Orange pie

On Sunday Adonis’ and Effie’s friend Katerina Papas, who used to live in the village, came for lunch with them. We were invited, in part so Katerina could show us how to make a sweet called Orange Pie, πορτοκαλόπιτα, that she’d brought along on Easter Monday. I took notes as Lin observed. This is also a happy way to improve one's Greek:

Open out ½ kilo of filo pastry and leave it in the sun (or put in a low oven) until it’s dry and crumbles easily.

In a mixing bowl put the grated zest from two oranges, one tumblerful of sunflower oil, one tumblerful of orange juice and one tumblerful of sugar and mix.

Add a small packet (about 2 teaspoons) of baking powder and one small carton of Total yoghurt (the container carries slightly more than other brands) and mix in well.

Crumble the filo pastry into the mix a bit at a time. Fold in gently, making sure that the filo pastry is all coated with the mix.

Grease a large shallow baking tin. Pour in the mix and spread to cover the base of the tin, making sure to break up any filo still in large pieces or stuck together.

Cook in a preheated oven at 180°C (Gas mark 5) for half an hour.

Make a syrup with a tumblerful of sugar, a tumbler and a half of water, zest from one or two oranges and a few drops of vanilla essence (or two teaspoons. of vanilla powder). Mix and boil for 3 minutes.

Remove cake from the oven. Allow to cool. Spoon over the syrup, making sure that the cake is covered all over.

Serve on its own, with cream or with ice cream.

We had the pie – more a cake – after lots of other tasty things in company with Effie's and Adonis' other guests, Gerasimos, Anna, Michael, Yianni, Katerina and – my memory fails me. To my content we soon broke the rules about talking politics (I find people have enough faith in shared food and wine around the same table to treat politics as an acceptable subject even among new acquaintances). Talk turned on ‘Macedonia’. I couldn’t figure different shades of pessimism and optimism, but one at the table muttered to me of another that ‘they believe’ incorrigibly ‘history as it is written in school texts.’ I ventured there’s a history of the head and a history of the heart. The truth of the former is always a debate, of the latter a conviction.
I asked Michael what he thought of the current crisis. I’d first mistaken him for a Greek but he’s German long in Corfu, a language teacher. He said many people had lost their work, their businesses, their hopes. He saw no clear end to the problems “and not only here.” We agreed. It brings ‘a move to the right’ he said quietly, fuelled by humiliation. Pessimism turns to bitterness. "Foreign workers are less welcome on Corfu" he said "They get a negative response" (see news of recent violence in Athens and - back to the future 21 May'11 The Politics of Insecurity)
A shared hiatus drew us both to the history of the 1930s.
“Ordinary people don’t want to go to war. They get led when they are ready to be led” said another. Yianni told us of two old men relaxed over coffee on the bank of the Contrafossa - the short channel that separates the Old Fort from the city. One was Italian, spoke some Greek; the other Greek spoke some Italian. So they conversed – sat together talking about everything enjoying the long afternoon, when the Greek noticed his companion had tears in his eyes.
“Why are you crying?”
“We were soldiers here”
We spoke of living with less money, of allotments, of sun and wind energy. How easily these could become normal across the world.
In the background I could hear the continued talk of Macedonia.
“Surely” I said to Yianni “this couldn’t lead to war?”
“I hope not”
I saw Michael was telling a joke in his perfect Greek ending with the evil salute.
“What’s that in English?”
“There was a little boy sitting with his father looking at a family photo album. The boy saw one snap of his grandpa making the sieg heil and started to ask questions. His dad hurried on to other pictures in the album. The boy was insistent. His dad took a deep breath
‘Once there was a very bad man called Hitler. He was making a speech asking German people if they wanted to kill the Jews (everyone cheers), make total war (more cheers), rule the world (even more cheers)' but your grandfather replied ‘kill the Jews?’ - stretching his arm out level - ‘make total war?’ - raising it higher - “rule the world?” - raising it nearly over his head he shouted at Hitler 'enough! I’m up to here with all this!'”
*** ***

By the bins were two kapok-filled mattresses, covered with sturdy striped cotton fabric and held together by tasselled buttons. We took these home, from where they’d lain on the road. Beneath them was a gathering of leaf mould, twigs and seedlings, harbouring centipedes, scattering ants and wood lice, some flecked with yellow, others with a brown skirt edging a shell covered with light blue spots.

Dried out from the morning showers, the mattresses were almost pristine, though plainly of some age.
“How could someone have thrown those away?”

Off Democracy Street, in one of its narrowest parts, we came upon a man painting the doors and windows of an old abandoned shop, still with its fittings – shelves, glass-fronted cupboard and counters, all with finely moulded edges and on the floor encaustic tiles – chequered oxblood and white. He allowed us in to look around.
“We hanker for these things because they were made by craftsmen in whom the balance of the mechanical – joinery tools including moulding planes, saw and set square, screws and nails, kiln and paints – favoured the carpenter over the predominance of mechanised manufacture, synthetic pre-moulded standard and universal products."

A distant relative by marriage was a very successful games machine salesman. By way of compensation for a job that didn't inspire him he was devoted to restoring old buildings. He's dead now, husked out by drink and a succession of temporary partners more interested in his money than him. The only conversation I had with Freddie he was working on a vast oak purling for a medieval Welsh farmhouse, gently adzing it square.
"I could have had this work done at the timber yard in half an hour and still met the heritage specifications. Here I've been working on it for three weeks. I know this piece of wood. I know it in the way the original carpenter knew the decayed timbers I'm replacing."
I don't believe in hauntings, but I guess this is how a place acquires its spirit; the unique imperfection that comes only with time, small blemishes, careful repairs made long ago, the process of ageing, signs of daily use by people no longer living; wabi-sabi - 'nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect' -  侘寂
Lines, proportions and angles are the creation of particular eyes and hands so that, even when precise, they lack the uniformity and symmetry that can be achieved with machines. When peoples unfamiliar with the products of mass production first encountered a discarded pop bottle – detritus of the US army in the Pacific - they were impressed. Containers are valuable, not to be thrown away so casually, let alone one made of glass. When people saw another exactly matching bottle and then another and another and another they were at first overwhelmed. When such objects were chucked off the back of a jeep they were impressed that people could part so easily with something so magically similar - something impossible for men to make prior to mass production. In some pre-industrial societies, twins are sacred and risky, fraught with mystery, even taboo. Yet here were numberless twin glass bottles, and a thousand other objects, all exactly the same, yet taken almost for granted, fecklessly thrown away, replaced, thrown away, replaced...tipped, dumped, discarded. No wonder we, among whom mechanisation has such command, covet asymmetry, dissimilarity and uniqueness. On that score we take pleasure and pride in completing the latest set of shutters for our bedroom window.

Louvered shutters converted to village style shutters

...and ones we made earlier

*****
If I get gloomy about the prospects of our species achieving a sustainable relationship with the Earth it's not because I cannot see the poor giving up having children or surrendering the possibility of having white goods and cars or the products of mechanised farming - though that seems unlikely - but because I cannot see we who already enjoy the benefits of those things being ready or able to give them up or vote for governments who will encourage or even make us. Can I deny myself access to a tenfold increase in chances that if injured or sick contemporary medicine, hard pressed though it seems, can save my bacon? What about the joys of travelling the world, enjoying unprecedented choices of food, unlicensed diversity of sensations for mind and body, the entertainments of sensuality, owning several spacious homes supplied with water, power and the means of communicating with the rest of the world? "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God" I find that retort as telling as, my favourite "this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice."
Mark showed me an article last week about a book by Prince Charles, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at our World. Its strength – I’ve only read a favourable review in Mark's January copy of The Shooting Times – is that it strives to digest the whole dish, climate change, town planning, medicine, advertising, deforestation, gardening, farming, transport, globalisation, attempting to reason the dire consequences of our detachment from nature, trying to navigate between good science and bad science, to enrich public debate between faith and reason, provide marriage guidance for the awkward partnership of empiricism and spirituality. He's a penitent rich man, who like many of us is trying. His arguments are supported by opinions formed in the conversations he's had and the the places he's visited. Reading it I expect to hear some of the HRH phrasing- the gnomic wisdom Private Eye enjoys parodying - 'If people are encouraged to immerse themselves in Nature's grammar and geometry they are often led to acquire some remarkably deep philosophical insights.' Well yes, but I value his use of the word 'grammar' in this setting.

The Prince may be criticising Cartesian detachment, but his polemics have never sought to deny sweet reason. I'm also less than impressed with the critiques especially some comments on the internet by keyboard warriors gripped by ad hominem ire - strewn with capital letters; venomous judgements from mean imaginations looking at the royal finger instead of where it points. When did an heir to the throne or indeed any member of our royal family write a book so steeped in understanding of the world's great problem? This is the 'king's writing'; Lionel Logue's role shared by Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly. I shall get the book.

Goya - The Sleep of Reason brings forth monsters

Meantime I'm engrossed – as I didn’t expect to be – reading Mark Twain’s late book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I had expected it to be simply a long funny essay in which Hartford meets Camelot, Hank Morgan takes on Merlin. It’s all that and the humour of Yankee English full of Great Scotts, ain’ts and corkers, encountering Malory’s wists, wonts and prithees. As I should have expected of Mark Twain it's a deal more of that exploring - with great humour and passion - the encounter of a late 19th century industrial entrepreneur republican with feudal superstitious 6th century Camelot, getting darker as it goes along. Twain is prescient about the American military fascination with 'rapid dominance' - shock and awe. In this book he may have invented the first ugly American.
** ** **

We are now officially included in the Hellenic Census. Angeliki  and Marie-Elena who have volunteered to carry out the census for Ano Korakiana and who live in the village knocked on our door today and noted details of our names. education, jobs, parents and...
"Why did you come here?"
"Love" I said. Marie-Elena wrote on the form.
"You mean you can put that in?"
"Of course"
"Not because we loved each other" Lin hastened to correct "but because we  love Corfu."
"Li-in!"
Thanassis on the village website reminds us that the population of the village needs to be above a certain number - 1000 residents - to avoid our village losing influence in the new local government of the island,
*** ***

Onions were 69 cents a kilo this February, and this isn't just Lidl

A circuitous and counter-intuitive position on the Greek economic crisis is taken by the BBC's economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders. 'Everyone says that heightened talk of a Greek default is proof that last year's bail-out has "failed". But you could make a strong case for the opposite.' The BBC tend to hire rather clever people - in this case Balliol, Harvard, US Treasury - so I note what she says even though I understand hardly a third of her argument, but would like to agree with it even so - not least because she likes cycling in sensible clothes.  Her view is that the bailout has worked for the Eurozone but hasn't been much help to Greece. That's so unlike 'a strong case for the opposite', I find her her piece tendentious and insensitive.

*** ***
Since dominant Bubble died, there's been renegotiation between cats around the house - a valued pitch with so many of us putting out food for them. A new Tom has made his appearance, testing out more familiar males, each challenge, avoiding actual fights, has enhanced his place in the feline pecking order. He's not a prepossessing beast - matted and mangy - 'of feature by dissembling nature' - seemingly composed, fore and aft, of separate animals, we've called him 'devil-cat'.

Getting ready to go to Greece

Coming back from a meeting in Stafford to plan scrutiny seminars later in the year, I decided to get off at Smethwick Galton Bridge. What makes this location a delight is that the station contains, on separate levels, intersecting lines to New Street and Snow Hill - both going to a destination hardly four miles away, yet, at Galton Bridge, forming a cross roads which makes me lose my orientation as I emerge with my bicycle from the lift to take another lift to get to the street exit. There are surrounding roads and junctions and a pedestrian walk - Roebuck Lane - across Thomas Telford's high Victorian cast-iron bridge, from which you see - a few yards away - another bridge carrying trains from the north, and then, peering over Telford's fine railings, I glimpse a smooth zigzag leading down to the towpath of the Birmingham main-line canal and know my way again. I headed down the slope and cycled a mile and a half to the exit next to Black Patch Park, inspected the place and headed up to the Soho Road and a long meal at Sangams before going home.

Amy's finally reclaimed her bicycle from our garage, changed the knobbly mountain tyres for hybrids. I gave her a lesson on mending punctures, changing tubes, putting talcum inside the tyres, checking pressures. I fished gadgets for her from my tuck box of cycle bits and pieces including a light set. So now she's cycling into the city centre from Minworth via the Birmingham-Fazeley towpath. ** ** **

Honey snaps a marrow in the garden at Democracy Street

Lin's packing our cases. "Let me know the books you want to take." I'm getting ready for the journey, thinking about where we're going and ticking off jobs to be done here - tap washers changed, lawns mowed; physical things. Preparing for work can be done anywhere. Honey's sent us pictures of the garden at 208. "Lots of weeds but we'll have lots of stuffed marrow." Yesterday Richard drove me down to Rock Cottage.

It needed checking for damp "and hornets" said two friends who'd stayed a night instead of the week they'd planned. Switched to 208 we've been spending little time in the Forest of Dean. Wabi sabi (侘寂) cottage - a place of such happy times as the children were growing - bought the year Richard was born, 70 miles south of Birmingham, approached by a footpath up Bell Hill in the centre of the long village of Lydbrook, backing onto the forest - another village with a band.

We trudged up the steep familiar path to the cottage. It wasn't so bad. Dusty and musty perhaps. I put the heating on; electric blankets; scrubbed out debris from mouse-riven tea bag boxes in the kitchen drawers and swept the bathroom, cleaned the bath and shelves; cut away the Virginia creeper filling the gutters and the bramble tendrils reaching for windows and under the doors. How swiftly the forest takes over.

Once the beds were made up and the messiness reduced we left and went further into the forest, stopping in a layby beyond Ruspidge. Just inside the trees as we wandered through a scowle, Richard said "Look, dad" There, as close as I've been to any in the wild, were two stags and a doe, gazing down from the grassy spoil heap. We drove to the river's edge at Alvington and walked along a narrow path lined with tall nettles and brambles under the railway, emerging on a grass covered slipway before a panorama of the Severn estuary. Spring high tide. An expanse of brown water moving neither way, turgid, slightly sinister. Walking back I picked and savoured rich blackberries and got a tingling sting and a scratch. Then to the small church at Hewelsfield and back to Lydbrook to visit our friend Steven Outram in the converted church that is his studio. For twenty years he's painted the local landscape, defining its appearance as composites - the result of sketches made on long walks.

* * * I’m nursing two disappointments. We’ve been warned by Birmingham’s allotments officer that the arrival of local allotments on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (VJA) is again postponed - this time indefinitely. Email 19 August 2009:

Simon, I have no further news. In short, I do not have a firm date for completion of the works and I also understand that the land acquisition is not complete. Given those facts, we cannot occupy the land as I had assumed we would have been able to by now. Without specific detail I am not in a position to tell people anything more. However, my view is that we will have to delay opening until 2010 - we have the added problems of losing a key staff member, Gardeners Weekend and the imminent rent period and these have huge implications on our resource. My optimism is therefore evaporating but there is little more I can do except shout. Adrian Stagg, Allotments Finance & Records Officer.

Dear Adrian. Thank you for your swift reply to my query about when plots on the VJA would be becoming available after we had heard rumours of yet further delay. It's clear that within the constraints of officer's neutrality you've been doing your professional best to encourage the development of allotments including the VJA. It's not too strong to say that I and a lot of others will be very disappointed and indignant at not being able to apply for plots on the VJA for yet another year, and indeed will have to continue to worry that our hopes have been frustrated and - given past experience - that this waiting might not even end in 2010. Over a year ago on 20 May 2008, at a site meeting with Alan Orr, our community planning officer, local councillors and other local representative's were told by Mr Orr that the developer, Persimmon Homes, had agreed that the 'trigger' point for proceeding with the contracted terms of the Sections 106 Agreement on the site had arrived. Details of that meeting and an image are here. Basically Alan Orr said that a representative of Charles Church, the developer of the housing on the site, would now be proceeding to implement the terms of the Section 106 Agreement (planning gain agreement) on the site - a legal agreement concluded between Birmingham City Council and the Applicant on 20 May 2004 after their application - N/01514/03/FUL - had been approved by the City's Development Control Committee on the grounds that in return for building on green space next to Handsworth Park, the developer would lay out on the rest of the land, 80 new allotments, a cricket pitch, two soccer pitches, sports pavilion and children's play areas and that these resources would be passed on to the City as soon as an agreed number of the new houses had been sold - the 'trigger' point referred to above. I'm sorry for being repetitive but this is a legal agreement whose terms are not being implemented and in that respect it seems to us that both parties bear responsibility for this continued failure to realise its terms. Yours sincerely, Simon, Handsworth Allotments Information Group (HAIG)

Adrian’s a sober and politically sensitive officer, but we can tell how he feels about this succession of delays and broken promises. I'm writing around, letting people know.

The other disappointment is that our Amy missed - by five seconds - passing the fitness test to transfer from Community Support to the Police. It’s the same test for men as for women; unjust by Olympic standards of physical differences between men and women, but possibly right in terms of doing the same job on the streets. She must wait 12 weeks to take the test again. On this occasion, apparently fairly typical, 8 out of the 9 women candidates failed while 1 out of the 11 men failed.

* * *

Cycling back from campus I met Robin Clarke cycling the other way. He lives high in a city tower block in Ladywood. We stopped in the shade of sycamores by the Vale Bridge for one of our biannual chats about the end of the world. He drew, from his bag, his paper ‘Will there be an abrupt collapse?' We discussed what might collapse, when and how - currencies, credit, commodity markets, especially energy and food, retailing, transport, communications, water supply, government operational systems, trust in government and in legal, social, and informal norms, trust in, and cooperation with, other persons of varying familiarity. Robin suggests potential causes of abrupt collapse: hyperinflation, crossing of balance-sheet thresholds, under-recognised key roles, market failures (short-termism, panic-paralysis), 'unexpected' events in a context of corner-cutting, loss of confidence in various assumptions..."Make sure you're down for an allotment!" I said. Next day he sent me an e-mail and a link:

You'll have heard that not only are France and Germany "recovering" but so is the US. Meanwhile in the real world.....