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Cheek

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Μαγουλιά ...from the village website for Ano Korakiana

Ψαρόσουπα με λαχανικά «σβησμένα» με κρασί και «μαγουλιά» λυθρινιού, συνοδευόμενη από άσπρο κρασί και το Τριώδιο ακόμη δεν άρχισε…Στην τηλεόραση, τα τελευταία τηλεοπτικά σποτ των πολιτικών κομμμάτων, λίγο πριν την κάλπη...On TV, the latest TV spots for political parties just before the ballot in the village. They will be voting on Democracy Street today.
Polling on Democracy Street, Ano Korakiana ~ 25th Jan 2015

*** *** ***
My personal connections to beloved Greece means the matter intensifies my interest, but this turn of events - like many in Greece in modern times - has implications. Greece's connection to the EU and the Euro always had more to do with the symbolic significance of Hellenic membership, than economic logic. Alexis Tsipras is an attractive bright idealist, leader of Syriza with government-forming support in the polls.
He thinks there is an economic alternative to austerity. My neighbours in Ano Korakiana like this man's thinking. At previous elections they saw him as too young, even naive, lacking in experience. Inside the polling booths, they may yet have reverted to older politicians and parties, rather than support Tsipras' avowed policy to renegotiate the policies of austerity - conditions affecting Greece worse than other PIIGS. Syriza is about to form a government that will challenge the neo-liberal economic method and faith we've inhabited since Mrs Thatcher read Hayek's Road to Serfdom* in 1944 and took it to heart, and pursued its message with conviction for most of the free world.
Our trust in the power of markets is lessening these days but while many. including me, can explain our mistrust - especially the visible facts of market failure and its consequences, we tend to keep 'a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse'.
Syriza's going to have a go. If it elects a workable government under Tsipras so is Greece! Tsipras without becoming a useless, and dangerous, populist (not impossible given the despair of so many in Greece) must, to succeed, sell to his fellow citizens and the rest of Europe 'the big idea' that there's something better for Greece than the horrid prescription of continuing austerity.
Those, who like me, don't trust, communism or the bureaucratic fumbling of state socialism, are attracted to Tsipras' more moderate nostrums - ones that focus on bringing government authority to ameliorating the toxic effects of market externalities.* We've heard the poetry. it stirs!
...Mario Cuomo's famous dictum that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose...The poetry of campaigning is lofty, gauzy, full of possibility, a world where problems are solved just because we want them to be and opposition melts away before us. The prose of governing is messy and maddening, full of compromises and half-victories that leave a sour taste in one's mouth.
But I hesitate to test my intuitions and hopes of alternatives to austerity to the rigorous prose of government - especially as I am quite comfortably off. especially as I'm alright.


It's a complicated case, hence Tsipras' vagueness - along with all aspiring political leaders - about what he will do as Prime Minister. He's been effective in opposition. I cannot see him being as effective in government. He wants to keep Greece in the euro. He wants Greece to withdraw from the bailout agreement. Samaras has given his main opponent little time to turn that popular adversarial vision ("the future begins today") into a reality that will get votes on polling day. But then I'd far rather have Tsipras than Golden Dawn. There's an easy opinion!
I am too far imbued with the painful principles of neo-liberalism to believe in practical alternatives to continued austerity. Is there one? Margaret T did well. "I can see no alternative - TINA!"; perhaps there are alternatives in those Scandinavian welfare states with small, still relatively homogeneous populations. Whether there's an alternative that can work for the rest of us, the rest of the world is asking.
*Hayek's case for free markets includes the view that where market activities damage third parties - negative externalities (corruption, harm to the environment, 'exploitation of ignorance') there's a place for the intervention of government. 
*** ***
Exit poll as promised around 19.30 in Greece, 17.30 here in UK

  • French Tart What does it mean?
    59 mins · Like · 1
  • Heather Skinner it's the spread across the various exit polls "from %" on the left column "to %" on the right - IF Syriza actually has polled 39.5 % they MAY have enough seats (151) for an overall majority to make a government on their own, parties that poll 3% or over (which in this case includes the extreme right Golden Dawn) will also have seats. If Syriza cannot form a government on their own, they will have to form an alliance with one or more of the other parties
*** *** ***
Syriza Rides Anti-Austerity Wave to Landslide Victory in Greece
by Eleni Chrepa & Marcus Bensasson
Bloomberg NewsJanuary 25, 2015

Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza brushed aside Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s party to record a landslide victory in Greece’s elections, after riding a public backlash against years of budget cuts demanded by international creditors, exit polls showed.
Tsipras’s Coalition of the Radical Left, known by its Greek acronym, took between 36% and 38% compared with 26% to 28% for Samaras’s New Democracy in Sunday’s election, according to an exit poll on state-run Nerit TV showed. To Potami, formed less than a year ago and a potential Syriza coalition partner, tied for third place with the far-right Golden Dawn on 6% to 7%.
The projected victory, by a wider margin than polls predicted, may be enough for Syriza to govern alone. It hands Tsipras, 40, an overwhelming mandate to confront Greece’s program of austerity imposed in return for pledges of €240 billion ($269 billion) in aid since May 2010. The challenge for him now is to strike a balance between keeping his election pledges including a writedown of Greek debt and avoiding what Samaras repeatedly warned was the risk of an accidental exit from the euro.
Syriza, in a statement read out by a party official, said the victory was “historic” and one that represented hope.
*** **** ***
From the poll in Ano Korakiana, above average support for Syriza:
Αποτελέσματα βουλευτικών εκλογών
Γράφει ο/η Κβκ   
25.01.15
Αποτελέσματα βουλευτικών εκλογών 25ης Ιανουαρίου 2015, στο χωριό μας:
Ψήφισαν: 735
Ακυρα-Λευκά: 13
Έγκυρα: 722

Έλαβαν:

ΣΥΡΙΖΑ: 314 (43,5%)
Ν.Δ.: 162
ΚΚΕ: 63
ΠΟΤΑΜΙ: 48
ΑΝ.ΕΛ.: 36
ΠΑΣΟΚ: 27
Χρυσή Αυγή: 27
ΚΙ.ΔΗ.ΣΟ: 16
ΛΑΟΣ: 6
ΑΝΤΑΡΣΙΑ: 5
ΛΟΙΠΑ: 18

New Corfu MPs: SYRIZA, Stefano Samoilis and Fotini Vaki for SYRIZA, Stefanos Gikas for ND

<Το Νησί των Συναισθημάτων>

"Let us therefore brace ourselves..."

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'If SYRIZA survive the tough beginning, a looming change in European attitudes to austerity politics in Europe might vindicate their struggle.' SYRIZA are inexperienced in government and up against such powers and carrying such hopes in Greece and across Europe. I would have thought that the most important requirements within this government along with Odyssesian agility is courage. ("Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves etc".) For us watching and, in some cases, directly experiencing this bold attempt to end Greece's 'fiscal waterboarding', the trickiest thing will be sorting out the truth amid the media blitz that arises from the fact that we are seeing a small country, a truly 'forlorn hope', charging the agents and agencies of mainstream economics. Tsipras and his cabinet are up against current economic science, present economic faith and almost universal economic common-sense. But all these things, for which we can see no clear alternative, means imposing upon Greece a prolonged version of what the Treaty of Versailles - so very understandable, such common sense - did to Germany in 1919. We have a dear friend in Greece who pays her bills, obeys the law, pays all the latest taxes, and works work works. 'There is not a morning I do not wake up scared" she says. In the case of Greece economic 'common sense' is not working. Some people use language and interpretations of events in Greece as though they have nothing to do with this. That is not the case. Let's have some tunes? Hallelujah
"We need to stop this carnival of tax evasion and tax avoidance"Alexis Tsipras


Winter work

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Simon in Greece with a Mayday wreath; stepfather Jack Hargreaves in his shed in Dorset with a film from Out of Town
In the last three years we've worked on the production of two commercially available box-sets of my stepfather's TV broadcasts on DVDs. Now I've bought the rights in Out of Town held by Endemol, I'm earning royalties on their sale through Delta Leisure, as Jack intended. The next challenge is the more complicated one of securing his remaining material, most of it not shown since it was broadcast in the 1970s. The box-sets consisted of material more or less ready to show, but this older material does not exist in the form of complete episodes. It comes piecemeal, incoherent, muddled up...
Jack Hargreaves - the invention of the camera from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
When he died twenty-one years ago, my stepfather left an unwieldy but intriguing collection of 16mm film and 1/4" reel-to-reel sound tape - incomplete components of his long-running television programme Out of Town. For nearly three years I've been striving to organise this precious stuff into a secure archive.
On January 12th Lin and I had tea with Christopher Perry.
He lives just streets away. We met at his house to discuss his offer to speed up the process of digitising, synchronising and remastering the archive of my stepfather's silent films and tapes that I've been storing in a scruffy lock-up near Spaghetti Junction since April 2012.  So far this exercise in recovery has been going at sub-snail pace, because of time and equipment constraints on Francis Niemczyk's work. In the last two years just three episodes have been remastered. Good work but leaving close to two hundred archived episodes yet to be recovered.

Chris Perry is a pioneer of Kaleidoscope. A film and tape archaeologist, he helped recover 'The Lost Episodes' of Out of Town published by Delta in 2012. A month before Christmas Kaleidoscope won a bid to take over local TV ....
Kaleidoscope TV Limited has been awarded the licence to broadcast a new local television service for Birmingham, the Black Country and Solihull via Freeview channel 8 and Virgin Media cable channel 159. It is expected that the channel will launch early in 2015. Ofcom has stipulated that the new channel should be on the air no later than February 28th, 2015. The new company, formed specifically to hold separate Kaleidoscope’s broadcasting venture from the existing organisation, is jointly owned by Mike Prince who will be a familiar face to Midlands television viewers as an on-screen continuity announcer for ATV and Central Television during the 70s and 80s and Chris Perry, head of Kaleidoscope, the Birmingham based classic television organisation. KaleidoscopeTV will launch as part of the government’s initiative for a national network of local television channels. The licence had originally been awarded to City TV, a company that went into administration before getting on the air. After administrators Duff & Phelps Ltd took control of City TVs assets, numerous bids were received for the company’s licence. Kaleidoscope TV was the preferred bidder and after a stringent examination of the company’s finances and programming plans, Ofcom has agreed to transfer the licence to Kaleidoscope.
Tea with Chris Perry


In return for being allowed to broadcast these episodes on KalTV Chris offers to remaster the film-tape archive.
"Draw up an agreement. Get me 33 tape-film matches to start. The digitising can be done in London. You can oversee synchronising and editing tape and film at Walsall Studios prior to broadcast."
On Wednesday Lin and I went out to the lock-up with our list of tapes and films. We brought home all the sound tapes, organised the films into the numbers attached to the cans while they were at South West Film and Television Archive, and removed one box of film. Once home we got the tapes checked against our list and marked them with the numbers on the films. That done we matched three of the films in the one box brought home.

Two days later we returned to the lock-up and dug out all the films with the listed numbers; Lin digging in the film boxes and calling out the numbers as I ticked off them off on the list.
It was chilly work. Once home and warmed up we started matching films and tapes - relying on the numbers on the boxes and cans, but also checking titles written on both containers. By the end of the day we had 70 matches.

"Tomorrow we'll select 10 of these matched film-tape pairs to take to London"




Extract from an 'Agreement' with Kaleidoscope TV ~ signed by Simon Baddeley and Chris Perry and witnessed

My plot

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'Above all remember; allotment gardening is fun, it's healthy and it's a great way to meet people. So the most important thing is to enjoy your allotment.'
Advice from the Allotments Section at Birmingham City Council suggests it takes 3 years to get a new allotment in order, but that's if you are already skilled and organised.

I and Lin and now my waged help, Winnie, have been digging over and over, weeding, weeding, weeding (dragging out those sinuous creeping white couch grass rhizomes especially)....
Winnie and Simon on Plot 14 (photo: Sue Hall, Winnie's mum)

....laying permanent paths, cutting out and pegging down porous weed control fabric, making temporary paths by moving around stacks of the industrial-grade carpet tiles I picked up for free during a garden clearance for Handsworth Helping Hands. Making separate beds accessible. The plot is just over 200 square meters, but with the shed and paths only half of that area is now working soil.
Potatoes planted in a bed dug over and over, weeded; new topsoil and compost raked in; all easily worked from surrounding paths

I love it. I do. I really do. But this is not a 'working man's' allotment from which i can proudly feed my family - the ideal of small holdings - urban green spaces whose legislative protection grows weaker by the year. Mine is a hobby plot - a word I dislike; a fact I accept, as a man seven generations from the land. My family have been townspeople, even when enjoying life in the country, since my ancestor Samuel Lees in Oldham became an iron master, then cotton mill owner, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. True my stepfather could work the ground, handle stock, and grow vegetables in large numbers while my grandmother, Bar, abandoned metropolitan life to start the dairy farm where I was born in March 1942 and spent a lot of my childhood - an idyllic place I first heard described, when I was in my teens, as 'a hobby farm - by my stepfather.
Mill End: Simon on Gypsy, Bar on the haywain
I can't say I'd rather my allotment wasn't just a hobby. That's silly. I don't quite know what I was thinking. I suppose I think of it more as an experiment; a test even.
January 2007 - a picture in The Birmingham Evening Mail"When will the company who bought this green space in Birmingham and built on a third of it lay out the allotments that were part of planning gain deal agreed with Birmingham City Council?"
A hobby is 'a regular activity done for pleasure during one's leisure time'. Campaigning ten years to stop the Victoria Jubilee Allotments from being built over and, after that busy time - lobbying, writing, filming, speaking - getting the opportunity to work this plot, has hardly been a leisured activity. I've never been that keen about dividing activities into ones that are leisure, and one's that aren't. I've a distaste for how that distinction defines 'work'.
Starting on Plot 14 in 2010

I want Plot 14 - one Lin and I chose when the Victoria Jubilee Allotments opened in June 2010 - to prosper. I want it fecund, thriving - a source of pride and good food, I want to agree with the advice that an allotment should be enjoyable.
I've invested money on help, on topsoil, on compost, striving to get the ground closer to how I think it needs to be, and all the time I'm learning, with help from other plot-holders far better than me at growing their own - especially my friends Ziggi with her plot in north London and Vanley with his on the Victoria Jubilee, just a few yards away.
Winter sown broad beans with a sprinkle of potash to rake in
I'm going to make this work. But I'm reminded of Douglas Adam's remark "Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss" or Winston Churchill saying 'success involves persevering from one failure to the next', The gardening guide books I read aren't helpful. They begin at a point I'm still striving to reach. They hardly mention soil filled with rubbish, as well as stones, nor do they seem to give much attention to the emotions aroused by the depredations of slugs, onion fly, pigeons, snails (with their exquisite shells I find impossible to crush), and human pilferers - the ones that stole my garlic last year! How I do not envy new plot holders as inexperienced as I, trying to get vegetables to grow on adjoining plots that are like mine was four and half years ago, perhaps worse.
Stones continue to come out of the soil at every dig....

....but they never appear in the books
...and this worthy tutor teaches me more or less nothing about how to dig my plot

I emailed Clive Birch, BDAC, for advice:
Dear Clive.  Happy New Year 2015.  I hope you're well. I've a favour to ask. Since 2010 I have struggled to get my allotment working. You’d not expect less when I’ve invested so much in getting it in the first place. My favour is also a question. We have by all accounts rather uneven topsoil on the VJA. I know that allotments officers on the council were hesitant about accepting the new plots from Persimmon under the S106A of 2004 because the land was not adequately prepared by the developer. Those of us pressing to get the allotments up and running pressed the council to let people start gardening. A minority of plot holders are doing pretty well but all I’ve spoken to admit they’ve had to do a lot of work getting the soil manageable and productive. It is full of stones, bricks, and other debris, as well as chunks of clay with - in some places - ground heavily compressed by building plant machinery. A lot of us have invested in manure, compost and extra topsoil. I would - now that I am beginning to feel more in control - be so grateful for someone coming to look at the soil on my plot to give me an assessment and tell me the best way to continue improving it. All the guide books speak of adding nutrients and getting a balance between acid and alkali, but I’m in the dark as to the starting point on soil composition. It would be great if someone with much more experience and knowledge than I could drop over and give my plot soil an assessment and diagnosis with suggestions as to the what would now be the best treatment to get healthy crops. Would this be possible? Best wishes Simon 
Simon. An experienced allotment holder visited your site and had a good look round, concentrating on the soil structure. Some plots were thriving, some were struggling and some were vacant and overgrown - the overgrown plots obviously were able to support plant life! You can test the acidity of soil [test kits available at DIY/ Nursery] - often the only balance used is lime for the brassicas. The answer to improving the plot - clear rough debris - stones etc [stones can be buried to provide drainage] Clay - working in compost - leaf mould is one of best ways - over wintering will help here. Adding as much rotted compost/manure is great. Leave on surface for a while then dig in [note some crops do not like fresh manure!] You could import topsoil but beware it could include weeds etc even Japanese knot weed! Perseverance is needed. Hope this helps. Best wishes, Clive
So really there's almost nothing in that I don't know, except for the hint about brassicas and the use of stones for drainage. Yet I'm grateful for the confirmation. The depth of my ignorance shared with Lin had me putting my seed potatoes under our bed to chit.
"They need the dark" Lin insisted, so under our bed they went.

I checked this up in books and on the internet
"No Linda! They need light not dark!"
Since the only chitting spuds we'd ever seen were the ones that start sprouting in the veg cupboard in the kitchen we'd assumed that darkness was needed. Out came the spuds from under the bed. Now I have them laid out in the conservatory.
A potato from the kitchen cupboard
Seven months ago the plot looked lovely - the greenery of mid-summer covering a multitude of sins. How will it look this summer? Much depends on what i do in the next few weeks.
June 2014


***** ***** *****
That other plot...
"We didn't reach an agreement. It was never on the cards that we would"
Yanis Varoufakis meets Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin. The first 10 minutes of the clip has journalists and camera-folk preparing to see and hear statements. Then 'the curtain rises'. There they are, by god! Varoufakis has earned a concession before the conversation began. Greece is talking through Varoufakis to the Finance Minister of Germany - not to the Troika who Tsipras told his voters would not be the new Greek government's first port of call after the election. At 23.25 the German turns with courtesy to the Greek who with the journalists has been listening to the most sober and grave re-iteration from Schäuble for the European Project, an address not really to beloved and beleaguered Greece but to a far wider and more fragmented and unreliable audience across our continent.
Aristeidis Metallinos, Ano Korakiana's laic sculptor, depicts the EEC (EOK) as a broody chimaera
In my head there plays as background to this press statement I hear music - the 'Song for the Unification of Europe' composed by Zbigniew Preisner, sung in Greek by Elżbieta Towarnicka - an abridged version of 1 Corinthians:13, from the soundtrack of Krzysztof Kieślowski film 'Bleu'. Varoufakis is also in government but he speaks eloquently, poetically, to the people of Germany; pleads to them for their support in fighting the threat of fascism in Greece. I feel I am watching two statesmen at work; two men who know their trade.

I had an exchange with Richard Pine a few days ago. He wrote in The Irish Times
Tsipras appears to be naively idealistic, innocent, ingenuous and transparent, but he needs to be secretive, cunning and dishonest to succeed in the minefield he has created. As Maurice Manning once said of Garret FitzGerald, it is difficult to trust someone who pours a glass of wine without reading the label on the bottle. Tsipras wants to do the impossible, but if he is to succeed as a political leader he must learn the art of the possible and acquire the killer instinct.
So Richard suggests Tsipras must imitate the Greek hero Odysseus - famous for escaping terrible dangers more through cunning than face-to-face combat. My email:
Richard. I recall writing this in a paper published in the 90s about political skill in civil servants and politicians.....The constant negotiation of this moral minefield is part of life and certainly part of government. An additional layer of complexity is added to these circumstances by the fact that in families, as indeed in government, many people recognise the presence of these dynamics and may actually impart “in confidence”, something intended to be passed on. A process of negotiation is occurring where one person appears to be trusting another to risk being untrustworthy. The novelist Iain McEwan describes public figures who move around in this moral maze by navigating the complicated channels that run between truth and lying: 'with sure instincts while retaining a large measure of dignity. Only occasionally, as a consequence of tactical error, was it necessary to lie significantly, or tell an important truth. Mostly it was sure-footed scampering between the two extremes. Wasn’t the interior life much the same?’  (McEwan 1988:182)....McEwan captures the moral nimbleness that accompanies grown-up behaviour - public and private - where corruption and probity are proximate rather than polar and, where rules are at best casuitical; maintaining integrity requires wit.  What I struck me about Iain McEwan’s words is that self-query 'Wasn’t the interior life much the same?’  My tolerance of politicians about whom you are much more judgemental (I think) is that politics - certainly the politics of government - is that it’s so like my internal life and I suggest I’m not alone in that. Best, Simon 
Richard: You mean you lie to yourself and let not your right hand know....? 
Simon: That’s what Iain McEwan is suggesting. I care about the environment and do many things that harm it. I shop at supermarkets while praising the survival of small shops. I think lascivious thoughts about other women. The list of my moral inconsistencies is endless and I don’t let them worry me or lessen my expressions of concern about the sins of my fellows.
My interior life is a parliament of debate with every now and then a rare internal argument from which the whips are withdrawn and I have a vote in which I must truly interrogate my conscience - but most of the time I’m bladerunning ‘the complicated channels that run between truth and lying”.
I think you have so hit the spot when saying how Tspiras must be. The killer instinct etc. Do you think he has it? Could he grow into it? Is his partner going to help? Peristera Batziaka. ‘Tough cookie”? This is riveting. S 
R: I don't have that problem/advantage. I never argue or debate with myself. I am conscience-free when I wake, and the same when I go to sleep. Thanks for the Batziaka article - interesting that "peristera" means "pigeon" or "turtle-dove". R 
S: 'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'Matt 10:16"I never argue or debate with myself. I am conscience-free when I wake, and the same when I go to sleep”. People will make pilgrimages to seek your advice - the sage of Perithia. You make me think of that other writer Nikos Kazantzakis “I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realise of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”  S
Draw me a picture....

In other words just 10.6% of the €254 billion funds 'state operating needs'



Εμπρός γκρεμός και πίσω ρέμα.

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In Ano Korakiana, and every village across the land, edges of roads and steps and paths are being whitewashed, verges tidied, surfaces swept as Easter comes closer. Fortis and his son Lefteris set to with bucket and brushes this morning, doing edges by our home as well as theirs. From the 12.15 city to village bus I glimpsed his back – an older man in a wide hat walking near the centre of the road below the village. The driver used his horn. The figure moved a pace to the left without turning; absorbed. Andreas Metallinos on one of his regular walks – βόλτες του – a slight stoop and a walking stick, coming from his daughter’s home – which he built - just outside the village. Angeliki, grand-daughter of Aristeidis Metallinos, has set aside an hour a day from Tuesday to Saturday in the week after Easter to create a catalogue of the laic sculptor’s works. I couldn’t be more pleased at this step toward making sculptor better known. She suggested this over coffee at Crescendo - next door to the sculptor’s museum; told her I’m responding to a request for a picture of one of the sculptor’s works as an illustration in Richard Pine’s latest book – this one about Greece from an Irish perspective. Tassos took photos of all 250 pieces in the museum but the one which Richard’s suggested to his publisher isn’t clear enough. With the family’s permission I arranged for Rob Groove, a professional and a friend, to visit the museum.

He uses a far better camera than mine. Publishing even one picture fits the hope Angeliki and I share of another increment to her grandfather’s public presence – in this case his craft and his gift for ribald illustration of human frailty.  Richard said “It’ll go down a treat in Catholic Ireland”
Anna, holding Stavros her little nephew, welcomed us again into their home, turned on the lighting in the familiar rooms where the stone and marble works sit on packed shelves. Rob set up lights and tripod and took pictures; used his laptop to check results.


“I’ll work on these tonight. If you could link to robgroove.com I’d be happy”
“Send your best choice straight to Richard. Copy to me”
Richard’s email re ‘The naughty bishop” – a scandal of the mid-1970s.
‘Yes, it's better - much clearer contrast. Many thanks for organising it.
You didn't say whether you'd prefer Chrysomalis or Nino's - where we were (the 3 of us) before. Please let me know. The bus I will be taking is the 4pm to Acharavi - it goes straight on from Tzavros, not turning right to go through Ipsos. Not sure if it stops anywhere from where you could get to Ano K.
SB: We’ll see you at Chrysomalis. Your bus can drop us at the turn to Ano Korakiana off the Sidari Road. Only 2 kilometres to the village.
Once at lunch – the usual disappointment starting with tourist guff about this being Lawrence Durrell’s favourite place (he did have a favoured table by the window and told someone seeking a signature to ‘f’ off’. That was half a century ago and more.) Lin’s chicken was reheated; my giant beans straight from the tin; the chips pre-cut. But at least we got a receipt.
“I’m long used to being offered with and without receipt prices” I said “and I still get them from the baker in the village, but in the last week I’ve had more avoidance receipts than ever, with excuses about broken tills, a lengthy request for tax number and other personal details to enter in the computer until I give up, and at a garage when I followed up the now familiar avoidance – despite the valuable word ‘ λοιπόν’ to allow a pause and rethink – I said “I’m supposed to get in touch about this with Mr Varoufakis”
“Ah yes well when you speak with Mr Varoufakis please ask him to drop in and mend our cash-machine”
Richard, over his tepid plate of wrinkled greasy rice stuffed tomatoes, said “You know, I know, and everyone in Brussels knows that despite the lip service absolutely nothing is being done to try and extract tax owed by the very rich. I suspect it’s impossible. Meynard Keynes at the time of the Treaty of Versailles wrote a policy paper to the Allies saying there were two choices ‘Enable Germany to rebuild her economy despite all animosities, or bring her low, gutting what’s left'"
To the bruised and vengeful allies the generous option would have been politically impossible, even morally feeble. No Marshall plan in 1919.
“The consequences for Europe and the world we all know. The troika with Merkel’s support intend to maintain the pressures that over the long term will reduce Greece to the economic condition of a third world nation” (Richard's latest article in the Irish Times)
The pace of real disaster seems snail paced against the fireworks of TV entertainment we enjoy over evening meals. Striving to stand back far enough to get a perspective on an unfolding catastrophe I wonder how in the midst of this national crisis with its wider corollaries anyone would want to watch something as invented and artificial as Black Sails, House of Cards or Game of Thrones.
Tsipras is playing a weak hand but playing it as well as anyone whose promised not to be as obedient to Brussels as his predecessor Samaras. I emailed John Martin the other day. He and Annie went to a conference at Birmingham University last week. He’d asked for my impressions:
Dear John. Sorry you seem to have missed Richard in Birmingham.
I’d like to know if the accomm at the Bull was quaint and interesting or unmentionable.
With your customary generous manners I can see you not grumbling to me as I recommended. But I’m hoping so much it was OK and you didn’t have to move out to Holiday Inn or equivalent.
Hope Cats was good. Happy Birthday to Annie.
In Corfu everyone speaks of endless rain but we’ve hit a lucky set of blue sunny days with the wood stove needed only at night to keep us cosy in the house.
General view of the ‘situation’ here is that the SYRIZA government needs its first 100 days and that Greece is playing the toughest of games despite a lousy hand. The cards? Card 1: Austerity doesn’t work. Card 2: Don’t drive us into the hands of Golden Dawn. Card 3: Russia and/or China. Card 4: German WW2 reparations -  cut us some debt-forgiveness like Germany got war forgiveness via the Marshall Plan. Card 5: We really will do something about corruption and tax collection.
Systems of tax collection have closed down here pending the new government’s resolutions on what will be stopped, modified and renewed. So even if we want to pay our taxes we can’t. All is on hold.
There is a feeling of resigned waiting, but it still feels slightly better than under the previous government.
Varoufakis seems to be lying low at the moment. His initial coverage led to vexation and some envy of ‘bandstanding’ in his own party; SYRIZA already being a loose partnership of several left wing parties.
How does it look from your perch?
Our children stepped in to look after Lin’s mum. It’s so good they enabled her to get away, but Lin’s mum Dot has an alarm button that rings with Amy, Richard and us if pressed. Dot’s been mistaking it for the normal call button. I think that’s sorted now. Love to all, S 
*** *** ***
It wouldn’t need a theologian to argue that hefting a plastic bag of just born kittens out of a wheelie bin is no act of charity. We were walking down National Opposition Street in the dusk, further than we’d planned. Distressing cries came from within.
“There’s a cat trapped in there” said Lin lifting the lid “Oh no it’s kittens in a bag” There were four of them soaked fur matted in condensation, one dead already, umbilical still attached.
Next day chatting to Katerina she gestured with a heave of her arm the obvious sense of chucking them back where we’d found them. There are feral cats in scores across the village. By then our rescued kits – two tabby, one ginger - were in a cardboard box, wrapped in a towel on top of a hot water bottle being fed Lactol solution from a syringe dropper bought at the pet food shop in Dassia.
“Lick them with a sponge in warm water” said the woman there “as the mum cat would to keep them clean”
“So what do we do with them?”
One friend advised “Take a fetching photo. Float them on local Facebook. Say if no-one claims them by the end of May – if they last as long – they’re off to the vet”
“I’d like to let them loose to take their chances with the other village cats” I said
“They’ll be eaten alive. They’re going to be domesticated by you tending them. They’re domesticating by the hour”
“Great. Why don’t I just clobber them with a spade now? Dig them into the wisteria roots like the butcher’s fresh rabbit skin”
They have all died now, increasingly enfeebled, they've faded away. Without the attention of a true dam our ministrations were futile.
*** *** ***
It rained. “We’ve had so much rain” everyone repeated. Down at the Sunday table-top sale at Sally’s Bar we skyped Amy, outside to get away from the piped sound indoors, but Lin protecting the screen from stray drops of rain. Something about a shower screen bought on ebay but sent without the bar that attaches it to the wall. Amy - in bed with our grand-daughter crawling vigorously back and forth while Oliver naked bounces in and out of vision grinning at us across the ether - checks the ebay description and seller’s details on her phone.



On the Ipsos esplanade, almost deserted, the unsightly palms bent to a wind from the south.


*** *** ***
I’ve been engrossed in a South African police procedural. Heart of Darkness stuff, in the publisher’s words ‘World Noir’, translated from French in 2008 Brian Epkeen, South African Police officer reflects on his boss’s inabiity to proceed with a politically charged case
‘Faced with competition from world markets, sovereign states could do very little to withstand the pressures of finance and globalised trade, unless they wanted to alienate investors and threaten their own gross national product. The role of states was now limited to maintaining order and security in the midst of a new world disorder controlled by centrifugal, supranational and elusive forces. No-one genuinely believed in progress anymore, the world had become an uncertain, precarious place, but most decision makers were happy to let the pirates of this phantom system continue with their plunder and to take advantage of it themselves while hoping it would all blow over. The excluded were pushed farther out onto the periphery of huge cities reserved for the winners of a cannibalistic game in which, with no prospect of collective action, people’s widespread frustration was channeled into television, sports and celebrity culture.’ Caryl Férey Zulu (2010) pp.379-380 
The plot is relentless. Good for the Christian week of despair. ‘No-one genuinely believed in progress anymore’. Is that my elderly mood or a national spirit in the few more weeks before our uncertain General Election? Re the panem et circenses comment, I enjoy some television. Watching sport and following celebrities rate with glue-sniffing. With my stepfather I'm probably living in the cracks between ever spreading concrete. In my dreams I’d like to see myself as a clerk of small works, alert to my position and the opportunity to garden, pick up litter and do the occasional small-orbit good turn, and meet good people. I’ve not got much time for public anger. Private vexation is another thing.

Cheek

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Μαγουλιά ...from the village website for Ano Korakiana

Ψαρόσουπα με λαχανικά «σβησμένα» με κρασί και «μαγουλιά» λυθρινιού, συνοδευόμενη από άσπρο κρασί και το Τριώδιο ακόμη δεν άρχισε…Στην τηλεόραση, τα τελευταία τηλεοπτικά σποτ των πολιτικών κομμμάτων, λίγο πριν την κάλπη...On TV, the latest TV spots for political parties just before the ballot in the village. They will be voting on Democracy Street today.
Polling on Democracy Street, Ano Korakiana ~ 25th Jan 2015

*** *** ***
My personal connections to beloved Greece means the matter intensifies my interest, but this turn of events - like many in Greece in modern times - has implications. Greece's connection to the EU and the Euro always had more to do with the symbolic significance of Hellenic membership, than economic logic. Alexis Tsipras is an attractive bright idealist, leader of Syriza with government-forming support in the polls.
He thinks there is an economic alternative to austerity. My neighbours in Ano Korakiana like this man's thinking. At previous elections they saw him as too young, even naive, lacking in experience. Inside the polling booths, they may yet have reverted to older politicians and parties, rather than support Tsipras' avowed policy to renegotiate the policies of austerity - conditions affecting Greece worse than other PIIGS. Syriza is about to form a government that will challenge the neo-liberal economic method and faith we've inhabited since Mrs Thatcher read Hayek's Road to Serfdom* in 1944 and took it to heart, and pursued its message with conviction for most of the free world.
Our trust in the power of markets is lessening these days but while many. including me, can explain our mistrust - especially the visible facts of market failure and its consequences, we tend to keep 'a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse'.
Syriza's going to have a go. If it elects a workable government under Tsipras so is Greece! Tsipras without becoming a useless, and dangerous, populist (not impossible given the despair of so many in Greece) must, to succeed, sell to his fellow citizens and the rest of Europe 'the big idea' that there's something better for Greece than the horrid prescription of continuing austerity.
Those, who like me, don't trust, communism or the bureaucratic fumbling of state socialism, are attracted to Tsipras' more moderate nostrums - ones that focus on bringing government authority to ameliorating the toxic effects of market externalities.* We've heard the poetry. it stirs!
...Mario Cuomo's famous dictum that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose...The poetry of campaigning is lofty, gauzy, full of possibility, a world where problems are solved just because we want them to be and opposition melts away before us. The prose of governing is messy and maddening, full of compromises and half-victories that leave a sour taste in one's mouth.
But I hesitate to test my intuitions and hopes of alternatives to austerity to the rigorous prose of government - especially as I am quite comfortably off. especially as I'm alright.


It's a complicated case, hence Tsipras' vagueness - along with all aspiring political leaders - about what he will do as Prime Minister. He's been effective in opposition. I cannot see him being as effective in government. He wants to keep Greece in the euro. He wants Greece to withdraw from the bailout agreement. Samaras has given his main opponent little time to turn that popular adversarial vision ("the future begins today") into a reality that will get votes on polling day. But then I'd far rather have Tsipras than Golden Dawn. There's an easy opinion!
I am too far imbued with the painful principles of neo-liberalism to believe in practical alternatives to continued austerity. Is there one? Margaret T did well. "I can see no alternative - TINA!"; perhaps there are alternatives in those Scandinavian welfare states with small, still relatively homogeneous populations. Whether there's an alternative that can work for the rest of us, the rest of the world is asking.
*Hayek's case for free markets includes the view that where market activities damage third parties - negative externalities (corruption, harm to the environment, 'exploitation of ignorance') there's a place for the intervention of government. 
*** ***
Exit poll as promised around 19.30 in Greece, 17.30 here in UK

  • French Tart What does it mean?
    59 mins · Like · 1
  • Heather Skinner it's the spread across the various exit polls "from %" on the left column "to %" on the right - IF Syriza actually has polled 39.5 % they MAY have enough seats (151) for an overall majority to make a government on their own, parties that poll 3% or over (which in this case includes the extreme right Golden Dawn) will also have seats. If Syriza cannot form a government on their own, they will have to form an alliance with one or more of the other parties
*** *** ***
Syriza Rides Anti-Austerity Wave to Landslide Victory in Greece
by Eleni Chrepa & Marcus Bensasson
Bloomberg NewsJanuary 25, 2015

Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza brushed aside Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s party to record a landslide victory in Greece’s elections, after riding a public backlash against years of budget cuts demanded by international creditors, exit polls showed.
Tsipras’s Coalition of the Radical Left, known by its Greek acronym, took between 36% and 38% compared with 26% to 28% for Samaras’s New Democracy in Sunday’s election, according to an exit poll on state-run Nerit TV showed. To Potami, formed less than a year ago and a potential Syriza coalition partner, tied for third place with the far-right Golden Dawn on 6% to 7%.
The projected victory, by a wider margin than polls predicted, may be enough for Syriza to govern alone. It hands Tsipras, 40, an overwhelming mandate to confront Greece’s program of austerity imposed in return for pledges of €240 billion ($269 billion) in aid since May 2010. The challenge for him now is to strike a balance between keeping his election pledges including a writedown of Greek debt and avoiding what Samaras repeatedly warned was the risk of an accidental exit from the euro.
Syriza, in a statement read out by a party official, said the victory was “historic” and one that represented hope.
*** **** ***
From the poll in Ano Korakiana, above average support for Syriza:
Αποτελέσματα βουλευτικών εκλογών
Γράφει ο/η Κβκ   
25.01.15
Αποτελέσματα βουλευτικών εκλογών 25ης Ιανουαρίου 2015, στο χωριό μας:
Ψήφισαν: 735
Ακυρα-Λευκά: 13
Έγκυρα: 722

Έλαβαν:

ΣΥΡΙΖΑ: 314 (43,5%)
Ν.Δ.: 162
ΚΚΕ: 63
ΠΟΤΑΜΙ: 48
ΑΝ.ΕΛ.: 36
ΠΑΣΟΚ: 27
Χρυσή Αυγή: 27
ΚΙ.ΔΗ.ΣΟ: 16
ΛΑΟΣ: 6
ΑΝΤΑΡΣΙΑ: 5
ΛΟΙΠΑ: 18

New Corfu MPs: SYRIZA, Stefano Samoilis and Fotini Vaki for SYRIZA, Stefanos Gikas for ND

<Το Νησί των Συναισθημάτων>

"Let us therefore brace ourselves..."

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'If SYRIZA survive the tough beginning, a looming change in European attitudes to austerity politics in Europe might vindicate their struggle.' SYRIZA are inexperienced in government and up against such powers and carrying such hopes in Greece and across Europe. I would have thought that the most important requirements within this government along with Odyssesian agility is courage. ("Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves etc".) For us watching and, in some cases, directly experiencing this bold attempt to end Greece's 'fiscal waterboarding', the trickiest thing will be sorting out the truth amid the media blitz that arises from the fact that we are seeing a small country, a truly 'forlorn hope', charging the agents and agencies of mainstream economics. Tsipras and his cabinet are up against current economic science, present economic faith and almost universal economic common-sense. But all these things, for which we can see no clear alternative, means imposing upon Greece a prolonged version of what the Treaty of Versailles - so very understandable, such common sense - did to Germany in 1919. We have a dear friend in Greece who pays her bills, obeys the law, pays all the latest taxes, and works work works. 'There is not a morning I do not wake up scared" she says. In the case of Greece economic 'common sense' is not working. Some people use language and interpretations of events in Greece as though they have nothing to do with this. That is not the case. Let's have some tunes? Hallelujah
"We need to stop this carnival of tax evasion and tax avoidance"Alexis Tsipras


Winter work

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Simon in Greece with a Mayday wreath; stepfather Jack Hargreaves in his shed in Dorset with a film from Out of Town
In the last three years we've worked on the production of two commercially available box-sets of my stepfather's TV broadcasts on DVDs. Now I've bought the rights in Out of Town held by Endemol, I'm earning royalties on their sale through Delta Leisure, as Jack intended. The next challenge is the more complicated one of securing his remaining material, most of it not shown since it was broadcast in the 1970s. The box-sets consisted of material more or less ready to show, but this older material does not exist in the form of complete episodes. It comes piecemeal, incoherent, muddled up...
Jack Hargreaves - the invention of the camera from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
When he died twenty-one years ago, my stepfather left an unwieldy but intriguing collection of 16mm film and 1/4" reel-to-reel sound tape - incomplete components of his long-running television programme Out of Town. For nearly three years I've been striving to organise this precious stuff into a secure archive.
On January 12th Lin and I had tea with Christopher Perry.
He lives just streets away. We met at his house to discuss his offer to speed up the process of digitising, synchronising and remastering the archive of my stepfather's silent films and tapes that I've been storing in a scruffy lock-up near Spaghetti Junction since April 2012.  So far this exercise in recovery has been going at sub-snail pace, because of time and equipment constraints on Francis Niemczyk's work. In the last two years just three episodes have been remastered. Good work but leaving close to two hundred archived episodes yet to be recovered.

Chris Perry is a pioneer of Kaleidoscope. A film and tape archaeologist, he helped recover 'The Lost Episodes' of Out of Town published by Delta in 2012. A month before Christmas Kaleidoscope won a bid to take over local TV ....
Kaleidoscope TV Limited has been awarded the licence to broadcast a new local television service for Birmingham, the Black Country and Solihull via Freeview channel 8 and Virgin Media cable channel 159. It is expected that the channel will launch early in 2015. Ofcom has stipulated that the new channel should be on the air no later than February 28th, 2015. The new company, formed specifically to hold separate Kaleidoscope’s broadcasting venture from the existing organisation, is jointly owned by Mike Prince who will be a familiar face to Midlands television viewers as an on-screen continuity announcer for ATV and Central Television during the 70s and 80s and Chris Perry, head of Kaleidoscope, the Birmingham based classic television organisation. KaleidoscopeTV will launch as part of the government’s initiative for a national network of local television channels. The licence had originally been awarded to City TV, a company that went into administration before getting on the air. After administrators Duff & Phelps Ltd took control of City TVs assets, numerous bids were received for the company’s licence. Kaleidoscope TV was the preferred bidder and after a stringent examination of the company’s finances and programming plans, Ofcom has agreed to transfer the licence to Kaleidoscope.
Tea with Chris Perry


In return for being allowed to broadcast these episodes on KalTV Chris offers to remaster the film-tape archive.
"Draw up an agreement. Get me 33 tape-film matches to start. The digitising can be done in London. You can oversee synchronising and editing tape and film at Walsall Studios prior to broadcast."
On Wednesday Lin and I went out to the lock-up with our list of tapes and films. We brought home all the sound tapes, organised the films into the numbers attached to the cans while they were at South West Film and Television Archive, and removed one box of film. Once home we got the tapes checked against our list and marked them with the numbers on the films. That done we matched three of the films in the one box brought home.

Two days later we returned to the lock-up and dug out all the films with the listed numbers; Lin digging in the film boxes and calling out the numbers as I ticked off them off on the list.
It was chilly work. Once home and warmed up we started matching films and tapes - relying on the numbers on the boxes and cans, but also checking titles written on both containers. By the end of the day we had 70 matches.

"Tomorrow we'll select 10 of these matched film-tape pairs to take to London"




Extract from an 'Agreement' with Kaleidoscope TV ~ signed by Simon Baddeley and Chris Perry and witnessed

My plot

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'Above all remember; allotment gardening is fun, it's healthy and it's a great way to meet people. So the most important thing is to enjoy your allotment.'
Advice from the Allotments Section at Birmingham City Council suggests it takes 3 years to get a new allotment in order, but that's if you are already skilled and organised.

I and Lin and now my waged help, Winnie, have been digging over and over, weeding, weeding, weeding (dragging out those sinuous creeping white couch grass rhizomes especially)....
Winnie and Simon on Plot 14 (photo: Sue Hall, Winnie's mum)

....laying permanent paths, cutting out and pegging down porous weed control fabric, making temporary paths by moving around stacks of the industrial-grade carpet tiles I picked up for free during a garden clearance for Handsworth Helping Hands. Making separate beds accessible. The plot is just over 200 square meters, but with the shed and paths only half of that area is now working soil.
Potatoes planted in a bed dug over and over, weeded; new topsoil and compost raked in; all easily worked from surrounding paths

I love it. I do. I really do. But this is not a 'working man's' allotment from which i can proudly feed my family - the ideal of small holdings - urban green spaces whose legislative protection grows weaker by the year. Mine is a hobby plot - a word I dislike; a fact I accept, as a man seven generations from the land. My family have been townspeople, even when enjoying life in the country, since my ancestor Samuel Lees in Oldham became an iron master, then cotton mill owner, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. True my stepfather could work the ground, handle stock, and grow vegetables in large numbers while my grandmother, Bar, abandoned metropolitan life to start the dairy farm where I was born in March 1942 and spent a lot of my childhood - an idyllic place I first heard described, when I was in my teens, as 'a hobby farm - by my stepfather.
Mill End: Simon on Gypsy, Bar on the haywain
I can't say I'd rather my allotment wasn't just a hobby. That's silly. I don't quite know what I was thinking. I suppose I think of it more as an experiment; a test even.
January 2007 - a picture in The Birmingham Evening Mail"When will the company who bought this green space in Birmingham and built on a third of it lay out the allotments that were part of planning gain deal agreed with Birmingham City Council?"
A hobby is 'a regular activity done for pleasure during one's leisure time'. Campaigning ten years to stop the Victoria Jubilee Allotments from being built over and, after that busy time - lobbying, writing, filming, speaking - getting the opportunity to work this plot, has hardly been a leisured activity. I've never been that keen about dividing activities into ones that are leisure, and one's that aren't. I've a distaste for how that distinction defines 'work'.
Starting on Plot 14 in 2010

I want Plot 14 - one Lin and I chose when the Victoria Jubilee Allotments opened in June 2010 - to prosper. I want it fecund, thriving - a source of pride and good food, I want to agree with the advice that an allotment should be enjoyable.
I've invested money on help, on topsoil, on compost, striving to get the ground closer to how I think it needs to be, and all the time I'm learning, with help from other plot-holders far better than me at growing their own - especially my friends Ziggi with her plot in north London and Vanley with his on the Victoria Jubilee, just a few yards away.
Winter sown broad beans with a sprinkle of potash to rake in
I'm going to make this work. But I'm reminded of Douglas Adam's remark "Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss" or Winston Churchill saying 'success involves persevering from one failure to the next', The gardening guide books I read aren't helpful. They begin at a point I'm still striving to reach. They hardly mention soil filled with rubbish, as well as stones, nor do they seem to give much attention to the emotions aroused by the depredations of slugs, onion fly, pigeons, snails (with their exquisite shells I find impossible to crush), and human pilferers - the ones that stole my garlic last year! How I do not envy new plot holders as inexperienced as I, trying to get vegetables to grow on adjoining plots that are like mine was four and half years ago, perhaps worse.
Stones continue to come out of the soil at every dig....

....but they never appear in the books
...and this worthy tutor teaches me more or less nothing about how to dig my plot

I emailed Clive Birch, BDAC, for advice:
Dear Clive.  Happy New Year 2015.  I hope you're well. I've a favour to ask. Since 2010 I have struggled to get my allotment working. You’d not expect less when I’ve invested so much in getting it in the first place. My favour is also a question. We have by all accounts rather uneven topsoil on the VJA. I know that allotments officers on the council were hesitant about accepting the new plots from Persimmon under the S106A of 2004 because the land was not adequately prepared by the developer. Those of us pressing to get the allotments up and running pressed the council to let people start gardening. A minority of plot holders are doing pretty well but all I’ve spoken to admit they’ve had to do a lot of work getting the soil manageable and productive. It is full of stones, bricks, and other debris, as well as chunks of clay with - in some places - ground heavily compressed by building plant machinery. A lot of us have invested in manure, compost and extra topsoil. I would - now that I am beginning to feel more in control - be so grateful for someone coming to look at the soil on my plot to give me an assessment and tell me the best way to continue improving it. All the guide books speak of adding nutrients and getting a balance between acid and alkali, but I’m in the dark as to the starting point on soil composition. It would be great if someone with much more experience and knowledge than I could drop over and give my plot soil an assessment and diagnosis with suggestions as to the what would now be the best treatment to get healthy crops. Would this be possible? Best wishes Simon 
Simon. An experienced allotment holder visited your site and had a good look round, concentrating on the soil structure. Some plots were thriving, some were struggling and some were vacant and overgrown - the overgrown plots obviously were able to support plant life! You can test the acidity of soil [test kits available at DIY/ Nursery] - often the only balance used is lime for the brassicas. The answer to improving the plot - clear rough debris - stones etc [stones can be buried to provide drainage] Clay - working in compost - leaf mould is one of best ways - over wintering will help here. Adding as much rotted compost/manure is great. Leave on surface for a while then dig in [note some crops do not like fresh manure!] You could import topsoil but beware it could include weeds etc even Japanese knot weed! Perseverance is needed. Hope this helps. Best wishes, Clive
So really there's almost nothing in that I don't know, except for the hint about brassicas and the use of stones for drainage. Yet I'm grateful for the confirmation. The depth of my ignorance shared with Lin had me putting my seed potatoes under our bed to chit.
"They need the dark" Lin insisted, so under our bed they went.

I checked this up in books and on the internet
"No Linda! They need light not dark!"
Since the only chitting spuds we'd ever seen were the ones that start sprouting in the veg cupboard in the kitchen we'd assumed that darkness was needed. Out came the spuds from under the bed. Now I have them laid out in the conservatory.
A potato from the kitchen cupboard
Seven months ago the plot looked lovely - the greenery of mid-summer covering a multitude of sins. How will it look this summer? Much depends on what i do in the next few weeks.
June 2014


***** ***** *****
That other plot...
"We didn't reach an agreement. It was never on the cards that we would"
Yanis Varoufakis meets Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin. The first 10 minutes of the clip has journalists and camera-folk preparing to see and hear statements. Then 'the curtain rises'. There they are, by god! Varoufakis has earned a concession before the conversation began. Greece is talking through Varoufakis to the Finance Minister of Germany - not to the Troika who Tsipras told his voters would not be the new Greek government's first port of call after the election. At 23.25 the German turns with courtesy to the Greek who with the journalists has been listening to the most sober and grave re-iteration from Schäuble for the European Project, an address not really to beloved and beleaguered Greece but to a far wider and more fragmented and unreliable audience across our continent.
Aristeidis Metallinos, Ano Korakiana's laic sculptor, depicts the EEC (EOK) as a broody chimaera
In my head there plays as background to this press statement I hear music - the 'Song for the Unification of Europe' composed by Zbigniew Preisner, sung in Greek by Elżbieta Towarnicka - an abridged version of 1 Corinthians:13, from the soundtrack of Krzysztof Kieślowski film 'Bleu'. Varoufakis is also in government but he speaks eloquently, poetically, to the people of Germany; pleads to them for their support in fighting the threat of fascism in Greece. I feel I am watching two statesmen at work; two men who know their trade.

I had an exchange with Richard Pine a few days ago. He wrote in The Irish Times
Tsipras appears to be naively idealistic, innocent, ingenuous and transparent, but he needs to be secretive, cunning and dishonest to succeed in the minefield he has created. As Maurice Manning once said of Garret FitzGerald, it is difficult to trust someone who pours a glass of wine without reading the label on the bottle. Tsipras wants to do the impossible, but if he is to succeed as a political leader he must learn the art of the possible and acquire the killer instinct.
So Richard suggests Tsipras must imitate the Greek hero Odysseus - famous for escaping terrible dangers more through cunning than face-to-face combat. My email:
Richard. I recall writing this in a paper published in the 90s about political skill in civil servants and politicians.....The constant negotiation of this moral minefield is part of life and certainly part of government. An additional layer of complexity is added to these circumstances by the fact that in families, as indeed in government, many people recognise the presence of these dynamics and may actually impart “in confidence”, something intended to be passed on. A process of negotiation is occurring where one person appears to be trusting another to risk being untrustworthy. The novelist Iain McEwan describes public figures who move around in this moral maze by navigating the complicated channels that run between truth and lying: 'with sure instincts while retaining a large measure of dignity. Only occasionally, as a consequence of tactical error, was it necessary to lie significantly, or tell an important truth. Mostly it was sure-footed scampering between the two extremes. Wasn’t the interior life much the same?’  (McEwan 1988:182)....McEwan captures the moral nimbleness that accompanies grown-up behaviour - public and private - where corruption and probity are proximate rather than polar and, where rules are at best casuitical; maintaining integrity requires wit.  What I struck me about Iain McEwan’s words is that self-query 'Wasn’t the interior life much the same?’  My tolerance of politicians about whom you are much more judgemental (I think) is that politics - certainly the politics of government - is that it’s so like my internal life and I suggest I’m not alone in that. Best, Simon 
Richard: You mean you lie to yourself and let not your right hand know....? 
Simon: That’s what Iain McEwan is suggesting. I care about the environment and do many things that harm it. I shop at supermarkets while praising the survival of small shops. I think lascivious thoughts about other women. The list of my moral inconsistencies is endless and I don’t let them worry me or lessen my expressions of concern about the sins of my fellows.
My interior life is a parliament of debate with every now and then a rare internal argument from which the whips are withdrawn and I have a vote in which I must truly interrogate my conscience - but most of the time I’m bladerunning ‘the complicated channels that run between truth and lying”.
I think you have so hit the spot when saying how Tspiras must be. The killer instinct etc. Do you think he has it? Could he grow into it? Is his partner going to help? Peristera Batziaka. ‘Tough cookie”? This is riveting. S 
R: I don't have that problem/advantage. I never argue or debate with myself. I am conscience-free when I wake, and the same when I go to sleep. Thanks for the Batziaka article - interesting that "peristera" means "pigeon" or "turtle-dove". R 
S: 'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'Matt 10:16"I never argue or debate with myself. I am conscience-free when I wake, and the same when I go to sleep”. People will make pilgrimages to seek your advice - the sage of Perithia. You make me think of that other writer Nikos Kazantzakis “I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realise of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”  S
Draw me a picture....

In other words just 10.6% of the €254 billion funds 'state operating needs'



'Though inland far we be...'

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My grandson and I have been working the allotment

"Here’s a thing, Oliver. Suppose I get this allotment producing a regular supply of vegetables. Suppose I sort out my confusion about whether this is a serious exercise in producing healthy and tasty food, if not cheap; that this is not an allotment in the old sense – the means by which a working man may feed his family including you – but a hobby, a leisure activity that maintains my mental health and physical shape. Suppose I sort all that out by spending money on soil improvement and paying Winnie to help work the plot with me, there’s yet another challenge. What do I do with what I grow. Does your nan cook it? All of it? Do I give it away? Some of it? How do I grow and supply what I grow in a way that gets things to the table in the right way, instead of producing gluts. As well as growing things - my main purpose - do I have to master the art of storing things? Preserving fruit and pickling veg? That’s a whole other aspect of the project, requiring crafts as tricky to learn to do well as those I’m ever so slowly learning about cultivation. What do you think? While you're thinking about this put some more water in the kettle"
  • Nick Booth "can you grow ice cream?
    19 hrs · Unlike · 2
  • Mickey Lowe My God what a lucky little tyke that is to be with you and learning all the time! Bless ya both !!
  • Mickey Lowe Any extras you grow could surely go to any food bank or homeless shelter!! 
  • Tony Jacks Excuse the language Simon, but that is an awful lot of bloody thinking.
  • Simon Baddeley Of course. Just insert the liquid and the ice crystals grow in it
    19 hrs · Like · 1
  • Ann Marie Gallagher There is a super project called the Real Junk Food Cafe - cook up surplus food - Payl pay as u feel - or u could give to a local place of welcome ?
    19 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley A friend has just sent me a message...'Re your allotment quandaries ... I'd been going for a while before i got the hang of preserving. I have to say that its one of the things that is most exhausting. After working at the allotment i drag the produce home and have to start working again to prepare it for the freezer/pickling/chutneying etc. It adds a whole other level. And it makes giving stuff away even more joyful at the time of inevitable gluts - you will not be able to avoid gluts.There are plenty of books about preserving.' But why not just go to Fortnums or Harrods' Food Hall next time in London. It's cheaper in the end. Apple and Mint Chutney £4.95 a jar. Off my allotment the same would cost nothing in materials and around £150 in labour (:))...and you want me to give that away to the poor?
    19 hrs · Edited · Like
  • Sue Tsirigoti Your friend is right! we are sooo lucky not to be in a "needs must" time.. well not much anyway. There is a great deal of pleasure in growing and eating ones own produce and the sad thing is at the time you havea glut so does everyone else too! Well here at least where we all have gardens of varying sizes. Even the effort of harvesting and blanching ready for the freezer is so too much for me once summer season has started. I remember my mother salting beans because we of course didnt have freezers. I would have to buy a new freezer to accommodate all our produce and even then we would be struggling to eeat it all before the next crop next year. At least some of it oes to the chickens which continue with the circle f life and turn it into eggs and chicken soup, or Kokoros pastistada. It is the eternal question isnt it?
    18 hrs · Unlike · 2
  • Zena Phillips I was lucky. It was my own garden so it included fruit trees and soft fruits. All my surplus requirements went to the village shop. We split the proceeds half and half. Sometimes there were people waiting for me to arrive because they knew stuff had been harvested a maximum of half an hour before I got there. I never made a fortune but it covered next year's seeds and needs.
    18 hrs · Unlike · 3
  • Andy Mabbett That looks like a proper shed.
    15 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley Got in on freecycle. Had to cut two panels in half to get them in the van! I recovered the roof, added the veranda and rain gutters and downpipes. https://flic.kr/p/a5qBJ7 Got the slabs after a neighbour's front-yard make-over. https://flic.kr/p/a5qBJ7
    13 hrs · Like · 3 · Remove Preview
  • Poppy Brady Are you sure you haven't tied Oliver to that chair?! And who sits on the chairs on the tables?
    11 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley How else can I get anyone to listen to me (:))
    11 hrs · Like · 3
  • Paul McGovern I think you should let Oliver take over and take up fishing x
    4 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Maureen Carter I keep a log of the produce i use and give away for every year and the chutneys i produce and its quite amazing how much you do produce. It takes a few extra minutes daily but you can then see what was productive to grow and what wasnt worth the effort but it does at the end of the day , depends on the weather. I this winter didnt grow enough winter greens but it is a very big learning curve. The neighbours quite happily look after my plot when i go away as they pick and use the produce !
    1 hr · Unlike · 1
I've invested in topsoil and compost; dropped off in builder's bags from the lane at the top of my allotment. When needed Ollie and I barrow it down to the bed we're working on.
We passed Vanley on the way down to Plot 14 yesterday. I haven't seen him for a while. Oliver strolled on with Oscar on his lead. I reflected on my hopes and cares for the plot.
"The paths are much wider"
"Yes. And when you want you can always make your beds larger and thin the paths again"
"This March is going to be important. That's when I'll do a lot of planting, now I've done more weeding and digging over and added in more compost and top-soil...but both plots on either side of me have been abandoned"
"They may turn up when the weather gets better"
"Yes but I wish I had plots next to me that were thriving. There are so many plots that people have given up on after covering them with bits of wood and plastic and....someone came for three weekends in August last year and then disappeared. That other covered the plot with polythene last November but hasn't checked in since. I keep putting her weed suppressor back in place but the wind is always..."
"Allotments are a metaphor for life"
Oliver, Winnie and her son, Dennis

Dennis and Oliver moving earth

There have been big winds rising. How they gust across this dishevelled site, showing scant respect for structures not well secured, tattering plastic covers, blowing over poly-tunnels...

...shifting one greenhouse onto a neighbour's plot; getting under people's weed suppressing fabric; blowing it around until it's in shreds. On Plot 14 everything's tied, pegged or weighted down.
The bottom bed was collecting water, producing lots of mud. To get it workable I dug a trench at its end. Oliver and I filled it with rubble. Splash! Splash!

I barrowed the earth I'd shovelled out to the top of the plot; brought back lighter topsoil and good compost to mix in the earth I'd forked over and weeded yet again.

After removing its fabric, I covered the fly-tipped bed-frame I dragged to the site yesterday with insect netting - Veggiemesh - using my gun tacker.


On a nearby bed I've planted parsnip seeds. I've done this twice without success, so here goes again but with more compost and bed preparing. I bought a resistant strain of seeds. Archer.  Have I done this right? I'm already thinking I should have waited for warmer weather despite the Feb plant packet advice. Perhaps as a safeguard I should try germinating the parsnip seeds I've got left on a damp kitchen towel in the conservatory.
As it is I checked instructions on depth and spacing - but I wonder how much to trust the retailer's instructions. I semi-sprinkled the small disc-like seeds along rows. The instructions - read in several places as well as from the packet  - say that parsnips dislike transplanting, so these are not to be cultivated in my frame-covered seedbed then moved. What I should expect to do is to thin the sprouted plants and expect to harvest something around Christmas or beyond. I'm slowly realising that there's no substitute I've found for the time it takes to make judgements based on experience I've only just begun to acquire.
The plot now- this bed ready for potatoes
The plot 3 years ago









Starting on a shed from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo - 2010

I've finally found a book on gardening that I like. I was told about it by Barry on Facebook - a veteran pro gardener....
 'Simon. Look for a book called “ Gardeners Earth“ by Dr Stanley Whitehead. I had a copy for horti exams I had to do yearsssss ago. I managed to “keep“ it LOL'
**** **** ****
Even so we miss beloved Greece....in memory land...an Easter Sunday five years ago...a lamb roast at Mark's and Sally’s. At one in the afternoon, having been up until nearly four the same morning enjoying food – singing and conversation with our dear neighbours, we strolled down Democracy Street. The spitted lamb was turning over a bed of charcoal. Our assembly came from most parts of the UK, some long inhabitants of the island – citizens - others like us still new and some visitors, one in Corfu for the first time. Angie and Martin we’d met before but I learned they knew Richard Hill’s part of the world, and indeed, when I mentioned his address, knew his street. I explained Richard’s craft and the finely re-carved roach I was so looking forward to holding in my hands in May. We came onto Pompey and the writer Graham Hurley who’s given me so much pleasure.

The view from the balcony - greenery to the blue Kerkyra sea and the mainland mountains in their distant detail, while behind us the three crags, on one of which some lads had raised a flag – not the patrida, because it was red and yellow, but we couldn’t make out the pattern. “Could ever a village be better placed?” Swallows darted among the houses. Our company spread across two tables on the balcony; smoke from the roasting lamb full of rosemary rising upwards; cheerful conversation. We ate olive-oiled pitta bread from a barbeque, helping ourselves from dishes of pasta mixed with glazed carrots and sausages; dressed salad; small roasted fowl to be eaten delicately. “This is just the first course" reminded Sally. There was wine, which could be diluted with ice and sipped for hours; also beer and water. Then the lamb – I honoured with half the head. “I’ve never seen anyone trying to eat a lamb’s head with a knife and fork”. True the only way to tease the meat from a skull is to pick it up and feed in the old way.
EASTER LAMB ROAST IN ANO KORAKIANA from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
But Angela Papageorgiou in Corfu shares this picture, tagged : "What was that about wishing you were here"?
Southerly gale on the Old Fort, Ormos Garitsas  ~ Friday 6th March

**** **** ****
Catching the 9.10 train to London is altogether a fussier business than the purposeful 7.30 that goes non-stop to London and is full of serious commuters. This is my second visit to London carrying films and tapes from the Out of Town archive for the first stage of turning them into broadcasts.
Leaving New Street for Euston

It doesn’t help that I’m carting an unwieldy old suitcase weighing over 20 kilos containing eleven episodes of ‘Out of Town’ – rusty film cans of 16mm location film with, cello-taped to them, my stepfather’s commentary as recorded in his studio ‘shed’ at the time of broadcast – over forty years ago. I needed a taxi to New Street. It didn’t arrive quite on time. The traffic after eight was heavy – parents to school, commuters into the city centre – congestion I’d slide by on my bicycle, but for this freighted journey I’m a penguin ashore. Desultory chat with the young driver; peering at my watch. I got a receipt at the drop-off.
“Keep receipts” says Lin “If you ever make any money from this I’ll need it for your tax return”
At New Street it’s a literal drag from the drop-off to the platform. A Virgin platform helper consulted his tablet.
“The 9.10 is coming in the wrong way round. Your coach will be up that way”
The platform was crowded. Travellers for Coventry and International. My train arrived. I trudged towards Coach D. My guide was swiftly behind me, grabbed the hefty case to the right door and heaved it on board for me.
By Coventry I was in an almost empty carriage. At Euston I’ll hope to find a trolley and another taxi to Deluxe Soho.
Dear Mark. As arranged I expect to be with Deluxe Soho around 11.00 this Wednesday morning with a second batch of ‘Out of Town’ film and tapes. Looking forward to seeing you again. I shall come to Mearde Street. Best wishes, Simon 
Morning Simon. I'm actually in meetings, so please ask for my colleague Graham Jones, who will make you a nice cup of tea upon arrival. I will hopefully see you a bit later. All the best, Mark 
I have taken up Christopher Perry’s offer. We’ve signed a witnessed contract. Big Centre TV on air in Birmingham and the Black Country Saturday Feb 28th  - will pay for processing the films and tapes in the archive I’ve been looking after these last few years, in return for being able to broadcast some of them.
At Deluxe Soho with eleven film-tape pairs for digitising
This deal includes showing episodes from the Delta box-sets that contain over fifty complete easily broadcastable episodes of Out of Town. This gives us time for the old archive film to be digitised in London by Deluxe Soho and brought to Walsall Studio School for the key work of turning it into broadcasts – a process that requires film and sound to be synchronised, titles and credits to be inserted along with the Southern Television logo at start and finish, and - probably the biggest challenge - editing decisions made about what do with the sequences of Jack’s commentary where we have his voice but no picture. We’ll almost certainly remove him talking about an unseen object on the table in his studio ‘shed’ hoping to create sensible transitions from his commentary in the ‘shed’ to the location film. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of chat on Facebook– nearly 900 members now – about what images to insert in the ‘shed’ sequences; stills from the episode itself, silent moving film from the episode, portraits of Jack – stills and moving. One helpful adviser even dubbed my stepfather’s imageless commentary onto a sequence clipped from a different episode where the studio is shown. It fooled a few people including me until after a few seconds I spotted the subterfuge.
From Euston where I had further help - a trolley for the hefty case from the platform to concourse and a station uniform to guide me to the lift that took us down to a taxi. The taxi took me to the centre of Soho, to Meard Street, where I lugged the case into Marie Fieldman's workroom at Deluxe Soho.
With Marie Fieldman starting work on the next Out of Town batch


After a coffee I picked up my pleasingly light suitcase and started walking north. I bought delectable lox and cream cheese bagel to eat in Soho Square......
...walking north towards Euston Road and the mainline station.
Euston Road - a phone booth in old London town

On Monday 2nd March, 10.30-11.00am, Big Centre TV broadcast a half-hour episode of Out of Town. The next episode goes out same time on Friday, and thereafter at same time on Mondays and Fridays. I'm keeping careful tabs on what's shown - the deal being to show only 50% of the contents of each of the two box sets. That gives us just under 15 weeks before we go on to do the trickiest and most interesting broadcasts - the archive material I've been taking to Deluxe Soho. Now I'm more familiar with the people at Deluxe Soho, I've asked Chris Perry to get me together with editors at Walsall Studio School - the people or person who'll be synchronising and editing the digitised material sent up from London.
Dear Chris. Not sure if we were clear on the advertising of Out of Town on Big Centre TV. I saw the announcement of future episodes being shown Monday and Friday mornings, but we agreed there would be, at the end of each episode of Out of Town (as you suggested and we agreed), showing a 10 second commercial for the Delta Box sets with a link to Delta’s website for OOT.
I have told Delta this would be happening so I could check with them the effect of that publicity. Sales of the box sets pay me the royalties I need for storing the archive and expenses associated with the restoration of the archive, the main part of which Big Centre TV will be covering once we arrive at broadcast quality episodes from the archive.
I anticipate you have about 15 more weeks drawing on the existing box set material. If all goes well the first of the recovered archive episodes should be ready to broadcast in the first week of June. These will be unique, not seen since first broadcast in the 1970s.
Remembering I will be out of the UK, the sooner I can get together with a Studio School editor with digitised material to hand the better. It may help that I have three such episodes already processed by Francis Niemczyk. Best wishes, Simon
Email from Chris:
Hi Simon. As soon as we take some delivery of files, I can fix you up with an editor. I planned to give Steve until end of week and then chase him at Deluxe. I have fixed the caption issue - playout server couldn't see it.  c

Small works

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Clunk!
From downstairs Lin calls “What have you done now?”
“We have a problem”
The stove, just refilled with wood, was keeping us warm. The hollow half-cone cast iron moulding that linked it to the stove pipe had dropped off onto the marble base of the stove. Six 5mm bolts sheared.
“It’s because you let the lid fall with a bang all the time” said Lin “Cast iron’s brittle.”
We opened both french windows to clear any smoke. I measured the height from floor to chimney, went down to the apothiki and found a suitable piece of sturdy plank under 60cm to prop back the moulding, now cooled in water. I offered up the moulding, pushed the plankprop under it, while Lin jammed in pieces of planky firewood wood front and back to hold it in place.
Sorted until the morning, I considered the problem. The sheared bolts were firmly married to the stove casing, almost invisible.
“I’ll have to drill them out and cycle down to Tzavros in the morning to get replacement nuts and bolts.”
The morning was bright; clear blue. Ripe for a cycle ride south.
First I took the moulding outside. My metal drills found an easy centre in the bolt heads. Through to the other side, the metal  drill gave a grip to a big nail used as a punch. Bang, bang, bang. A sharp tap with a small hammer and the holes were clear. I tidied the interior surface with a sanding disk on the angle grinder.
“If the rest of the job’s as easy…”
I disconnected the stove pipe and swivelled the stove to the light. Reaching inside with grippers I tried to turn the bolts. No way were they going to give. But drilling was hampered by the inadequacy of my metal drills and the difficulty of getting them centred on the sheared end of the bolts.
The solution was for Lin to hold the moulding in place so that its bolt holes gave me a centre on the stove. With the six bolt holes just pricked with the drill I began drilling proper, having first used the angle grinder inside the stove to cut through the immovable nutted bolts. Sparks flew.
“Why bother?” Said Lin “Once you’re through the casing they’ll surely drop off anyway”
“It feels better this way”
Drilling with my metal drills was frustrating. They were the cheapest kind and lost their edge in moments. I got out my bicycle, checking my tyres for thorns at the end of the path to the lower road. The pleasure of being on the large bicycle on a fresh sunny morning – a downhill run almost the whole 7 kilometres to Tzavros. A list of small things to buy.
At Kostas’ I got the 5mm nuts and bolts but he was out of 5mm metal drills ‘ the cheap ones and the good ones. On to Technomart another kilometre. They had some in stock.
Now the long ascent back to the village – a test of my declining powers. I stopped for a scoop of melon ice cream and a glass of water at Emeral; rested at the Doctor’s Bridge turn and ate a choc biscuit and again, after the turn onto the village road, at the bridge over the stream. The wind was fresh and chill, Wild flowers blooming. The mountain sides greening with spring leaves. It was pleasing how a five minute rest recovered my powers. Here was the steepest part in the last half kilometre. Fine on 1:1 gears. I walked up the path, rang my bell.
Lin in our small garden says “Hi”
“Right let’s see what happens now. Make me a cup of tea, woman”
“Yes master”
Each hole took the best part of 10 minutes drilling, with me switching through even my new drills.
“You need a diamond tip”
“Get me a set for Christmas”
The holes were not well enough aligned to get all the bolts through. We argued, Lin as usual using that dratted past tense containing the futile imperative “You should have…”
She left me to it to work in the garden. I used a larger drill from my set, a cheap one, but it worked well enough enlarging the drill holes now the casing has been pierced. Offered up again each bolt, two at odd angles, came through. I tightened the nuts. All flush. I loosened them again.
“Li-in! We’re ready for the fire cement.”
“Hm” she said “Well done Baddeley”
The cement – red sticky from a tube was applied as I watched. Then I tightened the nuts for good.
“Looks good” I said “I’ll just grind off the bolts an inch”
“Not too close to the nuts. While the stove’s facing this way I’ll give the back a coat of stove paint.”
That done we eased our mended stove back in place, vacuuming up ash and soot. Lin applied marble cleaner to clean scuffing on the base; re-attached the stove pipe to the next length of pipe, sealing the join with silver tape.
“Cup of tea?”
“Yes”
“And now be more careful about not banging the stove lid. I keep telling you”
“Yeah yeah”
I put my clothes in the washing basket, had a shower and felt pleasantly clean and achy from the cycling and the drilling.
Later I said “The problem with the sorts of repairs we do, or the things we make...It’s not like a craftsman doing similar things over and over. Improving on experience; knowing the measures and the having the right tools to hand. How could we have known that stove moulding would just drop off one evening? What do I know about how it attaches…the width of the holes, the number of bolts? Now it’s reattached is it likely to happen again? Touch wood, no. Something else will break or go wrong. No wonder I sometimes seem cackhanded; always an innocent.
“If you get me diamond tipped drills when will I need them again?”
**** **** ****
On Good Friday, coming home from a walk in the late afternoon, we could hear singing in the large school room above us – the choir from Sokraki rehearsing one of the three Great Friday songs, ‘Ω γλυκύ μου έας’– ‘Oh! My Sweet Spring’ that I chose to begin my mother’s funeral in the Highlands. In old age, memory’s palette has more shades to mix from present cues. I allowed myself – so it felt – a tear. I wonder if there’s some reservoir of grief as yet untapped though I sense, as someone feels themselves after a fall, that my mourning’s done. The richness of her long life, her hand in mine at her last breath, Bay and I beside her bed, her genes so thoroughly, often familiarly, in me; and didn’t we both say at moments of chat immersed in favourite places, happy with the hour, even the whole day, that, come a time, these things would all pass. Once I grew out of thinking of my mum’s death as beyond bearing, the infant's nightmare, their ending became the hidden ingredient - the risky spice - of our shared enjoyments. I like seeing things of hers here in Greece – the windvane that followed us for 50 years, the pitch pine drawers used to store garden things now part of the bedroom wardrobe Lin and I built last year, the pyjama’s Lin’s wearing now, the cashmere neckwarmers good for cycling in chilly winds, a small portrait of a woman mum found in a junk-shop (when such places existed) seen now in the Greek light that seeps through the shutters here.
Easter Saturday coming up to midnight: Stephanie and Wesley live close to the higher church. They’d invited us to a recording in their big sitting room of the Corfu Christmas panto, Cinderella, in which Wesley played a moustached and goatied ugly sister performing in ever expanding hoop dresses, while Steph played  half an extemporised double act between the main scenes – one of two spivs in pin stripe and trilbies. Maria, also in the panto, had joined us with her sons James and Adam. The finale done, we got our coats on against the chill and strolled with candles unlit to Ay Georgius.
“The Greeks find the British enjoyment of men dressed as women and vice versa as strange” said Wes.
The annual panto’s plot is topped and tailed, characters and plot, exposed to a hybrid Brit-Greek audience by a Corfiot clown front of curtain.
The triangular courtyard of the church was full, a platform with speakers for the priest and a lozenged image of Christ risen, and, beside the church, the brass helmets and plumes of the village band. We joined the throng of familiar faces and every age. I stepped up via the back door into the smoke wax scented glistening gloom of the church’s crowded interior audience to prayer and incantation, candles all around below the lights of the big chandelier. The congregation moved slowly towards to the front lighting their candles from the original flame and walking them down to join the people outside. From the podium there were more prayers until at midnight ‘Kristos Anesti!’ bang bang bang bang of fireworks, a merry tune struck up by the band and further away the sound of shots, hugging and kissing and handshaking, faces uplit by candles. Down the short steep hill, guarding our candles in the wax cradles Wesley had given us, to Democracy Street where villagers lined the road, more hugs and kisses and the hum of happy greetings “Kronnia Polla!” “Kala Paska” “Kristos anesti” ‘Alethos Anesti”. Under our porch was room for one more candle flame cross to join three from previous Easters.
** **
Peter and Elena are married and she expects a child in September. Easter Sunday afternoon, a spotless blue day, Peter’s parents, Paul and Lula invited us to a lamb roast at Elena’s parents, Procopius and Chryssa’s home on Filareto, beside the road to Kanoni. We’re used to filotemo here, but here, if that’s possible, the gift was amplified as we - strangers - were from the first second of our arrival drawn into the orbit of two Greek families joined in pride and happiness at each others’ children’s union. Starting with warm handshakes and kisses we were sat at joined up terrace tables under a veranda overlooking the narrow road from town. Between us already many plates spread with prosciutto, salami, feta cubes, slices of hard cheese and village rosé in jugs not allowed to empty, a bottle of tsipero circulating and toast. To the rhythm of songs whose lyrics all but I and Lin knew the company sang, now and then breaking off to clash our glasses and plastic cups in toasts to health up and down the tables.
“Come” said Procopius “the spit” He gestured the turning. I followed him to a cooking space where glistening with fat a whole lamb stretched over the charcoal, turned by Anna, Procopius’ mother.
“Here, baste!” he handed me a brush and jar of olive oil and then pinched off a piece of crisp skin and juicy flesh, piquant with rosemary, salt and the small of the roasting beast
“Ready?” he asked me
“Thekka lepta?” I ventured
“Thekka lepta” he instructed his mother, who smiled without a hint of indulgence.
Back at the table village sausages were added to the mezes, cut six or seven times, to make delectable mouthfuls.
Lin began nudging me as I ate “Don’t be so greedy”
We sang and hummed and toasted and drank, Paul, Lula, George, Lin, I, Procopius, Chyrissa, George, Rula and her daughter Elena, Pete and Eleni, his brother Kostas.
Procopius and George ready to unspit the lamb

Then it was time to prepare the lamb for the table, unshackle its neck, draw the spit from centre, lay the cooked carcass on wood and chop it limb from sizzling limb. Procipius and Chryssa prepared the feast. Chop chop chop. Bones and sinews gave way. Rich slivers of meat and crisp skin were laid in square platters for our table. I carried one, trailing the delicious scent of the roast to the table and so to our plates to be enjoyed with the help of fingers, fatty, hot and lickable.



Procopius filled the wine jugs, led the toasts amid the eating and the singing and dancing. Two plates were smashed followed by more, with Chryssa adding the regular clanging of dropped oven and baking tins “Oopa” “Oopa”.


When the younger people had gone the grown-ups continued the meal with two enthusiastic household dogs bounding under and around the tables. As the sun sank and began to dazzle us Chryssa hung a cloth from the beams of the veranda. Procopius - or was it Paul? - threw two plates to smash in the road...
...and then we continued dancing there waving to passing cars on their way to Vlacherna and Kanoni, some drivers and passengers waving happily “Kala Paska” “Kronia Polla”.
Music, dancing, plate smashing, ironware clashing continued, tables were swiftly cleared, more wine poured, sweet things served on platters, and hardly consumed before Procopius whipped the whole table cloth with all on the table to the floor “Oopa” – and danced amid the shambles swiftly; swept away and tidied by Lula and Anna, who’d already swept our wreckage in the road. Then we were dancing, even I, on one of the tables. Procopius picked up the other and threw it over. Chryssa pulled a hollow brick from the garden and hurled it into the shattered debris of plates and glasses. Two girls passing outside were invited to join us. They too were soon dancing and singing plied with food and wine “You realise where you are?” said Paul “we are all vampires!”

Then there was coffee. Slowly the party wound down, the terrace tidied even as the music and singing continued. In the Greek way of enjoying a party eyes never glaze over, speech is never slurred, no-one gets drunk, for all the wine that flows, and no-one whispers “You know I really like you”. Wit stays sharp. Mickey is taken. Procopius and Paul, father to father “Me Greek bastard no English! You English bastard, no Greek”. At some point I went over to Paul; gave his shoulders a hug “Thanks for asking us to this. I couldn’t be happier”. So when it was time to leave we all hugged, kissed, shook hands and went our ways.
*** ***

Anna Metallinos has brought me a rich diplo and chocolate cake these last two days as her daughter Angeliki and I work in the Aristeidis Metallinos museum listing the features of each of the laic sculptor’s works – whether marble or stone, its dimensions, whether a full sculpture or a relief, oblong or oval. Andreas has dropped in and answered more of my questions. He brought in his father's marble - Kozanis κοζάνυς. The works in stone - like one of my favourites, the small statue of a woman - came from local houses that were falling down or were stones just lying beside the road, which might have come originally from a quarry at Sinies.
"Why did he sometimes use marble and sometimes stone?"
"We don't know"
"Which is easier to work?"
"Marble"
Right now this is my favourite - smoothed stone; hardly 15 inches high



A stone shoe

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The light behind the curtains suggests another sunny day, with reservations. Enough to do laundry. Once the machine is rumbling reassuringly, the soaked mix tossing in the froth, I’ve emptied the waste into a plastic sack for walking to the wheelie bins, I boil the kettle for tea and coffee, slice two pieces of bread to toast, and take from the fridge my usual Christmas gift from Amy, anchovy paste – Partum Peperium–  ‘There’s only one shop in Birmingham I can get it, Dad’.

The balcony, where I take my tray, affords a view that spreads from Albania, across the border, along the high mountains of Epirus as far as the hazy space of Igoumenitsa over the shining sea between island and mainland. From the crags behind us...
...the island mountains disappear around to an inland cape covered in trees and shrubs from which stone cliffs jut now and then, over which, in winter, the sun will suddenly appear having risen red over the mainland peaks.

In April our sun rises further south, above our view of three gentle hills a couple of miles away, clothed in olive trees that reach into the village, hiding the long shore between Pyrgi, an hour’s walk, and Dassia in the centre of the bay 10 kilometres wide between ugly Barbati, invisible from Ano Korakiana, and Corfu Town. Between the hills I can see, less than a mile from the Old Port of the city, Vido island. Due south the gentle undulations continue, completing the middle distance – dotted now and then with a pink-violet blossomed Kokukyias.

Above them, usually in haze, sometimes invisible, more mountains – south of the city the saddle back around Agia Deka, 20 kilometres away, astride the island’s narrow tail, and to the west the mountains behind Cape Plaka forming precipices over the resorts of Ermones, Gliffada and Pelekas, facing the Ionian Sea – on their lower slopes, speckles amid the greenery, of villages. I call the time to Lin and prepare her coffee though she’ll lie abed another hour at least, muttering ‘Yes, maybe’. If only the swallows soaring across the distant haze of mountains gave people pensions; jocund weather converted to salaries; my joy in this place into its economy, but for all that we live here our contribution is paltry set against our detachment from the crisis whose slow and relentless development is being described on televisions behind shutters and doors, making the internet unreliably busy. The coach is turning back into a pumpkin, the footmen into mice. One delicate glass dancing shoe is turning to stone.
I had awoken from one of the loveliest of dreams about my mum; awoken happy too, rather than sad at realising I’d been asleep all along. Mum had been walking with me in the English countryside, stood at the lip of a long escarpment, surveying together a green landscape that stretched to a hazy horizon lit by a summer sun, then in the middle of Rome she’d sung from a balcony after breakfast ‘Mum’ I said ‘you’ve got crumbs on your tongue!’
She laughed and we were shopping in a fashionable arcade and she’d bought a dress in which she looked as beautiful as I’d ever remembered her. We hardly needed to speak; just comfortable and happy and at peace in one another’s company and all the time it seemed we both knew very well she was no longer here. It didn’t matter a jot.
'You know why we dream so much when we're here' said Lin 'Both of us! It's because our mattress is so hard we never get beyond REM sleep.'
That, not cheese?
*** *** ***
I was on the bus back to the village sat behind K.
‘Things are bad’
‘I know’ I said
It’s the first time I’ve heard her suggest we may return to the drachma.
Richard P had said that without money from Europe the first thing will be that the government can no longer pay its workers – civil servants, nurses, police, local government officers, refuse collectors, bus drivers, electricity and water workers.
‘They will strike' he said
Things will close down.
‘What do people in in England say?’ asked K
‘My brother-in-law, with many others, say it’s Greece’s fault. Get out of the Euro and let them make their own way out of the mess they created for themselves. Stop taking our money...I say I don’t want to hear such opinions.’
A friend for supper here has a similar refrain
‘Greeks have got to grow up.’
I get flustered at glib imperatives. I rehearse the counter-arguments that much of the time seem to make sense – of deliberately created national debt, the impossibility of trying to get water from a stone (or any more money that goes only to cover interest payments on a debt that is wholly unrepayable by people being turned into paupers), ‘fiscal waterboarding’; of the fact that Greece’s crisis is Europe’s, an amplified problem of advanced capitalism...my words are assailed by the worthy logic of economics.
But how is it across the nation? People must be watching TV as we don’t. What do they say in the streets of Ioannina, in Metsovo and Kalamaka, in the islands of the Aegean, in Crete, let alone Larissa, Thessaloniki and Athens? I detect a resigned numbness with flashes of hope. People get by. Perhaps.
‘If everyone in Greece paid their taxes, the problem would be solved. If Greek institutions scoured themselves of corrupt practices...’
‘Who said that? It’s not so simple...’ I say...lamely
 On the bus I said how impressed I was by Yannis Varoufakis, and Alexis Tsipras ‘playing an impossible game with the weakest of hands.’
‘Yes, indeed’
‘Flying on empty’
‘Yes, indeed, Simon’
There is no conspicuous consumption in Ano Korakiana. People work. People nurse frappés and soft drinks as they chat in Piatsa. One family in our part of the village roasted a lamb for Easter. Vasiliki gave us plates of her delectable cakes on Easter Monday. The washing flies in the wind. People garden, as we do. Katerina gave us horta and pastichio. The people we meet are ever polite, generous and cheerful. It made the conversation on the bus the more worrying because the expression of such apprehensions. at least to us, is so rare.
Lin and I have pondered options.
I ask Mark, over a beer in Piatsa.
‘Quite simply, Simon, I don’t know anything anymore. So many people have so many opinions.’
******
We’ve been building a buttress to support the garden wall. Lin doing the skilled work with trowel and cement...


I carting heavy stones. We’ve made a workbench in the apothiki using recovered wood from the rebuilt balcony. These chores are pleasantly endless and simple; sawing logs, putting out washing to be dried in the wind; making a rough table, also from the old balcony. The days pass as they do in England.
Sun dried sheets




Winnie’s sent me photos of how my allotment’s coming along. Peas are rising, parsnips sprouting but where are my potatoes?
** ** ** ** **
We’ve now listed more or less every one of Aristeidis Metallinos’ works. From Tuesday to Friday for a couple of hours each midday Angeliki and I and Linda have worked through the collection, ensuring every item is numbered and measured. Serious with clipboards. We’ve added a small section for carvings of uncertain date, as well as the weathered works on the roof - stone boys astride the roof gables, a peacock at the apex, a tall woman in skirt and prim jacket and bare breasts. As work on the catalogue progresses Anna has brought us coffee, cakes and orange juice.

Andreas has helped improve our listings with recollections of his father. I am cautious with questions, learning more – but slowly. Aristeidis relied on his son to obtain his marble and stone and, since the sculptor’s death, Andreas has striven to be ‘the steward of his legacy’. The phrase is mine. After his father died in 1987 the museum that Aristeidis Metallinos wanted sustained as a gift to the village was, as far as I know, opened to visitors. I’m unclear for how many hours or days, or indeed for how many years before the place became the closed building we encountered when we arrived in Ano Korakiana in 2007. I suspect my initial difficulty gaining entry (K trying to get inside the Castle?) and even an introduction was because, after for whatever reasons the museum closed – and I speculate on these, Andreas has had quite a few individuals asking to be shown around. What happened? They had a look. They satisfied their curiosity. They went away. Did they remember anything? Were they even that impressed? Could they or did they have time for that contemplation essential to determine, in more than the most quotidian way, whether what they saw provided more than passing sensations. ‘Fascinating’ ‘Wonderful’ ‘Amazing’ ‘So interesting...where shall we have lunch?’ Where did that leave Andreas? Growing austerity in Greece must have made maintenance even trickier.
Before the sculptor died there had been promising academic articles about the ‘laic stone mason’, ‘the village sculptor’. Aristeidis seems to have had no interest in his own promotion. His interest was in the art, his trips to the open air cinema in town and views of what he watched on television, and a wish to give a gift to the village where he’d spent his life. He encountered - unknowing until near his death - the indifference of the world; hardly a problem for him, engaged with his chisels and mallets and the fascination of making things out of stolid stone and marble. At some point as he worked away in his open house he seems to have come upon disapproval. I don’t know enough about this. Just clues including the reference on his gravestone by Paraskevi Church to ‘slight bitterness’.  I suspect it may have been a problem for Andreas. Aristeidis countered with inscriptions – rebukes in marble that last, leaving a sensitive puzzle that calls for more understanding. I venture – tentatively – to explore something else missed by the academics who wrote about the laic sculptor while he was alive; Yianni M Mari in 1978 and Efrithikis Antzοulatοu-Retsila in 1985. They were intrigued by Aristeidis Metallinos as a carrier of folk-lore, of village tradition, history and culture. The photos selected by Antzοulatοu-Retsila say as much. They show sculptures of villagers in traditional dress, of Greek dancing in Corfiot costume, of local individuals respected in the village and in some cases Greece – the statue of Makarios. They do not address the drubbing that Aristeidis Metallinos metes out to authority; his ridiculing of priests, of the police and the army, and the ever-present figure with cigar and top hat fondling a naked mistress, shopping for human flesh at the butchers ‘as a cure for piles’, roasting a native on a spit, ribald personifications of money men, ridicule and contempt for government – Greek, European and global. This was a man carving a permanency of anger at things he saw wrong in the world, depravity and exploitation; with this was his fascination with carnal pleasure – sometimes celebrating the beauty and excitement of women, their lusciousness under the male gaze, his lust surely, yet also his interest and respect for women as strong, surging above their traditional roles as part of the farm-stock inventory, becoming dominant, even appropriating the traditional and oppressive weaponry of men, riding their phallic missiles, harnessing their grandiose and rather ridiculous penises. Now this must have been a handful for the family, even for parts of Ano Korakiana to which Aristeidis wished to dedicate his work.
‘So what next?’ asked Mark.
‘Well we’ve got the sculptor’s name in Greek and English wiki. One of his works will be mentioned in Richard Pine’s next book – about Greece – to be published in October. Angeliki and I speak of 'step-by-step', a year at a time to fathom the work. This catalogue is a logical next step – to have an inventory and an order that is more organised than the present list.’
I paused. This was insufficient.
‘And what then?’
‘Visiting the museum when we want is a privilege. The other day Andreas let me hold that first piece Aristeidis carved in stone when he was hardly 20, that women’s shoe which would have given a candidate for art school serious consideration...but how many people know about it being the only thing he carved for another fifty years? How many know about it at all? Few seeing unknown original art feel confident about its qualities – good or bad. So much art we know has been via introductions, references; from parents, teachers, books, friends, public esteem. Aristeidis’ work hasn’t been prepared for exposure or accreditation, hasn’t begun to run the familiar gauntlet of indifference, ridicule, or slight praise. People don’t know the man. His works are crowded on shelves and walls in four small rooms without commentary; a cluttered stockroom of souvenirs. His story, clearer and clearer to us, is vague, confusing, even uninviting.’
I knew I was going on too much.
‘Sorry’ I said ‘More has to be done to cultivate the eye of the beholder. A catalogue of the works; a selection of the most representative; themes clarified; commentaries by Greek critics – two I have in mind – a biography, perhaps by Angeliki, Andreas and I, building on my wikipedia article. Creating provenance. Our Richard could design the catalogue cover, using Jan Bowman’s sketch of the sculptor. Start with the shoe.’
‘Another pint?’
Andreas, the sculptor's son, allowed me to hold this precious shoe his father made in 1927 


'A ship of rich lading wrecked on the narrow seas'

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Familiar dreams of inadequacy – unprepared notes just before a lecture, no papers to explain myself to an arresting authority, a journey started but vital luggage gone missing...They are born on wasted efforts to strengthen arguments that differ from common understanding, on giving up on something within my capacity, but requiring effort I’m too lazy to exercise, finding other things to do; displacement activity. The crisis in Greece. I’ve surrendered to common explanation; resigned myself to the given options. Greece must pay the debts she’s accrued or leave the Euro, pay in cash or kind.
‘And how is leaving the Euro going to make anything any better?’ asks Lin.
‘Well they don’t have to pay back all that debt.’
‘Yes and exports – tourism to Greece being her main export – will, in theory, get cheaper, attracting more visitors...’
‘...except tourists, even if they are not on all-in holidays where they've paid for their holidays and all extras outside Greece, don’t just need waiters and accommodation. They need food, fuel, perhaps healthcare. Since most of those involve imports they’ll cost even more in drachmas, especially when devalued against the Euro, the pound and the dollar’
‘What a mess!’
The pound of flesh is due. Shylock – ill done by - awaits in the north for the bloody payment.  Sensible voters of northern Europe say ‘if you prick us do we not bleed?’
I see no Portia in the wings with clever pleas and saving arguments.
I am slightly ashamed; one of those faltering disciples for whom the apostles – especially Paul – wrote their encouraging and loving letters.
‘Hold fast’ ‘Be of good faith’.
Yannis Varoufakis, shortly before he became Greece's beleaguered Minister of Finance published a book in which he described economics to his daughter...
An inability to explain to a teenager the fundamental issues of economics reflects badly on one’s own grasp of them. And the failure to inspire youngsters to care about wealth, poverty, power (and their distribution in society), reveals the instructor’s, or author’s, own lack of appreciation of what makes our social world tick. This book strives to inspire teenagers (and other readers normally disassociated from economic narratives) to care about economic ideas and economic processes by revealing their power over our imagination, beliefs and passions. It does this by means of a narrative of how economic power has emerged from the shadows of political and military might before gradually taking over human societies. The narrative combines history, literature, science fiction films and down-to-earth economic analysis to impress upon teenagers, and various beginners, that economics is an epic drama. Rather than a technical science, it is a battleground on which armies of ideas clash mercilessly and where concepts with a capacity to move mountains emerge; and all that in a war for our own allegiances which are being fought over by powerful interests usually at odds with ours. In addition to its drammatic style and content, this book answers two fundamental questions: How was the modern world formed? And why are the economists’ theories part of the problems that this world is constantly producing, rather of the solutions. In the process, it poses and answers challenging questions, such as: • Why did British colonists invade Australia instead of the Aborigines invading England? • When and how did the primacy of profit come about? • Why could wealth never exist without debt? • From where do bankers derive their exorbitant power? • What is hiding behind economic crises? • Is there hope that humanity will stop functioning like a stupid virus killing the “organism” in which it resides? • What is money and why does it "need" democracy?
Varoufakis' introduction to the German edition of the book...
One of the enduring memories from my early childhood is the crackling sound of Deutsche Welle radio transmissions. Those were the bleak years of our dictatorship (1967-1974) when Deutsche Welle was the Greeks’ most precious ally against the crushing power of state propaganda. Mum and dad would huddle together next to the wireless, sometimes covered by a blanket to make sure that nosey neighbours would not get a chance to call the secret police. Night after night these ‘forbidden’ radio programs brought into our home a breath of fresh air from a country, Germany, that was standing firm on the side of Greek democrats. While I was too young to understand what the radio was telling my mesmerised parents, my child’s imagination identified Germany as a source of hope.
As I am writing this preface to the German edition of a book aimed at another child, my daughter, I feel the urgent need to recount that memory. To turn it into a small homage to the idea of Europe as a realm of shared democratic ideals. A small gesture of defiance against the recent tendency for European peoples, who were hitherto coming closer and closer together, to be set apart by a… common currency.
Our European Union began life under the presumption that to achieve political and social union we must first bind together our economic interests; that economics would lead the way to a united European polity. It was a good idea except that, as the years and the decades went by, a problem emerged: our collective understanding of ‘economics’ became increasingly crude. We slipped into a simplistic mindset according to which the sphere of the economy began decoupling, separating itself from that of politics, of philosophy, of culture. As it did so, the economic sphere acquired massive discursive and social power for itself, thus causing democracy, politics and culture to fade out, to become shadows of their former selves.
We economists were, I confess, responsible for this steady erosion of our collective understanding of the economic sphere. Before we knew it, markets were no longer means to be placed in the service of social ends but emerged surreptitiously as ends in themselves. Under the influence of, on the one hand, financialisation and, on the other, economic theory, we began to resemble Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic: one who knows everything about prices and nothing about values. Naturally, our European Union’s institutions also tended towards the conviction that the large decisions should be taken by technocratic committees that constitute ‘politics-free zones’. In an ironic twist the language of economists helped usher in a mindset that jettisoned from the corridors of power and the halls of decision making not only politics and culture but also …economics.
But enough of this now! This book is not intended as a diatribe on Europe, on Germany, on Greece or indeed on anything that would bore… my daughter. It was written in order to test the author’s ability to convince a recalcitrant teenager that economics is too important to be left to the economists. That it can also be too much fun to be ignored by those interested in things other than money and finance. That, looked at through a piercing eye, behind every economic notion, every theory, there lurks a fascinating debate about human anxieties that only poets, dramatists and musicians have managed to address with any degree of efficiency.
Did I truly write this book for my daughter’s sake? Not really. I wrote it mainly to test the limits of my own understanding. For if I failed to explain to a teenager the fundamental issues of economics, my failure would reflect badly on my own grasp of them. Indeed, the failure to inspire youngsters to care about the nature of wealth, poverty, of economic power (and its distribution in society), reveals one’s own lack of appreciation of what makes our social world tick. As for my daughter, it is true to say that she played a major role. Being my worst critic, every time I completed a section or chapter I wondered whether she would look at me with disgust upon reading it. Nothing motivates an author better than such terror!....
Terror. Yes. That's the core of it. I'm not sure how, other than in appearance, clothing and panache, Euclid Tsakalotos, differs in theory and explanations of the world from the man he is replacing as negotiator with the EU.
*** *** ***
On Saturday morning we tried to catch the bus from the village. We waited at the bus stop below our house for half-an-hour. No bus came.
‘Shall we walk to the Sidari Road for another there? Two kilometers’
We set out. Dawdling to enjoy the views, chatting. Two familiar big old dogs attached themselves to us and stayed with us a kilometre, sniffing the verges and stopping to scratch.
Road from the village. Our companion dogs finally head home
At the Ano Korakiana T-junction we waited twenty minutes by the bus stop. Mark drove by heading into the village.
‘Is there a strike?’
‘No I’ve seen public buses on the road to Acharavi’
Reassured we waited as cars and trucks charged by. There at last came our bus. We hailed it, pointing south; the driver grumbling that we’d not waited on the right side of the road, where the southward stop without kerb stood in brambles swayed by passing traffic.
‘To Gouvia’ Lin paid our fares ‘I scratched my hand on brambles getting aboard’ she said rubbing her arm.
Catching a bus after lots of waits is such a pleasure. At last we’re on our way; tucked in seats with other passengers, hurrying down the main road’s long hill, past Sgombou and Emeral, past the Tzavros junction where the road flattens and becomes a dual carriageway. There was none of the chat that goes up and down the aisle on the Korakiana bus.
‘Gouvia’ said the driver slowing near Technomart.
‘One more stop’ said Lin
We were dropped within yards of The Lighthouse where we could go to the Saturday tabletop sale, and, upstairs, enjoy a coffee, greet Pastor Miltiades, and use the WiFi, skyping Amy who we glimpsed via the camera opposite her bed sleepily speechless tending Hannah and Oliver bouncing exhaustingly to and fro across the picture, ignoring us.
‘Bye-bye! Bye bye Oliver. Bye bye Hannah’ we cried ignored, switching them off with a distinctive Skype‘cloomf’’
‘Amy needs a drop-in child-minder to take Oliver off her hands now and then’ I muttered ‘The energy! Ollie’s like a two year old colt. He should carry weight.’

We strolled a few hundred metres up to AB supermarket and with our shopping crossed the road to a Green Bus stop, buying ice creams to eat while awaiting the Sidari bus, which dropped us at the Ano Korakiana turn. We walked up to the village carrying our shopping, resting now and then in occasional shade.

All along the Easter-strimmed verge flowers had grown since, swaying in the slight breeze. A day earlier we’d walked a circle from Democracy Street, down towards the main road, turning west on a grassy track between smallholdings and vineyards which wound back towards the village before dissolving in meadows.


We followed where someone had walked already, slightly disturbing the uncropped grass, wild thyme, daisies, thistle, vetch and Honesty, until, beyond a ruined apothiki, past a well cultivated smallholding...

 ...we were following the familiar back road into Mougades and the rest of the village.
Ειδικά της κοκυκιάς που σε κάθε κήπο, σε κάθε φράχτη κάνει την εμφάνισή της! Walking below Ano Korakiana on St George's Day

*** *** ***
Angeliki phoned on Monday to approve my musings on her grandfather, and tell me the news that her father is now ready to write about his memories of his father.
‘It will take time’ she said
‘Of course. But that’s wonderful’
I prepared an email to Dr Alexandra Moschovi, Senior Lecturer in Photographic Theory, University of Sunderland:
Dear Alexandra
I hope you’ve not given up on me and that you are well and that you will receive this email.
I am afraid my pace on our shared Aristeidis Metallinos project is slower than yours might be, were you in my shoes.
Nonetheless we do proceed! I attune to the family’s pace - and perhaps my own. The tortoise rather than the hare.
I am as enthusiastic as ever. Linda and I have now, with Angeliki, made a list of every item in the museum as well as a few weathered pieces on the roof.
In the week after Easter we  created a temporary numbering of each item; whether it’s stone or marble; its metric dimensions. In about two weeks we will add to this information the inscriptions by the artist - his signature and date and where he’s written something - his words. We will then use our own words to describe those pieces where there’s little or no information from the artist. These notes will be in Greek and English (other languages could be added). We will then renumber the collection - chronologically (by year as there’s no way of finding a month unless Andreas who sometimes remembers his father’s work can date them more precisely).
I have ideas for the form of a published catalogue. Covers can have perhaps the sketch I had done by a Birmingham artist - Jan Bowman - which she made from Andreas' black and white photo of the sculptor at work.

I have also started with the help of a friend - Rob Groove - to get some high quality photos. He has already made a couple, one of which will be featured in a book by the scholar Richard Pine who’s next book will be about Greece from an Irish perspective - to be published this October.
We would pick - say - about twenty representative works to illustrate the catalogue.
I would like then to have three brief articles at the start of the catalogue
- One by Angeliki, Andreas and I describing Aristeidis - enlarging the Wikipedia piece I did last year, or if we are fortunate, one by Andreas alone remembering his father.
- One by you (if you’d be prepared) discussing the imagery from your perspective as a Greek scholar and referring to a timeline of events accompanying the sculptor’s works, your sense of his subversive risk taking etc.
- One by Prof Efrithikis Antzοulatοu-Retsila expanding on the piece she published in 1985 (I’ve now heard from her and she is interested in a second sight, from her base at Kalamata, University of the Peloponnese
These would be in Greek and English.
These are tentative ideas. There is of course no money but I see it as unnecessary at this point (if at all) to spend money. Time! Yes. My son is skilled at self-publishing and graphics so he could mock up a model catalogue. Rob Groove is interested in establishing a reputation as a professional photographer and for the moment speaks of leaving out being paid in favour of the pleasure of taking part in an interesting project. It is one of his photos that will be credited in Richard Pine’s book. There are no problems with copyright as the family of the sculptor - in particular Angeliki and Andreas are involved and enthusiastic about seeing Aristeidis Metallinos better known.
My judgement is that a draft but publishable catalogue is a logical next step, essential for any wider recognition. About twenty pages, it could be presented in any initiative that might be taken to promote the laic sculpture in Greece and elsewhere.
In case you wonder why I would most especially like you to write something…your standing as a scholar is significant of course. More so your part in this project. You replied to me last year when I wrote to you about the laic sculptor. All original art has to be discovered; discovered by the individual who strives to see the artist's work directly, unmediated by reference, comparison or repute. I could see from the moment we sat down over coffee in Newcastle that day of my visit last August that you’d been ‘discovering’ Aristeidis. You’d read the papers I attached, looked at pictures, made notes. You had not awaited my arrival with questions, but had prepared thoughts of your own – especially about the timeline of contemporary events in Greece that offer context to this jumbled collection. I believe that few people have yet discovered the laic sculptor. Efrithikis Antzοulatοu-Retsila did in 1935. Yianni M Mari in 1978. I discovered him too as has Linda, through the kindness of the artist’s family and after five year’s wait. You have. So has Richard Pine and the writers Jim Potts and Maria Strani-Potts, to whom I sent all the photos. Aristeidis’ son is the most complex and ambiguous of these discoverers – the one who’s lived longest with the artist. This is why I’m pleased that Angeliki has just told me he’s come round to the idea of writing (or speaking) an account of his memories of his father. There must have been others - some of whom found the work boring, possibly ugly and second-rate, who were rather shocked by some of the pieces. Their reactions are also a discovery. I feel disturbed, even repelled by some art, as the artist may have expected and even intended.
My sense is that we can do our best to intervene in a process of discovery; by mediation and presentation enable more people to see and imagine Aristeidis Metallinos at work, to be able to place what they see and touch in a context and gain a sense of the range of his work - work he began in his 70s (but for the stone shoe he carved in 1927), through the last decade of his life, after most of a lifetime as an artisan, stone-mason and builder - a worker from Ano Korakiana becoming a self-taught sculptor of Kozani marble and unforgiving local stone.
I hope you are well and will forgive me the long interval between communications. We are back from Corfu in early June. It would be good to meet up again. Best wishes, Simon


My plot

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'Above all remember; allotment gardening is fun, it's healthy and it's a great way to meet people. So the most important thing is to enjoy your allotment.'
Advice from the Allotments Section at Birmingham City Council suggests it takes 3 years to get a new allotment in order, but that's if you are already skilled and organised.

I and Lin and now my waged help, Winnie, have been digging over and over, weeding, weeding, weeding (dragging out those sinuous creeping white couch grass rhizomes especially)....
Winnie and Simon on Plot 14 (photo: Sue Hall, Winnie's mum)

....laying permanent paths, cutting out and pegging down porous weed control fabric, making temporary paths by moving around stacks of the industrial-grade carpet tiles I picked up for free during a garden clearance for Handsworth Helping Hands. Making separate beds accessible. The plot is just over 200 square meters, but with the shed and paths only half of that area is now working soil.
Potatoes planted in a bed dug over and over, weeded; new topsoil and compost raked in; all easily worked from surrounding paths

I love it. I do. I really do. But this is not a 'working man's' allotment from which i can proudly feed my family - the ideal of small holdings - urban green spaces whose legislative protection grows weaker by the year. Mine is a hobby plot - a word I dislike; a fact I accept, as a man seven generations from the land. My family have been townspeople, even when enjoying life in the country, since my ancestor Samuel Lees in Oldham became an iron master, then cotton mill owner, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. True my stepfather could work the ground, handle stock, and grow vegetables in large numbers while my grandmother, Bar, abandoned metropolitan life to start the dairy farm where I was born in March 1942 and spent a lot of my childhood - an idyllic place I first heard described, when I was in my teens, as 'a hobby farm - by my stepfather.
Mill End: Simon on Gypsy, Bar on the haywain
I can't say I'd rather my allotment wasn't just a hobby. That's silly. I don't quite know what I was thinking. I suppose I think of it more as an experiment; a test even.
January 2007 - a picture in The Birmingham Evening Mail"When will the company who bought this green space in Birmingham and built on a third of it lay out the allotments that were part of planning gain deal agreed with Birmingham City Council?"
A hobby is 'a regular activity done for pleasure during one's leisure time'. Campaigning ten years to stop the Victoria Jubilee Allotments from being built over and, after that busy time - lobbying, writing, filming, speaking - getting the opportunity to work this plot, has hardly been a leisured activity. I've never been that keen about dividing activities into ones that are leisure, and one's that aren't. I've a distaste for how that distinction defines 'work'.
Starting on Plot 14 in 2010

I want Plot 14 - one Lin and I chose when the Victoria Jubilee Allotments opened in June 2010 - to prosper. I want it fecund, thriving - a source of pride and good food, I want to agree with the advice that an allotment should be enjoyable.
I've invested money on help, on topsoil, on compost, striving to get the ground closer to how I think it needs to be, and all the time I'm learning, with help from other plot-holders far better than me at growing their own - especially my friends Ziggi with her plot in north London and Vanley with his on the Victoria Jubilee, just a few yards away.
Winter sown broad beans with a sprinkle of potash to rake in
I'm going to make this work. But I'm reminded of Douglas Adam's remark "Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss" or Winston Churchill saying 'success involves persevering from one failure to the next', The gardening guide books I read aren't helpful. They begin at a point I'm still striving to reach. They hardly mention soil filled with rubbish, as well as stones, nor do they seem to give much attention to the emotions aroused by the depredations of slugs, onion fly, pigeons, snails (with their exquisite shells I find impossible to crush), and human pilferers - the ones that stole my garlic last year! How I do not envy new plot holders as inexperienced as I, trying to get vegetables to grow on adjoining plots that are like mine was four and half years ago, perhaps worse.
Stones continue to come out of the soil at every dig....

....but they never appear in the books
...and this worthy tutor teaches me more or less nothing about how to dig my plot

I emailed Clive Birch, BDAC, for advice:
Dear Clive.  Happy New Year 2015.  I hope you're well. I've a favour to ask. Since 2010 I have struggled to get my allotment working. You’d not expect less when I’ve invested so much in getting it in the first place. My favour is also a question. We have by all accounts rather uneven topsoil on the VJA. I know that allotments officers on the council were hesitant about accepting the new plots from Persimmon under the S106A of 2004 because the land was not adequately prepared by the developer. Those of us pressing to get the allotments up and running pressed the council to let people start gardening. A minority of plot holders are doing pretty well but all I’ve spoken to admit they’ve had to do a lot of work getting the soil manageable and productive. It is full of stones, bricks, and other debris, as well as chunks of clay with - in some places - ground heavily compressed by building plant machinery. A lot of us have invested in manure, compost and extra topsoil. I would - now that I am beginning to feel more in control - be so grateful for someone coming to look at the soil on my plot to give me an assessment and tell me the best way to continue improving it. All the guide books speak of adding nutrients and getting a balance between acid and alkali, but I’m in the dark as to the starting point on soil composition. It would be great if someone with much more experience and knowledge than I could drop over and give my plot soil an assessment and diagnosis with suggestions as to the what would now be the best treatment to get healthy crops. Would this be possible? Best wishes Simon 
Simon. An experienced allotment holder visited your site and had a good look round, concentrating on the soil structure. Some plots were thriving, some were struggling and some were vacant and overgrown - the overgrown plots obviously were able to support plant life! You can test the acidity of soil [test kits available at DIY/ Nursery] - often the only balance used is lime for the brassicas. The answer to improving the plot - clear rough debris - stones etc [stones can be buried to provide drainage] Clay - working in compost - leaf mould is one of best ways - over wintering will help here. Adding as much rotted compost/manure is great. Leave on surface for a while then dig in [note some crops do not like fresh manure!] You could import topsoil but beware it could include weeds etc even Japanese knot weed! Perseverance is needed. Hope this helps. Best wishes, Clive
So really there's almost nothing in that I don't know, except for the hint about brassicas and the use of stones for drainage. Yet I'm grateful for the confirmation. The depth of my ignorance shared with Lin had me putting my seed potatoes under our bed to chit.
"They need the dark" Lin insisted, so under our bed they went.

I checked this up in books and on the internet
"No Linda! They need light not dark!"
Since the only chitting spuds we'd ever seen were the ones that start sprouting in the veg cupboard in the kitchen we'd assumed that darkness was needed. Out came the spuds from under the bed. Now I have them laid out in the conservatory.
A potato from the kitchen cupboard
Seven months ago the plot looked lovely - the greenery of mid-summer covering a multitude of sins. How will it look this summer? Much depends on what i do in the next few weeks.
June 2014


***** ***** *****
That other plot...
"We didn't reach an agreement. It was never on the cards that we would"
Yanis Varoufakis meets Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin. The first 10 minutes of the clip has journalists and camera-folk preparing to see and hear statements. Then 'the curtain rises'. There they are, by god! Varoufakis has earned a concession before the conversation began. Greece is talking through Varoufakis to the Finance Minister of Germany - not to the Troika who Tsipras told his voters would not be the new Greek government's first port of call after the election. At 23.25 the German turns with courtesy to the Greek who with the journalists has been listening to the most sober and grave re-iteration from Schäuble for the European Project, an address not really to beloved and beleaguered Greece but to a far wider and more fragmented and unreliable audience across our continent.
Aristeidis Metallinos, Ano Korakiana's laic sculptor, depicts the EEC (EOK) as a broody chimaera
In my head there plays as background to this press statement I hear music - the 'Song for the Unification of Europe' composed by Zbigniew Preisner, sung in Greek by Elżbieta Towarnicka - an abridged version of 1 Corinthians:13, from the soundtrack of Krzysztof Kieślowski film 'Bleu'. Varoufakis is also in government but he speaks eloquently, poetically, to the people of Germany; pleads to them for their support in fighting the threat of fascism in Greece. I feel I am watching two statesmen at work; two men who know their trade.

I had an exchange with Richard Pine a few days ago. He wrote in The Irish Times
Tsipras appears to be naively idealistic, innocent, ingenuous and transparent, but he needs to be secretive, cunning and dishonest to succeed in the minefield he has created. As Maurice Manning once said of Garret FitzGerald, it is difficult to trust someone who pours a glass of wine without reading the label on the bottle. Tsipras wants to do the impossible, but if he is to succeed as a political leader he must learn the art of the possible and acquire the killer instinct.
So Richard suggests Tsipras must imitate the Greek hero Odysseus - famous for escaping terrible dangers more through cunning than face-to-face combat. My email:
Richard. I recall writing this in a paper published in the 90s about political skill in civil servants and politicians.....The constant negotiation of this moral minefield is part of life and certainly part of government. An additional layer of complexity is added to these circumstances by the fact that in families, as indeed in government, many people recognise the presence of these dynamics and may actually impart “in confidence”, something intended to be passed on. A process of negotiation is occurring where one person appears to be trusting another to risk being untrustworthy. The novelist Iain McEwan describes public figures who move around in this moral maze by navigating the complicated channels that run between truth and lying: 'with sure instincts while retaining a large measure of dignity. Only occasionally, as a consequence of tactical error, was it necessary to lie significantly, or tell an important truth. Mostly it was sure-footed scampering between the two extremes. Wasn’t the interior life much the same?’  (McEwan 1988:182)....McEwan captures the moral nimbleness that accompanies grown-up behaviour - public and private - where corruption and probity are proximate rather than polar and, where rules are at best casuitical; maintaining integrity requires wit.  What I struck me about Iain McEwan’s words is that self-query 'Wasn’t the interior life much the same?’  My tolerance of politicians about whom you are much more judgemental (I think) is that politics - certainly the politics of government - is that it’s so like my internal life and I suggest I’m not alone in that. Best, Simon 
Richard: You mean you lie to yourself and let not your right hand know....? 
Simon: That’s what Iain McEwan is suggesting. I care about the environment and do many things that harm it. I shop at supermarkets while praising the survival of small shops. I think lascivious thoughts about other women. The list of my moral inconsistencies is endless and I don’t let them worry me or lessen my expressions of concern about the sins of my fellows.
My interior life is a parliament of debate with every now and then a rare internal argument from which the whips are withdrawn and I have a vote in which I must truly interrogate my conscience - but most of the time I’m bladerunning ‘the complicated channels that run between truth and lying”.
I think you have so hit the spot when saying how Tspiras must be. The killer instinct etc. Do you think he has it? Could he grow into it? Is his partner going to help? Peristera Batziaka. ‘Tough cookie”? This is riveting. S 
R: I don't have that problem/advantage. I never argue or debate with myself. I am conscience-free when I wake, and the same when I go to sleep. Thanks for the Batziaka article - interesting that "peristera" means "pigeon" or "turtle-dove". R 
S: 'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'Matt 10:16"I never argue or debate with myself. I am conscience-free when I wake, and the same when I go to sleep”. People will make pilgrimages to seek your advice - the sage of Perithia. You make me think of that other writer Nikos Kazantzakis “I hope nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realise of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”  S
Draw me a picture....

In other words just 10.6% of the €254 billion funds 'state operating needs'



'Though inland far we be...'

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My grandson and I have been working the allotment

"Here’s a thing, Oliver. Suppose I get this allotment producing a regular supply of vegetables. Suppose I sort out my confusion about whether this is a serious exercise in producing healthy and tasty food, if not cheap; that this is not an allotment in the old sense – the means by which a working man may feed his family including you – but a hobby, a leisure activity that maintains my mental health and physical shape. Suppose I sort all that out by spending money on soil improvement and paying Winnie to help work the plot with me, there’s yet another challenge. What do I do with what I grow. Does your nan cook it? All of it? Do I give it away? Some of it? How do I grow and supply what I grow in a way that gets things to the table in the right way, instead of producing gluts. As well as growing things - my main purpose - do I have to master the art of storing things? Preserving fruit and pickling veg? That’s a whole other aspect of the project, requiring crafts as tricky to learn to do well as those I’m ever so slowly learning about cultivation. What do you think? While you're thinking about this put some more water in the kettle"
  • Nick Booth "can you grow ice cream?
    19 hrs · Unlike · 2
  • Mickey Lowe My God what a lucky little tyke that is to be with you and learning all the time! Bless ya both !!
  • Mickey Lowe Any extras you grow could surely go to any food bank or homeless shelter!! 
  • Tony Jacks Excuse the language Simon, but that is an awful lot of bloody thinking.
  • Simon Baddeley Of course. Just insert the liquid and the ice crystals grow in it
    19 hrs · Like · 1
  • Ann Marie Gallagher There is a super project called the Real Junk Food Cafe - cook up surplus food - Payl pay as u feel - or u could give to a local place of welcome ?
    19 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley A friend has just sent me a message...'Re your allotment quandaries ... I'd been going for a while before i got the hang of preserving. I have to say that its one of the things that is most exhausting. After working at the allotment i drag the produce home and have to start working again to prepare it for the freezer/pickling/chutneying etc. It adds a whole other level. And it makes giving stuff away even more joyful at the time of inevitable gluts - you will not be able to avoid gluts.There are plenty of books about preserving.' But why not just go to Fortnums or Harrods' Food Hall next time in London. It's cheaper in the end. Apple and Mint Chutney £4.95 a jar. Off my allotment the same would cost nothing in materials and around £150 in labour (:))...and you want me to give that away to the poor?
    19 hrs · Edited · Like
  • Sue Tsirigoti Your friend is right! we are sooo lucky not to be in a "needs must" time.. well not much anyway. There is a great deal of pleasure in growing and eating ones own produce and the sad thing is at the time you havea glut so does everyone else too! Well here at least where we all have gardens of varying sizes. Even the effort of harvesting and blanching ready for the freezer is so too much for me once summer season has started. I remember my mother salting beans because we of course didnt have freezers. I would have to buy a new freezer to accommodate all our produce and even then we would be struggling to eeat it all before the next crop next year. At least some of it oes to the chickens which continue with the circle f life and turn it into eggs and chicken soup, or Kokoros pastistada. It is the eternal question isnt it?
    18 hrs · Unlike · 2
  • Zena Phillips I was lucky. It was my own garden so it included fruit trees and soft fruits. All my surplus requirements went to the village shop. We split the proceeds half and half. Sometimes there were people waiting for me to arrive because they knew stuff had been harvested a maximum of half an hour before I got there. I never made a fortune but it covered next year's seeds and needs.
    18 hrs · Unlike · 3
  • Andy Mabbett That looks like a proper shed.
    15 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley Got in on freecycle. Had to cut two panels in half to get them in the van! I recovered the roof, added the veranda and rain gutters and downpipes. https://flic.kr/p/a5qBJ7 Got the slabs after a neighbour's front-yard make-over. https://flic.kr/p/a5qBJ7
    13 hrs · Like · 3 · Remove Preview
  • Poppy Brady Are you sure you haven't tied Oliver to that chair?! And who sits on the chairs on the tables?
    11 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley How else can I get anyone to listen to me (:))
    11 hrs · Like · 3
  • Paul McGovern I think you should let Oliver take over and take up fishing x
    4 hrs · Unlike · 1
  • Maureen Carter I keep a log of the produce i use and give away for every year and the chutneys i produce and its quite amazing how much you do produce. It takes a few extra minutes daily but you can then see what was productive to grow and what wasnt worth the effort but it does at the end of the day , depends on the weather. I this winter didnt grow enough winter greens but it is a very big learning curve. The neighbours quite happily look after my plot when i go away as they pick and use the produce !
    1 hr · Unlike · 1
I've invested in topsoil and compost; dropped off in builder's bags from the lane at the top of my allotment. When needed Ollie and I barrow it down to the bed we're working on.
We passed Vanley on the way down to Plot 14 yesterday. I haven't seen him for a while. Oliver strolled on with Oscar on his lead. I reflected on my hopes and cares for the plot.
"The paths are much wider"
"Yes. And when you want you can always make your beds larger and thin the paths again"
"This March is going to be important. That's when I'll do a lot of planting, now I've done more weeding and digging over and added in more compost and top-soil...but both plots on either side of me have been abandoned"
"They may turn up when the weather gets better"
"Yes but I wish I had plots next to me that were thriving. There are so many plots that people have given up on after covering them with bits of wood and plastic and....someone came for three weekends in August last year and then disappeared. That other covered the plot with polythene last November but hasn't checked in since. I keep putting her weed suppressor back in place but the wind is always..."
"Allotments are a metaphor for life"
Oliver, Winnie and her son, Dennis

Dennis and Oliver moving earth

There have been big winds rising. How they gust across this dishevelled site, showing scant respect for structures not well secured, tattering plastic covers, blowing over poly-tunnels...

...shifting one greenhouse onto a neighbour's plot; getting under people's weed suppressing fabric; blowing it around until it's in shreds. On Plot 14 everything's tied, pegged or weighted down.
The bottom bed was collecting water, producing lots of mud. To get it workable I dug a trench at its end. Oliver and I filled it with rubble. Splash! Splash!

I barrowed the earth I'd shovelled out to the top of the plot; brought back lighter topsoil and good compost to mix in the earth I'd forked over and weeded yet again.

After removing its fabric, I covered the fly-tipped bed-frame I dragged to the site yesterday with insect netting - Veggiemesh - using my gun tacker.


On a nearby bed I've planted parsnip seeds. I've done this twice without success, so here goes again but with more compost and bed preparing. I bought a resistant strain of seeds. Archer.  Have I done this right? I'm already thinking I should have waited for warmer weather despite the Feb plant packet advice. Perhaps as a safeguard I should try germinating the parsnip seeds I've got left on a damp kitchen towel in the conservatory.
As it is I checked instructions on depth and spacing - but I wonder how much to trust the retailer's instructions. I semi-sprinkled the small disc-like seeds along rows. The instructions - read in several places as well as from the packet  - say that parsnips dislike transplanting, so these are not to be cultivated in my frame-covered seedbed then moved. What I should expect to do is to thin the sprouted plants and expect to harvest something around Christmas or beyond. I'm slowly realising that there's no substitute I've found for the time it takes to make judgements based on experience I've only just begun to acquire.
The plot now- this bed ready for potatoes
The plot 3 years ago









Starting on a shed from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo - 2010

I've finally found a book on gardening that I like. I was told about it by Barry on Facebook - a veteran pro gardener....
 'Simon. Look for a book called “ Gardeners Earth“ by Dr Stanley Whitehead. I had a copy for horti exams I had to do yearsssss ago. I managed to “keep“ it LOL'
**** **** ****
Even so we miss beloved Greece....in memory land...an Easter Sunday five years ago...a lamb roast at Mark's and Sally’s. At one in the afternoon, having been up until nearly four the same morning enjoying food – singing and conversation with our dear neighbours, we strolled down Democracy Street. The spitted lamb was turning over a bed of charcoal. Our assembly came from most parts of the UK, some long inhabitants of the island – citizens - others like us still new and some visitors, one in Corfu for the first time. Angie and Martin we’d met before but I learned they knew Richard Hill’s part of the world, and indeed, when I mentioned his address, knew his street. I explained Richard’s craft and the finely re-carved roach I was so looking forward to holding in my hands in May. We came onto Pompey and the writer Graham Hurley who’s given me so much pleasure.

The view from the balcony - greenery to the blue Kerkyra sea and the mainland mountains in their distant detail, while behind us the three crags, on one of which some lads had raised a flag – not the patrida, because it was red and yellow, but we couldn’t make out the pattern. “Could ever a village be better placed?” Swallows darted among the houses. Our company spread across two tables on the balcony; smoke from the roasting lamb full of rosemary rising upwards; cheerful conversation. We ate olive-oiled pitta bread from a barbeque, helping ourselves from dishes of pasta mixed with glazed carrots and sausages; dressed salad; small roasted fowl to be eaten delicately. “This is just the first course" reminded Sally. There was wine, which could be diluted with ice and sipped for hours; also beer and water. Then the lamb – I honoured with half the head. “I’ve never seen anyone trying to eat a lamb’s head with a knife and fork”. True the only way to tease the meat from a skull is to pick it up and feed in the old way.
EASTER LAMB ROAST IN ANO KORAKIANA from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
But Angela Papageorgiou in Corfu shares this picture, tagged : "What was that about wishing you were here"?
Southerly gale on the Old Fort, Ormos Garitsas  ~ Friday 6th March

**** **** ****
Catching the 9.10 train to London is altogether a fussier business than the purposeful 7.30 that goes non-stop to London and is full of serious commuters. This is my second visit to London carrying films and tapes from the Out of Town archive for the first stage of turning them into broadcasts.
Leaving New Street for Euston

It doesn’t help that I’m carting an unwieldy old suitcase weighing over 20 kilos containing eleven episodes of ‘Out of Town’ – rusty film cans of 16mm location film with, cello-taped to them, my stepfather’s commentary as recorded in his studio ‘shed’ at the time of broadcast – over forty years ago. I needed a taxi to New Street. It didn’t arrive quite on time. The traffic after eight was heavy – parents to school, commuters into the city centre – congestion I’d slide by on my bicycle, but for this freighted journey I’m a penguin ashore. Desultory chat with the young driver; peering at my watch. I got a receipt at the drop-off.
“Keep receipts” says Lin “If you ever make any money from this I’ll need it for your tax return”
At New Street it’s a literal drag from the drop-off to the platform. A Virgin platform helper consulted his tablet.
“The 9.10 is coming in the wrong way round. Your coach will be up that way”
The platform was crowded. Travellers for Coventry and International. My train arrived. I trudged towards Coach D. My guide was swiftly behind me, grabbed the hefty case to the right door and heaved it on board for me.
By Coventry I was in an almost empty carriage. At Euston I’ll hope to find a trolley and another taxi to Deluxe Soho.
Dear Mark. As arranged I expect to be with Deluxe Soho around 11.00 this Wednesday morning with a second batch of ‘Out of Town’ film and tapes. Looking forward to seeing you again. I shall come to Mearde Street. Best wishes, Simon 
Morning Simon. I'm actually in meetings, so please ask for my colleague Graham Jones, who will make you a nice cup of tea upon arrival. I will hopefully see you a bit later. All the best, Mark 
I have taken up Christopher Perry’s offer. We’ve signed a witnessed contract. Big Centre TV on air in Birmingham and the Black Country Saturday Feb 28th  - will pay for processing the films and tapes in the archive I’ve been looking after these last few years, in return for being able to broadcast some of them.
At Deluxe Soho with eleven film-tape pairs for digitising
This deal includes showing episodes from the Delta box-sets that contain over fifty complete easily broadcastable episodes of Out of Town. This gives us time for the old archive film to be digitised in London by Deluxe Soho and brought to Walsall Studio School for the key work of turning it into broadcasts – a process that requires film and sound to be synchronised, titles and credits to be inserted along with the Southern Television logo at start and finish, and - probably the biggest challenge - editing decisions made about what do with the sequences of Jack’s commentary where we have his voice but no picture. We’ll almost certainly remove him talking about an unseen object on the table in his studio ‘shed’ hoping to create sensible transitions from his commentary in the ‘shed’ to the location film. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of chat on Facebook– nearly 900 members now – about what images to insert in the ‘shed’ sequences; stills from the episode itself, silent moving film from the episode, portraits of Jack – stills and moving. One helpful adviser even dubbed my stepfather’s imageless commentary onto a sequence clipped from a different episode where the studio is shown. It fooled a few people including me until after a few seconds I spotted the subterfuge.
From Euston where I had further help - a trolley for the hefty case from the platform to concourse and a station uniform to guide me to the lift that took us down to a taxi. The taxi took me to the centre of Soho, to Meard Street, where I lugged the case into Marie Fieldman's workroom at Deluxe Soho.
With Marie Fieldman starting work on the next Out of Town batch


After a coffee I picked up my pleasingly light suitcase and started walking north. I bought delectable lox and cream cheese bagel to eat in Soho Square......
...walking north towards Euston Road and the mainline station.
Euston Road - a phone booth in old London town

On Monday 2nd March, 10.30-11.00am, Big Centre TV broadcast a half-hour episode of Out of Town. The next episode goes out same time on Friday, and thereafter at same time on Mondays and Fridays. I'm keeping careful tabs on what's shown - the deal being to show only 50% of the contents of each of the two box sets. That gives us just under 15 weeks before we go on to do the trickiest and most interesting broadcasts - the archive material I've been taking to Deluxe Soho. Now I'm more familiar with the people at Deluxe Soho, I've asked Chris Perry to get me together with editors at Walsall Studio School - the people or person who'll be synchronising and editing the digitised material sent up from London.
Dear Chris. Not sure if we were clear on the advertising of Out of Town on Big Centre TV. I saw the announcement of future episodes being shown Monday and Friday mornings, but we agreed there would be, at the end of each episode of Out of Town (as you suggested and we agreed), showing a 10 second commercial for the Delta Box sets with a link to Delta’s website for OOT.
I have told Delta this would be happening so I could check with them the effect of that publicity. Sales of the box sets pay me the royalties I need for storing the archive and expenses associated with the restoration of the archive, the main part of which Big Centre TV will be covering once we arrive at broadcast quality episodes from the archive.
I anticipate you have about 15 more weeks drawing on the existing box set material. If all goes well the first of the recovered archive episodes should be ready to broadcast in the first week of June. These will be unique, not seen since first broadcast in the 1970s.
Remembering I will be out of the UK, the sooner I can get together with a Studio School editor with digitised material to hand the better. It may help that I have three such episodes already processed by Francis Niemczyk. Best wishes, Simon
Email from Chris:
Hi Simon. As soon as we take some delivery of files, I can fix you up with an editor. I planned to give Steve until end of week and then chase him at Deluxe. I have fixed the caption issue - playout server couldn't see it.  c

The boat

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Guy's text from GB the other evening
*** ****

"I want a boat!” said Oliver
“You mean you’d like a boat”
“Yes! A boat!”
“Make him a boat, grandpa” says Amy
I glued and screwed together two pieces of moulding – useful bits kept in the apothiki; fashioned a bowsprit from another shape cut out of something else, added a deck house, and cut a piece of old broom handle for a funnel adding plus two paddle wheels cut from ply - the bolts fixed through the sides and riveted with the ball of my hammer to hold the nuts.
“It’s like that tug that’s towing the Fighting Temeraire
“Make it so it can be pulled along”
“Hm. OK. I’ve also got to check it floats the right way up”
“You only really needed to put a piece of dowling in a log”
"You mean I'm making it for me?"


"I'll show it to Oliver...
The family in the garden on Democracy Street

...and then we'll try it out on water"
Oliver's boat launched in the river that flows into the sea at Ermones

The water in the Ermones River is crystal clear. It runs, just a yard wide and two feet deep, into the surf on the shore. The little paddle steamer drifted into an eddy, under a footbridge, then caught the main flow which ran into the ripples of the collapsing waves of the cove. I was enjoying the voyage until the current sped up of a sudden and the boat was tumbling in the shallow surf, everyone laughing; Oliver crying out in alarm. I waded into the sea and caught the boat on a returning wave.

"She's fine. The bowsprit's cracked but I'll mend that tonight. I should have varnished her first but I couldn't wait"
Ermones bay

*** *** ***
The novelSuite Française exemplifies the sympathetic fallacy in reverse; perfidy, and violence in central France in the June of its third German invasion in a century. I had difficulty when on peaceful contented family holidays in Normandy and Brittany in the 1990s, imagining this green and pleasant countryside fouled by war - one in which my relatives, especially my dad, were to be at hazard two years later. In France in 1941 edging into 1942, Irène Némirovsky wrote the first parts of what she intended to have five parts – a book on the scale of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; avowedly achieving its timelessness. In July 1942 Némirovsky was arrested by the French police, handed over to the Occupying Germans; swiftly transported her to Auschwitz where. sick with typhus, she was killed on 17th August 1942, four and half months after I was born. Dolce and Storm - the first two parts of her work – published 62 years (translated into English in 2007) after her murder - describe people escaping from Paris in face of German invasion, and then, life in a French village in the south of the Occupied Zone where a German regiment is stationed for 3 months before being summoned away to fight in Russia.
‘Soon the road was empty. All that remained of the German Regiment was a little cloud of dust’…and that’s it; the separate characters in Dolce and Storm, yet to meet, in parts yet to be written, remain forever separate. Némirovsky wrote without knowing the outcome of the war or the possibility that the proclaimed 'Thousand-Year Reich' - Germania its capital - would soon fall. It's a truly unfinished work. After reading the ‘first’ 340 pages of what was intended to be a 1000 pages, I so desire to continue, yet suspect the vile circumstances that have deprived me of the symphony the author was planning, will ensure what survives endures in imagination. Suite Française is thus published in sublime and poignant draft. The author's notes show reworking was important. She had no time for it. An un-sanded unvarnished unframed sketch stands on its own even so, made memorable and poignant for being two out of five episodes. Unfinished paintings take me closer to the artist, notwithstanding the possibility the lack of finish is intended. One comment especially …
‘the book itself’ she writes in her planning notes for the whole ‘must give the impression of only being one episode … which is really what is happening in our times, as in all times of course.’ 
Ah yes …’as in all times of course’. We live not in beginnings, middles and ends but in episodes. Don’t I read books, for stories, with beginnings. middles and ends; even where there are formal episodes I want them to be chapters that start, continue and conclude a story. I don’t want to think - or perhaps I’m on to something I hadn’t properly considered - that enduring ‘soap operas’ – the Archers, Coronation Street, both going on around 60 years – are a closer representation of what happened; is happening. My life, anyone’s life, fits the notion of beginning, middle and end, a biography, but perhaps I should think instead of mine and the other lives that have crossed, are crossing and will cross mine as episodes. Beginnings. middles and ends, births, and deaths, are critical to biographies, but not in series, not in episodes, or not in the same way. They happen but they no longer define a plot or storyline...
**** ****
When we were first here, eight years ago, almost tasting the beauty of the place, we dismissed the smell as one that came from a soakaway, βόθρος - unused to new arrivals, or possibly to a predecessors’ habit of using bleach, and other chemicals that interrupt an efficient cess pit’s necessary chemistry – a hole in the ground that was once a well into which the water from domestic sinks, baths and WC flow and disperse into the surrounding ground – not a cesspool, a closed tank, that must be pumped out regularly. Inspections showed our cess-pit was invariably ‘sweet’. The wafts were from next door – miasmas drifting below our noses whether on the veranda, the garden, even our balcony ten feet above the neighbour’s garden. Like wind broken in company we’d collude in ignoring these smells, especially as on breezy days the worst dispersed. But amid our comfortable life we needed to deal with the bother of a problem that was technical and diplomatic.
“You’ll just have to have a word” said Lin this April. I looked up words in the English-Greek dictionary ‘smell’ ‘bad smell’ ‘cess-pit, ‘overflow’, ‘leak’….
Between our properties there’s a gully hardly 45cms wide and about 4 metres long, which carries grey water from our neighbour’s garden into a small culvert under our garden into waste ground. This gully is floored with an inch of concrete; carrying, as well as water, occasional plastic bags, cups and bottles that trap in a metal grid before, some of it slipping into our garden. We clear this now and then. Last year seeking the source of the cess pong, Lin sealed several small leaks coming through the concrete below the mouth of the gully. This caused leakage further up.

“Water finds ways” said Lin.
It became clear that under the narrow concrete of the gully was a thin layer of rubble and under that, earth – black soil, a capacious sponge containing all that leaked from the cess-pit. Any sealing we’d done so far, led to the cess working through the soil and trickling out of the wall higher up.
“Whatever we do” said Lin “we just drive the leak higher”
This month we tactfully approached Fote and showed him a ‘problema’. He pointed out he’d had the soak away pumped out two years ago. We remembered that but, ..."now the smell is as bad as ever”.
A few days later he attempted a bolder solution – applying a rough cement mixture that sat like a bank six inches high along the margins of the apothiki that stood on top of the soakaway where it backed onto our garden.
“It’s not working” said Lin one morning after “and look, he’s inserted a small length of hose pipe at the end of his bank of cement which is emptying into the culvert under our garden."
The smells hadn’t abated.
“We have to make a more thorough push on the problem” said Lin
Paul had told us about a product he used to seal leaks in swimming pools – Waterplug or Aquafix.
“It fills cracks even as water trickles out” he said
We realized our earlier efforts using quick drying cement applied during siesta when there was no waste water generated, were based on not understanding exactly where the liquid and accompanying smell started.
“First we block the leakage into our garden coming from the back of the apothiki.”
We had nine 45cms square floor tiles which, once the leaks had been sealed with aquafix, covered with cement containing Revenex– the local equivalent of pudlo – to make it water proof and then another large layer of mortar holding on each tile that sat neatly in a four inch concrete ledge. Nine tiles did this trick sealing small leaks and places where we might expect future leaks. Then came the tough bit - an incursion into our neighbour’s gully.
"Now for the gulley"

I removed the metal rubbish grid with help from the angle grinder, giving us access to one side of the apothiki. Once Fote’s work had been hacked back - not tricky as it was quite soft - the leak into the gully was apparent, flowing over a thin layer of cement into the soaking mud under the gully. I hacked out blackened muddy pieces of rubble.
“You’re just making it worse” cried Lin
“No I’m not”
I applied a hose pipe to the pool of black water that had seeped into the hole I’d made in the gully. Syphoning out the water revealed a lengthy seam in the side of the apothiki below the level of the gully. The water once syphoned swiftly refilled the messy hole I’d made in the gully
“I’m opening up the wound”
“No you’re making it far worse!”
“Watch” I said, having my doubts.
With my hands - rubber gloved - I reached into a horizontal hole that seemed hard enough on top but was edged below with muddy rubble. I pulled this out, widening the hole until I felt I had a base of sorts.
“The problem is that the main leak is below the edge of the gully”
Lin was sceptical. The smell was of course as bad as ever. The next morning I assembled lots of cardboard, soaked it and shoved it in to plastic bags. I then started shoving these into the hole to staunch the leak.
The gates of Hades


The hole’s appetite for filling was considerable. I pushed the bags in until my arm was in the hole above my elbow, packing in more bags filled the same way. I used a block of wood to press the filling into every part of the hole, banging it with the lump hammer until the hole seemed thoroughly blocked, the plastic just inside the hole quite hard, with room to apply cement on top.
For three days with the smell gone, we waited. Then yesterday evening Lin mixed up quick drying cement, after I'd levelled the gully again with rubble and started filling the hole in the cesspit and the depression in the gully with cement which seems to be setting despite the shade and a few showers of rain...


...and our incursion into the neighbours' space has gone unremarked.

Sailing to Pirate Island

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It would be a fabled island. Guy, Dave, Oliver and I set out in Summersong from her little home port of Ipsos; motoring without wind from the aquamarine shallows into the deeper blue of the Kerkyra Sea.

“See the engine?” said Dave
Oliver peered down on our engine under the first cabin step; made engine noises.
“Bob bob bob bob? Call it ‘Bob’’
“We’re going to Pirate Island” I said
Slowly the old boat headed south a little away from the coast, then further past Dassia Bay.
Water for Oliver, beer for the grown-ups and small croissants for everyone . The sandy pebby shores passed slowly by and a small tree covered island appeared on the horizon
“There it is”

“Does he know what an island is?” said Dave
“I don’t know. But we can give Ollie some memories – for us; his innocence to make a different account of this melancholy place. Wouldn’t I prefer to set aside the arguments about what happened there; set aside in all its squalor. Wouldn’t I prefer my grandchildren to think of me living on Pirate Island - where we buried treasure; a cross or two pointing to the spot.”
We approached the island carefully; edged up to the ragged low jetty and took a line ashore; and headed inland.
“Ssssh watch out for pirates”

Under the shaded pines and through the ruined buildings where the pirates go.
"Could this be the place where the treasure was buried?"

"Hear their noise!"
"Ssssh they'll know we're here?"
'Back to the boat...Quick!"
In no time we'd returned aboard, cast off, and were heading home, Oliver at the tiller steering with the foresail up before a gentle breeze. Quiet. Ripples and small splashes against the hull.


Dave, Guy and Oliver sailing on Summersong

I found a souvenir - a thole-pin in a block of wood broken from the gunwale of one of the pirate's sally boats; rusted spiky nails sticking from it. Dave banged them flat against the stone work of the jetty. I drew out the pin and put it in the other way round.
"A boat!"
The boat I found on the island

"Back to reality"

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"Oliver! To make castles you must add water to your sand"

I mistook the old bloke with a flat cap, a fag in his mouth, shuffling by my borrowed chair in the airport car park, for a local.
"Kalimira"
"Are you waiting for a car?" he said
"Ah yes. Yianni told me he's just coming"
I glimpsed the wife with luggage ready. Yianni drove up, shook the old man's hand, patted his back, kissed his wife.
"Back to reality" I heard the man say.
Yianni saw them off; strolled over to deal with my paperwork; licence details.
"Hullo, Simon. How are you?"
"Not so good"
"Why?"
"Seeing off my family"
"Ah you will see them soon"

All that's true, so why do I feel the old sadness of separation in my stomach? It's unavoidable. Cole Porter ...'how strange the change from major to minor, every time we say goodbye?'
It matches the joy of arrival, smiles and laughs.

In one way I'll be glad to get back to just us two routines with time to make toast with butter and anchovy paste in the morning while Lin sleeps. Good too to take down that inconvenient safety gate at the top of the stairs, disposing of nappies and food strewn in bits on the floor - and cigarette butts; quiet in the house instead weeping, wingeing, pattering feet and bumps on the ceiling and shrieks at Oliver's new invention - 'spiderdust!'.




Hannah and Oliver with Amy

We've been together to Sidari, Kouloura, Kalami...
Kouloura



Palia Perithia, Ermones, Kanoni, Vlacherna, Sokraki...
Sokraki

...Dassia, the pool at Dominoes - still chilly - near Ipsos...


...Gouvia, Faliraki, places in the delightful city, and at Piatsa in the village where the children are made much of and we watch people and cars and bikes go by. Oliver's been to the shop with me to buy bread. He can say "psomi", ''efxharisto"and "yasoo" and cope with being hugged by - to him - strangers. Oliver and Guy came with me to Pirate Island in the boat.
Last night - their last night - we had Mark and his parents for supper. Lin made two kinds of meat loaf with tasty tomato sauce, baked potatoes with butter, runner beans and carrots, and lots of bread before that to mop the mix of balsamic vinegar and olive oil that came with wide plates of tomatoes and mozzarella, like abstract patterns.
I imagine Oliver, especially, as a camera  '..with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking' starting an album that will last his life.
Faliraki below the city

*** ***
The day before they left my ache began, adding to the joyful taste of every moment. The still summer air within the shade of the cottage hallway was suffused with the unmistakable smell of a live brown trout just caught, held, to keep it pristine, in a small sheaf of fresh grass laid in Bignall's kreel. On such days as this when departures approaches the little dying comes in small sensations that touch every sense and cue timeless associations. What is beautiful in the day becomes even more beautiful.
This is when memories are made that last until old age, until death I suspect, hung in the memory gallery; sometimes still pictures, to be evoked by a smell, or hung in the hall of continuity open all day and night for life - awake and asleep - the palette of every sense, separate and together - the latter the mysterious ingredients of déjà vu.
At Emeral after taking the family to the airport

'The sea is calm tonight'

Innocent as artists but without the craft. Nothing is significant – expect food and love and attention – nothing is insignificant. Nought selected, everything relevant, all is fecund with intimations. Later the children will select, learning the necessary understanding of common sight, which so few slough, to recover glimpses of celestial light, dreams that recur, gloriously fresh.
The bridge over the brook at Ermones
*** *** ***
I had a frantic text from Winnie...


...the bees had caused her problems. She and Dennis had been stung; she twice. I phoned and emailed Gill, my neighbour apiarist. She said the bees population was expanding beyond the hive on Plot 14. She halved the colony. That vexed the remaining bees, hence the text from Winnie. More phone calls. I told Winnie she must stay away from the allotment but she went back and called me again and sent me a clip from her phone...

"Winnie! They're swarming"
"They're dangerous"
"No not while they're swarming. It's OK but phone Gill now"
Later Gill told me that thanks to Winnie she'd caught the swarm and temporarily moved the colony.
"There should be an almost entirely new lot and I'll bring them back"
"I so hope so. I do not want to lose our bees"

Tilth

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“I’ve just had a woman complain my compost is full of worms! She was all the way down towards Benitses. Asked me all sorts of details about the compost and then ordered one bag. I delivered it. Next thing I heard, she’d warned another customer not to buy the compost…”
“Because it was full of worms” we chorused.
“The worms for goodness sake show it’s not manure any more..that the compost is well on its way to being humus. I know, Mark, because when I handle it, there’s no discernible smell, it crumbles and mixes nicely with our present soil. It’s darker than the compost we’ve made with kitchen waste and green stuff from the garden.”
Fortunately the women complained to a another Greek who explained the function of earthworms to her”
I keep turning over in my head thoughts about the earth on our allotment in Handsworth. I’d been warned on Day One – back in June 2010 – when I, at last, signed up for a plot, full of excitement, and delight, that the one we wanted was available.
Plot 14 on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments
I’d been warned there was clay just below the surface; that the ground was full of large stones; that it would drain badly because new poor quality topsoil had been spread over earth compacted by the works vehicles used in building the neighbouring houses that had come with the S106A that had delivered the allotments to Birmingham City Council. The soul was also full of annual and, worse, perennial, weeds, mares-tail but especially couch grass whose rhizomes spread swiftly just below the surface of the soil leaching nutrients, spreading grass where it wasn't wanted. I knew all that. I've been dealing with the problem since – digging over and over, removing large stones, adding commercial compost, weeding constantly with the extra help of pegged down weed suppressing textile.
What I did not know, what I’ve just begun to understand is what good soil should be like; how it should be created; how maintained. It was not until I was pointed to the book I’ve mulling through for two months now, that I began to grasp the depth of my ignorance.
Gardener’s Earth it’s called by Stan Whitehead. Barry Luckhurst who knew and liked my stepfather’s programmes on TV, found me on Facebook, pointed me to this book; all the while mocking TV gardeners as entertainers feeding dreams rather than offering education.
The soil is a universe, alive, ever changing. It plays only a small part in the final success of what I grow – other factors being the plants or seeds I start with, the weather, insects and other predators, my skills in sowing and tending the growing plants. But that small percent on mainly the first seven inches of ground is a fascinating world, intriguing. Luckily Mark and I share this interest at the moment.
Greenery for our compost heap from Lin's gardening
Our compost heap - leaves, roots, vegetable peelings, egg shells, vacuum cleaner dust etc 

Our compost after just a few months


The composted manure we had from Mark

We’ve been discussing earth, manure, compost and humus, over drinks at Piatsa. How to get good tilth? He’s been digging into a couple of piles of three year rotted horse manure at Sally’s stables; distributing it via customers on the internet in 20kilo sacks of compost.
Organisms in the gut of the horse starts the decomposition as part of digestion. The process continues outside when dung meets air. When the manure has lain a while exposed to rain and sun, mixed with straw from the stables, worms start accelerating the composting, creating humus, that, spread on and mixed in with existing soil, enriches the earth, helping please the plants; creating conditions that enable other good things to happen in the soil.
Food for the soil rather than the plants
There’s far more to it.
I’m only starting to understand the subject, aware that good farmers, good gardeners, have known about the earth intuitively; learned it from parents, from direct experience, not books. The vital thing about compost is that, applied properly – there’s the rub, it can improve and maintain the soil. To understand that I have had to grasp what is meant by good soil, gardener’s earth; what is meant by both the composition and the structure of the soil, and how it is constantly changing and how what is needed to arrive at the best growing medium – good tilth - requires an understanding of the kind of soil I’ve started with.
Colloids are particles of earth which do not dissolve in water but form, depending on whether soil is more sandy, loamy or clay, varying sized clumps, giving the earth greater capacity to hold moisture and plant food. Soil forms into clumps – sticky or less sticky, hard, soft, soggy – depending on whether it’s predominately clay or, at the other end of a spectrum of types of soil, sandy. Each type of soil needs different treatment to create colloids and so approach the composition and structure that suits what I want to grow in it. Another phenomenon I’ve yet to understand is flocculation– a process by which added lime creates greater aeration within the earth.
Even if the ideal tilth is approximated, growing things, even when successful, changes that approximate ideal, demanding continued work to keep the soil fecund. Growing things in it makes earth more acid. The balance of alkalinity-acidity (pH value) has to be created, restored – constantly.

The soil must also have holes in it, space between the particles - aeration - allowing roots to spread and gain nourishment, and – amazing – allow, in many cases, the growth of a fungus that attaches itself to those roots – mycorrhiza, which grows on humus – and in a mysterious symbiosis enters the roots of the plant, becoming a partner that makes other nutrients in the soil more available to the plant.
How far this seems from paying over the counter at garden shops for fertilizers in sterilised sacks and boxes and bottles, containing, if you examine the labels, the key ingredients – nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus plus small trace elements known to be important...

...These things, writes Whitehead, feed the plant, not the soil. Better he suggests to create the conditions for these to develop and remain in the soil mingling with myriad millions of micro-organisms nurtured by well mixed-in compost. He understands the power of artificial fertilization and the need for it by farmers who need to make their living from the land in the market, but better, he argues, to fertilize the soil rather than what grows in it; better to work on the soil’s native fertility rather than use artificial fertilizers which may, in promoting growth in one season, exhaust the soil the next of its natural capacity to produce the commercial nutrients you’ve added. Once reliant on artificial fertilizers for the growth you expect and need, you, or the plants you want to grown, can be hooked on them. Whitehead’s no faddist. Artificial fertilizers used with discretion can be good so long as you know the principles at work and can make appropriate adjustments, rather than head towards total dependence on products you have to buy.
I can see why one may be tempted to buy nutrients. There’s an art to creating the conditions under which the nutrients needed by what you want to grow will occur naturally and in the right balance in the earth. That’s how far I’ve got. Knowing far more about my ignorance; knowing, as I did not a year ago, things I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
I am not that keen to return to Birmingham – too much work on the untidy house and its delinquent plumbing, but then there’s babysitting duties – the pleasures and frustrations - work with Handsworth Helping Hands, even some paid work teaching, the need to help edit the recovered ‘Out of Town’ episodes for broadcast on Big Centre TV, drafting an Aristeidis Metallinos catalogue, getting back to the defence of Black Patch Park, tidying our neglected garden and the allotment – from which I’m expecting a better crop than before, a prospect that excites me but also reminds me that I am about to move from being delighted at managing to grow things to growing them in the right amount and sequence for cooking and eating, as well as observing the rotation of crops needed to keep the soil working for me. I’m also hoping that I am getting closer to making my own compost instead of buying it in. I shall make a plan that shows each bed and keep notes - a growing diary, and a reminder of how little I still know but how much I’ve learned in four or so years.
*** *** ***
I had speculated that there’d come a day when the subversive row of punk would become nostalgic “sing along a’ Sid”. Last night was so. A taverna near Ipsos, old English folk, a couple of holiday grandchildren – hardly out of toddling – pogoing round the pool at Dominoes to the harsh tones of punk tribute – a fiftieth birthday party and farewell to an ex-pat couple going home, a birthday cake iced in the Union stripes, “God Save The Queen”.
God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb
God save the queen
She ain't no human being
There is no future
In England's dreaming
Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future, no future,
No future for you...
The hour and a half we stayed felt more exotic, than any Greek celebration. Stranger nation. Gnarled Brit men with shaven heads, tanned Anglo-Saxons, sun-dried ladies, having good fun, dancing and chanting to the frenetic noise of their youth.
“An ethnic event” I muttered to Paul “It’s strange”
I doubt it applied to these x-pats either - never scrapped into the wasteland of post-industrial meltdown; not tuned to the desolation that made this droning clamour literally the rage. Paul generous and innovative had added the punk group from Maidstone to his Agiotfest menu, where, their dutiful ill-manners earned the ‘mixed reception’ intended. Now at Dominoes Paul politely pogoed a few seconds. I imitated him.
“Don’t be ridiculous” said Lin.
Yes indeed. How could I, under my unshaven silver hair, in my white jacket, my white easycare M & S shirt, my clean jeans and brogues, have a hope of being a headbanger?
*** *** ***
I am still aware how life and its meaning hang by threads. How the universe of all matters can implode in an instant. What bloody contingency makes of all hopes and plans. That fiery New England preacher, Cotton Mather, put the fear of eternal damnation into his rapt congregations, reminding them that below their feet, an inch beneath the unreliable floorboards on which they stood, burned the vivid flames of hell. One lapse, one wrong thought or action, the wood could crack and...
Well who believes all that stuff. A parent? A grandparent?
When she flew into Corfu at the beginning of May, Amy pointed to Oliver’s head, showing me a bruise he’d received just a few hours earlier…I at the airport or on my way, excited and joyful, to meet my beloveds, might instead have had a phone call…Later she wrote a letter to the airline:
Dear Ryanair Customer Services,
I am writing to bring to your attention a frightening and very worrying incident which occurred on Sunday 3rd May 2015, as I and my children were boarding Ryanair flight FR3854 from East Midlands to Corfu (Booking reference IDHIWB).
I was travelling with my three year old son and also my nine month old daughter, who I was carrying, along with the two bags containing items we needed during the flight.
As we got to about halfway up the metal steps to enter the plane, about six or seven feet above the ground, my three-year-old, Oliver, for whom both the handrails and the individual steps were very high, tripped and fell towards the left handrail.
There was nothing to stop Oliver going headfirst through the large gap between the steps and the handrail. The  top half of his body was already through the gap, before I just managed to grab the back of his clothing and pull him back under, thereby averting what would have been a serious, or possibly even fatal, fall to the tarmac below.
Another passenger, who was still on the tarmac, saw the fall and, assuming a fall was inevitable, had started to run to try and catch Oliver below the steps (though it was unlikely he would have got there in time, had the fall actually occurred). The accident was also witnessed by ground staff and other passengers.
During the incident Oliver sustained a nasty blow to the side of his head and departure of the flight was delayed by about ten minutes, while airport paramedics were called to the plane and examined the bruising and swelling to Oliver’s left cheekbone and the area around his left eye. Fortunately the injury was not serious and could be dealt with by applying a cold compress, and we were allowed to fly.
I would like to commend one of the Ryanair flight attendants, a red-haired lady, whose name I unfortunately didn’t note, who was very helpful and efficient in dealing with the situation after the accident occurred
Both Oliver and I obviously found this incident quite traumatic, but luckily no permanent damage was done. However, I think that Ryanair should take a serious look at the health and safety implications of the occurrence, in case of any similar accidents which may occur in the future, and which might end less happily.....

An hour

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The whole job – tidying up the piece of wood from the shed; cleaning up three old coat hooks; centring and spacing them and fixing them to the wall in Amy’s bedroom, took an hour. Those brash and useless diagrammed and illustrated DIY books! Never a chapter on creating even holes in an old wall which, behind render and plaster, is made of undressed stones and old mortar. For the first two holes the masonry drill entered fairly sound mortar, but two and half inch screws through countersunk holes in the wood into rawlplugs, left the hooks insecure. I could feel the give. I made two extra holes in the wood, offered it to the wall with a spirit level, making small marks on the plaster to start the hammer drill, which first hit and pierced a stone. Making the next hole, the drill crumbled the mortar, slipped and made a crater of broken render and plaster. I filled the cavity, and the better holes, with a dollop of quick drying glue from a gun; tapped in larger rawlplugs flush with surrounding plaster; wiped excess glue from the wall; presented the tips of four longer screws to the prepared rawlplugs; tapped the wood slightly home; tightened the screws. Three pulled firm. Where, as expected, a screw went on turning despite being home, I relied on its glue filled hole to do the holding. Half an hour later the hooks were fit for use.
*** *** ***
Nico and Sophia Zervopolou, neighbours, invited us to a celebration at their family church on Monday...
Στην Αγία Τριάδα
Γράφει ο/η Κβκ   
02.06.15
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The Church of the Trinity - a kilometre south of Ano Korakiana
Πρωτομηνιά χθες, εορτή του Αγίου Πνεύματος και η εκκλησία των Ζερβοπουλαίων, λίγο έξω από το χωριό, εόρτασε όπως κάθε χρόνο. Ο κόσμος όπως πάντα αρκετός, ανηφόρισε από τον κεντρικό δρόμο στο μικρό ύψωμα, όπου η μικρή εκκλησία στέκει εδώ και μερικούς αιώνες περιτριγυρισμένη από παμπάλαιες ελιές και μερικά αμπέλια. Την επιμέλεια της φετινής εορτής  είχε η οικογένεια Νίκου Ζερβόπουλου, που με τους γιούς του Χρήστο και Αλέκο, είχαν φροντίσει για το καθετί, με τον εσωτερικό διάκοσμο του ναού να έχει ανατεθεί στον Ιωάννη Κοντοστάνο. Την λειτουργία ετέλεσαν ο παπα-Κώστας και ο παπα-Ιωσήφ Γεωργουλάς, που έχει συγκενέψει με κορακιανίτες Ζερβόπουλους. Ανάμεσα στους πολλούς γνωστους, το παρόν έδωσαν και ο Σάϊμον με τη Λίντα, λίγο πριν επιστρέψουν στην Αγγλία για τις καλοκαιρινές τους διακοπές.
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Simon and Thanassis at the Church of Holy Trinity ~ Αγία Τριάδα




Outside the church as we enjoyed cake and coffee, Dr Savannis gave Linda a posy
Lin said later "It's made up of a carnation, myrtle leaves and something else whose name I didn't catch"
"The Trinity" he'd said, smiling "All are sweet smelling"
"I've never understood the Trinity" I'd said
"Nor I"
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