Robin gave up on Batman

The poodle got away from the lead. My son keeps going around the house saying, 'Tonto has left the Lone Ranger.' He is happy; so am I.

   Like the historian, Sir Matt Hastings, said on the T V interview yesterday, I also hate that phrase, special relationship. It is meaningless, as in empty. The USA makes no concessions to any country where their interests are involved. Consider the history of extraditions - mostly one way.

   Consider also the sharing of intelligence. We get what they throw away, what the Sun or Daily Mirror has already published, with more detail. They do not consult us before they bomb Tripoli or engage in a long war with Vietnam. I don't even think they have to. Their mistakes are theirs.

   AND - if North Korea can get away with blue murder, literally, and the American conscience is  not agitated - Mr Kerry, what is more special about Syria?

   Now I must admit I think Kerry will make a wonderful president. I like him. He toiled and travelled ceaselessly until he got the Arabs and Israelis to talk to each other. What an achievement!  Take note, Mrs Clinton. When Kerry speaks at the podium in Washington, he makes sense. I hope he will be the next Democratic President. I loved the way he told UK off yesterday - the substance and the words were apt. Necessary and Sufficient as they say in Maths proofs.

   But we are a very small nation. There are States in India who have more people in it than the United Kingdom. 'Punching above our weight,' they say. Well, stop. Old men sitting round a table and calling themselves The National Security Council should not send young men and women off to die in distant hells.

   Every time another man or woman dies in Helman or in some other foreign killing field, a family is devastated; an endless grief for an unnecessary war. I note that in the Security meeting in Downing street there seemed to be only two women: Justine Greening and Theresa May. I think women will hesitate longer before they order sons, family and lovers to war.

   The Arab world is capable of solving their problems if only we could take our hands off that incandescent area. Sunnis and Shias can talk to each other if they want to live in peace. Let's send medicines and food to Syria, not armaments and soldiers.

   I am convinced like Mr Obama that the Syrian Government and their army are together responsible for the chemical weapons unleashed in Syria. But the response should not destroy more people and places. Above all, the UK should learn from its mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

   For now, we are in a good place. My son has now changed what he says. 'Tonto is now dead,' is the message going around in my house. Thank God!.

The Disabled

With the anniversary of the London Olympics this month, the disabled have front-row voices again. The Olympics made me proud of the way this country has regarded its disabled. For a few days all of us forgot that anyone was disabled. They looked so capable of soaring to heights of all kinds of achievement. Their self-possession was amazing. 

     In the succeeding months, slowly, they went out of centre stage. On TV, occasionally, there were murmurs: difficulty of access, public perception, employment - these were unsatisfactory . It seemed the euphoria was quietly ebbing away.

     I think I am a little disabled myself when I am faced with the three flights of steep stairs at a railway station or the vast gap between train and platform I have to negotiate sometimes when I arrive at East Croydon. Well, age is a kind of disability, I think,  though it is not comparable to genuine handicaps: not being able to see, to hear, to walk at all without crutches, or live in a wheelchair all your life. Still, I begin to appreciate the problems faced by the less -abled in our society.

     I cannot these days forget that tattered man who carries himself round the streets of Kochi on a floor level plank, to which he has fixed little wheels. Another has not even that option: he drags himself on his backside, using his hands to propel himself along. The people on the streets toss them coins, but that is as far as it goes. We take our shopping home and forget about them.

     In the orphanages where the disabled orphans live in Kerala there is hardly any specialist help. A kind doctor might spare some of his/ her time, but she has a full time job. No one is paying that doctor to look after those epileptic young men and women at the orphanage. There is barely enough food for the children and their carers. They live on donations, which come haphazardly.

     India is tardy organising itself for the care of its disabled. After all what is the point of exceptional GDP growth if there is no growth in social awareness?

     Compared to the situation in parts of India, the disabled in the United Kingdom are well-catered for. But what they want is to be able to look after themselves, to be employed, to be self sufficient, to have places to stay where they are comfortable, where they have access to friendship and to love. They want the things that you and I take for granted.

      They need entertainment and sport, not just for the few but for all. They need Society to cater for their special needs and treat them with respect.

     We still have some way to go.



     

Volda`

I travelled to Alesund as further North was too expensive, even on Norwegian Air. Everything is that bit more expensive in Norway. I was headed for Volda, where my friend, Lila, lives with her husband, dog, huge cat and arthritis.

   Lila picked me up and drove the 2 hours to Volda. I didn't mind the drive or the ferry; I wasn't thinking , how much further? as I do when I do road trips in India. Relatively flatland in the South gave way to mountains, and the fjords on either side were grey-blue and calm. The wooden houses perched on the hill side defied gravity and were scattered far apart.

   The rhododendrons were still in flower and had reached that blousy stage when the petals are about to drop. By the end of the week when I left, they were all gone. But in my garden in England they were long gone, having flowered a little late in June and disappeared at the first sign of warm weather.

   Norway was 12-15 degrees a lot of the time. Very occasionally it got up to 20 degrees, but the light never quite faded in the night. The dog and the cat decided I was harmless, probably a sucker for them and quietly invaded my room and then my bed. The people smiled when they saw you and there was no turning away or looking through. I was at home there; if I knew Norwegian I would not have stopped talking.

   I had a few arguments with my computer just before I left; I had lost all my e mail - 550+ of them -  in one hacking event. Norway reminded me to get my priorities right. E mails, who needs them? I can do without. Hackers - do you want the rest? It's all silly stuff, not the kind that has any lasting impact on anybody, even me.

  Switzerland was picture postcard pretty in my memory from long ago. But Norway was breath taking. The mountains lifting their peaks above drifting clouds, the glaciers now frozen but threatening, the rocks and boulders on either side of the road as you drove through the valley reminding you of how little you are - it was all majestic.

   I am back in England now, ready for the fray. Cleansed out and hopeful.

The English Language

There are some words, fairly recent adhesions to the English language that  really get me going. They touch a nerve and start serious discomfort.

   Girl children? Did we not have a perfectly good word for that since long ago? Are they not girls any more when Aid agencies begin talking about them in connection with inequalities in educational access or Female Genital Mutilation  (FGM is too antiseptic a word to describe this particular horror - let us call it by its real name. This is only for females and it is genital and what happens is horrendous chopping up that some times kills them and leaves them forever handicapped. Sexually. I once asked an African man, an educated one in Malawi about it , and he said, 'If they get pleasure out of sex, they will be rampant. We won't be able to control them.' But then the same man told me his wife was 'loaded, when she became pregnant. I've still to get over that, nausea included.

   And - come to think of it - why does nobody talk of boy children in this connection or any other? So boys remain boys till they become men and we girls have a holding place till we become women. Like purgatory. Ah well!

   Mind you - the boy word has its own indignities connected to it if you have ever lived in Africa as an expatriate. In South Africa all African men were boys irrespective of their age. 'Boy!' the white bwana shouted and the ageing steward actually limped in to answer that command. All over Africa, North and South, this word was copied by many expatriates. 

   And in sport, I have noticed, the men are all 'boys' even if they are at the fag end of their sporting lives, Tendulkar, Steven Gerrard, those huge forbidding Rugby players that look like mountains - all boys.

Back to my favourite language: My writing group once said to me that we should , each of us, have a writing buddy. Buddy? Thank you, no. A writing partner, yes. But buddy I can do without. As I said, it makes me itch.

Then there are the nouns that have become verbs. Now you can access something on the phone or computer. Maybe even gain access? How many of these are we letting in? Soon I shall have serious confusions if I try to 'parse' a sentence. (That's a childhood pastime that has vanished.) The nuns insisted you had to find the verb and the subject pretty quickly, or else you were lost.

   I guess that is enough of a moan for a day about things most people take no notice of. It's me from another century being cantankerous as the old are expected to be.

   

Abduction? I think not.

Now, I have a grand daughter aged eight. I know all about the tug-of-war in parents' minds between the desire to give a precious child freedom to enjoy the world - the parks, the playgrounds, the roads home - and safety- safety from the stalkers, the groomers, the rapists and other predators.

This young man, the Maths teacher, who was given a five-and-a-half year jail sentence yesterday - isn't there any one else who thinks it was a bit extreme? He was silly, stupid, manipulative - all that. But the girl went with him willingly. At fourteen she was fully aware of what was going on. Abduction? I think not.

He was a moron and should not be let loose near young girls. I agree. But adding on four years  of imprisonment for sex with a willing girl?

Did the judge think that in those few days in France before they were apprehended they were teaching and learning about Matrices and Transformations? For heavens' sake!

I know this is controversial and many will jump down my throat in an instant. But where no force is applied and the sex is consensual, should we not make allowances?

Rightly, Steven broke the laws governing the teacher-student relationship. Rightly, he should never be near a school again. And rightly, he should not be in positions where he can influence young girls. So he loses his livelihood and that's quite a big punishment. I thought the fifteen months was about right. Enough to make a point.

The banks who impoverished a whole nation and a whole generation got away with no punishment, certainly no jail sentence. The BBC officer, Hall, got away with fifteen months. For abusing children for four decades. For rape, and all that goes before it and after it.

I hope there will be a few others to see how unjust this sentence is. That stupid man deserves fifteen months, no more.

Bookless in Blantyre

When I think of dying there are two things I am sad about: all those books that will be written after, that I shall not get to read, and all the music I will never hear. Hutchens, approaching death with stoic rationalism apparently moaned the fact that he would not see his beloved England, as cancer slowly destroyed his voice, that which he considered most himself, relentlessly. Is there a part of this world I shall miss? All of it, I suppose, so in an odd way, no special part of it. 

  Before I die I would love to visit China and see whether there are any smidgens of Taoism still left there, hiding in little village huts. Are there people out there enjoying the every day physical things, like scratching an itch vigorously, that Lin Yu Tang once commended? Listening to the bull frogs' chorus during the rainy season, nicely cosy in bed; watching the rain flies descend in swarms for that brief pre-rain flurry, straining to hear the crickets at sundown while shutting out all other sounds - these are the things I must seek in the next few years. I seem to have lost that quiet place inside me to the cacophony of urban life.

   But what is there to be done about all those yet unwritten books? There are clearly journeys on which my Kindle cannot go with me.

   I found out how painfully dependent I was on the written word many years ago when I travelled from Dubai to London, forgetting to pack my reading in my carry-on case. The word-less hours were sheer torture, making me restless and irritable. Sister Benoza at our Catholic High School in India drew vivid word pictures of purgatory, the holding place between heaven and earth. Fires raged there and inmates screamed and begged God for delivery. I had nightmares about the serpents and the fires until I got the measure of Sister Benoza somewhere around standard four. But purgatory is individual, and mine is a place devoid of books.

   The newspapers on board the Emirates plane were all about Gulf news, not a word in them to interest me after the first five minutes. On that trip I learned my lesson.

   On another occasion I read too fast on a plane and finished my book for my flight half-way through the journey. After that I started packing two books for each trip. And then my son gave me a Kindle and life altered gloriously. Now I can sit on my veranda in India and download my reading. I don't have to husband the material and read slowly to save my reading.

   However, long before Kindle, I found myself in Blantyre on one occasion with two weeks of back-to-back workshops to do. I was living at Hotel Mount Soche, which manages to be comfortable and dead boring at the same time. The T V in the room was useless as the remote control could not work. The cleaning staff kept the best ones in store to hand out to guests who paid the largest bribes. I did not know that, so I did not have access to the T V.

   Again, I had left my reading material at home in Lilongwe. On Saturday I wandered around the quiet Blantyre streets looking for a book to read. I finally found a pavement vendor and bought two books from him. At last, I thought, now I can get back to the hotel, order a tray of tea and relax into a book.

   The tea came and I made myself comfortable, with the reading light placed strategically behind my lounger, and opened the book eagerly. It was porn - hard porn intent on teaching me lessons I had never got to learn about sex. I dropped the books in the waste bin and then picked them up again and hid them in a drawer. What would the cleaners think about me if they saw these books?

   I was forced to take them home to burn in my garden. Burn because I would not want my house-staff to think I'd been reading that stuff.

   Today I have solved my insecurities in the book department. I keep one by my bedside, another in the sitting room and a third in the medicine cabinet by the bed. My kindle always stays close to me and I shall never be without something to read.

Layers of Belonging

This last visit to India was off-putting. Something that has been nagging at the back of my mind for many years slowly came into focus. I did not really feel at home in India. Or was it just Kochi?
   So I have to investigate this strange, persistent discomfort in my head - an itch requiring constant scratching. I put off writing about it because I needed to be sure as to what I want to say. I now know this is not going to play out in a day or a week -or a month, maybe a lifetime. So please bear with me while I turn this over - and come to no steady place in the end. I know I will keep coming back to it.
   Kochi is a rich place where hordes of poor live. It is noisy, brash, cold-blooded, and in places beautiful. It is a buy-buy land. If you have money you buy. Whatever is current: flat screen T Vs  (the third one in the house) and Samsung mobiles are the latest. I feel no part of all this affluence.
   Yet I have lived in Kochi for five years in the early 2000s. And I still go there every winter, escaping the British ice-age. I speak the language and know the scams. I know how to haggle with the fish man and greet the old man. I love the food, the clothes, the colours and above all the back-waters and the Marine Drive, where the young and the old come at dusk to sit on the parapets and watch the sun descending. To this extent an outer layer of me fits in. I am not an alien. It's just that I am No Longer at Ease. As the wonderful Chinua (Achebe) would have said, if he had not gone and died on me last year. (There are some people who should never die; for me, he was one. Perhaps he never will, living on the sensibilities of the likes of me, who spent years living in the Eastern Nigerian bush.) How well he expressed that sense of fumbling alienation of the returnee. And Adichie (Chimamanda Ngosi), I am looking to you to keep that fire burning.
   It's just Kochi, I tell myself. Go to Thalassery and I am OK. And this is true, to a point. I melt in, I belong. Or so I assure myself. An inner layer of me is at home. Why then do I have to question all the parts when the whole is so familiar, so right? I scratch at my discontent and I know it is all the things which Thalassery is not.
   It is my fault that I am not interested, except as a visitor, in the Indian news, even when I think NDTV is so professional. I enjoy the aggression of the anchor, good old Barka and Sardesai and the rest. But where is BBC news and my favourite Channel 4 and Jon Snow? What are the Conservatives up to now? Is the NHS breathing its last? And is education still vaguely what I remember it as, when I taught in Wickford and Dagenham a lifetime ago? Unleash Jeremy Hunt and Gow on the nation and you have to hide your children and old people away in safe places.
   And the sad part is: I am certain I DO NOT belong at all in Britain. Neither the Labour one or the present mess. Though the old mess was a better and kinder mess. 
   All those years when I worked in many countries in Africa - did I belong there?  I knew they were temporary, so I did not try to find out. There was a job to do, so get on with it. And when it was over, thank God for safe drinking water out of the tap and twenty-four hour power back home.
   Sadly, I am coming to the conclusion that people like me belong nowhere. We who have been wrenched from our birth-countries early in life can no longer anchor ourselves elsewhere. We try to attach ourselves, we copy the behaviours of locals and proclaim ourselves even more suspect.
   Maybe I have to be content to be part of that huge diaspora of people who have left home and have never really gone anywhere. Vidya (Naipaul) has talked about it eloquently, sometimes whined about it. How can I equal him? Leave it to the experts.