Elizabeth Speller's Blog

I love the Scops owl; small enough to sit on a human hand - about 5” high - with a hooked beak and expression of utmost ferocity, it clearly has no idea that it is not as impressively fierce or as romantically Gothic as its many cousins.


...Meanwhile, Igor, the white dog next door on the goat-and-chicken smallholding (equally unaware of how small and, in his case, fluffily unimpressive, he is) opens up, newly surprised by it every night.

...Just visible behind the spoil heaps of rubble, bags of cement turned into boulders by several long, wet Ionian winters, rotten floor boards, discarded white goods and bits of the last girlfriend but three’s car that he cannot, yet, bear to part with, the house is nearing magnificence and — who knows? — completion.


...But, he explains, the most recent girlfriend chose the colours and now – to live with the pain of memory or face the considerable labour of repainting the whole thing?


...My terrace garden – formerly a shady bower under the ancient olive and fragrant lemon trees, hidden from the world - is now a sunlit open space, overlooked by goats, Igor (yip) , my elderly neighbours (wave), and the young Albanian family who have set up an alfresco sitting room furnished with the ubiquitous white plastic chairs, on the hillside above me. There they wave and, of an evening, roast lamb (or, I hope, goat) and, on special occasions, sing very long songs into the night.

The water is pumped from a sterna which collects the copious winter rains but now it’s vibrating wildly and in the suspiciously hot smell I envisage a disastrous island conflagration known to have started right here.


...My British friend remarks, wryly, that it could be a metaphor for Greece but my Greek friend says if Greece is the pump – what and where is the brick that makes everything run smoothly?


...In ancient Greece water was collected in run-offs to underground flask-shaped storage to prevent evaporation in the searing heat of summer, but our island reservoir, heedless of millennia of experience, is a vast, open, shallow bowl, offering the maximum surface to the sun..


...Currently I’m enjoying the ritual by which the sterna - a system adequate since ancient times but unable to meet the demand for daily showers and a washing machine - is filled from the town water via a long and potentially lethal hose across the dusk courtyard.


...Every time I think (smugly) my rather basic Greek is catching some crucial political discussion on a bar television, the words winning, losing, former glory days, discipline and national respect, turn out to mean the boys in blue.


...Next door is the long derelict olive oil soap factory where the goddess of fertility, Ceres – here, a Ceres bearing a branch of olive leaves, not corn – still stands over the boarded doorway, looking calmly out to sea.

There are two things I get used to very fast when I return to Greece: the cocks crowing from 5.00am onwards – the cock on my elderly neighbours small-holding seems to be the sentinel bird for the whole valley – and the lighthouse; every couple of minutes its distinctive pattern of two long flashes and two short sweeps across my bedroom wall.

...This-morning small scuffles outside the front door turn out to be two cats and three kittens sitting round a propitiatory dead rat and below my house a young and smiley Albanian labourer is listening to a badly tuned radio.

...Last year saw whole backstreets of shop closures in Corfu, taxi strikes, ferries suspended because of forged documentation, the occasional appearance of traffic wardens and their portable rules on my small island and the panic when the tax inspectors arrived, unheralded, from Corfu.

...He hopes for a Syriza win as he fears otherwise Syriza as a potential miracle will always be a distraction, but he worries about reaction from the far right: "it could be worse than the civil war", he says. ... A sociologist tells me that the Syriza bloc contains both candidates who have advocated armed protest in the past and those who are respected teachers/lecturers, idealistic and active in their local community, so represent the best and worst of political life.


...A small building down the lane used to be the HQ of the communist party, with a shabby red flag and a painted sickle on the wall, but it was restored to a house last year, its past obliterated.

Nevertheless, walking down the apparently endless Währingerstrasse on a grey winter’s day, past the neo-Gothic Votivkirche, a massive Coca-Cola advertisement not so much not so much emblazoned on the porch as offering some sort of annunciation- past the dusty academic bookshops selling surgical texts and plastic skeletons, to (eventually) the Josephinum, was something of an act of courage.


...Not all their explorations were profound in concept but all made an impact: in Vienna poor Semmelweiss, later to die in an asylum, ironically of infection, introduced the simple idea of hand-washing in obstetric wards and cut death rates at a stroke.


...I was riveted by a picture of the first ever gastrectomy, with a full audience: surgery as theatre, accompanied by the entire, immaculately stitched stomach, retrieved by the surgeon and preserved in formalin when his patient died three months later.

...Created over two hundred years ago, here are the life size écorchés - wax models - flayed or neatly eviscerated to reveal what were then the unfamiliar wonders of the human body to the public as well as medical students.

...This is where my imagination wanted to linger-not in the monologues of the patients as they lay on Freud’s couch, but of what they thought when they waited.

...Just as the surgeons magnified, stretched and pierced the human body so that we might live infinitely safer lives today, so Freud, at his simplest, entered the human mind and left us with the idea that the motive for our thoughts and actions might be more complicated than we had believed and not always under our conscious control.

As with all places that I visit, I soon find my fantasy narrow street (the one where poor Schumann lived, and where, in 1212, they found the basilisk, which could kill with a look, biding its time in a well beneath an ordinary house), my fantasy apartment building, local coffee shop, small restaurant, second hand book shop and so on.


...Soon this is extended to the relationships I shall have with figures who cross my path: the man with the coat as well-cut as his manners, the woman writing in a café, the friendly couple in the music shop.

...But I feel at home, gazing out on an alley through curtains that have been cut instead of hemmed and appear to have been fraying since the war, and surrounded by layers of ancient posters through which door knobs have torn their way out of the old paper.


...This was an opera I first heard in East Berlin when I was twenty and to go there through checkpoints bristling with dogs, guns, bored, cold soldiers, concrete, anti tank girders, mines and mutual suspicion, through unlit streets and thirty year-old war damage, was a journey in itself.

...The door opened and there was the Gothic nave transformed into a place of soft and shifting shadows of colour from a lantern in the main door, the golden sunburst at highest point of the altar glittering in candle light, the side aisles in darkness and from the distant choir, one of the choruses of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio being rehearsed for Christmas Eve.


...I stood for a while, invisible, lit a candle for my mother and my nephew, heard the conductor stop and start his musicians, as conductors must have done a thousand times, as they aimed for perfection on the day, and, finally, left.

I dedicated this, my first novel, to my nephews, rejoicing that they were of a generation who, unlike those in my story, and in the first half of the twentieth century, would never be called upon to die or kill for their country.

...But even if one could, with difficulty, accept that death may occur in the wrong order – the child before the parent from accident or illness (my mother died in her early 60’s my step-sister in her early 40’s) – it was unthinkable that any member, loved and important to the whole, would want to leave it.

...At first, every day, I cycled through normality, even bright productivity, to tearful bursts of emotion, to a physical ache, an intense wish that it wasn’t true, to, perhaps above all, anxiety with a world exposed as more dangerous, more arbitrary than any of us want to accept. ... I felt (selfishly) inadequate and frightened at being unable to make it better for my younger brother in the bleak place he found himself in as a father who has lost his boy in such tragic circumstances, or my much younger, former Pollyanna of a sister.

...We are born, most of us, in a fortunate age, we expect our children to be safe, and fiction is one way in which we can explore emotional pain, the random assaults of fate and the not quite unthinkable.

...The tracks were chosen by my nephew on a list left as part of his immaculate planning for death: “I can’t make you love me”, “Hey there, Delilah” - songs chosen, we saw, from a CD called The Very Best of Sad Songs - even at the darkest times there are fragments of humour.

They are not, as northern Europe would have it, idle – those connected with tourism, work very long, hot days, seven days a week in uncomfortable conditions and in towns most of those in offices earn low wages, enterprising young companies start up but are often stifled by bureaucracy.

...Whether this is the sort of long term stable democracy that should have been included in the Eurozone is a question I cannot answer, but perhaps Greece deserved some help to become the sort of productive, peaceful democracy it, and Europe, needed?


...But all the ordinary Greeks I have spoken to expect a default and casual talk is simply about timing, so the government is failing to convince its own citizens of its view of their interests or offer them a viable future.


...None of this theatre goes any way towards re-educating a country in the need to pay tax, nor in establishing a relationship of trust which encourages potential tax payers to believe their taxes will provide services not increase the prosperity of a rich minority.

...The recent ‘discovery’ that many Greek ferries had fake seaworthiness certificates (a sort of marine MOT) issued by a Russian ‘business’ operating in Greece, which provided the paperwork without the financial cost and time of exhaustive safety checks: X raying hulls, lifting the boat out of the water and so on, has halted easy travel to the islands.

...It is probably hard for a Greek to feel militant on an island in summer, part of an extended family and anchored to ancestral roots; the sea and sun are free; but once the city-livers return to Athens and Thessaloniki, to cramped apartments, restlessness and the winter, things will seem dark indeed.

The air is cool and very still, the occasional cock crows, the hens and wild turkeys chatter on softly in the olive groves around my house and the cicadas have yet to start that day long thrill of sound which is so much the Mediterranean to us north Europeans who rarely hear so much as an unconvinced cricket.


...It is wonderful to walk on these nearly forgotten paths, letting them determine your direction: although unless you watch turnings very carefully, faint memories of the Cretan labyrinth creep in as they fork and curve back on themselves and swiftly become indistinguishable one from another.

...Pomegranate, cherry and fig trees hung over the walls from long forgotten orchards whose houses and memories are just a pile of rubble or a single carefully built stone gateway: ‘nothing beyond remains’. ... The relentless winter rain here gives the island a wonderfully lush vista of 500 year old Venetian olive groves, woods of bracken and dog rose as green as Devon, and headlands with their melancholy sentinels of pines and cypresses, but on the west coast it turns to a cropped, thorny garrigue, smelling of oregano, myrtle and, often, goat. ... The air is damp however hot the day, the breeze blows and the sea is piebald in shades of blue: the crystal turquoise of small coves almost iridescent in its brightness, the deep pewter-purple swell in fissures in the cliff so deep, that it is here where some Paxiots claim to have kept a submarine during the war to harass the German and Italian shipping fleet.


...My first, not entirely rational, thought was that it was a llama, the second, in common with my companions, was to climb over a high wall as the beast thudded towards us, gathering speed.

Now it was me, curled up on the back seat of an old taxi, drifting in and out of awareness as the driver travelled with infinite care down the bumpy tracks to the port.


It was 1.00 am, but the port lights were on and a small boat was waiting, and so was a small crowd of onlookers - it was all in a evening’s entertainment and Greeks have none of the reticence of the British when it comes to illness or, indeed, any form of privacy. The captain had to be paid €200, then I was lifted on to the back of the boat, followed by the GP who gave me an anti nausea injection in my bottom while the crowd sighed in sympathy.


...I was still in the teeshirt I’d arrived in and sufficiently relieved to put on the red satin nightdress, fit for a 1960’s honeymoon, which a friend eventually delivered.


...A day or so later, driven half mad with vomiting and pain I was having fantasies about pulling myself to the sea shore and throwing myself into the cool water and ending it all.

...I was so traumatised – by continual pain and fear - that I couldn’t speak for two days but in fact with the right drugs, properly administered, it was only a week later that I left hospital, with dressings on the huge black blisters on my legs.

Daily life consists of erratic hours - in my case dawn starts - and uninhibitedly comfortable clothes – too many or too few according to season with annoying bits of hair pulled into a unflattering unicorn forehead bunch or with a pencil holding it all up (so incredibly chic on French models so, basically, sci-fi on the cheap, on me). Stella Duffy and I did an event together at the recent du Maurier Festival and she pointed out that one of the reasons women actors don’t like the word ‘actresses’ is because it still carries overtones of 18th century prostitution.

...The siren call of cream fudge, or cream teas with scones, or simply cream, is followed by the virtually vertical ascent up narrow lanes between tiny cottages lived in by the part-time fisher-folk of north London.

...But Fowey has the sort of bookshop writers like and hope they write for – Bookends – one part hand-picked new books and another part old leather, dust and foxing, dealing in the irresistible randomness of the second hand: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Pilgrim’s Progress, a set of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a dog-eared Peyton Place and The Shell Guide to Essex.

...It was the best sort of festival - combining real local flavour with smooth-running administration, a wonderful location at the extraordinary Fowey Hall Hotel - the ornate cliff-top house that was the inspiration for Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows and, of course authors: I heard Linda Grant speak on the continuing resonations of the Baby Boom and their astonishing trajectories from patchouli oil, and finding profundity in the Desiderata (“Go quietly amid the noise and haste…”) to advertising and central London property ownership.

...Books, fudge, nesting ravens, shrieking gulls (try sleeping in Fowey to understand exactly where du Maurier got her inspiration from) friendly and engaged audiences, fresh crab, and, tucked down a side street, a gallery of bird photographs by Ian McCarthy, as dramatic and beautiful as any I have seen.