CORFU SPRINGS TO MIND...

Is there anywhere more beautiful than Corfu on a sunny April day?

Sitting at the computer this morning, window wide open, with the mouse hovering over the Jango Music Radio connection, I suddenly heard a bird singing and there was just no further competition. Who would choose a random selection of electronically transmitted sounds when the pure, clear, unassisted, unenhanced notes of a bird singing could be the accompaniment to my thoughts?

Corfu in winter is largely silent when it comes to birdsong. Hawks fly on silent wings, magpies quarrel from time to time, woodpigeons call mournfully, but those trilling cadences of real birdsong do not appear until Spring.

I don’t know enough about birds to say which ones serenade me so sweetly in the morning and evening. Just to know that it could be any one of these lyrically named creatures is sufficient pleasure in itself – Blue Rock Thrush, Sardinian and other  Warblers,  Common Blackbird, Bunting, Cisticola, Black-eared Wheatear, Oriole, Wryneck, and of course the Nightingale. Counterpointing the true song is the conversational chatter of the swallows, recently returned and busy building nests and repairing old ones.

The island of Corfu is surprisingly rich in birdlife – surprisingly, because people assume that birds have been hunted into extinction here. In the past, the inhabitants of places such as Corfu were very poor and their diet very limited. Birds were trapped and shot as a necessary source of food. Today, in spite of the current difficulties of life in Greece, the hunting of birds is strictly controlled and the season restricted. Corfu and neighbouring Paxos lie on important migratory routes and the resident bird population is thus regularly augmented by visitors pausing to rest on their long and exhausting  journeys between the northern Europe and Africa. Around 277 species have been recorded in Corfu alone, where the diversity of environments attracts avifauna of all kinds from water birds to song birds, from voracious raptors to gentle doves.

A friend told me that she had seen a hoopoe walking with a certain insouciance down the middle of the country road on which she lives – exotic looking birds, they would not look out of place in a Disney cartoon. Now I can hear a wood pigeon, and a buzzard has just flown over.

A Hoopoe

Flamingoes were sighted a week or so ago in the south of the island; eagles patrol the crags of Pantocrator; Golden Orioles flash like sunbeams through the olive groves.

A ‘birding’ or ‘twitching’ holiday in Corfu is just one of the many forms of ‘alternative’ holiday that has proved remarkably successful here. I led such a group years ago, and while half the group spent the days on hands and knees photographing the unbelievable variety of wild flowers, the other half passed their time with noses in the air and binoculars following the movements of the equally amazing variety of birds.

Entranced by the beauty of the birdsong, I waste time without regret, just allowing the music of Nature to waft across my senses. Bees are humming too in the jasmine and the wisteria blooms – the working bees hum quietly and industriously, stealing the nectar from the orange blossom, the louder, deeper buzz of a solitary bumble bee emerges from deep within the creamy throat of an arum lily – does it sound just a little drunk?

But it is not just the sounds and sights of Spring in Corfu that are so intoxicating. Now my window is the portal for great waves of perfume – the kind of perfume that used to engulf me as I wandered the aisles of grand London stores like Harrods and Harvey Nichols. I used to think that no perfume could truly capture the natural scent of flowers, no matter how many petals of rose, jasmine or violet went into their creation, but at this moment I am wondering how it is that the scent of orange blossom and jasmine in my garden can so truly evoke the names of Coty,  Houbigant and Guerlain.

Spring is not a cliché in Corfu – or if it is, if you feel that no words of your own can describe its beauties, that it has all been said and written and depicted before, in paintings and photos, then don’t be disheartened. There is always room for an original perspective on what almost defies description – the  magic of the Spring revival on this blessed island.

Even the Greek TV weather forecasters get carried away by it all. Men dapper in suits, raffish in distressed jeans and tweed jackets, women discreet in power suits or bright in over-the-top bling, they allow Spring to open a crack in their professional blandness. Last night, one waved an excited hand over the temperature chart and announced that the weather was ‘flirting’ with higher temperatures. It seems that in the Spring even a weatherman’s fancy turns to thoughts of….

We are now in the middle of Holy Week with its peculiarly exciting atmosphere of anticipation.

 Under starter's orders!

Moreover, it is the First of May. This year the traditional celebration of Mayday has been banished to next week, the 8th May to be precise.

Traditional Easter preparations are now underway – cleaning and painting, baking Easter biscuits, buying the lampades (fancy candles) for godchildren, dyeing the red eggs on Thursday, buying new clothes and shoes. Then there are the gardens to be tidied in preparation for the setting up of the spit, which should have been cleaned and oiled after its last outing but will no doubt need a few cobwebs removed.More chairs will be needed to accommodate the visitors - - a little paiting and repair may be needed after the wet winter we have endured.

I remember seeing women in the Cyclades one Easter painting the lines between the paving stones of the alleys, as well as the steps and lintels of their homes, not to mention all the quaint receptacles, from old saucepans to retired chamber pots, from recycled feta tins to old sinks and other sanitary ware , that find a new life as plant pots.

Easter is celebrated in Corfu with great passion and devotion. Centuries-old traditions merge with modern customs, and the message and meaning of Easter is unmistakable and hopeful.

The rearrangement of dates means that we shall see two kinds of floral wreath within the space of days.

Mayday wreath

Good Friday wreath

Nothing, however, will interrupt the spectacular pot-smashing event on Easter Saturday!

So yes, Corfu Springs to Mind, for a Spring holiday. You will be rewarded with banks of wild flowers on every side, sweet birdsong carried on every gentle breeze and all the pomp and ceremony of Greek Easter.

This year, providing the weather remains as warm as it is now, you will even have the chance of an early season dip from a distinctly uncrowded beach!. But above all, you will see Corfu in bloom.

Photos by me, Joanna, Frosso, Katy, Julie and Aleka.

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A MOVING EXPERIENCE

We have moved.

Again, do I hear you say?

Yes, again, after only two years.

The reasons are too many and too personal to go into, but, as always, we hope for better things. A better view, more garden space, a house of character and unfulfilled potential, affordable heating, quieter neighbours; though it is fair to say we have been very happy in this house. I will be happy in the new one - when I find the cat.

When I was a kid, we never moved, except for the move to the country at the beginning of WWII and the return at the end of it. That was a very different kind of move, one occasioned by the demands of wartime. For a number of years we lived in accommodation in the country provided by my father’s employers with other people’s furniture and our moves were a matter of packing bedding and clothing, books and toys and some household utensils of my mother’s. At the end of the War, we were ‘dismantled’, the need for safe homes and schools for East End children, evacuated from the hell of the London Blitz was at and end. Many of those children found no homes left to return to, sometimes no parents. We were lucky – we had grandparents and a safe house in the suburbs to return to as a family.

I once witnessed a major move, however, with teams of burly men in beige cotton coats, tweed caps and white aprons. The foreman wore a bowler hat as befitted his status and which was a common badge of authority in those days. Wearing cotton gloves, they packed the possessions of a lifetime into huge tea chests, and  I was fascinated to find that such chests really did once carry tea from India, China and Ceylon, across the seas aboard great sailing ships called clippers to the insatiable markets of London. Far more glamorous than any plain cardboard or wooden box, tea chests became collectors’ items long ago.

The moving men worked swiftly and with practice, rolling carpets and packing china and glass into tissue paper. Everything was stowed and stacked with scientific precision, into huge vans called pantechnicons, bearing the name Pickfords on the side.

My own first real move was from England to Greece, and involved no furniture, only clothing, books and wedding presents, some still in their original packing. We sent two steamer trunks and a large suitcase via land and sea to Athens. Weeks later, they arrived, with half the contents of the suitcase missing, presumed stolen, and certain items from the steamer trunks mysteriously absent. Deep in the bowels of one of the trunks, however, wrapped in layers of soft clothing and tissues, two tiny Elizabethan wine glasses, fragile antiques, a precious gift from a beloved friend, survived and continued to survive until an earthquake smashed them one day in 1992.

At about the same time, my sister was emigrating to Canada. Everything she owned was packed and made ready for shipping to Canada by sea, aboard a ship called the Stefan Batory,

On arrival, days later, some of the crates carrying her things fell from the unloading net and sank out of reach, out of sight and out of her life, into the waters of the port of Montreal. After that, though she has moved many times, it has always been from one part of Ontario to another and despite the vast number of streams, lakes, rivers, ponds and waterfalls in that Province, she has always managed to carry out her moves over dry land.

My next major move was from Athens (Piraeus) to Corfu, and involved a large lorry that was most definitely not used only for the purpose of moving precious cargo like house contents. It was coated in brick and cement dust and the sides had at some time been dented by angry and frightened hooves. But – friends of friends, as is so often the rule in Greece, not too many questions asked and no quibble with the quote. 

From another (very interesting) blog

We had loaded it up outside my mother-in-law’s home, where we had lived for a while, with some of our Greek wedding presents, the others being too hideous to take with us. At that time, people’s homes were not generally the comfortable retreats that they now are, and home decoration was still in the future. Wedding presents were inevitably either furnishings not of the bride’s choice but ostentatiously expensive, bed linen and tablecloths that would never see the inside of a washing machine – firstly because washing machines were not yet available in Greece and when they were, these lace and embroidery trimmed items would never survive. China gifts would be more ornamental than useful and horribly ornate.

Our rejects included a vase gilded to within an inch of its life and a lamp made by my father-in-law from shells and too frightful to contemplate (it also played a tinny tune…). We had barely driven twenty metres down the road when my mother-in-law’s voice called us back.

‘You forgot this!’ she shrieked breathlessly and held the unloved vase aloft. I don’t think she was so concerned about the lamp.

It amused me to think how little time she had wasted on tears and how swiftly she had started examining our waste bins. Thank God I hadn’t had the courage to throw out the large crucifix she had given us.

Back in the twenty-first century and still living on Corfu, and we were on the move again and people were making appointments to view the home we were vacating.

If this had been a TV programme, I would have been sent to a hotel for a weekend while a team of eager and muscular New Zealanders, boys and girls, transformed my home into something attractively bland and completely lacking in any trace of my personality. This is supposed to encourage  a prospective renter/purchaser to feel the desire to put his/her own stamp on my place.

But this was not TV, and my house was upside down with half-emptied cupboards and half-packed boxes and the cat was paranoid and  hiding in dark places.  What could I do to present my home in the best possible light for the prospective renters arriving in ten minutes (the amount of notice my landlord had given me – and in the middle of my routine daily siesta, which is a sacred time as any fool knows?)

All I could do was squirt some room freshener around and put Leonard Cohen to warble away agreeably on iTunes. I’ve heard that you can put a sheet of aluminium foil in a hot oven and it will give off a fresh baking aroma – very attractive to would-be purchasers.

Our consideration for the ‘visitors’ is rarely reciprocated however. They leave muddy footprints, leave windows open that they found closed, drop cigarette ends in your plant pots, smirk at your book selection, snigger at your photos and certainly throw up their hands in horror at any sign of a pet in residence..

I’ve checked the auspicious dates for moving according to the Chinese calendar – quite a selection in March. But will it rain? Not even the Chinese can tell me that.

Moving an entire house, rather than just its contents, is not as far-fetched as it sounds. It is a fairly common occurrence in North America, from small and simple relocations to more ostentatious moves.

 

I have seen it happen in the UK, when a very rich man decided to move his recently purchased Elizabethan manor house from its position at the bottom of a sloping Suffolk field to a site a little higher up in order to gain a view. The move was achieved without the breakage of one window pane, without the loss of one brick or tile. (Something like this..)

We accomplished our move with the help of a couple of cheerful, willing friends, and our own trusty pick-up truck of the kind to be found parked outside most houses in Corfu and probably most other parts of the world.

Perhaps not quite like this though!

Back in the nineteenth century in Corfu, when the island was a British Protectorate and there was a large garrison here, there was a great deal of work for removal men. Army families were arriving and departing regularly, and all their baggage to be carried laboriously up the many flights of narrow stairs in the tenements of the town, some built specially by the British to cater for the demands of the garrison. A number of gentlemen travellers,too, found their way here, for their health, though who would have chosen to spend a winter In then malaria-ridden. damp Corfu I cannot imagine. Cheap and ill-informed advice I fear, handed over on receipt of a none-too-cheap fee by a Harley Street specialist who envisaged the isles of Greece as being permanently bathed in balmy sunshine, much like a badly trained travel clerk of our own times. Such gentleman travellers would arrive laden with the tools of their profession, writers and artists, and inevitably on a budget requiring the renting of cheap rooms up the inevitable banks of damp stairs.

At that time there was a considerable Jewish population in Corfu, but far from being the rich merchants of other great trading centres, they were the poor porters and furniture removers of the time.

Today, in a strange twist of history, it seems to be the British themselves who are now the porters, removal men and general handymen of the island.

Ah, the romance of moving! Are we the new nomads? I just wish we could have squeezed all we need into a rolled up carpet tied to a camel, with a cooking pot clanking against the saddle. So much easier.

Oh well, mission accomplished, here we are, has anyone seen my black Crocs? The cat? Anyone?

SPRING'S A LITTLE LATE THIS YEAR...

And so is everything else!

 Goodness me, is that the sun out there? And spring flowers?Better blog it quickly before it disappears again.

Ten days into March and still we wake up almost every day to a gloomy Corfu, dreary with drizzling rain, dark and depressing.

Why do so many words for negative descriptions begin with a D?

What is it about the letter D?

Dismal, disgusting, doom, dim, dark, dank, dire, dreadful, desperate … and so it goes on.

I know there are Spring flowers out there in the dripping olive groves and on the sodden banks but their beauty is obscured and almost invisible,  their colour leached and stolen away. Here and there, however, one glorious example of beauty in miniature raises its exquisite head, as in this photo by my friend Sue, of a Milky Orchid, one of so many to be found in Corfu.

It seems that nothing can prevent Nature from obeying its own laws of inevitability and whenever the rain stops for a brief moment, a bird, bursting with the need to build a nest and mate, darts through the barely budding branches of trees that have yet, in many cases, to put out new foliage.

Eagles were riding the thermals above the crags of Mount Pantocrator yesterday; Scops Owls held a reunion outside my bedroom window last night, and the cat now prefers to stalk the garden bushes rather than stake out the sofa. I haven’t heard a cuckoo yet but I have heard the first strimmer! Nature is on the mov

But inevitability guides the course of the Greek calendar year too, and even though the great Eastern Orthodox Easter celebrations will come at a different time most years from those of the Western Church, and particularly late this year (6 May) they will come, with all their tradition and ceremony, both majestic, magical and even a little mischievous.

We are almost at the end of the Carnival period that precedes Lent. In Greece, the Church tends to diplomatically ignore the pagan spirit of these celebrations – far older than Christianity - and fit in where it can. Bawdiness and vulgarity are displayed in the choice of costumes in a way that would have been very familiar to the Ancient Greeks. I guess that is something that has never changed. Human nature!

 

In Corfu and the other Ionian islands, however, much of the Carnival atmosphere dates back to the days when the islands were ruled by the Venetian Republic.

Every part of Greece has its own particular customs for this period, and while Patras is held to be the biggest, brashest and best Carnival in Greece, I have always loved the Corfu Carnival.

My introduction to Carnival here was in simpler times, when I answered a knock of my front door to find two masked and giggling ‘ballerinas’ with suspiciously large biceps lurking on my doorstep. They pushed past me, filled the house with confetti and blew loud party noises at me before departing. I never did find out who they were!

Last Thursday was what we call ‘Tsiknopempti’ – on the evening of which people gather in homes and tavernas to eat as much meat, usually grilled, as possible before Lent begins. The air is filled with ‘tsikno’ which is the smoke that arises from the meat as it cooks.

 Needless to say, this eating spree is accompanied by plenty of wine and beer and Greek music.

Nest Thursday evening will see the ‘Petegoletsa’ which is a completely original, Venetian kind of street theatre, with women (usually from local theatre groups) standing at the windows of the old houses in the town centre, hurling insults, abuse and scandalous gossip at each other across the alleyways. Petegoletsa means gossip and is a good example of how unfathomable the Corfiot dialect can be to outsiders. You really do need to be a Corfiot to appreciate the innuendoes of the dialogue

The people of Corfu have always celebrated Carnival with great wit and ingenuity, which is reflected in the costumes invented each year. My family always seem to raid my cupboards at the last minute each year which has led to come interesting outfits!

In fact, the Afro wigs come out year after year -after year...

Some of the most traditional costumes belong to the Venetian period – the long black ‘domino’ gown of the doctor or notary of the times, Punchinello, the ballerina and so on. Today, political figures local and international are widely satirized.

The last weekend of Carnival, with the burning of King Carnival himself, is followed immediately by Clean Monday – Kathari Deftera – an unofficial public holiday, celebrated by taking a picnic out to the seaside (never far away in Corfu) or into the countryside, and praying for a good breeze to fly the kites that are so much a tradition of this day.

They can be bought readymade but my husband used to make ours, huge and meticulously constructed from balsa wood, coloured papers and foil and miles of string. He learned the craft from a famous kite-maker of Piraeus – does that sound like the title of a book?

By the time the kites were aloft at the end of a surprisingly weighty length of string, the kids were tired and Yanni was left to fly the kite alone. A favourite spot for us on Clean Monday was always the headland at Kassiopi on which the fortress then stood alone, unfenced, bare of trees, with no villa neighbours. Most of our kites found their way across the Channel to Albania in the end where they probably served for target practice.

Clean Monday picnics are supposed to be composed of foods that have not involved the shedding of blood and are not obtained from red-blooded animals. We have feasted off fresh spring lettuce, dill and onions, taramasalata, baked yigantes (large butter beans), pickled vegetables, every kind of shellfish, octopus, squid, cuttlefish and shrimps, and of course the wonderful flat bread baked only for this day and called lagana. The meal is always finished off with halva, either the commercial kind made from sesame or the home-cooked variety made from semolina.

There is an unsophisticated, old-fashioned joy in the whole event; strangers chat to each other, children in their best clothes romp on hillsides and cover their white tights and new chinos with grass stains and it is all part of the day. Only the haughty teenagers are there yet not there, plugged in to their electronic devices. Food is grazed on all day long , and frequently supplemented by oranges gathered straight from the trees, or clams dredged up by a keen snorkeler, or a handful of wild asparagus gathered on the steep slopes above Nissaki.

Clean Monday allows us the unique and very virtuous pleasure of eating food that has travelled the least possible distance from its source to your lips. In Corfu it is a unique and wonderful experience. The breeze seems to blow away the last vestiges of winter and leaves you refreshed and revived for whatever the summer may bring.

Corfu has come through a difficult winter and maintained the spirit of Carnival yet again. Long may that spirit live.

Signing off with another word for the weather that begins with D – double-cross. Two days of Spring promise then a night of  crashing, thrashing thunder, incandescent lightning and hissing rain.

Is this Spring in disguise?

 Thanks to Sue, Frosso, Julie, and Jo for the use of their photos.