Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws

I am used to housework. I like the routine of lighting a log stove first thing, hearing it start to burble like a stream as the fire catches hold on the larger wood, as the sun rises over the mountains of mainland Greece and bathes the house in gold, and I can make shadow play with my shape on white walls.

The wood here is ready for the stove. I've made myself a cup of tea. A little paper, perhaps a firelighter and kindling - some dribbling of old ashes on the floor from which I've pulled back the carpet - then a match and gradually the winter that got inside is sent out again and something like civilisation returns as I sweep up round the hearth and tidy what was left lying about last night. At ghostless Brin Croft - 18 days after mum died here - I have always been fêted, by my mother when she was strong and her helpers and carers, to all intents waited on, free of drudge to think and talk and read and write and take long walks wherever I want with dogs for company.
Now there's a new routine. The heatings turned right down; we all share in housework; I sweep now and then seeking out hidden brushes and dustpans; working an unfamiliar vacuum cleaner into unknown crannies; learning the controls of the washer, once so taken for granted it's steady work was all but invisible.

"There's a thing in the dryer"  said Amy, who'd left me briefly in charge of Oliver, chatting quietly to himself, while she had a bath
"A what?"
She showed me this plastic netted thing, a filter, having slipped it from the dryer that sits atop the washer, all unknown to me all these years.
"You have to empty it of fluff after each wash"
I've found the location of switches I've never used and learned where to find plastic bags, kitchen wipes, toilet rolls and dog food.
On several occasions I've shared the chore of picking up small gifts from one of the dogs, soaking up a puddle of pee with paper, spraying on stain and odour remover. I wonder if the dogs are anxious, troubled by a great absence, or just nervous when a human baby's around, to which they - the usual beloved small things - must defer in care and attention - to an even more beloved small thing; nervous because if Oliver reaches to give them an exploratory but ill-judged baby-squeeze their reasonable reaction of a warning growl is disapproved; even evokes cries of distress from the human primate. They're in a no-win situation. I'd be uneasy too.

Of course I make myself cups of tea, even toast and now and then something a tiny bit more ambitious like a boiled egg, and I used, when here with my mum, to fetch things, missed in the main shopping by mum's carer, an easy errand to the local shop, using mum's car or the bicycle I've stored here.
Now files lie around - discreetly. Letters, forms, copies of things. Temporary lists. I'm supposed to be in charge.

We've got our workspaces. I bring in logs and kindling. Just before mum died John cut down a birch near the house and sawed it into firewood piling its logs, as asked, on top of older dry wood. Birch is never good for stoves; sappy birch is worse. We didn't understand at first; had the chimney sweep in who left with a bag of soot and £45 but no improvement in the burning. I dug round the woodpile and unearthed older dry logs - seasoned hard wood. Now, though the real winter's not arrived, the stove rewards us. I've ordered another good load of hard wood cut to size along with a few months' supply of kindling - after checking round for prices.
*** ***
Robin whose allotment is next to ours, wrote condolences in his usual style:

Dear Simon. There are only two logical possibilities, namely a parent dies no later than their child, or a child dies before their parent. And which is the more regrettable, and which the preferable? At age 18, my father had no other relatives than his 36-year-old single-parent mother, when he came home from work to find she had died (of a broken heart I may add).  Such is life! And if I myself were to die today, thanks to cruel criminal-abuse fate I would have no children or partner to commemorate my passing. Such is life! I myself have survived a whole stream of life-event shocks, more than I care to remember.  But my view is as follows. Nothing has really changed in the Baddeley universe this year.  Your mother was going to die on date/month/year anyway (and it's hardly a great surprise if a 90-something person dies). All that's changed is your awareness, such that you now know the date, and have for better or worse lived on to see the world afterwards. In my analysis and experience, vitamin B6 (and wonderful glutamine, etc) has a lot to do with this.  To adapt to a life-event a person's brain needs to adjust lots of connections. That requires a lot of vit b6 etc, and if there is a shortfall then pathology results such as was manifested by Queen Victoria and by Mendelssohn after his sister's death (relentlessly grim last quartet in f minor (my answer to people who say "I like listening to music"!): 
Anyway, I hope this makes sense! Meanwhile Cheers, Robin (and are you planting winter beans? - ive not been to plot for a monthish)

Dear Robin
You know that my mum would often stroll with me across the Victoria Jubilee Allotments while they were still barred to trespassers like us. She was deeply supportive of my campaign (with many others) to stop them being built over and enjoyed the frisson of entering them unpermitted.
My highly metropolitan mother - journalist and publisher and at one time War Correspondent for Vogue (actually just post-war in occupied Vienna)...

...wanted also to be isolated - a little. Hence Brin Croft on the Farnack that runs just below this small house.
But you are right. A glacier carved Strath Nairn ten thousand years ago. 200 years ago the Clearances greatly slimmed a sturdy community of subsistence crofters in long houses and cot.
Over the last thirty years the city of Inverness, undergoing the same transformation that autodependency and diminished public transport has visited on cities across northern Europe, especially the UK, spreads like the old glacier, only much faster - its suburbs reaching relentlessly outwards, a centrifugal blight of ticky-tack  that blurs the old boundary between town and country.
It’s good for farmers who can sell parcels of land with planning permission and at least for a while seems good for the new inhabitants as their distinctive unvernacular two and three garage homes offer a sylvan haven on the heathered hillsides with a short commute into their offices or massive peripheral retail parks in the still burgeoning economy of Inverness and Ross.
Brin Croft is still just out of reach, 7 miles to the south of the city centre, a little closer to the edge of the creeping sprawl, but it already looks as you observe 'suspiciously like commuter land.’
Ask the local shopkeeper who watches frustrated as the supermarket vans go to and fro by her struggling shop delivering groceries ordered on line from homes across the Strath, their inhabitants no longer buying her papers because all their news is on the web. She was once also a petrol station and until four years ago a post office. Now the bay next to Inverarnie Stores has Highland Council recycling bins

It's not all bad. We have a Community Council. Fifteen or so years ago a fine community hall was built behind the shop (my mum was there for the Jubilee), and playing fields were laid out.

.  

Local woods have been turned into attractive places for all to walk, small children and the disabled catered for, with signage added. In  one wood there’s a log cabin classroom teaching children from the thriving local primary school about the nature from which their contemporary way of living has so distanced them in mind and body.

I am up here a few more days engrossed in the dire details of probate. I read your letter of condolence to my daughter and wife, Amy and Linda, and Amy's friend Liz, who helped care for mum in her last month. We thought it was great! It has the same sound, if very different tone, as the sage Epicurus’ “Death is nothing to us”. I’ll think about those winter beans ...and what about winter onions? S

*** *** ***
If Brin Croft's imperfect we have the consolation of mum's sampler...

Last night we sat around and talked and watched dumb things on the tele' like Embarrassing Bodies, gasping in delighted horror at eccentric deformities; Frankenstein surgery to put things right; full screen public pubes in sinless detail;  ate supper - calamari with chips.
Oliver was skyped by his father four hundred and fifty miles away...

*** *** ***
Before I flew up again on Friday I was sitting in the loo glancing through an allotment diary mum had sent me two years ago. Out of it dropped a one-page note of hers, in which she mentioned the name of the son of a longstanding friend, a retired priest, who'd recently moved to Fortrose on the Black Isle. William Mather. I googled the name and place, got the number and phoned, He knew mum had died; remembered me, said as I started to ask that "It would be an honour" to officiate at Mum's memorial service in a few weeks. He's coming to tea Sunday afternoon at Brin, and dear Christina will join us too.
"Well get off the computer" says Lin "you've got guests and tidying up to do"
***** ****
It's 39 years since the Polytechnic - the anniversary yesterday of a popular rejection of the Greek military junta of 1967-1974. The uprising began on 13 November 1973, ending in bloodshed the early morning of 17 November after a tank forced the gates of the Polytechnic...

...and a Greek sketch from today on trying to get a job (for English subtitles turn on captions beneath picture)

Leviathan

Linda laid these tiles on our apothiki

We seem unable to avoid bickering. I suspect I am being pointed somewhere – on villages? communities? getting old?
“When I was very young” I said to Lin “I thought the default condition was tidiness."
People I hardly noticed cleared up after me and I didn’t even notice – having my nappies changed - I suppose I must have had them - my washing done, my food prepared. Later it was housework. I knew how to muck out a stable and clean tack – from enthusiasm for a pony – long before compunction to make a bed or clean up a room. The first space I learned to keep tidy – immaculately so - was the inside of a sailing boat – from enthusiasm for not scraping a mélange of glass, broken eggs, cutlery and clothing from the cabin sole the first time we hit a sea. I didn’t know houses needed maintaining until I was thirty. And I didn’t think about whether a community was sustainable – let alone worry about whether a village or a street worked until late middle age – 50 or older? apart
Now I’m seventy I recognise the default condition is mess, collapse, corrosion – a relentless conspiracy of moth and rust to corrupt. Without work- constant energy - things fall. I’m acquainted with the dust to which I shall return. Lin sees entropy all about – paintwork fades and blackens with smoke, walls that mould and bleed efflorescence, roof tiles that loosen and crack, invasive weeds, woodworm and termites, dry rot, wet rot, leaking joints, speckles of oxide lifting paint, bleaching wood shrinking in the sun. Something Graham Hurley wrote he’d learned researching his brilliant procedurals ‘that so-called “vol crime” would never go away.  It was like the weather, or gravity.’
Lin thinks a house can be made good; gets morose when I behave and sound unconvinced, but the Naz knew “The poor you have with you always”. Graham puts it ‘Pompey scrotes would never give up.  Never.  You could depend on it.’
Lin still seeks to drive up our Performance Indicators, but as the Bible’s first atheist wrote – to get past a censor – ‘Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?’ Greeks invented philosophies that engaged with the despair that can attend housework, stoicism to confront the inevitability of unending maintenance, irony about its ultimate futility. Fatalism - μοιρολατρίαin - knowing dust will never give up.

Δύνασαι νὰ σύρης ἒξω τὸν Λευϊάθαν διὰ ἀγκίστρου; ἦ νά περιδέσης τὴν γλῶσσαν αὐτοῦ μὲ Φορβιὰν;

Villages? What makes them work. Why the question even? Because cities are imbalanced in their relation to their surroundings. They parasite on the land, forcing people off it into their slums and sprawling suburbs. The world’s trend is towards vaster cities. Towards citification. My stepfather would speak of the coming city of England, where on some busy weekends you'd have to book your visit to the countryside as otherwise it would be 'full'. In the advanced economies the countryside has become a metro recreation ground – commodified views, picturesque with footpaths that circuit back to carparks off big roads, a place for second homes and transit hubs for big box distribution and factory farms. In England now hardly 4% of those who live in the countryside make their living there. The urban bourgeois yearn to live there and buy second homes in villages. The poorer like a spin in the countryside. What’s left of villagers, especially youth, find nothing to do there and look to the city for a life, for education, training, for health and for the possibility of work.
Is this an approximate diagnosis of a problem? How could the picture be enriched, its crude brushstrokes made more precise while maintaining the general impression? If the countryside is so congenial to townspeople why do some people crave Dubai? Now there’s my idea of a netherworld – concrete Mordor-on-Sea. But lots of people love it. There’s no crime to see, the apartments are spotless and spiderless, the pools blue and the domestic help upon which this sanitized limbo depends pliable, almost invisible – unless like us, you take a bendy bus from the mighty airport before first light to see Satwa Bus Station...

...Give me a bicycle and a map and I’d end up liking the place – don’t I come from Birmingham? – pedaling round the underbelly, trunkless lots, amputated pipes of various gauges sticking up from nowhere, premature Ozymandias. Look upon Dubai and despair.
*** ***
What if the earth refused credit? "For your seeds I loan you nutrients and space." It’s not like that among men. The first question isn’t about the earth but about human property. Who lets you use this plot of land on which to grow your crops? Whose army protects it from invasion? Whose local government decides this land is for growing food rather than providing space for building, road, rail, runway or car park? What laws protect your rights to use this land, enjoy its usufruct? Who contests its ownership? What if the sun demanded a down payment, or the weather allowed you a slate? It’s not like that among us.
When does a child learn about ancient lights? About the law as it relates to casting shadow? What a row is in preparation about selling the sun, and rights over its harvest. Come come, of course the sun is free, as was coal, oil and wood. Where the law and money enter is in the knowledge that made – makes - them into easily available energy. The cost of solar energy will contain profit to recover the investment in education and technology that allows us to focus the sun, as through a magnifying glass we used it to make a flame or to signal with a heliograph. Without human inventiveness the sun’s heat, for all the divinity men ascribe its source for the myriad use of sunlight, is hardly more useful than water vapour from a boiling kettle. Fruit dropped on men’s head for millennia. Isaac Newton struck by an apple mid-muse thought gravity. Steam bubbled too, even powered the playful aeolipile, but James Watt ignored the vapour streaming from the kettle spout, mused on the unharnessed power in the invisible gas heaving at its lid. For the sun to power a train or a hand-drill, to fry an egg in winter or deliver a hot shower in Reykjavik, someone’s going to want to be paid. It's for the intensification we’ll be taxed. I’m not sure William Blake decrying the sequestration by men of what should be God’s gift understood this.
*** ***
So what can be done?

The Leaders of SYRIZA, PASOK and ND have separately and successively tried and failed to form a government; some rainbow coalition that would support continued austerity. Lock in, or rather lock-out. We watch and pray and paddle and I feel an almost constant nagging worry in the pit of my stomach.  

An English-language summary of the transcripts of the meetings held on 13/05/2012 between the President of the Republic, Karolos Papoulias, and the leaders of all the political parties that were elected to parliament following the 06/05/2012 elections, in an attempt to form a coalition government.         

Emma and Richard in Corfu