Greece: Eurozone bailout programme finally over

From BBC News, Andrew Walker

"The eurozone passes an important milestone on 20 August. The date marks the formal end of the bailout of Greece..,The last payment has been made and the Greek government will have to finance its spending through taxes or by borrowing in the financial markets, though it will be decades before it is all repaid".


Greece warns Brussels: No Brexit deal could trigger economic meltdown, KTG


Η πραγματικότητα παραμένει δύσκολη - Δεν έχει έρθει το τέλος των μεταρρυθμίσεων. Kathimerini


A sad assessme, eKathimerini


Shadows loom over government’s ‘clean exit’ scenario, eKathimerini


Greece Meeting with Lenders Sept. 10 for Post-Bailout Talks, Greek Reporter


A Controversial Viewpoint, The Telegraph: "Greece will not escape debt servitude until the euro is destroyed"

Greece’s eight-year odyssey shows the flaws of the EU, Charlemagne, The Economist

"Greece created its own problems, but was largely a bystander while “solutions” were imposed by others. The rules of its bail-outs reflected the installation-by-stealth of austerity as official euro-zone dogma. And it was the victim of bad policy as well as power politics. Other governments regularly promised Greece jam tomorrow in exchange for hardship today. But projections for its recovery consistently proved wildly optimistic, as the austerity visited on the country, wholly predictably, deepened its recession and made its debts ever more unpayable. It was the most ruinous way imaginable to make a point. Now Greece, left with threadbare public services, eye-watering tax rates, weak institutions and appalling demographics, is supposed to run large primary surpluses (ie, before interest payments) for the next four decades. This is magical thinking masquerading as policy. Too often in today’s Europe, acute problems are not dissolved by silvery diplomats but rather transformed into chronic ailments that remain bearable, until they are not... One lesson, then, of Greece’s crisis is that the single currency is harder to fracture than critics predicted. Another is that the EU will go to considerable lengths, including the impoverishment of its own members, to avoid taking hard decisions".


A Greek tragedy: how much can one nation take? Financial Times

Corfu in Colour, 1920s National Geographic; Crete and more

From Pappas Post

Corfu Garbage Bales Update: Lefkimmi-Tebloni Back and Forth Pass the Parcel Farce

Τραγελαφικό «πήγαινε-έλα» των σκουπιδιών Λευκίμμη-Τεμπλόνι-Λευκίμμη! Enimerosi

"As reported in a press release by the Corfu Municipality, a contractor's machine was collecting the bulk trash in order to take them back to Temploni to re-package them!"

Any ripped garbage bales were sent back to Temploni again to be re-baled and returned to Lefkimmi!

Ludicrous coming and going of refuse: Lefkimmi-Temploni-Lefkimmi

"To summarise - the waste bales travel 40km from Temploni landfill to Lefkimmi landfill where they are deposited according to the temporary permit. The bales that have broken open (2,500 up to now) leave a pile of mixed waste which is collected and travels 40km back to Temploni to be baled once again before travelling the 40km back to Lefkimmi..."

Poundbury, Dorset: New plans for Jubilee Hall

From Wessex FM

From Dorset Echo  

Hoarding a "mental disorder" - World Health Organisation

From The Telegraph

"Hoarding has been classified as a medical disorder for the first time by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in a move that experts say could benefit thousands of people. Psychiatrists said the “extremely ­significant” decision would help ­doctors and the NHS identify people struggling with hoarding and improve treatment for a condition campaigners say affects up to 5 per cent of the ­population. According to the WHO, hoarding disorder is characterised by an “accumulation of possessions due to excessive acquisition of or difficulty discarding possessions, regardless of their actual value”.

From Metro: Hoarding officially recognised as a medical disorder

Collecting is ok then!

Metro: "When you collect items such as stamps, mugs, or postcards, you’ll usually keep them well-ordered and easily accessible, whether that’s in a display case, a scrapbook, or a box. People who hoard, however, tend to keep items in an extremely disorganised state, letting them take up a lot of room in the house. Hoarding is considered a serious problem when the clutter interferes with everyday living (such as blocking off access to a room) or is causing significant distress to the person or their family. Items hoarded have little or no monetary value, but if someone tries to clear the clutter, someone who hoards will become very upset".




Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2018/08/16/hoarding-now-officially-recognised-medical-disorder-7846267/?ito=cbshare

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/

Charmian Clift: What Migrants Miss Most in Australia

From the newspaper article, "On Gathering No Moss", included (undated) in "The World of Charmian Clift", 1970 - essays from the last two years of Charmian Clift's writings for the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald. She had begun writing a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald after fourteen years living abroad.

It must have been published several years before she took her own life, almost fifty years ago, on 8th July, 1969.

Charmian writes that migrants to Australia might have been "a good deal better off emotionally in their own familiar social patterns, which are generally richer and more colourful and more satisfying than anything we can provide".

By the time I lived in Australia, the country had changed in many ways: the Mediterranean spirit had established itself down under, even if the siesta was no longer a practical possibility for most people.

As she points out, life wasn't much fun "in a crowded slum in the inner suburbs or a still unsewered estate twenty miles out, certainly way beyond range of all those lovely golden beaches".

Remember, she was writing about the situation as she found it more than fifty years ago.

She wasn't always happy living on the Greek island of Hydra. Her article, "Getting Away From it All" expresses her dissatisfaction with the number of visitors expecting her to be "entirely at their disposal", a "permanent summer host" to all-comers, including the friends of friends of friends. "Hydra during the years I lived on it appeared to be the holiday goal of half the world...the one thing certain about holiday-makers is their inability to accept, or even comprehend, that everybody else is not on holiday too".

She also complains of those visitors arriving on steamers (cruise-ships these days), who never spend more than a day, or maybe just a few hours "to wring the island dry of its history, economy, local customs and quaint folklore, to snap the colour slides, buzz off a few feet of film, raid the tourist shops, write the postcards and be off".

Charmian Clift, Self Portrait: - Ten years on Hydra

“We were about the first foreigners who lived on that island, and later…others came drifting in, buying houses, and there began to be established a foreign colony – I don’t like that word “colony” very much but I can’t think of anything else to call it - a foreign colony composed of people who  wanted to write and people who wanted to paint, and exiles from all over the world…I began to feel like an exile myself. I hadn’t until that point, because in spite of the fact that one was alien again, on that island for the first time I didn’t feel like an outsider looking in, because I had built something for myself that was mine…the foreign colony got more and more fashionable…and our cheap little island that was ours was ours no longer”. Self Portraits by Charmian Clift, selected by David Foster, 1991

"Through the turbulent and transformative years of the 1960s, Charmian Clift engaged the readers of her weekly newspaper column in a way that would now be done by a blogger. While her writing was so far ahead of her time that her opinions continue to challenge us to think about our identity and responsibilities as Australians, Clift’s cutting-edge social and political commentary was conveyed in a prose so exquisite that she is regarded as one of the greatest stylists of Australian literature"-  Nadia Wheatley, 

Nadia Wheatley on her biography of Charmian Clift (pdf)

- or read online


Q. Emigration and expatriation: what is the real difference? What do expatriates miss most?


See also:

Australians in Aspic: Picturing Charmian Clift and George Johnston’s Hydra Expatriation, TANYA DALZIELL, University of Western Australia, PAUL GENONI, Curtin University (pdf)


The World of Charmian Clift (Neglected Books)

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