Charles Ellingworth

'If it saves the life of one child'. Whenever I hear that phrase from the mouth of a politician, I know I am listening to someone of mediocrity and vacuous sentimentality. Always. It is an abnegation of the duty of power which is about making balanced choices; where you have to weigh up the pros and cons and accept that there will be a bad outcome for some in any human activity.

A classic case are the drink driving laws. In an ideal world, where drink was not the mortar of most people's social lives, taxis were cheap and available or everyone socialised within walking distance, then zero tolerance might be an acceptable option. But of course we don't live in that world. The balanced choice is that a pint of beer, or the equivalent slightly raises the risk to the life of a few children - but weighs that against the needs and desires of the other sixty million odd people that live in the UK. Taken to its logical conclusion, the 'if it saves the life of one child' argument would rid the roads of all cars.

I read somewhere, some time ago, an interesting take on the 'slaughter on our roads' headline. These are rough figures, from memory, which I have tried to check online - without success, which perhaps is not surprising as most of the statistics seem to come from total abstinence pressure groups. Apparently, on average, around 250 people a year die in drink-driving accidents. Of these half were drunk drivers who killed themselves. Of the remainder half were drunk pedestrians killed by sober drivers but which are classified as drink driving deaths. Which leaves about 60 people, out of a population of sixty million, who were killed by drunk drivers - which apparently is about the same as are killed each year in police car-chases. This takes no account, of course, of those injured and maimed. But equally, it doesn't tell us how many of those drunk drivers were serial offenders many times over the limit as opposed to someone just over on 'the morning after.' Serial offenders aren't going to take notice of any limit.

Two conclusions. Look hard at any statistics - and look even harder, and then away, from any politician who tells you it's not worth the life of one child.

Werner Hertzog is never boring. He produced a documentary recently about McMurdo Sound Base in Antarctica, which is more like a small town in Arctic Canada than the edge-of-the world polar base of popular imagination. The roar of tractors and generators obliterates the silence of the sixth continent.

Mcmurdo Sound

 

He interviewed the chief diver on the station; it was his last day on the base before his retirement and he was speaking in the dive-hut which straddled the ice and from which the divers dropped through the floor to explore the dark of the ocean below. He was in a valedictory mood.

He thought he knew why the earliest sea creatures had struggled onto the land, exchanged their flippers for feet and after an amphibious transition become creatures of the land. He pointed to the hole in the ice and the inky blackness below. ‘That is a very dangerous place’, he said, ‘ you can’t see more than fifty yards – ever – and outside that radius everything is trying to eat you; the quicker you can get out of it the better.’

If you’ve ever done a night dive, you’ll know what he was getting at.

Life expectancy for males declines by one year every stop on the Jubilee Line east of Westminster. For a male in Russia it is only fifty nine.  At the same time, and I find this hard to believe when you see the vast size of so many American women, the life expectancy of a baby girl in Chicargo is over a hundred. If you made it to forty in 1840, and that was a monumental ‘if’, your life expectancy was only four years shorter than it would be now.

Two dyslexics were sitting next to each other.

‘Can you smell smoke?’

‘I can’t even spell my own name.’

Philippa Gregory was on the radio discussing the continuing fascination with the Tudors - particularly Henry VIII - a fascination that I don't share. In fact I would go further and say that I would not willingly read anything more about the that monster or any of his benighted wives. I seem to be in a minority of one in not liking Wolf Hall.

There is a good reason why historians as well as historical soap-drama are so fixated and it is to do with historical documentation as much as lopped off heads and bodice bursting lust. The key thing about Henry's killing was that it was judicial: not for him the simple joys of laying about his enemies with a sword. Each of his victims was given the full complexity of a judicial murder which involved a trial and the collecting of all the victim's papers which became the property of the state. As there were no 'Not Guilty' verdicts and there were a lot of trials, the state under Henry acquired a quantity of documents that is unique - until the 19th century. It was at that time that the Victorians filed and stored nearly nine hundred folios of nearly a thousand pages each from Henry's reign - a treasure trove for historians who, when researching the world of Henry's daughter, Elizabeth, have only a fraction of the archive material to occupy them.

It is this treasure trove of source materials that have fed the Tudor history machine as much as the loose heads of Henry's queens.

Charles Taylor, the Liberian warlord that made Sierra Leone a byword for a millennial heart of darkness, has just been found guilty in the Hague of multiple charges of crimes against humanity. He looks like a bank clerk and was once a Baptist lay-preacher. His killing squads’ speciality was the question ‘long sleeve or short sleeve?’ - before hacking off an arm above or below the elbow. I have one degree of separation from him.

  Charles Taylor

This was thirty years ago and I was working for a shipping company in Hong Kong. My boss was the Chairman of the Hong Kong Association of Ship Owners – and many of our ships were registered in Liberia. At the time, the President of Liberia was Master Sergeant Doe. He had gained power by shooting the entire previous government on a beach after disemboweling the president in his bed. He was visiting South Korea and announced that he was paying a visit to Hong Kong so, at very little notice, I was tasked with arranging a lunch for him and his entourage to be hosted by the Association of Ship Owners. The day arrived and at about midday word filtered back to me that he had not made the flight after a serious night’s partying in the red light district of Seoul. We cancelled the lunch and breathed a sigh of relief.

At about 4pm I received a panicky call from the manager of the hotel where the lunch was to have been. Doe and his entourage were in the foyer and were helping themselves to the contents of the shops and didn’t see any reason why they should pay. I got there to find a dozen policemen remonstrating with an irate Doe and his acolytes. His breath stank of drink and there was not much understanding between the broken English, not helped by alcohol, and the Cantonese of the police. I persuaded Doe to go to the bar and pacified the manager while getting him to check the status of Doe’s flight to wherever he was going next. Many bottles later – cheap at the price in the circumstances – we shoehorned the last of them into hired limos and passed on the problem to the unfortunate ground-staff at Kai Tak airport. Doe gave me a sweaty hug before he fell into his car.

Charles Taylor was a member of Doe’s government and was accused of embezzling over $1m and had to flee to America where he was imprisoned. He escaped and made it Libya where he became a protégé of Gaddafi who sponsored his return to Liberia as the head of the army that provoked a civil war. This culminated in the capture of Doe by one of Taylor’s renegade commanders, Prince Johnson who, on a video broadcast around the world, tortured Doe to death. The film showed Johnson sipping beer as Doe’s ear was cut off.

 

I have a friend who loves walking to the South Pole. I have asked him to kill me if I ever start talking about joining him; as he was in the SAS that shouldn't be difficult. I could think of nothing worse: the mind-numbing boredom of the hundreds of miles of the featureless Ross Ice shelf, the sheet ice and crevasses of the Beardmore glacier and then the unutterable tedium of the polar plateau with its hurricane force headwinds for six hundred miles. Someone else I know who has been to the North Pole twice says it is much more 'fun': icequakes, polar bears and melting ice floes. I prefer my discomforts a bit warmer.

But I do understand my Antarctic friend's obsession with Shackleton and Scott. The more I read about them and their fellow polar explorers the more there is to admire:scientific endeavour, hardiness and self sacrifice. They embody the ideal of a British Empire that, at its worst, was brutal, greedy and patronising. The mid-winter expedition to Cape Crozier to collect Emperor Penguin eggs, so horrifically described by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World, is a tale of such quixotic heroism as to begger belief. Cherry-Garrard's two companions and friends on that journey, Wilson and Bowers, died with Scott and it was he who found their bodies the following year.



Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard: the privations of their journey on their faces

Scott's final diary entries movingly sum up this spirit. “We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.”. On the centenary of
his death these stoic qualities are now outshining his well-documented weaknesses - and deservedly so.

A lap dancer has just won a case that established her as an employee of, rather than a contractor to, the club where she worked. Lap dancing clubs are licenses to print money - but not for the reasons you might think.

They work like this. Each (probably not very beautiful) 'punter' pays £20 for a 'dance' with a (beautiful) girl. This is a semi-striptease in front of him in a semi-private booth overlooked by a bouncer. There is no touching allowed. Before they do their 'dance' they usually weedle a (very expensive) drink for themselves and the man they have enveigled. Here is the best bit: each girl pays (yes that is right) £80 to come and work at the club and they then keep all the £20s they earn once they have covered their door money. If they choose to expand the relationship outside the club then that is their business.

There cannot be many business models  where the main employees and salespeople pay to come to work.

My wife was telling me about the farmhouse in which she lived when she was at Kent University in the 1970s. The rent was very cheap because it was in a valley that was going to be flooded to create a reservoir. The farmhouses were abandoned (except by students), the roads disintegrating and the hedges growing out in profusion without the attention of flails. No animals were in the fields that had become the province of wildflowers, and dead trees lay where they fell. Nature was taking over and the manicured garden that is the English countryside was returning to its prelapsarian or, more accurately, its antediluvian state.

It struck me as a vision of the end of the world – our human world anyway; what it might look like in the wake of the ultimate epidemic. It only takes a between twenty and fifty years for a brick-built house to crumble to nothing. It happens slowly at first while the roof remains weather-tight but the rot sets in, literally, when the first slates slip and the water ingresses. After twenty years the roof and windows have gone and the rain begins to dissolve the mortar in the brickwork. After fifty years all that is left is the rusting skeleton of pipe-work and a mound of bricks. This is what most of London would look like. But the towers of Canary Wharf will still be there as modern Pyramids, their concrete proof against all that the English climate can throw at them. Perhaps in three millennia an archeologist will find the HSBC logo and a mission statement engraved on weathered concrete.  This could be the Rosetta Stone of our age – all that our curious descendants will know of what we were.

It is always difficult to say anything new about an artist like Freud whose work has been written about in innumerable memoirs and hagiographies. Here goes anyway.

My main emotion was one of admiration for his sitters: Sue Tilley, the eponymous ‘Benefits Supervisor’, or Leigh Bowery – both of who lie, sit, spreadeagle and sprawl in the most courageous nakedness – every roll of fat, flesh and genitalia exposed and relished in coruscating detail. I couldn’t do that. How do you get that sort of confidence?

He had, apparently, between fourteen and forty children. It’s the ‘between’ bit that gets me.

I found the progression in his work interesting. The 1940s are distinctive – a ‘naif’ style in green hues that is utterly different from anything from the mid-1950s onwards where the thick paint and sculptured flesh tones are instantly recognizable. In about the mid 1970s he started using Cremitz White, and there is again a change – less in style but more in the flesh tones which have a chalkiness and, to my eye, uglier hue.

This uglification I found difficult to understand. There was one tall picture with a girl - or is it a woman - sitting naked on the sill of a first floor window. The chalky patina makes her appear emaciated and her breasts are pendulous and sagging.   There was a photograph of Freud painting this woman – and she is young and beautiful. He also painted The Duchess of Devonshire in her thirties, and she complained that he made her look sixty. You can see why. And yet the pictures of his mother are some of the most moving and sensitive to old age I have ever seen. Why did he always want to see flesh in its final iteration - even when that was not what was in front of him?

Soweto is an acronym for South West Township, a description that hardly does justice to the sprawling city of up to five million people that is Johannesburg's dark twin. It is something of a metaphor for South Africa where, disconcertingly, two parallel worlds and economies exist together as if Los Angeles and Lagos found themselves conjoined. We went bicycling round it.

For anyone who has lived in the 20th century Soweto is synonymous with violence and deprivation. Who could forget the daily pictures on television screens of the police gunning down schoolchildren or the appalling black on black civil war fought out between Inkata and the ANC with their 'necklaces' - tyres filled with petrol and hung flaming around the victim's necks? We had visited Soweto briefly before, exactly twenty years ago, and it was then a real Hobbsian nightmare with gangs of unemployed single men, forcibly separated from their families, housed in hostels with no restraint from a hierarchy of society or police, running wild at night to rape at will. It is difficult to shake off these associations and it was with some trepidation that we drove into Soweto to find our bicycle tour.

Poor it certainly is, but a disconcerting mix of tin shacks within a few hundred yards of middle class well-built houses, surrounded by walls for the most part, but with none of the razor-wire and electric-fences of the paranoid affluent suburbs of Johannesburg. It is almost entirely single story which gives it a less threatening mien than the tenement blocks of other cities. Life is lived in the open and every street has a football game amongst children who are keen at every opportunity to high-five you and shout a smiling hello. It is hilly and surrounded by the spoil-heaps of the gold mines that spawned it.

The tour was in and around Orlando West, not exactly the centre of a city that does not really have such a thing, but the spiritual heart where Mandela once lived and Desmond Tutu still does. It started with a dip in the deep end as we crossed the road into the former Inkata heartland of Zone 1 and into a shocking slum of corrugated shacks and piles of rubbish picked over by rats. We stopped by a shebeen - a pub of sorts with no windows - and went in for a drink. In former times these were illegal and everyone had with them a bible so that all a police raid found was a prayer meeting. We sat, in the gloom, on a bench with the regulars who were drinking the local beer that comes in carton rather than a bottle or tin and sells at about 25p a pint. It tastes like a malty home brew. We were welcomed with smiles and jokes as the loving cup was passed round. We all relaxed.

From then on former associations melted away. Threatening groups of men waved and smiled as we passed. Wild drunks would shake us by the hand and cars would wave us through at intersections. We were liberated from our fear and it was exhilarating. We had arrived with the burden of association and only saw danger. We drove away seeing people coping with poverty and deprivation with admiration - and gratitude for the luck of our own lives.

Everyone should do it - certainly the denizens of the other South Africa. Fear is always corrosive and without it you are liberated to see people differently.

We are spending a week in Malawi at a remarkable place, Ripple Africa.

Malawi is beautiful and poor. It is known as the warm heart of Africa with reason. Despite rural poverty and the depredations of HIV, the people are charming and friendly and the children enchanting. The country is land-locked between Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Tanzania though landlocked is a misnomer as the dominant geographic feature is Lake Malawi - known as the calendar lake as it is 365 kilometres long and 52 kilometres wide. This is like the sea and all through the night waves crash onto the beach below our hut. Things are not easy in Malawi at the moment with achronic lack of foreign currency (it exports very little) leading to year-long fuel shortages. The death of President Bandu last week is giving rise to hope that things might get better.

Ripple Africa was founded by Geoff and Liz Furber who came across a failed small beach  resort on the lake when they were on holiday, fell in love with it and bought it - as charitable rather than commercial venture. They have a business based in Buckingham but now spend six months of the year Malawi. Ripple's motto is 'a hand up, not a hand out'. Its aim is to help Malawians to help themselves and, based on the old resort, it is spreading out like the eponymous ripple to the surrounding area and involved in three main areas, health, education and the environment.

The environmental efforts are typical of the Ripple approach. A universal African issue is one of firewood - the main cooking fuel. Women spend a good deal of time every day collecting wood that is used principally for cooking. A household will need around three bundles a week which they collect themselves in the country and buy in the urban areas. Each bundlecosts about £1. Deforestation is the result -especially as  the population has quadrupled since 1960.

Ripple is approaching this problem from both ends. On the demand side they are training local people to help 63,000 households to build Chonga Chonga Moto(quick, quick fire) stoves which cost £4 to make and use a third of the
amount of wood a week than the campfire alternative. As the payback is two
weeks, the economics are compelling - with the side benefit of freeing up
womens' time for more productive activities.

On the supply side they have got together with with the local chiefs to
create nurseries for trees. So far they have planted three million - yes,
that is right. These are both for firewood and fruit: the Malawian avocados
are the best I have ever eaten. This is not aid money being distributed by
government and legally enforced from the centre but a community effort that
is entirely self administered and self funded with only guidance, and Geoff's diplomacy, being provided by Ripple. The management on the ground is entirely by Malawians.

Ripple employ directly 160 local  people and have a few, mainly medical and
completely self supporting, volunteers from the developed world. Geoff runs
a tight ship and there is not a penny wasted. It is  a remarkable charity.
Take it from me - it is really making a difference.

Have a look at their website on www.rippleafrica.com

Africa is huge. This sounds like a blinding glimpse of the obvious but how big is not generally appreciated. Within its landmass you can fit the entire continental United States, China, India, Japan and the whole of Europe with the UK fitting neatly into Madagascar.



Quite how big is underestimated because Africa straddles the equator and our perception is formed by the warping effect of the Mercator projection used on most world maps. It's effect is to 'stretch' the landmass towards the poles - which makes Russia and Canada, no tiddlers, seem much bigger, in relation to Africa, than they actually are. Having said that, I met a Canadian general once whose command covered the Northern Territories, an area he claimed was larger than China.

You can see this map of Africa on a great website www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualisations/ that puts knowledge that is traditionally imparted in words and numbers in visual form. Check out the Radiation Dosage Chart and worry a little less about nuclear power.

Kwazulu, South Africa. This is a beautiful part of the world. The road from Johannesburg goes through the rolling countryside of the Free State in hues of autumn; brown grass and turning maze with the wind turbines of the 1930s speckling the landscape. After the state-line with Natal/Kwazulu something changes: green, despite the lack of rain, is the dominant colour. Trees, broad acacias from the plains of another Africa, shade a different landscape of savannah. The houses change. Instead of the township architecture of single story brick and corrugated iron roof, the Zulu round house, thatched and elegant is the dominant style and the ladies, colourful and cheerful, wave as you pass. We are in Zululand and it is different.

Today we went to the battlefield of Isandelwana. Here in 1879 the British Army suffered its most humiliating defeat at the points of the asseigies of a Zulu nation that never wanted to fight a British empire that had invaded on pretexts that made Hitler's invasion of Poland look ingenuous. The battlefield is worth a visit as, apart from some trees (there were none then) and the odd village, it is a landscape little changed from that terrible day. It is marked with cairns of white stones where they buried the British dead on the spots where they fell in graves of between eight and ten. The concentrations of stones mark the progress of the battle culminating in a cluster marking the the final stand where the last of thirteen hundred were cut down. All this under the twilight of an eclipse of the sun. They were only buried six months later when the British army returned to after the murderous battle of Ulundi where Gatling guns saw off spears and hide shields. By then they were burying only skeletons held together by sun-bleached red tunics.

As the sun sank on its fast African trajectory later in the afternoon, we sat spellbound in the missionary station of Rorke's Drift as the tale of the battle was told by an expert - theatre at its tragic best - standing on the ground made famous by Michael Caine every Christmas as he fends off the Zulu hoards in the eponymous film. This battle only happened because the right wing, or horn of the buffalo, of the Zulu army missed the slaughter of Isandelwana and the impis had not 'washed their spears'. No Zulu man could marry without this 'washing' - normally in the entrails of an unfortunate Swazi - and it was against the express orders of Chetaweyo, the Zulu king, that these warriors crossed the Buffalo River, the border with British Natal, to attack Rorke's Drift later the same day. So it was sex that caused the slaughter that followed in an area half the size of a football pitch. Eleven VCs were won that day amongst the rag-tag garrison of the two tiny buildings that made up Rorke's Drift.Three thousand Zulus whose country had been invaded and who had marched thirty five miles and fought until the early hours of the following day without a meal, died there too.



If there was ever a pointless war, this must be it.

I heard Jez Butterworth being interviewed at a small literary festival recently. Inevitably much was focused on Jerusalem - a play that few would disagree is a theatrical event the like of which appears rarely. How much of its impact is down to Mark Rylance whose Rooster Byron, the play's charismatic anti-hero, is such a tour de force? Butterworth was generous and humble about this.

He wrote a first iteration of Jerusalem for the Royal Court nearly ten years ago - and it was a disaster that he put in a drawer to forget. He met Rylance quite recently and asked him down to stay at his home on Exmoor. One evening, by the fire, Rylance read Ted Hughes's Daffodils. The hairs on the back of his neck were up and he realised that he had that rare opportunity to create something exceptional for an actor of greatness - and that he had better not mess it up. This and a deadline. He talked a lot about deadlines.

He is a writer for the theatre for a good reason. He asked us to imagine a cinema with an audience of two and then the same in a theatre. In the cinema a tiny audience would make no difference but in the theatre it would be a disaster because there is always a two-way interaction with the stage that, at its best, lifts the experience to a place that the cinema cannot go.

He was interesting about the creative process. He was driving one day and a line popped into his head: 'Rooster Byron called down a curse on Kennet and Avon District Council'. Just like that. From this came Jerusalem. And the secondary characters? He described it as like opening a door and finding a room full of people already there. I get that.

It seems as if the newspaper industry has decided that it is going to die - killed because it got eaten by its online offspring, a brat child that refused to pay its way. No one will pay for online content seems to be the accepted wisdom. Maybe. But perhaps they are offering their readers the wrong thing - an outdated package. Maybe they are failing to use the online medium properly and missing a huge opportunity.

Take the Times. Their app is a beautiful thing: convenient, slick, readable and inexpensive. So what's not to like? Well the first thing is that you can't buy a single edition - you have to buy a subscription for a month. And that is a calendar month, so if you know you are not going to want it for the next two weeks you are paying for it anyway. You can pass a newsagent and get a single copy but you can't do that online.

Let's take this logic further. Maybe you don't want to read the whole newspaper but only some sport articles, a leader or two and an opinion piece. Why can't you buy individual articles? If the online subscription is paid through iTunes why not individual articles? Pricing? 5p a pop? At a level anyway that makes it as inconsequential as a cup of coffee.

The world has moved on. In the same way we don't necessarily want to buy a package of music in the form of an album any more, nor do we necessarily want to buy a package of journalism. We still want good writing and readers are prepared to pay for it - just not in the format currently on offer.

One of the more goulish things about being a pilot is that you get sent regular update on crashes - the idea being that it is less painful to learn from other peoples' mistakes than your own. What is amazing is how many experienced pilots make a perfect landing with their wheels up or take off with the dolly that is used to manouver the aircraft on the ground attached to the front wheel. Believe me, anyone can do it. I'm not a naturally methodical or careful person - except with flying. There is a check-list for everything or I know I'll kill myself.

With this in mind it was particularly shocking to read the recent account of the Air France Airbus crash that occured in mid-Atlantic in 2010 during a flight from Rio to Paris. It was a  mystery for a some time until they found the Black Box flight recorder - how, at the bottom of two miles of Atlantic, I don't know. What it revealed was that the pilot had stalled a perfectly sound, state of the art,  aeroplane from 37,000 feet into the sea. No mechanical, computer or airframe failures - only human.

The Airbus was in mid-flight when the Captain handed over to the experienced First Officer, who remained in the right seat, and the inexperienced  Second Officer who climbed into the left seat - traditionally the pilot's seat. The captain went next door to sleep. They were near the equator, an area of frequent thunderstorms, and they could see storm clouds ahead. The decision was made to climb through the top of
it. The fuel-heavy Airbus was not capable of flying over it.

The Airbus is a 'fly-by-wire' aeroplane with two 'sticks' beside each seat.In less sophisticated aircraft there is a mechanical linkage between the two sticks so that if one pilot pulls one stick back the other will feel an identical movement in the other. The airbus's arrangement is analogous to two computer mice where an input on one leaves the other stationary.

The (inexperienced) Second Officer, who had control,commenced a climb. As he did so, the pitot tube which allows air into the airspeed indicator iced up and  the airspeed was allowed to decay up to the point that the Airbus stalled - there was not enough airflow over the wings to create lift and the plane was falling, nose up, at a considerable rate. To get out of a stall, you  push the stick forward and wait until the airspeed has built up again before pulling back to straight and level flight. As the altimeter unwound the First Officer was looking wildly around for what was wrong. What he didnt know was that the Second Officer, for some unknown reason,had the stick held fully back - probably he had 'frozen'. The First Officer could not feel anything because his stick was standing in a neutral position. There were moments where control was regained but the pattern continued to repeat itself.

In a cockpit there is normally a clear pyramid of authority with theCaptain at the apex. When a Quantas flight recently had a multipleelectronics failure the Captain straightaway parcelled out tasks to the flight-deck crew to isolate the critical malfunction resulting in a close-run thing but no catastrophe. On this Air France flight, with only two secondary flight crew in the cockpit, there was crucial lack ofauthority, exacerbated by the inexperienced Second Officer sitting in the left seat. This arrangement was almost certainly critical when the Captain,just awakened and very alarmed, appeared on the flight deck. He sat  behind in the Second Officer's seat, and did not take back the pilot's seat next to the left stick. He, also, had no idea that that stick was being held fully back.Too late, only 10,000 ft above the sea,the First Officer realized whatwas happening and applied forward pressure to the stick which was cancelled out by the back pressure from the other seat and, still in a stall,the Airbus hit the ocean.

When you read the monthly litany of accidents it nearly always pilot error,of some sort or another, that is to blame. It is often to do with weather - get-home-itis as is nicknamed - or not noticing something wrong when a methodical check would have nailed it. This Air France flight must be right at the top of the tree when it comes to 'human factors'.

Apparently, and the story is too good not to be true, Terry Thomas once met Picasso. ' I say, old boy,' he said, 'could I have a  word in your eye.'

Dubai again. One of the authors was Darren Shan. I had never heard of him but apparently he is huge in teenage vampire - and same genre comic books. I can testify how huge: he was signing books for at least three hours and I suspect he only stopped because they ran out of books. Average age? Thirteen - and boys.

I'm in the wrong business - and certainly the wrong genre.

I was in Dubai last week for the Emirates Literary Festival - the first of many, I hope. What's not to like? Staying in a lovely hotel, meeting some great people, hearing interesting thoughts, having breakfast in the sunshine and being given the opportunity to talk about yourself for an hour with no one telling you to shut up.

Each time I land in Dubai my jaw drops. Every five years or so it becomes unrecognisable with an new Manhattan springing up out of the desert that makes the last look rather provincial. The Burg Kalifa, now the tallest building in the world, is surpisingly beautiful and the fountain show that plays in the artificial lake in front of it is an aquatic firework display the like of which I have seen nowhere else. It is however a very odd place: hookers with dresses that are barely decent walk alongside women in burkas; there are only two million people in a city that looks big enough to swallow three times that. It has the carbon footprint of an elephant in an age of concern about global warming and it is the money laundering capital of the world when that is supposed to be squeezed out of the global financial system.

Above all there is the sheer incongruity of this temple to Mamon and pleasure rising out of one of the hottest and driest places on earth right next door to Saudi Arabia. As I was wondering about this I had a thought: who, fifty years ago, would have guessed that Dubai would look as does.....at the same time as Detroit has all but crumbled into the dust. My guess would be no one. But it does make you wonder what will look like what in another fifty years.

I was listening to a programme on the radio about Plate Tectonics yesterday. Two things particularly struck me. The first was how new the science was; for something that explains at a profound level how our planet is formed it seemed amazing to me that the theory has only received widespread acceptance in the last thirty years. How did people think mountain ranges and oceans were formed before? Volcanic activity is a plausible explanation but there was one huge phenomena that defies any other answer than plate tectonics and it is how the Atlantic did not fill up with the vast amount of silt disgorged by the rivers of Africa and America.

The interesting thing about this question is that nobody asked it. The physical facts were there to be wondered at. For many centuries we knew how vast the Amazon and Congo deltas were and the sort of volumes of debris that they produced and had produced for millennia: so where did it all go?

The answer we now know is the process of subduction, where one continental plate slides under the other and in the process takes that silt back into the earth’s core to be, in a sense, recycled. This theory, or fact as it now is, explains why the Atlantic is still there and full of water - so why had no one even asked that question? Perhaps it shows the weakness of the scientific method in that it is all very well ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as Newton put it, but even he needed an apple to fall on his head to make the big leap.

I’ve never remotely considered myself a techie but I found myself today on a one- day course on coding. The website www.decoded.co (sic) was a good one and they promised that I could learn enough about code in a day to build a website – and I did. It wasn’t a very sophisticated site and I’m not sure that I could repeat it in short order – but it was a functioning website.

Why bother?

First, to learn the language. Techie talk is a foreign country to anyone not involved in that world and to be able to talk to someone doing any IT stuff it is good to know what they are talking about and why it matters. This involves a history lesson on how the internet came about and the practical and commercial forces that shaped it. In itself this would have made the course worth doing as you appreciate the extraordinary tug between the monopolist tendencies of the tech giants and its opposite, the altruistic sharing of information and advances by people who don’t see the web as a commercial venture but as a the modern tool of human advancement.

Second, to understand how the various factors used to build a website work –HTML, CSS and Javascript. What I came away with was a grasp of the sort of logic you have to use when dealing with any programming. We are all used to making intuitive short cuts that take you from A to D without going through B and C. With computers you have to follow the logic – which is surprisingly difficult. I don’t want to become an expert in it but if I have to commission work from someone else, I want to be able to ask the right questions and, even more importantly, make the right demands.

Lastly, to stretch your brain. The guys running the course were highly intelligent - but one in particular had that rare ability to explain complicated ideas with great eloquence and sophistication. The other attendees were varied – most, but not all, with more prior knowledge than me – and they shared it well. I was hanging on by my fingernails at some points and felt like my mind had been for a workout in the gym afterwards.

It’s fun to do that every now and then.

Kim il Ju, Bashir Assad and Said Gaddafi: they are painted as sinister monsters, taking over the tyranny of their fathers and willingly slaughtering dissent to keep their oppressive regimes going. It is as if wickedness and tyranny are in the genes. But perhaps we should actually feel sorry for them as maybe they should be seen as victims of their heritage, condemned to play out a role that they would never have chosen for themselves. They have a choice, is the obvious retort - but what real choice is there when family, patriotism (as they are conditioned to see it) and even plain survival are all at stake?

I look at Bashir - a doctor in London for many years - and I don't see the sort of sadistic monster that Saddam's repellant sons had become. He seems more a man 'in so far' but not really knowing how to get out. Events, and a more ruthless brother, seem to be taking him to a place where he is far from comfortable. Was Said Gaddafi a Janus faced hypocrite - or someone whose liberalism wilted in the showdown between ideals and family? Who would envy Kim junior, in a guilded cage surrounded by a Praetorian Guard for whom he is a disposable pawn any more than you would envy the Chinese emperor Pu Yi - of The Last Emperor fame? They are all children of men with a ruthless lust for power whose tastes they probably don't share but who have inherited their fathers' poisoned legacies.

Perhaps the key test is whether you would change places with them - or more importantly, would they change places with you? Their fathers wouldn't - but I would be pretty certain that they would.

Global warming is a bad thing. Or is it? Compared to the status quo – which is all we have to compare things with - it would seem to be fraught with problems.

But the status quo is not an option, because the climate is always changing if you think in thousands, rather than tens of years, and very recently – only twelve thousand  years ago  - it was very cold indeed with ice-sheets covering the UK. Most of Europe had a climate not dissimilar to Greenland today.  This was preceded by a warm phase that was in turn preceded by another ice age. If this pattern of oscillation between hot and cold is a regular one then we should now be looking down the barrel of a cold phase that would leave most of the world outside the tropics marginal if not uninhabitable.

What has stopped this happening? Well it looks as if might well be the man-made carbon emissions that started with the widespread introduction of agriculture and which has dramatically accelerated since industrialization and the global burning of fossil fuels. It is probably this warming that has prevented another Ice Age.

Is that such a bad thing?

Every day seems to bring yet another story of Israeli persecution of the Palestinians. Any criticism is met by accusations of anti-Semitism as if that is the card that trumps any rational or humane argument. It is the attitude of a petulant adolescent, not a grown up – as was well described by Tony Judt, the historian, who was well able to say these things as he had been a kibbutzim and served in the Israeli army.

A visit to Israel is fascinating – one of the most interesting and valuable travel experiences - as it is very difficult to have any understanding of the issues there without a feel for the geography on the ground. The abiding impression is how small it is. From the Mount of Olives looking down on Jerusalem you can see to the Mediterranean one way and to the Dead Sea the other – across the width of the country and you could drive from top to bottom in less than four hours. For anyone bought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, every place name is redolent with history and legend – Jericho, the Baths of Bathsheba, the Garden of Gethsemane, Masada ; who could not be moved by Jerusalem and its extraordinary history? Equally, when you see on the ground just how the settlements have been stamped all over the West Bank as a crude and brutal land grab it is difficult not to share the anger and despair of the Palestinians

However, despite its current iteration as a regional bully, the story of the creation of state of Israel is still one to wonder at. What other nation, after a diaspora of two thousand years, has retained its sense of identity to the extent that the Jews did? There is something miraculous and moving in the experience of the Israeli paratroopers capturing the Wailing Wall of Solomon’s Temple in 1967 having kept alight the candle of nationhood through persecution and exile for so many years.

This sense of young nation living on the edge was very powerful when I first went there nearly thirty years ago. Aside from the historical and geographical experience the strong memory for me was one of a society that was very different from the one I was living in. The food was simple and there was little drinking. The young people of student age were nearly all in uniform and it was commonplace to sit in a café next door to fit and lean men and women with their guns scattered over the table. The culture was of a frontier society – ascetic almost. It was also a vibrant and noisy democracy where politics were heatedly discussed over tables and in newsprint; Israel had recently invaded Lebanon and the issue was a burning one.

Visiting it again with my children recently was intriguing. The Palistinian question has ossified into a brutal land grab and statement of separation given physical form in the wall that separates the two peoples. We were driving to the Dead Sea and were trying to find our way through – there are no road signs or any obvious gates. We spied two Israeli soldiers and wound down the window for enlightenment. One shrugged. “Why don’t you go and ask the fucking Arabs down there” was all he said. “Welcome to Israel” was what I turned and said to my shocked passengers.

But the most abiding impression for me was the change in  society. The ascetic has been replaced my materialistic. It looks and feels like America – no lean, tanned reservists but many podgy and spoilt looking young people of both sexes. The usual mass-affluent brands are there in abundance as well as restaurants and bars which are full. The feeling of a frontier society has disappeared. This is, of course, a generalisation - but it it is an impression and not an attractive one. Then nor is a bully attractive - nor an adolescent who accuses anyone criticising their behaviour of child abuse.

 

When I am in London I stay in Orme Court which is next to Queensway - just off the Bayswater Road. It's not famous for much except the Opus Dei in England is based there and it featured in the Da Vinci Code. But any taxi driver knows where it is because, at the start of the their career they all had to pass 'the knowledge,' the test that showed that they know pretty well any street in London. The examiner was (is?) called Mr Orme and apparently he had (has?) a parrot that sat behind him while he asked the questions.

The experience is burned into every cab-driver's brain along with his name.

Apparently the new high speed link between London and Birmingham will take half an hour off he current journey. The cost is a scar through some of the loveliest country near London and a cost of $32 billion. To build or not to build? There is a solution: only make the high speed line one way from Birmingham to London. After all the quicker you can get away from Birmingham the better - and who would want to get there any faster?

I have invented a new word:

Peecrastinate    Verb: to irrationally put off getting out of bed for a pee when you wake up in the middle of the night

Where I live in Somerset it is dairy country – small fields and hedgerows interspersed with woods many of which are recently planted. Looking at it from the hill above our house I reflected that this is a landscape in transition and one that will look very different for our grandchildren than it did for our grandparents. For them, pre-war, it was a vale of hedgerows thick with trees – one every ten yards or so, mainly elms. Now the hedgerows remain, protected by law, but now largely denuded of trees. Elm disease cut the first swathe. The second has been more gradual but no less destructive: the mechanical hedge-cutter.

In our grandparents’ day hedges were cut by hand. They were allowed to grow out for a few years and then cut and laid in the winter with thorn shoots growing up to form a stock-proof fence every bit as impenetrable as a barb-wire. As the hedge-layer picked his way along and came across shoots of ash, oak or elm he  would leave it be – to grow ultimately into the mature trees that we now see but which are now at the end of their lives. The problem is that as they die they are no longer replaced. Instead the hedge-trimmer, the driver in a sap-spattered cab paid by the metre,  simply flails the hedge into a uniform shape taking no account of the saplings fighting to get up and out. The result? Lots of hedges – but no trees in them. Instead plenty of new woods planted in fields once considered to valuable for woodland.

What can you do if you own a mature hedgerow? I have found that a scaffolding pole placed vertically next to a potential oak or ash tree works wonders. Flails and scaffold poles don’t mix. Warn the contractor beforehand and you will see the fruits of your efforts in a handful of years.

We live in rural Somerset. Bristol is an hour’s drive away, as is Bournmouth; Yeovil, hardly an economic powerhouse, is the closest town of any size. Yet when I look into estate agents’ windows there is no house, not even a two bedroom bungalow, that is below £170,000. Anything that resembles a family house is well north of £250,000. The average wage locally is around £23,000. The maximum loan-to-value for any mortgage is now 5:1 - if you’re lucky.

There seems to be a big disconnect here. Anyone not already in the property market must now be effectively disqualified unless they are the lucky recipient of a lottery win or an inheritance. The only buyers must be those swapping similar value properties or investors in the buy-to-let market.

It tells you that the mainstream property market in the UK is overpriced and probably only being held up by ultra-low interest rates and lending criteria that, unlike in the US, mean that you can’t hand back the keys to the bank without potentially risking personal bankruptcy. This last makes the market more stable – but mean that prices don’t adjust so fast to economic realities. Reality will catch up – it always does – but it just means that the time when our children will remotely be able to buy a house will be many years away.

Ever since studying the English Baroque at university I have wanted to see Wren’s Great Model of St Paul’s. It is not the model of the cathedral that was actually built following the Great Fire, but the cathedral that Wren wanted to build. It was a domed building in the form of a Greek Cross – of curved lines joining the nave and the transepts – cleaner and more sculptural than what we see today. Crucially it meant that the altar would be under the dome in middle of the cathedral – and that did not go down well with the clergy who were wedded to the traditional layout of such buildings with the congregation at the west end and the clergy and altar at the east end, cut off by a rood screen. This was, after all, the first cathedral built since the reformation.

Though the newly restored King Charles the Second supported Wren’s concept of a classical church of the Renaissance, the clergy prevailed and the present St Paul’s, surely the greatest building in Britain, is something of a compromise – though less so now as the Victorians dispensed with the rood screen that Wren was forced to include.

The Great Model is located on the Triform – the ‘first floor’ that runs above the aisles either side of the nave and round the west end of the church where it forms a gallery that houses the trumpet pipes of the organ. This organ has over seven thousand pipes. The tour is called the Triform Tour and you need to have a minimum of five people but it is well worth it. Hardly anyone does it. The guide was a retired structural engineer who was fascinating on the arcane details of the massive construction – and while the view from below, so to speak, is impressive – that from above is spectacular.

The Triform itself feels like a neglected store room – which it is – filled with pieces of stonework and sculpture and, most interestingly, pictures, prints and plans of St Paul’s from its medieval incarnation, through to the present day. The Great Model itself is in a separate, locked room. It is about ten foot high and twenty-five foot long and built with huge care and detail. You can look inside and form a vivid impression of what the interior would have looked like. It cost over £500 in 1670 – the price of a quality three-floor town house at the time.

Afterwards we climbed to the top of the dome where there is a round glass porthole in the floor. This is the ‘eye ‘ of the dome and the view down to the ant-like tourists below is vertigo inducing. The vista from the gallery just below the cross outside must be the greatest in London.

This must be one of the very best things you can do in London. It is that very rare thing – fun for all the family.

                   



The Great Model was constructed, beginning in 1673, by two London joiners named William and Richard Cleere, at a cost of £500. It does not represent Wren's first thoughts, nor does it reflect the Cathedral as built; but it does appear to show what Wren would have liked to build, if he had not been subject to the opinions and wishes of the Dean and Chapter.



The quality of the joinery is superb, and it is adorned with exquisitely-worked cherubs' heads, flowers and festoons. As originally completed, some of the detail was sumptuously gilded, and there were tiny statues on the parapets, which are thought to have been Wren's first commissions to Grinling Gibbons.



The model was restored and re-installed in the Trophy Room in 1998.

I went to a charity dinner recently in the Great Hall of Lincoln's Inn - a
magnificent Victorian paeon to the medieval gothic. The Inns of Court are
the closest in London to Oxford and Cambridge colleges, havens of quiet
away from the hurly-burly of the City and the West End,

Their denizens, the barristers, Queen's Councillors, firms of family
solicitors and judges exist in a world that for many, if not most, has been
familiar throughout their lives. The halls and courts look similar to their
schools - Eton, Winchester, Harrow, Westminster and, indeed, any of the
19th century  public school creations. From there they moved to the
colleges of Oxbridge, dining in Hall and living in sets in the courts and
quads, looked after by college servants - scouts and bedders depending on
whether their college was on the Cam or the Cherwell

The Inns of Court would be entirely familiar, with similar clubs,
traditions and servants. Those that work there may go through their whole
life knowing little else. Out of touch? It would be hard not to be.



The Great (or New) Hall, Lincoln's Inn. Philip Hardwick, with Philip Charles Hardwick. 1843-45. London, WC2. Photograph and caption by Jacqueline Banerjee, 2009.

For the last two years Exhibition Road,  which runs from South Kensington
up to Kensington Gore and Hyde Park, has been a chicane of workmen and
roadworks undertaking one of the boldest and most imaginative overhauls of
an open public space in London. It is the most visited place in London,
with millions of tourists visiting the  museums that are the great legacy
of Prince Albert.

It is now unveiled. Instead of a tarmac road populated by cars and
separated from a pedestrian pavement by barriers, there are now white
cobbled St Andrew's crosses stretching from building to building either
side with no railings in sight. Walkers and taxis share the same space -
but not entirely: the bottom section from the Cromwell Road to Prince
Consort Road that incorporates the Science Museum and Imperial College
keeps the traffic to the east side but only demarcating this with benches
and Boris-bike racks. The idea is that when barriers are removed, those on
foot or those driving both keep a more careful look out for each other.

Instead of the depressing sodium or orange glow of the municipal street
light there are 'flag poles' with integral spot lights that look
magnificent as they stretch up the hill towards the Park.

it is a project that has been done with style, imagination and materials
that will last - a great street for a great city. Hats off to Kensington
and Chelsea, Westminster, Transport for London and the Architects Dixon Jones.

What next? Any of the awful London roundabouts: think of the change for the
better when Trafalgar Square or the area in front of Buckingham Palace were
reclaimed for pedestrians. Sloane square is an obvious candidate.
Parliament Square? Think bold.

Cultural criss-cross ... the new-look Exhibition Road in London. Photograph: The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Only in England.

I overheard my own conversation with the ticket collector on a train this morning – an entire dialogue, making complete sense to both parties, consisting of only four words words.

Conductor: ‘Thank you?’

Me: ‘Waterloo please.’

Conductor takes credit card.

Conductor: ‘Thank you.’

Me: ‘Thank you.’

Conductor hands over credit card machine.

Conductor: ‘Thank you?’

Me: ‘Thank you.’

I hand it back.

Me: ‘Thank you.

Conductor hands over ticket.

Conductor: ‘Thank you.’

Me: ‘Thank you.’

Anyone who has opened a bank account, or done anything that is vaguely financial, will dread doing it again. Aside from the money-laundering tedium and the endless forms about risk profiles, there are disclaimers covering pages of small print that make you lose the will to live. And this is for grown-ups who know what they are doing.

And for what? Still the Madoffs appear. Still the system gets blown apart by regulators, politicians and bankers who, steered by dodgy economic models, allowed us to get into the mess we are in and in the process destroy more pensions and investment nest-eggs than any two-bit swindler or incompetent ever dreamed about. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) must be the best example anywhere of tidying the deckchairs on the Titanic.

But it is worse than that. If you could say that ordinary people – or even more importantly those least able to deal with financial matters – were getting good, impartial advice as a result of all this paperwork there would be at least something to put on the other side of the ledger. Unfortunately, in what must be one of the greatest examples of the law of unintended consequences, this could not be further from what has actually happened. The reality is that the costs imposed on banks and financial advisors to provide this advice for those of small capital and lower incomes has now become so high that they have effectively exited this business leaving a vacuum in its place. So those that most need advise and help are left to swim in the shark-pool on their own.

Will the Coalition do anything to roll back this legacy from Labour? Don’t hold your breath as Parkinson’s law on the triumph of red tape over action and humanity will inevitably come to be proved once more.

Is  the printed book's six hundred year technological reign - surely one of the
greatest ever, about to come to an end? Is it now all Kindles and Ipads? Is
the great joy of the first visit to a bookish house where you can work your
way through bookshelf after bookshelf before lunch about to go the way of
the polaroid camera ?

Like most things of pleasure it comes down to taste. I have friend who only
reads on a Kindle. But I don't like it - the greyness, the fade and reform
of the page turning - and its size. It travels with me, but somehow always
manages to discharge itself and rarely gets read - only if the
printed word is missing or the Ipad has gone flat.

In contrast I love reading on my Ipad. The size is just right and the
quality and contrast of the lettering is as good as the best of printing. I
like the way the page turns - better than the 'real thing' and, above all,
I am sold on the back-lighting - you can set it to just the right level to
suit your eyes and it is God's own gift to the insomniac who shares a bed with someone;
no bedside light needed - you just pick it up, open it and read. With no
weight of pages to support, or direction of light to worry about , you can
lie on your side and read until sleep takes you away. Its not great in
direct sunlight - but hey, I live in England.

So everything to the Ipad? Novels - and for anything with a narrative arc where the
direction of travel is one way it is perfect. Where electronic  doesn't work as well
is with writing  that is for dipping into, history with illustrations,
science books or just about everything to do with the arts; here the book -
hard-backed, indexed and layered with photographs, still rules over
the digital version.

But there is also a growing hybrid area where multiple media are embraced by the electronic version.
For example, take the 'book' of Simon Schama's TV series on America. On the
electronic edition you can read Schama's prose, intersperse it with film
and audio clips from the archive and, when you have to get into a car, hear
Schama reading to you as a audio book. The publishing potential here is
huge.

Does this mean the death of the small bookseller - or indeed of anyone who
can only do dead trees? Hopefully not, as you can buy your electronic books
now through a website called hive.co.uk where you nominate your
local bookshop to get a cut of the  price. It won't just be Amazon who wins.

So back to the book on the shelf, the decorator of many houses where
the walls are covered with bookshelves rather than pictures. I doubt if I
will ever ask for, or be given, an ebook for Christmas. I may often have a
paper and an electronic copy of the same book - particularly novels where
my preferred medium is already the Ipad.

And for writers the electronic version has much to recommend it; after all the
key thing about an ebook is that a person buys it and reads it and can't
pass it on to his friend - as is so often the case with  the dead tree
version. For publishers there are probably more upsides than downsides.

For small book retailers - already under siege from not just Amazon but
also from the omnipresent Tesco and Waterstones, the future looks bleak but
could be turned around by the likes of you and me if we patronise them in the
proper sense of that word - visiting them and enjoying the
browsing, buying presents and asking for recommendations - and by using
Hive.co.uk for electronic books. And principally by believing that books are
a pleasure, not a commodity to be bought on price only. In the larger scheme
of things the difference in price between Amazon and your local bookshop is
less than a sandwich - which for something that will give you a week's
pleasure is not a lot.

How could I have got to fifty odd, have been to Paris many times and never
visited the Louvre? Pas possible! Queues snaking round the pyramid,
strikes, other things to see, eat and listen to all did their bit. I
finally made it yesterday evening - and friday evening when it is open
until late is great time to go.

And what a feast! The greatest anywhere surely? It is beyond cliché so I
won't try more hyperbole but only four impressions.

The first is size; not of the place - though that is awe-inspiring - but of
many of the paintings which you thought you knew intimately but of which I
actually had no concept  because photographs give you no inkling of their
scale: the Raft of the Medusa by Gericault  or the Death of Sardanopulos by
Delacroix are but two examples

The view of the Nike of Samothrace, the monumental Greek sculpture of an
armless winged Victory over the prow of a stone ship is unforgettable from
the end of a gallery looking as you do from below to its place at the head
of a flight of stairs. How wise it was to position it there rather than below
the IM Pei pyramid, as once considered, where the view would have been from
above.

I saw a graph today that is not for the faint of heart. It showed where the
UK, and almost certainly much of Europe  will be in thirty years time with
a horrible clarity. It showed the current levels of sovereign debt and on
top of that the unfunded government commitments going forward - pensions,
old age care and  health.

With the demographic profile that we know is our destiny, it is  clear that
the sort of welfare state that we have been used to now for two generations
is over. There is no way that any government will be able to pay the
pensions it has promised nor deliver the services that it still does
reasonably well. With the patent failure of our education system it looks
unlikely, to say the least, that we will be able to pull a competitive
rabbit out of the hat.

The stark reality is that we will move from being a rich nation to, if not
a poor one, then one where the contrasts between rich and poor become
shocking and where the look and feel will be that of Latvia rather than
Singapore. As in many things, America may be showing us our dystopian
future: think of the contrast between mid-town Manhattan and Detroit. This
is a contrast that you can glimpse now when you travel from London to the North
West of England: not many skinny lattes there.

One of the loves of my life is called Bessy; Black Bess to give her her
full name. She is half Springer Spaniel (her mother) and half Labrador - but
looks entirely like a small Lab apart from half a dozen white hairs on her
tummy and a propensity to 'spring' as quarters the ground ahead of you with her nose in that doggy world of olfactory pleasure of which we have no concept. When a genie gives me a wish, mine might be a minute ofthe dog experience of smell.

There is not a bad bone in Bessy's body. She is an entirely benign being
(unless you happen to be a rat or rabbit) and her affection knows no
bounds. Physical proximity is heaven for her and there is no better place
to be than lying in front of a fire enfolded  with her, feeling her soft
fur and smelling her doggy scent. Maybe Penelope Cruz might be better - but
Bessy is right up there.

But how shallow am I? I imagined her pink and hairless the other day. Would
any of us love dogs if they were bald? I doubt it.

The blond hair, that I cant help feel is kept in a studied state of disarray, is everywhere.  He is probably the most recognized politician in Britain – more than Cameron and certainly more than the geeky-school-swot lookalike now running Labour. He is also, despite his Turkish ancestry, the most English of celebrities – in the sense that it is hard to conceive of him flourishing anywhere else except in these sceptred isles: the thought of him in Germany is, well, unthinkable.

I was reading an article in the Figaro magazine last year which sought to explain Boris Johnson to a French readership - and it made fascinating reading. They asked the rhetorical question of how could anyone take this ‘bouffon’ seriously – and then answered it in a subtle and nuanced way. The author explained Boris’s social position: he is high society not High Society, part of a meritocracy  where he would be asked to the smartest of parties but without a debutant in sight. He could be a member of the Bullingdon Club with neither family money nor aristocratic forebears.

He also explained how the English (and I use English, not British intentionally) mistrust cleverness while appreciating intelligence – as long as it is disguised by wit and self-deprecation. This is the same trait that makes Jonathan Millar so miserable: he was born in the wrong place - in Germany he would rule the roost. He pointed out that far from being a fool, Boris is one of the most intelligent of public figures who has the high political nouse to understand, at a deep level what plays well in a society that is so finely tuned to class issues. He is the nob who isn’t one, with a huge brain playing the fool, the outsider who is an insider and the buffoon who is anything but.

He is recognizable everywhere he goes, impervious to gaffes because he just laughs them off, hugely ambitious without appearing so. He is ruthless while looking like a teddy bear. No wonder that French (and just about everyone else) scratch their heads at this particular phenomenon.

As we have all seen and heard over the last exciting months in Libya, it is a country of deserts and oil. In other words it has problems of water but not energy. What might surprise some people is that there are huge aquifers under the Sahara, a reminder that the Sahara was not always so dry and the reason that North Africa was the granary of the Roman empire. It is also why life can still exist there – principally in oasis towns like Gaddames – and how there are lakes in the middle of the sand sea.

This will cease soon unless one of Gaddafi’s more lunatic projects is halted. He conceived a plan of Pharonic scale to take water from these aquifers under the desert in order to water the agriculture of the coastal strip. This was by building pipelines big enough to drive a car down. For obvious reasons, this water is a finite resource; enough for the needs of nomads and their goats and donkeys but not to provide millions of cubic meters of water to spread over wheat-fields. If this resource is plundered at the current rate, cities like Gaddames will sink into the desert and an already marginal way of life disappear.

Libya has plenty of oil. Desalination is perfectly possible and sensible. But wheat-fields in North Africa? By any standards other than those of the unlamented, delusional colonel it is mad. But that probably won’t stop it. Corruption and stupidity are not, unfortunately, restricted to one man.

Does your brain change as you get older? Are you the same person at fifty as you were at twenty? I really don’t think so.

Some things are constant. You have a nature that is clear of nurture and where your hard wiring will produce similar reactions to things: I didn’t like heavy metal or celery when I was twenty – and I don’t now. But I do think that I deal with people and issues very differently.

This was bought home to me when I found a file from my first year at Oxford. This was neat and carefully ordered with, and this was what really surprised me, utterly different hand writing – legible, with well-formed letters. I now have difficulty reading what I have written in a hand that is forward sloping scrawl where conjunctions and prepositions look more like short-hand than something that is designed to record or transmit a thought.

Why should this be?

A guess would be that then my mind was fresh out of formation in an education that focused on all the left brain stuff – analysis and logic. It was about ordering and absorbing, in a rational way, imported knowledge. Intuition is not something to be encouraged in this environment.

Since then the other side of the brain has been allowed to work harder – creativity, intuition and trusting the subconscious. I now find that if I have a complex problem to resolve, I find that the ordered rational approach only goes so far. Better to think hard and then park it. It is amazing how the answer ‘appears’ out of nowhere the next day.

Blackberrys have had a more insidious effect. First, my attention span is not what it was. Looking out for emails six times an hour is not the friend of focus. And then there is the memory. That bit of my brain is now on my Blackberry where everything that comes to mind is instantly recorded on a wonderfully efficient mini filing system that is instantly accessible. What is difficult is to separate a possible mental atrophy that may be caused by over-reliance on the electronic brain and just plain middle age – CRAFT – Can’t Remember A Fucking Thing.

I told my father-in-law about CRAFT – which he hugely enjoyed. Instantaneously he decided to tell his wife over the telephone. ‘Darling’, I heard him say, ‘I’ve just heard the funniest thing……….what was it?’

On the Chilterns' escarpment, looking down on the Thames valley and towards
the cooling towers of Didcot power-station is the village of Ewelme. It is
all brick and flint and the epitome of an English village of farms and
cottages.

The church is rather special, a Decorated Gothic beauty that would be
entirely at home in Suffolk. It is part of an ensemble of buildings that
include almshouses and the inside is equally beautiful and interesting.

Of particular note is the tomb of Alice, Duchess of Suffolk. Her likeness
is in alabaster and of a delicacy that is Italian in form and finish. She
is lying, hands in prayer, with a look of calm repose - every inch the
duchess: Queen Victoria is supposed to have had the tomb inspected to ascertain
how the Garter should be worn.

Underneath is something quite different: a hideous , emaciated woman in her shroud with her face  twisted into the rictus of a death agony. It is shocking and powerful.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

The next year will be testing for the top end of the property market – particularly in London: testing because it will test the theory that central London property has become the a safe store of value, like gold and US Treasuries, in a world of incipient sovereign default - or its cousins inflation and currency debasement.

The question hovering around in everyone’s minds is “is this the big one?’ After the false starts, or rather stops, of the last twenty five years – the crash of 1987, The Russian Default of 1998, the Millennium tech bubble and the bankruptcy of Lehman’s – is this now the beginning of not necessarily a depression but the sort of Japanese semi-permanent recession that has ground on for twenty years while the rest of Asia has boomed? And if it is, what does it mean for the prime property market in the UK?

The bulls point to affordability – which with current interest rates has not been as good for many years. They also point to the ‘lesson’ of the 1970s - that if we are in a stagflationary environment then quality property is the place to be as a ‘hard’ asset that will hold its value when fiat money is being debased. Anyway, whatever happens, so the upbeat story goes, the rich are always with us and UK property, particularly that in Central London, will always be in demand by the international rich.

The bears say “be careful what you wish for’. Ultra-low interest rates (which is the only reason property is currently so affordable) are only that way because if they were any higher they would expose the vulnerability of the property market – tipping overextended borrowers, and probably the banks that made them that way, into insolvency. Japan has been ‘affordable’, on this metric, for many years but who would want that? The inflation argument has more merit – though it would seem that inflation can come in many forms. The wage-driven inflation of the 1970’s doesn’t seem to be quite the same sort – essentially imported – that we have now. And the sort that central bankers seem to secretly want in order to sort out the seemingly intractable debt problem might be more difficult to dial to order than it would appear: volume of money is one thing; velocity another – as the Japanese have found out. It is interesting that the inflation-hawk Ken Rogoff, who learnt his trade at the knee of Paul Volker is now recommending limited inflation as a means of dealing with the debt overhang. Things must be bad.

But does any of this add up to a decline in property values in the prime areas of London? If we end up in a depression – or something that feels like it – then it is unlikely that any property will hold up. The inflation situation is more difficult to predict – but it is likely that property’s reputation as an inflation hedge might be a self-fulfilling prophecy in that it becomes that port-of-call of choice and gets bid up by everyone looking for the same protection – like US Treasuries in this current iteration of the crisis.

Will this be all property? Unlikely – as the sort of property that is dependent on bank lending won’t thrive in the sort of mortgage drought that we are in now. The deleveraging of banks is only at an early stage and they are also facing the headwind of Basel 3 - which can only suck future lending out of the system in order to satisfy the regulators’ demands for reserve capital.  And this is without any crystallisation of bad loans on commercial property or Greek and other dodgy Latin bonds. It is all very well the government telling banks to lend more – but they can’t do that and follow the new rules at the same time.

In practical terms it is likely that the markets that the international rich love most will do best – or least badly depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist (the joke goes that an optimist is someone who still thinks the future is uncertain). This means Central London and the Home Counties of the Wentworth variety. The rich domestic should be ok: this means areas in London like Wandsworth and Fulham where there is still the injection of new capital in the way of bonuses and where banks are comfortable lending on loan-to-value ratios that allow them a good night’s sleep.

In the here and now the market is doing what it always does when a crisis hits – it slows right up with both buyers and sellers sitting on their hands. At the lower, bite-size levels in London it is quite busy. At the top, where asking prices are often delusional, very little is transacting. In the country and in France, the optional purchases are being shelved for the time being: when all is said and done, no one needs to buy a second home in Rock or Antibes. Where a decision has been made to move the family home, and supply is always an issue, there a still buyers and active ones at that, though prices – asking prices anyway – are 10% less than six months ago.

One by one the traditional safe havens are looking less attractive. Even at current levels of inflation US Treasuries are costing you money – yields need to double to tread water. If the rational bond vigilantes start winning the argument then a hefty capital loss will be the result for that safe haven. Gold is – well, everyone by now knows the argument – but anything that has moved so far so fast is vulnerable. As the price rises, it attracts sellers who suddenly find that the necklace around their neck is a high proportion of their net worth – and suddenly the argument that there isn’t much more of it around is confounded. The Hunt brothers found this in the 1980s when they cornered the silver market to suddenly find it flooded by silver teapots from innumerable attics around the world. Cash? Which bank? Which leaves London property – illiquid, large bite-sizes - and no one would claim it’s cheap.

Take your pick.

The UK air traffic control centre  used to be at Heathrow. It's now at
Swanwick on the Hamble river, not far from Southampton in a huge modern
building. Visiting it was fascinating.

From this building all commercial as well as some, generally larger, private flights - are controlled and organised. In a vast room of computer screens, something like five thousand flights a day get delivered to and from airports all
round the world in and out of the UK. Watching the blips on the screen, particularly around Heathrow, you see how the controllers have to concentrate.

I learnt something about 'slots' - as in 'I'm sorry Ladies and Gentlemen
but we have lost our slot and will now be arriving fifteen minutes later
than scheduled'. I had always assumed that this was about taking off and
that the slot referred to the aeroplane's order in the take-off queue. In
fact, it is about when you land.

The ideal commercial flight is when you take off, climb to the cruising
altitude and land without any circling. Circling costs money. The problem
is that there are choke-points throughout the day - particularly in the
morning between 7am and 10am which is when every red-eyed businessman wants to arrive in London. The problem is that Heathrow can 'only' manage a
landing every seventy seconds so the challenge is to make sure that, with all the known knowns – speed, wind direction and distance – that each flight hits their place in the queue at exactly the right time. You see this graphically in bar-charts on screens as all the data of each scheduled flight is entered and the take off time given out - presumably by computer - as this would be a human challenge indeed when you see the numbers of flights and imagine them in three dimensions.

I now look at the orderly procession of jets over London with new eyes.

Italy in August: a tourist hell? It all depends on what you want to see and where you want to stay. If you want a tourist hell of the home grown variety, go to the Tuscan coast. Every Italian heads there leaving some of their most beautiful countryside empty.  On Lake Trasimeno, a sixty square kilometre lake in Umbria I counted two sails. Florence is a seething mass of sightseers with queues stretching half around the Duomo sweltering under Japanese sunshades as they patiently await entry. The Bargello you can walk straight into and have the sublime Donatello David almost to yourself. The Uffizzi doesn’t even bear thinking about. In San Giminiano you can hardly see the street for tourists. The Medici villa in Poggio a Caiano was empty.

The moral of the story? The ‘must-see’ sights of the world are probably best seen on television, in a coffee table book or at eight o’clock in the morning in January. The ‘second division’ – and you could, absurdly, put the Bargello in this category - are still accessible as long as they are nowhere near a beach. Little hill towns, sublime churches containing some to the greatest works of the Renaissance, and some of the loveliest countryside on the planet are nearly empty. Phew!

Every day I count my blessings for being born when and where I was. Someone probably said the same thing as he was looking out over the Bay of Naples from the prosperous city of Pompeii in 79 AD. We can’t know the future but we can appreciate the past – especially if you have been lucky.

As it is, I had the great good fortune to have lived, so far, in peacetime and in an age of unparalleled economic prosperity in a country of freedom and law in a middle class family with all that implies in terms of stability and education. I also hit, as a young man, the only twenty-five years in human existence when you could have sex without getting pregnant or contracting a disease that killed or ruined you. I missed the wars that devastated my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The newspaper headlines may make grim reading today, but reading  a copy of the Times from 1938, as I did the other day, and you get a real sense of perspective.

This is not smugness. Someone said that the there are too many people around who think they hit a home run - but started at third base. I hope that this is quite the opposite of that – an appreciation of the lucky spot I was born into. I didn’t deserve it – but I can appreciate it.

Apparently almost every mammal’s heart beats about two-and-a-half  billion times during its natural lifetime.

An elephant lives for about 60 years and has heart rate of about 30 beats a minute. A mouse lives for around 2 - 3years and has a heart rate of 500-600 beats per minute. And us humans? 60 each minute – but we live about 75 years. An anomaly? Not really. Life expectancy ‘in the wild’, without modern medicine, would be about 30.

An interesting aside on this modern longevity is the pension age. The first state pension was pioneered by Bismarck – who set the pension age at 60. The life expectancy of  German male at that time was 45. If you set the pension age at the same level in relation to modern life expectancy it would be at 90.

And the French civil servants go on strike against the proposal to raise the entitlement age to 66? Smell the coffee……

Last month a statue was unveiled in Grosvenor Square to the memory of Ronald Reagan. He is now celebrated as one of the great presidents of the 20^th century – by Republicans anyway. Many want to carve his head into Mount Rushmore alongside Lincoln, Washington and other greats. He was clearly a man of charm and decency but I would contend that, for Americans anyway, he was a disaster – and did more than anyone to set the stage for the post-imperial decline that America is clearly entering.

First, he won the Cold War. While this was unambiguous good news for nearly three billion Chinese, Russians and East Europeans who suffered so terribly in the ideological cul-de-sac that was communist tyranny, for Americans and the rest of the capitalist west it introduced three billion competitors who have hollowed out the industrial base that gave so much post-war prosperity. These three million now also compete for the earth’s finite resources, driving their prices ever higher. Selfish – but true.

Secondly, the cost of the victory has bankrupted America. During the 1980’s the arms race that Reagan initiated raised the US deficit to unprecedented levels. That may have been in order if the victory had been followed, as after most wars, with a scaling back of the military to pre-war norms. Instead the  military/industrial complex insinuated itself, alongside the financial industry, within the very heart of US government where they both have corrupted the political process to their own ends. Imperial overstretch is the commonly used description of its result, the consequences of which are now becoming clear.

Thirdly, he gave political heft to the academic theory that market forces know best. It was Reagan who set in motion the deregulation of financial markets that culminated in the disasters of the last three years – and disasters they are, condemning the developed West to a future that looks horribly like Japan of the last twenty years.

It is in Tiananmen Square, not Grosvenor Square the statue of Reagan rightly belongs. What an irony.

My father died recently. He had been ill for six months and died at home surrounded by those that loved him most, with discomfort but no pain. He and I had always had a lovely relationship and I was dreading his death; I had managed to get to fifty-four in the fortunate position of never having lost someone close. Friends had told me about the unbridgeable gulf of death, the terrible finality of it and the grief that I would feel.

It hasn’t been like that. There was plenty of grief to be sure – before he died. Tears would erupt at the oddest of times and I found it difficult to speak of him without choking. But since he died, hardly at all.

I have a strong sense of having absorbed him into my life. We had left nothing unsaid and his life had been happy and long. For my mother there is the terrible physical loss of someone with whom she had shared her life for nearly sixty years. Though we spoke at least once a week, we lived far apart and so that physical loss is not so obvious. I think of him often – but at the end of that telephone where he has always been. Even at their home – my home since I was born – I have a strong sense of his presence. This is not a religious thing but a feeling of him being in the very fabric of the building and in the flowers of the garden he loved so much. He is in the next room. It is the comfortable silence that exists between close friends who do not need to speak as they sit together in the same room.

Maybe this will change. I hope not.

We went on a wonderful trip to the Sinai a couple of years ago. The Sinai peninsula points into the Red Sea between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aquaba and is a mountainous desert. It also contains Sharma al Sheik, the Egyptian Benidorm that sucks in millions of tourists each year in search of cheap winter sun.

The interior is very different. This is the wilderness in which Moses and his chosen people wandered for years before coming to the land of milk and honey. This is where, on the top of Mount Sinai, he received the Ten Commandments from God. We saw it, possibly as he did, by camel.  We were accompanied by two Bedouin boys for four days, one of whom was deaf – a common affliction caused by the continuous interbreeding as cousins marry cousins. They were merry and chatty companions – but spoke not a word of English. They bullied their stoical camels whose hardiness has to be experienced to be believed.

During the four days the camels ate and drank nothing – well nothing that you or I would consider edible. After breakfast, the boys would rip apart cardboard boxes  - which disappeared as if they were the most epicurean delicacy. As they walked with their strange gait that is the opposite of that of a horse – a sort of side to side roll – they would reach down to graze on bundles of dry thorn that you would hesitate to handle delicately with  bare hands - and munch on it contentedly. Their mouths and guts must have the constituency of leather.

We wandered through mountains of harsh beauty. Occasionally we would come across the remains of a settlement where the outline of goat corrals and huts could be made out. We looked over what appeared to be a ten mile wide valley with mountains in the distance, to find that it was only mile across: such was the distortion of distance with no frame of reference there being no roads, trees, buildings or animals to lend proportion or perspective. The nights were freezing, despite wearing all the clothes we had, including hats, and being inside two sleeping bags. The reward is the great beauty of the desert - the night sky - with neither moisture nor light pollution in the air to dull the phosphorescence of the stars.

We finished at St Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai where we were to stay the night in the guest cells. During the day it groans under the weight of coaches delivering their shoals of tourists from Sharm al Sheik. The monks retreat inside the private areas of the monastery and no doubt pray for the seclusion that was the reason they came to such a lonely place. By early evening, when the last coach departs, silence descends and one can almost hear a collective sigh of relief.

It is a fascinating place. It enjoyed the protection of Mohammed himself and as a result was the recipient of the treasures of the monasteries of the Levant and eastern Europe as they were threatened by the Muslim armies that were sweeping all before them. The library is filled with the earliest copies of the bible. I was handed a 3^rd Century Greek codex by an Orthodox monk who spoke with an unmistakable Devon accent. ‘How did you get here’, I enquired. ‘The grace of God and a jet aeroplane’, he replied. In the courtyard is the Moses”s Burning Bush: next door to it is, I promise, a fire extinguisher. Near to our guest accommodation was an ossuary with the bones of centuries of monks piled from floor to ceiling. Both the summit of Mount Sinai at sunset and the Mass at dawn, with only the monks and four Serbian women wreathed in incense, were  unforgettable.

But he best was in the library. The Devonian monk showed us the piece of parchment that had protected this place for so many centuries. Mohammed was illiterate and instead, on the parchment, was a distinctive handprint – the handprint of Mohammed himself.

There was an article in the Times about erosion and the disappearance of a large amount of the east coast of England. There simply isn’t enough money around to build adequate sea defences to protect every cliff-dwelling house looking over the North Sea. You feel sorry for the individuals – but surely this was always a probability if you chose to live so dangerously?

But it is not a one way traffic. On the Wash – the strange area of water that divides Lincolnshire from Norfolk - the sea is receding. On the Norfolk side there are dykes behind which are hundreds of acres of rich sticky farmland that is quite different to the sandy loam further inland. This was reclaimed in the 1960s. What is interesting is what has happened to seaward of the dyke which, when it was built, was a sea wall onto which the North Sea broke.

Now it is marshland - invested by the high tide and awash at springs – but now definitely of the land rather than the sea: hundreds of acres of honking geese grazing on the salt-resistant grass and samfire before it peters into the sea. This process has taken only fifty years and when the next dyke is built that marsh will desalinate and become the rich goo that makes Fen farmers so prosperous.

You win some; you lose some.

During the Galastonbury festival there is a two-mile aircraft exclusion zone around the site. I flew around it a couple of times and it is an extraordinary sight – the size of a small town covering almost the whole valley floor - and the hills around as locals have cashed in and put up tented camps for refugees from the mud and the overflowing loos.

Two days afterwards, when the exclusion zone was lifted, I flew over the site. Every field was covered in tents, most simply abandoned but others trashed and piled on top of each other. There must have been tens of thousands of them – all probably containing discarded sleeping bags and other detritus of camping. Then there is the rubbish. Despite hundreds of huge litter-bins there is not much grass – or rather mud – that can be seen under a carpet of plastic and cardboard.

Michael Eavis, the owner of Worthy Farm, paints the whole event as some sort of eco, green and environmentally friendly affair. There is an irritating, right-on tone to it where you half expect to see Paul McCartney do one of his hippy V signs and tell you it’s all about peace and love, where horrid capitalism is parked in a corner for a long weekend.

Of course it’s not. It is a consumer pig-fest pure and simple - where middle class people take lots of drugs, listen to music made by bands that earn millions from them, leave all their rubbish where they drop it and then abandon their throw-away camping equipment when they go home.

I wish they’d just give the eco bullshit a rest.

My father is very ill. We sat together a few evenings ago, holding hands and looking out onto his garden, his creation over fifty years, in high English summer.

‘This is paradise.” he said to me, “Think of all the troubles across the world, and I am lucky enough to be here looking at this: it is paradise isn’t it?”

It is. And we need to remember it.

I had never seen an exhibition of Tracy Emin’s work before. No one could miss a life lived so publicly, so the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery contains few surprises: the masturbatory drawings, the diary entries, used Tampax and the films and photographs of her curious lopsided beauty.

The question that is always posited is whether all this is Art. If you think that all graphic art has to have its basis in skilled draftsmanship then the answer has to be no. There is little evidence of a technical mastery there: the drawing  (technically monoprints – inked-up glass with the paper applied on top) is clumsy and the paintings often just daubs of paint randomly applied to the monoprints.

But I think this misses the point. There is something magnificent about so much that is normally intensely private exposed to such a magnesium light. Her handwritten account of an abortion is coruscating in the rawness of the emotion and her agony of loneliness mixed with a compulsive sexuality has the power to move. And some of her painting, notwithstanding the comments above, are striking, though you feel that behind each one on the wall there were hundreds that the random technique she uses consigned to the rubbish bin. I particularly liked her wooden structures – there is a pier and shed that smells of her native Margate.

Can this celebrity life claim to be art? I think so - if that art is a reflection and interpretation of a humanity at a certain point in time. Solipsistic self-absorption is at the heart of our celebrity culture - and no one does that better than Tracy Emin.  The question is whether the qualities of an artist are something that are eternal - or would they fail taken out of the context of their time. How would the peculiar religious genius of, say, Michelangelo have fared in a secular twentieth century in the milieu of Picasso and Braque? It is worth asking the question not because there is any meaningful answer, but only to highlight the problem. Though she’s no Cezanne, I’m a convert - and feel a real affection for a heart so raw and exposed.

Finally it appears that the shareholders of public companies are beginning to say enough is enough and are beginning (it is only just happening) to veto some of the outrageous packages awarded to chief executives.

What happened to the remuneration committees of non-executives that were supposed to be doing this? Is it just a herd of pigs, all with their heads in the trough, reluctant to curb a their fellows because that would mean someone would haul their own snouts out? The cynical would concur with this -  but I think their sin is not greed but sloth - intellectual mainly.

The excuse given, by headhunters and directors, is that you have to pay ‘the going rate’ plus a premium to tempt away one of  ‘a limited pool of chief executive talent’. Sounds plausible - and of course justifies an ever-upward spiral in pay.

So why lazy? The supposition is that the pool is limited to those who are already chief executives – which it isn’t. There are plenty of Young Turks in the marzipan layer just below who have the potential to do the job as well, if not better, than ‘the limited pool’ and it should be down to the headhunters and non-execs to pull their digits out and for the first to find them and for the second to take a calculated risk in hiring them.

You don’t have to pay a premium to get these people – probably a discount. If they spread the net we may see something that hasn’t been evident for many years – deflation in executive pay and some sort of value for money reappearing.

The jerry can is a genuine design classic; classic in that in form and function it is beyond improvement. It is difficult to see how it could be made better.

As its name suggests, it was a German invention. The British first came across it during the Norwegian campaign at the very beginning of the war. They themselves carried all their fuel in cylindrical drums – difficult to carry and pour requiring a vent hole in order for the fuel to flow smoothly. The round shape made for inefficient stacking and storage.

They captured the German equivalent and simply adopted the design as they found it, realising that there was little to improve. It carries twenty litres – a man can easily carry two of these on his own holding the middle of three handles and two men can carry three between them holding the middle can by the outside handle. Its oblong shape stacks efficiently with minimum spaces between cans. The cap is attached to the can and seals without having to be screwed down. It pours smoothly with no need for a separate vent: I’m not quite sure how this works but it is smooth enough that a separate funnel is not strictly necessary. The size and shape meant that dozens of cans could be lashed around a vehicle to double its range.

There are plastic fuel cans of similar size today which are slightly lighter and which must be cheaper to produce but the chances are that, if you ask for a large fuel, can you will get exactly the same design that the British recognised as the ne plus ultra in 1940. That is a classic.

David Eagleman is well worth reading. He is a neuroscientist – but also something of a polymath and thinker of startling originality. What captivated me was his slim ‘visions of an afterlife’ called Sum. No angels sitting on clouds here and certainly no theology - but some wonderfully rococo musings on existence and consciousness.

For example he takes our bucolic daydream of living the quiet life of a horse, grazing in a field without a care in the world. How nice that would be in comparison with our busy lives. But he imagines one becoming a horse – the hooves bursting out of the toenails, the mane sprouting and equine muscularity subsuming a feeble frame. But also he imagines the Rubicon of consciousness that is crossed when you realise that the desire to be a horse is a human desire. As you become a horse you can only think like a horse and as you slip over that line you comprehend there is no going back. You are now a horse.

Great stuff.

Reading about the demonstrations in Syria, I was reminded of our own visit to Homs – one of the centres of rebellion – a few years ago.
We had taken a long bus ride from Palmyra, in the middle of the Syrian desert, to Homs on the way to Aleppo in the north. Homs was the centre of the rebellion against Bashir’s father – who dealt with the problem Tiananmen-style, leaving a reported twenty thousand bodies behind. The bus terminal was in the market which was also the taxi centre: taxis in Syria are very cheap. A big alpha-male driver ushered us into his mini van and off we set into the dusk for the two-hour drive to Aleppo.
We stopped in a suburb and were joined by a friend of the driver who took over from him at the wheel. It was now dark and we were driving along a road of infrequent traffic. The alpha-male then joined us in the back and it became obvious that this was a – maybe this is too strong a word – psychopath that we were with. There was no sense of personal space and a leering suggestiveness in his every gesture and word. He clearly thought that we were up for whatever he had in mind and, while neither of Amanda nor I said anything to the other, we were both thinking the same. He asked us where we were staying in Aleppo. I lied and told him that the British Ambassador was expecting us and that we had telephoned him just before getting into the van. It was the right thing to say as he virtually did a somersault back into the front seat. Talking about it afterwards we reckoned that messing about with tourists would probably result in a two-week rendezvous of his testicles with an electric cattle-prod.
Don’t let this put you off. Syria is a wonderful and fascinating country with delightful people. In nearly forty years of hitchhiking and travel this was by far the scariest moment. It ended fine – but it wasn’t one to repeat.

I fly a microlight and one of its joys is that you see England with new eyes. This is not simply an aerial view - which are breathtaking at this time of year with the countryside like a jewel with shades of emerald and gold - but an appreciation of the limits of how we normally see it.

When we travel, it is normally by road or rail. What do roads and railways do? They join up the ugly bits. Think of the M6: until you reach the Lake District it is almost continuously industrial and urban - Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester. No jewels here.

However if you fly only twenty miles to the west, parallel to the M6, you are over some of the loveliest countryside anywhere with hardly a blemish upon it. It's quite a privilege.

With the Chelsea Flower show in full sail, attention was rightly focused on the other side of Lower Sloane street from the former Chelsea Barracks. It also, rightly, reminds us what an important site it is and why what is built there must live easily with the Royal Hospital.

It was a close thing. Thanks to Prince Charles, Richard Rogers was prevented from imposing yet another carbuncle on London. Surely One Hyde Park, with all the architectural sensitivity of a car crash, is warning enough as to what damage he might have done on an infinitely more sensitive site. Having said that, Prince Charles’s alternative of Quinlan Terry was almost as bad in the other direction - with a proposal that might have done a Regency workhouse justice. Terry is a wonderful domestic scale classicist – but surely out of his depth on this scale.

It will be interesting to see what finally comes out. For me, the best idea for this site came from very talented developer friend. His suggestion was to keep the mass of the site as gardens and put two bold and imaginative towers along the southern end of the site, counterpointing the Battersea Powerstation on the other side of the river. Someone like I M Pei would have the sense of beauty of form to do it. Instead of fighting to overbuild the site, this would have given the Hospital room to breathe and give something exceptional to the skyline. It won’t happen – but it’s a shame.

There was something very moving about the Queen’s visit to Ireland this week. The weight of history was palpable but I don’t think it’s being sentimental to think that some sort of corner really has been turned and a return to the bad old days is unlikely. That was in the south.
In the north I sense a similar change that was vocalized by a friend of mine who is an old fashioned Ulsterman – Protestant and a landowner in the Ian Paisley heartland of Antrim. In the past he was Orange to the core and viscerally opposed to any sort of union with the Republic. Now he is cheerfully different. Why? ‘Because it’s not a theocracy any more – the priests don’t run it now.’
Put like that I now see where he was coming from. In the week when Garet Fitzgerald, the man who started that change died, and in the year when the Catholic church in Ireland has been so discredited by the child abuse scandals, there really is hope that the border could melt away over a generation or two. Or at least be the sort of Benelux border that you hardly notice.

Getting published is a great moment, without doubt. But that is just the start – particularly if you are published by a small publisher with limited budget for marketing.

The first problem is getting reviews. Without the heft of a big publisher behind you, or a track record, you simply don’t get any reviews - no matter how good the book.  The more you read reviews (and I read the Literary Review end to end and those in most magazines and Sunday papers) the more you realise that it is a closed circle of mutual back-scratching. And before you think I’m irredeemably chippy, I’m perfectly happy with that: today’s best selling authors were where I am thirty years ago - and I appreciate that spurs have to be earned. It’s a simple fact of life - which is frustrating but which you have to get used to.

What has surprised me more is just how difficult it is to get your book stocked by Waterstones in particular. The buying there is done centrally and the more you visit  individual shops, the more you realise that the old ethos of Ottakars (which was taken over by Waterstones about five years ago) - giving individual managers the freedom to stock what they want - went a long time ago. The same tables of "3 for 2" and the same promotions on the counter are in every shop. In almost every instance where I have been to see the individual manager and asked he or she to stock Silent Night, they have agreed. My experience is that these managers are genuine book lovers working in a sausage machine. Even when Silent Night has had some recognition – it was long-listed for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel – there was still no change of heart from the politburo at the centre of Waterstones.

In the early days, when someone asked me where it to get Silent Night, I would tell them to go to their local bookshop; this would normally be a Waterstones. Nine times out of ten it would be out of stock and they would offer to order it in. This would mean that you would have to come back to the shop in two weeks time and pay full price. The alternative is to go onto Amazon at home, read seven (at last count) reviews and buy with one click to be delivered to you at home within two days and cheaper. Guess what I do now?

I love my local independent bookshop (Bailey Hill Bookshop in Castle Cary, Somerset) who have enjoyed Silent Night and sold it hard – hundreds in fact. But Waterstones? They have an almost monopoly position that deserves to be squeezed between Amazon and the smaller independents who give people who like books choice, recommendations and service. When Waterstones finally goes under, hopefully these independents will be able to flower again out of its suffocating shadow. Amazon isn’t going away and ebooks are not good for bookshops, but there is still room for a good dead-tree retailer – I hope. I just hope it's not called Waterstones.

Much has been written about the cost/benefits of a degree. Aside from the cost it seems to me that there is a real problem about the content of a degree and what it is supposed to do. At the heart of it is the way academics view the world. For them a degree is just a stepping-stone to a doctorate and then to life of research and specialism. However, for the vast majority it is preparation for a career in something quite different, like business, and unless the degree is in something like law, its content (but not the discipline) is rather irrelevant.
Yet it seems that the content of an undergraduate degree is getting more and more arcane and specialist. A potential candidate for Oxbridge now has to persuade the their panel of dons that their lifetime obsession is in the recondite detail of some obscure subject. And when they are at university the subject gets narrower and narrower.
And in the real world? Life is getting more complicated and broad. People leave university with no insight into even the basics of business nor knowledge of the thought processes of different cultures and disciplines – surely something to find out about as part of an education for anything other than academia. Can this be right any more than primary schools not teaching touch-typing as part of the basic curriculum?
This seems to be a particular problem in the UK. My son is about to go to McGill in Montreal where he has been accepted by the Faculty of Arts – that is all. He can chose from a smorgasbord of subjects from Greek poetry through Finance to Politics. He can do a mix of minors and majors to come out with BA that seems to me to be both interesting, wide ranging and educational in the best sense of the word. There seems to be there a recognition there that an undergraduate degree is a separate thing from postgraduate work, undertaking a different task for different ends.
Unfortunately universities are run by academics and the prism they see things through is rather different. This is too important to leave to them.

I have just finished The Big Short by Michael Lewis - definitely his best
book since Liar's Poker lifted the lid on the ghastly world of the bond
dealers of Salomon Bros in the 1980s. By any standards the people and the
environment he described in Liar's Poker were deeply unpleasant - a
dog-eat-dog world of aggression and amoral moneymaking. But the bear pit he
described was just that - a mini-world of its own where consenting adults
abused each other in private with any victim as carnivorous as  the one
above in the food chain.

The Big Short describes something much more shocking. It paints a whole
financial system in America that went out of its way, unimpeded by a
corrupt governing class, to systematically rape and pillage the very
poorest in society to its own ends. It paints an incompetence,
irresponsibility  and greed within the elite financial institutions that is
breathtaking.

Billions of dollars - that's right, billions - are spent every year by
lobbyists in Congress on behalf of the financial industry. Their scions,
Rubin, Paulson and Summers to name only three have been deep in the
executive for decades. And, surprise, surprise,  the way the financial
system operates has hardly changed at all and the systematic fraud at the
heart of the sub-prime mortgage scandal has been gently whitewashed.

One has to hope that Lewis's book doesn't get read by too many people.
There would be a revolution if it was.

Reinventing yourself is one of life's privileges - and many people take
advantage of it. There are some people who keep popping up as different
people: one, who was at school and university with me, has metamorphosed
from a hippy to a punk and then to a hooray henry all before he was twenty
four. Since then he has been an oil driller and an architect. That was up
until ten years ago since when I have lost touch - but I would put money on
some new incarnation

If Facebook had been around during his serpentine career would he have been
able to pull it off? Would he have left too big a footprint behind him to
be able to make the changes in friends and contacts that such a career
would demand? While I find the intrusion of Google and Facebook vaguely
creepy, my children don't. Nor do they see the dangers of a very public
record of modern lives making a later reinvention at least much more
difficult.

But then they don't  think about this sort of thing very much. When you're
eighteen, thirty seems an eon away and someone of fifty only vaguely
different from someone of eighty. They may live to regret Facebook - but
it's too much fun to worry about now.

Holland is a sophisticated place - nowhere more so than in its laws on
cannabis. The common misconception is that cannabis and the cafes that are
a famous feature of the Amsterdam scene are completely legal normal bars -
but with reefers for sale.

Not quite.

First, these cafes are coffee shops where no alcohol is permitted. There is
a conscious effort to separate the two. Secondly there is a legal limit on
the amount of dope anyone is allowed to own - an amount much less than the
cafes have to carry as stock for their customers - so they are all
technically illegal. It goes futher. Smoking (tobacco) in a bar or cafe is
also illegal but there are many bars (normal bars) where you can light up a
cigarette and no one bothers you. A small amount of tobacco is allowed in
the coffee shops in order to roll a joint.

It all goes on perfectly happily because the Dutch seem to have a
sophisticated and pragmatic view of the law, where everything depends on
how people behave. If there is antisocial behaviour or criminality rears
its head, the police have all the powers they need to shut an establishment
down with no fuss. If the (normal) bar owner is a smoker and employs staff
who don't care, the police turn a blind eye.

This all seems to be a sensible way deal with the grey areas where there
is a disagreement on morality and where there is no victim - the argument
around cannabis inhabits this space. It accepts that the law has a capacity
to blunder and be ignored when personal morality is involved - as it was
when it tried to legislate on adultery in Augustus's Rome for example.

The blind eye has a lot to recommend it.

If you're rich enough to need to live in a tax haven, surely you're rich enough not to need to? I suppose where I'm
coming from is that I haven't been to tax haven yet that hasn't been
somewhere that I couldn't wait to leave, most egregiously Monaco, Guernsey
or the Isle of Man. What unites these places? What makes them so grim?

I went to a debate this week organised by Edelmans on 'The Big Society'. The panel was suitably worthy and included Nick Hurd, whose ministerial responsibility it is to propound the idea for the government, and various hacks across the political divide including Peter Oborne and Kevin McGuire from the Mirror. The argument, predictably, batted between the 'new vision of society' and 'a fig-leaf for cuts' without getting much above motherhood and apple pie. There was overall agreement that it was a ‘good idea’.

The question I wanted to ask, and which I couldn’t despite waving my hand (I never normally do this), was how the Big Society was going to work in a society of ghettos? Middle class involvement in village life is a given – its already happening – but what about the black spots of long-term unemployment where the middle classes only go to get votes or drugs? How is the Big Society going to work there? With the reform of housing benefit this ghettoization is only going to increase as the underclass is progressively ‘kettled’ in housing estates at the bottom of the pile rather than, as currently, mixed in with the rest of the population. I am not making any comment on the housing benefits reform but there is, it seems to me, an inherent contradiction and tension between that reform and the ‘Big Society’, one which this panel of ‘bien pensants’ failed to either identify or address.

I was in bicycling over Tower Bridge today and marveling at the bustle and energy of London. It bought back memories of twenty eight years ago when I was, for a brief period, a ship-broker in the City.

I had fixed a cargo of scrap from London going to I can’t remember where. It was not a glamorous business. However my broker friend and I decided it would be fun to go and have a look at the cargo being loaded down in the old London docks as we never normally saw what we were dealing with by telex or telephone across the globe. We went on his Norton Commando motorbike through the wastelands of Wapping where there was little building other than on the river itself. The docks, apart from redundant box-like cranes, our ship and its cargo were a scene of utter desolation, a monument to the work, or lack of it, of the dock-workers’ unions during the sixties and seventies. In the distance were the council block towers of Millwall and the industrial chimneys of Silvertown. Apart from the clattering of loading scrap the only noise was of seagulls fighting over a fish carcass.

We were standing on Canary Wharf.

Last September we sailed a small boat from Skiathos in Northern Greece to the Black Sea. It took us through the Dardanelles, the narrow straights that squeezes the Mediterranean into the Sea of Marmora and a waterway of such history that anyone with a sense of the past is left almost giddy: Xerxes with his bridge of boats, Jason and the Argonauts, Byron swimming the Hellespont and the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War.

The Gallipoli battlefields are tiny – measured in hundreds of yards, not miles. From the visitor-centre by Anzac Cove you can see the whole battlefield – a rocky hill covered in scrub falling down to beach that was not intended as the landing ground: an unexpected current, duff navigation and the usual chaos of war meant that the mainly Australian and New Zealand troops advanced up what must have been a killing ground. They nearly made it. Except for one man.

When I was studying history in the 1970s the role of the individual was unfashionable: history was made by deep economic, cultural and social forces, we were taught, that reduced individuals to the status of rocks in a glacier. Yet here in Gallipoli it is possible to see where one man’s actions changed of the direction of the world.

That one man was Mustafa Kemel, a lowly colonel commanding the regiment holding the hill above Anzac Cove. He went on to become the founder of modern Turkey, Attaturk. What was at stake was the course of the war. If the Allied troops had taken the hill – and they were in overwhelming strength – they would command the hills above the Narrows by Cannakale, be able to clear the batteries and minefields and force entrance into the Sea of Marmora. From there they could have gone on to bombard Istanbul, force Turkey out of the war and supply Russia through the Black Sea. Churchill’s strategic vision was brilliant – and it really is possible that the war could have been over in 1916. The Russian Revolution may never happened with all its baleful consequences and Germany may have never had the conditions that bred Hitler.

Except for one man. Mustafa Kemel’s regiment was almost overwhelmed. With suicidal courage he personally rallied his men, forcing them to fight at gunpoint, telling them that they had to die. At the same time, massively exceeding his authority, he ordered up reinforcements that just, and only just, managed to hold the line during that crucial day. Without question, without him the hill would have been taken.

And the world would have been different.

A huge improvement at Heathrow: the trolleys at Terminal Five. They have fixed back wheels and only the front ones move. No longer do you find half-a-ton of luggage slipping inexorably sideways into the greeting queue as you negotiate the final bend. No longer do you have to spend as much effort stopping the wretched thing going sideways as forward. It got me thinking. There are endless prizes for great design – but why not one for the truly crap; a bad sex prize for the people who are paid to make things fit for purpose.

Candidates? How about CD jewel cases? How long does it take for the hinge mechanism to snap? In my experience, in the brutal environment of a car with children – surely what they were designed for – about a week. What about labels on so-called high-quality shirts?  You raise a mortgage to buy a beautiful soft cotton shirt and what do they do? At the point where your neck is squeezed into maximum contact with the cotton, they attach a hard, normally synthetic, label that takes ages to remove and when you have finally prized it off,  leaves an Achilles Heel that always ends up fraying first.  Expresso pots – the stove version. Can you pour the contents without it dribbling down the front? I can’t. Black tie. Whose idea was that? Edward the Eighth I’m told. No comment needed.

At the very least it could be a new party game.

Sitting on a side-table we have a beautifully carved ivory ball. It was probably created in China. When? I have no idea. It is, more precisely, a series of five hollow balls, one inside the other, each intricately carved into a lattice pattern. Each inner ball would have had to have been shaped and carved through the aligned holes of the outer ones - work of immense patience and skill. It is the sort of creation that would only possible when life and skilled labour were cheap.

It fell onto the floor yesterday and two of the inner balls were broken. The anger I felt had nothing to do with any monetary value. It was a fury that the careful, painstaking work of maybe years of a man's life, probably a substantial portion of his adult existence, was lost in a split second. I imagined him squinting on his workbench in a  hut in China, carefully filing out each concentric ball so that his commissioner - a mandarin perhaps - could hold it out as conversation piece to friend who would marvel at its complexity for a few seconds  before returning it to its shelf.

Such craftsmanship is wonderful... and appalling... in the same thought.

Has a book ever saved the world? Literally? I mean actually stopped a nuclear holocaust. There is one and it is The Guns Of August by Barbara Tuckman. I had it in my hands today.

The subject matter is the lead-up to the First World War. It focuses on the events of August 1914 when control of events slipped so disastrously from the civilian governments  to the generals and their timetable for mobilisation. Once the first mobilisation of reserves was initiated by Germany there was a hideous inevitability in the automatic response of the threatened Great Powers. None could halt their mobilisation without fatally weakening themselves. Germany was dependant on its Schleifen Plan in order to defeat with France before the behemoth of Russia could marshal its huge manpower and commit her to war on two fronts.

During the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy, a callow commander-in-chief of generals whose huge reputations had been made during the Second World War, had been railroaded by those generals with assurances of military success as well as covert threats as to what would happen if their advice was ignored. In a relatively minor military adventure, Kennedy had been given a glimpse of problems of the momentum and pressure of the military machine that he recognised from his reading of The Guns of August.

All his senior advisors were required to read Barbara Tuchman's book. And when the 'big one' - the Cuban Missile Crisis - came round, the crucial decision-makers knew that the threat to world peace came as much from the Military/Industrial complex as from the Kremlin. Psychologically, they were prepared to resist the pressure of the generals  and sceptical of their promises. The Guns of August may not have changed the world - but it might have saved it.

The papers have been full of the promotion of Bob Diamond to the top job at Barclays. I am agnostic as to whether it is a good thing or not. On the one hand he is clearly able - but on the other, if he had been able to buy Lehmans or ABN Amro, as he desperately wanted to in the first iteration of the financial crisis, it would be his name in the rogue's gallery of former masters of the universe whose hubris created their nemesis.

But he was lucky....and that was always what Napoleon valued in a general. The saying that luck is only where opportunity meets preparation breaks down here. He simply got away with it because there happened to be a bigger fool out there, in the case of ABN Amro, or the FSA saved him from himself in the case of Lehmans. Just luck.

What is more interesting is the relationship between Diamond and John Varley, the patrician scion by marriage of one of the Barclay quaker dynasties. I know neither of them, but by all accounts they are polar opposites in temperament and background. Though Varley was Diamond's boss it was a primus inter pares relationship and made all the more intriguing in world of hierarchy, ego and aggression. It seems to have been one of those  productive relationships where each personality and intellect has the perception to recognise in the other qualities that they are themselves lacking. It must have had its rough edges but the result speaks for itself with Barclays one of the clear winners from the debacle.

These cooperative right brain skills are almost certainly as valuable as the left brain intellectual faculties that are so prized and nurtured by universities and business schools - but almost entirely ignored by them. Is this the new frontier for education? It should be.

3rd October  Tunis

A long day. A long week.

I left Somerset on Monday morning in dreary weather at 7am, just after dawn.. Half way down the take off roll the engine started running rough and I aborted. It’s never happened before and I wasn't going to launch myself anywhere - let alone across the Channel and the Mediterranean with a dodgy nodding donkey. No mechanic. I eventually located an engineer who had done some work on the engine before who appeared at midday - and after a full up and down and lots of telephone calls we pronounced it cured (if there was ever anything wrong).

An hour later I was being routed by Jersey air traffic straight over the top of their runway at 800 ft and then over St Brelarde's bay where we used to spend our childhood family holidays. One miserable sandwich later in Dinard (what has happened to French food?) it was south to the Loire which I followed for about fifty miles before the cloud started to get lower along with the daylight. It was time to land.

Chatellerault sounds nice - but isn't. The next day, scratching bedbugs, I got to the airfield at dawn and took off into glorious sunshine that went the same way as it had the night before as I headed south and east towards Lyons. Lesson No1 in flying is that the weather never, ever, gets better....so I returned to Chatellerault to think again.... in glorious sunshine. Tried again after midday having now missed the third Easyjet flight home from Nice. Same again so changed tack and headed south and slightly west(the wrong way) towards and beyond Limoges - which was a good call as the cloud lifted and the country become very beautiful. I saw a small airfield on the chart called St Flour in the Massif Central and landed for a pee and fuel. Wild place. Cows, cold (3500ft) and locals who looked at my registration number in disbelief as they combed the straw from their hair (the registration number is GEECC - Golf  Echo Echo Charlie Charlie and it was the Golf (British) registration, not the rather poor pun, that got them.

The last leg was magnificent as I climbed above the cloud and the Massif with the Alps jutting out to the East. When I arrived in Cannes, the culture contrast with St Flour was rather extreme when I parked up with all the Bizjets and helicopters. One more rotting le sandwich in Nice airport to round off a culinary experience only rivaled by Nepal.

I was back in Cannes on Friday to meet my  brother and sisteradventurers. As a general rule (moi aussi) most pilots are anoraks who think they are Spitfire pilots - but the advantage is that one can talk isobars and transition levels without your neighbour drowning in the soup having passed out with boredom. The disadvantage is that I may even start boring myself.

We set off early for a long day to Tunis across the Mediterranean. The weather was good on take off but the cloud descended as we approached Corsica - which turned out to be spectacular as I hit the coast at about 700 ft and was flying round Martello towers with a majestic background of sun and clouds over the mountains behind. Ajaccio air traffic was on strike (this is France, of course) so I routed inland, flying around the peaks en route to Figari in the south which is a rare beast indeed - a charming airfield.

The same could not be said of Cagliari in the south of Sardinia which turned our to be the most expensive pee I've ever had at Eu117 - though the handling girl (that's what she introduced herself as) was very pretty. I found myself sandwiched between a Ryanair and an Easyjet flight as I trundled my aerial lawnmower down the taxiway to take off. A bit grown up. The flight to Tunis was in formation with one of my new anorak friends. The sea was golden red in the late afternoon and it did feel like an adventure flying from Europe to Africa. A real big airport landing as well - thick with Jumbos and lots of technical stuff I only half understood.

4th October Gadames

Two days in the sun. Tunis is ok - but I don't think I’ll be booking the next holiday there.

There was a drama on leaving as the first Mrs Ellingworth called from the check-in at Heathrow to say that the computer had said no to her Libyan visa arrangements (she doesn’t ‘do’ water and was joining me in Tripoli). Needless to say the steel magnolia prevailed with five minutes to spare just as we were about to start up. Tunis Carthage is a grown-up airport with lots of huge flying hardware moving about. I had an inadequate photocopied airfield plan on which a B and an A looked like the same sort of blob. There was a bit of consternation in the cockpit when the instruction from the tower came to 'Taxi Alfa via Taxiway Quebec to Line up behind Quatar Air at Holding Point Kilo'. This was not a time to bluff. The controller was very nice and within two minutes a car with 'Follow Me' written on its back window appeared and signaled me to follow.

Nothing much that I saw of northern Tunisia made me revise my holiday plans - though the Roman Amphitheatre at El Djem was spectacular.

Only the Colosseum in Rome is bigger - and it dwarfed the little town that formed its skirt. It was a long flight to Tripoli and the controller routed me over the sea to the east of Jerbba which is supposed to be Odysseus's island of the Lotus Eaters. Ernle Bradford, who wrote a fascinating book about the 'real' Odyssey, reckoned that his hero left Troy and got caught in a Meltemi in the Northern Aegean and was blown south, past Crete to the coast of Africa. If you've ever sailed in a Meltemi you'll know that the only option in an open boat would be to run before it - so I buy the theory. And they reckon the Lotus was some very good weed. No wonder they stayed a few years there.

The flight was a tad under four hours and after about one and a half I began to regret the third cup of coffee and the second glass of orange juice at breakfast. I had a purpose-made receptacle specifically designed for such an eventuality - but I had never used it before. The seating in my (very little) plane is what would best be described as reclining - imagine lying back on a sofa with your feet on top of a Labrador. To complicate matters there is a stick between your legs (not that one). It was tricky, but deeply satisfying, until I hit a patch of turbulence. DIY laundry that evening.

We landed in Mutiga airport in Tripoli which Gaddafi shares with the military and the occasional internal flight. It was littered with old Antonovs and Tupolevs, with or without propellers. Amanda had arrived safely with an aeroplane battery that was sorely needed by one of the others in our party. It had had a medley of customs men somewhat flummoxed. She thought they thought it was some sort of sex toy.

Tripoli itself is rather pleasant. It has the typical corniche of most arab ports and a ramshackle mix of old Italian architecture - including Romanesque style churches from the Italian occupation (which was indescribably brutal) - and the arab venacular into which are threaded souks, Roman Arches and ruins. No one ever hassles you - the souk is still for locals not tourists -  and it has enough bustle to make it fun without being as over-powering as, say, Cairo. The colonel is everywhere in an array of pantomime costumes and green is the colour - green revolution, green square, green flag, green book - you get the idea...

We flew today to Gadhames which is on the Algerian border nearly 300 miles south-west of Tripoli. As one would expect, the country starts built-up and relatively fertile but the desert takes over after fifty to a hundred miles - a plateau of gulleys and small escarpments. There appears to be nothing there apart from stones and spinifex bushes. But people and animals are living there - goats, donkeys and camels in solitary collectives. Occasionally there is evidence of a water-hole but the thought that anything or anyone can live, or even think of making a living in such a baked plain, is humbling indeed.

We were flying at different levels at different times. Once away from Tripoli radar the choice is (unofficially) yours. It is quite difficult, with no human reference point, to feel how high you are when flying at low levels. A row of telegraph poles gave a useful reference. We were told that this problem of perception is accentuated over the sand-sea where we will be tomorrow. As a group we had our own frequency and so instead of the usual call-sign formality there was plenty of anorak-talk and the excitement of one of the party landing on a road to re-fuel. It was pleasant, every now and then, to climb to 10,000 feet and cool off in silky air away from the heat-induced turbulence of the surface.

Editors should be the heroes of readers and authors. They save authors from themselves and readers from authors’ egos. Consider: when did you last read a book that you wished was longer? Not in the sense that you would love the delight of a good tale well told to continue, but in the sense that you would want to eat a second pudding after a three course dinner. Difficult to remember isn’t it? Yet it seems that books, most egregiously biographies, seem to get longer and longer with stuff that shouldn’t even make it to the footnotes appearing in the main body. For example, in a biography I recently abandoned through sheer tedium, we are told, more than once, that the poet dined on oysters and champagne. Take a note publishers and authors: food outside a cookbook is never interesting - unless it killed the subject. The more famous and best-selling the author, the worse it seems to be. This is probably part of the disease of celebrity-worship and cost-cutting that is infecting all publishing: the more successful the author, the less powerful the editor. When costs are cut who feels the knife first?

Honour, pay and obey the editor should be a vow taken by both author and publisher.

I have just finished Peter Mandelson’s memoir. It suffers from neither being a good diary – immediate, waspish and unselfconscious - like that of Alan Clark, nor a memoir that has the benefit of time, consideration and perhaps wisdom. Instead it falls into the self-serving tedium of the minutia of the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of the political tribe. Its objective was, presumably, to prove, after all the gossip and backbiting, that New Labour was a serious political movement.

Does it?

What has hit the headlines is the dysfunctional relationship between Blair and Brown. Mandelson’s description leaves one amazed that Blair was so weak that he was unable to sack his insubordinate and destructive chancellor. Also that he was so irresponsible that he could promise to hand over the keys to No 10 to a man he knew was unsuited to the highest office - and then be mendacious enough to renege on the deal. I’ve always been a Blair admirer – but that is shaken by the portrait that Mandelson paints albeit, I think, unintentionally.

Or maybe Blair was simply politically weak. Maybe, he simply didn’t have the political roots and backing to face down the consequences of the sort of bloodletting that Macmillan practiced in 1962. Maybe, despite all of Mandelson’s efforts to paint a picture of a lasting political legacy, New Labour was only a will o’the wisp; a faction that ultimately signified little in the sound and fury of the grand Labour story. It is interesting that none of the candidates for the Labour leadership ever willingly mention the words ‘New’ or ‘Blair’.

I never saw it. All I heard was the shout of the guide, ‘Avalanche! Avalanche’ - and I knew it must involve me. I didn’t even look but dropped my poles (you ski in powder without the loops for exactly this reason) and pulled the rip-cord of my airbag. Whether the explosion of the bag, or the avalanche, pitched me forward I will never know. Instantly I was being washed forward in a grinding, churning mass of snow. The noise was intense but I was on my front and sliding downhill face-first – that much I knew. Was I holding my breath? I presume so. Survival kicked in. If you ski off-piste you think about avalanches: if you don’t you’re a fool. Cover your face I remembered. I made a sort of breast-stroke motion to get my hands to my face; without success as they kept getting swept away.

Then it stopped. From a growling, alive, thing it metamorphosed in an instant into a silent clamp. Silent that is apart from my breathing which was now loud in my ears and filled with adrenaline and physical exertion. I opened my eyes. White. Tried to move my arms which were outstretched and slightly behind me. Not a finger. Cold. No pain. Breathing; fast but unimpeded. Why? I have no idea except that I may have jerked my head back in the last split second before the concrete set. I knew I had to slow my breathing down. With each slowing breath I fell into a state of something akin to a trance; calm. Clearly, and this is very memorable, I had a lucid thought: ‘if this is it…..it’s not such a bad way to go'. No life flashing before me. No fear – just the realization that a lack of oxygen would mean that I would loose consciousness and die of slow asphyxiation; die in my sleep.

Practicality returned. Who was in this with me? There were eleven in the party. I knew there were around five below me and stationary. Had they been caught too? I knew that there were at least three well behind me, one of whom was, ironically, an avalanche expert from the Canadian government. Three to dig out eight: no good odds. Then I heard, very muffled and feint, a voice counting…. ‘eight, nine…..two in….go, go!’ I knew then that I would probably get out and, sure enough, I felt the compression of snow above me and a hand appeared in my vision scraping snow away from my face.

I have been asked if you could get yourself out of an avalanche. It took about five minutes for two people to free each limb in turn and I was only about a metre down. I think not.

All of us have a dominating cultural or global event that shapes our way of thinking about the world. For my parents it was the war – even though they were too young to fight in it. The ethos that it engendered, the privations they endured and the pride in the achievement shaped the way they looked, and look, at things. For us baby boomers it was the sixties. The French have a word for it – the soixant huitards – the sixty-eighters. The soixant huitards simply look at things differently to their parents.

Tony Blair is soixant-huitard to his toenails, a baby boomer in everything he does. But what about Gordon Brown? Can you imagine him with long hair playing a guitar? Or smoking a joint - whether or not he inhaled? Pas possible. The only plausible sixties Brown that you can picture is him coming out of No 10 with union leaders in a rumpled black suits having had beer and sandwiches with Harold Wilson. In other words we have a prime minister who, at a very profound level, has little in common with the people he aspires to lead. No wonder he is so tone deaf to his electorate – and so deeply unsuited to be prime-minister.

In a today’s clear-out of a storage room I came across my collection of vinyl records – the primary recipient of, initially, my pocket money and then my grant (remember that quaint idea?) during the seventies. I found myself fondly holding Cream’s Disraeli Gears – a psychedelic masterpiece of the art of the cover sleeve – an art form that, like the typewriter, has suffered death by technology. Don’t get me wrong; this is no paean to the ‘warmth’ of vinyl sound. The only warmth I recall is the heat rising under my collar as a scratch, inflicted by one of my brothers, ruined a superb guitar solo. Nor is it nostalgia for the seventies where I keenly felt my loss at being too young to be a (credible) hippy and too posh to be a (credible) punk. I was neither a Led Zep nor a Sex Pistol fan and found the pretentiousness of the overblown likes of Rick Wakemen, well, pretentious. But David Bowie and Pink Floyd – bring ‘em on.

No, what I loved, and still love were the cover sleeves: tangible value rather than a shower of digital bits that may play anywhere you want, perfectly, but are missing that extra something – like naked girls, pace Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland or the frisson of a one removed acid trip. Thank you Disraeli Gears.

Occasionally something reminds you of the deep cultural differences between races. The Toyota recall of hundreds of thousands of its cars was one. The president of Toyota appeared with a facemask covering his mouth and nose – in itself a PR own goal in a west obsessed with the burka. Why as he wearing it? Pollution? To protect himself from germs? Actually to stop himself passing on a cold – a common sight in Tokyo and an eloquent metaphor for a fundamentally different view of society. Another was provided by a friend of mine who is now the chairman of an Asian conglomerate. He was negotiating with a senior government official in Beijing who appeared late for a morning meeting with an apology and a brief explanation that she had just had an abortion...