By and by we came to Scilly by boat, far enough beyond Land's End to be mistily over the horizon, veiled in Atlantic salty air, beyond a strait of gannet-hunting and basking-shark wallowing sea. These worn down old granite knuckles just showing above the ocean swell are bathed in mild wet breezes, fresh and clean, sleep making, ringing with the sounds of gulls and oyster catchers. Garlanded with kelpy rocks and necklaced by tiny coloured shells on white chests of sparkling sand the Scillies warmed themselves in the sun. Islands take possession of normal cares and obligations, imprisoning you in chambers of delights, calming fevers and opening the eyes. And so we came to Tresco, already enchanted like sleep-walkers, trudging up to the Parsonage where friends took our cares and shut them in a cupboard.
Like Prospero's isle full of “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” there are island qualities that are elusive on the mainland. “Oh no, don't shut the door. No one locks up here!”, and so we walked off each day leaving our possessions scattered about for magpies to carry off. There is no fear of the stranger; we even smiled and bowed to others encountered in the road. Less profoundly, there were no cars other than the odd work vehicle and tractor. You could walk in the middle of the lane, stop to inspect flowers and watch birds, have conversations. The common experience of being islanded, cut off by racing tides and boat time tables created an instant community. We were cast up with others and found them all quite unthreatening, even interesting. One wonders; if you take a away the means of frenetic journeying and we became “villaged” were we lived, isolated by the dusty empty roads leading to distant settlements, would we actually learn to re-recreate community where we are, all together? It would also change the economy. Fewer thundering trucks bringing food from afar, and more market stalls and village produce that “give delight and hurt not”.
27 June 2010 – Sweeney's Peregrinations
On a bench in the sun at the Hay Festival I spotted an abandoned paperback, but on inspection it had a postit announcing “Free Book”. Someone else lent over it as if to take it away, but no, rejection. Discarded, free, rejected? It seemed to be charged with potential, and so it was that I took possession of Seamus Heaney's translation from the Irish of Sweeney Astray. A chieftain clashes with the priest and is cursed for his impudence, exiled from wife and hearth, his sanity and even his body. He becomes a bird wandering all Ireland, straying even to Scotland and “Britain”, banished among the wild animals, sheltering in the green woods, before some sort of redemption is found. So here is my ode to an Irish king.
On the edge of Subotica must be one of the largest markets in Serbia. Like the whole of the province of Vojvodina, this is a market on the crossroads of Central Europe and the Balkans. I haven't discovered the main currents of trade but they probably go both ways. Cheap goods come from Turkey and China. Unavailable goods come from Northern Europe. Manufactured products are on display from Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia. Hungarians slip over the nearby border, Serbs come from the far south. There is lots of rubbish but it is cheap and it is in demand.
The collections of outdoor cooking equipment were essential viewing. In a climate that requires most summer cooking to be carried out half outdoors or under a tree there is every size and shape of pot to be hung over a fire to cook fish soup, guljash and paprikaš. Tools and boards of hard beech from the Serbian mountains could be found, especially long wooden spoons for stirring and tasting the bubbling spicy čorba. But the age of hand-prepared food thankfully lives on; many simple tools exist for grating, slicing, and shredding vegetables.
The Roma were there of course, those master traders and travellers, with blankets and plastic sheets spread out with the contents of house sales, rubbish winnowed from dumps, and trophies somehow accumulated. I bought some paper money both from Tito's Jugoslavia and from Milošević's stratospheric inflation during the civil war when a month's wage would buy a packet of bubble gum, if you were quick. It is hard to resist asking, in this polyglot milling market place, “where do you come from?”. The answer, among the dark gypsies, was “We came from Kosovo.” One couple told me that they still had land there but their house had been burnt. Their names were Muslim. Their language was Albanian, Serbian, Roma and now some Hungarian. Mixtures all of us.
We bought some beautiful embroidered pillow cases from a woman. All hand embroidered, perhaps a solid week of work if you did it full time. Such hand work told of a pre-television age of domestic community, conversation, the endlessly passing on from lap to lap of folk culture. The work seemed to be Croatian so I asked the woman if she was from the Bunjevac community, the local Catholic Croatian people, famous for their music, who settled this corner of Vojvodina from Ottoman Europe in the 18th Century. “No, no; I am a Bosnian!” Another story, another much more recent packing up and travelling over frontiers to some sort of more hopeful life. In the market there is truth.
16 May 2010 – Uninvited guests
I did notice that a jemmy had been put to the door, but there was no apparent sign of break in. But wait a minute, the stable looked a little bare. Tools had gone, no benzine can, a much diminished wood store, so lovingly piled up, beech from the mountains as hard and dry as iron. When Aranka arrived we got the story. One winter night when the wind was blowing and the rain crashing they came and managed to break into the “outdoor” room, stealing taps and curtains, but little more, leaving mud and broken glass. Now I see the muddy trainer print of uninvited guests on the back door where they had tried and failed, this time.
The psychology of being burgled is all too familiar to many but not to us. We aspire to live simply without too much that might attract thieves, but the fact is that our house is empty for most of the winter and foreigners are always “rich”. There were mutterings, as there always are in villages, about “the gypsies”. They live constantly on the edge, like the birds, somehow surviving and usually without complaint or apparent concern. That “somehow” means a little redistribution from those less in need. And we were not the only ones to suffer we heard. It had been a long hard winter and poor people lacked fuel wood. Trees had been cut down, houses had been broken into, unguarded farmyards had been visited on stormy nights, chickens and ducks had been taken, deep freezes had been emptied, saleable materials had been taken off leaving muddy footprints.
Is there a moral? The fact is that the chronically poor need help and in a Western society there is a wide and deep safety net. But when it is institutionalised can it survive our frailties and fairly resist abuse? If given the choice one would hand out some help to neighbours rather than suffer the damage and fear of having them visit on a dark night. 'There should be no poor among you' it says in Deuteronomy, because there is enough to go round. It comes back to justice and generosity.
By and by we came to Scilly by boat, far enough beyond Land's End to be mistily over the horizon, veiled in Atlantic salty air, beyond a strait of gannet-hunting and basking-shark wallowing sea. These worn down old granite knuckles just showing above the ocean swell are bathed in mild wet breezes, fresh and clean, sleep making, ringing with the sounds of gulls and oyster catchers. Garlanded with kelpy rocks and necklaced by tiny coloured shells on white chests of sparkling sand the Scillies warmed themselves in the sun. Islands take possession of normal cares and obligations, imprisoning you in chambers of delights, calming fevers and opening the eyes. And so we came to Tresco, already enchanted like sleep-walkers, trudging up to the Parsonage where friends took our cares and shut them in a cupboard.
Like Prospero's isle full of “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” there are island qualities that are elusive on the mainland. “Oh no, don't shut the door. No one locks up here!”, and so we walked off each day leaving our possessions scattered about for magpies to carry off. There is no fear of the stranger; we even smiled and bowed to others encountered in the road. Less profoundly, there were no cars other than the odd work vehicle and tractor. You could walk in the middle of the lane, stop to inspect flowers and watch birds, have conversations. The common experience of being islanded, cut off 
by racing tides and boat time tables created an instant community. We were cast up with others and found them all quite unthreatening, even interesting. One wonders; if you take a away the means of frenetic journeying and we became “villaged” were we lived, isolated by the dusty empty roads leading to distant settlements, would we actually learn to re-recreate community where we are, all together? It would also change the economy. Fewer thundering trucks bringing food from afar, and more market stalls and village produce that “give delight and hurt not”.
On a bench in the sun at the Hay Festival I spotted an abandoned paperback, but on inspection it had a postit announcing “Free Book”. Someone else lent over it as if to take it away, but no, rejection. Discarded, free, rejected? It seemed to be charged with potential, and so it was that I took possession of Seamus Heaney's translation from the Irish of Sweeney Astray. A chieftain clashes with the priest and is cursed for his impudence, exiled from wife and hearth, his sanity and even his body. He becomes a bird wandering all Ireland, straying even to Scotland and “Britain”, banished among the wild animals, sheltering in the green woods, before some sort of redemption is found. So here is my ode to an Irish king. 
On the edge of Subotica must be one of the largest markets in Serbia. Like the whole of the province of Vojvodina, this is a market on the crossroads of Central Europe and the Balkans. I haven't discovered the main currents of trade but they probably go both ways. Cheap goods come from Turkey and China. Unavailable goods come from Northern Europe. Manufactured products are on display from Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia. Hungarians slip over the nearby border, Serbs come from the far south. There is lots of rubbish but it is cheap and it is in demand.
The collections of outdoor cooking equipment were essential viewing. In a climate that requires most summer cooking to be carried out half outdoors or under a tree there is every size and shape of pot to be hung over a fire to cook fish soup, guljash and paprikaš. Tools and boards of hard beech from the Serbian mountains could be found, especially long wooden spoons for stirring and tasting the bubbling spicy čorba. But the age of hand-prepared food thankfully lives on; many simple tools exist for grating, slicing, and shredding vegetables. 
The Roma were there of course, those master traders and travellers, with blankets and plastic sheets spread out with the contents of house sales, rubbish winnowed from dumps, and trophies somehow accumulated. I bought some paper money both from Tito's Jugoslavia and from Milošević's stratospheric inflation during the civil war when a month's wage would buy a packet of bubble gum, if you were quick. It is hard to resist asking, in this polyglot milling market place, “where do you come from?”. The answer, among the dark gypsies, was “We came from Kosovo.” One couple told me that they still had land there but their house had been burnt. Their names were Muslim. Their language was Albanian, Serbian, Roma and now some Hungarian. Mixtures all of us. 
We bought some beautiful embroidered pillow cases from a woman. All hand embroidered, perhaps a solid week of work if you did it full time. Such hand work told of a pre-television age of domestic community, conversation, the endlessly passing on from lap to lap of folk culture. The work seemed to be Croatian so I asked the woman if she was from the Bunjevac community, the local Catholic Croatian people, famous for their music, who settled this corner of Vojvodina from Ottoman Europe in the 18th Century. “No, no; I am a Bosnian!” Another story, another much more recent packing up and travelling over frontiers to some sort of more hopeful life. In the market there is truth.
I did notice that a jemmy had been put to the door, but there was no apparent sign of break in. But wait a minute, the stable looked a little bare. Tools had gone, no benzine can, a much diminished wood store, so lovingly piled up, beech from the mountains as hard and dry as iron. When Aranka arrived we got the story. One winter night when the wind was blowing and the rain crashing they came and managed to break into the “outdoor” room, stealing taps and curtains, but little more, leaving mud and broken glass. Now I see the muddy trainer print of uninvited guests on the back door where they had tried and failed, this time. 
The psychology of being burgled is all too familiar to many but not to us. We aspire to live simply without too much that might attract thieves, but the fact is that our house is empty for most of the winter and foreigners are always “rich”. There were mutterings, as there always are in villages, about “the gypsies”. They live constantly on the edge, like the birds, somehow surviving and usually without complaint or apparent concern. That “somehow” means a little redistribution from those less in need. And we were not the only ones to suffer we heard. It had been a long hard winter and poor people lacked fuel wood. Trees had been cut down, houses had been broken into, unguarded farmyards had been visited on stormy nights, chickens and ducks had been taken, deep freezes had been emptied, saleable materials had been taken off leaving muddy footprints.