Rubbish

We are really no better in the UK than in Greece as regards our rubbish management, just better at hiding it. We pretend we can go on forever creating mountains of plastic, waste food, barely used glass and metal.... But it's hidden in bins, lorries, closed yards. In Greece, in these tourist districts, if you're lucky it's bundled up into plastic bags and then put into dumps beside the road.  I am amazed the piles of rubbish aren't bigger, the wasteful way we live. There has to be a better way than this. The blatant disrespect for the earth, wildlife, health, the landscape, for ourselves is - frankly - staggering.  I suppose everyone feels helpless to do anything different. We buy our food instead of growing it. We choose it from gleaming shelves which are clean and orderly. We lug everything home in neat non-spill packages. We are totally disconnected from the real means of production, the costs and the downsides.  We could have street composting systems.  In the old days there was the pigswill man. I think (cannot prove) that we ate proportionately more vegetables and meat, fish or eggs were for high-days and holidays. I sometimes get into a rage walking into so-called 'supermarkets' which are nothing of the sort. A market implies choice and variety, options. The industrialisation of our food supplies - while it has fed billions of us - has in fact diminished our choices. It would be wonderful if a supermarket chain started to take real responsibility, made its buildings into real markets, encouraged local growers and suppliers, paid a living wage, ran plausible recycling systems for the packaging and waste, encouraged communities to take responsibility instead of persuading us to wear blinkers and pretend that everything is alright.  I guess living in a marina for a few days - a hothouse of leisure, 'escape', irresponsibility - focuses the mind somewhat.
Our trip by hire-car up into some of Corfu's northern villages provided a welcome change into a real and seemingly more natural landscape. Olive groves, stone walls, hamlets clinging to the mountainsides, spectacular views, winding roads, cypress trees like pencils punctuating the wobbles and undulations of the tree canopies.... So beautiful and it was not difficult to imagine that the Romans or ancient Greeks had seen identical vistas in their day.  We passed long distances without really seeing a single bit of evidence of modern life, nothing more recent than, say, 1500.
The summit of the day was a trip to the mountain, church and communications centre of Pantokrator ('the Almighty'), which is Corfu's highest peak. The holy church was founded in the late 14th C, rebuilt in the last years of the 17th. I suppose the original was reached by pious monks on mules and donkeys, lugging the timber and stone up that precipitous pathway - now a road capable of taking coaches and HGVs, and thus not feeling so very remote.   What the 20th C added was a gargantuan array of masts, towers, aerials, wires, girders, pylons, spikes, receivers, transponders, god-knows what, stuffed into the cloister and garden, and onto the slightly lesser hilltop immediately facing the gate.  The little church is a glory of painted icons depicting the transfiguration of Christ, and is adorned with countless lamps, silver panels, carved and coffered woodwork, a little loft filled with mattresses, and a chance to buy  and light some tiny tapering candles. Outside you might be in the back yard of GCHQ or an ancient BBC transmitter station such as Daventry. Weird, man.
It's another clash between an old, staid, and rather beautiful way of life and a crashing ugly purposed industrial modern way of doing things.  I wonder which will last the longer (she says).