as it heads north freighted with passengers bound for work, brief holidays ended, Corfu’s green and blue falling below; swiftly hazed. I’ll catch the bus to Sokraki from the stop beside Sette Venti Café. I look for a bar without a queue that sells Ionian Beer, the green top bottles, and there just opposite my stop on the Old Port Road I sit inside a cushioned sofa sipping from a flute glass reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow – the novelist imparting insight into the dynamic of political Islam beyond the reach of non-fiction; walking me through the snow-filled streets and the population of Kars - a contested Anatolian city - decaying - against closed borders with Armenia on the eastern edge of modern Turkey. !0 minutes before the bus I paid for my beer and found, nearby, a small grill. Waiting in the generous shade of a pavement acacia I picked happily at the bits and pieces of fresh pork gyro – tomato, crispy juicy pork, chips, fresh pita, licking sauce from my fingers as the bus arrived. 15 passengers boarded; people who would once have waited conveniently at the old Green Bus station, but aren’t going to walk, especially with their shopping, a mile across town to the new one. My familiar journey from the Old Port takes under an hour. Ticket €2.90. On level ground I continued reading, glancing at our whereabouts – Kontokali, Gouvia, Tzavros, Dassia, sinking into a reverie of falling snow and darkness, missing the landscape outside, rocked by the familiar racket of changing gears as turning and turning the bus climbs steadily up from the sea. Some passengers are getting off. Are we in Spartillas? Or are we already edging between buildings on the road through Sgourades, descending through olive groves to the sharp left turn at the T-junction in Zygos which, if you turn right,  leads north through Klimatia and Episkopi to the coast at Roda? I see gardens, frontages, stores, woodpiles, verandas, houses, forest slopes, whole villages perched on long ridges I passed when cycling this route. Stop anywhere. From a glance, I’ll know exactly where we are. Nothing’s odd or foreign. The undergrowth along the verges - parched kindling mingling with rich greenery - bracken, brambles, dry seeded flowers, tall tangled grasses, thistle, fig that grows like weed, feral vines, errant climbers reaching into the woods.

It’s cooler where I leave the bus in high Sokraki to freewheel blithely down the mountainside passing the two reservoirs that hold the village water, seeing the road below, half-wondering if it’s the road above, so circuitous are the zigzag turns; passing below the little church of Ag Isadoras, through the narrows of Venetia, into Ano Korakiana – all the way my feet resting on the pedals, my hands on the brakes checking my speed enough to avoid overheating the sides of my Brompton’s 16” wheels.

** ** ** **

An intransitive verb is simply defined as a verb that does not take a direct object. There's no word in the sentence that tells who, or what, received the action. It’s not as if I’m not prepared – when it comes to starting to read Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. There are stages in making sense of its subject matter, that starts with someone born in 1942 learning. Remote from it in time and place I was nonetheless alive while these things were happening, and long after, when so many called  to account found ways to lie or deny their part. 
“There was so much propaganda, we didn’t believe such things” said my mum late in life. 
I don’t hold her to account for one second – nor countless others who could not believe or, if they tried, could not begin to understand and even if they did could do nothing. I mean those involved. David Thomas in Ostland – ostensibly a thriller – stretches that genre; asks what would you or I have done? Littell creates, in his SS officer, a character who, so far as I know, doesn’t exist. Why? Because he’s someone who, throughout the novelist’s account - I’ve got about 500 of over 970 pages to go - sticks steadfastly to the transitive tense, avoiding the evasive intransitive; not using verbs that duck the direct object; verbs reflexively, and usually disingenuously, placed in sentences without a personal pronoun; without an  ‘I’ - to tell who or what carried out the action, the einsatz. Littell’s writing, unparagraphed even during dialogue, has a quality of relentlessness and pace as though he is writing for his life. The great hanging proposition, supported by prolonged casuistry, innumerable examples, conundrums, utterly detailed research, that those who took part in these actions were no different from the rest of us, no different from me. So don’t, says this fictional first person biography, get into the minds of others when trying to understand and explain, go into the possibilities that exist in you, in me, as I recount this terrible tale. Did Bosch paint himself in hell? We can speculate. But Dr Max Aue does, in excruciating detail, with all the second rate, half-baked pernicious nonsense of a highly educated grown man striving to be honest.

** ** **

There’s something I can like about the torpor of high summer in Greece that is foreign to England. 

I don’t really like being so hot, but if I move slowly, use the weather as a reason for lying about reading with a cold drink to hand, I come to terms with it. 

August - from the village

But now the enveloping heat of August, but not the wasps, has been chased decisively away by two 24 hour intervals of rain, wind, thunder and lightning. 
Gabriella, a friend from Rumania rang to ask “Are you alright?” 
“Why?” 
“Oh my dear, there’s been news of a typhoon in Corfu, flooding and cars washed away.” 
"Blimey. So sweet of you to call us. No we’re fine. Just a bit damp.” 
I’d read on facebook about someone who’d described flying towards Corfu entering the blanket of cloud that’s been covering the island on a plane full of people frightened, as we would be, by extreme turbulence; how their holiday plane seemed to descend for ever through a tunnel of unbroken cloud rushing by, windows slashed with rain, the interior lit by flashes of lightning, and still no sight of ground – 'some were crying, others screaming now and then' - until the pilot gave up and diverted to Thessaloniki, where passengers were boarded at a local hotel with vouchers for food. This contemporary bout of terror reminded me of how passengers on a 19^th century sailing ship, embayed by a sudden shift of wind strength and direction, might be given hours of fear as her crew work to balance weight of sail against risk of losing spas, praying to weather a distant cape.

The start of September

*** ***

We’ve been at Stamati’s Piatsa, most evenings, less than a minute from our front door. Three years it’s been going, converted from a shop; a small plaka’d triangle right against an especially narrow few yards of the road through the village. I have come to enjoy this unpromising place for a bar. 

Aristeidis Metallinos - sitting over to the right - carves the peddler in to the village Cat 222 1985 marble relief 55 x 69cms

It’s a small theatre. The wings are east-west along the road that bisects the village, on one side almost invisible, but with the doors and canopy of the baker’s shop and its customers comings and goings glimpsed askance. On the other, a 50 metre stretch of Democracy Street down to the Philharmonia rehearsal and teaching rooms, that disappears round a bend on a slope. Entering left and right we see bicycles, scooters, vans, cars and the municipal refuse truck that passes through at night...

... men hanging on dashboards front and back, a miasma of rot in their wake. We wave to them and they wave back. Now and then when a parked car narrows the road even more Stamati walks into the street waving directions. Our entertainment includes surmising how vehicles going opposite directions will pass one another. From the bandroom, from time to time, we hear their rehearsal music. Add to this pleasing melange of sounds, the rub-a-dub-dub-dub on some evenings of the lads on their motorbikes. 
There are other ways onto the stage; from a Venetian arch over steps just below, from the house opposite – three metres across the street. Dogs and cats are extras, lying insouciant on the patchy tarmac as wheels pass inches from their reclining paws, or barking at something off-stage, or wandering between our feet, being stroked and patted, as we sit at the outside tables.  As in classical drama actual action occurs outside the theatre, retold and discussed by us as anecdotes, tales, opinions, judgements. 

Aristeidis Metallinou 1984 Cat 205, marble relief 40 x 59cms*

I doubt Aristeidis Metallinos would charge us with being ‘the snails of the village’? Do we gossip? Yes but we also debate and discuss and laugh a lot. 
“Socrates asked three questions of an informant” I was told the other day by Yani Metallinou – that 'M' name traditionally diffused throughout Ano Korakiana - and one who recalls, as a ten year old, seeing the laic sculptor at work, rhythmically chipping at stone and marble. 
“First question. Is it good news? Second. Is it true? Third. Is it helpful? If not ‘yes’ to all three, say 'no more'"
Above our theatre, but below the sky and the Trompetta crags that tower over our village, there’s the next floor of the surrounding houses with doors, french windows, shutters, a balcony. Perfect for hanging out washing and enacting a conversation with those below, Juliet to Romeo.  From May to July, even early August, swallows nest and raise their young in niches all around, adding their chatter to the sounds of children – playing football, skateboarding, cycling – easily moving out of the way of vehicles. The other night, as happens now and then, Stamati organised music, sardines, souvlakia. Two musicians – an old man and young man, son of a neighbour, played for four hours almost without a break, keyboard, guitar, for a while, bouzouki. People danced – Zebetiko - and sang – "laiki musiki" - seeming to know all the words and tunes.

*Translation: 'When the village’s snails are alone they sit and boast about their big horns. But when somebody comes up to them they try to hide their horns, one behind the other, between their legs'

*** *** ***
My goodness! A leap in time. Bignells Cottage in Itchen Abbas. My half sister, Oriana, sent me this picture the other day - a watercolour by my great-aunt Florence Apperley, who I called Auntie Flo.

Bignalls Cottage, Itchen Abbas 1940

She painted the cottage in September 1940 - at the height of the Battle of Britain, this thatched house belonged to my great grandmother Lucy Halkett, with whom I spent much time as a small child. She taught me to read. I am unsure when Gaga (my name for her) bought this lovely place. I believe she sold it in 1949. I was born in 1942. Born in another thatched cottage on the other side of England, I spent part of my earliest childhood at Bignalls, on my own and with my sister, Bay, 18 months younger. The house stood next to an avenue of lime trees that led down a gentle slope to the River Itchen. My room, my nursery, is the upstairs window on the far left. The next two upstairs windows were to Gaga's bedroom. Early on summer mornings, as I recall 70 years later, I would get out of bed and climb into hers. She'd start reading to me, teaching me letters and words as a story proceeded. I recall the first of many classical tales - that of Baucis and Philemon. In her 70s then she could complete the Times x-word in half an hour. Later in her 90s she complained of her mind going "It takes me an hour" she grumbled. In 1969, she died in her sleep at 99, after heading upstairs with her usual nightcap of malt whisky. About six years ago I was in Winchester for work. I found a few hours to cycle out to Itchen Abbas and catch a glimpse of Bignell's Cottage and stroll beside the Itchen in whose crystal water I saw brown trout through the reflection of my face as I gazed down from a low bridge hardly two feet above the river.

'By the first drop of rain summer was killed...'

On Sunday morning Lin's dad, Arthur, would have said "It's a bit black over Bill's mother's" warning Dot not to hang out the washing. By evening Lin, on our balcony, could still see lightning flashing beyond Agios Theka over Benitses, across the Ropa Valley, to the heights of the other Pantokrator above Mesonghi straddling the view south, south east across Kerkiraiki Thalassa - now calm - to the mainland mountains above Parga, over twinkling Sayiada, then north east over Epirus and Albania. During supper lightning blinked inside the house. The crash that followed shook the building. What a difference from the same time last year when the welcome return of rain - after nine months - had found us stemming leaks from a dozen places. Lambros and his men, found via Paul and Lula, made the main roof sound, and Alan, more recently, sealed with lead, the ends of the shallow pitched roof that joins up with Lambros’ work and the neighbours’ house. Lin checked the edges of our bedroom and the spare room, where last year she’d spread towels and flannels. “All dry” after a day of the same driving rain that found its way in so easily only a year ago. I phoned Alan as soon as we got in. “A big hug from us both!” “Oh blimey yes, thanks for ringing. I was so so pleased with my garden getting rain at last I left the studio open and I’m just clearing up now.” I’d watched the start of the predicted storm from Summer Song’s cabin where I was doing odd jobs. Val and Linda had gone to Corfu town, dropping me at the harbour as rain began to spatter from a darkening sky, thunder rumbling distantly. I’d hardly sat down with Lin’s packed lunch – made up from sweet soft bread just handed me by Leftheris’ granddaughter Dimitra outside the church, where there’d been a morning service for the saint, and I’d gone to see the source of the buzz of conversation in the Democracy Street – when, like a fever breaking, the rain burst forth with a rush of wind from the west. I closed the cabin; turned on a light. Rigging smacked against masts. Boats swayed at their moorings. Flags fluttered horizontal. One of the nicest sensations is to be in a secure harbour, sat in a dry boat, enveloped by cacophony, doing an odd job like fitting new slides to the spare sail.Lightning was constant from many directions, thunder echoing from the mountains but spread across all that I could see of the drenched landscape through cabin windows washed by the downpour, drumming on the leakless cabin roof.

After a while everything went quiet but for more distant thunder. Then, with the air cleared of rain, white cloud carpeting Pantokrator and the slopes on the coast towards Kalami, the wind rose again from the opposite direction, rapidly increasing, stirring whitecaps from the short Kerkyra waves between us and the mainland. These mean little to larger vessels working up the straits, but they’re trickier for small boats than longer higher waves. In the Solent, almost comparable in area to the sea between Corfu and Greece, I’d have assayed a sail to try out the new reefs. Not here. What impresses is the Hebridean abruptness of this weather. The wind was warm; the sea azure, even below a grey sky. Yet it’s hazardous, fiercely choppy, blocking progress. In an hour the wind went. The flags were drooping. I tied practice reefs and stood back to inspect the still sail. OK. Lots of bits of string and it’ll take time to get good at it if we’re rocking, but it seemed to set well enough. I shook out the reefs and sailed out of the harbour in zephyrs. Outside it was settling down and we had a breeze. I picked up a firmer breeze, sailed a while and turned for home. Closing the harbour, planning to berth under foresail, I dropped the main, but then found what I should have noticed the moment I’d unfurled it, that the piece of cord that stops the rim of the foresail furling hub rotating as the sail unfurls, had broken. I should have checked it. I didn't. I’d hauled out the jib, and the furling line wrapped itself itself round the forestay instead of winding onto its hub, so now I couldn’t furl a sail as large as the main. It’s quite complicated to drop a sail set in a grooved stay. With a crew all would have been fine. I put on the engine for safety, turned about and jogged along quarter of a mile offshore, went forward, swayed in the bows, glad amid the flying canvas and sheets that my glasses were attached with string, and laboriously unravelled the mess. Eventually I could rotate the hub, and knot ties from my pocket (see how I’m relearning all this stuff) around the hand furled jib - remembering ‘one hand for the work, one for the boat’ - before heading for harbour. The day before, in a sunny breeze, I’d gone out alone to test the autohelm. It will need tuning but just the zig zag reach across Ipsos Bay while I watched was encouraging (...and here's a picture taken earlier - in 1962). Lin and Val returned from the town where water streamed from the awnings and gutters spouted tributaries into a sandal drenching torrent down Nickiphorou Theotoki Street. Despite the link to Elytis' poem - summer is 'killed' - this warm rain evokes no sadness, reminding me of tea and muffins, damp sphagnum, dripping heather, noisy burns and Highland midges.
* * *
The Leftheris were away two days. We missed them – the conversation and the Dimitra playing lovely tunes on flute and recorder. Democracy Street is having a main drain installed. Our road is closed to all but scooters for at least ten days. We’ve been using, with other residents, different paths up to Democracy Street, carting shopping, groaning at the gradient – sometimes with steps – winding between houses.
* * *
Earlier in the week Dave helped me mark the mainsail for reefing points. I thought of DIY with grommets and strengthening canvas. He offered the latter and suggested asking a sailmaker to sew round the results. Once at the sailmakers – a cool interior off Kontokali’s narrow high street – Astrid looked at the sail. “You have a reef running through a baton pocket”. I saw myself fumbling in a squall. “OK. Move it down to miss that?” "Yes" I said. “You will need larger grommets at either end and more reinforcing canvas. The lines in between hardly matter. There’s the strain for which you must allow.” I imagined heeling in a gust, worrying about the reef holding. “Right”. “You say six ties for the first and five for the second. I’d say not so many – five and four?” Cut to reefing at sea. “Yeah right”. “Also your ties need to be higher than the edge cringles.” “I’ll go with your judgement and craft” I said Next day I collected the sail, put it back on the boat, cut lengths of rope and and tried both reefs. I’ve got a safety line snap hook to hold the mast end cringle. Just as I was inspecting the reefed sail, Dave turns up. By a fluke he’d obtained a second-hand sail with rare reef cringles that fitted Summer Song. The chances that would happen! But now I have a spare main for €30. “Now what I want is a self-steering” I said. From long ago I remembered the freedom this gave to make a cup of tea, fiddle about on the deck, check a chart and take a break from steering without the boat turning in circles - sails and rigging ashake. Two days later Dave invited us all over to his building plot below the village for a tasty joint of barbecued pork, salad and garlic bread and beer. We sat in the dusk, the two dogs – one Greek, one English - looking longingly at the juicy slices of meat on our plates and spoke of airlines going bust, planes clamped on runways stranding thousands; strain on cash flows as credit tightens and rumours circulate about banks. “I’ve got something you’ll like” said Dave handing me an oblong object in a plastic bag. He connected its hanging wire to a battery. With a whirring sound a stainless steel arm began to move. I panned the gadget in the dark – the arm, with a hole at its end to fix to a nipple on the tiller, went in and out, depending on your position. "You set that on a little compass rose on the body of the machine." “Just what we need, Dave”. “The mind boggles” said Lin amid giggles.The autohelm Dave has found me needs battery power, but here it could be more helpful than a wind vane, given the time we’re becalmed, motoring without even the sails to offer a bit of auto-steer without this gadget. We chatted about the state of cleanliness in Corfu General. “Doctors are fine but you should see the public conveniences there”. “It’s disinfectant on a mop and a cleaner” “I saw one reaching with an ungloved hand into a bucket of discarded needle in plastic bags to shove them in her wheelie bin.” “Ouch” “Yet they have no MRSA. None of our Streptococcus difficili.” “Yet?” We spoke of differences between wood and plastic kitchen cutting surfaces; of food that still looked like the animal it came from; of fussiness in eating, of over-attentive hygiene and living closer to the land, relying less on credit, more on one’s own handiwork. “The cicadas descended on our sweet corn last month like locusts. But the potatoes and most of the other vegetables are doing fine”. Building is delayed by the wait for an archaeological survey. If there was a temple here we’re in trouble.”
* * *
I’m remaking our little jetty with wood from a pile in the apothiki; invested in a battery powered drill, levered off the old flaking palette wood and rusty nails. The weather was torpid, sweaty. With the job started but needing more wood, I cycled to Dominoes, and sat in the pool. “Zat man’s got a drink in the swimin' pool” points a pigtail toddler in gingham under the eave of a watchful parent. “Are you in the police?” I ask. Her mum overlooks the charge with a grin. I continue sipping lager from an iced glass. Next morning, starting at eight, I finished the job before the heat set in. * * * We’ve visited the Museum of Asian Art in the Palace of St.Michael and St.George at the head of the Liston and got enticing glimpses of a private collection donated to the Greek State to which we’ll return. We toured Frederick Adam’s lovely house at Kanoni, it’s interior intelligently restored, built in the early 19th C. for his Greek wife – a neo-classical building of great serenity, ill painted outside and, suffering the unfortunate name ‘Mon Repos’ - not the Adams' choice. Incidentally, to explore the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous - the extraordinary as compared to the banal - the Achilleon Museum of kitsch with its collection of 19th century imitations assembled by the self-obsessed Empress Sissi at her 'pile' (as Bertie Wooster would have called it) at Gastouri, is a good place to visit, before or after seeing examples - especially at Delphi, and in Athens - of Greek sculpture. Mon Repos on top of Analipsis hill, near Kanoni shows, also, how 19th century Philhellenes could build in a way that honours and respects Greek history. The German Princess stayed there on her visit to Corfu in 1861. I imagine her being unimpressed by the simplicity and moderation of English neo-classicism. Her contribution to the architecture of the island - the Achilleon Palace - is a tasteless caricature of the Greek tradition, a Germanic version of neo-classicism, a precursor for the anorexic souvenirs of classical deities sold in trinket shops to visitors whose ideal nude cultivates the physique of a bicycle. Elisabeth von Witelsbach's adoration of the most aggressive of Homeric heroes was an infatuation shared by Kaiser Wilhelm ll who, bought the building, and built his own bridge to his mooring over the road by the shore near Benitses and wore military uniform on Greek soil. No visitor can entirely ignore the ominous 19th century swastika above the gates of Troy in Franz Matt's mural celebrating an atrocity. This, with other overblown decorations created by the high fashion architect Raffaele Carito, and the grossly expressive sculptures of Enst Herter, is in contrast to Sir Frederick Adam's earlier neo-classical achievement on behalf of his beloved Greek wife. (I'm not making an English-German comment. The Brits can do crass with the worst). In recent times the Achilleon found its true role as a gambling joint. I can fantasise a visit by Donald Trump followed by a bold decision to transport the lot to New York to help regenerate Coney Island. A plethora of over decorated 'palatial' villas built in the style and vernacular that Sissi and the Kaiser brought to Corfu, attest the collateral damage they've caused a sublime architectural tradition. I've another fantasy that UNESCO, now its given deserved protection to Corfu old town, might require, as a condition for continued support, that the Achilleon be razed after everything portable has been auctioned off to new money in Russia and China. We took a picnic up to the old fort on Saturday watching skiffs jostling in Garitsa Bay. Earlier in the week Lin drove us up to Arillas and Agios Stephanos, passing through compact villages via sinuous and ambiguously signposted roads, affording glimpses, between the abundant greenery, towards the north east of the island and back to the heat hazed slopes of Trompetta. Later she said “The drive was nice”.