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Old Rhodes, 2023
I don’t think I can do any better than to replicate my account of walking into the Old Town from my Facebook feed.
So I’ve been in the Old Town of Rhodes for a couple of hours now.
…
OMG HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS PLACE BEFORE?!
It is a medieval theme park, as conjured up by Mussolini’s archaeologists, with all the architectural irresponsibility and short shrift of the Ottoman past that you might expect of them, packed to the rafters with souvenir shops and restaurant touters, and fake suits of armour. It is overflowing with ambling tourists.
It is garish and over the top, it is a simulacrum and a show. It is a a Respighi tone poem on a ghetto blaster (and of course I didn’t pick him at random).
It is simply the most glorious thing I’ve been caught up in. It pulses with life, life bouncing off restored stone walls.
And people’s Dodecanesian accent is a lot stronger here.
The way up from the port, it has to be said, was not promising. The harbour is a workaday, unlovely thing that goes on much too long. It opens onto a typically brusque Greek main road, and the first shop you see, after a fair walk, is a stripper club. (They still exist, who knew.)
Yet you can see at the end of the road an urban park unusual for Greece, and beyond the park a long stone wall…
Yes, it is an honest-to-goodness castle wall, complete with honest-to-goodness moat (repurposed as outdoor theatre, hope you like cannon balls), and an honest-to-goodness boom gate, trying to back the cobblestones up in blocking entry to the wheels of modernity.
The rest of modernity, of course, can step right in with its wallet. The riotous theme park awaits.
It starts slow and gentle enough, the walk into the theme park, with a couple of tavernas, lots of cobblestones, and more greenery uncharacteristic for this part of the world…
And then, you fall upon the restored ruin of Our Lady of the Burgh (14th century), and it’s all over. You’re in Mediaeval Wonderland.
And sure, the restoration is compromised, not least by the need to put a road through it, so that the locals call it “the split church”.
It doesn’t matter at all. The ruins jump out at you, where you least expect it. It’s breathtaking stuff.
Our Lady of the Burgh is breathtaking enough that you’re sure to miss the fact that this area in fact ended up as the Jewish Quarter of the town. The only signposts of the Jews of Rhodes left are the name of the piazza, “Jewish Martyrs”, and a synagogue that I could not track down.
And then the Respighi cranks up, and you are in a glorious sea of tourists and tourist tat and restored monumental architecture…
And one wrong turn off Socrates St, and there’s my AirBnB lodgings. Right out of Winterfell. I was outright giddy to find it…
And the monuments continue, old and new. The 19th century Suleimaniye mosque, beseiged by the encroaching souvenir shops…
Knight Street, poking through the ruins of the Grand Mosque built over it (again with an assist from Mussolini’s archaeologists)…
The absurdly imposing Palace of the Grand Master…
The also 19th century Mehmed Ağa Mosque, defiantly straddling Socrates St (and under which my AirBnB was)…
And not least, Lipsi Restaurant, where I’ve just had another too-rich dinner. Lipsi is a small, hard-scrabble island nearby. Nothing hard-scrabble about this decor…
Olympos, Karpathos, 2023
In lieu of a separate post on Olympos: I’d already written it on Quora.
Well, four years after proud Olymp-ian Rigopoula gave her answer,
I’ve just paid Olympos a visit myself.
Olympos is a village cut off from the rest of the island of Karpathos, which itself is somewhat cut off from the other Greek islands. Road access only dates from the 1980s, and the road is windy enough I had to stop at least once, to prevent me soiling the cab I was in.
Karpathos is spoken of with some reverence by Greek dialectologists as an archaic kind of place, with four subdialects to go around 6k people, and with lots of interesting things going on with /z/, whose status as a double consonant appears to have survived here uniquely ([zː]); in Olympos, most archaic of them all, in fact, it survives as [dz].
As I heard from Mrs Sofia, the owner of “Mike’s Restaurant”, the first shop you stumble across as you drive into the village, and she knows it.
- dzisome “make a living”
- madzi “together”
- xadzi “silly”
And most important of all, her parting wish to me and my cab driver:
- kali sedzon, “Happy Tourist Season”.
And as I walked up the hill, it became clear why. There’s enough woodwork in the old mansions to suggest there was some affluence here a while back. But now, Olympos depends on tourism. Olympos main snaking alley is a queue of tavernas and traditional wares showcases, all of them trying to sell you something. Olympos’ claim to fame is its cultural conservatism, and it clutches on to that fame to make a buck. The locals are proud of their traditional women’s clothing, but there’s a reason you don’t see traditional women’s clothing worn anywhere else in the country. If you just rock up here, you can be forgiven for thinking that this is a Disneyland exhibit. The Greek equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.
There was already a fair bit of this to be seen even now in early May, when only the Dutch come to Karpathos. (I have no idea why, but Karpathos is Dutch-only from 20 April until the start of the “sedzon” proper, in June.)
Of course, there is an actual village behind both the obligatory traditional clothing and the tourist tat. You just have to sit down in a cafe and listen to the locals.
And what you’ll hear from them—as well as from my somewhat sceptical cab driver, from the south of the island—is that Olympos struggles in the winter, and it really does depend on tourism to survive; but there are still people that stay and tough it out outside the “sedzon”. In the 2011 census, the village has a population of 500; 80 of them stick around in winter, my cab driver claimed. (There is a north/south rivalry, I’m told, so I’m just passing that on as his take.) The whole of Karpathos is oriented around tourism, but (with the exception of Pyles) the southern villages look to have enough else going on to keep them going in the winter months. And none of them were as enthusiastically turned over to tourism as the main drag of Olympos has been.
(With the non-exception of Ammoopi, which is exclusively hotels and rental houses; but that’s because Ammoopi never was a village to begin with: it was beachside farmland belonging to Menetes village, and the villagers of Menetes were savvy enough to turn their farmland into gold. They’re still building there today.)
But the profusion of goats on the road to Olympos were proof enough that there is life outside of Dutch tourists up north as well; someone’s making a living from them. And the local constable—from Iraklio, Crete, with moustache to match, and an accent utterly out of place—was also confirmation of life outside of tourism; he was regaling his neighbours with tales of the unregistered shotgun he’d just confiscated from a car.
“If it was registered, he could claim he was a shepherd, and he needed to scare the crows away from the goats. Still illegal, but the court would let him off. But this thing had the serial numbers filed off, with nine bullets in the front seat. What did he think was going to happen?“
(You’re not going to hear that much dialect from the non-Cretan villagers, by the way. If you wanted to hear that, you’re 50 years too late. A bit of the Cyprus-lite intonation is the most you’ll get out of the majority of people. Mrs Sofia is clearly a conservative speaker, and even at her least guarded—when she was chatting on the phone to a friend—I caught just one archaic verb ending, piɣasi “they went”.)
EDIT: while at the University in Rhodes, I checked
Makris, Manolis. 2022. Στην Όλυμπο της Καρπάθου: Σελίδες της Ιστορίας και του Πολιτισμού της [In Olympos, Karpathos: pages of its history and culture]. Piraeus: Αδελφότητα Ολυμπιτών Καρπάθου «Η Δήμητρα».
- He puts the current permanent population at 200.
- Never mind the road, the phone connection to the outside world only dates from the 60s, and was unreliable until the 80s.
- I surmised past prosperity from the woodwork on show, but there is no historical indication of it, other than the general fact that Olympos, like much of the Dodecanese, had tax exemptions during the Ottoman Empire. The village did agriculture and animal husbandry, same as most villages in Greece, and with the same primitive tools. (As Greeks like to say nowadays, the plough had remained unchanged since when Hesiod described it.)
Kasos, 2023
Kasos is a sleepy, small place, with fishermen, old timers drinking beer, women running general stores, a couple of elderly Dutch tourists, and a few soldiers. Linguistically very heterogeneous: I did hear one local with a strong accent, as I walked past, drop a delta (ξα(δ)έρφια)—a local feature which make the local name of dolmadhes “durmaes”. One middle-aged woman had a rapid-fire and heavy enough accent to challenge intelligibility. On the other hand, the 92-year old holding court in the local cafe dropped no deltas, and all he generated of linguistic interest was a couple of -εύγω epentheses, and one instance of αφέντης “sire” for “father”.
(He had a sad tale of a brother—I think—who married a woman from Salonica in Australia and cut off all contact; but the tale wandered off in the telling, and then so did he…)
In fact, I think I heard more Cretan dialect on Kasos than I did local dialect—people do cross the strait from the more parochially proud island to work, and my cousins were not one offs.
Kasos is small enough that they actually observe siesta: when I finished lunch at 2, I went in search of anywhere still open. I found just one place at 3, “Blue Mare”, and ordered a coffee. It turned out they had just closed too, and they only let me in because they assumed I was meeting a builder. (Builders were the only people not taking siesta, and there were things for builders to be tinkering with.)
“Blue Mare” was a name that previous cultural exposure to Kasos allowed me to decipher. It’s actually supposed to be bleu marin, the French for navy blue; and I remember being startled to hear it describing a girl’s clothing in an album of Karpathos & Kasos folk music. The islands did clearly have a lot of contact with the outside world. In fact, as I found from a local history I picked up, five thousand people from Kasos went to work on the Suez canal, and a significant population then moved on to Mozambique.
Karpathos, 2023
I decided to visit Karpathos on my first holiday trip, for fairly trivial reasons.
- Karpathos is renowned in Greek linguistics for its archaism and its diversity of dialects.
- I had written a paper on the dialects of the Dodecanese, in which Karpathos had played a starring role (Nicholas, N. 2004a. Η γεωγραφική ιστορία του «ίντα ‘ν’ που» [The geographical history of inda ‘n’ pu “what it is that”]. Ελληνικά [Hellenika] 54. 311-343.) So I at least had seen the village names of Karpathos before.
- Karpathos, and its smaller neighbour Kasos even more, are borderland areas between the cultural dominions of Crete and South-Eastern Greek. Linguistically, they align with Rhodes and Cyprus; but culturally, specifically in food, music and dance, there is a lot of influence from Crete.
So I wanted to check out how those places ticked.
I’ve expressed the same vague notion of being interested in how the Heptanesa tick, and I am in fact going to Corfu in a month. And I was justly put in my place about it at the time by my friend George Baloglou: as a tourist spending a week on an island, I’m not going to see a thing. That kind of cultural observation, now that the culture has gone underground in the face of Standard Greek identity, needs three months and trusted locals.
And he was entirely right. There were no community folk dances, for me to note the variant tunes played; there was a wedding, and when I walked past it, they were playing Elvis. Hearing even South-Eastern intonation was rare; in a week, I may have heard three or four people do something dialectal in their phonology, and one, at her most unguarded, do something in her morphology all of once. From the exceptions I did encounter, I’m pretty sure the dialect is alive out there, but it was going to take a lot more hunting down than a tourist with no local ties was going to manage.
(I have a cousin who was a schoolteacher in Kasos a decade ago, and another cousin who delivers kitchens to Karpathos; but even those tenuous ties would have required a lot of preparation. I just have to trust that Michailidis-Nouaros and Minas and Sofos and whoever else has recorded the dialect of those islands, back when it was more of a going concern, did a good job.)
There was one cultural hybridisation I got to experience viscerally. Literally.
On my last night in Sitia, as I reported here, I had skioufichta, a pasta dish I had not had since childhood, which was a delightfully light, white mac and cheese: twisted penne, broth, big heap of grated salty cheese (anthotyro).
As I was warned, there is a very similar dish here, makarounes. Except the favoured topping here is grated salty cheese…
… And burnt onion.
Light is the one thing the Karpathos variant is not. After two separate dinners of it, the smell of burnt onion would send me running.
That aside, I feel into lazy holidaymaker mode in Karpathos quite readily. I limited myself to taxi rides to get a glance of what the villages are like (and a day trip to Kasos). I ate out, and ate too much. I strolled a bit, napped a lot, and felt more chilled out than I have in maybe a decade. My main task was to dump photos onto my Facebook feed. (And in truth, these posts following are reworkings of Facebook stories.)
The main town of Karpathos, Pigadia, was the harbour of Aperi, which was the main town when the sea was where raiding pirates came from, and you’d be a fool to actually live there. The front three streets of Pigadia are wholly set up for tourists, with tavernas and souvenirs and gelati shops—although when I went, the season had not yet officially kicked off, and the only tourists to be seen anywhere were Dutch. (Possibly something to do with the timing of school holidays, but most of the tourists I saw were elderly.) But the touting is still low key, and Pigadia is still a relaxed place.
Olympos, I post about separately. I did a travelogue of the Southern villages of Karpathos:
- Karpathos is a linguistically archaic place, and that means that the inflection of the village names is a trap for the unwary. Othos is neuter. Menetes is feminine plural. It’s singular Volada, not plural Volades. Pylés is accented finally.
- There are no cafés in Aperi (astonishingly, given it was the former main town of the island), Volada, or Pyles. But Aperi and Volada are still going concerns: school with basketball court being used in Aperi, cultural association and supermarket in Volada.
- Othos had a souvlaki taverna and a cafe opposite each other, barely in competition at all (“I cooked some great pasta last night, where were you?”) Cafe owned by Karpathians home from the States: you hear a lot of New Jersey-accented English in Karpathos.
- The villages are all in eyesight of each other: you can see each village from the next. I’m not used to that from Crete, where they are much more scattered. (And Olympos and its port of Diafani are in splendid isolation up north.)
- The one village you can’t see from any neighbouring village (because the mountain gets in the way) is Pyles, and that’s the one village that is pretty much dead. People clearly do still live there, and the 2011 census says that Pyles should have almost as much people there as Volada or Othos (216 vs 264 and 265 resp.), but Pyles was the one place I did not see a soul. Apart from the Dutch tourists that were following the same route as us.
- The beachside village of Arkasa was doing quite well for itself, with a lot of tourist accommodation already in use, but also with several cafes open. The one we alighted at had a lively and rapid-fire card game going among the locals.
- Menetes is very picturesque, with lots of colours, and a cosy café (juicer currently under repair). Village clearly prosperous and confident, all the more as it owns all the up-and-coming hotels and rentals in nearby Ammoöpi. (And you can see Pigadia from Menetes, which brings the southern village tour full circle.)
Sitia, 2023
My home town of Sitia is routinely described as a sleepy kind of place, and sleepy it is.
Sleepy enough that I couldn’t write about my time there, until after I’d left it behind, three weeks on: its lazy cafes and brandy bars encouraged nothing so much as more brandy and more coffee. A town of 10k souls, that never sought to amount to much, and the windy slow road here from Agios Nikolaos guarantees for now it won’t—and that the locals will have something external to blame for it. Sitia is bigger than Ag Nik, but Ag Nik gets all the tourists and the bustle; Sitia is proud to be a hub for its farmers, but Ierapetra has grown far richer from its greenhouses, and it gets the population too.
This was the first time I’d heard the locals complain that they were in the middle of nowhere, disconnected from the rest of the country. In truth, the only difference now is that they are unusual as a Greek regional town for being cut off. And at least they have an airport now.
But it is a small, cozy place, Sitia, and it’s very hard to put out of mind when you’re there, how small and cozy it is. (Or seen differently, claustrophobic.) One of the many regional brutalist towns of Greece, clinging to a hill, all the more precariously as you get closer to the hilltop, with streets no wider than when the town was rebuilt under the name of Avniye in 1870. (The short lifespan of Ottoman Sitia made it all the easier to get rid of all traces of it.) I dare not imagine how claustrophobic a place it was in Venetian Crete, when it was a mere landing strip under the long-since ruined fort of Kazarma (Casa di Arma). The Kazarma still stands out over the city as the only well-ordered construction, the only hint of something monumental and spacious, amidst the improvised brutalist apartment blocks, and the half-hearted domes of the three parish churches. The mediaeval maze you still see in Old Rethymnon or Old Chania did not survive the town being razed; but the way the Ottomans rebuilt the town, it might as well have.
The results are something the locals are used to. Pickup trucks, scooters and pedestrians interlacing, none of them in any particular hurry. Shop owners treating their enterprises as a front for the tapas bars they open up to their friend the quiet part of the workday (including, so help me, a service station, the owner and a friend knocking back brandy). Melancholy stray dogs moseying from shopfront to shopfront, ignored. Everyone knowing everyone else, and lots of backslapping in the promenade. An average Greek country town, in other words. And people making their way around the neo-mediaeval alleys of the town, with not much friction.
Not none, mind:
2 PM, Venizelos St. One of the main thoroughfares of the town, and where my family used to stroll in our Sunday best when I was a child. It looked a lot wider when I was a child. The street is clearly not wide enough for two cars side by side.
The street is empty, people have gone home for lunch—and the older and idler for siesta. A truck stops in front of a clothing store, to pick up some shirts.
The car behind him discovers that Venizelos St. is not wide enough for two cars side by side. And its driver communicates that very clearly to the truck driver.
As the truck driver emerges with his first load of clothes, the car driver exclaims:
I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW I’M CALLING THE POLICE.
The reply comes from the unfussed truck driver:
BUDDY, YOU SHOULD BE CALLING THE MAYOR.
MY TESTICLES!!!
No, it is not clear that a call to the driver’s testicles would be any more effective. But irate Greek has its own internal logic.
I used to have an oppressive feeling when I’d come back here on visits. “Not this shit again.” That feeling is quite gone now. All that I had this time around was the vaguest of recognition, and “well, this is a pleasant resort town”. It’s a fine place to retire, I guess. I didn’t feel it was a place for me, which means that I’m not quite ready to retire. And if I no longer felt that old feeling of oppression there, then my bonds to the place have been severed as well.
It is a delight for me to be somewhere where there is no question of getting an ice cream or a crepe at 11 pm, and where you can be walking around at that time of night with no concern. (Being on the receiving arm of that lack of concern, as drunks walked home from the bar that time of night—not so much.) There is good food to be had, and if you’re into that kind of thing, there is a hell of a lot of brandy on offer.
But as the old couplet recognised, the capital of Sitia is its people.
“Chania is for arms; Rethymno for learning;
Iraklio is for drinking.”τα Χανιά για τ’ άρματα, το Ρέθεμνος για τα γράμματα,
το Κάστρο για το ποτήρι…
… Oddly enough, it was decades after I learned that incomplete couplet, while living in Sitia, that I learned its ending, far from Sitia:
“Sitia are pure swine.”
Στειακοί καθάριοι χοίροι.
(Attestations in https://sarantakos.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/manolios/.)
No depending on externalities to define the people of Sitia. A generous testimony from the other towns of the island…
I was saddened my first week in Sitia, because the café I defaulted to to work from, Café Corner, did not feature much of interest in its crowd. There was a pleasant group of English retirees, familiar enough with local ways that they knew how Greeks tell age (“I’m closing 79 years of age, as they say here”), and they were puzzled over the local enduring custom of burning Judas in effigy (“but that’s nowhere in the Bible!”There was creative latitude in the celebrating of Guy Fawkes too.) That aside, busy young and middle-aged people, in and out. The only consolation there was the barista, who would grumble to himself, like a gravelly Brian Blessed, couplets and insults and stories in dialect, to keep himself entertained. As his particular way of inflecting “piece of shit” gave away (κοπρέ), he wasn’t even a local, his phonology was West Cretan.
The dialect is indeed dying, and is a lot worse off than it was in the 1980s. In much of the town, all that survives is the sing-song intonation (even that unevenly), and a couple of words; I’m surprised that epae “here” has outlived ida “what?”, as the only dialectal word I heard with any regularity.
But I was set aright by my cousin: the place to hang out was Café Drosoulites, named after yearly ghosts reported from Sfakia, out West. The owners there are out-of-towners, but they were the eye-rolling outsiders this time; the Brian Blessed performances were being given by the customers, all of whom were older than me, nursed coffees for hours and brandy shot glasses for a lot less time, and sang love hymns to their tractors. I actually got to look on as two women commandeered a table to clean vine leaves, to make dolmades with at home.
(Women did in fact turn up in the café, albeit not in great numbers: that is a change from the traditional division in Greece, where men dominated the public space, and women the private. A generation ago, those women would only go out to visit each other at home.)
Plenty of dialect to be heard there. Rarely to be heard with people’s inside voice. Often still in rhyming couplets, as an earworm form of proverbial wisdom.
The youngest and loudest regular I saw in Café Drosoulites (not by much) appears to be a former mayor, who is still pursuing office. It being elections season, he showed up a few times, brandy carafe in hand, to ensure the cafe regulars were electorally well-disposed towards him.
AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A CITY COUNCILLOR! DAMN ILLITERATE!
WHY? YOU RECKON MY COLLEAGUES ARE ANY MORE LITERATE THAN ME?
That session got me the phrase that made my entire stay in Sitia worthwhile:
The former mayor’s brandy carafe flows freely, and one of the customers that had received the former mayor’s liquid bounty appears to have been insufficiently fawning in his response.
… MAY YOU BURN AND ROAST! YOU DO NOT HONOUR THE MAN WHO BRINGS YOU DRINK!
(Απού να καείς και να φουρναρίσεις! Δεν τιμάς τον άθρωπο απού σε κερνά!)
Who knew there were Klingons hiding in plain site in my home town.
I envy the Brian Blessed types who walk this country and perform their party pieces. I wish I was as έξω καρδιά “hearts out!” (as the locals say) as they are, and able to put on such a performance. In a good enough mood, and with enough exposure, I can essay an impersonation; and I’ve been building up dialect competence in my three weeks here, like learning to ride a bike again. I enjoy it when I start speaking Greek fluently again, and building the confidence to come up with linguistically interesting errors. There’s been enough attrition here, that the bits of dialect I recall have brought out smiles of recognition from relatives, rather than cringe. kodo “d’you think”, ksa su “never you mind”, ʝi “or what?”
It’s a matter of time till those little signposts of identity are extinguished; just as the turns of phrase I was reading about in January, that Contossopoulos had recorded in the 60s, are long forgotten. Like the obligation to make an exception, if you disparaged a town—”Iraklio is a complete dive! (Excepting any monasteries that might be there.)” “Agios Nikolaos is full of layabouts! (Excepting the Manousakis clan, those are fine upstanding folk)”—traditional society welcomed you putting on a Brian Blessed performance of bigotry, but you had to make at least some gesture of fair-mindedness to make up for it.
I had the whiff of death that first week I was in Sitia, as I could see what had gone. I found enough survivals in the second week, that had not died yet, that took me back to my childhood, to get me through.
Including a dish I’d quite forgotten, and ordered on my last night in town, at random. Skioufichta makaronia [skjufixta makaronja], “twisted macaroni”. Small twisted penne, cooked in broth and butter, topped with an immoderate heaping of anthotyros—grated salty white cheese. And nothing else (despite what the Internet tells you): no mushrooms, no pork sausage, no sun-dried tomatoes.
Resulting in a brothy mac-and-cheese, that goes down light, but suffuses you with gooey brine. And that took me right back to my great-aunt Despina’s kitchen.
(Closest I could get: https://www.cretangastronomy.gr/2011/04/skioufixta-makaronia/. Consumed at Cretan House taverna, Sitia, because culinary authenticity is now marketable.)
These things all perish in time; that was my sadness of the first week. These things are to be celebrated while they yet endure: that was my contentment of the last week.
And my shot in the arm half way through my stay was my lightning visit to Iraklio and Chania, cities of 60k and of 100k. I am someone of the city, and I need a city around me to feel alive.
Which is why my next stop in Karpathos (population: 6k, dialect zones: 4) is an interesting choice of destination…
Σταύρος Νικολάου (1936–2023)
Τις ευχαριστίες μας σε όλους εσάς που έχετε παρευρεθεί σήμερα να τιμήσετε τη μνήμη του πατέρα μου, και ιδίως στα ξαδέρφια μας Μαίρη, Στήβ και Κιμ, που ταξίδεψαν από την Τασμανία για να βρεθούν κοντά μας.
Θέλω επίσης να απευθύνω εκ μέρους της μάνας μου ένα μεγάλο ευχαριστώ στους γείτονες παλαιότερους και νεότερους, που στάθηκαν στον πατέρα μου στα στερνά του, και που δέθηκαν τόσο σφιχτά με την οικογένειά μας: στο Γιάννη και την Ντίνα Βαλαχή, και στο Θανάση Ζαφειρόπουλο, που ήταν στο πλευρό του πατέρα μου τις τελευταίες του στιγμές. Σας είμαστε ευγνώμονες εφ’ όρου ζωής.
Ο πατέρας μου έφυγε πλήρης ημερών. Έφυγε αιφνίδια κι αναπάντεχα, χωρίς ούτε να ταλαιπωρήσει, ούτε και να ταλαιπωρηθεί. Έφυγε, όπως είπαν, «σαν πουλάκι».
Και έφυγε ο πατέρας μου έτσι όπως προτιμούσε ο ίδιος να φύγει, σε περιστάσεις που ο ίδιος εξέφρασε την ικανοποίησή του μόλις την προηγούμενη μέρα. Έφυγε στο σπίτι του, στο οικείο του περιβάλλον, με τη θαλπωρή και τη στοργή τριγύρω του των πιο αγαπημένων του, της οικογένειάς του.
Έφυγε όπως ζούσε, αθόρυβα και ήσυχα. Στο βαθμό που είναι εφικτό, έκανε καλό τέλος.
Ο τρόπος που έφυγε ο πατέρας μου με ενόχλησε, να πω την αλήθεια. Αμέσως κατόπιν, ένοιωσα πως δεν έπρεπε να είχε φύγει έτσι, πως έπρεπε να μας είχε ταλαιπωρήσει περισσότερο, να μας γινόταν περισσότερο βάρος. Και αυτό, από φόβο να μην περάσει ο πατέρας μου από τον κόσμο τούτο απαρατήρητος, να μην παραγκωνιστεί το όνομά του. Γιατί ο πατέρας μου μέτρησε κι αυτός το μπόι του στη γη. Ο πατέρας μου πάλεψε κι αυτός με τις δυσκολίες και τις δυσχέρειες της ζωής.
Και τις πάλεψε με μεγαλύτερη επιτυχία από πολλούς. Αυτό που συγκρατούν όλοι από τον πατέρα μου είναι πως δεν έπαιρνε τη ζωή τοις μετρητοίς· γι’ αυτό και η ζωή δεν τον έβαλε κάτω. Ήταν άνθρωπος που λαμπύριζε η καλοσύνη στα μάτια του, κάτι που νομίζω το ζήσατε όλοι σας. Άνθρωπος που είχε έτοιμο ένα αστείο, ένα γέλιο έτσι να σπάσει τον πόνο. Και αυτά τα χαρίσματά του τον εφόδιασαν να αντιμετωπίσει όσα του επιφύλασσε η μοίρα.
Εγώ όμως συγκρατώ μιαν άλλη εικόνα από τα παιδικά μου χρόνια. Τον πατέρα μου να κάθεται ατάραχος, γαλήνιος, και ήρεμος. Τον πατέρα μου αμέτοχο και ανέγγιχτο από τα μάταια και τα επιπόλαια του κόσμου. Μια γαλήνη που ποτέ δεν εννόησα και που πάντα τη ζήλευα.
Ο πατέρας μου ήταν άνθρωπος φιλόπονος. Καταπιάστηκε στη ζωή του με πολλές τέχνες: νοσοκόμος, μπακάλης, ασυρματιστής, ταχυδρομικός υπάλληλος, αγρότης, μαγαζάτορας, εργάτης. Δε φοβήθηκε και ούτε ντράπηκε ποτέ να δουλέψει, και ό,τι καταπιάστηκε, το φρόντισε να το κάνει σωστά και ποιοτικά. Κάτι που το έμαθε από τα παιδικά του χρόνια, όταν υποχρεωνόταν να πάει να ποτίσει όταν ήθελε να πάει να δει Καραγκιόζη.
Ο πατέρας μου ήταν άνθρωπος φιλόστοργος. Άνθρωπος που πάντα πονούσε την οικογένειά του, και γινόταν γι’ αυτήν θυσία. Είναι τόσα τα περιστατικά που μπορώ να απαριθμήσω. Το ταξίδι στη Βηρυτό που πλήρωσε για όλη την οικογένειά του που είχε μείνει στην Κύπρο, για να κάνουν τις ιατρικές εξετάσεις ώστε να πάνε όλοι μαζί στην Αυστραλία, για να ανταμώσουν τα δυο μεγαλύτερά του αδέρφια. Το χρόνο που πέρασε στην Αυστραλία προσπαθώντας να αποκαταστήσει την αγαπημένη του αδερφή Δώρα—που μας άφησε πάνε τώρα σαράντα χρόνια, και που συχνά τη θυμόταν στα τελευταία του. Τις λιγοστές ελεύθερές του μέρες, που αντί να ξεκουραστεί μας έπαιρνε τα παιδιά του σε μύριες όσες εκδηλώσεις και συναυλίες. Τις επισκέψεις και εκδρομές που βγαίναμε, πάντα πρόθυμος, πάντα πρόσχαρος.
Ο πατέρας μου ήταν άνθρωπος που έδωσε πολλά αγάπη, τόσο για την οικογένεια που μεγάλωσε, όσο και για την οικογένεια της γυναίκας του, που δέθηκε σφιχτά μαζί τους τα τέσσερα χρόνια που ζήσαμε κοντά τους.
Είναι δύσκολο πράγμα να συνοψίσεις μια ζωή, και να πας να την τυλίξεις σε μια κόλλα χαρτί. Ο καθένας από μας που ήρθαμε σήμερα να τον τιμήσουμε έχουμε μια σύλληψη ξεχωριστή, μα και μερική, της ζωής του Σταύρου Νικολάου.
Αλλιώς τον ζήσατε οι γείτονές του, αλλιώς η γυναίκα του, τα παιδιά του, οι συνάδελφοι, οι φίλοι: την ολική εικόνα δεν την είχε κανείς έξω από τον ίδιο. Πολλές σελίδες από τη ζωή του δεν τις γνωρίζω. Τα νιάτα του στην Κύπρο, τις εκδρομές που έκανε με πολλούς από σας, τα παιδικά του χρόνια πέραν από κάποια τραγουδάκια που τα ξαναθυμόταν στα τελευταία του. «Πού πας καραβάκι με τέτοιον καιρό, σε μάχεται η θάλασσα, δεν τη φοβάσαι;»…
Από τη ζωή του μας μένουν τώρα οι εικόνες που μας αποτύπωσε, στον κάθε ένα από μας.
Και η εικόνα που μου αποτυπώθηκε πιο έντονα από όλες τις άλλες, είναι μια βραδυά στο χωριό, που είχαν στριμωχτεί όλα τα μπατζανάκια μαζί στην κλούβα, και πιάσανε όλοι μαζί, και ο πατέρας μου πρώτος, το τραγούδι, λέγοντας το «Μια ζωή την έχουμε» καθώς προχωρούσαμε σιγά σιγά τις στροφές, ένα φωτάκι μουντό που πείσμωνε πως δεν θα το νικήσει το σκοτάδι.
Και τώρα που ξεπροβοδίζουμε τον πατέρα μου στο τελευταίο του ταξίδι, τον κρατάμε ζωντανό στις αναμνήσεις μας, ώστε να μην τον νικήσει ούτε τώρα το σκοτάδι.
Τώρα που μας αφήνει στο στερνό του ταξίδι, επανέρχομαι στην ανηχυσία που είχα, μη φύγει ο πατέρας μου απαρατήρητος. Την ανησυχία μου, ποια θα είναι η υστεροφημία του.
Και τη σωστή απάντηση σ’ αυτήν την ανησυχία μου την έλαβα από την ξαδέρφη μου Ουρανία. Από τον πατέρα μου συγκρατούμε ο καθένας μας πλέον μόνο εικόνες, και η υστεροφημία του πατέρα μου είναι πως δεν υπάρχει άνθρωπος να μην τον θυμάται με χαμόγελο.
Πατέρα, στη ζωή σου πάσχισες να κάνεις πάντα το σωστό. Αναπαύου τώρα, δεδικαίωσαι. Και ελαφρό να είναι το χώμα που σε σκεπάζει.
31 Ιανουαρίου, 2023.
Why do the British and the Canadians spell check “cheque”? (Post deleted on Quora)
It is delicious when hundreds (literally) of Poms puffs their chests out in pride to assert that cheque was the original spelling, and dastardly Noah Webster simplified English spelling because Americans are stupid, and pip pip, we speak English and its our language, and the Yanks perverted it, and they can’t tell check and cheque apart…
… only for historical fact to kick their unwarranted, empire-losing vanity in the face.
Of course, being Poms, they won’t notice.
Check is the original spelling.[2][3] The newer spelling, cheque, is believed to have come into use around 1828, when the switch was made by James William Gilbart in his Practical Treatise on Banking.[3]
[3]: Ellinger, Peter (August 1981). “Chapter 4: Negotiable Instruments”. In Ziegel, Jacob S. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law. Vol. IX: Commercial Transactions and Institutions. Springer. p. 26. “It would appear that the modern spelling, viz. cheque came into use at about 1828, when the switch was made by Gilbart, Practical Treatise on Banking (London 1828) 14. Holden 209 points out that Chitty, On Bills of Exchange, used the old spelling, viz. check, until ed. 10 in 1859. The adherence to “check” in the United States is a commendable manifestation of independent conservativism.”
The spellings check, checque, and cheque were used interchangeably from the 17th century until the 20th century.[4] However, since the 19th century, in the Commonwealth and Ireland, the spelling cheque (from the French word chèque) has become standard for the financial instrument, while check is used only for other meanings, thus distinguishing the two definitions in writing.
In American English, the usual spelling for both is check.[6]
Etymological dictionaries attribute the financial meaning of check to come from “a check against forgery”, with the use of “check” to mean “control” stemming from a check in chess, a term which came into English through French, Latin, Arabic and ultimately from the Persian word shah, or “king“.
Not one of you self-important tea-sippers who have responded that check is an American abomination bothered checking something as simple as Wikipedia before shooting your mouths off about Webster, did you?
No. Of course not.
Accordingly, the Oxford English Dictionary, authored by scholars and not online blowhards trying to compensate for the Loss of Empire, notes as the etymology of cheque:
Cheque is a differentiated spelling of check , which is also in use, especially in U.S. In meaning it belongs to check n.1 13. Compare also check v.1 16.
As it turns out, the very earliest instance in the OED of check in a financial sense, the Acts of Parliament from 1706, use the spelling checque, influenced by the fact that they’re referencing counterfoils (receipts) of exchequer bills.
From being the name of the counterfoil of an Exchequer or other bill, the purpose of which was to check forgery or alteration, the name appears to have been applied to any bill, note, or draft, having a counterfoil, and thus to its present sense, where a counterfoil (though usual) is not even necessary.
After all: “The spellings check, checque, and cheque were used interchangeably from the 17th century until the 20th century.”
Act 5 Anne c. 13 [Enacts that Exchequer Bills be made henceforth with two counterfoils instead of one, and] That the said Governor and Company [of Bk. of Eng.] shall..have the use and custody of the one part of all and euery the Checques, Indents, or Counterfoyls of all such Exchequer Bills..and from which the same Exchequer Bills shall be cut.
But if you want a lexicographer who chose to simplify the spelling of the word, and supposedly to have introduced needless confusion into the world, your man is not Noah Webster.
It’s Samuel Johnson.
1755 S. Johnson Dict. Eng. Lang. Check, the correspondent cipher of a bank bill.
You have heard of Samuel Johnson, I trust, defenders of the most Britannic English tongue?
Hint for those playing at home. He wasn’t American.
And while most 18th century instances of the word in the OED are cheque, there are several quite British instances of check through the 19th century.
Including by one Charles Babbage:
1832 C. Babbage Econ. Machinery & Manuf. (ed. 2) xiv. 124 All payments are made, through written orders called checks.
Hint for those playing at home. He wasn’t American either.
As one answer given entirely typically puts it:
“Check” and “cheque” are different words, and we know how to spell them both.
Ah yes. “We British.” As opposed to some lesser lights of British history, like Johnson and Babbage. And some lesser, more benighted times of human history, when a check was the “name of the counterfoil of an Exchequer or other bill, the purpose of which was to check forgery or alteration.”
We’ve seen this anachronistic show on Quora of people spouting off nationalism in lieu of historical linguistics before:
These historical facts have not stopped British people who can’t be bothered to research their own language from complaining that ‘tyre’ is the ‘correct’ spelling and ‘tire’ is incorrect American nonsense.
And we will see it again.
That’s ok. Gives me more stuff to write about here.
Europeans dislike it when Americans say ‘I am Irish’ or ‘I am Italian’. What if Australians and Canadians said that? Would Europeans still dislike it? Or do they dislike it only when Americans said that?
Answer deleted by Quora for violating Be Nice Be Respectful policy.
I won’t appeal, but it needed saying.
Dear denizens of the Old Continent (Γηραιά Ήπειρος, as Greeks like to call it):
You discard your poor huddled masses, and you repay their passed down love and homesickness with sneering, now that you’ve grown fat. You decline to countenance that a country built on diasporas may avoid using hyphens in their descriptions of themselves, when almost everyone in that country has a hyphen: no, the European construct of civic identity is the only true construct, and Americans are Nazis, and Plastic Paddies, and profanation of the holy comestible spaghetti with impious meatballs, and blah blah de fucking blah look at us we’re so much better than you, we have a cultural identity, and you only have McDonalds, no wonder you go magpieing our culture.
Yeah, bite me.
You don’t deserve an answer as gentle and patient as
But then, I don’t know that Quora in general deserves the gentleness and patience of Edward Conway…
Australians, for what it’s worth, do say “I am Greek” or “I am Italian” or “I am Chinese”. I know that, because I DO say that. Other posters say they don’t: that’s simply not been my experience. You may not get as many Irish Australians saying “I am Irish”, because the Irish have been better integrated into the construct of the dominant Australian ethnicity. (Irish Australians are unhappy about it, but the official name is “Anglo-Celtic”.) But you don’t get zero of that, either.
It is also true that the melting pot has been less proactive here than in the US in the past couple of generations, as a matter of both official policy and general culture, so it’s unexceptional for someone to say familiarly “he’s Somali” or “she’s Vietnamese”; and (because mass migration is a generation newer) it’s expected that the people who say that still have some substantial ties of practice as well as identification to their ancestral cultures.
What do Europeans make of it?
Well, I’m clearly not a denizen of the Old Continent, so I can only respond from observation.
Italian Australians, I’m guessing, are a bit more visibly Italian than Italian Americans, but I don’t have much reason to think they’d be dealt with that much more benignly. Campanalismo certainly sees to that anyway. (“You’re one of those… Southern people, aren’t you…”) But that’s inference, not observation.
Greece Greeks in my experience don’t actually have a problem calling Greek-Australians Greeks in familiar practice, because those Greek-Australians do at least speak some Greek. Popular usage vacillates between calling someone like Jen Psaki, who’s fourth generation, “Greek” and “Greek American”.
But Greek-Americans are still regarded as not as Greek as Greece Greeks: there is some contempt about them no longer speaking the language and holding on to antiquated notions. And that othering does extend even to myself, me being 1 1/2-generation Greek-Australian (2nd generation, but extensive exposure to Greece). All hyphenated Greeks, whether Georgian, Australian, American, or French—are omoɣenis: it’s literally the same word as “homogenous”, but it actually means “of the same stock”. (So much for the confident assertions here that Europeans don’t do ethnic nationalism any more. Eastern Europe is still Europe.)
You don’t assert someone is of the same stock as you, though, unless it is to indicate that they are not actually the same as you after all. For all that they label you as a “fellow Greek”, they do also make it clear that you’re not a completely fellow Greek.
But my experience is, they do it gently, with at most some amusement. Maybe because of my own 1 1/2 status and fluency in Greek, maybe because of residual ethnic nationalism, maybe because of Greek volubility, maybe because of the later wave of emigration to Australia, maybe because I’m Australian and not American and therefore not from the Great Satan—but I’ve never noticed, let alone experienced, any of the outright dickishness that Italy Italians and Ireland Irish seem so happy to dole out on Quora.
This answer is a shout out to Amy Christa Ernano. I don’t share her taste in music, but in the shared experience of anger at sneering from the Old Continent, I deem her my goomar.
As in comare, koumpara in Greek (feminine of koumparos < compare), someome close enough in affinity to be like a godmother to your children. Not as in “mistress”, a term which shows up in media about the Mafia, and from the same etymology.
How significant is Brooke Burton’s turn as the Australian Bachelorette?
The Australian Bachelorette is about to screen Season 7. Its protagonist is Brooke Blurton, who was a contestant on The Australian Bachelor Season 6. Brooke Blurton is bi, and has has made out with another former female contestant, Alex Nation, on the followup Bachelor In Paradise; so this is her third outing on the Bachelor franchise. The contestants this season are 8 men and 8 women. Brooke also has Aboriginal ancestry on her mother’s side. Her entry into the Bachelor franchise has occasioned much laudatory commentary about her being the first LBGTQI and First Nations participant in the series.
Debuting, Wednesday 20 October, 2021, on Channel Ten Australia.
What follows is not Hegelian dialectic, it’s probably just strawmen and centrist waffling, but I think it interesting enough to propound nonetheless. YMMV.
THESIS
Brooke is a strong proud woman, proud to be Aboriginal, proud to be LBGTQI, proud to be a social worker trying to make life better for her fellows. She has been unlucky in love on the show—walking out on Bachelor Nick Cummins,
before he in turn walked out on the two finalists; and then… mumble mumble, whatever happened with Alex
and with the bloke she ended up pairing off with after Bachelor In Paradise.
But now, she is going to find her one true love. And she will not be limited to one gender in her quest, for she sees no gender.
Her debut as the Bachelorette is a milestone for inclusion and diversity on Australian TV. The producer has said to The Age how proud she is of the move:
“The franchise needs to be brought into the now, to our contemporary world, whatever that means,” says Innes. “It needed a jolt.”
(Sure. That’s if you don’t count Alex Nation from Bachelor 4, the two other contestants from Bachelor 4 who ended up dating after the show, the African American Blake Garvey on Bachelor 2, or the Fijian Jimmy Nicholson on Bachelor 9. The Dutch Ali Oetjen on Bachelorette 4, I’ll grant you, is a stretch.)
(But we don’t speak of Blake. Oh, that cad.)
ANTITHESIS
Milestone.
Pull the other one, it’s got fucking bells on.
The Bachelor franchise is not a salve to the heartbroken, and it’s not a vehicle of societal progress, and it’s certainly not a “social experiment” like the execrable drunken gaslight-fest that is Married At First Sight claims to be. It’s an exploitative contrived reality TV show, with antiquated notions of romance and courting, that people throughout Australia watch in order to mock.
Eight queer women in the Bachelor mansion in evening wear, alongside eight blokey blokes in tuxes? Is that what the Revolution is supposed to look like? That’s even more ludicrous than the show usually is. And wake me up when there’s eight bi blokes in the Bachelor mansion wearing whitey-tighties.
The Australian franchise actually has a better track record for long-term relations than I thought: three marriages, two with children, and one engagement with children, out of 17 contestants. But people routinely joke about the contractually required 6 months post-competition before contestants break up (and not without reason). People snark about contestants only going on the show so they could get relocated as a TV reporter from Tasmania to the mainland (true enough, yet Reader, she married him).
And the thing about robust systems is, they envelop their criticisms, and neutralise them. That’s why Germany isn’t communist: Bismarck coopted social welfare. That’s why Chomsky can say what he wants: he’s the court jester of the military-industrial complex.
Snarking recaps about the “Bachie”? (My favourite: a shot of a confused Bachelor, with the spoken caption BACHIE BOT MALFUNCTION! BACHIE BOT MALFUNCTION!) The TV channel embraces all that, and neutralises it. They know it’s mock-watched, and they play up on it. They foster a culture of it. Contestants actually go on the show in subsequent seasons, speaking among themselves about “the bachie”.
The flaw of the show is that it takes interesting people, and turns them into mush, because the show’s narrative weighs them down. The Bachelor and the Bachelorette are routinely recruited among former contestants (Richie in Bachelor 4, Matty in Bachelor 5, Sam in Bachelorette 1, Ali in Bachelorette 4, Brooke in Bachelorette 7) and media personalities (Nick Cummins in Bachelor 6, Georgia Love in Bachelorette 2, Sophie Monk in Bachelorette 3, Angie Kent in Bachelorette 5) who display humour, spark, ironic detachment—a personality. Once they are the stars, they have to turn into opaque everymen and everywomen, fully committed to the show’s premise: the opposite of why they were recruited.
I can no longer watch Bachie after what they did to Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins. To those north of the Murray, he is a sporting legend of rugby; to those who are unaware of rugby (like me), he was that charming guy advertising underwear, with delightful blokey quips reminiscent of a gentler past—which not only Anglos get to be nostalgic about. He was a postmodern Mick Dundee without the overt xenophobia and sexism.
He did try, bless him, Nick, some subversive promo spots,
some mugging and eye rolling with the High Drama of the competition, but he couldn’t escape the confines of the formula. Brooke Blurton, infamously, walked out on him before he could walk out on her. What Nick Cummins did next may have been because he preferred Brooke to the remaining two contestants, as I thought at the time—or (as Brooke dished out on her next appearance on the Bachelor franchise) it may have been because he had a WarGames moment of clarity (“the only winning move is not to play”). He walked out on the show.
That made him a winner and an honourable man in my book. He upended the confining ethos of the show, and refused to succumb to it.
Not in the book of the rest of the country, either, who hounded him like they hounded Blake Garvey (that cad!). He did penance the old fashioned Aussie way—going for a week-long hike down the Kokoda Trail (a WWII site for Australians in Papua New Guinea, which has somehow turned into an Australian secular equivalent of the Camino de Santiago). And then, he did the TV penance Australian celebrities have now adopted: getting humiliated on another Reality TV show. (For disgraced celebrity chef George Calombaris, it was singing disguised as a duster on Masked Singer. For Cummins, it was being screamed at by British soldiers on SAS Australia.)
Not a winner and an honourable man in Brooke’s book, either, who has been talking smack about Nick ever since (most recently, applauding her female footballer friend on SAS Australia for boxing against him, and landing a punch). Brooke Blurton takes cheeky swipe at Nick Cummins.
I thought I was proud of you for giving the honey Badger a good 👊🏽 for me 😜 but you beyond make me proud of the intelligent strong woman you are.
That’s not cheeky, that’s Build A Bridge And Get Over It. By going on the Bachelorette, perhaps.
I loved Angie Kent as one of the many snarking viewers featured in Australian Googlebox. I couldn’t stand to watch her get the same treatment, and stopped watching.
ANTITHESIS II: REPRESENTATION
(Told ya it wasn’t Hegelian dialectic.)
Nor has representation been the Bachelor franchise’s strong point. East Asians are rare, South Asians quite predictably get sent home after the first couple of episodes, and the Bachelors and Bachelorettes have mostly been chiselled Anglos (though three winning contestants have been East Europeans, at least).
Though the caddishness of Blake Garvey wasn’t stunt casting: Vince McMahon didn’t screw Bret Hart, Bret Hart screwed Bret Hart. Broke up with the winning contestant before the finale aired, had propositioned the runner-up, ended up in a relationship with the second runner-up—and when they broke up, they did a moping photoshoot together in a women’s magazine. It was all quite bizarre, and no surprise that Garvey has kept a decidedly low profile since.
Buzzfeed can absoutely go and get fucked for their typical Buzzfeed headline:
An Indigenous, Queer Woman Was Just Cast As “The Bachelorette”, Making Australian History
Hey, they’re plenty diverse! Ali (far right) is Dutch, and Georgia (far left) is brunette—and FUCK YOU, Buzzfeed, for reducing the Bachelorettes to Anglo bingo. And not a WORD from you on the delightfully sarcastic Angie Kent in the middle, who will always be a delightfully sarcastic Goggleboxer to me, lounging around her flat with her flatmate making fun of the telly, because I never could bear to watch her bleached of personality as The Bachelorette #5.
In fact, we’ve not had a POC lead on either series since 2014, when Blake Garvey was cast as Bachie.
Oh, you remembered him. Good. (That cad!)
Aussies are absolutely rejoicing in the news — commending the producers for finally giving Australia the kind of representation that really matters.
Right. That’s what really matters.
The gushing queer and POC testimonials in the article, and how this is a season that We Must All Watch, I cannot but find rebarbative. It’s still the Bachie, people. It’s the same show it always was. Last Bachelor series confected scandal out of one drunken contestant calling another drunken contestant a “c*nt”. Do you really think you’re going to get your woke vindication from this show? The trailer already finds the sainted Brooke shocked! shocked! that some of the male and female suitors have ended up hooking up with each other.
[EDIT: this answer may well have been collapsed for the quote. Which just boggles my mind…]
I am annoyed at myself for being disappointed. I’d been seduced by the fact that, as an undercover reporter from the first season of the Bachelor wrote, with all the contestants stuck in the Mansion for days on end and only a couple of hours a week of sighting The Bachelor, they ended up forming intense camaraderie with each other. I was hoping there’d be a queer woman/blokey bloke rapprochement, exuding pure wholesome.
But of course not. Never forget: this is 2021 Australian Reality TV. 2021 Australian Reality TV does not do wholesome. (Cooking competitions, maybe. You’re likelier to see a minority win there, too…)
Masterchef Australia finalists, 2018
(Not much more love from me for The Bachelor Australia’s diversity problem will be its death knell. Just ask the magazine industry | Grace O’Neill: “It’s overly simplistic and factually inaccurate to suggest that print media could have been salvaged by diversity alone.” Yes, O’Neill. Yes it would.)
And oh, what was it Brooke saying about the show two years ago? Bachelor In Paradise’s Brooke Blurton says her romance with Alex Nation “wasn’t genuine”
Although Brooke says she’s glad to have made history by being the first woman to share a lesbian kiss on an Australian reality series, the Indigenous social worker felt as though she was pressured into pursuing her relationship with Alex.
“I knew that there would be the pressure of having a same-sex relationship, but I wasn’t really going into it like that. I wouldn’t say it was forced, but they (the producers) were really going with it,” she said.
No! Really? A confected romance on Reality TV?!
As for why she quit, Brooke says she grew tired of being pressured to play “the angry black girl”.
Incredible! I thought it was because Nick Cummins (that cad!) told you he wasn’t going to pick anyone, and he was uncomfortable with the show premise, and you concluded he should never have been on it…
… sounds like you came to exactly the same conclusion, Brooke. Wonder why you chose not to mention that story on Bachelor in Paradise?
“Obviously, they’re making a TV show and you hear that quite often. You’re basically characters in a show and you have to conform to be that character. If you don’t conform, they [producers] are quite aggressive with how they speak to you. I didn’t necessarily conform… and the manipulation is definitely there.
“I think they wanted me to be the angry black girl, but I was not that. I think they wanted me to step up and be controversial on camera in front of the girls which I don’t think is right. That’s not how I deal with confrontation. They stick you in these environments that are very testing and trying. You know, late nights, early mornings. It’s chaotic.”
Unbelievable! I never!
And two years later, this selfsame show is going to be at the vanguard of social change in Australia? They’re going to tell Brooke’s story truthfully and sympathetically? And they’ve earned a nation’s undying thanks for putting the underprivileged and the ignored on our screens?
The other one has bells on, like I said.
SYNTHESIS
Brooke Blurton is not a spokesperson for a sexuality or for the First Nations of Australia (even if she does put Noongar/Yamatji on her Instagram page). Brooke Blurton is not a vapid clotheshorse wound up to play an outdated Barbie doll fantasy. She’s both. She’s neither.
Brooke has a history of hardship and rejection that she has harnessed to make her into a strong person, even if she did speak of it in a TED talk. She was too black for her white peers, too white for the Noongar and Yamatji; she was bullied, she was molested at the funeral of her suicided, drug-addicted mother, she was kicked out of home by her father at 15, and she has turned her life around following guidance by a teacher of hers into a life of service, as a social worker…
… And that does not mean that she’s Mother Teresa and above criticism (neither is Mother Teresa, after all). That doesn’t mean that we’re not getting something confected and sanitised on TV (which she admits, after all). And for what it’s worth, it doesn’t mean that I should “Yass Queen” her about her ongoing grudge against Nick Cummins, either. (That was a private conversation she leaked, after all. And then she wonders why he was upset when she told him she would blurt it out on national TV, a year after she’d blocked his number.)
Brooke is someone who went on TV because, eh, why not. Like her peers on the show. All of them have stories, even if few of them as momentous. All of them have something to prove to themselves. All of them have foibles. All of them, I don’t doubt, are looking for happiness, though I’m hopeful not all of them are sold on the mythology of Bachie (or that inevitable phrase used among contestants, “you’re not here for the Right Reasons”). And it’s not like Brooke has any illusions by now about how the Bachelor franchise works—as we saw above. Unlike Nick Cummins, Brooke Blurton has chosen to work the franchise, rather than be worked by it. Well… let’s see how successful she is.
Before Brooke there was Megan and Tiffany, contestants who ended up dating each other, in the limelight, and then breaking up, because they found that off the show, they didn’t actually have that much in common. That’s fine, fortunes of love and all.
There was all this pressure. The biggest thing was letting down the LGBTIQ community.
… That is not fine. Megan Marx is not the anointed spokesperson of the LGBTI community any more than Brooke Blurton is either of that community, or of the First Nations community. It’s nothing but regrettable that both of them are feeling pressured to be anything more than twenty-somethings trying out a date or two.
And yet diversity does matter. It is important to see East Asian faces on Australian TV outside of cooking competitions, and Aboriginal faces outside of the ABC, and an occasional guest star role by Deborah Mailman. Even if the Grauniad and Buzzfeed say so. And Brooke on commercial mainstream telly tomorrow night is something of a win. I wish her luck, and I hope she’s going in with her eyes even more open this time, now that she’s been foisted with all this expectation.
I hope the minorities of all stripes watching the Bachie for affirmation tomorrow night go in with their eyes open too. It’s still the Bachelor franchise.
Myself, I’m going to watch it on the off chance that that blokey bloke/queer chick camaraderie happens after all.
And lament the absence of the gentle ocker humour of Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins. Nick ‘Honey Badger’ Cummins’ Bachelor disaster talks a bit about the mental healths struggles he had, after going on the show: it was the show, not the social media two-minute hate, that drove him to seek strength in the New Guinea jungle.
And lament too, something he had to offer—and for that matter, so did Brooke—that was even more important than minority representation in public life, because it’s what makes everything else possible.
Integrity.
“Out of respect to these women, if I can’t stand here right now and say I’m picking her and I love her…if I can’t say that, why would I start something with someone?” he told interviewer Lisa Wilkinson.
He later admitted to ABC Radio National that he didn’t want to fake a relationship for three months as a contractual obligation.
“And what’s more important, me just saying ‘yes’ and going through the motions and dragging some girl through all this media about how we’re in love and then three months down the track after the contract’s over, um, we’re allowed to break up. I’m not going to drag them through that rubbish … and break her heart. Bugger that.”
Debuting, Wednesday 20 October, 2021, on Channel Ten Australia.
Two songs of loss
I have had occasion to think, in recent times, on two songs of loss. I’ve cried to them before the loss, and I’ve thought of them ruefully after the loss, when I had no tears left. I will analyse them and discourse on them in The Other Place; and I’ll have fun doing it; and that will take the sting out of them. Here, let them stand as they are. This is where I get to cry.
A song of lost love. Τα βεγγαλικά σου μάτια. Your firework eyes. 1995. Lyrics: Michalis Bourboulis. Music: Stamos Semsis. Sung by Giorgos Dalaras:
I lit all the lights. I put on a show.
When love dies, it knows no resurrection.Your firework eyes shine like phosphorus,
like ships passing through the Bosphorus at night.You switched off the lights and left, you became invisible.
Mist that the wind took away, in an automated town.Your firework eyes are a bonfire
and loneliness drips like rain onto the floor.I am trapped now in your perfume, in your name,
and in your eyes, yes, your cold firework eyes.Your firework eyes shine like phosphorus,
like ships passing through the Bosphorus at night.
A song of lost friendship. Πεθαμένες καλησπέρες. 1995. Dead Good Evenings. Lyrics & music: Miltiadis Paschalidis. Sung by Dimitris Mitropanos:
We met in the evenings
with sad songs
and with caresses exhausted
by the scars of the day.
Our cigarettes were shared,
the guitar was borrowed.
Our dreams were painted,
in a black and white life.
Now the songs have stopped,
the colours have faded.
Streets and old town squares
have changed their names.And should I see a friend
I’m terrified he might recognise me.
I don’t feel like hearing
any dead Good Evenings.You told me everything changes,
scared, and speaking softly,
that what we love the most
hurts us all the more.
You told me everything changes,
it just needs something to set it off.
But your two eyes look like lanterns
in a barren zone.