Getting ready for the New Year

In many ways this Christmas sticks in your mind when disasters are spoken off.  The Mayan calendar ending  spanned a huge range of doomsday scenarios and it was quite disturbing the number of elderly relatives who confessed to being quite content if the world ended.  They obviously felt life had gone on long enough and going out with a bang and lots of company held a certain appeal.  Unfortunately, these turbulent times are nothing new. 

Imagine living through the World wars or even the Spanish flu, which alone wiped out 40 million.  My great grandmother lost two sons in one week from that Flu.  I cannot begin to imagine what that was like to endure.  With World War I fresh in the mind there must have been a feeling that the horror would never cease.  The young and the strongest, the flowers of each family mowed down with breath taking speed.  The Spanish flu took out those with strong immune systems and so it must have seemed as if the blood let, in those trenches was not enough. If ever you walk, as I did with a cousin, through the war graves in France the scale of such losses hits you.

As far as the eye can see there are graves and as you crest one hill more stretch out in yet another vista of never ending crosses to mark lost lives.  The real consequences of war, its horror hit home and we were silenced by the horrendous loss before us.  

Years later, I had a similar feeling in Auschwitz when visiting the camp with a friend, Pari.  We entered a huge barn like room with shoes of those killed in the camp. 

It felt as if one’s heart was being squeezed in a vice, tightening with the absolute horror of it.  As the train pulled out of that place, Pari and I sat opposite each other in a carriage, in silence.  I found myself rubbing at my chest as if trying to ease the physical pain that knotted there.

Who can forget the more recent disasters such as the Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 that wiped out 227,898 lives in terrifying unexpected swiftness.  If someone had predicted these disasters we would not have grasped even the possibility that such things could occur.  Our brains would have rightly denied the forthcoming horrors as impossible, intolerable and unendurable.  But our disbelief does not prevent such tragedies happening. 

Likewise, the fact that such tragedies do occur, does not necessarily mean we learn from our mistakes.  Wars still occur with depressing frequency; even natural catastrophes that afflict the world fail to unite us in response.  Instead, a strange lethargy keeps us continuing with business as usual.  As if daily routines will soothe things.  It strikes me that knowing the future might not help.  In fact spelling out such disasters would not be meet or seemly.  Our perversity in not awakening to such tragedies, adapting, learning and changing is however, distressing.  There are lessons to be learned and such losses of life should instil in all of us an urgency for change. 

If nations can endure such horror when we rise up to war, we must wage peace instead.  When humanity is facing such natural calamities and disasters, the need to be a world united in the race to save lives becomes achingly apparent.  These are lessons none of us can afford to forget.   

My Criminal Childhood with Cousins

My cousins and I were experts at fiddling the machines at the amusement arcade.  In Ireland we have cousins the way other countries have mosquitoes.  I remember being shocked by a visiting English child who confessed to having just one cousin; I had figured cousins always came in batches of dozens, like eggs.  Aged between 8-13 our gang knew the ropes like old convicts.  Mind you, we’d learned the hard way.  These blasted machines had eaten our sparse holiday money for years, so we’d grown hardy and wily. 

My cousin Bill was the best.  Only trouble was, he was so good he got barred very quickly from all the establishments.  He was also rather ruthless in his methods.  His favourite trick was to smash the glass window of the first cylinder of a one armed bandit.  Then he’d put coins in and pull the arm while carefully moving the cherry round to win two pennies each time.  It took patience but gradually, in a day, he could empty a machine.  The trick, he said, was breaking the glass cleanly so that no tell tale cracks could be seen.  One of the older cousins, Tom, felt Alan’s technique was not moral and spoke at length about how illegal it was.  The rest of us were conflicted about this issue and would hold long debates about the ethics of it all.  Tom was righteous and managed to save some of his holiday money each year putting it aside in a responsible manner.  As one of the debaters admitted, it was tricky, on the one hand there was no one more righteous than Tom but Alan was by far the most generous of all of us, so which virtue was more important.  The general consensus was that generosity trumped righteousness.  We would not use Alan’s technique, as the majority felt it lacked finesse but we would not condemn him either that would be altogether far too righteous.  Our acceptable methods were subtler.   

People often forgot to press the refund button on machines, so we’d feed off their carelessness once they’d gone.  The joy of those large round illicit pennies warm in your palm!  Old money felt much more substantial and indeed one penny could in those days buy you a paper bag full of sweets.  Or, we’d find coins lying under the bottom rim of a machine kicked out of sight.  There was a favourite change machine in one arcade that was meant to change half crowns into pennies but was the very dickens to use.  It took the half crowns easy enough but then sullenly refused to spit out pennies in return.  The poor punter would press every button available to no avail and then go to the booth at the middle of the arcade to complain.  In a flash, we were on the machine and would give the side panel high on the right a swift blow.  Like a choked person the reluctant machine would cough up first two pennies in rapid succession before vomiting the rest into your waiting hand.  You couldn’t let it hit the bottom for fear of announcing your success to the world.    Ethically, we felt secure.  Sure, didn’t people who dropped money need to learn to be more careful? We were practically providing an educational service! When using the change machine play, we always insured that one of us would be left with the machine so that when the technician came with the punter to investigate they would confirm he had indeed put a half crown in and proclaimed loudly that the machine often didn’t pay out as it should.  This meant the punter got his change and also meant we were up front about the machine’s weaknesses.  We felt no guilt whatsoever, after three hours of wandering desolately around the amusement arcade penniless, we felt we were due some reward.  We learned gambling was addictive. 

One summer our youngest cousin, Sarah , stood transfixed at the penny drop, pumping not just ten but every single one of her valuable pennies into a money clogged waterfall that despite a sliding log refused to fall.  She tearfully begged money from her Mum on the beach, while I minded her machine from the ‘jumper inners’ waiting to take advantage of all her priming of the pump.  All to no avail, even a half crown later not one penny fell.  She dropped to the ground sobbing in anguish and despair.  Bloody machines, we all stood appalled by her pain.  The hero of the hour was cousin Henry, built like a brick house, he tried to pull her to her feet and in doing so leant his considerable weight against the glass fronted machine.  That was all that was needed and there was an ecstatic machine gun of pennies firing out into the tray, the logjam freed.  I still remember her shocked face as pennies rained down over her head and shoulders.  It wasn’t every day you witnessed a miracle. 

However, all these tricks were as nothing compared to our biggest triumph.  There was a machine at the back of an arcade that consisted of black and white stripes moving over rollers.  You slide your penny down a chute and it rolled on its side until it fell over on the black and white stripes.  If it landed on the white stripes not touching the black, you won.  We discovered that if you took the chute and wagged it from side to side like a demented table tennis player, the coin would come out in a perfect straight line each time and flop on the white middle line like a beauty.  We were delighted with this discovery and made a real killing.  Imagine our outrage when the arcade closed this machine, taping an ‘out of order’ sign across it.  It took us a while to discover another in the back of a smoky arcade across town.  More success followed and we were exultant.  After years of the amusement arcades taking our pocket money we felt we were on a righteous roll.  Gradually, they disappeared these black and white beauties to our deep disappointment.  Decades later, I discovered one in an amusement arcade in Brighton.  I cannot begin to describe my ecstasy on spotting the familiar friend behind a pinball machine.  Within seconds, I was whipping the chute to and fro like a pro and winning coins hand over fist.  My three sons looked on in awe as we left, all our pockets bulging with coins.  There are always moral issues to tackle in life but just occasionally success is down to sheer skill and you can only celebrate that.

One minute you're defending the whole galaxy, and, suddenly, you find yourself sucking down darjeeling

Was invited out to tea by an eighty three year old Irish woman on Malta, yesterday.  We’d never met before.  I had been at a restaurant and her daughter, sitting at a nearby table, heard my Irish accent and said her mother would like to meet me.  She gave me her card and her mother’s phone number was written on the back.  I took a chance and phoned the next day before I lost courage and forgot.  A lovely Donegal accent replied and we arranged to meet at her home.  This was how I found myself at a lovely villa overlooking the sea along the coast outside Sliema, sharing a large laden table with this sprightly lady and her two friends (around the same age).  It felt surreal to find beautiful china, elegant linen napkins, homemade bread, apple tarts etc. with the strong Irish brogue coming at me.  Mother of eight, she spoke her mind and I loved listening to a familiar tune washing over me.  Despite having lived in Malta fifty years her accent was as strong as if we had just met on the back roads of Donegal today.  I cannot begin to tell of the delight of this company.  Their wit, the laughter, shopping exploits, collections of spoons, husbands all illuminated by three ladies who had lived life to the full.  Their openness and friendliness was like an antidote to homesickness delivered intravenously with copious gallons of tea.     When you are far from much that speaks of home it is delightful to fall into such company.  I thank God that my Irish accent was overheard, that her daughter handed me her card and for encouraging me to call and that for once I took the opportunity offered.  Life is far too short to waste what it brings unexpected to your door.  Unexpected kindness takes you by the hand and urges you gently to start thinking of others instead of yourself.  A memory from childhood blows to me on familiar breezes. 

When I was a child we had a caravan in Donegal on a windswept beach that even in bad weather was breath taking.  It struck me how empty all this landscape was with sand stretching off into the distance devoid of any humans.  As we made the journey to our caravan and back we’d go down tiny bumpy back roads equally empty.  But, if  ever we did come across a solitary human being high in the mountains it was usually an old farmer type, wearing formal dark suits.  He would straighten as the car passed and wave a warm welcome and nod their head sweetly in our direction as if you were a fond cousin newly arrived.  I asked my father why they did this and he said, in olden days everyone would out of simple courtesy.  Sitting in the back of the car I watched the green fields flash by and I mourned the loss of such simple civility in our brand new world. 

A strange thing would happen when we passed a funeral cortege.  My father would slow the car and remove his hat, setting it on my mother’s lap beside him.  A sober silence would reign and as a young child I knew that no talking was allowed.  Later, I would ask, why this careful ceremony and he gave different answers, like “every man’s death diminishes me”, or “every life deserves respect as does every death” and “it reminds us all powerfully of our own mortality”.  Every time, a different answer as if the actual answer was too deep to put into normal words.  Even now, when passing a funeral, I long to have a hat to remove and show my respect.  I make do with a silent prayer and remember my father’s small gesture and the lessons it inculcated in all of us.

Once, we caught the train to Dublin and my father played chess with a friendly priest in our compartment.  As they played they discussed Irish history, politics and religion.  It was like watching two experienced swordsmen testing each other capabilities.  Quotes would be used from historians, writers and the bible.  Anecdotes given and tales told to make a point and always laughter as the wheels of the train rocked us south.  You could tell they were pleasantly surprised to meet a worthy opponent both on the board and off.  At times, the discussion became heated but it was always courteous.  From the clash of differing opinions the truth does emerge and it was thrilling sitting eavesdropping on this epic battle.  When they said their polite farewells, my father asked his name and the old priest replied, “It’s William, sure you’ll not forgot crossing the Boyne with Father William will you?”    I drank it all in, their wit and good humour along with their eagerness to test their insights and experience with each other.

Yesterday, drinking gallons of tea at a laden table, listening the Donegal accent work its magic, a fragrance of that lost world wrapped itself around me.  That old-fashioned courtesy and kindness no longer extinct, as I feared, but sitting opposite me, pouring tea and forcing slices of freshly baked cakes onto my plate.

“Well is it with him who is illumined with the light of courtesy”

Rich Tit Bits

I am reading a wonderful book at present.  Entitled, “the best American magazine writing” 2011 it contains wonderful gems worth digesting indeed.  Michael Hasting’s piece “The runaway General” frightened me only because I’d already read the impressive piece before and was for a moment horrified that the book would turn out to be all too familiar.  But no, the rest were new to me and delightful in their range of topics and insights.  Jane Mayers wrote ‘Covert Operations’ and dealt with two wealthy brothers who have fought a furious war against climate change science and helped to seed the tea party movement.  They criticize political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffectual and unnecessary.  The fact that their own company was named one of the top ten air polluters in the US might have had something to do with that.  In 1997 when the Environmental Protection Agency acted to reduce surface ozone, caused in part by emission from oil refineries, one of industry’s arguments put forward against this reduction was that smog free skies would result in more skin cancer!  Unbelievably, this argument was accepted by the Court.  You, really have to just shake your head in bewilderment at times!  Such is the funding strength of the two industrialists mentioned in the article that they even manage to colour the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History exhibits.  In a multimedia exploration of mankind and climate change, the human element in influencing such climate change is carefully whitewashed out.  Obviously, linking increases in carbon dioxide to fossil fuels would not hit the right note for these particular funders. 

It reminds me all too painfully of the new Giants Causeway Centre in Northern Ireland where the creationist belief finds its place in the display.  Please, let us be real!  In educational establishments that play, one hopes, a role in shaping young minds of the future can we try to avoid fantasy land, fake science or the polluter’s agendas.  The Giant’s Causeway was created by volcanic eruptions 60 million years ago, not by mystical giants laying down a bridge to Scotland and clearly neither is it consistent with the creationist’s claim that the earth is a mere 6000 years old.  The fact that increasingly educational programmes pussy foot around the truth to humour the rich or the religious is a worrisome sign.

This book challenges many other taboos including how we treat the dying in our medical system.  A must read article by Atul Gawande entitled ‘Letting Go’.  Scott Horton’s article on the three suicides in Guantanamo on June 9, 2006 is troubling.  It does seem highly suspect, as is claimed by American authorities, that the three could managed to have hung themselves, hands bound with rags down their throats.  I am only halfway through this book but it is toe curlingly good.  Well written, thoughtfully researched it feels like a long cool drink in the desert, refreshing, unexpected and rejuvenating. 

It is astonishing what the human being can achieve

There are times when you begin to doubt yourself.  To see flaws, imperfections in all aspects of your persona.  Then cracks appear which effect your outer façade.  How you seem to others deteriorates until huge chunks of who you once were begin to fall away.  It’s not that we are, what others think of us.  It’s more that we are easily polluted by our environment.  We all like to think of ourselves as impervious to such erosion but unfortunately we’re not.  Once the slide into disintegration has begun no energy goes into reconstruction. All of it is diverted into keeping up appearances.  Trying to fool the onlooker that, actually, all is well.  So many organisations and  individuals are in that mode.  They don’t take criticism well because it strikes at the very core of what they have become.  Hypocritical shells of themselves.  Criticism to them can only fuel huge self-deception and aggressive defensiveness.  It is so easy to lose the plot.  Principles go out the window as pragmatism dominates.  In such a slippery state the hardest thing to do, is exactly what you need to do.  You need to set aside your own perspectives and learn from others.  It is perhaps hardest to do because it demands a trust of others at a point when we no longer even trust ourselves.  

One example of what one individual can achieve when they believe in themselves and go for their goals is the Edhi Foundation.  Abdul Sattar Edhi started a welfare centre in Pakistan with the equivalent of fifty-three pounds.  He bought an old van, which he called "poor man’s van" and he drove around providing medical help and burying unclaimed bodies. 

With his wife, a nurse, he has built a foundation that has grown to have 300 centres across the country, runs 8 hospitals providing free medical care, eye hospitals, diabetic centres, surgical units, a 4- bed cancer hospital and mobile dispensaries and they have in addition to a fleet of ambulances their very own air ambulance service.

Their achievements are breath taking indeed and include:

20,000 abandoned babies rescued

40,000 qualified nurses have been trained

50,000 orphans are housed in Edhi Homes

1 million babies have been delivered in Edhi Maternity Centres

1800 ambulances (the largest ambulance fleet in Pakistan and the largest private ambulance service network in the world)

He is now 82 years old and has been working for 60 years to serve the poor and the suffering. Here is a description of this modest man and his home,

“Edhi remains a very down-to-earth person, dressed always in grey homespun cotton local clothes.  Apart from the one room, which he uses for his living quarters, the rest of the building serves as his workplace in Mithadar, a locality of old Karachi that is full of narrow streets and congested alleyways. Adjoining their living room is a small kitchen where his wife usually prepares the midday meal. Next to it is a washing area where bodies are bathed and prepared for burial.”

It is astonishing what the human being can achieve when it sets out to try and solve the challenges society faces.  He may be half way around the world from us but isn’t it heartening to hear of an individual making a real difference. 

Humanity seems really weary for want of a better pattern of life to which to aspire.

My father was headmaster of a school in a small village in Northern Ireland high in the Sperrin mountains.  You learn a lot from your parents, not so much from what they say but more from what they do.  From my father, I learned tolerance and a search for knowledge.  In that small polarised community, Catholics on one side and Protestants  on the other, two communities existed side by side.  As one village wit sarcastically pointed out to my father, “You try and stay on the fence between the two communities and there isn’t room on that f__king fence!”  In a place, where some parents would stone the visiting psychologist’s car, in fear of them labelling their child as having special needs, it was tough at times.  Ignorance is scary, not funny.  Those who shout loudest are not necessarily the people we should listen to.  Volume rarely equates with insight.  Those who stir up hatred and prejudice do not appeal to our intellectual side but to our more animal instincts.  The few that try to speak to grander principles, such as the independent investigation of truth, will never be given the populist platform bigots possess.  Perhaps, it is easier to speak to the worst side of human nature rather than engender thoughts of the nobility of mankind.

I had a colleague who ran a business in the town nearby, a good man, married with two children.   For decades he was a pillar of society and then he lost his footing.  He had financial problems and he used client’s money to make up the shortfall.  Of course it was discovered, only the hardened criminal with expertise or the very lucky escape such deeds.  The local paper was frank but surprisingly fair, highlighting in an article the financial mistakes and criminal charges but also speaking to his forty years of service to the community.  The national tabloid newspapers were not so balanced.  They ran lurid headlines that assassinated that quiet man.  He was found in a fume filled garage dead, the tabloid newspaper open beside him.  When did these newspapers get the green light to degrade, humiliate, eviscerate, hound the famous, plague the bereft and expose only the very worst of our civilisation?  We have cultivated that taste for excess and the perverse in all of us and it sells newspapers very well but at what cost to all of us?

Is that the only way individuals can feel good about themselves, by constantly observing and gloating at the degradation of others?  To me it is akin to a short man digging a trench around himself so that he can appear taller.  The sad news is there seems no end to the depth of this trench.  Just when you think the press has reached an all time low they discover a whole deeper darker level.  Reporters should enquire into situations as much as possible and ascertain the facts, then set them down in writing.  Such news is a mirror of the world and it is a potent instrument that should be used with justice and equity, not to torture the subject and degrade the reader.  They have a  mighty responsibility.  They are not meant to manipulate for material gain, malign for malicious intent or magnify the misdemeanours of our society. Humanity seems  genuinely really weary for want of a better pattern of life to which to aspire.

It is surely in finding a better of pattern of life real hope lies.  My mother taught me kindness not with words but deeds.  A neighbour’s cat died after giving birth to five kittens near our home and I remember being awed as my mother set herself the task of hand rearing these five small bundles of fur.  We had big thick brick storage heaters, which were great for sitting on, and she used one of these for the kittens, placing their bed just above the heater.  She used an eyedropper to feed them regularly and had names for them all including the best feeder Big Boy who was impossible to fill.  I watched as she fought to save them all even the runt a tiny still shape under the feet of the rest.  They all survived and I watched engrossed at how much work and dedication it took to keep these tiny fragile animals alive.  It seemed to require incredible act of determination and will power.  When they were fully weaned she found owners for all of them.  The local postman took two of them.  Within weeks, he and his family suddenly decided to immigrate to Australia.  Unbelievably to me, as a child, he had the two cats, one of whom was Big Boy, euthanized.  I was devastated by how much work it takes to keep something alive and how little it takes to end a life.  It suddenly seemed when it comes to ending life, thoughtlessness is an advantage.  

Now, as an adult I look back and wonder at my Mum’s thoughtfulness and kindness.  She worked, had three children, nursed my invalid grandfather fighting gangrene and yet found it within her to lavish such kindness on five vulnerable kittens.  I suspect that, is what good people do, they instil in themselves the habits of kindness, every hour and every day.  Steeling themselves to do good in this world.  It is not easy, it is backbreaking and it is hard finding that extra energy to see to the needs of others.  But there are so many like her around us, looking after our young, our elderly, the disabled, the ill every day and night.  Pushing themselves past limits of human endurance and we will never read about them in newspapers.  It is a shame really, because these are the people at whose feet we should be learning what it is to be a real human being.   They, by their deeds, foster families and communities whose ways give real hope to the world. 

           

 

The Walk – A pictorial tale of desire and longing

Walked around San Anton gardens (in Malta) and then from Valletta to Sliema capturing some of my favourite things on the way.

A beautiful walled garden around a palace. San Anton Palace was built between 1623-1636 as a summer residence for the Grand Master of the Order of St John, Antoine de Paule. Beautiful trees and lovely green lined paths.  Such an oasis of calm.

One of the lovely walkways, great to wander through pondering stuff.  It has a lovely kitchen garden cafe to have coffee in and watch the ducks and kids.

Then, after a coffee it was on to Valletta.  Jumped off the bus as it entered the city walls so I could take the coastal route back to Sliema.  Next stop, after an hour of walking, was ice cream at Busy Bees.  Positively, the best ice cream on the island.  Then onto my favourite house, I have no idea who owns it, but I want it!

Around the corner is a ship owned by Errol Flynn briefly in the 1950s now converted into a restaurant on the sea front.

Fashioned on strength, so that she could penetrate the Baltic ice floes in the cold winters and sail in the strong Nordic winds of Scandinavia, the Black Schooner was constructed with a hull of two layers of thick seasoned oak. For sixty-nine years she navigated under sail with cargoes of grain, coke and wood on voyages far and wide. Built around 1909 it has had a traumatic history, suffered weevel worm in the hull, a fire in the engine room, abandoned by her owners in a Malta harbour where she sank, settling on the seabed at a depth of 70 feet for years.  Eventually, she was refloated and refitted and used in the filming of the motion picture “Popeye.  Sadly, she sank again during a freak storm in 1981.For a ship that has sailed the high seas for so long there is something tragic to find it on dry land, being prostituted as a restaurant.

This one is my favourite yachts in Malta so far.  Such beautiful wood and lovely lines.  A really classy article with a life boat look of stability that appeals to the total coward in me.  Note the rich cruiser alongside, now they don’t tempt me at all.  We had a cruiser and they drink the fuel so quickly that instead of enjoying the sea and scenery you end up transfixed by the falling fuel gauge.  Just in case you think I come from a rich yachting set, let me hasten to say ours was small and much less impressive.  I fondly remember my Dad feeling nervous about leaving our new purchase tied to the walls of the harbour and so we rigged up a combination of sturdy ropes to secure our new boat safely in place.  Came back to find the tide had gone out and our boat was hanging from the wall in mid air.  Darn, but we had really tied it securely! 

She is bigger and broader than she appears.  See what I mean about a broad beam?  But, like all things it has that beauty that only comes from being well looked after!  Only another 4km to home now, I reckon I will make it before nightfall.  

A Real Winner

 

It has been said with more than a grain of truth that if you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize start killing loads of people quickly.  Once you have murdered enough then make peace.  This, it would appear is the quickest way to win the Noble Peace Prize.  It is perverse because it is also so true and many previous winners fall into this category.  But, the hardest way to win this prize is to actually believe in a noble principle and work with backbreaking intensity all your life to achieve it. 

An example of some one who falls in to the latter category is Norman Borlaug.  He grew up a farm boy in Iowa and saw at first hand the poverty of the depression years and it instilled in him a conviction that it was impossible “to build a peaceful world on an empty stomachs”.  This fuelled a lifetime commitment of almost a century during which this determined man did more than anyone else during the 20^th century to help the world feed itself and the fruit of his labour was the saving of hundreds of millions of lives.

 

Now, that is the way to win a Noble Peace Prize!  It was typical of the man that when his wife told him he had won the prize he was working in a wheat field outside Mexico City and he responded by telling her someone was pulling her leg.  When persuaded of the truth of the prize he did not leave the field but kept working commenting that he could celebrate later.  It was this sense of urgency that stayed with him and his knowledge that every second two more people into the world crying to be fed.  By 2050 he predicted that the world would need to double its food supply of 2005.

He specialized in plant breeding and left a good job to go to Mexico in  1944 and started experimenting with wheat to help people who were starving there.  Mexican farmers faced soils which were depleted, crops ravaged by disease, low yields and were not even able to feed themselves, much less sell surplus for profit.   For ten years he persevered even ploughing by hand and, thanks to his efforts, by 1956 Mexico’s wheat production had doubled and it had become self sufficient.  It did not stop there, he then went to India and, while the war between Pakistan and India raged around him, began planting until it too became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.  He even came out of retirement, in 1984, to take his seed and techniques to Africa. 

 

When the Nobel committee presented him with the Peace Prize they commented “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world”

Isn't it sad, and a sign of the poverty of our education system, that hardly anyone even has heard of this amazing character?

“The fundamental basis of the community is agriculture, tillage of the soil.”

Baha’i Writings

So leaders can be killers and often are

Am posting this here as new website a bit slow these days -sorry if you have already seen it!

People sense things about others.  My mother swears her first impressions are always spot on.  Mine are totally crap.  It’s not just that I lack that intuitive feel for people; it’s something more fundamental than that.  Lately, I have begun to suspect I am a hermit in a modern world.  Think about it, what social skills do hermits need?  None, in fact in a certain light a desire for social interactions is a positive flaw.  You can’t have a hermit hanging out on street corners gabbing away about the local gossip.  Neither, do you want a talkative hermit with the broadcast signal ever on.  No, you want silence, introspection, a tendency to prefer your own company and a genuine desire for solitude.

Perhaps, first impressions were evolved by the sociable among us after their initial forage into community dynamics around Stone Age fires.  After chatting to enough fur clad companions these extraverts began to figure out who would respond willingly to conversation gambits and who would respond with a club to your head.  This over centuries morphed into an intuitive feel for different types, perhaps fuelled by common gestures, speech patterns, physical habits etc After all, most of us can tell when relatives are sulking, moody or bad tempered.  They don’t have to verbalise such distress, banging doors, awkward silences and even the way in which they perch uncomfortably on a chair say it all.  Gradually, those proficient in first impressions began to use their newfound skills.  It’s not a big jump from understanding your audience to manipulating and directing them.  Maybe, our first leaders emerged from this very cohort, skilled in the art of reading others, they could have used it to attain positions of authority.  No wonder intertribal warfare became common.  Into the mix comes different groups with their own loyalties and impervious to the group manipulation of their rivals. 

You can see it all evolving nicely with politicians and sales people emerging from this early branch of extraverts.  So if this holds true, what happened to the hermit?  Well, perhaps being on your own lends itself to development of crafts and arts.  It allows extra time to fine hone skills that only the extended isolation from others permits.  Some philosophers and scientists perhaps, could also trace their evolutionary roots back to the hermits in caveman days, loners who had time to examine sunsets on a mountain top, contemplate the grain of a wooden club.  But it is not all rosy in the hermitage.

Psychopaths and violent criminals also usually spring from hermit stock.  Studies have show that the majority of criminals at the vilest end of the scale have not yet mastered the social skills of toddlers.  Such people have often cannot even manage basic eye contact when speaking, nor learned rudimentary body language cues. So there you have it.  Hermit or socialite?  Are you adept at social skills, reading people, responding to their overtures?  Or are you happier in your own company, introspective and socially constipated?

Mind you it makes sense in caveman society that if you are a violent killer, there would be a high likelihood of some community minded individual clubbing you to death in your sleep.  After all, one of the advantages of community living is that one’s faults are plain for all to see.  Indeed one of the little known facts about psychotic aggressives is that, generally, they move frequently causing little oasis of pain in their wake.  Out of proportion to the number of social contacts most of us have.  The advantage of moving is that they can often evade detection by exiting when their activities begin to reach night time clubbing proportions or in today’s parlance, when they come onto police radar. 

But there are psychotic individuals who perversely rise to the very top.  Probably, the caveman example would be the violent oppressor who manages to rule the community with fear and impunity.  Despite their violent tendencies such characters have usually cloaked themselves in the disguise of a greater cause.  Thus, justifying their mass murders.   You may well think I’ve lost the plot here but you need only look back to   Stalin, Russia (through his land programme and The Great Terror caused the death of millions), Hilter, Germany (including six million Jewish people in the Nazi genocide) and in case you think World War 2 was an exception, later the killing propensity of leaders went on with Mao Zedong, China (40–70 million people through starvation and executions).  The list goes on, stretching not just back into the past but depressingly on up to present days.  So leaders can be killers and often are.  The question is, are they hermits with killer tendencies or extraverts with murderous intent?  I have come to no conclusions except two suggestions:

1. My conviction that things will improve when we elect leaders not because they want the position of power but because they are capable of serving a nation. 
2. It would also help if the horrendous tortuous process of becoming and staying a leader did not deform even normal decent human beings into a shadow of their former selves.  You may be a hermit or an extravert or somewhere in the middle but do spare a thought for those in power whatever they started off, corruption seems to set in sooner or later!

"How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope and with expectation.”

We are born, we live and we die.  Life on this material plane exists of these three stages.  Birth is pretty traumatic, you emerge down a narrow restrictive channel bruised, bleeding and gasping for air.  Dying, I’m told can be pretty traumatic too.  Again, gasping for that last breath, facing darkness and feeling battered from holding on to life. What about the in between?  Well, living that gap between birth and death, can be bloody, breath taking and you invariably find yourself in the dark at times.

So what do we learn from all this?  For one, I tend to find the whole idea of re-birthing hogwash.  As if repeating the birthing experience as an adult can exorcise what went wrong first time around.  I feel the same way about reincarnation, the idea of having to live another life again, how depressing and repetitive.  I also am heartily fed up of listening to people who claim they were Princess Antoinette, or the Queen of Sheba in a previous life.  Please, isn’t living one life sufficient and having the notion of endless repeat attempts an admission of failure (a sort of university of life, examination resit schedule for the chronically incapable)? And doesn’t having that notion of endless repeat attempts steal from this one life the priceless unique opportunity that it really is.  Much as some would prefer to think otherwise, this is it folks, no rehearsals, no second takes we have only one shot.

You cannot even prepare the baby within for that shock of birth.  No stroking of that bump or careful explanations of the coming process can help.  Pre-natal classes, prepare parents but we are kidding ourselves if we think they make a major difference to the actual experience ahead for the baby.  Being born is traumatic.  Having a chilled out mother perhaps reduces adrenalin flowing to the baby, a darkened room helps reduce the shock of bright lights on the newborn, a quiet delivery room avoids the noise assault experienced somewhat.  The voices of family members, whose voices are familiar, can be comforting, but who are we kidding here.  Birth is traumatic for a reason.  Without that shock perhaps that first vital breath is not taken.  Indeed some babies require removal of fluid from their airways and a jolt to the body to get truly going.  Transition is painful, by definition there is a letting go of what one has become accustomed to.  We can have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the next phase of our life.

By contrast, dying can sometimes be incredibly peaceful too.  Weariness, deep tiredness to the bone can anaesthetise that final transition.  Sleep is referred to as ‘the little death’ for many reasons.  It is also a surrendering to oblivion, to a different state.  So, if our physical life is like bookends, with birth and death at either end, perhaps there are lessons that can be learned and applied.  Not being afraid will help reduce the trauma, a peaceful environment soothes the spirit (not easily found in the modern hospital environment) and being surrounded by those closest, remind you that you are not alone even at this final moment and wrap you in that greatest comfort blanket of all, love.  I chose to think that we are then, freed of our physical body much as when you remove the cage, the bird is finally free to fly.  This transition is traumatic but necessary.  At a recent funeral a family friend was speaking to the audience of mourners and pointed out that death is not a shameful and fearful thing to which the recently departed loved one has been subjected to.  It is a part of life, like birth and a path each one of us sooner or later will take.  He then asked the question, “How should we view death?”  and gave this quote as an answer,  "How does one look forward to the goal of any journey? With hope and with expectation.”

So, what about that period in the middle called life?  Well, it can be traumatic but then that usually  means a time of change has come.  Be comforted that you are at a turn in the road and a time of transition.  You may well be a little bloodied, somewhat in the dark, not sure of the way ahead, but don't forget to enjoy the journey.

Be gone foul cup cake

I will not eat that cake

It sits there gloating

Full of fat, bulging cream

As if to say

Be like me, abundant

Indulgent, finger-licking good

But I have eaten my ryvita

My chosen food of suffering

Chewed down the tasteless

Sesame covered cardboard

And I will not be tempted

By such fancies as that

Luscious cup cake

I have aspirations

To be less of me

And if I have to live

On cardboard and water

It will be so.

I am a woman with a goal

Not some weak floozy

Who is thrown by the unexpected

I am made of sterner stuff

My will once set

Cannot be broken.

Be gone foul cup cake

I spurn you

You are nothing to me

In the greater scheme of things

You are but a tiny morsel

I’ll take just one crumb to remind me

Of all that I choose to reject

One needs to know the enemy

Keep your friends near

But your enemies even closer

Heavens that cake was small

It started with a crumb

Barely a morsel

But somehow the cake has been eaten

I can’t believe it’s gone

In the greater scheme of things

I will not let such a slip

Cause me to lose my way

To err is human after all

Even one crumb can lead you to disaster

Now I know the danger of a tiny piece

That is how it begins

A slippery slope

To cake indulgence

I will be strong

I will say no

To all future, finger-licking food

Exhibiting Oneself

I sit in an art exhibition in Valletta, keeping an eye on the paintings and the visitors.  It suddenly strikes me that art, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.  But, what do I know, being from a science background, I am in foreign territory here in more ways than one.  Valletta, the capital of Malta is beautiful.  With her elegantly chipped sandstone walls and narrow steep streets, surrounded by the blue Mediterranean she is a unique find.  The streets are laid out like New York in a grid fashion but with wonderful buildings rich in history at every turn.  

The best way to visit her is by sea.  The huge walls of Valletta rise above you as you get closer and its fortifications intimidate exactly as intended around half a century ago.  

Right in the centre of Valletta lies St George’s square, which I am overlooking at present.  Surrounded by the ancient buildings of the Knights of St John there are water fountains laid out in the middle.  It’s lovely to sit eating an ice cream while children frolic in the water jets.

 I watched a four year old, at first, play cautiously with her hand in the shooting water.  Then growing in confidence she carefully lowered her hair in to the spraying jets.  She put her face directly into the jets of water and giggled at the explosive force hitting her eyes and mouth.  A growing audience watched as she explored further.  After lying on top of the many jets, she tried sitting on them.  By now completely soaked and bare foot she wandered through the many jets with arms and legs outstretched spinning in ecstasy.  Finally, she sprawled on top of as many jets as she could cover on the flat of her back and while moving her arms and legs, like a figure making snow angels, she controlled the tall jets blocking and releasing them in turn.  Her delight was ours, her genuine wholehearted absorption, a reminder.  Of how all of us should approach life and art, arms outstretched and spirit unleashed.  Only then can our hearts be touched and art do its magic – a true ladder for the soul.

Across Canada and The USA by Campervan

We were in a camping van recently, my family and I, recreating a road journey of over fifty years ago. It’s rare such things happen.  You always mean to do such trips but usually never do.  Life kind of gets in the way or runs you over.  Half a century ago my father decided to immigrate to Canada from NI.  He had a teaching post offer in the plains in Saskatchewan in a tiny hamlet called Piapot. So with his young wife and two toddlers (My Mum and brothers are shown in photo above) they headed out westward, where so many have gone before.  All of them in search of something better, I expect.  Later, he moved to Maple Creek a larger town nearby with proper shops.  On his holidays his persistent restless urge got the better of him, so he set off on an epic journey across Canada and The United States in a large car with his family.

It was this journey, which took us across Canada to Vancover and down the US through loads of national parks, that we redid in 2010.  It felt epic driving a massive camper van through country you associate with movies.  Coming from a small island the vastness of a huge continent is heady stuff.  The campervan rattled and shook as we drove and handled like a small house on a trailer.  As before, there were five of us but there were changes too.  I was merely an embryo on that first journey and my Dad had died five years before the trip.  He has left a huge gap in all our lives and he was the missing passenger on our journey.  He would have loved it. The lakes, glaciers, forests, plains all unfolded before us.  Then, when delight or weariness got the better of us, it was time for a nice cup of tea in our campervan.  Elbow to elbow with my brothers for the first time in three decades felt like revisiting your childhood as an adult.  Only this time around instead of fighting we enjoyed the closest company of all, family. 

There were challenges, my eldest brother’s boots (which had smell one cannot begin to describe), my mum’s skin reaction to mosquitoes (huge swollen pus filled protrusions), a hernia and more (don’t ask!).  But it was all great!  The open road, a huge campervan and total freedom.  We saw real live wild bears in the forests, swam in glacier lakes, explored and have photographs to prove it.  I’m so grateful for all of it.  In Maple Creek the school had been preserved as a museum, so my Dad’s classroom was there exactly has he had left it down to the posters on the door and exercise books.  There was even a picture of my Dad, looking so young, with his class beside him.  Strange sadness as well, as if we were close to him, but he was gone, out of reach, despite our longing.  

Piapot was different, the whole prairie area has suffered economically and there has been a huge exodus of inhabitants to the bigger cities.  So Piapot, which had always been a tiny hamlet beside the Trans Canadian Railway line, had shrunk still further.  The school here had been disserted for years with grass growing waist high around it.  Peeping through the front door everything was still there desks neatly lined up as if it had been left just yesterday and not a few decades.  It felt strange, as if we as a family had been transported back to the same spot 50 years earlier in a time machine. Then, as my brothers stood shoulder to shoulder next to the train lines, a huge endless train trundled past and sounded its horn.  It completed the miracle and we were all awash with the past, delighted to have caught this exact moment on the wind.  There is a photograph of my Dad with my brothers next to the same railway crossing and you’ll never understand it – but we were all there, every one of us, together again at that spot.  It felt like, this is the moment that we had come so far for.

Preserving - how to do it

Canning

One way to preserve is to use canning.  This is a method that means you have to lock yourself away from contamination to avoid any sneaky bad things getting in at you.  Unfortunately, if you are not particularly careful, in the first place, it just take one slip and you become unsafe.  So leaving a contaminate in the mix, without thorough heating and high pressure, or allowing a break in the seal after closure will mean you are exposed to corruption and danger.

Freezing

Just keeping things at a much lower temperature and never allowing heat can preserve but is not as long lasting as canning.  It requires a considerable amount of energy to maintain the effort.  Also, in the process you lose some of the essential you (tendency to become a little mushy).  Frozen as you once were, you are inevitably somewhat less too.

Dehydrating

Taking all the moisture out of you means bad stuff cannot grow.  You can last quite effectively with this method.  You won’t be as nourishing, as you once were either, and in the process you often get pureed.  Preserved but in a different form if you get my drift.

Pickling
Pickling is a common preservative and in solution we can last some time.  It is a common technique in modern days and you can grow to love the taste and the feel of being pickled.  You can find yourself more comforted, social and outgoing in the pickled state.  In the shortened modern form of pickling, excess pickling is expected along with frequent vomiting.

It would seem that preserving oneself in the modern world is fraught with difficulties.  You don’t want to isolate yourself, freeze all emotion out, remove the life force or anaesthetise yourself with alcohol.  None of these things will really do.  They are just a method of avoiding, concealing, ignoring the inevitable.  

Change comes to all of us let’s embrace it.  So I’d like to introduce the concept of renewal.  Our skin does it all the time so why can’t we?  Instead of keeping what we are, why not let it go and become a better us.  Then, instead of viewing each passing day as a threat we can see it as an opportunity. 

May today bring assurance to your heart, quietness to your soul and a renewal of your spirit.

My first Love

You can look back at relationships and see in hindsight the first hairline cracks.  You didn’t see them at the time but passion has blinkers.  Veils are gradually lifted, you not only get to know a bit more about yourself (there are veils between us and our own hearts after all) but also you see the people you know with different eyes.  This applies to other aspects of your life as well, like careers.  Looking back through the wreckage of my physics career many things have become clearer.

I hated physics at school, loathed it, in fact.  But I’d read enough about the subject to know that the awful tedious physics one ploughs through in class, bears little relation to the beauty of relativity, our galaxies, sub atomic particles etc and the practical applications for all that knowledge.  To me it all felt pure and noble – a search for truth.  Having good enough grades in every other subject, bar physics, I managed to get into university to study what I loved.  My physics degree was fun and I sailed through with a 1st class degree.  I started my PHD and was lucky enough to get a CAST award, which involved working in the prestigious Royal Signal and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern for a month every year.  During this month, I was put up in a lovely health farm and the healthy food, regular walks in the Malvern hills and physics research was a heady combination for me. 

The first cracks appeared when the Duke of Edinburgh came to the site, to give the RSRE an award for excellence in industry.  His security people, refused me entrance to the site that morning.  Somewhat bewildered, I was forced to spend the day outside in the hills and not cooped up in a lab with experiments.  No big deal, but the next day everyone including my supervisor was enraged on my behalf.  Apparently, being from Northern Ireland and technically a visitor, my presence constituted a threat to the royal party.  So, despite having security clearance and badges etc I was deemed too dangerous.  It’s quite amusing really and I could see the funny side of it.  Which was more than my fellow colleagues did.

Then, I did something which angered my supervisor.  That year, I married, despite being half way through my PHD.  His annoyance was not the distraction a marriage might bring but it was that my husband was from the Middle East.  At that time, relations between that region and Britain were as challenging as that between Britain and Ireland.  So my working in a Ministry of Defence centre like RSRE was causing him a major headache.  My security rating plummeted and that month I had to wear a red badge on site and was accompanied at all times by a security guard!  It all felt very ridiculous, my work was not rocket science.  All I did was study the metal-semiconductor interfaces and try to understand what was going on. 

In order to get rid of possible contaminants (which would complicate things) my experiments were done in an ultra high vacuum.  To make sure that these surfaces were totally clean, I cleaved them inside the vacuum.  Then, in this totally clean environment with a freshly exposed semiconductor surface I gradually evaporated down metals and studied them.  As I say, not rocket science, but while I was experimenting with antimony ( a metal), over in the USA, theorists were modelling how this metal would behave on my particular semiconductor and blow me down, my experimental results exactly matched their predictions.  It was particularly heartening as this happened independently; neither knew what the other was doing.  Science is lovely when something like this happens.  You really get the sense of a breakthrough of sorts.  A jump in understanding.  It may have been one particular interface but it felt like it was all exciting stuff with my papers published and presented. 

Given my security rating, however, my marriage was a real headache for my supervisor and he complained bitterly.  Exasperated by his nagging I told him my husband’s family were in the oil industry and really rich.  This he understood immediately and he dropped his belligerent attitude.  Mid conversation his objections melted away and a tone of respect was suddenly engendered towards me.  Ah, the respectability of wealth!  We talked for a half an hour in this vein and I accepted his warm congratulations on my marriage.  Then, I told him that actually there were no oil mines in my husband’s family.  No massive wealth that made my marriage sensible and wise in his eyes.  He was floored and speechless.  He could not now backtrack and change his tune, after all that would make obvious his real objections and how much money changed his attitude.  He told me, I was too clever for my own good and we laughed together. 

He had the last laugh.  During my last visit to RSRE, while heavily pregnant, he pumped me for ideas on how to make faster switches.  It was presented as a physics problem and I was encouraged to be as off the wall as I liked in coming up with unique ideas.  So I was creative and gave him a list of ideas of the top of my head from radioactive decay, to diodes, to lasers etc.  He took out a sheet and began scribbling some of the ideas down.  I laughed and said most of them were just brainstorming stuff with probably no real chance of practical implementation.  He retorted that only one had to work to make it all worthwhile – they could afford many to fail.  Perplexed, I asked what it was all for.  He told me that it was related to my PHD research.  Now, I was confused and he was eager to explain.  “We are trying to make faster switches for bombs, that’s what we’re after, that’s what’s funding the whole research you do here, each year.”

I remember my stomach clenched in shock and my hand went to my bump in an instinctive defensive reaction.  Making faster switches for bombs!!  All my work in understanding interfaces, the beautiful theoretical predictions, the scientific experiments to find the truth, the noble truth.  It was all to make us more effective at killing and destroying.  I finished my PHD but I never did any more research in my field again.  There was something about carrying a life that meant being a part of taking a life absolutely abhorrent.  My published papers all date from before my eldest son was born.  His presence in my life made me choose a different path.  I can have no regrets about that.  I look back at my relationship with physics like a bad affair, it started with passionate devotion and ended in acrimonious divorce.  It’s such a shame because I did love physics so much.  

Let each morn be better than its eve

"Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday."

You get up and hope that the day ahead is better than the one before.  Not in some vague wishing good things for the next day for yourself, but more in the desire that whatever the next day brings (good or bad) you will find something within to face it with grace and dignity.  It is not about what comes to us, it is all in how we deal with what comes that matters.  That is the nature of this game of life we all play.

"Man's merit lieth in service and virtue and not in the pageantry of wealth and riches."

It helps to realize the purpose of our lives and what it is not about.  If life is about service to humanity then the acquisition and display of wealth becomes rather a distraction to the main goal of being here.

"Take heed that your words be purged from idle fancies and worldly desires and your deeds be cleansed from craftiness and suspicion."

When I think about words, how they can hurt others, be fuelled with all kinds of desires, no wonder our deeds inevitably reflect our ulterior motives and doubts.  So we need to choose our words with care and make our deeds worthy.

"Dissipate not the wealth of your precious lives in the pursuit of evil and corrupt affection,"

Time is so precious and how easy to waste it on passing fancies that make a mockery of the reality that the only real wealth we have is our allotted span of time on earth and what we choose to do with it.

"nor let your endeavours be spent in promoting your personal interest."

If we focus only on what we want, what we feel, who we are, then we fail to see the horizon out there and lose our way on a comfortable circular path of selfishness.

 "Be generous in your days of plenty, and be patient in the hour of loss."

Perhaps the only real measure of a character is not what we do in good times but how we cope with the really bad periods.

"Adversity is followed by success and rejoicings follow woe."

It is the nature of our lives that, like our landscape around us, there are hills and hollows.  It is a truth that sometimes the hollows are more like deep dark endless ravines.  But they give us a valuable perspective on life and when you emerge from a deep dark valley the sunlight feels so good!

"Guard against idleness and sloth, and cling unto that which profiteth mankind, whether young or old, whether high or low. "

There is a strange lethargy that can steal from you, your rightful birthright.  This is not something you must guard within that others may take from you.  It is the strange ability in all of us to lose our sense of purpose and direction.  No one can take it away from us or give it to us, it is within each one of us and only we can and must find it for ourselves.  


Quotes taken from Baha'i Writings (Words of Wisdom)