Kili Training

The training continues in the Brecon Beacons and other local mountains. It looks like I am ski-ing uphill -- more or less sums it up.

Ugandan Affairs

The art of headline writing lives in this wonderfully schizophrenic tabloid story from Uganda. One can't help but feel the paper's lurid homophobia may be covering deeper tendencies...tongue in cheek or perhaps between cheeks?

BBC and BNP

The BBC's defence of Radio 1 Newsbeat's kid-glove handling of BNP spokespeople is unravelling. Roy Greenslade's criticisms of the corporation's journalistic failure appear to have been vindicated and now there is worse . I do wonder why the BBC is bending over quite so cravenly to the BNP? I am all in favour of the party being featured on BBC programmes like putting Griffin on QuestionTime. The BNP's lack of ideas and pointless hatreds collapse under fairly modest challenge. The criticism of Newsbeat is that there was no hard questioning, challenge or it seems basic research.

In a small way I experienced the BBC's jitters a few months ago. Asked for my views on a Radio 4 website I decided to contribute to a debate about protestors pelting Nick Griffin with eggs. I simply wrote that this was a time honoured British tradition for dealing with the pompous and unpopular. Of all people, Nick Griffin -- who constantly says that his party is the home of British heritage -- should understand this. My comment was moderated out straight away. Opinions like this clearly have no place on a BBC website. When I complained about the moderator's action I was warned that I was in contravention of the BBC website guidelines and if I persisted could be banned from any future participation...so much for the BBC and free speech.

Friends in the North

I have just spent the weekend in the north east of England – beautiful weather and lots of fun in all respects. A highlight for me was seeing the Trinity Square multi-story car park in Gateshead made famous of course by its central role in Get Carter. Sadly dilapidated and slated for demolition by Tesco this monstrous structure has an eerie beauty. When the film was made it was still representative of “space age” modernity. Now it’s an unloved icon in the midst of a city centre desperate to regenerate itself. I wonder how far into the future we will have to go before we fall back in love with 60s and 70s brutalist concrete? Too long probably, or at least long enough for it all to have been dynamited or succumbed to concrete cancer.

I don’t use the term icon lightly. On the whole I am with Jonathan Meades on this exhausted word. But here I think it is right. Everyone will talk about the car park and show it to you with a semi-detached pride. There is a “Get Carter Butchers” in one the nearby down-at-heel retail parades. Taxi drivers jump at the chance to talk about memories of the location filming even if they are probably too young to really remember it. I think it will leave a hole when it’s blown up. It may be the hole of a healed scab or a lanced boil but something will have gone.

I would like to see a rehabilitation into something useful and worthy of local and national pride. A museum and interpretation centre for British Gangsterism is the top canddate right now – perhaps not top of Heritage Lottery Fund priorities.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

My nephews in Cornwall bring in the harvest...

At this time...

Another lingusitic mystery....Why do officials -- airline cabin staff in particular -- like to say "at this time" when they mean "now" or "right now"? I have never heard a real person use this rather strangled phrase. There is of course the officialese user's fear of the single perfectly adequate word, add more, add more and you sound more important. But I don't think that tells the whole story. Will ponder.

Ways with Words

African English and uses of English are sources of endless joy. My two favourites for this trip have been:
"God Help Us Driving School" and "No Wife Video Library"

Maasai Ramadan

My Maasai bretheren do not observe Ramadan. Along with swimming, eating fish, vegetables and chicken (really only for women!) and eshewing beer it is one of the annoyances of living away from the homelands.

Ramadan

Ramadan is now over for another year. I sort of half observed it when I was in Zanzibar. I didn't eat during the daylight hours but found doing without liquids a bit tricky in the heat. My conduct clearly wouldn't satisfy a zealot but I felt I was showing some willing as well as shedding the odd excess pound.


The Holy Month is one of my favourite times to go to Islamic countries. It provides an excellent opportunity to meet with local people in a relaxed and peaceful way. When the fast lifts at sundown everyone sits down to eat together. Food is such a great universal language. The preparations take all day -- all the more lovingly carried out by hungry chefs. As with so many other things outside our crazy western fishbowl, the preparation of food is not a chore, rather a communal activity. It's the chance to chat and put the world to rights. It's due reverence to that most basic of human activties, sustenance. Somehow despite the rise of the TV chef, internet recipes and ubiquotous food porn we could do with a dose of such human sense.




Busy Kitchen

Endless Blue

At home in Wales I look out on the beautiful Towy Valley. In spring and summer the counterpane of fields, trees and hills is stitched together from more shades of green than I could imagine possible. Here on the east coast of Zanzibar we have endless versions of the colour blue. The lagoon, the ocean and the sky -- each brings its own palette of my very favourite colour. Even the language of blue is exotic -- turquoise, azure, aquamarine. They are all there of course and so many more for which we will never shape words.

Pondering, as one does sitting on the edge of the world, I imagine Earth with yellow skies, red grass and a green sky. I can't believe, even after millennia to get used to it, that we would find it quite as "right" as the current arrangements.

Normal Service Resumes

I am back from Africa. The blog silence has been the result of a] poor connectivity in my village in Zanzibar b] my distaste of being one of those travellers who visits paradise but misses it because there was always an excuse to sit at the laptop checking Facebook...

Anyway I did write some rough pieces which I will post over the next week or so. If you like you can imagine I am still there tapping away with all the Facebook saddoes.

Alaskan Invasion

I shall head off and away from these shores before Sarah Palin launches a mercy invasion to save us from the evil NHS and its "death panels". As I said not long ago it is worrying that the most information rich society in human history gets things -- especially facts that can easily be checked --so wrong.

The Non-Sensual Poet

Poets are having a good summer. The Tennyson bicentenary has acted as a well timed reminder of a real master. Keats' house has reopened. Andrew Motion has remained an energetic ambassador post-laureate. And we have even had Rupert Everett mincing about on Byron.

Thomas Rees writes to offer a treatment on Shelley. It's a cracking yarn, as Thomas' usually are, about Shelley's attempts to free the Irish and the Welsh from English rule. The young firebrand had the unusual idea of encasing seditious pamphlets in little caskets he made and then launching them by balloon. Perhaps an eighteenth century version of political Twitters. Anyway when one of his caskets landed into the hands of the secret police Percy Bysse was forced into "exile" in North Wales. There his attempts to radicalise the locals were not met with the enthusiasm he had hoped -- they felt they already had enough poets. He did however see a devil in his garden and get to work on one of his masterpieces, Queen Mab.

Despite eloping with a sixteen year old Shelley was not wildly interested in sex. His passion was for revolution and free thinking. Sadly that means we probably won't see a BBC adaptation of

Thomas' story, not even one with Graham Norton as Shelley.

In the meantme I continue to try and persuade Thomas to write a biography of his godfather, the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess. If he doesn't perhaps I should.

Praying for Rain

Right now not everyone is worshipping the good weather. My uncle and aunt in British Columbia are in the middle of the terrible forest fires that have been ripping through Okanagan and in particular Terrace Mountain where they are. They have been on evacuation alert for some time and thought the worst was over. Last week the wind changed and the fires intensified. People have to act very quickly to avoid disaster -- they managed to evacuate with pets and a few essentials. Everyone is now glued to the weather and fire forecasts hoping the house and home will be safe. A rainy spell would be great.

My cousin Nicole keeps us updated on her blog http://riverchinook.blogspot.com/

Close encounter

My niece Lily has a close encounter with a cricket on the beach today. The meeting went very well and they both enjoyed making each other's acquaintance.