Greece: Part 2

Greece is liberally scattered with half-completed buildings and empty hotels ... but that's not the whole story

I had only been in Greece for a few days when I started laughing. It wasn’t a giggle or chuckling kind of laugh, but a deeper kind of gut rumbling, thigh slapping laugh that went on and on. I was sharing a bottle of wine with Dmitry, an ex-footballer, and we were talking about the situation in his country as bats flitted around above our heads in the twilight and the distant sound of bouzouki music wafted through the hot pine-scented air from the local taverna. We were talking about the politicians, or ‘comedians’, and the more Dmitry mentioned them the more he laughed.  

But enough of that, let me start by apologising for the piece of dramatic fiction I composed for my last post. I’ll admit that I couldn’t resist poking a bit of fun at the idea that the only alternative to economic ‘prosperity’ is total collapse and all-out lawlessness. Let's face it, that's what some in the media have led us to expect, but Greece, to all intents and purposes, is still a modern-looking European country and the casual observer would be hard pressed to notice any difference compared to a visit made a couple of years ago.

Anyway, let me get straight to what I think of the ‘Greek situation’ and be done with it. Here it is in a nutshell: Greece is okay. It’s a bit stale around the edges, like a piece of pitta bread left out in the sun, and the young university-educated career minded folks I sat on a roof terrace with in Athens one evening don’t like it one bit. This wasn't the country of opportunities they had studied so hard at university to take their place in. But it’s a country where suicide capitalism has been stopped in its tracks, leaving half-built concrete eyesores at the edge of every town and empty nightclubs and fast-food bars in places where they should never have been built in the first place. If your idea of ‘okay’ is the endless construction of new shopping malls, roads and airports, where everyone works in an office and has a mortgage and a new car every three yearsand kids are placed on a conveyor belt which processes them and turns them into worker/consumer drones, then I’m afraid to tell you that Greece is in a very bad way indeed.

But if you’re not that way inclined you might well ask what’s left now that the festering boil of suicide capitalism has been lanced. Well, the heart-breaking beauty is still there, the 1,400 islands with soils so fertile that the tables are laden with more fresh produce than people can eat haven’t gone away either, and nor have the 10 million or so adaptable souls, some of whom are actually unaware there is a crisis and still sacrifice bulls in a pagan tradition going back millennia. In fact if you view the world solely through the distorted lens of economics and power politics you might think that Greece should just jump onto a sharpened bronze spear and be done with it. But if you’re of a romantic bent and have the a bit of an appreciation of history you might just realise that this economic crisis has been whipped up by a media that is beholden to the power of what we may as well call The System, for want of something better.

It’s pretty hard to sit, as I did one evening, gazing out across Athens and the nearby Acropolis, reading a potted history of Greece and not come to the conclusion that this economic ‘crisis’ is a mere blip that will barely register on that country’s timeline. Financial doomsters may spew forth frothy talk of Eurogeddon and Grexit, but really if you can only see the world in terms of economic statistics and indicators then it probably does look doomed. True, it seems impossible for Greece to hang onto its euro membership – everyone I met said so – from waiters to a bank manager. But were they gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair out and begging to be allowed to stay in the ‘privileged’ Eurozone club? No, most of them just shrugged and said that at least they’d got quite a few infrastructure benefits from it (such as the superb Athens transit system pictured below) but now it was time to go back to the drachma. It’s the kind of intransigence that infuriates free marketers and talking heads on CNN.

A gift from the gods? Athens' super clean and efficient mass transit system

The party was over. The party was just beginning. From several people I heard it said that they had friends and colleagues who had ‘gone back to their island’. Many Greeks were turning off the office lights as they left and returning to their ancestral island homes in what Homer called ‘the wine dark seas’.  Foreigners,at least those that like to be called ex-pats, were leaving like rats from a sinking ship. They didn’t want to be in a country with ‘no future’ (although quite which country with a future they were returning to remained to be seen). Other foreigners, let’s call them immigrants, were getting one way tickets back to their home country courtesy of the police.

We, for our part (and this was a holiday, so you’ll forgive me for not spending my time cruising the back streets of Athens seeking out stories of people selling their mothers’ kidneys for pennies) stayed in Athens for a few peaceful days before driving across the Peloponnese and catching a boat to the island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea. Athens, if you will forgive me for being sentimental for a moment, has a special place in my heart. It was here that I travelled when I was 18 and fell in love for the first time. We had slept on a flat roof, crammed in with hundreds of other cheap-as-chips backpackers, and walked up to the Acropolis by day to sketch the caryatids (I was studying classics at the time – sorry if that sounds pretentious). Athens is now just as it was then: dirty, chaotic, ancient, romantic, and unpredictable - and still a great place in which to fall in love. It’s a mixture of the first and third worlds, and is dotted with ancient ruins and little green parks filled with snoozing lazy cats and old men playing backgammon.

On Zakynthos we stayed in almost monastic calm in a stone building on an organic farm with few concessions to the modern world. No TV, no computer, no mobile phones and no other mod-cons (except an aircon unit, which I must admit I found it very hard to sleep without as I’m not accustomed to 40 degree centigrade heat). Some mornings, before the fearsome heat of the day took hold, I would go for a walk through the nearby countryside, ogling the numerous smallholdings with their strutting turkeys and staring goats. I would reach a cliff and look down on a wide sandy beach where, if I was lucky enough, I might just see the shape of a huge loggerhead turtle hauling itself back into the sea after a night of egg laying, just as they had been doing for the last 150 million years. The air everywhere was suffused with the smell of wild herbs and myrtle, and the music of birdsong was always audible.

A typical smallholding in the early morning with inquisitive ram

It is a truly magical island, tenaciously hanging onto its charm despite the best efforts of the legions of young holidaymakers who tear around its coast during the day on quad bikes, partying all night and tolerably often ending up flying home in a black zip-up bag. Attempting to stay away from them wasn't too hard (tip: stay away from infrastructure if you want peace and quiet) and I spent quite a few days swinging in a hammock on a remote beach re-reading Homer and snorkelling with my daughters. Such a state of calm came over me that I even started writing poetry (I know, I know ...). In fact, as a survival technique for countering the toxic effects of media overload and peak oil over-contemplation I would highly recommend something similar. It doesn’t have to be a sun kissed Greek beach, just away from most humans and electricity will do.

I soon learned indeed that the island was girted with concrete and the seas filled with banana boats, party cruises and jetskis, but that the interior was more or less how it has been for centuries. Here, farmers rode donkeys, old women sat in the shade weaving baskets and people laboured in the fields bringing in melons, tomatoes and lots more besides. Roadside stalls were buckling under the weight of fresh bread, olive oil, wine feta cheese, fruit and eggs. Some had erected small signs that said ‘Supermarket’, perhaps because they didn’t know what a supermarket was.

Fresh produce was available wherever you went like at this 'supermarket'

Greeks, on the whole, are a friendly and talkative bunch (apart from the guy in the Athens souvenir shop who refused to serve us because he thought we were German). Between us, my wife and I have a good handle on eight languages, but Greek isn't one of them. So it’s a good thing that Greeks tend to be very good at speaking English and love to shoot the breeze with strangers. What most of them seemed to be saying was this: economically speaking, things are bad, but they are not half as bad as they are being made out to be in the foreign media. Madonna was a case in point, and her comments about starving Greeks did not go down well.

Still, the Greeks care about what people think of them and their country (as they well might with so much depending on tourism) and it was with some amusement that one night, on the television in our Athens hotel, I spotted a grizzled American talking about how friendly and nice everything was in the country. He looked familiar and on closer inspection it turned out to be Robert De Niro on some kind of hospitality PR offensive. Next to him sat John Travolta, who was making similarly encouraging noises. This, it was hoped, should be enough to convince jittery tourists to come back (I did speak to a couple of heavily tattooed English yahoos in a bar but they hadn’t watched the news for several years and were unaware of any ‘crisis’ or otherwise so they don’t really count).

Here’s my disclaimer: yes, I know that lots of people are hard up in Greece right now and we see and hear lots about the country on the news. We can even see people lobbing bricks and wearing face masks on the evening news (but tell me, what country in Europe doesn’t have a sizeable contingent of anarchists? – even Denmark has them). Greece has a debt problem and how did it get into it? It got into it because all sorts of dubious development was rammed down their throats in the form of loans to build the swanky new airports, highways and other things that are deemed necessary to be a global player in the 21^st century.

Yes, a lot of people were willing to swallow it and get wildly in to debt and, yes, the politicians and officials are sometimes crooked, just like they are in any other country that has passed its 500^th birthday. I’m not saying it isn’t hard for a lot of people in Greece right now, but in my opinion it’s going to be a lot harder for people in other countries soon enough. Greece, at least, still has members of what we might call a peasant class (and I’ll never tire of pointing out that peasant means ‘country person’ i.e. one skilled in making a non-exploitative living from his environment, and not a term or derision). In Denmark, for example, I doubt most farmers would even be able to start up their combine harvesters if the control software failed to boot up.

On the farm where we stayed, the owner, Dionysios (it seems almost every man on Zakynthos is called Dionysios after the island’s patron saint, including their celebrated poet Dionysios Solomos.) was a case in point. He might be a farmer, but he was also internet savvy and knew how to network with like-minded organic farmers across Greece, and I noticed an organic cooperative operating on the outskirts of the island’s main town.

Empty concrete shells were on the outskirts of many towns and cities

Oh yes, and those unemployment figures people keep talking about. What is it – 30% youth unemployment or something? Well, I can tell you that those figures are certainly wrong. Unemployment, you see, is relative and the kind that gets mentioned all the time is the kind of Anglo-American statistical unemployment beloved of economists. Greece, like other countries in southern Europe, has millions of invisible employers known as parents and relatives. No matter how idle or unemployable their offspring they can usually be found something to do stacking shelves in a shop or helping out raising children or lending a hand with the cash-in-hand cleaning business. And, yes, they probably claim unemployment benefit while doing so. Urban sophisticates in Athens would be horrified by this, but in truth it is they, when they lose their jobs, who are the truly unemployed. It must be particularly galling having left one’s family for a career in the bright lights of Athens only to find yourself coming back, tail between legs, and moving back into your childhood bedroom.

But perhaps more worrying is the rise of the far right. We made friends with Yannis, a veterinarian professor who lives in England but was on holiday in his own country, who expressed concern that the Golden Dawn party were on the ascendant. The cause of their recent popularity, he opined, was people’s fear that the destiny of their country was in the hands of foreign powers. Greece has no desire to be a client state of Germany, and neither does it go down well with the populace at large when the papers are filled with talk of selling off the islands to the Chinese. People, it seems, are being offered a choice between lifelong poverty and national bankruptcy on the one hand, or salvation in the form of foreign overlords on the other. Does it really take a genius to figure out why nationalist sentiment is being aroused?

It wasn't too hard to find signs of decay if you looked for them

So Greece has a lot of natural capital, is thinly populated, and has a bountiful supply of free energy in the form of sunlight. Why doesn’t it just declare itself bankrupt, devalue its currency, and get on with life (and get to keep the goodies, such as that nice metro system)? Life would be a lot easier without all that debt, plus the tourists would return because it would be much cheaper for them to be there. Well, the reason it doesn’t do an Iceland is because it’s not allowed to by its ruling political classes aka the Comedians, who are clients of the Eurozone central powers. Germany won’t allow it because of the feared domino effect which will result in quite a few northern European banks disappearing in puffs of smoke. Perhaps that’s why I encountered this in a field as I was passing through a town.

Putting China into the mix, it seems that the vast country hasn’t thrown in the towel over Greece either. Knowing that Greece has the world’s largest merchant fleet, China has pledged $5 billion in loans to its container shipping industry, allowing Greece to execute a coup that has left a lot of red faces in Germany. Greece sold many of its larger ships to Germany five years back when the good times were still rolling, but now Germany has no need for them because of the global slowdown in freight shipping and Greece is buying them back at bargain basement prices.  

But how long can the Comedians who currently have the power hold this act together? At the moment the crowds which occasionally gather outside the parliament building are kept at bay by the police – but when the government can no longer afford to pay them … what then?

The only thing to do is wait and see.

Our Vacation from Reality

A family holiday to the hop fields of Kent. Below, a modern family holiday.

This last week a personal stroke of good fortune led me to book our first proper family holiday in five years. Yes, we finally seem to have sold the 'unsellable' farmhouse in Spain and I had promised the family that, should this ever occur, we would all go on a holiday somewhere.

Of couse, me being me, I couldn't let that just be an excuse to lie on a beach for a couple of weeks – that would just be cheating – so instead this summer we'll be staying on an organic farm on a Greek island and will help protect the eggs of endangered loggerhead turtles on a nearby beach. The farm is run by 'returnees' – who had previously had good jobs in offices, probably in Athens, before TSHTF, so it will at least be interesting to talk to them and get a little first hand reportage from Greece (two days in Athens at the start should allow for that).

I'm not sure if people who have knowledge of peak oil should be allowed to go on aeroplanes, and in my defence, I hardly ever do. My normal mode of transport is a bicycle or the feet that four billion years of evolution have given me. But still, please don't expect a grovelling apology as I fully intend to continue using some fossil fuels on the Long Descent, whilst at the same time using my time and energy learning and preparing to live with a lot less of them.

'You're going where?' asked a relative in horror when informed of said holiday. The implication being, of course, that Greece is some kind of warzone and that we'll likley be taken prisoner and sold into slavery for hard currency. I doubt that will happen, but if it does you can be sure that I'll be blogging about it.

Anyway, on a related note, I was flicking through an old copy of the literary magazine Granta the other day and I came across a series of pictures of the Kent hop pickers of yesteryear. Until about the 1950s it was common for thousands of people from the poorer districts of London to go on a family holiday every summer in the hop fields of Kent, south of the capital. Most of them walked there, spending up to two months at a time working quite hard every day beneath the summer sun. Kids joined in too and, for the men, it was a chance to escape the grim and dangerous conditions on the docks or in the factories where they worked.

The practice persisted for many years, and in many counties a similar thing still exists (the most notable example I can think of is the great walnut forests of Kazakhstan which fill with families every summer and which the late Roger Deakin wrote about so wonderfully in his book Wildwood:a Journey through Trees) but was killed off by the arrival of the welfare state which negated the need for those on low incomes to earn extra money to pay their rents. Of course, it wasn't all work. There was a great knees-up most evenings (they were, of course, involved in the production of beer) and the opportunity to live in the open countryside for a few weeks of each year with a bunch of friends and relatives must have been highly anticipated.

I remember my own grandparents telling me about their family holidays. They set off from Manchester, en famille, on bicycles, arriving at the coast some days later. This was considered normal back then when the aeroplane's main purpose was to drop bombs on your enemy and the only people who took to the skies in them often didn't come back again.

I know quite a lot about my ancestors from the last few centuries because my sister is a genealogist and has traced them quite far back (although not all the way to the Viking settlers who named a Yorkshire village Hybden's Dale (which meant Rosehip Valley in Old Norse, as it still does in modern Danish) which was later anglicised to Heptonstall, and then misspelled Heppenstall). I know, for instance, that most of them lived in and around Sheffield and one of the most common professions, if you could call it that, was 'stone picker'. These people went around literally picking up stones from fields and transported them to wherever railway lines were being built where they would be used as bedding for the tracks. It's a bit of stretch to say that my family built the world's first railway system, but we certainly did our bit.

This gave me pause for thought about how things have changed – and the likely direction they will take again in the future if and when cheap fossil fuel powered transportation reverts to its default position of unobtainable. Will my great-grandchildren one starry night in the future be sitting around a camp fire in a Scottish vineyard and telling stories about how their ancestors once flew around the world in giant ships with wings?

When this thought seized me I couldn't resist the idea of making a little photo series at the top of this blog post showing a past family holiday (the hop pickers), a current family holiday (a consumer class family in a concrete resort staffed by resentful underpaid locals on a tropical island) and then a future one ... But try as I might I couldn't find an image for the last one as all available images relating to families of the future have us decked out in skin tight costumes and hopping onto spaceships for a few days on Mars.

So I'm afraid we'll just have to imagine how a family holiday will look like – if such a thing exists – 50 years from now when we all tumble chaotically down the rough side of Hubbert's Peak.

Here's a thought for the week that fits in with my Greek holiday theme but which I couldn't be bothered to insert into the prose in a convincing manner: Like Icarus, we are certainly flying too close to the sun and the wax holding the feathers in place is melting quickly, if only we had the eyes to see it.

In the same edition of Granta I read a story by Doris Lessing entitled Death of a Chair. This tells the tale of an old chair bought at auction for pennies in the 1960s and its eventual destruction by Lessing with a saw some 40 years later. It's as poignant a story as you're likely to find about the loss of craftmanship over the years and its replacement with cheap mass-produced junk. Only at the end, when she strips back the layers of fabric and the saw bites into the wooden frame does she realise what an act of vandalism she is involved in, although by that point the chair has been ruined.

When I'd finished reading it I quickly showed it to my wife, in the hope thet she would become inspired to return to what she is trained to do. She is a qualified old-style upholsterer who can take an ancient smashed up sofa, strip it down to the frame and build it up again into a top quality restored piece of furniture that should be good for another century of use.

She learned these skills in England, completing a City and Guilds course in upholstery and furniture restoration, despite being the youngest in the class by forty years or so. Since she finished it ten years ago she has been told repeatedly that there is 'no use' for her skills and she eventually conceded that 99% of people would rather shop in Ikea than pay for craftmaship. So now we have a huge amount of tools and materials in storage – everything from wooden trestles and different kinds of tack hammers, to huge bags of horse hair, webbing and resuscitated fabric – just waiting for the day when the logic will turn and people will once again want to pay a flesh and blood person a reasonable sum to do a decent job. In the meantime she is working as a cleaner for the local council, cleaning up after old people in care homes and listening to their stories of how things have changed over the years.

I'm not sure how long we will be waiting ...

Has Greece been hung out to dry?

'To hang someone out to dry: to get them into trouble, especially by making them take the blame for a bad situation' (thefreedictionary.com) 

I've been thinking quite a lot about Greece recently. We are told every day that the country is facing a ‘meltdown’ or that it is in a death spiral that it can’t pull out of in time. The public health system is in crisis, HIV rates are skyrocketing, people haven’t been paid for months, malaria is returning to some areas and four skeletal looking men on black horses have been spotted gazing down on Athenians from atop the Acropolis.

Actually the last one isn’t true but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it in a news report some day soon.

It strikes me that the Greeks have got a bad deal in all this. Amidst all the doomer porn which is surging around the Internet these days, could it be that Greece is the inkblot nation onto which others project their own fantasies of collapse? The narrative is as familiar as it is blinkered and it goes something like: ‘Those crazy/lazy Greeks (or Spanish or Italians or Portuguese) borrowed far beyond their means and spent it all in an orgy of consumerism and now they are getting their comeuppance and threaten to bring us all down with their fecklessness.’

If you subscribe to this narrative it goes without saying that you will think the opposite of the sinful south is the virtuous north. While Stelios, the part time fisherman in Corfu, was spending his days lazing around drinking Ouzo and polishing his new Mercedes Benz (bought on credit, of course) Fritz in Stuttgart was busily actually making new Mercedes Benzes on a production line and dreaming about his upcoming family holiday in Corfu (paid for from his savings, of course).

This, in my opinion, is total rot, and is not borne out by the actual figures, which show that southern Europeans work longer than their northern counterparts. But apart from getting into a bind about who works hardest perhaps it would be more instructive to understand who is responsible for getting Greece into the situation it is in now – and in any discussion about that it is impossible not to mention the EU.

Now, I’ve always been a fan of European union. I liked the idea of all of us Europeans sharing a common identity and being able to go and live and work in one another’s countries with only minimal red tape. I was also a cheerleader of the euro currency – no longer did we need to stuff our money belts with wads of francs, drachmas, deutschmarks or whatever whenever we went abroad. I moaned out loud about the pound not being part of it, but was always secure in the opinion that it would just be a matter of time before it was.

I liked less the grey bureaucracy in Brussels, and hated the Common Agricultural Policy, which rode roughshod over the environment and probably caused starvation in other countries – but these could be reformed, I reasoned.

But if I had truly understood the economic situation as it unfolded from the early 1990s onwards I would certainly have changed my mind, for what was happening was a form of economic colonialism. Banks with too much capital, mostly from northern Europe, were permitted – nay encouraged – to push this liquidity onto southern Europe. It was a bit like offering a suitcase full of cash to the less well off people who lived down the end of the road – and it would have been a no-brainer not to take it.

The money, of course, was intended for infrastructure projects and came with strings attached – usually in the form of demanding ‘reforms’. What is a reform? A reform is where you lower the barriers to entry to your national industries, allow venture capitalists to run riot and then proclaim everything to be much more efficient and transparent than it used to be in the bad old days.

But something went wrong. Corruption and tax avoidance became endemic (that tends to happen when you pump a lot of money into a previously poor country but the suits in Brussels hadn’t factored that in) and the mind-warping advertising industry encouraged Greeks to spend way beyond their ability to pay back debt – something they took to with gusto just like, well, just like everywhere else in the world.

Crash! The tidal wave that formed as the Greek Colossus fell into the sea swept across the front pages of the world. Greece now ‘stared into the abyss’ or was facing ‘Armageddon’. Greece was doomed!

Or was it?

Iceland faced something very similar a couple of years earlier and, instead of being wiped off the face of the Earth by the wrath of the gods of finance, it is now doing remarkably well and getting back to normal. Argentina too, which basically told the IMF to ‘go swivel’ is now the place that most Spaniards want to emigrate to.  You don’t hear about this too much, of course – it’s the economic equivalent of believing in ghosts or the afterlife.

But enough of talking about countries as if they were monolithic abstractions of economic units – what about the, you know, people who live there? I’ve been following Jon Henley’s blog ‘Greece on the Breadline’ in the Guardian, which focuses on the effect on people’s everyday lives that the economic problems are causing. What shines though is the fact that people, as people will do when left to themselves, are muddling through as best as they can. Many are turning off the office lights and returning to their ancestral villages, forming cooperatives and living vastly improved lives outside of their cubicles. Others have set up small businesses that are doing well selling their wares locally and people have formed their own support groups despite having very few resources to do so. These, then, are the real Greek heroes.

In fact the last thing the Greeks want is to be labeled as victims by others. One teenager, Tetty, in Jon Henley’s latest dispatch says:

"As you can see, things are bad in our country and it won't be easy for us to get out of this crisis. However, sometimes people exaggerate and talk about Greece as if it is completely ruined and there's no way we can be saved. That is not true and unfair towards us. I'd like the rest of the world to know that we Greeks are proud of our nation. I'm sure that we will overcome this crisis since we are hard-working and persistent and we don't give up easily."

Max, who is 13 but more tuned in than most news editors, added:

"Have you ever thought about the big nations and the advice they gave Greece in the first place that led this country into the state it is now? And we are still taking advice from the 'Good advisers', for no other reason except we have nowhere else to turn. We have not got the choice to recede from the big international forces. So please, consider my advice, and choose not to demote my fellow citizens but help people understand the situation that really exists. Even though I am a 13-year-old I believe I know better about my fellow citizens than the media that change the real story into a tragedy."

Greece, for those who are unaware, is a very ancient country. I have to admit an interest here: I fell in love with Greece as a teenager, a love that endures to this day. Perhaps it’s because of my name, but I was enthralled by the story of Jason and the Argonauts from a very early age (the 1963 film version features a fight with realistic looking skeletons, which was right up my street). I read about the Greek myths and went on to study Classics at ‘A’ Level, which culminated in my first ever trip away from my parents with my girlfriend, whom I was very much in love with. We slept in a filthy hotel in Athens, revelling in the exotic sights and sounds of this strange country. The stultifying heat, the exotic food, the incomprehensible language, the astonishing ruins of the Parthenon (which I had drawn so many times in exercise books) – I felt as if I had landed on another planet. We sailed in ships across Homer’s ‘wine dark sea’ and when we came back to England via a very long train journey it was this taste of Greece that made me decide that I wanted to spend as much of my life as possible seeking out the richly exotic before it disappeared beneath a tide of concrete, fast food chains and Disney films.

Later, I read Herodotus’s Histories (something I’d recommend everyone to do if you’re interested in men with dog’s heads and giant ants that dig up nuggets of gold) – the first attempt at mapping out human history. I have returned to Greece several times since, including Crete, Corfu and Rhodes, and each time I am awestruck by the layers of history, the natural beauty and the civility of the people.

Beauty, civility and history, of course, don’t appear on accountants’ balance sheets, but they do at least form the basis for some optimism about the Greek ‘situation’. Because what the Greeks are learning now is that when the safety blanket of easy credit and consumer culture is taken away you are faced with a very different reality to the one presented on our television screens. The fact that despite the difficulties they face many people in Greece are adapting should be a cause for optimism. It should also be an opportunity for learning. I can quite easily imagine ‘education retreats’ run by ex civil servants and assorted office workers, where groups of us ‘descenders’ learn of ways to make our communities more resilient against economic shocks – taking place in some dreamy island destination of course.

The Greeks, in fact, are ideally placed because they have, at most, only one generation of experience of hyper capitalism, against northern Europe’s (or America’s) several. Enough old peasants are still knocking around who know how to yoke an ox or tease nourishment out of the soils, and the opportunities for re-learning these skills are immense.

‘We are all Greek now,’ goes the rallying cry of the anti-financial movement.Take comfort from the fact that Greece is rising to the challenge, and that we can too.