The Moment

2012-02-11T11:37:00.001Z

testing ping

2011-05-24T18:24:00.002+01:00

Dead sure about doomsday

Another prophet like so many of his fellows has proven inadequate to forecasting accurately ‘the end of days’. Instead of mass extinction last week, those of us who have not yet succumbed to natural wastage are readying ourselves for the next doomsday pronouncement, the very big one on December 21^st 2012. Soothsayers, exactly like the rest of us, have been dropping like flies for centuries suffering desultory demises long after the much promised final moment. Over their lives their apocryphal ambiguities will have hit the occasional mark in the manner of shot from scatterguns. Because one or two pellets strike the target it foments their followers to dance and gibber, express themselves in tongues, while failing or not wishing to see that the vast bulk of lead shot is littering a still living landscape.

How do these would-be shamans magnetise their disciples? I suppose there are many among us who wish to be saved from the horrors of mortality and would rather believe in a bizarre salvation than the occupation of a mundane slab in the mortuary. Others, with exalted thoughts above their station, fall for the notion of being ‘chosen ones’, notwithstanding the fact that all supplicants of all religions have this as a germinating notion at the root of their belief. For others it might just represent a sublimation of suicidal tendencies. Better being part of a mass rapturous exit than a solitary one from a ledge or a bridge. Or is it for some that life is dull and this represents excitement in an otherwise nondescript existence and they are attracted by the buzz of projected mayhem like rubberneckers at a traffic accident up ahead?

Whatever, the fact is that anyone prone to prophesying, no matter how crass and transparently unbelievable he or she appears to the majority, will gather adherents. Most of us are gullible and impressionable given the right circumstances no matter how much we might uphold rationality as our banner, as can be witnessed by the number of atheists and lapsed believers who recant on their deathbeds. The spectre of death drives us into many a strange realm.

"I have seen the future and it is very much like the present, only longer." Khelog Albran (The Profit).

2011-05-17T15:23:00.002+01:00

The Death Divining Device

There is some interesting news today and long overdue, particularly if you are a science fiction reader. For the measly sum of 400 pounds (a thousand cedi) you can undergo a simple test that gives you an indication of how much longer you are going to grumble and stumble your way across the planet! Apparently chromosomes have little dangly bits which erode over time. By checking the rate of wear a calculation will tell you how much life you have left in your carcass. Though, as yet, the dangly bits cannot be lengthened, it is believed that their rate of decrease can be slowed by not harbouring the usual suspects of booze and fags, fast food and couch potato inertia.

This could change society as we know it, Captain. Insurance companies could insist on the test before taking you on as a client, businesses may wish to see how long you can be reasonably seen to be employable, future wives and husbands might want to see if you are all flash and no stamina and you, yourself may wish to have conclusive proof that you should change your ways or get some living in before the great day.

Our western societies run on a strange premise and that is that you don’t know when you are going to die. This ignorance insulates you from having truly to explore your natures with that concentration that comes at the prospect of your hanging. Your relationships with near and dear as well as those you just about put up with would change dramatically as the dangly bits are seen to have all but disappeared. The youthful, irresistible force of a personal belief in immortality which lasts well into middle age for most of us, will weaken until you are faced with the bare facts of the end being nigh.

Will you be more caring and empathetic to others, eschewing war and territorialism or will you become greedier for pleasure and riches and develop little instinct to love your neighbour?

The choice is yours - for 400 pounds.

2011-05-14T18:25:00.000+01:00

The Black Hole of Islamabad

Continuing the theme of asking how it is possible to square the assassination of Osama Bin Laden with the US’s avowed intent of exporting democracy and the principles of a justice which is universal and does not discriminate between rich and poor, I see that the American administration is cementing its story that there was ‘no alternative’ to the killing. Obviously this is a nonsense. Releasing pictures of Obama and the war cabinet viewing what amounts to a ‘snuff movie’ merely underlines the event as a global advertising campaign for the assurance that American vengeance will prevail everywhere. In fact there were several senators who concurred openly with Obama on that score. Far from being the least bad scenario in terms of its consequences for peace and harmony between creeds and races in the world, its very calculated and atavistic nature will enrage and incite those for whom life amounts to a jihad against anyone who is different from them.

I watched a programme on black holes the other night and there is a growing number of scientists who believe that there is a black hole nestling in the centre of our planet, having its most demonstrable effect on the Bermuda trench and the Marianna trench, resulting in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle history and the same heap of weird occurrences on exactly the opposite side of the Earth. In fact the suggestion is that there are black holes everywhere, the biggest nearby being the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Apparently our little, local one still packs a punch and could be having effects upon tectonic plates, volcanoes, weather patterns, the ocean flows and all else. One of the outcomes of this likelihood is the theory that the constant creation of new life forms results from a physically changing earth. The supreme violence of black holes leads to the birth of new possibilities.

No doubt Obama, who seems a straight fellow in most ways despite a certain religiosity that does not sit well with me, hopes that by exporting his own black hole into the centre of Pakistan, something creative will emerge from the act. But what? Stretching my mind I cannot embrace any likely good. Instead, as with the Bermuda Triangle, all I see are more anomalous disasters, planes coming down, ships sinking, buildings, dams, railways lines, airports blown up. The problem for Obama is that what he has precipitated and witnessed is in complete contradiction to his rhetoric. He cannot now ever be a Ghandi or a Christ or a Buddha figure. He has, like Macbeth, stepped too deep in blood to ever redress his extreme act and find redemption.

2011-05-10T14:58:00.001+01:00

To Kill A Mocking Bin Laden

I remember liking a film starring Paul Newman, called Hombre. The scene which stuck in my mind was when the baddie takes off his weapons and goes to face Newman (white man brought up by Indians and despised because of it) who, nevertheless, is protecting stage coach passengers who hold exactly those racist attitudes towards him. There is some verbal interplay where Newman refuses to bargain with the outlaw. The outlaw eventually says he’s returning to his men. Newman smiles and asks him why he thinks that is going to happen - and then shoots him. For me it was my first example of a number of films where the hero ditches a code of honour and does the improbable - if you like to believe in fairness, justice and the right to a trial. In fact, last night I was watching yet another episode of Homicide, Life on the Streets (by the team that went on to make The Wire, that beacon of confused and tangled morality, and currently, in season five, one of the detectives is under pressure because he killed a very unsavoury drug dealer and murderer when he could have taken him in. Like Dirty Harry films, he believes that the villain will not see justice in the liberal courts.

So it is with mild surprise that I have not heard or seen anything in the media which challenges the killing of Osama Bin Laden. He could be one of the worst villains around from the West’s point of view, whatever he and his followers believe to be justifiable in their acts but it raises the question of assassination being suddenly regarded as lawful (in David Cameron’s terms and acceptable). Is it? Obama gives the nod, watching streamed images of the attack and there is no jury, just a group of gawping politicians and soldiers. Isn’t most western law so framed as to try murderers through an impartial judicial system? The problem for the Americans and liberal consciences everywhere is that by disregarding it, it brings the whole political game into disrepute. Shooting an unarmed man in cold blood. It justifies everything the Israeli death squads do around the world, the Russians, the Pakistani Mumbai terrorists, Chechnyans, Middle Eastern dictators, African state militaries, secret services everywhere. If you can’t draw a line in the sand over such a high profile killing, then how can we uphold international law?

I am not sure we can use the excuse that to let him live until he is tried and hung like Saddam Hussein would have caused more terrorism. If you are going to export notions of democracy to the world, there have to be hard and fast rules. Haven’t there?

2011-05-07T12:14:00.002+01:00

Spy-ders and webs of intrigue

I watched yet another programme about the end of the world happening on December 21^st 2012, according to the Mayan calendar, the patterns in the I Ching, Chinese astrology, Revelations in the Bible, a variety of soothsayers and some scientists who say that the earth, the sun and the black hole at the centre of our galaxy are in alignment for the first time for 25,000 years which could lead to the poles reversing and untold doom. I’d seen it all before and there is a part of every person prone to a hysterical flash of deep fear when presented with the presentiment of his own death, never mind all of humankind. That having passed, there was a piece of evidence that I had not seen before and which lingered when calmness returned.

Apparently, by using spiders - search programmes - that run around the web, information can be gathered of even the tiniest import, which gives something like an accurate projection of events and when they will occur. It began (naturally) as a means of forecasting the stock market (crashes in particular) and moved on to political, environmental and social events. What I thought was intriguing was that the programmers believe that their spiders create a zeitgeist-like understanding of macro events because they are linked in to the combined consciousness of everyone who uses the internet. Very close to Jung’s idea of a universal unconscious which he believed we tap into for our visions, dreams, innovations and creations. Anyway, the spiders also say that December 21st 2012 is human race ground zero. Of course they must be gathering all the other prognostications listed above in their travels around data topography which itself must be influencing millions of internet browsers but even so, it was a new perspective on doom.

No doubt these spiders or spybots are used extensively by all intelligence units throughout the world. Every nation wants an economic, social or political edge never mind a military one. But I have not read that the banks who brought us into economic ruin have been subject to our web creepy crawlies. Of course not. They are above rigorous investigation as are their auditors. They eat and drink at the same troughs are our political masters and leaders of multinational companies, move across international borders with impunity and gamble the day and night away. Wouldn’t it be good if a spider-handler did a wikileaks on them and we were given some illumination into the murky world of the hidden controllers of human destiny?

At least until December 21st 2012!

2011-05-03T17:41:00.002+01:00

In the name of justice...

Well, it’s been a week of it! Two billion watching the Royal Wedding just as they had when Princess Diana was the then royal bimbo of choice. The War Cabinet in the White House watching Bin Laden being blasted off this mortal coil by a US assassination squad, Pope Paul passing Go towards beatification with Robert Mugabe there to watch the proceedings by special decree of the Italian Government. We are a global viewing community are we not? Cameras on mobile phones bring news to YouTube watchers of war, rape pillage and one on one humiliation, the content of which governments, special forces, girlfriends or classmates would like to suppress, CCTV everywhere and the media’s own trained sleuths with their nosey distance lenses capturing celebrities at it (it being whatever they want to think of as private). If you can’t see a recording of it, it doesn’t pass muster in modern society.

There was something of Ancient Rome about Emperor Obama’s watching the assassination. His thumb had pointed earthwards and so the dogs of war shimmied down their ropes to put an end to Bin Laden’s hateful stratagems of terror in a tiny arena outside Islamabad. There was something undeniably unseemly and surreal about Paul being elevated towards sainthood on the strength of a nun’s recovery from Parkinson’s. In front of a million flagwaving amnesiacs or deniers. This, the man who had presided over child abuse from his priests for more than two decades, his administration blocking investigations, covering up the horrors of it all, moving on bishops and priests to enact their life-shattering crimes over and over again. And all this with Mugabe, apparently a devout catholic, given special permission to pass through Rome to be there. Mugabe! Special friend of the Vatican! Given the history of Catholic atrocities, I suppose he must be regarded as a fellow traveller, bedfellow, bosom pal.

The Americans could have taken Bin Laden for trial. Benedict could have prevented his church from swimming even more in a filthy quagmire of hypocrisy. Mugabe could have been told that his Catholic soul would rot in hell and no amount of last rites would bring absolution. A litany of ifs and buts that bear no relation to the upper atmosphere of politics.

2011-04-29T11:15:00.000+01:00

Royalty - the soap

Well it’s not exactly a day for republicans in the UK. Gimlet eyed I turned on the TV to watch the world news and avoid any reference to the wedding, thinking that Al Jazeera would be the one to eschew the saccharine pomp and ceremony at Westminster Abbey. What was their main news story? The same as everywhere else. Not Syria or Libya. One becomes a sexist monster muttering expletives at the female kind as you watch hitherto calm and even intrepid reporters going girlie, ogling, eyelash fluttering and sugar voicing their way through the ‘making of history’. David Cameron who just the other day told a female MP to ‘calm down dear’ several times, also warbled like a reed bunting about a thousand years of royalty and what it has done for Britain. No killing of wives, imprisonment and executions of competitors or German take-overs there then!

A while back I did some work in St Petersburg and was fortunate enough to visit the Tikhvin, a small cemetery which contained the graves of many Russian composers, artists and poets. I sat on a stone and wondered whether their still decaying bodies were throwing molecules into the air that I was breathing. Maybe I was imbibing the spirit of creativity? And I have gone on to write a three volume fictional piece which I begin to edit today! Who knows? As an atheist of a kind I am not averse to believing in some things and the way we pass on memories through our genes and atoms is one of them. Anyway, in the Abbey is Poet’s Corner, a bit like that Russian quarter acre. So the bride and groom will walk through the lush grass of approbation from the great and the good and ‘some ordinary people’ -Al Jazeera, and imbibe the molecules tossed into the air by poets turning in their graves. Well, some of them:

"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living" - Epitaph on the memorial to T.S.Eliot.

The monarchy seems to me to be a palliative, a bit like football. For so many people it arrests their development into critical members of society by filling their heads with dreams of princes and princesses, glass slippers, thousand piece tea sets and maybe a bit of acceptable bodice ripping, sexy phone tapped calls, murky deaths, disagreeable humour, racist attitudes and heavily regulated liaisons.

2011-04-24T11:24:00.002+01:00

Of dogs and men

Away from the dogs of war in Libya, Cote d”Ivoire, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq - I suppose the list would comprise a whole, dispiriting blog without any further content but this is holiday time as those atheists and agnostics among us piggyback on the Christian calendar. There are a number of churches within earshot of our half acre compound and Easter Sunday sees them in full flood, vaguely Anglican hymns melding with ululations that sound as if they came off that Paul Simon African-inspired album. In case you think that that must be wonderfully exotic, it is not. It is loud and intrusive. There have been a number of cases of complaint around Accra at the pain caused to neighbours by these open air concrete hangars (not agnostic or atheist neighbours but Christians of a quieter, indoors, enclosed hue.) Complainants have then been threatened and victimised by the proponents of the ecclesiastical loud speaker systems. Recently I have come across a new dialogue here. There are (admittedly academic) those who see the evangelical mission in Africa as a form of imperialism. Since Ghana had an all-seeing, non-gendered, abstract notion of God before the missionaries arrived to infuse souls into pagan black bodies and promulgate Jesus-worship with its own pagan communion rituals, there is a harking back to what this colonialism has meant for indigenous culture. What is being lost? Whose god is it anyway?

Anyway, Easter Sunday is no different from any other day in the compound. The three dogs play out their strange relationships and are an unceasing source of wonder and debate. If you remember there is the old dog, a bit like Tommy, deaf, and blind but loudly not dumb and once about to die. His two mutt friends for ten years or more both gave up on life, not raging into the night but happily sleeping under the bougainvillea and so we bought two pups, a Caruso bass Doberman called Sirius and a female, eye-lash flickering Alsatian called Andromeda, the daughter of Ghana’s leading drug-sniffer dog. Andromeda goes in the pool every half an hour for a swim, a half-length at a time. She is also likely to swim out to you as you do your lengths in meditative silence and try to get on board, nearly drowning you. The Doberman is very big and excels in ball chasing, fending off the other two. Heracles, the old boy is now frisky and excitable, enjoying his two young companions who seem to treat him with respect and can’t sleep unless he is nearby to reassure them. Each wants to be the favourite of their human owners. They bat each other away, Andromeda hangs on to Sirius’ collar and tries to drag him to the ground and Heracles cunningly waits and eases in for a stroke while the other two squabble. They play tag with a tennis ball, the rule being that the one who has it wanders around, nonchalantly, chest puffed out and the others run in circles and wait for it to drop. Sometimes they can be seen careering up and down the half acre, making up new rules for the contest.

If, as many have pointed out, dog is god spelled backwards, then our three anagrammatic deities have shown that differences can be assimilated in fun and peace for the pleasure of all.

2011-04-15T17:25:00.005+01:00

I know it's only rock and roll...

I walked into a supermarket in Accra today and asked who was in charge of the poultry section. A nice feller came up to me and said “I am the Eggman”. I wondered whether he had heard of the Beatles and he looked pinched before nodding dubiously. No Ghanaian wants to say no to anything. We shop in supermarkets because there is more chance of hygiene being applied to food preparation and storage, though sometimes, when there is a gap between electricity supply going off and generator coming on, there is a smell that drives you to the food that is not raw. We tend to buy in bulkwhen desired offerings appear on the shelves because there is no guarantee you will see them again for weeks. Hence, the fruit and vegetables we juice every morning are at the centre of the shopping quest. It is not unusual to see us making off with several kilo bags of carrots, beetroot, green beans, cabbages, ginger and the fruity rest. There are scares about buying on the markets because sometimes root crops are grown in effluent.

Which reminds me of shopping in Tashkent, Uzbekistan a few years after the demise of the USSR. There, the supermarket had what it had. There was no rhyme nor reason for what was on the shelves. I remember seeing a brass telescope next to umbrellas and tinned goods. Then, next to them I became excited because there were piles of vinyl, albums by British and American artists, copied in the old USSR, despite their degeneracy. I got everything that fulfilled my love of the riffs of progressive rock music or which, like The Eagles or The Band melded rock with country.

So once again in 2011 I was shopping in that same opportunistic way, sticking my hand in the bran tub of surprise and pulling out a plum; Jack Horner rather than Jack Sanger. I thought to myself, placing a half dozen big white eggs in my basket, that I was never the Egg Man, more Jumping Jack Flash which then reminded me to look for Brown Sugar.

2011-04-12T15:45:00.002+01:00

Dear Brother Leader and Sister Burqa

Some news items are difficult to write about. and some not. Libyan citizens (apart from Gaddafi’s own tribe) have generally been oppressed for forty years with secret police instigated disappearances, torture and an absence of the freedoms they would like to take for granted. The African emissaries did themselves much harm in toadying up to the dictator and offering a ceasefire that would consolidate his military hold on Libya. To insinuate that he was in a club of like-minded African Heads of State did little to make the continent feel good about itself. But then it has been Gadaffi’s oil money that has underpinned many an African dictator’s hold on power. The Dear Brothers’ League of nations will continue to turn a blind eye to ordinary people’s suffering.

Some two thousand women in France consider themselves to be suffering. They must divest themselves of their facial encumbrances if they want to go shopping. They claim it is an attack on their civil rights. Probably. They claim it is an attack on Islam. Not. There is nothing in the Koran which preaches such extremes. The nearest the Prophet came to limiting a woman’s attire was when he asked that she retained a degree of modesty.

All religions appear to have a problem with sexuality - usually a woman’s. Since the Romans, according to Foucault, first began to institute laws to limit women’s freedoms in order to guarantee men’s progeny their right to property, women have been receiving a raw deal. Most religions limit their powers to lead in their organisations. Many still enshrine in ecclesiastical law, constraints on their sexual rights. The burqa is the symbol of a property being owned by a man. Imagine, in an Alice in Wonderland world if, in a religion, a wife must wear a burqa in the home but not in a public place. How long would the religion demanding it, last?

In Lysistrata the play, women stop war by withholding conjugal rights. Zuma and company should be brought to heel by their African women for their patriarchal despotism. Meanwhile, the French two thousand would do well to read the Quran and question what their husbands are demanding of them.

2011-04-10T11:33:00.002+01:00

Blind spots

I was reading a BBC website article on acronyms and the internet this morning and had one of those rude awakenings that my parents must have had after I first played a 78 of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock as it ushered in teenspeak from the United States which was completely unintelligible to them. Grooving, cool cat, square, daddy-o, fast, free love and the like studded the language of teenagers, coined mostly by beatniks and black jazzers and the early mainstream drug pioneers.

My call to senses came when I read the following paragraph:

But many mistake "LOL" for "lots of love", leading to some unintended "LOLs", such as the infamous tale of the mother who wrote: "Your grandmother has just passed away. LOL."

Now like the author of the message above, I always thought LOL meant lots of love. After all, many of my female friends put it at the end of their missives to me. Yet all the while their communications may have been tongue in cheek, sardonic or, even worse, privately amused! Ah well, you are never too old for schadenfreude. It actually means Laughing Out Loud!!!

Here in Ghana there is much to learn in the mutation of the English language. I got a touch of conjunctivitis the other day and was instructed to go to the pharmacy and ask for drops for Apollo, the common name for it. Apparently a vast proportion of the population looked skywards imagining the moon landing and this coincided with a particularly virulent outbreak of the condition. One had obviously led to the other.

2011-04-03T10:56:00.002+01:00

Upwardly and laterally mobile in Ghana

Maybe life is a struggle for everyone, rich or poor if you see it through the eyes of each individual but it doesn’t look like that from the outside. While students in developed countries fight to maintain their grants and fulfil the expectations of having universal education, albeit with varying degrees of fee-paying in the latter stages, what happens when you are born and brought up in a Ghanaian village where, if you are lucky, there is some rudimentary primary education and little else afterwards for the vast majority?

I will try not to be sentimental about what follows. A young man, in his early twenties came to the house as a gardener. Illiterate and not speaking English (the post-colonial language of Ghana) he worked very hard and with intelligence. He was moved to the factory which sells uniquely designed clothes directly to customers in the UK and elsewhere but not in Ghana. Here the staff at all levels are paid three or four times the national average for their levels of work in the fashion industry. Our young man became an ironer. A couple of years later he was literate and taking photographs of garments (having a very rare eye, even for so-called professional photographers). Now he is quality controller in the factory and patrols every phase of production with a forensic eye and a completely immovable force (resisting sixty staff’s desire to bend the rules has broken a few spirits!). He is earning money he could never have dreamed of. He still spends his Saturdays with us, cleaning. Much of his income goes back to send his sister through school and for other family needs.

Where does he live, here in the sprawling morass that is Accra? Every possibility exists, from under a tree to a sumptuous gated property with armed guards. But the majority live in kiosks and rough-made dwellings built from any available material, usually small, windowless and in acreages of the same or - and here we come back to the protagonist of this blog - on any available land that has not yet succumbed to the builders, both private and municipal. Just so with our man. Yesterday he could not come to clean because the Accra Metropolitan Authority was moving his kiosk on. At this moment his house will be on a trailer heading for a little plot he has had his eye on for some time. This is his third such move in three years. I expect he has found somewhere and I will hear about it tomorrow, at work in the factory.

2011-03-29T10:43:00.002+01:00

The eyes have it but who cares?

I have always had problems with my eyes and, in the course of a fairly physical as well as intellectual life I have suffered just about every operation on them known to ophthalmologists. If eyes are the windows to the soul, then whatever spiritual essence resides inside must be mutated out of all recognition!

Anyway, my retina managed to throw up another problem three thousand miles from my regular consultant in the UK. A good friend arranged a private appointment with an ocular expert in Accra (actually, nearly all Ghanaian medical treatment is private). I arrived at the clinic in good time, registered and paid for the consultation. Then I sat and waited for the doctor to arrive. His list was full and the waiting room crowded. Nearly an hour passed and then he phoned to say he was stuck in traffic. This is normal for Accra but, if I had been the doctor I would have taken account of it, wouldn’t you? I decided to abort the appointment, feeling demeaned and angry. I wondered whether a doctor who shows that much respect for his patients would be any good, anyway? The more a professional feels accountable to customer, client or patient the more he or she ratchets up the quality of his or her work. For a number of years I worked across the medical firmament in England, developing appraisal measures which might improve not only the quality of expertise among doctors but also their attitudes to patients, nurses, managers and juniors, their time keeping, their team work and their self-critical faculties. It was a rocky ride because there was so much professional arrogance abroad at the beginning. But it helped to change the culture.

Many if not most of the consultants here in Ghana train in the UK or US. If in the former then they would have had to abide by the appraisal system to which my team and I contributed. Then they return to Ghana and a proportion of them are too delighted to embrace arrogance and dump any notion of accountability. They have re-joined the Ghanaian middle class. When I asked the receptionist whether the doctor was usually late, she smiled benignly and said, “He is a doctor”.

In Ghana, accountability hardly exists in practice though the rhetoric is very western in language and structure. If someone sells you a bum service there is little redress. Socio-political reforms show hardly any palpable result. The general populace is utterly cynical about government bodies, professional services, corruption and backhanders. It is sad because ordinary people in their towns and villages are remarkable in their general capacity to get by. Change will only occur here when the middle classes forget about feathering their nests and maintaining their vantage point in the class system and begin to institute hard-edged offensives against corruption and grossly unprofessional conduct.

2011-03-20T17:30:00.001Z

Skin deeper

I am writing this on the road back from Cape Coast to Accra. We have just spent the weekend on the beach; long stretches of sand and coconut palms, a few local villagers walking to and from Elmina, a small and delightful fishing port. From the chalet they are silhouettes, carrying large basins full of yams or firewood through the palms with the sea breaking behind them. We ate fresh grilled lobster and squid, grouper and snapper under straw lidded canopies, walked the isolated sands and rested. This morning we drove to Elmina on the way home to buy fish. It is an enjoyable half hour if you like haggling and checking the species covered in ice in big pails. All the while the sellers assume you will pay four or five times the price a black skin can afford. Even with the help of a six foot female who calls herself the Queen of Togo, the bartering is in favour of the locals. Not that I mind. The redistribution of wealth is built in to skin colour. If I can buy fish at half shop price and they can sell it to me at twice local price, then who can complain? We are a bit late at the market so there is no squid or octopus and few of the more exotic shapes and colours but we buy two plump and richly red snappers, some silver fish which are flat ribbons, moss green grouper, barracuda and a bag of whitebait. I like it at the market, the bustle and noise, the shouting of wares and the smell of a fresh catch. It is redolent of childhood forays with my father to North Shields from Newcastle on the electric train, to fish off the quay at seven in the morning, catching crabs and coley and the occasional cod. It’s strange how smells which might turn the nose of someone new to them become familiar, embracing and latterly nostalgic.

As I write we are half way to Accra and have just passed a couple of young men trying to sell grasscutters. I must look them up. One of my first Ghana blogs included a description of grasscutter stew. The grasscutter appears to be a large rodent, a bit like a coypu but they are sold by the wayside in smoked form. Imagine quite large bellows, flattened or spatchcocked, except the bones are visible like x-rays against the deep brown of the charcoaling and on being held in front of the vendor this gourmet’s delight obscures half of his body.

The skin colour based interchanges mentioned above work rather badly for mixed race individuals Someone with a fair skin (for Ghana this means, say, Lebanese brown) may be the subject of racist abuse in Europe and then find himself or herself similarly dealt with over here, in reverse. A victim in both worlds. In general I have found Ghanaians remarkable in their ability to laugh at the racism they have experienced abroad, though I would have exploded with outrage, I am sure. I interviewed a woman the other day who had been a supply teacher in the UK only a few years back. She had arrived at one primary school and the receptionist told her to pick up an apron and join the canteen staff in the kitchens. When she revealed her identity, the woman was embarrassed and said that because her name was so English sounding (traditional English names are common in coastal Ghana from the slave trade and gold mining) she had expected a white woman for the teaching job.

Managing staff can be difficult too. Skin can get in the way. Ghanaian culture, for example, has little evidence of what we might term depersonalised critical dialogue. To manage anywhere in the world you need to establish the criteria upon which you judge a person’s performance. But to tell someone that their performance is under par even when citing previously agreed and understood criteria can be taken very badly and the race card can appear. We carry our skins like badges as we traverse the world. A lot of the time and energy is spent in finding ways to disclaim responsibility for this birth-packaging.

2011-03-15T12:26:00.004Z

Covering the Japanese Tsunami, UK style

I suppose that the more you travel, the less jingoistic you become. I am three thousand miles from the UK these days and it seems like so many light years from home - not! That’s it, really. Home is for me an ephemeral outdated concept, maybe the place of my childhood or childrearing years but many like me are now wandering creatures, itinerants in search of answers to questions we have had little time to frame because of our very movement, the constant change that has become our way of life. We may, like the Buddha, seek through our journeys to find enlightenment, somehow knowing it is not likely to be found in the fixed geography of our history but what we discover are peoples in lands who are just like us, clueless as to what existence is all about.

The expatriated gypsy flunks the test of knowledge more often than not by assuming that coming to terms with a new location, a foreign culture is somehow the same as discovering deeper answers. While engrossing and diverting, it rarely is. We carry our history on our backs. We live and die in new scenery, that is all.

Meanwhile, those we have left behind and who populate the ‘old country’ seem to become moored and mired in their unchanging homeland. Everything is weighed and measured against its history, its traditions and its certainties. Even when these stay-at-homes cross borders, they have one eye over their shoulders to make sure they can get back to safety as soon as the little adventure is over.

I am digressing in this ill-formed way as a lead-in to something which seems obvious to me but may not be to those whose news service it is. Watching the UK’s Sky News coverage of the tragedy of Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami, I felt somewhat ill at ease by its approach. It had a team out on Japan’s east coast. They made it seem that they were braving danger. They were concerned about the British who might be caught up in it. They talked to Save the Children workers about what they might do to alleviate the horrors for Japanese children. They rolled out the Minister who proudly boasted of the sixty odd crack force on a search and find brief. They marvelled at the Japanese refusal to loot, their order and discipline, they produced little cameos of individuals searching flattened towns for their loved ones. Worse, they played over and over the engulfing black sea of destruction as it took everything in its path, played it with their own version of the sinister Jaws theme, deep reverberations and oriental cymbals in disharmony. They played up the fears of radiation and how far it might be spread by winds.

In other words, it was news for those who can never shake off the notion of home. It was a cake of horror and it was to be eaten by those who are safe and far away from it all.

Al Jazeera, on the other hand, gave it straight, without translation into a UK cultural context.

2011-03-08T10:30:00.006Z

It's life but not as we know it, Captain...

Leaving aside belief in gods, the hereafter, heaven and hell and the trappings of metaphysics, where are we when we drop, for example, the meta in the last domain? Where are we with science, generally? Do we believe it? The professions are certainly beholden to it. Law now has its forensics, medicine has its pharmaceuticals, the food industry has its nutritional values, the home has a complex reliance upon science in all its forms, from entertainment through heating, cleaning, birth control, depression and on to an induced good night’s sleep. Gradually, the science is outstripping our capacity to understand how it works. But hasn’t it always been so?

The arrival of margarine heralded a new healthy alternative to butter. It was decades before it was realised that trans fats in margarine were potentially lethal. Obesity is rising rapidly in all countries that adopt western fast and processed food regimes though the manufacturers stay on the legal side of the scientific protocols for what constitutes harm. Salt and sugar are being reduced but only after a few million heart attacks, diabetes and early deaths. Powdered milk is being sold to mothers in subsistence cultures as they are being weaned off breast feeding. Skin bleaches are sold openly across black nations with some terrible consequences. Cosmetic surgery is a growing trend for the emerging middle classes.

Thalidomide was sold as a safe drug until misshapen babies arrived. We were captivated by menthol cigarettes as a healthy alternative to straight tobacco; “cool as a mountain spring’ was a strap line. All the while, in ads, we see serious looking white coated professionals, still with clipboards, researching the efficacy of products. We buy the hype and then curse ourselves when the bad news filters out and it is too late. We assume, I suppose, that the tests are all finished with, that the beagles and rats and volunteer humans have given their bodies to make us safe.

That is why the Sky News expose of the maltreatment of Gressingham ducks in Hingham Norfolk, with brutal keepers holding birds by the neck to beat the others into the hangars, while dead birds lay untouched on the ground to rot, was so offensive. Trust was broken. These had been sold by Waitrose Supermarkets as having been regularly inspected by their scientific vets. They were sold as organic birds and were at the top end of their sales meat chain.

It was visual agitprop for how we have become disenfranchised in understanding the science of our own lives.

2011-02-23T09:38:00.007Z

Enemies of the People

As Gaddafi unleashes sub-Saharan mercenaries, threatening to kill the children in every family that has protested against his tyranny, Cameron the UK Prime Minister is wandering with a band of British arms dealers around Kuwait. His snake oil salesman’s rhetoric runs along the lines of ‘every country needs to defend its borders’. After the Libyan foaming dog sent in jets against his own people we may allow ourselves a little vomit in our handkerchiefs. The jets weren’t built in Libya. They were sold to the country by previous incarnations of our grubby salesman.

Meanwhile, away from oil rich states and firmly among the oil poor UK, the same Cameron and his siblings of state have introduced a new health test to check on people’s capacity to work. In an eloquent article in the Guardian today, people with terminal cancers, distressing pains, traumatising depressions and the like talk about the humiliation of the testing procedure. Do you watch East Eenders or Coronation Street? To do so means you can sit for half an hour. Nice for office work. Not that there is any work waiting for them. It is symbolic humiliation only. In the UK there is no culture of sensitivity towards those unable to work. They are just like elderly bed-blockers, a barrier to the capitalist enterprise.

In Soylent Green, an old but good science fiction film, the elderly and the extremely ill can opt for a fantastic, almost heavenly euthanasia to get them off the eating register. Fewer mouths to feed. Not only that but their cadavers are recycled as food tablets.

Now this is something the Tories would love to get their teeth into!

2011-02-20T12:42:00.004Z

The Courage of Convictions

Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid is a rather piquant quotation from Franklin P Jones. Watching the domino demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa where thousands march in the face of guns is a humbling experience. It is too easy to see small figures on a tv screen and allow the brain to comprehend it as a spectacle, a computer game, a film with a cast of thousands and somehow discount the fact that every person out there is facing personal fear. It takes such courage to put one’s life on the line for the principle of democracy. Time and again, determined faces come up close to the camera and say ‘freedom’, ‘no corruption’, ‘peace’, ‘fair elections’. Old, young, religiously diverse, professional and every day workers, march for a future for their children, their fellows and their country.

Meanwhile we have to witness the great ‘unbrave’, the milk-toothed leaders of western states and their foreign representatives pontificating on how these toppling regimes must suddenly behave towards their citizens. The very same individuals and their governments have supported these same criminal dictatorships for decades without a murmur, without a single proclamation in support of their downtrodden citizens.

Let us see what transpires. Meanwhile isn’t there a sense of schadenfreude at our first world governments’ Uriah Heap hand wringing as they reap middle eastern everyman’s repugnance for their hypocrisy?

2011-02-17T17:30:00.009Z

History is egg-shaped

When I was a boy in Durham I used to go egg collecting. The tallest risk-laden trees for rooks’ eggs, sinking marshy waters for those of the black headed gull and flimsy attic floors for a starling’s ice blue oval. The lure of the colours, shapes and sizes, the art of blowing them, the need for some kind of natural lore to hunt and broaden the collection was time-intensive and obsessive. But all that changed. Even then we knew never to take an egg unless we could leave at least two. Now we protect and take none. Those who do so are rightly prosecuted.

The skull is a little like an eggshell. Indeed, scientists are called eggheads. Recent finds in Cheddar Gorge, England, suggest that Cro-Magnon man used the skull as a drinking vessel, either for religious ceremonies or for more prosaic dietary purposes, around twenty thousand years ago. It seems he did this in a brief warm spell between ice ages when Britain became temporarily accessible. We don’t do it now - unless we have some kind of Hannibal Lector psychosis!

The nearest I came to the skull being used in a less than meritorious way was in my early days of teaching. Students who were engaged in what was called liberal studies, broadening their apprentice shoe-maker curriculum, turned up for class with skulls they found on Dunwich beach in Suffolk. Dunwich was the same size as nearby London in early medieval times but slowly succumbed to an encroaching sea, a monk’s graveyard being among the last vestiges of its existence to fall from the retreating cliffs during the early nineteen seventies. The young would-be cobblers put light bulbs in them. You can imagine the lit eye sockets by your bedside. Strange to think of all those monks seeking illumination during their lives and finding it, perhaps, only after their deaths.

The times they are a changing fast; attitudes, behaviours and beliefs. Each one of us can find epitaphs to them within our own histories. Something Cro-Magnon Man and the Monks of Dunwich may not have been able to ascertain.

2011-02-11T14:26:00.002Z

On shellfish and the selfish

Paris in early February. Cold, clear and sunshine arriving by late morning. The whole city has a half-awake feel to it. Somnambulistic shopkeepers powered down, the lights in their eyes barely glinting. But the restaurateurs know that people have got to eat, especially the tourists who have come on cheap breaks and the business people who have to be here for the expositions. So they are zappy and chatty, unless you don’t speak French when, I am told, they turn an epaule froid and offer the service of a tundra-ready robot. Since I can converse at a level which manages the every day but falls short of the philosophical we can exchange mild jokes and gain the security of acceptable tables. All of which is a lead-in to a half dozen oysters in the Mascotte in lower Montmartre. They were as good as any I have had. Large and succulent, bedded in icy salty water, their taste so indefinably faint, their texture so softly enticing that it is an almost not-there flavour. Compared to the full range of gastronomic tastes available they are off the scale at one end where, say, three day marinated boar is off the other. That’s my spectrum anyway.

On another note I see that Manchester has closed all but one of its nineteen public toilets, some of which have been monuments to Victorian architecture. It is happening everywhere and now everyone runs the gauntlet of getting into pubs in the evening, using their amenities and exiting without buying anything. At the same time libraries are being closed. We will all have to have in-built brain chips, catheters and colostomy bags if this continues. Privacy in downloading everything from the word to the turd is the future. Personal rather than public conveniences.

2011-02-06T11:53:00.001Z

History: It Never Lets You Go

Sometimes you encounter these odd triangulations in your life. As if it has all been a dream from which you have woken, temporarily. Three bits of your life juxtaposed, though years apart and from different countries, even continents.

I am on a Virgin Atlantic plane heading to London from Accra. This us MA what happened. I saw a film called Never Let me Go from a novel by Ishiguru. As I watched I saw countryside and coastal settings as familiar as the mind can recall. They were all in Norfolk. Places I had walked and talked. Places I no longer really saw because they were every day familiar. The film is worth seeing. It is both unsettling and also a period piece, set in the 1970s. The first decade of my time there. It is sufficiently unsettling to be classed as science fiction in a Margaret Atwood kind of way. I could almost have written it. It felt as if I had. After all I did the Creative Writing course at UEA the year after Ian McEwan and before Kazuo Ishiguru. What happened on that course might fill a number of future blogs!

I got up at the end of it to wiggle my toes and do what you need to do to stop deep vein thrombosis and caught sight of where the aircraft had reached on one of those moving maps beloved by early cinema and copied in Indiana Jones films. We were just past Barcelona and directly over the house I own in France, near Perpignan. Accra, Norfolk, the Franco Spanish border, Ishiguro. Triangulation is needed to tell you where you are. But it doesn’t tell you who you are.

2011-02-03T14:33:00.002Z

You too can be a great musician

Both of my sons are musicians. One plays and creates using a number of instruments some of which he makes and the other composes using electronics. The older started with piano and the younger with guitar. They went to teachers, off and on until their teens. Somehow both managed to cross that divide into which the vast majority fall and never climb back up. I don’t really remember dragooning them into practice. I have heard a number of grown-ups say that they wished their parents had ‘forced’ them to continue so that now they might have a degree of musicianship, enough to entertain themselves and friends.

Vanessa Mae was compelled to practise by a very forceful mother (“I love you but it is conditional on you playing”) and now, at 30, she is beautiful and wonderfully accomplished at her violin. A sexy soloist. I say that because, in the documentary I saw yesterday there was film of her from 15 upwards in hot pants, bikinis and figure hugging dresses. Her mother made her iconic. Classical prodigy as pubescent pin up. She has not spoken to her mother in eight years….

Vanessa was asking herself a question: how much is my mastery owing to hard work and how much to some innate quality? Nurture or nature. She would have preferred the latter to have dominated. She didn’t want to give too much kudos to her mother. She went to experts in this and that who scanned her brain, tested her bravery, explored her extroversion and sought to discover how true was her ‘ear’ for sound. At the end the jury was half in and half out. You have to have aptitude but then most of us actually have. Then you have to practise for between 5,000 and 10,000 hours by the time you are adolescent to become a soloist. The brain is shaped by all this until you only need to exercise the desire and you perform.

I am glad we managed to encourage my sons to play. It is a huge part of their lives today. I have always thought they had aptitude, something lacking in myself. I can strum some chords and sing some songs but nothing like them. Now I realise I could have done it, too. But my parents did not think of it. And if they had forced me, my relationship with my father would have zeroed like Vanessa and her mother.

It all does prove something and that is that whatever we want to become is merely an exercise in willpower. You just have to want it enough to practise for 10,000 hours.

2011-02-02T11:50:00.003Z

Myopia and mortality

There is little motivation among societies’ leaders to take a long term view when establishing policies. That’s why we have environmental disasters, genocide, diseases, poverty, multinational corporations overruling the interest of ordinary folks, bank collapses etc etc. Everything is measured in terms of their own lives and their own comforts. It is not just that they want to see immediate outcomes and benefits and bask in the glory of their achievements, it is, it seems to me, to do with a deep-seated psychosis at their own mortality. Human beings are egocentric and want as much history as possible encompassed within their own existences.

I was shunted down this train of thought when watching a programme on the history of soothsaying and the great prophets of doom. Nostradamus and the Book of Revelations, for example. The Bible Belt in the US has an alarmingly high population of believers of prophecies. In fact there is a two century tradition of Christian ‘prophets’ who forecast the end of days but always within their own life times! Thus they prepared their congregation for a rapture, an Apocalypse, an uplifting of their souls to God. When it didn’t happen they simply changed the date of the world’s extinction, claiming a simple error of calculation. Their credulous congregations swallowed it.

And the end hasn’t happened yet. Obviously.

Here in Ghana and wherever else the evangelists have hooked their pernicious doom-mongering claws into fearful people, whipping up frenzies during church services and running bible classes that promote its every written word as the truth, they proclaim that the prophecies in Revelations are about to happen now, in their lives, thousands of years after they were written by a mad, hermit isolate. In fact Revelations was just another example of doom-laden prophecy limited to the immediate world of its writer(s). Not beyond. Not for now. It related entirely to the horrors of Roman (Nero’s most likely) sadistic occupation and fears for the end of their race. Not 9/11, Stalin, Hitler or a present day rise of the Antichrist.

It is too much for men and women to believe that the important events of humanity’s extinction will fall outside their three score years and ten. They want them to happen now. Not even a generation or two down the line.

2011-01-23T10:09:00.001Z

The drying of the will

The hot, dry winds from the Sahara still blow across Accra. The dust gets thicker and the attempts to stave it off become more desultory. Any notion you might have that equatorial Ghana is plush with forest, dripping water, snakes and crocodiles must be relinquished immediately! It is an effort to keep vivacity going through the long, hot days and it got me to thinking about the will and personal discipline.

What is our relationship with inner drives? We talk about how by strength of mind we can rein them in and channel them to our advantage but the fact of the matter is that for too much of the time they control us rather than the other way round. Let me take some examples. I’ll try to think of four. The first is keeping in shape. We now know that physical exercise elongates life’s path. Let yourself go and the brain suffers and you become prone to faster ageing and the various diseases associated with it. I have a pool, a gym and, separately, a treader with elastic skiing straps which I can mount and watch the tele as I go. This affords me the opportunity of watching documentaries and toning up. That’s the idea, anyway. But do I do it enough? No. There are days when something inside creeps out of the darkness of the unconscious mind and prevents me. I might go two days without pool or gym or treader. I feel really irritated afterwards but at the time I am blithely evasive about facing myself.

Now, what would be the second? Writing. I need to finish the third and last book in my fictional trilogy about the beginnings of humankind’s dallying with religion and the apparition of death. If I wrote two pages a day, I’d be finished by May. But there are days when I don’t write at all or prefer to do a blog like this or a number of emails to friends. My mind tells me that I need to think about the next piece of writing and allow it to gestate. But is that a fallacy? I know when I attack writing with discipline, no matter what corner my characters find themselves in, I can get them out by some alchemical process.

My third? I play the guitar and learn songs. I do this because it is good for me, I know. Highly meditative. I am not even averagely good at music. It is all a struggle to keep things improving. It goes back to when I was eleven and sang tenor to another boy’s contralto in concert parties to raise funds for a village hall. My voice broke and a deep musical depression fell upon me. So when I am playing and singing today I am facing the demons of early ageing!

There has to be a fourth. Probably hundreds more. Some things I manage without fail Diet, except when on holiday where I implode - or explode, actually! Daily raw fruit and vegetable juices for instance. Let me say, reading. There are books I should read. They would help in backing up my skimpy knowledge about the history of human thought but I just don’t. In fact, as I have said, I can’t bear fiction which is well researched because it seems to preclude the real power of the imagination. I read the odd page of non-fiction and a few bytes of the internet.

So, as you read this, what do you not do that you know you should? Why do you desist when you know the consequences could mean the lopping off of years of your life? What are the hot Sahara winds that lay you low and desultorily pondering?

2011-01-13T11:27:00.002Z

The dust settles on Accra

I was reminded of Dickens’ Bleak House this last week because Ghana is experiencing the Hamatan. It is dry and the sir is full of Sahara dust. Read the quote from the beginning of Dickens’ novel and substitute dust for fog and you’ll get the picture!

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green lanes and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

The light is milky and it affects breathing and how clean you feel. Coming back from work reveals your clothes filmed in it. Our house here in Accra has no glass in the windows, just mosquito netting so the dust penetrates everywhere. It would take a whole below-stairs of Dickensian staff to keep it from being a repository of dunes. You just paddle about and ignore it.

The contrast couldn’t be greater when watching the horrors of water-logged Australia or the strangely surreal European snow reports on Sky News. At the same time our swimming pool, which ought to be called Wikileaks, is allowing the water to seep away so we are encouraging the process by bucketing it to the garden. It’s ankle deep at the shallow end and the new Alsatian pup, Andromeda, appears to be unlike her cowardly big friends, the Sirius the Doberman and Heracles the Alsatian cross. While they are bumptious on dry land, they run a mile when you suggest having a dip. She, however, a mere three months old, scampers in and thrashes her paws in the water making a fine spray. The other two watch her curiously as though she is an alien.

Meanwhile, back in the UK which seems less and less where I would want to live these days, the Tories have cut an education programme which gives free books to children from poor homes. Maybe three million or so? The Tories are the Hamatan of culture. Any notion that the reason why people might want to live and work in the UK is because it is a natural habitat for creative artists is quite beyond them.

2011-01-06T13:42:00.004Z

Lies, damn lies and poor interpretations of statistics

Funnily enough, when I was flying back from Japan, I saw a programme called Freakonomics based on the book of the same name. I hadn’t read the book but understood it was a lateral look at the myths that can abound when people make wrong inferences from data. Well, two outcomes that stuck in my somewhat jetlagged nut. One related to Japan. The other to New York.

First the Japanese angle. What the documentary showed was that when a society has, it imagines, in-built ethics or traditional cultural behaviours, it will not face the consequences of these being brought into disrepute. We saw sumo wrestlers. Here is an ancient art, a rule-ridden battle between men whose weight is more significant than their body shapes. Giants who are fed like the carp in Japanese ponds until their mountainous flesh vies with Fuji itself. They fight their way to the top where the pickings can be massive and include enamoured, beautiful, slight-bodied women. And NO-ONE could envisage even the sniff of corruption in this stylised, mannered world. No single event had come to light until an ex-sumo coach said that fights were fixed. Uproar. The media tried to shut him up. But our intrepid statisticians looked at the data and, over thousands of fights they found an anomaly. There was a huge bias where victories by opponents did not hurt the losers because they had already enough victories under their great leather belts to progress to the next championships. The Japanese federation accepted that in certain cases, injuries among sumo wrestlers (some died in training) were the result of abuse but would not accept the statistical pattern showing that a big proportion of fights was rigged. This notion that culture has its purities that we need to believe in, regardless of the true state of affairs, rings a bell, does it not? Politicians peddle it when they defend the police, secret services, religious schools, the royals, foreign conquest and so on. We are not expected to challenge these verities. Wikileaks exposed not only the malady in ambassadorial life but also the hypocrisies that abound when people like Hilary Clinton defend their nasty email injunctions to spy on America’s friends.

The other angle was the New York one. I have to admit that I was a sucker for the story about how New York was reformed by its Mayor and its policy of zero tolerance. By jumping on the small details of antisocial behaviour (breaking windows, throwing litter, petty stealing) the big ones do not occur in the same numbers. What a great breakthrough in public order. Well, our number crunchers looked at the data. What did they find? Following Ceaucescu’s fall from power in Romania it was discovered that he had forced women to have babies to swell the labour market. Twenty years later these unwanted babies had inflated the criminal ranks of the country. At around this time, the American Senate passed what seemed to be an unpopular law which allowed women to have abortion. Twenty years later, the crime figures for New York and elsewhere had dropped sharply. Unwanted pregnancies had been so diminished. Of course, religious fundamentalists don’t like it that abortion is a possible tool for ensuring babies are born to their mothers when they are ready to support them. Others on the liberal front attack the connection on the grounds that it appears to be biased against the poor, suggesting they are poor parents and irresponsible. But the causality is striking, make of it what you may.

Two examples from Freakonomics. You have to be brave to challenge social orthodoxies that underpin your culture and you have to control your own destiny, regardless of the State. But you may die for such causes. Take Punjab Governor Salman Taseer who was assassinated this week for wanting to repeal blasphemy laws. Laws that do not stem from the Koran but from bigots who want to limit freedom of speech and frank debate about religious and other pillars of Pakistan society.

2010-12-30T11:42:00.002Z

The Disease of Disney and the Solace of Zen

Japan is an oyster whose pearl is the asceticism of Zen and the consequent aesthetic of minimalism. Thousands of years of philosophical struggle with the eternal questions of existence and thereafter run a deep course beneath its modernity. I have to admit I am deeply affected by it. It needs protection from the global consumerism that reduces the spiritual and intellectual quest to gift shop retail. Of the latter let me make some vitriolic comments.

Japan has a strange fixation with cartoon realities. Everywhere you go, the shops, the people, the tv programmes have elements of humanity reduced to the simplicity of animated creatures, anthropomorphised into stylised representations of human characteristics. If there were seven versions of the human condition then the Seven Dwarfs would represent them. Kuresawa’s The Seven Samurai would involve Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy et al being ‘collected’ by a central, smiling, androgynous hero to take on the mission of saving humanity. Or the more serious version would be found in the vivid, sometime violent and perverse renditions of a Manga graphic novel. Walk down the roads of Electric City in Tokyo and you begin to believe you are a figment of the Matrix and there is no separation between you and the virtual.

That is the every day. Then go to Disneyland and what is already a twee world becomes exacerbated into the outlandishly infantile. Here, the garish and the glitzy, the caricatured and the personified become a treacle of mawkishness, as devoid of the sweat, flesh and blood or intellectual curiosity of the human condition as it is possible to experience. Millions visit every week. They can queue up to an hour for ‘rides’ and if they manage three special attractions in a day’s slog, they go home happy. Do not imagine I am talking about children. From my viewpoint, primary school and younger ones were actually a minority. Couples, mature professionals, pensioners and every other age group and type of worker wander about with blissed-out expressions as they take in the Disney experience. This chasing of the dragon of fantasy is an addiction. A friend of mine, known internationally for his pithy and delightfully creative children’s books was once visited by the wife of the Japanese Ambassador to the UK with her about to be married daughter. They wanted my friend to sign some of his books created for five year olds. He learned that they would be added to a ‘shrine’ of artefacts that the daughter was gathering her marital boudoir. English and American children’s books are much sought after.

I visited Miyajima Island on my last day’s trip to Hiroshima. The usual tourist traps were full of souvenirs, superficial replicas of the Buddha through to ornamented rice paddles and sake bottles and cups. The narrow streets, despite the bitter cold, were thronging. Only twenty metres above the main shopping street is a wonderful Buddhist building of ancient, polished planks and massive columns. Peace and tranquillity rule. The structure radiates an imperative to ponder on the shortness and superficiality of life and what meaning might be squeezed from its fruits. While I was there, there were only a couple of other visitors.

Disney and the Buddha emphasise that life is but an illusion, an unrolling celluloid that one day will flutter off the reel. Take your pick as to which one offers a path to enlightenment.

2010-12-28T23:36:00.003Z

Masks or blindfolds

I am in Japan at the moment. It’s a relief to be back in a culture where there is no tipping of waiters, no backhanders to get things done, a country where people bow and show respect at all times (except the Yakusa!) . Not that I have ever been a traditionalist, bemoaning the behaviour of the young or writing hang ‘em-flog ‘em letters to the right wing press. Quite the opposite. It has always seemed to me that a radical youth is needed everywhere to stir up societies and stop them becoming moribund or reactionary, even though it upsets those who are approaching their dotage or who have a monopoly on power.

Wanting to shape a country’s culture shows a person cares about it. In the fifties and early sixties we teenagers felt alive and sensed we were dominating attitudes and beliefs. We behaved badly but the arts flourished with our headstrong attack upon the establishment’s control of what counted as culture and what didn’t. Eventually we were marginalised as our creative forces were subsumed in the new consumerism but much changed. This condition still pertains. Ideas are merchandise like everything else. Walk the streets of Tokyo or any other city in the world and you see fashion appropriating every form of disaffection, muzzling it or neutering it. The young are disinheriting the earth.

As I said recently, student revolt in the UK over fees bears little comparison with earlier student revolt over disproportionate power and control where the haves dominate the have-nots, keeping them firmly embedded in ignorance and powerlessness. Similarly, marching to Aldermaston or Greenham Common encampments had a different order of caring for a country, its people and humanity as a whole, than breaking windows at Tory Headquarters in London. When people march for their rights to gather, to be uncensored or not to be discriminated against. there is hope.

I visited the Hiroshima Peace Park, yesterday, for the second time in three years, with its museum attesting to the devastation of the Atomic bomb in 1945. The images and artefacts are so unsettling that the mind revolts against them, trying to deny them access. No human being could do this, surely? Harry Truman did and he was no Hitler or Stalin. The order was passed. The decision was made not to warn the civilian population. Days after Hiroshima the Americans turned on Nagasaki. The carnage was stupendously obscene. The bombs we have today are thousands of times more powerful. Many countries have them. Yet, in the main in the apathetic west we don’t protest about the world’s ills beyond our doors. We keep our heads down and let our politicians, our own Harry Trumans, do what they may. Even if we could be flattened by H Bombs or environmental suicide.

When I was forced to drink coffee in the smoking area of a restaurant in Tokyo, a young couple came in, their faces covered in those white anti-pollution masks. They took them off and lighted up cigarettes. It seemed to sum up the Wonderland we live in very well.

2010-12-17T02:05:00.002Z

Charles and Camilla

One of those symbolic moments occurred the other day on Regent’s Street, London, captured in a short take of film by a lucky photographer. And from it was extracted a single frame of film in which Camilla stares open-mouthed and Charles in bemused consternation at the parallel universe beyond the glass of their vehicle. The world, in its unpredictable proletarian reality, was washing up on the shores of their royal separateness! The prince is not used to his subjects being other than forelock tuggers on his estates, or the Uriah Heaps of the royal retinue and the landed gentry of the county set. Of course, the Prince’s Trust has its charitable offerings to needy young folk who aspire to making it in business and the prince might have assumed that it was a conduit to understanding the downtrodden masses. Until now. Nothing had actually prepared the surreal pair for this rupture of their rarefied universe.

The most significant element of their brush with unwashed studenthood was the attack upon Camilla’s royal person. Was she, as was originally claimed but not really corroborated by the Home Secretary, ‘poked with a stick’? If so, how Neanderthal. Even today, in this world of technology, virtual aggression and climatically controlled vehicles, we can be prodded by an oaken branch, from the same genus of tree that another royal Charles once hid from republican Cromwell!

For Charles, rhetoric and reality are not considered complementary. He it was who paid for a planeload of black lilies or some such plant to be brought from South Africa for a swanky do whilst well into his cant on environmental sustainability and man’s odious place in that narrative.

As you will know from a previous blog, I don’t feel that much solidarity with the student revolt this time round as there seems little ideology or altruism in it but, at least, it has given genesis to that iconic photograph of the future king coming face to face with the people he must one day rule.

2010-12-12T13:24:00.005Z

You Dear Reader, may not exist...!

There is an excellent series on BBC Knowledge showing in Ghana at the moment. I suppose you may have been able to see it a year or two ago but time here does not behave like yours does. Last night I watched Morgan Freeman, who fronts it, ask what the latest scientific proof might be for God. Get to see it unless you are so smitten with your religion that you could not bear to be challenged. The latest theories were like a gourmet’s meal for famished philosophers. I’ll have to watch it again because my brain buckles with so much being thrown at it. Here’s what my depleted memory store can regurgitate for three of them.

Theory One: we are living in a simulation created by our descendents. In 50 years computer power will be so extraordinary that this world we know as our own, with you, me and everything could easily be created and because we are part of it, like in The Matrix, we cannot tell that it is not real. Think Playstation 50+ and the Sims. Evidence can be found by examining the very fabric of our world. On close inspection it is made up of pixels…

Theory Two: put a magnet over your brain’s right lobe and focus its power and even atheists have God-like experiences. Because we know death is an end to existence our anguish is converted into the means to alleviate it with spiritual experiences. Great prophets may have access to this part of the brain and thus ‘see’ God.

Theory Three: a beach bum with a PhD and a mind that has moved on since Einstein has come up with a theory for everything, mathematically speaking. It excludes God but is so elegant that it makes it appear that God or a supreme Physicist must exist. It (the metatheory) says that only by random do the constituent four theories of gravitation, electro-magnetism and weak and strong forces fuse together on this planet….

As I gurgled in a recent blog, our brains are undoubtedly capable of believing that what they conjure up, actually exists outside them and that our senses apprehend them.

Oh no! I have just realised that mine may well have done this. My brain is so capable of such creative self-deceit that it has fabricated this blog, Ghana, my life thus far, the programme called Through the Wormhole and even the illusion that I am an atheist...!

2010-12-10T13:54:00.003Z

Whose God is it Anyway?

There they were in Israel trying to change the course of nature which, according to Sky News had become ‘biblical’ in its form and effect. There is a seven year drought and we all know that plagues, pestilences, floods and the like go in seven year cycles in the Old Testament. God might work in mysterious ways but His ready reckoner tends to get stuck on seven.

“They’ who had got together to seek God’s intervention, were spiritual leaders of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. Joint prayer. The paradoxical element of this is that there is widespread belief among adherents to different faiths that the God of each is not necessarily the same God. Otherwise why would Muslims and Jews be in a death conflict, or Christians and Muslims? Or are they saying that it is the same God but each road has different scenery and they are fighting over the view out of the window?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a God? We’d all be happy and in harmony. But we don’t really believe it or we’d stop the bloodshed immediately.

If there is a God then I doubt He bothers too much about people praying and genuflecting to Him. A bit demeaning to His intelligence, don’t you think? What kind of Being finds His ego inflated by men and women on their knees? Hardly an all-seeing, all-knowing, loving God!

But there they stood on the dusty terrain, hedging their bets as they allowed each in turn to invoke the rain through God, whomever had the most scenic route to Him.

2010-12-03T14:22:00.005Z

On level playing pitches and moving goal posts

So, as I mentioned a couple of emails ago, FIFA had little intention of supporting England’s bid, despite it being the best constructed, most viable and economically beneficial to grass roots football throughout the world. The 22, largely old men, who are steeped in forms of negotiation and power that are beyond the comprehension and experience of the Brits had little compunction in saying they were going to support the English bid and then reneging at the last possible moment.

Why?

Well, I am a much travelled man and what you discover when you travel is that cultural norms differ wherever you find yourself. For example, in Ghana it is likely that, whatever you suggest will be agreed by your opposite number. This is a norm. It has little bearing on what your opposite number may decide to do. People here regard it as showing good grace. But they dislike intensely any criticism, implied or direct, regardless of the justification for it. I found when working in Uzbekistan that people agreed with your strategy and then went off to find out whether it was politically acceptable. Similarly in Russia. In France there can be a nationalism that rejects suggestions, theories and hypotheses from ‘foreigners’. In Africa, generally, everyone suspects voting results because they know the likelihood of rigging and many indulge in it for themselves, anyway. Bribes are part of every day interactions, as they are in most countries outside those with an investigative free press and openness to public scrutiny.

England was on a loser from the beginning (as were the USA and Australia). Blatter’s word sways delegates from the developing world because he has the power to award funding and doesn’t really hide it. He is also known to dislike the British. He has an overblown sense of personal legacy which, in his terms means that he has raised his profile as god of football as a means to bring about social and political development in his empire. It is no surprise that FIFA decided to hold two ballots on one day, making it possible for collusion between delegates to advance the causes of Russia and Qatar to the detriment of the traditional football playing nations, despite the odds. It is also no surprise that FIFA laid down one set of criteria (which the English felt made them pre-eminent bidders) but, at the death, changed the goalposts.

So, thinking about it, the English did not stoop (in their terms) to the internecine tactics of their competitors who then gleefully walked off with the prizes. Over time more will come out (perhaps through Wikileaks) but the chances that anything will be done about it will be minimal. The English and Scottish may have invented the rules but they were the rules of football, not of football politics.

And this latter point holds in it the promise of biters being bitten. Russia kills its investigative journalists with impunity. Its mafia roam free and its institutions kow tow to the old KGB. Qatar imprisons homosexuals, restricts peaceful assembly and has different laws for foreign workers. The votes of two women are generally regarded as equal to one man. The World Cup brings with it the cultural norms of other nations and there is nothing more liberalising than the every day traveller and his/her expectations. Alphadogs and Emirs are about to discover the cost to their power and influence.

Maybe Blatter IS a god and this was his strategy all along... Why do I doubt it?

2010-12-02T10:46:00.003Z

The End of Days

This phrase, appearing in Revelations, has a deeply mordant edge to it because of its sheer poetic finality. Watching a programme about the battle between dark matter and dark energy led me to the speculation that it is no wonder some people find life intolerable and top themselves.

You see, it appears (in our latest scientific theorising) that dark matter keeps everything together like an all-pervasive glue, from the atoms in our bodies to the great galaxies of space. We are formed in it and then it supports us in an invisible miasma of togetherness. BUT, as in action comics, if Dark Matter is our saviour, Dark Energy will have none of it and seeks to tear everything apart. They call it The Big Rip. Currently, computer models show that the universe will break down, not in shreds but in sub-atomic particles.

It got me wondering about the stability of our psyches. We live and then we die. That’s painful enough and we invent all sorts of thinking to handle it positively (God, heaven, reincarnation and the rest) and those of us who have kids take comfort in our genealogical line heading off to infinity. Not in this universe. Even the sub-particles of God will succumb to the disintegration of Existence, He being a human construct and thought itself not surviving, even if science fiction suggests it might one day disengage from its physical home.

So, what is the point of being 'alive' when we discover the bus we are on is the number 13 and humanity is on the road to nowhere?

I suppose I gravitate towards Zen Buddhism because it acknowledges this in its maxim of living within the moment. That is all there is.

2010-12-02T10:18:00.001Z

Prince Andrew: the Royal Right Wing

There is a genealogical line in the Royal Family I believe that has seen them, over the decades, breathily embraced with fascism. The Queen Mother had her somewhat tarnished reputation for all things Right and nasty, heavily glossed in the second world war, to make her appear a war heroine, one of the first campaigns over which Saatchi would have been proud. And she was just the latest in a long line of Nazi sympathisers. Oh no she wasn’t! Did not William go to a ‘natives and colonials' party in Nazi uniform? The Queen seems to have kept herself to herself in most matters political but she did marry that consort to racism, Philip and thus they produced Andrew who, for some unaccountable reason, goes under the title of Royal Ambassador or some such toff tosh. The fact that he is figuring in Wikileaks is hardly a surprise. It turns out he hates the Guardian for its nosiness in business deals, particularly those involving arms sales to countries that have no compunction in using them against their own people or their neighbours. Like his father he is incapable of moral judgment. Given their generations of wealth acquisition, tax dodging and EU handouts in all sorts of dubious circumstances it is hardly a surprise.

2010-11-30T14:32:00.003Z

Taking a leak

I have been watching Hilary Clinton and the apparatchiks of the White House for the last two or three days in increasing amusement tinged with not a little disgust. The leaking internet is pouring their urine back over their heads and they are attempting to put up the sanctimonious umbrella of victimhood as though the world they live in is devoid of deceit and wrong-doing. A bit like Watergate in the early days. Diplomacy is being undermined, they thunder, through the fluttering eyelashes of denial. We cannot get on with our work of protecting democracies throughout the world.

At the same time, Sep Blatter and his corrupt cronies on the FIFA Panel are saying, more or less openly, that The Sunday Times and BBC exposures of vote-rigging for money (plenty of it) will mean that England will not host a World Cup.

The way the world is means that the virtuous cannot inherit the earth. These powerful groups within their establishments have got to their lofty positions precisely because they operate within what they call realpolitik. Like Putin the self-confessed alphadog, they claw and stamp their way to the top with sweeteners and threats their tools of the trade. And they expect the world to genuflect to their missions and admire them for it.

I once did some work for the Home Office in the UK, developing case studies on public order and the like, to help train police recruits to understand ‘complexity’. At the time, some branch of the secret service was tailing vicars, landowners and any proles who were supporting a campaign to stop nuclear waste dumping in Lincolnshire. I interviewed individuals who swore they were beaten up, cars trashed and whatever, as the then UK Government sought to further its democratic vision of a subservient and ignorant public. Is it any wonder we, the voters, who are normally excluded from the whispering corridors of power, feel duped and disenfranchised? The Unites States has a history of dirty deeds in the name of spreading democracy, undermining and toppling regimes it does not like. We swore it was going on and it always denied it. So we sit back and grin at the schadenfreude and sick sanctimony, scrabbling to find a way of presenting their incredibly expensive diplomatic machine as though it was a misunderstood and much maligned force for good. The fact is, reading some of the transcripts, they disgrace the name of democracy, are little more than the bilge of bigots and have as much cultural sensitivity as a whole legion of Prince Philips.

They don’t want us to know. Vive L’Internet!

2010-11-25T18:09:00.003Z

The Right Royal Caper

There was a curious anomaly the other day. Research is needed. Nobody bought clothes for about 9 hours. You see, my partner runs a woman’s e-commerce business and sells all the clothes outside Ghana. High quality, classically designed and drawing 500 plus visits every day. Sales are great, even during these hard times. Then, at roughly 11-00 am one fateful morning last week, everything ceased, as if we were in a science fiction movie – you know, when everybody wakes up and discovers they have lost nine hours of their lives, checking their bodies for undulating movement under the skin. Kate and William announced they were to be married.

One assumes it was this and not something even more bizarre like a trial run of the virus that will end the world as we know it, that was the cause. What happened belied the science of statistics. Look at the patterns of buyer activity on any day and you have hot spots and cooler periods but you don’t have no activity for nine hours!

Now, the full royal machine is running on its well-oiled cogs. The right wing press is oohing and aahing. This is going to be a wedding for everyone! You are all invited. Westminster Abbey. 2000 guests. Everyone? Have an extra day’s holiday, businesses won’t mind paying the wages, the PAYE.

It feels like after the nine hours I woke up to discover that I had passed on the other side of the looking glass. Wars, famine, disease, nuclear bombs, killer viruses, Armageddon had all been left behind. Never mind all that, let’s have a nice cup of tea and watch the bluebloods at play. That’s the reality. And the royal confidantes have been on-screen warn us in their cut glass accents that the Windsors will have to be careful and make the wedding seem not too glitzy like the Charles and Diana do because the poor people won’t like it, you know, they are suffering a recession….

For me, for what it’s worth (not much, I know), having a royal family is having a keystone in the arch of a largely corrupt and iniquitous establishment. If you are a top stone, everything is fine. But the rest of us hold them up, unable to move because of the weight of their wealth and vested interests.

2010-11-17T12:53:00.006Z

From Beatniks to Vandals

The Government in the UK have introduced higher tuition fees for university students. For the priciest courses the fees for a three year course can amount to nearly £40,000 or $60,000. It is a far cry from the free education of my beatnik youth and the reaction to it is very different from the heady days of 1968.

There I was in the heart of the French-led student revolt, in Paris, in Brussels and in Geneva, making the odd incoherent speech but not about education being a mortgage for life but about transparency of student records, open, critical debate, democracy. It was tied up with what was then called the counter-culture, West Coast American hippy idealism, flower power, the end of war and time to make love. Of course it all looks naïve and simplistic today but it wasn’t then. We were touched by idealism and wanted to change society and change the way that society thought about itself and its young. It was the inevitable politicising of rock and roll. OUR music.

Watching some students in London smash their way through glass panes in Conservative party Headquarters, there was none of that. It was all about money. In fact the multitude that marched peaceably did so about fees alone, as far as I understood it from the media and my armchair in Ghana. I don’t know where our idealism got society when our descendants, now at university, can only think in those terms. They were not talking about the quality of education only the price of it. Meanwhile the inevitable University Chancellors were doing their interviews, wanting more money for the trough in order to ‘compete with the elite universities across the world’. What a travesty of the truth. Over the last decades, university senior managers have become well off at the expense of education. Larger classes, lectures to hundreds and falling standards of teaching and research are the true indicators of what has been happening among our ‘elite’, together with tie-ups to multi-nationals in the private sector. In my time I have ‘saved’ PhD students from Oxbridge colleges who never saw their supervisors and were referred in their vivas. And the fee for a year’s work in helping turn these students round? £100. This was only a short while ago. The students in question were being charged £8000 PER YEAR. Academics are as greedy as bankers, in the main. Greedy to pursue their own careers by publication, greedy for status and about as altruistic as panhandlers in a river of gold.

Decades of education have not raised critical consciousness in the UK or American society any higher than it was in the fifties. Everyone has bought in to capitalism and acquisitiveness. The vital energies of the young are chanelled into intellectual and creative dead ends. It would have been remarkable if the march in London had signalled the beginning of a philosophy of a new world order but it was more about students feeling that they were being priced out of consumerism.

2010-11-12T11:45:00.004Z

Me greedy, you dead

We’re heading for another global crisis. It is another banking crisis, too. Not money this time but fat laid down around midriffs, bottoms and thighs. The OECD has just released a report showing that developing countries, as soon as their populations begin to join the middle classes, adopt western lifestyles. This means processed foods with transfats, sugars, salts and the rest. It means increased diabetes, heart attacks, early senility and many conditions where the correlations have not yet been done. Going into Accra Mall at the weekend provides you with plenty of evidence for this. Fast food, western style outlets buzz and waistlines increase. The Ghanaian middle classes are not eating a balanced diet. The Daily Graphic today was lamenting the fact that Ghana, which has wonderful potential for feeding itself and exporting far more food to the rest of Africa, was developing a cultural dislike for home grown rice and other commodities.

Meanwhile, watching a programme about the human body, it turns out that if we eat less than 2000 calories a day, we can rejuvenate our hearts and make them 15 years younger! Dieting rats outlive those who can eat whatever they like by up to 33%. That’s a lot. Now we can stuff ourselves like junkies with food that is bad for us and go down with our flags flying, in a hospital bed for months, saying that we preferred fewer years of life but stuffed full of crisps, pizzas, burgers, pre-prepared meals, chips, restaurant meals and the like or we can live many years longer on raw stuff we buy and cook for ourselves.

At the same time, food and water will be what is fought over in the decades to come and western lifestyles and protectionism will increase, exponentially, famine and disease elsewhere. When I overeat, another anonymous person dies.

On the same programme I saw a man who survived seventy odd days in the ocean by eating fish only. If he had been eating, as usual, as a westerner, he would have been dead in days but his brain overwrote his wiring and made him suddenly desire the eyes, liver, kidneys and other bits of the fish carcass that we routinely throw away. All the fish vitamins. The lesson in this was that if we change our eating habits, eat properly but far less, there will be more food for everyone. We would develop a taste for new, healthier foods that we chuck away (currently one third of all food bought in the UK ends up in the bin) or never buy. The body is a chemical machine, not an altar to greed. We need to learn to control it but it is a lifelong discipline.

2010-11-08T13:12:00.002Z

Peanuts in Space

I was watching the British Prime Minister yesterday talking persuasively about his mission to create a big society to be the senior partner of a much reduced government. At the same time the attack on the poor and ill-educated goes on. They will bear the brunt of the losses incurred by banking gamblers. But then, the poor, who make up a fairly big proportion of the big society have little going their way when it comes to influencing governmental thinking, so it was obviously not them to which he was alluding. For example, they wouldn’t be passing a bill to pick up litter in order to get their unemployment benefit would they?

We know that it is only at election time that would-be politicians genuflect to the wishes of the public, often fabricating what these might be to suit their ideologies, so, now in power, Cameron’s rhetoric is beginning to unravel in the way of all politicians. Under the urbane and much cosmeticised exterior (his photographer has now a paid post in the civil service) there beats a heart that is indistinguishable from those of Tories through the Ages.

It led me to wonder, as I have done before in these blogs, what alternatives there are to having Oxbridge boys, silver-spoon fed and chubbily self-important, running the country. I won’t pursue this, having done it before but what I did not discuss then, was the matter of their intelligence. Now, I have worked in delight and despair with people from all walks of life for decades, finding high intelligence randomly distributed across all the social divides. Yet, when I see and hear politicians, I find a low correlation with the world outside Whitehall. There is a level of articulation that passes the demands of media questioning but I have never sat back, shocked into serious thought, by anything a politician has ever said, as I have been by an artist or a philosopher or a scientist. It appears that only those who will never achieve the highest levels in intellectual and creative fields turn to politics. We put our countries in the hands of people who we could not elevate elsewhere.

The picture from the BBC science site shows what I mean. It is my metaphor for politicians, worldwide (with obvious exceptions such as Mandela, Ghandi et al). It is an asteroid, mostly ice yet with its own jet exhaust and comes into public view once in a while. It is a space peanut and does nothing for the rest of its universal kind and has been there from the beginnings of time. Sound familiar?

2010-11-01T14:06:00.002Z

If we were more like eels…

A while back I wrote an adoring blog about a meal I had in Paris which began with smoked eel, a rarer delicacy in England than France. Now I discover that the creature is, like too many species of animal, plant, fish and bird suffering huge losses in its numbers. What to do? My life seems to have spanned a post-war delirium of open fields, wild flowers, clean water and every bird and animal on the doorstep through to today’s dereliction of human duty to the environment.

First, let me persuade you that the eel, a creature that ties your fishing line into knots and covers your hands with slime, should be a symbol of the extraordinary, a true miracle in mucous. Eels were not born, according to the great Izaak Walton, they sprang from the "action of sunlight on dewdrops". Actually they are born in the Sargasso Sea and stay there as ‘yellow eels‘, feeding and growing and swelling and darkening, for perhaps 7 years if they decide to become a male, and 12 if they're female. (It’s always harder, being a lass.) But there you are. It’s the future for us, too. Soon, all humans will be making similar choices, in order to save ourselves and the planet. The Chinese are doing it under State edict. More and more people are choosing the gender of their children as a design statement. Not for long. Necessity will triumph.

The eel forgets about the need for genitals until procreation becomes a possibility. That is why Walton became so poetical about its apparent spontaneous combustion into life. Perhaps we would all be better if we grew genitalia later. No more prudery about the naked form. We’d be as blank down there as Angels in a fresco (in the pictures I have seen!). Maybe we’d only cover up later when we are about to procreate with our newly grown appendages. That would be the difference between ‘parents’ and those who have no children.

Eels can live undisturbed in forgotten pools for 25, 30, even 40 years. They are Zen creatures meditating on the meaning of existence, uninterested in sex, drugs and rock and roll. Then (read the BBC science blog) one dark night, usually in September or October, usually after rain and when the moon's overcast, they get the call. No one knows why. They turn a kind of mottled green-black on top, silver underneath. They head downstream on the flood, and swim 3,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea. Then they spawn, and die.

There must be a sense of completion in this mass sexual encounter at the end of days. Who would not feel ‘closure’ as the current cliché has it? Wouldn’t our lives be richer and more meaningful, if we ended them on an equivalent social high note?

2010-10-26T11:10:00.004+01:00

Mondo Cane: it’s a dog’s life….

We keep two or three dogs in the compound here in Accra. They run freely, are well behaved and well trained. Everything they do (in the main) is in the best possible doggie taste. But, as you may remember from a recent blog, two died, leaving old Heracles, a grey muzzled Alsatian cross. He is such a genteel fellow and did not, in any way, mourn the loss of his companions of ten years or more. This is because he was third in line to the canine throne. Now he was top dog with no usurpers in sight. Life could not get any better, could it?

Then, yesterday, we bought a Doberman pup, aged four months, the reason being that you should always have at least two dogs here; one running and one in a (spacious) doghouse, at night. Robbers in Ghana throw poisoned meat over the wall to eradicate the threat of four legged guards. In a couple of months or so we will take ownership of another pup, this time a white Alsatian. Anyway, back to old Heracles and the insurgency. Already, the old dog is teaching the young new tricks. The little one follows the big one round the garden, like an imprinted duckling. And the old one enjoys showing him around. “This is a nice place to pee, this is where my dead friends are buried, this is the swimming pool, here’s where you eat, this is Master, don’t dig up plants or you will be in trouble, I can tell you, this is Mistress etc etc.

In the way of cartoons, Sirius has taken to living here immediately. He did not bark all night but tucked himself up in his shed with Heracles lying on the other side of the wire. In the first day he did the following: he fell into the pool and was rescued standing on his hind legs at the shallow end, his paws on the edge, crying lustily. He walked into windows (the first experience of glass in his life). He bounced off mosquito netting doors for much the same reason. He sat (firmly pressed!) next to Heracles as they got their coconut halves to gouge out – good for the teeth - and took it to eat on the grass next to his sudden big friend). He barked at planes which flew too low and at passing irritations such as boys with bells on little mobile food bicycles. He appears indomitable and eminently ready to be trained in all matters of house protection. As we figured, the greying Heracles is his teacher, friend and playpal.

It brings to mind the whole business of culture. What we are all born into (whether it be as dog, plant or human) helps to define our growth and behaviour in the world. Much of our learning is at a level below the conscious. How else do we come to feel love, loyalty, fairness, protectiveness…? We like exactly the right proportion of external control and freedom of choice (which varies with the individual!).

We, in the house, are not cursed by too much sentimentality. Dogs are dogs and not humans. They have their place in the pecking order and must be shown it. But a dog’s life doesn’t seem that bad – or that different from our own, give or take the odd bone!

2010-10-18T11:26:00.002+01:00

Gain without pain

Someone wrote to me the other day and said that I seem to have a hatred of ‘believers’. I suppose some of these blogs could be seen that way but the intention has never been to demean people, only try to understand why they believe. I certainly have a dislike for organised religion which seems to have been able to perpetrate crimes from torture, imprisonment and murder through to genocide without, apparently suffering that much from people’s disaffection. I don’t think that the original tenets of the world’s great religions ever intended to aid and abet their disciples in committing sin, in any circumstances but the fact has been – and is – that they do.

I would be very happy in myself if my quest to find a deeper meaning in this existence was even partially answered. The more I investigate religion, the less it seems a viable route to understanding. Any system of thought that requires an individual to forego so much evidence to the contrary has little chance of seeding itself in my skull.

A friend in Ghana, the other day, said that he went to church because this seemed the only possible way he might meet with and talk with his beloved mother, now long dead, either in this life or when he, too, had passed over to the other side. He is a scientist. It seems that there are very few individuals in Ghana, with a scientific bent of mind, who would follow Richard Dawkins’ brand of atheism., or even the softer line of agnosticism. It is culturally unacceptable here. The churches spring up as fast as banks and the preachers are wealthier. Bible classes are for indoctrination and not for critical discourse.

I had something of an enlightenment on these matters the other day. I was watching a programme on pain. When you scan a person in pain (let’s say from the application of some torture of the Inquisition) the resulting patterns of neuron-firing are generalised across the brain and unique to each individual. The same degree and intensity of torture produces wildly differing results. One person’s headache is another person’s decapitation! BUT, and this is very bizarre, it is possible to hypnotise these dissimilar individuals with the following effect.

By telling a person under hypnosis that pain is pleasure, then they can take a dental extraction without anaesthetic and love it. Not only this but, in the residual pain that follows, they gain equal pleasure. They have become hard wired to perceive pleasure where there should be pain. That is how the brain works. Examples were given of people with terrible injuries, crawling for days over rough terrain to get help and only experiencing pain once friendly arms picked them up. So the brain can sublimate for itself, too.

My illumination is this. Life, in general, is a painful business. We look around and see the horrors of war, famine, Man’s obscenities in every day life and, really, we should top ourselves. We are the most insidiously disgusting, immoral creatures imaginable. How do we cope? Well, if we are a Muslim suicide bomber, we turn the pain of a bomb belt into a Paradise with virgins. If we are Christian, then God’s judgment will take us into heaven. If we have a more eastern religion, we may be reincarnated as someone better. All beliefs. All based on perception. All based on a form of hypnosis via conditioning. That is what belief without authentic evidence amounts to. It is also why preachers from Africa to Asia, from the Bible belt to Russia, regurgitate quasi-evidence along with hypnosis techniques to get brains to perceive the opposite of what real evidence might tell them.

A great example of this was on a Ghana TV channel the other night. A preacher was asking people to get their credit cards out and make donations of at least a thousand dollars to his church. We saw four or five operators in a call centre, apparently taking the ‘gifts’. The preacher told people to keep trying to get through because the lines were so busy. “Give your seed of a thousand dollars and you will reap God’s harvest!” He raged at immorality, he thundered about being saved, his choirs were great and sang lustily for the Lord and he told his viewers that they could only be saved if…..

2010-10-14T15:27:00.007+01:00

Three Men in a Boat

Here is the image of the front cover of a new novel. It is also part of a tale of synchronicity. Three or four decades ago (my mind is sharp on image and blurry on time) you would have found three men with a modicum of middle age adorning their skin, sitting in an old attic, like the upturned hull of a barge and reading poetry and prose to each other. As I recall, it was a ripening experience. All three of us went on to write, in our various media. One was Mike Mackmin and one was Lindsay Clarke. The other day he sent me this poem:

THE STILLNESS OF THE FOREST

Ghana. Dry season. Nineteen Sixty-Three.

the heat was dropsical, and if we felt

the need to swim we’d drive for hours along

the road the JCBs had opened through

two hundred humid miles of forest

till we reached the coast at Winneba

where palm fronds rattled in the breeze

and lush Atlantic combers surfed the beach.

I can smell the stillness of that forest now -

the steam already rising off the bush

at dawn, the grey, high-buttressed trunks

of Odum trees, a hot mist sauntering

across the canopy, the cobwebs strung

from branch to bough, green strobes of sunlight

shuttered by the leaves. And if you took away

the road, the world had always been like this.

So I remember the relief of breaking out

on to the coastal plain - that breathing space

of scrubby grass and sand abased beneath

unshaded sun. And if you’d told me then

that long before I came to write this poem

those close-packed multitudes of trees would all

be gone, I would have called you fanciful,

and had my swim; then turned back for the long drive home.

He spent three years in Ghana but his memories of it remain powerful and are still helping to form him. His first novel was called Sunday Whiteman which leant more than a little upon his time here.

Meanwhile, across the road in a terraced house in Norwich, I met a white woman who had lived in Ghana. She had had some success with a children’s novel called Ashanti Boy.

Fast forward our lives and here I am, beyond prediction, in Ghana, living, writing.… Meanwhile, no less in this country, though physically in the softer climes of Somerset, England, Lindsay has just published The Water Theatre. Ghana permeates it. The pull of this country does not end.

So, this blog is a preview of his new book, as I await its arrival here in Accra. I am certain it is a fine novel and a testament to Ghana's capacity to seduce and stimulate. The reviews suggest as much. To have kept the forest fires of West African experience alive and then to have tempered them in literary steel, is

a gift from the ancient gods...

Read it. I shall.

2010-10-06T17:25:00.004+01:00

Sad but true

I am becoming a scholar of the early Catholic Church, a curious fact, given my distress and anger at what organised religion can and does get up to. Anyway, the latest fruit of my labours (apple shaped since it involves knowledge that the early orthodox Christians tried to place beyond mortal ken) is the Seven Deadly Sins. So what about them?

First, there were actually eight. These were drawn up by Evagrius of Pontus, alone in the desert, excommunicated from social life and trying to muzzle his consequent desires. To those sins we have all had drummed into us, he added vainglory and sadness. Pope Gregory, at the end of the 6^th century, removed these latter two and instituted envy instead. So, the final list is the work of the fevered minds of men (like the contents of the bible, the Koran, the Vedas …). It all depends on your belief systems, the degree to which you feel that God was speaking through their authors.

Anyway, back to the Catholics. Pope Gregory, in tightening up the vices, re-engineered the way that the church operated in those turbulent times. As well as refining what constituted vice, he saw to it that priests should be celibate. The reason appears to have been economic. If priests married then their wealth would be passed to their children and not the church. In order that priests might manage their celibacy, the move became part of the train to make sex a sin. Full stop. Soon it was for procreation only and must never share a bed with lust. Before this, lust was seen as a natural expression of male and female desire in Greek and Roman times and had none of the demonology associated with it that came with Gregory et al. Were they such evil civilisations? Only a lateral branch of ‘heretics’ or free lovers, called Gnostics, continued in the old ways, seeing priestly, public and group sex as a form of sacrament; that is until they were ruthlessly expunged and their religious writings destroyed.

But I digress. What interested me was not the behaviour of the Catholic Church, then and now but why sadness was regarded as a sin in the first place and then later airbrushed from the list along with vainglory. The latter seems obvious in that every time I have entered a Catholic house of God, I have been struck by its glorification of the material things of life. The gold, the tapestries, the art, the incense, the wine, the rich life of priests even in poor communities. Yet sadness…

It is a subtle and enduring emotion. Perhaps it was felt that sadness, caused by the death of another, or the loss of a lover, was an emotion which undermined the glories of the life hereafter. How could a truly religious Catholic, imbued with the spirit of the Holy Ghost, feel sadness? Pray and this corrosive emotion could be washed away.

I would have it back there among the Seven Deadly Sins instead of lust. Lust, as those who study the brain might aver, is the result of chemistry which, more often than not, subjugates reason. As long as it is not imposed on another and causes no physical, emotional or mental harm, lust should be de-listed. Sadness, however, whilst part of the mourning that comes to us now and then, should not be an indulgence. Then it truly is a vice. I’ll finish with a story from my own experience.

I was talking with an old soldier who lost all his platoon companions during the first world war. He was perpetually sad, even morose. Why had he survived? It wasn’t fair. I suggested to him that he should be living a celebratory life on behalf of those who had died for his sake. It was an illumination. He grasped my hand and went home. I felt the sin of self-congratulation.

The next day we met and he told me that his wife wanted me to keep my mouth shut. For her, the man was an embodiment of sadness. That was what she loved and what kept them together.

2010-10-03T11:39:00.003+01:00

God and the Fortune Tellers

Having just returned this weekend to Ghana, I watched a History Channel programme on Nostradamus and his modern equivalent, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Who is he? Well, he’s a mathematician who has a futurological algorithm which suggests prediction of events involving humanity is possible. Paid handsomely by Fortune 500 and the State Department for his secretive maths he has cross-checked Nostradamus’ various foretellings, and come to similar outcomes. QED, we are all about to die in catastrophic events involving some combination of the rise of the third great Anti-Christ, an asteroid hit bringing fire from the heavens and/or nuclear war. Grim plot lines.

Since Bruce was roughly correct on the rise of Al Qaeda and the Twin Towers attack, among other modern events, he has a certain fervent following. Some fellow mathematicians are pretty irritated that they can’t take out their red pens and check his workings. But they couldn’t with Nostradamus, either, since he cracked the number codes in the texts of the Ancients and then hid his discoveries in cryptic, revelatory prose. I suppose if you are reading this and have a penchant for global hypochondria, then you can imbibe your fill of doomsday scenarios by following the thread of December 21^st 2012 on Google and see how the world will end, according to all the available predictions from the Mayans, Revelations, the Chinese Horoscopes and, of course, Nostradanus, himself.

This latter prophet could not proclaim his predictive capabilities at the time, unlike Bueno de Mesquita, because he would have been hung, drawn and quartered by the Catholic Church for assuming a power which only God exercises. He had to stay this side of heretical. And here is the nub of the paradox. Those among us who are critical of the place of organised religion in society may agree with the Catholic position, if not its reasoning. If there is Fate, then there is possibly a god-like force that has written the script of life on earth, the universe and everything. If Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is right and his sums add up so that his QEDs equal actual scenarios, then atheism may have to float out of the window. And, unfortunately for many of us, so might religion. Why? Well, it seems to this benighted thinker that people tend to pray in order to persuade their God to do this or that; save a stricken relative from an incurable disease, save one’s soul, save the planet or win a lottery. There is an assumption that S/he can intercede.

Either God knows everything that ever was and ever will be or S/he has set in train humanity’s careering journey into the future, giving it the capacity to choose a path that is either self-destructive or filled with glory. If everything is laid out in warp and weft and we have no choice, then God becomes a bit of a supernumerary and certainly beyond any need for disciples and their prayers since they wont change one jot of the narrative. If it isn’t then Nostradamus and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita are remarkable indeed, for their mathematical equations are taking the forces that bind us to life and, by the application of Games Theory or numerology, are prognosticating events which are as beyond the ken of God as they are us.

Which is exactly what God might have planned for the two of them. Or not.

2010-09-29T14:00:00.005+01:00

Obituary for The Ancient Mariner

My friend Sean, poet and translator of the Greek into the Irish, sent me an email today regarding footballers who cross themselves at the beginning of matches. Sean wonders what gross perversion of morality has them praying for a hat trick rather than for the millions who will die from starvation in the oncoming months. This religious egocentricity is common enough and aeons old. As Mrs Thatcher might have said, “There is no such thing as Christianity or the Caliphate, only Christians and Muslims!”

News yesterday that the bones of a 14 year old boy have been found close to Stonehenge, that circular astrological and religious wonder of the Ancients. He had an amber necklace around his neck. Very important person. A bit like footballers’ bling. When his teeth were analysed it was discovered that he had grown up in the Mediterranean. This was 3,500 years ago when Stonehenge was THE place to be seen at, praying. How had he got over to the sceptered isle? No doubt by rowing, think the archaeologists.

What did he pray for? Should we conjecture? Hardly for the wealth and wellbeing of nations, tribes or clans. More likely that he would have a long and successful life and become a Chief of men. But he only made it to fourteen.

No change there then.

2010-09-24T10:03:00.011+01:00

Christians awake!

The other night I watched a Derren Brown special on demystifying magic and miracles. For anyone who does not know this entertainer, he produces illusions of consummate skill. Where others might saw a woman in half, Derren Brown would quarter her, where others might suspend themselves in shackles from a rope, he would do it in a pool full of piranha. But where he really scores is in the psychology of deception. He beats top class poker players and chess players at their own games but not by their rules.

He is also a hypnotist. In his programmes, conservative people have conducted themselves outrageously, whether in bizarre social behaviour or by undertaking fiendish or seemingly impossible challenges. Whole groups have ‘seen’ ghosts in ancient buildings. Taxi drivers are suddenly unaware of a landmark like The London Eye which towers above them, in full view. I read recently that he ‘persuaded’ the passenger on a plane to take over the controls because the captain and co-pilot were struck down by illness. The man, unknowing, ended up in a flight simulator but believed, totally, he had undergone the heroic act of bringing down the plane and saving his fellows.

Back to magic and miracles. In the programme he set out to show that faith was a trick of the mind, only and bore no relation to evidence. He passed himself off to well known protagonists in a range of fields and was accepted by them as a great purveyor of their arts. Ufologists, spiritualists and the like found him demonstrating extraordinary, supernatural powers. Then there were the atheists.

Gathering together a profoundly irreligious group of individuals, within ten minutes he had them believing in God. Rather like all priests of the smack em on the head and dump them in water, brigade, Derren Brown placed a hand on the forehead of an unbeliever and the individual would experience a profundity unlike anything he or she had ever known. They fell, one after another, into their chairs and woke up announcing that they now believed there was a god. What struck me pleasingly, as an academic who likes the notion that evidence should guide human action, was Brown admitting that he had been a devout Christian until, in his twenties, he had reviewed the historical evidence and realised that it didn’t add up. Synchronous viewing, on my part, had me watching programmes on how the Christian church developed in the early days, how the New Testament was formulated by men who eradicated women from power within the church, vilified Judas (the disciple closest to Jesus and chosen by him for the dastardly deed) and created the patriarchy of the priesthood. I also watched, on Euronews, a chief honcho of the Vatican saying, brazenly, that it was the Catholic Church that was responsible for civilised behaviour in the world. Very little appeal to evidence there, then!

Here in Ghana, conversions are every day events. The preachers have big churches, wear their gold neck chains and drive chauffeur driven cars. They encourage prayer for consumer items. They are very much like Derren Brown. Only he shows us that there is nothing mystical or magical in all this. Just sad, vulnerable people who would rather subordinate themselves to belief than face the evidence that there is probably nothing out there and our lives are (as a priest said eloquently) flights of butterflies through the front door of a building and out of the back.

2010-09-16T18:07:00.004+01:00

Is God a Diagnostic Molecular Imager?

Well, He, She or It seems to be a prevailing theme for many of these blogs. God. Does He, She, It exist? How do we know? Does the knowledge liberate us or further constrain our paltry attempts to be free agents beyond the scheme of an all-seeing Fate? It’s a good week for God doubters. As I write, the Pope is trundling around ‘secular Britain’ in his Popemobile just as described in my last blog. As he passes by, the crowd is hysterical with the adulation accorded to pop stars. Would the sound of their screams and supplications, their raptured eyes and offerings up of babies for him to bless be any different if another Messiah, say Elvis, was risen from the dead and equally enbubbled in his glass topped car? I doubt it. In fact all the tickets would have been sold. But, as in Julius Caesar, I come to bury God, not to praise him.

By that I mean, bury the memory of a rather bizarre event the other day. Being an academic of sorts, as you can see from the CV on the website, I like to go to lectures in other disciplines. Why? Well, rather like Thomas Kuhn or a 19^th Century rennaissance man, there is a certain pleasure in seeing that science, that flagbearer of the objectively focused, has common themes and structures that appear everywhere and follow the fads and fashions of the philosophy of the day. So, anyway, I went to a symposium in a medical department of a university here in Accra. It was on the treatment of osteoporosis. It turned out to be less a forensic account of the condition and its effects (there is no epidemiological data on it, in Ghana) but more a chance for Roche, the pharmaceutical conglomerate, to sell a drug and an independent entrepreneur to advertise his mobile machine for diagnosing the disease in the first place.

I have no wish to demean the individuals selling the treatment and the diagnostic machine: everyone seeks to survive here in Ghana, but I wanted to recount a couple of incidents during the event that brought God and Science together in my head; an unhappy conjunction. The screen saver on the inevitable power point presentation had three nails that appeared (I have no idea if this was so) like bloody iron impalers. The text said, Tougher than nails!” I DID think of Christ when I saw them, despite myself. When the session eventually got started (attendees at any event in Ghana arrive an hour or more late for sessions) the MC, running the programme, asked us all to pray, with the phrase, “Christ take control of this meeting…” I didn’t genuflect, feeling outraged as an agnostic and a fellow traveller of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and the rest, not to mention Dawkins and his irreverential ilk. When the event came to its end, the same MC thanked God for overseeing it and prayed that Roche Pharmaceuticals would enjoy great success in its business.

I am sure that Roche is very happy to have Dylan’s anthem, “With God on our side", playing in all its lifts in Switzerland, the US or wherever.” Maybe the Pope has it playing in his “look but don’t touch” motorcar. But, to be frank, I don’t want God on my side. Call me perverse if you like but I’d rather have the same equanimity at facing eternal darkness as our dog, Juno, who died on Sunday aged 10 years. He came to say goodbye to me and my partner, separately. Then he walked unsteadily down to a patch of earth beneath a bank of bougainvillea and died. His eyes were open, taking a last long look at the world he was leaving.

2010-09-10T16:18:00.006+01:00

I should cocoa…

When I wrote the title for this piece, it occurred to me that most of my readership (which is truly multi-national) would not understand its nuances. The phrase I should cocoa means that you are not going to do something, whatever someone has asked of you (see the following explanation).

It is rhyming slang and originally stood for “I should say so!”, a sarcastic exclamation to express disbelief, derision, scorn or indignant negation. You might also render it as "“You must be joking!” “Not on your life!” or “No way!” http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ish1.htm

Anyway, after this long-winded beginning, I used the title to refer to one of those events that occur rather rarely except when you are in a new country (Ghana, here). The title is ironic because I feel, having encountered it, that everyone should cocoa!

A member of staff gave me a present the other day. In a plastic bag I found three alien objects. I knew that they were fruit of some description but had not seen them before. He said they were cocoa pods and I should scoop out and eat the contents.

This I have done and the results are astonishing, appealing to all the senses. Inside the brown-speckled yellow rugby ball shaped exterior are cocoa beans the size of thumbnails, each packed in a sweet, sticky white glutinous film. The beans are bitter. They lie inside as if they are extras from that fifties film, They Came From Outer Space. I looked them up and discovered that these raw beans contain a myriad of essentials for a healthy body and are the number one killer of free radicals. They also increase brain power which may explain my earlier long-windedness – more words per second, unfortunately! They are the greatest superfood on the planet.

Meanwhile, the Pope is visiting secular Great Britain in a multi-million pound beano, paid for by the tax payer. They are paying their agnostic taxes and he will go there and try to convert them. He will travel around in the usual papal bubble. After the Vatican’s failure to make available its files on child abuse across Europe, I think he will be a little like a bean in the pod in my photo. Sweet on the outside and leaving a bitter taste in the mouth. But in his case, there are no health benefits.

NB If the Pope’s visit turns you to smoking, eat very dark chocolate – the cocoa in it redresses some of the worst effects of tobacco. Then shout “I should cocoa”

2010-09-05T15:09:00.004+01:00

A Vampire May Visit You Tonight

Maybe there have always been fears of the bloodsucker. I remember as a child, wading in streams and ponds and watching diligently for a leech to attach itself to my welly. I was magnetised and terrified at the same time, wanting to see whether it could suck my blood through the rubber. It never materialised but that didn’t cross it off my list of horrors. In the taxonomy of terror, long before Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave it a human form around which to coalesce, we have worshipped the vitality of blood and we have known that having it siphoned from our body is bad news (except for the aforementioned leeches, which have recently made a medical comeback). Maybe the Aztecs or Mayans drank it in acts of religious fervour and Christians attach great significance to drinking Christ’s blood, if only in a symbolic form. Nature programmes show bats and other creatures suckling away at their unaware victims and the sight can disgust us with tremors of identification.

Here in Accra there are vast colonies of very large fruit bats in the city centre that hang blackly on avenues of trees, like dark, misshapen fruit. Despite their provenance as vegetarians, visitors can be decidedly ambivalent when they see the heavens darken as their collective will sees them reach for the skies.

In Ghana, mosquitoes are the great bloodsucker. I am told that the malarial mosquito does not come out until after nine o’clock but I don’t believe that these creatures from the depths, are timekeepers. I take my medicine and daub on my toxic barriers the whole time. We also have mosquito nets and spray the rooms. The consequence is that we feel pretty secure. Imagine us in netting that has a heavy hem to keep it snug to the floor. Nothing can get in. But, ironically, it is like a film of innocents locking themselves in their ‘panic rooms’ and then discovering….

What the audience discovers in horror films and what we discover inside our net is that something unearthly exists ALREADY inside. It is voracious and wants our blood.

The bedbug.

News is out today from America that there is a global pandemic on the way with these creatures of the night. They are becoming impervious to sprays. They bite and cause nasty discomfort although, at least, they do not spread disease or, like Cronenberg’s The Fly, infect and transmogrify us into giant bedbugs. But, let us be plain about this, we do not want ANYTHING inside our sanctuaries. A human being should have a bed to call his or her own where the predators of the world are either banned or exterminated if they try to force entry. We have enough nightmares without that particular reality.

2010-08-30T13:12:00.006+01:00

Ghana's young middle class: cutting and running

I was at a glam wedding in Accra this weekend, a tapestry of beautiful people enjoying themselves. There were several events, culminating in a dance on the final night of the two days of eating and drinking. I don’t propose to talk about the clergyman and his self-indulgent sermonising both in the wedding service and at the reception, save to say that sometimes His loyal servants give Him a bad name – even among agnostics like myself. What was both magnificent and very sad related to a contingent of young Ghanaian professionals come over from the UK. Indeed, bride and groom are living there and many of their friends were doubling up holidays with a few days in Accra for the marriage.

What was sad? Well, they were fine looking, articulate, fun-loving, hard-working and successful middle class people who play by the rules and are on top career trajectories in law, medicine, management and the City. In the UK. Not in Ghana.

I remember several occasions when I lived in the UK when there was an outcry about the ‘brain drain’ from the UK to the US. Thousands going west for better prospects. Here, it is pernicious. The continuing diaspora of young, ambitious Ghanaians to UK and US educational institutions and who then ‘stay on’ leaves the country with a deficit in the intellectual elite who can challenge the establishment and the archaic and sometimes corrupt practices of Government bodies. Every country needs youth to lock horns with the previous generation, forcing change, improving the lot of people with altruism and rationalism before they, themselves, become corrupted or de-clawed by osmosis among the insidious ruling (largely male) political, social and business elite. But I don’t sense much of that idealism exists. Perhaps the lure of middle class England is greater than the challenges and vicissitudes of middle class Ghana? Perhaps, in mythological terms, they don’t, symbolically, want to kill the Father and prefer these fleeting visits to keep in touch with the old country but not to get involved in intractable problems of its society.

I met a Japanese girl who is currently working in East Africa for Medecin Sans Frontieres. Now there is a charity worth supporting! She is an idealist, giving some of her life for the benefit of others. Ghana needs its own young people to be filled with the same idealism. It should not be a breeding ground for western-bound intellect and skills or it will, forever, be ruled by dynasties appealing to the largely poor and ill-educated populace with reductionist slogans and offering them little likelihood of meaningful change in their lifetimes.

2010-08-23T15:55:00.004+01:00

Surviving the worst

Hardiness is a much valued human characteristic. It often underpins bravery. We love hearing about how miners survive underground explosions, children are pulled from rubble, pensioners take on and defeat robbers or cats who travel a thousand miles back to their original homes, after their human families moved to another part of the country. On the one hand they are examples of role models. We identify with them. We like to think that in the same situation we would emulate them, even the cat. Therein lies a mistaken feature of our perceptions of the world. Most of us would never be the hero nor the obdurate survivor. We are social animals who prefer to keep our heads down and live quietly alongside our neighbours. Indeed there have been many studies that show that most of us will take orders, despite our role being to inflict apparent pain on others. Most of us defer to authority, no matter how unacceptable and inconsiderate that authority’s demands upon us. So, as far as following role models in the real world goes, it occurs mostly in our fantasies.

On the other hand, much is made of these incidents by God-fearing folk. “Miraculous!” they say. It was used many times about survivors of the Twin Towers attack.

What is the opposite of miraculous? Natural? Normal? Prosaic? In fact there probably is no antonym for the term, even among atheists. This may be because we prefer evidence of there being some supernatural order to existence that can bend forward and intervene, even when all seems doomed. One last chance, a gift from God. The randomly rare nature of these interventions undermines the existence of deities for unbelievers but, paradoxically, prove how difficult He is to please for believers, since, more often than not, the dead outnumber survivors in catastrophes. Isn't that the definition of them?

It may be better to take on personal responsibility to do as well as we can and not speculate on, or ask for, God’s or Satan’s interventions. Try to be hardy. Try to be heroes within reason. Question more.

Scientists recently took some rock from Beer, a place on the south coast of England. They attached it for more than a year to the outside of the space station. When they got it back it was to discover that bacteria within it were still alive. Is this a miracle? Are these microbes heroes? They are certainly hardy.

2010-08-17T15:13:00.003+01:00

Staying abreast of women’s fashion

I’m on a train travelling at high speed towards Paris. Suddenly it is cooler. The heat of the south is giving way to weather much like one might expect in East Anglia in the UK. People in the carriage are donning extra clothes. A woman in the seat in front has screwed down a tight leather jacket with a ribbed back, much like those beloved by French film directors. I think she is a shoe designer because I half overheard her talking about footwear and she was pointing out a pair of blood red boots to her companion, not in that ‘wouldn’t these be nice to own’ kind of way but with a proprietorial, ‘these are my children’ lyricism. Women’s magazines are also stuffed in a rack beside me. My companion designs clothes.

When I look through them, there are all the expected images of women, emphasising, shot by shot, different parts of their topographies, as though, in essence, there is actually only one woman and she has been dissected and then rendered in cameo sections to the reader, as a benign gift of attainability. But this composite woman cannot be emulated by her readers. She is a phantasm, populating their dreams but never their realities.

Look, she has all the bits that men crave for and in such perfect order. See the breasts in particular. Aren’t they just sugar coated seduction?

Except when they have a baby attached to them. Then there is shock and rejection. Do not enter the fantasies of magazine readership with those sort of realities. One female writer sent an email to a news programme this week saying that breast feeding should be kept to the privacy of the toilet, not public spaces.

This places it nicely in the pages of life, doesn’t it?

2010-08-09T14:59:00.004+01:00

A Night at the Opera, rural French Style

We are still in France for one more week, the weather is as hot as Accra but the air is dry and, being up a mountain, there is a clean crispness that is very reviving. It is a perfect counterpoint to the humidity of equatorial Ghana and I am made to feel like a swallow by my excursions here and back. To labour my point about climate, the other evening we went to a village called Mosset, armed with a variety of warm clothes, dried fruit, blankets and thermos flasks, despite the day temperatures being in the upper twenties.

Mosset has a tradition of staging operas at this time of the year in its old castle – a sort of reinforced version of the original. It tries to integrate local people in a vast chorus with a few semi-pros or young singers, hopefully on the way up. Incomers (Dutch in this case) produce and direct the whole affair and tickets are hard to come by. It begins late, at about half nine, to ensure that darkness lends it a special atmosphere. And indeed it does. Well worth the visit. The crowd scenes are full of kaleidoscopic colour and pinball vitality, hugely ambitious and yet most of the time managing to avoid catastrophe or disbelief. Mercutio is particularly virile and believable among the leads and, if better choreography had engineered it, the exceptional masks and costumes and other elements of dark menace would have lifted some scenes even more.

It would be an injustice to call it amateur opera but it also falls a lot short of professional staging. As it happens I am not a great supporter or afficionado of singing theatre of any kind, finding the plots usually too ploddingly bathetic to carry the frequently haunting melodies. Usually, too, the acting lacks a call to passion. In the end I am happiest attending some highly stylised, minimal set and a form of gesturing that stay within the convention of semaphore rather than a plunge into hot breath and fleshy contact, thereby allowing my ears to dominate my other senses.

So, in the delightful Pyrenean village of Mosset, it happened that, when Romeo the plank tried to get it on with Juliet, the ice siren, there was a squirm or two on my plastic seat. The voices were ok, hers better than his, but I was left at the end wishing that the death-embracing philtre of poison, taken by Romeo, was Viagra.

That would have made for an erect, rather than recumbent and somewhat limp end to proceedings!

2010-08-01T08:31:00.005+01:00

Vodafone: polluters of an African heritage

Here I am in France, with space for reflection after a rather hectic time of it. I am at an age when, gradually, assumptions are made that with the passing years the vital edge of analytical thought decreases and the demand for my labour consequently diminishes. I finished my ten year stint with the British Board of Film Classification a week or so ago as a member of their children's advisory panel, though that was the end of a natural span of service but I also found that management consultancy in the public sector had been excised by the latest Tory edict. Before that sounds too crabby and personal, it suits me. I have to complete the final volume of a three stage fictional account of the beginning of agnostic thought among the demons and gods of a time pre-Buddha, a cross between Rider Haggard, A Thousand and One Nights and Samurai legends. In other words attending to a personal sense of legacy.

But the blogs will also continue because they are part of a discipline. They maintain the focus on everything from social change to agnosticism in the same way the vicar compiles his sermons for a Sunday. They also put out into the ether certain questions and challenges which others might take up. Tiny snowballs that accumulate into landslides, if the time is right.

Of course, snowballs are beyond most Ghanaians ken. In that tropical clime it is possible to witness hailstones from vast cumuli disturbances overhead, where rain drops are shuttled up and down in the deep miles of cloud, icing, dropping, rising and dropping so many times until, too heavy, they crash upon the world beneath. But snow, no.

What most Ghanaians seem oblivious of, also, is the insidious way that mobile phone companies are destroying any aesthetic that might exist within traditional communities. Few people have landlines. Vodafone have recently bought Ghana's main telephone system and are joining the forces of pollution that are turning some of the historical sites of Ghana into vast advertising hoardings. How it is done I have no idea. Equally, how it can be stopped is also beyond me. Whether money is exchanged for officials to turn a blind eye or whether the eyes are blind at the outset and do not see the increasing travesty, I don't know.

Just imagine this. You live in a pretty Cotswold town in the Uk or in the Lake District or any medieval town in Europe and along comes a telephone company and paints the main building on a confluence of roads at its very centre, red. Or yellow. Or purple. Then, to add the icing they put lots of Vodaphone, MTN, Zain or other branding insignias all over it. This is what is happening in Ghana.

I look out on my unspoilt village in France and reflect on Cape Coast along the sea road from Accra. To help you empathise with my troubled thoughts, you can see in the accompanying photograph the main bridge in its centre, now a crude yellow vehicle of advertising for MTN. Vodafone are rapidly catching up. They want to paint every town red. Ironically, the photograph was taken from the slave fort, built when the British, Dutch and Portuguese thought in equally demeaning terms about the Ghanaian people.

Could you argue that if the people don't object, then it can't be bad? Like Avon selling skin bleaches to African women. Or tobacco companies turning their financial strategies towards poor countries where peoples have to be conditioned into the consumption of cancer-inducing cigarettes?

2010-07-07T16:49:00.005+01:00

Phone sex and basic instincts...

Sometimes I feel I have to write a blog because something has happened which, I know, is another step towards a change in human affairs and that my grandchildren will be living in times that make today prosaic by comparison. On QI, that TV programme which occasionally reaches the twin peaks of erudition and comedy simultaneously, there was much amusement at historical quotes from famous people and their incapacity to forecast what products, inventions or activities would take later hold of universal consciousness and become commonplace. The domestic computer sticks in my memory. No chance. Why would people want such a thing? But the computer is now part of an inexorable drift in the way we see and deal with the world. It has become a seedbed of ‘applications’.

The other day I saw someone use a calculator to work out what she owed me from five pounds. I had bought something from her stall for one pound fifty. It had become for her, a surrogate for that part of the brain that does sums. From the onset of writing via pictographs through to phonographs, tape recorders, film, video, holographs and now the microcomputers we carry in our pockets, machines have steadily appropriated mental functioning for us, recording our thoughts, offering strategies for our futures. And we now use computers to build better computers (the doomsday scenario for many science fiction writers from Asimov on) so that they can take on more sophisticated tasks for us.

At other levels (see old blogs here) they are used to create simulated environments in which people can play, vicariously, with each other, virtual worlds which they can inhabit, alongside this one. In these worlds people can try out new personalities, new genders, new ages. Some are so intoxicated that they become addicted and lose the thread of their 'real' lives.

This weekend, in the UK newspaper. The Observer ( I receive it by certain means, here in Ghana, two days late!) there was a magazine article about Grindr, a new website that locates, via your mobile phone and GPS, the nearest enrolled gay man to you at any time you inquire. He could be anything from a mile to a foot away. A grid of pictures on your screen shows the nearest person top left and then down to the bottom right, the furthest away. In the article, there were comments about how sex had never been so instantly available. It will be unrolled as a heterosexual application very soon...

What is happening here? Yet another facet of consciousness is gradually being technologised so that we don’t have to use our instincts or our intelligence. Instead of being in a room, sniffing the pheromones in the air, wondering whether we might meet a woman or a man who could change the next few minutes, hours, days, weeks or years of our lives, all we need to do is call up Grindr (or whatever the hetero-equivalent might be) and get it on.

There will come a time when everything we do from our basic instincts to our higher order consciousness will be managed for us by technological prostheses. What will happen then to our sense of identity?

2010-07-02T11:49:00.003+01:00

I Spy

Leaving the grotesque nature of war aside and the appalling way that international politics is geared to decrease the chances of states like Ghana from achieving trade parity with the west, the news recently on other obscene fronts is equally dispiriting. Spying and assassinations are all the vogue.

Israeli hit squads travel across borders to erase their enemies without any moral qualms or consideration of the sensitivities of foreign governments, never mind the inhuman nature of these acts against individuals that are far beyond the parameters of justice. Likewise, the Russians poison dissenters with plutonium and bump off free thinking journalists and develop a spy network in the United States which seems to exist in a suburban world that mixes Desperate Housewives and 24 Hours. All of this comes to light through the usual bungling of which even the most professional human beings seem capable. As I have often remarked in these columns, entropy is endemic in human affairs. No matter how like Bourne or 007 these agents of state terrorism try to be, they slip up. Forged passports, indiscreet emails, letter drops, buried bank notes and writing in invisible ink bubble to the surface of scrutiny as though they have a life of their own, unbeknownst to their human couriers.

This is what we can see. But, like the proverbial iceberg, most of it we can’t, though, eventually, it will percolate into the public arenas of the future as spies write their autobiographies, or files eventually come to light as state apparatuses change.

It seems to me to be totally unforgivable that governments from west to east and north to south play with each other’s employees in this inhumane way, as though their lives have no other meaning than virtual figures in computer games. Ministers of State must sit down in their grand offices and discuss, coldly, the extermination of foreign nationals. War is obscene and unfathomable but there is something even more evil in this personalised visciousness.

But it is only a jolly game, after all. Obama and Putin’s puppet are keen to keep the latest spy furore as a sideshow because they have ‘greater considerations’ driving them. Israel still gets its huge subsidies from the United States despite the sickening nature of its apartheid policies and its high seas piracy. China is not really challenged on Tienanmen or Tibet. We witness everywhere Governments who have no sense of moral credibility, whether they be our own or those of others.

The fact that the eleven Russian spies lived and worked among US citizens for so long may show levels of deep-seated ideology on the one hand but they also show that they are like you and I or they wouldn’t have been able to exist, untroubled, in that every day ordinary world.

2010-06-27T11:10:00.005+01:00

Two legs good, four legs bad...

When you are viewing the World Cup in Ghana as an ardent football supporter, the phrase ‘opiate of the masses’ returns to thought, often and enough. Last night was very wild here. Horns. Singing. Dogs barking. Chickens cackling and crowing. Goats bleating. Speakers blasting. Euphoria as the goals went in. Skill beats brawn. And the silky skills were Ghanaian and the brawn was the Imperialistic US!

Since this is my adopted country, it was a tense but rewarding affair. There were many eulogies banded about in the televisual media such as ‘All Africa is behind Ghana’. In the mean time, one of the ads on tv has leading African footballers packing bags in grainy black and white. A ‘profound poetic voice’ speaks over the images, saying, “Football called us. We answered the call’. To riches and fame far away from their African roots. The success of Ghana so far has been gained despite the poverty of the infrastructure here. I’m glad that they beat the US because that country insists on handouts (they call it aid) and prohibits free trade. Dependency rather than independence. Slavery by other means. Another version of Orwell's Animal Farm. Thus it is that everyone from footballers to nurses and doctors fills the holes in the UK and American football league teams or health services rather than building their country’s own infrastructure. Thus it also is that Ghana, like many other African States, never tackle corruption because their leaderships channel aid into the pockets of the elite. Thus it is that wherever you go, everyone seeks to ‘chop’ and take bribes. (Chop means to slice off money for yourself from whatever aid or investment there may be). It is endemic because at the heart of things, the elite in these countries are self-serving rather than seeking to serve their people.

For a few ecstatic days, Ghana is Africa. It is learning about national identity (in itself a miracle given the tribal divisions which tend to procreate political parties) and it feels very proud of its achievement. Would that this translated into a government that truly looked after its own people and built its putative democracy to such an extent that the western and now Oriental capitalist megastructures were forced to treat it as a partner, not a poodle running on a lead over its mineral-laden territory.

And what a football force it would be. The Brazil of the African continent.

2010-06-19T11:27:00.002+01:00

Homos have rights too...!

This was the headline on the front page of the Daily Graphic in Ghana yesterday.

I remember a couple of science fiction novels based upon the premise that, among the infinite number of parallel universes, it must be that each of us has infinite possibilities of playing out our existence. Take what is happening here. I am writing and you are reading. Everything I write could be exactly the same in another universe, save for a full stop...or a different word...or a typo...or I didn’t write it at all. All the possibilities lie within infinity. My life and yours are being played out in parallel, infinite variations. We could be evil, we could be good, we could be philanderers, we could be bisexual, we could be nuns and monks, we could be presidents and we could be killed at birth. On and on. And in parallel universes, time can move backwards and forwards, denying us the certainty of the progressive arrow arcing to the furthest edge of existence.

In some of these science fiction tales, the heroine or hero goes back in time and then returns to exactly the same point at which she or he left. Everything seems the same but then... a different party is in power, adverts are different and friends are not, somehow, the same. There are some scientists who say it is possible that ghosts are our other selves in parallel universes. Universes touch and we see through, momentarily.

All this is a roundabout, literary affectation to bring you back to the headline that begins this piece. Maybe you would have seen it in a red top newspaper in the sixties in Britain before there were changes in public attitudes which led to the repealing of laws on homosexuality but it underlines the difference in cultural norms between Ghana and the UK. Bodies resulting from macabre rituals, photographed in situ at the murder scene, are routinely published. Accounts of sexual acts are graphically described. There is less observance of what the British call ‘decency’ in coverage, less gloss, less euphemism. As a result, the truth – or at least the evidence upon which truth may rest – is less varnished.

I have been here for two years and will be happy to remain here until I am jettisoned into a new life in a parallel universe after death – or some quirk in fate thrusts me elsewhere. Anyway, it will take me twenty to thirty years to fathom the subtle differences between Ghana and the UK, so headlines such as in the Daily Graphic yesterday don’t make it seem that, unbeknownst to my current self, I have flipped through time or across universes but am solidly rooted in a culture I understand.

2010-06-15T14:27:00.003+01:00

Just my cup of tea....

I can’t remember if it was the Goon Show on the walnut caesd wireless but I suspect the sketch came from there. I was intoxicated by the Goons in a way that maybe viewers took to Monty Python later. Catch phrases, surreal plots and resident characters that grew and changed over time, the point about these programmes was that they broke the mould of previous comic structures and actually seduced their audiences into new ways of seeing. They appealed to the young because they were opaque to older audiences who had been brought up on Music Hall and gave the new generation a language and experience much as rock and roll did, which offered personal possession of a whole slice of culture. When I was at school, there was a distinct division between the Goons and the Anti-Goons. The former adopted the voices and endlessly repeated favourite sketches while the latter talked about girls and getting your end away. Maybe the Goon Show represented the beginning of the sexually immature Nerd.

The sketch I alluded to at the beginning of this, possibly infinite set of regressions (!) went something like this:

“We were out in the garden when war was declared (World War 2) and our Mum said, never mind about that, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”

In succeeding programmes, disasters were shelved as the willow pattern cups and saucers appeared with their efficacious brew, dissolving angst, magically. Unlike coffee, the range of recipes of how tea must be drunk is almost infinite. Strength, with or without milk and/or sugar, lemon, blend and (to me very important) colour. I have seen people wave a tea bag over boiled water, allowing it to dip once like a martin, taking in fluids and discolouring the liquid very slightly while others require a pair of scissors to snip off the brew as it reaches the top of the mug. Tea in Britain is a bit like the weather, never predictable and rarely acceptable, even when you make it for yourself.

So, it must be a relief for the reader that I come to my point. Tea, it turns out, does NOT dehydrate. It offers as much as water in rehydration BUT on top of that it is an anti-oxidant, doing wonders for all manner of bodily processes.

In the excruciating aftermath of English goalkeeper Robert Green’s feckless attempt to save a bumbling shot from the United States, I heard myself saying:

“Never mind about that, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”

2010-06-10T12:24:00.005+01:00

The New Creationists

A long time ago in the hazy dawn of my memory, aged around eight years, I was for a while in the choir of the local church before being expelled for various bits of nuisance, including questioning God’s status. My mother used to say that Shadforth church was ‘high’. I had no idea what that meant, except that it suggested a notion of altitude. When I became the main tree climber of the village a bit later, I had to take on the dare of climbing a tree by the church and sitting in a nest that was above its main roof. I can still remember the fetid smell of birds’ droppings, musty twigs, asthma inducing feathery refuse and insect larvae. Up there was a different world. Rooks are very gregarious and get annoyed at a boy’s invasion, so it was like being an alien, sitting on the accumulated ledge of ill-formed housing that rooks go in for and being bombed by indignant residents. None of your weaver bird architectural niceties. More like the trolls in Tolkien.

Anyway, before I got thrown out of the high Anglican church with its quasi-catholic tendencies of Latin, gold-edged robes and funny hats, its incense swinging and so on, Canon Tillard told a story about God and scientists. Scientists took a seed of corn and broke it down into its various ingredients (we’re in the mid Fifties) and made a copy. But a priest pointed out that, although the seed was in every obvious way the same as the original, once planted, God’s seed would grow and the new one wouldn’t.

Let us career on to the present day. Canon Tillard would need to revise his well thumbed note book of sermons because this week a scientist named Craig Ventner has produced a synthetic microbe called (scientists are rather bad poets as a whole) Synthia. It is a breakthrough of immense significance, well into the territory of the wheel, the microchip and the atom bomb. The next fifty years will flash past faster than the half-century I have just spanned in this blog and a theological question will become part of everyone’s attempt to understand the nature of existence.

Will these new life forms be godless, since they were created by man? Or will there be a revision by the world’s religions to the effect that God has intended humanity to supplant itself with a species, perfectly formed and equipped to deal with a dying planet and conquering space? A species which will one day extinguish its human antecedents because of their incapacity to tend to their environment and manage a life of peaceful, creative co-existence.

This could be a species that will outlive the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas and any other tracts that lack proper scientific validity and begin to assemble its own manual of existence.

"In the beginning was the Ventner. And He did engineer Synthia. And He was pleased."

2010-06-03T18:25:00.002+01:00

Killing Boat People

As I was born in India, I have a great regard for Ghandi’s peaceful protests in Africa and in his homeland. My father, who trained Indian military during the second world war, saw things differently. Ghandi, as far as he was concerned, was ‘troublesome’. I am sure that the Greek women (as depicted in Lysistrata) who refused their husbands sex unless they stopped fighting, were also called troublesome. However, these days, to be troublesome can be, in some eyes, synonymous with terrorism and it can lead to death.

Non-violent acts are and have, in recent years, been punished by deadly violence in a whole host of countries where the State has felt its authority is in question. Tiananmen Square, Iran, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Russia and in many parts of Africa here, have all seen peaceful, protesting people mown down in the midst of their outpourings of hope for better times.

It is as wholly evil as it is inexcusable.

The latest example was the assault on the humanitarian aid flotilla as it sailed indomitably towards Gaza. Israeli gunboat diplomacy was illegal, it was cynical and it was predictably bloody. However the scales are set in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, they weigh more heavily on the Israeli side which seems to have contempt for lives other than those that, they assume, share their own blood. Gaza has been made a prison, a concentration camp. Hit squads on the sovereign territory of other nations, the killing of non-military medical volunteers and air assaults in cross-border battles with their neighbours, are hardly the work of a humane, peaceful and civilised people. And yet the Israeli Government seems unperturbed by opinions beyond their boundaries, whatever reservations some of its own population might have.

The point is this. Peaceful protest can only be effective in countries where the rule of law and a sense of decency prevents soldiers or police from killing those who are merely voicing their protest. Building a population profile which legitimises peaceful protest takes decades. It involves independent courts, freedom of speech, a democratic education system and a belief that to take from others, whether it be their land, their wealth or their dignity, is unacceptable.
Israel is, therefore, uncivilised. Anyone who says different is troublesome.

2010-06-01T19:09:00.003+01:00

The Big Nightmare

The second biggest fear, after cancer, in the United States, is Alzheimer’s. This degeneration of the brain can not only rob you of your memory and clarity of purpose but, seemingly, of your identity; the stuff that, when in conjunction and melded into a composite, makes you who you are. Thus it is that the former elements of decay become disturbingly obvious to the sufferer and the latter, in the later stages, become an ordeal for family and friends.

The notion that our identity is nested in groups of cells firing electrical charges to each other is bizarre, is it not? Somehow, the traditional view of personality is that it is a mysterious non-material part of us, much as believers think of the spirit or the soul. But, as the cells die and holes appear in our brains, we lose even our selves. Oliver Sachs said in one of his books – probably The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat – a book which is surprisingly positive about degenerative conditions, that the last thing to go which is recognisably the person, is his or her signature. Like the Cheshire Cat our identities fade away, leaving only a just legible scrawl, which is our name.

In the interests of your health, wherever you are, I watched a brilliant documentary on this whole area, pulling together the latest scientific developments. There is no doubt that a cure is on the way – an injection which rids the brain of the plaque and tau-tangles that kill cells. But in the mean time, here’s what you must do if all this scares you.

1 Don’t eat processed fats and sugars or go mad on alcohol but take in lots of fruit and veg

2 Take lots of exercise – which makes brain cells work more efficiently

3 Keep a strong social network (isolates die a lot earlier)

4 Profens, normally used to kill pain, protect brain cells against the assault

5 Take up new activities which demand you learn – languages, music, crosswords

Then, even if your brain is showing advanced signs of degeneration, the brain may still function remarkably well.

Whether we have one or a number of identities – the jury is still out! – we’d like it or them to ride to the last sunset, carrying us along, lightly and with grace. So, we must do what we can and follow the rules until the drug arrives on the market that gives us protection.

2010-05-28T17:26:00.001+01:00

The Big Sleep (part 5)

Why is it that when you have been writing about a subject (death in this case) your life imitates art. Not that I have died since my last blog, nor anyone that close to me, but the subject of death has entered conversations and I am sure that I have not guided it there. Maybe something happened telepathically, the way it can. Jung called it synchronicity, a sort of juxtaposition of events, thoughts or feelings that seem beyond normal understanding. (I have just read that paragraph and it raises the interesting notion of communication from beyond the ether by blog. You wouldn’t know whether I was dead or alive, would you?!)

Anyway, I was asked at a dinner party whether I believed in God and I said no, I was more of a rudimentary Buddhist. The conversation went on to whether there is an Afterlife. I said that no-one, as far as I know, had come back to tell us that there was. I remember once going to a spiritualist church where everyone believed their families were out there or up there, waiting for them with open arms but it seemed to me to be on a par with end of the pier magic shows.

Anyway, one of the group, a seemingly staid vet, told a gripping tale about the death of his mother. When they were gathered together as a family, to share out her jewellery and other possessions, an argument broke out between two of her daughters over a particular piece which was missing. Then a third daughter broke in. Speaking in their mother’s voice she declared that this particular heirloom was hidden in a drawer and described where they might find it. The girl had never spoken in tongues before or since and they were all rather scared by hearing their mother speak through her. Whether this constitutes proof of life after death I know not. But it did to them. I am unsure whether Christianity embraces ghosts or otherworldly communication, since my religious education ended when I was eleven and thrown out of the choir of the local church but I have a feeling it doesn’t. Heaven has air-locked gates and no email, wireless or sepulchral voices to communicate with us.

My own mother swore than when people in the family died, the fire irons would rattle in the hearth but I never saw it.

There are plenty of stories but they never happen to me. I am a Doubting Thomas, I suppose and want to see the wraith or hear the disembodied voice, myself. I would willingly spend a night in a haunted house, happily waiting for the chains to clank, the doors to creak and the hollow tread on the floorboards.

Back to the dinner party, it emerged that all of them missed their parents – mothers in particular – so much so that they wanted there to be an afterlife so that they could rejoin them. Maybe I am made of sterner stuff or maybe I am an unfeeling old sod but I don’t experience that longing, much as I loved my Mother. It seems to me that whatever this life has for us, it does not include extensions into other dimensions. Buddhists believe that there is a connection between this life and the next and the others that follow but the analogy I heard one of them use was that of a snooker ball striking another and then that one striking a further ball. The first ball makes the others move but they remain, sadly, separate and unable to communicate, otherwise.

So, if you wish, the hereafter is all balls, unless you are a believer.

2010-05-22T11:58:00.005+01:00

The Big Sleep (Part 4)

Going to funerals was not something that grabbed my younger self. Life was for living and these events usually meant a kind of farrago of hypocrisy about resurrection, whatever the religion - Buddhist and humanist ceremonies being the exception. I am thinking about this subject because yesterday I went to another Ghanaian funeral, this time one that was almost patrician in its panoply. It is the first that I have attended where the body was on show and everyone was asked to file past and pay their last respects. The deceased was an indomitable woman in her 91st year. I had met her a couple of times. While I waited my turn to be ushered forward, I observed that more than half those who were paying their last respects, did not look at her, keeping their faces averted. One or two others later told me that they thought she had been prepared well and looked at peace. Someone else told me that this was a step forward because, in Ghanaian terms she was fair skinned which means of mixed blood, going back generations and embalmers are not so used to the cosmetics needed for whiter skin. Indeed, this friend told me that a few years back a white man’s skin was bright yellow as a result of the injudicious use of the wrong pastes. All of this had immediate surreal resonance for me since we have bought the entire box sets of Six Feet Under, that miracle of ensemble acting which takes place at an undertakers.

So, back to my thread, here are some memories of such events, although I can’t include among them a single final get together where the priest, the vicar, the imam, the rabbi or the humanist proclaimer, said anything that added to my store of knowledge about the human condition.

First memory: a new friend, but one who I sensed would become very close, was killed in his twenties. It was the first time I had seen artificial grass covering the mound of soil. An old friend (now himself dead) said that he had visited D H Lawrence’s grave in New Mexico and there were artificial flowers everywhere. Poor D H, the defender of all that nature brings! My second memory concerned a little church where, as the service came to an end, a red admiral butterfly flew into the light of a stained glass window like the fleeing spirit of the deceased. Next, a very dear friend, internationally lauded for her illustrative work in children’s books was being lowered into the ground at a humanist farewell, when a steam train shunted its way past the cemetery, hooting to her. This was in the present epoch of electric and diesel railways, quite recent in fact, but her work is chiefly remembered for its evocation of the 1950s when such trains were the conveyance of the time. The ghostly engine and its quaint wooden carriage had come to carry her off. My final illustration is of a burial of my boy Joseph's great grandfather. Joe must have been six or so. When we asked him if he wanted to go the the cemetery he said no because he did not want to walk on the planks. Staring at him, I asked him what he meant. It turned out that he had been to an archeological dig with his class and fully expected that a burial would involve walking along planks and looking down into holes where bones lay exposed!

There are other such memories of goodbyes to dead folks I once loved and/or enjoyed but I want to finish with the events of yesterday. All the hymns were from that time in the 17th and 18th centuries when the evocation of the Christian god was of a wrathful Father, carried by missionaries to Africa. One stanza, for example, talked of Heaven being a place where one could lie forever at His feet, able to look upon Him forever - if He so allowed. The Methodist preacher occasionally thrust his face forward and spoke in an impulsive, declamatory resurrectionist screech, as he sought to impose a frisson of mortal fear in us all. Apparently he was very restrained compared to what is the more usual. What was really touching were the personal tributes and the visual intimacy with the dead woman, the emotions of the bereaved and the symbolism of everyone wearing black and white, the mark of a long life that must be celebrated as well as mourned, though, from the priest himself there was too little of the former.

I mentioned ‘living wills’ in an earlier blog in this series on death and it made me think. I suddenly recalled The Big Chill, a rather endearing film about friends coming together for a funeral in which the church resounded to The Rolling Stones great track, Love in Vain and I began to wonder how my own parting could be effected. I should choreograph it, I thought. One last chance to impose my taste and general cultural interests and ideals upon those left behind. A bit of an Irish wake, bawdy and rumbustious with the forest or the sea or the mountain top (yes!) rocking, and everyone having a laugh.

But I could not do it here in Ghana. The wishes of the dead are usually ignored and the imperatives of the various church denominations rule. Here, their god can be a vindictive old beggar, who judges harshly, expects your life to be pretty miserable and full of sin, but who, in some act of last minute teasing forgiveness, allows you supplication at his feet.

2010-05-17T18:17:00.001+01:00

The Big Sleep (Part 3)

I saw something the other day which was new to me. I like to keep myself as fit as possible, swimming, multi-gym, running on a trampoline and so on. In Ghana this requires true dedication to the contours of the body. Even in the evening it is close to 30 degrees and the humidity is extremely high. Thus, exercise is both a challenge but also a reward as the sweat pours of me and so I can cut down the time I spend in this masochistic pursuit of a few more years of life.

Perhaps you have heard that at seventy you can have three-quarters of the strength you had as a young, vibrant, semen-rich twenty year old male. I can’t think of the equivalent hyperbole for women but it must exist. At the same time we know that the body replaces cells at a fantastic rate (some, every three days!). So, the question arises, why do we age? The answer appears to be that when the body replaces cells, it copies the last known version as its prototype. Now, imagine taking a photograph and then scanning it. And then scanning the last scan, on and on for eighty years. What would you have? The answer is a very decrepit version of the original. A pixelated morass. It is another example of entropy. In the academic world, plagiarism is a crime probably worse than homicide and here we have the body managing it on a huge scale. It seems irrevocable then that we just break down. That is why there is such a buzz about stem cell surgery. Take some stem cells from me when I am very young and store them until I am very old. Then begin growing and replacing bits and bobs of my body, not with the zillionth copy but with relative originals. It will happen but nor for my generation.

This entropic process continues all around us, from New Labour ‘running out of steam and ideas’, to houses needing constant upgrading, to businesses who forget to develop their workforce, to crockery and glassware. The universe itself is heading, it seems, for its own final Big Sleep where all the atoms that comprise it are spread through an infinity of icy blackness, so far apart that they can no longer interact and make stars, planets or us.

So what those of the end-game generation are doing is encouraging cells to copy cells that are a bit stronger than they would have been otherwise. The finishing line may or may not remain in the same place but we will run as close as we can to it before the final crawl.

2010-05-14T12:53:00.004+01:00

The Big Sleep (Part 2)

I saw a documentary clip about comas. In it a woman was exhibiting on what has become a familiar medical screen, the nearest to a flat line that you can get without being vegetative. Her children were going scatty with worry and despair. What did they do? They assumed that she could hear, though the doctors were doubtful. One of them told her that their father and her husband (of forty or fifty years) had decided to take another woman on their long planned cruise around the world. The effect was instantaneous. She sat up, opened her eyes and proceeded to be highly indignant!

I suspect this might be a good dinner party game. What would wake YOU up from a coma? Since science recently is theorising that our emotional centres rule our logical consciousness to the extent that we respond to situations by gut reaction – and then summon up post-hoc rationalisations, what wakes you up must be exceptionally disturbing/passionate or even obsessive. We hear that people have been woken from their Big Sleeps by being played their favourite musical tracks – the karaoke cure, by the arrival of their dogs or cats – animal magnetism, or by smelling the scent of their favourite flower – pollination. Yet without these mysterious trial and error interventions, they might have lain there forever, puttering along in their interiors, happily ignoring their physical interaction with the world in favour of floating ever closer to the great abyss.

Death will arrive all too soon and flatten out, forever, the lines of our mental functioning. So, the sooner we leave instructions on what our nearest and dearest must do to raise us from this simulated extinction, the quicker we will click out of comas and engage with the business of living each moment as if it is our last. This is probably a better definition of a ‘living will’ than the usual.

2010-05-04T13:43:00.006+01:00

The Big Sleep

I have had computer problems despite supposedly being well protected. Everything ground to a halt a few days ago and the last escapee from its innards was the latest update of the book I am writing called Azimuth. The fact that it has taken me 8 years and is 600 pages long, added to the frisson of despair that attended my attempts to right the sinking ship. But this is Ghana and around the corner a fellow dived like a BP engineer off the Florida coast to where the wreckage of my data was spewing into the ether and rectified everything; data returned and all working properly again for the princely sum of seven pounds and fifty pence.

I have written often enough about entropy – how everything we do, no matter how exacting we are as task masters over our own destinies, gradually breaks down and chaos ensues and here was yet another example. Meanwhile, in parallel, I am watching quite an old but brilliant series called The Human Body, fronted by that genial doctor with the perfect mix of humility and curiosity, Robert Winston. If you have not seen it, please take this as a strong recommendation. It follows a journey through the life of human beings, from egg to dead. The science is fascinating and the lessons, extraordinary. I am at that age where much of the journey represents where I have come from until this moment. The last of all episodes deals with the death of a German in Eire. It is poignant, challenging and uplifting. The camera does not show his last breath but it is a pretty close run thing. He didn’t want the cancer drugs, preferring a slightly shorter life of greater quality than being hospitalised in an intiseptic, clinical environment. He was an atheist and somehow this added lustre to his struggle.

All of us have to face the final curtain, as the cliché goes but most of us want it to come down while we are asleep. I’d prefer to be awake and see it come down. Winston says that we cannot divulge what happens in the end-game, despite the thousands of near-misses that people have had – reporting tunnels of light with their loved ones waiting with outstretched arms. It turns out that even this is a trick of the mind. Astronauts on high speed simulators report the same illusion as they lose consciousness. If it is to be so private and personal that no-one will ever know how we moved from dead in our heads, then so be it. But it would be worth being awake. Our last lesson learnt as the brain ceases to function.

Then our atoms break free from the little force fields that held them in body colonies and are carried away in the universal tide. They were there from the beginning of time and have travelled through suns and planets and cold empty spaces all their existence. Nice that they spent a few brief flickering moments as part of a human life, don’t you think?

It’d be great to have someone take me, at the penultimate second of existence, round the corner and have all my data and processing restored for seven pounds fifty. But, since that day belongs to a genetic progeny of mine far into the future, I will be content to keep my eyes open until the last.

2010-04-17T15:44:00.003+01:00

Nice pair of genes!

When is it amoral to have an affair, no matter whether it be a one night stand or something a little meatier?

The other day I caught a story in which a rather crestfallen man discovered, by chance and DNA testing, that all four of his children had been fathered by other men! His wife, during ovulation, had sought out partners of a particular genetic profile. It was probably not conscious, more a driving need but she gave way to it on four separate occasions. One thing is for sure, something about the make-up of her husband's cells sent her scurrying for something different!

Once, when I did some consultancy work for a hospital management team, I was told by midwives that anecdotal knowledge, accumulated over time, suggested that between one and two in every ten children are not born of their legal fathers. The official figure is one in ten. Women of all walks of life, rich or poor, are fully capable of breaking the bonds of happy matrimony and playing the field.

This is a paradox at the heart of societies. While the majority uphold social conventions regarding the sanctity of families, they can still be susceptible to their loins and then their logic gives way to illicit sex and bastard offspring. The rather poignant point of their behaviour is that their genes override everything conventional in their attitudes and set them on this course towards extra-marital promiscuity, for entirely worthy reasons.

The cause of their philandering is that they ‘sense’ that their partners’ gene pools are not sufficiently different from their own to be certain that their offspring will be healthy. In an experiment to show this, women and men were asked to sniff the tee shirts of members of the opposite sex and rate them according to their attractiveness to them. The pattern of results showed, unequivocally, that they rated the tee shirt which was most dissimilar from their own gene profile as the most attractive.

It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female but you have this sense of which you are consciously unaware. Let’s call it genetic sensitivity. Could it be a defence that might stand up in a court of law? As Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene, could we argue that in certain circumstances we are not of sound mind, we are at the behest of our DNA? Should we even allow divorce on the grounds of a woman’s infidelity when she is driven by altruism rather than lust? Seeking an unalike genetic partner must be a biological imperative to ensure that her own genes and those of humanity, as a whole, prosper, thus reducing the opportunity for malfunctioning DNA to weaken the population.

This must be the true meaning of the French maxim, vive la difference!

2010-04-13T18:06:00.003+01:00

The Politics of Empty Rhetoric

So, the UK election fracas has begun in earnest. Being 3000 miles away gives me a certain dispassionate objectivity these days where once I would have been spitting tacks and feeling that if the Tories get in it would mean the end of life as we know it, Captain. Like all manner of experiences, the mind becomes indifferent when the object of desire loses its immediacy. But I manage to hang on in, some days, and evaluate the rhetoric as I see them doing their TV-glossed thing.
Cameron said today that this would be an end to Big Government. Instead a Big Country would be in charge. The Uk’s social infra-structure would see far more guidance and leadership from ordinary people who have a right to determine what is being done for them. A bit socialist, prithee! Meanwhile he has managed to cajole one hundred and fifty Big Business leaders to sign up saying they support the Tories in not raising national insurance contributions. I suppose I could get a hundred and fifty figures from any walk of life to sign up to a policy which increases their profit margins.
At the heart of this bandying of policies is a curious contradiction. Cameron says that the incumbent Government have no credibility in the face of the combined experience of business leaders. They know nothing. However, the Tories do not suggest that businesses would be run better if Big Business Executives shared their power with a Big Country, or even those lower down the organisation. Here, they are in absolute agreement that the Executive must rule the rest.
Both Labour and Tory rhetoric promotes the increased engagement of the everyday person in all manner of professional services. More public accountability, they both bleat. I’m not so sure. What on earth is the point of training professionals to do medicine, education, social work and whatever else and then hamstring them with a committee of naives, laypersons, novices, obsessives, fanatics....
The law can take care of those who break it in any profession and it is there that a jury of ordinary men and women can have their final say. It is the professions that must take the ultimate responsibility for their development and moral purchase on social life, based upon fairness, respect and equal opportunity for all. Give the public the lever of power to lead these domains and we’d have hanging, flogging, a curriculum of learned facts without the nous to apply them, classified drugs everywhere (except alcohol which kills more than the rest put together) and a dictatorship of the middle classes (because the lack of education of the poor at present prevents them having any say in their Big Country). It’s time we stopped electing MPs (who have shown their propensity for venal, invidious and self-aggrandising behaviours) to further the outdated ideologies of their Parties and, instead, elect them for their independence of thought and their expressed concerns for particular issues. Then Parliament might be fun, intellectually absorbing and in itself an education of the Big Country, instead of a ragbag of ill-educated, emotional trumpeting from all sides.

2010-04-08T11:24:00.005+01:00

Sadists, Paedophiles and Dissemblers: All the Pope's Men...

Imagine a grand palace where officials wear gold and purple, where the decor is splendid beyond even the capacity of a billionaire to reproduce, where there is a hushed silence everywhere and where the central figure, a man among men, is treated as though the Divine emanates from his every molecule. Meanwhile imagine a grim barracks-like detention centre where there is nothing playful to lighten the day and where children are beaten, sexually abused and have their childhoods systematically robbed from them. The latter may have taken place over hundreds of years, there is no way of knowing. The former has been the staple diet and centre-piece of the Catholic Church’s control over millions of people through time.

My knowledge of the history of religion is somewhat piecemeal, mainly because the doings of the various churches that have Christianity at their core, leave me cold and sometimes furious. In fact a key source is a book called Q by Luther Blissett which traces, fictionally, the Reformation. For those of you who know the name Luther Blissett, he was a footballer who went to one of the Milan clubs and played outrageously primitively but created a cult of adoration. A few fans turned out to be good historians and wrote Q, under the pseudonym of their hero’s name! Anyway, back to my thoughts: maybe it is not the place of an agnostic such as I to be critical of religion but even so I expect someone called The Holy Father to eschew riches, be pure of heart and demonstrate in his every act, the teachings of his purported Son of God.

Instead, the abysmal gap between the Pontiff’s Vatican and the Catholic care homes, schools and seminaries around Europe over the last few decades, seems as wide as is conceivable. Although his lieutenants obligingly apologised to their flocks on Easter Sunday, at the same time another of the Pope’s ‘mouths’ was saying that scurrilous rumours regarding the Pope’s previous role as a bishop and condoner of his priests’ unforgiveable crimes was akin to the treatment of Jews in the holocaust. Hyperbole is not dead. A further senior mouthpiece for the Papal tongue, said that rumours regarding the Pope’s behaviour were trivial gossip. Meanwhile, the Pope said nothing.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that an organisation that purports to uphold Christian values, that believes in one God, his Son and the Holy Spirit, would, as a matter of course, be able to tease out those who do not demonstrate the much needed piety and purity. But there have been no such tests of the quality of these servants of God. Whether they entered the Catholic Church in order to perpetrate crimes against the very young, or whether the culture of the seminaries is such that their desires were fed by their brethren, I have no idea but these men (and some Nuns in Eire and elsewhere) were able to stand in front of their congregations, issuing homilies about how to live a good life and meanwhile make demands on the rich and poor to give generously to the Church. And all the while, their horrific acts were concealed by their superiors, to protect the reputation of the Vatican or to protect their own criminal pasts.

2010-04-01T13:46:00.003+01:00

Advertising Death in the Taxis of Accra

I have reported occasionally on notices in the back windows of taxis and tro-tros because they contain enigmas, ironies or plain challenges to my own imagination. Two that I have seen during the past week are symbolic of key forces that are shaping Ghanaian society. If you have read previous blogs you would know that drivers go off to a cheap store and buy acid coloured sticky-backed letters which they then form into words or messages for following drivers and passengers to read. They are mostly religious, declaring their love of God (or fear of Him) usually via the channel of Christianity. They declare bits of biblical text and warnings if these are not heeded. But, as inferred at the outset, some seem to have been written by inscrutable minds, determined to baffle, amuse or create philosophical discourse.

The first one I saw was, “Heaven gate: no bribe”. Now isn’t this the perfect drawing together of religious and social politics? Ghana, despite Obama’s flattery about it being politically clean, is riven with problems of ‘chopping’, the local word for bribery. It is a great shame for the people here are generally courteous, passive and tolerant and the country would do much better if corruption was eradicated. At every level of business, most individuals who have a direct role in one's life seem to expect backhanders, whether it is customs, Government grants, traffic cops and all the usual Ministries. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that people, merely doing the job they are paid to do, will refuse to do it in good time, unless they are paid bribes. Even sometimes refusing to do it at all! Here, people shrug and say that that is the way of it. Some even suggest that it is no bad thing, since no-one is paid a decent basic salary in the first place. But to get into Heaven requires a purity of purpose and spirit that does not exist in every day realities.

The second sign was, “Ending is the problem”. How do you read its sense? I pondered a long time, after initially laughing out loud at its strange, cryptic truthfulness. For all of us, the ending is the problem. Wittgenstein, the philosopher, a conformed atheist, was seconds away from the final curtain when he realised that his impeccable logic, which proved that there could not be a God, could mean, equally, that there was a God! Deathbed revisionism. It is said that a sizeable proportion of lapsed Catholics enjoy a return to the fold during these dimming times. Anyway, as a writer and a mortal, I have often found endings to be a problem. We humans want the stories of our lives like those of good books, to be satisfying with everything tied up neatly and properly, regardless of whether we hope to spend eternity with a handful of virgins or a pastel Heaven full of angels with harps or being blown through the universe, dissembled into the atoms that originally came together to construct us.

2010-03-26T12:20:00.002Z

The Medium is the Massage

A while back now I was in Tashkent in Uzbekistan and developed a bad back. Someone arranged for a physiotherapeutic massage. I turned up at what seemed to be a night club in the basement of a high rise block of unsympathetic concrete. The tale could be a long one. Suffice it to say that the masseuse was a lithe woman, dressed only in a white towelling dressing gown. She spoke no English and I no useful language. The effort to beat, pummel, knuckle, twist, scrunch and slap my back utterly exhausted her. At the end she collapsed into a chair, her gown fell open, revealing her nakedness and in this intimate and frank posture, she had a cigarette. I suspect that if the course of events had been what she had expected, she would have been less tired!

This week I visited a health spa in Ghana, near Accra, run by a doctor and with a little flock of engaging Ghanaian masseuses. I had a two hour session of oil massage. My masseuse, Celestine, worked very hard for the entire period. She did not want conversation and was very careful about unwarranted physical contact, other than what her fingers and palms intended. It was almost pitch black. Music played at a level below really hearing. Two hours went by and all but the obviously taboo areas were kneaded and cajoled into soft rubber. It struck me how extraordinary such activity is. The meeting of strangers who are in constant physical contact but with their own thoughts and mental isolation. What did she discover about me in that long silence? Did my muscle and skin speak? What did she learn from these daily encounters with passing human trade? What fulfilment was there for her in this work?

I never had the opportunity to ask her. She blanketed me at the end and told me to wait five minutes before getting dressed. Like an oil-slicked creature from a deep sea, I emerged into the light, no wiser about Celestine and only a little wiser about myself. My body had been like Braille but I had no idea how literate its reader had been.

2010-03-12T17:38:00.003Z

Brain damage is good for you...

Of course, when I was a boy there was no such thing as sats – standardised tests of children at ceratin stages of their school careers. But there was the eleven plus examination which weeded out snotty grammar school children from grubby secondary modern children. When they dropped this divisive and discriminatory examination in all but a few independent schools it was with great relief to all parents except those who were snotty in all regards and felt it was their privilege. The pressure was fearsome. I was lent a gold Parker pen by my father, as if this magic implement would turn an ugly duckling of an exam paper into a swan. The nib was scratchy and I was impeded by its progress across the paper but I didn’t dare tell him afterwards.

One of the post-war myths among those of us who were trying to transcend our inauspicious beginnings and go to grammar school, was that a girl in Newcastle had had her head run over by a bus , following which she became a genius. I am not sure how many of my peers considered this unique therapy to please their despairing parents but I am reminded of it as I see on Sky News that a man who had a cerebral haemorrhage has been changed into a poet and a painter as a consequence of the blood letting. It seems as though there are short cuts to better brain output, then. Perhaps we could adopt the approach announced today in skin cancer treatment. Eighty per cent guarantee of a cure. A cream is put over the tumorous growth and then a sticking plaster to cover it. The cancerous cells gobble up the cream. Three hours later a charge is released which turns the cream into a potent killer and the tumour dies, leaving the healthy cells to grow again. No scarring.

We should do the same with our kids. Instead of sats, that long term inhibitor of flowering creativity and self-assurance, we should put cream on their skulls, wait three hours and then charge it up. All the dumb cells would die, leaving the healthy ones to propagate. A bit like the old vinegar and brown paper cure for Jack in the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill.

The trouble is that everyone would then have kids bordering on genius and those that have always relished their children’s dominance in exams and the wold of work, afterwards, would bring in a law to protect their interests. You can’t win in class warfare if you belong to the underclasses.

2010-03-06T14:12:00.001Z

Under the skin of Geert Wilders

Being a beatnik; donkey jacketed, side-burned, quiffed, d.a.’d, Aldermaston-marching late teenager in the early sixties, I had the utmost respect for Michael Foot and am sorry he has passed to that other place where idealism conquers cynicism and humility snuffs out ambition. I hope his soap box is a golden wing’d chariot so he can declaim forever from a moral height upon democratic principles. More or less at the time of his death there arrives in the UK a Dutch politician from the far right called Geert Wilders with a short film about Islam. He too declaims about democracy but his freedom is about keeping Holland for the Dutch and excluding all others. In those days when I found Foot’s rhetoric so persuasive, I also found the Dutch tolerance of youth culture in all its forms, seductive. Today (though I’d come across it before) the Lemba tribes of Zimbabwe have been shown (genetically and in many aspects of their current social/religious behaviour) to be a lost tribe of Israel dating back 2,500 years. If you take a swab to your inner cheek and send off the resulting evidence to a genes web site you will inevitably have African lineage. It’s true of us all.
Geneticists say we probably all descend from the same tribe in East Africa, long before Moses. The Lembas were just coming home. Wilders’ antecedents (the same folks that became the Lembas) instead settled up north and gradually whitened their skins under pallid suns. So it was with the Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists and all other god fearing folks in all their skin colours and eventual nationalities. They prospered in their different ways and slowly forgot their roots.
Now, tens of thousands of years later, they pretend to themselves that they are different. They develop hatreds. They develop pretentious self-esteem. What’s to be done?

2010-02-25T21:59:00.002Z

Robbing Banks

There was a time when I was a lad, running wild through the fields of Durham, building dams and shooting at birds – with no success – that my father was paid cash in a small brown envelope with holes in it, each week. I don’t know at what point it happened, probably in the sixties, that his money came into his bank account. He never disclosed what he was paid to my mother in either case. She was given her house-keeping and a bit extra for clothes if she asked for it. I became a student and my first student grants were in the form of postal orders and it was when I started teaching in 1963 that I had my first bank account. At the time the bank was another version of the counter at the post office. It was irritating to discover that I had to have a bank account and that my wages went into it and the bank charged me for the pleasure.

The gun I used in those early days was, I think, a Webley slug gun. It was black and cold metal. To cock it you had to press the inner barrel on something hard so that it retracted. When you fired the inner barrel jumped out and the slug sped away.

It never occurred to me to stick up a bank, even in play, although I was a gunslinger some of the time.

Reading the news on the internet, I see that there is an outlaw, based in Britain, who is robbing banks in Latvia. Using twitter, he is disclosing more and more information on bankers to the Latvian public, showing how they have been receiving government bail-outs but meanwhile, living it large and pretending they have been taking cuts to their salaries. Where once I was a tracker, hunting my prey physically through hill and dale, this fellow is a hacker, hunting his prey virtually through data mountains.

He is being chased by Latvian police. What he is doing is illegal. The bankers are versions of my father. They don’t want their power and authority undermined by people knowing what’s inside their accounts or their little brown envelopes with holes.

2010-02-22T16:02:00.002Z

The sin of Anger

The media have been full of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s anger tantrums for the last few days. I even saw a clip of him saying that he had never hit anyone in his life. It’s all a storm in a thrown teacup one suspects. What the press are saying is that he is regarded as a bully. Well, I have worked with many Chief Executives in my life and very few, I’d conjecture, would get away with an unblemished record on this score. One person’s strong and confident leadership can easily be another person’s aggressive bogeyman. If Brown showed no inclination to demand his own way, the press would quickly have him down as a weak PM. Nothing worse in the public's eyes.

And it’s not just a matter of style. There comes many a point in every week if you are at the top of the tree, when you have to make tough decisions. They can be about a range of issues from individual performance to strategic change. You may have to make people redundant or close a unit. The better you are at it, the more you appear as Attila the Hun, to many. As you will know from these columns, I have not found an organisation without its fair share of entropy. That is, staff underperforming, making mistakes, working at snail’s pace, taking the mickey and all the rest of it. British Airways, for example, is sinking into deeper debt. The most obvious recourse for management is to cut staff, as this is always the biggest single cost to an organisation. The cabin staff have shown an inclination to strike, thereby maybe ending the life of the airline and their own jobs. Postings have flown across the multi-faceted features of Facebook and each accuses the other of bullying. Gordon Brown and every Prime Minister before and after him, has to handle excessively controversial issues. Like all PMs he wants the best research, the best strategies, the best communication, the best decisions. At most what he will get will be patchy because that’s what people are like. He will stamp and shout in those circumstances where he can’t contain himself any longer.

Anglo Saxons have big hang-ups when it comes to displays of passion. I doubt whether Italians or French would bat an eyelid at their Presidents or PMs having a hissy fit. And what does it say about the so-called bullied staff? Why don’t they stand up to the yelling and accusations of incompetence? Or are their fragile egos unable to cope with the heat of the governmental kitchen? Worse, are they claiming to be bullied because they know they don’t measure up and can’t bear the criticism?

We have to be realistic about human beings. In the main we can run our companies and departments using charm, reason and sets of protocols and procedures. We can stamp our authority where and when it matters. But, occasionally, if the heat is really on, we can end up stamping our feet and letting rip with one of the seven deadly sins. Anger.

2010-02-17T18:11:00.004Z

A Rough Guide to TV Social Anthropology

I suppose I am a well seasoned traveller, having worked in over 20 countries in Europe, North America, Russia and Central Asia. Now, here I am in West Africa. This is Ghana, which most UK institutions seem to think is an annex of Nigeria and, therefore, a credit card pariah of the world of personal finance. Despite having British bank accounts, if I try to use the cards on the internet that these banks doll out like confetti, I get blocks put on them, immediately. I am suddenly a high risk, scam merchant. The nastiness of it allows me to mouth off my displeasure at these intuitions as I pay for expensive phone calls to them so I can buy and trade in a less virtual way for books on Amazon or whatever.

Working in countries that are foreign to your place of birth brings home certain truths that cannot be gleaned from holidaying, no matter how rucksacked, sandalled and low spending you might be. Travellers, in general, follow the grooves in the vinyl that they have bought into. If young, they tell each other where to go and rarely strike out into environments that The Rough Guide and The Lonely Planet regard as too lonely, dangerous or unpropitious to give them a kick (or a hit). If older, then there is always Michael Palin and assorted other comedians such as Stephen Fry and Paul Merton to provide a route across the world. In fact, their programmes are advertised here in Ghana llike tour guides for the better off. 'Thousands now walk in their footsteps', says the bleating advert. no doubt expecting to see the cultural anomalies that attract their rather lame, look-at -those –native- people- doing –silly- things, humour. And lame they are. There is nothing to compare to Ray Mears in the outback or this fellow Bruce Parry who fronts Tribe on the Discovery Channel. I haven’t a soft spot for him because he is occasionally too gigglingly hyper and intent on going native with those he is travelling among, to be authentically a social anthropologist. But he tries. He does what the tribes do and it makes I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here programmes look even more gratuitously superficial.

Last night I was viewing his latest hosts who live in rather splendid wood and thatch houses on very high stilts because in the past local head-hunters came a-calling. He went with them to kill boar, had his arm tattooed in the most painful way imaginable and ate sago yeast, chopped from trees and pulped. It was so dry he could hardly swallow. But the worst was yet to come. In these tree boles live sago pupae, like extra-terrestrial maggots in Michelin suits. The native tribesmen put one in our traveller’s ear to eat out the wax. To see a close up of poor Bruce’s ear, with this white bulbous thing waving a yellow head or butt – it was never explained – from it, didn’t help my supper go down. Then he was also requested to eat one. His face, unlike the comedians I mentioned above, was a perfect mix of respect for his hosts (who were chewing them like gourmet Cheshire cheese balls) and sheer disgusted agony. They were all stomach-creasingly merry at the whole business but what was very fine was that we had no idea whether the tribe were having a laugh at Bruce or not. Bruce, as the perfect visitor he is, laughed too. Out of respect.

In a way he was working with them, which corroborates my first point, that working alongside is the way to understand culture not being there as part of an extreme version of 18-31, or Saga Holidays.