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

Scything between the daisies

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I've not had so much hayfever for years. I'm giving vent to those explosive eye-watering sneezes I recall from my youth, which is when I was last mowing meadow grass. My symptoms are soon removed with an allergy pill but such sneezing bouts are almost a pleasure, enhancing appetite. It's because I've been doing more mowing on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments; this time at the request of Phil Rose, our Chair, who said it was the Allotment Association's job to clear plots that the City Council Allotments Department was going to relet as their present tenants were not cultivating them. I said I'd be happy to agree a quid pro quo - such as a few sacks of compost. I set to using my shorter scythe blade watched by my plot neighbour Robin. As I mowed we discussed not cutting certain plants - especially flowers that might be favoured by bees, but our ignorance was mutual.
 I realised how little I grasped of the character of this variety, let alone the propinquity of one plant to another, the possibility of order in what had been designated neglected ground. Would my crudely selected leavings be acceptable to the city allotments officer when he inspects the site in readiness for reducing the current waiting list for plots on the VJA?
There's plenty of common mallow - the perfect plant - in violet flower veined purple:

Mallow - the perfect plant (photo: Jeevan Singh)

What was this majestic lone bush like plant that looked as if it might have escaped from someone's border?

Caper Spurge?

And what might this be - the tall delicate leaved plant with small pink petals between the violet mallow and a clump of daisies?

Pink or Moroccan toadflax?

Fescue, dock, thistle and nettles fell before my well whetted blade along with a close matted plant spread like a carpet of chickweed, checking my scythe,  carpeting most of the plot and altogether larger with little yellow flowers? What of these tall elegant plants still in bud, emerging yellow, which I've left standing?

Reseda Lutea or Wild Mignonette, also called Weld, Dyer's or Bastard Rocket

...or these pair, next to Anna's well hoed African millet?

Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris )

"Put them on the internet" said Robin, who'd taken the photos while I mowed, "I'll look them up and let you know." Thus we do our homework; learning grassland grammar, declining weeds.
Andrew S sent me a note:

Hi Simon. I think the last photo is of Mugwort, which has a very distinctive smell, and the long tall plant looks like Weld or Dyer's Rocket which as the name implies was used to produce a yellow dye. I'll take a closer look at the other two plants the next time I'm at the allotment. Some allotment holders have chosen to keep patches of Mayweed and Common Mallow on their plots to add colour. I made a note of some of the plants on plot 25 before we cleared it. This is just opposite the plot you scythed. The list was as follows: Fat Hen, Groundsel, Common Sorrel, Redleg, Spear Thistle, Broadleaved Dock, Evening Primrose, Broadleaved Willowherb, Shepherds Purse, Apple of Peru, Common Nettle, Common Mallow, Black Meddick, Clover, Horsetail, Lupin. Best Wishes Andrew

This job finished I went to our own plot and continued brushing wood preserver over the still separated sides of our shed, splinting the roof, another of the sections we'd had to saw apart to load them on the van that bought them to the site. From a skip Lin had noticed we've recovered turf, that will go nicely in front of the completed shed.

and though it stopped me working I was glad of the evening rain that came to damp it down. But why are we not making hay? Why do we seem to have no obvious use for the vegetation scythed, other than as future compost? Why no pitchfork or raking? No haycocks set by my wife in the field?

Medieval labours of the month - July

** ** **
Even as people in Ano Korakiana express their apprehension, in statistics describing the awesome scale of this new still unfamiliar technology, about the next stage in permission for twelve wind turbines above the village on Trompetta...

Παρά τις αντιδράσεις των κατοίκων και του Δημοτικού Συμβουλίου Κέρκυρας, ένα ακόμη βήμα προς την δημιουργία του πάρκου ανεμογεννητριών στον Παντοκράτορα (και κατ’ επέκταση στην περιοχή του χωριού μας) αποτελεί η χορηγηθείσα άδεια εγκατάστασης την οποία υπέγραψε στις 30 Ιουνίου 2011 ο Γενικός Γραμματέας Αποκεντρωμένης Διοίκησης. Η άδεια αφορά στην  εγκατάσταση αιολικού σταθμού παραγωγής ηλεκτρικής ενέργειας ισχύος 24 MW, από την εταιρεία «ENOVA Hellas Windenergie A.E.» . Σύμφωνα με την άδεια, «Ο ανωτέρω Σταθμός αποτελείται από δώδεκα (12) ανεμογεννήτριες τύπου ENERCON E-82, ονομαστικής ισχύος 2 MW η κάθε μία, ελέγχου ισχύος με τη μέθοδο pitch control, αριθμού πτερυγίων 3, ύψους πυλώνα 98 m, διάμετρο πτερωτής 82 m, τάσης παραγόμενης ενέργειας 460 V υπό συχνότητα 50 Hz, ισάριθμους με τις ανεμογεννήτριες μετασχηματιστές ονομαστικής ισχύος 2000 kVA, ενσωματωμένους, σχέσης ανύψωσης 0.46/20 kV, κτίριο ελέγχου εμβαδού 80 m2 περίπου και λοιπές αναγκαίες συσκευές, κατασκευές. H σύνδεση του έργου με τα δίκτυα της Δ.Ε.Η. θα γίνει σύμφωνα με τους τεχνικούς όρους της ΔΕΗ».

...our neighbours John and Gill Rose have invested in photo-voltaic roof panels, the first in our street to take the risk of benefiting from the government's Feed-in Tariff Scheme (FITs) introduced on 1 April 2010, under the UK Energy Act 2008. I say 'risk' because although such panels can now be installed with the expense lessened by government grant, the investment is unlikely to be repaid in under 15 years.

That's the current situation. In a few years economies of scale will have made the process of generating electricity and selling what's unused at home - 'feed-in' - back to the national grid look far more affordable. I first encountered this technology in 2009 in Australia. I recall my friend John Martin, who'd organised a conference in Bendigo on energy futures remarking that energy companies were unused to buying energy from consumers; their rationale being to sell it.  For the moment most UK householders prefer to wear more jerseys in the winter or install more roof, wall and window insulation. In twenty years or less, as energy gets dearer and dearer and the ostriches who won't believe there's an energy crisis caused by dependence on fossil fuels die off, there'll not be a building whose owners aren't doing something like this. We've also discussed photovoltaic (PV)  panels, with a Solar Consultant from EvoEnergy on the phone scanning our roof via Google maps, finding our house - 'the one with the white front gable end"; doing a virtual crawl over our tiles to assess the amount of sun we might harvest. Our home is for the moment a less than an ideal candidate when it comes to harvesting the sun.

Dear Mr.B. I have taken some rough measurements of your roof...

** ** **

...Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things...

It is Greek. Here was hubris, overwheening banal contamination of our public life, invasion of mine and a million other's interior lives. For me it began with that ominous MacTaggart Lecture delivered by Rupert Murdoch at the Edinburgh International Television Festival on 25 August 1989.

In an atmosphere of imminent change, New Television is to be the theme of this year's Edinburgh International Television Festival. It will kick off on August 25 with Rupert Murdoch giving the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture on Freedom in Broadcasting...The Herald 26 July 1989

I didn't even have to read his words in detail. I just knew this charming affable Australian stood for something pernicious. Robert Fisk, on 11 July '11, put it well, speaking from far more direct experience than I of the phenomenon of self-censorship - not Fisk's forte by the way:

I don't believe Murdoch personally interfered ... He didn't need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence. If I hadn't been living in the Middle East, of course, it might have taken me longer to grasp all this. But I worked in a region where almost every Arab journalist knows the importance of self-censorship – or direct censorship – and where kings and dictators do not need to give orders. They have satraps and ministers and senior police officers – and "democratic" governments – who know their wishes, their likes and dislikes. And they do what they believe their master wants. Of course, they all told me this was not true and went on to assert that their king/president was always right. These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a "news" story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire. In the sterile world of the Murdochs, new technology was used to deprive the people of their freedom of speech and privacy. In the Arab world, surviving potentates had no problem in appointing tame prime ministers...

Private Eye ~ 22 July '11

No doubt Murdoch will appear before the public garbed in the poise and using language of Uriah Heap, shocked and saddened by what has happened, profoundly sorry at being let down, nay betrayed, by people the News International imperium recruited and paid, making his excuses and leaving.  It will be impossible for any of these moguls to stand again on a public forum touting the superiority of pure market forces in broadcasting, damning all regulation as interference. Hovering over their heads will be the phantom of a 13 year old girl abducted and murdered in 2002 - a parent's worst fear, so of course of interest to journalists; a child's technical umbilical to her parents was already, by then,  a mobile phone. Driven by the 'Caliph's' remorseless desire for his version of 'freedom in broadcasting', his minions saw fit to listen to the missing child's voice-mail, eavesdropping messages to her after she was murdered.

As her friends and parents called and left messages imploring Milly to get in touch with them, the News of the World was listening and recording their every private word. But the journalists at the News of the World then encountered a problem. Milly's voicemail box filled up and would accept no more messages. Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. Guardian 4 July '11

Amanda Dowler's cruel fate has served, posthumously, as Murdoch's nemesis, Νέμεσις - giving him and his what they are due, remorseless is as remorseless does.

Power and sufficiency in the village

I'm in Birmingham Handsworth, and reading about Ano Korakiana via Thanassis' blog, which has 'temporarily' replaced the village website - undergoing maintenance. He mentions a power cut in the village. Thanassis points out, despite the inconvenience that follows the failure of modern technologies of power supply, older sources of light can make for neighbourliness. "Can I have a light - from your fire; from your candles?"

Όμως, όπως το νόμισμα έχει δύο πλευρές, έτσι και η διακοπή του ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος, μας δίνει την ευκαιρία να γυρίσουμε μερικές δεκαετίες πίσω, όταν το ηλεκτρικό δεν υπήρχε ή (όταν πρωτο-εμφανίστηκε) ήταν λιγοστές οι λάμπες στα σπίτια και στους δρόμους...Τότε βέβαια, η έλλειψη ηλεκτρισμού δημιουργούσε πρόσθετες δυσκολίες στην καθημερινότητα, ενώ σήμερα προσθέτει λίγες στιγμές ρομαντισμού, που τόσο λείπουν από την αυτοματοποιημένη εποχή μας…

Something similar happened when water was delivered, and foul water removed directly from individual houses. No more parish pump gossip (deeper ideas here about mother-tongue) - the glue of community, but few will regret the demise of midden heaps, though there's a rich new technology of sewage treatment as part of the sustainable treatment of 'grey' (washers, shower/bath) and 'black' water (toilets and kitchen sinks) that I saw as a guest visiting Mike Hill's and Lorna Pit's ecovillage in Melbourne the other day.

As it is the village - slightly ironically - but in line with current trends in Greece, being gradually attached to a main sewer by contractors to Faiakon Municipality, with foul water being treated at a sewage facility at the base of the village, finally abandoning old wells as soakaway cesspools which aren't happy with loo paper.

This is confusing, taking us forwards but also backwards. While it is beginning to become acceptable and practical to process and re-use waste water locally, Ano Korakiana, and many other places, are getting attached to the mains, even as places like Westwyck are detaching themselves.

There still are reasonably clear, if not potable, water wells in Ano Korakiana. Until twenty or so years ago, these were the main source of drinking and washing water. As more wells became soakaway cesspools the other wells in the village became unreliable. Even today some householders pump water from their wells to get the benefit of unmetered water for their gardens.

We have a cesspool, once a well, at 208 Democracy Street, at garden level below our veranda, by our composter. It works fine, but a main sewer pipe is slowly advancing up beneath Democracy Street. Work had reached the Community Clinic and band room by mid-2009.

I'm not sure yet how and when connections will be made to individual homes, nor how much this will add to our water bills, or indeed whether connection will be compulsory. One worry is that you can meter water coming into the home, but not water going out. There will simply be a fixed charge controlled by the sewage treatment agency. Once we are on a main sewer, and this would involve installing nearly 100 metres of pipe down to the main pipe on the lower road, will it mean that our soakaway cesspool can gradually revert, with similar soakaways, to a well from which we can extract gardening water?

Although alternative technologies are increasingly accessible, we've quite a long way to go before the village moves back to an older, but very different, form of self-sufficiency using modern technologies for harvesting solar energy, capturing and processing rainwater and tapping into wind power; one day even selling excess energy back to the rest of the island, even to the mainland, via a smart grid - things I learned more about at the Energy Futures Conference that John Martin organised in Bendigo in early November, the place I first met Mike Hill, chairing a session in which he participated.

** ** **

In London on Friday morning I enjoyed tutoring and animating half a day in Hounslow on Managing with Political Awareness - an event for nearly 60 officers, joined from mid-morning by some elected members and ending with a half hour Q & A session with CEO Mark Gilks and Cllr Peter Thompson, Leader, who agreed to do a video for me as soon as it can be arranged.

Aims for the seminar

to improve understanding of the skills and values involved in political-management working relations in Hounslow,

to increase understanding of how political and managerial roles are changing, and how this applies in Hounslow

to enrich your vocabulary of political concepts and offer models of competence and integrity in political settings,

to assist resolve dilemmas that arise when giving professional support to politically led agendas,

Programme

Brief introduction - overview of the morning (& a short icebreaker)

Political-management: negotiating the overlap

Member-officer conversations

Defining political awareness: reading/carrying

Work on critical incidents: facilitated by guest councillors (Cllr Barbara Reid, Cllr John Todd) and tutor

Summary and feedback: Q & A with Cllr Peter Thompson and CEO Mark Gilks

Networking lunch

* * * * Had a planning meeting in Staffordshire for one of three planned seminars on scrutiny. Lucy Stratford has edited a film made with the Leader of the Council, Philip Atkins, and the most senior Scrutiny Chairman, Alan White, which I've sorted into four separate thumbnails - making the film rather more accessible than leaving it on a DVD. Why? Because a DVD runs off the disk not the faster computer hard disk and is not as controllable via the keyboard as an MPG or MOV file - where you can project a picture onto a white wall or large screen and pick and choose between extracts.

For my travels - to London and Stafford - I'm back to relying on my Brompton, avoiding having to pay to take a full size bicycle on the train to London and using the tube to get to and from Hounslow and, back in Birmingham last night, not having to wait by a chilly wet bus stop, cycling home from New Street in 15 minutes after a swift visit to the German Market.

* * * I'm keeping an eye on TeacherDude's citizen journalism and Malcolm Brabant's reporting as we arrive at the anniversary of last year's troubles in Athens and other Greek cities. See also Monday 7 December events in Athens as reported from Australia.

** ** **

Long ago Cheshire County Council, with whom we were running an in-house course on Political Skills for Managers commissioned a mug for each participant. My friend Nina Dawes knew a potter in Walsall who made us about 20. I have one with the Cheshire CC logo and Inlogov on it and the four animals signifying 'wise, clever, innocent and inept' from Kim's and my paper. They might be quite a souvenir one day. My own mug is priceless of course.