Canal Journey

Yesterday, I had an unsolicited call from Sheila, one of the receptionists at my doctor’s practice. “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “You’re on a list the doctor gave me. I just need to ask whether you are having any problems with your memory?” I was tempted to reply, “None that I can recall,” but that would have been glib and callous considering the NHS is doing its best to pick up early-stage dementia. So, I just said that I had none and thanked her for enquiring. Anyway, I don’t know where the line is drawn: they say that memory plays tricks on you; that it is subjective; that you remember only what strikes you at the time as being important.

I distinctly remember, for example, being impressed the first time I saw the 1957 film The Forbidden Planet, but when it reappeared at a local cinema last week and I had the opportunity to re-visit the experience, I realised that all I remembered were the spectacular (for the time) special effects. The cheesy romance between the Captain and the only female on the planet made no impression on me, although this could be explained by the fact that I was just a boy – assuming I was when I saw it: I can’t remember. Anyhow, notwithstanding Hollywood’s schmaltzy intervention in the plot, I marvelled then at the writer’s vision of the future and thought that the ability to visualise it was akin to clairvoyance. Now, however, I would attribute it to imagination, alloyed with an understanding of science and a degree of historical knowledge, all used to extrapolate what the future might look like.

Last Sunday morning, I took a recreational walk, not on the hills or heathlands, nor through the country lanes and muddy, rural tracks, but in the city. I followed a canal, from its terminus in the centre of Manchester towards the satellite town of Rochdale. I walked only a few miles, but how stimulating they were – and in more than a physical sense. They gave me a glimpse of a continuum of social change – past, present and future. The starting point was an artisanal bakery overlooking the renovated canal basins, where ducks float among the houseboats and people stroll with their dogs around a patch of newly-established park. I fortified myself with one of their big fat croissants and coffee made from locally roasted beans before setting off. The people who once worked in this former transport hub lived nearby in slums long-since demolished. When the railways made the canals redundant, the land around them lost value and was colonised by light-industrial buildings. But, with business now concentrated in the service sector and conducted elsewhere, the last cling-ons have been cleared and the land given over to a master-plan of high-density, high-cost, inner-city housing. The canals have been restored, cleaned up and re-purposed for leisure.

It doesn’t take long, however, to walk out of latte land and into a brown-field development of 1990s houses built for families. Here, the style is traditional but with modern touches and the canal has been adopted as a valuable feature, its banks grassy and cherished. Further on, you come to 1980s houses, their backs turned towards the canal, 19^th century-style, and interspersed with remaining industrial units. Keep going and the houses get older and shabbier. Further still and they become grand, reflecting the exodus of the Victorian middle classes from the polluted core of the city. I was reminded of the concentric rings of a tree trunk, each one capable of storing information about its heritage, except that these rings are apt to time-travel.

Overall, however, the current trend is clear: people are moving back into the city. I hope the town-planners – if there are any remaining – will extrapolate wisely and make suitable provision for all the newcomers, especially in healthcare. I don’t want Sheila to be too busy to phone me again next year.

Here and There

Last week, driving through the bleakly deserted centre of a small town in Crete, I mistook the civic Christmas crib for a bus-shelter full of bored teenagers. I put it down to a combination of my expectations (I would have been there as a teenager in such a town), deteriorating acuity of mid-distance vision and the disorientating effect of being in unfamiliar surroundings – the last of these being the least plausible: after several weeks in Crete, I should have become used to driving on the wrong side of the road.

However, I am back in the UK now, lapping up those things that I have missed about it while still pining somewhat for Mediterranean culture. First, however, I faced the menial task of taking down the Christmas cards and vacuuming up all the glittery stuff that fell off them. Then, with the festive residue dispatched and my outlook refreshed, I settled into the groove: not “new year, new you”, but more of the same – with a few efficiency tweaks to improve outcomes. One such tweak is avoiding the combination of booking connecting flights and taking hold-baggage: it is bound to fail at some time and so it did, during return flights via snow-bound Munich airport. A more fundamental tweak, however, is the need to cultivate the habit of setting dates in the diary for all the rendezvous I want to happen and journeys I would like to make, since this kind of kick-start is the best way that I know to ensure that things happen. Procrastination, after all, is the thief of time. The trip to Crete had been planned some eight months in advance. Had it not been, it might have been shorter – or squeezed out of the calendar altogether by other events.

For the first few days back in Manchester, I spent a lot of time at the cinema. There are plenty of films to see, especially during the ‘awards season’, and I had missed a few by being abroad. One I did catch, Free Solo, may appear to be simply a documentary about rock-climbing, a subject which is not of particular interest to me, yet the spectacular, death-defying feat of its hero, Alex Honnold, is more than a nail-biting experience for the spectator. It raises the questions “how?” and “why?” anyone would want to do such a thing and provides, in part, an explanation. Such feats are not for me, but I was left in awe of Alex’s ability to objectify fear by setting it against risk assessment. Can it be so simple, even for someone at peak technical and physical prowess?

Between the latest releases there was Bad Timing, a film by Nicolas Roeg that was lambasted at the time of its release in 1980, but which has come to be regarded as a ground-breaking classic. I had not seen it before and was engrossed in the emotional power of the story. Yet I was distracted and fascinated by the period details – the way that everyone smoked at every opportunity, the clothes they wore, their hairstyles, their cars and Theresa Russell’s under-arm hair! I have no equivalent first-hand experience of 18^th century fashions but later, watching The Favourite, was similarly distracted by the elaborately reconstructed period details. Nevertheless, the vile behaviour of the characters fuels the belief that human nature is constant, whatever affectations prevail at the time.

Still, like flashbacks in a film, glimpses of moments in Crete keep coming to mind: standing in the sunlit ruins of Ancient Lato on the hills above Ayios Nikolaos; contemplating the Byzantine frescoes in Panagia Kera; and driving along the scenic north coast highway, sandwiched between sea and mountains – which reminds me that I must go to the opticians and order some new specs.

Sticky Reputations

During our stay on the island of Crete we have noticed how friendly and keen to engage the locals are. Are they just sucking-up to tourists? Cynicism notwithstanding, a genuinely warm welcome is hard to fake and easy to detect. They often ask where we are from and, invariably, our answer – “Manchester” – elicits a positive response that can serve well as a conversation-opener. For some it is about football, for others the music scene, but for the dentist whose services I was obliged to engage, it was about the city’s scientific heritage and the fact that he had trained there. The point is that we are from a place that people know something about: it has an international reputation that, fortunately, sticks to its itinerant denizens – for which I am grateful. If I were to hail from, say, Hemel Hempstead I doubt the conversation would get past the “Where is that?” stage.

Having left Chania, where we had been staying for ten days, we arrived at Ayios Nikolaos, where we were ushered into our apartment by Sacha, an unkempt, laid-back (I would say stoned) man of about forty. His manner – which included a tendency to swear casually – led me to enquire whether he was Greek. “No. I’m a bloody Serb,” he said, explaining that the adjective was conferred on Serbians in 1994 by a CNN reporter and that it had stuck – much to his obvious resentment. Sacha went on to remind us that the next day, January 6^th, would be Christmas again because “the effing Greeks” use both the Gregorian and Julian calendars, “FFS!”.

We had heard that the 6^th would be celebrated by a traditional cross-diving ceremony at the harbour so, rather than attend a church service, we went down to watch it. It started with half a dozen bushy-bearded old men in fancy clerical kaftans chanting and singing on the quay. Meanwhile, in two small boats below them, a dozen clean-shaven young men in swimming shorts were poised for a contest. At a given moment the priest with the most elaborate hat threw a small wooden cross into the water and the young men dived in to retrieve it. After a lot of splashy tussling, the victor climbed out clutching his prize, presented it to the priest and was rewarded by being allowed to kiss it before it was thrown in again.

I didn’t take the trouble to learn the significance of the ceremony, but it was more fun than any church service I have attended, though the absence of female participation rankled somewhat. Sceptical though I am about organised religion, it is a significant factor in social cohesion. However, I prefer the entirely secular – like the performance of folk-dancing I had seen previously, where boys and girls, dressed in mid-18^th century costume, danced together in what was obviously a display of marriageability – a very temporal raison d’être that has little to do with an imagined life hereafter.

Traditions, whether fostered by religious or secular practices, define communities, and a Greek tradition that I particularly like is generosity to strangers. In Chania, our landlady gave us jars of honey and bags of produce from her smallholding; the lady in the fish shop (where they grill your purchase over charcoal, if you wish) gave us a portion of fava beans with our takeaway lunch; the lady in the bakery gave us extra sesame breadsticks; and Lena in the coffee bar (a Stone Roses fan) pressed on us some of her biscuits made with olive oil and red wine. All of which has left me nonplussed the by fact that Virgil’s comment “beware of Greeks bearing gifts” still comes to mind, 2000 years after he wrote it. Reputations can be very sticky, but these guys are working hard to shake this one off.