Time for a Global Space Agency?

I saw an interesting Update on LinkedIn today.  Yesterday, 20 July, was the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, the first in history.  The poster suggested that the apparent lack of ambition in terms of space flight nowadays might be countered by the creation of a global space agency.  There were a couple of Likes and a couple of Comments, making the probably valid point that we as a species should be spending more money on cleaning up the mess we have made of our own planet before worrying about going anywhere else.

In the first place, I confess to missing the anniversary completely.  I can remember vividly as a 16 year old kid sitting in the Red Lion pub watching the Saturn rocket blast off from Cape Canaveral.  I remember sitting up all night watching the grainy black and white images broadcast to the world’s TV screens of the landing, and the “giant leap” moment when Armstrong stepped off the ladder to seal his place in history.  I can remember thinking that I would love to go there myself someday…..  I followed the entire mission closely, and that of Apollo 12.  Like the rest of the world, I prayed for the safe return on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission (so well captured in Ron Howard’s movie).  I marvelled at the entire Shuttle program, and wept for the fatalities aboard the doomed Challenger and Columbia flights.

And I feel saddened by the apparent lack of imagination and intent displayed these days by once pioneering NASA.

I’ve blogged about this before (see the post “Out of this World” from October 2010 if you’re interested).  In the nearly four years since I posted it, not a lot has changed.

  

NASA concentrates on unmanned missions to the outer planets and asteroids and trying to land on comets, and supplying crews to the ISS, and planning, seemingly half-heartedly, for a manned mission to Mars at some ill-defined point in the future.  The Russians continue to provide the only means of getting people to and from the ISS in the absence of a replacement for the Shuttle.  They sometimes suggest they’re planning to go the Moon or to Mars, but it always comes across as even more half-hearted than NASA.  China and India continue to creep slowly forward with their own plans, mainly again in the realm of satellite technology, while both say they hope to go the Moon and/or Mars and establish viable colonies in 50 years or so.  The EU – satellites, and the odd national spending time in the ISS, mainly it seems for publicity.

And that’s about it.   To all intents and purposes, mankind seems indeed to have lost its mojo, at least as far space travel is concerned.  It depresses me now more than it did four years ago.

Now I know the arguments.

I recognise that sending anything into space is hideously expensive.  I know that the parlous state of the world’s overall economy means governments must think very carefully about the most cost effective and beneficial ways of spending what money they have – I have to do that every day as an individual. 

I know that things like climate change, and healthcare, and food provision, and waste disposal, and alternative energies, and a hundred and one other concerns require increasing amounts of funding too.  Governments everywhere face increasingly complex demands for their tax revenues.

I recognise too the arguments about going out into the universe and trashing other planets not being the best advertisement for human civilization (whatever that is – I’ve yet to see a decent definition), and essentially sympathise with them.

But, I’m sorry, I cannot bring myself to agree with them.

Man has always been an explorer.  I’m sure when Columbus set off to find a passage to India, a lot of Portuguese citizens complained about the Royal family wasting so much money financing this Spanish adventurer.  But off he went, got lost and discovered (or at least re-discovered) the Americas, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Britain probably faced similar complaints when it started its Empire building but got around the problem by employing the Armed forces and convict labour.

 

This is what humans do.  It is part of the never ending search for knowledge.  That is what has dragged us, often kicking and screaming, from the plains of pre-historic Africa, to every corner of this old world we inhabit.  That search for knowledge has also brought us from the first flint and bone tools to modern weapons systems (perhaps not the best advertisement for progress, but valid nonetheless).  It’s brought us from cave paintings in blood and sand and water to today’s 3D and wide screen tv’s and cinemas.  From the wheel to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

The Wright brothers first took the air in a flimsy wood and fabric glider in 1903.  That entire first flight, from take-off to landing, could have taken place INSIDE the body of a stripped down Boeing 747 freighter – a plane that itself first flew not much more than 60 years after the Wright’s maiden flight.  That’s well within a single lifetime.  Two years after the 747 took to the air, Apollo 11 landed.  That is phenomenal progress.

Look at old pictures of the Mission Control centres in Houston and the Cape.  Row upon row of desks, each with its own computer screen showing a little bit of information, each to be interpreted by its operator, often armed with a pen and paper and slide rule.  There is now more computing power in the average smartphone than ran the Apollo program.  We’ve gone that far, in terms of computer power, in less than 50 years.  The internet has grown from a handful of users, all scientists in a more or less closed environment, to ubiquity in half that time.

The oldest airline is KLM, founded in 1920.  Before it celebrates its centenary, Virgin Galactic, an off-shoot of Virgin Airlines (itself only 30 years old), will carry its first paying passengers into space for an hour’s joyride at a cost of a quarter of a million bucks or so.  It has a waiting list of passengers already.

This progress has all been great, and in many ways has given us all a better life.  But it’s not perfect – nothing ever is.

Not everybody has access to it all for a start.  Huge swathes of the population still live in poverty and have no job or home.  No amount of iPhone computing power is going to help them.  As manufacturing has gone up – and despite factory closures world-wide, businesses continue to start up and flourish -  the demand for raw materials shows no sign of abating.  This leads to increased output of greenhouse gases.  This in turn leads to global warming, as far as many scientists are concerned (although many more would strenuously dispute that).  And what no-one denies, the supply of those raw materials decreases, and once they’re gone there is nothing to replace them with.

The population too continues to grow.  There are in excess of 7billion people on this Earth now.  It’s expected to reach 10billion sometime around July 2060 (source: the fascinating Worldometers website at  http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/).   That’s a lot of people to feed, when the land mass itself isn’t changing size to keep pace with population growth and the amount of arable land is actually decreasing as cities and, worse, desert areas get bigger all the time.   So as well as shortages of raw materials like oil and various ores, we are facing, soon, food shortages too.  Expect poverty levels to go up then.

Scientists are working on of these issues of course, but they faces challenges as big – perhaps bigger – than any that we have faced before.  New energy sources are needed.  Nuclear is good but accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima have turned many people, in particular environmentalists and (crucially) vote chasing politicians against it.  Wind power increases in popularity but is still relatively inefficient and those same environmentalists tend to object to the proliferation of wind turbines that spoil sometimes beautiful landscapes.  It takes an awful lot of turbines to match the energy output of even the smallest power station.   Solar power is good and increasingly efficient, but expensive to install and still reliant on the weather: fine in the southern Mediterranean, the Gulf states and similar areas of high sunshine, less acceptable in say northern Europe, or the extreme southern parts of South America and New Zealand, where the climate is cloudier and wetter. 

In food terms, scientists in the Netherlands have grown meat (or something like it) by a sort of cloning process, building a burger cell by cell.  It took a couple of months and cost millions.  Other protein sources such as insects (fried cockroach anybody?) are being seriously discussed as foods of the future.

All of which, in my humble opinion, as a layman with no vested interests (beyond living), suggests that in not too many years’ time, this old Earth will become incapable of sustaining anything remotely like even a modest way of life.  Mankind needs, desperately, more space.  More raw materials.  More energy sources.  More food. 

For this reason alone, it seems to me, there is an imperative to move out into realms beyond this Earth.  This is what people have been doing since time immemorial, moving on to find themselves more space and food and, yes, wealth.   But we have almost exhausted everything there is to find and exploit here. 

So it seems to me we need to rediscover this spirit of exploration, of going somewhere new and dangerous and exciting.  We all know it will cost huge amounts in money and, perhaps, lives – but relatively speaking that has always been the case, and it hasn’t stopped us yet.  It should not stop us now. 

It seems, however, that NASA and its worldwide partners and competitors are lacking that spirit, at least individually.  Perhaps a Global Space Agency is the way forward, a pooling of minds and ideas.  It works at CERN, but that seems to be an exception.  The US, Russia, China, India and the EU seem incapable of sitting down in a room and coming up with any kind of consensus.  They have failed to do so in the face of the on-going Palestinian  and Syrian genocides.  They are failing to do so in the wake of the murderous downing of MH17 over Ukraine.  There are always, but always, competing priorities and cost concerns and vested interests.  Perhaps there always will be, but I hope for the sake of us all, and our grandchildren, that I’m wrong.

A final analogy.  Put yourself in the place of Mr and Mrs Ugggg, the first humans on the plains of Africa when food starts running low in their little valley.  Mr.Ugggg is insisting they should move on and find somewhere else where there is more to eat.  Mrs.Ugggg wants to stay where she is – she’s just cleaned the cave (again), she has skins to cure and the kids are settled and there’s still at least one wild pig to eat…..  But Mr.Ugggg is insistent, so move on they do.   And this turns out to be a good thing,  for their ancestors proceed to populate the entire planet over the next several millennia.

Sadly, it seems to me we are all turning into Mrs.Ugggg, at least as far space exploration is concerned.

What should we do about Putin?

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin used to run the KGB.  This means he has blood on his hands.  Lots of it.  After the destruction of MH17 over Ukraine he has another bucket load to rinse them in.

He can say as much as he likes that it’s Ukraine’s fault because it happened in their airspace.  Watch his body language making that statement: looking down at the desk, his eyes straying all over the place but never looking at the camera.  All classic indicators of bare faced lying.  The man would not know the truth if it kicked him in the crotch.  The statement – no, let’s be clear here: the LIE - ignores the fact that in many respects the Ukrainian government’s hands are tied.   Tied by the massed ranks of the Russian army, tanks, fighter planes and all, lined up just across their border, ready to move.  The forces have been there since Russia illegally annexed Crimea.   The LIE also ignores the fact that Russia is helping the rebels (sometimes I hate that word) by providing arms and assistance and training.

Look at pictures of the rebel militia men.  Despite the fatigues and the Kalashnikovs, they are not soldiers.  For a start, most of them are overweight.  Serving soldiers don’t normally wear ski masks to hide their identity either.  They are, quite simply, poorly educated petty crooks and thugs, the kind of person proliferating throughout eastern Europe.  They usually supply the muscle that helps organised crime flourish, and the oligarchs amass their fortunes.   The majority of them probably do not care about whether they are in Ukrainian or Russian territory, their main concern being who is lining their pockets with the largest amount of hryvnia or roubles.  Given a free rein, the Ukrainian police and armed forces could probably mop them all up in a week or so, with it must be said many casualties on both sides. 

But of course, the Ukrainian government does not have a free hand.  The Russian presence along the border assures that.  And of course, the thugs know it and are happy to strut around, posturing for the BBC and CNN cameras, fire off the odd round and intimidate any outsiders having the gall to enter their territory.  They clearly possess better armaments than the average criminal gang (for that is what they are), and know how to use it – the Ukrainian casualties, including military planes shot down, so far proves that.  Which raises the questions of where they have obtained the hardware, and who has provided the training required to master its use?  There can only be one answer, and it lies a few kilometres away across the border.

 

 

Which leads us back to Putin.  If, as seems certain, the arms and training have been provided by the Russian armed forces – and for the life of me I can’t see any other alternative theory that makes any sense – it is surely inconceivable that it would have been done without his knowledge and indeed approval.  Given the fatalities in the conflict so far, on both the rebel and (mostly) Ukrainian side, here is yet more blood on the man’s hands.

The downing of MH17 is now providing these gangs with their (I use the term at its loosest) finest hour.  The eyes of the world are on the wheat and sunflower fields of the border regions, and the smouldering wreckage and twisted decaying corpses of nearly 300 innocent souls, children and infants included, that disfigure the landscape.   Ignoring the human tragedy (and that is nigh on impossible to do), the downing is giving the rebel forces a power over events they can only have dreamt of.  Clearly, they are making no attempt to secure the site for the necessary investigation.  This ensures that anybody can wander into a field and pick up a piece of wreckage or someone’s pitiful belongings, as a ghoulish souvenir – though why anyone in their right mind would want to do such a thing is beyond me.  And yet there are many reports of this happening.  Instead of securing the site, the militia are actually hindering the efforts of investigative teams to reach the site at all.  There are reports of crash evidence being stolen or destroyed, the whereabouts of the flight recorders is disputed (some reports say they are in Ukrainian hands, some say in Russian and en route to Moscow, and others that they haven’t yet been found), and that the missile battery that allegedly brought the plane down has already been spirited away, back onto Russian territory, within hours of the incident.

It’s an appalling situation.  There are 300 odd families in this world, most of them in peaceful Holland and all of them thousands of miles away from a conflict that has nothing to do with them, trying to grieve for their loved ones, and understand why and how this was allowed to happen.  These poor people don’t even know when the bodies, or what’s left of them, are likely to be returned for a decent burial.   My heart breaks for them as well as the victims.

 

 

Back to Putin.  Over the whole period of this crisis in Ukraine, he has insisted on the right to protect the “rights of Russian citizens”.  We’ll leave out the fact that the people in Crimea and eastern Ukraine are actually legally Ukrainian citizens but of Russian ethnicity.  He has provided assistance to the “government” of Crimea and visited the province within hours of its proclamation, thus nailing his colours firmly to the rebel cause.  When the conflict moved on to the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, he made the same statements of support, and the gangs took over.  Russian forces moved up to the border, and despite denials from the Kremlin troops helped with equipment and training.  The situation remains thus today.

Western governments and the UN have made their usual statements of condemnation.  The US and the EU have imposed a number of economic sanctions and travel bans on Russian businesses and individuals “close” to Putin, and Russia itself has been expelled from the G8.  Its economy has been damaged, but not enough.  Obama and Merkel and Cameron have urged Putin to do something to rein in the rebels, pull back the Russian troops and engage in meaningful dialogue with the Ukrainian government to bring a peaceful conclusion to the conflict.  For the cameras and the world’s press he has appeared contrite and conciliatory and promised to do so.  More lies – nothing has changed, no troops have been pulled back and more arms and assistance have been provided.  His word is worth nothing.  He is a liar.  More blood…..

 

 

In the wake of MH17, more sanctions are being proposed, stronger ones.  There has been a fractious debate in the UN Security Council, but as usual the Russians have protested their innocence, the Chinese have sat there inscrutably saying nothing (thus tacitly supporting Russia) so the required unanimity for action is never going happen.

The US and the EU, if they are going to impose more sanctions, should no longer tread lightly.  They should impose financial sanctions and travel bans on one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  They should take similar action against his lapdog Dmitriy Medvedev and every other member of the Russian cabinet.  For good measure, do likewise to the heads of the Russian Army, Navy and Air Force.  While they are about, they should make public how much these financial sanctions amount to – the offshore bank accounts where Putin’s ill-gotten wealth is gathering interest, and the amounts in them – I’m assuming of course that the CIA and MI6 have been doing their job properly and have this information.  The whole sorry gang should find itself persona non grata outside of the Russian borders.  For their complicit support of the rebels in eastern Ukraine, they should be declared war criminals and indicted.

The UN, meanwhile, supported by the US and EU governments, and its entire membership, should announce that under UN treaties national borders are sacrosanct and the citizens living within those borders are citizens of that country.  In the case of eastern Ukraine, anybody who does not wish to live in Ukraine is free to cross the border into Russia, leaving their home and belongings behind them, and make a new life for themselves there.  Anyone remaining in the Ukraine is deemed a Ukrainian citizen and may be subject to investigation for war crimes, including the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, and/or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by hiding or destroying evidence at the crash site.

 

These measures, of course, run the real risk of spreading the conflict across the Ukrainian border and onto the world stage, but frankly the murderous downing of flight MH17 has done that already.  The victims of that terrible event, and their grieving relatives, deserve justice.  The US was quick to react after 9/11, even if a little misguided in launching a War of Terror that 14 years later has arguably failed and made the world a more dangerous rather than a safer place.  Obama, for all his faults, comes across as a more thoughtful and less gung-ho individual than Bush, but with a determination to seek and bring about the sort of justice required here.  I sincerely hope he has the courage to act strongly in this situation too. 

Putin, no matter what he and his apologists may say, is behind all that is happening in eastern Ukraine, including the downing of MH17.   The rest of the world must stand clearly against him and his regime, and stop the bloodshed. 

It must bring him to justice.

 

World Cup 2014 according to Travellin Bob

Well, it was a good World Cup in the end.

Before the start, for months, there had been mass demonstrations by Brazilians who were (and I’m sure remain) decidedly pissed off that their Government chose to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure projects like new stadia in towns (like the capital Brazilia and Manaus) that don’t even boast a top flight team in the Brazilian leagues……stadia that will probably lapse into crumbling disuse by this time next year.  Roads were built – or at least started - , railways and airports upgraded, though often not completed.  Favelas, the slum cities where millions of Brazilians still live in squalor, were cleared by armed riot police, often without providing adequate replacement housing, and given a lick of paint to make them look a bit nicer to tourists.

Key things, at least to the population at large, like education and health care and state benefits, of course lost out in the cash stakes to this massive FIFA demanded splurge.  So I guess people had every right to be pissed off and complain, even though at times it did all get a little bit more violent than was strictly necessary (although much of the blame for that seems to lie in the usual heavy handed policing – at which Brazil is seemingly no different to anywhere else, including the Met Police and NYPD amongst others).

So there was massive doom and gloom before it all kicked off, and predictions (mine included) that it was all going to be a bit of a shambles.  TV crews, in the days before the opening ceremony, were busily shooting film of rickety temporary stands and entrance stairways at stadia throughout the country that did indeed look a danger to life and limb, and many pundits expected a tragedy or two in waiting.  Happily, it all turned out to be largely misplaced, with the only accident I can recall happening in Belo Horizonte where a new road bridge collapsed with a few fatalities.  The bridge was about 3km from the sparkling new stadium there, and on a new road linking it with the airport, so the link to the World Cup is clear.  

I can’t recall a single incidence of crowd trouble throughout the tournament, no fan fights, no riots, no nothing.  Indeed the atmosphere at every game I saw seemed electric, a wash of colour (largely Brazilian gold and green liberally mixed with national team colours) and singing and drums and brass bands – everything indeed that makes the World Cup such a wonderful spectacle.  I missed both the opening and closing ceremonies, but I gather J-Lo and Shakira shook their booties rather well, and of course Shakira can boast a longer involvement in the tournament than her other half.  She also became the first artiste to perform at three successive World Cups apparently – clearly good ole Sepp Blatter must be a big fan.

And what of the football?

I didn’t see a lot of the matches.  Despite being in a time zone close to Brazil’s the match scheduling often meant I missed the early game and a good half of the middle match as I was at work.  Later on, once the group stages were out of the way, the situation got even worse.   This was not always a bad thing – it meant I didn’t have to suffer the torture of England v Costa Rica.  But what I saw of it was excellent I thought. 

There was thuggery, as usual – the Uruguayan bloke who for no reason – apart from his team losing at the time - kicked Joel Campbell of Costa Rica up in the air, swore at him while he was on the ground then marched off without waiting for the obvious red card being probably the best example.  And of course Suarez taking a chomp at Chielini was unbelievable.  The ban he’s been given is about right, and at least Liverpool did the decent thing and packed the bucktoothed bastard off to Barca as soon as the right money was offered.  Frankly, the Catalans are quite welcome to the poisonous little shit (brilliant footballer though he undoubtedly is).

There was some great goalkeeping.  The Mexican guy, Ochoa. may have looked a bit of a wuss what with the hairband, but dragged his team out of the group and close to an unlikely victory against Brazil by his superb keeping.  Neuer was also superb for Germany, playing in the modern sweeper-keeper role and just about deserved his Golden Glove Award.  Honourable mention too for Tim Howard, USA’s finest.  His Tourette’s Syndrome has given rise to the best chant in the Premier League in my opinion: “Tim Timminy, Tim Timminy, Tim Tim terroo, he’s got Tourettes and he says fuck you”.  And what of Joe “Head ‘n’ Shoulders” Hart?  Well, if he is England’s best then we really are in trouble.  I would blame him directly for Italy’s winner – why on earth he didn’t come to collect a routine cross into his six yard box I’ll never understand (my old team manager would have subbed me straight away for that, even in the Tonbridge League Division 2) and he never looked confident.  Woy rightly left him out in the dead match against Costa Rica, but played 30 year old injury prone Ben Foster instead of 23 year old Frazer Forster, who has shone for Celtic in the Champions League several times.  The kid deserved a chance and surely is a better future prospect than Foster (or for that matter Ruddy, Stockdale, Butland or arguably Hart himself).

There were great goals.  Rodriguez’ volley for Colombia was a thing of beauty, as was Tim Cahill’s for the Aussies, but I still love RvP’s header against Spain…….a perfect cross and the sort of dive rarely seen since Andy Grey retired twenty years ago.  Quite stunning.

And there were shocks too.  England were never expected to get out of the group (except by me, of course – I thought we had enough to beat Uruguay and Costa Rica) but nobody saw Spain getting hammered by Holland and failing to get out of the group.  Even England lasted a couple of days longer, although that was down to match scheduling not ability – we were equally piss-poor.  Likewise Italy going out at the group stage raised eyebrows.  But the biggest surprise for me was Brazil.  They were almost universally acclaimed as winners before a ball had been kicked, but turned out to be pretty awful.  Their capitulation against Germany in the semis was the stuff of dreams.  Germany are good, no doubt, but 7-1 was an embarrassment – pub team defending and a coach who clearly hadn’t a clue what to do to change anything.  They weren’t much better against Holland in the Third Place Play Off either – 10 goals conceded over two successive matches is the stuff of park teams not five time world champions.  At least we English can make the excuse that our football needs as much of an overhaul as Brazil's and (arguably) Spain’s.

The right team won in the end, of course.  Germany were a step ahead of everybody else.  The best goalkeeper.  Best defenders.  A midfield to crave.  And strikers in Muller and Klose who know where the goal is. And a team ethic that everyone else should aim for.  I can see them ruling the roost for the next ten years, no matter what Spain do to rebuild themselves.  Argentina were solid enough, but as usual Leo Messi (how on earth did he get Best Player?) was a disappointment and Aguero seemed to be carrying an injury.  Holland were entertaining with some great displays and a very un-Dutch camaraderie – I look forward to seeing how van Gaal does at Man U next season.  But Arjen Robben gets a bigger embarrassment every time I see him play.  He seems incapable of running past another player without falling arse-over-tit, contact or no contact.  He’s always been a diver, but a season playing for the Blessed Pep has made him even worse.  Frankly, they are too horrible bald old gits who deserve each other.

So now we look forward to Russia in 2018.  Oh, what fun that will be!  And then – Qatar 2022….unless of course Blatter retires or dies, bribery and corruption are then proved and the tournament taken away from them (the same could be said of Russia’s tournament).

I’m not holding my breath.

Oh, and a final thought.  On the BBC News this morning, I watched the Germans arriving home, to be presented to half a million delirious fans at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.  There was the most wonderful atmosphere there as the players danced and sang along with the fans, signed autographs, kicked balls into the crowd and generally had an absolute blast.  I thought I hope our vanquished England failures are watching this, and feeling very envious and determined to do everything to improve and maybe one day do something similar, before I die.  Then I saw in the Mail Online some pictures of Joe Hart, James Milner, Jack Wilshere and others, pissing about in a pool in Las Vegas with champagne and cigars and scantily clad beauties with pneumatic tits, without a care in the world.  The Champions League Qualifiers kicking off.  Pre-season tours and friendlies started.

And I thought, nah.  No chance. 

English football?  You’re ‘avin’ a laugh.

On writing, phone hacking and the Al Jazeera Three

I’ve been writing things, on and off, for most of my life.  It’s something I enjoy doing, and without blowing my own trumpet I thinks it’s something I do quite well.  This blog is just the latest manifestation of something that, while not really an obsession, is very important to me.  In all that time I’ve only had one item published (if you disregard Around the World…., which essentially I’m self-publishing courtesy the Mighty WWW).  It was a short story I entered into a competition run by the Surrey Mirror newspaper, way back in the mid-60s for its festive issue.  It was called something like “Hitch-hiking Home for Christmas” and was I think 500 words long, and described how I (first person narrative, of course) thumbed various rides home from a logging camp in British Columbia to spend Christmas with my family in Kent…..  I was about 11 or 12 I think, and won a postal order for thirty bob (that’s £1-50 in new money) for my trouble.  My mum and dad were immensely proud, and told anyone who would listen that one day I would earn my living from my pen.

It gave me a bit of a spur, I suppose, and throughout my school days I fiddled about with my exercise book and mandatory Osmiroid fountain pen.  I know I started and never finished dozens of now forgotten stories, but did fill one book, when I was maybe 15, with poetry.  One I remember to this day, inspired by Erich von Daniken’s then best seller “Chariots of the Gods?” (postulating that ancient Mayan and Egyptian civilizations were kick-started by visiting aliens) and a book by someone else, I forget who, that suggested that Christianity – and religious belief in general - was a direct result of early hallucinogenic experimentation, went:

                                Was God an Astronaut? Von Daniken said,

                                He must be crazy in the head!

                                Everyone knows the one to whom

                                He refers is but a Sacred Mushroom.

Ah, adolescence!  I thought I had lost the book at school but it turned up 20 years later, after my mum died (she seems to have hoarded it somewhere in her stuff, God bless her) so I took it home, but alas I’ve managed to lose it again somewhere along the way.  Ah, well, c’est la vie.

Later on, when I left school, I had less time to write, as I was working for a living or else playing football or cricket, or getting drunk……all the usual teenage stuff.  I was also devouring sci-fi by the crate load – Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Andersen – all the Golden Age legends, and newer writers then like Larry Niven and Piers Anthony.  So naturally enough, when I hit my twenties and got my second wind so to speak I started writing sci-fi too.  It’s all lost now, perhaps fortunately: a lot of it was excruciatingly bad and derivative and eminently forgettable, but I can still remember the odd yarn.  There was a fairly short one about the return to Earth of the first starship several thousand years after it had started its journey, during which the crew had only aged about 10 years (relatively speaking….), and finding a world that had gone through an ecological disaster that had seen the seas all but disappear and all life too.  They landed in a long dry valley between the Australian Gold Coast and the Great Barrier Reef, I remember plotting, and failing to recognise where it actually was.  I think they killed themselves in despair.  Then there was another one, very derivative of Isaac Asimov, about a bloke who invented a time machine but something went wrong and he ended up being projected back about 5 minutes every time he tried it out, and just repeating the same thing over and over again (“a tape loop in time”, I described it…..almost poetic, that).

There was also a series of three or four stories about a bloke called Jay Soon – very Larry Niven-ish, they were, and all basically extended puns.  In one our hero went hunting for a huge yellow insect (it was called Jay Soon and the Golden Fleas), another where he goes out and collects the Voyager 1 space probe to sell to a tv company to use as an advert, and a third where he goes to some planet or other to toboggan down an eighty mile high mountain but finds someone else has already done it (here the pun was again in a character’s name)……  I still have them somewhere at home.  They’re not bad, when I think about how pissed I usually was when I wrote them, and what turmoil my life was in.  This was the early to mid-1970’s, a fun decade.

Then I stopped again, because I got married and had kids, and had far too many important things to do than waste my time scribbling in exercise books.  I was trying (not altogether successfully) to nurture a career too.   I was working in a succession of banks, in pretty much pre-computerized (or at best limited main-frame, punch-card, pre-PC days) offices where a lot of work was manual and involved not quite quill pens and ledgers but not far short.  So I was indeed earning my living through my pen (a ball Pentel or Biro this time, fountain pens are such old hat….), just not in the way mum and dad had meant, nor indeed how I wanted to (deep down).   But my first priority was paying the mortgage and buying clothes and food, and booking school trips and all those things – things I could only do working, and with no obvious way of making any dosh writing I let it go.  To be honest, I lacked inspiration too – I still read copiously, all kinds of stuff (my tastes remain eclectic and wide ranging to this day: I always have at least one book on the go and often more), but I could never get an idea clear enough in my mind to get anywhere.   I guess all the influences I was soaking up in my subconscious confused me.

I did try though.  I started one semi-autobiographical, hopefully funny book about four guys going on a bachelor vacation in Majorca (as I and some mates had done back in the early 70s).  I called it One Peseta, Two Peseta…., with the vague idea of a follow up set in Benidorm called Three Peseta, Four…., but abandoned it after about page 10.  I’ll never go back to that one, the euro has basically killed the terrible titular pun.

Then I lost my job so I had more time.  I even bought a pretty crappy electronic typewriter and bashed out a story, much more adult, that I even finished.  It was called The Road to Zennor, and featured a bond trader who takes a long weekend at his holiday home in Cornwall, has a brief (and highly descriptive) fling with a girl hitchhiker he picks up on Bodmin Moor who turns out to be the ghost of a missing heiress.  Bit of weird one, but I still have it somewhere at home, and I like it.  I showed it to someone who worked then at a women’s magazine, and she thought it was sellable, but I never got around to doing anything about it.  And finally, I wrote my book, in a constant six week graft during a very very quiet spell at work when I basically had nothing else to do.  It fills two exercise books, runs to maybe 200 pages and is about sex and booze and football (as opposed to sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll) – subjects dear to my heart.  That was in about 1985.  Since then, I’ve had about four stabs at re-drafting it into a proper manuscript but never finished it – work always seems to get in the way.  The latest effort is nestling within the bowels of this ThinkPad’s files, 70% completed. But I forgot to pack the bloody original to finish it while I’m here in Hamilton.  I could kick myself!  

One day, I will finish it and I will publish it – on my own if I have to.

But all that is preamble.

What my mum and dad envisaged, fifty years ago now, was not my being an author, a writer churning out fiction for the masses, but being a journalist.  Whether they were thinking local rag or national broadsheet was never clear, and the problem was neither they nor I had the faintest idea how to go about it.  My careers officer at school was, typically, no use whatsoever.  This is the man who advised me not to bother trying to get into university because my parents would never be able to affords the fees and in any case council estate children didn’t go to uni.  (Both points were probably true then, in the late 60s, but hardly aspirational and frankly a dereliction of his duty……careers office my arse.)  So I kind of drifted into consultancy via the London Stock Exchange and investment (sorry, casino) banking over the next forty odd years.

But I often wonder, to this day, whether journalism might not have been a better career choice, and indeed what my life would have been like now had I taken that path.  Conjecture of course, no way of knowing.  I think I would probably have enjoyed myself – at least I could have spent my time doing something I still enjoy – bashing away at a keyboard or scrawling almost illegibly into a notebook, creating sentences and visions and stories for other people’s enjoyment (I hope….).  I’m sure I would have had my fair share of boredom too, sitting around in courtrooms or pubs or wherever, waiting for something interesting to happen that’s worth writing about, or collecting statistics from hospitals of new arrivals and recent departures to fill the Births, Deaths and Marriages column (or as my dad memorably called it the Hatched Matched and Dispatched Page) in some local rag.  Would I ever have made an investigative journalist?  A features editor or columnist? Better yet, a sports (preferably football) reporter or music journalist?  As I say, complete conjecture – but I think I probably would, and a good one too, if only I’d had a shove in the right direction at 16 or 17 when I gave my education up as a bad job and entered the big wide increasingly ugly world of the wage earner.

I’m perhaps using rose tinted spectacles here.  Not about the process of creating, being a wordsmith, but being a journalist.  Because, from what I’ve read in a couple of news stories over the past couple of days it seems to be an increasingly grubby and dangerous profession these days.

First, there is the long awaited conclusion to the News of the World phone hacking trial.   The story has been rumbling along for a few years, and the trial itself nearly nine months but the verdicts finally came out today.  Basically, the editors and senior journalists at the paper spent a lot of time and money hacking the mobile phones of literally hundreds of people – celebrities, politicians, and ordinary people including (unforgivably) that of a murdered teenage girl – to get a better (for which read more scurrilous) story for a paper that had once been well respected but had turned into a bit of a kiss-and-tell rag.  Complaints were made,  police investigations and public enquiries set up and a new press code of conduct and self-governance proposed (but so far not implemented).  The paper itself was closed down after nearly 150 years of publishing.  Today, the ex-editor was found guilty on a number of charges and faces jail time.  Four other accused, who pleaded guilty, are also looking at spending time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.  Another four were today acquitted of all charges but face uncertain futures after their names and journalistic reputations have been dragged through the mud. 

What makes it worse is that Andy Coulson, the editor found guilty today, after leaving the paper was appointed top spin doctor to the Conservative Party – personally interviewed and hired by current Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne.  They swear they asked him in the interviews if the phone hacking allegations were true and appear to have accepted the “What me, guv? Nah, wouldn’t do a fing like that, guv” answer as gospel without further checking, and hired the bloke to a position giving him access to God know’s how much sensitive material.  Cameron has done the relatively decent thing of apologizing unreservedly for his “honest mistake” in making a decision he “now knows to be wrong” – but is that enough?  Osborne has been curiously silent about his part in the affair, which surprises me not at all – the man’s a weasel.  Typically the Opposition have started pillorying Cameron for a lack of judgement (not for the first time) and demanding his resignation (also not for the first time, nor probably the last).

This follows a couple of days after a story from Poland wherein the offices of a news magazine were raided after publication of a story that involves a further case of phone hacking, this time those of various Polish ministers, one of whom was taped having a conversation with the head of the (supposedly impartial and independent) central bank about what would be the best policies to follow to help the government win the forthcoming general elections.  The situation is boiling away there and could lead to snap elections that could quite possibly end up with the ruling PO being punished at the ballot box and kicked out of office.

The interesting part of this little story, splashed across the Guardian but seemingly ignored elsewhere, is a series of conversations between the Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski (an Oxford colleague of messrs Cameron and Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson) in which he roundly and obscenely accuses Cameron in particular and the UK government in general of being complete idiots in regard to EU relationships and “fucking up” big time and being completely out of tune with what the rest of the EU wants and so on and so on.  Nothing new there,  perhaps, but a revealing glimpse of what other nations think of Call Me Dave and his merry band of political lightweights currently running Britain to rack and ruin.

These stories seem to me to shine a clear light on the way today’s press use all kinds of dirty tricks to get the juiciest, most unpleasant information to then splash across the front pages.  It does not seem to matter who the story is about – the more dirt the better.  The more a reputation is tarnished the better (and who cares whether the accusations are true and attacks deserved).  Dirt sell papers.  I seriously cannot remember  the last time I read a genuine feel-good story in praise of something or somebody – there is always, but always, a sting in even the nicest piece.  I’m not suggesting for one minute that politicians and paedophile tv stars and serial killers and dishonest thieving bank executives should not be pursued and brought to justice, of course not.  And I accept too that the press have a huge and often honourable part to play in doing so.  But surely there are limits to public decency and, if you like, fair play that should never be exceeded, and it seems to me the press these days – and not only in the UK but in the US and Germany and Poland and elsewhere – are too keen to exceed those limits. 

And then you have the other side of the coin – the plight of journalists imprisoned across the world for doing their job in an honest and honourable way, reporting the facts and exposing what needs to be exposed – telling it like it is, as our transatlantic cousins might put it.  Putin’s Russia and China, in particular, have large numbers of journalists locked up for simply not toeing the party line, for saying things that the government would rather remain unsaid.

Yesterday, at a court hearing in Cairo, harsh prison terms were confirmed on a trio of Al Jazeera journalists for, amongst other charges, allegedly supporting a terrorist organization (the Muslim Brotherhood).  When they were arrested in December last year the Brotherhood was actually ruling the country (but shortly to be overthrown in a military coup).  The journalists and Al Jazeera have consistently insisted that the men, who include an award winning Australian and ex-BBC journalist Peter Greste, have no links with any terrorist organization and were merely reporting what was happening on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria and elsewhere, but the judicial system has ignored that and locked them up for seven years.  They intend to appeal, of course, but that process in itself could take months – maybe a couple of years – to be completed, given the state of the Egyptian legal system and chaotic state of the country itself. 

Now I watch Al Jazeera News quite lot, the English version for which Greste worked, and it’s a good station.  It seems to me less slanted than similar networks (for instance CNN International has a huge American bias both in the range of its presenters and in what it considers to be newsworthy, DW-TV has a heavy German slant, France-24 English very French and so on), and covers stories and features that are ignored elsewhere.  I watched their coverage of the situation in Egypt at the end of last year, right up to the day Greste and his colleagues were arrested, as well as the CNN and BBC World coverage, and Al Jazeera were as impartial as anyone else – nothing was said that, in my view, could be considered pro-terrorist or pro-Muslim Brotherhood in any way.

And yet these men now face years in a jail far worse than any that Coulson and his colleagues are ever likely to face in Britain.  And for what?  For doing their job in an honest and honourable way.  As opposed to a grubby, underhanded and illegal way.

Which is the true face of journalism?  

A stroll to the beach

Well, the first week here in sunny Hamilton has passed without  mishap.  It’s a nice little project in a nice little bank, with the usual multi-cultural project team.  The bank folks are also very friendly and helpful, and clearly desperately keen for a successful project – right now their systems and procedures are largely manual and hence 25 years out of date, so essentially anything we deliver will be an improvement.  So it’s been workshop after workshop to go through the usual intelligence gathering and get it all down on paper in the approved manner (even where the approved manner actually doesn’t make a lot of sense).  But we’re getting there and on track to deliver the first milestone on time.  

With all this going on, there’s not been a lot of time to see Hamilton or the greater island, but so far what I’ve seen has been very pleasant.  The town (you can hardly call it a city) is a very pretty and relaxed place, beautifully situated on the Paget Bay inlet.  It’s clearly an affluent place, as befits a global centre of offshore banking and tourism, with a good selection of shops and bars and restaurants along the waterfront.  Back from the shoreline and town centre are the residential areas, along winding and hilly streets filled with palm trees and lilacs and bougainvillea.  The houses are substantial and expensive looking, many of them in good sized and well enclosed gardens for privacy (although I’ve seen no swimming pools apart from the one at the hotel – I guess so close to glorious beaches no-one wants one).

There is a shopping mall between the bank’s location and Front Street that has a good food court where we’ve taken lunch a couple of times, and the meals have been excellent.  One day we took sushi, and the other Chinese, both times from a buffet, and ate in a sunny central atrium in the fresh air.  We also went to another place further up the hill, close to the small cathedral, that did another buffet, and the rice, vegetables and sliced fried beef I had was delicious.  On Friday we went to a Jamaican place behind the mall that offered excellent sliced roast pork, rice and vegetables, as well as ribs and jerk chicken, and a selection of delicious sweets.  So I’ve eaten well and at a reasonable cost – each meal with drinks has come in at around USD20. No complaints.

In the evenings I’ve, as usual, fended for myself.  Sandwiches and concoctions involving rice and beans and corned beef and onions and garlic mostly, washed down with Nescafe and water and Abbott’s Ale (a pleasant surprise to find that in the local supermarket).  The kitchen is pretty well equipped, so when I get round to it I’ll stock up and do some proper meals.  It’s a bank holiday today (Monday) and all the shops are closed so it will have to wait.

The weekend was pleasant enough.  Two free days to explore, so I consulted the map and picked out a reasonably close beach (Hungry Bay on the South Shore, about 2 ½ km from the city centre, an hour’s walk from the hotel according to Google Maps), stuffed my towel, book and swimmers into my rucksack and set off about 9:30 Saturday morning.

I arrived in Front Street just in time to see the annual Queens Day parade start off from the Cabinet Building and War Memorial (it’s an exact – but slightly smaller – copy of the Cenotaph in London’s Whitehall).  The street had been closed from there westward as far as the Ferry Terminal, and there were a handful of tourists scattered around takings pictures, but by and large the locals seemed absent.  About half way along a small enclosure had been set up for local dignitaries (I assume government ministers and the British Consul) to sit in the shade and relative comfort to watch but it was oddly deserted – perhaps they were behind the enclosure having a quick gin and tonic or something.  So I took a few pictures of the small contingent of troops and sailors lined up in the gardens of the Cabinet Building, and the marching band as it struck up when the flags were presented, then moved on. 

                                                  

                                                          Queen's Day Parade, Hamilton

There is a small container port close to the end of the bay, not much bigger than a jetty with a couple of cranes, and then the last little section is full of small boats and cabin cruisers tied up in the safety of the Inner Bay.  I wandered past into Harbour Road and headed off towards the South Shore.  At that point, although I didn’t realise it until hours later, I was lost.  Blissfully unaware, I ambled along, up the steep and narrow Stowe Hill to join the South Road, where I spotted a sign “South Shore Beaches”.  Fifty metres further on was a junction, with no indication which way to go…..I took a punt and stayed on the main road.  A kilometre further on, past the College, there was still no sign of a beach or even a sign pointing to one, so I asked a guy cutting hedges where to go.  Helpfully, he told me to go back the way I had come and turn right at the church – my unsigned junction.   Back I went, and next to the church ducked into a little store for a bottle of water – thirsty work in the hot sun, this wandering around Bermuda.  I checked my bearings with the check-out girl….who totally contradicted my hedge-cutting friend and sent me back that way again.   She was right.  Not more than 100 metres beyond where the guy had been working was the grandiose entrance to the Elbow Bay Beach resort, and a couple of hundred metres beyond that the little trail that led down to the public section of the beach.

It was worth the effort.  Elbow Bay Beach has the reputation of being one of the best beaches on the island, and I could see why.  From the steps leading down, the powdery white sand stretches clean and, even at 11:30 on a June Saturday afternoon, virtually deserted both east and west.  The sea is astonishingly clear and calm, and a little offshore you can see the small coral reefs that provide for good snorkelling.  At either end are sun beds and umbrellas belonging to the Elbow Bay Beach resort and its neighbouring Coco Reef Hotel, and of course there are signs that mark the limit of the public sector (which stretches for maybe 300 metres or so).  At the eastern end, just before the Elbow Bay Beach Resort section, was a little stand of rocks a couple of metres high that offered some shelter from the hot sun, so I parked myself there, stripped off and went for a swim. 

                                            

                                            Elbow Bay Beach, 11:30 a.m. Saturday 14 June

The sea was quite warm – Mediterranean temperature I would say, but it’s still early season and will get warmer yet – and the clearest sea water I have ever seen.  A bowl of tap water would be no clearer.  There was a gentle swell, no massive breakers as I’d experienced four years ago on Trinidad’s Maraccas Beach, nor the sort of rough waves that are more or less constant in the Baltic and English Channel.  It reminded me a lot of Elafonissi Beach on Crete, another favourite place of mine from maybe seven or eight summers ago, and a place I want to re-visit.  So I floundered around happily for half an hour so, cooling down from the six kilometre walk from the hotel (I checked it on Google Maps that evening).

                                                           

                                                             My rocky place to chill

In all I spent maybe three hours at Elbow Beach, and there were never more than about 30 people along the whole public stretch.  Then some guys from the Elbow Bay Beach resort came along and sneakily I thought moved their boundary sign along about 20 metres – so that I now found myself essentially sprawled on private property.  So I packed up my stuff and headed off, deciding to try and find my original Hungry Bay destination if I could, and if not head for the pub back in Hamilton for a beer or two before football.

Back on the outskirts of Hamilton, I found where I had taken my wrong turning, and plodded off up Trimmingham Road to re-join the South Road – in doing that I had added a good couple of kilometres to my walk.   But eventually I found the road that, on my map, led to Hungry Bay.  On the map, it looks like a very small and enclosed bay not much more than a hundred metres or so across, and when I got there that is indeed accurate.  But what the map fails to convey is that it is a private beach, with entrance limited to the residents of the surrounding neighbourhood.  And very nice that neighbourhood is too – a couple of dozen big secluded mansions, bigger and grander than anything I had seen before, sitting in manicured and landscaped grounds behind high hedges and secure gates, all I would think with superb sea views.   But the only way onto the beach seemed to be through somebody’s back garden, so that was a no-go.  Back to Hamilton I went.

I broke off for some food in Flanagan’s Irish pub, and sat on the balcony upstairs overlooking Front Street and the Ferry Terminal.  It’s a typical themed Irish boozer, but very good for all that.  The Kilkenny ale was cold and went down a treat, and the Shepherd’s pie with a side order of fries was very tasty.  Actually, it wasn’t a Shepherd’s pie as it wasn’t made with lamb – the minced beef technically made it a Cottage pie – but I hadn’t the appetite to point out to the staff that they needed to change the menu, on the basis that the majority of visitors would probably be American cruise ship passengers (judging by the accents surrounding me that’s a good bet) who would neither know nor care about the finer points of British cuisine.  And it’s their loss, frankly.  Anyway, after that I trudged wearily back to the hotel for a cooling shower and an evening of World Cup watching.

Hamilton Harbour from Flanagan's Irish pub

And what a fine World Cup this is turning out to be!  I can’t remember the last time I watched so many exciting and entertaining games in the group stages.  Up to last night, in 11 games there had been over 30 goals, which is ridiculous really, and of 22 halves of play only one had been goal-less.  There have been some unbelievable results as well – I don’t think anyone saw Holland’s 5-1 drubbing of reigning champions Spain coming, least of all the Spanish squad, and no-one gave Costa Rica a chance against Uruguay, but they still ran out victorious.  Perhaps predictably, England lost to Italy, but I thought a bit unluckily, and they showed some very good play too – quite unlike England in fact.    And it took a moment of inspiration from Lionel Messi to put away debutants Bosnia – Argentina are a good side and I fancy them to win it, but at times they had looked ordinary.  There’s a long way to go yet, but I really hope the tournament carries on like this.  After all the publicity about the problems Brazil were having getting the stadia and infrastructure – roads, airports, hotels and so on – ready for the off, I had predicted (along with many others) a disaster, but so far it’s been anything but that.  Long may it continue!

So there you go.  Week one was fine, as was the weather – hot and sunny every day.  Today, typical for bank holidays everywhere it seems (at least when I’m resident), it’s a good deal cooler, and quite overcast.   There could be rain later I think.  Most of the team fly home tomorrow night (they’ve already been here a few weeks) but I stay until early July, so plenty of time for more exploring yet.

And I guess some work too…… 

Bermuda for beginners

Well, here I am, in sunny Hamilton, Bermuda.  I’ve been here a couple of days, so it’s time for some first impressions, I think.

First of all, contrary to popular belief, Bermuda is not in the Caribbean.  In fact it’s about a thousand miles north-east of the nearest recognizable Caribbean island, and actually lies some 450 miles due east of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina.  So it’s a pretty isolated speck of land.  And speck is not an exaggeration: the island (in fact, group of islands) measures a mere 21 square miles in area, and since from its most easterly point to its most westerly is just 20 miles (according to Arthur, my local cabbie who picked me up at the airport), it’s rarely more than a mile across.  In many places, the distance is mere yards, and the Atlantic is clearly visible on both sides.  Viewed from the air or Google Maps, the island has a roughly fish-hook shape, with a scattering of islets around the perimeter and a larger one settled in the main bay area (so in the curve of the fish-hook).

Yet despite its miniscule size, there are about 400 miles of roads – by which I’m referring to proper, honest-to-God tarmacked roads, not unpaved tracks.  Most of them, even in the capital Hamilton, are very narrow and winding and undulating – it’s a surprisingly hilly place – and there seem to be few footpaths alongside.  My hotel is a ten minute walk from the office, on the edge of town, and at least a third of the distance is walking along the side of the road, hugging boundary fences and hedgerows to avoid being mown down.  It reminds me of some of the lovely Cornish lanes I used to drive on vacations many years ago.

This little rock also houses a population of around 65,000.  Again, refer to Google Maps, and this time view in satellite mode.  The entire island appears to be covered in white dots, as if God has flicked a celestial paintbrush overhead and scattered droplets of emulsion over the place.  Zoom in and you will see that these dots are in fact buildings – houses, hotels, warehouses, offices and so on.  Apart from the beach areas, a handful of parks and sports grounds, and a golf course or two, there is precious little free land area at all.  So there is very limited agriculture, no orchards, no potato crops, nothing.  There is a small dairy farm and that’s about it.  Everything has to be imported – and so everything is expensive.

Until 1948 or thereabouts, there were only a handful of cars on the island, and most of those were owned and run by the government - police force, ambulances and so forth.  There was a small railway line running around both north and south coasts, linking Hamilton with the more remote (if that’s the right word) areas, but hardly any private cars.  But as the population grew, and its offshore banking and tourism industries expanded with post-war American affluence, the government changed things around a little.  The railway was closed down (today the tracks form a jogging and cycling path around some of the most beautiful parts of Bermuda), roads were built, and private citizens were allowed to buy cars.  But strict limits were imposed that stand to this day – only one vehicle per household and a 25kph speed limit island-wide.  Given the nature of the roads, this is no bad thing.  Motor scooters are very popular too, and seem to outnumber cars around the city, and so are bicycles.  Helmets are mandatory for both, including for passengers on the scooters, and using seatbelts in cars and taxis is likewise a must.  There are no hire cars on the island, which is just as well, so if you want to get around under your own steam you need to hire a scooter or a bike, or use the bus and taxi networks.  I plan to rent a bike at the weekend and explore a bit….which could be fun.

The people are very friendly indeed.  Walking around town, between hotel and bank, or around the shops, complete strangers flash you a broad smile and a jaunty “Good morning, how are you today?”  It all makes a change from surly London commuters barging past you on the steps of Bank station, or crazy Warsaw drivers cutting you up on the school-run.  Even the beggars here are friendly and polite: “Lovely day today, sir.  Can you spare me a dollar for a coffee please?”  Well, a buck certainly won’t buy a coffee, but I’d rather be asked politely like that than some of the confrontations I’ve had over the years, in cities everywhere.  I was actually surprised to find homeless people and street beggars here, given how wealthy Bermuda is, but they exist as they do everywhere – and if that’s not a sad indictment of 21^st Century Planet Earth I don’t know what is.

Bermuda is a Crown Territory, and its Britishness is evident everywhere.  You drive (albeit s-l-o-w-l-y) on the correct side of the road.  The road markings and traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are British style.  The buses are the same as the ones in Oxford and Edinburgh and Gravesend – no bendy buses here (the roads couldn’t take them).  Among the normal international brand stores like adidas and Benetton there is a Marks & Spencer, a shop called The English Sports Shop, a Red Lion pub (and of course the inevitable Flanagan’s Irish Sports Bar).  In the food court at the mall close to the office you can buy delicious looking chicken and mushroom or steak and vegetable pies – and of course pizza and pasta and sushi and oodles of fresh fish dishes.  There is Weetabix and Colman’s Mustard in the supermarket.  All very homely, apart from the weather which is much better.

The island lies in the Gulf Stream, so the sea is warm as is the year-round climate – blue skies and fluffy white clouds and plenty of sun.  But it’s not excessively Caribbean hot – so far this week around the mid-20s: very comfortable and pleasant.  It’s also on the edge of the hurricane belt, and sometimes catches storms of Biblical proportions (although rarely a direct hit). That said it will be just my luck to be here for the first hurricane in years……now that WOULD be something to write about!

What else?  Oh, yes – dress code.  Shorts are de riguer here – the world famous Bermuda shorts.  Everyone wears them, and very natty they are too.  They are perfectly acceptable at work, provided they are a single colour (no lairy patterns or loud flowery designs here) – the most popular colour is pink, which is the national colour.  They are worn with dark knee-length socks, black business shoes and a normal shirt and tie (and sometimes a jacket or blazer for important meetings).  Many people at the bank wear them, and I have to say it actually looks very smart in an English sort of way.  One guy there is French, so of course he has to be different: khaki shorts, a check shirt, no tie, and sailing shoes with no socks.  My colleagues and I have agreed that in a couple of weeks we too will join in the fun  - they are leaving for home visits next week so will bring suitable gear with them on their return.  I may well invest before then……  A couple of weeks ago I wrote and published a piece on LinkedIn (advice for new consultants – how to survive life on the road) and one  of the key points is to blend in with the locals.  So shorts it is – I can hardly not follow my own advice!

So there we go.  My initial thought is this a cool place and I’ll enjoy my time here.  There is the obvious caveat that so far all I’ve seen is a surprisingly shabby airport, the road into Hamilton, my hotel and the office, and a couple of shops.  I’ve not visited a beach yet – I’m told they are stunning and the best in the world - , nor a pub; I’ve not hired a bike or caught a bus.  All that is to come, starting this weekend. 

Watch this space….

The End of the European Dream?

As usual, the European Parliamentary elections last week attracted a low turnout - in most countries fewer than 50% of the population bothered to vote. This has usually been explained away by saying that most people, unless they have a (possibly unhealthy) interest in European politics to the expense of more normal pastimes like drinking and sport and girls and tv, don't understand - nor even particularly want to understand - the intricacies of the European Parliament or the voting system that feeds it. Up to a point this is undoubtedly true. Most people are more interested in what is happening in their own back-yard, not in some country a thousand miles and more away.   Probably the biggest number of people with any kind of interest in all this is the ex-pat community, from any nationality, for whom the Old Country still has a strong pull.  I've been critical in this blog on a number of occasions about the way Britain has changed over the years since I've been "away", but it's still my homeland, I still have friends and family there, so of course I'm interested in its political scene.  Of course I care.

But over the past few years, courtesy of the financial crisis that has gripped the whole world and come close to bankrupting some EU member states, notably Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal, probably more ordinary people across the entire EU have become aware of how it works and what it's all about. And a lot of them clearly aren't too keen on what they have learned.

Across the EU there appears to be a growing movement against the way the EU is being run by the Franco-German bureaucrats and politicians who have been setting the agenda for years - and quite right too. The dream of a single entity covering the entire continent, with harmonized financial rules (especially in the area of taxation), a single defence force, common trade rules - amongst other delights - and no border controls, undoubtedly has some merit. But to achieve all that effectively means doing away with individual countries like Britain and France, Poland and Cyprus, and creating one single entity called Europe.

It will never happen, because most people do not want to be called "European", and continue to prefer the title of British or German, Danish or Portuguese. National identity is still paramount, especially I think in the old Soviet satellites like Bulgaria and Latvia and Poland and so on, and of course my own Little England. With it goes a desire to be masters of your own destiny, set your own laws and taxes and border controls, and not be dictated to by the Brussels mafia, if I may call the Commission that. No amount of reliance on a single all-encompassing euro (as a currency unit for all states) is going to change that, especially when said currency unit has been cobbled together in the way it was 15 years ago, and when states - despite insistence to the contrary from the European elite - flagrantly ignore or change their euro-membership criteria to suit their budgetary and political needs at the expense of everyone else.

There have of course been historical precedents to this mythical Euro superstate, manufactured confederations of different ethnicities and countries great and small, and most if not all have failed sooner or later. For example, the USSR and Yugoslavia were concocted largely through violent conquest of one kind or another, within the last century or so, and fell apart equally violently within 50-odd years. Kazakhs are Kazakh, Georgians are Georgian, and neither are Russian. Similarly Serbs and Croats are just that, and neither are Yugoslavian. I well remember the fall of the USSR and Communism 25 years ago, and equally the appalling bloodshed and genocide in the Balkan wars even more recently, and genuinely fear for the future of Ukraine and its people now. The lessons of history do not appear to have been learned by Mr. Putin and his cronies - or else the man simply doesn't care.   It seems, from today's signature of a new Russian-led trading bloc with Kazakhstan and Byelorus (both ex-USSR states, ruled by old style dictators and butchers) the old KGB relic is intent on recreating the USSR by stealth - and we should all be aware of the dangers inherent in that little scheme.

Is it any wonder parties like the Front Nationale in France, UKIP in Britain, and others across the length and breadth of the EU have made such significant progress just recently?  By no stretch of the imagination am I a supporter of old Nigel Farage, pint in one hand, fag in the other, but I can certainly appreciate his appeal to the average Brit.  It's probably fair to say that most people are sick to the eye teeth of the sound bite politics and lies that the likes of Blair and Brown, Cameron and Gove, Clegg and Cable have been foisting upon them for years, so Farage, with his blatantly Eurosceptic anti-immigration -nay, borderline racist - stance (even if his statements don't stand up to too much scrutiny) seems a decent alternative.  He isn't, and neither is his party a serious alternative to the Old Guard, which is a shame.  They need challenging.  The mould needs breaking. 

So I suspect the status quo will continue for a while yet and it will take the bankruptcy of a major player (France? Italy?) and consequent collapse of the euro to force the changes that most people in the EU clearly want.  In fairness, the EU leadership has recognised this mood swing and is threatening to do something about it.  It has promised "discussions" to try and decide how to make the EU more relevant and citizen friendly.  So that's a consultation that will probably take about four years - just in time for the next round of elections.  Which is, of course, part of the problem.  It will certainly be interesting to see whether the dissenting majority, now represented by UKIP and FN and Golden Dawn and a whole plethora of extremist groups (even neo-Nazis have managed to get in there) do indeed get their point across effectively and whether it's listened to at all by the Commission.  I'm not holding my breath for much change, quite frankly.

I remember some years ago, in a previous life, working for a small company in London, while preparations for the single currency were going on. We were invited by the Bank of England to give our views for inclusion in its White Paper on the subject (as were the LSE, LIFFE, major banks and other financial institutions). We went along and met with the Bank's team, in a small office with a nice view of the internal courtyard and an IBM desktop pc perched incongruously on a Queen Anne desk with brass drawer handles and a leather top. We told them we couldn't see it being a success, and reeled out the USSR/Yugoslavia comparison to illustrate our doubts. We felt that the southern European states (at that time only Italy, Greece and the Iberians) lacked the fiscal discipline to continue to meet their entry criteria and felt it only a matter of time before one or more defaulted and brought the whole house of cards crashing down. We gave it a maximum of 10 years before that happened. The Bank was flabbergasted - no-one else had expressed anything but enthusiasm, apparently. But we weren't far wrong - only the combined (and hugely unpopular) efforts of the larger states and their insistence on swingeing austerity measures have prevented it happening already.  Despite the recent economic upturn, Europe is not out of the woods yet - there may be more problems around the corner.

My prediction, for what it's worth, is that there may well be further fiscal problems to come, this time in France or Italy, and if that does happen there will be a reluctance amongst the remaining EU states to spend the amount of cash that would be needed to prop either state up.  So the default will happen and that will be that. The EU started as a trade bloc, and that is how it should have remained. All this federal hogwash and financial engineering remains, in my mind, a recipe of disaster.

We shall see.......

Episode 108 - Trips and Easter, Tragedy and Saints. And chocolate eggs.

So.  It’s been three weeks since my last epistle (well viewed, too – thanks everyone) so I thought it’s about time I gave you, Gentle Reader, an update to my currently mundane life.   Of course, the fact it is mundane explains the lack of posting – it’s very difficult conjuring anything readable out of basically nothing.  It could be argued that I’ve actually been doing that for three years now, but surprisingly perhaps there are shades of Nothing and right now I’m in a very deep and not very meaningful Nothing.

A lot of that has been to do with the continuing work shortage.  Contracting is all well and good, but it’s also very frustrating at times: more than I had expected.  The increased earnings (and it does indeed pay better than a salaried position, at least in my sector) are welcome, but the potential spells sitting on your arse doing nothing are difficult – especially if for whatever reason you’ve not managed to save a lot of spare capital from the last gig.  Then the sleepless nights eventually kick in when the cash reserves are depleted with no sign of relief in the form another gig on the horizon.  I’ve suffered from insomnia for years anyway so I should by rights be used to the wee small hours by now, but I’m not. 

But happily things seem to have been resolved, and all things being equal I will be boarding a plane again soon.  New destination too – watch this space.

Making things worse lately have been some private issues.  I won’t go into any detail at all, but for the past year and more we’ve been caught up in a very unpleasant set of events that frankly make unemployment concerns trivial.  They’re not getting better any time soon.  The Dark Thoughts that keep me awake and restless at night, and make each day difficult to get through (thank God for my kids!) will be with me for a long time yet.  But still, the situation is making me as miserable as sin and short tempered with my family, and that depresses me more than anything – they don’t deserve any of it.  And I can only say sorry….

But anyway that’s depressing and this blog is never planned to be that (even if depressing topics like wars and despots and matters political are often discussed).   What have I been up to the last few weeks?

Well, I had a quick trip to England.  I needed to take care of some family business, so boarded my WizzAir plane again to Luton.  I stayed just under a week, and saw pretty much everyone who matters back in my homeland, and it was good, if at times trying.   Successful visit?   Yes, I think so.

It was not without its mishaps, mind you.  When I got to the car hire place at Luton Airport I found I’d left my driving licence at home – first time I’ve ever managed to do that.  A call to DVLC confirmed that I had a clean and valid licence (even though I couldn’t remember which address was on the thing) and that meant that National Cars were happy to release the Astra to my tender loving care, in exchange for another eighty quid (returnable) to do away with the insurance excess.  It was a nice shiny new car with less than 10,000 miles on the clock, but dreadfully underpowered.  I’m not sure what engine was under the bonnet, but whatever it was it was not good enough for the car.  Acceleration was always poor, especially uphill, and overtaking, even dropping down the gears, was heart-in-mouth stuff at times.  Living and driving in Poland (and other European countries) means that overtaking other cars is part and parcel of the driving experience, and drivers generally do the sensible thing when being passed – which typically means easing over slightly to allow a bit more room and perhaps checking speed just a little and just for a second, to allow safe passage.  But except on motorways – and even there not in every case – British drivers seem not to like being passed these days.  Off motorway, I made perhaps four overtaking manoeuvres in a period of six days and over 500 miles of driving, each time on nice clear straight stretches of road, with no oncoming traffic or restricting signage or road-markings.  And every time – EVERY time! – the cars (and in one case a bloody great articulated truck) I was passing speeded up as if to prevent me going by, tooted their horns, flashed their lights and/or pulled out (rather than in) – none of it good in my underpowered Astra.  Now why on earth is that?   Has Mr. Cameron made overtaking illegal or something?  I don’t remember it being like that before, but quite definitely it’s been getting worse in the years since I moved away.  Most odd.

I also had the chance to enjoy the splendours of the British railway system again, as I had to run into London from Norfolk for a business meeting.  The train journeys themselves, through the lovely Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Hertfordshire countryside were very pleasant, and even the Tube was quite comfortable – new trains since last I used it: thank you Boris!   But parking at Kings Lynn station was a bit of a challenge.  The two car parks were both full, so I had to run half way round an unfamiliar one-way system to find a multi storey.  Plenty of spaces, but the ticket machine took a maximum payment of 4 hours at a cost of £8, and accepted neither notes not credit cards.  No good to me then.  Back round the one way system, and I took the wrong road, and found myself leaving town.  U-turn in a factory estate, and back in again.  To the station, one car park full, into the other – also full.  But what’s this?  Ah!  An overflow, its entrance between two overgrown bushes that obscured the signs, and in any case on my original visit had been blocked by a National Rail Transit mini-bus.  Plenty of room and a machine that accepted all denominations of coins, notes and credit cards – and just £2-90 for a full day.  Result.  Mind you, I’d missed my train by then, and had to call from the platform to move the meeting back an hour and a half.  But it was a good day, and excellent fish and chips on the way home from the chippy in my sister’s Norfolk village.

I like the new skyline that is developing in London these days.  It’s always had its tower blocks, and glass office skyscrapers, but for a while in the 80s and 90s was beginning to look very shabby I think.  The Docklands development started to change all that (I worked there for a while, and on a brief return last year was surprised by just how much even that had changed over the years) but there is a new burst of construction going on.   The Shard at London Bridge (80% empty, but still the tallest building in Europe) is an extraordinary piece of work, and across the river in the City there are perhaps another half a dozen blocks going up.  The one that most caught my eye is opposite the Lloyds Building (itself a lovely piece of work but old now) and right next door to the old Commercial Union building.  I went for an interview there once, many years ago, with a US bank that occupied the top three floors, and remember well the view from the bank’s Reception area, north across Liverpool Street station towards suburban London and Essex and Hertfordshire beyond.   Well, the new building dwarfs the CU tower – it must be double its height, and while not in Shard territory matches anything at Canary Wharf.  It narrows dramatically from ground (or at least concourse) level, and I imagine each floor as you progress upwards is a bit narrower than the one below – it certainly resembles the cheese grater that I think gives it its nickname.

I spent a good bit of time with my sisters as well.  One evening, Win and Alan and myself sat up until nearly 1 a.m. discussing the internet: I am of course a great fan and supporter, whereas they are of the equally strong opinion that it is the font of all evil and refuse to have anything to do with it.  We failed to agree on anything (and in all honestly we’re probably both right in our views) but it was a great discussion for all that.  With Shir it was different: she is recovering from back problems and still suffering greatly, but on one day I took her and my niece out for a drive.  We went into Edenbridge, where we both grew up, and put flowers out on mum and dad’s grave, then headed out into the country through Chiddingstone (where Shir had spent the first years of her married life and my niece had been born), then out into the Sussex countryside to Crowborough in search of fish and chips (the shop, when we got there, was closed) and back into Rusthall and Tunbridge Wells.  It was fun, we talked and laughed a lot, and enjoyed it immensely. 

It was good trip.

Then we had Easter. 

It’s very different here to the UK.  In a previous life, I would give and receive many chocolate eggs of different sorts, and eat them in a mad frenzy over no more than a couple of days.  One year I was given no less than 8, and ate them in two sittings on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, and was sick for a week.  Later on, in adulthood, it was a weekend of football (my club usually played at least a couple of matches) and of course drinking.  And eating chocolate eggs.  After I married and had my own kids, Good Friday was typically a day to go to 3 o’clock Mass then off to either the local garden centre or DIY superstore (or both) and stock up on plants and paints and wallpapers and so on.  Saturday would be spent decorating or gardening  (depending on the weather), then on Sunday Mass again and a roast turkey (or maybe lamb) dinner, and on Monday carry on with the decorating or gardening (depending on the weather).  And eating chocolate eggs. 

One year, in my US banking days, I had to go in to work on Good Friday – not a holiday then in the States.  I was one of a dozen people minding the shop, since the entire European and London market was closed.    We sat around drinking coffee and playing Trivial Pursuit until New York opened, at which point the handful of traders went home and left us back office grunts to keep New York happy.  I had a call from my counterpart there telling me about a problem with another bank in London (actually it wasn’t a problem as such, and wouldn’t become one for at least another six days) and demanding I call them immediately.  I politely informed him that it was Good Friday, part of the  Easter weekend, and we were the only people working in the entire City.  He went berserk, and insisted I call them at home.  I explained that I didn’t actually have the home telephone number of every settlements clerk in London, and even if I had they wouldn’t answer as it was Good Friday, part of the Easter weekend…..  He got even madder and insisted I did something or he would report me to HR, my manager and the Chairman of the Board.  I told him to fuck off and we all went home.

Over here, it’s different.  Despite spending 50 years under the yoke of Communism, Poland is one of the more religious countries in Europe.  So much so, in fact, that throughout all those years, the Party hierarchy did not dare to do anything to suppress Catholicism in the country, and most people still went to Mass regularly.  After the Fall of the Iron Curtain and its obscene ideologies, strongly supported by the Polish Pope (who deserves his recently granted Sainthood for that alone), the Polish people were able to celebrate their Faith openly for the first time in a generation, and continue to do so in huge numbers to this day.  

Easter, of course, is central to that faith.  On Good Friday (a holiday of course) we went to Mass as I had in England with my first family.  Our old thatched parish church of St. Francis de Sales in Hartley would fit in its entirety at the front of my local cathedral-sized neighbourhood church here, in the space where is the altar, seating for 9 priests and about 16 altar boys.  The place was packed to the rafters, including the balconies at the back, and standing in all the aisles, the entrance halls and steps outside.  It’s usually full anyway, even on a normal mundane Sunday service, but Good Friday was exceptional.  We arrived at the wrong time, as one Mass was ending, so were able for once to sit down, close to the front.  The Catholic Mass seems to me to lend itself well to a church setting, with its prayers and chants and bells ringing, and in our Church with the big organ and a (very good) choir it sounded magnificent.  The rolling, consonant heavy Polish language added to the spectacle too.  Even though I understood very little that was said, and in any event can hardly remember the Creed or any of the other liturgies that I could actually mumble in English (I was never confirmed or baptised Catholic so never had to learn it all), I tried to join in, and spent some time in contemplation and my own version of prayer.  I hoped for a clue or something to put my mind at rest about the complications I mentioned earlier in this post, but I failed – the Dark Thoughts were (and are) still there.  One man, however, was in what I can only conclude is an ecstasy of faith (that may be too strong a term, but never having experienced one myself that’s the way it looked to me).  I’ve seen him there before and marvelled at his devotion.  He spends half the Mass on his knees, often in the middle of the aisle directly in front of the altar, so that communicants have to step carefully around him to receive their Hosts, and seems intent on breaking the world record for genuflections in one hour.  He is always dressed in the same grubby-kneed khaki chinos, held up by a piece of what looks like curtain cord, short sleeved shirt and jacket, no matter the weather – hot days, wet days or bitterly cold winter days are no different to this pilgrim.  I’m not sure whether to admire him or sympathise with him.  I saw him again on Tuesday, when I was cycling to school with the kids – he was crossing the road, dressed the same and clearly on his way to his next devotions.  It may be uncharitable but frankly I found it a little unsettling.

Saturday is spent preparing the Easter basket for blessing.  The tradition here is that you take a small decorated basket of food (hard boiled eggs, some bread, sausages, salt and pepper) to church to be blessed by the priest – this is believed to ensure you won’t go short of food over the next twelve months.  The eggs are hand painted, and eaten as part of the Sunday breakfast.  Of course we enter into the spirit of things and every year our own family tradition dictates that I decorate my egg with the Polish flag on one side and the English flag (cross of St. George, not Union Jack) on the other.  Incidentally there is usually not a chocolate egg in sight – but this year I brought some back from England, so for the first time my kids had the opportunity to sample traditional English Easter fare.  They were not keen….  Anyway, we had the basket blessed in a once again packed church, this time in a spacious basement chapel, with a life-sized depiction of Christ in his tomb, fronted by rows of seats for prayer and contemplation.  It was decorated with many candles and flowers, and looked very pleasant.  The mood was noticeably more sombre at our church than at others we’ve been to on other Easters.  I wonder why.

Then Sunday we got up and prepared the usual Easter breakfast, of salads, hard boiled eggs (decorated with a home-made mushroom sauce), various hams and cheeses and fresh breads.  We dressed in our best suits and ties – MUCH more formal than back in England! – and of course took many photos.  Then to another packed Church again for Mass, before a dinner of roast goose with baked apples, asparagus and roast potatoes.  It was the first time Ania had cooked that bird and the first time I had eaten it, and I have to say it was delicious.

Monday was a day of rest.  But no chocolate eggs.

In the wider world, the search for missing flight MH370 continues, with sadly no result. 

This is such a tragic and mysterious disappearance, and despite reams of speculation by experts and idiots no-one so far has a clue what really happened.   Apart from the plane turning back and reversing course for no obvious reason, with all communications and transponders apparently disabled, no-one knows what happened or where it went.  There were two possible alternative route options – one northerly, ending somewhere in the region of Kazakhstan, and the other over the southern Indian Ocean – suggested by satellite tracking tools, and the main search has been on the second alternative.  The northerly route would have taken it over several countries, and some sensitive border areas so was deemed highly unlikely.  But after more than 50 days now, there is still no trace of wreckage and the black box pinger batteries are long exhausted.  Some signals were picked up a couple of thousand miles off Western Australia, roughly on the possible southern route and at its very limit, but despite exhaustive searches by planes and vessels from many countries (including the US and Britain) still nothing is found.

Throughout these weeks the conspiracy theorists have had a field day.  Some of the ideas are frankly ridiculous – alien abduction, anybody? – and most of the rest far-fetched to put it mildly. The CIA seems to head the list of potential Villains Of The Piece, closely followed by the US government, the Chinese (despite the bulk of the 260-odd passengers being from that country), the Israelis, Arab terrorists (hijacking the plane to Pakistan to convert it to a massive flying bomb to attack an unspecified but probably American target) and the Malaysians themselves (who panicked when the flight did its about turn and shot the plane down by mistake over the jungles or the Malacca Straits, and have been covering up ever since).  More believable, perhaps, is a report that came out of the Maldives the day after the plane disappeared.  In this, a group of people on one of the more remote, outlying islands reported seeing and hearing a low flying plane heading south just offshore.  The report has never been properly investigated and the Maldivian newspapers have run various articles denouncing the authorities for not taking the report seriously.  There seem to be two chains of thought on this one – first, the plane was actually crashing at that point and so the wreckage is to be found somewhere quite close by, and second, that it actually landed on another outlying island, was re-fuelled then flown to the US bases on Diego Garcia (the CIA conspiracy again….).  To me, the first option seems the most likely – indeed the most likely explanation of the lot – and I can’t really figure out why it apparently hasn’t been taken seriously.

And while all this has been going on, the friends and relatives of over 250 people from several countries are suffering the agonies of not knowing…..whether their loved ones are dead or alive, what happened, where they might be – whether they suffered.  I can’t begin to imagine what that must be like.

I personally don’t think we’ll ever know the truth.

But their distress can be nothing compared to that of the parents of the 300-odd schoolchildren drowned when their ferry capsized and sank travelling to a holiday island in South Korea – the school-trip from hell.  It appears from reports that the crew were grossly negligent when the ship hit something and began sinking, telling the victims to stay in cabins and restaurants until help came – which it never did.  In this internet age, the text messages saying things like “Good bye” and “I love you” to parents that were sent by these 16 year old kids waiting to die found their way into newspapers all over the world and are truly heart-breaking.  What a world we live in!

On a brighter note – much needed after the last few paragraphs – The Polish Pope John Paul II was Beatified last weekend, only 9 years after his death – apparently a record.  Another, pre-war, Pope, John XXIII, was Beatified with him.  The ceremony was watched by a crowd of a million-odd pilgrims, and no doubt a huge global live television audience – it was naturally carried live on most local stations here.  Like all such Catholic ceremonies, it was a splendid spectacle, the sort of thing that the Church does supremely well – a bit like the English and Coronations and State Funerals.

Whether Catholic or not (and I’m not) Jan Pawel Drugi - as the Poles call him still – was an extraordinary man who led an extraordinary life.  He was even a goalkeeper, like me, in his youth.  To be made a Saint you need to have been credited with I think three proven miracles.  I’m not sure what his were (from memory, I think one was a documented case of a nun who was cured of Parkinson’s Disease after a visit by him), but to my mind his steadfast leadership and support for anti-Communist groups world-wide, notably the Polish Solidarity movement, that ultimately brought down the Iron Curtain and dispensed with the undoubted horrors of Communist oppression across Europe and gave freedom and prosperity (to varying degrees) to millions of ordinary people is worth a Beatification on its own.

Top man, that Karol Wojtyla.

And now we come to the May Bank Holiday weekend.  The weather looks good, so it’s barbecue in the garden time for us all here.   Out on the bikes too, no doubt, and for sure shift a few Tyskie (or Lech, or Zubr….or all three).  I’ve just seen a piece on the local news about this weekend’s traditional barbecue session – always the day after May Day is a barbecue day.  This year of course, the day falls on a Friday……which as every good Catholic knows is a day of fish.  So in his infinite wisdom the bishop of the dioceses on the east bank of the Wisla has refused to provide a dispensation to allow people to eat meat, whilst his counterpart on the west bank has allowed it.   Fortunately, I live on the west bank, so I’m in the clear so to speak.  But really – how ridiculous and how petty!