Forest Fire, Kassandra peninsula, Greece

Different trees, you notice, have different ways of burning. The olives burn like lanterns, the flame nested deep inside their hollow trunks; you can see the warm orange glow through knots and spyholes in the wood. The palm trees burn like roman candles, the fat flame on top of the trunk sending a cascade of sparks down through the fronds and onto the ground below. And as for the pines, they burn constantly, vigourously, relentlessly; they burn like the waves of the sea. Driving along the main road from Pefkochori to Polichrono on Monday night is like passing through a Disneyland of fire- everything that's not moving is either burnt out or aflame. Along the roadside there are burning houses and burning sheds, burning olive groves and burning vegetable gardens. A two story supermarket is merrily burning down to its metal frame; outside it sits the scorched shell of a car. A decorative gazebo is ablaze, but the garden around it remains completely untouched. In an abandoned basketball court, only the baskets are burning. A low yellow flame laps at the base of a circular stone-clad outhouse; the building looks as if it is being gently heated on a gas hob. To the west the fire is still raging through the pine forest, turning the night sky a lurid salmon pink. On top of the highest branches dance bright red flames, as tall as the trees again. I've only witnessed scenes like this in Vietnam movies; it's corny, but I think of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, ghosted and raw-eyed, scanning the devastation on the riverbanks as he approaches Kurtz's lair.

At seven thirty that evening, E and I had met her mum for dinner at the Roma Pizzeria on the main street of Pefkochori. After four days of sunbathing, swimming and backgammon in nearby Polichrono, we were pretty much resigned to a change of weather, so when the sky above the sea darkened to a dull oyster colour, we just thought it was the afternoon's thunderstorm come back with its mates. Not so, the waiter told us; this was smoke from a small fire in the hills above the town; it was old news; it had been burning for a couple of hours already. About half an hour later, the electricity in the main street flickered, came back, flickered again and went out for good. It felt thrilling, sitting there munching our pizzas on the darkened terrace, watching the lightning flashing, and the palm trees blowing and the tourists scurrying; like the prelude to a hurricane. A thin white ash began to drift onto our plates and clothes, and we went out to look at the fire. Now, for the first time the sky to the north was lit up with an eerie pink glow. When I was fifteen, and more than regularly gloomy, I used to spend hours in my room staring at a reproduction of Bruegel's painting "The Triumph of Death"; I now realised I was looking at it again.

The fire seemed to be moving closer to the road back to Polichrono, so we decided to get our bus home before the road became impassable. All of a sudden, there was a hot wind all around us; it felt like it was coming from every direction at once. The air was thick with ash and soot. The traffic out of Polichrono and Hanioti grew heavier, and tailbacks began to form. Someone said that the fire had reached the road. A fuel truck pushed its way through the jam with blaring horns. Now, tourists carrying children and cases began to stream out of the hotels- Germans and Austrians mostly, but also Czechs, Serbs, Russians and Brits. Some of them got into their cars and drove further down the peninsula; others just walked as fast as they could into the countryside or towards the beach. Motorbikes weaved in and out among the fleeing pedestrians. A guy in a yellow muscle-top loaded his cases into the boot of a hatchback, then sat in on top of them. People were starting to do stupid, panicked things, and there seemed to be no police around to calm the situation down.

E's mum phoned her sister Katerina, and asked her to pick us up at their flat in the old town. As we walked uphill we found ourselves pushing against another tide of fleeing people- tourists mostly, but now also local people using towels as masks. Then the crowds were gone. The smoke and ash were much thicker up here, and in the dark, hushed streets, you got an inkling of how it must have felt in the final hours of Pompeii. At last we turned a corner and saw the fire full on for the first time; it was wilder and stronger than I had imagined, and less than 500 metres away. The flames didn't roll along at ground level but perched like birds at the top of the tallest trees. Even at this distance you could feel the toasty warmth on your calves and lower arms; it felt pleasant and cosy, like when you sit too close to a campfire. Two kids on a motorbike shared a cigarette and watched the flames in silence. I had always thought of forest fires as incredibly noisy, but my strongest memory of this scene is the quiet and the calm. The smoke was too thick to wait here, though, and we were hardly halfway to the flat- finally we got through to E's aunt and arranged to meet her at the post office on the main street instead. As we returned downhill, we passed the last few departing families. A father packing luggage into a car screamed at a little kid, who had almost run away into the dark.

We settled down at the water fountain in the main street. E. filled up a couple of bottles, and I tried to wash the soot out of my eyes. A shirtless, middle aged guy wrapped a wet towel around his head and set off stoutly into the woods- no fire, it seemed, could ever withstand the fury of a bare-chested Greek. Two teenage boys brought a clutch of plastic bottles to the fountain and filled them up. "Wanna buy some water?" they asked us. "Only three euro." Then they set off to hawk the bottles to the crowds on the beach. Every five minutes or so, I crossed the road and checked on the progress of the fire. By the time Katerina arrived, it looked as if it had pulled away from Hanioti and Polichrono, and was heading for the old town of Pefkochori instead. (In the end, it got to within 100 metres of the town, but firemen checked it before it reached its first hotel.)

The rest of the night played out as a series of more or less surreal car trips up and down the peninsula. We originally headed south from Pefkochori, but the fire was travelling faster than the gridlocked traffic, and at one stage threatened to outflank us , so we turned tail and headed north back through Pefkochori and on to Polichrono, along the newly re-opened road. This was the landscape dripping with fire from the first paragraph, and this was also the place where people had suffered the most- in Hanioti, halfway between the two towns, the fire had jumped the road and travelled down as far as the beach. The first time I saw any emergency personnel was at half-eleven in Polichrono- squads of black-clad police were holding up traffic and tv crews, and waving through fire-engines, and blowing whistles and acting both enormously busy and enormously aggrieved, in the classic manner of people who know that they've fucked up already and, whatever they do from this point in, are still going to get their asses chewed tomorrow morning. We stay here for an hour, but then the wind changes and sends plumes of thick acrid smoke into the town. By one o'clock we are on the move again, this time further north, to a German run resort that Katerina knows, where we will spend the next day drinking Fanta lemon among dauntingly cheerful families, who know what time aerobics is at, and when the kiddies' karaoke final is taking place, but who have no idea that half the book of Exodus just took place thirty minutes down the road. That late night journey is the strangest of all, a kind of lulling comedown through gradually less worried towns- from Kriopigi, which is basically on a war footing, through Kalithea, where plenty of people are still up in bars and cafes watching news reports- but also hanging out on bikes and playing test your strength games and generally acting the maggot- and into Aphitos, which is completely shut down at this late hour, no signs of alarm at all, apart from the stream of cars and buses coming through, and, to the south, the thinnest sliver of pink just about grazing the horizon.

Web 0.2

The kids, they don’t understand. They don't. Acting so proprietorial about the internet, with their MySpace and YouTube and iTunes, as if they had just happened upon this cool abandoned factory in the woods, and decided to kit it up as their clubhouse. They don't know that the internet is ours- we watched it grow, we built it up, those are our initials etched into its roofbeams. Of course, things were very different back then. Back then, there was none of your broadband or skype or always-on connections. Frankly, it was a struggle, kitting the house out for the internet. I remember the whole family pitching in, my sister fiddling with the aerial, while dad tweaked the whiskers on the monitor, trying to find hotmail. After an age, the static eased, and a dim, fuzzy picture emerged on the screen.
“Can you see what it is?” dad asked.
“It looks like a lot of hamsters dancing,” mam said.
Dad thumped the back of the computer, hard.

In those early days, you learnt a lot about website design. Originality was the key. A guaranteed way to stand out was to tweak your text colour and your background colour until you hit a combination that had never been seen before in three thousand years of graphic art. If reading the front page felt like being forcefed spoonfuls of sugar through your eyes, you knew you were onto something big. The next important thing was to whack an enormous, metallic-effect counter in the centre of the page, ensuring that visitors' eyes were drawn to this before anything else on your site. Depending on your traffic levels, this was a great way of either telling your visitors how unimportant you were, or how unimportant they were. And finally, you linked your site to every other website on the net, because you were Irish and you didn't want to appear rude. All these links made surfing a uniquely circular experience, like driving down an endless ring-road composed of nothing but roundabouts.

Of course you could always make use of a "search engine". Back then, there wasn’t just one search engine, there were dozens, and they were all equally shambolic. Performing a search was like engaging a private detective firm staffed exclusively by autistic savants. They'd either come back with nothing, or empty the entire internet into your lap. Some search engines even made it into the dictionary. For instance, if you were going out to a restaurant, you might make sure to "jeeves" your date. This meant telling her reams of useless information about other people who shared her surname, most of whom were dead. That way, you got to eat her dinner too.

Back then, there was only one webcam in the world, and it was owned by an American college student called Jenny, who left it on around the clock, and it was watched by millions of men the world over, on the basis that Jenny at some stage in her life might possibly get undressed. Now those men are in their early forties, hunched over their workstations, in the all-white boxroom that used to be the loft- no, sweetie, this is Daddy’s office, you can play downstairs- trawling the net for live feeds of young women from the former Soviet Union performing sex acts on Vietnamese pot bellied pigs, the pot bellied pig lovers really doing it for them right now, and occasionally- no, for the last time, you can’t come in, Daddy’s busy, Daddy’s doing important grown-up work-occasionally they shed a little tear for innocent Jenny, and her apartment, whose dimensions they still know intimately and which, to be honest, they sometimes dream about, and they wonder how Jenny looks today, and what age she might be, and how she feels about the webcam now, and how she might react if they introduced themselves to her in the street, and what they might talk about, and where they might go later, for a drink, and whether, if the mood was right, she might consider trying some pig porn.

Flat Hunting

I have this problem with estate agents. I kind of like them. I like their assumption of the style of Wall street – the dress sense, the sharky patter, the moral laxity– without any of the substance of Wall Street– like the money, say, or the power, or the responsibility. I like their earnest pantomime, the way they project their performance somewhere beyond our shoulders, as if they’re stars of their own reality show, as if they’re half expecting Sir Alan Sugar to step out from behind the rubber plant. I like their fragile self-possession, forever at the mercy of the ephemera of modern life - the jamming doors, the messy bedrooms, the upstairs neighbour's penchant for deep house. I like the complications in their voices when they discuss their less attractive properties, guarded generality shading into light exasperation, like special needs tutors at a parent-teacher night. I especially like the gimmicks they employ to jive things up a bit- like the convertible that ferries us from Shepherd's Bush to Acton Town this Saturday. E. and the estate agent sit up front, while I sprawl out like a dog in the back. To an inveterate non-car-owner this feels antic and glamorous, like flat-hunting in movies; we could just as easily be steering a brass bed down the Portobello Road. It doesn't even bother me that the first flat we visit has already been let, or that the agent is obviously stalling our visit to the second property by zipping randomly around the quieter streets of West London.

"She delayed us until the other couple showed up," E. says afterwards. “And then she tried the line about so much interest in this property.”
"It felt so fast," I say. "It was only 40 miles an hour, but with the wind and everything, you felt like you were hitting 80, hands down."
"And did you hear her banging on about the holding deposit?" E says. “As if she hasn’t spent months trying to shift that place.”
"It's mad isn't it?" I say. "The way you duck on the way out. You know there’s no roof, and still, you can’t help ducking. That’s mad.”
“We need to try something different,” E. says. "What do you think?"
"Let's look for a flat with parking,” I say.

Who's Who on the Chessboard, Part Three- The Knight

Sometimes he dreams it is the war again, and he is being chased by soldiers through the streets of Paris. He ducks into an doorway, pulls off his rough coat with the paper star and turns it inside out. He is surprised to discover that the lining is smooth and elegant, and he walks out past the baffled soldiers with the swagger of a true aristocrat.

His best songs are sustained puns, two things at once. There is the earthbound song that you can touch, and there is one that travels scornfully in the air above it, and neither of them will let on that the other one exists. When he sings, you can sense his glee at finding the words to unite this unlikely couple, along with his contempt for a universe that lets him get away with it.

His singing career has not yet caught fire. There is the problem of his face, for a start. But there is also something elusive about his talent. He won’t settle into any particular genre but drifts from chanson to chamber jazz to calypso. Also, he is too productive for his own good. He hands out songs to younger women, and they burn down in their hands like cigarettes.

Alain looks at the sheaf of songs. “You’re not singing these yourself,” he says.
“Why not?” he says.
“With your voice? You'd suck the life out of them.”
"Maybe that's what they deserve," he says.
"You're betraying your own gift," Alain says.
“That’s what I do for a living,” he says. “A pun is a betrayal. A rhyme is a betrayal. A tune is a betrayal. Everything I touch I defile.”
“These are pop songs. Confections. They need a lighter touch. Give them to France Gall.”
“Whose touch is lighter than a traitor’s? I’ve even betrayed my name. Did you know this? I was born Lucien Ginsburg. What does Lucien sound like? Lucien sounds like a women’s hairdresser.”
“What does Ginsburg sound like?” Alain says.
Serge says: “I despair of a world where such wholesale treachery is permissible.”

Secretly, he knows Alain is right. He has written a song stacked on top of another, about a girl who enjoys candies, and a girl who enjoys fellatio. But when he attempts to sing it, his voice sounds heavy and laboured, like a man carrying too many parcels. So he calls up France Gall instead. In the rehearsal room, he pushes her voice up through its register until it cracks. He wants to use the edge of her voice to cut his song in two, but the double meanings fly away from her and all that remains is her own guilelessness. She makes it a sweet song about a lonely child who is perhaps a little frightened of the world. Something inside him crumples, and he decides that it's time to get a drink.

At the café, he takes out the chessboard and teaches her to play.
“The knight,” he tells her, “is the secret hero of the game. It’s dressed like a fine horse-rider, but between ourselves, it’s actually a spy. It’s the only piece allowed to leave the board. This means it can vault any obstacles, outflank enemies, act as if none of this battle was its business. But really, the knight just likes the experience of flight. When it’s up there, looking down, it can see what none of the other pieces can: how everything rubs against everything else.”
France yawns.
“Of course, it pays for the privilege,” he says. “It can’t go directly where it wants, like the regular pieces, but it is always forced to shear off to one side. So if the knight sees a pretty girl he wants to talk to, he has to jump all the way around the board to approach her. That way she doesn’t have to look up and see his horsey face.”
“You don’t have a horsey face,” she says.
“I have the face of a jackass,” he says. “But, see, this is the saddest thing about the knight. You notice how he moves? Two steps up, one to the side. You might think he is free, but it is an illusion. He is condemned to trace forever on the board the outline of his own silhouette.”
He picks up a piece to demonstrate, moving it from a white square to a black square and then on to her forehead, to her cheek, to her collar-bone.
“Poor creature,” she says, pushing his hand away. “So which piece am I then?”
“Obviously, you’re a queen,” he tells her.
“Are all these little ones the queens?” she asks.
“Exactly,” he says, but he has stopped listening to her, he thinks of the knight still moving through the world, now reaching the keyboard of the cafe piano, leaping from d to f-sharp and back again, trying to shock its grubby pathos into unaffected song.

He goes with France to the fashionable boutiques to select his outfit for that night’s show, an austere arts programme on the second channel. He buys jackets with the widest lapels, polka dot shirts, crushed satin pants. He tells the assistants that he wants to look supremely fraudulent, a man of 37 dressed as a teenager.

By the time he’s due on stage, he has downed half a bottle of bourbon. The presenter attacks him for abandoning the French songwriting tradition for Anglo-American pop. Some would call you a turncoat, she says.
“That’s right,” he says. “I have turned my coat. And I have found that it is lined with fur.”
Then it is time for his performance. He faces the cameras like he would a firing squad. A last cigarette burns down between his fingers. He frowns at the army of aesthetes and delivers his ridiculous pop song. When he sees their faces cloud, he feels a sort of elation, as if he has just cleared an obstacle. He knows now that this will be the mode of his success, a series of sideways leaps over the tastemakers, and into the unsighted space beyond, going on and on until he exhausts himself or loses sight of his audience, or somewhere in the endgame falls apart, becomes two personalities, one trailing across the hard ground, the other floating scornfully in the air above it, neither of them acknowledging the other one exists.