Hypothetical Holiday

I must admit I am quite enjoying this "would have been" trip to the north-west of Greece! The trouble is I find my mind is wandering up and down the streets of Ioannina when it should be concentrating on translating or teaching. The more I think about it though and the more I look at people's photos I find things coming back to me; little memories of the smells of coffee and mothballs; walking along the main street and the uneveness of the pavements or the light on an Autumn afternoon down by the lake.

When I lived in Ioannina in the 70s it was not at all typically Greek. Ioannna was not liberated from the Ottoman Empire until 1913, almost a century after the Turks were driven out of the rest of Greece, and there were still many reminders of the 450-year occupation.
This is Ali Pasha's palace overlooking the lake.

Now that just does not look Greek!

If you went in a kapheneion in those days you ordered a tourkiko - one of those little doll's house coffees with all the powder still inside the cup. During the time I was in Ioannina the name of the coffee was made politically correct in gradual stages. First the name was changed to byzantino - i.e. a Byzantine coffee and by the end of my second year there you could only get an elliniko - a Greek coffee. The drink was exactly the same of course!

After a Hypothetical Breakfast..

Proino (brekker) in Igoumenitsa...say, Greek yoghurt and honey and a strong black elliniko to wash it down and then on the road again. Past the sheep with their dull-ringing clunky sheep-bells and on to the part of the road I used to call "Scalextric" because of the serpentine way it wiggles its way through the hills.

Normally I would get stuck behind a groaning heaving truck at this point having passed not a single vehicle up till then.

Also the music would have been important at this point...whenever I think of this stretch of the road from Igoumenitsa to Ioannina I hear "Lying Eyes" by the Eagles in my mind's ear...so let's have it...

You can't hiiiiiiide your lyin' eyes....dadang da..

Next stop Ioannina...

The Next Step

So, while I am actually up early at home on this Saturday morning doing a translation about cubist and suprematist Russian painters, I can continue my - sadly theoretical - Greek holiday...

This would have been me on the ferry passing early morning dark grey hump of Corfu on the right and coming into the entrance to the port of Igoumenitsa with its low wooded hills just behind the town and the hint of mountains beyond. When I was leaving Greece from here for what turned out to be a very long time in the 70s it was late evening and there was an incredible display of a kind of dry lightning across these mountains...blue streaks zapping and fizzing almost horizontally across the body of the uphills. The gods were obviously trying to tell me something important...probably something like, "don't eat the meatballs on the ferry".

Anyway, the ferry steams slowly into its berth and it is time to disembark. When you are driving around the port in Italy, Ancona or Bari or Venice as it would have been in this case, you are aware of the bustle, noise and aromas and you think, "aha, a Mediterranean port!" but on arrival in Greece...Igoumenitsa, Corfu, Patras, which are of course also Mediterranean ports, that bustle, noise and aroma is in some strange way different...I don't think I can describe it - it could well be an "if-you-have-experienced-it-you-will-understand" type of thing...
It is a Greek bustle, noise and aroma...

Anyway, time to look for a kapheneion to break my fast and have a spot of proino...

Wish I Were There...

That is where I should be right now.

Ioannina in north-west Greece, where I lived for 2 years back...way back...oh, yonks ago. That is something like the view I had from my balcony too although I was further down in the town within mozzy range of the lake.

The plan was to go to Greece just about now - this was my birthday present last year, faithful readers will remember. I would have driven down to Venice in my bus and then caught the ferry to Igoumenitsa. After that there would have been a 100 kilometre drive to Ioannina and there I would have spent a few days looking for places I once knew, eating fantastic food in disorganised little tavernas, walking along the lake front and generally having a good old wallow in nostalgia.

So, why all the 'would haves' and 'should haves'?

The most boring of reasons...money! I was hit by the curse of the freelancer at the start of March when 4 (4!!! I can't believe it was 4) of my week-long intensive English courses were cancelled... argghhhh! I moan when I have got them... but I moan even more when they get cancelled at short notice but not short enough that I can bill the companies... argghhh! This of course blew an enormous hole in my financial 'plan' and so I have had to postpone Greece and spend my time grubbing around for work to fill the gaps.

In the meantime I am trying to do the trip vicariously in my head with the help of Google images!
(And it has also helped finding a really nice blog called 'Ta nea tis Zitsas' written by someone in the village of Zitsa which is near Ioannina. I have been brushing up my Greek by reading his/her blog and leaving comments.)

So, assuming I would have left yesterday, I would have driven over the Brenner, through the Dolomites, past Lake Garda and along the Autostrada 1 to Venice. There I would have spent the night in Buzzy. Just about now, 8 a.m., the ferry would be leaving, I would be waving goodbye to Venice harbour and we would be slicing lines of creamy white surf in the wine-dark Adriatic...heading east.

And I Quote...

I just came across this wonderful quote by Jeff Pesis on A-Quote-A-Day :

Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked.

Campaign for Real Pubs

On the journey back to Munich I was reading a very well-written article in the Sunday Times Magazine about the demise of Britain's seaside resorts. It got me thinking about the demise of other things in Britain...and at the top of my list was "the local pub".

Now, before I go any further, I have to say that what follows is an extremely selective view due to the fact that I don't spend that much time in England and what time I do spend is almost exclusively in one small area of Merseyside...but...

My favourite 'local' pub when I am in Liverpool is The Crow's Nest in Crosby...what makes it so good is the presence of some very important factors and the absence of some others.

They have: excellent beers, an open fire in the winter, a convoluted interior design of snug, bar and lounge which is not efficient or easy to navigate especially after a couple of pints but very human, newspapers to borrow and read, the chunner of people conversing, a manager and assistant manager who really run the place and are not marionettes shunted round from pub to pub by a faceless chain management....

They don't have: a jukebox, a DJ, piped music, fruit machines with their incredibly irritating bleeps and bloops and scraps of electronic melody which makes them sound like demented Daleks, pool tables, plasma screens, tacky false beams, or any of that horrible false chain pub paraphenalia...

So does this make me just some grumpy auld git who wants to go back to the fifties? Aye, it probably does BUT if so, then I have always been a grumpy auld git because for a start I have always hated loud music, background music, piped music or any kind of bloody music in pubs (unless of course it was the wonderful Morrisey/Mullen band in what was a live music pub in Finchley).
I remember going to one of the first 'loud music pubs' in Liverpool with my mate Neil in the 70s - the Penny Farthing...a quaint name for a 1000 decibel pub. We sat inside tossed and thrown by a swelling tide of guitars and screaming vocals pouring out of huge black speakers and held a very difficult conversation at the tops of our voices which left me hoarse for days.

I mean, what is the point???

The pub I used to go in with my great drinking and discussing mate Dave was the Great Mogul in Maghull which used to be a rambling, almost country-style pub but which sadly and inevitably has now been redesigned (= destroyed) with fake beams, jukebox...etc.

Anyway, the Crowies' is the only pub in the area in my part of Liverpool which fulfils my needs; the rest all cater for some stratum of the market which requires brain-numbing music video clips and electronic entertainment to protect anyone from the dangers of a conversation..

So can one of you out there in Hingerland reassure me that the 'pub', the good old English pub - which of course is the acronym from public house; a wonderfully cosy concept when you think about it - is not in extremis or will we soon need a companion organisation for CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, such as the Campaign for Real Ale Pubs... or for short CRAP...oh, perhaps not...

Sick of "Sikth"...

I have to have a short rant.

It concerns the ordinal number '6th'. It seems the English don't know how to pronounce it any more.

It is spellt 'S-I-X-T-H' ok? The 'X' is pronounced 'KS' as always and not 'K'...and after that comes a 'TH'.'

Now it might be difficult for French or German speakers to get their tongues around the 'th' bit and Ancient Persians would have had trouble with the 'ks' which is why you get hotels in the Middle East called 'Al Eskander' from a mispronunciation of 'Alexander', but for English speakers it IS NOT DIFFICULT!

The number is 'sixth' and NOT 'sikth'!

To my ears "sikth" sounds like the kind of thing you hear in infant school where young kids say, "a likkel boy" and when I hear 6th pronounced as 'sikth' I get ektremely ekasperated.

In fact 'sikth' is harder to say than 'sixth'. The 's' between the 'k' and the 'th' is pretty well automatic when you move your tongue from the 'k' postion to the 'th' position. Try it (make sure you are on your own though!)

It wouldn't be so bad if I could say it's only ignorant plebs who pronounce 6th in this way but it is alarmingly prevalent on the BBC too.

Now, I love the BBC...I love the programmes, the style, the humour and even their attempt to include speakers with regional accents amongst their announcers...but 'sikth' is too much to accept. I mean all the speakers on the beeb must be able to say six-thirty: "...that episode of Scrunge your Burzlecocks will be repeated tomorrow at six thirty..." so if they can manage that they can manage 6th...it is six-thirty without the 'irty'.

And there is one more rant while I am at it...there is a series at the moment and which goes on over the next weeks of cookery shows in which two top chefs from the various regions of Britain battle it out to be picked to cook for the Queen's birthday banquet in June(?). It's called, the Great British Menu.

There are 2 chefs ok...remember that.

On this same programme there is an oldish blonde bird who kind of gets in the way and says the same things all the time in her voice-overs. And one of the same things she says all the time is, 'the judges will decide which of the two chefs is the best...', '...which of the two menus is the best...'
I quite often made the other members of the family jump last week as she finally got to me and I found myself correcting her at first in a normal voice and then shouting, "the better of the two...the BETTER of the TWO...you stupid cow!!!"

The fact that José Moanrinho, manager of Chelski says this all the time when his team loses to Liverpool ('the best team lost') does not mean that it has become acceptable any more than his other insane claims are.

Strangely the only person I heard on the beeb last week who got it right was the Blackburn goalkeeper Brad Friedel (an American!).

Anyway rant over, I will go and pick the best of my two kinds of coffee and have my sikth cup...

Channel Pirates

We'll be belting back to Munich tomorrow...down to Dover and across the Channel with SpeedFerries. This is a relatively new company set up largely in response to the extortionate prices of the other Channel ferry operators like P&O, SeaFrance and tunnel operator EuroTunnel - the most expensive of all. Not long ago they would charge fantasy prices - upwards from 150 pounds - for the 90 minute, 40 mile crossing making this stretch of water the most expensive in the world to cross pound per mile (on one journey I made in my bus some years ago Eurotunnel wanted to charge me 350 pounds for the 35 minute train trip - ten pounds per minute!).

A group of disgruntled travellers set up a protest website "Channel Pirates" with the aim of petitioning the European fair-trading courts about what was, in practice, a cartel - I joined them quite early on - and, lo and behold they got thousands of travellers signing up to their petition, went to Brussels to speak to someone like the European Minister for Companies-Who-Take-The-Piss-Out-Of-Their-Customers and actually managed to shake up the big companies who have now also reluctantly started reducing their prices.

The people behind what was to become SpeedFerries saw a gap in the market for a cut-price ferry from England to France, bought a ship and started a cheap route from Boulogne to Dover. Their slogan was something like "fight the pirates!" And they seem to be doing ok.

Proof that even in the European 'Union' where the individual becomes smaller and less powerful on a daily basis, it is still possible to change things for the common good.

Cadbury’s Chocolate Eggs

I don’t want to sound like an advert but is there anything more luscious at Easter than a Cadbury’s Crème Egg?

I used to spend ages unpacking mine so that I could smooth out the glorious silver paper afterwards…even the packing was sensuous.

And then I would bite a little hole in the top and slowly get at the filling by poking me tongue in and licking around the cavity. Then when most of the sticky, sugary filling was gone I would pop the chocolate shell into my mouth and try to let it melt without crunching on it…! Hours of enjoyment in a brown creamy chocodise…

And it gives me toothache just to think of it now – but even so I could just fancy one right now!

PC at Easter (Plenty of Chocolate)

It looks as though the extreme PCers didn’t get hold of Easter. As far as I know no-one was warning us off wishing people a Happy Easter for fear that it might upset someone…say, the Westers or the Northers.

As it was people were able to celebrate a traditional Christian Easter with Easter bunnies, chocolate eggs and new toys for the kids; coloured eggs, pussy willow branches and hot-cross buns.

Hang on a minute…I don’t remember all that stuff in the bible..!!?? Just like I don’t remember the bit about putting up a pine tree in your living room at Christmas.

When you think about it it’s the Christians who should be offended by how they themselves celebrate Christmas and Easter!

But come on let’s face it…it’s pagan; Easter is the pagan fertility celebration of the Vernal Equinox, the rising of the sap, the spring rebirth of the world after the long dark winter. If you are going to have a resurrection story then where better to put it in the year than the very place where life itself seems to be returning to the earth.

Mind you, it is only in the northern hemisphere that we have a feeling of rebirth in the spring months of March and April…does anyone know if the aboriginal peoples of the southern hemisphere celebrate rebirths and all that in their spring months of September and October?

That could be a market gap for the chocolate Easter egg manufacturers. You could call it the Autumn Eggquinox...