Death ...not just another day

9 June 2012

Recently I've been thinking some about death, a number of the thoughts are strange. Death is not a topic I've written about before as a principal subject because I've always suspected that I'm somehow immortal, that the opportunity to start-over, to fix the misadventures of past times, will always be there. Increasingly, however, I am coming to think this not to be the case. Like so many others, I, too, will eventually die -- sooner or later. This is the ineluctable conclusion from the evidence: little signals that litter my quotidian existence and suggest I am mortal. These proofs of clay feet include aches and pains that come from muscles that are just not as quick to recover as they were before, the fact that my sleep is less sound and the effect of it less recuperative than when I was younger, the preference I have for going home earlier rather than sticking around to watch the last dog get hung and, this one does worry me, a sort of traveller's ennui extended to life.

Don't get me wrong, my traveller's ennui is not so systemic that I've turned into a curmudgeonly cynic, I'm curmudgeonly, yes, but my cynicism is still under control, it tends to be more of an amused tolerance masking jealousy when I see younger people being enthusiastic and genuine about places, people, politics, philosophy, art, religion, literature, food and each other.

It may seem, as it so often does, that I've digressed but such is not the case; no, I am addressing death. Well, not actually addressing it in the sense of speaking to it but, rather, talking about it as a fact of human existence and that's an irony, that a fact of human existence is non-existence (at least in this corporeal form). Non-existence is one of those things that we need in order to validate or define life, without the one, the notion of the other would not make much sense -- we would simply be in a steady state without the certainty that the state will not continue indefinitely.

So death is there and it's a fact and, so far as I know, no human has escaped this coil without experiencing it. When my father was dying I remember, rather strangely, trying to encourage him to let go -- he was in pain -- and I suggested that it must be a bit like standing at the open door of an airplane, your parachute on your back, facing the unknown of your first jump. I've never done this and I have no idea why the analogy came to me but giving in to death struck me that day as possibly like letting go of the frame around the door of the plane. You just give in, release and drop. The first awful moment is making yourself let go, after that I imagined it as very quiet, peaceful even, floating down, the universe spread beneath you, infinite and beautiful.

What happens after that? I've not got a single idea yet. Lots of people have written lots of things about it but I'm not sure that any of that writing is more than mere speculation. There is, as far as I know, no eye-witness account that we can rely on. Strange that; I read that there have been about 60 Billion or so humans since we first began to walk upright and I reckon, without evidence to the contrary, that all of them have died but we have no real idea what that experience of death was actually like. It's rather fun to speculate about what the experience must be like, though, at least when you're feeling reasonably good and the auguries of death are still nothing more than the minor aches and pains that accompany the aging process.

And so it goes .....

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The Conradian Gland

26 May 2012

I've been persuaded to quit smoking. This is day 1. So far I've torched an orphanage, ridiculed some nuns, tried to run over a dog, eaten too much and gone for a long bike ride. The ride was the least fun; however, it was the only thing that didn't take place in a part of my mind that has just moved front and center. No, the ride was real. I rode around the island. During the trip, a duration of about two hours -- and, it strikes me now, why isn't 'durate' a word; for instance, I could have written: 'During the trip, which durated about two hours', making the noun, 'trip', much livelier; but, admitting this time that, indeed, I have digressed, to continue -- I wandered around various jungly corners, past old British military buildings, tropically classical, that had been converted into a museum in one case and into a restaurant in another, which strongly appealed to my Conradian gland, the part of my anatomy that makes me sit and stare across the straits, seemingly mesmerized, or which takes over whenever we fly low over islands out here, endlessly fascinated.

This isn't the first time I've quite smoking. I managed it about 22 years ago when my wife got pregnant with our daughter. I stayed clean for about 18 or 19 years, not a puff during that time that I can remember. Then, about three years ago the two of them, mother & daugher, both occasional take-it-or-leave-it puffers, a subspecies that I cannot abide because I cannot be like them, were arguing loudly and I made the error of getting involved, picked up a cigarette and was off. It took me about a year before I managed to quit again. Why I started this last time, about six months ago, I don't recall; it may have had something to do with a new job, moving back to Asia, my Conradian gland (all of his characters puffed on cheroots or pipes or, if I'm not mistaken, cigarettes -- and, by the way, what is the origin of the word 'cheroot'?), or the fact that the unconscious memory of the pleasure derived from a nicotine hit with a coffee or a glass of wine is something that cannot be eradicated. Whatever it was, I was soon up to a pack a day.

No one needs to tell me they are not good things for your health but there is something that is deeply and quietly pleasurable in a smoke. I hope that I will be mourning them in the days to come and not wallowing in the pleasure of that stab of nicotine, contemplating the sinuous trail of smoke that snakes around my chair, rises and then dissipates.

By the way, to digress again, 'cheroot' come from the Tamil, 'curuttu', a roll (of tobacco) and 'curut' (roll) which morphed into both the English version, 'cheroot', and the Portuguese 'charuto' (cigar). The French also have a version, 'cheroute'. The cigars which the term refers to are open at each end and not tapered and were very popular with the British in Burma and India during the raj. I suspect they were a useful anti-malarial prophylactic. Most self-respecting mosquitos prefer a sweeter odor.


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Men in Black 4

21 May 2012 Monday There's a fungus in Oregon that covers something over 2500 acres. It is the largest living organism on earth. Frightening! People around the world, mostly middle-aged white women, report a strange disease called Morgellon's. This involves sores out of which come fibers as a result of the implantation of nano-devices in the skin of these middle-aged white women by aliens. The Centers for Disease Control call this a 'delusional infestation'. Clearly the CDC is under the control of the aliens already. Where are the Men in Black when we need them? My wife was watching a program on TV which featured irrefutable proof that the ancient Mayans, a civilization that couldn't make it past the 12th or 13th century, predicted that 2012 was going to be a rough year, finishing with a bang on the 20th of December when it will all come to some sort of watery or flaming end (I can't remember which). Despite placing an order for 13 tons of fresh water and 4000 cans of pinto beans, my wife's reaction was fairly calm and she didn't lose her sense of humor, she pointed out that our daughter, currently in university in Canada, would be flying to Asia on that day and so would have a bird's eye view of the end of the world. Me? I'm trying to remember where I put my copy of Nostradamus.

Scenes ...April, May 2012

28 April 2012 Just 1'15" north of the equator. Steel-blue, mottled with darker patches of gray, the surface is ever so slightly rippled between stretches that are smoother, these latter better reflecting the early light, the Straits of Malacca this morning are quiet. South of where I sit a hundred ships, all moored, appear motionless, their lights softening as the morning grows brighter, between them and the low, small green islands more directly across the narrow waters in front of my terrace there is a stretch of open water across which, dimly, I can see the lights of Indonesia, glimmering through a low haze; across this blank canvas a freighter now glides quietly, turning a painting into a film; it slips behind the islands and makes its way northwards, up the channel, heading for the north point of Sumatra where it will turn and head West. 29 April 2012 Sunday No rain, the day began brilliantly, clear, illuminated as if the island had been dragged North during the night, to climes where the atmosphere is not so heavily laden. But it's still here, floating just north of the Equator, it continues hot and a later haze has formed, made up of sea water and low cloud, catalyzed by the sun. Visibility has dropped, not because rain or a storm has come up (though there are towering cumulonimbus clouds along the horizon), but simply because of nature's cocktail of water and heat, undiluted by any breeze. The endless parade of merchant ships appears out of focus. 1 May 2012 Tuesday, Jakarta It's been almost a decade since I was last in the archipelago. Both in physique and temperament the pleasant people of this land are similar to Filipinos. The latter may sound condescending but it is not; geography, climate, history and culture all have an impact on social values and social behavior, Indonesia is no different. Like all humans they are equally capable of genius and evil, creation and mayhem. History in this case, however, has shaped the social culture. The Dutch hand on this vast collocation of volcanic islands was necessarily light, far different from the impact of the far heavier weight of, first, the Spanish and then the Americans on the Philippines. As a consequence of historical causality, therefore, it has been more difficult for me to organize a cup of coffee this morning. The hotel puts an espresso machine in the lobby for early leavers and late arrivals. This is a simple mechanism, you put a cup under the spout and press the button for your desired version of the beverage, in my case a double shot, 'short' as the Australians refer to it. The challenge in this case, however, was that my 'short' was 'long', watery, diluted, without body. Stay with me here; it may seem I am digressing but that is a slander. You may have forgotten or your attention has drifted, but a couple of paragraphs above I mentioned that the Dutch hand was light on Indonesia. This feathery touch -- and I am being ironic here -- included language, only merchants and collaborators learned Dutch, the majority continued to live and die in Bahasa. And here's the point: when the coffee maker shoves too much water through the beans to ruin your morning coffee the solution is beyond me, my technical capabilities in this case stop at pressing the button, I must express myself in words. In a panic I looked around for help, I needed coffee. No one from behind the reception was available. I am pretty sure they were back behind the wall, huddled around a working machine, enjoying perfectly brewed coffees. Too bad because I could have spoken with them in English and communicated my distress. In my growing need, however, I found a couple of cleaning staff who were extremely friendly and full of good intentions. By gesture I was able to convey that something was wrong with the machine. They huddled over the malfunctioning device, intent and full of goodwill but, my bad, I was unable to get across to them the need for the quantity of water to be reduced.... ...the rest of the day was dreamlike and muzzy, only improved when I found a fortuitously located Starbucks (not yet arrived when I last visited). They had coffee but somehow the mere presence of the chain, however minuscule at the moment, has bleached a tiny bit of the vivid colors that are Indonesia. 20 May 2012 Sunday Some of the heat has dissipated with a breeze today that has blown the hot, wet air around and made sitting on the balcony/terrace a pleasure. The week was hectic. It began with a day in the office but then I flew overnight to New Zealand, landed in Auckland at 10 AM the following morning and drove to Taupo, three hours south, sitting on the edge of a huge caldera that is now the country's largest natural lake, as big, they tell me, as the entire city-state of Singapore. The weather was bright at first and fall-like but in the afternoon it came up a rain that turned to hail and the temperatures dropped, to 3 degrees C. Because time was tight, we drove back to Auckland in the late afternoon, three colleagues and myself in two cars. My traveling companion was bright and pleasant and full of energy and we would have dined at the airport hotel where I was booked but the other two must have grown tired of each other's company because they called us about halfway along and suggested we stop and eat. We did, at a Thai place in Matamata. Having spent the previous weekend in Phuket, this struck me as surreal. We were the only customers on a blustery, wet evening, served by a lovely young woman who was half Samoan and half American and knew nothing about Thai food. The painfulness of watching her carefully write down our order is a memory that will stick. She wrote in longhand and I'm pretty sure spelled out every one of the four dishes we asked for -- each one ending in 'prik' or something equally likely to cause teenage boys to think up clever plays on words (something I can verify that grown men will also do when they are in an otherwise empty restaurant in a rural New Zealand). The food was interesting if you look for consistency -- the duck was served in a mass of vegetables and noodles, the pork came in another mass of vegetables and noodles, ditto the chicken and, for variety, the beef was also served in the same style although it was distinguished by the presence of more broccoli than a couple of the other platters. It wasn't really bad but it wasn't Thai either, at least if the excellent curries and Pad Thai's and so on that I'd consumed in too large quantity in Phuket were examples of Thai food. At the end of the meal I wandered back toward the toilet, past the bar where sat a fairly stout, older Thai gentleman, alone and staring at a video of a new program from a Thai TV station. We got back to the airport around 9 PM, I slept deeply and quietly and next morning flew to Brisbane. In May the capital of Queensland is a good place, the days are bright and cool and the people live outdoors as much as they can, drinking coffee, eating, drinking beer, eating, drinking wine, eating some more. I like it like this, in February it's Miami, only hotter. I flew back to Singapore on Friday, leaving in the afternoon and arriving 8 hours later. Long trip, during the day, hard to sleep, you work some but mostly you just endure. It's good to get back to the island, sweltering but alive.

No Turning Back

25 July 2010

Madrid

I’ve put it behind me now. Yesterday was the end. Like the firefly who backed into the fan, I was ‘de-lighted … no end’.

Yep, after many years of the traveller’s bane, I submitted myself to the surgeon’s scalpel and in a 30 minute procedure, I became a perfect ass – a state which many would argue I achieved long ago. But that’s a discussion that need not detain us; I am now wandering around the house, looking for soft places to sit.

It’s painful, there’s no doubt of that. Last year I broke my leg in a number of places and am still walking around with enough screws and plates in me to open a hardware store, but for the leg they give you more drugs afterwards and you pass the first couple of days in a rather pleasant, dreamy haze, napping and then napping again. For what they did yesterday they give you some drugs but not anything like enough.

What did surprise me and was the only frightening thing was the epidural, I think that’s the term; they stick a needle in your spine and take away all feeling from the waist down. It’s frequently used during long labor or difficult births, I’m going to name this one ‘Pigu’. At first your legs, beginning at the feet, just tingle a bit but pretty soon you are not just numb, your bottom half has disappeared.

The anesthesiologist talked to me throughout the surgery, mostly about solar power and wine – good mix, actually. When I got back to the room from the operating theater, I could only tell that the rest of me was there by feeling with my hands. Strange and frightening. I had absolutely zero sensation, as if I stopped just below my waist. I didn’t like it.

We'll Always Have Paris ....

17 January 2010

I’m back. The trip from Taipei was fine for the first 13 or so hours, I boarded around midnight and went into a coma as we passed over the Eurasian land mass. It was dark the whole distance. And then came Paris, the city of ‘half light’ on a gray winter day. Europe has been wearing a cold blanket for the past several weeks. England, poor England, is covered in snow and paralyzed. Spain is coping with more snow than it’s had in years.

Charles De Gaulle didn’t seem so bad. There was a bit of dirty snow alongside the runway, it looked like it had been scraped off the tarmac about two or three days before. After getting my luggage and stepping outside the terminal for my first cigarette since leaving Taipei, the weather was brisk and slightly humid but not impossible. The skies were low and gray but that’s winter and it’s to be expected.

I wandered away from Terminal 1 and found the train that took me to Terminal 2B and Easyjet; well, not actually to Terminal 2B but within a kilometer of it. My flight wasn’t yet ready to board, I’d gotten in at 6 and they weren’t taking any baggage until 8:30. There was a kiosk selling undrinkable coffee that I gagged down and a croissant that I’m going to write to Sarkozy about. I thus passed an enjoyable half-hour before I got the chance to consign my bag to Easyjet.

Freed of the responsibility of hacking around with a suitcase filled with Taiwanese treats for my daughter, I found another kiosk whose proprietor was in cahoots with the operator of the first I’d been to but this time I found a convenient bin into which to pour the contents of the cup of ‘coffee’ he sold me before they ate through the cardboard cup.

Flight time approached, I went through security – always fun when you’ve got a metal hip on one side and 15 screws holding your leg together on the other. I moved to the front, waving my crutch at folks so they would know that I was one of those needy souls who required early boarding. I found a chair near a couple of families coping with babies who were not pleased with the way things were going and, as is the wont of babies, were robustly expressing themselves. So far, so good.

Of course, they didn’t board us on time, but with the weather in Madrid and over a lot of other European cities, a delay was to be expected. Forty-five minutes later, a half-hour after we were scheduled to have taken off, the ground staff vanished, literally vanished – I think there may be hidden stairways behind those desks where they stand near the gates, always seeming to be very busy, huddled over their monitors, playing World of Warcraft.

So, about a hundred and fifty of us stood or, in my case, sat, and stared at each other, wondering what to do. I’m not like that, though, I’m a man of action, at least I was after 20 minutes or so. Of course, the onset of initiative may have been helped by the fact I needed to pee and there were no toilets on this side of security. I got up and hobbled back through the friskers and past the x-ray machinery to the check-in desks, stopping at the toilet. Back at check-in I was informed our flight had been delayed an hour. I figured, selfishly, my fellow passengers would eventually deduce without any assistance from me that the flight wasn’t going for some time so I wandered away through the terminal rather than back through security, deciding that I would take another shot at finding a palatable cup of French coffee.

You know, it’s a wonder to me still that you can cross the border down there near Monaco and stop at the first cruddy looking station on the Italian side, ask for a coffee and be immediately transported to cappuccino heaven. How can that be? What is wrong with France?

You’ve probably figured out that our flight was delayed even more than the hour I was told about and you’re right. We were postponed another 45 minutes and then another hour and then two hours. At some point the young Walmart Welcomer who stood at some type of lectern just before the ribbon-tape maze that you line-up and shuffle through at all airports, so that you can be informed that you have to pay extra for your bag, actually had no idea about the flight at all, she even asked me for information. I was beginning to slip into a Kafka novel. Clearly action was required, drastic action.

Now, the French are still struggling with the art of coffee making but they’ve got a modest reputation for wine and I decided to put that to the test. I found a slightly plastic bar-cum-bistro manned by a surly and completely unmatched couple. The female was a blue-black-haired (that stuff seemed to suck in the light) twenty-something type with an interesting, albeit also frightening tattoo that spread its sinuous tentacles up her neck from somewhere below the collar. The male half of the sketch was a shaven headed young North African immigrant, pleasant, rather shy and without a clue about what he was to do as a waiter.

I sat down and asked for a glass of wine (which I can ask for in twenty seven languages, including French!). After conferring together, the couple determined that what I wanted was a glass of wine, red wine. There! First time out of the box they got it right! And the stuff, at four or five euros the glass, was very, very drinkable. I had two. Landing on the scant contents of my stomach (half of a stale croissant), the pair of them (the wine, not the folks running the restaurant) quickly imparted a nice glow. But, they improved the young couple running the bistro at the same time. Their attitude got better and the female’s gleaming midnight hair was, I realized, actually just one of those French fashion things that they can pull off and I can’t. The snaky tattoo thing was actually a bold statement using the side of her neck, and who knows how much more of her body, as a canvas on which to write a commentary about post-industrial life. The North African was not just a new, nervous employee whose waitering skills were tested every time he brought a glass of wine, struggling to keep the tray balanced but a symbol of the new France, the Rainbow Nation of Europe.

Pretty soon I was feeling left-bankish. The plane had been delayed again, I’d confirmed that because there was a conveniently situated departures monitor which I discovered outside the toilet after my third wine. I pulled a hand-made notebook out of my backpack and a beautiful new pen my sister-in-law had given me for Christmas. This was just the moment! I was here, in this enormous concrete carbuncle of an airport, sitting at a bistro table. This was France, this was the place where Sartre and Camus and Derrida and so on had helped to frame the literary and philosophical dialogue of the world after the War.

I ordered another wine and began to write. Here, let me quote from my new notebook, which has a lovely green cloth cover decorated with painted, elegant Chinese characters: ‘This is my notebook’. Yep, that’s it, I deconstructed the notebook; I captured in that short sentence the whole existential anguish of the airport. My notebook was real, the wine was real (the second and last sentence of the entry is: ‘I’m having a wine’) but the flight, Madrid, the airport, that was all getting a bit blurry. I think it may well have been fading away as a nice case of jet lag arrived to help things along. Or it could have been some break-through in my perception of the material world although I think it could have been the ‘vin’.

And so the afternoon wore on. I eventually ate something, it was good, lamb I think. I had one more wine and then it struck me that, attractive as it was, I really didn’t want to sit at that little bistro for the rest of my life so I ordered a coffee! I can report that although my senses were ever so slightly affected by the wine, they were as sharp in the afternoon as they had been those eight or ten hours before when I’d had my first coffee on arriving at CDG (that’s Charles De Gaulle for short or, possibly, it may stand for Café Du Garbage). Night was falling, set off by the warm glow of institutional fluorescents, my flight had reappeared on the departure list, life was good. I paid and leisurely wove my way through the thickening crowd, through security and onto the plane. I got on the right one by cleverly confirming with everyone that this flight was going to Madrid (the one in Spain, just to be double-sure).

The rest was easy, I let the crew take care of the flying bit and the taxi on the Barajas end the driving bit. Our doorman was kind enough to take responsibility for the get my luggage out bit and push the elevator button part. I easily found my way down the hall to our apartment door and after only two or three tries was able to make the doorbell work. That attracted my daughter’s attention, who intelligently (she is my daughter, after all!) linked the door bell’s sound with the presence of someone without, wanting in. I was back in Madrid!

Fate...

6 January 2010

Pingtung, ‘Los Reyes’

I like the word ‘irascible’. I think it’s onomatopoetic. It just sounds just like irritability should sound.

So, I think that describing fate as irascible is both just and evocative; it sounds as if it’s pissed off. And, much of the time, it appears fate is, basically, a curmudgeon. I write this because my experience of the fellow – I think he’s a ‘he’ but she could as easily be a ‘she’ (I don’t want to be accused of sexism on this topic) – has frequently consisted of cosmic practical jokes, with me as the butt.

Today, for instance, fate decided to test me. I was sitting on the roof terrace, enjoying a beer and a quiet cigarette, ashing my smoke in an empty can left over from the previous evening that I scrounged from the bin we keep on the roof. There was a pleasant breeze and the wind chimes, from Santa Fe, which have adjusted nicely to their new Oriental home, were playing something classically Chinese. Overall, a nice way to spend some ‘me’ time.

Of course, just when I was having some out-of-body, peaceful experience, fate interfered and I ashed my cigarette in the beer I was drinking rather than the empty can (note to self: use different brand cans when drinking one and ashing in the other). The choice I was left with was whether to abandon the cold, refreshing beer I was drinking or carry on bravely, ignoring the ash content.

At first I rashly tried to pour out some of the beer, assuming the ash would float off. I checked myself just in time and stayed my hand, this is, after all, beer we’re talking about.

I don’t think I’ve ever drunk beer mixed with ash before – at least not the first one. There’s always, though, a time for these new experiences and, with two and a half flights of stairs between me and the refrigerator, this seemed the ideal time to try it.

Well, I can report that apart from a slightly gritty taste, the beer seemed to be unaffected. I sipped away, contented, the breeze wafting across the roofs, tinkling the chimes and me, slightly prone and very relaxed.

So, although irascible fate has tested me yet again, I do not think I have been found wanting. I have taken a few roughs with the smooth, a bit of grit with my brew, and have emerged, beery but unbowed.

Tainan

2 January 2010

Pingtung

Tainan, by the admittedly low standards of urban design and beauty that prevail on this island, is a pretty city. Before they were all bulldozed, the city woke up to the fact it had a few interesting relics of the past. Chief among those was the 17^th century Dutch fort which was besieged by Koxinga/Zheng Chenggong, a pirate who is frequently mentioned as a national hero of Taiwan. Still standing, the Dutch fort, called Zeelandia, was originally on Anping Island but the tidal inlet between it and the mainland of Formosa eventually silted up so that today it sits several blocks from the sea at the Western end of Tainan city. When Fred Coyett, the Dutch Governor, surrendered the fort to Koxinga in 1662, it brought an end to 38 years of Dutch presence on Taiwan.

By the way, Fred was called ‘Frederik’ but I think, being an American, that the shorter form sounds more accessible …friendlier.

In the center of the city there is a 17^th century Confucian temple and school. It sits in a park. It was the first Chinese institute of higher education on the island. I liked it; the architecture was still Chinese with those curved roofs supporting dragons perched at the ends but inside it was very simple, austere even. Compared to the architectural chaos of the Taoist temples that dot most cities, this place is refreshingly understated.

In front of the temple there is an impressively large Banyan tree which has apparently been sick (I’m not completely surprised, after all, it’s reputed to be several hundred years old) but the good folk of the city have been working to make it well; it’s been a symbol of the temple for a very long time and they rightly would like to keep it so. A dead tree is not nearly as attractive a symbol as a live one – the same thing applies to the oak (or something) that grows in Guernica and is the symbol of the Basque nation. Here in Tainan they’ve put up several plaques to honor themselves and their efforts to revive the tree. I can report that, apart from the encomiums to its saviors memorialized in eternal bronze, the tree lives still, but it looks poorly and I suspect that full recovery is a considerable way off.

There was a food fair in the park and blaring popular Chinese music. The food was good but I couldn’t help wonder what the ghosts of the students who buried themselves in the Analects when the place was an institute of education would have thought about the noise. Unseemly would seem a good guess.

Still, Tainan has sidewalks that are open, broad streets and a number of parks. Rather than build up, they’ve built out, the place is geographically bigger than its population would lead you to guess. It may be, though, that some of the building out is from fear – a lot of the land is reclaimed and the Japanese will tell you, ruefully, that the reclaimed land turns into something like water in any decent earthquake; better to build low and spread the weight than build up.

We drove along National 17 when we left the city; it follows the coast for a while as you head down towards Kaohsiung. The murky air makes the sea the color of dirty bathwater but the authorities have made the best of it and built paths, public areas, parking lots and benches from which you can look out at the water and watch bobbing barriers that mark the line between various commercial fish farms. Wherever there was a tidal inlet, the bridge over it was lined with people fishing. I liked it but, then, I always like coastal areas.

Buddhist Banquo?

1 January 2010

Pingtung

Eccentric, that’s the word. I’ve been trying to find a term to describe the latest stage in the evolution of my Mother-in-law’s character. When she elected to become a Buddhist nun, sometime in her 50’s, I would have described her as devout, determined to spend the rest of her time on this coil performing various exercises that would ensure her next rebirth would be less filled with work and disappointment.

Over the years I think she has moved from devout to ever so slightly potty and frequently a bit grouchy. Yesterday was one of those grouchy days. She always gets up early and wanders down to the kitchen where she spends way too much time over a pot, stirring up some virtually inedible concoction of bean curd and vegetables (no onion or garlic please!) but the family assures me that she was always a pretty miserable cook so no real change there. What impresses me is the amount of time that she invests in cooking and eating. The quantities of the muck she consumes are impressive – I figure she stays rail thin because she has managed to boil out all of the food value of whatever ingredients she mixes together. Even the smell is faintly repulsive; normally Chinese cooking is a welter of smells, many exotic but virtually all enticing (except for a type of pickled bean curd whose olfactory characteristics are not attractive).

So my Mother-in-law finishes her cooking and eating – she needs to rush because she will have to begin preparing her next meal shortly. Meantime, my wife is busily cutting and chopping and so on, getting things ready for a family shabu-shabu in the evening (our New Year’s banquet if you will). The ingredients are fresh – seafood, beef, lamb, tofu, vegetables.

My Mother-in-law looks over my wife’s shoulder, ‘What are you preparing?’. When informed that it’s a meal for the family and the ingredients are enumerated she mutters and wanders off, ‘I guess I’ll have to go to the temple’.

Buddhists are generally the most tolerant of the religious amongst us. I frequently tell people in the middle of arguments about how Christianity is a religion of the emotions that no one ever charged into battle shouting the name of Buddha at the top of their lungs. This doesn’t, however, seem to be the case of my Mother-in-law on one of her grouchy days.

My Mother-in-law is now getting on for 80. I suspect that her mental faculties are as good as ever they were. What I also believe is that they don’t come into full use except when she is grouchy. It is during those periods that she gives play to a sharpness that is otherwise disguised by what I suspect is a form of piety that includes both generosity and an inward focus that seems to be an objective of being Buddhist.

So, Mom-in-law was not pleased, on this grouchy New Year’s Eve, by the notion of a family dinner where the attendees would stuff themselves with God’s creatures. All day, after learning it was her plan to go to the temple, I wondered what would be the end-game. Evening and the arrival of family brought the answer.

I should explain that ‘Amah’, as she is referred to by the family, is not exactly Kate Moss. She shaved her head when she became a nun and has kept the same hairdo ever since. It’s not unattractive, it’s just there – and I think that’s the point of shaving it for Buddhist nuns and monks, you get rid of sexual differentiators. And her clothes? She dresses in a loose shirt-like thing and some even looser pants that are tied at the waist with a string. The color is a becoming and uniform washed-out gray (from daily laundering).

Amah’s teeth were pulled a couple of decades ago and, since then, her smile has been one of the sights of Pingtung, enhanced as it is by her brilliantly white dentures. But this evening we were not to be graced by a dazzling display of her oral prosthetics. I saw her half an hour before the first relatives were to arrive and she was toothless, her lips compressed into a depression around the gums. Very attractive. It was clear that she was heated up and not in a party mood.

Recently Amah has taken up making notebooks of cheap computer printing paper with covers made of intricately decorated cardboard from used boxes. I am not digressing here ….

New Year’s Eve and the pending arrival of family for a slap up dinner was, in her view, exactly the right time for Amah to decide that she should park herself on the marble steps just inside our door to cut used Christmas boxes into notebook covers giving her an excuse for being there so that, toothless, she could glare at every relative as they came in, wordlessly condemning them for the cannibalistic rite in which they were about to participate.

Being Chinese and inherently polite, everyone made note of Amah’s presence as they entered, nicely circling around her and making appropriately respectful noises. They then traipsed into the dining room to eat. Eventually with all the guests at the table and Amah absent (after everyone was here she managed to trans-substantiate herself from the downstairs entrance, past the dining room and upstairs to her room, unseen) I innocently supposed that we had seen the last of her for the evening; she would go to bed, it was getting on for 7:30 or 8:00 and that’s lights out for most Buddhist nuns. I was wrong.

So there we were, talking away, piling the beef, shellfish and other sinful ingredients into the shabu-shabu pot. I, playing gracious host, was intent on keeping every glass filled with plum wine, beer or some other alcoholic beverage, aiming to get 80 year-old Grandfather inebriated enough so that he wouldn’t go off and gamble whatever he had in his pocket (a winning evening would be even worse) and the rest of us could just relax and enjoy the time together.

It was at this point that our Buddhist Banquo showed up. Gliding down the stairs, all gray and toothless, Amah percolated into the room. Refusing a seat at the table where the slaughter was underway, she hovered behind various chairs, murmuring vile imprecations while still commenting on our cooking techniques (around a family shabu-shabu pot, culinary skills vary widely, mine being particularly unique).

We managed to wind the evening up very nicely. Everyone ate their fill and I rate the dinner a success. The shadow of Amah hung over things for a bit but optimism in the face of adversity is our watchword and, with enough alcohol, specters become illusory. The last guest stumbled out and we went to bed just after midnight to the echoing booms of what were clearly celebratory bombs.

The rest of the night passed peacefully except for the ruckus around 3 AM when a spectacularly lit neighbor’s wife noisily tried to prevent the man of the house from taking a leisurely drive around town. Ultimately she convinced him that bed was a better bet but by then the first dawn of 2010 was on us.

Today’s Laundry – Wash Before Wearing

1 January 2010

Pingtung

There is a little enclosed garden space off the living room. The garden wall is covered with orchids, all types, hanging in little nets, their roots spreading along the tiling. Some have thick, long leaves and others small delicate ones. Roots climb along the spaces between the tiles, taking in moisture, feeding off the rich air.

Crystal skies are a rarity, the humidity is high year-round and frequently a light sea fog moves inland from early morning into the night. Nimbus clouds hang above the shrouded countryside. The sun is diffuse, its rays cut and weakened by hanging, microscopic bondings of hydrogen and oxygen.

There is a strange appositeness about the climate; in winter the atmosphere is like a cotton sheet that lightly covers and in the hot season it is a blanket that suffocates. What nurtures also consumes; mosquitoes flourish, termites feast on anything wooden, even concrete and steel cannot defeat this environment – the concrete becomes pitted and prematurely aged, the steel corrodes. New aluminum structures are soon covered with a patina of moisture and mildew that erodes the brightness of the metal, creating hoary monuments of even the recently constructed.

The orchids – and this time I have fooled myself (and, perhaps, you) because the seeming digression after the first paragraph above was not a digression at all but, rather, part of the point of this splurge of words – are compensation for the weather; they bloom, brilliantly effusive, long-lasting, apparently delicate but surprisingly hardy, giving us color, light and beauty in a small, exquisite package that can make the corner between walls a reason to reflect.

Today’s Laundry

31 December 2009

Pingtung

Yesterday we drove along the coast, south towards Eluanbi. Narrowing quickly, the coastal plain thins down to a point where the mountainous backbone of Formosa slips into the South China Sea. Eventually the highway and the old, Japanese-built railway run nearly together, the latter ducking in and out of pitted concrete tunnels that I figure were built to protect from high seas, landslides and, perhaps, were intended to camouflage it from the air.

As you head south of Pingtung there are banana plantations and factories. Apart from the mountains to the East, just kilometers away but difficult to spot through the sea haze, the plain is as flat as a pool table.

We didn’t make it to Eluanbi – it’s not far but we stopped and took a nap on the coast just north of Kenting. When we woke it was time to drive back.

This morning we drove to Dongkang, the fishing port. The boats don’t get in until 2 pm so we had to settle for yesterday’s catch. However, since we were buying shellfish, prawns and the like, they were live anyway. Once bivalve, a greenish clam-like being, looked delicious and I’m told they are very good with basil and butter. They stick a stalk-ish appendage out of the shell and then spit at you. I will have my vengeance at our New Year’s Eve dinner tonight.

We reminisced as we drove, this route past cane, rice and corn fields, remembering mutual childhoods when the sugar-cane seller would sell a foot-long piece at a time, to Ting here in Taiwan and to me in Sonora (I still wonder where they grew it, certainly not in that desert!). You would chew the fibrous interior and the taste of that sweet juice is a memory that lingers, always there.

Later, back in the relative chaos of Pingtung (relative because it is nothing compared to the bigger cities), we stopped along the street at a bakery that produces marvelous fresh cheese bread and loaves filled with sultanas and nuts. How these people remain so slim is something that still baffles me. Perhaps it’s the water?

Schools were letting out and I think I was the only gwai-lo on the street so that every one of them wanted to shout ‘Happy New Year’ at me. Chinese teenagers seem so naïve compared to their Western homologues.

Ugly?

28 December 2009

Pingtung

On the surface our town here has all the charm of a strip mall. Scooters side-swipe cars and pedestrians with equal insouciance; public sidewalks are extensions of whatever commercial establishment that front them, providing extra display space for clothing racks, stacks of plastic utensils and bowls and bike and cycle parking. The kitchens of eating shops are often outside the premises, on the sidewalk, where it is cooler for the cooks in summer and where the frying and sautéing and stewing acts as a both a visual and olfactory advertisement of the pleasures to be had at the narrow, slightly dirty tables of the establishment. Mostly, too, they are right, those advertisements, the food is basic but flavorsome and prepared with a flair that comes from a combination of a millennia-old cultural fascination with cooking and eating and a need, born of scarcity, to use all of the fresh, edible ingredients that are available.

The bakeries produce soft, fresh pastries that are unrivalled except by the best croissants in Europe. But here they are made in bewildering variety, cheese, cinnamon, sausage, onion, fruit, cream ….

I am still on a crutch, just one now as my recovery from a broken leg proceeds, and limping across the streets is a challenge. I hobble across the intersection; no one intends to kill me and no one does; one old woman, plump and with crooked teeth that she’s proud to show, smiles at me as I hobble by, gunning the hand accelerator of her scooter. It’s a nice smile.

The 7-11 is gleaming and offers not just the usual mix of chips and beer and cigarettes but an aisle of fresh packaged food that is appetizing to look at and smells delicious. The clerk, seventy if he’s a day, enjoys selling me the English-language paper, speaking a combination of Mandarin and a version of English that is just enough for my scant Chinese that we can transact some business. Business done, we smile, wave and say ‘good-bye’ and ‘tsai-tsien’ – ‘see you again’. I hope we do.

Outside the bakery I sit and read the paper and sip at a cappuccino that is as good as any I’ve had in Italy.

Later. I still have the smile that the chubby lady on the scooter gave me this morning.

South of Cancer, North of Capricorn, East of Bengal

27 December 2009

Pingtung

The windows are open and the early evening breeze rustles at the curtains. In the empty lot behind our house there is insect call – chirping mostly. There are a few birds but the last of the butterflies has gone for the day. The grass was cut a couple of months ago but it has grown back and is now thigh high. There are a couple of renegade banana plants and a few trees, mimosas I think.

A fountain drips; the water masks most of the puttering of scooters a few streets away. For Taiwan the neighborhood is quiet, calm. Although the markets are still open and the food stalls are lighting up for the evening, the pace is slower on this Sunday. It may not yet be a day of rest for these industrious people but they are learning to make it a day at half-speed.

We are surrounded by our things – photos of Alex as a little girl, a picture of us on our wedding day, my books, candles, framed remembrances, the Encyclopedia.

There are smells, sounds, feelings that define what it is to be back here. Our house is in Pingtung, now virtually a suburb of Kaohsiung, second city of the island, a huge place. Thirty or more years ago I recall walking the streets around the old port, which was then still a dangerous place with sailors pitching out of bars and lost ex-pats playing dice and whoring. Container cranes have replaced swaggering Greeks and beer-soaked Yanks. The last of the hangers-on after the US closed the airbase are gone. There is a Costco, an Ikea, the Dream Mall (either the biggest or one of the biggest in Asia) and Starbucks and McDonald’s, there is even a modern metro whose lobby is ceilinged with stained glass.

I would stay at the Kingdom Hotel. The Ambassador, on the other side of the Love River, was more modern, plastic. The Kingdom was comfortable, smoky. Middle class Japanese businessmen and western expats on assignment stayed there. The bar was carpeted and traditional: stools, Taiwan beer on tap, bottled Guinness and Heineken. Sometimes you played ‘balut’ to see who bought the round – a game with five dice in a cup and a scoring system whose complexities increased in proportion to the amount of beer ingested.

Across the street from the Kingdom there was a ragged row of bars and cheap, Western-style restaurants. The bar girls spoke the hoarse English of bar girls everywhere in the Orient from Seoul to Saigon, raspy and strangely exotic. The customers at the Kingdom bar were a mix. The most interesting were often the Westerners, mostly Americans in Taiwan with the occasional Brit, who had come out years before, during the War or as engineers or commercial officers for one of the hongs and who had fallen down the black hole which can be Asia. Frequently they were well read and intelligent. Mostly they were lost and their stories were the stuff of fiction, wars and bright lights. I would drink with them, beer fuddled and seduced by their tales, into the early hours. Sometimes after hours of drinking and suddenly hungry, we would wander to a nearby night market and eat noodles and pork belly.

We were all, in a way, the off-spring of tea planters, opium traders, China Marines … even a few missionaries.

They call this half of the ring out here, the Asian edge of the Pacific, stretching from Jakarta through Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Osaka and, now, Shanghai and Shenzhen, the rim. It is the edge, still.

Today's Laundry

19 December 2009

Madrid

So Google has been fined about 400,000 euros for digitizing French language books. What idiots occupy these positions of responsibility in the French Government? Language, and literature, are, if not originally, open-source cultural tools, aren’t they? Yes, if you write something and copyright it, it’s yours for a time and you get to make money off it. Fair enough. What doesn’t make sense is for some narrow-minded linguistic chauvinist to participate further in the murder of a beautiful language. A hundred and fifty years ago – I was going to write ‘a hundred years ago’ but my asseveration wouldn’t have been true – French was pretty much on a par with English, a world language. Today you can speak it in France, at least in France outside of Paris where any attempt by a foreigner to communicate in the local lingo is regarded as an act of lese majeste. You can try it in the countryside of that beautiful country and it’s bienvenue, no matter how fractured your pronunciation and limited your vocabulary. You can speak it in Quebec, in Gabon, in the rest of Francophone Africa, in Haiti and a few other places but that’s pretty much it. When I was in college we were conned by French language grifters who persuaded us to take courses in the tongue and then disillusioned further when we learned that if you wanted to work in a French speaking country, you were more likely than not to end up in some desperately poor, malarial dictatorship.

So, we’re witnessing the further decline of French. The lesson is that if you don’t make your cultural patrimony accessible, it becomes ossified, fit only for a museum. Literature – even the bad stuff – needs to be available if it’s going to make any difference to people. In France they’ve decided not to participate in the democratization of literature and culture that is being delivered for other tongues across the internet. You won’t be able to call up a free copy of an out-of-print and out-of-copyright book in that language. Spanish has sped by French as a world language and English is completely dominant (I recall over-hearing a business conversation some years ago in the lobby of a Seoul hotel whose participants were Finnish, Chinese, Russian and Japanese, all speaking some form of English). Chinese is not far behind and Arabic and the Turkic languages will no doubt all have an international role. Only French will not be at the party and that’s because the fools decided not to attend, despite being cordially welcomed if they did.

And in Catalunya they continue to march backwards. A meaningless referendum was held for about a third of the voters in the region this past week. About a third of that one-third actually bothered to vote. The vote was to express support for Catalunyan autonomy/independence. So, let’s see, one-third of one-third is about one-ninth I think. Seventy percent of that one-ninth voted for some form of independence, amounting, in the end, to less than 10% of the voting age population. Hell, I bet that you’d get more voting for Texas independence!

So what is Catalunyan independence about? I reckon it’s about inferiority. The entire region is riven with a resentful, hard-headed dislike of Madrid and Castilla in general. There’s a history behind this, Franco was rough on the place. But Franco died a long time ago and Spain is now part of the EU. The central Government spends a lot of money on Catalunya and there’s no reason for this silly posturing.

Catalan is a ridiculous language. It is something between French and Spanish. If it wants to survive and people want to speak it, I’ve no problem. When the misbegotten regional government in Barcelona decided, however, that there wasn’t enough of it being spoken and it began to promote its use over Spanish, it was a body blow to the economy. Catalunya has always had a strong, industrial economy. Its people are creative and enterprising. Hobbling it with a requirement that forces the use of Catalan in place of a more international tongue is even worse than what their cousins across the Pyrenees are doing with French. There are very few people who speak Catalan but there are now signs in Barcelona that tell you it’s okay to reply in Catalan when someone addresses you in Spanish. The schools require students to learn Catalan. It’s no surprise that more and more back-office work is being transferred to Madrid where I suspect the regional Government doesn’t care whether you answer your phone in Spanish, French, English, Mandarin or even Catalan; the point is to communicate and get the work done.

Barcelona needs to take a lesson from the Dutch. There is no stupid language posturing. The Dutch speak Dutch, German, French, whatever they need to get things done. You can walk into a shop virtually anywhere in the country and do your shopping in whatever language you want, your money is what does the talking. Be practical Catalunya!

Whew! I feel better.

Sunday coffee ....13 Dec. 2009

Madrid. It is before 8 AM and the sky is cloudy. It is a Sunday morning in early September. We are in the barrio of Salamanca, the most expensive area in the center of the city. I can see a woman in high heels perched on the window ledge of a brick building, some four floors above a courtyard. The building is modern compared to its neighbors, built in the 1950’s; those that abut it date from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The woman is blond and even at a distance I can tell she is dressed fashionably. She is holding on to the bricks around the window. She is edging her way along the ledge to an open landing, about a meter away from the window. If she stretches, she can just reach the edge of the wall and pull herself into the open stairwell.

I am standing on my roof terrace, peering over the edge, watching the woman.

She is a thief.

A handbag is strung over her shoulder. I am certain that it contains the jewelry that she has stolen from the apartment whose window she has just climbed out of.

I think about yelling at her, about calling the police. I am afraid, though, that if I do the first, it may startle her and she could lose her footing – the high heels she is wearing are far from suitable for second story work. I think about the risk of her falling. Her life would be forfeit if she did lose her balance, the courtyard below is paved with limestone slabs and it is a drop of 30 or 40 feet. If I elect the second course of action, without startling her by calling out, and I just call the police, by the time they come she will be long gone. I muse that the purpose of their response will change radically to an investigation of death by misadventure from presumed thievery if I do yell and she loses her grip and crashes onto the stones below.

A few seconds only have passed and the woman climbs safely onto the landing. She straightens her dress, I notice that she is tall and slender; whether she is pretty I can’t determine, her features are too vague at this distance. I am certain she is Eastern European, probably a Romanian. Or perhaps I am wrong? I have deducted her ethnicity from my experience of the city. It is full of economic migrants; many of them work – as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, maids, waitresses – but many are criminal, pick-pockets, muggers and, more daringly, robbers who climb into carelessly open windows, left so by their tenants, seemingly secure because they are several floors above the street.

In an instant the blond thief moves off down the stairs and I know that within a few seconds more she will be at street level and out of the building. She will make her way down Ayala, which is empty at this hour, to Serrano where there are already a few pedestrians on their way to early Mass or to buy a loaf of bread or a newspaper. She will blend in and vanish.

There is no time for me to go down from our seventh floor roof terrace and around the corner to pursue her; among other things, I am in my bath-robe and I would surely lose her trail if I stopped to change. The alternative, scurrying down the street in my bathrobe and slippers, is embarrassing and I discount the option. I ask myself if my behavior is actually cowardice and am I just looking for excuses for my inaction?

My early morning coffee on the roof, usually a time of inchoate, multi-directional musing, has turned into a period of singular reflection. How have I behaved during this drama? What did I see? Why have I chosen to interpret it the way that I did? Have I witnessed a crime? I saw a woman leave an apartment in an unorthodox manner; she climbed along a ledge and I concluded that she was a jewelry robber, a second-story woman if you will. But, was she? Could she have simply been the resident of the apartment and lost her key which in this case was required for both opening and closing the door, inside or out?

That line of speculation is spurious, I move back from the edge of existentialism. I know that she is a thief and that I witnessed the last moments of her crime – the escape. I have never seen her before. No one would take the risk of death like she had if they weren’t up to no good. There remain a couple of scant possibilities: Perhaps she was leaving a lover? Perhaps she murdered someone inside the apartment and by climbing out of the window she supposed that suspicion would be directed towards someone other than her?

The sun has risen higher and the chilly temperature of the dawn has given way to a pleasant warmth that I can feel through the terry cloth of my robe. My shoulders are relaxed as I lean on the wall that encloses our roof-top garden. I take my coffee and turn away from the scene of the crime and move back to my chair. I sit and look up. The sky this morning is calm. There are a few cirrus clouds scudding about, propelled by winds several thousand feet above the calm at ground level, diverting me by their shape-shifting. I can no longer see the neighboring building, the open window that has been violated is now a mental picture only and what I’ve just witnessed is already fading into a mind imprint that seems unreal. It will be a memory that one morning, this morning, months later, will, without conscious thought, float to the surface of my ruminations.

Bette Jane Turney: September 2nd, 1924 to November 5th, 2009

Madrid

6 November 2009

My Mother died yesterday. She was 85 years old. She died in Tucson, Arizona where she’d lived for the past 30-some years. My Dad died in Tucson about 18 years ago.

I last saw Mom in August when I visited her twice, one evening and the following morning. She knew it was me but when I went back to see her the next morning, she had forgotten that I’d seen her the night before.

During her last year or two Mom mellowed into a sweet old lady – my nieces and nephew confirmed this. Certainly the last time I saw her she was exactly that, mellow and sweet with a smile plastered onto her face. Perhaps she’d found some peace, I hope that was the case.

I had a good childhood. My Mom was loving, protective and smothering. It took me many years to get over the last but I did. It wasn’t easy and there was a lot of broken china. Yesterday, soon after I got the news of Mom’s passing I wrote a bit about that broken china. It’s not the time to put that into the blog; it needs to steep a bit. Now is the time to simply record her passing, to be grateful that it was peaceful and that she had her daughter and two of her grandchildren with her when she went.

We were all prepared for this. I knew Mom was going, the doctors told us it was only a matter of time. I’d said my goodbyes but, still, when Meghan, my niece, called to give me the news, I stopped and sat and stared at nothing. There was a hole in the universe as she passed out. Whatever it is that life is made of soon washed over the hole and you would have had no notion that it had ever been there but, for a bit, that hole was palpable and there. It doesn’t mean she won’t be remembered or that she won’t have influence beyond death but the pattern of living was quickly restored. I suspect this happens however many times a day someone dies.

I can’t talk much about how I felt yesterday because I’m still not sure. I can report that I felt her passing and there was regret – about things that I will write about another time – but the feeling was really a combination of gratitude for the ease of it all for her and the emptiness that she left in me. Both for good and bad my Mother was a big part of my existence, more in earlier years than recently, but still a substantial percentage of whatever influences went into making me. That influence is now physically gone but it will never be entirely absent, both the good and the bad; I like to think that the good is more than the bad. I know that my Dad, whose passing I genuinely mourned and still do, still has a big influence, a positive one. My Mom will retain an influence as well; as I noted, not all for the good, but still there.

So, Mom, thank you for loving me all your life and for my childhood. There is much that we could have said and much that we could have done differently but there is no ‘do-over’. I pray that you ultimately had no shadow over the memories, no aching regrets. I have regrets but they are soft and indistinct as I hope yours were, having no greater weight on the scale than the warm memories of Christmases, picnics, rides in the country, family dinners and vacations at Kino. On balance its okay! Be at peace!

Financial Crisis? Nope, not here, it's more like Armageddon!

Madrid

28 October 2009

I'm finally beginning to realise how very close to disaster we came a year ago. We are still experiencing the after-shocks of the Lehman failure. Bank lending was very tight this past February and I was anecdotally telling people in the City of London that the banking houses in Madrid had been very lonely places, there wasn't anything going on.

Well, my friends, the truth is that there is still not all that much going on. Here in Spain we are at about 20% unemployment, highest in the EU. In my business, renewable energy, the price of assets is softening and the number of them on the market (for re-sale or for sale after construction) is growing. Owners who six months back were willing to sit on an investment, expecting that prices would begin to rise and that terms would evolve in their favour if only they held out, are now needier, they haven't seen many serious buyers and they haven't closed many deals. The terms are becoming more favourable for buyers and prices are, at a minimum, not rising.

This is not just a shift in my perception of what's happening, it's an important augury of what's really developing out there; there's a realisation taking hold that this is going to take a while to work out. The physical evidence supports this belief; the answer to what actually is going on in the economy is 'not much'. We are seeing a continuation of 'life support' activities, which you'd expect: groceries, fuel, agriculture. What we aren't seeing is what we did expect would be happening by now: a return to some form of normality in the rest of the economy. Naturally, we expected construction to lag; well, actually, to remain comatose for at least another 12 to 18 months. What we didn't expect was that everything else would be hurting. Deals just aren't happening and I think that's for two reasons: banks are not lending (at least they aren't lending easily and without extensive questioning of the deal) and buyers are very much more conservative than they were (and than we expected them to be at this point). The buyers are running scared. The due diligence is longer and more exhaustive. The desire to reduce the number of unknowns combined with a bull market in risk aversion has slowed the pace of business to a dangerously slow speed.

Sclerotic banks, needy sellers, conservative buyers: the way it stands now, we are going nowhere quickly. You cannot make buyers less conservative or quicker unless they've got some confidence in the economy as a whole. Banks are the only part of the dysfunctional algorithm that can be artificially stimulated. The upshot is clear, Governments have got to stimulate credit, they have to get banks to open the taps. Sellers will move enough in price and on terms to stimulate the buyers if they think the banks have enough confidence to lend.

So, are banks the bad guys in this picture? Yep, you betcha! There is no ambiguity; they got us into this mess and they are doing very little to get us out.

The photo-voltaic industry in Spain benefits from a feed-in tariff that is guaranteed by the Spanish Government for 25 years. What that means is that if you can get your solar cells producing correctly and the power you generate is evacuated into the grid, you will get paid. Unless it's got what they call trackers (little machines that turn the solar cell modules so that they get more sun), a photo-voltaic plant has, essentially, no moving parts and is undoubtedly the least risky way to produce power that there is. In other words, if you get your modules in place, there is not much that is going to stop you generating power and if you do, the Spanish Government guarantees you'll get paid. For a lender it doesn't get any better -- the deal is transparent, tick some technical and legal boxes and you've got a nice, steady income.

With these pluses, you'd expect that the photo-voltaic business, along with other renewable energies, would be one of those that would go through the crisis without much damage. Of course the industry isn't immune, a lot of sellers are construction companies that were battered by the residential bubble and have to liquidate assets to improve the balance sheet so, what do they sell, the assets they think will realise the most value, their renewable projects. Still, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the business (except maybe some over-enthusiasm on the part of Government when they first thought up these rich tariffs). Why can't we get things going then?

The answer is, again, simply that the banks aren't moving. Like deer in the headlights they are simply watching Armageddon hurtling towards them. They think that by strengthening their balance sheets they will survive and any loans they make now apparently do nothing towards that end. But, the fact is that theories about what percentages you need to be safe are all simply calculated risk assessments. The presume that we won't go over some financial cliff where all of those guesses (for that, in the end, is all they are) about bad loan reserves and so on are just so much statistical nonsense.

So, how do we get things going? Really simple, in my view; make some loans, prudent ones, but make them and make them soon! We've got to get money moving or we're really going to face some serious troubles.