Eye prayer answered?

When we lit candles in the little chapel of Aghia Paraskevi, high in the mountains of north-west Samos, it was to remember our dead on All Hallows' Eve. But the saintly one was there to protect or heal the sight of her supplicants, as the many votive offerings indicated.


I didn't think then that I would need eye protection, and if I got it, it sure worked in mysterious ways. As you no doubt read, I damaged my left eye and its vicinity quite seriously in the bike-smash less than a fortnight later. But for one thing, it could have been a lot worse, and for another, the circumstances led me to the Western Eye Hospital and a brief if painful laser treatment for my torn left retina. Which I suspect had been there before, from the rather inert comments of an ophthalmologist a couple of years ago. So it could very well have led, I was told, to a detached retina, which in turn can lead to sight-loss. In this respect, if you're superstitious - and there's a bit of that left in even the most rational of us - you might draw the irrational conclusion that Aghia Paraskevi was indeed my protectress.


The point of all this is to say that yesterday the maxillary unit of Northwick Park - the fifth hospital I've been to over the past few months - gave me the all-clear on the sinal fracture. The CT scan - the second, more detailed one after the first had got lost in translation (!) - revealed what we needed to know, that it was only the frontal wall, and not the rear one as well, which had been smashed. So I can have cosmetic surgery if I want - I don't - and all else I need to do is watch out for odd sinusitus as 'ten years down the line' I could develop a cist in the crack, so to speak.

In the meantime, I need to get on to Southwark Council about the truly ridiculous situation with the post in the middle of the end of the inadequate cycle lane south of Blackfriars Bridge. If only to stop it happening to someone else. Here's one of my photographic evidences, together with the brand new helmet I hate so much, but which I'll be wearing on even the smallest cycle excursion. Bear in mind I was coming from the other direction, looking ahead to the pedestrian crossing which weirdly shares the lanes. Do I have a case?


It was hard getting back on the bike several Wednesdays back after months of inaction - and I hadn't been anticipating any psychological fallout. But as I found with a frustration that verged on tears, I'd lost the knowledge, cars seemed alarming and threatening, which they actually were on an afternoon of full moon. That I stopped, anyway, to admire on the Southbank, having shucked off the cares and got back into the swing after half an hour.


Too much information? Not interested? Well, I don't want to sound ungracious, but while a decent few here did react to the earlier announcements, it does surprise me how little acquaintances give a dam(n). All I'm saying is that, dear fellow bloggers, if you had an accident like that you can be sure I'd join the comments to show a bit of solidarity. But I'm not you and, let's get it straight, friends on the blogosphere aren't real friends. Though several here have at least proved the exception, and I'm so glad to have made their acquaintance.

Hopefully not self-pity, this, only the way it is. Just as in the real world, reactions have ranged from the truly concerned, horrified and angry ('WHY weren't you wearing a helmet?') to the indifferent or the unheeding. Might I just add one general deduction from experience, though, which isn't quite the same thing as sympathy but comes into the same field of involvement: if you admire something someone's done or written, always tell that person - write, e-mail, go backstage if it was that good. Spread the love around.

Golden October, sombre November

Where, oh where - paraphrasing/adapting Pushkin's and Tchaikovsky's Lensky - have you gone, golden October days? Every Sunday in that month was one of brilliant sunshine, whether in Sandwich, Oxford, Athens or Samos. It hardly seems less than four weeks ago that we were hiking the hills of that wonderful Greek island, discovering fruit bursting and dropping ungathered from the trees. And there I was, today, one low ebb of the year - though I'm tolerably jolly in myself - hanging around on freezing outlying Piccadilly and Bakerloo line stations waiting to go and get a verdict on the fracture from the maxillary department at Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow (the second picture, obviously). Not at all grim inside, in fact, as NHS hospitals go. I'm getting to compare them all these days, split as I have been between six of them.

It cast me back to a bleak January day in Edinburgh in 1984 when I took a journey through the snows from our mice-ridden Dalry Cemetery Gatehouse to Portobello Cat and Dog Home, hoping to lay my hands on a mouser only - very reasonably - to be told that the carers didn't like to let cats loose with students who might desert them or, at best, shunt them around (eventually we got Sinope/Snoopy on loan from Iqbal and Sharif over the road).

Not to detain you with the boring details of this morning, but I must side- or even up-grade the 'supraorbital' wound to a fracture of the left sinus wall. Whether it needs to be operated on will depend on the CT scan which should reveal how far back the damage goes. Ho hum: only another fortnight's wait, with the comforting intelligence that if I start bleeding or vomiting again, I must take me back to A&E immediately (unlikely, insha'Allah).

In the meanwhile, preferring to turn the calendar back a month as November comes to a close rather than forward to Christmas as everyone seems so hell-bent on doing, I think of our Samian time, not all blessed with clear blue skies but all of them fresh and bracing. We harvested a good crop of local produce to keep us going in our Potami retreat.


The day of our fruit walk saw a rather bigger detour than we'd intended around mountain villages through valleys of silvers, greens, reds and greys


and eventually down to the coast path between Megalo and Mikro Seitani beaches, which we'd explore the following day after the storm had passed.


Even the coldest day of the week, when we froze above Manolates, was rather beautiful, with the Turkish coast at its clearest in the sun while we shivered under a grey pall.




The pomegranate up top, of course, plays a key part in the Persephone myth of the seasons. I'm just in the mood for the restrained emotions of Stravinsky's melodrama, the highlights of its Hades scene including the quietly ravishing 'Lullaby for Vera' to be heard here in Sir Andrew Davis's Proms performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Paul Groves and Nicole Tibbels. Forgive the artwork; it's beyond my control.

Dryadic, Nereidic

Following perhaps excessive contemplation in previous entries of my 'large peri-orbital haematoma with tracking to the lateral margin, secondary blepharospasm and superficial abrasions' (thanks to Doctor Andy Beale, KBE), I thought it was time to back-project myself to more idyllic surroundings before retreating from the pictures. Happy day indeed, our Samian walk from Potami to Mikro and Megalo Seitani beaches. That's little and big Satans, to you - and you can see that the day after the big storm, the wee devil was still quite churned up.


On the way, we passed through some of the loveliest olive groves I've seen. Better candidate, the olive, opined J, than the noble laurel for Daphne-like metamorphoses. The ground was studded with cyclamens and the odd chequerboard autumn crocus:


and then we were out on the cliffs, which felt not a little like the wilder stretches of our 10-year project the South West Coast Path, above sea-lashed rocks


down to Mikro Seitani, where the waves were too rough for bathing


and on to its big brother


reached at a point where a dramatic gorge tumbles down to the beach on the east side.




Blissful bathing, a picnic of salami, cheese and tomato rolls followed by halva, and we made our way back. I'm an addict of round routes, but the daylight hours were too short and of course it all looked very different in reverse, with the late afternoon sun and clouds further transforming the scene.




Back at Mikro Seitani


the sun finally sank beneath the waves


and we returned to Potami in time for supper. And I can say the same as I did in the saga of the ascent to Panaghia Makrini: we hadn't seen another soul all day. Soundtrack? Sibelius's only southern tone poem depicting the daughters of Oceanus frolicking in increasingly rough waters, a Desert Island piece for me. If you want sonic indulgence, there's none to beat Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, but I was surprised at how good Boult was in this magical rep in the late 1950s.

Ulysses on Samos

The year in which we coincidentally visited three of James Joyce's cities - Dublin, Trieste and Zurich - had to see the end of my odyssey through Ulysses. I wouldn't be defeated as I had been nearly thirty years ago, inter-railing to Italy, when I must have reached about the two-thirds mark but remember nothing except the phrase 'agenbite of inwit'.

Once I'd resolved to read an 'episode' a day in perfect holiday circumstances, with the aid of Jeri Johnson's commentary to the Oxford reprint of the original 1922 edition, and found I could do it in Switzerland, there was no stopping me. Especially as this time I found so much of it engaging, human and very funny.


Yet the conclusion of that particular trip brought a full stop to concentrated reading: too much hurly-burly here in London to find the right space. So having been engrossed by Leopold Bloom's reasoned altercations with Fenian bigotry in 'Cyclops', it wasn't until I was installed on the balcony of our Potami retreat in Samos that I reached Sandymount Strand at 8pm and Bloom's onanistic viewing of lame, would-be-genteel Gerty MacDowell.

Since JJ always starts each narrative from an exhausting new stylistic point of view, reading Ulysses is never calm sailing. The journey through the history of Eng Lit in Holles Street Maternity Hospital is bewildering; I found I sometimes just had to let my mind go slack over the flow of words. Johnson has a point here: you worry that you can't see the wood for the trees, but the trees are the wood. And then I thought I was going to relish the dream-drama of 'Circe', but found it just went on and on - which is, I suppose, nightmarishly the point.

Reaching the final harbour was easier, and again it's no doubt Joyce's intention that after the Goethean brothel Walpurgisnacht the often amusing dialogues in the cabbies' shelter should come as a breath of fresher air. And then we go to the other extreme with the didactic lunacy of 'Ithaca'. Fortunately there's raunchy, Rabelaisian Molly with her filthy talk and her forgiving view of humanity to provide a surprise feminine coda. Which I finally reached on the plane from Athens to London. How strange that we were flying over beloved Trieste


and Paris; that the end-date was palindromic (01/11/10); and that I finished my reading at 10.10pm. And then, onwards to Bulgakov, the engrossing family chronicle of Ludmila Ulitskaya's Medea and Her Children, and more Moominmadness at bedtime.

My thanks to the quietly inspirational Fritz Senn in Zurich for keeping me on the Joycean road.

Samian All Hallows' Eve

I know it's on All Souls' Day that the devout honour their dead, but we found ourselves lighting candles unbidden and unanticipated on a translucent Hallowe'en day in Samos, where for a blissful week I've been away from internet and from all music bar the mournful Greek songs interlaced with frothy Europop filling the bars and restaurants.

Leaving our eyrie on the north side of the island, which will have to wait until another day for its paean, we drove to the southern slopes of Mount Kerkis, at 1434m the second highest peak on any of the islands (Samothraki boasts the highest), and began the afternoon with a dip and a bask at Limnionas.


Here, again unanticipated, the spookiness began. I found a playing card, face down, on the beach. I held it up and later found out that our Polish friend had guessed its identity - the Ace of Spades. Betokening, we hope, not death but the day of the dead. Anyway, we drove with special care around the unfenced hairpin bends of Samos's empty western road, climbing to dramatic heights among pine forests (about 20 per cent of Samos's famous greenery burnt in 2000, but not here, nor in our north-western corner). It's a pity we pre-empted the beaches and monastery of Ioannis Eleimonas, recommended by resident German artist and neighbour Peter - we'd intended to make a second swimming stop later in the day but his other suggestion, the cave churches above Kallithea, took us longer than we'd expected.

That was not least because we parked early on the rough track up to Aghia Paraskevi and walked for an hour and a half before stopping to have a picnic. But the air was so fresh, and the views so spectacularly clear, that we could hardly regret taking our time. On our right was the ridge of Kerkis


and westwards, out to sea, the silhouette of Ikaria, a balder island with strikingly independent and sociable inhabitants, Peter told us.


Picnic was served at 4pm among the pines, and then we paid our homage to Saint Paraskevi at her tiny chapel, poetically sited with an enormous plane tree in front of it. Touching how most of these holy places, filled with icons, are left open, quite unlike the painted churches of Cyprus.


I can find out nothing about it, but I did read up concerning the saint, who went through the usual tortures unscarred in Asia Minor and, her persecuting Emperor having been blinded, restored his sight and converted him on the spot (it still didn't save her from ultimate martyrdom in Rome). And so, like Saint Lucy but with a different backstory, the eyes are her symbol, and dozens of votive offerings hung both over her picture


and on a hook to the left.


This is where we realised we were going to honour our dead on the eve, and so I lit a couple of candles to symbolise the most recent major loss (Noelle earlier this year) and my earliest (dad back in 1977).

Our destination, however, still lay ahead, up a steep rocky path marked by crosses: the church-in-the-rock of Panaghia Makrini at about 800 metres.


Again, documentation is scant other than the fact that it was founded in 800 by one of the many hermits who lived in caves on Mount Kerkis, and that its wall paintings are probably 14th century. We knew nothing about them when we arrived, so it was with a certain wonder that we took our lit tapers into the pitch-black sanctuary and found faces on the wall. Christ emerged in candlelight:


followed by disciples and prophets



Around the arches are spotted beasts, birds and fish.




So again we placed our lit tributes to our dear departed before the ikonostasis


and, walking around the cave,


had a bit of a shock when we found an open grave with skull and bones. Peter later confirmed that it hadn't been plundered but had always been like this.


And so in concern, more practical than superstitious, for the failing light, we made our way quickly down the mountainside


and arrived at the car just as Ikaria glowed in the sunset.


We hadn't seen a living soul all afternoon.

Was there any music in my head to all this? Oddly, yes - I discovered that what I was humming happened to be Marfa's song from Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, and a quick wordcheck along the lines recommended by Freud and Reik confirmed that the words of the folk melody's fifth verse were the cause:

Like candles of God
We shall burn together,
Along with our brethren in the flames,
And our souls shall rise through smoke and fire.

Admittedly Marfa is predicting the Wacko-like self-annihilation of the Old Believers, but the music is serene and glowing, and that's how my agnostic self felt as I lit the candles. Here's the great Irina Arkhipova at the Bolshoy in 1989 - another memorial tribute, because she was the favourite singer of my dear Russian friend Martin Zam, who died in his late nineties. As the scene continues, you also see another immortal, Yevgeny Nesterenko, as Dosifey.