Animal Farm

I recommend Winston Smith's blog . It's this year's Nightjack. Given both its quality and the writer's nom de guerre it is apt that it has been chosen for the Orwell Prize blog shortlist.

Winston's diary is subtitled "Working with the Underclass".  It is an occasional but harrowing journal of his professional life as a care worker for young people. It's really more Hogarth than Orwell. He portrays the gallery of grotesques he encounters working with troubled, out of control, and -- peculiarly to me -- often obese teens. I say peculiar because my imagination always gives me skinny and rat-like when I hear the word "feral" and that is one of Winston's favourite epithets.

Like Nightjack it is compelling because it is real life -- stories not statistics, grassroots not theory,  reportage by someone on the frontline in some of the places we would generally not know about. It is genuinely disturbing. Not so much in its descriptions of unruly, unpleasant, a-social young people -- anyone who walks the streets, travels public transport, lingers in a school or A&E in our big cities will recognise the cast of characters. What is shocking is how "authority" deals with them. What is truly shocking is the complicity of councils, social workers, procedures and ideologies in creating these miserable lives that go on to inflcit misery on those around them. The failures of these "systems" and the System are abject.

We may not agree with all of Winston's analyses or proposed solutions but his witness has to be heard.
  

Young Fashionistas

My nieces practise their fashion styling skills on grandpa. He is, they say, now dressed as a beautiful young woman.

The American Right Wing

I have never been a member of the American right wing so cannot leave it. But Charles Johnson has and is now -- as he says -- leaving the right. He explains very succinctly here.

There seems to me -- a mere outsider -- to be a huge gap in American political discourse just now. Where can you go if you are a decent,  broadly conservative, easy-going person who believes in basic Amercan values but doesn't want them laced with hatred and nutty conspiracy theories?

Terrifying you all

Ronald Reagan once said...

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.' "

How about some more nine word frighteners?

"And now Thought for the Day with Anne Atkins"
"I'm in the sauna with John Prescott, join us!"
"Look Morrisey has come along to cheer you up"

Further suggestions....

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.