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16 June 2009 – Debilitating connections
Seeing the British parliament and government in turmoil has been rather stimulating. One longs for something better. The economic crisis, so far, has been a lost opportunity to change the way we do things. When they are down perhaps we can push for change. A Green revolution is desperately needed. We might be tempted to despair but we still feel it is worth getting angry. Pity young Serbs. Mirijana sat with us in the park. She and several friends are working flat out to complete their exams and graduate. After 5 years of university parents in distant towns working all the hours they can to support their children are desperate to see them succeed and find jobs. But how? The greatest tragedy is not that jobs are scarce but that the market for jobs is corrupt. The heritage of top-down systems is that “connections” are the most important qualification. But it is worse than that.
 Every professional finds it necessary to join one of the dozens of political parties. With such a huge Government coalition even Milošević's Socialist party is back in action. Students and new graduates are encouraged at every turn to sell themselves to a party in order to get into almost any government funded department or organisation right down to schools and museums. Government ministries are fiefdoms used to pay off coalition members. And so the web of control and influence is used to the hilt right down to student level. Alas there is hardly even anger when things go badly; just despair and exodus. Will the EU change this?
 But Mira did have some good news. They had been campaigning against a ski development project on the protected Stara Planina mountain. This project has been tarnished by apparent insider dealing in land, which one would be tempted to call corruption. Of all unimaginative developments one party and its ministry want to create a huge ski and holiday complex on these low-lying beautiful mountains. Never mind the lack of snow, there are Euros aplenty, they hope. But the Germans had heard of the student campaign and seem to have had some influence in favour of a rethink. Give these gifted graduates responsibility without the debilitating distortion of “connections”. Scandals are good when you can change something. Forgive me for trotting out a favourite theme. Justice is fundamental to well-being. We are built with a keen sense for it. The prophet Micah poses a question with a succinct and profound answer; “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
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10 June 2009 – Plums and vultures
 With a friend coming from the UK it was an excuse to head into our nearest and favourite mountains in West Serbia hanging above the Drina. Returning to that timbered ridge of little farms and their bird-filled orchards under Medvednik mountain we found Dragutin and Božana still there,Dragutin shouting whilst he collected cherries and looked at his bees, Božana smiling quietly and providing us with excellent sarma (spicy mince wrapped in leaves of sour cabbage). Having both been widowed we noticed that Božana's grave stone was already firmly in place beside Dragutin's and his first wife, only the end date for earthy repose left to speculation.
 We had a long walk over Medvednik, across the Ljubadjija river and up onto the shoulder of Bobija to our much loved haunt at Tardić Brdo overlooking distant blue waves of Bosnian mountains. Nebojša, our host, knows well that we can look after ourselves and are happy with bare necessities leaving him free to take his hounds off into the beech forest to hunt for wild pig. My favourite spot is the paved terrace almost in the orchard that drops down the slope before the house. Here my friends the Sombre tits were at large again, and the Black redstart and a constant traffic of small birds. A wryneck cried down in the timbered valley, but no sign this year of the Black woodpeckers that come down to the meadows to feed on ants.
 Our walk into the Trešnjička gorge ran into a “vulture episode”. There is a good population of these “White-headed eagles”, as the locals call them, or Griffon vultures to ornithologists, where they managed to survive almost complete extermination in the Balkans due to wolf poisoning. This day we spotted a good “where-the-vultures-gather-there-is-the-body” moment. Some 30 birds had descended on a pig carcase discarded beside the track. This is where recycling works well; there was nothing much left. Pity no-one has found something that can digest plastic bottles, the ubiquitous audit trail of Balkan life.
 We had got so used to vultures soaring and circling that I think I overlooked a pair of Golden eagles coming into their eyrie. A bird soaring below me in the gorge came and landed on a ledge just tantalizingly out of sight; then its mate joined it. At this point I realized that they were the eagles I should have been watching for. The old very visible eyrie in a cleft in the rock face appeared to have been abandoned. But we did see a Black stork as a bonus, and met a pair of Aesculapian snakes, who were charmed from their rocky hole when stroked with a twig.
The mountain life is hard work and provides little cash. There is also an unremitting loneliness amongst old people whose children and grandchildren have fled the land for Belgrade and other cities. It was wonderful to meet one of these old ones who had not heard of England. “Belgrade I have heard of, but this Engleska I don't know!” When great cities sink beneath the flood her orchard will still be full of plums.
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7 June 2009 – The mulberry's intoxicating fruit
 Seasons wait for no man, which is the way it should be. If we all lived in a village and depended more on its fertile and not so fertile acres around us, we would have a proper sense of treating the land justly. Can I say that? If we don't treat the land sustainably we do our children an injustice and we do our fellow creatures an injustice. Almost certainly we also impoverish ourselves or someone else in our stead. Our pair of huge mulberry trees are now dropping their sweet and intoxicating fruit. Pollarded mulberries line the oldest street in the village, a shadowed haven for children on the way home from school to pick the ripe fat fruit. They once supported a whole industry of silk production but now they provide poles for growing beans and fermenting fruit for distilling rakija. A quick visit next door to Magda and Ferenc and we are in production. Some broad plastic sheets, a wooden ladder and a long pole with a hook on the end. Now we have a daily ritual of laying out the sheets, climbing the ladders and shaking the branches so that they rain down fat mulberries. Magda has a large vat of fermenting fruit, and we look forward to the moment when the still is fired up and the rakija is distilled off. That I hope will give her lots of bottles of dudavica (no idea what it is in Hungarian) which she can sell for 10 Euros a bottle in the market.
 Now the cherries are ripe. Another neighbour came in to borrow the aluminium ladder. The market is full of piled boxes of shining red sour višnije or the sweeter trešnije. But we have our own cherry trees in the orchard and we are soon bottling some, heated over a fire in the garden, and stirring up the rest to make excellent cherry jam. All cooking like this is done out of doors keeping the heat out of the house and using prunings from the orchard. Nothing wasted!
A horse and cart arrived next door. Soon a hoe was hitched up and the dark bay was being driven carefully up each row hoeing between the maize. This is the weeding season. It is not surprising that  people are out at 5 in the morning while it is still cool. But for some the heat of the day must be endured. Far out in the fields people can be found hoeing by hand or hoeing with horses. It is also hay making. Djordje was out scything his patch of oats for Sonja and Beba, his Lipizaners. Another was cutting his lucerne with a pair of stallions pulling an ancient mechanical grass cutter. The son-in-law worked the horses and the wiry granddad recited English nursery rhymes from some distant provenance of Tito era schooling; “Eeni meeni miney mo, catcha niga bi te toe!”
 It is striking that people like this look almost embarrassed when you want to look at their ancient agricultural equipment. I may have misread them. One friend was told by his father that he shouldn't ride a bicycle since he had a car; only the poor ride bikes! The farmers who are doing well manage to acquire a small tractor; we won't dwell on the huge modern machines that are working on large privatised holdings, often thought to be good money laundering  opportunities. The horse-powered part of the village is a thriving but slowly dwindling minority as the sons and grandsons abandon the vocation of working with animals. These skilled farmers may think of themselves as backward; but they are actually ahead. If we think seriously about the unavoidable transition to lower oil-use there must be a retreat from suburbia in the West. These skills and the ingrained knowledge of seasonal cycles are data banks to be preserved. Don't delete but back up well!
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6 June 2009 – The lime and the Law
 Now is the season. Spring shows little courtesy after a severe winter and just hastens north leaving the Balkans to an endless summer. The spring flowers fade and everything is rushing to live out brief seasons of glory before the heavy shroud of heat smothers the land with exhausting heaviness. The flowering of the lime trees is one of those early summer seasons that fills the village streets with intoxicating sweet scent. Those pale yellow panicles heavy with nectar drop their scent in waves as you ride your bike in their shade. Stand still for a moment and the whole canopy is murmuring with the frantic gathering of pollen by thousands of honey bees. In the Fruška Gora right now I know that there will be whole colourful trailer loads of blue yellow and red painted hives parked out in the shade of the lime forest that extends for 70 km. A rich harvest, though sadly it seems, none of it gets into UK shops with a Serbian brand label. It really deserves it; research needed.
 But something rather strange happened this year. The lime over our garden wall was suddenly covered with Painted Lady butterflies. I have never seen so many. They fed on the nectar for a few days and then passed on. They breed in N Africa (and elsewhere?) and have migrated all this way heading for who knows where. We share our flower garden with many wild friends. Large speckled fritillaries always cause excitement, and now as June heats up, the misty wild abundance of little blue larkspur attracts the hummingbird hawk moth stunningly able to dart forwards and backwards with lighting speed.
The sparrow children are very demanding. Both house and tree sparrow parents are hard at work foraging in the flower beds with constant chattering. The Black redstart is back on the roof singing and grating from first light, and always there is the entertainment of swallows and house-martins. Their alarm calls and flocking instinct make me look up. Flying round and round in agitation they are telling us that a hobby has appeared, or more usually one of our sparrow hawks. No peace for the greedy meat-eaters who make a living off the backs of ordinary taxpayers!
 I am always struck that in the Mosaic law there is provision both for the poor and the wild animals. When you harvest you are told not to be greedy but to leave something for the poor, whether it is gleanings or the field edges. And when the land is given a Sabbath rest, allow the wild birds and animals to help themselves. Why on earth would you do that, you might ask, in a market economy where those margins might be your profit. This is just an example of where even a native sense of justice tells you that those who are lucky to have something should share it with those who are in need. Community has evolved like that whether or not you wish to underpin it with a moral or spiritual framework. And what is obvious to conservationists is that wild life, all that non-human-animal part of the vast and wonderful creation, is valuable in its own right. The complex patterns that bring us a feast of gilded butterflies and the shrill chatter of the sparrows are fellow creatures to be respected.
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