Continued flytipping on a country track in Corfu
From Cavafy's 'The City': έτσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ’ όλην την γη την χάλαδες
democracystreet.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post.html
We watched the film of Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. Brilliant and grim; another of the many anticipations of Armageddon that entertain us – eloquent warnings to be watched over popcorn, or in our case, via VLC media player over a pleasant supper. “People ate one another in those times”; successive dark ages, with constant war, famished gangs of desperadoes, barbarians at the gate, circumstances in which the living envy the dead. We associate the ‘end of the world’ as we know it with plague, nuclear war and, now, with climate change – the latest horsemen. It’s even fun to watch, especially when the author's inserted a feel-good ending. Millenialism always present among us mortals, is especially popular these days - in secular as much as religious form. On Corfu its early apprehension is intensified by Maria Strani's cautionary fable - The Pimping of Panorea.
www.flickr.com/photos/sibadd/3394121179/
Maria's a Corfiot, speaking of her own people and place, but foreign visitors’ and ex-pat vexation at the despoiling of their ‘little corner’ looks like displaced guilt; half conscious awareness that what’s happened to Panorea is happening everywhere. “Didn’t we come here to get away from all that?” Tosh on stilts. Blaming Corfiots, or Greeks as a whole, is a diversion; a disingenuous denial of the collective mess to which most of us contribute across the world. The problem in cameo: follow a romantic gravel track past multi-flowered verges, hollyoak and myrtle hedges intertwined with wild asparagus amid crags whose rocky grandeur surfaces above pine covered hills between which are enticing glimpses of azure sea skirting hazy mountains until on entering the cool shade of the woods we come, beneath the oak branches and overhanging cypress, amid ivy covered ground, a typical flytip – detritus, old and new, strewn along the way - building rubble, canisters of toxic liquid, mattresses, car body parts, carpets, fibre glass mouldings, polystyrene coving, cookers, washers, spin dryers, a baby-buggy and a baby-walker, square olive oil tins, shop blinds, a shattered mirror, off-cuts of roof insulation in geometric shapes, hardened bags of cement, old clothes, odd shoes, an umbrella, a bag of bar glasses, sodden books, a complete WC pan, ripped luggage, black plastic bags of unidentified debris, lathes, cardboard product boxes with more chunks of moulded polystyrene, broken bathroom tlles, legless tables and shattered plastic chairs, tattered bamboo screening, plastic bottles and popcans, fitted kitchen tops, sheets of cracked glass, rusting blackened stove pipe, off-cuts from pipes of various gauges, bags of sharded glass, semi-hardened crumbling plaster past its use-by date, palettes, a sack of bottles, electric cable, cracked plastic flowerpots, garden cuttings, a child’s plastic boat ‘The Titanic’ “and a cuddly toy!” – as competitors would say on one of Bruce Forsyth’s myriad TV game shows over the last sixty years. Recycling is a complicated and expensive process for glass and iron, especially alloys; even more so for plastic and polystyrene, not to mention the cans of chemicals. All but the garden waste could stay where it’s been tipped for decades, encouraging further nocturnal visits for dumping by people who are almost undoubtedly aware that what they’re doing is wrong. This is not the tedious moan "we're all guilty." As in The Road - there are good guys and bad guys. (Note: I heard the Demos brought a bulldozer to hide this site but were – rightly - stopped by an environmentalist in our village who insisted they must remove and dispose the rubbish, not just cover it up with local earth.)
This isn’t just Greece, nor is it the midden of impoverished people. Similar flytipping could be recognised at the end of a rural cul-de-sac in Staffordshire, on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, strewn beside two miles of the Drumossie Road between Inverness and Inverarnie, almost anywhere, across a thousand isolated and lovely locations in reach of car, van and trailer – the same conveyance that could travel to an official refuse disposal site and pay for the service. Where Corfu suffers is that its official sites – Temploni and Lefkimmi - are overwhelmed, even illegal, suffering the worst problems of unprecedently feckless onsumption, and, in the case of beloved Kerkyra, packed ‘στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή’ – ‘into this little corner’.
I’ve been collecting images of our species’ ways of fouling its nest – woodlands, meadows, rivers, oceans - across the world.
The other day I was kindy offered, as something of a bargain, at least €60 reduced to €25 – “it fell off a lorry” - a shiny coffee table book with many professional photos of Corfu, a selective portrait of its resilient beauty, artfully posed, omitting reference to its leprous plight, as selective as glamour photography; as duplicitous as pornography.
From the flytip off the sylvan track amid the greenery, Lin and I recovered wooden shop shutters in fine condition for fencing, drinks glasses, a bucket, several flower pots, and a small round table-top to which, once it’s cleaned up, we shall add a central support, along with two big sheets of cardboard we can use as templates for shelves in the dresser we’re fitting in downstair’s dining room. We also picked up the plastic ‘Titanic’ so that one of the children in the village can play at being the king or queen of the world or running it into an iceberg.
Continued flytipping on a country track in Corfu
From Cavafy's 'The City': έτσι που τη ζωή σου ρήμαξες εδώ στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή, σ’ όλην την γη την χάλαδες
democracystreet.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post.html
We watched the film of Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. Brilliant and grim; another of the many anticipations of Armageddon that entertain us – eloquent warnings to be watched over popcorn, or in our case, via VLC media player over a pleasant supper. “People ate one another in those times”; successive dark ages, with constant war, famished gangs of desperadoes, barbarians at the gate, circumstances in which the living envy the dead. We associate the ‘end of the world’ as we know it with plague, nuclear war and, now, with climate change – the latest horsemen. It’s even fun to watch, especially when the author's inserted a feel-good ending. Millenialism always present among us mortals, is especially popular these days - in secular as much as religious form. On Corfu its early apprehension is intensified by Maria Strani's cautionary fable - The Pimping of Panorea.
www.flickr.com/photos/sibadd/3394121179/
Maria's a Corfiot, speaking of her own people and place, but foreign visitors’ and ex-pat vexation at the despoiling of their ‘little corner’ looks like displaced guilt; half conscious awareness that what’s happened to Panorea is happening everywhere. “Didn’t we come here to get away from all that?” Tosh on stilts. Blaming Corfiots, or Greeks as a whole, is a diversion; a disingenuous denial of the collective mess to which most of us contribute across the world. The problem in cameo: follow a romantic gravel track past multi-flowered verges, hollyoak and myrtle hedges intertwined with wild asparagus amid crags whose rocky grandeur surfaces above pine covered hills between which are enticing glimpses of azure sea skirting hazy mountains until on entering the cool shade of the woods we come, beneath the oak branches and overhanging cypress, amid ivy covered ground, a typical flytip – detritus, old and new, strewn along the way - building rubble, canisters of toxic liquid, mattresses, car body parts, carpets, fibre glass mouldings, polystyrene coving, cookers, washers, spin dryers, a baby-buggy and a baby-walker, square olive oil tins, shop blinds, a shattered mirror, off-cuts of roof insulation in geometric shapes, hardened bags of cement, old clothes, odd shoes, an umbrella, a bag of bar glasses, sodden books, a complete WC pan, ripped luggage, black plastic bags of unidentified debris, lathes, cardboard product boxes with more chunks of moulded polystyrene, broken bathroom tlles, legless tables and shattered plastic chairs, tattered bamboo screening, plastic bottles and popcans, fitted kitchen tops, sheets of cracked glass, rusting blackened stove pipe, off-cuts from pipes of various gauges, bags of sharded glass, semi-hardened crumbling plaster past its use-by date, palettes, a sack of bottles, electric cable, cracked plastic flowerpots, garden cuttings, a child’s plastic boat ‘The Titanic’ “and a cuddly toy!” – as competitors would say on one of Bruce Forsyth’s myriad TV game shows over the last sixty years. Recycling is a complicated and expensive process for glass and iron, especially alloys; even more so for plastic and polystyrene, not to mention the cans of chemicals. All but the garden waste could stay where it’s been tipped for decades, encouraging further nocturnal visits for dumping by people who are almost undoubtedly aware that what they’re doing is wrong. This is not the tedious moan "we're all guilty." As in The Road - there are good guys and bad guys. (Note: I heard the Demos brought a bulldozer to hide this site but were – rightly - stopped by an environmentalist in our village who insisted they must remove and dispose the rubbish, not just cover it up with local earth.)
This isn’t just Greece, nor is it the midden of impoverished people. Similar flytipping could be recognised at the end of a rural cul-de-sac in Staffordshire, on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, strewn beside two miles of the Drumossie Road between Inverness and Inverarnie, almost anywhere, across a thousand isolated and lovely locations in reach of car, van and trailer – the same conveyance that could travel to an official refuse disposal site and pay for the service. Where Corfu suffers is that its official sites – Temploni and Lefkimmi - are overwhelmed, even illegal, suffering the worst problems of unprecedently feckless onsumption, and, in the case of beloved Kerkyra, packed ‘στην κώχη τούτη την μικρή’ – ‘into this little corner’.
I’ve been collecting images of our species’ ways of fouling its nest – woodlands, meadows, rivers, oceans - across the world.
The other day I was kindy offered, as something of a bargain, at least €60 reduced to €25 – “it fell off a lorry” - a shiny coffee table book with many professional photos of Corfu, a selective portrait of its resilient beauty, artfully posed, omitting reference to its leprous plight, as selective as glamour photography; as duplicitous as pornography.
From the flytip off the sylvan track amid the greenery, Lin and I recovered wooden shop shutters in fine condition for fencing, drinks glasses, a bucket, several flower pots, and a small round table-top to which, once it’s cleaned up, we shall add a central support, along with two big sheets of cardboard we can use as templates for shelves in the dresser we’re fitting in downstair’s dining room. We also picked up the plastic ‘Titanic’ so that one of the children in the village can play at being the king or queen of the world or running it into an iceberg.