Engrossed in 3D at IMax

I didn’t want to like Avatar too much. It’s the most expensive movie ever made, costing around $280 million to make and another $150 million to hype, and that’s enough reason to give it a wide berth. Besides Avatar is supposed to be pitched against a much smaller, cheaper British film in the race for the Oscars: An Education. The smaller film is set in the unswinging early-Sixties London and by most accounts a more nuanced effort – less crash bang whallop and much more my sort of thing really. Still, I was curious about this movie-phenomenon.

Part of the attraction of Avatar was finally getting to go to an IMAX cinema and to see a film in 3D. I’d never been to either and had this idea that the IMAX are the cinematic equivalent of the Alps with screens that tower into the clouds and leave the cinema-goer dumbstruck and overwhelmed. Unfortunately the Greenwich Odeon screen didn’t seem very big at all. Perhaps it was an IMIN.

It turns out that the movie is pretty engrossing. The hero, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, is a paraplegic ex-marine who is drafted in to the Avatar programme on the moon Pandora. This involves having his consciousness ported into the body of one of the tall, blue inhabitants of this jungle-covered planet. It’s a sort of a slightly less naff World of Warcraft. The humans are mining the planet for the precious mineral Unobtainium (an amusing name for a mineral that I assumed was original, but according to its wiki page has been around since the fifties). They want Jake to ingratiate himself into a village of blue-skins and persuade its inhabitants to move away so an open-cast mine can be ripped out of paradise.

The contrast between the unspoiled Eden of the handsome Na’vi aliens and the thuggish humans is the key theme of the film. However it has a lot more going on than that, and the movie throws out a relentless barrage of cranky ideas and motifs taken from other films. One of these familiar ideas is of virtual reality, entering another mind or world that has been used in films like Existenz, Total Recall and Strange Days. As in Existenz where players of the Existenz game have to plug in the gaming device into their bodies, the Na’vi connect their pony-tails to plants and animals. This enables them to commune with non-human intelligence – they grok each other – an idea found in Robert Heinlein’s classic Sci-Fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

There are bits of Star Wars, fragments of 2001, and possibly even a dollop of Flash Gordon. However, all this isn’t too obvious, it doesn’t weigh the movie down too much. James Cameron handles his sources like a mainstream Quentin Tarantino and creates something fresh and exciting. The 3D takes it into a new realm of cinematic experience and also isn’t too in your face. Before the film started, we were shown a trailer for a film about the Hubble telescope where the satellite was jutting out of the screen, but in Avatar the technology is mostly used to give the characters and landscapes greater depth.

Some of it’s pretty trippy -  at night the forest turns into a neon-lit, sub-aquatic day-glo rave. All beings on the planet form a vast intelligent neural network – similar to Terence McKenna and Paul Stamets‘ ideas about mushrooms. Some bloggers have even noticed that the blue Na’vi resemble the elf-people you’re meant to see after taking the hallucinogenic Ayahuasca vine from the Amazon. The natives live in a vast, ancient tree whose branches and roots are seen on the computers at the human’s base looking like the Norse tree at the centre of life Yggdrasil.

The most glaringly obvious thing about this film is its anti-colonialism. You can see Avatar as Zulu in reverse, with the Zulus surrounded by the Brits. Or is that The Emerald Forest, where a young man ‘gone native’ joins a fight to save the rain forest from earth moving equipment using only stone-age weapons. I wonder if this is what has contributed to the film’s international success, now that occupation by foreign powers is on the agenda again. Lawrence of Arabia wrote in a letter: “We are calling them [the arabs] to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.” Luckily, Jake Sully finds a way out. Although I expect Avatar will win more statues than An Education at the Academy Awards, I don’t suppose Cameron would mind if he was trounced by the little guys.

Not all smiles

At work I sit at my desk with my headphones on, sometimes listening to last night’s Late Junction and sometimes with no sound at all. That might explain the how I didn’t quite catch what was going on, at least I don’t think it was an aural Rorschach test.

Just now the bloke who sits next to me exclaimed ‘I fucking hate work’ with some rancour. To which the bloke opposite him responded ‘I hate myself’… Golly I thought, those are heavy sentiments for a Tuesday afternoon. That was until my brain had unscrambled the message and twigged that the first one had said ‘I fucking hate Word’ and the other ‘I hate Excel’!

Widow Twankey honks her horn at the Hackney Empire

What with the snow – or the ice – becoming annoying and the darkness of January grinding its way towards its lowest point on Blue Monday, it’s time for a little warmth and colour. That is, it’s really time for pantomime. So, last week the lovely Autumn booked us tickets to Aladdin at the Hackney Empire.

Since discovering last year that my great-grandfather was a scene painter in Victorian panto, I have a new found interest in the form, but I’ve also never quite grown out of it either. If you are off to see a pantomime this winter it seems that the Hackney panto is the one to see, even the sceptical (and slightly snooty) Telegraph reviewer left walking on air.

It’s easy to see why the reviews have been so good – from the introduction by the panto camel to the final rapturous bows – this is a desert-hot blast of energy and good humour. Alongside our cheery Aladdin (Anna Jane Casey) the other characters are as bright and bold as Dalston Market oranges. There’s definitely a Hackney influence: the Empress of China (Tameka Empson) has taken on a very ‘strident’ African form, complete with village proverbs, and the Genii of the Lamp (Kat B) seems to think it’s 4am in a bashment. Even the catch phrase of the Genii of the Ring (Josephine Melville) is “You get me though?”

Perhaps it’s because most of my panto going was done a while ago, but the Widow Twankey of The Wash-Me-Nicks Laundry seems to be more gregarious than ever. Wearing seven elaborate outfits, Clive Rowe is simply splendid. He’s as wide as a washing machine, with a voice as big as a bus that he left me wanting a him to finish the snatches of songs he sings. Luckily, with comic timing set in Greenwich, there wasn’t time to dwell on it.

If you thought that panto was for youngsters then you’d be wrong: we were sitting behind a row of oldsters. Who wouldn’t appreciate a dance routine featuring mummies from the tomb, or cart-wheeling pandas. All this happens on a backdrop of dazzling sets that flick past at a bewildering speed. The dragon that takes Aladdin from the Peking suburb of Ha-Ka-Ney to Arabia is a particular wonder of ingenuity. The set designers even built a palace just for the final bows. I’m sure Oscar Barrett and John P Barrett would approve.

Despite the jollity of the show, there is a sinister, sorrowful cloud that hangs over the proceedings. This is nothing to do with Abanazer the magician who’s the baddie, and everything to do with the financial problems that threaten to close the theatre. Last summer the Empire almost shut for good and when the panto finishes at the beginning of February, they are having a ‘rethink’ on their artistic direction. Roland Muldoon, a former chief executive and artistic director, believes the changes will move away from the theatre’s ‘black’ programming agenda. This suggests that the management thinks that this agenda is not bringing in the crowds. Whatever is behind these financial problems, this year’s Aladdin is not entirely ‘white’, but it left the audience entirely satisfied, black or white. Book your tickets now.

Christmas garland, St Bartholemew the Great, London

Peace on earth, and good will to all … hopefully

Roast potatoes, courtesy of su-lin

Michael Caine came over as an charming, down-to-earth Londoner on the Desert Island Discs Christmas Special. He trotted out a few great stories and chose some surprisingly contemporary discs (he likes ‘chill out’ music).  As a self-confessed romantic, he told us he loves Christmas and its rituals. Apparently, one of the highlights of the festive lunch in the Caine household is the potatoes. This is because Sir Michael makes “the best roast potatoes in the world” according to his mate, the film director and food critic, Michael Winner.

Presenter, Kirsty Young asked how he prepared these perfect spuds and he gave out a few tips. As his wife is a vegetarian, he uses no animal fat, so here’s Michael Caine’s recipe for unforgettable roast potatoes:

• Pre-boil potatoes “otherwise they’ll be no good”
• Drain and let them steam until “absolutely dry”
• Replace saucepan lid and shake “so that they go all fluffy”
• Place in cold olive oil (”so it [the fat] soaks in”) with rosemary and sage – then roast

I never cook them, so it’s all new to me, but a quick search reveals that rival cooks generally agree about this stuff. Everyone says par-boil them, Jamie Oliver reckons for five minutes, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says seven and Delia Smith 10. Drying and shaking seems to be essential for all the chefs.  Delia seems to think that it’s best to roast the potatoes for 50 minutes. So, possibly Sir Michael’s most original contribution to the art of the roast is the temperature of the oil – cold – and not a lot of people know that.

Science & tech activity on Wikipedia visualised - courtesy of abeautifulwww.com

Bad press on Wikipedia is probably something that most of us don’t fear too much. If you’re someone who does have such concerns, then you might want to set up an alert on Wiki Alarm. This service will alert you about changes to any wiki page that you are concerned about. It’s the latest thing in Online Reputation Management.

The guys behind the product have even found a term to describe the ultimate wiki disaster: Wiki-circularity. This is where a fiction is posted on Wikipedia and this is then taken at face value by a blogger or journalist who writes about it. This article/post gets quoted as a source on wikipedia and your fate – or reputation – is apparently sealed.

There are quite a few examples of nonsense on Wikipedia surviving on the site for a long time, and sometimes even finding their way into the press. The Guardian even used fabricated quotations apparently from Maurice Jarre, a French composer and conductor, in his obituary in April this year. It’s probably no coincidence that this snappy new term was coined by someone in that most dubious of disciplines, marketing. ‘Wiki-circularity’ is one way of putting it, but bad journalism, or even defamation, would be more accurate. Checking sources is basic.

It’s probably best to treat Wikipedia as a brief, tentative overview with (hopefully) some useful leads to follow up. The sources are all important in Wikipedia. Most journalists worth their salt seem to head to the sources anyway according to a study by the American Journalism Review last year.

If you want to know more about making the most of Wikipedia, there are some useful resources available. Many of them are found under the reference section of the site. Last year, the computer book publishing company O’Reilly, published a How To Wiki guide as a part of their Missing Manuals imprint. They’ve also very kindly put the book on the Wikipedia help pages – Wikipedia the Missing Manual. It’s a fairly comprehensive overview of how to use the encyclopaedia. Another practical guide called How Wikipedia Works can also be read online, although not in wiki (editable) form.

There are a few other interesting books for the general reader (rather than dry academic tomes, of which there are a few too) about the ideas behind Wikipedia. In 2006 Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams wrote Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything which explained just how it made a difference. In March of this year, Professor of Journalism Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia gave a history of the project. Finally, a couple of months ago Andrew Dalby, a writer on language and food history, has published The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality which looks at how the articles relate to the reality they pretend to reflect.

Wikipedia’s useful and potentially misleading qualities must be fairly obvious, however the number of editors seems to be falling. Dalby and Lih raise a few other issues that seem to be slowing work on the project: it’s possible that almost all of the most important articles have already been written, and the proliferation of rules might be putting people off contributing. In one of Dalby’s earlier books, he looked at the hegemony of the English language and in his Wikipedia book he examines whether its popularity is killing off rival publications, especially outside the Anglophone world. Others complain how Wikipedia monopolises Google results (although it seems staff at Encyclopaedia Britannica are key amongst these critics).

If you don’t like the Wiki-monopoly you can always start contributing to Citizendium, the encyclopaedia started by Larry Sanger who founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger became disillusioned with Wikipedia’s methods for achieving reliability, and his alternative wiki encyclopaedia gives a more prominent role to experts. (You could also consider Conservativepedia who give a more prominent role to bong-smoking US conservatives of the Dubya mould.)

Alternatively you could follow these five simple steps for contributing to Wikipedia:

1. Attribute/ source everything if you’re writing, and treat everything not attributed with caution if you’re reading

2. Have an argument for notability at the back of your mind (deletionists wield this criteria as their chief weapon to cut out articles)

3. Have a look at the featured articles and very good articles to get an idea of the direction you should be heading

4. Remember you don’t own anything on Wikipedia. It’s not your article, but merely one you started or contributed to

5. If you want to upload images familiarise yourself with the Wikipedia images policy and especially the image use policy

Ubuntu badges

I know why Acer computers are so cheap. I also know that although I like the principles of Ubuntu (the software, not ethic), I am not yet committed to the practise. The story started when I was looking to buy a computer. I got lots of advice (including from techies who should know the score) telling me what a great deal Acer computers are. They did compare very favourably with rival laptops, so I bought one. But now I have first-hand experience of one significant cost they’ve managed to cut to achieve their remarkable value for money.

In mid-June the laptop went on the blink after two and a quarter years of working fine. After pressing the ‘on’ button it ran a disk scan trying to repair errors, then just as it made it to the desktop the thing closed down and the whole process began again. Someone at work diagnosed dodgy drivers. In Safe mode I downloaded the drivers from the Acer site, some installed and some didn’t, obviously not enough to help. The same went for the drivers from Drivers.com.

At this stage, most computer owners would get out their back-up disk and either run a repair operation on the operating system, or start again and reinstall it. They would do this if they could find their back-up disk. I couldn’t, so I phoned Acer and was told that I should have burned my own when I first used the computer. Apparently the instruction booklet and a pop-up window tell you to do this. The sympathetic call centre man admitted that most people never look at the instructions and generally ignore the pop-up. About three weeks had passed and I was having to restrain myself from throwing the computer out of the window and then starting a site called acercon.com about what a con Acer are.

The computer was bust, but it seemed most unfair that I would  have to buy a new operating system. I did own the key to a copy of Windows XP, I’d just  forgotten to burn the software. This is when I heard of Ubuntu, this is a free operating system (OS) named after the South African brotherhood of man ethic. It is built using a Linux kernel, the kernel is the central component of an OS and Linux is a programming language that is ‘Unix-like‘. Unix is the language that is used to build the Macintosh operating system. So, at a bit of a stretch, Ubuntu is a Macintosh-like operating system – for free!

The ‘free’ side of the web appeals to me and not just in a download-all-my-music-for-free, take-what-I-can sort of way. Wikipedia must be one the best free things about the web and I contribute. Last week when looking up crumpets, I noticed a disputed point on the Anglo-Saxon roots of the bread, so immediately scurried to Google Books to see if I could find a source to verify the matter. Perhaps I could join the Ubuntu efforts too.

Ubuntu’s advantages over Windows operating systems include that it is faster and more secure. Oh yes, and freer. It starts up with African-sounding drumming and singing, and then you’re ready to go in about 10 seconds. As my windows took five minutes to get going at one stage, that is a big improvement. Rather than having a ‘Start’ menu, all the applications are found in menus on a top panel. It didn’t take too long before I was using it like a natural.

Unfortunately, not all software works on Ubuntu. This is not always a problem, for instance although you can’t run Microsoft Office, you can use Open Office an open-source version with very similar functionality. Also,  iTunes doesn’t work, but you can also plug your iPod into the free and open-source Songbird or even install a virtual Windows within Ubuntu and run iTunes on that. There is more of a problem when you own a gadget that runs using specific software – for instance, our dictaphone,  Speedo swimming MP3 player and Bluetooth dongle wouldn’t operate on it.

There were a few more annoying problems. The computer’s microphone and microphone socket didn’t like Ubuntu and wouldn’t work, so there wasn’t much point in Skype. The mousepad was far more sensitive than with Windows, which meant that when happily writing away at the bottom of the page I’d suddenly find myself in the middle of a word at the top. It also wouldn’t connect to my home wireless, although the work connection was fine. What should have been a jolly, positive thing was just irritating.

Ubuntu release a new version of their software every six months and last month the BBC News site had an article on the latest update. It mentions that Wikipedia use the software – another good thing. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to keep me on the OS. Perhaps it’s just a matter of habit or not having enough persistence to iron out the problems, but I’ve moved back to XP. If I could get the computer and software working properly with Ubuntu I might go back to it, unless Windows 7 tempts me.

The Bamiyan Valley from one of the monastic cells carved into the cliff next to the Buddhas

Developing a tourist industry probably isn’t a high priority in the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan at the moment. IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) would probably put off even the most daring of GAP year students. But the idea might not be quite as daft as it sounds.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times reported on fighting in the Nuristan region of Afghanistan where soldiers were struck by its extraordinary beauty. The country also has a fascinating history and tradition of warm hospitality. In 1970 Peter Levi, an English Jesuit priest, classical archaeologist, and poet set off to uncover some of these riches with his friends, Bruce Chatwin, the travel writer and his wife Elizabeth.

Levi wrote his journey up in The Light Garden of the Angel King, a book which demonstrates both his archaeological training and poet’s eye for the landscape. The title of the book is taken from the inscription on the tomb of the Emperor Babur. The Emperor began the mogul invasions of India, but despite the attractions of the Subcontinent, nonetheless demanded to be buried in the place closest to his heart: Kabul. The overblown poetry of the full inscription gives a flavour of Levi’s sympathies:

Only this Mosque of Beauty, this Temple of Nobility, constructed for the Prayer of Saints and the Epiphany of Cherubs, was fit to stand in so Venerable a Sanctuary as this Highway of Archangels, this Theatre of Heaven, the Light Garden of the Godforgiven Angel King whose Rest is in the Garden of Heaven, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, the Conqueror.

Next, Levi and Chatwin head off to Afghanistan’s other well-known tourist attraction, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. He mentions that Victorian explorer Sir Henry Yule described the arid landscape as having a ‘horrid aspect’, but irrigation seems to have improved the valley since and Levi writes of it as ‘dusky and peaceful’. They spend time around the Buddhas and in the shrines that honeycomb the cliffs and then explore more of the valley.

It turns out that there is more than just the standing Buddhas to explore, especially for an archaeologist like Levi. The Shah-i-Golgola, or city of the screams, was a thriving city until it was razed by Genghiz Khan (hence the screams). The great Khan reached the city after overrunning the Shahr-i-Zohak, a fortress at the other end of the valley, that, incredibly, is said to also be the site of a Greek acropolis (according to Nancy Hatch Dupree, the legendary specialist in Afghan archaeology and author of numerous guidebooks to the country).

Levi hunts down and even stumbles upon archaeological tit-bits throughout his trip. He’s forever remarking on the various ‘wares‘, ‘layers‘ and ‘mounds’ (common archaeological terms) of each site. Although I don’t know much about archeology, and haven’t even watched Time Team very often, I was fascinated by what he finds out. It is common knowledge that Alexander the Great passed through Afghanistan on his way to India, but his empire is only one of those that left their mark (and shards).

Alexander may not have been in the country for very long, but the Greek influence was felt for centuries afterwards. The Mauryan Empire of the Indian Buddhist Emperor Ashoka replaced the Greeks and together with the indigenous Gandhara kingdom produced the Indo-Greeks and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Then there were the Kushans, an empire that started in Central Asia, which somehow got in there too. Of course we shouldn’t forget the Persians, wandering Chinese monks and that’s even before the Islamic Invasion of the country and the numerous empires that have ruled it under that religion. Of course, in the nineteenth century the Sikhs and British had a go too.

The ‘tall, elegant, shadow-cut, biscuit-coloured pencil’ that is the Minaret of Jam is their next stop, which they somehow reach on horse with Levi himself suffering from appalling dysentery. From there they fly to Herat, which in the far west of the country, is the most Persian city. Blue minarets still tower over the city, like ‘big brick cigarettes stormed by swarms of cobalt and turquoise butterflies’, despite the British demolishing many masterpieces of Islamic art in the nineteenth century to improve the line of fire against a potential Russian invasion.

After a few stops in southern Afghanistan – Kandahar is so ferociously hot that it’s impossible to think – Levi and Chatwin head off to the North East, where the ‘greatest archaeological wealth’ of the country lies. They take in Surkh-Kotal, a Kushan city and Balkh, a site of early Islamic treasures. While staying in Kunduz, Levi meets some fellow poets and becomes involved with the local amateur dramatics society. At their Nashir Theatre, most performances are farces, and Levi be-friends Wazir Mohammed who holds Charlie Chaplin in the highest regard.

Levi and the Chatwins however don’t rest in one place for very long, they soon shoot off into the north east of the country. The speed at which they travel, alongside Levi’s keen interest in archaeology and problems with Farsi contribute to one of the shortcomings of the book – the lack of depth in the portrayal of any of the characters he meets. There are many short sketches, but no rounded portraits. Some of these brief encounters, however, can be utterly charming:

‘I offered one of the old men a pinch of English snuff; he took a huge pinch like a charge of gunpowder and sneezed and wept and beamed with happiness and came later to ask for more, because he said his eyes were bad and the doctors despaired of them, and none of the medicines had such an excellent effect on them as this powerful snuff. We became fast friends and he introduced me to his friend who asked me with a speculative eye where I came from. A country called England, I said. Oh yes, he said, England; would that country not be near Kabul?’

As they leave the archaeological heartland of the Uzbek north of the country, the landscape and Levi’s focus starts to change. The book starts to reveal what ideal hiking territory Afghanistan had in 1970. They take a short walk in Badakhshan Province, in the Pamirs, where the hills appear in the morning like ‘piles of fine dust’. This walk is really a preparation for a longer walk in Nuristan. Meaning ‘Land of the Enlightened’, the province was previously known as Kafiristan, or the land of the unbelievers, until 1895 when King Abdur Rahman invaded the region and converted the local people. The paganism of the region got the Victorians dreaming, and the idea grew up that the inhabitants were descended from the remnants of Alexander’s army. (Rudyard Kipling later sculpted this idea into The Man Who Would Be King.)

Levi, and his party walk up the Kamdeh and Kamdesh Valleys where the US Army are now involved in heavy fighting. The valley is beautiful, but wild. The Kamdesh houses are balanced on precarious precipices and the men walk around barefoot, carrying long handled axes. They do, however, encounter a shepherd with his head wrapped in a wreath of flowers who proceeds to sings them songs.

Finally, Bruce and Elizabeth Chatwin fly off to Pakistan, and Levi at last gets a permit to visit the site of the most important Hellenistic city in Afghanistan – Ay Khanoum. The site is in the north of the country near Kunduz, and he bumps into his old Thespian friend, Wazir Mohammed. The man has grown sad as his theatre company had become riven by internal divisions and broken up.

Levi and the Chatwins stayed in a hotel at the foot of the Kamdesh valley after their wlk in Nuristan. The place is run down, but Levi still manages to ’sincerely recommend this hotel to anyone intrepid enough to reach it.’ It is a sentiment that I’m sure he would apply to Afghanistan itself. The Afghanistan, that is, before the advent of IEDs.

(Image courtesy of MastaBaba on Flickr)

Two Buddhist monks, Marine Drive, Mumbai

Coming home from your holidays can make you feel blue. Out of the deckchair and into the office is a dismal contrast. It’s helpful to have a treat waiting for you a few days after you get back. A little something to look forward to.

The week before last Autumn and I did the first week of the Coast to Coast walk (no deckchairs in sight, actually). It was a great ’summer’ holiday, but made even better by fact that smack bang in the middle of the week after our jaunt, we were off to a smashing lecture. Nothing beats a good disquisition. We were scheduled to see William Dalrymple give a talk at the RGS. That’s the Royal Geographical Society to the uninitiated. This institution is where some of Britain’s greatest explorers and travellers have set out from on their way into the wilder parts of the world. And if they didn’t leave from the RGS, they probably ended up telling their tale there when they got back.

William Dalyrymple however is not an explorer or geographer, but a historian, journalist and travel writer. I haven’t read any of his eight books, but I am a fan of his journalism. He draws vivid pictures of the places he visits,and fills them with stories using his finely tuned ear for dialogue and sympathy for the characters he meets. He’s also interested in India and the subcontinent.

His latest book is called Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India which tells the tale of nine people whose lives have been profoundly influenced by the religious traditions of that region. The talk was organised by Stanfords, the map shop. Robust, he strode onto the stage wearing a yellow, quilted Nehru jacket, with a coral red cotton scarf draped around his neck. In one hand he carried his canvas holdall and in the other, an almost empty glass of whisky. He looked like a travel writer.

The talk covered three of the chapters in his book. The first story told of a couple of cheerful Bauls, or wandering monks, from Bengal, the second the melancholy story of the sacred prostitutes or devadasi of Karnataka, and the low caste labourer and prison warder who becomes host to the god Vishnu for three months of the year finishes the book. All the stories were fascinating and affecting. His softly plummy, slightly whiskied tones eloquently conjured up these distant personalities.

The two Bauls (pronounced ‘bowels’) are friends, one is blind and the other is his eyes. Dalrymple explained that he met them in rural Bengal and assumed they were unspoilt by the modern world, but it turned out they’d been to London in the Sixties for a massive psychedelic knees-up with the Stones for the launch of their Beggars Banquet album. Prior to Mick ‘n’ Keef, they’d come from opposite ends of the social spectrum in rural Bengal. Kanai was from a poor family of labourers and lost his sight at six months old. When his parents died and his sister committed suicide, the Bauls provided refuge. Debdas was the son of a wealthy landowner, but he was a rebel and ran away from home and also eventually joined the Bauls. Now they are friends and mutual protectors.

Prostitute, Rani Bhai is a devadasi, part of a tradition of whores who used to be attached to temples. Although the Indian government has broken the official links between prostitution and temples, these women are still seen as having a special connection to the goddess Yellamma. To make it through her grim life, Rani Bhai consoles herself with dreams of retiring to a small farm and occasionally being venerated as a representative of the Goddess. Eventually, Dalrymple learns that this dream is only that: she has HIV and is unlikely to live long enough to tend to her chickens, cattle and buffaloes.

Finally, Hari Das, a stoical chap works as a labourer during the week and supplements his meagre income as a warder in a prison that makes the Turkish prison in Midnight Express sound like the Sandals Caribbean holiday resort. Not only is Hari Das desperately poor, but he’s also a ‘dalit’ – of one of the lowest castes in Indian society. However, for three months of each year he packs in the drudgery and becomes a dancer. Not just an ordinary dancer, but a cosmic dancer. In a jungle clearing, after several hours of getting dressed up and made up, he looks in a small mirror and *boom* his personality is replaced by Vishnu. Then he dances for the assembled masses and the local big wigs and Brahmins queue to touch his feet. Despite their unusual lives, Dalrymple makes the humanity of his ‘lives’ clear.

It’s probably fair to say that most books that address religion, at least in the UK, will have to contend with the ideas of Richard Dawkins. He stands like a bull-necked bouncer at the door of religious debate in the UK. For Dawkins, it’s not enough to say that God does not exist, he goes as far as saying ‘faith is an evil’, because ‘it requires no justification and brooks no argument’; in short, faith ignores scientific method. Dawkins the Bouncer isn’t bothered about scruffy trainers, but if a belief system hasn’t been subject to hypothesis, experiment and peer review, then it isn’t getting in.

It doesn’t appear that Dalrymple’s subjects have been reading The God Delusion. Neither however have they been using religion to justify hatred. It is a part of their lives that provides solace amidst hardship and offers possibilities where options are constrained. Above all, whatever these belief systems might represent, it is difficult to see them as the deluded fancies of dupes.

After we had been introduced to these spirited and curious characters, during the question and answer session an Indian man in audience asked Dalrymple, whether he was not seeking out exceptional personalities and then exoticising them. Taking his second glass of whisky, he replied that although it might be true to an extent, these wandering minstrels and ecstatic dancers do still exist in India and so surely it is worth reporting on them. Perhaps things will change when the Indian economy rivals that of the USA in 40 years time, but for now, these nine lives don’t seem that strange.

The sunflower sprouting numerous sunflowerlets

Sometime in August, someone cut the huge head off my huge sunflower. By this stage the head had already dried out and its huge weight meant that it hung down towards the ground. Then one evening I noticed the head was missing. A clear cut revealed the pithy centre of the stem and the fact that someone chopped it off. Hopefully, it was taken home by some children to study and examine.

Despite the plant missing its head, I didn’t pull it up. This was partly because I couldn’t: it requires a fork and a portion of the afternoon. Such a mighty plant deserved a little bit longer in existence too. A month passed and I noticed small green, bushy growths on the stem. This weekend after returning from a week’s holiday, the little protuberances had flowered into small sunflowers – there are 12 so far, and a few more to come. This sunflower sure wants to bloom alright.

Chanctonbury Ring in West Sussex

Part 2

On our third weekend on the South Downs Way, we reached a momentous juncture – after having crawled across five folds on our map, we finally crossed on to the other side. Luckily, Side B only has three days of walking on it. The second of these – the Sunday – was supposed to be the toughest day of the whole trip – a whopping 20 miles.

More worrying than the hard walk ahead, I was to be possessed by a foul demon. This dark spirit was called Keith. He first came to the attention of the world as the central protagonist in Nuts in May, a lesser known British comedy classic made by Mike Leigh. The film tells of a couple and their summer camping holiday in Dorset. Keith is the highly-strung husband of Candice-Marie, sporting a tweed jacket with a gold Vegetarian Society ‘V’ in its’ lapel. When not dragging his wife off to see the principal local sights, which include some fascinating places such as the local quarry, he spends the holiday on a one-man mission to impose the Countryside Code on the indifferent campers.

Our weekend started at Amberley railway station. A large gang of knobbly-kneed hikers alighted the train and began heading down the trail before us, so we stopped for tea and toast to let them get away. During the course of the weekend we continued to see lots of people; this section of the Way includes many more car parks that allow visitors to take advantage of the Downs. There also seemed to be many more mountain bikers whizzing past. Unlike Hampshire where we walked for a full two days and with only two major roads – one at the start and finish of each weekend slot – this weekend would involve crossing several busy roads. The first, a dual-carriageway without a bridge meant a mad dash across in the gap between the speeding cars.

Once up on the chalky path with the familiar omnipotent view over the Sussex countryside and, like a geeky Mr Hyde, it wasn’t long into our walk before Keith started to manifest himself. Those are some nice looking flowers, I thought, and whipped out my Collins Book of British Wild Flowers to begin classifying. Common Toadflax – grreat! It wasn’t just Keith operating here, I also wanted to know what the writer Robert Byron had been on about in his flower-heavy prose poem All These I Learnt. But then perhaps it was just Keith.

After lunch we came across a round saucer-like earthwork about 50 metres across. A sign announced that the clay-lined depression was a Dew Pond, which was used to collect rainwater for grazing sheep before water could be piped onto the hills. Shortly after, Chanctonbury Ring emerged from the Downs.  First an Iron Age fort and then the site of a Roman temple, and now an area known for UFO sightings, the Ring consists of two circles of low earthen ramparts that rise out of the springy, sheep-nibbled grass on the edge of the Down. The centre of the ring is filled with a mass of small trees and bushes, while larger trees – stretched in wild wind-blown poses – grow out of the earthworks at the edge.

The Way continued along the grassy top of the Downs, until we then turned south to circle around a large natural bowl. A memorial bench looked out over the landscape: sheep, walkers, and para-gliders drifting across the hills.  To the north east, the town of Steyning rested at the foot of the Downs, and to the south east, a huge white L-shaped quarry cut out of the green hillside.

A hazy view of The Steyning bowl

The huge block of Lancing College chapel dominated the horizon to the right on the valley bottom. Steyning is the natural resting point for this stage of the journey, but we’d already decided to press on up the hill alongside the huge quarry. Another mile or two ahead was the Truleigh Hill hostel where, Keith-like, I’d booked two bunks for Autumn and I in the single-sex dorms. It had built up an eccentric ‘youth hostel’ atmosphere even before we got there: when I’d phoned to book our meal, we were offered a starter of either tomato soup or orange juice.

The hostel was in a rectangular 1970s building right on the trail. The corridors in the sleeping quarters smelt of feet, but it was cheap. Staying here also meant we’d already cut three miles off the longest day of the walk that awaited us the next day. The furthest we’d walked so far was 14 miles, and the Steyning to Kingston-near-Lewes section was 20 miles.

Apart from a gang of children and their dads, our fellow guests were not particularly youthful.  They included a grey haired Scottish lady who must have been approaching retirement age, and a large northerner with a loud voice and grey beard. Thankfully, a couple in their thirties who’d travelled down from London in their car with an Aussie mate brought the average age down a bit. The people didn’t wear anoraks or sandals, which made us feel a little less geeky and kept Keith at bay. We ended up sharing a table at dinner with the Scot, who gave us insights into how to make cheap journeys around the country. She was pleased to inform us that she’d travelled down to Sussex from London on the bus for only a pound, and explained that if you are ever travelling north, breaking your train journey in Birmingham can often end up saving you up to half your fare. Our friend tried to persuade Autumn to join our local Youth Hostel Association council after I left the table. It turns out they need more young members as most are over 50.

The next morning was cool and slightly hazy, and we set out under a marbled grey sky. The mountain bikers, joggers and dog walkers were already up. In less than an hour we had reached Devil’s Dyke, a prominent ridge with a pub and valley behind it. A man approached us asking if we’d seen a anyone rolling down a hill in a huge plastic ball. We hadn’t, but once we regained the path we spotted the Zorbing balls being dragged back up the hill on a trailer.

Morning gloom on the South Downs

An hour and a motorway later and the path led through the shiny greens of Pyecombe Golf Cours, as slick and well-groomed as a thoroughbred’s haunch. There were now even more people about: dog walkers, families with children, women on horses. There was also litter, and the opportunity to tut disapprovingly.

We ate at Ditchling Beacon and finally left the day trippers behind at a junction of footpaths in the middle of the afternoon. One path offered us a three mile walk into Lewes., and another six and a bit. After six hours walking, a rest was in order. Autumn nibbled an oatcake and I pored over the contour lines. Gallic accents announced the arrival of a Frenchman and his wife and three daughters from the longer narrow path we’d soon be following. A short discussion ensued, culminating with the man snapping “Non, c’est pas la” before striding off up the path. The four women, all sporting identical blond shoulder length hair, followed.

Soon we were walking across a large hillside dotted with grazing sheep. The ripping and chomping of grass filled the air. By this stage, my moans about the rubbish had turned into picking it up. I’d begun stuffing a small box found by the path full of abandoned sweet wrappers. At the bottom of the valley, beside the roaring A27, we stopped for another short break. Despite the traffic roaring only 10 metres from our feet, we both promptly fell into a dream-filled sleep.

Over the road and the valley opened up into another large bowl, with para-gliders once again wafting over the hillside. The path climbs to a sweat-inducing 150 metres in a horseshoe shape, and on the far side of the valley it becomes Juggs Road, which finally leads to Lewes.  Juggs were the baskets of fish that the wives of the Brighton fishermen carried down the path to sell in Lewes market. Although we hadn’t trudged with loads of stinking fish, it was still time for another rest. From this high point the path heads down steeply from the Downs into the village of Kingston-near-Lewes. Another hour’s walk and two more stops and we finally dragged ourselves into the charming town of Lewes. There I could dump my litter, and then go home to wrestle with my demon.

Keith and Candice Marie - "Follow me Candice Marie!"

The kitchen wall. Top: new paint job, middle: semi-polyfilla-ed hole, bottom: old wallpaper

After almost three years of dreaming (and saving) I’ve finally got round to replacing my old 1980s kitchen. The drawers and cupboards didn’t close properly, the tap dripped and the stove was rusty. It was way past its best; the sort of kitchen that featured where Neil could be found cooking ‘lentil sick’ in The Young Ones.

These are the lessons I learned after putting in our new Ikea kitchen. Ikea might not sell the best kitchens, but they are sturdy and they are about the cheapest. Preparing the kitchen and fitting them is hard work, and constantly hunting for the screw driver and/or pliers can leave you feeling almost stoned.

1. Plan the kitchen
Obviously you must have a rough idea of what you want to do, but you will also have to plan it on the Ikea CAD system. Although it’s possible to download the software and plan at home (unless you’re using Ubuntu like me), using it can be tricky so you might benefit from some guidance from an expert. A trip to pick the brains of someone at Ikea might help – but you will have to book ahead or hang around for hours. Then a period of reflection might help before you actually purchase the stuff.

Meanwhile back at home, you’ll have prepared your kitchen – in our case this meant stripping off the greying yellow wood-chip wallpaper and filling the craters revealed underneath. Then sanding and painting the wall.

2. Plan the plumbing and wiring
Once you have a rough plan of your kitchen, book a plumber and electrician to make any necessary adjustments (moving sockets, putting the gas in right place) before you actually start work. The key is to get work done on a ‘per job’ basis rather than a more expensive ‘per hour’ rate. It is much easier to do this if you plan ahead, and the work itself should be easier without the new cupboards in the way.

3. Get a friend to help
Installing the kitchen is a complex business and a definitely a two person job. Luckily, in my case a friend* who’d fitted a couple of kitchens before volunteered to help out a year and a half ago. I never forgot that offer. You will need two people to heft some of the units and it helps with the planning and measurements if you have some prior experience.

4. You will have to go back to the shop at least once more
It’s very unlikely that you’ll pick up everything you need, and another trip to Ikea is likely. One of our units was too big, so we had to go back on Sunday morning to get another one 10 cm narrower. Earlier, at the shop we found they didn’t have quite enough cupboard doors or shelves which would require another journey back to the belly of the furniture beast in a week or two.

5. It will take much longer than you thought
Not just some jobs will take longer, but everything will. I would say take your initial guess of how long it will take, and double it.

6. Ikea is designed for giants
Following the Ikea CAD plan may produce some strange dimensions. They will suggest that you put the cupboards up at xxm xxcm. Measure this out, and step back to look at it, you might even want to hold up a cupboard to this height before you start securing them to the wall, and see if you will be able to reach the top shelf. More than likely, you may find the top of the cupboards are lost in the clouds and are difficult to reach even if you’re lanky and stand on a chair and then balance on your tiptoes.  The kitchens were designed with seriously strapping great vikings in mind.

7. Doubts are inevitable
You wonder, does this bit go in here or here… and am we doing this right? Is this really a sensible investment? Where’s that Allen Key again? Will it ever end? Why didn’t we just spend the money and get in the professionals? Stick with it. There’s no doubt that it is a good investment – at the very least you won’t have to put up with that horrible wood chip wallpaper.

*Thanks very much Al.

A splendid view from the South Downs

Part 1

Despite my blisters, I’d been looking forward to walking the second quarter of the South Downs Way. So, last weekend we set off again. On the Saturday leg, we were joined by one of the lovely Autumn’s friends, Bruce. Wiry and fit, he often works as a professional football referee. Clever and ambitious, Bruce has been Head of Geography at a school in Southampton for five years, despite being only 31. Bruce and his wife picked us up in their car at Petersfield station and drove us the two miles to where we finished the trail last time.

We started in high spirits – Autumn caught up with the gossip and I quizzed Bruce (an informed and intelligent sort) on his thoughts on the current affairs of the day. This section of the Way starts on a tree-covered country road, so quiet that we didn’t see a single car in over an hour. The only traffic were speeding mountain bikers, shouting warnings before whistling past. After a yet another lycra-clad apparition disturbed our conversation Bruce quipped “I thought you booked the path?” Still, time passed quickly, no doubt sped along by our high speed nattering. Suddenly it was mid-day and we’d walked a third of the day’s distance.

Sun-lit path through the forest

It started raining as we walked across a meadow and wrapped in our hoods we almost missed the first spectacular view to our left. Fields and villages stretched away from us while the dark sky streaked rain; at our feet the copper spire of South Harting church, fluffy-white bonfire smoke and sheep spread out like breadcrumbs on a rectangular green table cloth.

We navigated our way down a slope with an even steeper incline facing us, the speeding mountain bikes were now being pushed up the other side. After a hard climb to the top, we found a couple eating a picnic which included brewing coffee in a cafetiere. This was another Beacon Hill, where fires would have been lit to warn of the Spanish Armada in the 1580s – we’d climbed another on our first day. Bruce looked at the map and figured out that we’d come the short (but hard) route and the Way actually went round the hill.

It was time for lunch. Bruce’s geography-teacher map reading skills came in useful again and allowed us to navigate off the hill, down paths made slippery with ‘chalk flour’. We ate ploughman’s lunch with gigantic slices of cheese bought in a tiny, low ceilinged pub. The beer garden had several large beds of sturdy, richly coloured roses and looked onto a giant bank of the Downs. After a quick visit to the village’s Saxon church, we headed back to the Way.

On the route up we passed a wooden carving of St Christopher carrying a baby Jesus on his shoulder.

St Christopher at Elsted

The saint points the way to the next village and beneath his waist a sign reads:
‘Who carried Christ
speed thee to-day
And lift up they heart
All the way’

Later, sheltering amidst the stinging nettles in a wood, we saw a small gravestone of a German pilot who must have crash landed there in 1940. The stone was recently tended with Poppy Day crosses and large daisies placed beneath it.

Somehow the first day’s walking came to a close and we soon found ourselves heading down from the Downs through a field of rich, deep clover. We spent the night in Cocking, an otherwise picturesque village spoilt by a busy road running through it. The owner of our B&B, Mrs H., welcomed us with the offer of tea, which we had to decline as we were off to have dinner with Bruce and his wife, Laura. Instead, the kettle went on after we returned from our meal, and we finally settled down for a chat.

Tall, with a slight stoop, Mrs H. had been running her bed and breakfast for about fifteen years. It was hard to remember exactly how long, she said. Her house was stuffed with items brought back from Nigeria and South East Asia where she had lived with her husband who had worked for ICI. There were Vietnamese tables, Javanese shadow puppets, and ebony figures from Africa. One wall was covered in ‘chinese’ hats. She said the thing she liked most about having paying guests was meeting interesting people. “Who needs to go on holiday, when the holiday comes to you”, was how she put it.

Many of her guests had been had been walking the Way. Her favourites included four Irish women whose infectious good spirits had filled the house with laughter. One time a Japanese woman had performed the Tea Ceremony on the dining room table. The most unusual must have been the Carthusian monk who had been walking from his monastery in Le Grand Chartreuse to another monastery in West Sussex. The monk knocked on the vicar’s door, who then brought him round to Mrs H.; he too was Irish and had studied at Lancaster University in the 70s. Despite the austerity of his calling, the monk was an excellent mimic and spent his evening entertaining Mrs H with impressions of television personalities from thirty years ago. He left his round straw hat as a thank you, for which Mrs H had insisted he took a straw solar topee in return.

Mrs H. and Jon

After more chat over a hearty breakfast, we left feeling we’d met a real star of our journey. We couldn’t even make it to the end of her drive before turning back to take pictures of our kind host. Before heading up the path back up to the downs, we stopped in to Cocking Church to see the medieval wall painting that Mrs H. had mentioned. The fragment is faded and shows a simple image of a man in a long brown robe with a boy and small dog standing up on its haunches. It’s supposed to be part of the Nativity story of where the angel appears to the shepherds, but the resonances with the local area are clear. Sheep rearing was big in these parts in the Middle Ages – yesterday we walked past ‘The Shepherd’s Church‘ at Didling – and the Downs feature in the scene as an oblong block with a wavy top.

Back on the Way, we came across a farm with flint barns and brown and black pigs in the yard. The farm had a shop where we bought sandwiches and  banana cake from the ruddy cheeked farmer’s wife. She told us that there were tumuli further up the path, and someone she had spoken to had seen signs of prehistoric settlements on satellite images of one of their fields. After saying out goodbyes, we set off under a baked blue sk. The path turned to flint between meadows which grazed deep-red Sussex cows, and then changed to chalk over dun-coloured stubble fields. We walked for long periods through shady woods, before finally emerging in the stubble again and then sweating up a hill under the strong sun.

At the top of a long slope, we found the shade of a small coppice in which to sit and eat our sandwiches. The view looked over our route of the last half hour or so, and someone was already sitting there enjoying it – a pair of knobbly knees stuck out from behind a golfing umbrella. I would have preferred more privacy as I thought this was the ideal spot to propose to Autumn. I’d been thinking about putting the question to her for a while, for too long in fact. Okay, I’ll admit I’d been putting it off. Finally action was called for, so on the Friday before the walk I went hunting for a ring. I finally found one that seemed right. I found it in Hamleys, purveyors of the ‘The finest toys in the world’, that way Autumn could choose her own ring later. Before we set off I reckoned, that there’d be somewhere suitable to pop the question on the South Downs and this spot seemed to be it. So,out came the pink plastic heart-shaped ring, and luckily, she said yes.

Cracking up at the hilarity of it all

Before setting off again I was just about to nip into a hedge and answer nature’s call, when I was approached by a middle-aged man wearing black shorts and a leather bush hat.
“Are you just here on a jolly jaunt?” he asked
Despite wanting to tell him that we were just about to be off on a jolly trip to the loo, I managed to get out:
“Yes, just walking the South Downs Way” while wondering what else we might be doing standing in the path, “What are you up to?”
“Looking for something…” he said, as he put his hand into the undergrowth near a fence post. He pulled out a small plastic sandwich box which contained a roll of paper and a few sparkly, children’s trinkets. It turned out he was called Peter and was a taking part in the sport of ‘geo-caching‘, which is a sort of GPS-powered orienteering. Geo-cachers are given the coordinates of these small boxes and when they find them by using their GPS-systems, they note the fact by writing their names in the log book contained within the box. They can also leave small presents for others in the club, or more accurately, for their children. He said that the game “can become quite obsessional”, and explained that as we were not part of the sub-culture, we were ‘muggles’ – outsiders, although he didn’t mind letting us in on a few of their secrets. Peter joined us for about a mile before heading off in the direction of another cache.

An old Roman road, Stane Street, stretches over the vast expanse of Bignor Hill. There’s also a modern road that leads down to Bignor Roman Villa where you can see some well preserved mosiacs and a hypercaust system. Unfortunately, travelling by foot leaves little time for detours, so we carried on up and over the hill to be presented with another stunning view. After another hill we finally came down from the Downs to the village of Amberley for a pint of beer, to take the weight off the blister (just one this time) and take the (replacement bus service and then) train home.

My head next to the huge sunflower

It hadn’t even occurred to me that the front garden could be improved. It’s not like I hadn’t noticed it: I walk through it every day. There’s a back garden which is tended by the people who live at the back of the building, but no one had taken responsibility for the front. It didn’t look too bad – it wasn’t high with weeds. Bluebells appeared in the spring, Day Lilies flashed by in June, and there was also a creeping plant with yellow flowers and a fuchsia bush. Admittedly, the creeper had taken over a third of the space, the fuchsia another third and the rest was uneven, scrappy yellow grass.

Then in March I found myself unemployed – I needed a project besides job hunting. I enjoy gardening and must have mentioned it to Andrew, from the back of the building, who suggested getting to work on the front. Of course!

A completely new beginning was called for: Up came the creeping plant, a neighbour got one of the out-sized Day Lilies and I starting turning the earth. It was filled with unruly weed and plant roots, as well as bits of glass, brick, slate and plastic. Digging is a satisfying task – good physical labour with no thinking needed. Progress is measured by freshly tilled earth and an ever-growing pile of stones and weeds.

It was around this time that I started to get to know my neighbours. On their way to work or when popping out to the shops, they would remark on the garden. It turned out the previous mess had been getting them down. Soon we were swapping plants and ideas.

With a new bed I could plant flowers around the edge, next to the wall. I wasn’t going for radical garden design, but it should be an improvement. I acquired flowering plants wherever I could: Deptford Market and Brockley fair, Phoebe’s garden centre, my sister and mum, an offer from a newspaper I found on the train and four rose bushes from B&Q. The kitchen became a mass of propagating trays and pots. In the sweltering May heatwave, I regularly watered the flower beds. To keep the slugs out I followed my sister’s suggestion of surrounding the lupins with plastic bottles that had their tops and bottoms chopped off.

Slugs are a cruel enemy. It was very difficult to keep seedlings alive despite their plastic collars. One rainy Sunday night, I found six slugs and snails on one small lupin. I hurled them across the road in a fury. A couple of hours later I went out to check the plant and found it had been singled out for oblivion: another five slugs were attached to the plant’s stubby remains. Another time, the protective bottle-sleeve a small plant was breached when a nasturtium flopped on top of it, which the slugs then used it as a ladder and plopped down into the plastic stockade to eat the seedling.

It was a slug Helmand Province and radical action was called for. Despite my better instincts I put down slug pellets. The result was mounds of snail shells, but finally the plants seemed to be growing.

It may be unadventurous, but I wanted to plant grass. In the middle of the garden I put in a small, oval-shaped raised bed, and a lawn seemed a good way to fill the space around it. So, during the June heatwave, I hired a Streetcar car to fetch some turf. Piled on palettes at B&Q,  the rolls of turf were hot to touch, and there seemed to be smoke coming out of them, although I suppose it must have been steam.

Unrolled at home, large amounts of the grass turned out to be grey. Still, I laid it all and then watered it day and night. After a week the grey grass was now yellow, while the healthy bits were livid green and starting to grow. It seemed dead, but Andrew at the back suggested that it might be like the grass in Hyde Park during the hot summer of 2004. That summer the grass went entirely yellow, but regained its natural colour when the Autumn rains came. After a few more days I became convinced this was not a passing phase – the grass was dead.

At B&Q I not only tried to get a return on the grass, but as I’d originally had to hire a car to pick it up, it seemed only reasonable that they should deliver the replacement. The disinterested staff pointed out that B&Q did not do returns on perishables and furthermore, they don’t deliver turf. This seemed unusually poor customer service, so I persisted. It took three more visits to get hold of a senior manager who agreed to deliver some replacement turf at a convenient time. After careful tending and watering, the grass turned jungle-green with a Henri Rousseau-like thickness.

The plants bloomed. The stock flowered white, mauve and purple, and the cultivated geranium is still a shocking magenta. Native to the Mojave Desert, the phacelia, sprawled hairy blue across the flower bed onto the lawn. The roses are on their third budding so far this summer. The tiny raised bed has filled our salad bowl with bountiful rocket, various lettuce varieties, long black French radish sent over by the lovely Autumn’s mum and courgette from my sister.

But it’s the sunflowers that get the attention. Grown from seeds bought in the Lewisham 99p shop, I managed to bring five to flower (not including the one I gave to my next door neighbour). The first sunflower, hidden away at the back of the bed, reached my chest in height and put a smile on my face; the second gave the first company. The third sunflower has been getting all the attention. It must tower seven or eight feet high. It has a trunk wider than a can of Red Bull and leaves wider than tins of Quality Street. Its bulging, convex face is twice as large as a football; it’s a vegetable mirror-ball dancing with bees.

Everyone seems to like it. Autumn heard a young child excitedly shriek, “Mummy, mummy – look at the ginormous sunflower.” This Sunday morning I noticed two elderly West Indian ladies, dressed in lavender and mauve Sunday best after the service in the Baptist church on the corner, stop and admire its glow. A sunflower-loving friend who I told about this monster remarked, “Who could be annoyed if you see a sunflower?”

Toys - Indian style

If you buy a copy of Geoff Dyer’s new book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi you get a free copy of a second book. It’s not unusual to get good deals on books in the Amazon era, but it’s still welcome. In this case, the additional volume is not physical, but comes with reading Jeff in Venice for a second time in an entirely different light.

The novel is divided into two distinct sections, almost two separate novellas, both written by Geoff whose central protagonist is a character called Jeff. As Jeff’s name is not mentioned in the second book we have to assume it is the same person. The first half is set in Venice and told in the third person, and the Varanasi-set second half is told in the first person, but from a more impersonal perspective. His earlier book Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It skirted around the spiritual, this book steers around similar skirts.

Anyone who’s read a book by the author might know what to expect. Geoff’s personality is a powerful presence in his non-fiction books; you might say that his books aren’t ‘by Geoff Dyer’, but are ‘Geoff Dyer books’. They have an amusing, cerebral and stoned style, the persona they construct is of a tall, thin and well-read, but lazy man who lives a peripatetic, slightly druggy life. A similar style, idiosyncratically Dyer-esque is used here. I’ve read a few of his books and enjoy this voice, but the lovely Autumn, for whom this was her first Dyer book, thought his persona in the first half was annoying and creepily lascivious. Her attitude softened a little after seeing the author’s handsome face on the sleeve.

I thought Dyer was a bit of a cult author (although I’m sure he’d had the title), in that very few of my friends or acquaintances seem to have heard of him. Jeff in Venice… on the other hand gets some impressive reviews on the dust jacket from the great and the good, including Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Edmund White.

The first section tells the story of an arts journalist called Jeff Atman who gets sent to cover the Biennale di Venezia – the art extravaganza held every two years in Venice. The exhibition of contemporary art is an excellent opportunity for some first-class ligging. Jeff and a vast gang of other art-involved pissheads down countless bellinis in the middle of a giddying heat wave. He meets a beautiful American and the party gets even better – sex, drugs and longing ensue.

Another watery city, Varanasi, is the setting for the second section. If decadent, art-filled Venice is an empire of the senses, Varanasi is equally vivid, but as one of the holiest cities in India, concerns itself with a different realm. The narrator, Jeff we assume, is sent on another journalistic jaunt. He likes the place and decides to stay. Moving to a less luxurious hotel, he makes friends, hangs around and starts to feel at home.

The whole book is filled with some very funny writing and peppered with amusing observations: Jeff’s trip to a swanky Marylebone hair salon where he ends up getting his hair dyed; a rickshaw journey through the lunatic chaos of Varanasi’s streets which inspires a fantasy computer game called ‘Varanasi Death Trip’, and a forensically accurate description of the frustrations of queuing on the sub-continent.

Although Jeff seems more intent having fun at the Biennale than appreciating the art, he still can’t help but catch some.  Geoff writes very well about the installations that Jeff sees, but I still got a bit lost on the art. I was pleased to discover the New Yorker had chosen Jeff... as it’s book of the week. They helpfully showed some of the work that gets mentioned in the book.

Jeff encounters some indifferent work at the Biennale, but there is also some which is genuine. Sitting inside James Turrell’s Red Shift ‘time melted away…there was no distance…’. No space or time? Hmmm, that sounds like a metaphysical or spiritual theme… sorry, that should be ’spiritual’ theme. In India, Jeff adds his own metaphorical inverted commas:  ‘the reason it [renunciation] doesn’t feel like renunciation is because it’s not,’ he says.

Although it’s never entirely clear whether the Jeff in Venice is the narrator in Varanasi, there are themes which appear in both – art, sex, music, etc. As you read the second half of the book you might spot even more connections between the two sections.  Specific motifs pop up again too – a bloody bogey, dolphins, and a painting of a storm reappear in India. Somehow I didn’t spot them until I read a review in the San Francisco Gate. Then, in an interview in the New Yorker, I discovered that Geoff mentions that there’s loads of obvious mirroring between the stories. Now I had a free book: I would have to go through Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi again to root out ‘these little echoes, chimes and rhymes.’

A mask on the Roman Road, Hackney

It can be difficult to throw things away, to finally get rid of things. I like to keep the Sunday paper and read it over the course of the week, but they tend to accumulate. There’s now a nasty stack of items that need reading.

Last weekend I found a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings at my mother’s house. The stories included Lindberg’s flight across the Atlantic and the crash of the R101, as well as various events local to Berkhamsted. One or two items had contemporary resonance: there were a few pages on the funeral of Douglas Haig, who’s son George died a few weeks ago.

There was also an article on a family cousin who drowned herself in the village pond in the late 20s. Neither my mother nor I had heard of the story before, so we asked a living relative who confirmed it. Of course, the medical understanding of depression at the time was very primitive, but I wonder if her plight had anything do with the death of her brother. The article mentioned that he had died the previous year from wounds sustained during the First World War as if it might shed light on the sad tale. It was almost ten years since the war had ended.

The enduring effects of war was one of the themes of Andy McNab’s first radio play Last Night, Another Soldier that aired on Saturday. McNab is best known for his first book Bravo Two Zero, which tells about his involvement in a failed SAS patrol in the First Gulf War in 1991. I’ve never read the book, but must have built up preconceptions that it was fairly gung-ho. I think must have had these ideas, because the play surprised me.

McNab’s attitude to conflict is a bit more complex. His autobiography, published last year, told how his friends and fellow SAS members suffered after leaving the regiment for the mundanities of civilian life. The portrayal of war in Last Night… was not exactly glorious either.

The story centres around Briggsy, an 18-year-old squaddie on his first tour in Afghanistan. Starting with a firefight in an Afghan maize field, and it’s clear that battle is exhilarating. It’s also very dangerous – one a soldier dies a gurgling death.

Briggsy isn’t just in Afghanistan because he’s after a buzz. A desire to create a stable, democratic Afghan state isn’t really what’s driving him either. He’s from Peckham (like McNab himself) and was brought up by his mum after his alcoholic dad left. The army offers a future, an education and a tight bond of comradeship. It also offers him a connection to his dad.

Mr Briggs Senior was in the army too and served in the Falklands. After talks with the platoon medic and his own taste of battle, Briggsy starts to suspect that his dad’s wayward behaviour was probably as a result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Afterall, 258 British soldiers died in the conflict in the South Atlantic, but over 300 have committed suicide since then.

The play shows the comradeship of the army as central to the experience. Briggsy’s colleagues are drawn from all corners of the UK, and even Fiji, but have to lay down any differences in those Central Asian fields. The brotherhood of the soldiers takes precedence over questions about the morality of what they are doing.

The ethics of what Britain and the Western powers are doing in Afghanistan is not really dwelt on for too long in the play. Last Night… is in a sense an open work: the reader is left to work out whether we think the enterprise is a good thing or not. McNab’s soldiers might say that decisions like that are made by ‘pencil necks’ behind their desks.

The Afghan conflict is a conundrum. It’s difficult to know if we should we be there, or even if can we make a difference. Whatever happens, there’s bound to be someone collecting newspaper cuttings about it for some time to come.

Then, a couple of weeks ago a colleague didn’t turn up at work; we later we found out they had this exotic Mexican illness. It seemed a worrying, but also intriguing: that the great plague of 2009 had arrived on my doorstep was extraordinary, but what was it like? Are we really turned into blood-crazed zombies, as we are lead to assume? Interviewing my colleague, Sarah, seemed like an ideal way of answering some questions about swine flu. Sarah is 35 years old and lives in Rochester with her family, this is her story:

In our area there’s been a problem with swine flu. The local school (of 600 pupils) has had 14 cases over about five to six days, including some staff. Finally the school was closed for a day and they had a massive clean, and pretty much fumigated the building. Also, some close friends caught it: three sisters, one of whom is my five-year-old daughter Lilly’s friend at pre-school.

I’d say I’m healthy. I work out three times a week at the local gym, I don’t drink much and I generally eat a healthy balance diet. When I mix in crowds, it’s mostly through the kids at school. I have two sons in senior school and a daughter in pre-school (who’s about to start school). This mixing mostly happens at dropping off and picking up time, but also at parents’ evenings and sports day. The other times I’d mix with others would be in the pub or shopping centre.

The first instance I felt ill was on the Friday. I usually go to the gym and take my little girl swimming. This time I didn’t feel energised enough to swim, so sat fully clothed on the side and watched her. I felt exhausted.

Over the weekend I got on with things and came into work on Monday. On Tuesday I took a while to get going. I was hot and cold, and also had a headache and felt absolutely exhausted. I didn’t have aches and pains at this time, but I went to bed early and was in a deep sleep by 8.20.

I woke up in the early hours of Wednesday morning, around five, and felt like I’d been hit by a lorry – aching like I’d done a very hard workout. I normally get up at six, but kept on ’snoozing’ the alarm and by around seven I realised I couldn’t get up. My head was thumping, my throat was sore and I generally felt like I had a full-on dose of flu.

I also wondered if I was being paranoid: I didn’t think ‘Do I have swine flu?’ Still, I thought I’d take it easy. With a family of five you don’t have the luxury of sitting down and doing nothing, but I did take it easy. I got Lilly her breakfast and then watched a movie with her, I was sitting on the sofa falling in and out of sleep. I also took some ibuprofen.

I had a swine flu leaflet and in the afternoon I thought I’d read through it. The leaflet listed the symptoms, and I had the lot: a sore throat, achey limbs, headache, loss of appetite. But by the time I took the symptoms seriously, the doctor was closed. I’d left it so long because I thought, I’m not going to panic or get on the swine flu bandwagon. It was only after it got worse through Wednesday that I checked the swine flu symptoms.

Thursday morning I rang the doctor and spoke to the receptionist. I said I had the symptoms and was told the doctor would call after the morning surgery. The nurse asked me to take my temperature, but I found it difficult as it was difficult to see. Luckily, a friend came around who had a gadget that allows you to take a temperature in the ear.

At lunchtime, the doctor called and after a quick chat prescribed TamiFlu, my friend (and Flu Buddy) went to get the medicine in the middle of the afternoon. I took a capsule immediately and had a second before bed, although you’re not meant to as its a five day course. That night I still felt bad, but slept well.

On Friday my husband came back from his week away. Although I was still weak and tired, the main symptoms had gone and I generally felt better. Swine Flu takes it out of you. By Saturday I felt so much better that I took a slow walk along the side of the river, which felt good. I felt so much better on Sunday that I went to the gym and did half an hour on the running machine and had a swim. By Monday I was back in the office, although the boss sent me home, just in case I was infectious.

The NHS in my area seems to be coping very well, they responded immediately, and there was absolutely no hesitation in prescribing TamiFlu, which worked immediately in combating the symptoms.

There seems to be a lot of hysteria in the media, and although it is frightening, there have been deaths from other illnesses as well. The media reaction is a shame as it’s making people scared, but it’s been mild for most people I know who’ve had it.

Generally, my experience has been of fear: it took me a while to accept I had it. There was my concern for my children as a parent, because it’s much more dangerous for children. I was especially concerned for her son who has asthma, and weak lungs and heart. But it’s nowhere as bad as the media have been painting it.”

We’ve been told it’s bad – worse even than the recession – but so far the statistics haven’t borne this out. I asked another friend of mine who also got the bug too,  what it was like and was told, “it’s just like normal flu”.

Google allows you to find the meaning of a word or phrase by typing in ‘define:’ followed by the term you’re after. I thought it might be interesting to create my own google definition. I found this article explaining how to get included in Google definitions. Let’s see if it works.

Incidentally, I came with this yesterday evening, when the lovely Autumn and I went out for a meal. Afterwards she wanted to go to the pub for an ale and a cosy chat, while I carped that I’d rather go home. Autumn reckoned that going home didn’t have the same romance factor.

“Haven’t you heard of the ‘home date’?” I exclaimed.

She hadn’t.

So, supposing two people who are shacked up with each other can actually have a ‘date’ together, here goes:

Home date: a social activity of a romantic quality taking place at home, usually involving two people, who hope to enjoy each other’s company and feelings of ‘togetherness’. This often takes place in the living room, involving a hired film or an episode of an American TVshow from a box set.

Thanks to Wikipedia’s ‘dating (activity)‘ definition.

Emily, who I mentioned in an earlier post, has been writing since an early age and started her blog last year. She came into my Birkbeck journalism class a month ago and told us all a little of how she ended up in print. This post should have been written soon after her visit, but the computer has been on the blink. Emily was introduced by our lecturer as ‘Emily Benet, who went out there and did it’.

The Shop Girl blog centres around the comings and goings in Emily’s mum’s south London chandelier shop where she works. Emily ended up working in the shop for a lack of anything else to do after she dropped out of the well-known creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She originally intended to stay in the shop for a year, but ended up staying for three.

At first Emily hated working at the shop, she hated the long stretches of inactivity and the weird people who kept coming and bothering her. These odd-balls include the woman who insists Emily buys antique jewellery, and the man who tries to sell her copies of The Guardian with all profits supposedly going to ‘the children’ or ‘the church’. Not only did they annoy her, they didn’t even buy anything.

In common with many people in their 20s, Emily was plagued by the idea that she was not in a ‘proper’ job. Surely, working in retail is no way to live one’s life. For six months she broke free and got a job in an Estate Agents, but it didn’t last. After returning to the shop, she escaped again to take the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course and then taught English to foreign students. Again, this was unsatisfactory and she ended up back at the shop.

Despite being stuck in the graveyard of her dreams, Emily had plans. Although she didn’t enjoy the UEA course, she was still passionate about writing. It started when she was a child, and by her teens she’d had a first short story published and even won a writing prize. Now her spare time was spent writing a novel, Painting Pears.

After almost three years of hard slog on the book, Emily took a trip to South America. Getting away gave her the space to see the book was no good. Now, looking back she can see why. Working in the shop had made her fed up; this anger affected her writing: “I hated the first character and the first character was me.” she said.

A new approach was called for. Rather than plugging away at a book in her garret, Emily decided to start a blog. She already had a website, where she posted her pieces from various creative writing courses. However, to get a readership a website needs regular updates, so a blog seemed a better idea.

As a blog needs a topic, the obvious choice was the shop. She wrote the first post in early July, 2008. Somehow the writing wasn’t so tough this time, it started to flow. Although Emily was still working in the small chandelier shop, now her strange customers who used to annoy her now made great copy. Base metals had been turned into creative gold. Luckily, she says, the anecdotes and quotes stay in her head, so she doesn’t have to take notes, but she added that it would be difficult to find time anyway.

At first only her family and friends read the blog and left comments. A turning point came when her brother advised a bit of internet marketing and in particular to use Facebook’s community building possibilities. She joined various writing groups on the social networking site, and wrote about the probability that shop was going to close down (”it always is”, she says now) on her local community forum SE1.

Soon Shop Girl was getting more visitors and comments, which, of course, was great. The internet marketing campaign didn’t just bringing in interested readers, but interested parties. Soon after the post on SE1, which had also mentioned her passion being ‘not lighting, but writing’ she was contacted by a local film director who was looking for ideas and asked her to write a script. That was back in October, and the pilot episode was filmed the weekend before she came in.

One of the Facebook groups Emily joined was for Salt Publishing. This small publisher based in Cambridgeshire got in touch in January and asked her for a book synopsis. “My first thought was that perhaps all Salt fans were asked to write a synopsis” she said. The company liked the synopsis and so began her path to becoming a published author.

It was only six months after Shop Girl started, and Emily had two projects on the go. She wrote in her free time: Getting home around 6 o’clock, she’d write after dinner from 8 to 12. To write you have to make sacrifices, reckons Emily: “you can’t have a lovely tidy house, for instance, and have time to write a book.” Luckily, her boyfriend is tolerant, although she does have Sundays off.

An advantage of working in the shop is that it is a practical rather than mental job, so even after a physically tiring day Emily still has the energy for writing. When she’d worked in TEFL, the teaching was exhausting, and preparing for the lessons was a worry that sapped all her mental energy.

It’s obvious that having a good subject is a great strength of the Shop Girl blog, but Emily reckons that “blogs don’t need to be what you know, but how you tell it.” A successful blog must have regular posts, although Shop Girl has shown that once a week is enough. It’s also important to include images, Emily gets comments saying ‘I didn’t read the blog, but I really liked the picture of …’

Most bloggers would probably agree with her when she says that she enjoys getting comments. There was however one very negative one. A furious Facebooker fulminated: ‘you are one of the most uninteresting and mundane people I’ve ever encountered’, and raged ‘no wonder you people lost the colonies’. Whether Mr Irate meant the British or Spanish Empires, (Emily’s dad is Spanish), or both, is unclear.

For those who are considering a blog, Emily thinks its best to put your worries aside and just do it. Although on occasional quiet weeks, she has had to pull out a story from her vast memory of goings on in the shop, on most nights it’s a matter of “sitting there until you’ve got something on the paper.” For her, it’s habitual: “I was the kind of girl who had to do her homework before she could go out and play.”

Initially she was bashful about introducing herself as ‘a writer’ to strangers at parties, but now she’s even made business cards marked ‘writer’. But as bookshops can return books at no charge to themselves for up to a year after they receive them, it’s now up to us to read Shop Girl Diaries.

This is good advice, and central to a good blog. More important, however, is having access to a computer with web access. The blogger’s pen, paper and printing press. Unfortunately, mine’s still on the blink with severe driver problems. This means having to snatch moments to post on my lunch break at work. Being a slow writer and even slower eater, I’m finding it difficult to posts. Please bear with me.