Reality: reflections on the best laid schemes.*

Reflections in the lake, Sarnico, Italy 20th April 2012

I like to believe I travel to experience novelty in my life but know that novelty is neither the only nor the principal reason that I choose to leave home comforts to risk the unknown.  I travel to get away from the perceived pressures of being at home; to be free to do that which I want to be doing without the nagging pressures, perceived and real, of what I believe I ought to be doing.  The reality seems to be that the pressures are, in a society that expects us to be in continual contact, far from easy to escape.  The reality is also that it is impossible to be travelling, experiencing novelties, and to be recording them.  To create requires time settled.

Chalet de Pascaline; lounge, kitchen, breakfast room

The first week of my current trip to Ireland I spent driving here, most of which was very pleasant and rich with new experiences of which the highlight may have been  an overnight stop at a delightful bed and breakfast establishment, Chalet de Pascaline, near Les Houches in the French Alps.  Pascaline, the vivacious, loquacious proprietor, spread throughout her eclectic, artful, little Chalet a rather wonderful atmosphere of warmth and good cheer.  I was very comfortable there and as with most of my overnight stops wished I had allowed myself time to linger longer.

The ferry crossing from Cherbourg to Rosslare was, to say the least, lumpy and the ferry busy with several ‘groups’ of french schoolchildren and geriatric german coach tourists so, not particularly conducive to following my chosen pursuits, although I did essay to make a drawing in the privacy of my cabin.

Chalet de Pascaline; overnight snow!

Settled at last for a week in a cottage in an ideal out-of-town environment, matters yet conspired to distract me.  For many months past I have not been able to use the integral keyboard of my laptop but have managed well enough with a wireless external keyboard.  At Cork city, an hour or so away from the cottage, there is an Apple Store.  I did not let pass the opportunity to have my laptop fixed.  At the Apple Store I learnt that the problem could not be attended to immediately, I would have to leave the laptop with them and return later in the week.  This was all unplanned and unexpected business - distraction - as was the e-mail I had received from London requiring me to sign and have witnessed various documents and to return them as close to immediately as was possible.  To do this, to get the documents printed, it was necessary to join the County Cork library; a painless experience which cost me just two and a half euros.  I chatted there with the librarian who told me that, in Ireland, the library service is free of the difficulties being faced by  the public library service in the U.K.  Ireland, free of funding the likes of Trident is, I suppose, able to afford the luxury of a decent, comprehensive library service.

This week perhaps I shall be able get to it.  Or shall I?  Yesterday was fine and sunny, too good an opportunity to explore the Burren to miss.  Later in the week friends, motor-home ‘gypsies’ last seen in Greece, will be arriving nearby.  And so it goes on, and on.  Delicious amusement but distracting!  It is a manifestation of the chicken and egg question; distraction equals experience, no distractions - no experience - no inspiration.


*Part of title I acknowledge to Robert Burns and link: www.robertburns.org


Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

The best laid schemes....

Here in this cottage in the West Cork countryside with Bags of time and material I had planned to post daily to this blog. Yesterday I took my Mac into the Cork City Apple hospital to have its non-functioning integral keyboard restored to perfect health. The problem, the doctors told me, was serious. Mac would have to be admitted for a few days for tests. Perhaps an operation, a transplant, will be necessary. I had to sign a form giving my permission - and pay some money. I now have the prospect of waiting anxiously by the phone for news. I do have this trusty iPad with me but do not have the patience to write posts hereon. The iPod is a great gadget but should not be regarded as a substitute for a MacBook.

To Ireland

I am writing this post at the writing desk in my light, airy and spacious cabin on Irish Ferry’s ship, “Oscar Wilde”.  Outside the windows a watery early morning sun is putting some minor highlights onto an otherwise grey-green sea.

I am on my way back to Ireland.  So much did I enjoy my time there last autumn that I am now keen to see the country in the spring.  For the past week I have been moving across Europe; from home to Patras, to Ancona, Italy, to Sarnico on lake d’Iseo, through the Iselle-Brig rail tunnel into Switzerland and on to Les Houches in the Frech Alps, to Portaubert, Burgundy, to Rosel near Caen, Normandy and, yesterday, from there to Cherbourg and this ferry to Rosslare.

I have the TV switched on.  An Irish news/commentary programme is being broadcast.  Much of its content is redolent of similar TV programmes currently be broadcast at home in Greece; the economy and how the hole in it might be filled.

I do not understand what attracts me to Ireland.  Until last autumn I knew little of the country.  Ireland was no more to me than, to borrow a phrase from Neville Chamberlain, ‘a small country a long way away’, but having experienced Ireland and the Irish for a month last year I want more of it and them.  

Ireland, it seems to me, has much in common with Greece, my chosen country of residence.  

Both Greece and Ireland are scenically beautiful countries.  Both are small nations fairly recently freed from a long tyranny of foreign rule only to be plunged into bloody, internal sectarian power struggles.  It also seems to me that the people of both nations have an attitude to life that owes more to satisfying the spiritual demands of the moment.  An attitude that puts life, and it's living, above material gain which, in some quarters, gives both the Greeks and the Irish a misplaced reputation for slovenliness and idleness.  Personally, being something of an anarchist myself,  I enjoy being amongst these people; people to whom the 'craic' is more important than fixing the peeling wallpaper; honest, what-you-see-is what-you-get folk unafraid of being themselves.  As in Greece, in Ireland there is a paucity of walls and fences.  To me this says much about a country and it's people.

As for economics I do not understand them.  In Greece life seems to be going on as usual.  There are plenty of hard-up folk but there always were and, I suppose, there always will be.  As ever, some folk will live in mansions and drive Porsches, some will live in hovels and ride busses, at the end of the day these things mean little, it is the ability to live for and enjoy the moment that is important.  Northern Europeans, I believe,  have largely sold themselves out to the security of being ordered cogs in the machine of the state.  In countries such as Greece and Ireland individual freedom and the risks that come with it are, in my opinion, yet valued above such an exchange.  Manners are innate rather than ordered by the politically correct dictates of a faceless state.

Laid low by a virus

Mystraki, a kilometre away across the valley. 12th March 2012

For ten days I have been suffering from a virus.  For half of that time I have been recovering, albeit very slowly, from its worst physical effects.  These physical symptoms, a nasty cough, aching muscles, have not, in themselves, been serious or particularly painful but they have been inconvenient and frustrating, draining me of any creative spark or interest in doing anything; the agony, such as it has been, has been more mental than physical.

The March weather has done little to alleviate my general fedupness.  A few fine days early in the month soon gave way to the generally unsettled, overcast and wet weather that has since prevailed.

This afternoon I felt well enough to take a gentle stroll up the track that leads from the back of the house.  For the effort of booting up I was well rewarded.  While I have been shut up indoors, almost totally inactive, nature has been busy.  Along the track myriad wild flowers including several orchid species have burst into bloom.  Long abandoned land that has not been lost to dense shrubbery is presently carpeted with flowers.

For the first winter since I have lived here the dense shrubbery has become a problem.  From when I first arrived here I had been told that in the more remote valleys hereabouts lived wild boar.  Perhaps they did but I saw no signs of them.  Last spring we began to notice their distinctive hoof prints, they have a pronounced dew claw bracketing their hoofs, around muddy puddles and the imprint of their bristles where they had bathed in the mud.  Late one evening last September, while driving my visiting family back to the house, we saw a full grown boar trot nonchalantly across the road in front of us.  This spring, inevitably, there are more of these beasts about.  A couple of weeks ago as I was driving home in the early hours of  the morning, a huge, black mature boar crossed my path within a few hundred metres of the house.  Although I have not heard of these crepuscular /nocturnal beasts harming humans, I would not like to take my chances with one. They are big, a full grown male can be up to two metres long and a metre high at the shoulder, heavy, up to a hundred and fifty kilos and can easily outrun a man!  I have the good fortune to live in this wilderness, a veritable Garden of Eden, so accept the boar as my neighbour but, unlike all the other animals with whom I share this territory and whom I assume to respect my being human giving me an unequivocal position at the top of the pecking order, I am circumspect of him.

The increase in population of wild boar may be a consequence of, and in direct relationship to, the accelerating decline over recent years of human intervention in the landscape.  During the relatively short time that I have been resident here (14 years)  there has been a marked and rapid decline in numbers of foraging goat herds and donkeys used as a means of personal transport. Today, on the hills around my home,  there are neither goats nor donkeys.  Consequently, within very few seasons, the paths they browsed, trod and kept open have grown over denying access to all but the most adventurous of machete wielders to vast tracts of wild country.  It has also been suggested to me that the forest fires, in Arcadia several summers ago, the fires themselves to some extent a consequence of a decline in domestic animal understory grazing, destroyed the boars’ habitat there driving them south.

Ophrys Spruneri growing on side of track from house

Luna Cafe, Aristomenes, Kalamata

Best hot chocolate this side of Italy, best croissants this side of France!

Drawing

For many and various reasons I have rather neglected my blog this year, principally because I have yielded to a creative impulse to take up drawing; time I may have used to blog I have applied to sketching and exploring the mysteries of colouring with watercolour.  I am a tyro at the game, more enthusiastic than skillful, but I am enjoying learning and believe it to be something I may stick with for a while.

Early in January I joined a local art course run by an ex-professional artist who has given me a great deal of help and encouragement.  Since joining the course I have tried, fairly successfully, to make time each day to practise drawing. Some of this time, inevitably has been stolen from time I might hitherto have spent blogging.

I hope not to completely abandon ‘Sensate Man’. I yet have plenty to say, much of which concerns present problems here in Greece, my chosen country of residence, but because I am not adequately informed about these matters to form, let alone to publish, any usefully informative material concerning the country’s future, be it within or outside of the eurozone or the EU, I am keeping such opinions as I have to myself.  I am however confident that the nation and its people will survive; the sun will continue to shine, the sea will continue to lap on the sand and, at base, life will continue as it has here for an infinite number of generations past.

I have started a new blog.  For the time being this is no more than an empty shell but in due time I shall use it as a repository for my drawings, a personal collection and record of the development of the skills I hope will issue from continuing practice and acquisition of knowledge of the craft.  

Φιλο

About three weeks ago, as I was leaving the house to forage for food in a taverna in one or another of the local villages, I noticed a stray dog greedily eating food that had been put down for the tribe of semi-feral cats that live around the house, earning their meagre keep by serving as deterrent to rodents and reptiles which may otherwise set up home in the old pile of stone and rubble that serves as home. I have the good fortune to live in a paradise - an authentic Garden of Eden, complete with a population of Asps.  The following day the dog was still hanging around outside the house, his ribs showing through his skin.  I am not really much of a dog person but nor can I watch an animal starve on my doorstep.  The dog was fed.  There is in Greece a considerable stray dog problem, a problem not apparently recognised by most greeks who have a very different attitude to animals from the generally caring, anthropocentric attitudes of the majority of northern europeans.  Having enjoyed our hospitality, ‘Dog’, as I chose to call him, seemed in no hurry to move on.  During the first days of his residence he was very jumpy and would not come near me but, two weeks to the day after he arrived, he hesitatingly allowed me to gently stroke his head.  He is yet very nervous but less so each day.  As it now seems he will be here indefinitely we thought it best that he had a name other than ‘Dog’; ‘Dog’, is now ‘Philo’ (Φιλο being greek for friend).

Philo is third dog we have kept here during the past fourteen years.  Topsy was the first.  She was a similar breed to Philo.  She turned up one hot summer day.  She was first spotted early in the day laying in the middle of the track that leads away from the house.  As the morning wore on, and heated up, she moved steadily nearer to the house.  Eventually Elisabeth took a bucket of water to her which our visitor drank enthusiastically before laying down again.  A quick glance at the pads of her feet explained why, in places they had worn through to her flesh; she must have walked for miles.

Topsy stayed for four years during which she hardly left the surrounds of the house.  When the car left the house she would follow it to the village where she would wait until it returned when she would follow it back to the house.  One day when the car returned from an outing Topsy was not around to follow it home.  She had disappeared as enigmatically as she had arrived four years earlier.  She is still much missed.

Some years after Topsy.  A friend who had taken in a stray dog contacted to ask us if we would be interested in taking the animal off his hands.  Our friend already had a pet dog and could not really cope with two.  I told him that, under no circumstances did I want another dog.  I do not know how it happened but Milly, a white, long-haired english sheepdog type of animal did eventually come to live here.  She too stayed for four years dying here of an illness the symptoms of which we had assumed to be pregnancy but obviously were not.  By the time we decided to call in a vet Milly, who despite her swollen abdomen had continued to eat and appear normal, was beyond help.  Burying her remains was one of the worst and most memorable tasks I have ever had to face.

Tomorrow, Philo will have been here for three weeks.  As with Topsy, how and from where they came to find this remote place, a kilometer from the nearest metaled road and what they might have experienced in their pasts are enigmas as impossible to decode as is that of how long Philo might now remain here.  He is, I believe, becoming aware he is welcome to stay.  If he does he will continue to enjoy the hospitality of the house and the freedom to wander as far and as long as he wishes, through the largely natural, fenceless wilderness around us.