Regeneration

Some years ago a large Lentisc (Mastic tree) that I could see from my kitchen window blew down in a storm.  The tree was old and weak; rotting from the inside.  Through subsequent seasons the hollow stub that remained rooted in the ground began to show new growth until, several seasons on from the tree’s destruction, the many new shoots thrown up by the ancient root had developed into something of a large shrub.  To try to encourage the growth of a single strong new tree from the original root, I thinned the ‘shrub’ to a single shoot .  In due time this sapling may grow into as fine and stately a tree as was its parent.  Inevitably the new tree will one day grow old, rot from the inside and, unable to resist the ravages of future storms, be broken to its destruction.  Maybe the generations-old root will again throw up new growth.  Whether or not this will be the case I can not know but I can be confident that, should it be so, I shall not be around to witness it.  My own shoots, my grandchildren, may, and if not themselves perhaps their shoots will enjoy something of that which I enjoyed of the tree’s parent.  Should this be the case I can be comfortable in that my arboreal prunings of the past week shall not have been in vain; the circle will not have been broken.

New Year

I prefer not to get into a sweat about 'New Year'.  My own new year either began some ten days ago when the magic workings of the universe again began to allow a little more daylight into each day or will begin on Thursday which will mark another annual anniversary of my birth.  Neat and limited packages of  time past or, possibly, yet to come are of little concern to me; it is the moment that I essay to enjoy living.

Christmas

For anyone dropping in here today, and all of those who do not, I wish this special day to be one of peace and contentment.

Winter in Messinias

Sunrise, 30th November 2011

Reading a fellow blogger's illustrated report of snow in Stirling and my daughter's tales of being cold in Kent has provoked me to remind you all that it is not necessary to tolerate such privations.  Relocate!  Here in Messina the weather remains pleasantly mild and there are few days during which the sun fails to make at very least a token appearance for an hour or two; invariably, morning coffee can be enjoyed out of doors on an average of three days out of four.  The far away mountain-top snow I can see from my balcony looks magnificent.  The price of almost everything is rocketing, incomes are being slashed but the sun continues to shine on us and very shortly the days will begin again to  grow longer.  Hooray!

Brindisi

In Ireland there are books to be had that are not common currency elsewhere.  Most towns, even the smaller ones, seemed to support at least one bookshop and most bookshops had several shelves of ‘Irish interest’ books; books, concerning Irish history, topography and culture, largely published by Irish publishers. In order to counter my ignorance of things Irish I spent many happy hours of my sojourn there browsing such shelves, a pastime which brought me home wealthier by more than two score of new books. It was while browsing in one of these bookshops that, by happy accident, I picked up a copy of ‘ Edgelands’ by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts; a book that has nothing to do with Ireland whatsoever.  Reading the first few pages sold the book to me.

I enjoy this type of unclassifiable reading; serendipity.  Farley and Roberts’ book celebrates and winkles out poetry from places to which most of us would rather turn a blind eye; the factory estates, tips, sewage farms and wastelands which, these days, surround most of our larger towns and cities.

Although not mentioned in ‘Edgelands’, the port of Brindisi is one such place, a vast acreage of concrete parking areas and security fences at the end of an autostrada; the terminus is situated miles to the south of Brindisi town - itself an edgeland of housing estates and little else. I spent the better part of the afternoon of Monday 28^th November there, waiting to board the ferry that would bring me home.  That the ferry port was working at a fraction of its capacity did not deter the enterprising local trader pictured above from trying his luck to flog his wares to the handful of people, largely Bulgarian lorry drivers, patiently waiting the afternoon away.  Not being in need of anything the mobile trader had amongst his stock I contented myself watching one of the longest murmurations of starlings I have ever seen, its form and tone infinitely varying as the shifting, swelling, contracting mass of birds murmurated across the clear evening sky.

Matera

It was all but thirty years ago that I first heard of Matera.  I read about it then in Carlo Levi’s, ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’, his account of his detention in the then rather sauvage south of Italy during 1935/6 when he was obliged to live under a kind of house arrest for daring to question the activities of the prevailing fascist administration. In chapter ten of his book, Levi relates the story of a brief visit from his sister, Luisa, like himself a qualified doctor, who had passed through Matera on her way to visit her imprisoned brother. Levi’s rehearsing of his sister’s account of the place makes harrowing reading; 20,000 people living in caves carved from the mountainside with their goats, sheep, pigs, dogs, in dwellings devoid of running water or any kind of sanitation; endemic disease, malaria, trachoma; children begging not for sweets but for quinine.

Safe with the knowledge that things in Matera had changed through the three-quarters of a century that have passed since Luisa’s visit, I made at Matera the last overnight stop of my return trip   home from Ireland. Wandering the extensive labyrinth of narrow streets and alleyways of Matera’s two adjacent ‘sassos’, presently an anthill of tourist lodgings, souvenir shops, bars and restaurants, it was impossible for me to imagine quite what Matera might have been like in 1935; even the bathroom of the centrally heated B&B cave I rented for the night was half filled by an un-necessarily capacious jacuzzi bath; a fine looking thing but the graphics on its controls were far beyond my capacity to reason so jacuzzi bathing remains something to which I yet have to look forward.

Matera marked the sixty-second day of my absence from home, an absence that had begun on something of an inexplicable whim; a revelation that a change of scene and routine might shake me out of the far too comfortable torpor into which I felt I had allowed myself to ease.

Inasmuch as I have returned to my home inspired to prosecute all manner of changes, directly to my immediate environment and indirectly to myself, my absence from here satisfied at least one  previously unrecognized objective.

God willing, I shall not wait a another fourteen years before making further solely hedonistic trips away from here.  Indeed, I am already pipe-dreaming a return to Ireland next spring, to re-visit some of the places enjoyed on the recent trip and to explore others which, this year, I was obliged to by-pass.

Θα δουμε! 

Further reflections

Reflections largely on why I have posted nothing for so long!  I have a mountain of material but since leaving Waterford I have had very little reliable internet connection, very little time between driving and sustaining myself.  On Tuesday, d.v., I shall finally arrive home.  Perhaps, once settled back there I may reflect further and write a few more posts.

To enlighten the confused, here is the original image before the demon editor got at it!