April 2023

It is now a month since the horrifying train crash that took place near the Vale of Tempe. The death toll eventually rose to 57, and poor parents had to go through various ordeals, such as the one of going to hospitals in order to give DNA samples, hoping against hope that no matches would be found. Members of the government toured the nightmarish scene: the Minister for Transport was in tears, and later resigned. He said he had tried to do his best with his portfolio, but found there was little he could do to correct past errors, not to mention effect a change to the general atmosphere of apathy.  This, unfortunately, is a common story here, where governments inherit the messes the previous ones have made. Of course this is not exclusively a Greek pattern. Various heads have rolled, so to speak, and it has been discovered that several people were negligent, and thus made errors that brought about the catastrophe.

The world in general seems to have come to a pretty pass. Everywhere you look there is calamity in varying degrees. I suppose a decline in the standard of English would not be considered an earth-shaking trend by many people, but it is a matter of grave concern to me. I can no longer regard the BBC as the fount of all wisdom in the area of the King’s English, whereas I once regarded this august institution as being infallible. Nobody ever proof-reads the little ribbons of news that run along the bottom of the screen, so that spelling errors are rife. And when a newsreader pronounced the word sepulchre as sepulcha, I nearly fainted away. In another age, I would have called for smelling salts. It is hard to credit such ignorance in people who should know better. Last week I read of a woman who was trying to buy a photo album, but the shop assistant did not know what such a thing was, and sent her to the technical section, thinking she wanted a gadget for her phone. People past a certain age feel like dinosaurs quite often. There is little we can do except get used to this sort of thing.

News from Warsaw, where spring is certainly taking its time about arriving, and where the weather is very up and down. However, my son and daughter-in-law were not deterred from taking part in a half-marathon last Sunday. Katerina wrote lugubriously that it was very cold, but they did it, running 21 km in under two hours, which I’m told is a very respectable time for two people who will never see 40 again. I feel weak at the thought. In my far-off salad days, now lost in the mists of time, I was a sprinter. In any case, way back then girls were not permitted to compete in any distance long than 220 yards. Nor were they permitted to play football or cricket. Born too soon, I was.

The highlight of the month of March was undoubtedly the play in which two of my youngest grandchildren took part. More accurately, the presentation consisted of three one-act plays. Most Greeks I know have boundless self-confidence and nerves of steel, and these children, ranging in age from about six to twelve, were no exception. There was no sign of stage-fright. Of course the audience of friends and family was almost uniformly adoring, so that was obviously a help. It turned out that Orestes, now aged ten, was star of the show: he played the part of a Greek mangas, the equivalent of a spiv, and wore his flat cap and swung his worry beads with great panache. His sister also did very well in her role as loukoumi, or Turkish Delight.

I find, at this late stage, that I am trying to plug various gaps in my education. Long a devotee of detective stories, I recently read an Internet list of ten novels that are considered classics. I was gratified to learn that I had read nine of these. Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, A. Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers et al. Not forgetting Wilkie Collins and his The Moonstone and The Woman in White. But I had never read any of the novels by Edmund Crispin, who was in real life a gifted composer and Oxford man called Robert Montgomery. His detective hero is Gervase Fen, who is also Professor of English Language and Literature at St Christopher’s College, Oxford. An amiable eccentric, it goes without saying. Of course I had to order The Moving Toyshop, in which place poet Richard Cadogan finds a corpse. But next day both corpse and shop have disappeared.

The plot is pretty ridiculous, really, and there is over-reliance on coincidence, but never mind. Parts of the book are a jolly good romp, and other parts have Fen and Cadogan swapping witty repartee, all to do with literature, so it is a novel with special appeal for literature lovers. Above all, it is a love letter to the city of dreaming spires, Oxford.