I'm genuinely sorry that my ancestors had anything to do with slavery!

26 November 2006
Sunday

Tony Blair has stopped short of apologising for Britain’s role in the slave trade. I believe that the United States has also failed to apologise.

It seems to me that this is all nonsense. Why not apologise? What would be the implication? If the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom says he’s sorry – and, indeed, he says he’s sorry on behalf of the nation – that Britons sanctioned, participated in and profited from the slave trade – there’s nothing wrong with that. It seems to me it’s the right thing to do. There’s something of an irony in the fact there’s a controversy in one action that’s moral and healing in the tawdry history of an unprecedented crime against humanity.

Personally, I’m sorry that so much of the history of the United Sates is built on the blood of unknown and unrecognised men and women held as slaves. The whole concept, if you stop and think about it even for a moment, is so revolting and unimaginable, that you cannot conceive of any reasonable objection to a national and personal apology for it.

Consider: If your grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes, survived a hellish voyage in chains across the ocean and sold into involuntary servitude, would that not be sufficient crime against your ancestors for you to ask for an apology from the inheritors of the culture that committed that heinous crime? And it was even worse, you not only had to survive, you frequently had to survive completely alone, with strangers, fellow-slaves, who did not speak your language and worshipped different gods. Then, having survived these challenges, having been renamed, forced to worship the white man’s god and forced to labour at the whim and sole direction of the ‘master’, imagine the hopeless sense that there was no alternative to this existence, neither for you nor for your descendants (frequently products of a pairing in which you had no choice). It sure doesn’t seem to me that both personal and national apologies are out of order!

The argument may be about where you stop. Are the descendants of the victims entitled to reparations? Should money be given to the societies from which these people were taken? Well, probably not; I think our economies – made up of both former slaves and former ‘masters’ – would be stretched too far to pay for it. What we can do is ensure that we have created a fair and just society for the descendants of those people who suffered this enormous crime.

Bush in New Delhi

Bush is probably wrong on this one. Do we really need to put geopolitics before nuclear non-proliferation? Are we building an alliance against the Chinese for the next 50 years? Why not build an alliance with the Chinese and use that to dominate the entire globe? The US would dominate Latin America, China would dominate Asia. Africa may not count for much for another century -- blame Europe! Meantime, Europe sits in the middle, prosperous but ineffective. India becomes an industrious non-entity.

India is prickly. Their reaction to many international issues is always reminiscent of some sort of national inferiority complex; reminds me a bit of the instinctive anti-Americanism of the Filipinos. For the subcontinent, of course, it's born of 200 years of domination by the British rather than centuries under the Spanish followed by five decades under the Almighty Dollar (the case of the Philippines).

So, by the terms of this new agreement, the international non-proliferation treaty is gutted but India opens up two-thirds of its reactors for inspection by the IAEA, imports US nuclear fuels, freeing up more of its own production to be diverted to mulitply its nuclear weapons production. This makes US conservatives happy because India's weapons then balance China's.

It gets ever more complicated. I don't want another nuclear power but India already is. So, this will just make them stronger? Does that make China relatively weaker? Do I worry more about China or India?

Charity the Wal-Mart Way!

Well, it’s a step in the right direction! Wal-Mart, the developed world’s most egregious profiteer whose senior executives are not either indicted, on trial or in jail, has announced that it will make some health insurance available to the 50% of their employees who are not currently eligible (that’s right, half of their work-force, around 650,000 people are currently out in the cold!). Of course, you’ve got to wonder how the workers are going to pay for this benefit with average wages under $20,000 per year.

This is not going to get me into Wal-Mart. I still go to Costco! Their average wage is 70% higher than Wal-Mart’s and their Chief Executive actually has a pay packet that bears scrutiny. You can look at what Costco’s top guys are paid without getting a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.

How does the senior executive corps at Wal-Mart manage to sleep? I’m not sure what innovations they’ve introduced that really make our lives better. Bill Gates’ wealth doesn’t bother me, he’s driven innovation and productivity and his charitable impulses are admirable. Wal-Mart? Well, let’s see, they’ve destroyed communities, nearly bankrupted some of their suppliers, exploit their workers and build giant, ugly boxes around the country to which people drive miles and miles, persuaded to do so only by what I can characterize as a mass psychosis and an ephemeral hope of savings. And, by the way, I do wonder how much additional oil we use every year in this country just to get to Wal-Mart for those savings? I bet it’s significant!

Shooting at the Arab company that bought the UK company that has a port operation contract and has, so far, not, itself, shot anyone at the ranch!

Bush was wrong when he ignored the secret court set up to authorise eavesdropping in the interest of national security. If the court was too slow, he should have asked for the court to be given either greater authority or more resources.

On the other hand, Bush was/is right to defend the granting of port operation contracts to a company owned by the Government of the UAE. If they won and they were fully vetted by various US Government bodies, they deserve to have the contract.

Those politicians who are trying to capitalise on this issue are wrong and self-serving. Only John McCain has shown any character on this matter -- he has, at least, said that we ought to give the process the benefit of the doubt.

I am not against a review of the process but any arbitrary cancellation will reflect badly on us as a nation of laws.

Actually, I'm convinced that all of this brouhaha over the port contract was concocted by Cheney's staff to distract attention from his culpability over the shooting of a lawyer during a hunting weekend at the Armstrong Ranch in Texas. Too bad, this, because Cheney demonstrated how dangerous guns are. He should lose his license but, wait, I forgot, there are no licenses for gun operation in the US. Any idiot, Dick Cheney included, is allowed to tote around a weapon that could end human life. That's reasonable, isn't it?

First Blizzard - Thanksgiving 2005

Geese wheeled and circled and ducks rose off the pond near our house in Santa Fe on the morning that the snow lay thick in the early sun this past week. We were the first people to walk out that day, alongside the fairways. The only life that preceded us had left tracks across the path: coyotes, bunnies, hares and others we didn’t recognize.

A day later we left in early afternoon and drove across Northeastern New Mexico and across the pass into Trinidad. We slept that night in Colorado Springs and the next morning awoke to news of a blizzard screaming across the northern plains, cutting our normal route back to Kansas City.

We considered and chose a southern route, roughly tracking the original Santa Fe Trail for part of the way. We passed near Bent’s Fort, historic trading post. Along the way there were high winds and swirling, light snows. Garden City was bleak and cold. Dodge City seemed lonely and barren. The small towns between there and Wichita were all unremarkable.

We drank hot chocolate and ate baked apple pies at McDonald’s. I would have preferred an espresso and a panini but there was no choice.

The wind continued to blow. The southern route we took was longer and slower than the northern freeway we normally drove but it was drier – a relative term – and open. It was almost 12 hours from Colorado Springs to Kansas City and the whole trip, over the two days, covered a thousand miles.

Thanksgiving -- Making Yourself

How does someone become what they are? How do you measure if a person has made the most of the combination of circumstance and natural gifts that they have been given?

Blue eyed, angular and taciturn, my father’s first cousin was a life-long farmer. He only left the little town in northwest Missouri where he was born, grew up and made his life when he went off to World War II. He put on the uniform, played his role dutifully – he was a battlefield MP – he fell in love, with a French girl who wouldn’t come home to a farm in the rural Midwest. When he got home, he put his uniform in the attic and took up farming.

He never married. It wasn’t that there weren’t other women; there were; there were stories told. I never figured out why he didn’t just settle with one but he didn’t.

Once a family Bible salesman came up to the door and wanted to sell him one of those huge, illustrated Bibles with room in the front to track the family through the generations. The farmer, dry and sinewy, looked at the salesman and asked why he would need a Bible like that. The answer was in the form of a question, ‘Don’t you have any children?’ Clearly the assumption was that he did and surely he’d want to leave it to them.

The farmer looked directly into the eyes of the salesman, ‘I'm not sure!', he answered.

The salesman quietly picked up his wares and made his way out to his car and drove off.

That farmer's name was John D. I don’t think the ‘D’ stood for anything, at least no one ever told me if it did. He had beautiful, clear, intelligent eyes. Maybe he could have been a lawyer or a statesman or a professor of philosophy. Circumstance made him into a farmer. I think he wasn’t much more than mediocre at that but he did take care of his Dad and people thought well of him. He died without enemies. I was with him only a little while, perhaps three or four visits, during my youth. I liked him, he seemed good and gentle and decent, wholly admirable. I admire him still, now many years dead.

Full Circle -- completing the circuit

I tracked down one of my cousins yesterday. We’re not what you’d call a close family. The last time I saw him was about 20 years ago. Apart from being related, we still don’t have much in common. For a brief time I lived in the town he’s called home for about 30 or 40 years.

I didn’t have his telephone number but I googled him and up popped his name, and those of his two boys, as owners of a race track! This was remarkable. Even in college my cousin loved fast cars. I remember that he owned a Jaguar XKE in the 1960s, probably one of the first in that part of the Midwest. He was a handsome, curly headed college guy with a fast car; very cool, especially to a kid of about 12 or 13.

When for that brief space of a few months we lived in the same town, he spent his weekends driving a race car, it was a Corvette I think with a huge engine, maybe 500 horsepower. I remember that he let me steer it into the pit after a race I attended (confusing affair, the cars sped around the track without any apparent objective except to finish without mishap and ahead of the others, only thing being they didn’t really go anywhere). You had to climb in through the window (which had no glass) and the seat was pretty much bolted to the floor and there was no radio. Anyway, I think it was very kind of him to let me steer it into the pit (did I mention the engine was not running?).

In those days he worked for an agricultural chemicals company. I am so pleased that he figured out how to make a living begin around what he loves: race tracks, fast cars and so on. And, he’s doing it with both of his sons. That’s pretty cool, that’s success. I’m happy for him.

My father-in-law nearly marries a rich woman ….

My father-in-law tells a sad story. As a young man in Taiwan his family were poor. His prospects were not good; he was not a student. He was, though, strong, hard-working, virile. As a teenager he had served in a support role for the Imperial Japanese Navy. The loss of those precious years in futile support of an aggressive military that held him in institutional disrespect simply because he was Chinese and a resident of an island held in colonial thrall, removed any opportunity of further education and fixed his future path: his strong back was going to be the foundation of his life.

But there was, possibly, an alternative future for my father-in-law in those tumultuous years. World War II may have ended but the Chinese Civil War rumbled on until the end of the 1940’s when the remnants of Chiang Kai Shek’s legions fled the mainland with their treasures. The choice that was offered my father-in-law was one sometimes available to poor families with too many sons; one might have to be ‘married out’. In Taiwan in those days, and even recently, wealthy families with a single girl child might arrange a marriage for a daughter (mostly those less attractive) with a presentable but ‘economically challenged’ young man who would agree to marry the daughter and take on her family name, thus ensuring that property stayed in the name of the girl’s family. It served the purposes of the wife’s family but for the young man it meant a loss of face; it was a humiliation.

Pride was more important to him than riches so my father-in-law ran away from home. He left without a single penny, took a train to Taipei and wandered the streets for three days, without a place to sleep, with no food, only water.

By the end of the third day, his pride was no longer the most important ingredient in his character: remorse, loneliness and, especially, hunger had moved to the front of the line. My father-in-law decided to return to the south of the island and face the music. Sadly, the southern train run was not as loosely policed as the northern and the father of my wife was apprehended and taken to the railway police office before the train ever left Taipei station. This time, however, luck, even just a little bit, favored him. The duty officer took a look at him and asked, kindly, if he was hungry. In answer, my father-in-law could only nod. He wolfed down the bowl of cheap noodles that the duty officer ordered one of him men to bring. Afterwards, he led him to the next train south and put him on it; even ticketless, which he remained, he was now certain to get back home without more incident; it was clear to everyone that my father-in-law was traveling under the protection of the duty officer of the railway police and no one would dare interfere with his will!

By the time he did get back home, tempers had abated and my future father-in-law was welcomed home, given more food and no more was ever said about him ‘marrying out’. I think it worked out – I ended up with the woman I love but for him, for my father-in-law, I’ve never been sure whether any marriage at all suited him. Perhaps he should have stayed on the train, riding up and down, across the island from North to South.

Besford Court - Worcestershire, England 

Back to school ...

Kansas City, 8 September 2005

It was parents’ night at our daughter’s school. Pembroke is a private school. It is not religious, just selective and focused on providing a strong education. Her teachers impressed us, they are enthusiastic and dedicated. Equally impressive, though, were the parents – mostly not divorced and all concerned and serious about the education their children receive. There is more: there is a quiet conspiracy amongst the parents. This conspiracy is unspoken and it is naturally occurring – we are all dedicated to spying on our offspring. We know that they are growing up in a world so different from our own that the two are mutually exclusive; what we experienced is as different from what they could experience as what we went through in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was different from what our ancestors went through a hundred years before that. Time has so accelerated that the only way we can manage what is happening or what could happen to our children is by simply spying on them.

The espionage we practice is benevolent in intent. We aim to know enough about the lives of our children that we can help them navigate through waters rougher, deeper and more unpredictable than we could have imagined.

There is some diversity at Pembroke – there are a few Jews, some blacks, scattered Asians – but mostly it is white and very mid-Western. I don’t think that’s wrong, however, I admire the self-conscious attempt at diversity and the inbred civility of these people here. The values that my Eurasian daughter will absorb in this place are good.

So, Alex, very much a fourteen year-old – with everything that implies – is now a high school student in this most mid-Western of places. After schooling in Hong Kong, in Manila, in Singapore, in Spain, in England and in Arizona, she has lit here (her father has been blown from place to place like that feather in ‘Forrest Gump’). Again, I think this is good.

Summer -- Swan Song

Kansas City, 5 September 2005

It’s fading, summer is slowly moving on. The mornings are brighter, cool. We walked around Loose Park this evening, two laps, the second in the dark, the paths lit by the old fashioned lights and a sliver of a crescent moon.

It’s Labor Day. My daughter and a bunch of friends cadged rides from a couple of parents to Worlds of Fun. There were boys in the group. My wife and I picked four of the girls up and dropped them off at their homes afterwards. The park closed at 6 PM today. It was not full.

Sudden floods in the Huachucas ...

4 September 2005

In those days the Huachuca’s and some of the other mountains along the border, both sides of it actually, were still sprinkled with a few characters from earlier, freer times.

Most of those folks were independent minded and most of them were eccentric; we’d probably call them weird today. In those simpler times we didn’t even really notice the eccentricity, at least not my family. You see, Dad was one of those old-fashioned mining engineers, the type who scratched at the rocks, wherever they were, always looking for that vein, the high grade one. Those others, the loners and losers who picked around the lonely desert and mountains were members of the fraternity, maybe not educated as engineers or geologists, but co-owners of the dream. Some of my earliest memories are of Sunday morning visits by old men, every one with a story, driving battered pick-ups, inevitably with sample boxes rattling around their rusty beds. Dad and his visitors would poke around among the rocks, Dad occasionally stopping and pulling out his pocket lens to look more closely at bits that glinted, that might be a clue of what they all looked for, Dad and his brother searchers.

But up there in the Huachucas it was Mrs. Meeker, widow of an old rock-dog. She lived among a settlement of abandoned buildings, atop abandoned underground workings. Dad got to know her, did a bit of poking around down there, under the dirt, in dark and, to me, scary old tunnels of rock with rotted timbering. Sometimes I went up there with him but I don’t recall ever climbing down the ladder into the darkness.

One evening we were up there into the late afternoon when the thunderclouds popped up, white, towering cumulonimbus clouds, heavy and full of water that then emptied themselves across the mountain slopes and then moved on.

The water accumulated and rushed down the creeks, too narrow for the load, and cut the roads.

We parked on the edge. Dad watched it for a while and then first tested whether our old Plymouth station wagon could make it across by wading it. I was scared but he did it, the water raced along but it only rose to his knees. When Dad got back to the side where we had the car parked, he got in, put it in gear and we inched safely across and then drove down the mountain and home. Dad always said the best way to drive through flooded streets was slowly so as not to flood the engine.

I can’t remember ever seeing Mrs. Meeker again. I guess that Dad’s way of driving is out of date now; certainly you wouldn’t be able to get through the streets of New Orleans these days driving slowly so as not to flood the engine. Lots of things are changed, I think that you might have been able to drive through New Orleans in a flood slowly and carefully in those long ago days when the city was smaller and richer and the waters didn’t rise as high nor stay as long. I miss those days, wish we could bring them back …

Is New Orleans Manila?

31 August 2005
Kansas City

So, a tornado, about 100 miles wide, blew into the Gulf Coast. It didn’t just damage, hurt New Orleans, though, it moved it, much farther than you’d think. I’ve been watching the coverage of this enormous tragedy and I’m convinced that New Orleans has been blown to the Philippines and has replaced Manila. It’s the worst of that city on the bay, guarded by Corregidor. There are places in Manila where the people scratch a miserable life above stagnant water, their lives foreshortened by disease and poverty, byproducts of human hubris, the decision, perhaps borne of necessity, to form the clay of their lives in a place that was never meant to host our biped race. Now, the pictures of the sad remnant of the Big Easy’s population, wandering dazedly in filthy, knee- or chest-high water towards I-10 and the Super Dome, make my chest hurt; they are so reminiscent of the misery I’ve witnessed in Manila that I feel I’m a decade younger and, yet, a hundred years older while I watch and empathize.

New Orleans existed, oblivious of the arrogance of lives lived in the shadows of the levees and it danced to the music of Bourbon Street, cheered on by the rich, by the oil companies, by the notion that we had tamed nature. But, we haven’t done that; nature is still our master. Will this city come back? Will we know and sooner than we may want to know.

I am amazed by what I’ve seen; is this still my wonderful, generous, developed country, the source of succor and comfort for the world? Who will care for the care-giver?

Weather/Whether

25 August 2005
en route: Kansas City to Los Angeles

Another flight, half-way across the continent, a little bumpiness as we rose through the morning rains across eastern Kansas and, now, smoother air as we glide through clear skies across the Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rockies.

Just a few days ago we drove back to Kansas City after a week’s holiday in Santa Fe. Over two days we climbed up past Taos on US 64, across the alpine valley at the foot of Angel Fire and down through Cimarron to Raton. We turned north, following the railway pass between Trinidad and Raton. In the former we gassed up and I chatted with a couple of older ladies at the Welcome Center. I had heard Trinidad’s winter weather described as bitterly cold but was informed that was wrong – there were days when the temperature did hit zero (Fahrenheit) but it wasn’t that cold, not like, say, Leadville where one of them had grown up. Summers had been tough in recent years; there were several days when the mercury passed 100. Leadville, on the other hand, was terrific in summer; only rarely was it as hot as 80.

We slept at Colorado Springs where the air was as clear as I can ever recall. The evening was bright and bracing and my blood ran faster. The next morning we rose feeling strong and hungry.

Why does weather so fascinate me? It’s been something that I’ve followed as avidly as some people do a sports team. On my home page I first look at the weather for key locations: Kansas City, Santa Fe, Worcester (England) and more exotic locales (Antantarivo, General Santos, Istanbul, Dacca). My real search has always been for places away from heat. I grew up in Sonora where the summers were dreadful and not much better when we moved to Arizona. I know, it’s a dry heat but at 110 degrees, it doesn’t much matter, it’s simply hot!

Later I suffered through humid, dreadful summers in Florida and sweated it out on the North Carolina coast. I was a Fulbright scholar in India and bore up under scorching hot seasons and worse monsoons (when the rain passed, the heat was some of the most oppressive I’ve ever experienced).

I recall, as a Boy Scout, the incredible feeling of cool air on summer camp outs in the Arizona Mountains. I remember traveling up into the Chiracahua Mountains one Easter, leaving the warmth of the Sulphur Springs Valley below to climb up into the meadows of Barfoot Park at about 8000 feet where paper thin ice lay over the slow trickle of water from an alpine spring, even covering the furry leaves of the rabbit tobacco and the smoother ones of the bitter skunk cabbage. We were alone up there that morning – I cooked eggs and bacon on a limp gas fire, the eggs ran and the bacon was, I’m being kind, ‘rare’. I can still feel the cold, crisp air of that morning.

So, I check the weather of places where there is relief from heat; mostly they are high, perched over the baking lowlands: Taif in the western mountains of Saudi Arabia, Navada Cerrada above Madrid in mid-summer, the central highlands of Madagascar, Mount Lemmon above Tucson and anywhere in the Italian or Swiss Alps while Milan bakes from mid July to late August.

Even where the escape is not by climbing but towards the sea, I am fascinated. The Freemantle Doctor mesmerized me, the wind reversing each afternoon, dropping its heat over the waves of the Indian Ocean and making Perth afternoons bearable, and there is a drop of as much as 30 degrees or more on many summer days between the Valley and thin coast littoral at Redondo Beach.

Weather is another way to travel. I escaped the Gangetic Plain some 30 years ago by climbing up to Rani Khet, rimmed by the Himalayas. We stayed at the Westview Hotel where the Manager typed up the menu each morning (we were the only guests) and where we sipped at our bed tea while we waited for the wood fired boiler to heat the water for our morning baths. Another summer I tasted forbidden love at a cabin on a golf course just outside Simla. I reveled in the slight cooling that January brings to Manila and Bangladesh. Another time, again in the Philippines, Baguio provided surcease from the broiling lowlands: damp, heavy air and the deeper green of the rain-belt mountains. We drove through the shuttered remnants of Camp John Hay, weird relics of the American presence where the sailors and airmen of Subic and Clark (and their dependents) would recreate a semblance of an Appalachian or Rocky Mountain holiday.

My love and I stayed on the slopes of Ali Shan in central Taiwan and there we watched the ‘qi’ rise from below where it hid the lower world. We rose at dawn and went with other tourists to the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise. The next day we crossed a high pass (Hohuan Shan), bought peaches at a roadside stand in one high valley and slept above Taichung at Kukuan next to a cold stream in a hotel where the hot water was piped directly from the volcanic spring. As strong as these mystical memories is that of me showing off and losing my glasses in the river when I tried to fling an apple core across the water and, later, on the bus into town when she bought dried squid and had to jump off at the first stop to visit the nearest facility, a whiffy spot that I think I can still smell. That night, glasses restored, we rode back up, fetched the car and drove back to Taichung where we amused ourselves at a hotel where our room featured a round bed and a mirror on the ceiling.

We are the United State of America, aren't we?

It can't be the United States of Petroleum Interests, can it? Is this what I want to be associated with? Is this what I want the land of my fathers to be?

What's happened to compassion, a sense of service, sharing?

We will rebuild this country and the values that matter but I guess we're going to have to do it -- as my partner says -- a block at a time! How sad!

Kansas City is a bit of light in this dark room. A tradition of giving and a sense of public spaces and their value!

24 May 2005, on a plane from Albuquerque to Los Angeles

Not a perfect world, but a better one …

In the better world, belief would be honored but not sacrosanct. Religion would be seen for the good that it does, the positive values it imparts and the discipline it teaches, the paths that it opens for people to live out constructive, contributive lives. Religion would be respected but not sacrosanct because of the emotional element it introduces into all consideration of the human condition. In the better world we would recognize particularly that the faiths born in the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all promote a level of emotionalism that is frequently irrational and often dangerous. Intolerance and ignorance mixed with injustice perceived (or suffered) can make people fly airplanes into buildings. It can make people immolate themselves in religious communes in Waco, Texas and it stops dialogue and honest inquiry. In some faiths the religious canon is open ended and can, therefore, change and adapt to different times, places and cultures. It’s difficult to think how a considered position on a contemporary issue can be derived from a closed canon that is a thousand or more years old. We can’t necessarily rely on ancient emotional diatribes to determine how we ought to run our governments, whether we ought to emancipate our women or what we ought to teach our children about how the universe was made and how we got here. Too often canons are dissected to serve emotion but, equally, apologists often strain to contextualize passages that are, in fact, nothing but antediluvian intolerance. Religious values that support the better world should be honored and there is nothing wrong with them but those that work against it ought to be shunned. Religion in the better world is personal and familial, it is not social – don’t be ashamed of it but don’t push it, be humble and diligent and focused and, if they want, they will come. Don’t support the broadcast rantings of a con man who is taking up valuable air time that could be better used by letting us follow the progress of our favorite baseball team or a rebroadcast of ‘The Wizard of Oz’.

You know, it’s interesting that I cannot recall ever having read of a war declared in the name of Buddha and certainly ‘Aristotle’ has not been a rallying cry for warriors going into battle. Even the memory of Socrates’ death stirs not the emotions but regret in the face of intolerance and a determination to work for a better world where honest, penetrating inquiry about all aspects of the human condition is not only accepted, it is encouraged. Debate must be honest, respectful and positive.

But a better world does not mean that we do not recognize that certain affirming values are superior. If we don’t do that, we end up wearing Birkenstocks, unwashed and marginalized. I’ve seen that and, no thanks, no more! Equally, I’m not going to honor the person who eats all processed food, feeds their children Coca Cola, spends Sunday waving their arms and speaking in tongues, believes, without rational thought, that the Government is a left-wing conspiracy and, in ten years, hasn’t read a book whose cover didn’t feature a ripped bodice. I believe in the great middle, somewhere therein lies the basis of the better world.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 22 May 2005

Sunday evening. It’s 8:30 PM, daylight savings time. There are grayish clouds, nearly stationary, against a pale blue evening sky. If the sky clears later, there will be a full moon visible. The high desert is quiet. A jackrabbit scurries and hops down a dirt track just below the northern portal of our house. The swallows have turned quiet and bedded down somewhere, they have given up protesting at our presence on the portal where they’ve built a daub nest between a log beam support and the roof.

I’m sipping at a California Cabernet. It’s full taste is somehow right at this hour.

There are still the remnants of winter on the peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. This year we had more snow than in the memory of many young skiers. Just six weeks ago we climbed partway up the mountain and drank dark German beer next to a fire in a bar patronized, apart from ourselves, exclusively by skiers.

This morning we parked near the Plaza and bought heavy, rich almond croissants from a bakery run by French renegades. We carried them – and coffees – to the park near the cathedral and sat on benches, in the shade, cooled by the green grass that grows so richly there.

A few days ago I heard from a former boss who was at some port in the Caribbean where he had sailed. He and his wife were having a wine at day’s end. His e-mail ended with the phrase, ‘life is good’.

It's nearly full dark now, there's only a receding splash of light to the West.

Outrageous!

28 April 2005
Tucson

How do some people sleep? Jack Nasser – who did a mediocre job of running Ford – and some cohorts have, apparently, ‘earned’ ten of millions of dollars in fees as Polaroid emerges from bankruptcy and is sold to a company in Minneapolis. Some 6000 retirees of the company who lost health benefits and their company retirement benefits each received $47.00. That’s right, $47.00. Let me write it out: forty-seven dollars.

What is going on here? What sort of a country do we live in when this kind of injustice is permitted? I saw an interview with one of the Polaroid retirees the other day, a gentleman of about 70. He was an electrical engineer. He retired with about $250,000 of his savings in Polaroid shares. His plan had been to play golf and, as he put it, have some fun. The value of the shares after the bankruptcy was nearly nothing.

He goes to the golf course every day now but, not to play; he has a job there, driving a mower. I hope that the golf course provides its employees health insurance but I doubt it!

10 April 2005 ...Haiku?

I.
There at the cove end,
Dreams rise, drift on smoke
A man sits idly

II.
Rusted, latched door
Corrugated metal wall
Grass grows on the stoop

III.
Air moves, leaf stirs
Thinly blossomed, buds break
Winter walks away.

In some woods near Lake of the Ozarks, I saw this nondescript corrugated metal building without a sign to indicate what it was for. On one end there was a door, infrequently used from the rust and grass that grew around it. A log lay just opposite the doorway. It was the sort of place that I'd have gone for a break to smoke, when I was a young man. I'd have sat there and puffed and reflected.

When I saw that door to that unmarked building today, it stirred the memory in me of working mornings in the south when my break would be a reflective smoke somewhere in a quiet piece of shade. I don't smoke any more and sometimes I wonder if I also don't do less of those other two things, sitting and thinking.

The memory gave birth to these three connected Haikus. Of course, I had to call my 14 year-old a couple of times with help on syllables and lines. She becomes a sort of co-author but is not responsible (and had better never even think about this sort of crutch for sitting and reflecting).

10 April 2005 Sunday, Lake of the Ozarks

I’ve been reading this weird novel called ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami. Post modernist, I guess. Strangely imagined. He’s in such a hurry to spill it out that there are lapses. One of the reviews said that he takes risks. I think so. I also think his translator doesn’t quite do him justice but, then, what do I know? I can’t read the original. For me, I can only imagine what that’s about; maybe the original and the book I’m reading have no connection whatsoever? I once heard ‘translation’ described as ‘transcreation’ -- apt.

The book is about a lost character, a hack writer who shovels ‘cultural snow’, writes restaurant reviews; anything, really, that he can get. Wanders around, searching for a lost lover, meets a grade school buddy who has become a movie star and may, or may not, have murdered his lost lover. Falls in love with a hotel receptionist who has stumbled into his parallel world where a being dressed in a sheepskin head costume lives in a tawdry room at the end of a pitch black corridor and waits for our hero to drop in and have strange, Delphic conversations. Meantime, the hack writer meets a 13 year old girl, just moving onto the edges of womanhood, who has a sort of second sight, a huge amount of resentment towards the world and a fragile ego. They become friends, sharing a love of music and a need for companionship. It goes on. Like selecting the ‘visualizer’ for your computer’s music player, you get a set of images you can’t understand, that aren’t of anything but that draw you into them. I’m truly enjoying the contrast between the lapping waters of the morning lake, the rising sun, the heron that I startled when I first stepped onto the balcony, the squirrels bobbing up and down the oaks and this urban novel about a world where it is now evening. Did I mention that there’s also a minor character, a one-armed Vietnam veteran, fluent Japanese, writes poetry and is killed by a bus when he steps onto a road after going grocery shopping and looks the wrong way? Right book for this place, don’t know why.

And, now, I’ve finished it. Time to go for a walk – the morning sun is bright and the air is clear, later they say there is a chance of thunderstorms.

30 March 2005

I’m thinking back about 20 or 25 years now. Thailand.

This is not an anecdote about bar girls or the war. I was first there in Bangkok in the 1970’s, passing through on Pan Am 1 or 2 (whichever one it was that ran West from San Francisco and, so, actually ran from East to West, weird that!). The driver of the taxi-van into town bought some jasmine flowers from a kid at an intersection and gave them to the girl I was with. It was very late, Pan Am had a schedule that must have taken some time to develop. They managed to land at ungodly hours everywhere between Europe and Hong Kong. In a strange way I actually liked this: first meeting a new city at dawn. It’s always been a bit of a mess, Bangkok, but it makes progress and it’s people remain mostly graceful and tolerant, even through those sweaty nights and amidst those rank canals and polluted air and over-crowded streets,

Years later I was trying to manage a project to provide a flare for a distillery about 100 kilometers outside of Bangkok. I say I was ‘trying’ to manage it because I really didn’t have much of an idea about what we were really trying to do. You see, I’d never actually built what the customer wanted. In fact, I’d never really built anything. I was a Duke graduate with a degree in history, some foreign language fluency and a facility for bullshit. I was particularly adept at the latter because I had the capacity to believe my own bullshit. Years later I saw this talent at its most refined in former President Clinton – he simply believed completely in the ‘truth’ of what he was telling you at the moment he said it, even if it contradicted what he’d just said a few minutes before. I don’t think I ever got that good, perhaps if I had, I’d be in a different place.

Most of the time I stayed in Bangkok, the customer’s main offices were in the city as were those of the engineering company I hired to do the actual work of the installation. Also, my technical failings seemed less apparent – at least to me – the farther I actually was from the equipment we were supposed to be installing.

Sometimes I went out to the site. It was a liquor plant, about 60 miles away. There was a nearby town, small but, in the way of Asian towns, it probably had a population of 100,000.

I stayed at a hotel in the town. It was very cheap – about $12 for a room. Mine was air-conditioned. The bathroom was as big as the bedroom. It was only fitted with a shower; there was no curtain. After you washed you simply opened the door to the bedroom and let the cooler, less humid air-conditioning flow into dry the bathroom.

The first time I stayed there I dried myself with a large cotton towel I found folded on the bed. Later that evening, when I got back from a roadside dinner of rice, prawn curry and beer, I learned that the towel was actually the bed cover. There was only a bottom sheet. You were supposed to use the towel if you needed a cover. Hell, the place only cost $12 so you couldn’t complain.

About 7 next day I wandered around the early morning streets, me and the monks with begging bowls. I found a stall that was selling coffee that was sticky with sweetened, condensed milk. By clever use of sign languages I persuaded them to make me a black coffee – not much better, it was instant, but good enough. They had multiple uses for the condensed milk. Some of the thick, syrupy stuff was put onto a slice of bread and handed to me. I liked it and had two more. That was breakfast.

The Thais who worked on the project with me – I was the only foreigner – were exceedingly polite and discrete. It was clear to everyone very early on that I didn’t have the foggiest notion what we should be doing. I’d never built a flare in my life; certainly couldn’t recall a single of the many humanities and economics courses I’d taken at Duke that ever even mentioned flares or combustion. Still, with good will, smiles and patience, we got something erected. I would read the instructions that were sent with various technical pieces from our factory in Tulsa. The Thais would ask me to explain some of the words, I felt useful. They never got around to making fun of my ignorance. They just worked around me to get the job done. Neat.

One evening we finished the job and it was time to see if the flare worked. The role of the thing was clear, even to me. Some special bugs had been introduced into several tanks of mash (grain, sugar, other stuff). They little guys farted pretty frequently and a lot of methane gas was produced. The gas was piped from the tanks of mash to fire various burners that fueled the distilling process. When there was no need to fire the burners and there was too much methane to store, the excess was piped over to the flare, which was supposed to burn it off. Simple.

I have no idea what persuaded me to arrogate unto myself the honor of firing off the flare – which was to be done manually the first time. I guess I thought I should demonstrate some responsibility for the technology; I’ve thought about it and, whatever the reasons, they are buried in the mists of time. Anyway, it was early evening. The moon was already out. I went over to the ignition button at the base of the stack. Five or six of my Thai friends were crowded around me. I grabbed the wheel to open the valve that let gas into the stack. I opened it and, staring intently at the igniter about 3 or 4 feet below the top lip of the flare, began a quick countdown from the number 10.

I pressed the button, there was a tremendous, scary whoosh and then a beautiful, pure blue flame bloomed out of the top of the stack. Satisfied that I’d done something to restore myself in the eyes of the Thais, I turned around with a smile. There was no one there. As soon as I began the countdown, every faithless one of them had silently sprinted a safe distance away. And there they were, grinning and waving at me from about a hundred yards.

We had prawn curry, rice and way too much beer for dinner that night.

Small epiphany: Retracing my Dad’s path …

Up there, along the Missouri River, north of St. Joe, the farmsteads these days appear wealthy, they occupy a different economic and social space from the little towns that grew up along the river and are now mostly sad and poor. Forest City, where Dad grew up, is a place I remembered as clean and prosperous. Maybe the future was clear to people older than me in the 1960’s when I last visited, but I thought then that the rhythms of its life were settled and constant. They weren’t.

My Grandma lived in a little clapboard place one street over from the Methodist Church, just down the hill a bit from ‘old Doc’ somebody’s place, the largest house in the town. (The good Doc must have been a source of much wisdom for my Dad because he told a lot of stories about him. Dad took a particular liking to Doc’s aphorism about drinking: you were a ‘damn fool’ if you took a drink before you were forty and a ‘damn fool’ is you didn’t after. The saying has more truth for me now that I’m well past forty; it was popular with Dad too in his later years.)

I couldn’t find Grandma’s house when I drove up from Kansas City two weeks ago. The Methodist Church was still there but it seemed smaller than I remembered.

About two streets further along, parallel to Grandma’s, lived my Aunt and Uncle. They were both teachers but my Uncle quit teaching to become the butcher and run the family grocery store that had been started by my Grandfather sometime in the 1920’s after Grandma and he decided a grocery store would be a better paying proposition than the bakery they first had in that space. And, hard at it was, the grocery store was a hell of a lot less work.

In summer my Aunt worked in the grocery store. They understood the concept of a vacation and I believe they took one or two over the years but mostly they worked. I think that for a lot of the folk up there, life and work were indistinguishable. This is an attitude that makes life more of a single piece – not a bad thing.

On of my most vivid memories of Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Ross’s place was that the TV played in the morning; they watched the ‘Today’ show as they got ready. To me this was exciting. In our house we just didn’t play the TV until evening. Our mornings were a serious time, we got ready for work or school, we ate, we left, our individual tasks performed without background noise that I can remember.

But there was something more about the glowing TV in their living room; to me it was evidence of my Aunt and Uncle’s connectedness to life beyond Forest City and Holt County. It was a testimony to some of the values that they held to: Education was important, you needed to know something about the world. They chose to live there, rooted in the land but the blaring television was their acknowledgement of the wider world.

I had come to Forest City, that summer that is now many years faded, with a sense that I was traveling back in time. My head was full of Mark Twain and fantasies about life in Missouri river towns. Some of that expectation was met by the pace of life along the little lanes where my relatives lived. I walked out in the early, humid mornings, the air still cool, and poked down among the vines and brush that lined the creek in front of Grandma’s place. It always seemed that there was a lot of time available to me. But, I think I must also have been reassured that I still had an umbilical to the life of my nuclear family, carried out in a much more urban and seemingly ‘sophisticated’ place, far away, by the link that the TV in my Aunt and Uncle’s living room made between their world then, in a little river town, and the place I lived with my parents and sister.

That day as I drove around the frayed town, now a couple of weeks past, I couldn’t find my Aunt and Uncle’s house either. Later, at the café, I ate lunch. The food was no better than I remembered, more notable for its ability to take the edge off your hunger than any capacity to satisfy an esthetic. The owner, a man of about my age, had known my family and he remembered our name. Yeah, the farmhouse had been torn down some years before – I’d already figured that, so this information only depressed me a little bit more. On the other hand, the news that the building that had housed the grocery store was gone depressed me profoundly. It was just another blow. Where it stood in a row of connected brick shop fronts, was now only an empty and somewhat forlorn lot of uncut grass and weeds. What was the value of doing this?

Dad had inherited half of the store but gave it to my Uncle – who he really did love – for all the cigarettes he could smoke whenever he made one of his rare visits to Forest City. He quit later but I don’t recall what was substituted for the cigarettes.

Uncle Ross died of lung cancer some years before Dad died of the same evil disease. His passing shook Dad deeply. Ross’ death swept away the last props of the sense of permanency that Forest City gave to Dad’s peripatetic life. You see, my nuclear family moved a lot. That Forest City was there and populated with relatives and things that Dad remembered from his youth was important, it gave us some underpinnings, some stability that made our gypsy life easier. Dad and Mom met in Peru after the War. I was born in California but we moved to Mexico almost as soon as I could walk and had lived there for a number of years until Dad’s mining business failed. Later we lived in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama, finally returning to Arizona where Dad lived out his last years. He called himself a ‘tramp engineer’.

The loss of tradition was sad but, thinking it deeper, it seems that maybe I’ve got an opportunity here; just as the ancestor whose family name I bear first left his roots behind – somewhere in Tennessee and, before that, in Virginia and England – to take up and own land that had never been owned before in Missouri (the concept being quite alien to the Indians who occupied it before us), I can put down new roots somewhere else, build something that more bears my imprint, that is more the result of an act more freely chosen by me and less dictated by people long dead. Maybe this little journey was a small epiphany?

-Santa Fe, 26 March 2005

Missouri Memories …. 12 March 2005

Saturday the weather was clear and the temperature rose into the upper 50’s. I’ve never been in Missouri at this time of year. It was beautiful; I couldn’t see buds on trees but, I imagined them. I needed to get out of town after a week in the office. My father came from Holt County in the Northwest corner of the state. It’s about 80 miles from Kansas City. It was time to get in touch with my roots. I drove north on I-29 across the waving countryside; the world was shades of lingering winter dust and yellow, fallow fields.

I found only the traces of ghosts, faint echoes; without remembrance, they will soon disappear entirely.

The last time I was in Forest City, Dad’s hometown, I was 14, Kennedy was dead, Vietnam was getting worse. We lived in Florida in those days. That summer I was to spend about six weeks visiting family.

Getting there took pretty much 24 hours. I went by train, there was an airline strike. It must have been just about the end of the era of private passenger trains. At St. Louis I changed for Kansas City. This was not planned, the train was to have run directly to Kansas City. The connection time was long, six hours or so; the airline strike must have strained the railroads and there were disruptions.

I don’t know why that world has gone; we were well into the 1960’s but in places the ‘50’s hung on. My family was as protective as any yet in those days I could take a train trip as a fourteen year-old – it was an adventure, not a risk. In the event, nothing much happened. During the wait in St. Louis for my connection to Kansas City some traveling soldiers took me under their wing and I ate with them at a coffee shop and we played pool. They were country boys and had been drafted. It was cool to hang out with guys in uniform (I think it was the first time I ever played pool). I guess they probably ended up in Southeast Asia. My Dad made me call him every hour while we waited for the train. Years later when I thought about it, it dawned on me how worried he had been.

Tucson, 27 February 2005: Sunday drive …

Both Arthur Miller and Hunter Thompson have died recently – one essentially of old age and the other, because of it (age that is), by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Their deaths, apparently, impacted me but lightly.

Today I arose early – it’s a Sunday, my wife slept into the mid-morning and my daughter and her friend, who was spending the night, didn’t go to bed until the wee hours so they were comatose. I tiptoed around anyway, quietly making coffee, checking the e-mail and showering. Eventually I took possession of the car keys, kissed my wife on the cheek and left for an early morning drive.

I took a thermal mug full of Starbucks with me and stopped at a grocery with a bakery to buy a couple of butter croissants (is there any other type?).

It’s funny how most of those who are about on a Sunday morning – churchgoers, bicyclers, hikers, bird-watchers – are generally a wholesome group. They were everywhere I drove. I pointed the car aimlessly and ended up near Gates Pass on the far western side of Tucson, passing birders, cyclists and hikers. Over the years the city has grown up along the Catalina foothills and east up to the swell of the Saguaro National Monument along the edge of the Rincons. Now houses are popping up along the low hills that presage the Santa Margaritas and they’ve also invaded the black, rocky heights of the Tucson Mountains to the west of the city.

The Tucson Mountains are anything but lofty. They are squat but their summits are ragged and look unscale-able. As you climb them, even in a car, you notice the ground is bare and rocky. The prevailing color is a burnt brown, a desert singed by the heat of summers that out there, on the western littoral of settlement, are fiercer than on the more settled eastern side of the city.

I listened to a piece on NPR about the way that the British had taken Hunter Thompson’s death to heart. I never read anything he wrote – still unlikely, the notion of reading the political commentary of a drug-addled egomaniac doesn’t appeal. Instead I pointed the car toward East Lawn, a cemetery on the east side.

I hadn’t been within the boundaries of East Lawn for more than a decade. It was cool, bird song was prominent. The trees that were scattered around seemed to have grown thicker and more rooted than the last time. I parked the car on one of the roadways. There was almost no one around. I wandered across the grass; it was a pleasant morning.

The grave markers at East Lawn are flat on the earth. Each one faces up to the sky. The mowers simply pass over them.

I randomly read out the distillations of lives that the stones offered. Many were poignant, especially when the interred was a child; some of those for the dead, full of years, were simple, unaffected and noble.

For more than half an hour I wandered around. What I was looking for was near one of those now matured trees but there were more of them than I remembered and the cemetery itself was far bigger than I recalled.

I finally found it, my father’s grave. He rests near a tree, still proximate an edge of the cemetery. From the angle of repose, you can still see out towards the mountains, where the Catalinas and the Rincons nearly intersect. More, though, there is some comfort that Dad still rests near the boundary of the occupied parts of the cemetery. He would have wanted it that way; he belonged to that desert, even when it’s condensed down to a scrubby plot adjacent to the manicured rows of flat stones celebrating unremarked lives like his.

The profound sadness I felt was not so much at his passing; I miss him still, probably more now than ever but the bittersweet memories, as a friend whose child was murdered once told me, grows more sweet than bitter with the passing of years. What I felt sad about was that the sheer humanity of my Dad’s story, at least that part that I’d been part of, remains untold.

I cannot let this pass; I must tell Dad’s story, at least that part which I shared.

Mumbai ... 4 February 2005

There’s a raga playing in my head. Memories bubble up: faces, parts of names, weird evenings, smells (some of the strongest memories are triggered by odors), noises and, always, a sheet of dust, evening dust, even in winter.

This trip began in what they call Kolkata now. Strange change that, to replace the name of a city with that of a village. Job Charnock probably never spelled much of anything the same way twice but he is the person who founded Calcutta, the place that became the second city of a great empire. I don’t believe he used very many ‘k’s’ in what he wrote and I wonder if the ground around his grave, there in Bengal, is stirred from the rotations he’s recently been performing.

Still, what’s in a name, a rose is still a rose and Calcutta at 3 in the morning just after you’ve been unceremoniously dumped into a rank cab (not a cab rank but a rank cab, there is a distinction) retains much of the character, and much of the fug, that it had when last I visited nearly 30 years ago.

The street cars are still there, older and more worn but trundling along at about the same speed. The slums go on, maybe slightly less horrible than before but still seemingly endless.

There is surely more wealth. There are new buildings, some fly-overs, an improved airport and, hidden, serious new information infrastructure. The hotel I stayed at was slightly charmless, a vast, modern palace, luxurious and lost. Always, out the window, there is still India.

I remember just a few years before and not far from Calcutta (sorry, Kolkata comes slowly to me) I stayed at a slightly frowzier hotel in Dacca where we overlooked a slum superimposed on an urban, human wetland. Always, out the window, there is where you are unless the window is simply an image and the room, air-locked and sterile and nameless, is your atomistic reality.

Bengalis have always been charming, intelligent, subtle, wise and well-read. Not all of them, of course, but a significant enough minority of those one comes in contact with to develop what is probably an entirely incorrect generalization about national character that differs them from people of other parts of India.

Then we had a dinner at a restaurant – Oh Calcutta – that claimed to reproduce cuisines that reflected the city’s history – something Portuguese, something French, some Mughlai, a bit of Bengali and, of course, something tasteless and British. It’s clear why the best restaurants in Europe are in Britain; in even the smallest town there are places for curry, kebabs, Chinese and Continental; in their newfound, post-Thatcher prosperity the British rediscovered their taste buds and they’ve been indulging them ever since; even pasties have gotten better and the Waitrose is undoubtedly the best grocery store chain in Europe.

Perhaps the discovery that most surprised me was that India now has wines that are drinkable. Three decades ago something was produced somewhere along this Western Coast – I’m in Bombay (sorry, Mumbai) as I write this – that passed for wine but was mostly made of seawater. Things do change! In Calcutta we were given a merlot from near Pune (I like that one, it’s the easy, clear version of Poona). It was big and red and full – like a Chilean, born and beaten under a hot, bright sun. There may be other wines that are as good, a bunch are on offer, but I’m sticking with this, I like it!

The flight to Mumbai was fine, the airline was good, my seat was too small and the legroom was miserable; I thought I was back on Southwest.

Bombay now has 17 million people. It sticks out into the Arabian Sea like a huge, booming, fetid finger. Unlike Calcutta, prosperity and change is not hard to spot, it’s there, in your face. The city is transforming itself nearly as rapidly as Shanghai did. In a few years this will no doubt be a rival to the Chinese city. Meantime, its economy is leaping ahead, driven by comparative advantage in language and education. The information infrastructure is more advanced than that of Calcutta, my hotel has wireless everywhere (even poolside!). Sure, there are slums but you get the impression that these aren’t temporary structures that have become permanent but genuinely momentary dwellings that will be abandoned soon; the change will be from cardboard, sticks and other urban jetsam to poorly made concrete but the change will be an improvement. Some few, too few still, will even go farther, to block houses or small homes in high-rise apartments that march, like HG Well’s enormous Martian invaders, across the flat coastal plain.

It’s been nice to be back. I think I’m too long gone and too set in my ways to easily re-adapt but my younger doppelganger, wherever and whoever he is, will certainly find it even more exciting than I did in the bad old days. More than anything physical, India has changed its mind and that’s great!

Leopoldo ...

a fragment of a memory pounded out one August evening this year ...

I will never do justice to Leopoldo in an afternoon and today I only have 45 minutes or so left of my journey down from London during which to describe him.

He is an overweight man, terribly out of shape. His complexion is pale but his cheeks are rosy, he is almost cherubic in appearance. His hair is often too long, it has not receded and, despite his 56 years, it is a youthful light-brown colour. His eyes are blue. All in all, Leopoldo look more like a Dutchman than an Italian; he is, though, somewhat weirdly proud of his nose!

Leopoldo eats carefully and he never drinks. Before meals he takes a number of pills and he puts at least one or possibly two seltzer-like medicines in glasses of water. After getting to know him better, I learned that his liver was shot and he was awaiting a transplant. That was in the earliest days of our relationship; over time his condition apparently improved and he was removed from the list, his liver judged sufficiently recovered that a transplant was no longer necessary.

After decades of alcohol and bachelorhood, Leopoldo married a Columbian woman, many years his junior. When I first met him, Leopoldo had only wed relatively recently but they had a child, Lucia, who was then only three. He doted on his baby girl and our friendship was sealed when I brought the first of several small toys for him to give her.

Leopoldo is smart; he spent his life building petrochemical projects around the world. He has experienced nearly every possible commercial situation and the memory of them serves him well. He knows what to look for and what risks are most likely in nearly every circumstance.

But, and this is sad, that part of the brain that involves creativity and flexibility no longer works so well for Leopoldo. I suspect that he simply assassinated billions of his brain cells, asphyxiating them with alcohol. The result was a man who could swing from friendly and open to suspicious and close in a matter of moments. His conversation could wander worryingly and he often focused on issues long after they had been resolved. He often seemed befuddled.

Leopoldo’s automobile, the one he had when first we met, was a battered old Lancia only it wasn’t so old, the fact was that Leopoldo was one of the worst drivers in a land of bad or, at least, dangerous drivers and he had simply dinged up the car in a series of minor mishaps, the result being a vehicle that looked as if it had been through the worst of the latest major world conflicts.

I was fortunate to learn of Leopoldo’s appalling driving before actually experiencing it first hand. We agreed to meet in separate cars at a service plaza on the motorway from where he would lead me to a project site we were planning to develop jointly and which I hadn’t yet seen. Coffee was duly drunk and we mounted up. What happened next was simply mind-boggling; after first trying to enter the freeway the wrong way, we eventually found the right way out and proceeded along in a series of stomach churning lunges and pauses. Leopoldo would drive extremely fast, regardless of whatever speed the rest of the traffic was going, apparently intent on ramming whatever vehicle was in front of him. At the last moment he would jam on the brakes and we’d slow down so precipitously that the cars behind nearly had to stop to avoid ending up in our back seats. The first time this happened, I slewed my vehicle into the fast lane to avoid the chaos and ended up with Leopoldo following me for a number of miles until I phoned him to tell him that I thought he ought to lead given that I had no idea where we were going.

The effect of our lunging forward, slamming on the brakes and then accelerating forward again was not only frightening, it was, as I noted, slightly nauseating. Eventually we swung off the highway at some obscure town, the sign to which Leopoldo only noticed from the far lane, some two-hundred yards from the exit. Clearly Leopoldo’s new son is not intended to grow up as an orphan because the manoeuvre was successful. I actually think Leopoldo was surprised when he pulled over at a nearby café to find that I was still behind him. Of course, the surprise may simply have been the sudden recollection of why he was there and who I was.

After another coffee we caromed along a country road. I had a map spread on my passenger seat but only glanced at it occasionally since Leopoldo seemed to be lurching spasmodically but knowledgably forwards. At one bend in the road, Leopoldo chose the simpler alternative of going straight, into a wheat field. His vehicle ploughed along for a bit and then came to a shuddering stop, surrounded by the staff of life. I followed, much slower, and stopped some distance behind him. I rolled the window down and yelled out at him that this didn’t seem to be the way that was marked on my map ....

Thirteen.

My daughter, Alex, is thirteen. Disconcerting. My little girl has suddenly developed breasts and other accoutrements of womanhood. Her speech has changed as well; she can be dismissive and sarcastic, emotional and unfair, angry and resentful, all within the space of a few minutes conversation. Advice, never very willingly listened to, is now completely unwelcome and, indeed, is something that I rarely offer these days. Hormones, something of which she was, I believe, completely free just months ago, now appear to control her completely. These creatures, hormones, are irreversible; I know, I asked a fellow-suffering doctor friend with two teen-aged girls of his own if there was anything that might stop this maturing process and restore to me my little girl and he shook his head sadly and simply offered me another glass of wine. Once in a while my daughter will permit me to listen to her. Mostly this is when she or, more correctly, her hormones have concocted some fairly ditzy theory about unpopularity (hers) or the long-planned tortures of the educational system which she is being forced to endure at the hands of evil teachers who took up the profession decades before in the sole hope that one day they would have the opportunity to inflict misery upon my daughter.

In those cases where I am permitted to listen, the sheer verbal volume of which my daughter is capable is awesome. She delivers soliloquies that can last thirty minutes and during which she must suck air in via her ears because I swear that she doesn’t stop to take breath.

Mostly I make sympathetic noises about the various injustices that appear to characterise every aspect of her life. This past summer these have ranged from a broken nail – I kid you not – to some rather insightful comments on ‘Animal Farm’. At times it is clear that certain of her teachers redeemed themselves when they saw fit to grant her grades that were unexpectedly good. When the grades were not as good, it was a result of the conspiracy of anti-Alex ‘sleeper’ agent-teachers who had been waiting these past decades for her to be conceived, raised and, almost providentially sent to the very school at which the individual tool-of-evil awaited her arrival.

This past year my daughter attended a uniform-school and was extremely happy when, after incessant lobbying on her part for at least two years, we agreed to move her to a new school whose only policy on dress seems to be that casual (shorts, tee-shirts and those space-aged sport shoe things) is good but sloppy (holey jeans, torn tee-shirts and those footwear things – I don’t mean the slingshots that they wear instead of panties – that we used to call thongs) is better (thankfully sexy seems to be forbidden). Her cousins all excitedly provided advice on her new wardrobe but sometime during the process her hormones intervened and announced, rather insightfully but unhelpfully, that she had merely changed one uniform for another. Her individuality was under severe threat from the need to conform to be cool.

The scope of Alex’s conversation is three-dimensional: she can speak long and she packs a lot of words into small, tight spaces; even more impressive, though, is the scope. She can discuss books, nail polish, John Kerry (‘he’s in what band?’), popular culture and her need for a larger budget at length and without the annoying need for any real feedback. Mostly I just listen, fascinated at the way her mind flits from place to place. The world for her is a great plain over which are scattered opportunities, experiences and things-to-be-discovered without end. I’m jealous and happy for her.

Natural Courtesy
The world is sadly lacking in this vital commodity. It is, paradoxically, considering the name I’ve given it, not naturally occurring at all. Natural courtesy is that unfailing and unasked mannerliness that characterises gentlefolk of both sexes. It is not the exclusive property of any particular class though it is easier for the mantle of natural courtesy to be acquired by someone in good circumstances, materially affluent and well-educated, and, hence, it probably ought to more expected and less valued in those from that group. When it is found, as it quite often is, in those of less affluent background, it is remarkable because I think that natural courtesy, which is the right human way to be, is something that is unnatural to us as animals. That person who exhibits, or more, practices natural courtesy in their dealings with the world, is that much more developed as a human being. This is the person who better understands and protects the present and future of the human race. She manages inclinations that are inherent, selfish and short-sighted. Her natural courtesy, on the other hand, enhances civilisation and will help preserve the human race, giving us a future worth striving for.

It seems, though, that every day we move farther and farther away from the ideals of natural courtesy towards a materialistic ethic characterised by behaviour directed to satisfying selfish and immature ‘needs’; in other words, we keep sliding back down the evolutionary ladder. Americans particularly seem to be inclined this way but they are by no means the only members of the club. Newly wealthy Asian societies are producing some of the more outrageous examples of this ethic and representatives of it are found in every single country; interestingly, it seems to occur more in places where the rule of law is weaker and where wealth in newer. The connection between the place that rule-of-law occupies in a society and the presence or absence of natural courtesy is pretty direct in my view. And, of course, rule-of-law requires fierce defence not just against its possible subversion by bribery or the like, but against a different type of abuse, the use of it as a form of lottery, as a get-rich quick scheme which is a practice that is increasingly common in the U.S.A. The law is a place where we ought to seek redress and a forum where behaviour can be called into question. It exists as a backdrop against which our daily activity takes place and it provides context. Whatever you do, if you violate the precepts we as a society have agreed ought to govern our behaviour towards each other in our daily transactions, you are subject to redress under law. We must, in other words, have the right to seek redress – the possibility of an action against someone for a faulty product or a misrepresented service has to be there but this must be a right that is exercised and applied in a balanced and mature manner. I’m not sure how we can define it yet but, like the duck, I think I can recognise it’s abuse when I see it.

What is odd about all this is how the materialist ethic actually militates against happiness. I subscribe to the Aristotelian notion of what happiness is. Very briefly, I believe that happiness is a personal freedom from fears, which creates the freedom for us to focus on personal growth and realisation. The fears from which we seek to be free are the fear of want and fears for our safety and the safety of our loved ones. The best way to secure that freedom from these fears is fairly straightforward, it is achieved socially. That society which works to eliminate the fear of want amongst its members creates a society in which the fears for personal safety are less. The reason is that if your neighbour is free from the fear of want, he is less likely to want to take from you. He is more likely to focus on making sure that he and his family are safe once he is free from want. To ensure that he stays free from fear, he ought, as a matter of course, to work to ensure that his neighbours are as free from the fear of want as he is, otherwise they will threaten his and his families security. To be most happy and most free to pursue my own selfish objectives (which, of course, cannot threaten or take away from my neighbours), those around me must be as free of these fears as I am (or as near as possible).

That society in which I can be happiest – ie, free of my fears and most able to pursue personal growth and realisation – is one in which the rule-of-law prevails. The best possibility of happiness for me is if I can depend on an impersonal and just rule-of-law to guarantee my freedoms. Deep down, I’m pretty close to convinced that fundamentally this is all we need: everything else is simply frosting, the cake is baked. If I get the condo on the beach or the Mercedes, that’s fine as long as acquisition of those things is done within the rule-of-law and (get ready to think about this one!) doesn’t threaten my family or me; in other words, there must be a balance between my material well-being and my freedom. Seems illogical at first glance but I think the reason behind it is both compelling and ineluctable.

Mickey

I’ve written a number of stories that have been lost. Many were brief but based on truth, compounds of things I’ve lived or seen. I remember bits of one that was set in the Philippines; it was about Mickey, a professional diver. Mickey had come to the Philippines courtesy of the U.S. Navy who had also trained him to be a diver. He was in and out of Subic over several re-enlistments where he spent long, beer-fed evenings, leaning on the greasy counter of an Olongopo girlie bar, a world away from his North Carolina white-trash roots: a fatherless family made up of numerous, quarrelling siblings and an indifferent mother.

It was inevitable that Mickey would fall for one of the girls that drank and loved the sailors in that string of bars facing the main entrance to the base; whether the cause was lust, love or loneliness or a combination of all three didn’t much matter in the grand scheme of things, one of girls was going to provide what Mickey needed.

Rose was the name of the one that Mickey ultimately learned to love. She came from the south side of Manila Bay, Batangas province. Like most poor Filipino families, Rose’s was large. She was the sixth child. Her father was a contract worker at Shell’s Tabangao Refinery. The work was good but only occasional. When he didn’t work he would drink and gamble with his friends. When he didn’t gamble, he would come home and make more babies with Rose’s amiable, fat mother.

Rose grew up in a concrete-block house on a dirt road that ended amongst some palms and a bit of sand and rock along the sea. The air was clean and there was just enough food. She learned to read a bit and to add and subtract. Her uncle ran a small store selling soda and cigarettes. At 16 Rose worked for him but when he began to touch her and pester her for sex, she left by bus for Olongopo where her cousin made good money working in a contract laundry for the U.S. Navy.

Only Rose’s cousin didn’t work for a contract laundry. She was a bar girl at the Power House.

Before long Rose’s scruples gave way before her greed and the 16 year-old was pounding beers with the sailors, fending off their groping hands and, occasionally, sleeping with one.

Rose wasn’t the prettiest girl at the Power House, she bordered on plain and she was skinny but Rose had a quality that drew Mickey to her, she was what the Indian matrimonials advertise as ‘homely’ and it was her domesticity that ultimately captivated Mickey. Rose filled a hole in Mickey’s life, an unarticulated need for family.

The two of them moved in together off base where they rented a two room flat above a shop during Mickey’s last tour. When his enlistment was up, they married and moved to another small but much quieter place overlooking clear seas at the end of a track near a Batangas beach. Mickey opened a dive shop with his savings and gave Scuba lessons to a few backpacking tourists and some wealthy locals. He was popular and laid back. Far from the most ambitious man in the world, Mickey seemed content to earn enough to pay the rent on the cement shack that served as shop and home to Rose and him. Children soon came, one after the other. The children lit up the faces of both parents, Mickey would spend long afternoon playing in the surf with them and evenings they would curl up around him and Rose as they watched their snowy, black and white TV, a wedding gift from Rose’s groping uncle. No longer objectionable, the uncle now behaved most respectfully towards his niece, partly, I’m sure, out of fear of Mickey’s brawny arms.

It was a good life for Mickey. I met him one day when, on a trip to the Shell offices at Tabangao, I stopped for lunch at a beach-side restaurant where Mickey was sharing a soda with several locals. We had little in common besides being American and each having once lived for a time in North Carolina. Still, it was enough for a conversation.

Over the years I lived in the Philippines I would see Mickey from time to time when I travelled into the provinces. Although he lived no more than a hundred miles from the capital, in all the time I knew him, I never heard of him coming to Manila. He changed very little, his face became more leathery and creased from the sun and the salt water. He had a smile that was individualised by cracked and worn teeth, some broken in fights at Olongopo and elsewhere during his Navy career, and he developed a beer gut that, strangely, seemed to suit him and secretly please Rose who was one of those cooks who fry everything. I can still close my eyes and smell her kitchen and the fresh fish that she prepared the few times that I ate with her and Mickey. Each time I would bring some toys for the kids – I think there were about 7 at the last count – some fabric for Rose to make up into clothes for the kids and a few beers for Mickey. We wouldn’t talk much, we’d sit outside on a couple of ratty old folding chairs and stare at the water, sucking a couple of beers. When the food was ready, we’d eat in the darkness of their unlit living room. Afterwards we’d drink coffee brewed from strong, Filipino beans.

As the heat of the afternoon crept even into the shade where we would sit, I’d make my excuses and drive back to Manila, the air-conditioning on full, insulating me from the land through which I drove and in which Mickey had chosen to live and, one day, die. You see, although the tale is one of languid happiness, ultimately it was a tragedy because one day Mickey disappeared into a South China Sea squall that had blown up quickly during the course of an afternoon. Some outrigger fishermen were caught by the storm a few miles offshore; they were visible between sheeting bands of heavy, almost horizontal rain. Their distress was obvious and their peril real. Mickey and two neighbours, all three combining fearlessness and foolishness in equal measure, went out in a small motorboat to bring them in. When the storm had blown itself out, the scattered outriggers were all found swept ashore on scattered beaches down the Batangas coast but the boat in which Mickey and two others had gone out to save the fishermen had disappeared.

It’s been 15 years since last I lived in those green islands. There was no way to keep direct contact with Mickey’s family and I lost touch even with those who might have known what happened to them. In a way that’s okay because I’ve kept Mickey alive in my world; I have put him back on that dusty patch under the palms, sitting in an old webbed lawn chair, sipping a beer and playing with his kids, laughing through his broken teeth.

Train Spotted

Sitting uncomfortably in a narrow seat that refuses to recline even the slightest bit, my unknown travelling companion, in the next chair, is equally or more physically distressed, the latter possibility more likely than not because of his bulk (indeed, he makes me, a rather pudgy 50-ish type, feel almost svelte). Whatever the relative merits of our individual suffering, there is no doubt that we are both pretty miserable. This is not your sleek modern train, it’s a three car special across the Styx, passenger comfort is not a criteria nor, it seems, is punctuality for this morning we are embarrassingly late; I will be one of those last arrivals to my office today, wandering in after everyone else has settled down to the new week, trying to look harried, as if I’ve just swam, climbed and fought my way through the wilderness to arrive here, dedicated to my work, anxious to be at the side of my brethren as we do the company’s bidding.

My eyes feel red; I got up before the dairy farmers. I’ve tried to work some but there is no room to spread out and I’m not in the mood to read so I just stare blankly ahead where there is a row of three folding seats that are, if possible, even more uncomfortable than the one I’m occupying. Those three must be miserable because they are the absolute last to be filled and, indeed, we pass a number of stations without even one being occupied (the option of clambering over someone on the aisle to take a window being preferable). Ultimately, though, they fill up and, as we near London, amazingly, one is occupied by a Vision.

Withdrawn, unapproachable the way a beautiful woman must learn to be (or so most of them have always seemed to me), a woman from the 1960’s occupies the seat in front of me. She is the pinnacle of the ‘60’s ideal – Julie Christie, Twiggy. Her black hair is straight and hangs around her shoulders, nothing out of place. She has bangs that complete the frame around a face that comes straight out of a dream about the women of that decade. Her eyes are large and blue with long, black lashes. Her skin is pale and unblemished.

I suppose I’m so tired that I can’t help staring but the Vision seems oblivious, she doesn’t even move her head in irritated acknowledgement of my stares. After a couple of minutes respite from the real world, restfully letting my gaze linger on the Madonna face, I realise what I’m doing and re-focus, moving my eyes about but, they keep coming back, glancing at the Vision. She’s real but so very far away.

Then, as we near London, she moves for the first time (Pygmalion lives), reaches down and opens her purse from where she takes out, astoundingly, cigarette papers and a pouch of Bugler cigarette tobacco. Delicate fingers then begin to roll precisely judged pinches of the tobacco into cigarettes. She continues this, each new fire-stick very nearly identical to the previous one, until we begin to slow down to dock at Paddington. The tannoy bleats the announcement of our arrival, she folds up her papers and the pouch of tobacco and places the bespoke cigarettes into a silverish holder, rises, ethereal – and, now, very real and earthy – her bag stuffed with cheap, hand-rolled smokes and then, the door open, delicately picks her way into the crowd and out of my life.

Dawn Spill … Tuesday notes meant for a Monday (3 February 2004)

I must somehow make this day amusing; actually passing through it was not but the raw materials were, I’m thinking now (at the beginning of this piece), sufficient to father a smile.

Firstly, I was up very early. Another Monday (to note that it is Tuesday is a mere quibble); another dawn flight to another city that, over the years, has become everycity. The coffee maker chose today not to work, augury of what was to come. The benighted machine failed to perform not in any conventional way, it chose to make coffee but not convey said beverage into the coffee pot. This is considered impossible, the machine is supposed to be fool proof but, I have decided, it is only idiot proof; against a pure, 100% fool, like myself, it is completely helpless. There are engineered defences against the possibility that the newly brewed coffee might fail to reach its objective, the thermos carafe; for the coffee to arrive at the latter, one must jam said receptacle into a designed space under the filter basket where, by which jamming action, is popped open a valve-like contraption that permits the hot water, freshly boiled, to percolate through the ground beans and the fine mesh paper filter and, traversing a tiny aperture, exit into the stainless carafe below. Today, however, the coffee failed to attain its objective and was, instead, pooled either on the granite counter top or dripping into the open drawer where we keep our supplies of ground coffee, filters, tea, herbal infusions and chocolates. By the time I made my way back to the scene of neglect (after initiating the process by pressing the ‘on’ button, I futzed about, packing and so on whilst all the coffee-brewing excitement occurred), all of these things were semi-floating in about a quarter of an inch of cold coffee (amazing how rapidly the stuff chills on frosty mornings when it fails to land in the insulated container!).

It took me a full ten minutes to sop up all of the coffee and another ten to brew a new pot. At last I had a cup of fragrant, rich, hot coffee! I perched myself in front of the TV and watched the early morning news although, scandalous admission, I did flip over ITV 2 to check the conditions in the Australian rain forest and see whether Jordan’s boobs might have fallen out of her top overnight. The former is sweaty and overgrown, the latter is, honestly, not worth waiting for unless you hold shares in Dupont and think the knocker-on effect will buoy the price. In the event I grew quickly bored and turned back to Sky’s 0530 broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Mr. Rather, famous for his hugely overworked country similes during the last election, is, fortunately, still fascinated by the U.S. presidential election process, a fascination I share. Somehow, Rather is beyond cynical and simply observes the whole process with a weary wonder.

At this stage, with everything still pretty much to play for, there is a perverse pleasure, akin to the Australians’ delight in ‘topping’ whatever tall poppies their society might throw up, in witnessing the decline and fall of, mostly, egotistical Deomocratic dreams about power and popularity in the bright snows and harsh election reality of New Hampshire or, later, South Carolina or New Mexico. What I fail to understand, the fun and games of primary season apart, is how, in all seriousness, at this time and in this world, any reasonably educated, right-thinking, compassionate American could remain Republican. We owe it to our posterity to rid the country of this man Bush and his cronies. They must be retired! Not only Bush, but Cheney must go! The United State of Halliburton must no longer be the voice of our people!

Americans must grow up. If we are to create the society that we want, one that is just, which provides real opportunity, we must accept that our will can only be expressed collectively via Government and, therefore, Government must be truly representative, just and pro-active, reflecting our hopes, dreams and will. Taxes are the inevitable cost of creating this world. Pay up and be content with the smaller house, happy in the knowledge that, because you have chosen to create as close to a fair society as you can, everyone else has a house as well, that only the hardest core sleep in refrigerator cartons. Be happy that there is a park within easy distance of every kid’s door and that the schools they go to provide an education and are not places to park unwanted or unexpected offspring. Expect that when you go to the emergency room of the nearby hospital, your child’s arm bent strangely after her street-dance recital, you don’t have to wait for credit processing before the doctor will see and treat you. Expect also that the doctor and the staff at the hospital will treat you as fellow citizens, acknowledging your existence in a manner that dignifies, does not demean you, whatever your capacity to afford the treatment that will be meted all equally.

But, I digress or, maybe, this time I don’t …

One thing for sure, my reflections on the American political scene have made me less than amused. Dave Barry has it right; you must laugh at it. We are obligated to cry out for change but it is right to do it through a smile! Lives of quiet desperation are so because those who live them choose to define them that way.

I'll save the story of the two airports, one missed flight, the train, the bus, the taxi, two missed meals and the bad wine for another time when I elect to write my own Gormenghast -- a day in a book.

On the London to Hereford HST the day after the big snow (??!!) of winter 2003/4 …As usual, England reacted to a couple of inches of snow by completely falling to pieces. Trains ran late, planes were cancelled, the underground – unaffected by the snow but unwilling to be left out – managed a small and otherwise unthreatening fire between stations that shut things down on the Circle and District lines for several hours beginning around 8 PM last night. Along a street that separates one London borough from another, the snow and ice on one side was completely cleaned away but the services department from the adjacent borough couldn’t be bothered to do the same on the other side of the street. Funniest story I heard, though, was about gritting trucks that got out in advance of the arrival of the storm and sanded down streets and ‘pavements’ (sidewalks) in one neighbourhood just to have the grit cleaned off by sweepers that came through not half an hour later!

But, this week in England was otherwise interesting as well. Tony Blair has survived another self-inflicted wound and continues as Prime Minister. Gordon Brown helped round up sufficient votes to pass the ‘top up’ fees bill and avoid a vote of confidence on Blair only because he’s pretty sure, rightly, that he’d not succeed Tony but go down in defeat to that awful man, Michael Howard (he of the acerbic delivery and nasty demeanour).

The top-up fees issue seems to have excited the open toed sandal brigade. What Government wants to do is charge a small amount to students to help pay for their own educations. Britain has recently begun to fall even further behind the U.S. in the higher-education stakes and Government here in Britain has, rightly, figured that students who are privileged enough to be able to attend university ought to be willing to pay for some of it themselves (or persuade their families to). U.S. universities in an open market continue to raise tuition fees regularly and students continue to find the ways and means to pay them. In fact, I’m one of the survivors. I went to an elite university that my father would never have agreed to pay for, even if he could have. The best he could manage, or would agree to, was support equivalent to the amount it would have cost me to go to a good state university (which, even then, about 30 years ago, was more than the amount of the top-up fee charge just approved here in the U.K.). I supplemented my father’s largesse with earnings from a job, student loans and a grant from the university. I only managed to pay off my loans sometime in my 30’s but I honestly can’t see any long-term harm that it might have done me. Graduates, who didn’t earn enough, didn’t have to pay, just as would be the case under the new legislation. I counted myself lucky that I made enough that I could pay my debt.

To my mind, the whole issue can be reduced to the following: the Government’s goal of having half the population attend ‘university’ simply demeans the value of technical education – and way too many good poly-technical and vocational training institutions have been renamed ‘university’. Meantime, in its quest to provide new ‘opportunities’ to the masses, old-style universities have been denied support, their quality has deteriorated, good students and outstanding professors have been lured away by better funded American institutions that will provide them the facilities, remuneration and recognition they crave.

But, there is a more fundamental issue here, which, put simply, is – why should a bus driver pay for my child to go to university? This is so fundamentally unjust that I cannot think of the opponents of the proposed fees as anything but selfish, spoiled and unthinking. The system of top-up fees that was voted by the Commons this week provides so many ways for a student to be excused the charges that I rate it one of the most egalitarian, democratic measures I have seen in some time.

But, as always, I digress although in this case I am not sure from what. I would note in closing, however, that the Hutton report is somehow pleasing. I like Blair. He’s bound to be a bit arrogant after so long as Prime Minister and probably has lost touch but he’s still the best choice to lead the country. A contest between Gordon Brown and Michael Howard might result in Charles Kennedy becoming Prime Minister simply because he’s slightly less objectionable that the others who are patently cut out to play character roles as gangland thugs. The Hutton report has given Alastair Campbell a chance to reinforce his image as a hard-man who, in this case, was right (and my goodness how’s he’s cackled over things). Greg Dyke, appearing pompous and unattractive to the world outside the BBC, has resigned and Andrew Gilligan, the reporter who has inadvertently exposed the inherent anti-Americanism and instinctive knee-jerk left-wingism of the BBC, is exposed as unethical and self-obsessed. I think he should stay in his London flat for the next year or two, having curries and Chinese delivered, pondering what a complete twit he is.

The only thing that could improve my day would be if that terrible man with the loud socks and ties who delivers the news on Channel 4 and who hates everything American and the British Government equally without the need for any justification of his position (at least that I’ve been able to glean listening to him) were to become permanently voiceless or be caught in a compromising position with his pet iguana.

And, the train tonight is not even running that late!

Iraq, Dean's Electability, Toilets in the Czech Republic

There seems to be a change of mood in Iraq. Yes, there are still terrorist attacks and Baghdad looks like a miserable place to live. But, it’s getting better. I am genuinely convinced that is one of the reasons that Howard Dean lost Iowa and, compounded by the now famous yell, will lose New Hampshire. Just as well, we have to find someone who will win to challenge Bush. Special interests are simply too powerful today in America. Dean is a luxury we cannot afford, better Kerry or Edwards who just might succeed in unseating Bush and the heartless, arrogant automaton who is Vice President. Wesley Clark must not get the nomination because with him we might well combine the arrogance of a Bush with the naiveté of a political novice, giving us a completely unproductive presidency, something we can ill afford in the 21st century.

And now I’ve seen Prague and, over the past several days, a great deal of Moravia and Bohemia. I’m impressed. I travelled with a group of Czechs and foreigners round small villages searching for places to build new, environmentally friendly projects. We ate at restaurants tucked in the basements of large, Soviet-era public halls near the centres of small towns. We stopped at remote petrol stations at the edges of villages where everyone but a rather sad cashier was at home, throwing lignite into their boilers to fight the cold, the thermometer was at minus 14 Celsius yesterday afternoon.

The country is clean; there remains much impressive architecture from both the Austro-Hungarian period and before, when these lands at the very heart of Europe were a power in their own right, and, pleasant surprise, there is not an overwhelming amount of ‘sock in the eye’ stuff from the Communist period although there is still too much.

For me though, having now travelled nearly constantly for much of my 52 years (today is my birthday), one great measure of the relative progress and ‘civilisation’ of a country is the state of its toilets. Those in the Czech Republic are, generally, very clean. This is not because they are serviced more often than in other countries; indeed, in some of the places I visited, I’m quite convinced that the cleaners don’t come too often. As much as anything else, the users of these toilets seem to be aware that someone else, another human being, will be using the toilet after them and they try to leave it as clean or cleaner than they found it.

This toilet cleanliness thing is something important. I have sampled them around the world: in China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Venezuela, Spain, Mexico, Australia and many more countries. It has proven to be one of the most accurate measures of how strongly the rule of law prevails in a particular place. For instance, cleaners in many pubs in Britain have, I believe, disappeared years ago but the toilets remains useable – just, mind you – because of the basic decency of the patrons. This latter, of course, is only true of rural pubs, not those cosmopolitan, rude places that are more ‘bars’ than places for congenial congregation, the true definition of what a pub ought to be.

But, as usual, I digress, this was to be about the Czech Republic I think. Nice place, visit it if you can.