The Greek National Tourism Office

I watch a lot of CNN -- somehow I've grown disenchanted with the BBC (except for parts of Radio 4 which, living in Spain now, I miss very much) -- but CNN International can also be both boring and repetitive. From time to time the advertisements are more compelling than the regular programming. For instance, in the wake of the Olympics the Chinese have launched a semi-tourism/awareness campaign which is wonderful, compelling, colourful and inviting. I spent five years travelling to China and since have not had much desire to go back for any extended time -- these spots are changing my mind.

On the other hand -- and there's always another one! -- the Greeks have dropped a clanger. What they ought to drop is their advertising agency. I'm not sure of the theme of the campaign, run by the Tourism Ministry, but it seems to be something like 'highlights of an amazing waste of money and time in Greece'. It is visually washed out and and out of focus and every character in it seems to suffer from a serious case of ennui! The scenes of Greece, completely pedestrian city-scapes, unattractive beaches, shallow and callow young people you wouldn't want to spend more than a few milli-seconds with, leave me more than cold, they repel me!

I promise never to go to Greece if you continue this awfulness, Greek Tourist Office/Ministry, but I promise to think about going if you will please take these things off the air and put the actors in them out of their misery! Remember what brought you here -- the Parthenon, islands, crystal seas, history, Zorba ...

Wow! Sarah Palin ...

Madrid, 30 August 2008 ...cool (ish) and partly cloudy (for a change!)

McCain has pulled this one out of his hat! What a choice! I've been reading and researching about this woman for the past several hours -- her story is as compelling as Barak Obama's, if not more! She ticks the boxes that McCain can't tick. I hope that she can stand up to the microscope that is about to be put to every chapter of her life. Glad I don't have to explain everything I was doing 20 or 30 years ago!

I wonder, too, if there is a connection to Michael Palin here somewhere? Monty Python takes Washington!

Madrid, 23 August 2008, lives ripped from us ....

... that mark our place and in the sky ...
...the planes still bravely winging fly ...

It was warm and quiet on Wednesday afternoon. Madrid in August is, in my view, at its best. There is no traffic, the boiling July heat has given way to a milder warmth and for those restaurants that are open, no reservations are required. A great place to be.

Still, some people still work and that involves travel; others drive off to holiday homes in the sierras or fly to island retreats.

So, three days ago I drove out to pick up a colleague who was flying in from Switzerland. The traffic was light so that I noticed the ambulance behind me, surely one of the first, earlier than on a busy day and scooted over a lane to let him pass, siren screaming and lights flashing.

On the horizon the black smoke was just starting to boil up. The plane cannot have gone down more than a minute or two before. There was something terribly wrong. In my gut I knew that this was not just a normal fire, a warehouse or burning brush. Something very bad had happened. I picked up my colleague and we left the airport before chaos set in.

And today, another perfect August day in Madrid, there is a picture in ‘El Pais’ of the interior of one of the huge exhibition halls at the Feria Madrid, very near Barajas. It is one of those very functional buildings, with the framing visible on the interior and the floor an easy to maintain granite or marble – ochre, shiny, cold. It is so enormous that the line of people passing by on the far side occupies just a fraction of the photo. In the foreground are rows of sheet-covered bodies, stretching the length of the hall.

It must be very cold in there. The technicians have turned the air-conditioning to maximum, the living are wearing dark colours, heavy coats.

This is the same place that the bodies were laid out in the wake of the terrorist bombings at the Atocha station, a similar number of victims, a similar feeling of numbness.

This time the deaths are not the result of insane fanaticism but the result is the same. It feels as though lives have been ripped from us out of time. You should die old and surrounded by your loved ones, shouldn’t you?

Welcome Mr. Bud!

2 March 2008
Sunday
Clifton

My nephew has been persuaded to join the world of blogging. It’s a silent sort of place for the most part. I’ve got a few readers but I post irregularly and it’s difficult to pigeonhole me. Mr. Bud (my nephew) will face some of the same problems although I suspect, much to my dismay, that he’s a better or, at least, more with-it writer so he may have a larger audience. If he includes a photo, that’s sure to happen; in fact, I just might cop one of his to use for myself. The age thing can be explained.

He’s just headed back to Holland to continue some sort of libertine semester off thing that he’s organised. Here on Pudding Island he was mostly ill and confined to his bed but managed to stagger out occasionally, belt down a few drinks and bed some likely wench, then stagger back to his bed where he passed the time reading an impressively wide array of literature. And, in this case, I mean it, the guy really does read widely. I was delighted to give him something by Italo Calvino, something by Bruce Chatwin and, for pure fun, something by Bill Bryson. He’ll suck these things up and come out, in just a few days, wanting more. Wow! It is cool to see someone’s reading appetites grow.

Hey, Mr. Bud, for a neat serving of something entirely different, may I suggest Neal Stephenson? I won’t describe it, just go out, buy something by him and enjoy!

Beer, Turkeys, Scientific Research, Sex ...

6 November 2007

My brother bloggers – Dave Barry and Scott Adams are two names that spring to mind – often regurgitate an amusing article from a magazine or newspaper which permits them to eschew that annoying requirement to come up with something original while still providing the required column inches.

I am the first to acknowledge that Dave and Scott are, of course, minor gods and I prostrate myself at their feet; also, they publish every day whilst I only do so when the muse kicks me in the tushy; also, they actually have readers whereas I just write this for myself, but, nonetheless ….

Don’t condemn either one of my heroes, what they do is both sensible and entertaining. Why think of something new when there may be something much more interesting that you can filch from the papers? I’d do it myself more often, expanding available personal grooming time, increasing my real world work day and generally benefiting myself all around. The problem has been this conceit that I’ve got something uniquely me inside that’s trying to make its way onto the screen.

Well, that may be so some of the time but it’s certainly not so today. I have to acknowledge that ‘New Scientist’s’ 3 November issue, page 53, has anything I can come up with beat hollow. No contest.

So, what is it that is so fascinating it has caused me to abandon a long-held policy. Turkeys, my friends, turkeys …

I was in graduate school myself for a preternaturally long time so I’m very sympathetic with Marty Schien and Eddie Hale, two early 1960’s Penn State graduate students who, I’m pretty sure, had been waaaay too long in the Nittany Valley by the time our story opens. Clearly Schien and Hale drank a lot of beer because, firstly, that’s the condition of graduate students and, secondly, no one could be sober and come up with their topic of research: turkey sex. It was 1960’s, most of the United States was still suffering a post –Eisenhower hang-over (which Marty and Eddie were cleverly able to avoid by continuing to drink beer, even after they’d come up with the subject of their research). The cold, hard reality of Vietnam hadn’t yet hit home, we were New Frontiering, Peace Corps-ing, heading for the moon and trying to get booty desperately from a sex that still hadn’t managed wide-spread adoption of the pill. So, it was a rough but deluded time. Marty and Eddie deserve our respect for their bleary-eyed navigation of those ‘National Lampoon’ years.

The circumstances behind this discovery are hidden in the mists of time but, evidently with this excess amount of time on their hands (a common condition for graduate students) and, as I’ve noted, several bottles of beer to the good, Marty and Eddie observed that horny (how did they know that?) male turkeys placed in a room with a life-like model of a female turkey demonstrated all of the intelligence of human fraternity brothers and mated with it as happily as they might have with the real thing.

Inspired by this startling result, Marty and Eddie celebrated with another couple of beers and then embarked on a series of experiments to determine the minimum stimulus it takes to excite a male turkey (I could have told them that the minimum stimulus was beer. I should also note, parenthetically, that the results are equally applicable to college students.) Their research really began to break new ground now as they removed various parts from the female turkey model, one at a time, until the male turkeys lost interest.

Tails, feet, wings – Eddie and Marty removed them all – but the still clueless birds – the record is unclear whether they might have been fed beer during the research – kept on keeping on, gobbling amorously and climbing up on the hapless model.

In the end Schien and Hale proved, and I think this is the important part, that turkeys are actually more mature and discerning than frat brothers, they eventually reduced the female to just a head on a stick with which the birds dutifully attempted to copulate. Try that with any 1960’s vintage Frat brother!

Stick with me here, this really was going on. It is scientific fact as reported in the prestigious ‘New Scientist’ that I cited above. And the results of these experiments were published in 1965 in ‘Sex and Behavior’ (which most ex-college students of the male persuasion would pay to write!).

And, let’s remember, we shouldn’t make fun of turkeys without considering our own giblets first. We humans, frat-brothers or not, have been trying to mate with all manner of things for a long time. Dave Barry has written about vacuum cleaners and Scott Adams copped something about a man convicted of having it on with his bicycle (both columns, I add, ‘borrowed’ from the original work of others). Our ‘New Scientist’ article ends up recounting the sad case of Thomas Granger, a New England teenager who, in 1642, was executed for having had sex with a turkey!

I cannot write anything more. My keyboard is wet and I need a shower.

The Omnopticon ...

4 November 2007

‘Omnopticon’

I sat bolt upright this morning – around 4 AM. This was either because I was having a eureka moment or the pizza I had for dinner was repeating; either way, the word/invention ‘omnopticon’ came to me out of the blue. I had been thinking about ways to get more readers and it hit me that Sweik’s Anabasis was probably not the most common referent for what I was trying to do with it. Like a lot of other lazy people, I use my blog to express shallow opinions and relate short histories; it allows me to set down unthought-through opinions about any topic that my dilettantish mind flits over without really having to break a sweat.

And those things I write about tend to be pretty varied – whatever passes in front of either my physical or mind’s eye. Of course, in the case of the former, I mean my ‘eyes’, I’ve still got two of those. This does raise an interesting question as to whether schizoids have two or more mind’s eyes and another about non-schizoids: are they a sort of mental Cyclops because they’ve only got one eye? I’m digressing here, aren’t I?

Anyway, this multiple streams-of-consciousness approach to putting it out there ought to have a single word to describe it, no? And that’s when ‘omnopticon’ came to me.

So, like any semi-literate denizen of the century, I googled it but found only one use of the term by Jeffrey Rosen in a 2004 book that I’ve got to read within the next decade or so. Intriguingly called ‘The Naked Crowd. Reclaiming security and freedom in an anxious age’ (New York: Random House, 2004), he is apparently, and among other things, worrying that the Age of Google is going to result in not the panopticon where authority can see all but the omnopticon where everyone can see everything.

I think I can better that definition: omnopticon is a place from where everyone can see everything and, indeed, has the freedom to look in all those places. Because it’s a concept rather than a physical place, the omnopticon must be virtual, not real; you can’t be in all those places at once.

So, can I link ‘Anabasis’ and ‘Omnopticon’? Perhaps so. In Jaroslav Hasek’s book, ‘The Good Soldier Sweik’, despite his brilliant, single-minded and endlessly inventive obtuseness, the protagonist eventually has to go off to the war. It is at this point that his anabasis begins.

Sweik goes left, he goes right, he goes north, south, in circles, backwards and, occasionally, forward but every single step is directed at keeping him from being shot. The anabasis is, indeed, a wander around without a map and, hence, its seeming randomness. But, at a deeper level, the trip is an ‘omnopticon’ because it allows Sweik to see (and show us) the futility of that war and the absurdness of the society that is trying to get him into that conflict from a variety of angles. The chaotic nature of the anabasis is actually a way of finding logic and pattern in the world; it gives Sweik an omnopticonic view which enables him to confirm his own instinctive view that the war is insane and, therefore, he’d be nuts to go along with those who want to get him shot in it. The only rational response is the anabasis. But you can’t tell those others that’s what you are doing, they wouldn’t understand, they haven’t got/found an omnopticon (begins to sound like something tangible, doesn’t it? Like a small metal contraption you carry around in your briefcase and pull out from time to time in order to help you figure out where you are. It could be a sort of philosophical sextant, couldn’t it?).

I didn’t really set out to write about ‘The Good Soldier Sweik’ but I did want to fool around with the word ‘omnopticon’.

Let me try the definition again: ‘omnopticon’ is a place from where you can distinguish the patterns behind seeming random, chaotic reality; the omnopticon is a Picasso-like way of looking at the world. It’s a virtual philosophical instrument that permits you to be in that place where you can make those multiple observations from multiple angles. We’ve all seen those works where Picasso tries to show the interior of his subject by painting two dimensional views of the figure from several angles, thereby giving us three-dimensions in a two-dimensional medium. The omnopticon allows you to see the world out there from all angles (or at least from a lot of them) but, it also allows everyone else (and everything else) to see you. I’m positive that the world out there that you are looking at is not reality because that has to be the result of how you interpret what you see; as Richard Rorty says, there is no such thing as objective truth. So, the omnopticon is one tool that gives you the opportunity to create your own truth from the sum of multiple observations (including observations by others and yourself of you). I wonder also if it might require wine for lubrication?

You may not be able to make much of my definition but it makes some sense to me. That may be because I had to struggle through trying to set it down in a comprehensible manner. Reread the above and tell me if you think I’ve done any good. Or, just have a glass of lubrication.

Vinculated sintonia ...

3 November 2007

Another Saturday night and how I wish I had someone to talk to …

There is a certain ‘sintonia’ to the past couple of weekends. I’m not sure what the English word for ‘sintonia’ is; I’m pretty sure it’s right out there just beyond the edge of my mind. ‘Sintonia’ is another word like ‘vinculado’, one of those words that should exist in English but doesn’t …quite.

Things are linked but that isn’t quite the same as ‘vinculado’; there’s a degree of connection that ‘vinculado’ implies that is far more than a mere link.

But, as always, I’ve digressed. Somewhere back there I was trying to talk about the ‘sintonia’ between this Saturday night and the last. If I recall the last one, I was seated here, my computer in my lap, ruminating on the shallow vacuous-ness of evenings spent with empty minded people eating over cooked and tasteless food with over-priced wine and watered-down cocktails (at least that’s what I was thinking about). I was, if I recall, singing the praises of creative loneliness. A far more entertaining and constructive way to spend you time than engaging in empty verbal trivialisation about superficialities.

[Wow! I really do sound bitter, don’t I? Perhaps it’s time for the wife to finish sorting out her Mother and the rest of the family in Taiwan and come on back before I fold up into some sour old cynic?]

There’s really no point to ‘sintonia’ here – it gave me a chance to parade a bit of language knowledge, to write smarter than I speak, think or, sadly, am.

Of course, now I’ve given the game away. I just created the opportunity to use ‘sintonia’ and ‘vinculado’. But, wait, maybe there is something to be gotten out of all this, maybe there’s a way to rationalise the time I’ve spent writing this crap and you’ve spent reading this dross? … Yep, I think there is! And this is what it is:

You need to recognise links in life. ‘Vinculation’ is important. ‘Sintonia’ is also important. It helps you to recognise patterns and make a picture, to put things together (to ‘vinculate’ them if you will).

Exposed ...

28 October 2007

My daughter doesn’t read my blog. Of course she’s in a minority but unsurprisingly so, she’s a mere child (16) and still incapable of considered discrimination in her choices of reading matter.

Since she doesn’t read the blog, I’ve been taking advantage of drive time to share my unique and entertaining views. The problem is that I am beginning to believe that she’s seeing through me. Today I was sharing my mordant perspective on shallow, meaningless, expensive socialising by individuals with empty lives.

After listening to me for a few minutes (a very few minutes), she gave me a considered reaction, “You, Dad, are a wanna-be cynic. Your cynicism is shallow and poorly presented.”

When I asked if I wasn't a cynic what exactly it was that she thought I was, she said, “You are a crappy happy person.”

I don’t really have anything to add, I’m a bad cynic. I’ll try to get better at it.

Smirkily self-satisfied on a Saturday night...

or, how I explain sitting by myself with a glass of wine and another television travelogue ...

27 October 2007
Bristol

Here’s my list of things that have irritated me today:

1. Someone who ought to know better, primping around in a tuxedo, organising some theatre bar and entrance for a play that will be both boring and amateurish. The person is around 60 years old, surely old enough that we ought to expect him to behave maturely and not be a party to such self-indulgent silliness. Instead, he prances around in a black tie, mesmerized by some completely inaccurate self-image.

2. Dinner, cocktails, dates, dances, whatever, with inane people. I’m sitting here, on a Saturday evening, in a Bristol apartment, writing something, sipping on a glass of wine, gloriously alone (the wife has gone to visit her Mom and the rest of the family). This is soooo much better than being with people whose opinions I do not value, certainly do not respect and, frankly, do not want to listen to, even if I’m given free alcohol.

3. How much money do you think is poured down the gurgle every night, every week, every month, in every town, around the world, on meaningless ‘social’ events that add nothing to either the sum of human wisdom nor to the life of the individuals involved but represent, instead, another futile battle against loneliness? What if, instead, we spent that money on technologies that counter global warming? What if we spent it on bicycles and more bicycle lanes in our cities? Hmmmmm …

So, this is about loneliness. What you need to know is that loneliness is good for you. It’s another facet of what it is to be an adult, a realised human being. It’s not just analogous to sticking together in a marriage, through thick and thin, not choosing to take the seemingly easy way out, divorcing a partner for a newer, apparently faster model, indulging yourself (notice how indulgence is a feature of this piece?), being an adult involves coping with loss, with loneliness, with failure and remaining an adult throughout, a decent, human adult, a civilized human. But there is an upside, being an adult is also fun and fulfilling. There is no relationship to match one that is fully realised. And how do you define fully realised? Easy, a ‘fully realised’ relationship is simply one where your love and your admiration for the character of your partner deepens every year. A few wrinkles, an extra pound, these things don’t matter, not even a bit.

But, as always, I’ve digressed. I wandered away from the issue of loneliness. Loneliness is good for you. You have to introspect and, eventually, you will learn something about yourself. It’s a selfish time as well: you can read, you can take a walk, go to a museum by yourself, contemplate a painting, a view, an essay. You can lie in bed and take a trip into the back corners of your mind and the side-streets of your memories. An indulgence but not destructive or wasteful.

This scribble has been a bit of a mental wander and is probably both boring to the reader and seemingly self-indulgent but it surely felt good to me to express the feelings. Also, I’m actually right about self-indulgent, selfish, lonely, immature people. And, by the way, much of the time, I’m one of them; you see, not a single one of us is fully realised (if you really are, you are probably not reading this, you’ve exploded in some cosmic moment of incredible self-realisation, quite certainly leaving a considerable mess for your partner and associates to clean up), we just hit moments of realisation. Loneliness is a way to have more of those moments. Learning to love maturely is another.

I do enjoy preaching but must admit that all of it is directed at some element of me and not whoever is my audience (if anyone). Like everyone except those guys I mentioned above, the all-the-time fully realised, I could use the advice.

This one ought to stir things up a bit ...

22 October 2007

Boy is this going to infuriate some Catholics.

Here are the difficult issues today:

1. The Pope ought to retire when he becomes too old and infirm to serve as Pontiff. This just makes sense – John Paul II connected with the young, the poor, the disenfranchised very well in his early days, the dynamism of the man was just what the Church needed. But, you have to question how effective he was as an old, bent-over man. Why not give him some time off – let him retire to a life of prayer and contemplation? Put in someone else to carry the burden. You don’t make retirement mandatory based on age, you just use common sense.
2. The Papacy ought to be open to women. This is not a question for God, it is something for humanity and it’s right that women ought to have the opportunity. Why are we denying ourselves 50% of the candidates for important, critical roles? We ought to pick whoever is best for any role, regardless of sex, religion, colour, age, weight or whiteness of teeth.
3. Abortion is wrong unless there are serious extenuating circumstances (the mother’s health, incest, rape).
4. Birth control is good. We have too many people and you can’t stop those we have from being really stupid. They are going to copulate, no matter what the Church says. Better that they are on the pill or using condoms or something to prevent another unwanted pregnancy and a child that grows up neglected, poor and under-educated. That’s just crazy.
5. Celibacy ought to be optional. If you are a priest and you want to get married, it’s okay. If you are already married and you feel the call to be a priest (or priestess), it’s okay. We need committed people – of both sexes, married or, if they choose, unmarried.
6. From the above, it’s clear that I already think that your sex has nothing to do with whether or not you should be a clergy-person. If you feel the call and it’s what you want, go to it. I want to be ministered to by someone who genuinely feels the call and is serving humanity equally. How can you join something so exclusive as a fraternity of judgemental, celibate priests and then call yourself a person of God? Jesus has got to be laughing himself silly at the way in which we’ve perverted his life and mission.
7. And, you’ve got to know this one is coming from the penultimate sentence in item 6: Judge not lest ye be judged. It’s up to the individual to decide if they are fit to take communion, you can’t turn them down if you are really God’s Church. It isn’t your church, it’s God’s. You can’t presume to speak for Him if you’ve got one real ounce of reverence and perspective; you can say how you feel about something, that’s not just a right, it’s your duty but you cannot judge – that’s imply arrogating to yourself a power that is waaaaay beyond you! If you are a Priest/ess, you have the obligation to accept that an individual has judged him/her-self worthy of communion if they present themselves. You are the instrument, not the player. Give them the wine and the bread and let the rest take place between that person and God.
8. I really can’t see that these are the difficult issues. There are others, real doozies, that are problems that you’ve got to come to grips with in your life – your relationship to God is one that you’ve got to work out for yourself, no one can do it for you. It’s your obligation to listen to, even seek out the views of others (including those of the clergy) but, in the end, you’ve got to be an adult and do your best, you are going to take that step into eternity that everyone does but, like everyone else, you are going to have to do it alone and in your own way. That’s just how it is – there is nothing I’ve seen that says it’s easy and nothing that convinces me you should cede the responsibility for your relationship (or lack thereof) with God.
9. Good Luck! Thanks for the all the fish!
10. I'm not Catholic. It's not possible to be a lapsed Anglican -- I heard it on BBC Radio 4 this morning so it must be true -- but, if it were true, that's probably what I'd have to lay claim to. So, go ahead, tell me I have no right to an opinion. Frankly, I don't care, I'll still have one.

Tom Lantos ought to read Orhan Pamuk!

My wife and I lived in Turkey for about a year. It is a beautiful European-Asian country. It’s people are welcoming, it’s cuisine is remarkable and it’s religious tolerance is an exemplar (the first friends we made in Istanbul were Turkish Jews, descendants of 15th century refugees from Christian Spain). Turkish is a sophisticated world-language whose range extends from the far West of China right up to the East of Europe; Turkish literature, art and music are all important elements of world-civilisation.

And there’s another plus – the wine is very drinkable. This country demonstrates what modern, secular Islam can be. I am even impressed at the recent election of a more conservative Muslim as President – I am sure he will be true to the secular spirit of Ataturk while trying to encourage people to adhere to the positive moral values of the Quran. You see, Turkey is mature; it will swing, of course (every country does), but it will swing within tolerable limits and it will remain true to itself and its values. This is the country of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Lawgiver. It is the country of Ataturk. It is also the country of Orham Pamuk, Nobel Prize winner. It is Turkey the Brave and Turkey the Wise. Of course it’s got problems, who doesn’t?

About a hundred years ago something pretty terrible happened in Armenia. I don’t know who is responsible and I don’t know exactly what happened; a lot of people did die, I don’t think anyone serious disputes this. What I do know is that I don’t know a Turk today who would either endorse or encourage anything like this. That the current Government of Turkey does not wish to apologise because it contests the causes and the detail of the event is probably more of a contemporary political problem than anything to do with Armenia or what happened a century ago.

Here in England there has been a brouhaha over a proposal that the City of Bristol should formally apologise for it’s role in the slave trade – the source of much of the city’s wealth. They didn’t actually kill them (most of the time), but the slavers were complicit in a terrible evil that puts the Holocaust and Armenia in the shade. This cool Sunday morning I rode my bike down to the Imperial and Commonwealth Museum – an institution that tries to present a balanced view of some 400 years of British international policy. This year is the anniversary of Wilberforce’s historic success in getting the British to act against what many thought was their own self-interest and outlaw the slave trade. Before the terrible business was finally ended, though, some 24 million Africans were ripped from their homes and crammed into stinking, fetid, rocking ships that carried them into exile and life-long captivity. Of those 24 million, however, 12 million were murdered by the system itself before they ever formally became slaves, they were just poor kidnapped wretches who died.

Maybe we ought to clean up our own past before we clean up anybody else’s?

However, before I'm misinterpreted, let me be clear that I'm absolutely not advocating that we ought in any way to ignore any contemporary act of inhumanity, anywhere. I'm not even saying we should not study and learn from our past. Far from it! We must behave morally now and do what is right for humanity now. We ought to aim to be the first generation that no one in the future will have to apologise for. However awkward the structure of that sentence, that’s a pretty admirable objective, isn’t it?

But, as always, I digress. I was talking about Turkey, not about slavery and how Bristol got rich. Moving on, and this is not a non-sequitur: I want to point out that Tom Lantos is behaving stupidly. This US Congressman from California has decided that he ought to be one of the sponsors of a resolution in the US Congress that condemns Turkey for the Armenian Genocide a hundred years ago.

Amazingly, Lantos has decided to do this in the middle of a war when Turkey, one of our best and most loyal allies, is supporting our troops and giving us access to facilities in their country that are critical to our war effort. Turkey has even shown remarkable forbearance in the face of growing cross-border attacks by Kurdish terrorists (both the US and the UK have listed the PKK as a terrorist organisation). At the specific request of the US, they have not moved their very capable military across the frontier. They have given the US a chance to get an administration up and running in northern Turkey that might be able to control the PKK and bring peace to that troubled border. US policy is failing, mainly because the Iraqi Governemnt is weak, incompetent and corrupt. The Iraqi side of the frontier with Turkey is, essentially, no-man’s land and the PKK is running wild.

So Turkish soldiers and civilians have been murdered as a result of PKK terrorist incursions from the Iraqi side of the border. The US and Iraqi forces have not been able to prevent this – there are too few Americans and the Iraqis are not capable. So, to protect its citizens, the Turks have prepared to cross the border and take care of business. Frankly, I can’t blame them.

So, Tom Lantos and all you other idiots in Congress, please think these things through. Stop behaving stupidly! Why don’t you pass a resolution thanking Turkey for half a century or more as a loyal and brave ally? Why not speak up about the suffering of innocent Turks today? If you want the Turks to behave with restraint, you ought to treat them respectfully as serious and mature partners, not as some sordid, petty 3rd world bully – something they most definitely are not!

By the way, I have to declare my interest a bit further; it doesn't make me biased, it makes me more balanced, unlike Mr. Lantos. When I lived in Turkey I made a lot of Turkish friends, including Jews, Armenians and Greeks – all of them Turks! My daughter’s god-parents are Turks, Muslim Turks. Their values, their understanding, their compassion and their wisdom would do credit to any peace-loving, tolerant religion, anywhere! I am grateful for their friendship and the love they have given Alex – indeed, to all of us!

A Rant About the Pillsubry Dough Boy

I’m still very upset about the dirty hospitals! No, actually that's wrong; I'm not upset, I'm furious, I'm hugely pissed off! I am deeply offended that this is going on in modern Britain. I am profoundly angry that yet another crime is being perpetrated on the poor; it is an injustice -- the middle classes, those with private insurance can go to a clean BUPA hospital (I did) but if you are poor and you go to an NHS hospital, you may die of something that should not even be a vague worry and is completely disconnected from whatever took you there in the first place.

It happened on their watch and after they’d spend billions of pounds so, no matter what their story, it is Labour that is responsible for the fact that a lot of people are dying every year in Britain from various hospital super-bugs. And why is this? To be frank, I can’t figure it out. There is no excuse. You have to clean the floors, clean the commodes, change the bed linen, make sure that everyone washes their hands. How difficult is this?

One of those double-speak pundits on a Radio 4 chat show yesterday – a Talking Head sent over by the Labour Party – explained that you couldn’t make these changes immediately if the budget was too small and there wasn’t enough money in the kitty to pay for the extra cleaning.

I’m sorry? What is this about? A budget shortfall is not an excuse in this case: You simply give them the money from somewhere. If the hospital doesn’t have the money, you get it from the central office of the NHS and if they don’t have it, get it from Gordon Brown. Do not make lack of money the reason you kill people from something that is eminently and very cost-effectively prevented!

It is, after all, the by-God National HEALTH Service. It is supposed to take care of people, to make the sick well, isn’t it? It isn’t the National Infection Service! It isn’t the place you go to make people ill, it’s where you go to get better …

I saw a nonsense about a new ‘target’ to reduce C. Difficile by 30% in the next 3 years. What a load of complete and utter verbal fluff, in this case very dangerous fluff. You do not need to wait 3 years to reduce something so easily managed by 30%. Why not simply say you are going to reduce it by 100% in 3 months or, indeed, in a month? Put the institutions on a war footing. Let’s get serious. Put up a lot of signs, give matrons authority and responsibility, install those dispensers of anti-bacterial hand cleaners everywhere. Put in more soap! Encourage patients to help themselves by asking their doctors, nurses and attendants if they’ve washed their hands (with soap!). Follow the cleaners around and make sure they know what they have to do. Show them where the corners are. Explain to them that the underside of a cabinet or a wardrobe is not a black hole but a place to be cleaned! Make sure the commode’s are cleaned, the seats wiped with anti-bacterial cleaners, the floors gleaming and redolent of the smell of that green liquid that that you know shows no mercy towards any bacteria that is unfortunate enough to be in its path. Change the culture! Just do it, for God’s sake! This is a serious crisis people! I do not want to die from a wholly preventable bacterial disease that was contracted in a filthy, stinking ward, in a bed covered with shit-stained sheets, my last memory of a dirty bathroom, drinking from a water glass that hasn’t been cleaned properly, wondering why the ‘professionals’ – every one of them: the doctors, nurses, cleaners – hadn’t had the humanity to wash their hands and give me a chance to recover from whatever it was that put my in the hospital in the first instance but, instead, infected me with a disease that is going to unnecessarily kill me! I do not want this fate to happen to anyone.

But there is another layer of blame and this is even more serious. It’s not just about following the wrong orders which is the somewhat explainable fault of the hospitals (explainable, maybe, but still unjustifiable; there is a moral imperative not to follow wrong orders!) that have been charged with meeting ‘targets’. This is all about a failure of leadership. And this failure is right up there, at the top. Yes, my friends, it’s Gordon’s fault. Previously it was Tony’s fault but Gordon wanted the job and he’s going to have to take the responsibility. Lead on this, Gordon, for God’s sake! For the sake of people who can’t afford private health insurance, for the sake of their humanity and your own, Gordon, you’ve got to lead on this! Give the order today, call up Alan Johnson (or however you spell his name) and simply turn things around, now! I promise this will raise your polls because it often seems that is what matters to you more than anything. I see this morning you are 7 points behind the Tories. Well, if you clean up the NHS that 7 points will be erased and, what’s more, you will, in all likelihood, be saving more Labour than Tory voters’ lives.

If you don’t do this, Gordon, I am going to draw attention to the fact that you look like a mean version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy (you can google him if you don’t know what he looks like). You will not like this!

Where are you Gordon?

Nicholas Sarkozy is there at the rugby match this evening. Where is Gordon? This is an important moment for English sentiment. Why isn’t he there? Tony Blair would have been. John Major would have been. Okay, Margaret wouldn’t have come but that’s because she always had more important things to do – she was excused. Gordon is no Margaret Thatcher.

Gordon Brown has dirty hands and he's no Eric Clapton

Recently I’ve been in the midst of a due diligence exercise that will, hopefully, lead to an important seed investment in a project. This process is something I’ve had involvement with numerous times before but the amount of detail that has gone into this particular exercise and the sheer picayune nature of the questions has been exhausting. At the beginning of this past week I thought we had just about gotten there but I was bushwhacked on Wednesday by a black swan question about the form of the investment. I thought we’d explained this thoroughly and identified the risks but clearly not as well as we might have – to be fair, the investment form is different than any other the investor has ever looked at. So, I spent several days scrambling around to get third party opinions that would help me calm this one down. At times I’ve honestly felt enough deal fatigue that I suspected we might never close this one; that makes for a generally bad week. Indeed, the week was bad enough that last night the team got together at about 5 PM and we all drank a glass of wine. The therapy worked and I’m much more tranquil today; we may never get that investment but I’m pretty satisfied we gave it the college try.

Reflecting on my week and comparing it with the last few for Gordon Brown – admittedly the scale may be wrong – helps to restore the yin-yang balance in my universal view. Gordon did indeed have a good run when he first got into office as Prime Minister. The honeymoon lasted the full 100 days and he had some very nicely manageable crises that boasted his public profile and the ratings. He went into the party conference on a high and gave a good workmanlike speech to wind it all up.

What I didn’t realise, very few of us has, is that Gordon is apparently a complete pragmatist: he’s in the game for the game, to become Prime Minister and stay Prime Minister. I think he’s in it for the rush of power, not for any higher purpose. His politics is the politics of expediency and contingency.

New Labour appears to be some sort of unwritten compromise with the establishment – a body I cannot actually define – whereby they become co-conspirators with the Tories in keeping the establishment in a manner that has nothing to do with the way that the vast majority live – including most of the middle and even a substantial portion of the upper middle class. You see, in this country you are paid a salary that is generally amongst the highest in the world but live a life-style that is amongst the least comfortable of the industrialised countries, you drive a car that costs as much or more than cars anywhere else, you fill it with fuel that is 50% more expensive in most EU countries, you eat at restaurants that are mediocre but more expensive, buy groceries that cost more, wear medium quality clothing that costs more, live in a smaller house that costs a lot more, ride a train that costs twice as much and goes half as fast (and is generally dirty to boot), pay huge fees to go to a mediocre ‘private’ school because the government schools are so shockingly bad, and pay expensive private health insurance so that if you do go to hospital, you have a better chance of leaving hospital on your feet (or in wa wheel chair) than in a bag because to go to the NHS is to expose yourself to one of the most miserably managed enterprises that has ever been created.

But, as is always the case, I digress but, frankly, I don’t care. I’m now onto the NHS and will get back to Brown in a moment – and if he’s the man in charge, he’s got to accept responsibility for the miserable state of the NHS. The NHS is killing people because they can’t get their staff to either wash their hands or clean the floors and toilets. This is not difficult to resolve. You simply pass the order and enforce it. Yesterday I heard an interview with some politician – I think it’s Alan Johnson (who’s got some role as Secretary or Health or something) – and he said that they had a new goal of reducing C. Dificile cases by 30% by 2010.

Why is this? Why can’t the goal be to reduce C. Dificile by 100% in 30 days? You have to clean the rooms, wash out the toilets and make sure that everyone frequently washes their hands with soap and water, certainly every time before and after they touch patients. What is so difficult about this? Why can’t this be done tomorrow? Why can’t they just send someone down to the shops to buy soap if they can’t find any in the supply closet? This makes no damn sense!

We lived in Spain for several years and my wife had to have surgery twice. Once she was operated on at a private hospital and the second time at a major teaching institution, a public hospital. Both times we were fine. The notion that the hospital wouldn’t be clear never entered our minds – it didn’t need to because there was a culture of cleanliness. What is going on over hear in dirty old Britain?

Someone I talked to yesterday remarked about how dangerous it was that nurses and other hospital personnel in this country go to work in uniform, riding on filthy underground trains or dirty buses in the same clothes that they are going to wear as they move around the wards. The two way opportunity here to carry a germ into or out of the hospital is truly fraught, isn’t it? Again, though, a pretty easy thing to straighten out – you come to work in street clothes and change into uniform at the hospital. This is pretty much how it’s done in the rest of the world – seems sometimes like half of the action in the series ‘Scrubs’ takes place in the locker room.

No locker room in the local NHS? No problem, use a room, even two rooms, for a while until a locker room gets fitted out. Don’t let the absence of a formal locker room prevent an action that would help to preserve lives.

The situation is so scandalous and the risk so dire that it baffles me completely why the public are not demanding the heads of those who are responsible for this unbelievable lack of compassion and who have not demonstrated even the elementary management skills to force everyone – visitors, nurses, cleaners, consultants, administration – who has anything to do with the hospitals to wash their damn hands! DO IT NOW!

So, Brown has a lot to answer for. Blair too, for that matter but I’m more forgiving of Tony because at least he had some principles and some objectives apart from wanting to be Prime Minister. In contrast to Brown, Tony did occasionally stand up for what he believed. He may have been wrong about going into Iraq but he was resolute in his conviction and he stuck to his guns. Brown is such a waffler that he looks Belgian.

I’m genuinely sick of politics. And, in my own country, we are looking at one of the most outstanding collections of the tired, the cynical, the ignorant and the appalling inept in my experience.

Fred Thompson is so tired that it’s a wonder he makes it from one appearance to another – perhaps he has a Winnebago fitted out with a big, comfortable bed so he can curl up for 40 between appearances that, from what I can tell, are completely without spark? He’s married to a young, vibrant, intelligent woman. Why doesn’t she run? Fred can stay home and watch the kids.

Mit Romney – trying hard to be sincere and maybe he is. I think it’s interesting that he’s a Mormon, the Republican Governor of Massachusetts and so darn good-looking. Something has got to be wrong with this picture – other than the Mormons don’t necessarily preach values that are shared by everyone else and certainly their history is drenched in blood (theirs and others – I’m not pointing a finger at anything here except the capacity of religion to avoid appealing to our minds and go directly to our passions).

Rudy Giuliani – smarmy and with a personal life that must have the Democrats salivating. He didn’t bottle it on 9/11 but, on the other hand, who had a chance to bottle it – this was not Iraq, you had no choice but to live through it or, if you were unfortunate enough to be right in the gunsights of those monsters, to die. Giuliani did help hold things together during that horrible period and I give him that but I’m not sure that’s enough to qualify him to be President.

John McCain – appears to have all the right qualities. He’s compassionate, he’s very honest, he’s intelligent, he has enormous character and great courage and he’s got a perspective on life that is unique. John McCain is a true American hero and a man who dedicated his life to real service for his country. Even worse, his policies appear to be balanced and rational. There must be something wrong but it doesn’t matter – he doesn’t stand a chance.

There are a couple of other Republicans but they haven’t even registered on my political richter scale.

Meantime, the country is led by a man who is so out of touch and so arrogant (thank you for confirming that in your recent autobiography, Vicente Fox, former President of Mexico) that we are in danger of blowing every iota of good will that anyone in the world has for us (including our last and best hope for allies in Europe, the Brits), letting the man-made contribution to global warming push us right over the tipping point and, in a related matter, continue to regard oil as more important than the lives of our Marines and Soldiers (not to mention the civilian men, women and children who are ‘collateral’ damage) and thereby make two additional big mistakes: inhibit the research and the innovation that will give us energy sources that will fuel a carbon neutral economy and support a medieval and corrupt theocracy in Saudi Arabia and a bunch of self-serving petty crooks in Iraq.

Is this a cock up or what?

Now, for the Democrats.

Hillary doesn’t stand a chance of being President. The American people are not going to elect her. She’s so blatantly hypocritical and so graspingly desperate for the power that she will say anything, sacrifice anyone and compromise every value to get there. She is the perfect soul-mate for Gordon Brown. I’m not even sure I understand why Bill hangs around. If we make the awful mistake of electing her, we aren’t going to have Bill as President, it’s Hillary everyone! Make sure you realise this!

Barak Obama: this isn’t going anywhere. This guy is so liberal and panders so much that his spine consists of the same stuff that my mother used to hold together the marshmallows and canned fruit in her famous fruit salad. Let me see, what was that called? Yes, I’ve got it, jello!

Bill Richardson: Well, this might have had some legs but I understand that Bill has a bit of a reputation. He’s got a wandering eye and the arrogance to assume he’s physically attractive to women. This sense of male entitlement is stupid. It’s not even sexy. Where’s the fun of the mutual tease, the frisson of getting to know someone, really know them, to fall in love and to grow together? If you’ve got a hankering to chase women and you want to be in politics, learn to please yourself! The two, politics and womanizing, do not match. Hell, they don’t match in the real world. If you are to be whole, you need to strive for integrity in your relationships with everyone, including spouses, partners and so on.

And, here I digress further but, again, I don’t give a damn, this leads me to those supposedly sophisticated French, Spanish, Portuguese (add anyone else here who is so immature that they think it’s okay that someone is an idiot and dis-respects women) who just look the other way at behaviour that is just wrong. This is not difficult people: it is wrong to go around cheating. This includes cheating banks, your neighbours, cheating in business or cheating on your partner. If you aren’t getting along and you need to do something else, leave your partner as honourably as you can so that you can pursue your other interests. Do not compromise her/him and your own integrity by cheating. It is simple. If you do not ultimately want to leave them, work it out. This is how you do it – you just get in there and you stick with it. This is how people with integrity behave. Society generally has this one completely wrong and most psychologists have a lot to answer for by authorising immature and selfish behaviour – you aren’t number 1 and you’d better realise it! If you’ve contracted to be in a relationship, commit to it or leave but do so as honourably as you can – you don’t cheat on a business contract and you don’t cheat in life! There is no middle ground here, it’s completely black and white and if you are looking for some sort of maudlin, soft-hearted permission to make yourself feel temporarily good, you aint gonna get it from me. If you did the crime – you do the time – feel bad and suffer! Learn that it’s a lot easier to sleep well if you do the right thing!

By the way, the moral rant above doesn’t mean that I haven’t had to feel bad and suffer. I have. It took me a lot of years to grow up. I’m not sure I’m completely there now; it’s a struggle but I recognise that this is what being an adult and a complete human being entails. It’s what I want to be. I’m not going to throw rocks at you but I’m certainly not going to feel bad for you or to be understanding – if you are in that type of mess, you are a damn fool!

You know, Eric Clapton is a hell of a person. I think he is what I’m talking about; he’s been on the other side but I think he’s come through. He’s got no excuses; he faces to up to what he was and what he did but he’s come out the other side. What he wrote about the death of his son, ‘would you know my name?’, is one of the most haunting, memorable songs I know. He falls in amongst the crowd for whom I’d consider voting because he’s honest and straight.

Gordon Brown is no Eric Clapton.

Minneapolis

Seville, 3 August 2007

The collapse of a piece of the infrastructure of modern society and the deaths that accompanied that terrible accident is, I'm convinced, even more evidence -- if we needed it -- of the horrific and worsening impact of climate change.

I got up early on Thursday and flipped through the news channels, thinking I would watch the world's stock markets implode for a while but I caught sight of the flattened bridge and watched, in shock, a loop of video that showed scrambling rescue workers, a burning truck and an abandoned school bus only half on the shattered roadway.

But, and this is the point of this comment, there was an engineer who tried to explain why the disaster hadn't been prevented. One reason, he suggested, was that the bridge had undergone repeated recent episodes of thermal stress when the temperature had swung 20 or 30 degrees over the course of just a few hours. He noted that concrete just doesn't like this and reacts very badly.

I was convinced I now knew why people had died. They've been killed by climate change. The bridge had collapsed because of thermal stress. Global climate change means extremes of temperature and weather. We've got to learn to cope with the results of our own actions. Meantime, a typhoon is battering Japan and there are at least two others forming off the Eastern coast of Asia as I write this. Another study recently reported that the number of 'reportable' hurricanes in the Atlantic has doubled over the past 40 years.

We are going to see more typhoons and hurricans and, sadly, more events like the collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Train Spotting ...

3 July 2007

My London terminal is Paddington. Just about every daylight hour of every working day there are two trains from Bristol Parkway to the old iron marvel, one of Isembard Kingdom Brunel’s wonders. There are trains from Bristol Temple Meads, the older station near the centre of the city but I don’t think they are as often and some of those go to other London stations, I think.

This has given birth to several thoughts; one is how strange it is that we know so little about things outside the narrow channels in which we live the bulk of our lives. On the tube you see countless hardened Londoners who have some internal GPS and just know when they’ve reached their station; at their destination they just meander off, zombie-like, without reference to the line map above the doors or the station name in tiles on the rounded walls of the tunnel, oblivious to everyone and everything, usually tethered to some i-pod-like device secreted about their person, the only visible evidence of which is the white wire and white earpieces that aliens must think are a part of us. Oh yes, there is one other piece of visible evidence: a sort of blanked off look. The i-pod’ers are one of the most asleep generations we’ve had. It used to be that you had to drink or take drugs to get that alienated from your environment, you actually had to work at it a bit. Now you just press a button on that little white plastic box with all that engineering magic inside.

At my terminal, though – which is where I was before I did what I so often do and digress – what interests me is the way that we all stand and stare slightly upwards at the display boards, willing our train to move over to the left, ever closer to the witching hour when they will depart. Sometimes your train actually slides over to the far left display, panel by panel, and it reaches the end and there is still no platform number next to the name of the final destination so you don’t know where to go to board it. You just stand there and stare, powerless, a mere passenger, pawn of the railways, watching as the actual time passes the time of departure and your train, whichever one of the dozen or so that is currently drawn up into the station, nose first, just sits there (if, that is, it has even managed to arrive from wherever it came).

At least during the evening rush there is a bit of sport; we are also preparing for the made dash down the platform when our train has been identified (and this is the other thought that I mentioned had come to me about two paragraphs up). Until they announce the platform number, you just mill around, covertly appraising the competition, handicapping those who are lugging the heaviest bags, are old or infirm. High heels are deceiving, I’ve seen a woman in a tight skirt and three or four-inch heels scoot down the platform, as fast as a young banker on the make sporting testosteronal Nikes. Of course, this is really only true of the sans culottes, the lumpen proletariat who ride standard class; first class is still not over-sold most of the time and the railway companies conspire to keep it so by raising prices as fast as a Venezuelan brothel keeper (whose pricing policies, I add for the benefit of my wife who might one day read this, I’ve only read about).

So what happens is that your train moves across the electronic displays, closer and closer to that magic place over there on the far left where there is nothing between it and that moment of scheduling magic when your mode of transportation is finally given a platform number. That’s when the mad scramble begins, you walk/jog down the platform and wedge yourself on board and seize the first empty seat you can.

As the late comers make their way down the centre of the car you can feel quietly superior, sitting in your slightly plush, too-narrow seat, knees against the chair in front or, if you’re lucky enough to get a table, against those of the person facing you (frequently someone with peculiar personal hygiene).

It’s all great fun, really so if you only do it once in a while and are still sufficiently conscious of your surroundings to notice them. Or, you can buy an i-pod.

1 July 2007, Fear of bumper cars ...

1 July 2007

These latest threats to my freedom from fear have had less impact than previous ones. Last night we had to pick up my niece from Heathrow. I can’t recall worrying about leaving the car in the multi-storey. Later, in the early hours, as we got nearer home, we passed a crowded nightclub, cars parked up and down the street on both sides for a block each way and the sidewalks/pavements teeming with young partiers. It all looked like great fun. For a second my mind built a scenario about a bomb in a car destroying that atmosphere and many of those lives. Our daughter had gone out to one of these outdoor all-night concerts where insane young people stand around in the mud and rain and listen to the latest electro-techno-indie-scooter-wooter music. And, yes, I had thought the unthinkable about that venue as well.

The decision has to be that you go on, that you adhere to the patterns of life before the first attacks, as closely as you can. Of course those patterns are subtly changed beyond recognition by the simple fact of being forced to consider the action, a concert, an evening at a night-club, a business trip, as at risk from terrorism, even if we reason it through and rightly determine to carry on seemingly as before, knowing the calculable risk is infinitesimal.

I guess we will eventually weave the pattern of these threats into our lives; they will become as commonplace as the risk of an automobile accident on a wet, rain-slicked highway. You know that the possibility is there, you register the risk in your mind but, by and large, you ignore it and go about your business. Life appears to be increasingly cluttered with these little fears.

Scotland Forever!

30 June 2007

It’s just after midnight so the date on the top is not quite right – July is here but so far I can’t tell much difference with June. The rain is just continuing.

Earlier on Saturday, about mid-afternoon, these two yay-hoos, would-be terrorists, drove a Jeep into the front door of Glasgow Airport. Apparently they managed to get their vehicle alight and then just rammed it part way into the concourse. Thankfully they didn’t manage to hurt anyone, other than themselves, so drama becomes farce.

One of the two in the vehicle apparently jumped out and then doused himself with gasoline. The human torch then tried to box a number of policemen and other bystanders. According to one observer he was ‘disoriented’ – which is as it should be when you’ve managed to burn most of your clothes off and have singed your skin, ‘ouch’ pretty much covers it as far as I’m concerned.

Our terrorist boy was a big fellow according to this observer who, by my lights, has cojones the size of grapefruits. In the midst of the melee – terrorist swinging wildly at all and sundry – this fellow just walks up to the perp and knocks him down, modestly claiming later that he couldn’t have done it if the baddie hadn’t been so ‘disoriented’. I’m thinking that this is one of those very tough Scots who basically conquered the territories that made up the British Empire.

I once had one of those tough Scots save my butt from a passle of very large Norwegians.

His name was Bill Christie. He must have been about 45 or 50 but, frankly, he looked like he’d been ridden hard and put up wet. His hair was straggly, long, dirty looking and graying. He can’t have been more than about 5 and a half feet tall and he weighed about 145 soaking wet. Tough, though, didn’t do the guy justice. He had a face that had a thousand stories written on it – mostly hardscrabble tales about drink, fight, loneliness and courage. Christie was a North Sea roustabout who’d managed to raise himself into some sort of oilfield sales role. For me, however, he was a hero.

We were in Stavanger for some oilfield show or the other. I’d driven across the country from Oslo, arriving about 3 in the morning and been put into a room next to Bill’s – he was awake when I arrived and asleep the next morning when I went to the conference. Throughout the three days of the conference that was his pattern, asleep pretty much as long as the sun shone and awake for the rest of it. I think the long winters up there suited him down to the ground.

The second night Bill and I and a bunch of new acquaintances were drinking in the pub/disco of the Hotel Atlantic down in the centre of Stavanger. There was a pretty girl seated at a nearby table with a modern day Viking – bearded, red-faced and drunk. For no reason that I could discern, all of sudden the Viking just punched the girl, the force of his blow propelling her off the chair. She just curled up there on the floor, a pile of seemingly disassociated limbs.

Well, I was facing that table, Bill had his back to them. I must have been drinking a lot more than usual because as soon as the Viking had struck the woman, I was up and on top of him, having thrown myself at him and knocked him back over his chair. I was sort of sitting on his chest, yelling – ‘you can’t hit a woman, that’s just wrong, no matter what she said’.

Now where I got this sense of knight errantry is a mystery and I wont go into it here. What was clear almost as soon as I got the Viking onto his back was that he wasn’t going to stay there and there was nothing I could do, short of shooting the guy, to keep him down. He just put up an arm and swept me over, like batting away a fly.

I got up pretty quick and then watched the Norwegian do the same. He got up, and up, and up. This was one very big Viking. He was taller than he was broader only because he was very tall. I began to wonder if I wasn’t looking at one of the Minnesota Vikings.

Things did not look promising. The Viking was going to kill me, that much was about all that was clear. But, I hadn’t thought about my secret weapon: Bill Christie.

The little Highlander just stepped into the circle that had formed around the Viking and me, the two of us focal points at the north and south hemispheres. He stared at the Viking, the room was quiet.

I can’t do the accent but Bill looked at that monster – and he must have been about 6 foot 6 inches and weighed 280 (say 20 stones) – and Bill says, ‘So, are we gonna have a fight then?’ And he smiled this crooked little smile that every person in the room read right for what it said was this: ‘A fight would just about suit me, and if you don’t kill me, I’ll kill you because no other type of fight is worthwhile.’

There are few men in the world with a stomach for killing with their bare hands. Bill was one of them but the Viking wasn’t. He stared for a while at the little Scot and then you could see his spine begin to get a bit mushy. Beating up women was fine and throwing Americans around the room was okay but getting into a tussle with a Scot who you’d have to kill before he’d give up was just not on.

The Norwegian swallowed …big. That was it. He growled something and then just headed out the door, leaving behind the girl and his honour.

Me? I got back to the hotel about 2 or 3 AM. I rummaged around my luggage and pulled out a bottle of Glenfiddich that I’d brought to give to a Norwegian friend. I made my way down the darkened hall and knocked on Bill’s door. He was back and half-way conscious, I gave him the bottle and awkwardly thanked him for saving my life. Bill took it all, except the whiskey, with ill grace. I knew my Norwegian friend would think that I’d acted wisely in giving Bill his bottle of whiskey.

The next morning I had to get down to the conference pretty early, around 9. As I made my muzzy way down the corridor, I looked in at Bill – his door was ajar. My hero was lying there, all 50-something of his years very obvious (because in the morning light it was clear he was older than I’d thought), clutched in his right hand was a bottle of Glenfiddich, about half-empty. I pried the bottle out of his hand and screwed the cap on, leaving it on the nightstand.

Bill Christie was a man. The fellow who tackled the over-sized, dazed terrorist this afternoon at Glasgow was another.

Scotland forever!

Angst ...geographic overload

17 June 2007
Father’s Day (UK)

My sixteen-year old daughter made her way back from a friend’s where she’d spent the night. It was just on 10 AM and the streets of Clifton were virtually deserted. Sunday morning. She was hiking her way back home – about half an hour walk – to make me a ‘fry up’ in honour of father’s day. At first she baulked when I suggested I preferred some of Chandos’ fabulous croissants – finest for a hundred miles around! When I talked her around, a chocolate croissant having aided the cause immeasurably, she was a ‘fry up’ apostate. I’m not sure it’s actually healthier, though, those croissants at Chandos, made upstairs every morning and still warm when they open (I’m waiting at the door for them to unlock), are unimaginably rich – they make you fantasize about fresh creamery butter and the purest organic white flour. So flaky!

Of course, I’m a model of restraint and set the example for my child by limiting myself to two plain and one almond (rich marzipan enclosed in buttery, flaky pastry, mottled with almond slivers). Fortunately she managed to get in there and appropriate about half of the almond.

We drove across country towards the sea at Poole. It was the first time I’d seen that enormous harbour. We ate a father’s day lunch of fried scampi and chips in the garden of a hotel above the beach at Studland. We could look out over the sea, blue in the sunshine. To the east and west we could see white cliffs. Those to the east marked the mouth of the bay.

The queue for the ferry across the throat that separated us from Poole proper was three boats long. Alex slept through the wait, I listened to a play on BBC 4 that involved a scheming woman bent on revenge for wrongs done her family (I admit that I tuned over to Classic FM for a bit and lost track of what was going on).

I’m not sure it’s actually Poole, but the area beyond the eastern terminus of the ferry is wealthy and charming. It reminds me of suburbs of Sydney, beautiful, waterfront or near-waterfront apartments, low rise and glass faced. Another, similar place is across the water from the centre of Perth, a string of low- and mid-rise buildings, spacious, heavily windowed.

You know, it’s strange how many times in life I’ve compared places to Oz – once the wife and I decided to write down our top five, favourite places to live and both of us, separately, listed Sydney and Perth. We’d lived in the former but had holiday-ed in the latter (a lot!).

I belong to that narrow class of humans who are virtually without a place that is truly home anymore. We lived on four continents in the first two years of our marriage. No matter what city I go to, I still play a mental game of ‘could I live here’. I pick out little grocery stores that seem clean and bright and restaurants that might make living in that place palatable. I assess schools and housing; I am particularly alive to the weather, not as a traveller inconvenienced by heat or rain, but as a potential resident, keen to know whether the nights will be sticky and a ‘barong tagalog’ required (and, hopefully, accepted as appropriate).

The last time I recall playing ‘could I live here’ was particularly poignant, I was in Dhaka. I’m now 55 and moving and adjusting to new places requires huge energy and bursting health. I believe that I still possess both but in measure less than when I was in my 30’s. I can adjust to Clifton, the chi-chi part of Bristol, but I question whether I have the strength to make another move to a place as challenging – health, food, weather, culture, language, religion – as Dhaka. Two decades before I would have welcomed an opportunity to live in a place like Bangladesh: I lived and thrived in India, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan …but my mental, if not my physical life in these places has always been a bit of B. Traven, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, John Masters, even Sir Richard Burton. I am still drawn to the romance but I’m not sure that I’ve still got stamina for the reality.

We’re contemplating purchase of a place in Taiwan where we’ll spend part of each year as we get older. I look forward to this, the island is far richer and more user friendly than it was the first time I visited it about thirty years ago. And that was a decade or so after I’d left India … where I thrived.

I don’t know, though, whether the story is a happy one or sad …. I can’t actually remember the name of the maids my Mom hired when we lived in Mexico back in the 1950s; they took care of me, they were ersatz Mothers and I can’t remember their names – there were two of them, they stayed with us for a couple of years (each) and I can’t remember their names. There have been so many names … so many places … so many names … so many places …

The dog ate the newspaper ...it made him sick! Me too!

16 June 2007
Clifton
Ruminations on building …

Rainy. The dog is running around the house in ever decreasing circles. Earlier he munched placidly on last week’s newpapers, digesting headlines about events that have been overtaken in sensation by disasters that seem to be ever worse.

Time for another coffee. I’m working away on spread sheets for our Spanish projects and will later try to catch up with my correspondence.

I’ve set the mindless talking head volume to nearly zero so that the TV behind me is just a droning noise, like that of some nameless buzzing insect, circling your chaise longue on a summer’s afternoon whilst you, eyes closed, enjoy that precious space between being awake and being asleep – the crepuscle of consciousness. The buzzing is not so annoying as it is reassuring; there is a tangible world to return to when you reach out into that mental space you’re floating in, and retrieve your persona, jerking yourself back into the existence that includes family, job, responsibility and the evening glass of wine.

Penumbra – nice word, derived, I believe, from more recent Latin, means ‘shadow’, particularly the shadow of the earth on the moon when there is an eclipse.

This rain up in the north of England that closed out the working week worries me. I didn’t pick up precisely where it was located but the weathercaster said that many places had received a month’s rain in less than a day. In America the draught is the worst in many places since the dust-bowl years of the 1930’s. Is there a link? I’m inclined to think there may be. But, then, I just read Clive Hamilton’s comments on George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’ in the New Left Review; if we don’t take this 2 degree limit seriously, we’re going to kill a lot of people. It isn’t a matter of PC, it’s going to be a crime against humanity to fly unless you absolutely have to; to jet down to the costas for a weekend is going to make you an accessory to murder! We’re staring in to the abyss my friends!

Coffee’s ready, back to work. I’ve got a world to save. We are going to have to construct as much built space in the next five decades as we did in the previous 4,000 years if we’re to have a hope of providing decent dwellings for all nine billion of us (our total by the middle of the century if we don’t get hit by an asteroid or burden our natural system to the point that it can no longer self-regulate and spiral into an unknown, planet-killing climatic decline).

To build all of these new dwellings, we will have to adapt our construction methods to the realities of a world in which, if we are to survive, we do much more with much less. We cannot afford just to rip the guts out of the earth, consuming all of our natural resources in some two decade long building frenzy – two decades because that’s how long our easily recoverable reserves of many key metals and other resources will last if we continue to live like there’s no tomorrow (which there won’t be).

So, we have to build carefully, using local, abundant materials, we have to build carefully, keeping our real-time carbon footprint as narrow as we can and we have to build for a long time in order to amortise the inherent energy content of the new constructions over a reasonable period. This is important – we must build to last. If we build for 30 years, you just divide the energy input by 30. You get a much larger number than if you divide that same energy input (or, as we plan, a much smaller one) by a much larger life, say 500 years (which is not so difficult to do – just travel around some of Europe’s older villages).