Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
for John Lucas
John, there's only this last half-inch of ouzo left,
a fistful of bivalve pistachios and half
a jar of olives. The tan's long flaked away. Well,
your letter asks, glad to be back?
Don't remind! That
roller-coaster taxi-ride to Athens Airport,
the jet's growling up-rush descent to Manchester
over black, snow-daubed Pennine Hills.
So things happened
after I left! Four Spanish women, unexplained,
you met at Katerina's, plus two Germans and
a villainous-looking man who could have come from
anywhere, reminding you of Monsieur Rigaud
as Citizen of the World. Then George's name day
celebrated one day before – this is Greece! – with
village friends, and one day after this with you, then
with other friends the following!
I'm not surprised.
All those adventitious comings/goings. Fireflies
in Katerina's scented garden that evening
with a Foreign Correspondent and the son of
a famous children's author and Katerina
throwing bones to dogs, and boisterous about
her translations of Pushkin, solemn about Greek
distrust of Albanians. On our walk back
you observed the island was now a-yap with dogs.
And talking of that walk back and fireflies, how can
I forget the unspooky little cemetery
with its exquisite nightlights, moon-glazed white marble,
how sensible it felt walking there at midnight,
breaking our talk of Manley Hopkins to do so,
(Age and age's evils, hoar hair,/Ruck and wrinkle)
then sauntering back to the flat as if life was all
easy-going-natural, the gods not bothered
what we did or spoke of, dogbark keeping at bay
thoughts of scurvy banditry.
Now you've discovered
the island's very best retsina in a shed
behind a little store – there on that same road back –
where one Maria dispenses wine from a vast
barrel as well as a superb local red sold
from a barrow near the church, good enough, you say,
to convert to Greek Orthodoxy for. All this
for next time, eh?
How often we've agreed that there's
no longer a cogent language for gratitude.
Words turn hard in the mouth as if you've literally
bitten your tongue and swollen it. I'm afraid, John,
there is not enough ouzo left to make me chance
those sort of words. Still, I raise what is to all the
overlapping lives our easygoing friendship
comprehends, even in a moonlit stroll round graves.
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- Information
- Getting There , pp. 59 - 60Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001