I am so enjoying this just published title from sometime Kiwi, now UK-based writer/traveller/linguist David Cade. I was immediately arrested by his 20 page introduction wherein he explains his fascination with all things Greek and offers readers a comprehensive, liberal, up-to-date, and entertaining view of the capital of Modern Greece.
The author has kindly allowed me to reproduce the first five paragrahs from his introduction which I hope will give you something of a feel for the book which is "both a gripping read for the armchair traveller and a rich alternative to the traveller's traditional guidebook.
" My journey to Athens began 50 years ago, on
the South Pacific island of Viti Levu, Fiji. Enveloped one morning in the heady fragrance of one of Planet
Earth’s most gorgeously-scented flowers, the little frangipani, delicate
creamy-white with an eye of intense yellow, I sat under the great arching
leaves of a banana tree and held, almost to the point of caressing, a brand-new
transistor-radio. Despite the strong sun and the trenchant tropical heat, I
remember too how all the brilliant-red petals of the hibiscus bushes which
surrounded me on every side that mid-morning, still sparkled as brightly and
vividly as they had when I’d been up first thing at dawn, full of excitement.
But now, three or four hours later, ever so slowly turning the dial backwards
and forwards, I was all agog in that South Pacific paradise with rich new
layers of aural sensation, sounds that were totally foreign, exotic,
bewitching, and magical."
"That morning, in 1962, I had
become an eight-year-old, and the big heavy radio on my lap, about the same
size as an A4 page, was my one, but very great, birthday present. My parents,
having fled grey damp Britain after the trauma of World War II, were ecstatic
to be living in Fiji, and so for my birthday they’d hit Suva’s duty-free shops
determined to splash out. And now here it was: a luxurious radio, ‘Made in
Japan’, gleaming with complicated wavebands, with silver switches and sensitive
dials, an extendable aerial like a long chrome fishing-rod, and the whole thing
protected within a durable case of highly-polished richly-smelling deep-brown
leather! That morning that transistor seemed to me the most marvellous object
in the universe. But this was mostly because the music it produced was
something I’d never before encountered: the strange music of the
East. Fiji had, and still has, a large Indian population, and so whether the
music that was being broadcast in those days was Carnatic, Hindi, or comprised
of the greatly popular ‘filmi’ songs of Indian cinema, I found all of it absolutely mesmerising. But why did
it so hit the eight-year-old me, like an asteroid from outer space, why was I
so captivated by it, while my parents, and their friends, and the few other
white boys amongst my classmates, either sniggered at it or were indifferent to
it? I have no idea."
"Some years later we were settled
in Christchurch, New Zealand, and during my first year at an all-boys secondary
school there an architecturally splendid new science-block was opened. Its
corridors, labs, and seminar rooms had all been lined and floored with fresh
pungently-scented New Zealand timbers. These woods, however, smelt sweetest and
most strongly in the building’s little theatre, which unlike all of the other
spaces had no windows and was dark. With its tall science-lab taps and deep
basins built into the great raised bench that stood directly in front of the
blackboard, this room had been designed specifically for serious demonstrations
in physics, chemistry, and biology. But one afternoon, after lunch, when we’d
all expected to return to the classroom for more miserable maths or suchlike,
our teacher announced a surprise, a treat: a film in the fine new theatre! We
were then all single-filed in a state of considerable excitement over to the
science-block and up into the steep rake of its little ‘cinema’. A projector
started up behind us, its reels clicking as they turned, the lights were
killed, and then in the blackness there suddenly leapt upon the screen - in
that little space in a small school in the Antipodes - an intensely bright
light, the daylight of some unknown, undreamt-of, unimagined, and very far
distant land. In the vivid luminosity of that remote place we boys gazed upon
stone and marble monuments; dense concrete apartment buildings, such as simply
didn’t exist anywhere in our country; we saw crowded streets with people passing
up and down in fashionable summer clothing, wearing dark glasses and looking
sophisticated; and I can also remember trains, and trams, and trolleys. This
place, apparently, was the city of Athens, a large and thriving metrópolis
that none of us young Kiwi boys knew anything about, other than, of course, it
once having been a very important part of Ancient Greece."
"The film was a well-produced
documentary, a forerunner of the TV travel programme, and with that intense
effulgence which had burst upon the screen in the film’s opening moments, there
had come a rippling surge of tinkling music, a magical entrancing vibration of
sound that we boys, of mainly English and Irish stock, had never before heard:
the music of Athens and of Greece. But unlike my classmates, I instantly and
somehow ‘recognised’ it. There was something about it that flashed me back to
the Eastern music of my transistor, to those exotic sounds that had suddenly
gone from my life when our family departed sunny Fiji. Now, here in cool and temperate
New Zealand, alongside the rapture of the warm and glowing images of that
faraway country upon the screen, a related music fluttered in like a flight of
delicate glasslike wings, a flock of gentle bouzoúkia, beating and soaring in and around phrases of
beautiful plaintive melody."
"Eleven years old, I sat there
devastated. I had known of course that Greece was a place of antiquities, of
old columns and carved stones and very many statues, often connected with the
tales of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and each year on ANZAC day there
were references to the six hundred or so New Zealand soldiers who’d died in
Greece’s defence during the Second World War. But this rippling, magical, glasslike music was an
aspect of Greece that was completely new - unexpected, a revelation. But such
was the gulf at that time between we lads down there in the South Seas and the
lands of far-distant Europe, in the Northern Hemisphere and truly the other
side of the globe from us, that it did not, or could not, even occur to me that
one could at least go to a library and find out what instruments those were
that gave off such remarkable sounds. I was just too much in awe, too removed.
It was simply music ‘from far beyond’, from ‘heaven’, from a foreign world an
incomprehensible thousands of miles away, music from a continent which people
said it took months to reach, by ship. And as the film had purely been meant as
a treat, a diversion apparently granted us on a whim, back in the classroom
there was no follow-up to it, not even a ‘So what did you think of that then,
boys? Any questions?’ "
www.davidcade.net - for stockist details in NZ and around the world.
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