The Sky is Falling…
Well, a satellite anyway. A US spy satellite at that. Landing possibly near you in February or March – forecasting their return is as precarious as forecasting their launches.
Thanks for reading. This blog is an opportunity for me to capture some of the diversity of my writing interests. My muse tend to appear on my shoulder as I board an international flight although not all of my writing is inspired by travel and foreign places. These blogs have been the basis of a novel (Flowers of Baghdad) but there are a few other writing projects in progress besides. Please feel free to leave a comment. Or two.
Time to Drink the Toilet Water
Tom Hanks has a very explicit house rule for his new boofhead dog of a pet (Hooch) when he instructs him most sternly that there is to be no drinking from the toilet. The good folks of Orange County (CA) are turning a deaf ear to mother’s advice and are going to be doing just…
To the Victor go the…large mounds
Battlefields have a strange attraction. Gettysburg had an impact on me which was all the more powerful for being so thoroughly unexpected. The humanity of it all was perversely rammed home by understanding the sheer scale of the slaughter. In the case of Gettysburg the preservation of the slaughter-yard otherwise called a battlefield adds to…
Thanks Heath…
Heck of a way to do it but thanks for driving our greedy self absorption, reflected in the stock market headlines, off the front pages of the papers and reminding us all of what is really important in this all too brief run we have.
Sweetwater Flower Girl
That is what her name means in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns. It is a more poetic and uplifting post title than the more dramatic one I was concocting. Here she is, her face staring down from a poster twenty feet high in the Forbidden Palace, Beijing.
Pharaoh’s Pharmaceuticals
There is something that resonates deep within us when we read about Oetzi, or are mesmerised by a mummified corpse of the Andes or Nile. We connect somehow with bodies preserved in peat, having a sense that, though long dead, they can somehow still speak to us. We will them to open their eyes, especially…
The Camera Trap
If you have ever had a video camera fixed to your eye at an airshow, or at the car race track you will understand what I mean by the camera trap – so fixated are you on capturing the moment (to be stored forgotten in your camera) that you miss the real experience. When filming…
Vale Nigel Hankin
Readers can be very kind, even if it is sad news they bring. Ray Pearce has just brought to my attention the death of Nigel Hankin, a COMPLETELY eccentric, gentle, likable old chap who won our hearts when we met him in India. Thanks Ray, I had missed it.
Making a Molehill Out of Mt Everest
One of the more gratifying experiences I had when serving as an officer in the military was to hear, in the wee hours of the morning, after midnight when no one was stirring – except perhaps those Russian submarines – one of the junior staff, emptying bins and sweeping floors, declare he was forsaking his…
Cricket: India versus England, Australia, NZ, Sri Lanka…No one wins.
It was a World Series Clash held in Mumbai. It was hot. In the mid thirties and steaming, with the heavy salt air hammering the city with a humid blanket that never lifted. The tamarind trees around the ground had their foliage blasted off and shade was notional at best. Sri Lanka was batting, there…