AH SURE AZURE

Category: Country life

  • Spidery Futures

    I moved to an apartment in Ipsos Corfu two months ago.

    Outside was an awning to protect cars from the sun’s heat which can do damage to paintwork.

    Its a green piece of netting maybe twenty feet by thirty feet, suspended at the four corners by cords and elastic at a height of ten feet.

    During the month of May, we had very strong winds which tore one corner down. This was flapping in the wind for about a week, until I decided to take it upon myself to get up a ladder and tie the corner on. I was waiting for the neighbours to tell me to stop interfering but I soon realised no one cared and they were quite glad to have the awning up again.

    This lasted very well until the regular winds that come up in the afternoon here in Ipsos began to strike again and pulled it away from the edges. I climbed up again and reattached it, wondering whether my knot tying skills had completely deserted me. This time two corners had come down.

    Previously it had been attached by plastic ties and I carefully cut these off with a scissors and threw them away.

    So I was quite disappointed and discouraged to arrive home during this week to find it again has come down. I am tempted to give up and pull it down completely.

    Old Perithia, Corfu

    Then I had an idea while walking in the old town of Perithia with my friends. This old town had been a living place up to fifty years ago and then was abandoned for more accessible villages such as New Perithia, just down the road. So there are many ruined houses. More recently, renovations and landscaping has happened, in keeping with the original village. During the walk, we were totally struck by the diversity of nature living there. Bees, wild flowers, butterflies of all colours and then –Spiders! Hanging in strong webs across paths, high above our heads in trees and in among grasses where they had taken over the space between one clump and the next.

    Barley on Roadside

    We felt a sense of hope and really we just revelled in the feeling of nature continuing so abundantly all around us. Exotic flowers pushed up in unkempt fields and the sense of continuity was reassuring in a cosmic way. It contradicted the fear mongering of climate change and the existential worry and guilt we are loaded with about the future of the planet.

    It was a short link to my awning when I came home. Visions of Robert the Bruce in his freezing cave in Scotland watching a tiny spider weaving and remaking his web a thousand times flashed in to my mind as I resolved to get out the ladder and tie it up again.

  • How to make Bread

    How to make Bread

    Having spent six weeks working the early morning shift in a bakery in Co Kilkenny last summer, I knew I was not cut out for night shifts. My love of baking remained intact.

    It being Spring here in Corfu, I find myself again with the baking bug. Seldom do I pick up a recipe for the first time and have success. I have carried around on my travels a hardback book by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou called ‘How to make Bread’ and had never before made anything from it. I chose the cinnamon rolls recipe for no better reason than I had the right number of eggs and cinnamon in the cupboard. I was so happy with the result I wanted to record it and share if not the taste, then the experience.

    My first attempt, the ‘pre ferment’, failed to rise after an hour and I weighed out a second amount. This seemed to double in size after the correct amount of time. The smell of the cinnamon made the process a pure pleasure. I kneaded the dough the requisite five times, then left it for an hour.

    My failure with the first dough had lingered but I resisted the ‘useless’ label I was about to give myself. So I was like a mother seeing her child walk for the first time when I saw that the earlier dough did eventually rise. I had left it in its bowl on the radiator and my spirits rose with the dough.

    You can almost smell the
    cinnamon

    It was sheer pleasure then to knock the air out of the dough and lay it on the counter, baste it with beaten egg and sprinkle cinnamon over it.

    Rolling it up and cutting it into whirls was easy peasy and fitting them into a floured tin was novel. The idea is that they merge into one another but they are suppose to again double in size, before baking. That was not happening quickly and I was tempted to put them in the oven which I had heated up but I thought fondly of the first batch which just needed time to rise. I turned off the oven and decided to wait. It was in any event the time of day to attend the cafeneion for a little something, given all the kneading and rising time I had devoted to my precious dough.

    Back from the local, my patience was rewarded. The whole pan was now tightly packed with cinamonny, sugary rolls.

    I lit the oven again and in fifteen minutes exactly, my triumph was complete. They looked great as they were, but better with melted butter basted on top. Not sure if the icing sugar improved the look, but the inside was perfection, if I say so myself, and I will say so because this whole post is a boast. Here’s to lazy, perfect Sundays when the dough rises.

  • An Hellenic December

    An Hellenic December

    It was a December of bells. Not sleigh bells but sheep bells. Rattling and clanking across the fields as up to fifty animals are moved to better pastures, each one precious enough to have its own bell in case it gets lost. And each bell different and handmade. Brass, faded or glinting in the sunshine, decorated or too tarnished to show a pattern, long with a pretty chain or short with an old leather tie. But each one with that lonely plaintive sound, mingling together to form a cacophony.

     The afternoon is quite often sunny here and I take the opportunity to lie out in the hammock before the darkness falls. I read a bit and then invariably doze off, my dreams interspersed with the sheep bells as they are herded across the valley below, the cacophony becoming running water in my sleep laden brain. I wake and look around at the olive trees and the stillness.

    I am reading James Angelos book on the Greek economic catastrophe. And I think what is this country I have come to. Full of contradictions and turmoil. Mirroring Ireland in so many ways but then seeming to walk itself into deepening chaos. The agricultural base, the years of domination by other powers, the stunningly beautiful country side, surrounded by water, all paralleling Ireland’s history. But it cannot seem to pull itself out of the economic mire. Is it the weight of the early Greek civilisation that they feel they have to live up to or is it that they feel they have nothing to prove given what their forbears did for the world.

    The night is so absolute here. No glow from a town to dilute the starry sky. But the moon was in its crescent phase for much of the month and is only now giving us some light at night. It was a month of storms too. Storms that had no moon to illuminate the deep inky blackness. When lightning streaked across the sky it was the more intense for its murky background. So you make the most of the daylight  before going in to light a fire. Or there is always a welcome at the cafeneion where the Greeks keep company on the winter nights.

    As we approach the shortest day of the year and move towards a new year, it is easy to see how Greeks can become distracted from the mundanities of life. With their wonderful, complex and intricate language, their commitment to φιλοχενια or filoxenia, literally love of the foreigner or hospitality, and the extremes of nature playing out all around them, what’s a few points on the stock exchange to make international bonds beyond the country’s reach.

    The bell may toll on Wall Street to end a day’s trading but it will never sound as well as the bells that wake me from my afternoon nap!

    Bells at Gardylades

    Lemons so full of pips they are lumpy on the outside

    The lovely Ropa Valley in the mist