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'Out of Town'

June 2, 2013, 3:09 am
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From: Simon Winters
Hi Simon. Don't know if you are in UK and can make it, but there is a Kaleidoscope event on this saturday at Stourbridge. We are filming interviews for a major BFI documentary about missing tv. We will be filming David King about OoT. Can you make it and be interviewed? Cheers Simon
Saturday morning I was on my way to the Talbot Hotel in Stourbridge. The middle aged man sitting opposite wore a floppy sun hat, travelling clothes that seemed to set off his bulk, peered at a satnav in one hand and a note book in the other.
"What kind of train is this" I asked. I had been on the vehicle once - December 2011 - before but spotting a true trainspotter I thought I'd see if I could find out more.
"It's called a Parry People Mover"
"I like it"
"It's the only one in the country"
No more was volunteered; the satnav getting full attention.
We trundled along a mile of bumpy single track surrounded by greenery arriving at the one platform terminus next to Stourbridge Town Bus Station. Via a lift and a tunnel I cycled down the High Street to where Kaleidoscope was holding one of its regular get-togethers, found Simon and after a cup of tea was sat with David King to be interviewed about the way we'd arrived at the 'Lost Episodes" of Out of Town.
Dave King, Out of Town DVDs and reels of archive film from the archive


Chris Perry asked questions. Rory was behind the camera. I extemporised about my stepfather and described Out of Town - not easy, as the tags 'country life' or 'rural pursuits' misses out on what was really a vehicle for my stepfather to enjoy chatting to a few million people about his favourite subjects with brilliant illustrations from his camera-toting friend, of twenty five years, Stan Bréhaut...
Jack and his cameraman Stan


...and David told how he had discovered and saved the Out of Town episodes that Delta on the initiative of Charles Webster, put together and put on sale last year. I spoke also of the 'unwieldy material' brought in April 2012 to a lock-up in Birmingham from South West Film and Television Archive - Stan Bréhaut's 16mm reverse negative location film with library sound effects...
...and a whole lot of - so far unmatched - ¼inch reel-to-reel tape of Jack speaking to these films and introducing each episode. I spoke briefly about technical challenges that I'd explained in more detail in the account included with the Out of Town 'Lost Episodes':
...I hadn’t only begun to grasp that the background sound on Jack’s programmes was added later – from sound effects in the library at Southern synched with events on Stan’s film. What was I to do with hours of such film? Jennie at SWFTA gave me a clue. She and her husband Roger, also working part-time at the archive, showed me a shelf of ¼” reel-to-reel sound tape in cardboard boxes. These for no obvious reason contained Jack’s voice as he talked in the studio from his set – a shed - and his commentary on Stan’s film for that week’s episode of Out of Town. It had taken hours to find the tape that went with the film. There was no order and no titles that allowed simple one-to-one matching. Roger, using a Steenbeck machine that could play separate film and sound tape simultaneously accurately splicing sound to vision. He then digitised the result and we had a 1975 episode of Out of Town as a gift for Richard Hill and his family. Well nearly. At the start and often at the end of each episode of Out of Town the viewer would see Jack  sat in his studio ‘shed’ from where he’d say “Hullo” before moving seamlessly into talking about Stan’s location film, run on a monitor in front of him in the studio. This all went out live. The location film would end. We’d see Jack again in his shed for a few remarks and a “cheerio” and the gentle signature tune Recuerdos de la Alhambra. So we had Jack’s commentary and location sound effects, but we had no picture of Jack in his shed. Richard’s film with which he was delighted came to him on a DVD courtesy of SWFTA with a stills of Jack inserted over the recording of his studio introduction. But what about the sound effects; of traffic, of cattle lowing, a fish splashing, wind in the trees, a bucket dropped? “People fill in the sound if you give them a clue” was Jack’s reasoning so I was told recently by one of Jack’s old colleagues, David Knowles. He’d certainly fooled me. I learned that my stepfather had made a point of asking expert sound people not to get “too clever”, inserting every possible event that might have had a sound. “Just make it sound like outside and synchronise doors banging and gun shots” I was slowly understanding why it was so tricky to trace whole episodes of Out of Town. “Jack loved to do high quality television on the cheap” added David who’d produced Jack’s successor programme - Old Country - for Channel 4 in the early eighties. My youthful memories of Jack musing about technical challenges were being jogged “I don’t want to go out in the countryside with a TV crew of half a dozen and a pile of kit. They frighten things away.” I learned after a bit that even Jack’s director George Egan stayed away, as Jack with Stan in essential tow went on location. “The finest outdoor cameraman in England” he called him, shooting silent, sound added later, and live continuity by Jack’s when broadcast. Jack knew that what made TV different from cinema and more than just lesser picture quality on a small screen was being live. He was stimulated by the risk of going out live but much more he relished the knowledge of talking there and then to his invisible audience. “We filmed nearly 1:1” explained Jack years later “The normal ratio of used to edited film is 10:I for the sort of thing I do. In commercials it can be 1000:1.” Jack and his team did minimal editing, had a minimal set and a minimal crew and it went out live with Stan’s silent location film plus library sound effects....
...and an episode about rabbiting from Old Country, successor to Out of Town, screened in the early 1980s on Channel 4 with Stan's successor, Steve Wagstaff, behind the camera..
Chris Perry, seeing the OoT film cans and sound tape I'd brought with me to Stourbridge said, to my delight, that he would introduce me to an ex-BBC expert who would know what needed to be done to wed sound and image from the archive. I've been looking for ways to get this done for two years now. I so hope this will lead somewhere.
In the early 1990s, When I was 50, I began searching for my dad, not the parent I'd come to know, but the individual who met and married my mum in 1940, whose DNA is mine...
He died in 1973, In the midst of war my mother and he, having made my sister Bay and I, were divorced. Living with my mother I would only get to know my dad after he'd been married over 10 years to Maria, who he'd met in Athens in 1949. Twenty years later, I'm learning more about Jack, the step-father with whom I enjoyed my childhood and youth from one Christmas in 1948. My dad's life is part impenetrable; hidden by his profession. He served in MI6 (Greece, Brussels, the Far East, London, Washington) until his early death at 52. My stepfather's life, including so much that was very public, is made puzzling by his versatile and invigorating self-invention. The novelist Graham Hurley,  who worked for Jack at Southern TV, wrote....
...It was this wonderful marriage of fact and fiction that made him such a great broadcaster (and inspiring boss). Like so many men from that generation including George Egan (Director of OoT), who flew SOE agents into France aboard tiny Lysanders), Jack had been through something infinitely bigger and more scary than any of us would ever find in television and it gave him a breadth and a perspective and a degree of creative mischief that was utterly beguiling. I put a number of the Out of Town programmes onto tape (Stan shot mute film; Jack's studio musings became the sound-track) and after a while I began to spot where fact strayed into fancy. Viewers, and gobsmacked youths like me, loved him. Like Stan, truly a buccaneer...
*** **** ***
Lin was entertaining Oliver most of the day after Amy.on her way to work, dropped him off. I got to see him later. He's not saying much tho' making lots of interesting sounds. We played on the sunny lawn after I got back from Stourbridge and later, for tea, sat Ollie in the same high chair used by my mum, by me and my sister, by our children Richard and Amy...
...Guy came round after work to collect his son.
I started working on removing woodwork and tiling holding our bath. It's got to come out so we can do something about growing damp in the room below coming, it seems, from under the bath. The bath was put in with great firmness in 1935. Getting underneath it, let alone extracting it,  is going to be a stinker given we want to save the long slate panel that runs beside it and seems immoveable. I removed the locker I built twenty plus years ago so that I could start trying to tease out the panel. Hopeless. I'm so tempted to take a sledge to the slate. But if I do I'll regret it. What a mess.

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The music...

June 7, 2013, 6:58 am
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The music that suffuses Corfu and especially beloved Ano Korakiana with its sounds of practise in the quiet of the day. Takis Savvani, Τάκης Σαββανής, writes on the village website:
Το παλιό αρμόνιο δίπλα στον Άγιο Γεώργιο




Φρεσκάροντας παλαιές αναμνήσεις καί γεγονότα πού έχουν σχέση μέ το χωριό,  βρήκα μερικές φωτογραφίες. Μία είναι καί αυτή πού συνοδεύει τούτο τό σημείωμα καί η οποία  αφορά τήν ιστορία της χορωδίας του χωριού καί την  εξέλιξη της, καθώς επίσης καί την χρήση του μουσικού οργάνου (αρμόνιο) πού  φαίνεται σ΄αυτήν. Η λειτουργία του σημερινού σχήματος χορωδίας, αρχίζει από  τήν εποχή του μεσοπολέμου του 1940 καί τήν οποία έστησε καί εδίδαξε ο αείμνηστος Τηλέμαχος Μεταλληνός-Τατσούλης, μαθητής τότε του Γυμνασίου  καί αργότερα καταξιωμένος καθηγητής Μουσικής. Το πρώτο αυτό σχήμα απαρτίζετο από άνδρες καί στην συνέχειά του συμπληρώθηκε καί μέ γυναίκες.    Οταν ο Τηλέμαχος έφυγε από την Κέρκυρα γιά σπουδές  καί αφού γιά λίγο η χορωδία, βασικά εκκλησιαστική, έμεινε αδρανής, τά παλαιά μέλη της, μέ πρωτοπόρο τον άλλον αείμνηστο καί αγαπητό φίλο, Γιώργο Ιωννά-Μανούρο  καί μέ την παρότρυνση όλων μας,  αποφασίστηκε νά αρχίσει καί πάλι η λειτουργία της μέ εκκλησιαστική μουσική καί αργότερα, όπως όλοι γνωρίζουν  καί μέ τραγούδι, συνεχίζοντας την δραστηριότητα της μέχρι καί σήμερα. Εδώ πρέπει νά αναφέρω καί χάριν της Ιστορίας ότι ο Γίωργος ο Μανούρος στήν ουσία ήταν αυτοδίδακτος μουσικός. Στοειώδη μαθήματα μουσικής είχε πάρει  λίγα από τον Διονύσιο Σγούρο, λίγα από τον Τηλέμαχο καί ένα πολύ μικρό διάστημα κάπου στην πόλη της Κέρκυρας .
(Apologies for my translation) I found some old  pictures to freshen old memories and recall events relating to the village. One came with notes on the history of the village choir, including musical instruments (harmonium) used. The choir as we know it now dates from wartime in 1940, when it was set up and led by the late Telemachus Metallinos-Tatsoulis, then a student at the High School and later an acclaimed music teacher. The choir started with men with women joining to complete the choir. When Telemachus left Corfu to further his studies, the choir, basically a church chorus,  remained dormant. Another late and dear friend, George Ionna-Manouro, urged by all of us old members, decided to resuming the choirs function of providing church music and later, as everyone knows singing, continuing these activities up to the present day. Here we should mention for the sake of history that George Manouro was essentially self-taught musician. He had taken a few elementary music lessons from Dionysius Sgouros, a few from Telemachus and at  a very small space somewhere in the city of Corfu...
Τώρα γιά το Αρμόνιο καί τους εικονιζόμενους στην φωτογραφία. Το όργανο αυτό είναι, απ΄ότι έχουν πεί ειδικοί, πολύ παλαιό καί αντιπροσωπεύει το είδος  πού  χρησιμοποιούσαν  στις  εκκλησίες οι χορωδίες πρίν κυκλοφορήσουν τα σύγχρονα. Ο Γιώργος, δάσκαλος πλέον της χορωδίας, αφού αυτοεκπαιδεύτηκε  πάνω σ΄αυτό, μετεφέρετο στίς εκκλησίες πού θά έψαλε η χορωδία.  Στήν συνέχεια χρησιμοποιείτο, γιά πολλά χρόνια, είς την εξέλιξη της χορωδίας μέ την σημερινή της μορφή. Η φωτογραφία είναι έξω από την εκκλησία του Αγίου Γεωργίου το Πάσχα του 1949 μετά την Λειτουργία, φαίνονται δέ από αριστερά πρός τα δεξιά τα μισά μέλη της χορωδίας, διότι ο φωτογράφος ήταν «ατζαμής». Πρώτος είναι ο Σταμάτης Θύμης–Τσουπής και ακολουθούν οι Σπύρος Ιωνάς–Λιάθης, Βασίλης Μεταλληνός-Παπαντώνης, ο γράφων Τάκης Σαββανής Στάθιος, Σπύρος Σπίγγος-Μπότσολος, Μιχάλης Θύμης-Μόντος, λίγο τό πρόσωπο  του Γιώργου Λάμπουρα (πατέρας της Κικής Δουκάκη) καί  καθισμένος ο Γιώργος Ιωννάς-Μανούρος (Μαέστρος). Κλείνοντας τούτο το σημείωμα πρέπει νά αναφέρω ότι, οι κόρες καί η χήρα τού Γιώργου, θέλοντας νά πραγματοποιήσουν μία επιθυμία του πατέρα τους, έχουν δηλώσει ότι το αρμόνιο αυτό τό δωρίζουν στην Φιλαρμονική του χωριού καί ειδικά νά τοποθετηθεί είς το  αναπαλαιωμένο κτίριο της Φιλαρμονικής, όταν θά λειτουργήσει, μέ οποιαδήποτε  μορφή. Θεωρώ υποχρέωση μου, καί γιά  χάριν της  μνήμης  του Γιώργη,  νά  επιβεβαιώσω τήν σκέψη καί επιθυμία του αυτή, διότι πολλές φορές την εξέφρασε καί είς εμέ, στίς συζητήσεις μας σχετικά μέ το παλαιό κτίριο της Φιλαρμονικής,  διότι ήμαστε καί οι δύο συναισθηματικά συνδεδεμένοι καί ευαισθηκοποιημένοι  μέ αυτό. Τάκης Σαββανής-Στάθιος 
...The Harmonium in the photo, experts say, is very old and represents the kind used by church choirs before the emergence of contemporary organs. George, now replacing me as teacher of the choir sang in the chorus. So over many years we have been involved in developing the current choir's repertoire. . The photo is outside Ag. Georgiou in Easter 1949 after a service. From left to right are just half of the members of the choir, because the photographer was 'clumsy'.  First is Stamatis Thymis-Tsoupas followed by Spyro Jonah, Liathis Vassilis Metallinos, Papantoniou, the present writer Takis Savani - Stathios Spyros Spingos, Michael Thymis Botsoli, the little face of George Lampoura (father of Kiki Dukakis) and seated George Ionnas-Manouris (conductor). In concluding this note I must state that the daughters and the widow of George, wanting to make a wish for their father, have asked that the keyboard by as a matter of course, donated to the village Philharmonic, using experts to set it into the renovated building of the Philharmonic when will work almost as new. Because of my emotional connection and sympathy with these wishes with them, I regard it as my duty, in memory of George, to confirm this generous idea - one that has been explored many times in the  discussions we have had about the re-building of the original Philharmonic. Takis Savani-Stathios
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Linking 'Out of Town' films and tapes

June 8, 2013, 5:43 pm
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Jack with Bess, filmed by Stan

I've collected all Out of Town commentary tapes from the lock-up and about 50 cans of 16mm Out of Town film. I'm going to see if I can match one tape to one film. P & F N specialise in film transfers to other media. They'll make a sample film to assess quality and feasibility. Chris Perry, from Kaleidoscope, is seeing them 13th June. I just hope I can make the match they need.
Looking at the dry-marker written phrase on one of the boxes Linda picked up second hand from someone's removal operation, the blokes at the lock-up might have wondered what kind of film I'm keeping in storage.
I laid out the tapes in the order of the numbers stuck on them...
 ...at the South West Film and Television Archive. I did the same with the films...
...For the first part of the afternoon I struggled. Making head or tail of this collection stymied others. Some film's aren't even in reverse negative. Some lack library sound effects - the noises from Southern TV's library dubbed onto Stan's silent location film for Jack, when going out live, to add his studio musings. Some reels do have a magnetic strip for sound effects (and are in reverse neg), but there are some cans  full of out-takes and rushes. Some cans are so rusty I can't open them. Of course I recognise some of the scribbled titles but none appear to correlate with a tape (or v.v.).
Back in June 2010, Jennie at SWFTAtold me it took them ages to make just one film-commentary marriage - and they had a Steenbeck to run the film and check what it was about to aid their matching for one film -  - the 'exploding' bait-box when fishing for black bass out of Littlehampton with Richard Hill...

Roger and Jennie with my stepfather's films on shelves in Plymouth
After a break and a cup of tea I looked again at list I held on file, assembled by Jennie Constable's husband Roger Charlesworth - one that matched numbers on tapes to numbers on films. I realised the extent of my debt to the archivists who looked after and catalogued this material over so many years. In an hour I had assembled a working sample of paired film and tape.



Dear Chris.  I've managed to collate 8 tape-film pairs from which to select one (or more) for Francis to create a broadcast-quality tape which we can assess as a pilot for processing the rest of the archive. I know you're seeing Francis this coming Thursday, and I am going to Scotland for a week on Tuesday. The tape-film pairs are: 
JH526 Point-to-point & Apple grafting (sound dated 14 Oct 1986. Not original OoT) 
JH741 Broom maker & Saddle maker 30 June 1975 
JH762 Grayling December 1969 (possibly incomplete, with date variation)
JH764 Foxhounds & Marlborough horse fair 17 March 1977 
JH765 Roach & Pub Games 10 March 1977
JH782 Seasons in the garden 31 Jan 1974 
JH811 Casting champions 23 July 1973 
Any chance I could bring over these pairs to decide which might be the best pair to work on. Perhaps Sunday or Monday? I have a preference for JH741, JH764, JH765 and JH782. Given variation in the state of film and tape Francis may appreciate a larger sample from which to select the pilot. Best wishes Simon
Reply: Excellent news Simon! I am delighted if you want to drop in all 8 pairs of film/tape for P&FN to do for you. ...So glad we can help with this exciting project. c 
"When we return from Scotland" said Lin "we'll go to your lock-up with copies of the match list, lay out the whole collection, and use it to code every film to every tape. Then we can see what's left." She had, even as I was having a cup of tea, put labels on each selected film can, with the number that had been on the corresponding sound tape.
I can hardly believe that this transfer and marriage of film and sound will just happen. There'll be a problem with the state of the film. A sound track will be missing. The whole matter of synching location film to Jack's commentary will prove impossible or far more time consuming than expected. There will be big gaps in film and tape.
Dear Chris. I’ll try to drop over after lunch with the material, on my way to the allotment. So so glad of your help. I can’t quite believe we are on the road again as it were. I just hope the material doesn’t prove too unwieldy in one way or another. We have had so many slips betwixt cup and lip in the last few years of recovering Jack’s material that I don’t expect anything to be straightforward so far as this project is concerned. But I’ve also met and been able to depend on so many friends and interesting people, real persevering enthusiasts (of the kind that Jack so admired) on the journey.
I occurred to me that if Francis is able to marry sound and image on one of the pairs from the sample, we will still need to add still images for the places (usually start and finish) where Jack is musing in the studio shed. Can I suggest Francis leave this blank on any pilot DVD produced. I can then rip the DVd and add stills later as in the ‘exploding’ bait box sample DVD made from the only tape-film marriage so far at South West Film and Television Archive in 2010. Could you perhaps - if Francis can go ahead with the pilot - ask what he thinks it might cost to go ahead with up to ten tape-film combinations? I can start thinking more seriously about future funding for recovering the archive. Best Simon
Meantime I've made an appointment to have lunch with Charles Webster of Delta Leisure to discuss how things are going with the sales of their box sets of Out of Town DVDs and what possibilities there may be for releasing film of Old Country from the BFI as well as exploring the commercial prospects, if any, of the archive material in my lock-up.

Extract from Out of Town's successor Old Country from Channel 4
** ** ** **
Last night, eating salmon pâté with brown bread, Lin and I squeezed juice from the last of the lemons brought from our trees in Corfu two weeks ago.
...and early this morning, for the first time in my life, I had a fleeting dream of mum...
Mum and Lin dancing with the young men on the battlements of Qaitbay in Alexandria

...stirred perhaps through sifting and inhaling the dust of rusty film cans - a flash of such evanescent happiness I woke, suffused with the pleasure of it. We were facing each other as though in an open carriage passing, floating by, a place in the countryside I knew, and know, from childhood, sun dappled grazings receding into the distance under the shadow of ancient oaks and beeches
"Now" I whispered "and at the our of our death, I will never stop thinking of the beauty of the places we've lived, My god, mum, we have been so lucky. Relaxed, she gazed at me and sighed 'I know'"
The Lambourn near the place we dreamed (photo: Barbara Hargreaves)



Now and at the our of our death, τώρα και σε μας του θανάτου μας

***** *****
Handsworth Helping Hands on Facebook.....reverse timeline:

Another garden cleared, another mattress to the dump

**** **** ****
We have a leak from under the bath tub discolouring the ceiling in our boiler-room below. I've prevaricated about this. The leak is minimal. It can be safely ignored
"Meanwhile the wet and then the dry rot spreads" warns Lin
"There's an immovable sheet of slate on the side of the bath preventing access to the plumbing"
Three days ago, I attached the stone cutting disk to my angle grinder; removed the cupboard that stood beneath the washbasin up to the side of the bath, and began cutting out a panel in the slate that would be invisible when the cupboard was replaced. The slate dust was stifling, settling everywhere, blowing out the window I'd opened. A tap with a hammer and a panel appeared.
"Just great! I've found the leak. It's in the side of the old lead pipe just below its junction with six inches of copper pipe, old fashioned 1" gauge"
Lin peered in too.
The plumber we found took a look.
"I don't know what I can do"
He was worried about cutting the lead pipe in case it made the leak even worse. He applied liquid metal and refused any payment.
"I could have done that" said Lin
"Lin! It's old piping and it's copper to lead. That's a stinker. I don't blame him leaving it well alone"
Checking the next day the leak continued, but a bowl beneath the bend of the pipes contained the drips - hardly a centimetre deep.
"Who can we find who can connect lead piping to old gauge copper.piping? I guess we'll have to have the tap off, try to fit it with 15mm copper pipe and then cut the lead pipe below the leak and join the two pipes with a lead to copper compression joint. Phew."
*** *** *** ***
At Lin's urging, over a few years, I got myself a hearing test. It lasted hardly five minutes. An abrupt woman summoned me to follow her from the Health Centre's waiting area, ordered me to to sit and pressed a horn gently to my ear.
"How many sounds can you hear"
"What?"
"How many sounds can you hear"
"What do you mean?"
"How many sounds can you hear"
"I thought you were going to ask if I could hear anything? What do you mean how many sounds can I hear?"
"How many sounds can you hear?"
"I don't know. Can we try again. One I think?"
She switched the horn - a 'hearcheck screener' - to my left ear
"How many sounds can you hear?"
"What? I don't know. I think you're being rather rude"
"How many sounds can you hear!" she said; louder
"I don't know. None?"
"There were six"
She started filling in a form
"Six?"
"Yes"
"Blimey! I'm amazed."
"The thing about hearing loss is you compensate. Read lips. People talk louder. You don't notice what's happening"
"But I hear lots of sounds"
"You see lots of things even when you're short sighted"
Sylvia, the audiologist, checked my ears, peering inside with an otoscope
"No there's nothing in there"
Too right I thought, having half-expected there'd be an easily removed blockage to explain my test results.
"I'm really sorry. Being so rude" I said
I'm to have an appointment in about 5 or 6 weeks at the Hearing Services Centre at City Hospital, to have a more detailed hearing test; possibly get a hearing aid.
"I told you you should get your ears tested" said Lin when I got home.
"What?"
"Ha ha"
Well it could be interesting to see if I can extend my hearing. What puzzles me is that I'm quite sensitive to sounds I dislike, like distant amplified music late at night, the background noise of game show audiences on TV, the noise of football crowds, the sound of motorboats revving out at sea, the yapping of a stir crazy dog, as also to those I like; waves, wind in trees, the sounds of my bicycle, people in conversation in  the street, a distant piano...

Reactions from friends on FB (it may be the 'devil's machine', 'the President's earpiece' and 'tool of the CIA' but it's darned useful on occasions like this):

    • Jane Cochrane My husband has just got digital hearing aids and they have transformed his life in terms of conversing at parties or being able to answer questions when presenting on stage. 

      Be warned though that they are so comfy and non-visible that it's easy to walk into the shower with them on ... after a series of near misses I ended up making a laminated warning card that is kept by the shower tap!! Jx
      3 hours ago · Unlike · 1
    • Zena Phillips You are hearing quite a lot. You are probably missing out out on certain wave lengths. I have suffered a certain amount of hearing loss since childhood, couldn't' t read till a doctor discovered that I was lipreading to a certain extent and had me sat...See More
      3 hours ago · Unlike · 1
    • Jane Cochrane Aah ... Zena - my husband is an engineer/technologist and understands all the feedback issues etc ... he simply gets the audiologist to adjust the tuning to prevent the worst of the feedback or "clipping" on some of the sounds ... it might be possible to get some "fine tuning" that cuts down on the oscillation.
      3 hours ago · Unlike · 1
    • Zena Phillips PS.I have found the NHS audiologists to be brilliantly trained and sympathetic.
      3 hours ago · Unlike · 1
    • Simon Baddeley It's so strange that people used to be (perhaps still are) ashamed (perhaps mildly but often worse so) about hearing loss. I was prevaricating about a hearing test because I thought my 'hearing loss' was simply the result of being 'somewhere else' when...See More
      3 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2
    • Zena Phillips An awful lot of people are still embarrassed by hearing loss. Another lot of people, when you ask them to repeat something, think it's funny to say eh? What? Pardon? Etc. I just smile and say 'yer lips is moving but there's nothing coming out'. At checkouts assistants will talk while not looking at you. I say 'sorry' and indicate my ears. They are invariably polite and kind.
      3 hours ago · Unlike · 1
    • Steven Lee Ive joined the club too. 
    • Zena Phillips PPS. My smoke alarm is loud enough to bring the neighbours round to make sure I am okay.
      2 hours ago · Unlike · 1
    • Amy Elizabeth Hollier Dad we have put up with you being deaf and angry so long we whisper nasty things about you! So you see , you can't possibly get a hearing aid now else we will have to start writing notes to each other.
    • Zena Phillips My children solved that problem by facing each other with their hands in front of their mouths but looking at me with smiling eyes. (They understood at quite a young age that I could probably lipread what they were saying.) They always were imps with a wicked sense of humour.
*** *** ***
The sun was strong on Sunday afternoon. Amy brought Oscar round. Liz came too, her pregnancy showing now. She and Amy and Lin walked Oliver in the garden. Liz sat and held him on her lap beneath the honeysuckle
"I'll get the kitchen tidied" said Lin "and start making supper. You take Oscar round the park"
Oliver in a pushchair, I headed proudly for Handsworth Park - trusted with the precious boy. I negotiated the busy Hamstead Road and entered the park through its familiar gates. The place was as lovely as ever with couples, families, friends, individuals of all ages, enjoying a late Sunday afternoon, sitting and strolling, cycling and standing gazing. Near the bandstand I let Oliver out if his pushchair. We strolled together up the long slope that leads towards the flatter stretch of grass and trees bounded by Holly Road. Oliver walked confidently beside me, stopping now and then to examine the ground.



Its texture seemed to engross him. I watched as he examined the grass, picking several blades and bringing them to me - a sort of gift. He found twigs, and would have tested them in his mouth had I not gently asked for them. I held his hand on the tarmac path as we strolled homeward over the railway bridge. Back in his pushchair he looked around at people, dogs, geese and a swan flexing its wings, drinking in this new wonderful world. Will all this be recalled in his memory, in a subliminal space that, if he lives as many decades as I, will forever return as a fleeting moment of déjà vu?
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Plot 14 - a sheep or a goat?

June 10, 2013, 5:22 pm
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Another row of spuds, beans, a marrow and spinach on Plot 14
My allotment is surrounded by unworked plots. Imran took over plot 13, west of mine, in May 2012. After a few day's enthusiastic work he disappeared. I've not met him, though, odd chance, someone called Omar was chatting to me in the park, asking about Handsworth Helping Hands (he'd seen the banner on my bicycle front pannier); said Imran was his friend.
"Next time you see him" I said "can you ask him to work his plot".
Chris R has left Plot 15 to work, since Christmas, a few square metres of Plot 14. What he's planted is being steadily smothered by lengthening grass, dock, nettles and wildflowers. I have made some slight progress on 14 since I took it in June 2010 on the opening day of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments, but there's far more to do. It's partly the limited time I have to give to it, partly my lack of gardening craft, partly my failure to find someone else to work the plot with me. Nearly everyone admits the topsoil, spread by the developer under the S106 Agreement that included all 80 plots, is rather unfriendly - full of spade blunting stones, bricks and other human rubbish, but I've cleared much of that. I've dug over the whole plot, so even where it's grassy digging is easier than it was. I've put up a shed, added a veranda, paved around it, set up a composting space, made paths, planted small fruit trees, made a small lawn opposite the hut; and looked after the flower borders that Lin laid out next to the path before removing allotment gardening from her long 'to do' list.
The thing that really matters is to grow vegetables. I persevere. I've managed to grow a few potatoes, some cabbage, and sprouts, a few onions, runner beans and broad beans - small crops only. Last year was especially wet. This year has been cold into May and even June; but those are excuses. Others have succeeded in growing plenty despite the wet, the onion fly and other pests. Right now I have a line of spinach, some Jerusalem artichokes, a few more potatoes and some garlic. I've just planted a marrow, some broad beans and runner beans, and more potatoes. Now and then I get morose, when I see the amount of uncultivated space on my plot and, despite my efforts, the spread of unwanted grass and wild flowers instead of neat and reliable rows of vegetables. I failed last year, but I maintain the hope that I can present Lin with vegetables from the plot to cook on Christmas Day.
On a more sombre note we have not been able to vote ourselves the local leadership an allotment site needs in this economy. Here we sit on land - a green field site - of great worth for building the new houses the government wants to meet current demand. If nearly every plot was being worked. and the site ran regular events to attract new gardeners, especially young people, using the VJA to draw attention to the importance of DIY cultivation of fresh organically grown vegetables we'd be less vulnerable. But as council's raise allotment rents, and plots get abandoned or hardly used, certain iron rules of land use economics may all too easily begin to apply. The VJA could be vulnerable to suggestions that plot size and numbers be reduced, and in return for certain community contributions, a further part of a site once given wholly to allotments may be the object of an application to build more houses. It's unlikely at the moment, given the political history of the space, but given my estimate that each VJA plot could be worth a good £25,000 as development land, I wish our association was infused with a greater sense of urgency.
"If you're so concerned why don't you get involved?" someone might say
I vowed to myself when I took my plot that my involvement with allotment politics - a ten year campaign to save the VJA from being entirely built over - would cease. That I wasnted to prove to myself that after being off the land since the start of the industrial revolution, the descendant of six generations of embourgeoisement, I could take over a relatively small plot of soil and make it grow me vegetables. I'm trying. There's little question that with few exceptions, the VJA is, like many allotments, a middle class place, rather than a site that reflects the historical purpose of allotments, a phenomenon of urbanisation as working people were driven from the countryside to the cities by modernised agriculture and industrialisation and needed to feed their families. Now on the VJA we see people arriving in shiny cars, using expensive gardening tools, strimmers and cultivators, garden centre sheds and polytunnels,  intent on leisure, recreation, exercise and fresh food free of commercial agribusiness additives and for some  a desire to play their part in creating sustainability!
What a culling there's been since the day three years ago when the place was finally opened and keen new applicants queued to sign up for plots.

My Australian friend John Martin, Director of the Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities in Bendigo, said gently to me a while ago "I wonder, Simon, if you're not more interested in the idea of an allotment, than actually working one". That's proved too true for many.
In the sweat of thy face...

There are sheep who've persevered, who clearly draw food from well worked plots, but there are goats, once enthusiastic, separated from them by two bad summers, the ravages of insects and birds, the difficulty of our stony soil and most of all, I suspect, the contrast between idea and practice.

*** *** ***
I took the films and tapes of Out of Town back to the archive on Monday morning, having dropped off six film-tape pairs at Chris Perry's house over the weekend. I donated £10 of diesel. Denise and I drove to the Holford dump with the rubbish collected from Jo's garden in our road, and I took plants to an address in Havelock Road that volunteers will plant in a flowerbed in Leslie Road.
Named driver for Handsworth Helping Hands


In the afternoon I returned the van to the park compound and walked Oscar back through the park to the allotment, then home where we're preparing to head north on that once happy journey to the Highlands where there's melancholy work to be done at Brin Croft. Thank goodness for the company of Lin who always drives, and Oscar, who's prancing with anticipation at the familiar trek.

*** ***
From Jan:
Simon.  Thanks for sending this and other links. It all confirms what we've spoken about - ideology driven policy formulation. Councils as we have known them "going out of business" (to be replaced by what?). The triple whammy of delegated powers over "toxic" issues; increased costs as a consequence of Welfare Reforms (e.g. benefit capping and bed room tax) and more draconian spending cuts to come (whilst the present ones are yet to fully impact) will test even the most competent and creative council to the limit and beyond. The limits of "innovation and transformation" will emerge quickly. Then what? Are we heading for a residual poor law type of arrangement, heavily dependent on charity? Are other models still feasible? Will councils become local administrators of central diktat to an even greater extent than now? It is obvious that we are beyond the tipping point. Irrespective of who wins the next election, further financial cutbacks are inevitable. This is not a temporary phenomenon but a permanent paradigm change in what local councils are all about against the background of "the end of the welfare state". Who is doing any serious planning or preparations for this scenario? It appears that everybody is floundering. The LGA is fragmenting. SOLACE is saying very little. The impact on managerial -pPolitical relationships are profound.  See you at the end of the month.  Best Jan.
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Afterwards

June 14, 2013, 9:03 am
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Writing to the Council
A few days ago we arrived at mum's old home, late but in the long light of the Highland summer. Since then, but for walks with Oscar, it's been work, including composing a letter to the local council to claim exemptions from council tax that ought to have been accorded, but for complicated reasons, have not. The letter with redactions to protect innocent and guilty:
Dear Sir or Madam
Re: Brin Croft, Inverarnie, Property No.**
On Wednesday 12 June I visited the Highland Council service point in Inverness, having just arrived to arrange the clearance of my deceased mother’s house at the address above and finding a council tax/water charge bill for £1650.24 for the financial year 2013-14 and also a ‘final notice’ for the bill. A very helpful council officer, Mary, took details and advised me to write to you to request your assistance in obtaining the council tax discounts to which I should be entitled.
My mother, Mrs Barbara Burnett-Stuart, passed away on November 1st, 2012, but, for reasons I will explain, the executors’ exemption was never applied. As this gets quite complicated, I will give the details in note form.
1. 01/11/12 - Mrs Burnett-Stuart died
2. 12/11/12 - My wife, Linda Baddeley, phoned the Highland Council tax office on my behalf, to inform them of my mother’s death. She explained that, because there were items of significant value in Brin Croft, which I was not allowed to remove until confirmation of the probate, the house being fairly isolated and it being general knowledge that Mrs Burnett-Stuart had died, the executors  (myself and my sister, who currently lives in New York) had employed a caretaker. The representative to whom my wife spoke said that in these circumstances the executors’ exemption might still be applied and that a bereavement form would be sent for me to complete.
3. 14/11/12 – I received a letter from the Highland Council operations team and a form to fill in with the executors’ details. I completed this and posted it by return
4. 16/11/12 – A council tax bill arrived at Brin Croft addressed to Mrs B Burnett-Stuart, for the period 2012 to 2013, indicating that £1096.08 had already been paid and that the amount still due was £548. The reference number for the account was 67-*******-12.
5. 16/11/12 – My wife phoned the Highland Council tax office to question the bill, in view of the fact that it was in Mrs Burnett-Stuart’s name rather than the Executors’ and that she had been told previously that the executors’ exemption might still be applied, in spite of the fact that there was a caretaker living in the house. The council representative informed her that it could not be applied if the house was occupied.
Mrs Baddeley explained that the caretaker, Mrs B****n, had a residence in xxx where she already paid full council tax and requested that the single occupancy discount be applied, as only the caretaker would be living in the house.
The council employee said that Mrs B****n would only be entitled to a 10% “second home” discount, as she had a home in Edinburgh. Mrs Baddeley pointed out that Brin Croft was not Mrs B****n’s  “home”, but her place of work, and that the nature of the work, i.e. being caretaker, required her to live there.
The council employee insisted that Brin Croft was Mrs B****n’s “second home”, and said that the council tax account must be put into her name, as the occupant and the person paying the bill.
Mrs B****n was not in fact paying the bill. As my sister had already returned to her home in New York and I myself live 450 miles away in Birmingham and am regularly out of the UK, Mrs B****n’s account was funded by the executors to pay her salary and all outgoings for Brin Croft, including council tax.
The council employee my wife spoke to would not accept that Mrs B****n was not personally responsible for the council tax. She insisted that the account would be put into Mrs B****n’s name and that only a 10% “second home” discount would be applied.
6. 16/01/13 - The Highland Council sent a bill to Mrs B****n at Brin Croft with “Reason For Issue: New Account”, reference number 62-06****-12. The bill for £617.10, rather than the £548.00 still due according to the previous bill dated 14th November addressed to my mother, was for the period 15th November 2012 to 31st March 2013. No discount of any kind had been applied. Mrs B****n rang the Highland Council and requested single occupancy discount. She was again refused the discount, on the grounds that Brin Croft was her ‘second home’.
7. 06/03/13 – Highland Council sent Mrs B****n a bill for £563.75 indicating that the 10% “second home” discount had been applied. Mrs B****n paid this bill on the 7th March 2013 – payment reference 6****2.
8. 12/03/13 - Highland Council sent Mrs B****n a bill for £1508.10, giving 10% “second home” discount, for the tax year 1st April 2013-31st March 2014. The first payment was due on April 1st 2013.
9. 17/03/13 - With all forms completed by the solicitor and Confirmation having been applied for, I was given permission to start clearing the house. I contacted Mrs B****n, who had taken the caretaking job in the knowledge that it could end with short notice, depending on when permission was given to clear the house, to inform her that her services would only be required until the end of March. All valuables were removed from the house by the end of the month.
10. 29/03/13 (approx.) - Mrs B****n rang Highland Council to inform them of her departure at the end of the month, asking for the account to be put into the name of “The Executors of the Late Barbara Burnett-Stuart”, and requesting that the six months executors’ exemption now be applied, as the property would be empty for the foreseeable future. She was informed that this exemption would only be applied if the immediately previous account holder had died. As Mrs B****n was regarded as the previous account holder and had not died, my sister and myself, as executors, had been deprived of our entitlement to the executors’ exemption.
11. 31/03/13 - All valuables had been removed from the house and Mrs B****n vacated the property.
12. 11/06/13 – My wife and I, having been out of the UK for the whole of April and May, visited Brin Croft to arrange clearance of the remaining contents. In the post there was a council tax bill addressed to Mrs B****n dated 17/04/13 showing that she had paid all council tax due until her departure at the end of March.
There was also a bill stating “Reason For Issue: New Account, reference number 67-*****-13” in the name of “Executor of the Late B Burnett-Stuart” . The bill, for 01/04/13-31/03/14, showed the amount to be paid to be the full £1650.24 council tax, first instalment due 1st May 2013. There was also a council tax reminder/final notice dated 16/05/13, threatening harsh penalties for late payment.
The Highland Council had been informed by Mrs B****n that the property would be empty from April 1st  2013, so must have been aware that there was no-one at Brin Croft to receive the bill. I believe the bereavement form I returned in November 2012 gave my contact details, but, as far as I’m aware, no-one tried to contact me.
13. 12/06/13 - My wife and I spoke to Mary at the Highland Council Service Point in Church Street, Inverness.
Mrs B****n has informed me that during her time at Brin Croft she phoned several times and wrote to the Highland Council twice regarding the council tax issues, but nothing was resolved.
As you can imagine, trying to deal with this has added to the upset and stress already caused by the death of my mother and sorting our all her affairs.  The letter sent with the bereavement form on 12 November 2012 expressed deepest sympathy and stated “Council Tax is charged on a daily basis and in the changed circumstances it is important to ensure you receive every possible discount to which you may have become entitled.”
In effect the only discount which has been received was inappropriate, being a “second home” discount in the wrong name.
Mary at the Inverness Service Point was of the opinion that problems had all stemmed from the account being mistakenly changed into Mrs B****n’s name from 15th November 2012, resulting in two accounts being issued, instead of a single account, from November 1st 2012, in the name of the Executors of Mrs Barbara Burnett-Stuart.
The original account was:
67-****-12 Mrs B Burnett-Stuart
A new account in the name of the Executors of Mrs B Burnett-Stuart should have been opened from 1st November 2012 when she died. However the new account was opened in the name of Mrs E B****n from 15th November 2012:
62-****-12 Mrs E B****n
When Mrs B****n left our employ at the end of March 2013 the new account was opened in the name that should have applied all along:
67-*****-13 Executor of the Late B Burnett Stuart
In order to right matters, I am making a request that the records should be changed to reflect the council tax responsibility of the Executors of Mrs B Burnett-Stuart from November 1st 2012, until such a time in the future as the property is sold. I also believe that the following discounts should be applied:
1. 25% single occupancy discount from 1st  November 2012 to 31st March 2013, when Mrs B****n was employed as caretaker by the executors, due to circumstances beyond their control.
2. Executors’ exemption for the six months, starting 1st April 2013, or until the property is sold, should this be earlier than 30th September 2013.
The full council tax bill for Brin Croft for the year 2012-2013 was £1644.08. My mother paid a total of £1096.08 and the executors, via Mrs B****n, paid £563.75 (£617.10 less 10%), making a total of £1659.83. As you can see, this is £15.75 more than the correct cost for the year, even without taking into account the 10% saved due to the second home discount applied November 15th-31st March. The total charge before taking off this discount amounts to £1713.18. Obviously, as my mother was paying a year’s bill over only ten months, she had paid more than was due on the day the account was wrongly changed to Mrs B****n’s name. The amount due should have been £1644.08/365 x 228 days which equals £1026.99 rather than the £1096.08 she had paid.
In total £1659.83 was paid in council tax and water charges for the year 2012-2013, firstly by Mrs Burnett-Stuart and then by her executors via Mrs B****n.  I believe that the correct charge should have been £1489.81. (Full charge for the year £1644.08.   Mrs Burnett Stuart 228 days = £1026.99. Mrs B****n 137 days = £617.09, less 25% single occupancy discount = £462.82).
I am therefore also requesting that the overpayment of £170.02, which belongs to the four beneficiaries of my mother’s will, be repaid to the solicitor dealing with my mother’s estate:....Mr **** can also confirm that the executors have been responsible for and have paid, via Mrs B****n, all bills at Brin Croft since my mother’s death on November 1st 2012.....I apologise for the length of this letter, but, as you can see, the situation is complicated and took a great deal of words and time to explain. I have been out of the country for most of the year so far, so this is the first opportunity I have had to make this appeal. I believe that Mrs B****n wrote to you more than once while I was away, but had no joy. I was very upset to hear from her that it had been implied, by Highland Council staff, that she was lying about the situation in order to claim a discount on her own behalf to which she was not entitled. I hope this letter (and the considerable time and effort taken to write it!) will show that this was certainly not the case.
I must say that I have been both surprised and disappointed at the way this has been dealt with by the Highland Council and hope that this can now be redressed.
I will be in the UK until September and look forward to hearing from you in due course at the above Birmingham address. If necessary, I can also be contacted by phone on 0121 *** **** or by email at ***@****.
Yours faithfully
Simon Baddeley
"You know" I said to Lin after hours working on this letter - entirely her work - printed and posted by me this morning, also emailed as an attachment to the Operations Manager of Highland Council...
"I can sometimes see the attractions of corruption. Instead of writing this long complaint and petition I could pop down to see a 'friend' in the council and with a swift φακελάκι the whole ruddy mess would be sorted in minutes."
Arriving in the gloaming at Brin Croft
It's strange to be without phone or wifi, but a good test too. We can get a weak mobile signal from a slope at one corner of the garden, but to work on the internet and phone we're buying coffee and biscuits in a 'free wifi' hotel overlooking the river Ness in town.
A weak signal
Colin came round to strim the long grass that's grown around the house since mum died...


...and I've done weeding and pruning and sweeping and clearing - but there's more to do. Our main work's indoors where we have to have the house cleared so as to put it on the market, all items inventoried and accounted for, with some to be kept, some sold, some given to charities.  For some things, transport costs could be higher than the sale price, unless we do our own carriage. One quote we had for the journey to a sale in Edinburgh started at £600. There's an auction at Fraser's at Dingwall in mid-July, so we're creating an 'auction' pile and planning to hire a drive-yourself van. Other items are, though not especially valuable, likely to do better if sold on eBay or Gumtree or taken south and sold at auction there. We may be able to borrow a van for that and so more could be paid to beneficiaries. So there's a 'going south' pile. I'm taking a load of mum's books that none of us wants to Leakey's in Invemess. What they won't buy will go to the charity bookshop over the road. Lin's putting mum's extensive disability equipment on Gumtree, after disability companies told me that you cannot sell these things second hand to public companies or charities - those who perhaps most want it. "Too many ifs and buts about safety, especially for electrically powered items". I suspect we may end up giving away a lot of very expensive kit in good condition and I as an executor will need to justify this.
Mum's scooter bought new which she used once and didn't like (photo: Linda B)
My grief for mum is placeless. Thank goodness. This work is tedious and often frustrating, but I get not the slightest sense of mum's having been here. She's left no presence. That's all in my head wherever I am and in my DNA. She made the places she lived, and when she left them, in this case in dying, they cease to be part of her. What's her is not material, not in objects or sounds or even smells. It's all in my head and heart. So Lin and I are together here, surrounded by objects that carry no charge.
I take Oscar for familiar walks but no longer with the other terriers. He runs back and forth led by his nose, his tail wagging, happy as a Wordsworth child and as bored when stuck with us at home as we concentrate on the banality of probate.
Strathnairn - a fresh summer breeze from the south

*** ***
Ill news from beloved Greece - the planned closure of their equivalent of the BBC - TV and radio... a comment on the village website:


Η Φιλαρμονική Κορακιάνας για την ΕΡΤ

14.06.13

                                                      ΨΗΦΙΣΜΑ samaras.jpgΗ Φιλαρμονική Άνω Κορακιάνας «Ο Σπύρος Σαμάρας», ως ένα από τα πολλά σωματεία της Ελλάδας που υπηρετούν τον πολιτισμό και την παιδεία και διαπνέονται από την πίστη στην ελευθερία της σκέψης, τη δημοκρατία και την αγάπη στην πατρίδα, καταδικάζει την μεγάλη προσβολή που συνετελέσθη στο πρόσωπο του ελληνικού λαού με την βίαιη και πραξικοπηματική φίμωση της Ελληνικής Ραδιοφωνίας Τηλεόρασης, εκφράζοντας παράλληλα την συμπαράστασή της στους απολυμένους της.
Το κλείσιμο της Ελληνικής Ραδιοφωνίας Τηλεόρασης, του μόνου εναπομείναντος ισχυρού κυματοθραύστη απέναντι σε κάθε λογής προϊόν υποκουλτούρας και αποχαύνωσης αλλά και συνάμα πυλώνος έκφρασης και διάδοσης του ελληνικού πολιτισμού, στο κέντρο, τη διασπορά αλλά και πολλές ευαίσθητες περιοχές, αποτελεί πράξη εκβαρβαρισμού και γεννά πολλά ερωτηματικά, τώρα που όλοι είμαστε πλέον βέβαιοι για τις «πονηρές» ημέρες που διάγουμε και τις ζοφερές αναμνήσεις που πλησιάζουν απειλητικά από το μέλλον…
                                      Για το Δ.Σ. 
Ο Πρόεδρος του Δ.Σ.                                    Ο Γ. Γραμματέας 
ΣΠΥΡΙΔΩΝ ΣΑΒΒΑΝΗΣ                                 ΣΤΑΜΑΤΗΣ ΑΠΕΡΓΗΣ



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Tidying and clearing the house in the Highlands

June 21, 2013, 2:24 pm
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Tidying Brin Croft

I would, while she was alive, think of how it would be, sleeping and eating in her empty home, going through her things, sorting, allocating, disposing. I knew the day would one day come when she would be gone, Indeed it was an ever present understanding, once I was a grown-up, that intensified the joy of all the days we were together. Lin and I have spent nine days in Brin Croft, sprucing up the house, inside and out, deciding a ranking of the many things that must go - some, depending on what they offer, to antique dealers, some to auction, some to be sold on ebay or Gumtree, some to the family, some to charities, some, that can't be sold or donated, to house clearance. I've had a word with Sandy, the regular postie, who'll halt the flow of catalogues mum used for her bedside shopping. I've taken sacks of junk mail to be recycled in the bins by Inverarnie Stores. As I heaved handfuls of unread glossy catalogues into the recycling bin by the shop, I spied a slip of paper with typical scribbles in mum's hand...
'On the divan are piled (at night her bed) stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays…'

I didn't throw it out thinking of the only context I've come across the word 'carbuncular', known those resonant lines since I was taught about them at school. I recognise Watson and the Gaelic place names reference, but what's that 'Sister Theresa' and 'Hullo Hullo Hullo'? How mum shrank from 'apathy'. The Wiesel quote in Against Silence 'The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference...' She and Jack, between them, taught me, entirely indirectly and by example, that being 'bored' is nearly a crime, something to be scorned.
The house will be cleared, but for a few things left on the estate agent's advice - "so the house is not entirely empty" - in mid-July. All valuable items removed, we've reduced the contents insurance; given the place a short back and sides - washing, scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting, weeding, pruning; taken photos for the agent's website, lined up auctioneers, dealers and other potential buyers; made dates for van hire and moving; kept detailed lists of everything...demonstrated some of mum's disability gear...

Apart from those the family wanted, we've sold or given away what remains of mum's books - a good number bought by Leakey's in Inverness and Logie Steading Bookshop in Forres - both places where mum was a customer. Roger from Auldearn Antiques, often visited by mum...

...came to Brin Croft and made offers for us to review and compare with other valuations.

The house goes on sale in mid-July








I've got to find someone who'll climb the roof to recover the wind vane I've known for sixty years. It's followed mum around since it was first designed by my stepfather, put together by our blacksmith, showing a lurcher, whose name I've forgotten, and a Jack Russell called Sukie.

I've had times to go walking with Oscar, following familiar paths through the woods that march along the edge of Strathnairn along the Farnack...






Brin Rock

Brin Croft from the south
*** *** ***
For two days of our time at Brin Croft the once winding narrow road with passing places - the B851 that runs two and a half miles to a T-junction with the busy A9 to Inverness, was closed for the completion of 'improvement' works - in this case at the bridge over the river Nairn near Mid-Lairgs. To transport the big turbines for Dunmaglass Windfarm, just beyond Croachy, to be sited four miles down the strath from Inverarnie, the only route there has to be widened.
1. Littlemill Bridge
RES aims to commence construction work for the new bridge at Littlemill in early 2013 to replace the existing double arched stone bridge with a new, wider clear-span bridge. This bridge will require minor re-routing of the B851 to link in with the new bridge and provide approaching traffic with a clear view.
The new bridge works will take approximately six months to complete. No road closures are anticipated. However, temporary traffic lights and speed restrictions will be used for a limited time when the bridge is connected to the existing road network. There will be a brief interruption to broadband and phone services over one night. Residents likely to be affected will be given advance notice.
2. Inverarnie Bends
RES will be widening a 400 metre stretch of single track road near Tombreck to create a twin track carriageway. The works will include replacement of an existing culvert and diversion of existing BT cables, which will cause minor disruption to broadband and phone services over one day. Residents likely to be affected will be given advance notice. The road widening scheme requires the section of road to be closed to traffic. Diversions will be put in place for general road users but local properties will continue to have access. The works are likely to take two months to complete. Temporary traffic lights and speed restrictions will be used for the duration of the road improvement programme to minimise the road closure period and to protect the workforce and the public.
3& 4 Croachy North and Croachy South
Works at Croachy North will extend the twin track carriageway from its current extent near Brinmore School Bridge for more than one kilometre to the entrance to Croachy village. At Croachy South an upgrade of the B851 from single track to twin track will be undertaken on a short stretch of road between Blarachar Bridge and the existing twin track carriageway near the Aberarder Estate.
The improvements will include diverting existing BT cables and water mains to allow construction to begin, extending the road and embankment and creating new drainage. Residents will be given advance notice of minor disruption to water, broadband and phone services. Interruption to each utility should last no longer than one day. RES will work with The Highland Council to maintain access to fields and properties for adjacent landowners affected by these road improvements....

I approve renewable energy but this scheme deprives the route down the strath of a marker, the old humped bridge with traffic lights that pinched the road to Tombreck; always noted near the end of a long journey. It's gone; sidelined to a farm road and footpath beside a steel fendered clearway for the necessary trucks, incentive for speeding motorists. The building of a new parapet of 'old' stone where the river runs under the flattened crossing is an unconsoling excuse. Seeing the wide straight tarmac that's replaced the familiar delay I felt almost relieved to be ending my connections here.  I remembered something my stepfather had written a year before his death...lines from an ode to a book he never wrote...
...I said I must write a warning. But I was angry and - as the
Japanese say - to be angry is only to make yourself ridiculous.
So we will live out our days in the cracks between the
concrete. And then they will pour cement on top of us.
Road 'improvement' at Littlemill in Strathnairn
*** *** ***
Jan comments on our letter to Highland Council:
Subject: Some thoughts
Date: 18 June 2013

Simon. I have read with a mixture of bemusement and despair your experience with the Highland Council. It is beyond me how councils get themselves into this mind set but I suspect it is an accumulation  of trying to cover every eventuality and solve ‘problems’ by drawing up more and more elaborate rules and regulations and double/triple checks on everything, combined with a dilution in decision making and a defensive mind-set. Instead a system of delegated decision-making based on some simple but effective principles and procedures would improve the situation. We had a similar experience when we cleared out my mother-law’s council flat in Middlesbrough. The person on the phone informed us they could only deal with the tenant. As she was dead this was rather difficult and we had a bizarre ‘Pythonesque’ dialogue for over 20 mins, reminding me of the dead parrot joke, before it was resolved by us informing them that we were just leaving the keys in the door and driving away. This, not surprisingly, jolted them into action. There are times when it is difficult to defend councils.
On a more positive note it is pleasing to see that some councils are now trying to co-ordinate their actions in respect of all the welfare changes. Manchester City Council is taking a lead on this. I think developments in and around the Greater Manchester area are worth a bit of study. They offer some models of ‘recalibration’ with government, albeit on the latter’s terms, but it think they have been rather astute at exploiting what is on offer whilst also being robust in defence of their own communities.
Did you see the letter in the Observer from a large number of Council Leaders across the country pleading with the government not to be too harsh in the next spending review. I think this will fall on deaf ears and is a lost cause but it was interesting to read that they all now claim to be in or close to ‘insolvency’ in terms of not being able to fund their core statutory responsibilities. I believe most councils are beyond that ‘tipping’ point already. I think district councils in particular are very vulnerable to becoming ‘redundant.’ What was depressing was the tone and focus of the letter. It read like a drowning person without a lifejacket  crying for help and rescue to an imaginary rescuer on the beach (The Child believes the Parent will come to its rescue but the Parent believes the Child has to either sink or swim and this will make it stronger). 
It is frustrating that there is a lack of real meaningful strategy and narrative being developed by councils themselves other than the now rather old ‘innovation and transformation’ mantra, or a straight forward ‘help us’ message to government. As I have said before I think councils are hoist by their own success. They are by far the most competent and best performing sector across the whole public sector and this combination of Competence and Compliance is being ruthlessly exploited by Government and we’ll see this even more clearly in the next spending review. The most acute part of this is Adult Social Care, where numerous hospital, care homes, domiciliary reports, not to say scandals, point to a collapsing service for a very large proportion of elderly people. We are talking about basics such as not feeding and watering people, leaving people unattended and worst of all treating vulnerable people with contempt. Yes I know that there are examples of good service and committed people but when according to published figures between a quarter and a third of older people receive sub-standard services, then we have a national scandal which nobody is getting a real grip on other than by voicing rhetoric and platitudes; very depressing. Sadly, it can only get worse, especially for the most vulnerable. If you are old, ill and poor, then your end of life is likely to be a very distressing experience indeed.
There are no quick fixes but anybody who says “throwing money at the problem is not the solution” is either a fool or incompetent (or worse, driven by politically motivated ideologies). The key to it is to throw the money at the right things at the right time, but I can think of numerous examples where this approach has worked very well and often paradoxically (but not surprisingly) been more cost effective in the long run. 
It is disappointing that the various organisations representing LAs and its various professions have not developed more robust strategies and alternative narratives around such an approach although in fairness I see the occasional ‘green shoot’. The dialogue is dominated by Government around ‘cutting bureaucracy’, ‘efficiency’, ‘being creative’ etc.; in themselves OK, but in an ideological context, merely a smoke screen and hardly a substitute for proper strategies and investments. It is strange (or perhaps not) that concepts the government is keen to apply elsewhere (as long it’s not public investments) hardly feature in this debate, where it is absolutely vital. 
We can see the way the Welfare State is being phased out. The first stage is being completed; the removal of all universal benefits and services. This is being replaced by discretionary services across the board. The big prize here is the State Pension. We are being ‘softened up’ for its replacement by a means-tested state pension after the next election. The final stage is the emergence of a new form of ‘poor law’ heavily dependent on ‘voluntary’ contributions. Just look at Food Banks and Wonga Loans to see a glimpse of the future. Zero hours employment contracts are also a pointer to the future allowing government to claim employment is rising; but income is actually falling (15% since 2008) and growth stagnant. There is psychology at play here. Actively manage people’s expectations downwards. The new feudal elite (neo-feudalism) will use certain localities, mainly the financial centres of the world, as their docking stations; their connection to any locality merely guided by investment potential eagerly sought by Local Enterprise Boards, probably adopting a race to the bottom approach (e.g. as in Ireland). I am trying to put this and much of our previous correspondence into the context of Localism and the managerial-political arena, but I can’t get it to gel yet. Best, Jan. 
***********
Until just after Easter - the Orthodox that, this year, wasn't until the start of May - a collection of potholes on the country road between Ipsos, Ag.Markos and Ano Korakiana, endangered cyclists and people on motorbikes, and did little for any vehicle's suspension. Linda, adept at driving around them even at night, took pictures and showed them to a friend at Sally's Bar, her son Rob Groove. He's half in love with inventing impossible images.
"Rob! Can you make it look as if I'm stuck in one of those big pot holes?"
"No problem. Take a pictures for me of you looking as if you're holding on to the edge of one"
The Demos had sent a crew round and filled all the holes by the second week of May but Rob has just sent me a clever image.
Στο δρόμο προς την Αγίου Μάρκου - eίναι το ποδήλατο μου, ανησυχώ για!

*** ***
And in The Irish Times, Richard Pine writes from Corfu on the closure and reopening of Greece's public TV and radio:

Dispute over Greek broadcaster illustrates how essential public broadcasting is

Protesters demonstrate outside Greek state television ERT headquarters in Athens last week. Prime minister Antonis Samaras was forced to climb down over his decision to close the state broadcaster. Photograph: Reuters 
Imagine waking one morning to find that RTÉ radio and television services had been taken off the air by an overnight government decree. Many, it is true, might say “good riddance”, while others would scarcely notice. But the social and political repercussions of such a decree would be far-reaching. That is precisely what happened in Greece last week when ERT (the Greek equivalent of RTÉ) was suspended by a ministerial ruling of New Democracy prime ministerAntonis Samaras without reference to his junior coalition partners Pasok and Democratic Left. Samaras claimed that ERT was responsible for “incredible waste” and suffered from a “unique lack of transparency”. 
In the face of huge international criticism and opposition from his partners in government which might have broken the coalition and provoked a general election, the prime minister was forced into a climbdown, while Greece’s supreme court declared his actions beyond his power. ERT is now back on the air.
The episode is crucial to Greek society because it calls into question whether the country actually wants public service broadcasting.
Even more importantly, perhaps, it highlights the government’s announcement that ERT would be replaced within three months by a new organisation, “a state company owned by the public sector and regulated by the state”
“Regulated by the state” should alert all proponents of public service broadcasting to the dangers of too close an association between a public broadcaster and a government. It was Seán Lemass, as taoiseach, presiding over the formation of RTÉ in the 1960s, who saw the station as merely “an arm of government”.
Conversely, the European Commission, which denied it had any part in the Greek decision, has supported the role of public service broadcasting as “an integral part of European democracy”. 
National airlines in recent decades have largely succumbed to market forces, but public service broadcasting is a different kind of entity: the need for public channels which are not profit-motivated, which are supported by the state but not subject to government interference, is generally accepted as a necessary means of ensuring that information, as well as entertainment, is available free of market forces.
It also provides a common reference point in this case not only for Greek residents but also (as for Irish people via the RTÉ Player channel) for an enormous diaspora.
To give Greeks a sense of Greekness at such a crucial time for the country could be seen as one of the principal justifications for public service broadcasting. Given my background as a former RTÉ employee I might be expected to have an affiliation to the concept of public service broadcasting. But there is no room for either sentimentality or complacency. In the 1980s I wrote RTÉ’s mission statement “to commission, produce and transmit cost-effective programmes of excellence”. When the public broadcaster falls short of those standards it deserves a reprimand. In Ireland we have seen RTÉ putting its house in order by internal revisions in budget, structures and staffing, not least in the light of the Prime Time Investigates debacle in regard to Fr Kevin Reynolds. Yet it can also provide programmes, such as the recent Breach of Trust expose of Irish creches, which are of national importance and 100 per cent in the public interest.
In Greece a review of ERT’s performance and market share, on an already reduced budget, had been signalled for some time.
This is amid general agreement that the organisation was overfunded and overstaffed, and that its current affairs programming sometimes tended to follow the government line rather than conducting its own investigations.
However, on the basis of my knowledge of RTÉ’s budgets and staffing levels, it seems clear to me that in the case of ERT the proposed reduction of the workforce from 2,650 to a third of that, and a comparable budget reduction, is untenable if responsible quality programming is to be maintained on three TV channels and a nationwide network of local radio when Greece also has seven nationwide private TV channels and literally dozens of regional ones.
ERT channels may not necessarily be the viewing and listening options of first choice – they have only a 15 per cent audience share while private channels are thriving due to the popularity of their mindless diet of foreign soaps and “spin-the-wheel” programmes.
But that is not the point. At a crucial period for Greek society, with issues of identity and national self-confidence at the centre of public debate, the existence of a public broadcaster, even a faulty one, is of paramount importance.
Richard Pine is a former public affairs editor at RTÉ. He now lives and works in Greece

Barbara Burnett Stuart 1917-2012: 'a life of favourite days'





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Work

June 24, 2013, 10:05 am
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I cycled into town, Oscar running with me beside the canal, to get leaflets copied, buy some odds and ends including batteries for my cycle lights, marker pens, and a reliable steak bake from Greggs, and screws to mend the bottom hinge of our old garage door. In what was once the city of a 1000 trades I couldn't find a supplier; so instead of the 6" galvanised screws I wanted, I'll make do with half a dozen similar length coach bolts which at £5.50 cost far too much. Town was busy despite the chill with loads of people round the Birmingham Bull.




With my circulars printed at a shop on Colmore Row, I cycled back to Handsworth, headed down the Lozells Road and was called by name.
"Simon! Welcome back"
It was Aftab Rahman, with some people he was walking down the Villa Road, visitors to Handsworth
"I've been back a while, at least three days since Scotland"
We spoke of the success of the Heritage Trail and his plans for a Handsworth time capsule - local people to be trained as journalists to seek out older residents with memories of the area from their youth.
"You're ahead of your time, Aftab" I said, mindful of the view that few outsiders would want to visit Handsworth; that our MP, Khalid Mahmood, had called the trail a waste of money.
“We’re talking about the middle of Birmingham, I don’t think it is picturesque. We haven’t got the sort of sites they have in York, for example, but we’re not in that league. We’ve got to understand where we are. We’ve got better things to spend that money on than walking a group of Japanese tourists around.”
I headed a little north and...









...after fish and chips with curry sauce eaten in the street, I started the afternoon, trudging up and down Stamford Road, delivering leaflets. I detest British letter boxes - impossible to open, finger trapping, half-blocked with useless insulation, too often placed at the bottom of the door. Denise Forsyth came by, on her way to visiting a friend, and helped me for a while.
"Lin's gone to Sheffield hasn't she?"
"Taken her dad for a check-up"

 Handsworth
 Helping
 Hands…
      …working for the community
‘SKIP IT, DON’T TIP IT’ DAY

Handsworth Helping Hands are committed to cleaning up our area.
On Thursday June 27th a skip provided by HHH will be on the corner of Stamford Road and Putney Road from 8.30 a.m.
Residents are invited to use it to get rid of bulky rubbish & unwanted items.
Please do not put in household waste, green waste & recyclables usually collected by Birmingham City Council, building rubble or tyres.
HHH members will be there to help and advise.
HELP US TIDY UP ALONG YOUR STREET TOO - JOIN IN WITH OUR LITTER PICK!

"Putting these leaflets round, Simon, we're going to need more than one skip" she said. 
"Can we get a discount on a second one?"
"I'll give him a call. If we just have just one it'll overflow and we'll have a bigger mess than when we started. Oh and when you get home ask Nick Reid to send a scavenger truck round Friday morning to pick up anything left"
We saw several people in the street and told them there'd be a free skip in the street, may be two, on Thursday. The word's around and I can see us wishing we'd bought three.
"Let's just see what happens. It's a pilot after all. We can afford it"
"Lin's not going to like it. Another £120!"
"OK. I'll get a second skip and you deal with Lin and phone Nick Reid at the depot"
Dear Nick. Re: Handsworth Helping Hands skips in Stamford Road - scavenger truck follow-up...Can you arrange a scavenger vehicle to roam and pick up anything left over in Stamford Road (and Putney Road where it crosses Stamford) on the Friday morning 28 June after our skips have been removed? Best wishes, Simon 
Simon. I am concerned that you may be creating a bit of a monster here! Are you going to have somebody on site to supervise and turn people away once the skip is full?  I met Denise the other day and she did say you were going to do this and I have said that I will send the ward team across to clean up any spillage at the end of the day. Nic Reid, Principal Operations Manager, Fleet and Waste Management, Perry Barr Depot, Holford Drive B42 2TU.. 0121 303 1975 Mob: 07920 750 213
Follow us on Facebook  
Dear Nick. This was always a pilot and Denise and I have anticipated the thing that worries you. We’ve now invested in a second skip to go at the top of the road and of course we’ll be there - several of us - with the HHH van ready to speak to people and help pick up. But many thanks for your support and help and understanding. Best Simon, Handsworth Helping Hands
It's been an out-tray day. Checking with the removal company in Inverness, instructing surveyors to prepare a Home Report on Brin Croft; trying to get Highland Council to at least acknowledge my request to review their refusal to grant executors' exemption on Brin Croft ("We get 3000 emails a day we can't..." "OK OK, but has my letter arrived?" "It was passed for actioning on the 17th" "Thanks"). I have to complete an on-line questionnaire as part of it - but it only downloads on Internet Explorer which doesn't run on a Mac - as any ful kno. I've mowed the lawns here...

...and collected green waste and tidied and filed and prepared handouts and presentations for a seminar I'm running with Catherine in East Anglia - all done on line. It's mid-summer; the weather chilly even in the middle of the day. I'm putting off working on the allotment with a plethora of smaller jobs. The plumber, two doors down, has promised to fix the long standing slow leak below the bathroom tap, confident he can join old lead to new copper. X rang, anxious. Wanted to talk. His mother is over a 100 and he doesn't get on with the council carers. I could give little solace. The estate agent, Phiddy Robertson, emailed Brin Croft's particulars...

BRIN CROFT, INVERARNIE, INVERNESS IV2 6XA
Inverness about 8 miles.  Airport about 15.5 miles.

FOR SALE AS A WHOLE OR IN TWO LOTS.

Lot 1
An attractive single storey house on an elevated site with beautiful views over Strathnairn.

• The accommodation comprises:  Conservatory Porch.  Entrance Hall.  Open plan Sitting Room and Dining Room with wood burning stove.  2 en suite Bedrooms.  2 further bedrooms.  Kitchen.  Utility Room.  Generous Storage.

•Timber chalet, car port and game larder.

•Delightful wooded grounds overlooking the River Farnock.

•A peaceful and secluded setting on the edge of the village.

•Easy access to the A9 and Inverness.

About 0.27 hectares (about 0.669 acres) in all.

Lot 2
Littlemills Lochan

• Attractive lochan with boat shed located in Inverarnie Forest approximately one mile from Brin Croft.

Inverness Residential Department
Reay House
17 Old Edinburgh Road
Inverness
IV2 3HF

Tel: 01463 224343
Fax:  01463 243234
Email:  inverness@ckdgalbraith.co.uk
Website: www.ckdgalbraith.co.uk

Littlemills Lochan

*** *** ***
I emailed Minoti in Delhi
Dear Minoti. Linda and I have just come back from a melancholy week at Brin Croft getting the house ready for sale. Linda has been a great help as we go through the tedious details of disposing of things no-one in the family wants. We go up again in mid-July, also with Amy and Guy and our grandson Oliver, to do a final clearance and probably to spread mum’s ashes on the Findhorn. How are you and how’s your work? xxx Simon
Dear Simon. I was so stunned by what you wrote yesterday. But it was so good of you to remember me at a time like this. I also got the Memorial [you sent me] down from next to my own parents' photograph where I keep her and is the object of my worship when I do pray to all my ancestors.
I cannot imagine your melancholic visit but I can feel your pain as you have lost someone like Theodora who was the throbbing heart of Brin Croft. So much sadness.
I am in India since March as you may perhaps not remember in the midst of all that you have undergone since last year. I just keep praying for Peter to stay safe on his dialysis machine since he has been doing that at home for the last five months now! I also pray he stays that way till I am able to get back to Langford and be there to relieve him from all the house work at least which  he has to do despite his condition. Human beings need such support but he has to do it alone and I have never broken any rules of the UK. So here I remain for at least another 3 months before I go back.
I have just come back a week ago from Japan where I presented a paper at the International Association of the Study of Commons Conference at Kitifuji [northern Fuji Yama]  My panel was on Law and the Commons and I presented on Corruption in bureaucracy-political nexus  and land records in India and how the Law does not protect the commoners as a result of this. I can send my paper if you have the patience to read it.  Also two of my papers have got published just this month one as a chapter in a book which the Springer publishers brought out and the other in a journal called Global Environment.  When will you get back to England in case you go back to Greece or will you stay put till October or so when I might be able to get back. I might be trying to get to Germany too in case my daughter takes up a fellowship in Heidelberg.
Thank you again for writing to me - I am grateful. Love and all the best, Minoti   
Minoti and Mum at Brin Croft
*** ***
So there have been changes - prompted by the ERT closure and reopening  - in the government of Greece but the real news is that latest government reshuffle in Athens has not made news. Said Olli Rehn, EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner "I love Greece but I'm very much looking forward to a eurogroup press conference where Greece is not going to be discussed, and a summer where we don't have any Greek crisis.
In the village they've been leaping through fire:

Λάμπατα στην Κορακιάνα
Ανήμερα τ’ Αη Γιαννιού χθες, του «Λαμπατάρη» και στις γειτονιές του χωριού ζωντάνεψε για μια ακόμη φορά το έθιμο από τις «λαμπατίνες». Στο τρίστρατο του Κουκουκή (Μουργάδες) τα μαγιοστέφανα ρίχτηκαν στην πυρά, με την προσθήκη φρέσκιας ρίγανης και μικροί-μεγάλοι πήδαγαν πάνω από τις τρεις φωτιές…
labata2013c.jpg
Στον δε Άη-Γιώργη, το έθιμο έλαβε χώρα στο προαύλιο της εκκλησίας, με διοργανωτή το Συμβούλιο της Ενορίας και με την παρουσία κόσμου από όλο το χωριό. Η δε συμμετοχή του χορευτικού της Φιλαρμονικής έδωσε τόνο στο χορό που ακολούθησε, υπό τις μουσικές επιλογές του νεαρού Αη-γιωργίτη «D.J.» και τις ευωδίες της ψησταριάς που λειτουργούσε κάτω ακριβώς από το καμπαναριό…
labata2013a.jpg labata2013b.jpg 
Ψηλά, στον καλοκαιριάτικο ουρανό, η Μεγάλη Πανσέληνος αντιφέγγιζε από το Τριοκάτσουλο μέχρι του Κόρεντι, παρά το παροδικό πέρασμα από σκουρόχρωμα σύννεφα...
Υ.Γ. Από φίλους της ιστοσελίδας μας επισημάνθηκε ότι ο ένας εκ των κυρίων της ψησταριάς κατανάλωνε ασταμάτητα σουβλάκια!! Ποιος εκ των δύο άραγε??
I struggled translating this but when I asked him, Aleko D stepped in: 'Hello Simon and Linda. It was indeed a pleasure receiving your note. I thought that you would be here, this time of the year! I am now well again after my problem with the leg and I was looking forward to seeing you both over here or somewhere else! When you come in September please get in touch so that we can meet! Here is your translation':
On the day of 'St John of the Fire' the village once again revived the old tradition of lighting and jumping through the three fires. At the 'Koukoukis' cross-roads (Mourgades) the Mayday wreaths were thrown on the fire supplemented by fresh oregano.Everybody, children and grown-ups were jumping through the three fires. At the church of St.John this took place at the church forecourt and it was organised by the President of the Parish. The entire village attended this ceremony. The local Philharmonic gave the tone for the dance that followed under the direction of the young man from St.George who acted as the 'DJ'. This took place under the church belfry where the grill was set-up. High up in the sky on this summer night the very large Full Moon was shining from the 'Trikatsoulo' up to 'Korendi' even though at times dark clouds intervened!  P.S. It was noted by friends of our website that one of the two men grilling the 'souvlakia' was eating them non-stop!! We are wondering which one of the two it was??
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Place

June 26, 2013, 1:55 am
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We're all in the kitchen here, Amy. Liz, Oliver, Lin and I, with Flea watching us making lists...

Going back to an afternoon in 2009 on the other side of the world:
Meanwhile in the small town of Newstead, in Victoria, population according to Wikipedia, 487, I was taken to a community meeting in the main street coffee shop where there was a Sunday afternoon get together to discuss the implications of Social Networking with an invited academic, Barry Golding from Ballarat University, gently expressing his reservations about the difference between real face-to-face contact and that offered by, for instance Facebook or Twitter, and reminding us just what en enormous part of the global population has never made a phone call let alone having access to the world wide web, while someone working for the State of Victoria, Ben Hart, suggested - with equal politeness - the potential of the medium. We had WiFi where we met and after the Q & A session I couldn't resist asking to have myself pictured 'in country' by a page of Democracy Street blog.
It's not that I'm out of touch with information technology, nor anything but fascinated by inventiveness, No amount of communication via the vast but invisible stringing and switching of the internet can impart the sense of place I'm not at. I scan the Ano Korakianawebsite and follow a couple of Facebook sites on Corfu - one proving very popular among ex-patriats for buying and selling, co-ordinating searches for missing dogs and cats and finding accommodation - Corfu Grapevine - and another - Only Corfu Society started by our friend Aleko Damaskinos - for exploring facts and and sharing fictions about the island, and of course there are many others in many languages, not to mention panoramic photographs of beloved places and unique Corfucius. There's skype and email and ordinary telephone and of course memories I've streamed on Youtube and Vimeo. None impart the sense I associate with the places from which I'm absent in a way that consoles me for not being there. A place is touch, smell, sound but above all direct human contact and in a smaller but important way the anticipation of those in imagination, a kinaesthetic sense of things akin to the absolute reality of a dream. Music can evoke it; a sudden burst of a familiar sound on radio or TV  and I know - as if an internal sluice is opened, my chest flooded with such fullness, I suffer a momentary difficulty of speech.
Mother Greece across the Sea of Kerkyra in winter

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Search

Handsworth Helping Hands

June 29, 2013, 4:42 am
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Working in Stamford Road

Residents and volunteers with Handsworth Helping Hands - our local voluntary handyperson group with transit van and tools and enthusiasm - filled three skips with rubbish from Stamford Road in Handsworth on Thursday.
Some items were collected by scrap dealers, other items like beds and a disabled bath lift were donated to the Red Cross Charity shop at Newtown and other items discarded but in good condition will be sold on Gumtree to help recoup the cost of the skips - £420, paid for out of the solvency we've built up over the past year and a half, including money from our successful bid for Community Chest funds. Residents, who been notified by word of mouth and fliers taken door to door a few days before, brought their rubbish to the skips. I also used the van to 'scavenge' waste left in the street as well as knocking on doors where there was waste in the garden, and with help from householders, loading what they wanted removed onto the HHH van to be unloaded onto the skips for collection at the end of the afternoon.
Some of the chatter  and some of the clutter on HHH's Facebook page.....the chronology on Facebook's timeline - time's arrow - goes in reverse, with earlier posts at the bottom....I don't know about Facebook. Some call it evil, spawn of the devil, snooped on by spies, shared with unknown dark forces, while others like my friend Margie posted this and with no more effort on her part persuaded me to paste it into my own page on FB:


Simon Baddeley
10 minutes ago
I don't usually do this but....It occurs to me that for each and every one of you on my friends list, I catch myself looking at your pictures, sharing jokes and news, as well as support during good and bad times. I am also happy to have you among my friends. We will see who will take the time to read this message until the end. If you appreciate your friends from all over the world, go ahead and copy this into your status too, even if it's just for a minute. I'm going to be watching to see who takes care of the friendship, just like me. Thank you all for being a part of my life. Copy and paste please, don't share.
Like ·  · Promote · 
  • Paul Grant likes this.
  • Olimpia Gargano I did. I took the time to read until the end, as usually I do when I see your posts. I apologise if I'll not copy and paste, just because I don't like "chains", not even in messages .
  • Simon Baddeley I rather agree but Margie is a really delightful and altogether interesting person who as a carer became very close to my late mother. I will probably never meet Margie again in the flesh but I want to stay in touch. So for her I cut and paste what I'd usually ignore. S



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My hearing

June 29, 2013, 10:20 am
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I noticed his name badge - Phil Ypres-Smith. He was the expert at City Hospital Hearing Treatment Centre where I had an appointment on Friday morning, much sooner than I'd expected after my slightly grumpy encounter with the audiologist at my GP's, who more or less pushed a hearcheck screener in both ears and asked "How many sounds can you hear?"
"Sorry? What? What? What do you mean how many sounds can I hear? None! No. Maybe three. I don't know"
I apologised later for being so brusque.
"I've been telling you for years" said Lin later
I didn't know what I didn't know. It's so easy to compensate. Guess what people say. Read your lips. Just say 'what?' or 'sorry I was thinking about something, say that again.
I cycled to City Hospital where reception directed me to the low building next to Western Road. As I approached carrying my folded bicycle two doors swung open. I beamed at the receptionist
"Good morning. Did you do that for me" I said with a grin. I was blanked
"Have you your appointment letter? (pause, checks screen) Take a seat for me"
Then in comes a maintenance man covered in clips, chains and holsters
"Hullo, John" she says warmly "You coming in then?"
"Blimey. I didn't get that" I mutter "The leaflet says 'City Hospital Hearing Services Centre - where everyone matters"
A miniscule raising of an eyebrow by the other receptionist. I can almost see the 'thinks' bubbles popping from her head "We've got one here. Alert alert!"
I don't take a seat of course, but wander the waiting area checking the pamphlets and a glass display cabinet full of expensive looking hearing aids - I mean, deaf aids.
"Mr Baddeley? Come with me please"
A mild tall thin man about forty beckoned me. He invited me to sit on a plastic metal-legged chair in a small quiet room lined with insulating board framing a glass panel where after he'd put earphones on me, he sat opposite a screen to watch the effects of sending me sounds to which I was to respond by pressing a hand held button on an extension cord.
Now, I thought, I'll have a more convincing test. The door was closed. I was enveloped in blessed silence, my slowest breathing all I could hear. Bleeps came through. I pressed my button. This made sense. Not "how many sounds can you hear?" but "press the button when you hear something"
After noting several obvious bleeps, some came through quieter and I had the distinct impression of hearing sounds that were almost inaudible, so that I wondered if, trying to prove something, I was imagining them. Certain recognisable sequences were repeated. No doubt to test just this possibility. After a while. I was too interested to think of time, the door was opened and Phil Ypres-Smith sat me down beside him so's I could see the audiogram on his screen.
"Your wife is right and you are right"
"Go on"
A pair of graphs appeared on the screen; the one on the right for my left ear.
Phil traced his finger over these going almost too fast for me to follow. Far from patronising me I thought he's assuming I'm quite bright. I was certainly intrigued. How could Lin be right and I too. Things don't work that way between us.
"Did you work with loud noise?"
"I used to shoot quite a bit when I was in my teens - rifles and shotguns"
"Which shoulder?"
"My right"
"That's interesting. The deficit in the left ear matches problems caused by just that sort of thing, and that's where the report goes if you have the gun in that shoulder"
"Blimey. Come back to visit me after 50 years, like the ankle I broke when I fell off a horse when I was  fifteen. Gives me twinges in chilly damp weather"
"Your hearing left of the graph is in the 'normal' range for both ears. See where the line dips?"


"There is a loss of hearing in the higher registers. That's what your wife is telling you about"
"Oh. Right"
"You can hear her say 'bed' but you might think she said 'red', because you heard the vowels but you may be confusing the consonants in a higher register. You may also have difficulty with whispering and conversation with several people especially if there's background noise"
"How did you get 'Ypres' in your surname?"
"My grandfather had sixteen uncles. When he was born they were getting killed in France"
"Smith was changed to Ypres-Smith?"
"Hm"
"Have you been to the Menin Gate?"
"It's on my bucket list. The thing is that if you see a sentence in just vowels you can make little sense of it. With just the consonants there's more chance you can. 'ao a e'? 'bcn nd ggs'? It's consonants you may mishear, but I am not sure a hearing aid would help. If you turned it to a setting that would amplify this area" - he points to where the audiograph dips - "you'd be getting too much volume here" He points top left to where the graph is nearly level. Thinks about it anyway. if things get worse come back, direct in the next few weeks, via your GP again after a year"
"There were long battles round Ypres through the whole war. The town was only twenty miles from the sea, from the Channel. What's it called now? Leper. Yes. My grandfather was there, and your great grandfather and his brothers."
Phil didn't know how Ypres had been added to Smith. It was done. What a memorial.
"That was brilliant" I said to the receptionist. Beaming, she pressed a button to open the doors for me.
The Menin Gate, Ypres
Battles of Ypres...World War I in Flanders...first battle (Oct. 12–Nov. 11, 1914)...Germans stopped on their march to the sea...Allied forces surrounded on three sides...second battle (April 22–May 25, 1915) marked German use of poison gas...third and longest battle (July 31–Nov. 6, 1917)... battle of Passchendaele...British broke through German lines...seasonal rains turned Flanders into a swamp.. Haig persisted in his offensive...November 6 his troops occupied the ruins of Passchendaele, five miles from the start of the offensive...Allied and German casualties exceeded 850000.
Grandpa Henry in France













After it was over: Grandpa Henry with my mum in 1919
*** ***
In Ano Korakiana Thanassis notes, on our village website...
Shearing 
The passing of another ‘traditional’ παραδοσιακή, source of raw material for clothes, genuine spinning and knitting wool, μαλλί, worn by the old, barely remembered by those slightly younger – the famous ‘tsoukrine' jerseys and socks etc). The production chain – shearing, washing, spinning, and knitting into cloth - is ‘broken’, replaced by synthetic materials and methods of production. The old method is vividly demonstrated as Thanasis Nikolouzos, with his wife Maria, with deft movements, shear a black ram from their flock. “To preserve just a picture for posterity”, soliloquizing, the animal patently endures the three leg strap, τριπλοπόδαρα, to be rid of the ‘burden’ of wool. With the ending of the shear came the summer rain...(my attempt at translation)
Κουρά
Γράφει ο/η Κβκ   
29.06.13
Μια ακόμη «παραδοσιακή» πρώτη ύλη για ρουχισμό, βαίνει ταχύτατα προς εξαφάνιση (εάν δεν έχει ήδη συμβεί).Πρόκειται για το γνήσιο, πρόβειο μαλί, που οι παλαιότεροι το «φορούσαν» (οι περίφημες «τσούκρινες» φανέλες και κάλτσες κλπ) και οι κάπως νεώτεροι απλά το γνώρισαν. Η αλυσίδα παραγωγής του «έσπασε», αφού έχει πλέον αντικατασταθεί από το συνθετικό και έτσι το προϊόν του ετήσιου κουρέματος των προβάτων, δεν βρίσκει την ανάλογη συνέχεια, μεταποιούμενο σε ρούχο. Την κατάσταση αυτή περιέγραφε με γλαφυρό τρόπο ο Θανάσης Νικολούζος την ώρα που η σύζυγός του Μαρία, κούρευε με επιδέξιες κινήσεις το μαύρο κριάρι του κοπαδιού τους. «Να μείνει τουλάχιστον η εικόνα, για τις επόμενες γενιές», μονολογούσε, πάνω από το τριπλοπόδαρα δεμένο ζώο, που καρτερικά υπέμενε, προκειμένου να απαλλαγεί από το «βάρος» της προβιάς. Η καλοκαιριάτικη βροχή που ξέσπασε απρόσμενα, συνέπεσε με το τελείωμα της κουράς… 
koura_prov2013.jpg
Maria and Thanasis Nikolouzos



↧

A thread on Facebook - 'Only Corfu Society' - on superstition, religion and science

July 4, 2013, 12:33 am
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  • RECENT POSTS
  • Vanessa Katsarou
    There is a bird that screeches at night (definitely a bird not an owl as I have made out it's outline in a tree). My Greek husband has always got very unnerved when this bird screeches as he says it means someone has died, I of course laughed at him. However I am also beginning to get unnerved by this, 2 years ago a very close family member was diagnosed with cancer, that darn bird was outside my window screeching all night. My dog became ill over the weekend, bird back and screeched at least 20 times last night, my poor doggie had passed away. Anybody know exactly what this bird is? (nixtopouli is the best I get from hubbie). I don't usually spook easily but...........
    • 51 of 66

      Simon Baddeley Aleko has already posted about this bird over a month ago.
      30 June at 17:45 · Like

      Aleko Damaskinos Thank you Simon! I will re-post for Vanessa!!
      30 June at 17:47 · Like

      Simon Baddeley Me too. Στριγγοπούλι, πάτσα νυχτόβιου αρπακτικού - a nocturnal predator, probably the tawny owl tho' others think it's a barn owl. There's a lot of these about in our village along with the familiar Skops (gionis - Γιόνης?) which explains why I keep dying. Luckily so long as Ι also hear the Skops Owl the same night Ι wake in the morning - but Ι must never put three spoons of sugar in my tea for breakfast that day! (:))
      30 June at 17:48 · Like · 2

      Vanessa Katsarou So is it an owl? I stood and watched it one night flying between the branches of my walnut tree, I'm no expert but it didn't look like an owl, although it was dusk and hard to see clearly.
      30 June at 17:54 · Like

      Rita Frumin Could it be the European Nightjar? In case you were wondering I'm no expert but I do know the myths surrounding the Skops Owl but the rest is via google!!
      30 June at 17:58 · Edited · Unlike · 1

      Vanessa Katsarou Just found a video with the call of the European Nightjar and it sounds nothing like my screecher! Any other suggestions???
      30 June at 18:00 · Unlike · 1

      Rita Frumin I have a feeling that Angela Papageorgiou wrote in one of her lovely blogs about The Skops Owl!
      30 June at 18:04 · Edited · Unlike · 1

      Vanessa Katsarou The Scops makes a lovely soothing noise, this other thing makes your hair stand on end!!!
      30 June at 18:05 · Unlike · 2

      Annie Hawkins Could be a European screech owl.
      30 June at 18:08 · Like · 2

      Vanessa Katsarou Sounds very similar but somehow more piercing.
      30 June at 18:11 · Like

      Aleko Damaskinos Vanessa, this is the Night jar (Caprimulgus europaeous) and sometimes called the goatsucker because they say it sucks milk from a goat! In England and Scotland it is known as "the corpse fowl" and it is indeed a bird of ill fortune. To hear it at night it is an eerie sound you will not forget. It is said it is a reincarnation of a child that died without being baptised! In Greece and indeed in Corfu when you hear this bird there will most definitely be a death near where you live....I never believed such nonsense but...here where I live at Nisaki, I heard this bird last week and....a friend of mine died last Friday and because of that the panigiri planned for today (Agion Pandon is our church) was cancelled!
      30 June at 18:31 · Like · 1

      Jane Anemogiannis We've got these this summer in Paxos and its been of great debate in the evenings as to what it is... It's not usually an owl we hear , so thanks for the updates and should quieten the late night discussions on my patio!
      30 June at 18:37 via mobile · Like

      Vanessa Katsarou Well I wrote this post with a little trepidation thinking I would be poo pooed for succumbing to superstition but it seems I am not alone...... Think I'll sleep with ear plugs in from now on.
      30 June at 18:43 · Like

      Aleko Damaskinos Jane, the bird is exactly the one I have described for Vanessa. In Corfu and Paxos it is known as striglopouli-NOT AN OWL. Talk to the older members of your Greek family and you will see what they say....It is better not to hear it...but how do you avoid this? Locals call it "katsikovizahtra"!
      30 June at 18:43 · Like

      Aleko Damaskinos Definitely NOT an owl!!!
      30 June at 18:48 · Like
    • Jane Anemogiannis Oh ok Aleko Damaskinos I'm now armed with the info! The men in my parea were all unnerved by the sound, instilled from childhood stories perhaps... So far the paxiot older generation haven't been able to identify it that I know, perhaps they could do with putting their hearing aids in 
      30 June at 18:59 via mobile · Like
    • Vanessa Katsarou Agree with Aleko, not an owl, unless my eyesight is a lot worse than I thought.
      30 June at 19:08 · Like
    • Lavinia Psarras We have nightjars here sometimes and they completely freak me out. Their call is very eerie and really unsettles me, so you are not alone, Vanessa and I, for one, would never poo-poo you xx
      30 June at 19:11 · Like · 2
    • Simon Baddeley From reading this conversation I'd say a mystery remains.
      30 June at 19:11 · Like
    • Rita Frumin I think perhaps the recordings available all just seem to give the mating call of the male nightjar which is a low whirring sound but I believe it can certainly scream!!
      30 June at 19:12 · Like
    • Aleko Damaskinos Well Vinnie, they come and go! Sometimes for months you don't hear them and then...suddenly they are there with some disaster to follow...!!! Indeed they can freak you out and usually you are in your bed!!
      30 June at 19:15 · Like · 1
    • Simon Baddeley Στριγγοπούλι? Αιγοθήλης? Γιδοβύζι?
      30 June at 19:15 · Like
    • Vanessa Katsarou Ah that would explain it Rita Frumin, it was the low whirring sound that I heard on the video, the bird was similar in size and shape to what I saw. Aleko Damaskinoswould the translation of 'striglopouli' be something like 'witchbird'?
      30 June at 19:16 · Like
    • Lavinia Psarras I quite agree Aleko! I always hear them at night and they even drive the dog mad which unsettles me even more.....
      30 June at 19:17 · Like
    • Helen Lait We have a couple in the old factory near our house and they sound like the living dead! Must admit we thought they were screech owls but obviously must be this striglopouli. They have been there every since we have lived in the house but nothing nasty has happened so far - fingers crossed! We also get the skops owls as well together with bats and all manner of other birds.
      30 June at 19:20 · Unlike · 1
    • Helen Lait Just played that Simon and it is definitely not the birds we get, they really screech rather than hoot.
      30 June at 19:21 · Like
    • Simon Baddeley OK we're narrowing it down, Night jar?http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment/British-wildlife-recordings/022M-W1CDR0001526-2300V0

      British wildlife recordings - Environment and nature | British Library - Sounds
      sounds.bl.uk
      British wildlife recordingsNightjarAdd a noteLog in to add a note at the bottom ...See more
      30 June at 19:22 · Like · Remove Preview
    • Aleko Damaskinos The nearest translation Vanessa, would be "screeching bird"! Tawny Owl? NO! Owlsl hoot but, do NOT screech!!
      30 June at 19:23 · Like
    • Helen Lait Nope lol! Far to civilised. This thing sounds like the living dead, seriously it gives you the willies
      30 June at 19:23 · Unlike · 3
    • Helen Lait That is more like it I must admit, but still not unearthly enough. Also it is huge! At least the one we have is.
      30 June at 19:25 · Unlike · 1
    • Vanessa Katsarou Well the nightjar recording sounds nothing like it.
      30 June at 19:26 · Like · 1
    • Vanessa Katsarou Oh yikes........as we speak the bloody thing is back!!!!
      30 June at 19:27 · Like
    • Helen Lait So spooky aren't they!
      30 June at 19:27 · Like
    • Vanessa Katsarou They certainly are Helen, which area are you in?
      30 June at 19:28 · Like
    • Aleko Damaskinos Vanessa, tell your husband to get his gun and shoot the damn thing! Only then the curse will be lifted...!!!!
      30 June at 19:29 · Like
    • Helen Lait We live in Hlomos Vanessa Katsarou, have just read your full post and am so sorry about your dog as well. I am over in the UK at the moment and our two are in Corfu with my husband (and the screechy bird!).
      30 June at 19:29 · Like
    • Helen Lait Good luck trying to shoot it, they are like ghosts in the night. Scary but they do keep the rat population down.
      30 June at 19:30 · Unlike · 1
    • Vanessa Katsarou Husband says 'den kanei' to shooting it, apparently that will bring even more catastrophe. Helen Laitdo you know my friend Paula in Hlomos?
      30 June at 19:32 · Unlike · 1
    • Aleko Damaskinos This is a Corfu superstition!! because nobody EVER dared shoot it!! Catastrophe will end if you shoot it!!
      30 June at 19:34 · Like
    • Vanessa Katsarou Ha ha, I could see us becoming one of those families driven to distraction trying to rid ourselves of the thing... like those people that have moles and devote their lives to getting rid of them.
      30 June at 19:37 · Like · 1
    • Simon Baddeley Akrivos. You don't shoot the albatross, You don't shoot rooks, for the same reasons. There's a plethora of superstition around the sounds of the night. Owls live in the mythology of many cultures - as companions to the gods, evil spirits, wise observers or the embodiment of natural forces.For some, owls are messengers of death, demonstrating the power of the underworld. Being creatures of the night doesn't help...
      Monday at 07:52 · Edited · Like · 4
    • Lavinia Psarras The male and female nightjars appear to have different sounds. The male whirrs repetitively and the female is the freaky one which almost shrieks.......
      30 June at 19:41 · Like · 3
    • Vanessa Katsarou Thanks for clarifying Lavinia and this has been a most interesting thread.
      30 June at 19:43 · Unlike · 1
    • Rita Frumin Watch the Video called nightjar calling to the end!!http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/European_Nightjar#p0085wck

      BBC Nature - Nightjar videos, news and facts
      www.bbc.co.uk
      Nightjars are most active at dawn and dusk when they hunt for moths, beetles and crane flies.
      30 June at 19:54 · Edited · Like
    • Simon Baddeley Aleko! You say the catastrophe will end if you shoot the screecher (whatever it is and if you can even see it), but isn't thinking that killing the beast (whatever it is and if you can see it) just as unscientific a suggestion as the original superstition? What would Socrates have said?
      Monday at 07:56 · Like
    • Aleko Damaskinos  I agree with you Simon! I personally don't believe in superstitions of any kind but...what I wrote comes from the older people from my village! My thought on this matter is that the Creator (God?) gave this bird this particular voice and the poor bird cannot help it!!! Here I have to add that since yesterday when I said "shooot the bird", I mentioned this to some old friends of the village and they all said like Vanessa's husband : "DON"T" do this, because every catastrophe you can think of will befall you!-I wonder what Socrates would make out of this!!!
      Monday at 14:16 · Unlike · 5
    • Jeanette Parker Rita Frumin, I tried to watch the BBC prog. on the bird but not able to here. I worked for some years at Dept.of Zoology in Oxford looking after post D.Phil. research grants inc. EGI (Edward Grey Inst for field ornithology). I'll try looking there. Nice to see progs on Nat.Geo. etc. made by those students' - many now professors. Happy was able to help them.
      Monday at 23:16 · Unlike · 3
    • Joy Konstantishttp://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/barn_owl/sounds This is closer to it!!!

      Barn Owl, Sounds, All About Birds - Cornell Lab of Ornithology
      www.allaboutbirds.org
      Learn how to identify Barn Owl, its life history, cool facts, sounds and calls, ...See more
      Tuesday at 14:23 · Edited · Like
    • Joy Konstantis And yes, death almost always follows a visit from them.... one kept sitting in the tree outside our house - and we lost my father-in-law suddenly 
      Tuesday at 14:24 · Like
    • Aleko Damaskinos Joy! I am currently interviewing people all-over the island concerning this bird and deaths! Since I am a mathematician, I am going to put it all together (mathematically at first and for the general public later) so, soon I hope to have some results.....See More
      18 hours ago · Like · 1
    • Lavinia Psarras How absolutely fascinating, Aleko. Good for you and I cannot wait to read your conclusions. I wish you would do the same for the black-cloaked rider who our Nona was certain was the "angel of death" as she saw him just before news reached her of her husband's premature death in the olive groves way back in the 1930s.
      18 hours ago · Like · 1
    • Dawn Dodson this sounds very superstitious
      17 hours ago · Like
    • Joy Konstantis There are many phenomenon out there unexplained...
      17 hours ago · Like · 2
    • Helen Lait This is all a little worrying as we have them living opposite our house and they fly over it nearly every night. We have got quite used to it although it sounds unearthly and scares the living daylights out of visitors. So far (!) nobody has died!!!
      10 hours ago · Like
    • Simon Baddeley It will be near impossible for Aleko to find the unbiased sample he needs for his research. Superstition was once a science, until the Age of Reason brought real science and demonstrated the falsity of superstitious 'theories' of cause and effect. People die all the time so it's rarely difficult to find some similar event that has occurred around the same time. We are gullible and frail and some of us, for better but also for worse, favour the certainty of superstitious cause and effect to the probabilities of science. If lots of people across the island believe - superstitiously - that there's a connection between the screeching at night and death then Aleko will find lots of proof that there's a connection, unless he uses a more scientific method that doesn't entail simply asking people. I think you will find plenty of religious people who will poo-poo the superstition that there's a connection between the call of the screech beast and an imminent death. Religion and science can co-exist. Superstition and science cannot. So if you are fearful of the screech in the night try praying.
      9 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1
    • Lavinia Psarras Very interesting, Simon Baddeley. I always understood that religion and superstition are closely linked and it is science which is at the other end of reason? My late husband was a surgeon and always dismissed my religious beliefs by saying he dealt in facts, not fantasies (much to my annoyance!). Therefore, unless you pray to a scientist, surely is is futile to pray? My (half-Corfiot) daughter has a Masters in Comparative Religions and Social Anthropology from Edinburgh and we often discuss religion and superstition, usually in the context of tradition and culture. It is fascinating, but I doubt Aleko will come to any credible conclusion, whether it be deduced mathematically, scientifically or indeed religiously. I have always been fascinated by the origins of old nursery rhymes and old sayings. We are taught these by our parents and grandparents and pass them on to our own children. Surely the same applies to superstitions such as the bird? Corfu, in particular, has many myths, legends and superstitions which have been handed down for generations and we have to remember how recent the spread of literacy has been on our beloved island, particularly among the females (who are usually the ones to care for the children and tell them paramythia, legends and, indeed, superstitions). Therefore many of the older generation today in Corfu were never read stories, the stories they heard as children were of Corfiot myths. These stories were certainly told to my husband, although, as a scientist, he never passed them on to his own children!
      9 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 1
    • Joy KonstantisI am thoroughly enjoying this thread; my own mother-in-law is like one of the original tale-tellers of olden times. One says a key-word and she will relate verbatim a story about times now gone which either she experienced or had been told to her by her mother or grandmother... I have now lived with her for almost 40 years and fully regret not taping our conversations as they would create a fantastic 'history' of our part of Corfu. And yes, both religion and superstition play and have always played huge roles in everyday life here in the villages....
      about an hour ago · Like
    • Simon Baddeley Greeks, in contrast to other Europeans, link their national identity to their religion, sometimes seeing the church as the vehicle that kept Hellenism alive during centuries of Ottoman rule. Even tho' dented by charges of corruption and other scandals the church still binds and attracts xenos like me. It's a paradox. A Greek words of course! Unlike what happens in other European countries, being a communist, atheist, or agnostic does not preclude someone from attending Church in Greece, including Corfu (not held by the Ottomans of course). This attitude was exemplified for me in the words of a dentist "I am an atheist; but I am Greek, so of course I'm a member of the Orthodox Church" My dad, John, was divorced from my mum in 1949 but when he wanted to marry again in church to a Greek, my stepmother Maria, also divorced just after the war, both were allowed a 'second chance' - and so were married with full ceremony in the little church in Hermou Street in Athens, so I have half-Greek siblings. Yes! In Greece atheism and faith can co-exist, as also superstition (Yes. I changed my mind!). I'm still trying to sort this out, but in the meantime whenever I arrive in Greece I touch the ground - even the ugly concrete of Igoumenitsa - with my hand and weep with quiet joy.
      53 minutes ago · Edited · Like · 2
    • Dawn Dodson Just to go back to the original thread Barn owls never hoot they Screech always have always will it can sound more urgent if they sense danger.I used to foster injured owls years ago and have had hundreds of different owls in my garden.Love owls and the thought of someone shooting one through superstision appals me
      30 minutes ago · Like · 1
    • Simon Baddeley Συμφωνώ. I still think, tho' Aleko and others disagree, that that screech we are debating could be the alarm call of a barn owlhttp://www.barnowl.co.uk/editable/sounds/barn1.wav it's scary even as I sit in my kitchen playing it on the laptop!
      24 minutes ago · Edited · Like · 1 · Remove Preview
    • Simon Baddeley The main thing is how Vanessa is feeling. She said in the message that began this thread that it was 'definitely a bird not an owl' - but an owl is a bird, a wonderful one. I am so hoping she is less worried. Especially as so many of us are thinking of her.I know she is sure the noise does not come from an owl, so it would be good, without harming the beast, to know what it is. I wish we could get a recording and surely settle the matter with confidence, letting half the world analyse the sound that's captured.
      4 minutes ago · Edited · Like · 1
    • Joy Konstantis I must add that when I still lived in the UK, there was an owl which regularly perched in our pine tree and screeched very much like these here; never thought anything about it. It was only here that I learnt of the superstitions surrounding it - generally they don't bother me but it is odd how many times a death does follow its appearance - coincidence or synchronicity?
      6 minutes ago · Like
    • Simon Baddeley What a thread! Another Greek word! the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner. The source of Jung's split with Freud who detested the idea as 'unscientific'. ((see the film 'A Dangerous Method')) Wake up Aleko! What do you think?
      about a minute ago · Edited · Like

Owls of different kinds run through my life as entirely benign and wonderful birds, almost invariably associated with happiness. The Pierian Spring in the Roman Temple at Corinth (not, I proclaim, the one in Macedonia, in Πιερία) was created by the hoof of Pegasus. It is said to flow from the top of Acrocorinthis, the mighty fortress above Corinth. Alexander Pope cautioned "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring". I am uncertain where I found the owl feather or why I put it here. I recall knowing for many years of the Pieirian stream, but was unaware it existed until we came to Corinth in August 1996, where I did drink from it and noted as much in my diary. Amy, my daughter, was 11. She thought that if she drank she'd have to go to school for ever. I tried to explain the difference between school and learning without being disloyal to her mum - a fine teacher.

...and among my talismen is a golden owl, a gift from Greece long ago. I've not seen another one and it sits on a shelf above me now..

I note the blurred edges around my keys. Modern paranoia - lest a stalker copies them and comes for me and mine in the night. The owl made of papier-mâché was given me by my Greek half-sister. it hung in the bows of my boat on a long sea voyage long ago. And there's the stone carved owl on the wall of the unvisitable museum in Ano Korakiana...


Chris Holmes living above Gouvia writes:
My own κουκουβάγια is all too active these evenings. Swooping low over my evening camparis and soda and very tidy with her hunting of voles and those tree rats that were stripping the grapefuit off the trees. Terrible nuisance at meal times (see spread-winged foto of her at the spice jars), but obediently 'invisible' and silent during my watching of favourite TV soaps (snap of her behind the sofa waiting for orders). Cost Centre #2, my younger spitfire, Anna, summons her with a whistle but baffles the locals by referring to her in her Seattle accent as our 'Glaukos'. Aleko will know the correct word. (She's) a barn owl. We're all so reverently cowed up here in Gouvia Heights there's nothing to alarm it. Full menu on tap, the property is like a sanctuary with 5-star concealment, nooks and crannies galore, ponds and fruit trees...suspiciously soon after my mother died in jan 2012, I was at the puter at 0930 of a morning, with the patio doors open, searching for the right word for some blog silliness. I saw what looked to be a kamikaze swallow zooming at me, except it got bigger n bigger until it glided in to where I was typing and executed this amazing drift to the left, thus saving me a mouthful of feathers and talons. It perched on a top shelf between valuable Chinese porcelain. I ignored it; I hate showoffs. Then it's just stuck around, day and night, never keeping appointments. I ignore it. It is my 'owl in the corner'. Guests gaze and jerk their heads but I ignore it and them. The dog n cat seem to accept it n vice versa. When I go out to drink, I want to train it to glide down to the Navigators and peck on the Fix pump to have them have it ready. I actually want to have a leather-shouldered jacket on which it can perch as I shamble round town. Pretty girls will ambush me in tavernas asking if they can 'touch my owl', so to speak. Thuggish young men will scoff and I will ask them, 'you looking at my bird?' That's the story. I shall not write more lest I get big-headed and lazy and start boasting about 'as featured in Only Corfu.'
**** ****
At last a set of new uniforms for the band in Ano Korakiana:
Η παράδοση των στολών
Γράφει ο/η Κβκ   
02.07.13

filarm_stoles2013.jpg
Πραγματοποιήθηκε χθες το απόγευμα η παράδοση 100 νέων στολών για τη Φιλαρμονική Κορακιάνας, με την παρουσία του Ταμία (Γιώργος Μεταλληνός) και το Κοσμήτορα (Επαμ. Κένταρχος) του Συλλόγου. Είχε προηγηθεί, πριν από μερικούς μήνες, η παράδοση νέων μουσικών οργάνων. Όλα αυτά, στο πλάισιο του έργου για τον "Εξοπλισμό των Φιλαρμονικών της Κέρκυρας", που υλοποίησε η Περιφέρεια Ιονίων Νήσων.The delivery of uniforms. Yesterday saw the delivery of a 100 new uniforms for the Korakiana Philharmonic in the presence of the Treasurer (George Metallinos) and Dean (Epam. Kentarhos) of the Association. This was preceded, a few months ago, by the delivery of new musical instruments. This has all been part of a project aimed at  'Equipping Corfu Philharmonics' implemented by the Regional Government of the Ionian Islands.
↧

One option

August 9, 2013, 4:18 pm
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Through our kitchen window this morning
One option is to reanimate Jack as Tony has - to me astonishingly - in the film extract shown below...I posted this note in Facebook this morning having written a few days ago about the synching of one tape-film pair by Francis Niemczyk.
The film-tape archive of Out of Town - a summary for anyone interested but new to the project, in which I am supported by an informal JH committee and contacts on Facebook - spawn of Satan but ruddy useful. This collection was rescued by Jack after the demise of Southern Television in 1981. He was given its use, with accompanying rights, in place of a pension to which for complex reasons he was not entitled. The material is nothing if not unwieldy - piecemeal and incomplete. This is not a collection of full film recordings of old Out of Town episodes. It comprises a collection of silent 16mm location film by his cameraman for over 20 years - Stan Bréhaut -
....in cans developed in positive negative (reversal film) with library sound effects dubbed on to the edited film at Southern studios ready for Jack to talk about on his Friday evening half-hour broadcast. Each film should be accompanied by its 1/4" reel-to-reel sound tape containing Jack's studio commentary. In actuality film and taped commentary weren't stored together. The film was stacked on dexion shelves down in Plymouth (how it got there is another story as is how it came home to me) and the tape is neatly stored in boxes but in no particular order. Where we have a recorded tape and film match there is a recording of the sound of the whole episode (including theme music - Recuerdos de la Alhambra - for titles and credits but excluding commercials) but we do not have the picture of my stepfather introducing each episode from his studio 'shed'. We do have his voice. One of the challenges, after matching up tape and film and synching them is what to do with the imageless space including titles and credits. Invaluable work has been done by Roger Charlesworth at South West Film and Television Archive in Plymouth. He has where possible found which tape goes with what film and given each a code that will allow us, now the collection is in a lock-up in Birmingham near my home, to match tape to film and set about having the two mediums married and recorded on DVDs - meaning that instead of the collection fitting in a transit van it will go in a suitcase!
Now that the long process of getting the collection off film and tape on to DVD has begun I have to decide in what form to keep each available episode. Francis has sent me the first as a freebie to show what can be done. Initially he sent me the digitised 16mm film titled 'Planting a Vine' which I've streamed on Vimeo. He then sent me two more DVDs; one of the tape and film separate, and one of the tape and film synchronised. I have stored that on Vimeo but kept it private to myself, but have sent copies of the DVD version to a couple of friends to see what might be done about the 'imageless space'. Two days ago Tony Herbert sent me and Ian Wegg one of his suggestions -
Hi Simon & Ian. I have uploaded to You Tube as 'unlisted' Southern Titles and a brought back to life 'Shed' for 'Planting A Vine'. Please let me know your thoughts as to whether you find the out of sync sound irritating or acceptable or whether a Frozen picture of a shed Scene would be more preferable. I have to admit I feared this would turn out to appear awful but in honesty it seems to fit in quite well. Simon you can forward the You Tube link on to anyone you feel appropriate. Cheers, Tony
He followed this with a second email y'day:
I can fully understand people feeling uncomfortable with the 'reanimation' and at first I thought it would look dreadful but in fact it is uncanny how fortuitously some of Jack's hand movements seem to fit in. Out of sync sound/vision to many(including myself) can be very irritating but in this particular instance it seems to be dwarfed by the fact there is the warmth from the visual animated personal presentation.
There would have been a major problem if animation continued as we only have a limited number of good quality 'Shed Scenes' that might be used and you have hundreds of films so there is no way it could be completed without repetition.
My initial thoughts were to use a montage of good quality stills which could be captured from existing sheds or your own personal collection of any shed photos and I am sure this would be acceptable to viewers on any potential commercial release.
I am aware that Nic Ayling now owns the name 'Southern Television' and the idents. This does not appear to cause problems to both Delta & Renown Pictures who continue to market DVD's from the former Southern Television Library which include various southern Idents. Copyright is not my field so perhaps an enquiry should be made to Nic as to whether the intro film could be used incorporating the 'still southern ident'. The ident can of course be edited out which still leaves a 13 sec run time which will still include the words Out Of Town in the title. Alternatively do you hold a copy of the film used for the intro as you could then run any title sequence you wanted over it perhaps in the style of the much later non Southern editions.
End Of Part One, Part Two, & Exit titles can easily be recreated in Southern Style. For exit titles we obviously know to include JH, Stan Bréhaut  but was David Knowles the film editor on all programmes (especially earlier ones. Was he at Southern in 1972?) and George Egan director on all of them? or, do we leave it with just credit to JH & Stan. However it can give an opportunity here now to include later contributors to your project, but it would then not be appropriate to add the blue Southern End Cap...
I do not subscribe to Facebook but please feel free to put anything on there to test the views of a wider audience.
Lastly there will be a rollout of very Local TV stations across the country on Freeview with a community theme commencing next year using very directional transmitters. Both the Southampton/Isle of Wight(but not covering Bournemouth & New Forest) & Brighton areas are scheduled to get off the ground. I understand that the Southampton Station has some ex TVS/Meridian members behind it and I wonder what would be the chances of your restored project getting an airing in its old viewing territory.
I hope I have answered everything. Best wishes, Tony
Dear All. Tony Herbert, a good friend and support, has sent me this re-animation of Jack on Youtube as a fill for the space without an image in the recently restored Out of Town episode - 'Planting a Vine'. I've shown it to my family and a few others who've been helping all along with restoration of OOT. Some like it, some don't. Tony says he's happy for others to see it and both he and I would value your constructive views - positive and negative and in-between....

  • David Hunt Isn't it great how things work out in the end. The intro looks good to me and works better than the previous version with the stills.
    6 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
  • Adam Bootle I'm not sure where I stand here. I like it better than the version we have seen with the stills, but I find the lack of sync distracting. Maybe if it was a clip where Jack wasn't so animated with his gestures it may work better, its those bits that I notice the most.
    5 hours ago · Unlike · 2
  • Simon Baddeley I need these opinions. Thanks David and Adam so far.
    5 hours ago · Like
  • David Hunt There really wouldn't be another way of sorting out the sync problem unless the original footage was available. I don't think it is too much of a problem considering the lack of original footage.
    5 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
  • Mark Smith Yes Adam, I know what you mean. It is a great idea and it is far, far better than just stills but for me Jack's hand movements don't seem to go with what he is describing. If a less animated clip could be found, I think it would work better as you suggest. However, I feel I am nit-picking here as plainly a lot of good work has been going on in the background to get to the current position and I would be most upset if Tony took our comments to be negative. The concept is brilliant, just needs a little refining.
    5 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
  • David Hunt The other problem may be with any more later episodes being remastered. There is only so much footage of JH in the studio you could use.
    5 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 2
  • Adam Bootle David and Mark, I absolutely agree, its a positive step forward. Im sure even if someone did criticise Tony's great work he wouldn't take it to heart, as stated he welcomes all comments if its for the good of the project.
    5 hours ago · Unlike · 1
  • Dean Eric Hoffman When people restore listed buildings, planning often insists on some visual distinction between original construction and modern additions or restorations. Maybe that could possibly apply here as well. I would be afraid that on first viewing, the voice-picture mismatch (even though Tony did a brilliant job) would be seen as a technical fault rather than a convention for missing visuals. One thing that comes to mind is to use individual frames from the 'speaking Jack' in a rapid succession of stills, with maybe some interesting rostrum work (panning, zooming, dissolves, etc.) which would evoke the same feelings, but within a clear convention.
    4 hours ago · Unlike · 2
  • David Hunt Maybe Simon could record the introductions himself?
    3 hours ago via mobile · Like
  • Simon Baddeley Paul Peacock suggests that. But I don't want to get between JH and his audience. If I had Jack's camera craft I'd consider it. Maybe I should do a screen test (:)) See this from 03'50"-05'40? https://vimeo.com/12157596

    Losing the Plot - Midland Report BBC 2000

    This documentary directed and produced for BBC Midland Report by Nick Booth in 2...See more
    3 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2 · Remove Preview
  • Dean Eric Hoffman A collection such as this would certainly call for an introductory piece by Simon recounting its history. It's a good story in and of itself.
    2 hours ago · Unlike ·
Email from Paul Peacock, Jack's biographer:
Hi Simon. It is a solution, I can see that. I found myself wondering if Jack's hand movements were somehow describing the lass in the story, the size of her boobs and so on. Maybe that's the state of my mind. When the film mixed, it didn't work for me, indeed, the non synch, I think, undermined the whole thing.  A series of pics of land girls and stuff - stills, would be better, but I appreciate this would be hard work. At the same times lot of what Jack was saying was kind of irrelevant to Stan's film. Cuttings a couple of minutes into the film, I wonder if it might be possible to do something like this:
Simon piece to camera saying "Jack told a story about a land girl who wrote a book about being on the farm, having come from the city."... some parts of the story related by Simon with moving film of the city and country juxtapositioned ...Back to Simon, "So we'll let Jack tell the story from here.....Cut to Jack walking into the garden with the edit of his voice over the top.
But I understand this represents a lot of work, and I am not trying to be awkward..... ;-) 
Email from Ian Wegg, to whom I also sent the synched film:
Hi Simon, Firstly thank you for the DVD, which arrived on Thursday and I watched as soon as I got home from work. The quality is splendid (as I said on Facebook, even better than I had hoped), as far as the filming is concerned it is just as it would have been broadcast. I like Tony’s work on the shed segments and I have sent him this response...
I thought your intro worked very well (of course, with modern technology it would be possible to make a fully animated Jack with lips synchronised, but that would be a step too far!) I think a mixture of your approach and some stills. The idea of putting stills from the upcoming film has some merit I think, but it should also have pictures relevant to Jack’s narrative.For instance, I found the attached images on Google which relates to the book he talks about. For the second part it needs a picture of the house before Jack had it restored. I guess this is the sort of thing Simon could sort out. Finding appropriate pictures with rights would be a bit of work though.Incidentally, one other point is that the transition from 'shed' to film should be a dissolve. A very minor thing I know but the jump straight into film leapt out at me as not quite right.
Tony responded that he was aware of the 'dissolve to film' issue but didn’t have time to do it, so he has that covered. Just to expand on one point, something that I though worked unexpectedly well was having a still from the later film. I am particularly thinking of the butterfly on the yellow flower at the start. Seemingly a generic 'country' picture, there is something quite satisfying when it appears much later in the ragwort pulling segment; a feeling of a jigsaw piece being put into place that is quite pleasant. (or perhaps it’s just me!). To summarise, I think the opening titles are essential, then a mixture of 'animated' Jack from existing shed footage; shed stills (possibly some of those of Dave Knowles' showing the shed studio set with the cameras around to give context); stills that illustrate the narrative; brief glimpses of the upcoming film.
Of course all that is a lot of work. I offer these suggestions with the caveat that I know nothing of the commercial aspects of doing all this! Kind regards, Ian.
Email from Mark Smith:
Good morning Simon. The plough horses have been found. Wonderful! The soundtrack certainly fits them....I was surprised to see Jack doing the introduction and wondered how that was found until I noticed the speech not quite matching the film and then relished this was a clever adaptation of some other stock film. To the uninitiated, it would work fine. However, as the film went on, it became clear that the hand gestures did not match the spoken content. That may be over-critical as without the original studio introduction, this is probably as good as it can get. With a little more blending to smooth the transitions between edited sections of film, it will do the job and would be far better than just inserting a few stills to cover the introduction. I hope that doesn't come across as overly critical because I realise a lot of work has gone in to producing this sequence. It is so easy for someone like me who knows not the first thing about producing or saving a piece of film, to sit at my breakfast table, sipping my mug if tea and be critical. It could easily be regarded as rude and disrespectful but my comments are certainly not meant to be so! All in all, a good job. Kind regards, Mark
and a suggestion from Andy King:
I'm impressed with your TV performance Simon - Your TV voice has a lot of similarity with your stepfather's - timbre, measure..... delivered in a simple straightforward, unemotive and direct way - a chip off the old block perhaps. Regarding the intros to the programmes I am with Dean, Adam and Mark; for me the lack of synch distracts rather than enhances Jack's monologue. It's purely subjective but a series of appropriate still images played during Jack's into would be preferable to me. Alternatively you could re-record Jack's words yourself in a newly recorded intro but I suspect few on this site would prefer that option. I like Dean's idea that you, Paul, or someone close to Jack to write and record entirely new commentaries in addition to (not instead of) Jack's intros. Perhaps one or two new sections like this could be used in addition to Jack's own intros where appropriate.
*** *** ***
There's Facebook site in Corfu called Corfu Grapevine. Its administrator, Linda Kontomares, writes that... the group was created with the foreign population living in Corfu in mind...
...where you can communicate whether from the North, South or central of the island about whats going on at the moment, if you are looking for something, selling a used item, requesting advice or just want to pass on your experiences regarding local offices or services etc., here is the place to do it.....However, we have had so much interest from people who have previously lived here, want to live here or holiday here year on year, and who are now Members of the group - please be aware that your comments are reaching a much wider audience. I trust that all members will have Corfus Best Interest at Heart, and will respect all fellow members. PLEASE NOTE - a) - THIS IS NOT A FORUM AND IS NOT THE PLACE TO TAKE PART IN ANY LENGTHY DISCUSSIONS - there are many Corfu Forums out there - USE THEM.....
The group was only started a few months ago, already has over 4000 members inside and outside Greece, encourages the use of English and is confidently Little Britain in tone...Here are some quotes, mildly redacted, from Facebook in the early hours of 9/8/13:

            



Tricia Giles I think that some will never be adult enough to listen to opinions that they don't agree with. They are too busy shouting them down.
10 hours ago
    
            



Elizabeth Vlassi codswollop!
10 hours ago
           
            



Paul Christian FFS .. it's always the same old witches group .. gang up on the person with a different opinion ... and I'm not crying victim like all you people who can't take it do ... xxx .. you are a self centred , know it all old bag and a hypocrite to say the least .. one day we will meet and sort this out .. let's face it .. you don't like me and I hate you .. lets leave it like that .. xxxi .. biggest hypocrite who HATES the British .. opened her legs for money and then had her kids educated in the UK .. because Greece wasn't good enough. xxx .. FFS .. what a joke YOU are .. you need to come off the valium love. xxx .. say no more .. you get Xmas cards from the local off licence and xxx ... big bump coming you Umpa Lumpa ... watch it when you hit the ground .. pavement damage !! Just to let you all know .. i have a GREAT life ... and I really don't need all your insecure shit in my life .. and just likexxx ... I'm chickening out ... difference is .. I REALLY don't give a f**k ..mmmwwwaaaah !!
 OH .. forgot Janet Fruitcake .. who after disagreeing with a comment I made .. PM'd me with this .. just as she blocked me .. so giving me no chance to reply ... "Paul why don't you just stop picking for a fight all the time go and get a sun tan or something...please!!! l think everyone is sick of you and your arguments . did you know there is a closed facebook page about you l have not started of course .... so many people will be glad to see the back of you... but least you won't be forgotten when you go back to the uk ... its so sad you hate being here so much" .. we WILL meet one day Janet .. and I will reply.
10 hours ago
          
            



Heather SkinnerLinda Kontomares, you asked that inappropriate posts were brought to your attention. Before this nasty little man deletes his vile rantings if he has the sense to realise what an offensive little oik he is, I will certainly copy and post to you the above libellous comments he has made to others, and the violent threat he has made to me. I may well also take this matter further through appropriate legal channels.
10 hours ago





            
            



Paul Christian F**K YOU Skinner .. you know it all bitch .. bring it on !!
10 hours ago
            
            



Katie Jane Flower Ladies, do not respond.
10 hours ago




            
      



Paul Christian Come and meet me ... tomorrow
10 hours ago
           
            



Ozzy Corfu What a low life comment sorry Paul it had to be said I remind you of your previous post You know .. it's like watching the BBC parliament channel (god forbid) and being offended when Cameron has a go at Miliband because you have socialist views ... OH MY GOD CAMERON, SHUT UP OR I WILL HAVE TO SWITCH OFF YOU BULLY .. the debate still goes on .. that's life.
10 hours ago 
          
            



Paul Christian That's right Ozzy Corfu .. I am sick of being called because of my opinions .. and don't think everyone loves you .. a lot just humour you ... sorry maye but true.
10 hours ago
          
            



Ozzy Corfu I sincerely hope they don't all love me. That would be so boring!!
10 hours ago· 
           
            



Annie Hawkins Oh dear, true to form then Mr. Woodings/Christian.
10 hours ago





            
           



Annie Hawkins I love you Ozzy Corfu.
10 hours ago·
            
            



Ozzy Corfu Now don't get to boring Annie LOL
10 hours ago·





            
           



Paul Christian Yes Annie Hawkins .. and true to form for you ... thinking you are clever by posting my real name and my stage name ... WHO gives a f**k .. I don't mind and I'm sure that the world doesn't .. you are so so sad ... my God your life must be so boring ... probabaly worse than Heather Skinner s ... which let's face it ... lol
 Anyway .. come on peeps .. bring it on .. have a go ..'cos this post won't be here in the morning .. and unlike most of you I have the balls to say what I think .. and can laugh off your pathetic comments ...pmsl
9 hours ago

I complained: Saturday
  • 21:14
    Linda Kontomares
    Hi Simon, Thanks for copying and sending me the above. As I am at work all day and night Fridays - I didnt have chance to get on top of this yesterday. Paul Christian has now removed himself from the group and the post and comments were deleted. Thank you again for taking the time to forward it to me. Regards.
  • 21:50
    Simon Baddeley
    Dear Linda. Thanks for coming back to me. Congratulations of starting and maintaining such a successful FB site, It must be a handful at times though. Kind regards, Simon
This slightly negative experience of Corfu Grapevine changed on seeing this film posted on the site...

What a brilliantly crafted gem of a tale, not about a goose, or geese (tho' it's a delight to finally see them part way through) but about all Corfu in the last 40 years - and how joyful to hear the language and the prose "The absence of the goose hangs in the morning air"!
The film-makers say the film was made on a drunken evening...oh yeah? The filmcraft shines through, not least the steady shots, the editing and the back-research. Transparently a labour of love.
'The Beach that lost its Goose' sketches visitors and locals, all ages, in a variety that subverts the easy generalisations to which I'm prone. Doesn't art do that? I enjoy how the film-maker tight-ropes between involvement and detachment. There's nothing voyeuristic or judgemental in the tale of the nameless goose - tho' I'm confused by the suggestion that in Greek 'goose' translates, according to one of the people filmed, as 'ejaculation'. Χήνα; I think not, but who am I to know? I'm also intrigued by the concept of a 'rescue-goose' (yeah yeah). The project is an entertaining mix of mickey-take, in collusion with those filmed, on BBC docu-style - see the taciturn proprietor who fed the goose 'marijuana' - and poignancy without sentimentality, at times just very funny ("How did the goose come?" "It come by swimming over the sea" Greeks have a way - half my family is Greek - of being almost contemptuously surprised at anyone not knowing something so obvious as the meaning of life), while giving a jolly good mixed plug for father and son Yiannis' and (the late) Spyros' (such rare names) Cafe-Bar - 'toilets rarely cleaned' - at one end of Pelekas Beach.
*** *** ***

Spent the greater part of Thursday - Eid-al-Fitr by the way - enjoying HHH work with Mohammed Taj, who breaks his Ramadan fast this day, clearing a garden - front and back - laying a lawn, making a flower bed and removing rubbish, for a householder in Handsworth. At intervals I was plied with cups of tea and custard donuts, while the children of the house enjoyed playing with Oscar. Being Ramadan Taj could have only water.
Taj gets ready to lay turf

↧

Estate work

August 12, 2013, 6:11 am
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Lin holds the rope I've slung round the upper branches of the tree that overhangs Rock Cottage; ties it for safety round a tree trunk. Up a ladder leaning on the fork of the tree, I start sawing through a limb of the heavy soft ash, having cut, with my bow saw, a wedge on the side in the direction we plan for the branch to fall. I won't use the chain saw up a ladder.
This hasn't been done for since summer 2011, and then when I was on my own and avoided felling the larger limbs...

...As the branches start to speak I descend and both of us share hauling the rope, rocking away at the half-cut until they give; until they crack and slowly begins to fall while we keep pulling. So each of the five spreading branches drop where they should, missing the roof of the house.

On the ground the amputation is further de-limbed; cut into smaller lengths with a 12" chain saw. Other smaller trees - mainly birch behind the cottage - succumb. More will come down on our next visit when we'll need to scythe, sickle and mow grass. Meanwhile, Lin wields the hedge cutter clearing spreading brambles, cotoneaster, dog rose, ash saplings, hazel tips and ageing budleia, building up a stew of logs and foliage around the edge of the cottage.
"Next time we're here, we'll get some order in this chaos...cut logs and kindling and stack it below the lean-to. We'll have to get a professional to cut the ash trees along the path. They're already too tall and heavy for me. We'll get a good load of fire logs from them."
Now at least the repaired walls and roof of Rock Cottage are open to the sun needed to dry out the parts that had dampened from wind-driven leaks now sealed.
The garage by the road below us has been full of cast off objects for too long. Lin phoned G W Edwards, scrap dealers, in Cinderford who sent round a man with a small truck in half-an-hour and - for £5 - off went an old fridge, a doorless washing machine, along with a bicycle last used twenty years ago, the old wood stove now replaced, a couple of Calor gas stoves tattered by rust, a fireguard and length of stove pipe.
"How much will you get for that lot?" I asked
"Ooh, we'll be lucky to get £2.00"
"I think not" said Lin later

*** *** ***
Yesterday saw an annual celebration in Corfu in honour of the island's patron Saint Spyridon, our village Philharmonia taking part, and there's our neighbour Dimitra, far left in the first picture...

Λιτανεία τ' Αγιού 11.08.13
Λιτανεία του ιερού σκηνώματος του Αγίου Σπυρίδωνοςστην πόλη της Κέρκυρας, σήμερα Κυριακή 11 Αυγούστου 2013, σε ανάμνηση της σωτηρίας του νησιού από τους Τούρκους, που  για 40 ημέρες πολιορκούσαν  την πόλη, το 1716. Μια ισχυρότατη βροχόπτωση, που αποδόθηκε σε θαύμα του πολιούχου Αγίου, έτρεψε τότε τους οθωμανούς σε άτακτη φυγή. Με ψήφισμα της, η Ενετική Γερουσία  καθιέρωσε λίγους μήνες αργότερα, την Λιτανεία της 11ης Αυγούστου.
11august2013b.jpg

Η πομπή με εκκίνηση από την εκκλησία του Πολιούχου, θα κάνει το γύρο της πλατείας (Σπιανάδας), με δύο στάσεις για ισάριθμες δεήσεις μπροστά από το Παλιό Φρούριο και το Παλάτι αντίστοιχα, συνοδευόμενη από 8 Φιλαρμονικές, μεταξύ των οποίων και αυτή του Χωριού μας. Το ιερό σκήνωμα του Αγίου θα συνοδεύουν 8 Μητροπολίτες, εκ των οποίων οι δύο από Ουκρανία και Λευκορωσία.
11august2013e.jpg

Έντονη η λιακάδα στο νησί, αλλά σαφώς λιγότερος ο κόσμος που παρακολούθησε τη Λιτανεία. «Λιγότεροι οι πιστοί, αρκετοί οι περιηγητές» θα σημειώσει μονολογώντας ο ιερέας δίπλα μας και ανάμεσά τους και αρκετοί χωριανοί μας.
11august2013f.jpg 11august2013d.jpg 

11august2013g1.jpg
Χθες, παραμονή της εορτής, στην μικρή εκκλησία της Πλάστιγγας, θα τελεστεί όπως κάθε χρόνο Λειτουργία, με τη γενική φροντίδα της οικογένειας Σαββανή… Οι «επιτελούντες» θα απολαύσουν στο τέλος καφέ και αναψυκτικό στη σκιά από τις δαφνιές της αυλής.
Υ.Γ. Ανέλπιστη η φετινή παραγωγή σπύρδας για το Γιάννη Κένταρχο... τόσο που χρειάστηκε φορτηγάκι για τη μεταφορά, αφού δεν χωρούσαν στο αυτοκίνητο του γιου του, Σπύρου...Πιο πάνω, στο στένεμα του δρόμου, η κυρά-Χαρίκλεια, απτόητη από τη ζέστη, τραγουδάει από το παραθύρι της «Δυο μαύρα μάτια», καλωσορίζοντας ταυτόχρονα τις δεσποινίδες Μαρία και Έλλη Βαρβαρίγου, άρτι αφιχθείσες στο χωριό.11august2013h1.jpg

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How depressing and incredibly awful...or is it?

August 17, 2013, 3:52 am
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TheIrish Times, Tue, Aug 13, 2013 by a friend in Corfu - Richard Pine:
A report in these columns in July that an Italian senator had referred to the black Italian minister for integration as an “orangutan” should not give readers the impression that xenophobia is exclusively Italian. After all, it was the Greeks who, unwittingly perhaps, invented the word, even though up to now foreign guests (xenos) have been honoured and welcomed. But also last month, Nikos Michaloliakos, leader of Golden Dawn(GD), Greece’s neo-fascist party, referred to two Greek citizens, Giannis Antetokounpo and his brother Thanassis (sons of Nigerian immigrants), as “chimpanzees”. Giannis is a rising star in basketball. Last year a member of the highly successful Greek national basketball team, Sophocles Schortsianitis (Greek father, Cameroon mother), was also denounced by another GD MP for being insufficiently Greek. “Greeks have never been black” the GD leader proclaimed. He should read Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, which argues that ancient Greece, probably including its genetic structure, derived much from Africa and the Middle East...But racism is not GD’s only policy. It also pursues anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim policies and activities, encouraging arson attacks on synagogues and mosques in an effort to purify Greece of all non-Greek elements. In doing so it has secured 18 of the 300 seats in parliament – 6% of the total vote, which in Ireland would give a neo-blueshirt party 10 Dáil seats. Golden Dawn is in direct political descent from the military junta of 1967-1974, which it reveres. Its symbol is a version of the swastika, members give the Nazi salute, deny the Holocaust, and at a recent rally they sang the Nazi marching song Horst-Wessel-Lied, which is banned in Germany. Hitleresque harangues against Jews have reached the point where Michaloliakos lays the blame for the world economic crisis at the doors of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy, calling Jews “the absolute evil”. Vigilante groups in the cities pick on immigrants such as Afghans for beatings, to which the police (many of whom are GD supporters) turn a blind eye. At the GD food kitchen for the needy, production of Greek identity papers is required – or a beating is likely to be administered. At a time of austerity, with everyone feeling the economic pinch, it’s not difficult to understand why Greeks should feel some resentment at the huge scale of legal and illegal immigration through Greece’s porous borders. But the idea that you should not be in Greece at all unless you have four Greek grandparents is untenable. Perhaps few in Greece would argue with a “Greece for the Greeks” slogan, but to suggest that all foreigners should be expelled does not sit well with the concepts of democracy or inclusivity, to say nothing of EU laws. If Antetokounpo had been white and of Finnish origin rather than Nigerian he might not have attracted the “chimpanzee” insult but he would, by GD’s standards, be ineligible to represent his country. It’s not all that long ago (1985) that the then bishop of Limerick stated that you could not be Irish unless you were Gaelic, Catholic and nationalist. If a neo-blueshirt party had the power to adopt GD-style policies, it would call for the expulsion of public figures such as Paul McGrath, Simon Zebo, Kevin Sharkey, and Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, while former TD Moosajee Bhamjee and current minister Leo Varadkar would also be on the next boat. Public support Under these rules, Éamon de Valera could not have made the cut for a place in “Irish-Ireland”. In Greece, former prime minister George Papandreou, with an American mother, would be out, despite an impeccable political ancestry. Before the 2012 election, Michaloliakos stated “we are outside the political system”, indicating his disaffection from current democratic processes. GD is no longer “outside the system”. Public support is increasing; the party, according to opinion polls, is on 10 per cent, which would give it 30 seats in parliament. One citizen echoed Michaloliakos when he pointed out that GD is “doing what the politicians should be doing. There’s a hole, and they fill it” – referring to GD’s vigilante presence on the streets. In a small village in Corfu, 44 people voted for GD...
May 2012 and June 2012 General Election poll in Ano Korakiana - Golden Dawn votes went down!
...far higher than the national average and an indication of local frustration. Subsequently, an English resident of the village was threatened by a neighbour. The fact that someone whose judgement one respected and whose friendship one cherished could give his support to an out-and-out fascist party is a measure of the disenchantment felt by many Greeks with mainstream politics.
My son was in the centre of Birmingham with his camera on 20 July and took pictures of the English Defence League (EDL) marching.
EDL march in Birmingham ~ 20 July 2013 (photo: Richard Baddeley)
"Most of them seemed to be very angry. Spoiling for a fight." he said
"The same people who get thrills being violent at football matches? England scares them"
"I saw them in their coaches when they were leaving. Fired up. Mouthing through the windows"
"They must see so much to hate. The present is confusing."

This from Democracy Street, September 2012
The news as I already knew is miserable. Samaras interviewed talking in circles about liquidity and Tsipras promising to unite the left against austerity and negotiate a new contract with the EU and the Justice Minister, in a small footnote story, ‘considering’ a tougher line against racism after men in Golden Dawn T-shirts meted out street justice to non-Greek market traders who couldn't or wouldn’t show permits in Rafina and Mesolonghi, posting pictures of themselves smashing stalls on YouTube. We had our own small hint of such futile xenophobia on a walk through Venetia the other evening. A dog snarled and barked at us through a porch gate near the last corner of the village as we strolled by. The owner in a yard opposite and just above hurled curses at us for “threatening my dog with a stick” – mine or Lin’s walking stick. “No” I said “Your dog always barks when people walk by” This produced a stream of invective - ‘ μαλάκα’ or ‘wanker’ being preferred. “So is that the name of your dog?” More cursing “Don’t make me come down” “Come down but how about a bit of filotimo?” “Fuck filotimo. Why don’t you go back where you come from?” “But we’re from here” I said daringly. We strolled on, man and dog snarling. Later in town Richard P observed “Hm. That’s probably identified one of your Chrysi Avgi voters in the village” Bad eggs in villages are everywhere - not just Greece. I used to be bothered by them at other times in other places. Now it's usually water off a duck's back. This is the first example of ill-manners I’ve come across in Ano Korakiana in the five years we’ve been here; less a sign of the times I suspect, than a kind of fixture in any community - like Jud Fry in Oklahoma (or George Crabbe's Peter Grimes in Aldeburgh) the 'lonely misfit in a cast filled with wholesomeness and charm.'

Blokko in Kokkinnia in Athens on 17 August 1944

Walt Disney's WW2 animated propaganda - Education for Death - for the US government on the making of a Nazi...
In the village Lin takes her paintbrush to a swastika and filthy eggvolk icons
Reading about the past is a small antidote to the maxim that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it. I'm chary about being too extrapolative as to the trajectory of Europe's dark history. I'm not sure that Golden Dawn for all their nostalgic uniforms, ugly songs and salutes and seats in the Hellenic Parliament are more than a despairing and desparate flash in the pan. I've not yet met an intelligent or decent person in Greece who's got time for Χρυσή Αυγή, even as some may casually complain about numbers of immigrants or more particularly, in Corfu, about 'Albanians'. Richard's wrong to write, in his Irish Times piece, that the rude man we encountered one evening in Ano Korakiana is someone whose judgement 'one respected and whose friendship one cherished' The man provokes head touching among our neighbours. We're sorry for his stir-crazy dog - made vicious by circumstance.

No-one knows the history of the present. It's easy to be confused by history written too soon. We're arguing in some quarters about Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian Wars...whatever malign forces coil us - brain-rotting mass media fuelling global consumerism encouraged by modern merchants of doubt under the panoptic gaze of laking America, counterpoised to the mafia state of Russia and its satellites and the uncontrollable growths of India, Brazil and China....the story of the Third Reich (I'm reading Michael Burleigh's history again and Jan D urges me to start upon Richard Evans mighty trilogy on the same subject) can teach, but only so much. Anyone who wants to try to understand the present is at conceptual risk. It';s a start to embrace the fable of those chained men in Plato's Cave, mindful of the strangulation of Laocoön and sons. Burleigh says his book "deals with the progressive, and almost total, moral collapse of an advanced industrial society at the heart of Europe, many of whose citizens abandoned the burden of thinking for themselves, in favour of what George Orwell described as the tom-tom beat of a latter day tribalism"
The most depressing thing about Golden Dawn, but also a measure of the place where  the effects of austerity has had its highest profile, is that the most conspicuous and democratically successful of European neo-fascist groups has found a home in beloved Greece as have many others on attempted journeys from wrecked war-torn economies further east. I'm well aware of Greece's reputation for corruption in the highest parts of its government and church. Like many who know and study the country where they spend much of their lives, I'm educated in that criticism. Little can shock me about this land I love; a place whose countenance is part of me...as my g.g.grandfather said "except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin", and Auden "had Greek civilisation never existed, we would never have become fully conscious" and Bertrand Russell "the legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy"and Shelley "her citizens rule the present from the past"
Yet oddly enough this enveloping legacy, once examined, can place a different light on my philhellenism; on the depth of my feelings for the wondrous land...
Byron wrote to friend in the year before he died in Greece: '...I did not come here to join a faction but a nation, and to deal with honest men and not with speculators or peculators, (charges bandied about daily by the Greeks of each other) it will require much circumspection to avoid the character of a partizan, and I perceive it to be the more difficult as I have already received invitations from more than one of the contending parties, always under the pretext that they are the ‘real Simon Pure’. After all, one should not despair, though all the foreigners that I have hitherto met with from amongst the Greeks are going or gone back disgusted. Whoever goes into Greece at present should do it as Mrs Fry went into Newgate - not in the expectation of meeting with any especial indication of existing probity, but in the hope that time and better treatment will reclaim the present burglarious and larcenous tendencies which have followed this General Gaol delivery..."
My love for Greece is charged with sentimental memories of my own connections, the adventures of a happy traveller who's been visiting the country since arriving there one spring morning as an impressionable 16 year old, but without the talent of a Henry Miller, a Durrell, a Kevin Andrews or Leigh-Fermor - but equally seduced by Greece and the Greeks I met and the places I saw, the sacred Acropolis, Olympia, high Delphi almost free, in 1957, of fellow visitors, Nauplion, Epidavros, Corinth; the things I did, Saturday Easter procession in Athens, meals that ran into hours where I'd normally been long in bed, and with my cousins and Greek family in Kifissia for my first lamb roast, and five years later, in 1962, sailing from England to Greece...
On Danica in a calm off the southern Peloponnese
 ...via France and Italy, across the Ionian Sea to land at Killini, cruising slowly through the Gulfs of Patras and Corinth, threading the deep gorged Canal into the Saronic Gulf, arriving in sweltering Athens; visiting islands, sailing below the great capes of the Peloponnese - Malea and Tainaro and Akritas - and years later with the passing of the stone years returning to Athens with my closest family...

Amy with her mum in Athens
Richard at Venizelos on the way to Corfu
Amy with Natasha and Anna, her cousins, at Methoni
...to travel on a day long drive from Athens to Pylos crossing the ranges that divide the Peloponnese - Parnosas, Taygetus, and the lower mountains before the coast above Pylos and Navarino. Which islands? Cythera, Zakinthos, Cephalonia, Paxos in the Ionian Sea; in the Aegean, Aegina, Hydra, Kimolos, Mykonos and more...
Kymolos
With my brother George in the Aegean
Civil War - Nikos Engonopoulos 
My good fortune has been that my feelings for Greece have been shared by Linda, who might have decided the place was alright for one holiday but instead lives with me for months of the year on Democracy Street, but why should I juxtapose this rich almost lifelong experience with the contempt I have for the rise of the eggvolk and the shame I feel at this party's success in the assembly of Republic and on the streets of Athens and in too many other settlements across the country? Such a comparison is ridiculous. A proper one would be with the history of Greece, ancient and modern, with its great democracy that excluded women, with an economy driven by slavery, with its endless politicking, its ostracisms, its feuds, and many wars - civil and national - its massacres, murders, assassinations, executions, its betrayals, traitors, demagogues, tyrants and bullies, and that's just ancient Greece. Imagine too the hideous violence and atrocities of the War of Independence from the Turks, still almost impossible to describe to Greek schoolchildren, and the great population exchange and the bloody failure of the 'big idea' to recover Constantinople, capital of Byzantium, and the heartlands of Asia Minor, Cappadocia, Ionia, the Pontus and the former Russian province of Kars in the Caucasus and Bithynia, Nicomedia and Eastern Thrace - events still hardly mentionable. Then the occupation with its collaborators, informers and traitors and then, some say, even worse the Greek civil war of 1946-1949...and the coup of the Junta and their cruelties yet to come...
Picnic on Execution Island
POEM BY NIKOS ENGONOPOULOS 1948
this age
of civil strife
is no age
for poetry
and such like:
when something is about
to
be written
it's
as if
it were being written
on the other side
of death announcements
which is why
my poems
are so bitter
(and when - in any case - were they not?)
and are
- above all -
also
so
few
Being sad and fearful about contemporary Greece is understandable, what's foolish is to be blinded into thinking that what is happening here is out of the ordinary - for Greece. What's short-sighted is to assume that those wonders, with which old Greece illuminates our present, were not forged amid enduring proportions of good and evil.

*** *** ***
Me with Jim
I got a letter - a sort of a slightly dedicated form letter - from the Secretary of the Victoria Jubilee Allotments warning me to cultivate my plot...I hoped I'd never get one of these, having known others getting them prior to a council 'notice to quit'. It's a long drawn out process especially as allotment take-up has slowed right down as the urban middle classes (that includes me) collide with the reality of what's involved in running an allotment and growing their own vegetables.
Quick reply:
Dear Gill
I fully accept your ‘wake-up and get gardening' caution dated 12th August 2013 just received.
The state of the plot  on the Victoria Jubilee that I share with my wife has indeed been a cause of concern to us and obviously to the association committee..
It’s an explanation - not an excuse - but we have been preoccupied with the estate of my late mother who died recently.
Things are now becoming less busy on that front so there will be more time to get on with the important business of cultivating Plot 14.
We appreciate the warning and you and your colleagues' work on the site committee.
Kindest regards
Simon
I'm humiliated but rightly so. These sort of complaints run through my life. I first received them at school - reports, summons to the teacher - later it would be a friendly chat or a letter from somewhere. By and large I've found these prods vexing but ultimately useful. I have a procrastinatory temperament, easily led away from the proper priorities. It's why I like Jackdaws.
Jackdaws enjoy playing with shiny objects and other small household items, which gives them a reputation as thieves. My impression is that they are actually always checking out whether this or that trifle might be suitable for a nest. Konrad Lorenz' sketches, in 'King Solomon's Ring', where he has a chapter on the birds, capture what I noted in Jim better than any photos I've seen. The Jackdaw mentality in humans refers to a tendency to collect trivia in the fruitless hope that all may come together to explain the meaning of life...24/5/07
So I'm working harder on the maelstrom plot, entangled in couch grass, covered in meadow grass and flowers, things my friend Robin - also served a notice - argues are benign and useful and libelled by those who demand 'cultivation'. He's right of course but talking rubbish.
Fighting on Plot 14
The other evening I was cycling through the allotments in dusk after three hours digging when I was stopped by Vanley on the edge of the beautifulest plot on the whole site. I'd heard sounds, possibly music, and twice clapping, but continued my labours.
"Come Simon" said Vanley. he led me through the maze of paths that neatly divide his many vegetables, some burgeoning, some started, some already cropped.
"How do you get such a stroll onto one plot, Vanley?"
We came to a hard earth floored bower protected by a temporary piece of white tenting slung from uprights and part of the hedge, low benches around and a log fire burning and the remains of a meal of unleavened bread and cooked vegetables.
"Sit Simon"
"I regard this as a disgrace, sitting round enjoying yourselves"
"Have some elderflower champagne I've made, picked in the Sandwell Valley" said Jeevan offering me a bottle which I prised open to a satisfying hiss
"Share"
"Hmmmm. Not sure I want to"
The bottle passed around. A delicate fizzy drink, most pleasing after my digging
"Thank you so much for inviting me"
One of the gardeners showed me a film on his smart phone of one of Scylla's young boys playing the fiddle magically - a little concert I'd missed, tho' catching the applause.
"He'll go far" said one.
As people tidied up I was asked more about the old campaign to save the allotments. I spoke of the country lanes that used to run through the site, with doors off them to people's gardens.
"I tried, we tried, to get the developer and the council to ensure they stayed but they were cleared"
On a path on the old Victoria Jubilee Allotments



"So what's happening about the playing fields that are supposed to be laid out by the developer"
"There's a site meeting on 5 September with people from the council and Persimmon Homes. I'm asked to join that, so I'll learn more"
The discussion turned to the difficult topsoil on the VJA
"Yes I know, lots of rubbish, plastic, metal, bricks"I said 'but if Vanley and others can make plots like this, I don't want to make excuses"
"But I'm digging a plot over here" one pointed to the neighbouring piece of ground "and a spade's length down I'm hitting building rubble"
"I think the developer flattened the site and then when they'd finished levelling and completed the houses they bulldozed a pile of earth and rubble and all sorts including their works site, which you can see on Google maps, and called it topsoil.
"Don't get me wrong. Some of its good stuff but it needs a lot of work"
I made a pact with myself about more preparing of the earth on Plot 14.
"Do you think I need more manure?"
"Good idea and more compost"
 I was getting encouragement like Mole from Rattie and Badger and other characters circled around me from The Wind in the Willows. 
I cycled home happy in the dark.
*** ***
Yesterday was the closing date for bids on the sale of Brin Croft, under a month since Lin and I cleared the house and tidied its grounds. Phiddy, our estate agent phoned to say that, out of several offers, one for both house and lochan was especially worth accepting.
Brin Croft in winter

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'Another soul'

August 19, 2013, 2:59 am
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Robin, my friend, and neighbouring plot-holder, on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments has just circulated an email to me, and others who might be interested, having persuaded me, who really wanted to stay out of it and first prove myself a gardener...  
....of Novalis' quoted by Conrad on the start page of Lord Jim - which I did for 'A' level English Lit - 'It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.'

Subject: Draft of: Motion on VJA information policy, for consideration at AGM
Date: 19 August 2013

Dear VJA Members,
I am copying below a draft of a motion that I am proposing for consideration at the next AGM.  Simon has agreed to second it. If anyone has any suggestions for improving on this draft then please let us know as soon as possible. Otherwise please consider it as being here submitted 'as is' for inclusion in the AGM's Agenda and for the Motion and its Rationale to be included in the notices of the AGM.
Thank you, Robin (Clarke)

Motion for consideration at AGM 2013

Rationale for the following motion: A number of Members have expressed concern about lack of informing and consulting about what the Committee are planning or deciding. Even non-committee Members have to pay their rent (which more and more are finding difficult) and have to invest time in working their plots (which some find burdensome), and their membership needs to be respected and encouraged. We need to be attracting more new members and not risking disenchanting existing members by not informing and consulting them. In order to alleviate the hard work of running the Association, more plotholders need to be involved, and that cannot be achieved without keeping the entire membership better informed and more involved.

Motion Proposed by Robin Clarke
Seconded by Simon Baddeley

"That the following Annex be attached to the Constitution of the Association."
Annex to Constitution

The important and key role of the Officers and Committee as volunteers enabling the effective functioning of the VJA is recognised.  However there is not any basis for some Members having greater or lesser access to information within the association. 
Except where there is some consensually clearly accepted basis for making an exception: 
(a) All meetings shall be open to and notified to all Members.
(b) All meetings shall be minuted. 
(c) All meetings shall have as an opening item “Minutes of the last meeting”, at which draft previous Minutes will be corrected if necessary and then agreed. 
(d) All Minutes and Drafts of Minutes shall be posted on the Notice Board and circulated to all members as promptly as is practical. 
(e) (Subject to Clause (h) below,) Minutes of meetings shall avoid generalisations but instead make clear the specifics of what is being discussed and decided, such that the reader obtains the same knowledge as if they had been at the meeting themselves. 
(f) Minutes of decisions of any significance shall name the proposer and seconder and number of voters, along with statements of rationale concerning the decision. 
(g) Before any significant decision is taken the Committee and Officers shall endeavour to inform and consult with as many of the other members as possible, and take into account their views. 
(h) In the event that a Member asks for some matter of their personal circumstances to be treated as confidential to only some others, then that matter will be proceeded with as appropriate on a case-by-case basis which may include not being reported in the generally-circulated Minutes or in a generally open meeting.


*** ***
There is a door in the high privet at the bottom of their garden - Amy's and Guy's home on the edge of city. When we visit I'm strongly persuaded to fetch the key to the padlocked chain...
...and head over the fields with dog Oscar, my grandson and Cookie. In no time the rain, spattering at first, is teeming down but we run carefree across the wet mown meadow towards the wheat field beyond, divided from us by a shallow stream at the bottom of a defile, Cookie with her spaniel instinct, dashing to and fro and Oscar, getting old now, following with me in straighter lines, observing Oliver, in wet wear, who chases one dog then the other until by the unmown field verge we follow it round working our way back to the door in the hedge.


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London for the day

August 26, 2013, 4:29 am
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London was all grey overcast and drizzle. Big planes emerged, flaps down, turbines whistling, slowly processing at five minute intervals over central London down to Heathrow.
On Albert Bridge
I caught the fast morning train to London, pensioner's concession - hardly £32 return - with plenty of room in August; a frisson of sadness for departed mum when I see the intercity waiting to start for Glasgow Central on the New Street platform where I wait for my train south. I didn't feel her in the Highlands as we cleared Brin Croft but here, where I could recall the pleasant anticipation of one of my long journey's north, I did, and always will no doubt.

I cycled the familiar route - Gordon Street opposite Euston, past hedged Torrington Square and on to Trafalgar Square threading the congestion, down Whitehall past the Houses of Parliament onto the Embankment...
Thames embankment with sleepers

 ...straight on along the new blue cycle route to where it crosses the river at Chelsea Bridge and on half a mile to frail Albert Bridge, then across the brown river to take a right on to Parkgate Street. Just before it meets Battersea Bridge Road is Phoenix Cycles where I leave my Brompton with Mike, and his son Tom, for servicing. Meantime at a greasy spoon, run by Vietnamese, I take Full English beside tattooed workers in hi-vis tabards; one more - an African - arrives smoking a cheroot...
...the scent of musty paper and rich earth burning clashes with the buttered toast bacon black pudding sausage beans aroma of my classic ethnic meal
"You're spoiling my breakfast" I mumble as traffic rumbles by our outdoor tables. I'm ignored for a minute to save face and then the cheroot is stubbed. Later I count the cost of repairing my bicycle; a whole new back wheel unit as I've no time for rebuilding a wheel whose hub has worn paper thin with use. That also means a new chain and hub gears; new saddle; new brake blocks, and general tightening up and the best new tyres I can afford. I've removed the dynamo and lights front and rear, in favour of LEDs, now so efficient and cheap. Mike's bill is over £300 but the bicycle I bought from him in 2004, for £699, feels like new (perhaps better as I know it so well), as I ride it happily back across the Thames via the carriage road through Battersea Park. over Chelsea Bridge and along the river again until I turn left towards Victoria...


...where I'm to meet my friend Charles Webster from Delta Leisure at Seafresh on Wilton Road for fish and chips and tea and beer, to discuss what I'm doing with Jack's film-tape archive...
Out of Town - Restored to life. Charles with the blue-print we've discussed for tape-film synchs
Then back up Whitehall, up Charing Cross Road to Euston and another fast train home, enjoying my latest procedural - the intelligent work of Grijpstra and de Gier in The Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering; back home in time to take the minutes of a meeting of Handsworth Helping Hands, including a querying of our guest - my friend Andrew Simons, now its Community Engagement Officer - about an ambitious local investment, in which HHH might be involved. In common with similar central government initiatives across the country, it's called in our area, Birchfield Big Local, and those most directly involved, in particular Raj Rattu, a lapsed member of HHH, have recently been in receipt of £20,000 to spend on planning how to spend  a promised £1000000.
Handsworth Helping Hands discussing possible involvement with Big Local after Andrew's left
From our FB pages:
**** ****
Jan Didrichsen has sent me one of his valued emails:
Hi Simon
Back from South of France, trying to get my brain back into gear (with some difficulty) having gorged on Nordic Noir thrillers for the best part of 3 weeks, a bit of an addict I am afraid, must be a dark Nordic undercurrent in my psychology. All those formative years enduring long dark winters in sub-zero temperatures have probably left an imprint (well that’s my excuse!) Have been following your blog. Some worrying political developments in Greece esp around Golden Dawn. EDL are clearly trying to create something similar here but our circumstances (at the moment) are more resilient than those in Greece. Would you agree with that? But there is no reason to be complacent. The whole issue of immigration and everything tied into it has gone to the top of the political agenda. There is a danger of a 'race to the bottom'. There seems to be a competition between parties as to who can be the toughest without any clear idea of what that actually means in practice other than deliberately or otherwise stoking irrational and potentially poisonous responses and circumstances. A rational and well informed debate on this issue would actually be positive but I fear we are beyond the point where this is possible. Too many 'Sacred Cows' across the whole political spectrum will have to be culled for this to happen.
Reflecting in the sunshine on a Mediterranean beach I was beginning to question my own commitment to evidence based policy formulation and a rational approach to politics. Regrettably but not surprisingly, emotions, prejudice, perceptions fuelled by anxiety and anger, are the major driving forces in political development and processes; all of which creates, and is sustained, by strong ideologies. We know that facts are manipulated to serve ideological ends; so called 'independent' think tanks are fronts to promote certain  ideologies, financially  supported by vested interests. I am struggling to weave any meaningful Localism into this scenario. I note with interest that you are reading Michael Burleigh's book on the Third Reich. His linkage of politics in the Third Reich to religious crusades is an interesting one with a wider application than just the Third Reich. It’s a very attractive proposition for certain politicians. You may find his more recent book 'Moral Combat' (an oxymoron?) interesting in parts. You are no doubt familiar with Goldhagen’s controversial book. Whether you agree with all his analysis or not it is depressing to note how easy it was to recruit ordinary people including public servants to carry out mass murder on an unprecedented scale; no coercion or threats were necessary. That’s the power of ideology based on prejudice, misinformation, anger, fear, hate and associated irrationalities. It does not need threats or force to be successful or the threats can just be  implied and hidden.
The story of Police Battalion 101 is a warning from history. Can’t work out what all this means for localism or local democracy but it feels relevant somehow.
It would be good to meet up sometime this autumn. I have treated myself to another monstrous 4X4 vehicle so you may not want to be seen in public with me!
Best
Jan 
*** *** ***
I have been continuing to struggle with the small piece of land I rent next to Handsworth Park - Plot 14 on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments. My plot is hard on me, repaying my neglect; my inadequacy as a steward; my lack of prescience about just how much work it would require:
...An allotment is a test of character. This is what wasps and slugs have done to some of my produce. It makes me more determined to succeed but I do understand why so many people have been abandoning their middle class dreams of growing their own vegetables. I see now why peasants and poor farmers, if not forced of their land by exploiting landlords, also wanted to migrate to the cities and buy their food with their wages rather than with the sweat of their brows.



  • Tracey Parsons That's why we haven't done ours this year. The time involved over the past three years just keeping the caterpillars and mice away was just too much but we are planning trying again next year. We need better netting but we have no idea how to keep the field mice away from our strawberries and raspberries! The wasps eat our apples and the birds eat the cherries before we have time to pick anything! It's such a shame as we have a lovely veggie plot. Good luck Simon.. 
    5 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 2
  • Zena Phillips Referring back to an earlier post of yours Simon, our school had an allotment. while the girls were in the domestic science room learning how to make bread, preseve eggs in isinglass, gut and fillet fish etc, the boys had to walk to and work on the allotment
    4 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
  • Simon Baddeley Modern farmers deal with this with spraying, netting and sheer volume. The only way as I see it to do this on a small scale is more or less 24/7 care. Those apples were just getting ripe when the wasps struck. Perhaps I should have picked them while they were still unripe and left them to ripen on a shelf. I could I suppose have put a net around the marrow. Some gardeners just go over their vegetables picking off every slug as it is found and plonking them in a bowl of water. I've found slug pellets useless. The first rain washes them away and the idea of beer in saucers doesn't work well in practice...excuses excuses. It's a big analogy! People these days feel they are out of control of their lives in an unforgiving world. Think of country people trying to grow their food in centuries past. Everything changes. Everything remains the same.
    4 hours ago · Edited · Like · 1
  • Derek Watts I find the wellies and torch is a very effective slug deterrent on wet evenings, the old methods have their place too, soot for those with chimneys and if you have dogs their hair clogs the little buggers up. Best of all would be black beetles a voracious slug predator.
    4 hours ago · Edited · Unlike · 2
  • Zena Phillips I used to use companion planting and choosing your crops. I didn't have an allotment, but a lovely big veg garden area. I grew a row of comfrey for plant food, green manure between crops, asparagus and artichokes etc. I found the Henry Doubleday Institute invaluable, always my first port of call in the marquee at Chelsea..
    4 hours ago via mobile · Edited · Unlike · 1
  • Derek Watts Zena do you use the comfrey leaves to make a liquid manure my uncles swore by it.
    4 hours ago · Unlike · 1
  • Zena Phillips Yes. more potency than Tomorite so you have to dilute carefully - also make sure that the brew is furthest away from the house that you possibly can.
    4 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1
  • Derek Watts I think I was aware of that 45 gallons brewing up tend to clear the sinuses very quickly.
    4 hours ago · Unlike · 2
  • Derek Watts I forgot to mention we have a herd of toads in the greenhouse and compost heap lovely guys. They do however need rescuing now and again from the dog drinker.
    4 hours ago · Unlike · 2
  • Simon Baddeley Help. Not help! but helpful. Thanks.
    4 hours ago · Like
  • Zena Phillips I used to harvest first thing in the morning, select what I needed and deliver the excess to the village shop on my way to work. We would go fifty fifty on his sales so I always covered my costs. I also had Apple, plum and pear trees and soft fruit. I would even have people waiting outside the shop for me to arrive with my just picked harvest.
    4 hours ago via mobile · Edited · Like
  • Derek Watts Something well worth the effort if you have a metal dustbin lid or similar just place it on the ground ideally in the shade the slugs will congregate underneath it allowing easy collecting soon get the numbers down.
    4 hours ago · Like · 1
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Connecting rubbish in the streets to social cohesion

August 28, 2013, 10:08 pm
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One of our ward members, Councillor Waseem Zaffar MBE, JP, chairman of Birmingham City Council's Social Cohesion and Community Safety Scrutiny Committee, wrote a piece on 25th August in the Birmingham Mail on connections between mental health and crime.
We need help to understand this complex issue  Traditionally, we haven’t talked about the link between mental health and crime. To do so appeared to undermine the moral basis of justice. Society wants the commission of crime to be a simple matter of right and wrong.
If the agent of a crime is mental illness, it clouds the issue. At the most fundamental human level, that is why criminal justice and mental health have been kept too far apart by the authorities for too long.
At last, though, that is changing. Lord Victor Adebowale’s Independent Commission on Mental Health and Policing recently submitted its 80-page report to London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
Following on from this, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, Bob Jones, held a summit on mental health and learning disability.
The Birmingham City Council scrutiny committee which I chair is now taking up this baton, with our own enquiry into mental health and criminal justice in Birmingham.
A fundamental conclusion of the Adebowale Report is that “mental health is part of the core business of policing”.
The Metropolitan Police service estimates that up to a quarter of its incidents are mental health-related. They get 20,000 more calls a year related in some way to mental health than robbery calls, and 50,000 more than sexual offences. My committee’s inquiry will be looking for this kind of data for Birmingham, and seeking to interpret it for our particular context.
Very many people with mental health issues end up committing crimes because they don’t get the right support from health and social services at an early enough stage. Currently many are not ‘diagnosed’ until they enter the criminal justice system. Our aim in this inquiry is to explore how Birmingham City Council and its partners can work together more effectively to identify and reduce the number of those with mental health issues entering the criminal justice system.
We’re inviting people and organisations from across the city to send us their views on this complex issue. We want to find out how mental health is understood across the different agencies, and who takes responsibility for what. We know some groups are over-represented in both criminal and mental health systems, so how are such inequalities being addressed?
An inquiry is only as good as the evidence it receives. This is why we want people across the city to get involved.
It's not a connection anyone living in a big city who looks around them can question. Waseem posted his article on Facebook. My response among many other positive comments:
This is lovely intelligent and decent article. We have created a pre-Victorian judgemental world that abhors the notion of mental state as an explanation for criminality, since it fudges a determination to see the world as black and white, good and evil with nowhere in between - a pre-kindergarten view of human nature. Your comments on police experience of mental illness chime closely with my daughter's WM police experience, with my wife's teaching experience on a 'tough' estate and now with our experience of people we encounter as part of our work with Handsworth Helping Hands. There are so many 'lost souls' living in a sort of twilight world, utterly outside the experience (as they are allowed or inclined to publish) of tabloid judgemental journalists. I don't budge an iota on being 'tough on crime' but let's be more sophisticated about the probability that too many of the most successful criminals don't get found by the police, don't live 'around here' but are happy to use and exploit a wide pool of mental ill-health, which they, by pushing drugs, help expand. So much minor anti-social behaviour we encounter is committed by people unable to manage their own or their children's lives. I said 'pre-Victorian' earlier, because it was from the 19th century on that we began to share the more complex understanding of connections between mental health, poverty and crime that you describe in your article, and which the media and too many of our political leaders are determined to destroy in favour of shock-horror fear-mongering about 'feckless evil layabouts in our midst.' I'm not of the Faith but I do believe with utter faith that I am my brother's keeper, and that one of the greatest of parables is that of the Good Samaritan. Too many of us pass with ignorant trepidation 'on the other side' Thanks for your article Waseem.
Handsworth Helping Hands is doing their second 'Skip it, don't tip-it' day in Crompton Road today, with an extra skip at the top of Westminster Road...


Mindful of the connections Waseem's committee is exploring, I suggested to all our ward members they might look more closely into links between litter and social cohesion...and posted the letter on HHH's Facebook pages
Dear Ward Councillors
RUBBISH  AND SOCIAL COHESION
After Cllr Waseem's wise linking of crime and mental health and therefore social cohesion, it’s taking far too long to make connections between social cohesion and the state of the environment in Lozells and East Handsworth.
You know the effect of untidy, littered messy streets and frontages comes up again and again and again as a number one priority at meetings in the ward.
It was a priority for the success of events in Handsworth Park that there be almost instant clear-ups after big events there. This means people not involved are less likely to harbour uninformed, even racist views, about people using the park for cultural celebrations. Pollution poisons more than the environment, it sticks in people’s minds as a constant irritant stirring resentment in our community against others in the same community.
Rubbish wrecks relationships! Dirt is divisive!
How about a scrutiny of the connection between social cohesion and the state of our streets looking into the prospects of enhancing partnership between BCC, Veolia (why why do we not have a re-use centre like the one in Sutton Coldfield next to the waste depot there and why can these big organisations not to do more to educate citizens about street cleaning, advancement, contamination etc?), local organisations like HHH, and the community - street by street.
You should hear us in HHH transit van when we go out scavenging, grumbling and expressing our views about ‘feckless, dirty, lazy people who chuck out rubbish everywhere? (We are always polite in direct interactions with the public!)
If we are seeing our streets and making private observations about some of our neighbours like this, I bet others are.
Littering makes enemies of neighbours who could be friends! How about that for a maxim? Simon
Linda posted a set of images on the same day:
I took these photos whilst walking home from the post office today.
Cllr. Hendrina Quinnen replied to me and fellow ward councillors, Waseem Zaffar and Mahmood Hussain, HHH's John Rose, Linda Baddeley and Mike Tye and ward officers Steve Salt, and Cllr James McKay, Cabinet Member for a Green, Safe and Smart City, as well as Nick Reid, Principal Operations Manager, Fleet and Waste Management...
Hello Simon
Thank you for your email. On behalf of the Councillors, I can confirm that:
1. We take all the Environmental Issues seriously.
2. We would like to see Lozells and East Handsworth Ward Cleaner and Greener 24/7.
3. We are trying various strategies to address this matter; this includes working in partnerships and increasing street the contacts and Environmental Groups.
4. We have now an agreed plan, that we hope to implement from September - trying to speak face to face with all the Residents.
5. We are seeking to expand Environmental Friendly Organisations/ Groups like HHH, to cover every street in our Ward.
We note the success of HHH - thanks again.
6. We are pleased that Veolia has now joined in - in this venture and will be offering some Grants to the Environmental Groups.
I hope you have accepted the invitation to the launch on Wednesday, 18 September 2013 at James road, Tyseley, Birmingham, B11 1BA, from 4.30pm.
We do invite your views on how we can improve on Keeping our Ward clean - thus tapping on your first hand experience, for the benefit of all.
Kind regards
Hendrina
My letter's a forlorn hope but I wanted to slip it in to the discourse. I wanted refine and improve the narrative connecting messed up streets to community well-being. For the moment, there's neither the interest nor - equally important - the grasp of the problem among our local politicians, that would prompt significant attention to these problems. Littering like mental health is a 'wicked' problem.
'Wicked problem' is a phrase originally used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The term ‘wicked’ is used, not in the sense of evil but rather its resistance to resolution. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.
Litter doesn't matter enough compared to other things. It's unsexy compared to issues associated with crime, social cohesion, education, housing and immigration. But then you could say the same for mental health's conflation with crime - which is why it was so good to read Waseem's article. Hendrina's doing her best and has helped with some of HHH's work on the street; the best responses we can expect, a little baffling, but we appreciate the nice remarks about HHH. Things are being done by way of the placing of litter bins, the posting of notices warning of fines for flytipping, and the work of the council's waste services people despite ever diminishing funding, and HHH has been given a grant for its work in the Ward. A phone call to Nick Reid yesterday morning had one of his people dropping off a dozen pairs of litter pick-up gloves and a hundred large trash bags to help with the 'skip it, don't tip it' day. Nick will also send some of his people down the road with a council waste truck during the day, as he has on several other occasions when we've asked. Overall our impact on the problem is miniscule. I half suspect that the way we'll end up really getting attention and shared engagement with what I'm calling 'litter' and the people I'm calling 'litterers' with all the associated attitudes that go with such opinions, will be by focusing on sustainability and in particular the idea of recycling - not throwing things away, not wasting things.
Oscar dog, Denise and Jan from HHH with Sean and Cavs of BCC after  a tidying up job in Handsworth


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Topsoil

September 3, 2013, 8:21 am
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We are still inventing ways to introduce near completed episodes from the archive, where I've managed to gat tape and film matched. Tony Herbert has been working on Francis Niemczyk's work on the original material. I sent him one version, then another...

Dear Tony. I dropped some of the text into iMovie and looking at it on screen decided to have a go at this re-draft 
          Centred title ‘RECALLED TO LIFE’ 
Text block: In the shed next to his last home in Dorset, Jack Hargreaves speaks about the collection of films recording country life he made with his friend, Stan Bréhaut - cameraman for over 20 years - on the Southern Television series 'Out of Town' 
Overlap
This clip, made in his old age, introduces, for the first time since it was broadcast, an episode – as complete as we can make it -  from the unwieldy collection of 16mm film and ¼” reel-to-reel sound tape Jack left behind 
Overlap 
(dissolve/overlap?) 
Text block: At last there's the expertise and enthusiasm to start synchronising Stan’s location work with my stepfather's recorded commentary. There was, until the 1980s, no surviving film of Jack in the studio. We’ve improvised. What follows is an episode from the rich but jumbled archive of Out of Towns left in Jack’s shed after his death in 1994 
Dissolve to theme tune & begin 'Planting a vine'
It’s shorter, Tony. Please feel free to add/subtract your own improvisation - and perhaps the whole idea of that insert at the start (to be used to kick-off  future recoveries?) is misplaced. Best, Simon
How well timed that in the first film-tape synch achieved as part of my project to restore and preserve the unwieldy archive, Jack tells me, as he often did of an interesting person unknown to me – Rachel Knappett, writer of A Pullet on the Midden, her well-told story about working for the Women's Land Army (WLA) in WW2. Jack, in an episode of Out of Town made in 1972, tells where she described the farmer starting a job, reminded of another equally urgent, so that one unfinished job leads to another and another with forays back to the one originally intended.
“How strange are these August days” I aid to Lin at 6am as she, up all night, working on her defence for a legal case to do with car parking, prepares for bed.
“It’s been unceasing hasn’t it?”
“Managing your mum’s estate”
“That’s run through our lives since she died”
“Preparing paperwork fpr Helping Hands”
“Me driving the van for lots of jobs” and helping with litter-picking, clearing gardens, digging, planting, transporting furniture, clearing rooms and houses…continuing work for the university (I was coaching scrutiny chairs all Monday afternoon in Nottingham) and the allotment"
At last our notices are being kept up to date

I went to a meeting of the Association on Sunday, which went cordially with Danny in the chair, reminding me of the sheer volume of work that attends overseeing the VJA. Afterwards I strolled by Vanley's garden - the best on the site but a source of more admiration than envy. While there I got chatting with his neighbour Ralph, who already told me of the rubble he'd dug out of his plot and how far down it was necessary to go to get a decent bed, removing stones, riddling out pebbles, adding soil conditioner.
"They were driving heavy vehicles all over here while they were building the houses. You have to go down four feet in places to reach the pan"
"The pan"
"The surface on which they were driving. Over which they scraped topsoil"
Dannie and Vanley on the VJA

"Don't worry Simon" calls Vanley "You only need go down that far for the long rooted vegetables. You can plant lots of things without digging that far down"
"Yeah but you still need to riddle, to get a half-way decent bed"
When I looked in the hole Ralph had dug beside the hard core he'd piled up beside it my heart sank. I was impressed...and here he'd gone down no more than two feet with pickaxe and spade. 
"The pan slopes down from the hedge getting deeper as you work down the plot, then this road, being unculverted, blocks water in. We were swimming on here last winter."
Ralph's dig




"You got all that out of just that space?"
"Don't get so worried, Simon" said Vanley again.
But it's hitting home to me how important it is to get the ground right. I can plant and I can dig and I can plant again but I need to work on my soil. I've got our man Taj to come and help with digging. I've ordered 3 tones of topsoil and 3 tons of manure to be delivered to the plot on Friday morning, planning to meet up with Taj at noon to plan work between now and November.
Plot 14

As I left Vanley gave me a bag of baby tomatoes, two courgettes and a cabbage, which we ate that evening with best pork sausages, gravy and onions.
"Delicious. How come" asks Lin "there's not a slug to be seen on Vanley's cabbage"
"Just don't ask. They leave his vegetables alone."
Still life with cat. Vanley's cabbage - already half eaten by us

Lin's packing drawers, in chests of drawers; furnishing to be transported to Ano Korakiana, at the same time packing suitcases for our own journey that once seemed far away. Αχ αγαπημένη Ελλάδα - και σύντομα!
Dave sends encouraging messages about Summer Song...
...hi simon most of the seats are know covered all wood is done carpet
fitted looking good just a few things to finish, but very hot when 
working regards dave
...nearly all done she is looking very good now i think you will be very happy , when are you coming over here to Corfu hope all is well with you and Lynn. Regards Dave 
...just give me a call when you get sorted out with the house, no rush, all will be ready on the boat, just a bit of work with the sailing stuff we may be should do together, regards Dave 
*** *** ***
I was on the 12th floor of Muirhead Tower sorting out difficulties with remote access to the campus server - a security headache. It started with being been fooled by a phish
Message to IT services: An hour ago I received an email I thought at first was from Apple saying my Apple ID had been temporarily frozen. I foolishly clicked on a link in the letter and entered my Apple ID which had the same password as my campus account. I was then asked to give credit card details. I at once went to Apple forums and got a warning of the phish - rare in Apple. I have at once changed my campus password on the assumption it may have been harvested, and have changed my Apple ID.
Well of course my campus account was frozen by IT Services. I couldn't get it back without help. Peter Aston took me in hand. We went through the process of reconnecting. I was shown how to activate FileVault on my Mac, encrypting it and making my emails secure in line with campus Data Protection guidelines.
Peter sorts out my problems




*** *** *** ***
Last Wednesday Nick Booth arranged for a group of us to visit the new Library of Birmingham. I asked Richard to come too. About ten of us were guided round by Tom Epps - starting at the lowest floor which included the Music Library right up to the open terrace overlooking Centenary Square and the reconstructed panelled Shakespeare Room where Richard with his schoolfriend Jonathan, 9 or 10 years old at the time, had met a re-enacted Queen Victoria in the same room in the old library.
The old library from the new












Richard in the new Library
I was delighted with the place; having been unimpressed with its exterior I liked the interior - the wide vistas up, down and across the nine floors, the presence of books co-existing with evolving technologies of communication. I enjoyed all the new views of Birmingham from higher floors, including looking almost directly into our flat on the top floor of Cambridge Tower.
Back door of the library - Nick Booth in the background
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Handsworth Helping Hands this afternoon....
Laura Haynes
Help needed I am having sme sofas delivered today and I'm trying to gt my other 1 out but I physically cnt do it I've tried could any1 posb help me asap x

Like ·  · Unfollow Post ·  · 3 hours ago via Mobile
Linda Baddeley
DOES ANYONE WANT THIS MOSES BASKET WITH ROCKING STAND BEFORE I PUT IT ON GUMTREE? I'D RATHER IT WENT TO SOMEONE IN HANDSWORTH.
It's in as-new condition, has the mattress, but doesn't have the frilly liner/cover. It does have the plastic things for holding a lining hood, though. If you want it, please call me on 0121 554 9794 to arrange collection.
I'll be putting it on Gumtree Freebies on Wednesday night if no-one asks before then.
Lin

DOES ANYONE WANT THIS MOSES BASKET WITH ROCKING STAND BEFORE I PUT IT ON GUMTREE? I'D RATHER IT WENT TO SOMEONE IN HANDSWORTH. It's in as-new condition, has the mattress, but doesn't have the frilly liner/cover. It does have the plastic things for holding a lining hood, though. If you want it, please call me on 0121 554 9794 to arrange collection. I'll be putting it on Gumtree Freebies on Wednesday night if no-one asks before then. Lin



From Jan on Monday:
Hi Simon. Came across a few things this weekend which I think may be of interest to you and are very relevant to our discussions and exchanges on Localism and the wider issues about local democracy and all it entails, and the challenges/threats it faces in the current climate. I would strongly recommend you read Will Hutton’s article in yesterday’s Observer on the new library being opened by Birmingham City Council. In addition to specific observations about this project he also makes some broader comments about local government in general which chime with my own thinking...good to be in such august company. Here is a flavour of what he says. I think these comments speak for themselves. With reference to the prevailing culture being foisted upon local councils he says it is promoting the following model of local government: '...the only admissible objectives for local government are refuse collection, street lighting, traffic management and rat catching. Local government should not concern itself with housing and educating its inhabitants or sponsoring local economic vitality or trying to alleviate local social conditions. Local government’s role is instead to administer whatever is decided upon by Westminster and Whitehall, who obviously know best and are to be trusted with precious tax payers’ money in a way not allowed to cavalier local councillors and hoi polloi'(p.38 Observer) This view is most forcefully communicated by the Government's own outriders The Tax Payers Alliance but is clearly reinforced by Government decisions rather than their 'warm words' about localism. Hutton refers to localism as 'lip service' since all the capabilities and capacity of local government are being emasculated. With reference to Eric Pickles he says he 'has colluded with George Osborne to knock local government back to being no more than rat catchers and managers of street lighting Indeed, they scarcely have the money to carry out these activities'. He reminds us that only 10% of income is raised locally and that local government’s dependency on central government is increasing through the freezing of council tax which local councils can do nothing about even if the local population calls for it. Hutton quite rightly calls this 'finance of the madhouse' and calls for a drastic overhaul.
He is right of course and his views are close to those expressed in recent reports by LGA and LGIU, but I am sceptical about its chances of success. Developments seems to be going in the opposite direction and I have yet to see anybody coming forward with a credible strategy to reverse the trend, but I live in hope. I'm convinced that this must happen through political means. Political parties at local level and local elected members have key roles to play but they seem unwilling/unable to do so which is rather strange given the strength of feelings among local councillors. Perhaps it is a manifestation of the iron grip national parties have over their local branches when push comes to shove. I came across the phrase 'new feudalism' in an article recently. It seems to creeping into the language.
In this context a report by the Resolution Foundation entitled 'Low Pay Britain 2013' may contribute to the discussion. It contains a lot of statistics and data but essentially argues that the slide towards a two tier workforce is continuing unabated. It looks at developments since the 1970s. I suspect this report will not get much coverage in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph. Five million of the workforce are in low pay jobs. One in three of 16-30 year olds are in Low Pay compared to one in five in the 70s. Three million of the 5 million are women. Part timers in low pay have increased from 30% in 1975 to 58% now. Low pay workers in temporary jobs have almost doubled since 2000. Self-employed have been hit especially hard. Their numbers have increased by 400,000 since 2009 but their average rate of pay has collapsed from £16000 in 2002 to £11900 in 2011. We all know what has happened at the other end of the pay/wealth scale during the same timescale. It seem to me that these developments alongside what else has happened during this time have profound implications for democracy and localism. There is a real opportunity here for local councils and their partners to carve out a positive role for themselves and perhaps link this to the issues identified by Hutton and the two reports referred to above. There seems to be a strange reluctance to enter this debate. The whole related concept of Poverty seems to have been eradicated from mainstream political narrative. Some rather meaningless phrases from Labour about “making sure we have a more broadly based economy” is the best I can find without any details about how this will be achieved. The other two parties are not too concerned about these developments other than at rhetorical level. The commitment to eradicate Child Poverty by 2020 seems to have quietly disappeared. Work has become a gateway to poverty for millions of people rather than a step towards a better future. In addition, the overall picture for the so-called 'average' family is that by 2020 they will have an income 20% lower than in 2008. 
Surely these developments have profound social and political implications, but there is an ominous silence at the moment. Combine these with the 'rolling back of the state' and the 'minimalist public sector' ideologies and associated policy direction, we are entering the unknown and the untested without the skills set or experience to deal with them. The driving forces will be even more ideological since there is no evidence base to fall back on or act as a counter balance. What will fill this 'vacuum? Local Authorities don’t seem to recognise this scenario or have plans for dealing with it, so the 'intelligent criminal' may pop up. In this context a book - Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords And Their Godfathers by Anabel Hernández. Narcoland is a scary wake up call. We have talked previously about developments in Naples and Russia and the infiltration of organised crime into main stream politics. This book is set in Mexico. Some quotes to focus the mind : 'contemporary capitalism is no position to renounce the mafia. Because it is not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, but it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia'. According to Hernández this system can only operate with the support of officials, bureaucrats, police and banks. Given developments in our own banks, corporate businesses, police force, press, some national politicians etc., it would be naïve and potentially very damaging to believe we are totally immune from such developments taking place here. LAs are both vulnerable to this development but also potentially a bastion against it. Happy Days...
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Opposite the Palace of St Michael and St George in Corfu Town - balmy night - people from our village gave a recital of the poetry of Nikos Kavvadias, about whom I knew nothing, but from Ano Korakiana I am always learning,,,in this case from the village historian Kostas Apergis Απέργης Κώστας who in April 2008 gave me a complimentary copy of his history of the village...

Εκδήλωση για τον ποιητή Καββαδία - Tribute to the poet Kavvadia
ράφει ο/η Απέργης Κώστας   
03.09.13

        «…τρόχισε εκείνα τα σπαθιά του λόγου, που μ΄αρέσουν…» Κι ο λόγος ξεχύθηκε μεστός στην αυγουστιάτικη νύχτα, μεταφέροντας στις ψυχές των ακροατών το λυρισμό των στίχων του Καββαδία. Αρμύρα και θάλασσα, και συγχρόνως βάσανα, καημοί, μα και εκείνες οι συγκινήσεις και χαρές, που μόνο η πολυτάραχη ζωή των ναυτικών προσφέρει.
Ένας κόσμος άλλος, συναρπαστικός και απρόοπτος, που δεν μπορεί ο «στεριανός» να κατανοήσει.
Η παρουσίαση της χωριανής μας κ. Μαριέτας Σαββανή υπήρξε εξαιρετική, καθώς επίσης και η απόδοση των ποιημάτων του Ν. Καββαδία από τους ηθοποιούς του ΔΗΠΕΘΕ Κέρκυρας κ.κ. Χρύσα Πάντσιου, Κων/να Δουκάκη, Σπ.Βέργη και Σπ. Βερονίκη.
Η εκδήλωση, την οποία οργάνωσαν το ΔΗΠΕΘΕ Κέρκυρας και ο Οργανισμός Κερκυραϊκών Εκδηλώσεων, ήταν αφιερωμένη στη μνήμη του Σπύρου Ιωνά (Λιμενάρχη). 
kavadias2013.jpg
Esmeralda for George Seferis «…τρόχισε εκείνα τα σπαθιά του λόγου, που μ΄αρέσουν…» 

Εκ μέρους της οικογένειας του Σπύρου παραβρέθηκε ο αδελφός του κ. Κώστας Ιωνάς μετά της συζύγου του Βασιλικής.Παραβρέθηκαν επίσης πολλοί φίλοι του και συγχωριανοί του.
Η εκδήλωση έγινε στον «Κήπο του Λαού», στο Παλάτι, την Τετάρτη 28 Αυγούστου το βράδυ.
Nikos Kavvadia
I don't dare try to translate even Kostas Apergis let alone Kavvadia. From what I've read, by Greeks, on Nikos Kavvadia, translation difficult with poetry anyway is especially so with Kavvadia. My sense is that his poetry so goes to the gut that any translator must recreate in another language the physical reaction evoked by Kavvadia's writing. Kostas describes how the words of the poet on this night carried people away, imagining the sea where the poet spent many years and from whose turbulence he drew inspiration, describing a world of sensations unknown to a landlubber, στεριανός. 
The presentation of the villagers, Marietta Savani, was excellent, as well as the performance of Kavvadia's poems from the actors, Chrysa Pancho Kon / to Dukakis, Sp.Vergi and S. Veronica. The event, organized by the Municipal Theatre of Corfu and the Organization of Corfiot Activities, was dedicated to the memory of Spiros Jonah (Harbour Master), and was attended on behalf of Spiro by his brother Costas Jonah and his wife Vasilikis Paravrethikan as well as many of his friends and fellow villagers.
The event took place in the 'People's Garden' at the Palace on Wednesday evening, Aug. 28.

Exploring Kavvadia I came across two poems that seem to survive translation, in the impression they make on me and many others - Federico Garcia Lorca - his murder - with connections to DistomoΔιστόμου, and Kaiserani Καισαριανής (1 May & 17 June 1944) - and one about his own mortality - Mal du Depart. Since it resonates with the name and sounds of our village I will think of the last lines of the Lorca poem...σμάρι κοράκια να πετάν στην ερήμην αρένα και στο χωριό να ουρλιάζουνε τη νύχτα εφτά σκυλιά.

Federico Garcia Lorca - 19 August 1936
For a moment, you waved your bolero
and your orange petticoat, like banners.
Was it in August? I remember it so,
when they were all setting off, the cross-bearers.

In the wind the ranks of banners rippled –
toward death the galleys set their sails.
While children were cowering at the nipple
the old man was lazily sunning his balls.

Picasso’s bull let out a snort;
in the hives the honey all turned rotten.
The course is against us – it’s set for the north.
Full ahead – never mind that we’re forgotten.

The olives spread easy under the sun,
and little crosses grew in the gardens.
At night, only sterile embraces remained
when they brought you, my gypsy, wrapped in an apron.

My gypsy, my leader, what for your pall?
Bring the purple cloth of Mauretania.
In Kaisariani they took us behind the wall,
and the mass was raised to manly stature.

Distoman girls, bring water and vinegar:
cross-wise on the mare your body lain,
set out on the final journey to Cordoba,
across its thirsty open plain.

The marsh-boat reversed, narrow, no keel;
the weapons rust in a gypsy redoubt.
In the empty arena, let the crows wheel;
let the seven dogs howl in the village all night.
Nikos Kavvadias  Νίκος Καββαδίας, at Argostoli in Kefalonia

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Corfu

September 12, 2013, 8:09 am
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I am almost surprised at the way the flaps go up and down on landing revealing the innards of the wing that we've relied upon.
Landing at Kapodistria - Easyjet from London Luton

By the middle of the afternoon we were tidying the spiky Bougainvillea, pruning our over prolific wisteria, cutting back the lemon trees, and  green waste with help from our neighbour Katerina
208 Democracy Street

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Ατενίζοντας την Ελλάδα

September 15, 2013, 9:24 am
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From Democracy Street in Ano Korakiana

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