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Dorothy Reynolds - her funeral
It's raining and grey this morning but it feels lighter. Yesterday the family and some of our neighbours said farewell to Dorothy, my mum-in-law, at Perry Barr Crematorium. Her coffin was a pleasing...
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Age
A day later the rest of the family arrived. Linda and I become 'Nan' and 'Grandpa', 'Mum' and 'Dad'. The cottage becomes turbulent. To let grown-ups stay in bed, I'm steward - for drinks, cereals,...
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Μελίνα ~ Χρυσάφι της ζωής
Melina Spingos (1990-2019) in the centre. Her mum, Katya, sits at the back left (photo 2012: Thanassis Spingos) Yesterday Melina Spingos, the 29 year old daughter of Katya and Thanassis, woke feeling...
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Signing things away
On such a day as this There is something exhilarating about getting successfully through the Greek bureaucratic process! I have just left the Corfu Port Authority. I came from Ano Korakiana on the...
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Cycling to places
In an aeroplane, even the slow descent to Corfu airport from our village to the runway at Kapodistria, 18k further south, I travel further with one bite of a sandwich sat in my belted seat, than I...
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To a friend in the village
The sea of Corfu between Ano Korakiana and Mother GreeceΑγαπητή Αγγελική. In Ano Korakiana bereavement has been heaped on bereavement. We are foreigners who have a home in the village, but even, far...
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'Recalled to life'
Jack Hargreaves 1911-1994 with his stepson Simon Baddeley born 1942 (photo: Barbara Hargreaves) My stepfather delighted in reading Charles Dickens. He could recite first lines of the novels It was the...
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The march of time
Seven years ago in Spring, under Efi and Adonis’ walnut tree in their garden next door, my neighbour and friend Lefteris and I celebrated our 70th birthdays– he two months younger than I. It was a...
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Context
Before first light the parched island is soaked by a drenching downpour, a timely damping down of hectares of tinder. We lie in bed surrounded by unaccustomed gloom, lightning flashing through the...
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Getting to Greece
Our afternoon plane from Birmingham, first booked before Christmas for travel in April then changed to September, arrived in Verona at dusk. A 25 minute bus took us to the railway station. Checking a...
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Being here
Early November 2021? Will it be much the same as early November 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic persisted in being as unfamiliar to its millions of victims as myxomatosis was to rabbits when it...
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Locked down in Greece
At noon, Thursday 5th November, I sat, face-masked, in the Ano Korakiana baker's shop on Democracy Street, with Theodora behind her counter. I bought a cheese pie and ate it - temporarily unmasked with...
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Self-isolating for 10 days in Birmingham after returning from Greece
At Corfu Kapodistria waiting for a flight to AthensOver the better part of 2020 I've been able to access more information about the COVID-19 pandemic than has ever been available to any but experts...
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Greece from far away
My blood pressure as measured soon after the June 2016 Referendum on leaving the EUOn a day in June 2016 I was the subject of one of many research projects into healthy ageing at QE Hospital "Your...
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Locked down in Birmingham
Athens on Friday 19th Feb 2021. I had the Acropolis all to myself one rainy day in April 1958So it's snowing in Greece - the dear country, the wondrous land. The woman, Xristoo, told me when I asked...
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In London long ago
... The tone of a violins is influenced by the varnish, making it an important element of the instrument ... one cloth should be used only for the strings and the fingerboard, which should be wiped...
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Home to Greece at last
The procedures for travel to Ano Korakiana from Handsworth included a Passenger Location Form (PLF), a certificate of immunity in the form of a negative Rapid Lateral Flow Test for Lin at a shop in the...
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Marshall Law
One of my regular conversations with Angel, a trim lady finely dressed, elegantly trailing a wheelie case, bringing from her church in Highgate food for the poor to the city markets below St Martin’s...
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At 208 Democracy Street until winter
Looking over the Sea of Kerkyra towards Epirus in Mother Greece. The small island is VidoHaving been away – because of travel restrictions - since last December there have been more than a few...
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St Christopher Άγιος Χριστόφορος: Γιατί απεικονίζεται με πρόσωπο σκύλου?
A shop on George Theotoki where we discussed the puzzle of a 'dog-headed' St ChristopherLinda and I were window gazing on the south side of George Theotoki Street in town. At a stationer with a stand...
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The Greek Revolution
For once during this greyest of Mays the sky's cloudless, blue as eyes but for a small cloud the size of a man's hand over a southern mountain. My bicycle is loaded with onions, a box of village rosé,...
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“Which side, then, has committed more crimes here, the Right or the Left?”
A note to Iason Athanasiadis'A sense of the region as a unit'? What a challenge - to make sense of any region prior to the super-imposition of its formal boundaries, negotiated by powerful men, as...
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The six year plague on orange and lemon trees
Ano Korakiana, CorfuHandsworth, BirminghamSince 2006 we've travelled to-and-fro between out home in Handsworth Birmingham, where Lin and I have lived over 45 years, and our home on Democracy Street in...
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