The end is the beginning is the end

A lot of things finish today, Lost being one of them. But this post will not discuss this topic - yet.

This post is about saying goodbye to things that were both good and bad. English has a great word for the emotion that such situations give you: bittersweet.

Today I am saying goodbye to my flat of the last three and something years. And it feels utterly bittersweet.

This was the first flat that I got with my own money, it was the place of my independence. Although it didn't seem like that all the time, this flat was for my new beginning, in a new city, in a new (first, albeit initially part-time) job. I came here with no friends three years ago and the beginning was tough. Loneliness, lots of TV and general frustration. Then things went up and down and life went on. The sense of temporary reigned and I thought I was about to leave this city any day.

But then last year, almost this time, things changed. New life. Not always great, challenging at times, but new and exciting nonetheless.

And this year more changes. New house. My house. My own house. Never had this feeling before. I never wanted to be adult and conventional. But I guess resistance was futile. Now I am the ultimate 'young professional' with a big mortgage and new wooden floors. And I don't feel conventional. I just feel different. The same but different.

The importance of being earnest

I never write political posts but today I will make an exception. Labour lost, Gordon Brown resigned and Cameron turned the Torries into government with a 'historic' coalition with Lib Dems. This whole thing makes me sick. I have never seen a more opportunistic, insincere individuals as those two in government today. How can you work with someone that you called the bast joke you ever heard? I mean, David Cameron has called Nick Clegg a joke. And now he says he is the next best thing since sliced bread. I mean, come off it.

I understand that Labour had to go. I think it had to be punished, if for no other reason than for the war against Iraq. And although this was Blair's thing, it is the same party after all, and it had to be punished. But the Torries are not the answer. People who want to give tax cuts as incentives for people to get married, are not the answer. As JK Rowling said, this reminds us why we don't want to vote Torries.

But in a way, I think Nick Clegg is worst. Nobody knew this man a month ago, then he goes on TV, does a 'good' debate (which, for what it's worth I thought was simplistic and crap), gets hyped up like no other, LOSES seats for his party and in the end becomes the 'key-holder' for this whole election. He spent 5 days talking to the Torries AND holding secret talks with Labour, and then, like any slutty girl who double-times her poor boyfriend with the new handsome boy in class, chooses the new handsome boy in class. Who is also rich. And has gone to an expensive private school. And looks like an egg-head.

The only tragic figure in this whole story after all is Gordon Brown. The most uncharismatic man in the history of politics, but alas a sincere man, a man of principle who lost simply because he was not Blair (or Cameron with his pregnant wife, or Clegg with his 'charisma'-whatever). It pains me to see his stepping down statement, but it also makes me happy. It makes me happy that these people exist, that they go into politics and that they win, sometimes, even for a tiny amount of time, they win and they try.

As the man himself said, 'thank you and goodbye'.

Why do the best thoughts about the Greek crisis come from non-Greeks?

As published in today's Observer:

Deep inside the august halls of Athens University, the renowned political commentator Paschos Mandravelis will deliver a message this week that until very recently was lost on most Greeks.

His speech will focus on a single fact: that the country in the centre of the storm of Europe's worst crisis since the creation of the common market, missed the biggest story ever – its own looming bankruptcy. "Everyone," he says, "starting with the Greek media, was in an incredible state of denial."

Last week escapism was no longer an option as Greece's debt drama claimed its first lives and the nation, teetering on the brink of economic collapse, erupted into violent protests over unprecedented austerity measures.

The deaths on Wednesday of three Greeks, killed in a fire set off by hooded youths throwing petrol bombs into the bank in which they worked, has been the wake-up call – one more shocking than ever thought – to ask questions Greeks would have preferred never to ask.

Yesterday, as tributes continued to pour in for the victims – a man and two women, all recent British university graduates who had shown up for work despite a general strike for fear of losing their jobs – they were asking: "How could it come to this?"

"Greece," says Mandravelis, "is not only confronted with economic failure but a media failure and political failure, and that is what is so frightening."

The financial, and increasingly social, crisis gripping the country has, say analysts, brought the nation face to face with a myth: the myth of a democratic state that thrived not on meritocracy and progress but cronyism and corruption after the last chapter of its troubled history ended with the collapse of military rule in 1974.

As Athens prepares to receive the biggest bailout in history – up to €120bn dispensed from the EU and IMF over the next three years – the consensus is that Greece has reached rock bottom. A point so low that even Brigadier Stylianos Pattakos, the last of the dictators still alive, feels unabashedly vindicated. "In our time," he told the Observer in an interview, "there was no debt. Not one drachma went astray. The Greeks are not disciplined like the Germans or the British. They need authority."

Today the junta is embodied not by the likes of Pattakos, who at the age of 98 has no qualms about his role in quashing liberty in the birthplace of democracy, but the IMF. For the unions and tens of thousands who took to the streets last week – and are girding their loins for the "mother of all battles" in the weeks and months ahead – the Washington-based body is neither saint nor saviour.

Prime minister George Papandreou agreed to activate the emergency international aid after it became clear two weeks ago that Greece was heading for sovereign default, unable to refinance its staggering €300bn (£259bn) debt because of prohibitively high borrowing costs on international markets.

But for those on the left, leading the protests with flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, the intervention of the IMF has been the tipping point. The majority of Greeks not only see it as the harbinger of harsh economic reforms but the symbol of foreign occupation. For the abundance of conspiracy theorists on both the left and right, its involvement is part of a grander, but seemingly no less implausible, plan to subjugate Greece after draining the country of its resources.

"This has gone beyond economic matters to a battle for national independence," says Manolis Glezos, the leftist who shot to fame snatching the swastika from the Acropolis shortly after Hitler's forces streamed into Athens in 1941.

"Papandreou himself has admitted we had no say in the economic measures thrust upon us. They were decided by the EU and IMF. We are now under foreign supervision and that raises questions about our economic, military and political independence."

At approaching 88, Glezos embodies the Greek spirit of resistance – a leading light in the struggle against Nazi occupation, bloody civil war, authoritarian right-wing rule and the seven-year military dictatorship that ended with Pattakos sending a tank crashing through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic to crush the students' revolt that would pave the way to the regime's demise.

"We are," he says, "neither at the middle nor the end of political developments, of protesting what is happening in this country. We are at the beginning."

The Greeks' innate anti-authoritarianism, a legacy of 400 years of Ottoman rule, is also at the heart of the problem that has helped to push their country to what President Karolos Papoulias described last week as "the brink of the abyss".

More than any other European nation, the Greeks think nothing of taking to the streets in noisy outbursts of protests. But more than that, in a culture of cutting corners, they also have a problem with being told what to do. It is an attitude that could have profound consequences for Papandreou's ability to enforce policies that include painful wage and pension cuts – and the course of the crisis.

"The capriciousness of Ottoman rule and the weakness of the idea of the rule of law helped to shape the underlying values of Greek society and to determine attitudes to the state and to authorities that have persisted into the present," wrote Richard Clogg, Britain's pre-eminent historian of modern Greece.

Nothing encapsulates the strained relationship with authority more than the nation's predilection for avoiding the taxman – a hobby that has helped to push the public deficit to a European record – and Greeks' love-hate relationship with the state.

Assuming power after five years of scandal-plagued conservative rule last October, the Socialist government discovered that the tax inspectorate had virtually collapsed with revenue losses from tax evasion surpassing €20bn, more than any other eurozone nation.

It also emerged that fewer than 15,000 Greeks declare incomes of over €100,000, despite tens of thousands living in opulent wealth on the outskirts of the capital. A new drive by the Socialists to track down swimming pool owners by deploying Google Earth was met with a virulent response as Greeks invested in fake grass, camouflage and asphalt to hide the tax liabilities from the spies in space.

The country's black economy – estimated conservatively at 30% – has also helped to bring public finances to the point of meltdown.

"When the rest of Europe were living in dukedoms and refining democratic institutions, we were part of a huge empire living in an agrarian and feudal Balkan state," said Nikos Dimou, author of the best-selling book The Misfortune of Being Greek. "We had little relationship to our glorious past. Our institutions were imported or thrust upon us, our identity both eastern and western. It created a human being that feels very strange in his skin, culturally very different to other Europeans."

Dimou wrote the book in the latter years of the junta, but with ordinary Greeks now embroiled in the sort of soul-searching last seen at the end of the junta, the tome is selling like hotcakes. "Greeks want to know why they have got to this point, what went wrong," he says.

The austerity measures that have provoked such unrest aim to trim the budget of €30bn through 2012. Almost all are targeted at the country's dysfunctional and bloated public sector.

"Papandreou is paying for the sins of his father [former prime minister] Andreas, under whom Greece's debt soared," added Dimou. "The cuts he will have to make have never been made before. It is all very new."

But with poverty growing and the country's militant Communist party insisting that "the plutocracy pay" for the crisis, Greece could also be headed for a new class warfare the likes of which have never been seen before. Some commentators have not ruled out kidnappings and assassinations as Greek turns against Greek in the months ahead.

The conspiracy of silence that has marked Greece's troubles may be over, but the battle that could tear it apart has only just begun.

Beautiful things

Always in my life i have been torn between my love for simplicity and my love for beautiful things.

My mother loves beautiful things, our house is full of them. Although I have grown my own taste for them, I have always felt a bit overwhelmed by them. Why do we need all these useless expensive things? This feeling was also matched with a dismay against my mother's own profession: decorator. A decorator, I used to think when I was younger, why on earth would anyone want to devote their life in putting things in a house and choosing curtains?

And then growing up, it hit me: decorators do not make beautiful houses, they make happy people. And things are not expensive and useless, they are just small reminders of places we have been to, artists we like, unique artefacts that we have found, in short our entire lives.

The reason I am thinking of these things and I decided to write this post is because I went to a lovely house on Friday night, a house full of things of beauty and rarity. But because the people that have it are nice people, and have chosen these things because they like them and because they make them happy, the whole thing did not look contrived and pretentious, it just seemed simply great: a beautiful house, with beautiful things made by beautiful people.

It is the person then, it is the person that defines the thing, not the thing that defines the person.
Nouveau riche people have made a much bigger disservice to beauty than they think...

Was it always so simple?

I am a huge Lost addict, that is not news. I have written something about this series before, here and here but I haven't done any serious Lost fans theorizing.
As the ingenious series is approaching an end in 23rd of May however, and discussions on the net increase in number, complexity and literary credibility, I had an idea myself. As I am a fairly mainstream person, the column I am mostly following is Doc Jensen in EW, whose latest ideas had me thinking.

One of the most prominent literary references of Lost is that of Alice in Wonderland. As in Alice, my other two favourite tales for children, Miyazaki's Spirited away and Michael Ende's Neverending story also deal with a very important theme that is becoming increasingly relevant in Lost: keeping one's identity through memory, through remembering oneself. To cut a long story short, Alice, Chihiro and Bastian in the three respective pieces get lost/stranded in a magical/imaginary world and can only return to their own world, the real world if they manage to not forget who they really are in these magical worlds. In Lost, our heroes are stranded on this magical island and now with the sideways world they have these split lives. The only way they can come to their own world, the only way they can reconnect with their other halves -in this case their other half selves (Plato's Symposium anyone?) is through anamnesis, as Doc Jensen rightly points out in his column in another ingenious Platonic reference. Plato is clearly a major inspiration for the Lost creators (cf. the quite literal scene with the cave in 'Recon' of this season).

So, to cut the extensive name-dropping and to wrap things up: perhaps the answer to the question' what is Lost really about', I could provide my own spin on things. Lost is about being true to oneself, to one's true character and values and this connection, this memory of oneself is the only thing that can set us people really free, not just from the magical island as in Lost, but in life in general. And since it all makes sense so beautifully, read this again in my earlier post from this month where I reconnect with my roots.

Sometimes moodiness

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Give me that slow knowing smile (slowly)

The familiar: we always love more what we know best.

There is a deep, meaningful comfort and happiness when we are with people we know well, in places we know. When this happens to me, I feel that I am in some deep state of togetherness with my oldest deepest self. The older parts of me, the ones that are deeper, they are the ones that come out when I am with my parents, my family, my cousins. One professor of theatre once compared the characters and the plays oS Shakespeare to onions that have many layers. The comparison is not too new, I know, but i think it's also valid for people in general. We are born and in the beginning there is only the core of our character: nature. Then we grow up and we form our outer layers: nurture. The core always needs to be accessible though, always. And this is when familiarity comes into play: when you are with your family, with the people that know you best, in the places that you were playing as a child, you cannot escape from that core. You cannot pretend you're all layers. The stubborn child that you were once upon a time comes out again, and that's such a relief. No filtering, no nothing, just you and your core.

That's one of the reasons I love being home - it reminds me of who is me.

Not the me who teaches and tries to write papers.
Not the me who goes to nice dinners with colleagues.
Not the me who shops posh clothes.
Not the me who is a sensible, fake-lefty, essentially capitalist adult.

But the me I've left behind in Greece, the child who runs barefoot in the sand eating easter cookies.
And my mothers eyes always give me that knowing smile, when she recognises that child every time I go home... And I am happy because I know that she is still here, that child, underneath all these layers, she is still here, safe, in Greece.