My Hammock

Very close to my little hut, there was a hammock. It was not my personal hammock, it was for the free use of people who were staying, for one or two weeks, or for the summer, at our little camp near the sea.

But because the hammock was very close to my hut, I used it a lot.

In the evening, when the crickets were singing in the pines, the Scops Owls began their eternal “doub…doub…doub”. These owls were not all going at the same speed, so you would have two starting together, but one was faster than the other, and the birds phased in and out.

When I was in bed at night, I fell asleep amused by listening to them, and to the crickets that do not stop singing all at once, but one after another, moving slowly towards silence.

There was very little in the shack except for the bed: a clothes rail, a chair, and that's about it. For washing and other needs, there were collective facilities outside.

My neighbour was a yoga instructor.

Beyond the walls, there was, almost forgotten, the eternal blue of the Aegean Sea.

We were, of course, in Greece. On the island of Skyros, among the Sporades Islands. It was in Skyros that the English poet Rupert Brooke died on April 23, 1915. He is buried there, in a public place but away from the tourist trails. The island is home to a landrace of horses – small, as is the norm for islands breeds, and quite rare. During one of my stays in Skyros, a woman in our group was so fascinated by these horses that she moved to Skyros to work with them.

Speaking of nature, a very strong symbol of Skyros for me, and of Greece and the Mediterranean, is Eleonora's falcon. A medium-sized bird of prey, which, unusually, breeds in autumn, in order to feed its young on migratory birds.

The town of Khora, capital of Skyros, is quintessentially Greek with its small white houses and narrow streets; and then you have the port of Linaria where the liner comes from the neighbouring island, Evoia. It is also possible to arrive by plane, but the trip from Athens via Evoia is a classic. Not to be missed: the Faltaits Museum, a place of history, literature and folklore.

And then also you have Atsitsa. A former industrial port – relics of its past remain in the sea near the island – Atsitsa is today known for the Alternative Tourist Centre. Where I stayed on four occasions – as well as a week in Khora, where some courses, for example creative writing courses, take place. We spent the days in trying new things, for example painting or yoga. Afternoons were for siestas or going to the beach – I'm not a person for beaches, I prefer to go swimming, and then get out of the water and back to the café nearby, nicknamed “Marianna’s Sunset Café” or “Le Ktima d'Atsitsa.” 'Ktima' means in this sense 'a place apart' or a refuge. There is good coffee and excellent ice cream here.

It's a simple life, for a little while each year, which of course requires a complicated life to pay for it.

The next time I go to Greece, it is quite possible that it will be mainland Greece, in Thessaloniki, where a few decades ago, I spent six months … but that is another story.

 

Skyros Guide: https://www.greeka.com/sporades/skyros/

Atsitsa: https://www.aroundskyros.com/villages/atsitsa

Scops Owl Call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkGP2OP7wvc

Eleonora's Falcon: https://ebird.org/species/elefal1

My Garden

I don't have a garden. Previously, when I lived in London, in the suburbs, I had a garden behind the house. It was narrow but quite long – about sixty feet – and didn't get much sunlight, given the huge tree which, rooted in the ground of the neighbouring garden, blocked my light with its branches and thick foliage. But I had shade-tolerant plants, bushes, and a small pond where frogs sometimes lived. In the evening I sat down to watch bats flitter between the trees. It was never going to be Monet's garden, but I had a glass annexe there that I used as a painting studio. It was low maintenance, this green space, since I'm not very interested in plants themselves. I used to read up on gardening, plant what’s appropriate, and let the vegetation get on with it. There were hedge plants from Wiggly Wigglers, some shade-loving plants and ferns, and a yew tree at the end of the garden, that I planted some time around 2006.

And when I spent time in my garden, I saw my neighbours in theirs, and we talked over the fence, which was only a metre and a half high. It was good to have such friendly people nearby. They were interested in travel, and local environmental issues, so we had that in common. They were part of my support network in Kingston.

These days I live much closer to the countryside, but having no garden, I take advantage of the green space in front of the flats. I can go there, and I go there most days. There are also trees and bushes, and more sky and birds. I even have a westerly aspect and can watch the sunset (and bats from time to time).

As for my garden in London, with its new owners, it is still there, but changed – I saw it this weekend when I visited my old neighbours. The new arrivals have installed a jacuzzi at the end of the garden, in place of the shed that I had there (but which I did not have installed). They’ve also apparently removed the yew tree. My glass lean-to, they kept it. But all that doesn't concern me anymore.

It was moving to see my friends who were my neighbours again; leaving the city on Monday, it was perhaps difficult to remember that I no longer lived there. Was I someone who lived in Kingston and visited Gloucestershire, or the other way around? It wasn't that I would want to go back to live there – I find Kingston too crowded these days – but rather that it was hard to separate myself from a city where I lived for sixteen years (if you include the four years I spent in Birmingham in the middle of those years).

Where I lived before Kingston, in the middle of London, in West Kensington, I didn't have a garden either, but there were also green spaces and trees, and I once thought "I live in a garden.” Where I live now is very similar.

So I could also say, these days, that I live in a garden, and the garden surrounds me.

Calke Abbey - Preserved in a State of Decay

Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, is an 18th century house built on the site of an Augustinian priory. 

Many of the UK’s country houses are owned by the National Trust. But while most have been restored to showcase the upstairs/downstairs life of people in earlier centuries, Calke Abbey is different. The walls are cracked and browned, rooms are full of personal effects and collections assembled by a reclusive owner. The outbuildings are as they were in the days of the horse and cart. But the result of this apparent neglect and decay, is that Calke preserves the atmosphere of its long-gone past among its six hundred acres (240 Hectares) of parkland.

For the video go here:

Calke Abbey, Derbyshire - Preserved in a state of decay - YouTube

The Important Matter of Sleeping

 The Important Matter of Sleeping

John was sitting on the couch in the living room. The couch, bought from Wal-Mart at the time that John’s mom and dad had decided to refurnish the entire lower floor of their house, was angled at roughly thirty degrees to the back wall - the same back wall that provided  a structural member and division with the next house along, that was owned by an African-American family called the Davises, and faced the long front window of the house, roughly tour times as long as it was high, divided regularly into vertical bays by white-painted wooden pillars. Past the window John could see Joe Meyer and Chet Vole playing ball, and someone - a person unknown because not visible, hidden by the right hand (as John faced it) end of the window - making up the triangle.

John would very much have liked to go out and join in their game. Although he was unsure of the legality, or permissibility, of such a situation. The ball they were using looked soft enough - he was fully aware of the familial ordinance against the use of hardballs near the fronts of people’s houses, and their cars, etc - and would no doubt have bounced harmlessly off surfaces such as the front window of any house along the street, or the sharply raked windscreen of Bertha Mace’s Lexus coupe, or the shiny bald pate of Dervinus Scrope who just at that moment came shuffling along the street from Wal-mart with his weekly bag of groceries. John thought about Bertha Mace and the way she wore dresses that were too short for her, and regularly had gentleman callers, as his mom put it. Dervinus Scrope had once in John’s hearing, to Mr Davis, chuckled and said,

- The woman’s a tart. Nothing wrong with that, either.

John understood that it would not be a good idea to ask any responsible adults (or his older sister Marjorie, who was away at college anyway) what a tart was, and particularly why it applied to Bertha Mace (and why there was ‘nothing wrong with that’ when possibly there was), though it did seem odd that the woman was able to afford a shiny new red Lexus coupé when as far as he knew her job was cutting coupons. Mom forbade John to speak to Dervinus Scrope not because the man was African-American - the Davises were no way off limits - but because he was ‘a dirty old man’. Although John in later life - aged, say, twenty - was to feel mightily peeved by the fact that his parents had never warned him that Dervinus Scrope might attempt to pervert, manhandle, fondle, sodomise, or otherwise interfere with John, while his buddies, Joe Meyer and Chet Vole particularly, had been warned loud and long about the possibility of falling perverted prey to a pedophile. Although with double hindsight, John figured that Scrope probably wasn’t a pedophile anyway, there being no evidence whatsoever to that effect - it was much like assuming a shaven-headed man with a flattened nose is a bank robber because ‘that’s what bank robbers look like’. Scrope merely lived alone and spoke to people; had he been female this would have been treated as normal, but such behavior seemed to be unacceptable in a man, it being far more acceptable somehow to treat him as a neighbourhood pariah, never speak to him, and assume he was a dangerous pervert when there was actually no reason to do so. The later John would point out that most abuse happens within families so it was statistically less likely that Scrope was a molester.

Thus it was for no reason of this kind that John wanted to stay on the Wal-Mart brand couch rather than go into the street and play ball with Chet and Joe and the third player who now was revealed as the Davis’ son Kelvin. John felt a woeful lack of engagement, unconnected with uncorrelated accusations of perversion against his neighbour, or the presence over John’s corduroyed thighs and patellae of the family cat, Howler, whose large brindled flank rose and fell in contented sleep; John was reluctant to wake Howler but knew full well that the ‘useless furry lump’ (as dad called it, usually when looking at the cat with a look full of loving kindness, thus the words were clearly not intended to be taken at face value) would take to being removed from John’s upper legs and placed on the floor without breaking his (the cat’s) stride in the important matter of sleeping.

Dad’s approach to the cat had the air of desperation about it, moments seized between his apparently important work for a government agency and the desperate desire to watch ‘Jeopardy!’ on the television (a twenty-three inch JVC, bought from Cram’s Electrical in Burlington the week before it was closed down and replaced by a WalMart) or sit in the living room with a bottle of beer in the evenings. Dad’s approach to Mom had the air of a long-held armed truce. Marjorie, who was several years older than John, had gone away. In the eight years between their ages there had been another child, Matthew. Mattie had barely lived long enough to go to school, and of the family, only John couldn’t remember him. This, he felt, froze him out ever so subtly by comparison with Dad and Mom and Marjorie, but sometimes when Mom and John were in the kitchen, and Dad was elsewhere, Mom would hold John closely and he would hear her crying above him.

The ball curvetted and bounced off the sloping windscreen of Bertha Mace’s scarlet Lexus convertible. Kelvin Davis’ face appeared at the window and his fingers tapped on the window, alerting John from his cat-excused indolence.

John reluctantly shifted the cat and got up.

- 2011

Melbourne and the Cloud Trail

Melbourne is a village in Derbyshire. It was formerly a centre of market gardening, and is also known for Melbourne Hall and being the place that gave its name to a city in Australia.

Until the 1980s it had a railway connection to Derby: this has been converted into a walking and cycling route called the Cloud Trail.

See the video here

Melbourne and the Cloud Trail - YouTube