Coffee in Kolonaki

          As is our preference, we opted-out of Christmas (easy to do if you don’t have children). Having posted greeting cards to distant friends and relatives, we left town. So, we’re in Athens, where we don’t know anyone and are under no social obligation to celebrate the birth of a religious figurehead or to join the orgy of consumption for the sake of tradition. Mind you, even here people wear Santa caps and plastic antlers – waiters, shop-assistants, children etc. – and, for the sake of politeness, we did learn to say kala Christougenna (to which the invariable reply was “merry Christmas”). Nor are we the only escapees: there are plenty of other foreigners here, though it would be a mistake to assume they are all Christmas-averse: the few that I did speak to had the temerity to wish me “merry Christmas” on parting company.

          Still, being an outsider makes it easier not to participate in the big event. It also affords opportunities to observe differences. The institutions, businesses and big shops are closed for a couple of days, but it seems not to impact daily life. This is a low-rise city where, even at its core, whole families dwell in the five-storey apartment blocks that line almost every street. This, I surmise, explains the myriad cafes, bakeries and corner shops that seem never to close. It also explains why some cafes are equipped with card tables and frequented by old men. Where else would they go to escape when they have neither gardens nor allotments? Our apartment overlooks an active church in a modest square fringed with cafes, each of which claims a patch of outside space – essential not only for cooling-off in summer but also for smoking at any time. The rest of the space is used by children kicking footballs, teenagers hanging out and neighbours stopping to chat. Life here – as everywhere – is influenced by the built environment and by the climate.

          This is a relatively ‘nice’ neighbourhood – stable, family-friendly and law-abiding – but, like any densely populated city, there are people of different means living cheek-by-jowl. A twenty-minute walk from here, where two coffees cost €3.50, exposes a typical cross-section of urban life. Three blocks away, at Platea Omoneia, the traffic gets serious, the shops and cafes bigger and the hustle palpable. A couple more blocks and you are confronted with the fallout from Greece’s recent economic woes: ornate 19^th century villas are abandoned and crumbling – only recently have hipsters moved in to save some of them by establishing trendy bars and modern restaurants. One particular square forms an oasis of cool, stylish entertaining, but ignore Lonely Planet’s advice and turn up the wrong way and the streets belong to drug addicts who do not trouble to avoid scrutiny. I saw one young woman, sitting on the kerb with her chin uplifted, while a man injected something into her neck and three policemen drove by on motorcycles. Yet, a few more blocks away, set on a wide boulevard, are the magnificent neo-classical buildings of the National Library and Athens University, beyond which is the posh residential district of Kolonaki, where corner shops are replaced with boutiques. Here, two coffees cost €7.

          I am no expert but, in the end, the Greek economy may recover its balance. It does not rely on manufacturing or high-tech exports, both of which can be vulnerable to competition. Instead, like professional football clubs, it has a loyal customer base that keeps coming back for more – tourists. And I have read that the Athens authorities welcome the latest influx of immigrants. Disruptive they may be, but by dint of their commercial activities and entrepreneurial drive, they are bringing life back to derelict districts.

          So, the spirit of Christmas does pervade Athens and we didn’t get off scot-free – I did hear Noddy Holder at the supermarket – but the filter of foreign-ness has diluted the seasonal frenzy to an acceptable level. There’s just New Year’s Eve to dodge now.

Greek Oddity

          Because we’re staying in Athens for a month, I thought it a good idea to decipher the Greek alphabet and to master at least a few phrases, if only to show willing. But, even after a few days here, I remain tongue-tied, fearing that if I say so much as kalimera, I will be overwhelmed by an unintelligible response and the exchange will fizzle out. So, I keep shtum. Speaking Greek seems futile, anyway, as the locals can sense a foreign presence from a hundred paces and are quicker to slip into English than I am to muster my meagre vocabulary.

          We left the dis-United Kingdom two days after the election of a new government and the die was cast for Brexit. So, now that battle is lost, I am showing early symptoms of a Remainer-coming-to-terms-with-the-inevitable. Whilst I am still convinced that the EU makes sense as a powerful bloc for the purpose of global trade agreements (withstanding the bullying tactics of USA and China), I have begun to ponder the validity of oft-quoted negative aspects of the EU. I observe the Athenians smoking in cafes, riding around without helmets and seatbelts and I reflect on the futility of Europe-wide rules that some member-nations regard as optional. Then there are all those stories of corruption and waste to which I gave so little credence, not to mention the expensive layers of bureaucracy, the finest expression of which is the regular, unnecessary migration between Brussels and Strasbourg of council members and their entourages. Last, but not least – and the reason I am here – is the case for vive les differences.

          To make the most of this experience, we have rented someone’s apartment via Airbnb. We chose a neighbourhood away from Tourist Central, where we hope to get a fix of living somewhere different from our home. This is a recurring behaviour that stems from a desire to avoid getting stuck in habitudes that can lead us into intolerant mindsets: in other words, not getting too mired in comfortable complacency.

Our landlady met us at the door and remarked how little luggage we had, which, as it turned out, was just as well. Her apartment is as charming and homely as it appears in the online photos but there is a snag: it is so homely that there is no room for visitors and their gear. Although she had let the place to us, she had not troubled to move her toothbrushes from the bathroom shelf, nor her vast collection of cosmetics, shampoos and medication from the cabinets. She had cleared two feet of hanger space in the wardrobe for our use, but every drawer elsewhere overflows with stuff too personal to bear scrutiny. In the lounge, there are so many ornaments and knick-knacks that useable surface is hard to come by. On the walls is a photograph collection that tells her family history. She has enough stuff to set up a small bric-a-brac shop.  Considering that all she knows of us comes from a skimpy profile on Facebook, she is remarkably trusting of us not to ransack her personal life.

          When she left us, we cleared out the fridge so that we could jam a bottle of wine into it and photographed the lounge before rearranging her things so that we could spread out – both actions being symptomatic of our need to superimpose our familiar routines on our new environment, counterproductive to the purpose of our being here as it may be.

          Tomorrow, I shall try at the baker’s to order bread without pointing at it, though it occurs to me that Greeks don’t really want outsiders poking their noses into their language: we tourists have intruded so much into their lives already, it may be the last bastion of dignified privacy they have.

Feel the Pain

          The UN Climate Change Conference (COP 25) in Madrid seems to rumble on – as conferences do – without the sense of emergency upon which Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot, Extinction Rebellion and others are insistent. “Glacially slow” is the description applied to the progress being made though, given the current rate of temperature rise, the metaphor will soon be out of date. Governments are inclined to do business as usual, until they feel obliged to adopt minimal measures to address environmental concerns – despite the scientific certainty that such minimal measures ensure that we are set on a course for doom and destruction. Still, it should be no surprise that people are prepared to ignore, deny or rebuff the facts, since this peculiarly illogical human trait is one that that populist politicians have always appreciated and exploited. It is, as has been said, “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. So, if it is desirable to motivate people to save themselves from destruction, other means must be employed. One of those might be to encourage empathy.

          Ever since stories have been told – orally, written or acted out in plays and films – they have afforded us the opportunity to put ourselves in others’ shoes. Such a shift in perspective enables us, without being persuaded by argument, to see and feel beyond our own tight circle of preoccupations and to perceive a common humanity in spite of differing circumstances.  I was at the cinema this week and I saw a couple of films that did that trick for me. So Long, My Son brought a few tears to my eyes, even though the setting is far from my own life and experiences. A Chinese couple whose only son drowns before reaching teenage, suffer the torments of bereavement and loss – as parents will. The fact that China’s official “one child” policy was promoted as a solution to its economic dilemma is well known, but its sometimes tragic personal consequences are not so apparent seen from overseas. What a skilfully told story such as this can do is make you feel the consequences, not just nod your head in comprehension.

          The other film I saw that offered a similar insight is Blue Story, a tell-it-like-it-is portrayal of what it is like to be a black youth caught up in the warfare between South London’s “postcode gangs”. This was never my experience, any more than was life in communist China, but the film engaged both my brain and my sympathies – something that news media struggle to achieve with even the best, unbiased reportage of news, statistics and related commentary. The difference that distinguishes them is the dramatised story’s ability to make an audience engage with the characters as real people and, consequently, identify with their human dilemmas.

          Even though we might accept the fact that ecological disaster looms, it does so – conveniently for many of us – either somewhere else or sometime in the future, which makes it relatively easy to ignore. David Attenborough, with his nature-under-threat films, has done a good job of rousing people’s passions for the subject, but the visceral effect of observing the sufferings of other species does not necessarily transfer through to our own. To motivate us to save ourselves from destruction, we need more exposure to personalised, dramatised stories of climate-change crisis and ecological disaster that make us feel the pain. These stories may exist in parts of the world that have already been affected, in which case, let them be translated and set before us, since all the factual presentations thus far have not been enough to provoke us to significant action.

Lincoln as Reminder

          I was left open-mouthed recently by the Trump supporter who, in a brief interview, said that she was “terrified” by socialism. An extreme reaction, surely? But then she lives in America, where the media deliberately conflates social democracy with Stalinism. On this side of the pond, meanwhile, millions of us are thankful for having been beneficiaries of Britain’s post-1945 socialist reforms. Our differing political views are not surprising: as Claude Levi-Strauss observed, “One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation” *.

          Everything I perceive lately is coloured by the imminent general election, in which the principal contestants present extremely opposed theories of governance. But why extreme? Whatever happened to consensus? Was that, in Joni Mitchell’s phrase, “just a dream some of us had”? Utopian or not, the idea of a society in which wealth is more evenly distributed need be neither the end of capitalism nor the beginning of Stalinism. In the past twenty years or so the rate of disparity between rich and poor in both the USA and the UK has accelerated and this seems to be at odds with the principles of our democratic systems, which, supposedly, guard the majority against the minority of would-be plutocrats, kleptocrats and autocrats. Either democracy is not working well for the benefit of the masses, or the masses are failing to ensure that democracy works in their favour.

          We should be thankful that, compared with previous times, we do have considerable political freedom. The thoroughness with which authority was forcibly imposed, historically, was brought home to me this week as I wandered through the centre of the City of Lincoln, where the layers of history run deep and, here and there, resurface to tell their stories. The Romans established themselves militarily at Lindum, as they named it. Later, as they conquered more northerly realms, it became a colonia, or administrative hub. Not much remains of their infrastructure, but the essential layout of the city, based on fortification, endures. The city’s north entrance arch still stands and traffic passes through it on what was Ermine street, the Romans’ main route to the Humber estuary. (Ironically, there is a photo in the museum of a lorry, painted in the livery of ‘Humber Transport’ circa 1950, which became stuck fast under the stone arch.) The medieval southern gate to the city stands on the foundations of the Roman original that marked the end of the road from Exeter, the famed Fosse Way. The Romans brought unification, order, stability and the rule of law to their colonies, but the improvement of the lot of the masses was not on their agenda.

          The Romans left, abruptly, to look after their own back yard and the ‘Dark Ages’ set in. Uncertainty became the norm until, in medieval times, the power vacuum was filled by monarchs and priests, sometimes working together, sometimes at odds, to control the wealth produced by the country and its people. Lincoln, again, reflects this story, since it is dominated by the massive castle and magnificent cathedral standing side-by-side at its highest point. Less prominent, but just as significant, is the Guildhall, where the city council has met since 1520 and where ancient symbols of power are kept, such as swords representing fealty to the Crown and royal charters granting ‘favours’ such as the right to hold markets.

          By the end of the day, reacquainted with our long history of subjugation, I had strengthened my resolve to exercise my vote in the rejection of any politician whose words and deeds smell of the recurring themes of the past – plutocracy, kleptocracy and autocracy. Surely, faced with these, a little socialist compassion is not such a terrifying proposition?

* Claude Levi-Strauss, anthropologist (28 Nov 1908-2009)