marramgrass

Each morning, driving into Belfast (not so bad when the schools are on holiday), we listen to BBC Radio Ulster. It’s the only time in the day when I receive the news via a human voice rather than through the blue-on-white of Google Reader, but I’m getting fed up with it.

Take this morning as an example of why. Yesterday the Air Traffic Control radar at Dublin Airport fell over causing delays, diversions and cancellations to mess with the plans of many a holiday-maker. This morning a representative of one of the airlines was being interviewed on the radio. The first question he was asked: “Who is to blame?”

The was no acknowledgement that sometimes these things happen, and only a passing reference to the fact that the decision to take the system down was intended primarily to ensure the safety of flights in and out of the airport. The interviewer’s main concern seemed to be who would be held accountable for this terrible, awful, atrocious turn of events where no-one at all was injured.

I’m coming to despise that phrase, “held accountable”, and all the other variations that express the same idea: this was someone’s fault, and they shall pay.

It shows in the journalism, where interviewers seem to believe that their job is primarily to make their interviewee, whoever they may be, squirm as much as possible. Sometimes the desire to ask a tough and hard-nosed question is necessary, often it’s just silly and irrelevant. It shows in the phone calls, emails and text-messages from listeners, as the new, interactive BBC lets everyone throw in their two pen’orth. And you can see plenty of it — more, even! — online where the communication is oh-so-easy.

Of course society needs to ensure that everyone from government to grocer deals fairly, honestly and safely with each other, but I wish we could recover the shrug of the shoulder that recognises that sometimes stuff just happens, you know?

Again I think about something I’ve seen or heard, and I wonder about grace. When I encounter a mistake or an inconvenience, I do my best to remember to acknowledge no harm and let it go, but it’s tough when everything I listen to in the morning is focussed on assigning blame.

Do you think we could manage, as a society — especially in this little corner of the world where so much real harm and hurt still casts it shadow — to try for that grace?

I’m maybe half-way through the task of sorting and organising the almost 60 gigabytes of photos stored on our slowly-dying Windows desktop. This is from September 2004, of now-defunct Third From The Left playing the Bongo Club in Edinburgh.

Waterfront Hall, Belfast, July 2008.

(See the first, second and third posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

This series is exploring a bit more widely than I intended. It was conceived when I started wondering about how ‘the media’ (including those that operate mainly offline) and other commentators place such emphasis on the internet as a venue, a forum and a significant influence on society. I began to wonder if this was all just a little bit closed, a little self-important and short-sighted — especially as I am someone who has been fascinated by technology and by online goings-on for years.

Technology has allowed me to have contact and conversation with many people who I would otherwise never be in touch with. I have learned from them, laughed with them, shared in the little corners of life they choose to share, and I hope to continue to do so. However, by far the most meaningful contact I have had online has been with those with whom I have some form of relationship in the real world. Previously I posted about my infatuation with Twitter — it’s most fun with the folks I know in real life.

Beyond that, though, what connection has all this with ‘real life’?

Every now and then you’ll meet someone who goes all misty-eyed and smiles in an unnerving way when they talk about the internet and the good it can do. Maybe it can’t do much good in itself, but access to information is generally a good thing, and when it comes to making info accessible you generally can’t do much better than the internet. Ish.

The question is availability. Broadband uptake in Northern Ireland is high (Alan in Belfast recently provided a deal of analysis of this), but there are still plenty of folks who, if they have internet access at home at all, rely on dial-up. Even for those with a high-speed connection, cable covers a small area and DSL is a fragile technology that needs you to be pretty close to your telephone exchange. And it does cost money.

Theoretically the network of public libraries provides internet access for all, but even if we accept that then there is still the issue of capacity. Just because I’m completely comfortable using the web to find out what I need to know, communicating by email and IM, doesn’t mean my gran is.

Of course, this has changed (progressed?), is changing and will change, as long as no-one slips through the gaps.

Useful (powerful?) as technologically advanced communications are, perhaps it’s best to remember that they are as well as rather than instead of everything else we already had and relied upon. I wonder, generally as well as from my own experience, if more and more people will find it takes a conscious effort to write a letter, pick up the phone, drop by and say “Hi” rather than send an email or a tweet, or leave a message on a Facebook wall?

That’s at an individual level. For society, I doubt that there’s any going back. Commerce, government, entertainment… the change has happened, and corporately nothing is the same. Just remember that ’society’ and ‘community’ aren’t necessarily the same thing, and what works on one level doesn’t always work on others.

Belfast, July 2008.

It seems that one of the marks of a modern European city is public art. I’ve seen some that is strange (the five-foot square matrix of 4-inch umbrellas in Athens airport, say), but the first time I came off the ferry in Belfast and saw the Beacon of Hope (as I’m told this is called) lit up I thought it was simply tremendous.

I suppose, like most art, she will connect with everyone slightly differently, but I did find something eminently hopeful about this structure standing over the Lagan.

The sign by the base reads:

This female figure represents various allegorical themes associated with hope and aspiration, peace and reconciliation and is derived from images from Classical and Celtic mythology.

This symbol creates a tangible first statement of our long term objective in bringing people together to foster a happy and fulfilling life for all and a sense of gratefulness for all that life has given us.

Symbols can carry great power — as everyone in Northern Ireland witnesses from time to time — I like to hope this one does, too.

• NT Wright on The Colbert Report. I don’t know how this happened, but it’s cool.
• Princess Bride redux.
• Keep religion out of welfare provision. I was emailed this at work. So ill-informed it’s astonishing — I alternated between anger and laughter as I read it.
• The truth about working from home. No comment ;-)
• ‘Practise’ or ‘practice’? I learned something new. Now I need to remember it.

Near Kamari, Santorini, June 2008.

The last photo from our trip, and by far my favourite.

Megalochori, Santorini, June 2008.

Oia, Santorini, June 2008.

This is the view that has become the clichéd representation of Santorini in guidebooks, paintings and on postcards sent all over the world. Of course I had to shoot it for myself. It felt very strange to be standing looking through the lenses of all those other photographers, almost all of whom did better with the scene than I managed.

Something to know about me: I don’t travel well. I get nervous, my sense of direction is abysmal, I’m picky about food. I just don’t have the wanderlust.

None of which is to say I don’t enjoy seeing new places — I do — more that I need to build myself up to it, and then survive on adrenaline when I’m there. I haven’t travelled much outside the UK; a few European city-breaks, and one short visit to Kenya when my wife was doing her medical school elective there. That was more than five years ago, so I may not be remembering it clearly but I think our most recent trip, to Santorini, has trumped Kenya on unfamiliarity. Maybe it’s because it’s still part of Europe (Greece), so psychologically the differences were more visible.

Getting there is a bit of a nuisance. The way the connections worked out coming from Belfast we had six or seven hours sitting in Athens overnight before the 05.45 flight to Santorini, getting us on the ground on the island before 06.30. When we collected the hire car and drove from the airport it was still soon enough after dawn that we saw the rising sun catching the mountains and east-facing cliffs, with the small whitewashed buildings and blue-domed churches scattered everywhere. The sight was stunning, but for this Belfast boy it felt completely alien.

Santorini is formed from the edge of a volcanic crater peeking out from the sea. (The volcano is still active, so I guess there was a chance the whole place would explode while we were there. I’m pleased to report that it didn’t.) Across the road from our hotel we could stand and see the various islands around the caldera. Two islands in the middle are where the volcano still vents. There’s something satisfying about being able to stand and look at the islands and connect them easily with the map on the wall of the hotel dining room.

Our Lonely Planet guidebook advises that when you hire a car on Santorini (which is refreshingly affordable) you should approach the roads with patience and caution. Not only are they narrow and winding, with markings faded as a rule to near-invisibility, but each spectacular view seems placed perfectly to distract from an upcoming bend or crossroads (I never did figure out who has right of way at any given crossroads). Add that the fact that I’ve never had to drive on the right-hand side of the road before and I found my adrenaline!

Fira, the capital, hangs off the cliff inside the caldera, as does the village of Oia on the northern horn of the island. Where Fira has a fast, crowded atmosphere, Oia is much more relaxed — even when we were there and it was mobbed with cruisers from the ships resting in the caldera. It’s very easy to pass a day (or more) exploring either place, where the whitewashed alleyways are lined with shops from expensive jewelers to three shops in a row selling the same selection of baseball caps, shards of rock dancing donkeys on a string. The alleys seem to catch and hold the sun and the heat, and I was glad that almost everywhere had an air-conditioner over the door.

One of the owners of our hotel explained to me that the blue domes are all churches, although not all churches have the distinctive blue-domed roof. She told us that each town or village has a main church that gets used regularly, then many smaller ones that will only get used for special occasions, perhaps for a given family’s name-day celebrations. As she told us, “In Santorini there are more churches than houses, more wine than water and more donkeys than people. Maybe not the donkeys any more, but the other two… yes.”

Highlights of our trip included dinner at Ambrosia & Nectar in Oia, reliably beautiful sunsets over the caldera, another spectacular view around every bend in the road, Greek hospitality, no more than four drops of rain and the compliant way my hayfever switched off for a week!

I’d love to return to Santorini, either for a holiday or specifically to photograph all the churches — that would be a very enjoyable project indeed.