Category Archives: Environment

October 23, 2014 · 4:23 pm

Albania – With a clear blue eye on the wounded ox, in the city of Nymphs…

“What Country, friend, is this?”
“This is Illyria, Lady.”
“And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you, sailors?”

Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare

“And Hoxha did good and bad, but built 700,000 bunkers across our country of Albania”. It was possibly the most astonishing and depressing fact too, in an astonishing but only sometimes depressing day. It deserved a bit of the Borat treatment as well, from that ‘Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan’, as our coach snaked up the Albanian coast to the ancient citadel of Butrint. Leaving behind the six story hulk of Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth Cruise liner, monstering it in the charmless port but more beautiful bay of Seranda. Which USA Today included this year as one of the top 10 undiscovered cruise destinations. We were making for a citadel anyone interested in history or civilisation simply cannot afford to miss though, especially at 56 Euros. But as our tour guide Davina, trained in the Albanian Capital of Tirana, spoke of the facts of her country and the place where ‘Our Dictator’ was born too, Enver Hoxha, in part of that all or nothing attempt at Tourism, you wondered if she might joke that if you didn’t like the food they’d be attaching electrodes to your privates or, if you did, selling you their younger sister. Hoxha’s 45 year rule may have brought rapid economic growth and improved literacy too, but it was notorious for the suppression of opposition, detainment camps and the use of the death penalty.

No such horror stories now, on an easy day out from Corfu, forty minutes on the hydrofoil. Although to me packaged coach tours (lunch included), are always depressingly ‘Communistic’ somehow. With the dodgy looking bloke in the white jacket overseeing us, that very human tendency to behave like sheep and the few Euros guided carefully from your pockets via the unnecessary early restaurant stop. In a town that is winning more tourists – the guide said 80,000 to Albania as a whole, although most to the riviera are Greek or Italian – but which is a skeletal facade of dreary half-built breeze block hotels and empty bars, that may well harm future tourism, and the faint sproutings of small ‘International’ businesses. Nearby Corfu’s charm is it’s living history, its style, it’s comparative complexity, while Sarande’s lack of it is its functional emptiness. Yet when you see how little there is around, you forgive the simple packaging, and enjoy the ride and views, especially with the glorious weather that October brought here, which forgives so much.

So to dispense quickly with any depressing bits; Albania’s obvious poverty, especially compared to thriving and culturally rich Corfu, the romany shanti-towns on the reasonable roads, the lack of any skilled artisinal crafts to bring anyone real ‘Suvenir’ sales, over cheap plastic tourist tat, unlike all those crafts in Corfu’s old town, and the rubbish strewn not only on the verges but at supposedly natural oases too. Or the little girl begging at the coach, you see in London now too, and, at a harbour restaurant where all the moulded plastic chairs seemed to have broken their backs, the bruising looking guy in white socks who almost threatened to buy me a drink, to try and talk to me. “Where you from?” It might be no different in any struggling port, but I had just seen ‘Taken’ on TV. Then I felt guilty at the stereotyping of Albanians, so common across the water in Corfu, and on mainland Greece too, where something like a million emigrated after those iron ‘walls’ came down. In the old days the searchlights roamed the straights at Kalami and the small Albanian town beyond Seranda that means six, from the six mile gap of water, and people were shot too. While the husband of an English friend on Corfu had his boat stolen to be used by Albanian drug runners though, and crime has tarnished the image of some of whom have made it into the Greek Middle Classes, of course desperation and economic migration have happened a great deal in Italy recently as well.

Then to revelations though, only to underline my ignorance – that Albania, which uses the Lex, is Muslim, for instance, although its Communist past ruthlessly suppressed any faith. The guide defined it as 70% Muslim now, 20% Greek Orthodox and 10% Catholic, pointing at the church and simple hilltop mosque, as if atheists and agnostics had been eradicated in the new Dawn. She assured us folk live here in peace and intermarry easily too. Not much was said of Albania’s year long Civil War in 1997 then, although if I had a Euro for the number of times the guide used the word privatised, I could probably do a lot to help the Albanian economy.

How different the terrain on the mainland is to Corfu though, with those expansive, now half-drained and cultivated marshlands, where Gerald Durrell went hunting as a child and recorded it so elegiacally in “My Family and Other Animals”. From the coast, Albania is a four tiered hunchback of steep mountain ranges, feeding the many rivers that bring an astonishing variety of trees, giant bull-rushes and burgeoning flaura and fauna, among the dusty scrubland, burned by the Mediterranean sun. So we were quickly on the edge of the new 86 Square kilometer National Park and lake Butrint, ringed with half submerged cages for the huge mussel production here, in the brackish half-salt, half fresh water lake. The whole landscape suddenly seemed to glow a kind of electric mauve-green, dancing with vibrant, healing colours. Colour and light are the things I’ll remember the day for most, a draw to artists and water colourists for centuries. Like the Frenchman Dupre, and the limerick-writing Edward Lear, who came here in the 19th Century, along with those celebrated Grand Tourists, like Lord Byron himself. It pleased the Finnish Construction engineer, who had turned to painting and natural photography instead. Not least in our visit to the ‘Blue Eye‘, a bubbling natural spring that rises from more than forty metres through solid rock and is the visible source of the Bistritza river. When you’ve nothing you always make too much of something, perhaps. So the simple eco-cabins tried to compete with the broken down saw-mill and abandoned boats, or the Double Eagle of the Albanian flag, black on red, fluttered humbly but hopefully by the US and EU ones. Then Unesco’s intervention to define a world heritage site also helped create the national park. At first I wondered if the 40 minute excursion was worth it, for these ‘Naturalistic Learnings of Free Albania’, but that water is so pure it seems made of glass and in the afternoon light it suddenly looked as if you were gazing across a holy river in India.

Perhaps above all though came the revelation that this is claimed to be the land of the ancient Illyrians, proud soldiers and master shipbuilders, which vaguely competes with the miserable image of modern Albanians, not least to many Greeks, as dirt poor Armenian peasants. “What do you call an Albanian peasant?” someone joked, “An Albanian.” So to a natural diversion though and that quote from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when Viola is shipwrecked and believes her brother Sebastian has been drowned. “What country, friend, is this? – This is Illyria, Lady.” Whether Shakespeare ever traveled literally or not, his very English plays were vitally informed by the stories, legends and histories flooding into a Renaissance London, that also had very practical experience of seafaring and piracy in ‘Europa’, as England exploded as a maritime power in the late 16th Century and started competing with the likes of Venice. I believe the start of so much that is still not enough understood in the beginnings of World and American Capitalism. Of course Illyria, like Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, is chosen as a place of exotic difference, for it’s mystery and otherness, to welcome and test a foreigner in a strange land, as Shakespeare usually proves himself a friend of strangers. Perhaps also as a kind of creative gateway to that dominating imaginative landscape inside Shakespeare’s mind and education though, before science had herded the forces of Psyche and Eros into the clothes of modern psychology – ancient Greece and classical Rome. ‘What Country, friend, is this?” is exactly the point of so many of Shakespeare’s themes, inner and outer. One that Greeks might not take for granted either, considering the disparate ethnic histories here and their own Nation only being founded in 1830, as Albania was in 1913. Yet the literary point for someone living on Corfu is that Illyria perhaps adds a bit of credence to the tale Gerald’s brother Lawrence’s scholastic friend relayed in his own little travel gem, Propsero’s Cell, claiming that Corfu was the magic isle that Shakespeare had in mind for The Tempest. I still think Shakespeare’s greatest bark was his avid reading and all assimilating imagination, devouring the patterns of storytelling and myth, that ran like a river through trading London, while the magic of Shakespeare’s isle is really his own art. But that imagination ranged so often back to this world, not only in Twelfth Night and The Tempest, but in Timon of Athens, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Comedy of Errors, that you start to wonder. Like the marshes though, at times it could all be taken for Elysian Fields.

First in the day we had made for Butrint though, by one of the castles of Ali Pasha and the old rope ferry over the canal, sparking in the sunlight, to discover the remains of so many days. Perhaps it is because Butrint is such a microcosm of competing civilizations and changing, impossible time. With its re-positioned doric columns rising in front of the sturdy Venetian tower, Butrint was a wonderful revelation for me. Only touched by visiting Epidavros, or the much under-rated port of Ostia outside Rome, that so tops treking even the Forum itself. The acoustically perfect little amphi-theatre here was re-built by Roman settlers, under Julius Caesar, who established a Roman colony eleven years after he had invaded Britain. So the original Greek Agora and Acropolis (hilltop City) expanded, beyond the huge 4th Century BC ‘Caeclopean’ walls that began the fortified settlement. Which you can also see in Etruscan fortresses in Lazio, like the one above Florence in Fiesole, as well as original settlements in Mycaenean Greece. To remind us that everything lasting began with fortified towns, before Nations or Ideologies, with tribes and City States. So to the Roman period though and those heads unearthed here of different kinds of dictators, that makes it all a more seamless and intimate tapestry. Like those of Augustus and Livia in the museum, that became as common and recognizable symbols as the Holy Family, or as an important a meme as the coinage. Then came the building of a pillared Baptistry nearly a half a millenia later, once Constantine had turned Rome to Christianity. With a very natural ‘Christian’ mosaic circle, sporting birds and flowers and animals, sadly covered at the moment by sand to protect it. The large Basilica too, which originally meant a kind of market and meeting place, rather than a Church. As a side note, it was fascinating too to find that Partridge as an early Christian symbol also used here, related to work at Phoenix Ark Press on that carol, the 12 Days of Christmas, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

Like Shakespeare reaching back to the psychic source of the Gods though, it was the original remains that had the most power to me. Like the fine stone gate on the edge of the sleepy, lime blue and green lake, almost a secret scar in the rock, a magic doorway, that Virgil perhaps immortalised in the Aenead. Was it really here then that Aeneas himself, Trojan emmigree and mythical founder of Rome, after that 10 year war over a woman, landed on his way to Italy, in a still mythic world, that understood history as storytelling in a struggle between eternal fact and the needed journey and qualities of any individual life? – “I saw before me Troy in miniature, a slender copy of our massive tower…and I pressed my body gainst a Scaen Gate.” With that competes the much later carved gateway that at first I thought depicted a Wild Boar, but which is in fact a lion, devouring the head of a bull. Butrint’s name actually means Wounded Ox though, when the Greek foundation supposedly saw an Ox let ashore and killed by another animal, to prove auspicious omens. The city was also mentioned by Cicero though, after a friend with a country villa near here complained about Roman development and urged him to lobby against it in Rome, who in his letters wrote “Let me tell you that Buthrotum is to Corcyrca (Corfu) what Antium is to Rome…the quietest, coolest, most pleasant place in the world.” It shows how lively Corfu was at the time too.

For all the interest of the monuments though, and despite the aging guard in his overblown outfit blowing on his whistle as if Dictatorship had no tomorrow, or the fascinating artifacts in the little museum, so depleted by thefts in 1997, Butrint has something else that could wake Keats to his greatest song – “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, that foster child of silence and slow time………” It is the enchanted setting, on a sparkling day, wandering through sylvan groves blooming with wildflowers, edged by that wide blue-green lake, lifting with herons, as a fisherman tilted dreamily at the waters with his rod. Resources of fish were one of the reasons for the place’s ancient economic importance, though with those mussels Albania has other exports, like the wine on display in plush bottles in one of the port bars. For all the coachloads too, which must be far worse in high summer, you can hang back and find a space off beaten tracks to contemplate those vanished ghosts, of fact and mind and time. It is exactly what would have appealed to that 19th Century imagination obsessed with ‘the fragment‘ too. Those many ravished fragments of Butrint, crossing so much time, were picked out for me most in the sacred well of Minerva, bound by the hard rock, as firm as hope. Then the discovery of a Nympheum, a temple to those Nymphs and Dryads that sported through an ancient imagination, when Gods and Goddesses were living in everything. Then, to prove this was a City of Nymphs, by another well they found some Roman graffiti, in the achingly moving little dedication by one inhabitant “Julia Rufina – lover of Nymphs.” The painted head of Dionysus adorns one of the Nypheum’s alcoves, although I would take issue with the guide that he was just the God of Wine, rather than of natural Ecstasy and a transport to the Divine, unlike his debased Roman counterpart Bacchus.

Of course those super efficient conquerors and engineers, the Romans, stole everything from the ancient Greeks, except the Aqueduct and the Arch. But there was an older ‘religion’ here then, since 400 years before Chirst Butrint was a votive centre to the healing God Aesclepius. Where real sacred snakes, to wind symbolically around the staff of the Cadeucus too, were kept in pens and laid on the stomachs of the sick to induce dreams. As those wrestling with life and mortality took baths and visited the theatre too, a sacred space, as Shakespeare knew it was a sacred space too, and a place of artistic magic, even in hungry, entertainment driven, Reformation London. Everyone came here though, from ancient Greeks, to Romans, to Byzantine Greek Christians, Ottomans, Venetians, the gruesome but effective Ali Pashi, by which time Butrint had near vanished under the mud and topsoil, to bad old Enver Hoxha. Who closed off Albania completely, as paranoia saw him building all those pointless concrete bunkers. Then that fear and militarism deep in the Soviet psyche too has a very long history among regional warlords in the Balkans.

Forget it. Time is trying to and if they had the money in Tirana, or could persuade either some philanthropic Oligarch or Unesco, they should pour in as much money as they can to exploit its archaeological heritage, in the best sense. Only 60% of Butrint has been excavated, for instance, and the ancient town of Finiq, obviously linked to those tribal and seafaring Phoenecians, hardly at all. Come to think of it Phoenix Ark Press has to discover the etimology of the Phoenix and whether there is any link. Yet before Hoxha was even fighting in the mountains as a Partisan, or Mussolini made Albania as cheap a conquest as Abyssinia for his Fascistic dreams of Ancient Rome and invasion of Greece, Italian Archaeologists had begun to uncover the City again, in the twenties and thirties. What a glorious experience it must have been for those archaeologists. Mussolini renamed Seranda Port Edda, after his favourite daughter, who turned against her father on the execution of her husband, Count Ciano, and fled to Switzerland. To sell her husband’s diaries to Alan Dulles and the Chicago Daily News. It is written up at Phoenix Ark. In fact Hoxha, from an important local family, crucially linked Archaeology to the creation of Albanian National Identity. He and the Fascists too were wrong though thinking it provided any convenient truth, in that such sites really link the movement of peoples across deep time, and the long process of real Civilisation. It could be an even more powerful gateway to tourism then, if uncontrolled building doesn’t ruin the riviera and they learn the charm of real local family bars and restaurants. But Albania has something else shared by Greece, Bulgaria, up into Romania too, perhaps Romania above all, that reaches back to the nature worship of the ancients. Namely astonishing natural scenery, wildlife that includes wolf and bear and some of the most pristine but now threatened forests in Western Europe. It is exactly why the Albanians must try to keep an enlightened and open blue eye on its wounded ox of a country, shutting tight in Seranda, if it is to develop and change, as it might. But they also need to remember too that real prosperity has a far deeper and wider meaning that just the ‘Capitalist’ discovery of quick cash.

As the T-shirts saying ‘I Love Albania‘ flapped unconvincingly in the breeze then, the guide was cheerful, jokey but half apologetic, suggesting it would all be better in a few years and then those mosaics might be on display too. Like the man who apologised when I gave that little girl some Euros, or the waiter doing his damndest to offer good service, but looking rather small. Then there is a shame in that negative image of Albanians, its down-at-heelness and its recent past. But a great deal has changed too and in ‘Six’ families and kids were doing what everyone does, going to school or playing in playgrounds. Then the collapse of Communism opened another vital door to Butrint too and saw more archaeological work up to 2005, which has spruced up the museum and produced a National Park. More understanding and proactive engagement might come from Greece too, despite its own woes, meaning perhaps Greek efforts too to open up and make capital from a heritage where many people’s have intermingled for so long. Though the girl leading me to the hydrofoil was quick to point out she was part of the Greek Albanian minority, a community that revolted before the First War, and the association of religion with ethnicity has caused such harm around the world. As for Butrint, of course nothing especially important to the Greek lady who shrugged and said ‘it’s just a pile of stones’, to make my hair curl and remind me of an American who had said exactly the same thing years ago passing under the Lion Gate in Mycenae.

No, it is not just a pile of stones, it is literally one of the theatres of everything, so related to that healing son of the Sun God, Apollo, for those you like their sun worship intense. Where votive shrines to pure and natural wells first sprang up, as all settlements spring from rivers and clean waters. So came the burgeoning of trade, thought, literature, philosophy, and a symbolism that refers to everything still: the theatre of Gods and Man, the theatre of art, the theatre of magic and medicine, sadly the theatre of war too. It was only getting the Flying Dolphin back though, as the sunset burned the big white ships in Corfu Port a fiery bronze, making them look as if Vulcan had returned them to their smelting yards, that the full significance of Corfu’s Venetian Fortresses came into view in my head. Not so much on the tip of the Eastern headland, but the old Fort with its square, lionine eye to the little island of Vidos, and to Saranda and Butrint just beyond. Because it was dominating the straights of Corfu that was the key to shipping and trade, the gateway to the Ionian, and why the Venetians bought Butrint in the 14th Century to straddle those straights like a Colossus. Venice did so too, even as the Ottomans held Albania, Turkey and ‘Greece’ in their grip for five hundred years, at times pushing to the gates of Vienna. Until Napoleon marched into that “Drawing room of Europe”, St Mark’s Square, and the Venetian Empire came to an end, then the Balkans convulsed into the politics of ethnic hatred. Meat to remind you too though of the threats and unreformed horrors of now, and how significant that fall of Byzantium was in 1485, when Memmet II stamped his unreformed Islamic shields on the walls of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. Then Monotheistic Religion is like Communism, it attempts to impose an absolute truth, which is why it should be separated from the State. Except perhaps that religion of the ancients, when the Gods were a reflection of the psyche of humans, good and bad, but magic forces lived so deeply in nature too. But so a fascinating and profoundly colourful day came to a close, back home on Corfu. In the end making me feel that if they keep that blue eye clear and open, this part of Albania and Butrint National park especially, could long be the quietest, coolest, most pleasant place in the world.

David Clement-Davies October 1214

The photographs are in Copyright to Phoenix Ark Press – They show Lake Butrint, The Port of Seranda, The ‘Blue Eye’ spring, Bistritza river at its source, the ancient amphitheatre in the Temple of Aesclepius, the pillared circular baptistry, a fragment of lake and city, the ancient gate Virgil may have described as ‘Troy in Miniature‘, the later ‘Lion’ gate, the Albanian flag and a submerged boat opposite one of the little castles of Ali Pasha.

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Filed under Community, Culture, Environment

Tagged as Albania, Butrint, Corfu, Greece, Sarande, The Blue Eye, Travel

October 13, 2014 · 4:47 pm

CYPRESSES, CORFEATS, NAUSICAA AND A HOUSE ON PARADISE ISLAND

“The island, she won’t let you go,” whispered the hazel-eyed local on Corfu’s Agios Gordios beach, on the West Coast of my magic isle. She told me about her struggle and satisfaction in becoming a tourist rep, the legend of Nausicaa finding naked Odysseus here, washed up in the surf, and noticed the Disk of Phaestos hanging around my neck – Crete’s un-deciphered Linear B. I had bought it in my favourite artisan shop in Corfu town, where I get charming old postcards too. Then I’d been upset when it had tarnished in the bath and had taken it back to complain. “Life is never straight, my friend” the owner had twinkled nomicly, trying to convince me it made a better story too, as he assured me it was Stirling Silver, that very British hallmark. I was pleased above all that I hadn’t been lied to by him or been made a fool of either.

On Agios Gordios, this sudden Nausicaa and I joked about life, the real island of Corfu, ‘mad and wild’ Corfeats (according to other Greeks) and paradises naturally lost, or sometimes won again. If Corfu really was Homeric Scheria, at Thucydides claimed, home to those westernmost Phoenicians too, and so perhaps that link with the teacher of Zeno, Parmenides, she plays the strangest role in his rebirth and journey home. A symbol of half unrequited love, perhaps half mother figure, so much so one British scholar remarked that Nausicaa’s beach encounter and laundry scene is so realistic it meant that blind Homer was really a woman. Then the translations of Linear A on Crete turned out to be a laundry list! On Scheria cunning Odysseus, ship wrecked by Poseidon for tricking and blinding his one-eyed son Polyphemus, had to penetrate the palace of Nausicaa’s father, to get help, or breach what Wikipedia so anachronistically calls its magical ‘security systems’.

Since life is a beach though, what could be more magical then than to drink cold beer in the golden October sun, to swim in crystal waters but abandon some of the cliches too, as time and contact help me really experience a place. It has been a wonderful five weeks writing Dragon In The Post here, living in my rented house on Paradise Island, with its gentle garden, a place of recent barbecues and a new Dutch friend who was born here picking garden herbs for the marinade. So it was a bit of a shock to discover time rushing on, as ever, like Chronos eating his own children. The little ferry to Vidos from Corfu port has already stopped running, after three days of very heavy rains and gloomy skies. The Liston arcade in Corfu town still lights up and throbs at night, and the tourist shops bristle in the day, the electric evenings too, as a Maestre, a masterful Northerly wind, sweeps in to dispel the clouds around the great Venetian fort and the 18th century shuttered houses. But the season here is definitely winding to a pleasant autumnal close. Winter threatens in the falling leaves, the coming browns, the cooling airs, the death of each year’s life, but with something far less threatening than England and home.

On Agios Gordios we went swimming together at sunset in front of that burning red fire disk of exploding Hydrogen and Helium, so far beyond the real horizon, seemingly dissolving into a near-whispering, wine-dark sea. The bay held us like a friend, as the slanting afternoon sun painted our skins more golden and that renewed clarity of low afternoon light made everything sharp and real and very fresh and beautiful indeed. It picked out the shape of ‘Buddha Rock’ too, lying on his back on a nearby islet, beyond the Black Rocks, that to me looks more like a jolly Norwegian Troll, with a gigantic, bulbous nose. Then something of the ancient Gods descended, and light and sea and dying sun-disc became a filmy one.

The water does feel different suddenly, like warm silk, below the vaulting Cypresses climbing the slopes like markers to the island’s vigour, and as you stand in the sea, looking back at the hills, smiling or laughing, opening your arms, who would want her to let you go? The generous rains are the cause, and Corfu’s miracle micro climate, although with 10-15 days solid rain in September, it has not exactly been the perfect season. I’ve seen more of Corfu than I ever did last year though, swapping a battered bicycle that once kept me fitter for a sharp-engined white Mercedes (thanks to a free Airport upgrade, although with a struggle). So doing far more of the winding mountain roads, to Halikounas, Sinarades or Paliokastritsa, with its beetling Castello St Angelo and plunging, impossibly turquoise blues. Corfu always gives you a newly inspiring vista and opens your heart and mind, whenever you get locked too much inside yourself. “Oh, think twice, it’s just another day in Paradise” beats the Phil Collins song incessantly from Corfu Radio, of course, with its warning about forgetting other people’s problems. No, sorry, not at the moment.

It was driving up to a beer festival in Arillas in the North West this weekend though that I got to see much more of the ‘interior’ too – Those ever fascinating twisting, witch-hair olive groves, tipping down the slopes into mysteries of cool shade, the lifting massifs of hills, a sudden plain rich with wildflowers, pomegranate trees and pools of yellow sunlight, a flock of very smelly goats and, of course, among such lush vegetation, God-tall Cyprus trees everywhere, like perky sentinels, or officers of the watch. “Do you know their sex?” whispered someone in my garden, with a wink, as if introducing me to some great life secret, and of course the tall, straight ones are boys and the rounded, shorter, pear-like ones are girls. It’s all quite simple really.

I prodded my new friend on Agios Gordios and impressed her talking not about natural Phallic symbols, but the Omphalos, the World Navel and so the belly button. Also a time marker at ancient Delphi, once centre of the ‘known’ and imagined, where those weird women sat on their tripods, breathing in natural hallucinogenic vapours and whispering impossible oracles, or riddling warnings! She countered with talk of columns and the light on Delos, where the place seems to give birth to light itself. Perhaps then, while I learnt her real names are a feminized mix of the ever-present Orthodox Saint here and anti-Turkish intercessor Saint Spiridon and Alexander himself, such a green and fecund isle is an eternal antidote to that superstitious Greek association of Cyprus trees with death, misfortune and graveyards, like the sound of Scop’s Owls hooting in the night.

They are superstitions and legends much explored in the novel I’ve been reading here too, by Sofka Zinovieff, The House On Paradise Street. It is not a masterpiece, no Homer, with little of the literary panache or indeed sparkling charm of a Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, but it is compelling and more importantly valuable. In solid prose it moves between the present, especially that moment of recent Greek ‘crisis’ of 2008, where many worlds seemed to fall apart, and the Occupation by the Nazis, until 1942. Then the bitter tragedy of the Greek Civil War, through the dictatorship of The Colonels too. They could certainly make a far better film of it than that atrocious Americanisation of Captain Corelli with Nicholas Cage. Zinovieff writes like a journalist discovering fiction, which I believe she is, and with that name but also an agent in London, you wonder if English is her first language. She is married to a Greek and has two children. In a sense it is always a story somehow in exile from itself, seeking its own heart, but it is most fascinating both in providing a foreigner’s eye and experience too, with the detail of a tour guide and travel writer, sometimes a touch of the poet, and for its discussion of the British legacy too.

“On Corfu they still play cricket!” is the patriotic hero Nikitas’s dismissive quip that references this island in the novel. Nikitas’s sudden death provokes the historical investigation by Antigone his mother, an exile to Soviet and then modern Super Capitalist and ‘Cowboy’ Moscow, forced to abandon him to her sister as a baby, and his English wife Maud, bringing up their children in the anguished environment of student riots and the modern ‘Crisis’ in Athens, while coping with death, loss, age and decay that springs out so suddenly in everyone’s little life. The novel moves chapter by chapter between their competing narratives and one of its biggest flaws is that as such it internalizes none of its male protagonists, perhaps men are the book’s real Greek mystery and threat, but also creates few characters you can really love and so passionately identify with.

Its two central stings in the tale, most clever in the use of the seeming acronym ‘Wasp’ to reference those endless political groups from ELAS to PASOC, and least emotionally satisfying in the revelation over the British protagonist Johnny’s real human love affair, could have been far better handled dramatically. Meaning their power, outrage or beauty are not sought out from within for the reader and so lose effect. Yet they sustain the action and the themes and help a book approach depth and sometimes passion too, if, and precisely because of it’s dark themes, it is perhaps an attempt to avoid passion and get at fact and clarity in recording events many don’t know about. “Passion,” sparkled the girl on Agios Gordios, “That’s what Greeks are.” Meanwhile a book relayed the story of the brave women of Souli opposite Corfu dancing to their deaths in 1803, rather than surrendering to the Turks, or the 400 pleats in the traditional costumes of freedom fighters to mark every year of Ottoman occupation, as it reminds you that passion also brings a talent for tragedy.

I felt peculiarly British then as I saw them playing Cricket the other day in white flannels on the green in front of the Liston and the beautiful Archaeological Museum in Corfu town. “Pakistanis” observed a Greek friend though, with more than a hint of that schadenfreude that sometimes brands all Albanians too, and which is far more prevalent, and redolent with a threat that you can’t feel on Britain’s little island, so much closer to that real fault line of modern Europe; Turkey and the Bosphorous. That evening we listened to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here in the tiny Time Machine bar, then of course I saw the headline about UKIP’s victory back in the UK and its effect on the Tory Party and remembered the threat of atavism or real economic and cultural conflict is spreading everywhere.

That bar was part of the delight of getting to know Corfeats and a place though. Like tea and backlava with my friend and a young mathematician and Wikipedia guru opposite the Cafe Bristol. Or a game of ‘Gringlish’ and 1980’s Trivial Pursuit in my friend’s half built house with a view, as a storm fired lightening bolts across the bay, and too much booze after supper in my favourite restaurant here, Stimati in the village of Viros. There Spiros deals with his talent and ache as an artist by covering the walls with paintings bright with those ‘Iconic’ or primary Byzantine colours, although unfolding erotic Jungian dreamscapes, instead of God, in between the cooking. While his Scots wife Margaret bustles through with efficient practicality, stopping to discuss Scottish Independence, or to share some clear-eyed jokes and fun.

As for things being not quite cricket, or perhaps exactly Imperial Cricket, down in Corfu town I had noticed how I had noticed several young Pakistani players with surprise too, since this is what equates to a National Greek Cricket team. As the odd African peddles watches on the beaches, or there are so many cheap China stores here. Meanwhile a vastly tall, aging Greek Heavy-Metal hippy, with an Archbishop Makarios beard the length of a shaggy dog story, begs defiantly among the pretty cobbles and the wealthy trippers in the Old Town. Thankfully Corfu is no island to embrace the likes of Golden Dawn though, except perhaps in humorous talk of Independence for Corfu itself. Then, with its highly successful tourist industry and relative wealth, including a deal of British ownership, nor has it faced quite the hardships on the mainland. Despite complaints about sudden house taxes imposed, more than temporarily too, stories of local graft among doctors, to plump the Middle Classes, or that eternal accusation of political corruption at the top in Athens. More than that though, however bad things get, Corfu has an expansion and generosity that is in the landscape itself.

The British legacy is of course very strong on Corfu, the map of which looks a bit like Britain turned upside down. Not only with the cricket, but Prince Phillip having been born at Mon Repos, and celebrated English visitors here, from Edward Lear and the Durrell brothers to Joanna Lumley. ‘Kensington-on-Sea’ they call Kassiopi, South East of Sidari, the island’s most Northern point, bulging in the summer with rich Notting Hillites from London. Both of them above Kalami, where Lawrence Durrell and his lover had that White House on the sea, the property I think now owned by Lord Rothschild, or perhaps that’s above. Lawrence was of course a very different creature to his brother Gerald, that oh so British naturalist of the charming My Family and Other Animals. Whose practical, observant, scientific echo reminds you of the Brit care of local animals here; the tiny kittens like pocket watches and the battered cat families that survive around the dustbins. Perhaps I share fictional Nikitas’s prejudice against Right-Wing people, (except when you’re trying to get some decent service, or to fix my fridge, yet again), but I would translate it to people who don’t like animals instead.

Lawrence’s different kettle of fish to his brother, like some familial fault line at the centre of Paradise Street too, was in his attraction to Eastern philosophy, his protracted philandering, that help some remark he was ‘not a nice man’, but his skill too at history and very gorgeous travel writing, that did a great service to Greece. I’ve never read the Alexandria Quartet but know his painting the island of Corfu as ‘Prospero’s Cell’, referencing a bogus local legend a friend told him that Shakespeare’s The Tempest was set here. As if imagination and literature, from Homer to now, are not a country to themselves, as Martin Amis once remarked in shock at the Islamic reaction to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Well, the art of the novel, and of course the older ‘God Consciousness’ of Myth too, in the very emergence of language and storytelling itself, is that they aren’t entirely separate countries either, if they have power and meaning.

As for the map, physical and internal, and my obviously scruffier end of the isle below the airport, whose open runway always gives me a strange buzz, it is apparently Agios Stephanos to the North of Kalami that attracts the true cognoscenti and the elite ‘Philhelenes’ so questioned in The House on Paradise Street. So the novel discusses that superiority of knowledge and power that in the eyes of Nikitas made the British almost as bad as other conquerors, from Lord Elgin to even mosquito-bitten Lord Byron, but especially Churchill, with his carving up of Europe with Stalin at Yalta. A pact that saw both British and American influence after 1947 go unchallenged by the Soviets, although a role that other Greek protagonists in the story are very grateful for. It made me think of the pretty waitress in the Tea shop who had said so warmly “I like the British”. In the factual historical postscript to the book and with regard to Metaxa and the Colonels, who I first heard about personally on holiday visits as a child with my parents, when Greece was still a Homeric dream, comes that phrase that has haunted the World from London to Iran since WWII – “supported by the CIA.”

Meanwhile my chance friend on Agios Gordios tried to mimic being so ‘verrrrry British’, although she hardly knew where to look when I told her that at Edinburgh University I had once visited a friend at Broom Hall, only to see a tiny bit of the Parthenon on the Drawing Room wall. It was the Bruce home, and so Lord Elgin’s house and to be fare to myself I tried to pierce the grandeur of it by pretending to steal the cutlery. That Elgin Marble thing, or how you rewrite or correct history in a globalised World, or indeed if you should in a multicultural epicentre like London and The British Museum, serving so many visitors and scholars too, is an aspect that is intelligently dismissed by Nikitas in visiting Maud in London.

So instead to the human horror of war and especially Civil War and the atrocities on both sides, which was of course redefined by that super battle that began before World War II ever ended, the function and ideology of money and so power, Capitalism versus Communism, as the Cold War began. Fought with such vigour by the likes of Allen Dulles in Switzerland and then from America. That East Coast lawyer, OSS man and first Civilian director of the CIA, and great share holder in the American Fruit Company too. It is Churchill’s role I don’t really know about though, who incidentally was brought to power instead of Chamberlain partly through the offices of my grandfather Clement Davies, as Liberal leader and head of the All-Party Group in the UK Parliament.

The novel is fair minded by giving different voices and perspectives, just as one character says Greece was not a British Colony. Although what truth can be reached if Greece still thinks it was ‘them’ doing it all cynically, like modern day Politicians up at the top? When graft can go from top to bottom, all humans have potentially murderous instincts, the British Empire bankrupted itself fighting Nazi evils, for any Imperial evils, as America achieved a new Hegemony, and that ruling instinct was always towards law and order, especially in the vicious and tragic maelstrom of the Balkans. Churchill did not have the power to impose his will at Yalta and had to engage in real-politique, just as the Philhelene ideal was perhaps betrayed by the horrible realities of war, resources and survival. Something to wake up to, as much as Communist Idealists in softer countries woke up to the horrors of Stalin.

A historical postscript reminds you of the fact Greece did not become a country until 1830 either and then references the ‘catastrophe’ of Smyrna in 1927. Not so much Ethnic Cleansing as Ethnic Rearranging, shifting 500,000 Turks and 400,000 Greeks, always the problem of the Nation State, especially when religious identity and ideology steps in too – Christian versus Islam, that fault line so much clearer at the Bosphorous. One that competes with a ‘Greece’ that stretches back to Byzantium and the Eastern Empire. “I’m orthodox and respect their faith,” one waiter had grunted, looking out to sea and talking of ‘them’, after new beheadings on TV, as I failed to get the boat to Vidos. But he certainly didn’t agree when I gave him my weak-livered ‘One Planet’ liberalism. It was of course Ataturk though who tried to modernize a sclerotic Ottoman world, removed his mother’s headscarf in public saying she was too beautiful to hide her face, shifted the Capital to Ankara and tried to separate religion from the State.

Fatherland and God are defined as powerful forces in Greece in Zinovieff’s novel too, as they were in Spain, against those supposedly ‘Godless’ and youthful instincts to create a new world among the often Communist Partisans fighting the Nazis from the mountains or the idealistic Red Brigades. Meanwhile though The House on Paradise Street attempts a story that heals with the instincts of a woman and mother, while not sitting on the fence either. That phrase then – ‘atrocities on both sides’ – which is such a challenge in places like Syria now, is not quite good enough and is countered with the instinct to expose the Right Wing prison camps, the suffering in women’s detention centres, being much a book about women, and indeed the often ruthless support of the British Establishment up to 1947, that included decapitations of at least dead soldiers.

All potentially at the heart of modern debates too about the role of Greece in Europe, or Germany in Greece, just as a new German company was just exposed as one of the most corrupt of all. Or what happened when the European Troika insisted both on restructuring and savage cutbacks, and the actions of the likes of the Universal banking Spider, Goldman Sachs. It was interesting to see Zinovief take a differently slanted line then in the story of Maud’s children, echoing many things I have heard too, from my Economics teacher friend, or local mothers, about the old fashioned rote teaching methods here, in a sense the patriarchalism of history and National loyalty, and that much of it is about the frustrations and bewilderment of young people. So it references the murder of a young student by police, or the student deaths under the Colonels too, but balances that with a skepticism about ‘hoodie’ anarchy and lost generations. So too I’ve heard among new younger friends perhaps a worrying tendency to grow old or give up too soon, though it’s something many feel facing the vast capital gulfs of today. Don’t give up. Remember the light, the beauty, the future and the Gods that make you eternally young. Greece does have a working Democracy, it is investigating the crimes of Golden Dawn members and it also has a right to talk about the flaws of the European or Global Capital model too. Meanwhile Zinovieff can use the protection of fiction to address things that might cause offense here, or furious over-reaction, like why driving is so challenged, smoking is everywhere, or how the loud shouts of malaka at every slam of a backgammon piece sometimes frightens the non natives. Others might find it a quality of foreign difference and charm.

Much meat for my Greek guest at a barbecue who seemed convinced everything from to Ebola to Iraq is a global conspiracy and that old bug bear too, an Israeli one. With that you can’t really argue the facts though, as much as I might agree with the potential conspiracy of Capital and Corporations to always reproduce themselves, sometimes at deep human cost, because it usually descends into a kind of paralyzed mysticism. Yet I also wanted to chat to him about Parmenides, and one theory that the belief the entire history of Western Civilization is based on Socratic rationalism is in fact a misreading or writing of Plato, Parmenides writing just one fragmentary poem on Nature, and about the Snake and the Cadeucus, theatre, dream caves and Aesclepius too. Perhaps that was the lead in to the discussion too of how to learn and earn the joys of just living simply, free of the storms of the world, in such a beautiful place.

As for Britishness, my other experience of it here though was far less dramatic or imperial, at a friend’s birthday in the little Paradise bar overlooking ‘Mouse Island’, Pontikonisis, just below my house, where someone said the Albanian owner foolishly watered the wine. A group of fifteen English ladies, a German and my fiesty American friend, met for drinks and oily snacks. All of whom had married Greek husbands in the heyday of their romance with Paradise, like Shirley Valentines swept into a sea of passion and new possibility. Another English wife I talked to the day before in Corfu Town though now finds that roots are roots and that for her there remains a gulf of understanding or experience at times with her Greek man. The ladies at the supper are mothers, have jobs teaching, or working in the tourist industry, face the common issues of survival and every day life. Sometimes perhaps a cultural paucity too, or a lack of stimulation perhaps, common to young locals too, though Corfu Town is home to the Ionian University, that makes the likes of the Arillas beer festival a weekend must, engagement with the amateur theatre group vital, or talk of celebrity a place of a special frisson. The big, exciting world.

Now though, since the day Jude Law came, to be naughty or not in his villa, the reps have to sign special non-disclosure agreements. We all like the wild, the naughty and the indiscreet too, life-gossip, if not quite the loucheness of Kavos in the far South. I drove down one day, in search of who knows what, to find Kavos, even emptied of tourists, a gaudy horror story of strip pubs, indecorous lounge pools and Medical Clinics seemingly every 100 metres, to take in the drunk and the wounded, from the evening fights or the blow job competitions. The mayor complained loudly when a British Documentary about it was screened, as if it had offended Greek Honour, or Manhood. In that it probably does offer a cliche of a Brit Package Tour, ever pilloried as being the drunks or thugs abroad. But Corfu is big enough, sexy enough, roomy enough, to allow for that too, like a touch of the dark side in the Southern subconscious. I now call Kavos Corfu’s Torrid Zone.

So to sitting in the immortal Robins Nest in Agios Gordios, the charming little bar run by a sparky lady from Chicago who has been here 29 years, seems to have done everything, lets people flow through her place like magic and say’s she dislikes money and is ‘a trader’, the trade being human potential and fun. From dressing up parties, to the beautiful hand painted rocks that litter her place. “We don’t have Greek comedians” said the young car mechanic glumly, over a Trivial Pursuit question, and there are not many jokes in The House on Paradise Street either, but here there’s lots of laughter. So folk come, year in year out, friends and near family, Robin has four Greek children – from America, Britain, Norway, Serbia, although not everywhere. Since Robin thinks I’m far too posh, and that Pink Palace Hotel above is so very pink, it brings a slight yearning for the days when Sir Frederick Adam got so romantic with his Greek wife. As for how little I know, I never realized William Ewart Gladstone was a High Commissioner in Greece. But that world is gone, as the novel warns modern Greeks should embrace a new if however confusing world that they can only understand by jettisoning both some of the prejudices and especially bitter memories of the past, that essentially feed on the dead. The problem is that Greek identity or the search for it among the sense of pride and self worth is so mixed up in the past, and Soumian’s Marble Steep, that abandoning it sometimes seems like abandoning the Gods themselves, or the roots of language. On the other hand, one of my friends hates all that Greek Bazouki music and all life movement is a battle between past and present, localised or wider horizons. Last year my attempt to contact The Lawrence Durrell Society, for instance, as a Brit writer perhaps dreaming of Consulates, exotic Balkan Trilogies or sexy spies, resulted in a very desultory response. With not only the discovery that the budget had been slashed, and the lease on their building gone, but that lunch up North was far more appealing than making an effort to have a drink with a nosy Brit like me.

Hey ho, perhaps Corfu needs some brand new writers and poets, I thought, if anyone reads anymore, especially as I watched a gaggle of Russian sailors decamp around Corfu town last month, in those huge, flat, wide-brimmed sailor’s caps, that always look decidedly fascist. Apparently one of Russia’s largest warships was in port, The Moscow, docked among the giant ferries sailing between Turin or Venice, and bristling with missiles the size of White Mercedes. Young men in a foreign town, they sat politely in the Souvlaki restaurants, or gathered to drink beer and smoke cigarettes, as they got snaps and it all became part of their life memories too. Perhaps, with Mr Putin’s taste for muscle-flexing and the anguish in Ukraine, they’ll do what the Brits did, and not so long ago according to a nostalgic English friend at super who told me her husband’s stolen boat turned up on the news, used as transport for Albanian drug smugglers, and invite the growing phalanx of Russian package tourists swarming to the island on board for evening cocktails. You hear the Slavic voices in my local shop, Nikki Foros, or on the promontory below the big hotel beyond Mouse Island. It all seems so unreal though, on this generous, gentle island, where EasyJet plans to open Winter routes next year. Except when the sun sets and that nagging warning voice comes again, as you watch the News or look at Mr Putin’s face, that history not only repeats itself, but never learns the lessons of history.

So to what’s above me on the hillside, and apropos of a friend writing to ask me if I had been to the house and palace of Sisi. That rather bizarre and tragic woman, Elizabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria, murdered by a young anarchist in 1898, often lived in the Achilleon, the fine white marble mansion bursting with old curios, wide terraces with marvelous views and statues of the ancient Gods, to remind you of Germanic Philhelenism. Achilles is the centre piece, of course, the greatest of especially Greek warriors, only to remind you his wound was weak humanity, or mortality itself, as his mother dipped him in the river Styx, but had to hold him by that Achilles’ heal. Perhaps we should remember though that Athens, the home of those lost marbles, Democracy and Pericles, was also a warring City State, built by men and founded in slavery, or that the best of Greece, like the best of anything, was always a kind of myth.

The Achilleon is far better and more proudly preserved a place than the likes of the dusty museum on Mon Repos, open to 8pm everyday of the year, at 7 Euros a pop. It is of course also the place where the Greek experiment in Europe was first hammered out and then the bailout too. I didn’t visit again, but had an ice cream outside and enjoyed the Cypruses and the glowing evening sunlight, just beyond the sleepy village of Gastouri. Where thanks to lost English friends I first came to visit Corfu, three years ago. I thought of one whose father was murdered and told my new Dutch friend about it. “It happened” he said, “though it doesn’t really now. Often with two warnings and then a shotgun.” The crime has never been solved. That new friend of nostalgic British memories at the birthday supper had offered me a little flat to buy in Gastouri, but do up too, that wouldn’t exactly break a very down trodden bank yet, unless I got caught up in too much skimming off the top. Which my dutch friend remarked in his father’s experience of building, as he criticized the mentality here, especially in blaming others, planned to return for some Eco-living and bravely defended the honesty of his Albanian neighbour too.

Such things remind you always of real people and real lives beyond the borders, images and isms, washed up or not, which is what The House on Paradise Street is about too. I suddenly wondered and thought too it would not be remotely possible if the economy was not down. So to the real question, whether to stay on here writing through the winter, perhaps renting, and where any roots really are now? I thought of the little painting I had given my Scot’s friend for her birthday, a pleasant watercolour of Mouse island, bought in an art shop in Corfu town, then of that US girl who had so strangely wanted to get a very confusing tattoo – “Sail on Ulysses”. Then of the big eyed girl on Agios Gordios, who had so suddenly vanished that evening at Robin’s bar, with no reason and little rhyme, that put me in a bad mood for days. Who had told me of the ancient legend, that Pontikonisis had been the boat of Nausicaa, transformed by the Gods. It added to Nausicaa’s paradox, because while it was the Phoenicians who took poor, belabouring Odysseus home to Ithaca, and Nausicaa is said to have married his son Telemachus, that name never mentioned to patient Penelope actually means ‘burner of ships’. Hmmm, whatever the myths or truth, sometimes it is so lovely here I wonder if the island will let me go.

David Clement-Davies October 2014

Around the World? The photo is from the road above Agios Gordios on Corfu.

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Filed under Community, Culture, Education, Environment, Fantasy, Language, The Phoenix Story

Tagged as Agios Gordios, Corfu, Dragon in The Post, Greece, Greek History, Sofka Zinovieff, The House On Paradise Street, Travel

September 17, 2014 · 7:58 pm

SCOTLAND, INDEPENDENCE, GREAT BRITAIN AND THE IMPORTANCE OF NO

On the eve of this crucial vote what questions are we asking about Scotland, if those in Northern Ireland, England and Wales have a right to ask too? Perhaps a bit of history, and from Edmund Shakespeare’s time, might help. It was in 1607, the year of Shakespeare’s brother’s death, that a Scots King, James I, on the throne of England for only four years, failed in his vision of a ‘Greate Britaigne’, and an attempt to unite Scots and English laws, despite changing the flags. An Act of Union did not take place for nearly 200 years, in 1801, and after both a Civil War and that ‘Glorious Revolution’ that had brought Willian of Orange to the throne. None of those Scots monarchs though were especially laudable, despite the high romance of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45. In the meantime, out of an Elizabethan genius, in a country that never had an Empire, and after the long and gradual loss of France, England sailed out to both explore and conquer the World, with a new mercantile imperialism founded in the City of London that was defined by those East and West India companies. Which built a rather unique Empire too, founded both in the idea of trade and law, with very many flaws, for sure, and yet, especially if we accept the idea of Capitalism at all and that always essentially privatised enterprise, a far better track record than many equivalent powers and Empires. Far more than my homeland of Wales, that truly suffered both from English repression and contempt and never had the Welsh Dragon incorporated into the flag (pause for thought for Dragon In The Post), Scottish genius and enterprise played its role in that too, just as it had an Enlightenment at home. It also involved poverty and cruelty and a Scottish world diaspora, much influenced by the fact or truth of English land ownership in the North.

But what are we really asking now, in a modern world that may need and benefit from kinds of devolution, and those local parliaments that have given cultures greater autonomy and identity, but which is also seeing such calamities of conflict, fear and hatred Worldwide? Do we really need to take that ‘Great’ out of Great Britain and further undermine a United Kingdom, as well as that ‘Mother of Parliaments’ at Westminster, when this highly opportunistic attempt at Independence by the likes of Alex Salmond has been badly thought through, with no plans for an army, nor a currency nor a true discussion of the costs and benefits of the entire enterprise? Not only are companies talking of moving back to that financial hub in London, but if oil prices fall with new technologies, or when those resources decline, the kind of plans Scotland’s ‘Yes Men and Women’ have will see resources drawn down to government both by cuts, that have already happened with the SNP, but raised taxes. It is in fact British money that has underwritten the progressive social policies like free University education. Isn’t it telling too that the likes of UKIP leader Nigel Farage should want an independent Scotland, furthering the kind of dangerous petty atavisms his stamp of politics indulge in? Is it not also extremely arrogant that the SNP should simply have expected to keep the pound, yet not show a similar responsibility to the future of a weakened Union, or all our voices on a highly integrated island? Countries and Kingdoms also need to find an appropriate scale, on this geographic island of ours, to be a power in the World, to find a united direction that supersedes localised interests and to talk with a truly strong or coherent voice. In the end it is not just a question of some ancient sentimentality then but the damage this will do to a rather unusual European centre in the sea, that needs to pull and work together, especially if Great Britain is that island bridge between Europe and America. It is already having echoes in tiny European regions that will not benefit the World or themselves in trying to pull away, but a Yes will lessen all of our identities and voices on a world stage. Whatever this brings up, and promises have already been made from Westminster, do not break the Union Scotland and let a new genius and sense of united confidence stand out instead.

PA PRESS

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Tagged as Alex Salmond, Scottish History, Scottish Independence, Yes or No vote

August 25, 2014 · 1:52 pm

THE SOUTH DOWNS WAY’S HAPPY END, CROWD CAPITALISM AND A DRAGON HAS UNDER 65 HOURS TO GO!

This photo of the chalk horse is for Steph, DCD walked as hard as Les Miserables for Kelly, he went with gentle irony for Justin, he spread his wings for Yasmin, he watched kites for Sol, he told stories for Jonathan, he quoted Stevenson for Di, he kept talking and trying for Sheila and he applauded the Ice Bucket challenge for Laura, all of whom have kept standing up for him, when others didn’t. You’ve really made the Street Team and those needed thanks to others too is yet to come.

You can make a difference now too to Dragon In The Post, in these racy last hours, by BACKING DRAGON IN THE POST AND PHOENIX ARK PRESS

You can help the blind by taking the £50 Perk or just sponsor a completed 100 mile walk for the RNIB by pressing

DAY SIX

Hooray! It’s a really glorious feeling crossing those great white hunchbacks that edge the bleached blue sea at Eastbourne, those rightly named Seven Sisters, that end at the steadily eroding Burling Gap, to stop at last on Beachy Head and look back on another brilliantly clear blue day. It seemed as if I could really see back across all those hundred miles traversed and straight to Winchester, in the West, once a capital town of ancient Wessex and the Treasury of England. Now I should study the maps, fill out the blogs (with so much missed), put up three little films I made to Facebook and The Indiegogo Gallery too and leave some kind of useful or perhaps inspiring record for anyone wanting to walk the South Downs Way themselves. I think I’ll try to ‘publish it’ and keep on trying to raise money for the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Meanwhile, on the way I came up with a new term for what crowd funding might be about, in the future and an age of such impossible capital differentials. Not America’s hated socialism, not just a shop front window on the internet for the same as ever, but some new idea for a way forward where money is an inevitable part of the scenery but where some new spirit and awareness needs to develop alongside- Crowd Capitalism. What do you think?

But I did it, pack on back, hazel staff in hand, trying to have a go with Dragon In The Post too and I’m chuffed. I blogged it all as I went, even if few were reading, which you can read now by scrolling down or clicking on the page above – “The Winchester Chronicles”. Of course the lack of a ticker-tape parade at the end, or any thronging, cheering supporters, dressed in Dragon costumes, (I call it the James and The Giant Peach Syndrome) can lead to a little deflation. Or perhaps it’s a lack of contributions from folk I encountered on the walk, for a book or charity, who I told my story to. Or that’s mostly coming back into the dizzy, preoccupied world, that really started after winding out from Dean’s Place hotel, after a super-powered, fuller-than-English breakfast, meaning I ate everything. Along the little river Cuckmere, passed that mysterious chalk horse no one knows the name of, through aptly named Litlington and down to the estuary where the Seven Sisters National Park begins and the green fields suddenly exploded with bank holiday trippers, chasing dogs, children, kayakers and of course the cars and buses rattling noisesomely between Eastbourne and Brighton – nyawwwwwgn!

You start to dissolve back into the unremittingly ordinary, dare I say humdrum, the doplar shift of time and life and death. Which every traveller knows the sigh of on their return, like that Stevenson inscription on the Toby Stone on Stanes ‘Street’ – “home is the sailor home from the sea and the hunter home from the hill”. Yet especially from real walkers, there’s a knowing smile or greeting if you are carrying a pack and walking stick and look a little foot sore and many “well done’s” from folk I told, with a real glint of admiration in their eyes. No time for laughing, trendy Japanese tourists then finding the sight of windswept me very griggly – which means a bit of raughing at a weary sigh. “I’m not weary,” I cried indignantly “I just came 100 bloody miles!” No time for the irritating scruff of the traveller at Eastbourne Station either, as I asked about the absurdly long Sunday service, (over three hours, with two changes, although partly because I refused to go back more expensively to London to get to Winchester) and who quipped “Walk it the mate, will only take a week.” “I’m not your mate, mate, and I just did, in six days.” But that put me back in the world too, as did the genteel Eastbourne ticket lady objecting to my cussing. “Oh please, I wasn’t bloody swearing at you and don’t be so bloody provincial.” Still, it was good to stop half an hour in Brighton, since I’ve never been and to touch the still fizzy, saucy picture postcard, Quadrophenia feel of the merry place.

But people’s approval at coming a 100 milles reminded me of that wunderlust back in Tich, something very deep in the blood, from friends who suddenly wished they were coming too, or were out there having their own adventure, an instinct as old and primitive as being free, or wanting to conquer the world. Before you do such a thing, a kind of imagined map in the head develops of possibilities, dangers, ‘anything could happens‘, needed kit or warning notes, but the best is gaining the experience and knowledge of it all and sharing it too. Which is why I was annoyed with myself for moments of un-self-reliance, when I stopped thinking and looking and asked others instead. It seemed to lead to two big mistakes. First the day before yesterday when I went storming off too far south towards the sea, after a cracking and perhaps over confident morning. It had brought me back up to Black Cap, then to the sharp turn south ,above Ashcombe Bottom, to the campsite and weird blue-tied security guards sitting reading The Sun in their unmarked car, outside Housedean Farm. Were they spotting for drugs, protecting the Telscombe’s judge’s family out for a night’s wild camping or trying to cheer up the lonely looking fellow humping his solitary tent back to Brighton. The truth is you can sense a lot of loneliness in people too in their travels and wrestles with the wild. I saw my first seagulls tipping down that hill, and several often sullen looking young camping groups, as well as a pure white cow, not quite as noble as Shadowfax or the deer in Fire Bringer. That farm lies on the thundering A27, where I took a photo of the South Downs Way sign for Facebook, backed by the nasty motorway, then crossed the bridge. So up and out again onto the escarpment, blustery now with a more threatening breath of the sea, and massing clouds, un-wondering whether or not there was any ominous meaning in cows half standing up, half lying down. It’s sitting back in doors in the remorselsy damp of Winchester’s chilly, pre-autumn drizzle that I realise how incredibly lucky I was last week with the weather, and how miserable those downs could very quickly become, caught in a storm, or blown into over emotional shapes on the way, like the trees on the down-tops sculpted into wave forms by the wind. That’s how they grow and how we grow sometimes too, since all exists in its element.

So out passed Loose Bottom, down Jugg’s Road, by Slump Bottom, with posh Lewes to the East, reminding me of the nice bloke in the George and Dragon that lovely sunny lunchtime in Houghton and thoughts of Black Tie picnics at Glyndebourne too, to Swanborough Hill by Home and Long Bottom. That made me think of a children’s series years back about War Time refugee kids in long grey shorts meeting a Mrs Gotobed, in a place called Granny’s Bottom – so coming up with the laughing cry “Go to bed, in Granny’s bottom!” Tee hee. That made me ponder my flatmate Norm’s puns back home though and hurry on to Beachy head. I am almost sure now it was at Swanborough Hill I must have missed the sign and tipped off too far south, after some guy on his Mobile Ap said Southease was 2.8 miles away, but all down hill from here. The truth is I was really trying to tell him about Dragon In the Post, but I took the wrong Down, down the wrong hill! That extended bit of the Way was repaired by Roger and Hazel though, elder walkers as tough as ferrets, who marched me back passed the young stud horses, through the charming village of Telscombe, where that important security guarded judge lives, according to Roger, though centred for big cases in Lewes, and where there is also a neglected Youth Hostel. They kindly pointed out the road again at the motor cross circuit on the hill. Looking at the map now it is 2 miles, so my total detour must have been six. Yet any irritation I’d got it wrong so close to the end, or that long metalled roads just hurt more, was eased by eating wild apples o, and the fact that the sun seemed to blaze again and the weather clear as soon as I got back on The South Downs Way. It felt like magic. It snaked me towards the River Ouse in the valley and so to really charming Southease, with its little railway line beyond, worthy of the Watercress Line back in Arlesford. It wasn’t the newness of the hostel there that appealed, although it was built last year, but the pleasant farm barn style and its busy energy; the original way it’s done too, for adults and children. Like the giant Connect Four set in the garden or the interesting information about nearby Ramdeen, haunt of Virginia Wolf and that Bloomsbury Set we are clearly failing (though not entirely) to re-start back home in Tichborne. So, after the sweet girl in the cafe extended her hours to make me a delicious toasted ham and cheese banquette, with a bottle of larger, irritating her grumpy, plump table wiping colleague and my continued struggles with my draining mobile phone, trying to contact a friend, at 5pm came the momentous decision whether to stay here, or march on over the top for the six and a half miles to Alfriston.

I’m glad I did, if it was quite a hike, because the girl’s remark that “I wouldn’t get the satisfaction” if I cheated a little with a cab was absolutely right. Besides, I wouldn’t have met a young man in a Macmillan Cancer t-shirt who had just run 48 Miles in a day from Woking, training for real charity raising, nor a sweet girl with her black mongrel about to walk up Beddingham Hill. Either youth, hope or memory stepped in there, because she was quite wrong that it was only twenty minutes over Firle Beacon to Alfriston – the long evening journey down Bostal Hill took a good forty minutes. But so to private recitations of Gray’s Elegy In A Country Churchyard about drowsing tinklings lulling the too-distant, bloody folds, among the fish eyed sheep, a warm, golden evening, that stealthy fox and the growing shadows of over Alfriston, long before the sun set on the hill, nestled as it is into the darkling folds of the valley. It is an odd place, surrounded with wealthy modern homes, several with Solar Panelled rooves, pompously named driveways and sleek, rich cars, but with a very old centre. So it was a delight to pass The George Inn and see a sign saying its beer licence had been granted back in 1597. That year Shakespeare bought New Place in Stratford, six months after his 11 year old son Hamnet’s death, his brother Edmund was just seventeen, and in the beery, bear-baiting, brothelly reaches of semi-outlaw Southwark, the Rose theatre was still working hard by Winchester Palace in London. While the Swan theatre in Paris Gardens was closed for the summer for staging that lewd and seditious Ben Jonson Play “The Isle of Dogges“. Shakespeare’s troupe had triumphed North of the river in Shoreditch though, their new patron Lord Carey had been enrolled in The Order of the Garter, to become Lord Chamberlain too and for which Will probably wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor, set with Falstaff at the Garter Inn. Two years later The Globe would go up in 1599, after the troupe dismantled the wood from The Theatre and took it south of the river. If the bod at Deans Place is right about the super rich Record Producer’s raves in his mansion nearby though, or the steamy inter marital goings on in the finest hotels, then England is as thankfully as lewd as ever, to be gently reprimanded by Shakespeare’s pricking Fairies. In Shakespeare lust is not the crime, betrayal is.

So to that astonishing purple-blue misty morning yesterday, on walking day six – allowing time out to return to Southampton, and the last push. Not exactly a push, because from Alfriston it all seems to hurry towards you instead and sweep you back into the tide – that was the river, this is the sea. The second irritation at asking the way though was the irritating nasal bloke who stopped with his mates and went on and on and on about what you might see or miss, as the South Downs Way seemed to split into many little tracks here, like its own estuary, then who came out with clunking guide-book phrases like “very historic Alfriston“, or the vital importance of the Long Man of Wilmington too. Which you can only do if you take the eastern track around the Seven Sisters Reserve. The choice of seeing that is balanced against that un-named chalk horse though and the beauty of meandering along the Cuckmere instead at the valley bottom. I confess to a mile’s cheat too by hopping a lift with a Swedish redhead, but even in times of yore they wanted an adventure and I like testing the hitch hiker spirit. So to the sea and up, up, onto those roller-coastal Downs again. As you look along of course, at the Dove- white edges and back along the snaking Down tops to Winchester too, with true pride, you again remember that’s what the Downs you have just crossed are – billions of years of steadily accreting crushed sea shells, chalk, eroded and sculpted by wave and then wind, and given a thin and so very recent layer of earth and grass, farm and housing, forms and passing meanings. Who can remember it all? All being eroded too, as everything is really moving and changing, like the houses at Burling Gap, below the little light House where they shot The Lives and Loves of a She Devil, that are year by year falling into the sea. No wonder the South Downs Way is so clearly marked with wooden signs, to give even more poignancy to those mournful wooden crosses and flowers memorialising sadder endings at Beachy Head, saying CLIFF EDGE. But there, it’s done and it was great.

David Clement-Davies set out on Monday last and reached the absurdly busy Beachy Head Pub on Sunday August 24th, 2014, around 4pm.

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Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Community, Environment, Publishing, The Arts, The Phoenix Story, Uncategorized

Tagged as Beachy Head, Crowd Capitalism, Dragon in The Post, Indiegogo, South Downs Way

August 23, 2014 · 8:36 am

POPPIES, PYLONS, PEACE HAVENS AND THE GENTLE SHADOW OF BLYTHE SPIRITS!

DRAGON IN THE POST IS NOW CROWD FUNDED TO OVER 80 PERCENT, BUT ENDS NEXT WEDNSDAY, AUGUST 27th. YOU CAN SEE THE PROJECT, HEAR A BBC INTERVIEW AND CONTRIBUTE NOW BY CLICKING HERE

YOU CAN SPONSOR DAVID QUITE INDEPENDENTLY IN WALKING THE SOUTH DOWNS WAY FOR THE RNIB, THE ROYAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR BLIND PEOPLE BY GOING TO JUSTGIVING.COM/David-Clement-Davies

It’s an oddly proud and almost schoolboy feeling when a bloke with a slight hunchback on Pycombe golf course, with greens as smooth and trim as a Brazillian Wax, asks you how many miles you’ve come and you get a “Good man!” For walking the whole of the South Downs, I mean, and effectively in six days. The three golfing blokes even smiled, when I hailed them with “I was going to joke that you’re ruining a good walk, mates, until I realised your clubs are bigger than mine!” As I jokingly tried to stand up to five cyclists pouring down a narrow bit of the track, barring their racy road with my stick, though we all got it. Then many people on the way are admiring or interested to know you’re doing the entire thing on foot. If people, not being so time rich themselves, perhaps, or in a fit enough state, or wanting that kind of effort, often just do intermittent stretches and break the South Downs up into manageable chunks. I’m referring, of course, and with the increasingly confident tap of my tall hazzle staff on flint and white chalk, along these truly ravishing escarpments, through wooded groves or across occasionally murderous main metalled roads, to what I now see as ‘My Way’, as ol’ blue eyes had it – the magnificent South Downs Way. Which, in perfect weather almost throughout, since setting out on Monday, has surprised and delighted yet again.

Of course any presumptuous invitation to the good people of Hampshire, and West and a tiny bit of East Sussex here, nay to the very Nation, to throw off their chains of mounting illiteracy, or individual indifference, to read my blasted blog and even walk with me, for a personal protest against the machine, for crowd funding artists, for charity, for old style travel writing or whatever, has naturally fallen on deaf ears (though not entirely, because the Swiss professor from the Sustainability Centre has kindly backed). Then everyone has their own thang. Indeed though I’ve singularly failed to part the Red Sea of growing Internet miscommunication, or lead the Israelites to the promised land of real books, sent once again, in the post, I’m very near the end of two finishing lines now, with Eastbourne beckoning by Sunday and the Dragon In The Post campaign drawing to an end this Wednesday too, August 27th. Can we do it, still.

Despite the gloom of not breaking through with the Katie Martin show on Thursday then, here at least I’ve had a splendid try, along with an astonishing and still to be enjoyed walk. While it ain’t over till the Fat Lady sings, and I hope I’ve done some small service in writing up the lot too, as it happens. I have also ensured very personally that the good word of stories, dragons or Phoenix Ark Press is now echoing (well, perhaps whispering) from here back to Old Winchester hill, like news in the old days of French Invasion, or the price of corn in London. Not without a certain sense of fun and shared adventure too, I hope, but it means I have been telling virtually everyone I meet, of me, of dragons or the RNIB.

Then, like the pylons suddenly beginning to march worryingly overhead across the working farms, over the sheep and cows, gorse and wild poppies, from centres of so called Civilisation like Peace-haven or Brighton on the sea, and in what is one of the most thickly inhabited areas of England, today I’ve also met more people than ever before; always both good and bad, but mostly very good. It’s precisely getting closer and closer to bigger centres now and because folk use the South Downs National park in so many individual ways, to make it their beloved way too; from route marching it, mountain biking it, jogging and rambling it, to daily dog walking, wild picnics, orchid hunting or the hang gliders that soar out off the dramatic Devil’s Dyke, on this section of my walk between Upper Beeding and Blackcap (to be explained). The Devil’s Dyke of course has a devilish legend about it, but was in fact carved out of the downs as water melted out of the glacier Ice Age ten thousand years ago. It helps everyone approaching the way who start to wonder where they’d like to be, when time is blowing all our bones like chalk dust through the heather.

With talk at dinner in my B&B of the raves up there too, or the grizzly motorbikes that churn up soft ground and are thankfully banned, I bet it’s enjoyed for a lot else besides. Although I had got today’s planning wrong then, with little Pycombe being far closer than I thought from the House of The Rising Sun, making a hike to Alfriston of near 23 miles tomorrow muh more than I wanted, my own pure, exhilarated enjoyment was aided by the fact that at Hobb’s Cottage my hostess and I came up with a nifty contingency plan – Namely to leave an over-heavy rucksack with her just after lunch and walk on for seven miles, in the end to an appealing pub called The Half Moon in Plumpton, where she picked me up, to be returned there again tomorrow I hope – to the Way, not the pub!

It led to the loveliest uninhibited afternoon walk too, with sweeping views out across the richly wooded Weild to the East and the North downs in the distance, a growing sense of expansion, that almost makes me want to take the Monarch’s Way too, and a pace of a very decent four miles an hour. Parallel I went, past Pycombe Church, still needing £14,000 for their crowd funded restoration, to that Golf Course, up passed two wind mills that crown the hills, Jack and Jill. Jill, though not reached directly on the Way, in her sparkling Randal-and-Hopkerk White is open to the public on Saturdays. Then out across watery Ditchling Beacon and then to a sudden drop down near enchanted Harry’s Hill, at Black Cap, haunt of woodpeckers, badger and some former writer who rises to pure lyrical poetry in hhis description on the useful notice board. There to meet both a bearded Hungarian bicyclist and a couple learning the nearing middle aged freedom of travelling the world light, planning the Downs next year, but India too, lucky things. Whose son had crowded funded as well and not only reached his large goal of over £40,000 but in just six days! Then he was blessed by some patron who put in £20,000.

It was another warm hearted and interesting encounter, with a promise to have a look or spread the word, from here to the Himalayas. So perhaps I will see about it this Bank Holiday Weekend. Which had all really begun first thing with the old gent walking his Labradoodles, just above Upper Beeding and the river Arun, as I was thinking of Sue’s troubles at The Rising Sun, in trying to escape the clutches of her Brewery and morph into a Free House, one solution perhaps being a kind of local Crowd funding too, in making it a communal pub. Beyond the State Acquisition Notice flapping on a farm fencing, the man on Beeding hill touched another age by calling me ‘Sir’, and not with any shame. Then he told me about the new Power Plant at coastal Peacehaven, but also of that vast Victorian Cathedral-thing in the distance, that first crowned the skyline as I got to that pig farm of yesterday, perhaps to challenge or suppress so many pagan spots that line the Way with a Victorian certainty. Not in fact a Cathedral though, but Lancing College, where a mate of his had once worked and so knew that the piles for the foundations reach as deep into the soft chalk as those rather pompous flying buttresses climb to heaven! Apparently one of the reason it still stands though, after that War that is still such a deep part of the Way’s story too, and Britain and the World’s, is that the Germans used to use it as a handy grid point on their bombing runs to Portsmouth and Southampton.

“Be inspired” cried the motto from the very uninspiring breeze block Youth Hostel just up the way, and rather unconvincingly because we so often seem to do things with so little style in Britain. I was thinking of the brilliantly imaginative and part State sponsored Parador system in Spain. But there, perching on the verge before Perching Hill, as a cow led her calf up Fulking escarpment,came the very inspiring sight of five redoubtable ladies who call themselves The Blythe Spirits Book Club! Well, one seemed to have a reading club of more criminal interest, but we chatted about how scandal and gossip are the very life blood of any decent book club. Since one came from the bizarrely named Warning Lid though, where a gruesome murder happened a few years ago, we shared a little touch of Brighton Rock and the darker, sadder side of life, or the South East. Like the poor woman found hanged in the loos at Hampshire’s recent Boom Town Fair. As they spoke of real shootings and even a headless torso. Then, Elvira-like, these fine damsels, who got a bit irritated with my calling them Ladies and also turned out to be dedicated Orchid hunters, seemed to haunt my day’s walk, very pleasantly. In fact they were making for Pycombe too and so we met up around lunch again in a cafe called The Hiker’s Rest, where I advised them to look out for a film called Adaptation, all about writers and orchids and things.

Some sage advice, if you are on this part if the way, especially around lunchtime – miss out the dreary Devil’s Dyke pub beyond the broken down WWII pill box and forge on to Saddlescombe. What a little surprise that is, with its restaurant cafe, Elderflower and Raspberry sponge cake to commit murder for, home farm produce and jams. Also a settlement that stretches back to The Doomsday Book and one where there was a small Templar Monastery, and the near unthinkable record of a request for acceptance of a Lady Knight called Joan. It, like the Downs, stayed the same for thousands of years, until technology revolutionised everything and swept the old order aside. Now it’s kept up by The National Trust, not least because they bought it to protect a major aquifer into Brighton. It has a useful Information centre, a donkey wheel, even it’s own prison for transgressors, but is a place of special magic. I was talking of my encounters though, so, dear walkers, and not at all just for the money, as I had joked, but the constituency too and the sheer crac of it, I address this blessed blog to you! You,Blythe Spirits, you the fine hearted team just setting out through the litch gate to the Stud at Pycombe, you parents of successful crowd funders too – I and Dragons and Phoenix Ark hath need of thee, in this very hour! So come support, and help a little dragon story fly, because I have only five days left! Thank you, and if you take the higher pledge I’ll stride forth again and talk books to you all.

Communicating though is what has kicked off recently at Hobbs Cottage, with the most atrocious review left on the dreaded Trip Advisor, after one a couple of years back about a run in with the cat, among many that are very good. Vituperative doesn’t do it, although it’s length and passion certainly undermines itself. All I can say is I found the place, which stretches back to 1605, very nice, thoughtfully done, with a great breakfast and if Wendy’s husband Terry is a shoe in for Lez Dawson, a tad Forthright at times for us wayfarers, although with interesting tales of being country billeted as a boy during the war, humour is perhaps needed in these dark times and a reminder that that Way is 8000 years old, to give us all a sense of perspective. I couldn’t run a B&B or quite live the small village gossip life. But perspective is what comes again driving up the hill, among so many magpiesthat probably gave Pycombe it’s name, magpie valley, to look out through sweeping purple clouds at giant sunsets and free yourself into the journey of the Way. The problem with Trip Advisor is that people can say anything and it stays there, haunting you, although I’m sure others read through the noise and do what they do. The Half Moon pub is suffering from the very same Trip advisor phenomenon, which since I didn’t experience enough, I can’t say much more about than I like their style and menu, although a certain snootiness does waft about these genteel parts. So to waking early in the night to see gnarled trees and moonlit shapes and shadows worthy of a witch’s bothy and blogging this piece too, then to setting out again for the final race to the Seven Sisters and home. Even if it’s only in reading the word, I hope you come and join me for the next two days.

David Clement-Davies stayed courtesy of Wendy and Terry Desborough at Hobbs Cottage, very conveniently located on the edge of Pycombe, with a nice conservatory and very big garden. They have two twin bed rooms, though with pull down bed facilities too, at a very reasonable £30-£40 per head, breakfast and tea and coffee included. Contact 01273846150

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Filed under Books, Childrens Books, Community, Culture, Environment

August 20, 2014 · 8:11 pm

DAY THREE – BRUISES, BURIALS AND BREAKFASTING ON BLACKBERRIES!

Good God, what an astounding, generous, gorgeous day’s walking, that found me shouting not just ‘freedom’ and ‘lovely’ but ‘JUST BEAUTIFUL’ from the start! If I thought little could top the Hartings, today on the twenty miles from Cocking to Storrington, this ancient highway really came into its own for me, and for many coinciding reasons too, past and present. One of the nicest and strangest being the lift I got off the way this evening from Neela, a warm eyed gardener, in her green Citroen Escapade, walking with her dog and her daughter Eli, who turned out to be studying Children’s Literature at Winchester University. Then, when I muttered about crowd funding, Solent Radio tomorrow and told them my name, Eli declared that Fire Bringer is one of her favourite books and she has made many round about read it! That serendipity joins the girl in the estate agent when I first arrived and someone in the new YMCA cafe too in Winchester. Don’t tell me there aren’t strange patterns in the world, just like the landscape.

But first feet first. If the sight of Crypt Farm up the way from my hotel this morning, dozing in a damply glittering 7.30 mist, filled these aching bones with foreboding, perhaps I’m walking through the pain barrier now. While although the way up that hill was steep it was smoothly cemented beyond the field, rather than hard tarmaced, and lovely on the pads. As was so much of what is effectively one of the straightest parts of the South Downs Way that, through a succession of rolling farms, plunged me into dreamy forest groves, rich meadows and magical avenues of light and shape and shade. You need Keats to do it justice, with his ‘verdorous glooms and winding, mossy ways’, since the forest tops are just beginning to be touched by the coming richness of Autumn. As the sun rose higher and hotter though I found myself second-breakfasting on wild blackberries, plunging in and out of near sacred avenues of light and nearly burst out laughing with joy when I emerged in a field of glowing sunflowers, sentinel heads turned all together to praise the yellow East.

On and on the glorious tapestry went, Manor farm Down, Charlton Forest, Taggents farm, Graffam Down, Tegleaze Farm, passing through yet another of those sturdy gates, with their easy metal latches, into a harvested hay field, sweeping down the hill, where the giant round hay stacks looked like golden full stops in the sunlight, as the odd car windscreen glinted with too much speed in the distance. I was caught up there, with a huge grin on my face, by one of two wayfarers from the hotel the night before, burning the ground on his mountain bike and travelling probably two and a half times faster than a walker. He had left at 9am and no doubt benefitted from the Full English I had none of, with all abed in the BlueBell Inn. I won’t grouch too much about cyclists, most have been friendly and considerate, but now and then they do tend to come up your backside unannouncing, with the arrogance of anyone in the sway of technology. We wished each other happy travels, as walkers always greet each other with a chat and the knowing smile of a shared endeavour and he hurried on.

So to discover more of a route you can only have the vaguest map in your head of before you set out. The 100 mile Way is of course many things, not just clear chalk paths or droving tracks, all very we’ll signposted except nearing Eastbourne, where the key when you come to any main road is to look left and right for the next sign. But it involves many narrow metalled roads, pavement paths passed suburban houses, winding bridle ways and points where potential tracks split and rejoin, round hills or through fields. An interesting thing today though was becoming more aware of the management of the South Downs too, with its signs about how this is all farmed landscape, often boasting the ‘Red Tractor’ Farm quality labels, or why gates by cattle grids need to be closed to keep in livestock and paths need to be stuck to. But also a scheme called LEAF – Linking Environment and Farming – explaining, whether it’s true or not, how farmers care for the landscape and how little cut-outs of wild ground are left in ploughed or sown fields for flowers and nesting skylarks, as well as hedgerows allowed to grow wild. Sure enough, looking back across the endlessly variegated scenery, there they were, under a brilliant blue sky and burning sun, dotted with cloud, adding to a constantly shifting landscape of light and shade. Just stop and watch those clouds pass shades like waves across the fields or watch huge renaissance skies pouring out sunlight like rain and you’ll know the majesty of the South Downs.

Perhaps everyone comes to a stage when life is about looking back, not too soon you hope, but it’s an obvious psychological effect on a long journey too, looking back on both where you’ve been and who you’ve met too. But today, as well as looking back with pride at the ground I was eating up, came a succession of merry meetings: The bloke scouting the ground for his students, preparing for a Duke of Edinburgh award; the charming young man who shone when we spoke of The Seven Sisters, and was making for Winchester, to stay at the Sustainability Centre. I tried to crowd fund him and he talked about a writer friend in Winchester who meets her group of compatriots weekly in the famous and charming Black Boy Pub, where I’ve put up one of my posters, though never got a reply from the manageress about the RNIB. Those passing moments act like a kind of bush telegraph,too, whether it was the reservations from the couple I met yesterday about my hotel in Cocking being on a main road,or the shared wonders you might meet on the way. So you do start to touch something almost ‘Chaucerian’ when we didn’t have instant miscommunication, emails and mobile phones, that stretched back centuries in the English experience – how travellers must have learnt of attractive places to go and perhaps settle, of conflict, war, plague and opportunity. So came the approach to Bignor Hill, passed a Bothy I regretted I hadn’t tried to stay in and where there was a famous decoy clutch of airplanes during the war to fool those nasty Germans about Operation Overlord. I wish I had time to detour to the Roman Villa here, but the extensive drops off the escarpment make it a real hike, that could take up half the day, while it prepared me for what came next – Stanes Street.

There it was, emerging out of the white chalk way like history rising before your eyes, cambered, straight, reliable, undeniably Roman. I had no idea at all that part of that ancient road between Chichester and London, which I think becomes Borough High Street through Southwark, shares a central back bone of the South Downs Way. I was suddenly dreaming of Rome, or marching with the eagle of The Ninth and thinking of moments in Fire Bringer too. Not a hard march with such height on it all, following the gentle Lizard’s back of the downs, that makes this such pleasant walking. Far more than pleasant though, from the drama both of the land and skies, where giant clouds, white and angry grey, were massing above like the supertankers glistening out to sea. You could sit for hours and watch how those leviathans of weather mass, form and change over these powerful thermal generators of hills, scooping moisture into an endless vortex of movement and visual drama. My heart was soaring now, as I met a friendly couple on that Roman track, one of whom had worked in publishing for years and rather agreed with my premise that though nice people, they don’t exactly fight for much. On I went passed the Toby Stone, a rather brilliant little memorial from 1955 that doubles as a horse Mounting stone and carries an inscription from Robert Louis Stevenson that I recited at My father’s funeral. Of course the South Downs Way, as much as being an ancient route for life and change, is about ever present death. From those barrows on Old Winchester hill and the daily forest burials at the Sustainability Centre,to other burial sites on the route like the Devil’s Jumps, that I passed yesterday. In fact not a bad place to go! It is fascinating names en route too, filled with local lore, that make this road so numinous too.

Now I was caught up by the second bod from the hotel, marching to Washington, a good four miles on from my planned night top. Just as many use this ground just for walks, or do the Way in manageable sections, I think people sense if they have anything in common or want to share a pace and he hurried on. Lunch was becokoning now and so descending back into a valley I crossed the angry and decidedly murderous A29 and plunged down into the lovely valley of Houghton and Amberley, to be given a lift by a pretty local woman up to the George and Dragon Pub, of course, for a bloke with pressing news of a Dragon In the Post! From the thrumming clientele the promise of food proved as good as the chicken liver pate. Yet as I ate it and chatted to a nice bloke who lives in Lewes about Glyndebourne, champagne picnics and his own walks and blogs, a distinct monied gentility had suddenly entered in that stretches from Hampshire to London and back. It wasn’t exactly him, despite his describing Storrington as a ‘shit hole‘, or worrying about solicitors and costly arguments with his mother. It was the snooty attitude of the publican and his wife, although she did let me mix my purchase of a shandy and pate with eating my own pork pie, only in the Garden of course, not the terrace. Why is it that everything is money nowadays and more respect isn’t paid for the tradition of ancient travellers, pilgrims or not? The guys hulking the beer barrels were far more sympathetic than the landlord to my filling my water bottle, from a hose outside, like a tinker.

It was a delightful spot though, in the bowl of the valley, surrounded by dropping apple tress and everything in me wanted to snooze and linger; the delight of travel and way faring with no purpose at all and as important a part of doing the South Downs Way as meandering, rambling and stopping to look, or look back. Indeed I thought sadly with these astonishing every changing views of the 100 people who lose their sight every week in the UK, or my Dad and his eyesight battles, and suddenly rather regretted not planning my way a bit better, by relying on comps and so not stopping in Amberely instead of Storrington. A feeling not exactly cured by the small, humdrum town that night, yet certainly by a hugely comfy bed, nice spacious room and, above all for a walker, the most magnificent steaming hot showers. Bliss.

The White Horse Hotel – forgive my romance of an ‘inn’, since everyone seems to like shiny new these days – boasts being the former residence to the composer Sir Arnold Bax and at night with the not unsexy tequila chavs at the bar, he might have advised on the choice of music. Not worthy of another harsh comment by my lunchtime compatriot about keeping your wallet pocket well zipped though and it is now a clean but modern joint, that is certainly not for the Houghton set. But they kindly comped me in my adventure, have groups of walkers visiting, naturally a very passing traffic, and I liked them more than the dragon landlady. As for that lunchtime garden though, there is a joy in leaving things behind too, so ever onward, out through the fields and over the odd little metal bridge that crosses the river Arun, all bull rushes and drifting eddies of watery light, past the walls of Amberley castle, and the climb began again, very steeply up the aptly named High Down. There more signs spoke of the wild life here but then to the wonderful, real sight of kites riding above the forest line with their distinctive jack knife tails, while another rock-star-looking couple told me of a local women in the 70’s who as a young mother had done the way with her children and a donkey. We both agreed it would make a book people want to read. But now, nearing home, I was starting to ask again what this walk is really all about. A noble or idiotic protest march against disconnection and publishing corporations these days? A desperate attempt to be heard and tell everyone I meet about a project still marching on, that ends in just a week? Or simply a wonderful adventure and the most glorious lifetime walk you could not only possibly imagine, but actually experience. Well, whatever happens, that’s good enough for me!

David stayed in The White Horse Hotel, Storrington – telephone 01903745760. Rooms are £85 a night with breakfast. He drives back to Southampton today for a BBC Interviewthen picks up the Way this evening, walking on to The Rising Sun in Upper Beeding.

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Filed under Books, Childrens Books, Environment, The Phoenix Story

April 30, 2014 · 10:24 am

STRANGE PROFESSIONS, BETTER AMBITIONS AND BEING UP TO YOUR NECK IN IT!

An essay on working with wild Coyotes in the Californian Central Valley
by Kelly Michelle Baker

You know, it’s sometimes a rough go being a young ecologist. After four-plus years of exams, loans, groans and you finally try to enter the workforce. Then it doesn’t even want you. Most entry-level jobs are only temporary and pay very little indeed, if anything at all. Furthermore, they don’t really want your education, your genius, your dreams; they want your skills set and above all experience. So suddenly that perfect point average that you fought for so laboriously in college is topped by another’s raw field experience. For every fifty applications you submit, you may hear back from just two employers. If you are exceptionally lucky, then you’ll get an interview. If the stars are aligned, you’ll be hired.

So why do we even bother? Simply put: someone has to. The planet is warming. Natural resources are vanishing. Whether or not you’re in the habit of hugging trees, ecology affects everyone and everything, and whatever your profession, you play a role, you have an impact somewhere. As a wise bear once said “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Although last-minute vegetation thinning, so no brush to spread the flames, didn’t save my house from 2012’s Waldo Canyon fire…and luckily Colorado Springs firefighters were more capable than ours. Somewhere out there is an important cause though and we’ve the power and passion to fight for it, so long as the Buzz brings it to the forefront of our often blinkered lives and clipped attention spans.

I sound a little vitriolic sometimes. I can be. The battle for a green earth is just that: a fight. For every winter night that my roommate and I trade indoor heating for a wooly sweater, our neighbor is basking in their own personal furnace. For every day we try to buy sustainable foods, someone is enjoying a Big Mac (in the sense such a thing is enjoyable, if you’ll forgive my culinary snobbery). With over-exploitation and over-population too, it’s an uphill climb and mine are just the little steps. What are the really big ones then? After facing two years of infrequent employment, I finally made the decision to go back to grad school. Although my intentions were necessarily self-serving, and still are to the extent I need a pay cheque, my advocacy has sharpened. That stands to reason; I’m among my own people now, each with their own passion, their own issue too. I adopt their interests and they adopt mine. That’s the glory of education — in finding your calling and running headfirst towards that better tomorrow.

So what am I doing now and how am I becoming a better ecologist? That’s the biggest question you’re faced with entering grad school. I took it very seriously indeed. By asking seasoned faculty members, hounding them sometimes, by turning to the big guns too like the Fish and Wildlife Service, at last I found my answer: I was going to collect coyote poop! I guess you might call it Doo or Die… Laugh. No really, laugh! Please. Poop, fecal matter, dog dung, whatever you call it, is after all inherently funny. The fact that I am up to my neck in it now is even funnier because, as a person with some personal digestive issues myself, as my family well know, perhaps it’s kismet I would at last get to examine the scat of another omnivorous animal. Yet why is collecting scat so important? In that I am perfectly serious and it’s not that obvious either. Here are my field-won justifications then:

1) Coyotes effect everything in the local food chain, probably more than you think, even if you don’t spend your day thinking about it! The best way to find out what they eat is to look at what they leave behind. Although coyotes have an evolutionary aptitude for a predator diet, they’ll eat anything from wild grapes to crickets. Here in the Californian Central Valley we have many crops and in the Fall coyotes start eating tomatoes. Quite a few of them, in fact. Almonds too. This may hinder or help agriculture but whether or not they are scoffing enough crops to cause any substantial damage is beyond the scope of my study, as yet. BUT we can know with certainty that coyotes prevent crop damage by indirect consumption, which brings me to item two:

2) Coyotes eat micro herbivores like voles, rabbits, mice, rats, etc. This is hugely significant. Although we have a few bobcats and birds of prey here that do their own work, coyotes put an enormous dent into what would otherwise be explosive rodent populations. This is good for ecosystems then, as proliferation of any one species may exacerbate disease, encourage invasive species dispersal and so on. But it also has anthropogenic effects. Meaning the balancing act is that Coyotes may eat crops but mice eat MUCH more. About 8% of crop damage per acre comes from birds and herbivores, most of which are themselves prime snacks for tummy rumbling coyotes. Without predators then this statistic would skyrocket. A similar finding was made with the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 by the Naturalist Jean Graighead George, underling the importance of predator activity to healthy biospheres. Out terrain is in fact sparcer, harder, less of the real wild. Given my findings so far, specifically the massive number of voles that coyotes eat in every season and at every refuge, I believe the blushing tomatoes are certainly worth the trade-off.

3) Coyotes have intrinsic value, especially if you love animals, like me. Indeed, to bring back the romance of such animals too is very important, so remember that wily coyotes have those other names too, like the prairie dog, the brush wolf and the American jackal. Some might say this is a little wishy-washy but most nature-buffs can appreciate the beauty of charismatic predators. Coyotes are natives and their presence runs very deep in both human and ecological cultures.

4) Knowing what coyotes eat will lend itself to future research. For instance, if we know coyote are eating mule deer (which can transmit disease to livestock) there could be a study on how bovine-tuberculosis fluctuates in the presence and absence of predators. We could also study seed dispersal and how coyotes spread both wild and agricultural seed. These are just two examples in a hundred possibilities, dozens of which I probably couldn’t dream up, without furthering my education even more.

What’s my real point though, other than to attempt to glamorize, even aggrandize, ecological poo-collecting? I suppose I have many: the first is fight your battles. Take baby steps and stick with them. At the heart of it all, stay learning. Everyone is striving for something (Kickstarter has taught us as much) and even if ridiculous on the surface, try to find the inner merit, even if it may not be immediately so evident. So, keep learning, keep growing, even if that means playing Devil’s Advocate sometimes (as a friend reminded me at my last presentation).

Understanding coyote diet won’t rebuild the polar ice caps by 5 o’clock tomorrow, nor reverse the drought exacerbating wildfires in my own hometown. But it’s a dot of colour and significance in a much grander picture, where sustainability incorporates the wider needs of nature. That’s one hell of a painting. So I hope others will stand beside me with some able brushes and add to the picture too. Be informed in your personal interests and then go much, much further. The world’s very big and there’s much to fix. Get out your tools. Borrow from others and share. With that, I’m off to the seaside to spread the word, which I am trying at my own website too: kellymichellebaker.com

Meanwhile you can spread another word on great animal stories and back DCD’s dreams and animal stories too in crowd funding Dragon In The Post by going to Indiegogo and CONTRIBUTING TO A PROJECT

Kelly is a young ecologist in California, a passionate reader and one of the team who supported Phoenix Ark Press over Light of The White Bear and Dragon In The Post. The first picture is a Wikipedia public domain image of a Coyote in the snow, in Yellowstone. The second shows a government map of the San Joaquin Valley in California, where Kelly works. All the backers of Kickstarter projects have been invited to contribute their passion, knowledge, concerns and hopes to Phoenix Ark, working with David’s editorial help, as a little publisher throws the doors open wide.

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Filed under Community, Culture, Education, Environment

Tagged as California Central Valley, Coyotes, Ecology, Kelly Michelle Baker, Phoenix Ark Press, Young writers

April 7, 2014 · 3:21 pm

STILL TIME TO JOIN THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE WHITE BEAR AT NO COST AT ALL!

30 Hours to go and the company still rising!

If you go to Kickstarter and back the Light of The White Bear project still though, win or lose, you’ll be in the Company and ‘fellowship of The White Bear’ and David Clement-Davies, Clare Bell, who has kindly donated a copy of Ratha’s Creature for pledges over £45, one of JRR Tolkien’s illustrators himself, Roger Garland and a fine grew of artists, photographers, playwrights, ecologists, passionate fans and backers. A brave crew that could re-open an entire doorway on brilliant ideas here too, engagement and real art at Phoenix Ark Press. It would bring many things down the road. Come to the party!

Phoenix Ark Press always needed you though, and STILL DOES, and the support in these last melting hours will determine whether this is the end of the road or not. It has been a battle too for free speech. Perhaps fans can see it like this though, at 100 pledges of just £20 it would double instantly and you would be paying little more than you would in the shops anyhow. Although you would get a signed copy, copies of artwork, could have your name in the front of the book, alongside a favourite animal, would help raise awareness on Global Warming, and be part of so much more: Like Dragon in the Post, Amazon Rat, The Christmas Code and unique work on Edmund Shakespeare too, William’s brother, and London. That’s why, even if you don’t believe it will make 100%, and it still can, it’s important you come on board now, at effectively no cost either if the total isn’t reached, because then I will write to everyone right at the end about future projects.

Go on, put your finger where you heart is and Back This Project by CLICKING HERE AND JOINING THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE WHITE BEAR

Thank you.

DCD

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Filed under Books, Community, Culture, Environment, Fantasy

Tagged as A Party, Amazon Rat, Dragon in The Post, Edmund Shakespeare, Kickstarter, Light of The White Bear, Phoenix Ark Press, The Christmas Code

March 25, 2014 · 4:50 pm

FREE EBOOKS TO CELEBRATE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

Well, to help spread the good word and celebrate an attempt to publish a new big novel, Light of The White Bear via Kickstarter, Phoenix Ark Press are giving away Free copies of The Sight and Fell co-edition on ebook by David Clement-Davies, for the next five days only. At a 5 star rating and valued up to $8.99 it all starts tomorrow and lasts until this Sunday, March 30th. Enjoy.

You can download by copy and pasting the URL – http://www.amazon.com/The-Sight-Fell-David-Clement-Davies-ebook/dp/B008C3DLSU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395765573&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Sight+and+Fell

But the good spirited deal is this, sort of!!!! In exchange for more than a taste of highly rated work could you be good enough to share this promotion and also go to the Light of the White Bear Kickstarter page and think about pledging, or asking a friend to? If you cannot afford it, it would be wonderful if you spread the word about Light of the White Bear too.

You can see a project with the clock ticking rapidly down by Clicking here

Happy reading and happy word spreading.

PA PRESS

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Filed under Books, Community, Culture, Environment, Fantasy, The Phoenix Story

Tagged as Fell, Free Ebooks, Kickstarter, Light of The White Bear, Promotion, Spreading the Word, The Sight

March 24, 2014 · 2:46 pm

AN AUTHOR TRIES TO TALK TO AUTHORS!

Hi, I don’t know your experience but do authors really support one another in the world of Social Media and Kickstarter projects? Are we only a jealous and fiercely competitive lot, or is there such a thing as connecting to try and do something about the changed landscape of publishing, dying bookshops and fighting but endangered species of authors?!

I made lots of friends this weekend via Facebook and don’t want to use it just to peddle me, but right now I’m trying to get some help with properly publishing a long-delayed novel Light of the White Bear. It has its own rather extraordinary story, and why a leading author under four contracts who got so close to the heart of a firm had such an awful battle in New York City and then walked away from his own major publishing house. It led to creating this little publisher, Phoenix Ark Press. But if you pledge, or simply help by spreading the word, blogging, linking or liking, I would be hugely grateful. Only 16 days to survive and 50 years to save the melting ice caps and all those mighty polar bears!

You can see it by CLICKING HERE

Many thanks

Davidx

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Filed under America and the UK, Books, Childrens Books, Community, Culture, Environment, Fantasy

Tagged as Authors, Kickstarter, Light of The White Bear, Pledges, Social Media, Trying to Communicate

Category Archives: Environment

Albania – With a clear blue eye on the wounded ox, in the city of Nymphs…

CYPRESSES, CORFEATS, NAUSICAA AND A HOUSE ON PARADISE ISLAND

SCOTLAND, INDEPENDENCE, GREAT BRITAIN AND THE IMPORTANCE OF NO

THE SOUTH DOWNS WAY’S HAPPY END, CROWD CAPITALISM AND A DRAGON HAS UNDER 65 HOURS TO GO!

POPPIES, PYLONS, PEACE HAVENS AND THE GENTLE SHADOW OF BLYTHE SPIRITS!

DAY THREE – BRUISES, BURIALS AND BREAKFASTING ON BLACKBERRIES!

STRANGE PROFESSIONS, BETTER AMBITIONS AND BEING UP TO YOUR NECK IN IT!

STILL TIME TO JOIN THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE WHITE BEAR AT NO COST AT ALL!

FREE EBOOKS TO CELEBRATE KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

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Category Archives: Environment

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