My koubaros, Philip Parginos, sends me this photograph to remind me that spring has already arrived in the mountains of Corfu. The implicit question, of course, is why am I here, chipping ice from my little patch of Toronto’s sooty tundra when I could be there, watching plants grow in the sunshine. Meanwhile, I read that voting has begun in the Veneto to find out whether the local population favours secession from Italy and the return of an independent Venetian Republic. Corfu was part of that Republic for 400 years, until the coming of the Corsican monster. Is it time to put the pieces back together?