thetoffeewomble

Movie Idea

2010-09-26T14:37:00.002+01:00

Hello everyone, I am in Cajarmarca, Peru, and I've just had an interesting idea for a movie. See what you think.

Here’s the first scene.

EXT. AUSCHWITZ. 1943

A cold wind is blowing from the Polish forests. Another trainload of European Jewry has arrived at the grim and brooding portals of Auschwitz Two.

The train, steaming in the snowy wind, pulls to a halt. Crowds of Hungarian Jews are quickly forced from the cattletrucks. Women are weeping, children wailing. The bedraggled men stare up the tracks in despair.

The Germans are waiting. Fierce dogs bark at the frightened prisoners. Gestapo officers shout Schnell!! Schnell!! Schnell!!

Now the Jews are being forced along the platform, down a cold grey slope, and into a strange darkened chamber. The crying and howling increases, the hysteria is unbearable.

They are packed inside the chamber. A metal door slams behind them. The last lights go out and the chamber is pitch black.

Suddenly the lights go on again - and they’re disco lights! Red and yellow lights, complete with spinning disco mirror ball, flash and strobe across the room.

The Jewry realise that they are in a cleverly concealed underground disco! A smiling SS commandant is on the decks, spinning some discs - rap and trance, drum n bass, maybe some old skool sounds. The delighted Jews begin to shuffle, then they start boogying.

A previously terrified rabbi from Lodz starts breakdancing in the middle of the dancefloor. Several goldsmiths from Buda blow their rave whistles and perform The Hustle.

The dancing concludes. A genial Ukrainian guards explains to the Jews that they are part of Hitler’s “Vinyl Solution” - a daring but secret bid to unite all of Europe under the banner of disco grooves and the Balearic beat.

I am open to any interest from Hollywood producers.

Toffeewomble Redux

2010-09-14T18:13:00.004+01:00

Is this the weirdest church in the world? Quite possibly. It's a church made out of dolmens, in remote St Dinis, central Portugal - which I visited last month.

Why am I posting this superb photo by myself? No reason - other than to celebrate Ye Offycialle Toffeewomble Refurb.

Is there anything more to add? No! But I hope to be posting a few more photos very shortly, and generally synching my blog, website, and twitterstream in an exciting and almost sexual way, from now on.

Thankyou.

Window, Majorca

2010-06-13T10:00:00.002+01:00

So I went to Palma Majorca to do an article last week. Here is an interior shot of Palma cathedral; the sun was streaming through the modernist rose windows, scattering light, as you can see.

OK, not the most exciting blogpost in history, but I've been busy as F: I'm writing the third Tom Knox thriller. Hence no blogs for a while.

More anon. Hasta la V.

A Poem I Wrote. On Twitter

2010-03-07T16:35:00.015Z

Regent's Park, today

So I was walking in my local park, Regent's Park, this afternoon. It was a beautiful Spring day and I took the photo of the fountain, above, and I also composed a poem in bits, which I posted on Twitter, as I walked.

Here it is, slightly polished. My twitter poem. Maybe it will be the first in a new genre, or, then again, maybe not.

The Cycle of Rebirth in Regent's Park

Suddenly. In sunlit Regents Park,
A blaze of purple crocuses.
Like a busload of kids in school uniform
No longer afraid of the dark.

The park is full of girls, as well

Russian, Spanish, royal Khmer,

Tartan miniskirted; Japanese
Like unexpected, visiting divinities.

The pure apsaras of Primrose Hill,

Devatas of Delancey Street

Rusalki, sea-nymphs, nereids,

The sirens of St Katherine's Gate.

Young women are always young,

They make death look quite forlorn.
If this is samsara, in old Marylebone
Then amongst these girls you smile: reborn.

It's here!!!!

2010-01-12T12:20:00.004Z

Yes, it's here!!

Play the trumpets of joy!

Toot the horns of jubilation!

Parp the cornets of gladness and delight!

Run your fingers up and down the xylophone of general euphoria!

Take out the moog synthesizer, plug it in, stare at in confusion, then vaguely fiddle with some knobs and finally produce a thin eerie squeal of unbounded happiness!

My new website is LIVE. www.tomknoxbooks.com

Yes, tomknoxbooks.com is up and running.

Enjoy!

The Road Untravelled: Laos

2009-11-23T12:08:00.043Z

I haven’t done a Toffeewomble photo essay in a while, so here’s a new one, describing the weekend I just had, and from which I am now recovering.

You can click on the photos to get the detail, they are quite high-res.

What I Did This Weekend in Laos

So it’s Friday and I’m driving through the remote Asian country of Laos, to one of the remoter parts OF Laos: the so-called Plain of Jars. This plateau in the rugged centre of the country is famous for two things.

Firstly, strange and large Neolithic jars, carved from single boulders, that are scattered around the meadows near the provincial capital of Phonsavanh. The jars date from maybe 2000BC, maybe later - no one is quite sure. Absolutely no one has any idea why the jars were fashioned.

The second reason this sequestered part of a sequestered land is famous is because of bombs. To put it bluntly.

Per head of population, tiny impoverished Laos is the most bombed country on earth. Some of these bombs were dropped by Russia, China, and Vietnam; the vast majority were dropped by the Americans. Between the mid 60s and the mid 70s the Americans spent $2m A DAY, every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year - bombing Laos. The Yanks dropped more bombs on Laos than they dropped in the entire second world war on Japan and Germany combined.

And most of these bombs fell on the Plain of Jars, which is why the local peasants now use shell cases and old mortars as gateposts. Or flower pots, or pillars in rice barns.

The bombs – especially the millions of cluster bombs, “bombies” – kill hundreds of Laotians every year: even now. A walk in this countryside can very easily be lethal.

The bombingness of the Plain of Jars adds to its mystery, its air of troubled menace. As I drive along the horrible roads, I am starting to regret the fact I left backpackery Vang Vieng, where my hotel room had precisely this view.

The place I am headed is much colder, higher, darker, foggier.

Night is falling and some of the people here are so poor they don’t have running water, let alone electricity. So they have to wash in gutters, or from parish pumps. Also, they don’t have chimneys in their wooden huts - so to keep themselves warm they light fires outside.

It’s thus a Dantean scene as I cross the darkling plateau. The flat and lethal countryside is twilit and smoky and speckled with thousands of tiny fires, occasionally I glimpse a half naked crone, garishly lit by red flames, bathing herself at the roadside. It could be a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but hard to capture on camera: so here are some more bombs.

The yellow ones are the bombies. Laotian children think they look cute - like toys - so they pick them up when they seem them in the maize fields. And they lose a hand, or an arm.

In the morning I go into town and take in the market. I like Asian markets, the exotic foods in particular. This one is a doozy: you can have rat. Porcupine. Dried rat. Living guinea pig. More rats. Fermented swallows. Insect grubs. Toads. Polecat. And hornets pickled in vinegar.

As I wander the market, I am offered a big fat juicy bee larva by the friendly bee man. Once he has scraped off the wax and bee exudation and bits of hive he hands it over. I take the little bee larva, and eat it. It is cold and squidgy.

I head for the main street to buy a bucket so I can puke. But the first thing I see is a girl in a black and white turban. Then I see another. And another. There are girls in white stilettos and the most outrageous hats wearing costumes that jingle with silver piastres on strings.

Hello?

A quick visit to the Museum of Unexploded Ordnance tells me why: the helpful man there explains that these are Hmong women – the Hmong are an ethnic minority, possibly immigrated from Yunnan or Tibet, or (some say) Lappland, now scattered across northern Indochina.

They are animist and highly traditional. They are also fiercely independent, even now some of them are still in the mountains near here, refusing to surrender to the communist Laotian government – three decades after the end of the Vietnam war.

And, it seems, this is their Lunar New Year, a chance for all the Hmong in the world to wear their finery and party on down.

The man directs me to a disused airfield at the edge of town – “you’ll see a few more of them there”. No kidding. Five minutes in the car and I find there are fifty thousand Hmong gathered, in a big big space with lots of tents and fairground rides and impromptu dried rat restaurants, enjoying the biggest weekend of their calendar. There are no westerners apart from me. In fact there are no non-Hmong apart from me. The girls are fabulously overdressed.

I notice many of them are playing a strange and boring game: lobbing tennis balls at each other. There are long lines of girls and boys, slowly, laboriously, chucking tennis balls at each other. That’s it. How exciting is that? No wonder they look forward to their big New Year knees-up, when they get the chance to slowly toss a Chinese-made tennis ball at someone else, for seventeen hours.

I’ve had enough Hmong, now it's time to see the jars (I’m gonna speed up the narrative here cause I’m bored so you must be too). I jump in a car and rattle along horrible roads to "Jar Site 1". It turns out the jars are sombre, dignified, large, enigmatic, and slightly dull.

I like them. And yes that's me by the jars, just to prove I made it.

Another hour brings me to Jar Site 3. There are only 3 jar sites you are allowed to visit because the rest are all too dangerous, because of unexploded bombies. Thanks, Uncle Sam. Here’s a photo of a man taking a photo of a bomb crater at Jar Site 1.

Even at the designated jar sites you have to tread carefully between small blocks marked MAG – Mines Advisory Group; step over the blocks and ka-boom. Possibly.

Jar Site 3 is the most remote and the prettiest. I nearly get lost on the dirt roads home but the views are serene.

When I hit town I unearth an old book about the Hmong.

Ah. It turns out the boring tennis ball game is in fact... a mating ritual. This is how the Hmong choose their husbands and wives: there are ways of catching a ball and/or deliberately dropping it and then singing a song which all means, apparently, you have accepted the marital overtures of the person chucking the ball at you.

Sweet. No wonder they are taking their time over it all.

So, where was I? Getting lost. Yes.

The fact I nearly get lost on the way back from Jar Site 3 should maybe provide me with a warning but, fuck it, next day I decide to drive back to lovely warm not-so-weird Vang Vieng on a more “adventurous” route. My Lonely Planet guide to Laos deliciously claims there is an eastwards loop to Vieng from Phonsavanh, “but we haven't tried this route yet”.

I always like to try something that the Lonely Planet people have been too pussy to attempt themselves. So this it. I’m going to take the back route home. It looks like it should take five hours or so, judging by the map.

All begins well. The roads are dirty and rubbled but I am in a four-by-four. I feel intrepid but safe. The countyside is gorgeous. The sun is out. Hmong people are standing in fields playing their tennis ball mating game.

Look: that guy playing the game has got a crash helmet on, maybe he expects to get balls HURLED at him.

Then the road deteriorates. Then it deteriorates further. The hours pass. I experience fog, dust, traffic jams of loggers trucks, and washouts.

The countryside is staggeringly remote. Here are three children carrying wickerwork baskets home to their Hmong village on the hill. The kids are the dots.

As I drive past, people stop to stare at me – kids and adults alike. They seem stunned, astounded, wholly gobsmacked. They gaze my way, mouths hanging open. I guess they are all Tom Knox fans, literally amazed and gratified to see that the famous thriller writer is passing through their tiny electricity-less Laotian hamlets.

Then the road ends: it is blocked by serious people making a better road (hurry up guys) – it will be closed for two hours.

As I wait here I learn several things from a friendly Laotian English teacher on a tiny motorbike. He tells me that I am going the wrong way: and have been for several hours. He tells me that I have a lot of jungle to go through to reach civilisation – he adds that the road is ”quite dirty”.

He also explains the faces of the villagers. “They have never seen a foreigner before, ever”.

That’s quite something. How many places in the world can you still get that experience? So I’m not just the first slightly famous Cornish thriller writer to traverse these rugged trails, I am the first non-Hmong.

Wow. No wonder the Lonely Planet guide says this route is "untested".

It is also about to defeat me. The road finally reopens but night is falling, cold and dark and chilling, like a sickness. The jungle shivers.

Where the fuck am I going to sleep? I have hopes of the “provincial capital”, Tha-Thom, this turns out to be a series of teak-stilted shacks, and a pig.

Now I am worried. My car nearly gets stuck in deep mud. I have never driven myself really offroad before, in a 4WD – I am learning the hard way. A friendly bunch of Hmong locals in a muddy minibus help me unfuck my car. Their driver keeps insisting we should drive on “together”. As I have no fucking idea where I am, or how I’m going to get out of this mess, or where I’m going to sleep, I’m cool with the notion of collaboration. But what’s in it for them?

Over the next few hours, as total devil-black darkness descends on the misty jungle, I realise why they are keen to have me along for the journey. The “road”, such as it is, disappears altogether under THREE FEET OF MUD. At this point I forget to take photos for a while cause I am freaked, and also concentrating on Not Dying.

I have never experienced mud like this: literally waist deep in the big muddy. My car skids and veers all over the jungle, in the darkness, sometimes nearly tipping over cliff edges. But at least my brand new 4WD Ford pick-up “moves”. Their minibus is vanquished by the mud.

So I have to tow them out. Again and again. Every few hundred metres I have to chain my car to theirs and tug them free, in the blackness. Half of them jump in my car to even the load. I now have a load of giggling Hmong girls and nervous Hmong women watching a guy who has never really driven a 4WD before try and pull the minibus with their menfolk through the squidge in the darkness and the jungle at night in the mountains of one of the most remote countries in Asia.

I try not to panic. The ordeal goes on for hours - and hours. Grinding, reversing, swearing, despairing. More mud. Then another entire Hmong family emerge from the dark. What the?

Yes, that's them, packed in my car like Hmong sardines. Hmongous sardines. Hmongdines. They jump in the back of my pick-up, granny and granddad, baby and all.

I am now rescuing half of Hmong society it seems – but of course they are rescuing me, too. There is no way I would have been able to make it out of these mountains and forests alone. At night.

But are we ever going to get out? I have now been driving for twelve hours solid. TWELVE HOURS. Here’s my Hmong friend Pow, he seems cheerful despite it all.

I drink whisky to “stay awake”. The baby cries. The car complains. The chain snaps. I am rechained. The fireflies twinkle in the dark.

Without warning, the misery suddenly abates, and concludes. The road returns! The air warms. We are descending to the riverplains of the Mekong. Thank God.

At one mosquitoey dark sultry corner everyone hops off my pick-up. My friend the Hmong man Pow tells me he “loves” me. I think this is his way of saying thankyou. The girls laugh and smile and wave. The old granny salutes me. I an touched. We have been through all this together. *sob*

I drive on alone. I miss them already. At midnight I pull into a Vietnamese hotel in the seedy frontier town of Paksen, and a yawning but amiable receptionist makes me Pot Noodles. Because I haven’t eaten all day. I just forgot.

Monday morning. The sun is out. I have Bach and Moonbabies on the car stereo. The road back to Vientiane is GOOD. I feel about 120 years old, I look 156.
But who cares - I fucking did it. I DID it.

Yes, Lonely Planet people, you really can “take the eastwards loop from Phonsavan”. But if anyone out there plans to do it, I’d advise you to bring a good car, a bottle of scotch, a lot of time, and an entire Hmong family to help.

Kharb jai.

Bathory Redux

2009-10-08T14:18:00.001+01:00

[a number of readers have asked me to repost this essay, as the photos were bust for some obscure reason. Here it is, with images reinstated]

Weird stakes in the Bathory marshes.

Greetings. I'm in Asia right now, on the hunt for... babyrat wine. This is proving difficult, hence the hiatus in blogging. To make up for the lack of info, here's a longish piece I did for the Fortean Times, this winter, about my hunt for one of the most notorious murderesses in European history - Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the Tigress of the Carpathians.

The Truth About Countess Dracula

As nondescript places go, this one takes some beating. It's a muddy little town, in the corner of a forgotten swamp, a dozen miles from a remote section of the Hungarian/Romanian border. I'd guess the locals don't see many foreigners like myself: one farmer is staring at me so hard he's almost fallen off his bicycle.

But I'm not here to astonish the peasantry. I'm here to trace the lifestory of the most notorious murderess in European history. Elizabeth Bathory. A woman whose name was once so fearsome, the people of her native Hungary were banned from mentioning it for a hundred years. A woman, it is further said, who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

The tiny town in which I'm loitering is called Ecsed. According to historians Ecsed is where Elizabeth grew up, in the 16th century, in a large castle belonging to her illustrious family.
Yet not a trace of a castle can I find. Dowdy bungalows, yes, scruffy bus-stops, sure. But no ancient buildings. In desperation I head for the town hall, where, using my schoolboy German, I explain to a secretary what I'm seeking. 'Ah ja!' She says. ''Erzsabet Bathory!'

Soon we are joined by an amateur local historian, Zoltan, who "teaches theology and English" in the Ecsed school. We get in a car and drive past a yellow church to a concrete shed. Inside this shack I find a desultory display of stone coffins, bits of cannon, and a broken coat of arms - featuring a dragon-like creature strangled by its own tail.

Between the shed and the church is a flat swampy field. This chilly expanse of mud is, Zoltan tells me, the site of the great Bathory castle. The edifice was levelled when the Bathory family fell from grace in the 17th century. And these few dismal relics, collected in the shed, are all that remain of Elizabeth Bathory's childhood home.

There is a picture of Elizabeth Bathory on the wall of the "museum". Zoltan shakes his head.
'You know,' he says. 'They say she killed many people. But I think she was just an intelligent and independent woman - who would not kneel to men. Maybe they made up those stories to destroy her?'

Zoltan, it seems, is a Bathory Revisionist - he belongs to that school of thought which claims that Elizabeth Bathory, the infamous "Blood Countess", was really the victim of a lordly conspiracy.
This contrary perspective has been around for some time. During the 20th century it was promulgated by Hungarian scholars, keen to cleanse the national record. At the same time, a feminist perspective on Bathory has seen her as a smart and spirited woman condemned by a misogynist patriarchy. A new film, starring Anna Friel, and due out this summer, reiterates this feminist take.

Meanwhile, many writers, artists and historians have gone to the opposite extreme, citing Bathory as the quintessence of female evil. A cannibalistic lesbian who slaughtered hundreds of virgins.

They can't all be right. So my job is to sort the revisionist wheat from the hysterical chaff. And to do that I need to follow Bathory's trail across three countries.

Climbing in my car I bid goodbye to Ecsed. As I set off across the lonely marshes I go over what we already know - what is historically undisputed - about Bathory's background.

The gory tale begins in the mists of the Dark Ages, when a clan of German warriors settled in these Hungarian fenlands, between the towns of Nyirbator and Ecsed. The family was known as the Gutkeleds.

Through the medieval era the Gutkeleds distinguished themselves in various battles and repressions. As a result their name was officially changed to Bathory, which means "brave" in Hungarian. For centuries the Bathorys claimed their name was given to them because they slew the last dragon in the swamps. Hence that dragon - actually a "wyvern" - in their coat of arms.

Of course this is myth, the name probably derives from the name of the nearby town:
Nyirbator. But the conceit does reflect a violent streak in the Bathory character (a psychological flaw which might have resulted from inbreeding - the Bathorys were keen on marriages between noble relatives).

Elizabeth's uncle, for instance, was the ultra-violent Prince of Transylvania: he once roasted a rebel on a red-hot iron throne, then had the man's charred corpse force-fed to his followers. Other Bathorys were drunks and rapists, one was accused of devil-worship. Yet the Bathorys were not entirely rotten: amongst them were bishops, cardinals - even a King of Poland.

It was into this brutal but remarkable family that Elizabeth was born, in 1560. She was first raised at the ancestral manor in Nyirbator, next to the fine Calvinist church built by her Protestant great uncle.

After a few years she was moved to that Bathory estate at Ecsed, in the middle of the marshes. By the age of six she was afflicted by epileptiform seizures: perhaps a hint of the madness to come. Yet she was a very intelligent child, learning German, Greek, and Latin.

Elizabeth Bathory was also quite beautiful, with hair the colour of "sumptuous ravens", and a milk-white, northern complexion, inherited from her Gutkeled ancestors. Her fairness would have stood out strongly in a land of swarthy peasants. Even today the Hungarians I can see from my car - as I drive towards Budapest - are darker than the European average.

In the late 1550s, Elizabeth had her first encounter with real savagery. A gypsy musician was caught stealing by the Ecsed guards. The thief was dragged into the forecourt of the castle, where he was sewed inside the stomach of a horse. The screaming gypsy was left to die as the horse decomposed. Elizabeth witnessed this before her tenth birthday.

In her fourteenth year Elizabeth appears to have had an affair. The details are obscure: Elizabeth was highly sexed from youth, so she might have instigated the romance herself. Other stories claim she was raped by a serf. Whatever the truth, the resultant pregnancy was concealed and the scandal hushed up. Elizabeth's parents decided that their brilliant but troubled daughter needed a husband. And quick.

A match was duly arranged. Count Ferencz Nadasdy de Nadasd of Fogasfarold was the groom.
The couple seemed a perfect fit. The 26 year old Nadasdy came from a clan of warlike Hunnish nobles, who were almost as distinguished in lineage as the Bathorys. Nonetheless the 15 year old Elizabeth kept her maiden name, in recognition of her superior ancestry.

Following the splendid wedding, Elizabeth moved into one of her husband's castles: Sarvar, near the modern Austrian border.

It's a long way to Sarvar from Ecsed - even today, on EU funded motorways, I have to stop off three times for petrol and goulash. By the time I arrive in Sarvar it's very dark, but I still can't miss Sarvar castle. Large, brooding and severe, the castle dominates the little spa town.

Next morning I linger in the castle, sheltering from the wintry drizzle. These passageways and halls, now converted into offices and gallery spaces, are where Elizabeth Bathory spent her early married life. This castle is also where the newly-wed Elizabeth first showed her tendency to sadism. At least, that's what most believe: it's at this point that we reach the disputed evidence.

According to witness statements, at Elizabeth's trial, the young countess had a portfolio of special punishments for "erring" castle servants. One of her supposed methods was to jab pins under her serving girls' nails; on a different day she might have the young women thrashed with stinging nettles.

In some of these acts she was apparently abetted by her husband. Count Nadasdy also had a taste for violence, as he proved in his many wars against the Muslims. After battles the "Black Bey", as he was known, was seen to juggle the severed heads of his enemies in the air.

When he wasn't soldiering, or juggling, Ferencz apparently chose to pass the time at Sarvar by teaching his eager young wife more ingenious methods of "punishing" the staff. One involved smearing a naked girl with honey, then leading her out into the castle grounds. There the girl would be endlessly stung by insects, to the amusement of the chortling nobles.

That the couple shared an interest in witchcraft is inarguable. In one letter to her husband, when he was away at the wars, Elizabeth said of her spells: 'Thorko has taught me a lovely new one. Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear it on your enemy.'

"Thorko" was a manservant. During the long absences of her husband, Elizabeth had begun to surround herself with some very strange people. Within her own family there was her bisexual Aunt Klara, supposedly a sorceress. Elizabeth and Klara became great friends at this time.
Other accomplices were even odder. Amongst the Countesses servants there was a demented crone, a lesbian witch, and a dwarf called Fizko. This motley bunch helped with Elizabeth's household affairs, and her childcare (the Countess was by all accounts a 'good mother' to her several offspring).

Accompanied by these bizarre friends and underlings, Elizabeth began to travel. She specially liked to visit the other castles her family owned, like Forchtenstein, Lockenhaus and Kerezstur. It would of course have taken weeks to tour these places in the 16th century; today the castles are just an hour's drive from Sarvar - as I discover.

At Kerezstur, just across the Austrian border, I find the castle overgrown with vines, and practically derelict. Twenty miles west is famous Forchtenstein: this is still a grand edifice, inhabited today by the Esterhazys, distant relatives of the Bathorys. My last stop is Lockenhaus, high in the gloomy forests of the Burgland. It's here that I experience a truly sinister frisson.
On my arrival at the Dracula-esque castle gates, the place seems deserted, apart from a taciturn woman running a bizarre Christmas market in one of the towers. She lets me roam the empty dungeons and hallways. At one point, with the winter twilight encroaching, I am startled by a strange figure standing in a shadowy corner. Panicked, I turn the light on.

It turns out to be an iron maiden.

This is weirdly fitting, as Elizabeth Bathory was meant to have used iron maidens on her victims - in this very castle. Somewhat shaken, I retreat to my car and get out my notes. It seems the iron maiden story, despite the fine coincidence, is probably a legend. Yet there is firm evidence from Bathory's trial that, wherever she went on her travels, the Countess sought out young girls to abuse.

According to the allegations, one of Bathory's favourite tricks was to press red hot coins into the hands of girls she accused of stealing; alternatively she would iron the soles of the girls' bare feet. In more severe moods Elizabeth would cudgel her servants until she was so drenched in blood she had to change her clothes. On another occasion, she was seen to rip open the jaw of a maid with her hands.

Early next morning, I leave Sarvar, to trace the last and bloodiest part of Bathory's peculiar life. In 1602 Count Nadasdy died; some say he was poisoned by an unpaid harlot. Elizabeth was now rich, alone, untrammelled, and obsessed with her fading looks. She moved full-time to her favourite castle of Cachtice (it's pronounced Katch-teet-say).

Cachtice is quite hard to find. A good seven hours from Sarvar, its across the Slovakian border, way up in the Carpathian foothills, surrounded by enormous pineforests. When I reach my destination, and survey the silent ruins, I realise it's a suitably isolated place for anyone intent on murder.

If reports are to be believed, it was at Cachtice Castle that Bathory's crimes became truly insane - and homicidal. For instance: one wintry day at Cachtice Elizabeth ordered a wench stripped naked. The girl was led out of the keep into the snow, where she had water repeatedly thrown over her until she turned into a pillar of ice. Elizabeth watched.

On another occasion, Bathory demanded that maids be brought to her room: the girls were forced to lie unclothed on the floor: then they were tormented so viciously the blood had to be soaked up with ashes. The wildest rumours claim that this blood was used to fill Elizabeth's baths: as a cosmetic remedy for her ailing beauty.

There is an obvious sexual element in these and other alleged crimes. One of Elizabeth's penchants was, it is said, to have her girls do their chores nude. Elizabeth also liked to burn her maid's pubic hair with a candle-flame. During a stay in Vienna, Elizabeth supposedly had a naked housemaid put in an iron cage, which was then hoisted into the air; the girl was speared to death by Fizko the dwarf, while Elizabeth shouted obscenities from below.

Is this believable? Surely not. Yet the inhabitants of the monastery next door were so disturbed by the screams they threw pots at the adjoining wall.

Back in Cachtice the local villagers had, understandably perhaps, begun to hate and fear the Countess. When Bathory travelled she needed armed guards to protect her from the mob. Priests refused to bury all the mutilated corpses emanating from the castle; local girls refused to work within the castle's sinister walls. But Bathory was unabashed. As the supply of local serving-girls dried up, Elizabeth attracted aristocratic young ladies from further afield, with offers of patronage: these young women were, it's claimed, attacked in turn.

In these last desperate months Elizabeth was allegedly so deranged, when she was too tired to rise, she would have girls stripped and brought to her bedside - so she could bite them, ripping out chunks of bare flesh with her teeth.

Whether these rumours were true or not, the authorities had to act. Bathory might have been one of the noblest names in the country, but such inflammatory behaviour risked a peasant rebellion, and the disappearance of blue-blooded girls was unignorable.

One cold night in late 1610, the Palatine of Hungary, Count Thurzo, arrived at the isolated castle. He was accompanied by a platoon of guards. In his hand was a warrant from the king.
Refused entrance at the gate, Thurzo's men smashed the doors down, and marched right in.

According to some reports, they discovered Elizabeth hunched over a prostrate figure: she was torturing another girl. The Countess was arrested and taken away, along with her servants.
Thurzo's original intention may have been quite unambitious: to force Elizabeth to stop her crimes, preferably without the embarrassment of a trial; another motive for the arrest might have been blackmail: the Hungarian King wanted his debts to the Bathorys forgotten. But in the end there was no "hushing up", no backstage deal. A public trial was arranged, in nearby Bytca.

Bathory was actually tried twice. Each time, hundreds of witnesses were called, to testify to her cruelties. Some witnesses were tortured; most spoke freely.

It's here we approach the truth about Elizabeth Bathory. Yes, some of the allegations were clearly concocted. The blood-bathing, for instance, was a lurid embellishment (it only appears in accounts of her life from the 18th century). Many of the other tales were, presumably, embroidered, as is often the case with terrible tales.

But the sheer weight of evidence against the Countess was - and is - overwhelming. Aside from the many witness statements, we have contemporary letters, between priests, civil servants, and other notables, loudly complaining of Bathory's crimes. The fear and loathing the Countess provoked amongst the common people must also be taken into account; likewise the confirmed reports of mutilated corpses.

Finally there is the mortification endured by the nobility, and the Hungarian royal family, following the scandal. If the trial was just a conspiracy to defraud an uppity woman, why the centuries of shame? And why did the authorities feel the moral necessity for a trial at all, given the embarrassment this must have caused?

The answer is simple. Elizabeth Bathory was a brutal and murderous sadist, whose crimes were too atrocious to ignore. This is the only explanation that fits the many facts; any other perspective is incredible.

What we do not know is the true extent of Bathory's savagery. Did she kill 30 or 40, as seems likely? Or did she butcher 600 - as some have wildly suggested? The exact answer will always elude us.

After the trial, Bathory's female accomplices had their fingers torn out, and were then burned alive. The dwarf was summarily decapitated. The Countess herself was, by contrast, sentenced to a kind of living death. She was walled inside her room in Cachtice, with only a small window onto the world.

As I wander around the castle ruins, I see several such apertures. Any one of them is possibly hers.

For nearly five years the elderly murderess rotted away. Then, on August 21, 1614, a guard looked through the window, and saw a figure slumped on the floor. Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the Bloody Lady of Cachtice, was dead.

One mystery abides. Where was she buried? A popular theory holds that she was first entombed in her castle, then moved to the church in the valley.

But this is far-fetched. Would the villagers really have tolerated the body of this hated woman in their crypt? Much more likely is that Elizabeth's remains were taken across Hungary to the ancient family tomb: in the church built by her forebears. In Nyirbator.

My last drive is therefore a return journey: across the Hungarian plains, past Budapest, all the way to Nyirbator. Turns out it's not much of a town, the best thing in it is that church, a fine piece of central European Gothic, with a bizarre wooden belfry. Underneath the church is a sealed family vault. My hunch is that she is interred here.

If so, it is a suitable resting place. Even today Nyirbator has a bleak and eerie atmosphere, partly due to the bitter cold that sweeps in from the marshes. By nightfall the grubby streets of Nyirbator are usually deserted, and all you can hear is the howl of that wind. On a particularly bad night, it sounds like someone being tortured.

Lockenhaus castle - 'Leka'

Iron maiden, Lockenhaus Castle

Forchtenstein Castle. Bathory tortured girls in the dungeon here.

The bizarre belfry at Nyirbator church.

Kerezstur Castle. Now semi-derelict, and owned by an eccentric Austrian artist.

Ecsed Marshes.

Cachtice castle. Where Bathory committed her worst atrocities, and where she was imprisoned, and died.
Me! At Cachtice. Cold and a little spooked.

Where I Was Yesterday

2009-09-30T17:57:00.005+01:00

I am in France right now - in fact I'm in Deep France, the Cevennes, researching the next Tom Knox, the third in the series. It's a great part of the world - and I''ve found a fab thrillerish location - a menacing and highly impressive megalithic complex, Les Chams des Bondons.

It consists of hundreds of scattered and huge standing stones - some 5m tall - peering mournfully down at the forests from the plateaux of Lozere.

Amazing place - and yet hardly anyone has heard of it! Perfect for a Tom Knox thriller. I hope. Here are some pix.

My New Cover

2009-09-08T20:01:00.002+01:00

A Photo For Red Meteor

2009-08-25T17:24:00.003+01:00

This photo is for a totally gay Scottish Nationalist halfwit.

Gridlock for Millionaires

2009-08-25T14:57:00.002+01:00

Rush hour in Monaco, yesterday.

Time for a new Toffeewomble photo. This is a snap I took some months back, when I was spending a few days in Monte Carlo (yes, life is hard for the international thriller writer). It shows the most absurd traffic jam in history.

I don't know much about cars but I think that's a Ferrari, followed by a Ferrari, followed by a Maserati. Then a Lamborghini. Then a Ferrari. Or maybe the opposite.

Anyway, you get the picture. Not a Ford Focus in sight.

I loved Monaco, in all its cultureless vulgarity, and would one day quite happily retire there. Don't they say that the Riviera is where all good Englishmen go to die?

Salut.

Lucy in the House with Fountains

2009-07-28T13:38:00.006+01:00

So we took my daughter Lucy to Somerset House on Sunday, where they have these fountains spouting jubilantly from the Georgian flagstones. She loved it.

What I Did On My Holidays.

2009-07-27T16:36:00.012+01:00

I went to Scotland last week. To the wilderness of Knoydart, the wildness of St Kilda, and over the sea to Skye. Sublime.

Kolkata

2009-07-17T22:50:00.002+01:00

The flower and spice market of Calcutta. I took this photo in the winter of 2008.

Click on the photo for the detail. It was quite a place.

The Toffeewomble: An Announcement

2009-07-07T12:17:00.004+01:00

Trapani

The regular reader of the Toffeewomble might have noticed that the frequency of my posts has dropped off, in recent months; indeed these days one month can stretch into another with nothing on here but cyber tumbleweed rolling past the derelict cemetery of web silence and towards the disused saloon bar of over-extended metaphor.

Clearly I have an excuse. I have become much busier of late. Sort of. I also have another website: the genesis secret (soon to be tomknoxbooks.com - but not yet - calm down!)

Moreover, I have started twitterin. You'll find me tweeting under the name "thomasknox", if you are interested.

All that exciting activity leaves the Toffeewomble looking a little forlorn and neglected. And I have decided to do something about it. I don't want the place to become one of those sad blogs that just STOPS.

So. From now on the Toffeewomble will be, in the main, a repository for my photos. In the last few years I've started taking lots of shots, and indeed sometimes I even get paid tiny amounts for them.

So the Womble will become a kind of personal photo album of almost no interest to anyone apart from me. Yes, it's going to be that good. It will chart my travels, and not much else. It will be an imagistic map of my life and thoughts, with maybe some cute girls to make it halfway interesting.

I fully expect my readership to decline from the dizzy heights of two a day to maybe half a visitor a month, but at least in fifty years I'll be able to look back and say ooh, that's what I did in August 2008.

And what was I doing in August 2008? I was wandering around the Mafia port of Trapani, in western Sicily, a very moody but also captivating place, where I took this shot of an old alley leading down to the sea, complete with poignantly 3 wheeled car.

Ciaociao.

Door 78

2009-06-21T00:43:00.000+01:00

The doorway to the sala at Andrea Palladio's Villa Godi, a couple of days ago.

I am in Italy. I like Italy. I like the Italians. A lot. Right now, down in the evening street, outside my hotel room, the Italians are babbling way, with mellifluous unintelligibility. If there is Muzak in Heaven - it might be this: people chattering quietly and happily in a
poetic southern language you don't understand.

Ciaociao.

Happy Birthday Lucy Lamorna

2009-05-25T13:41:00.002+01:00

My daughter Lucy, yesterday.

She had a picnic party in the park, and very nice it was too.

The Truth About Our Leaders

2009-05-13T12:21:00.002+01:00

Cooperballs, yesterday.

Right now the whole of Britain and her attendant territories, is agog to hear the final revelation from the Daily Telegraph, as to the corruption of our politicians in the unfolding scandal known as ChocolateSantaClaimedOnExpensesGate.

The paper has promised that this last and latest revalation will be gobsmacking, and worse than all the others that have been revealed hitherto.

Frankly, the mind boggles. Given that in the last few days we have learned that our lovely MPs have stolen, swindled and cheated the taxpayer to the tune of several millions, while claiming for porn, a helipad, moat-cleaning, four houses, silk cushions, a chocolate santa, charity donations, £500 a night hotel rooms, £400 cab rides, wooden spoons, a bathplug, endless plasma screen TVs, and a private security force costing £25,000, one wonders just what revelation might be so bad it outdoes all this.

I mean, it has to be pretty bad. So here's my prediction for the Final Revelation.

A well-known Labour couple, both Cabinet Ministers, have claimed the cost of two pairs of £9000 ballet shoes woven by orphans in Vietnam, slippers so finely crafted the orphans have since gone blind from all the exquisite work in poor lighting conditions.

The gold trimmed shoes were for a special one-off £400,000-a-head Gold Shoes Fascist Sambo Ballet Weekend on a private island in the Turks and Caicos, also paid for by us, where billionaire bankers and well known Labour couples waltzed all night on an ivory dancefloor to popular Nazi songs played by native minstrels in comedy loincloths earning 3p a year.

I’m guessing it’s something like that, anyway

Gordon Brown's Manboob Moment

2009-04-30T18:45:00.002+01:00

Our Dear Leader, Yesterday.

I’ve just realised what Gordo’s weird “shoulder swaying” movement, in the Notorious Expenses Video, now reminds me of.

See it here

(the eerie socialist shoulder-shuddering occurs about halfway through)

He looks like one of those burlesque dancers in a Wild West saloon, at the end of her strip, who bends forward to “twirl” the tassels on the ends of her nipples, by making her hooters go up and down, and maybe left to right.

This is the only explanation for this otherwise inexplicable movement. In the privacy of his own home, Gordon likes to relax by getting topless and attaching shiny tinsel to his nipples. Then he bounces around the kitchen shaking his shoulders, so his prime ministerial manboobs go up and down - and left to right - and the tinsel goes twirly.

No doubt this is the cause of much amused laughter from Sarah, and the Number 10 staff, and various aides and passing EU ambassadors.

So why repeat it? I reckon this “twirly time” must be a cherished moment of intimacy for the Browns, so the prime minister unconsciously reenacts the happy memory during times of stress, as a kind of Freudian defence.

It all - suddenly - makes sense

HOORAY!

2009-04-16T11:12:00.002+01:00

Yowza.

As of this morning, my thriller, The Genesis Secret, is Number One on the UK Bookseller Heatseeker charts. For the third week running.

Number 1. You gotta love that. Not 2 - but... 1. ONE. Numbah Wun. In the premier spot. Top of the pile. King of the Mountain. The wearer of the laurels. The gold medallist. The silverback. The alpha, the first, the winner, the leader of the pack. Number 1. At the peak. Topping out. Making the summit. Standing above. Numere une. Uno. Eins. Numberrrrr.......... ONE!!!

Tomorrow I may be number 2. But today I am number 1*

*for the third week running

Most Ominous Roadsign in World, Maybe

2009-03-28T13:43:00.003Z

Gridlock, Namibian style

So I was going through my photos of Namibia and I found this one. It was taken about sixty klicks south of Rosh Pinah, on the MAIN ROAD through the Fish River Canyon and the Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, into South Africa.

The Namibian Highway Department weren't kidding about the hazards of that drive. It took about three hours to do those eighty kilometres: I saw one other car the whole journey, and about a hundred baboons.

Namibia is the best.

It's here.

2009-03-13T23:57:00.005Z

Massive phallus-like pillar in the lost Egyptian capital of Tel al-Amarna, city of the doomed monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, yesterday.

OK, I know you've been waiting all-too-long for this, but here we go.

The website for my thriller... is ready at last

Da-da!! If you buy the book I promise to sign it personally next time I am in your neighbourhood, especially if that happens to be near soi 6, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok.

Thankyou.

I heart Bangkok

2009-03-02T04:44:00.002Z

The most romantic place in the world? Yesterday.

People say romance is dead, don't they? But two weeks ago, last St Valentine's Day, all the brothels in Bangkok's Nana Plaza DOUBLED THEIR PRICES FOR HOOKERS, especially. Just for that one day.

All together now: ahhhh.

I just thought I'd post that, cause it's easy to get cynical and sour about the world, especially in these days of economic hardship and struggle. But it seems some people out there still CARE - they still want to celebrate the good things, and go that extra mile, and cherish the rose of love.

I fly home tomorrow.

Window of Rock!

2009-02-22T18:00:00.002Z

Astonishingly money-earning photograph of fat silly German standing in natural rock window overlooking Namibia's Fish River Canyon, yesterday.

Here's a thing. For a long time I've been taking my own photos as I trot about the world, doing my thang, as my regular reader will know.

But in the last couple of years people have actually started paying for them - my photos. I believe I have earned literally dozens of pounds in the last 18 months from my photos, and given that they are taken with a phone, that ain't so bad.

This photo will be published in the National newspaper of the United Arab Emirates, next week, to accompany a travel article, and it earned me the plutocratic sum of 50 bucks. Yes, fifty dollars. I hope the German doesn't sue.

Door with V Cool Name

2009-02-17T12:38:00.004Z

OK, this door isn't very exciting to look at. But it's the door to the Sleeping Chamber in the Courtyard of the Black Eunuchs.

It's in the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul.

The room itself is a bit poky even though several people used it. I don't think being a black eunuch in the Ottoman Court was a very good job, frankly. Not only did they chop off your penis and testicles and force you into a life of castrated slavery, but you had to share a room.

Back to Doors and Windows Hooray!!

2009-02-03T09:14:00.003Z

Me, cameraphone, Namibian desert, car door, window, mirror, rush hour, yesterday, ish.

Hello everyone. I'm in Thailand where it's hot and sunny, having just come back from Namibia and South Africa where it's hot and sunny.

If you are reading this in freezing Britain or frigid America, I thought you might like to see a picture of me driving along in the sizzling Namib-Naukluft desert, just last week.

This exceptional picture also manages to combine several of my favourite themes in one: exotic travel, desert austerity, a door, a window, and me having a nice time in the sun when everyone is cold at home.

If it's any consolation, about a day after this photo was taken I nearly died of heatstroke. I may post about it later.

Kappunkap from Bangkok.

Things You See On A Walk In Namibia

2009-01-15T16:29:00.003Z

So I was out having my regular afternoon stroll on the desolate diamond-rich coast of Namibia's "Forbidden Zone" (as you do), and I came across this:

It was SEVEN FEET LONG. Yes. More than TWO METRES. And there were dozens of them washed up on the beach:

What the F? Does anyone know what species these jellyfish might be? Or are they just dead aliens or something?

Crazy. And brilliant. Namibia is wild.

Nice View of Dachau

2009-01-14T11:59:00.004Z

Sea looks nice though.

OK guys, I'm aware my blogging has been sparse to the point of inexistence of late; that's cause I'm working hard. Right now I'm in Namibia, researching the next Tom Knox thriller. Recently I arrived in Luderitz, a semi-derelict port surrounded by deserts, ghost towns and prowling hyenas - i.e. it's a bit like Britain in 2010, after two more years of Labour government.

But here's a thing. I’ve just realised my hotel room has a good view of the world’s first extermination camp: Shark Island, where the Germans killed the last of the rebellious Witbooi people, in the 1900s.

Read about it here.

That's quite something isn't it? The island is on the left of the pic.

Do you think this was a deliberate feature, incorporated by the architects? I’d like to have been at the design meeting when the hotel was being planned. “No, Tarquin, let’s put it nearer the ovens, and call it the Mass Grave Breakfast Bar. Then guests can gas their own muffins.”

Maybe they just didn’t realise.

Anyway, I’d like to know if anyone can beat that. Has a reader been to a more unfortunately situated tourist complex? Perhaps they’ve stayed in a Centerparc built on a plague pit. Or used the trouser press at the Hotel Rwanda. I’m prepared to be trumped by the amazing resources of the toffeewomble blogerati.

Dankie. More soon. Promise.

A Spooky Door, from Navarre

2008-12-22T14:23:00.003Z

Not a sunflower, yesterday.

Here's a picture of a door I saw on my trip, last summer, to research my next Tom Knox thriller, at present entitled THINK OF A TITLE. Half the action of the book takes place in the mist-wreathed Basque Pyrenees, straddling the Franco-Spanish border.

The Basques are an odd bunch, in many ways (which is one reason I chose their strange and beautiful little "country" as a location - that and the food) and one of their great peculiarities is their attachment to pre-Christian superstitions.

Here, for instance, is a dried flower hammered to a front door: the flower is called a sun thistle, and it is a symbol used to ward off evil - sun-thistles can be found on many doors in the more traditional parts of "Euskera". Sun-worship itself is a leitmotif of Basque culture - their houses are built to face the rising sun, their wobbly swastika symbol, the laurubu, is also a solar sign, and so forth.

Even more intriguingly, I found this door in the notorious witch's village of Zugarramurdi, which is high up in the Navarrese Pyrenees. Zugarramurdi was the birthplace of the worst witchcraze in European history, which saw thousands accused, and hundreds lynched and burned, on either side of the mountains, in the early sixteenth century.

There is a cave just down the hill from Zugarramurdi which was supposedly used by local witches to have orgies with Satan. Apparently Satan has a notably thick and icy black penis. Just in case you were wondering.

Another Door, How Exciting is My Blog?

2008-12-16T13:33:00.002Z

Negev Door

Continuing my exciting and effervescent theme of Door, Windows and Other Things seen on my travels, here is a door which is also a sort of window - double the fun!

The photo was taken about a year ago, when I went to the Negev desert in Israel to see the Spice Route of the Nabateans. This hotel - with the door/window - was a freezing cold eco-camp, devoid of electricity, and full of young Israeli settler hippy types (a very weird sort of young hard right wing sandal wearing fundamentalist Zionist vegan) all singing songs and eating enormous breakfasts.

The only heat (the Negev is cold at night in winter) was provided by huge wood fires and the the only light at night came from storm lanterns.

It's right by the Egyptian border though so there's always the chance of a firefight or a missile strike to warm things up.

I quite liked it.

Window 2

2008-11-14T00:20:00.001Z

A window in the fake Prada shop in the deserts outside the modern art town of Marfa, west Texas.

Yes, that's me you can see - several times. FEEL the COMPLEXITY of the REFLECTIONS.

Window 1

2008-11-01T11:14:00.008Z

A window in Sogmatar.

Continuing my theme of Doors, Windows and Other Things Seen on My Travels, here is a window in a little concrete hut in the ancient village of Sogmatar, in the wild and sombre desert, south of Sanliurfa, in Kurdish Turkey.

It looks a bit primitive, but I actually had a very nice lunch in that concrete hut: enormous just-baked flatbreads, dished up with chunks of goat's cheese, fat tomatoes and juicy cucumber, followed by slices of fresh watermelon - served by a Kurdish shepherd. It was the simplest of meals, yet memorably delicious.

Sogmatar is an ancient and incredibly atmospheric centre of paganism. There is a temple to the Moon God, Sin, cut out of one of the cliffs. The eerie dead gods stand inside, in effigy, eroded by time. Assyrians, Romans and Hittites alike all practised human sacrifice in and around Sogmatar: you can still see the channels cut for the flowing blood.

The strange and deserted village of Sogmatar features significantly in my thriller, The Genesis Secret, coming out in March.

See here

UPDATE: This is weird. After uploading this post, I clicked on that photo for the first time, and properly enlarged it. If you look closely you can see in the top left corner, a strange emblem of a bird - some kind of raptor, an eagle or a falcon.

The resonance of this, for me, is significant: my thriller is partly based on the survival of ancient and unnerving Mesopotamian faiths, possibly dating back to the end of the Ice Age. Certainly some religions in the area are very old: e.g. Yezidism. The Yezidi still live in Iraq, and they worship a bird called a Peacock Angel.

My theory is that all these faiths stem at least from Sumerian times and maybe before. A common motif is the worship of birds: the Yezidi have their peacock god; birds are a common symbol in the 9000 year old village of Catalhoyuk, central Turkey; and birds appear frequently in the 12000 year old temple of Gobekli Tepe (about twenty miles from Sogmatar).

And birds were definitely adored by Sumerians and Akkadians etc: as flying spirits of the desert, embodiments of wind and sky; these spirits were often intensely evil (like the winged Demon Pazuzu, used in the Exorcist).

Turkey is of course 100% Muslim these days. Even the Yezidi have gone (supposedly). And yet - there's that bird on the wall. That slightly sinister emblem. Intriguing.

Door 2

2008-10-30T18:11:00.002Z

A door in Capraia.

Here's the second in my exciting new series: Pictures of Doors and Windows and Other Things Taken on My Various Travels.

This is a door on a fisherman's hut on the haunted isle of Capraia, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off Tuscany.

Ciaociao.

Doors, and More

2008-10-17T13:23:00.003+01:00

Door to the courtyard of the Blue Mosque, Istanbul.

Hello everyone. You may or may not have noticed that I have become the world's worst blogger in recent months, posting on average once a decade. This is because I am deeply immersed in writing the second Tom Knox thriller, tentatively entitled Think of Good Title.

As this state of affairs - i.e. my being pretty damn busy - is gonna persist for some time, I thought instead of posting nothing at all, I'd post a few photos from my travels in recent years.

During my adventures I have taken to capturing photos of doors, and windows, for no apparent reason. So I shall start by posting, occasionally, some of these photos of doors and windows. Then I might post some other photos. Sometimes I might write something. But I can't guarantee it.

How exciting is that?

Anyway, the above photo is of the door to the Blue Mosque, in Istanbul. As, er, the caption indicates. You can click on the photo to enlarge it - it's 5 megapixels.

I took the photo in the Spring when I, erm, visited Istanbul.

I'm just off for a beer now.

A Door In Palermo

2008-09-26T16:14:00.001+01:00

Oil!!!

2008-09-19T15:39:00.001+01:00

/>How to Prospect for Oil

Check if your garden’s on fire
Crude oil is the fossilised remains of tiny animals and plants who snuffed it millions of years ago. Over aeons the layers of organic material were compressed by overlying rock and sediment to create the thick treacly substance that BP and Shell etc. turn into motor lubricant, calor gas, scratchy jumpers, and petrol. Wherever oil is found in abundance it seeps up through the earth to form tar pits. These sometimes burst into flame spontaneously.

Borrow a vibrator
In the absence of a blazing inferno by your garden shed, you need to find good source rock: like the classic oil-bearing limestones, clays, and shales. If the terrain looks hopeful, then you have to test it: by directing sound waves through the earth. You can use a truck mounted ‘vibrator’: bit bigger than the girlfriend’s. Or you can explode small charges and monitor the results. Like a lawsuit from the neighbours.

See if she gushes
No matter how promising the results of your seismic tests, the only sure way to find out if there’s a recoverable reservoir of oil is by drilling. First off you sink a borehole. Then you send down a ‘sniffer’: a sort of hi-tech nose. If these work out it’s time to install a proper well and pump. This type of independent oil exploration is called ‘wildcatting’ and in the US it’s reckoned one in ten wildcats produce a ‘bonanza’ - a seriously profitable oil strike. A gusher.

Move to Bournemouth
Although 70% of the world’s million billion barrels of oil are located in Arabia, do not despair. You can always try Dorset. Yep, believe it or not, the UK has a small but lucrative onshore oil industry, much of it in the southern English chalk and limestone belt, much of it privately owned. Wytch Farm, in Purbeck, is western Europe’s largest onshore oilfield. Nearby Kimmeridge has had a ‘nodding donkey pump’ for decades. Oop North the West Firby oil fields of Lincolnshire make a shekel, likewise the gas fields of Pickering, Yorkshire.

Buy that private jet
Should you hit lucky, and get a licence from the Secretary of State for Energy to run a wildcat in your nan’s allotment, you’re in the bucks. Even a tiny independently-run oilfield like Goodwith, in Sussex (the Kent-Sussex Weald has been producing oil since 1895), is said to be good for 300 barrels of oil a day, for another fifteen years. Now, a barrel of Brent Crude fetches about £70 in the market. You do the math.

Warming Down

2008-09-05T05:59:00.003+01:00

Oxford Street, central London, yesterday. NOT.

A Change in the Climate?

Sometimes it takes enormous changes to shift a scientific paradigm. Sometimes these changes are accompanied by religious and cultural strife - even violence. Just think of the brutal passions that surrounded Galileo, and the shift to a Copernican, heliocentric view of the solar system.

And then there are the times when an established scientific theory just turns, overnight, into a joke. And everyone laughs at the naked emperor.

It is possible the great scientific paradigm of the moment - climate change, or global warming, has reached just such a jocular moment. Right now a team of brave men are busy kayaking their way to the North Pole, as part of the Polar Defense Project.

Their aim is to show how the ice is now so thin - dissolved by global warming - that the entire pole is navigable. Their noble campaign is, naturally, just a tiny part of the huge crusading consensus that surrounds the issue of warming: this global warming theory is so established it wins Oscars for its documentary makers and huge budgets for its scientific evangelisers, while governments across the world kowtow to its power. Meanwhile, any dissenters are regarded as mavericks - or worse. Some of the most aggressive "warmists" have threatened to imprison oil company executives just for being oil company executives.

Only trouble is the guys in the North Pole kayaks trying to prove there is no ice just got stuck. In ice.

OK, this could just be seen as bad luck. Let's face it, they're in the North Pole, in canoes. You might expect a bit of ice. Unless you were the most dogmatic of the Global Warming Wahabbis.

But this evidence now sits alongside a whole range of data that, at the very least, question the tenets of the Taliban of Temperature Increase. Look at Britain's summer. England has just experienced its cloudiest, dullest August almost since records began. Ireland's had the wettest summer in a century and a half. Sun spot activity is now at an all-time and unprecedented low - a phenomenon usually associated with dangerous global COOLING.

That's right, global cooling. And funnily enough global temperatures have, in the last ten years, actually flatlined, or even cooled. Not something you often hear mentioned by the Wee Free Presbyterians of Warmism.

Perhaps it is time for a paradigm change, or at least a little paradigm Questioning?

How To Yodel

2008-08-22T19:18:00.002+01:00

An extremely small picture of some people in Switzerland (probably), yodelling, yesterday (ish).

How to Yodel

What?
Yodelling is defined as a sung musical phrase where the tone or register rapidly and constantly alternates between a lower chest tone and a higher pitched falsetto. In other words you gotta sing like a slightly gay Toblerone worker with his gonads stuck in an Alpenhorn.

Where?
Yodelling is popular wherever there are mountains, or forests, or in any terrain where visual communication is difficult; the wobbly high pitch of the yodel carries across distances that would defeat normal voice registers. Yodelling can thus be found in places like New Guinea, Mexico, China, Norway, Eskimo Canada, and your bath when the water’s too hot. Even the pygmies of Africa are prone. But the true home of yodelling is the Alps - Switzerland, Austria, South Germany - where yodelling was devised by cowherds as a way of calling home their cattle in the mist.

How?
OK. Lock the doors, warn the neighbours, give some Valium to the cat. Take a deep breath and sing ‘Hodl-oh-ooh-dee’. Then take a breath and then say ‘Hodl-ay-ee-dee’. Now sing the two phrases again, and again, but each time when you sing ‘ooh’ and ‘ee’ try and make a leap into a much higher voice tone. As if you are hiccuping. And remember: at the end of each phrase, finish off with a glottal stop - that’s that unvoiced ‘t’ sound Cockneys make when they say gotta, or bottle. Clear? OK: all you need now is some leather shorts, a cuckoo clock, and a penchant for banking the unclaimed assets of Holocaust victims.

Why?
Why not? OK yodelling makes you look and sound like a git, but it can also be highly lucrative. Country singers Gene Autry, Jimmy Rogers (the ‘Yodelling Cowboy’), and Hank Williams all used the Alpine technique on their hit records. Present day yodelmeister Kerry Christenson is one of the biggest artistes in central Europe. And New Zealand-born twin lesbian yodellers the Topp Twins are amongst the biggest selling New Zealand-born twin lesbian yodellers in the world. Yodel-odel-odel-etc etc etc....

My Daughter, Yesterday

2008-08-08T17:52:00.000+01:00

Copper Canyon

2008-08-04T23:11:00.003+01:00

That's me at the front; tha's the Lost Cathedral of Satevo, behind me.

Last year I went to the Copper Canyon district of northern Mexico, to write a travel piece for the Sunday Times.

Yertiz, as they say in Herefordshire.

Copper Canyon

Sean Thomas

You don't expect to get vertigo on trains, do you? On a turbulent plane - of course. Walking along a windy cliff, it's a certainty.
But this is a first: I'm staring across the yawning depths of a mighty gorge, from the relative comfort of a first class berth, on the Chihuahua-Pacifico railroad, and I'm getting headspin. Everyone told me this train journey through Mexico’s Copper Canyon was deeply impressive. No one warned me it would be properly scary. I'm actually looking down on some wheeling vultures.
And yet, and yet. What a journey. This may be the most stupendous train journey of my life. And I've enjoyed a few. I've done the Cairo to Luxor night train: when you wake up staring at the temple of Karnak. I've thrilled to the Shinkansen in Japan, that speeds past snowbound Mount Fuji. I've even spent seven days on the trans-Siberian, chugging epically through the birchforest.
But this? - this beats them all into a cocked sombrero.
And now the railway is climbing the side of one giant abyss, in a heart-pumping series of switchbacks. We've only been on the train a couple of hours, since joining it in the winsome Spanish-colonial silvertown of El Fuerte (you can embark way back on the Pacific coast, if you want to do the whole thing), and yet I'm very ready for a drink. Something to steady the nerves.
Accompanied by my beautiful friend Jenny and our loquacious Mexican guide Huberto, we pick up our pesos and shift into the dining carriage, and order some delicious Mexican food - and some rather piquant Bloody Marys. And with a thousand foot drop just beyond the end of my burrito, we try to work out why anyone would build such a ridiculous railway.
Happily, Huberto is something of an expert - on just about everything. As the barman in the buffet car slots a tape of rather loud mariachi, Huberto shouts the history of the train at me, while spreading an explanatory map across the table.
The railroad was begun in 1898. It was designed to facilitate trade across northern Mexico, into Texas. Given that the wilderness through which it snakes - the daunting canyonlands of Chihuahua State - is one of the most intractable wastelands in the western hemisphere, it took quite a long time to complete. In fact, it took sixty three years. The finished railroad boasts 37 bridges, 87 tunnels, and it rises an astonishing 8000 feet - from the humid Pacific littoral to the harsh desert uplands.
Was it worth it? Economically, you have to wonder. The various mines, which the train used to service, have mostly run dry. These days, businessmen simply fly over the twenty-odd canyons hereabouts. But it you're a tourist, and you want to visit some of the most spectacular and inaccessible spots in Mexico, and some of the country's most recherché cultures, then it's pretty much unbeatable - cause there ain't many roads around here. And the Bloody Marys are great.
Back in the first class carriage - which is not exactly plutocratic, but a touch plusher than standard - Jenny and me size up our fellow travellers. There's a few locals, with bags of tacos. There's also a smattering of Americans, gawping at the golden eagles, soaring between the pinons. But there maybe aren't as many tourists as you'd expect, given the grandiose vistas. Perhaps they are put off by the rumours of bandits.
At one time, this part of Mexico was chocka with banditos. Just ten years ago, the Copper Canyon train was held up: by brigands on horseback - one of them actually aimed a pot-shot at a tourist.
But it’s not all doom and gloom: the tourist's life was saved when the bullet hit the thick, Lonely Planet guidebook he was clutching to his chest. As Huberto relates this story, I see Jenny is anxiously checking the width of her Rough Guide. Huberto assures her she needn't worry, the train is perfectly safe. And anyway, I've got an entire Dostoevsky with me.
'OK, now we get off!'
Says Huberto. Apparently we have to disembark. As I'm just settling into the agreeable rhythm of the Copper Canyon railway - a quick Bloody Mary, a nice tortilla, then a spasm of horror as you look out of the window at a half mile drop, followed by another quick Bloody Mary - this comes as something of a downer. But Huberto assures me this is the best way to "do" the railway. Your tickets allow you to nip on and off as you like - which breaks up the ten hour journey into less heartstopping chunks; this also means you get to sample the local scenery, upclose.
The only problem is, when I step off the train, I stagger around like a sailor on shoreleave. This may be something to do with the Bloody Marys, but apparently it’s the altitude: we've risen so quickly I've got a mild case of the bends. It’s a good excuse anyway.
So where are we? San Rafael is the name of the stop: and it's in the middle of the Sierra Taruhamara. This highland is named for the Raramuri Indians, who have lived in this remoteness for centuries. Their name means 'those who are fleet of foot', and they are known for their long-distance-running abilities. This is obviously something to do with their high-altitude lifestyle, but it might also be a result of their footwear. When I see my first Raramuri, I notice he is wearing sandals cut from car tyres.
I'd like to chat with this speeding local, but Huberto tells me it’s pointless. These Raramuri, with their loincloths and their early Beatles haircuts, are wary, shy, and evasive. This is not because they are rude: but because they are baffled by Westerners - the way we talk, the way we gesture, they way we get annoyed when our mobiles don' twork. So the natives keep their distance. To be honest, I’m simply stunned to realise that - just a two hour flight from LA - there are people living in loincloths.
Even if we can’t chat with the locals, we can still enjoy their culture. A brisk jeepride brings Jenny and me to one of the famous Raramuri churches, which are sprinkled throughout the sierras. When we step indoors we find a nobly whitewashed kirk, with wooden ceilings, vernacular wall paintings, lurid statues of Jesus - and a human skull on an altar.
A human skull? This is a shock, but then these Indians are known for their syncretic beliefs - a marriage of ancient paganism and accommodating Catholicism. It’s the same system that’s created one of the most vivacious Holy Week celebrations in the world; the seven day Raramuri Easter knees-up with dancing, theatrics, and vats of illicit local liquor.
Determined to try some more local liquor ourselves, we spend the night at the splendid Posada Mirador, perched on the uttermost lip of a side canyon. After a long dusty morning on the train, to sit on the Mirador terrace with a cold Bohemia beer, watching the hummingbirds suck nectar from the flowers, as the misty green chasms stretch gapingly away, is like being inside the mind of a romantic poet after he's had too many absinthes. Quite blissful.
In the morning we rise early, and set off for another yomp. Almost immediately we hear the toot of the train as it threads along the canyon wall, a mile distant. Jenny tells me she found a tarantula in her bathroom this morning. I try to make a joke about "creature comforts" but she seems uncomforted.
The hike is sumptuous. As we head down the canyonside, we pass through shady forests of oak and alder. Lower down we see pretty, sturdy, red-trunked madrone trees; then ceibas, figs, and even palm trees put in an appearance.
The delightful variety is a result of the unique Copper Canyon topography. The towns and sierras at the top of the canyons are almost alpine in their freshness - you are 6000 feet above sea level. In the winter, they get snow. Four thousand feet lower and you're in the tropics: agreeably warm in our European winter, humid and lush during the rainy season (our summer). The variation can be confusing – I find myself constantly taking clothes off, then pulling them on again, like a busy pub stripper.
The following day, Huberto drives us back, to rejoin the train. By now, we know the rigmarole. Vodkas, views, and very loud mariachi. Fantastico! A couple of hours later, we alight once more: at a one-donkey pit-stop called Batopilas Junction.
Why are we here? 'I am taking you to the lost world!' Says Huberto. He is waving his arms a lot.
But he isn't joking. Seven hours of spine-rattling, unpaved roads later, we reach the floor of the deepest canyon: and the town of Batopilas itself. It's a marvel, a Mexican Narnia: a faded old mining town that’s now a forgotten and beautiful realm of shadowy churches, folk-dancing schoolkids - and chickens that nest inexplicably in trees.
Rumour has it that there are people down here who have never left the valley; given that car journey, I'm not sure I blame them. And this is a pretty Edenic prison, anyway: the crystalline rivers of the canyon floor are a bather's paradise, the woods are full of warblers, vireos and orioles. There's even a Lost Cathedral down the valley, a huge mission built by eighteenth century Jesuits, when there were presumably more people around.
It's a startling and unworldly sight: this enormous cathedral at the bottom of a canyon, surrounded by cacti and butterflies. Like finding a royal palace on a glacier.
The motif of surreality is maintained in our hotel in Batopilas: Riverside Lodge. With its shady nooks, glittering cupolas, effeminate library and piano-that's-almost-in tune, it's like the imagined marital home of Salvador Dali and Elton John. And the views of the canyons are stonking.
Quite frankly, this place is great. A few days in the peculiar idyll of Batopilas, sans phones, sans internet, sans TV, sans everything, is as close as you can get to spending time on the moon. If the moon has fabulous guacamole. The only thing clouding this end of the holiday is the idea of getting out of the canyon. We don't fancy another bone-numbing seven-hour car ride. Fortunately, there is an alternative.
On our very last morning, me, Jenny and Huberto head to a simple dirt airstrip. Then we climb aboard a four-seater plane. For thirty minutes we lift and glide, escaping the awesome depths of the canyon, soaring into the milky blue.
All I can see, as far as the horizon, is the glorious wilderness, lush with green forests, and crazed by endless canyons. With a tortuous and extraordinary railway, snaking right through the middle.

The Saddest Grave in the World

2008-07-19T15:23:00.009+01:00

The mass grave at Glasnevin.

Who is the Greatest Poet in the English Language?

I guess many people, when asked this question, would immediately say Shakespeare. But I'd dispute this verdict: Shakespeare was definitely the world's greatest playwright - in any language - he was arguably the greatest writer of all time, again in any language. And yet, specifically as a "poet", I'm not quite sure he's the numero uno. The sonnets are delightful, but the greatest "poems" ever? Hm. Likewise, there are passages in the plays which are the purest and loveliest poetry ever written, but they're not actually poems - so they don't count.

Sorry.

So who is the greatest poet in the English language? Keats? Nope. His writing is very very pretty, he's a major poet for sure, but he lacks the overwhelming emotional impact for the title of "greatest poet ever".

What about Byron or Milton? They're both personal favourites of mine. And, coincidentally, Byron's Don Juan may be the greatest long poem in the language - right alongside Milton's Paradise Lost.

But again, for me, there is something a little too smooth and uninvolved in both these writers, despite their undoubted greatness, for them to get the gold medal.

Anyone else? Wordsworth is too wordy. Coleridge too mad. Spenser too Spenserian. The High Victorians - Browning, Tennyson, etc - are far too earnest for my liking. Though Tennyson did write gorgeous lines: "now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white".

I guess we should consider the moderns. Auden was brilliant, but not that brilliant. Yeats is a strong contender, indeed I'd put him in the top five; yet his overly-determined Irishness is a distraction. As for Plath, she was searing and powerful - but peculiarly minor at the same time. Hughes wrote too much about badgers. Dylan Thomas only wrote three good poems. Larkin I love, but, I confess he's hardly better than Shakespeare; and we've already denied Shakespeare the top spot.

Who's left? John Donne? He is always magnificent - "batter my heart, three person'd God" - however his verse is too halting and craggy, for my taste. As for T.S. Eliot - I'd put the Four Quartets up there with the greatest poems in the canon; yet there is a self-consciousness in Eliot which means that, though he's better than most, he's not quite the best.

Crossing the Atlantic we find a few more contenders. Robert Frost is a splendid poet in his deceptively simple New England way. He also wrote some of the most memorable lines in the tongue - "the best way out is always through". But there is also a lack of invention and intensity. Emily Dickinson is the opposite: sometimes too inventive and intense (though very fine). Whitman is plain weird. Ginsberg can be tedious. Longfellow is crap.

By now you may have guessed where I'm going. Yes, I already have one candidate in mind. For me the greatest poet in the English language is the sad, gay, London-born Jesuit: Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He's my chart topper. Why? Because he wrote poetry that was brilliantly experimental yet blushingly lovely at the same; because he was brave, bold and bitterly neglected - yet he carried on writing. Because he wrote Pied Beauty and Binsey Poplars. Because, most of all, his poems, at their best, have an emotional power which is simply peerless in the English language.

All of which is a very long preamble to the point of this blogpost: on my recent travels to Dublin I went to see where Hopkins was buried, in the city's Glasnevin cemetery. Because Hopkins was - is - such a great and important poet, I imagined there would be a big memorial, maybe even a statue.

He's buried in a mass grave, alongside hundreds of other Jesuits. His personal resting place isn't even marked. There's no gravestone, no memorial, no statue - not even a humble plaque. Nothing. The only indication that Hopkins is interred in this damp grey patch of Irish soil is a little inscription of his name, amongst thousands of others, on a cross above the pit of Jesuit bodies. And the inscription of his name is in Latin so you have to double-check the dates to make sure it's really him.

The sad anonymity is incredibly poignant. It's also arguably fitting: for such a self-effacing man as the shy and isolated priest-poet from Highgate.

And yet I still think Hopkins deserves a better memorial. In fact I think he deserves his own cathedral. But until the moment comes when he is properly honoured, we will just have to remember his through his immortal verse.

And so. Here is one of Hopkins's finest poems, from the "terrible sonnets" sequence, where - fittingly enough - he laments the loneliness of his final years in cold and dirty Dublin:

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing --
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

The inscription of Hopkins's name.

Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

The Worst Suburb on Earth

2008-07-03T11:00:00.006+01:00

Night falls in Moqqatam.

A few months ago I visited Egypt, to do a travel piece. While I was in Cairo I heard about a place called Moqqatam - "the worst suburb on earth". Duly intrigued, I got together with my good chum Peter Dench, world press award winning cameraman! - and we went to see how bad this place could really be.

Trust me, it was pretty bad. The article I wrote has now been published in the Middle East so I am now free to post it here.

Egypt's City of Trash

Sean Thomas

I'm sitting in a taxi, in eastern Cairo. Behind me is the vast northern cemetery of the Egyptian capital, the City of the Dead - famous for its squatters, who live amongst the ancient Islamic tombs.
For most people the City of the Dead is as daunting an urban environment as it is possible to imagine. Yet just in front of me is a scruffy street which leads to another Cairene suburb. It is called Moqqatam: and its reputation is so forbidding even the ruffians from the City of the Dead are scared to go near.
Moqqatam is also known as "Garbage City" which explains its character. It is home to the tinkers, rubbish collectors and rag pickers of Cairo. The Zabaleen.
Only a few people have ever pierced Moqqatam's secrets; the Egyptian authorities discourage investigation of this apparently "shameful place". This month, however, will see the world premiere, in New York, of an Arab-American documentary centred around the subject. The movie is called Marina of the Zabaleen, and it is said to be a lyrical and poetic analysis of the Zabaleen experience.
But still - that film was made by an Arab speaker. Going in as a foreign journalist is, I have been told, a very different matter: it is noticeable that very few photographs exist of the extraordinary Zabaleen lifestyle.
And I'm beginning to see why so few outsiders come here. The atmosphere is starkly hostile. Two dead dogs lie on the nearby pavement; the road ahead cuts through a wasteland of refuse. And Muhammad, my driver, is having second thoughts about our journey.
'Soon it will be dark,' he says. 'This is not a place you want to be at night.'
I ask him if he has ever actually been inside the infamous suburb.
'No,' he admits. 'But trust me. This is very dangerous. We do not have permission, we do not have armed guards. Even if we are not attacked, the police will be angry if they find out. Let me take you somewhere else. Anywhere else. Please.'
Somehow I persuade Muhammad to drive just a little further. We pass under a grey concrete bridge. A chilly twilight is falling. I see beautiful young women in embroidered robes; they are laughing as they walk through the streets. Fires are being lit at the edge of town.
The main street is lined on both sides with enormous sacks of trash. The air is filled with an incredible stench. People stare at us from dark windows and doorways: warily, yet not angrily. But when I take out my camera-phone, the atmosphere changes. The stares turn into scowls. An old man shouts:
'No! No photo!'
Locals are gathering around: leering and glaring. Muhammad has had enough. He does a sudden three point turn, and we race away. When we are several miles from danger, Muhammad breathes an enormous sigh of relief. It looks like my bid to visit Moqqatam is doomed to failure.
The next day, however, I luck out. I meet up with a photographer: and we have a lead. We have been contacted by Ethar Shalaby, a Muslim campaigner and writer. She meets us at the American University, in the centre of Cairo, and says she can take us into the "city of trash". But first she tells us of her own experience - maybe as a warning.
'Like most Cairene people, I had smelt Moqqatam many times, as I drove past on the motorway. And when I smelt it, I shuddered - and drove on a little faster. But then one day I thought - No. I must go and see it for myself.'
We climb in a taxi and head over to the suburb. It's the same scene as yesterday. Lying besides the road into Moqqatam is the discarded carcase of another dog; the dog's head is on fire. Ethar says:
'Maybe I was naive. I just wandered in. The locals got very angry when they saw me. They got in their garbage trucks - and tried to crush my car.'
I ask why the Zabaleen are so hostile.
'I'm a Muslim. I wear a headscarf. The Zabaleen are Coptic Christians. Maybe they don't like Muslims. They often claim they are mistreated by the Muslim authorities. They definitely dislike outsiders.'
It's a striking and unnerving picture. So just who are these enigmatic people? As the car inches into the suburb, I go over my research.
The modern name "Zabaleen" means, plainly enough, "the garbage collectors". But fifty years ago they were called the Zarraba, or the pig people: because they were ordinary peasant swineherds, in the region of Assyut, two hundred miles south of Cairo. They were another tribe from Egypt's ancient Coptic communities - Christians who have been living in the Middle East since the 2nd Century AD, long before the Muslims arrived.
No one is quite sure why the Zabaleen decided to migrate. Their peasant lives were poor, and Assyut is a roiled and sometimes violent region: it is home today to many Islamists. But it is difficult to believe the Zabaleen's present existence is superior to any rural lifestyle.
Whatever the sociology, in the early 1950s some of the Zabaleen upped sticks and moved to lower Egypt, and built shacks on the outskirts of Cairo. While sourcing food for their pigs, they discovered that there was money to be made: recycling the waste of an enormous city like Cairo, with its 18 million inhabitants. Eventually, the Garbage People assumed a semi-official role: as the city's Christian binmen, its Coptic tinkers and ragpickers.
'The trash used to be collected by a sect of Arabs from the western desert,' says Ethar, 'They are called the Wahiya. But when the Christian Zabaleen arrived, the Muslim Wahiya became middlemen.'
We have, at last, reached the main street of Garbage City. Looming beyond the lofty houses of the township are the surrounding limestone cliffs: of Cairo's eastern suburbs. Behind us are cemeteries: the City of the Dead. The whole neighbourhood is cut off and excluded. It also situated in a hollow: which makes it literally and emotionally invisible from the rest of Cairo. The metaphor is stark: you can maybe smell Moqqatam, but you cannot see it. Not unless you go dangerously close.
'Thirty years ago this area was a huge quarry,' says Ethar. 'It was the only place near the centre of Cairo where no one else was living. So the Zabaleen moved in.'
These days there are Zabaleen communities in several parts of Cairo. But Moqqatam remains the biggest Zabaleen township, and it is expanding every day: when the people need space for children they just add more floors to their tottering redbrick tenements: these crowded, high rise buildings add to Moqqatam's teeming, intense and very claustrophobic atmosphere.
A young man comes forward. Ethar tells me this is Walid; he is Ethar's friend in Garbage City. Through Walid we can safely talk to the locals. And then we can get those crucial photographs. As we walk into deeper into the suburb, Walid explains how the Zabaleen work.
'Every day, the men go out into Cairo, and collect rubbish. Their routes are arranged by the Wahiya. The poorer Zabaleen use donkey carts, many rent trucks. They work very hard hours. They get up at 3 or 4 a.m., go out into the city, and work till late afternoon.'
Walid stops, and points. It is difficult to convey the scene that confronts us. The word medieval seems like an insult to the Middle Ages.
Everywhere we look, teams of women are sitting on fetid heaps of rubbish: inside their own homes. The rooms are wholly open to the street, but the women's faces are barely visible, within the dark interiors. Pigs and goats scuttle around. Children are playing amongst bales of raw hospital waste; a baby is sitting on a sack of refuse.
Walid gestures at some women, who are sifting through a vast bag of black cloth. 'The trash is brought into the homes, and dumped in the ground floors.' He says. 'That's where the women do the sorting. The women spend their days here, picking over the rubbish, looking for paper, rags, glass, and metal: things to be recycled. The organic waste is fed to the pigs and poultry.'
We step inside a dingy workshop. A young man is stooped over a whirring machine. He is turning out black coat hangars, made from plastic picked out by the women. He tells us his name is Bahaa.
'I am 18 years old, and I've been doing this since I was 13. I earn maybe six dollars a day,' he tells us. 'It's tough, and it's hot. Sometimes I get burns from the machine. But the money.. it isn't so bad.'
The air is alive with flies; rats skitter along gutters. On the right are workrooms, with noisy contraptions pounding shampoo bottles into chips; on the left, piles of red cow-spines lie in a backyard, waiting to be turned into glue. In one building, women are sitting around a bathtub of murky brown water: they are rinsing cardboard, for a dollar a day. Recycling, recycling, recycling: everywhere they are people recycling.
As Ethar puts it: 'The Zabaleen are incredible recyclers. Probably the best in the world. Every day they pick up 4000 tons of Cairo's waste. American researchers have shown that the Zabaleen recycle 85% of this garbage into something useful: that's a rate higher than anywhere else on the planet. A few years ago the city tried to get rid of the Zabaleen, they brought in big western trucks and wheelie bins. But they discovered that the waste management was less efficient than before. The trucks got stuck in the narrow streets of the old town.'
Just in front of us, a man is carrying an enormous bale of cardboard. He looks like a kind of human leafcutter ant, ferrying ten times his own weight.
Walid concludes his story.
'Now we Zabaleen exist alongside the municipal rubbish collectors. But we may be driven out soon. Nobody knows. For the moment we are still allowed to go around town, picking up rubbish, which we bring home. And some of us make a relatively decent income, by Egyptian standards. That's one reason why many Zabaleen want to keep doing what they do...'
This is an important yet bizarre aspect to life in Moqqatam. To outsiders the existence of the garbage-pickers is surely a fate to be avoided at all costs. Yet many of the locals are stubbornly attached to their trade. They are obdurate. Fatalistic. And scornful of change.
Samah is a smiling young woman of 23. We find her sitting on a pile of rubbish on the ground floor of her home. She sorts through this rubbish all day, every day; she has been doing it every day since she was 12; she will do it every day for the rest of her life.
'My husband gets up at two in the morning, I have three children to feed. But this is my life.' I see that her sandalled feet are covered in dirt; her toenails are prettily painted. She laughs. 'The first thing I saw as a baby was garbage. Now I live in garbage. So I never notice it, not even the smell.'
This defiant attitude is also noted by the only non-Zabaleen we meet, on this daunting trek through town: a doctor at the local hospital.
'The Zabaleen are stubborn,' says Doctor Fady Fawzy, a young Muslim clinician, just coming off a 24 hour shift. 'There's a cultural resistance to change which I don't always understand. For instance, they won't wear gloves, no matter what we say to them. If they did wear gloves they could avoid many of the really nasty infections, especially the ones they get from sorting hospital waste.'
He shows me around his clinic. I expect it to be full. Yet there is only one patient in the wards, recovering from a gall bladder op. And in the waiting room there are just two ladies in black. The outpatients ignore us, but get excited when a bearded Coptic priest wanders in, to chat with his parishioners. The women rush over, to kiss the priest's calmly outstretched hand. The doctor goes on:
'They really only come here when they are dying. They have their religion and that gives them comfort. But they still have a whole range of health issues. Hepatitis A B and C. Tetanus and scabies. And many many wounds. We see wounds from machines, from collecting metal, and from fighting.' He sighs. 'Probably the worst health problems in Moqqatam are psychological. They never stop working; the women never leave the district, with its terrible smell. The intensity of the life here is mentally damaging. Women get stressed and depressed. And the men drink whisky and fight.'
Walid is getting a little edgy. The presence of the photographer is causing some disquiet: so far we have been OK, but now people are beginning to stare, and to mutter. Night is falling. The fires are being lit on the edge of the suburb. The air of deep hostility is returning.
On the way out of town we find a man butchering a pig at the side of the road. The porkmeat is glistening and pink in the setting sun. It looks fiendishly unhygienic, yet anyone who has tried the bacon of the Zabaleen can attest that it is meltingly delicious. As Walid confirms: this is because the pork comes from pigs doing what they are meant to do - eat rubbish. As a result, the best hotels in Cairo buy their bacon here: in one of the poorest places in the Middle East.
We are nearing the concrete bridge, once again. The cold Cairo twilight feels especially clammy, in the clinging reek of Moqqatam. On the road out of Garbage City, we witness one more striking scene: an argument at a teahouse. Two men are swinging punches; a crowd is gathering. 'I curse your religion, I damn your God,' says one of the men. He flips up a tea tray, scattering glasses. Then the crown intervenes, separating the brawlers.
Dusk is nearly upon us. Walid says his goodbyes. He tells me he has a date this evening - outside the neighbourhood. He says that he will shower, and change into fresh clothes, and he will take the girl to the cinema. It sounds very normal.
But then I ask Walid if he will tell the girl where he comes from. He looks at me with a flash of disdain. 'No' he says. 'I won't tell her I come from. Of course not.'
And with that he turns, and walks back, along the dark and dusty pavements, into his city made of trash.

Football Saves The World!

2008-06-20T10:34:00.002+01:00

Esteemed lensman Peter Dench, having a kickabout with the Druze, yesterday.

Israel versus Syria: with a football

The pitch is scruffy, with bare patches of earth. The crowd is desultory: half a dozen lads, yawning in the winter sunshine of the Judean hills.
As football games go, this is as ordinary as it gets. And yet this apparently insignificant fixture, in the Jerusalem dormitory town of Mevaseret, might be a glimpse of rare good news from the Middle East. Indeed it could go down in history as an unlikely turning point - like the pingpong diplomacy that ended the Asian cold war.
The home team is Katamon Abu Ghosh. The club was founded by onetime Israeli diplomat Alon Liel, with the express intention of uniting Israeli Jews and Arabs. All three youth squads, attached to the club, combine Arab and Jewish players. The management of the club is equally ecumenical.
But today's match is a giant stride beyond anything Liel has attempted before. As 12 noon approaches, his face twitches with anxiety. Will the opponents even show? At last a big bus sweeps in. And the first person who alights is a woman with a white veil.
She is a Druze. From the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. And her son is a member of the first ever Syrian-born sports team to play in Israel.
Liel explains the backstory:
'These people, the Druze team, are Syrian nationals, even though they live in the Israeli-occupied zone. Syria has been at war with Israel for decades. Maybe one day Israel will give the Golan back to Syria; if that happens its possible these people will be shot by the Syrian government, as Israeli spies. Yet they have come here, anyway, to play football. As a gesture of peace. That shows great courage.'
The match is part of a wider process of conciliation between Syria and Israel, centred on the thorny problem of the Golan Heights. For three years, Alon Liel has been conducting secret negotiations with Damascus insiders. The aim is that Israel can be persuaded to hand back the Golan; in return Syria will make peace with Jerusalem - and desist from supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.
It's a long and arduous road. But Liel is optimistic. 'These Druze would never have been allowed to come here without the tacit permission of Damascus. I see this match as a smile from Syria.'
At first there are not many smiles on the faces of the young Druze players. But as the match unfolds, everyone starts to relax. At halftime the friends and relatives of the Druze players hand out sweetmeats from Damascus, and rosy red apples from the Golan orchards. It is a touching scene.
Rifat and Nedaq are a young couple from the Druze village of Majdal Shams, in the Golan. They are here to watch their brother play.
Rifat explains that this is the first time he has been to Jerusalem. 'I am a Syrian national. It is very difficult for the Golan Druze to travel anywhere, we do not have Israeli passports, nor do we have Syrian passports. But we are very happy to be here today.'
He turns and cheers. The final result is 7-1; the Israeli team hope to do better in the return match.
But as the players troop off, chattering and laughing, it's possible to discern a wider message than a simple sporting victory. It is a rare message of hope. Maybe peace begins not with politicians signing grandiose treaties in palatial halls: but with a shy Arab woman handing out Syrian pastries, to a bunch of smiling Jewish kids, on a scruffy football pitch.

Tiocfaidh Ar La

2008-06-13T16:42:00.001+01:00

Cheer Up, England

2008-06-08T12:40:00.003+01:00

*sob*

Where Big Sam is King

Followers of English football may feel like hiding away for the next two weeks, as the rest of Europe has its soccer championship: for which, of course, the England team failed to qualify.

But a trip across Asia, as I’m making right now, shows English football in a less humiliating light. From India to Indonesia, English football is embarrassingly popular, despite its failings.

This phenomenon was brought home to me in Sumatra. I was briefly staying in the mega-luxury Banyan Tree Hotel, on the island of Bintam. During a chat with the Javanese hotel manager, I asked him what famous guests he had hosted. He shrugged, and dutifully reeled off a list of presidents, pop stars and movie idols. He did look moderately interested in one name: Ian McKellan the actor. He seemed pleased by the idea they'd had Gandalf raiding the minibar in Villa 20.

But then his demeanour changed. ‘Actually, we have had one very wonderful guest. Big Sam was here!’

I gazed at his new enthusiasm, nonplussed. Who was so famous he only needed a nickname? Who was this Big Sam, more famous than pop stars? Samuel L Jackson from Pulp Fiction? Sam Fox the ex page three girl? Samuel Beckett, the absurdist Irish writer and Nobel laureate, who is in fact dead?

Then it dawned on me. ‘You mean Big Sam… Allardyce. The onetime manager of Bolton Wanderers??’

‘Yes! He was here! Big Sam. We were all very excited, one of us actually talked to him. He said he liked coming to Banyan because it allowed him to escape the fans.’

How weird is this? A manager of lowly soccer teams who is almost a comedy figure in Britain is practically a semi-divine icon in Indonesia. But then it isn’t so weird when you see the adulation of English football across Asia. In Bangkok, everyone is either a rabid Gooner, or a Red Devil, or a mad Chelsea fan. There is a Man United shop in the very centre of Singapore, with a similar outlet in Bangkok's Central Chitlom. English football shirts can be seen, en masse, in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Chiang Mai and Hanoi. English premiership games are televised live, across Asia, whatever the hour.

The obvious question is: can this be real support? Or is it just a passing fancy?

I think it may be turning into real support. Because some Asians now follow teams which have no chance: the true test of fanhood. I found one Sumatran guy who was mad for Tottenham Hotspur, for instance.

“I am a Spurs man.” He said. “I don’t care if they ever win. They are my team”.

The man added a coda: “I think it’s a great shame England are not in the Euro Championships. Me and my friends, maybe we won’t watch the tournament - without England it isn’t the same.“

So if it’s any consolation to domestic England fans, staring moodily at the telly this month: right now people are sharing your pain in the jungles of northern Sumatra.

Polygyny, Technically

2008-06-04T02:00:00.003+01:00

My Day With the Windowless Polygamists of Arizona

Mormon polygamy makes good news copy. Just now the media is fascinated by the eviction of a notorious ranch in the Texan scrublands, occupied by a branch of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints: i.e. Mormon polygamists.
My interest in this is personal, as I am one of the few people to have visited the "capital" of the Fundamentalist Mormons: Colorado City.
The first I ever heard of Colorado City, was when I was camping in the Utah saltpans - writing a travel article. My guide was a likeable guy who did charity work: with abused and abandoned kids. He told me many of these children came from one eerie town on the Utah/Arizona border: Colorado City.
He added a compelling detail: he said the men of Colorado City had built huge homes to house their multiple wives and enormous families. However, many of these homes were surrounded by massive fences - and some had no windows. This was to stop people seeing just how many wives were sleeping in the different bedrooms. And maybe how young the women were. And how often they were cousins.
The charity guy explained that there were no lawmen for hundreds of miles: so the Colorado City polygamists went largely undisturbed. And when the cops did come snooping, the crafty patriarchs put their wives in trailers, and wheeled them across the stateline, out of police jurisdiction.
Of course I had to go and see if this was true. But the guide warned me off the idea. He said Colorado City was absurdly hard to reach, and when I got there, I'd find the locals heavily armed - and not averse to shooting voyeurs.
But I was with my brother, and I was feeling intrepid.
It took a day of driving through daunting yet beautiful desert landscapes. And when we arrived - it turned out the guide was right. Colorado City is a frankly bizarre place. It sits under soaring red cliffs, entirely surrounded by wilderness. And many of the vast and palisaded houses really do have far fewer windows than normal; some houses have hardly any windows at all. The streets feel oddly blind.
And the people are equally strange. Everywhere we saw women in long pioneer dresses, with dozens of children in tow. The women were big: like Stepford wives on steroids.
Our visit went quite smoothly - until we got the camera out. That got people staring - and pointing. We backed away. Then one guy started running towards us, and not in a friendly way. My brother jumped back in the car, and with the shouts of roiled polygynists in our ears, we sped onto the freeway, and got the hell out of Dodge.
This tale has a curious coda. Some days later I was having lunch with a woman in nearby Colorado state. I told her of the windowless city. She said people had got the polygamists wrong. 'Everyone assumes the women are oppressed. But I've got female friends who live in Colorado City. Intelligent women - doctors and lawyers. They choose that way of life. They like being in plural marriages. And Colorado City,' she added, 'has the best cheese shop west of the Rockies.'
One day I aim to go back, and maybe buy some polygamous brie. But next time I might take a gun.

Jetting to Constantinople

2008-05-11T00:12:00.003+01:00

Arguably the greatest building in the world.

Tomorrow I begin my travels, once again. I hope to return, ere long. Given that I am flying, first, to Istanbul, in Turkey, here's a wonderful and very relevant poem.

Sailing to Byzantium

By W.B.Yeats (1928)

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come

Holidays in Hell

2008-04-30T16:46:00.002+01:00

The desirable holiday destination of Sumqayit, yesterday.

Holidays in Hell

Ten Must-See Destinations for Environmental Masochists

Seversk
Location: western Siberia, Russia
Population: 109,000
Attractions: Entry to Seversk, once known as "Tomsk 7", is severely restricted; until 1992 it was not even marked on maps. Seversk is a company town - virtually the sole employer is the Siberian Group of Chemical Enterprises. The city boasts three seperate nuclear reactors, and multiple plants for the processing, enrichment and weaponising of uranium and plutonium. In 1993 Seversk was bathed in lethal fall-out, when a vat of radioactive phosphate exploded in one of the factories.
Things to Do: Visitors can swim in the colourful Tom River - said to be the world's most radioactive watercourse (with a toxicity equivalent to the outfall from 10,000 nuclear reactors). Twitchers will enjoy the many unique bird species, a product of genetic mutation caused by radiation poisoning. Honeymooners should note that Seversk is nicknamed 'Infertility City' by local wags, as anyone who lives there permanently can expect to become infertile after two years.
Quote: 'At least the moose are easy to shoot - because they are brain damaged.' Adam Nurilyov. Local hunter.
Hell Rating: 8/10

City of 10th Ramadan
Location. Suburbs of Cairo, Egypt
Population: 40,000
Attractions: the main employer in this windblown industrial suburb of reclaimed desert is the asbestos company Aura-Egypt. Production of blue and white asbestos has been in full swing since 1983. In the early years of the industry, the dangers of asbestos were "unknown"; local mothers would knit their children pullovers - using raw asbestos fibre.
Things to Do: favourite pastimes of the locals include coughing, spitting, flobbing, hawking, and gobbing up blooded sputum. Apart from these activities, most leisure-time in 10th Ramadan is spent contracting mesothelioma. This gruesome cancer is probably more common, per capita, in 10th Ramadam City than anywhere else on the globe: early symptoms include chest pain, muscle spasms, and shortness of breath; they rapidly advance to extreme vomiting, heart failure, and death.
Quote: Shabaan Ahmed, a local worker, says of his career as an asbestos worker in 10th Ramadan City: 'After a while my friend Muhsen Afifi died: although he was an accountant and far from the fatal dust. Then in 1995 Abdel-Mounem Halloul died of enteric cancer, and in 1997 Ahmed Abul-Einein died of stomach cancer. I don't feel so good myself.'
Hell Rating: 7/10

Katowice
Location: southwest Poland
Population: 317,000
Attractions: this regional capital of Silesian Poland has been a centre of heavy industry for decades. It is surrounded by mines, steel foundries, coking plants, chemical refineries and decaying ironworks. Nearly all of these run on the local brown coal, or lignite, which produces a smutty and very pungent smoke. This copious smog sometimes obscures the sun throughout the town: a so-called "brown-out".
Things to do: bring the family. A survey of pregnant women showed that more than 50% of placentas were damaged by exposure to pollutants. Babies are regularly born with meningitis, pneumonia, asthma and rickets.
If you fancy an excursion try the vast saltmines of the region. You are sure to bump into some locals: when the pollution is especially bad Katowicans are forced into the enormous mines themselves, where they sleep for weeks on end. Lovers of authentic regional cuisine should look out for the unusual salads - municipal authorities have banned all consumption of green vegetables grown in the district, as they are so contaminated with toxins.
Quote: local journalist Julius Seifer: ''During communist times, when we complained about the pollution, they told us we were unpatriotic. They said the west wanted to bring us to our knees: through ecology.''
Hell Rating: 6/10

Linfen
Location: Shanxi province, China
Population: 3.4million
Attractions: Linfen was voted "the most polluted city on the planet" in a 2007 report from the World Bank. It is the centre of Shanxi's vast automobile industry. Intriguing local pollutants include fly ash, sulfur dioxide, and lead dust.
Things to Do: Listen up. Where most cities have a dawn chorus, Linfen boasts an "evening chorus" of hacking coughs, as the city's smog intensifies towards dusk. The children of Linfen are prone to lead poisoning, which induces brain damage; almost anyone who samples the tasty local water risks arsenicosis. This causes skin lesions, vascular problems, hypertension, and many kinds of cancer. The perfect souvenir of any trip to this attractive city is a "Linfen tan" - a vicious ailment, caused by metallic pollution, properly known as blackfoot disease. Victims suffer bubbling and puckering of the hands and feet; eventually the skin turns crispy black; in extreme cases the appendage falls off.
Quote: "In the past, I dug 60 meters to get clean drinking water," says Li Yonggang, who lives in a stricken village in nearby Yongji County. "But now my well is 180 meters deep, and the water still looks like sewage."
Hell rating: 7/10

Mexico City
Location: Mexico
Population: 25m
Attractions: arguably the most populous city on earth, Mexico City is also famous for its rapid and uplanned urbanisation, the intense use of cars, endless miles of unregulated factories, and the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. The city also boasts a unique topography - it sits on a sunbaked plateau surrounded by mountains, which means smog and smoke can never escape. This creates a permanent filthy haze that hovers over the entire megalopolis.
Things to Do: enjoy a refreshing shower of shit. As rainclouds pass over the urban areas, they are trapped by that bowl of mountains. Consequently the clouds suck up water from wherever they can - e.g. the vast sewage farms that surround the city. The clouds then backtrack, and release their burden of tainted vapour on the city. This falls as a light brown drizzle - of human excrement. Climatologists actually have a name for it: "fecal rain". Hotels can usually provide umbrellas.
Quote: "Simply living in Mexico City is equivalent to smoking twenty cigarettes a day". World Health Organisation report.
Hell Rating: 8/10

Kabwe
Location: Zambia
Population: 1.1m
Attractions: Lead smelting,
Things to do: build a surprisingly dynamic career. This second largest city in this southern African country was home to one of the world's largest lead smelters until 1987. As a result, the entire city is contaminated with heavy metal, which causes brain and nerve damage in children and fetuses. This leads to massive educational problems throughout the town: for every 10 micrograms of lead in a decilitre of blood, your IQ drops by an equivalent 10 points. On the good side this means you can get a really top job, if you decide to settle down here, as the competition ain't up to much.
Quote: "I thought Joburg was the worst city in Africa, and then I went to Kabwe." Anonymous Medicins sans frontieres aid worker, 2005.
Hell rating: 8/10

Sumqayit,
Location: Azerbaijan
Population: 275,000
Attractions: this town on the Caspian coast features the world's highest concentration of disused oil and chemical works. So spectacular are the decaying, Soviet-era hulks, they have been used in several Hollywood movies as a stand-in for apocalyptic dereliction on a future earth.
Things to do: one of the main pastimes in Sumqayit is dying young. Life expectancy in males is no higher than 60, with some experts putting it lower than 50. It's still falling. Local Azeris suffer cancer rates at least 50 percent higher than their countrymen, and their children suffer from a lively number of genetic defects ranging from mental retardation to bone disease.
Quote: "When the town was working, as much as 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released on an annual basis," says local doctor Andrei Shalyaban. "There are also huge untreated dumps of industrial sludge, and the rivers are yellow and purple. It's not a nice place."
Hell Rating: 8/10

Norilsk
Location: northern Russia
Population: 100,000
Attractions: Norilsk is known for the smelting of nickel, which occurs throughout the town in vast plants. The smelting is directly responsible for pollution of a flamboyant complexity: the World Health Organisation's list of local air pollutants includes strontium 90, and caesium 137, as well as nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, palladium and selenium. Meanwhile the air and water is full of toxic gases such as nitrogen, phenol, carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide. Then there are the disused nuclear subs rusting in the freezing ocean a few miles offshore: they are thought to be leaking radiation.
Things to do: count yourself lucky you're here - Norilsk is world famous! By some estimates, fully 1 percent of the entire annual global emissions of sulfur dioxide come from this one smallish town on the Arctic Ocean. How good is that? But if the stats fail to grab you, then you can marvel at the celebrated "soil mines": metallurgic pollution in and around Norilsk is so severe it is now economically feasible to mine ordinary ground for its dangerous deposits of platinum and other heavy metals.
Quote: Yev Baidovitch, a local writer: "No one would live here if they, or their parents, hadn't been sent here."
Hell rating: 9/10

Sukinda
Location: Rajpur, India
Population: 2.6m
Attractions: Sukinda is a major centre for the Tata Steel company. The region is also home to a dozen of the world's largest lead and chromite mines.
Things to Do: spot the tumours. Those mines flush endless hexavalent chromium compounds into the Brahmani river, where they join 30 million tons of waste rock. The reliance of Rajupurites on this single watersource in turn leads to some of the most virulent and aggressive cancers ever recorded by medicine, including forms of intestinal cancer where the tumour rips overnight through the stomach wall, causing the sufferer to bleed to death through the rectum. Tuberculosis and asthma are common ailments. Infertility, birth defects, and stillbirths are endemic.
The Orissa Health Association has reported that an astonishing 85% of deaths in the mining areas and 86% of deaths in the nearby industrial villages occur expressly as a result of chromite-related diseases. The survey also claims that a quarter of all inhabitants are, at any one time, suffering from pollution-induced afflictions.
Quote: "These allegations about our town are clearly groundless". Rajpur State Official.
Hell rating. 7/10

Moynaq
Location: Uzbekistan, central Asia
Population: 30,000
Attractions: the endless golden beaches go on and on. And on and on and on and on. And on. Just a few decades back Moynaq was a happy and prosperous fishing town on the Aral Sea, one of the largest inland bodies of water in the world. But then the communists diverted the course of two major rivers, which fed the Aral, to irrigate more land for cotton growing. The ecosystem promptly collapsed, and the Aral literally dried up: the seashore retreated by a hundred miles: leaving behind a sterile desert. And a lot of stranded ships.
Things to do: go see the non existent wildlife. Of 173 animal species which flourished here 50 years ago, barely 30 survive today. Fisherman who fancy a challenge should bring their rods. And maybe a telescope: the local river systems used to boast 25 species of fish, now only two remain.
Weather-watchers will also have fun here: because of the disappearance of the forests, which used to regulate the microclimate, the region around the Aral is now exposed to atrocious Siberian winters, and summers where the temperatures can easily exceed 50C in the shade. That's if you can find any shade.
Finally, if you have your own transport, you might consider a pleasant halfday excursion to the nearby Island of Vozrozhdeniye: the site of a secret military base where chemical weapons were tested for thirty years. Spores of fatally poisonous anthrax, leached from the site, regularly turn up in the few fish that remain. Why not try the sushi? Talking of food, gourmets who like their seasoning should have a great time: on some days the entire city is shrouded in fogs of eerie grey saltdust, making any condiments unnecessary.
Quote: "The Aral Sea is a mistake of nature which has to be corrected." Stalinist scientist, 1950s.
Hell Rating: 10/10

A Brief Interlude of Gloating

2008-04-20T00:08:00.003+01:00

My regular reader may recall that I spent the winter in unusual circumstances: writing a weird thriller in various parts of Asia, while doing soccer-related charity stories for FIFA.

You may have wondered what happened to the thriller. Or you may not. Who cares I'm gonna tell you anyway.

The following snippet of gossip appeared in Publishers Weekly this Friday past, summing up the buzz from last week's London Book Fair, the premier global bookfest of the spring.

"Several titles out on submission in the U.S. may get a boost from foreign sales at the fair... Jay Mandel at William Morris New York is due to go out shortly with Tom Knox’s The Genesis Secret, a thriller that weaves together the story of an archaelogical dig in the deserts of eastern Turkey with that of a series of random murders occurring in England. Harper bought U.K. rights to two books, and there are offers in Greece and Finland and multiple offers in Germany, Italy, France and Brazil."

Modesty precludes me from commenting further. YAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

O Tempora, O Mores...

2008-04-18T14:10:00.003+01:00

.... my dad has a blog

Nobels

2008-04-03T20:32:00.002+01:00

Wladislaw Reymant. Literature, 1924.

How To Win A Nobel Prize

Be A Man

Few Nobels go to women. Only two women, for instance, have won the Physics gong, and no woman has ever won the Economics prize. The Mrs Lucas who shared Prof Robert Lucas’s Economics prize-money in 1995 only got that because she stipulated she wanted half of everything in their divorce.

Be Clever

Going to the right highbrow educational institution helps. The Bronx Science High School in New York has alone produced five ‘Nobellians’. Chicago Uni boasts 58 Laureates on its roster; Harvard 35. And tiny Trinity College Cambridge has won more Nobels than all of Japan.

Be Nominated

Nomination-papers for the six Nobel prize categories (Peace, Literature, Medicine, Economics, Physics, Chemistry) are sent out in November each year by the Swedish Academy. The papers go to thousands of universities, academics, and previous prize-winners all around the world. So all you’ve got to do is befriend a Nobel Laureate. Try taking out Mrs Betty Williams of Belfast (Peace, 1975) for a Babycham.

Be Recommended

Once the nomination papers are in (by February 1st) the Swedish Academy forwards them to various committees. These groups of Nordic brainiacs then spend the summer assessing the relative merits of the nominees. If lasting achievement is anything to go by, the easiest categories to win seem to be Peace and Literature. Henry Kissinger won the Peace prize in 1973 for stopping the war in Vietnam. The war then started again. Anonymous non-entities who’ve won the Literature prize include Shmuel Agnon (1966), Bjornsterne Bjornson (1903), and Selma Lagerloef (1907).

Be Happy

Winning a Nobel is well worth the effort. Dynamite-inventor Alfred Nobel, who started the whole shebang in 1901, left 33 million Swedish crowns in his will to fund the awards. With inflation this money has swollen, such that every Nobel prize-winner now gets 7.9m crowns - nearly a million quid. And you wondered why John Hume (Peace, 1998) was looking so chirpy. Moreover, when you turn up at Stockholm’s Concert Hall on December 10 to collect your cheque, you also get a solid gold medal - none of your plated Olympics rubbish. So get to it.

Poem for the Day

2008-04-01T15:53:00.002+01:00

Just found this great poem, in the Paris Review.

S. X. Rosenstock's Rimininny! (1996):

They read no more that day....
Dante

If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.
You're not the best of what's been thought or said,
Not yet. But youth, with genius, is enough.

Menage a trois is greatness, not rebuff,
If you gain art from what art's represented.
If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off.

I want you, and I want a paragraph
Of lengthy James; he does go on. My love
Can you? I shouldn't praise his length? Enough

Of him? The body of work's living proof
We're all rare forms, and living ... in the dead.
If you can't A Little Tour in France me while I read,
fuck off.

I signal lusts by title, not handkerchief,
Since I'm the sex of all that I have read;
Sometimes I write this sex. Kiss me enough,

And well enough, that I may hear the snub
That reading's not a sexual preference.
If you can't fuck me while I read, fuck off,
Or rave how I'm a work of art enough.

Vote for Frankenstein

2008-03-24T20:51:00.002Z

An Indian politician, yesterday.

Hello everyone. I am no longer in ASIA I am in IRELAND. One day soon I will actually go HOME. Until that moment, here's another essayistic riff provoked by my recent subcontinental travels.

Vote for Frankenstein!

India, it is often said, is a land of a thousand languages. But as recent visitors to the subcontinent can attest, one of those languages is heading for supremacy, and it isn't Hindi. It's English.

English is everywhere in India. On television and roadsigns, in newspapers and advertising. English is also in the mouths of the people, and for good reason. In a country so diverse, English is a unifier. If a traveller from Calcutta or New Delhi wants to be understood in Kerala he is arguably better off speaking the old colonial tongue. Because the official national language of Hindi is a mystery to many southerners.

So pervasive is Indian English, some experts think the native language is in danger of dying out: at least as a serious means of communication. Hindi is certainly struggling as a language of the elite. Mumbai University is reporting a collapse in Hindi studies: ten years ago there were 400 students taking a master's in Hindi every year; that figure has now halved. Many Bollywood stars, like Soha Ali Khan, admit they only talk Hindi to their "drivers and liftmen".

Moreover, when people do speak Hindi, it is often peppered with Anglophone idioms and phrases. Supposedly Hindi newspapers are full of this hybrid "Hindlish": "Tumko aana compulsory hai. Mere dinner ka time ho gaya hai".

All this is rather melancholy for Hindi patriots. But there is a comical aspect - for outsiders at least. Such is the prestige of western culture in India, many locals are giving their children names which are culled indiscriminately from English literature, and European history. Often to bizarre effect.

The upcoming elections, for instance, will see a battle between Romeo Rhani of the BJP, and Zenith Sangma, Admiral Sangma, and Adolf Hitler R Marak of the NCP. And the
honourable candidate for Mendipathar? A mister Frankenstein Momin.

Thai Punks on Bulb

2008-03-13T17:30:00.005Z

Don't bogart that... er... mosquito coil, man.

I'm STILL in Asia. The following Asia-ish piece, by me, appeared in thefirstpost, a few days back.

Mad Thai Drugs

Drug scares are a regular occurrence in Thailand. In the 1980s, the great fear was "China white" heroin. In the 1990s, methamphetamine came along. Now there is a new drug on the Siamese streets - and it is truly bizarre.

The narcotic is colloquially known as "4 x 100". The name comes from its four main ingredients: Coca-Cola, cough syrup, boiled kratom leaves, and crushed-up coils of mosquito repellent.

Three of these ingredients can be found in the average supermarket. Kratom is an endemic local weed with properties similar to marijuana: you can buy it anywhere in Thailand, for a few baht.

No one knows who first concocted this extraordinary mix. But everyone agrees that 4 x 100 comes from the country's roiled, insurgent south, where bored Muslim youths - forbidden alcohol by their religion - experimented with various substances, to see what made them high. Somehow they hit on the 4 x 100 combination. The resulting brew is drunk very quickly: because it tastes much as it sounds.

The effect is like a slow-burning, hallucinogenic opiate. The user is stupefied, but then becomes agitated - as the dreams and visions kick in.

The craze has lately hit Bangkok. You can see people whacked out of their gourds, on 4 x 100, in many poor parts of the city. The government has tried banning cough syrups containing codeine, but the kids have simply switched to new brands.

Indeed, the fight against 4 x 100 is getting more complex, as the drug evolves. Rumours are circling of a refinement of 4 x 100: known as 6 x 100 or even 7 x 100 - because of the addition of new ingredients. These can include yoghurt, coffee or Alprazolam, (a sleeping pill already nicknamed the "deflowering drug", in the Muslim south). The final ingredient is the powder from the inside of fluorescent lightbulbs.

What I Did On My Holidays

2008-03-03T03:52:00.001Z

A gluesniffing Indian kid, yesterday.

This piece originally appeared in thefirstpost, a few days back.

Sean Thomas is working for FIFA, publicizing charities around the
world. Recently he arrived in Calcutta. This is a diary of his first
day in this Bengali city, of 15 million people

One Day In Calcutta

21:00 Arrive from Bangkok

22:00 Drive into Calcutta. On the way learn that Winston Churchill
said of this city: "I am glad I have now been to Calcutta, because it
means I never have to go there again".

22:30 During the drive, nearly crash twice due to insane traffic
conditions: cars ignoring lights, trucks barrelling up wrong side of
road, everyone pressing horns creating a mindnumbing cacophony

22:35 Wonder if I am just being paranoid and traffic isn't that bad

22:36 See aftermath of road accident with taxi completely overturned,
in a narrow street: blood is splashed across the asphalt

23:46 Go to bed at hotel with large gin and tonic

09:30 Visit Futurehope, a charity that works with Calcutta's thousands
of streetchildren: abandoned, homeless and feral kids

09:40 Meet nine year old Jamal. Hear how he was found lying in the
railway station, where he slept with a razor blade under his tongue. Discover he used blade to defend himself from attackers

10:10 Meet twelve year old Kesar, who was burned hideously when his
mosquito net caught fire: a fire that killed his mother who was lying
next to him. He was found in the station sniffing glue and smoking heroin.
He plays football with us

10:50 Meet fifteen year old Ravit who was found age seven living on
street having been continuously raped for years by predatory
homosexuals: his syphilis was so bad he had to sit on a bucket of
potassium permanganate for six weeks

10:55 See the wooden sculptures that Ravit now carves. He is a
charming and friendly boy

11:00 Just about manage not to cry

11:40 Go for tour of Calcutta, "the city of joy"

11:50 On way through suburbs pass a begging leper, with no fingers;
see people living in plastic shacks by side of the road

12:00 Learn that we are in "the posh part of town"

1:00 Visit flower and spice market where peasant girls in gorgeous
saris sell beautiful garlands of orange marigold

1:45 See people living under the nearby flyover

2:15 Crawl through traffic and have minor crash: driver ignores incident

2:16: See an angry taxi driver continuously punching a smaller guy, in
the middle of the street

2:30 Go to the shores of the great river Hooghly, a tributary of the Ganges

2:40 Thousands of men are washing in the filthy water. An albino
child, apparently abandoned, stares wistfully at the banyan trees

4:00 Cross the river on the world's busiest bridge - a mighty steel
arch erected by the British - and take the slumroad to the "burning
ghat"

5:00 Three corpses are being cremated in the open air, on great pyres
of wood. A new corpse is being prepared for its immolation. The relatives stand around chatting as they watch the corpse attenders anoint the head with dark brown clarified butter

5:30 Watch as the fire is lit; the scent of burning human flesh fills the air

5:45 Step back from the heat and smoke as a previous pyre is stoked by
the corpse attenders; the half burned corpse rolls out of the embers:
the skull is still intact but the legs are burned to blackened stalks

5:50 Avert face from sight

5:51 See that behind me is a man naked from the waist down, in the
process of soiling himself; his loins are a mass of scarlet sores and
his wounds are seething with flies

6:30 Realise the man is dying

6:45 Climb back in Futurehope van to visit street kids who live under
the platforms of the vast Howrah railway station

7:15 See a teenage boy lying across tracks, with green flannel
draped over his face: the flannel is soaked in glue. His body spasms
as he inhales

7:50 Fight enormous urge to get taxi straight to airport

9:00 Instead go to visit Sonagachi, the red light district of
Calcutta, where 12 year old Nepalese girls grab every man by the arm,
trying to drag him in

9:15 Decide as a group to head directly and instantly to the hotel and get drunk

10:30 Have dinner in hotel restaurant of softshell crab in brandy
sauce, accompanied by Chilean shiraz

11:15 Realise wine cost hundred pounds: realise have drunk, in forty
minutes, a year's salary of average Calcuttan

12:05 Go to bed.

12.25 Stare at ceiling

12:26 Take Valium

www.futurehope.net

The Japanese are Mad, part Seventy Three

2008-02-24T11:00:00.001Z

Some gay Japanese anime cartoon sex characters aimed at girl fans, yesterday.

The Bizarre Japanese Sex Craze That's Coming Our Way

They call it "yaoi". The derivation of the word is obscure. Some think it's just the Japanese way of saying "gay". Others claim the word is an acronym, derived from: "yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" (which loosely translates as "no story, just the good bits").
Whatever the etymology, the meaning is clear. Yaoi is the name of a bizarre sex phenomenon sweeping Asia: girls who are devoted to comics and pornography which focus on love, sex and romance - between men.
Of course, it's well known that men like the idea of sex between women. Lesbian erotica - for men - is arguably the most popular genre in the porn industry. But hitherto it was always presumed that women were not interested in boys getting hot with other boys.
The craze for yaoi shows that this isn't true.
Yaoi began with anime and manga comics called shonen-ai, which depict, in a rather softcore way, intimacy between young men. These were originally aimed at a homosexual male market. But then the Japanese publishers noticed that many of their readers were heterosexual - and female.
Since then yaoi, also known as BL (for Boy Love), has developed as a genre of its own: with stories, comics and pornography specifically marketed at girls. Commonly these books and movies are written, shot and devised by women artists.
The stories have a formula. They usually feature a dominant male character - tall and masculine - who deflowers a smaller, more androgynous adolescent. Sometimes the stories are seriously explicit. These hardcore yaoi comics have recently attracted a gay male readership: a rich irony.
What do girls see in yaoi? Theories range from the obvious - "it's nice to look at cute boys together" - to the more complex and psychological: yaoi is a way for women to explore and enjoy male sexuality, in a non-threatening way. But no one really knows.
What is not in doubt is the genre's success. Yaoi magazines sell right across Asia, in their millions. They have become hugely popular in Korea, Taiwan and now Thailand (causing consternation in local politicians). In the last couple of years, yaoi has spread to America; a yaoi convention was recently held in California.
And now yaoi is coming to the UK. An English language yaoi magazine has just launched on amazon; there is even a website: yaoi.co.uk.
Could it take off in Europe? If the next boyband in the popcharts is suspiciously gay, you'll know the answer is Yes.

Naziphobia, Redux

2008-02-09T13:36:00.000Z

Some of the vast majority of peaceful British Nazis, at a local village meeting, yesterday.

In the wake of the flap over the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his halfwitted remarks on multiculturalism and the law (AKA "Shariagate"), I thought I'd revisit this blogpost of mine, from a couple of years ago.

(I promise to blog something new and exciting soon. But I'm still in Asia, writing the thriller, as of this moment.)

Naziphobia on the rise, says report

A report from the British Anti-Racist Federation (BARF) has revealed a frightening rise in Naziphobia, following the attacks on Britain by extreme Nazis.

Professor Tim Bimley, director of BARF, told us yesterday: 'Just because a few radicalised Nazis have attempted to attack Britain with large scale bombing atrocities, this in no way justifies any revenge against the vast, peaceable majority of Britain's Nazis, who simply want to live their quiet Jew-hating lives as they have always done.'

Heinrich Sturmer, is a British Nazi from Bradford, part of the growing minority of immigrant Nazis in Britain's industrial cities. 'Ever since these radical Nazis attacked London, life for us has become intolerable,' he says, in the lebensraum of his neat little bungalow. 'People stare at us differently. The other day I was goose-stepping down Bradford High Street, shouting in a hectoring manner and demanding that Jew-shops give me free food, and one small English boy shouted Hitler! at me. Luckily the British police jumped on the small boy, beat him up and carted him off to jail. He is now being charged with inciting ideological hatred. But it was a frightening incident.'

BARF has many such accounts on its records. The small British Nazi community in Leeds had their annual torchlit parade interrupted, before their local 'fuhrer', or community leader, could denounce Slavs and gypsies as vile thieving parasites, as is traditional. A hundred miles south, the significant British Nazi community of Luton claims that a local journalist has written columns questioning the British Nazis' use of eugenics, and forced sterilisation.

'These things are traditional to Nazis,' says one Luton Nazi, Hans Schlenk. 'We've always sterilised our mental deficients and stupid retards. And we only allow breeding between blue eyed Aryans. What's wrong with that? It's our way of life. Likewise,' he adds, his small moustache bristling, 'Nazis have a great tradition of gassing undesirable elements in our own community. Its just racism to say we should stop. We're just different. Why can't the British live with that?'

David Bloony, The Runnymede Trust, concurs. 'If multiculturalism is to mean anything, it means that we tolerate cultural differences. Nazis are genocidal sadists with a long tradition of anti-Semitic hatred, we should respect that.' And the attacks? 'If we let the Nazi bombings change our way of life, then we will have let them win. Because that's what all Nazis want. Er, uhm, I mean some Nazis. Er.. don't I?'

Parroting

2008-02-03T03:54:00.000Z

An African Grey, yesterday.

Greetings. I am in Asia. Writing a thriller. Yep. Maybe I will blog about this at some point, maybe not. Quite frankly, I might not, cause thriller-writing is knackering. Sorry.

Until that moment when I possibly blog about my Asian travels and experiences, or not, as the case may be, here is another piece of warmed-over journalism, lazily culled from all the stuff I wrote for Maxim about ten years ago.

And people say blogging is hard. Cuh.

How to teach a bird to talk

Choose your species
Different kinds of birds have different talking abilities. Macaws are pretty good speakers, but are loud and rough voiced and sound like a Glaswegian after a pint of lighter-fuel. Mynah birds from India are fairly chatty, but somewhat dim and repetitive. Likewise budgies, cockatoos, lovebirds and lorakeets - they can all be taught to speak, but tend to be rather slow on the pick up. According to Irene Pepperberg, the world’s top bird-speech expert, the smartest and clearest talking birds are, without doubt, African grey parrots.

Say some words
Once you’ve purchased your African grey, don’t expect him to be instantly nattering away like a teenager with her first mobile. It takes time. And of course individual critters vary in personality - some are sharp, some retarded. First off, try saying something clear and simple - ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’, etc. Say it slowly, close to the bird. Then say it again and again, and again, for ten minutes, then repeat these ten minute sessions twice a day for several months. If this gets boring you can make a tape and play it next to the cage.

Don’t say fuck
Birds like shortish words with hard, clear consonants. That’s why ‘Pretty Polly’ is so popular. It’s also why ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, ‘arse’ and all the other Anglo-Saxon swearwords are so quickly picked up by even an averagely stupid budgie. And remember, it might be, on the face of it, a laff to teach your nan’s parakeet to say ‘suck my dick, muthafucka’, but do you really want to listen to this phrase several dozen times a day? Every day? For seventy years? Parrots are some of the longest lived creatures on earth.

Try a sentence
Once your bird has mastered some simple phrases - and these should come in a few months - you can move on to more complex constructions, and even get the birds to say them at the right time: like ‘are you going out?’ when you are going out. However, if your bird proves to be a total smart-alec, keep him away from irrelevant noises. Quick birds have been known to pick up and repeat baby gurgles, phone trills, human snoring. And the quickest birds, according to Irene Pepperberg, actually understand some of what they’re saying. Which is another reason not to teach them to say ‘wanker’.

The Exorcist

2008-01-15T22:21:00.000Z

That's your mum, that is.

How To Become An Exorcist

Get ordained
Both the Church of England (in 1975) and the Roman Catholic Church (in 1999) have restated the ongoing need for ‘proper’ exorcisms. For that reason they still employ official exorcists. These tend to be local priests who have shown themselves to be ‘holy, courageous, and humble’. Candidates should also be physically strong: exorcisms are notoriously stressful. In 1982 the Pope himself conducted an exorcism on a possessed woman which left him ‘writhing on the ground’.

Be lucky
Each diocese or bishopric in the UK (whether C of E or Catholic) has one designated exorcist. That means there’s one living not far from you. But as there are estimated to be only a handful of true cases of possession (i.e. cases of possession which aren’t really cases of Tourette’s syndrome, or schizophrenia) in the UK each decade, even these official exorcists will be fairly fortunate to encounter authentic diabolic manifestation in their working lives.

Change denomination
If you’re determined to hobnob with a hobgoblin, consider working for a more flexible employer. The Eastern Orthodox church, for instance, follows medieval Christian practise in allowing any layman with the right skills and mindset to practise exorcism. And certain ‘charismatic’ sects of fundamentalist Protestantism, like the Universal Life Church, or the Assembly of God, positively encourage their ordinary members to lay into each other’s ghoulies.

Locate demons
OK. So you’ve joined some bunch of frankly mad tambourine-bashers. Now all you need to do is find a malign possessing spirit. Good places to look for demons, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, are latrines, wells, cellars, and dogs (particularly liable to possession, apparently). That done, just arm yourself with some salt, a violet surplice, some Holy Water, and a copy of the Exorcism Ritual, or Ritual Romanum, and you’re away. But be careful - on average one American dies each year as a direct result of ‘amateur’ exorcisms.

Christmas Repeats

2007-12-21T21:03:00.000Z

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I've just had some VERY good news. so good I'm too superstitious to tell everyone what it is, just in case it happened in a parallel universe or something and my revealing what it is will prevent it from having happened in a quantum type Heisenbergy uncertainty principle-ish sort of way.

So instead of telling you my good news, which will have to wait a few days, here, as a present to my regular reader (hello Tom in Milwaukee!) is the very first post I ever posted on the Womble, a post which remains one of my faves.

A Rose By Any Other Name?

Sean Thomas reports on some terminological trouble in the Deep South of France.

It's like any little town in the rural south of France - only prettier. Old men play boules in the shade of the linden trees. Pretty girls cycle past with baguettes pointing from their rucksacks. In front of the Hotel de Ville three tricolores hang ostentatiously in the fine summer sun. In fact, it could be a Gallic vision of earthly paradise - if it weren't for one thing. The town's name is Tampon.

Sipping a pastis in his favourite brasserie, the fifty-something mayor of Tampon, Gaston Lefevre, explains the latest difficulties caused by the town's name. 'It started about about ten years ago, with these Australian backpackers. They came to Tampon, and they took photos. By the town sign.' Gaston finishes his drink, slapping it down on the zinc-topped bar. 'Pas de probleme! But then they tell their friends, and their friends aussi, and now every summer we have many hundreds of them. They come, they take the photo, they laugh and shout Tampon! to their friends, and then pouf! - they are gone. They do not even spend money!'

For such a small place, Tampon is quite haughtily historic. The river Lisiec has been wending its languid way through the vieux ville for nearly two thousand years. Louis XIV used to send his favourite bastard children here; he allegedly once came himself with the royal mistress. Closer to our own time, famous French footballer Michelle Platini recently bought a home in the sunny chestnut-woods nearby.

The people of beautiful Tampon are, consequently, not used to being laughed at: and the touristic kerfuffle over their name has punctured their civic amour propre. But what to do? After much deliberation, the town council has decided to petition the French State, via the Ministry of the Interior, for permission to change the name of the town.

Job done? Not in France. It turns out that under an obscure Napoleonic law - the 'Loi Tissiane' - any French city, town, village, or hamlet is forbidden to change its name, without the express permission of the Senate and the President. Such permission is, of course, almost impossible to get, given the stubbornly slow wheels of French bureaucracy. The upshot is that it may be many years, even decades, before Tampon gets its new, less 'hilarious' name.

It's a setback, but Gaston Lefevre tries to remain stoical. He says they can wait: the townspeople have been called 'Tamponniers' for twenty centuries. He is however burningly curious about one thing. 'You Anglo-Saxons, why do you snigger?' He sighs, expressively. 'In French, the word tampon can also mean what I think it means for you, a coussinet, the cloth for the female period. But we do not have hordes of French tourists laughing by our town sign! Only you English. What is this: your strange humour?'

The derivation of 'Tampon' is obscure. Some people think it comes from the Occitan dialect word tapon, which refers to the rags used to clean, and plug, medieval cannons. That would make some sense, as this part of the Languedoc saw many religious wars in the 13th and 14th centuries. Other scholars think the name predates the crusades against the Cathars and Templars, and is some kind of Celtic tribal name. Perhaps it once belonged to a proud Gallo-Roman chieftain.

But if Tampon's name is curious, there are others in this lost part of rural southern France which are even more intriguing. Not far away from Tampon, towards la ville rose of Toulouse, is the departmental capital of Condom. This town has been the butt of many jokes in the last few decades; but it bears them bravely, and even exploits the possibilities in its tourist merchandise. The same goes for the fishing village of Pubic-sur-mer, down on the sea near Narbonne. It was once favoured by great painters like Cezanne; now it's more famous for its naughty postcards emblazoned with the town's 'amusing' name. This name, of course, simply means the hill-by-the-sea.

And then there's the village of Cuntface. This pretty, straggling village is only twelve miles from Tampon, up the green wooded valley of the River Lisiec.

What is extraordinary about Cuntface, is that the locals do not seem to realise the striking double entendre. When questioned, for instance, the local pattisier, Monsieur Pejul, can only shrug. 'Oui, Cuntface? What are you looking at? Zis name is difficult for you? It means... ow you say?' Similarly blank faces can be found in any of the village's bars and cafes. The people of Cuntface actively deny any knowledge of the English meaning of the name; and look shocked when it is explained to them.

The same remarkable ignorance is shown in the neighbouring hamlet of Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Cunt-Buggery-Tits-Cock-Fucking-Wank-Arsehole. This is a tiny French farming village of some hundred souls, dwarfed by the Pyrenees above. It doesn't even have a bar, or a church, just a little shop, and a rather quiet cafe. In the cafe the local flic, the village bobby, looks puzzled when questioned about his village's extraordinary name.

'Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Cunt-Buggery-Tits-Cock-Fucking-Wank-Arsehole is a very nice place', he says, in his thick but charming mountain dialect. 'We are very 'appy here. I do see there is une probleme with our name. What does it mean? You mean it eez rude?'

Anglophone visitors to Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Fuck-Cunt-Buggery-Tits-Cock-Fucking-Wank-Arsehole may find such indifference perplexing - even risible. But they should remember that our English-speaking world has more than a few intriguing names of its own. Near the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, for instance, is the large village of Derriere-sur-la-Nez. Scholars are unsure why the villages and towns in this part of the foxhunting Midlands have unusual French names; no one has any idea at all why little Derriere should boast such a peculiar moniker.

Other placenames around the UK have similarly wry echoes for foreign visitors. Old Cojones, near Harrogate, sees busloads of chuckling Spanish tourists every summer. Beautiful Scheissedale, also in Yorkshire, gets dozens of German visitors, some of whom aren't there solely because it's in Herriot country. And what about Merde-Merde-Merde-Merde-Merde-Merde-Pissoir-Merde-Foutre-Batard-Pissoir!, a pretty little seaport just south of Alnwick?

Remember that next time you are laughing at a badly translated foreign menu.

Howler

2007-12-14T00:48:00.000Z

An idiot, yesterday.

There is a piece in this week's New Yorker by frizzy haired pundit Malcolm Gladwell, all about race and IQ. The essay is trite, polemical, tendentious, and inane, if well-meaning - it basically rehashes old arguments against IQ. With more passion than conviction. But it does have one saving grace - it boasts perhaps the most absurdly embarrassing correction in recent journalistic history.

Here it is:

CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.

Er, yeah. Ahem. *cough* Bit of an error there, chaps. Thought the New Yorker had "fact checkers"?! *stifles laughter*

Namibia

2007-12-11T22:16:00.000Z

A caracal.

Earlier this year I visited Namibia. For Audi cars. Here's what I wrote about it.

Saving the Desert Elephants

It's a wild and spine-tingling moment. The elephant is staring at me in a curious, slightly malign fashion. She's so close I can count her long eyelashes; one quick charge and I would be skewered, by a tusk, to the American authoress sitting next to me. I guess that would make us a kind of writerly kebab.

Why am I so disconcerted? It's not like I've never seen elephants before - I have. I've seen them in zoos and safari parks. I've even seen them in the wild - in the outback of South Africa, for instance, where they are so common they constitute a nuisance.

But this elephant is different, and maybe it's this difference that makes her unnerving. She's a Namibian desert elephant - one of the tiny number of elephants that have adapted to the savage climate and hostile landscapes of this furiously beautiful south African country. And what's more she's endangered: and it's part of my job to save her. Even if she is freaking me out with her shrewdly glaring eyes.

The group I have joined, in the harsh terrain of Namibia's virtually untouristed Damaraland, is called EHRA. It stands for Elephant Human Relations Aid. The agency was founded ten years ago by Johannes, a tough, sardonic, onetime South African soldier with unrivalled knowledge of this terrain - and a very long pony tail. He's sitting right now at the front of our four wheel drive, reassuring us that the elephants won't charge.

I'm not totally convinced.

EHRA's ambition is to save the precious desert elephants. They aim to do this by smoothing the troubled relationship between man and beast. The difficulty faced by the elephants is that they need water, and lots of it, to survive in this arid land. A thirsty elephant can consume hundreds of litres of liquid every day.

Naturally, the elephant herds gravitate to the richest sources of water in Damaraland. Which just happen to be the wells and pumps used by the local tribesmen and subsistence farmers.

The result is conflict. The elephants suck up the farmers’ water, and then the angry and desperate farmers go out shooting elephants - to save their livelihoods. If this continued for long, there would be only one outcome. No more desert elephants.

Which is where EHRA comes in. The agency recruits volunteers from all over the world to rescue the elephants - and have the holiday of a lifetime in the process. These volunteers spend a minimum of two weeks and a maximum of three months reconstructing water sources - building walls to protect the solar-powered boreholes - so that humans and elephants can learn to share the water. The "ellies" are given access to the water at various points, which saves them from damaging the actual pumps; the homesteading farmers get plenty of good clean water from a renewed and safeguarded source. And everyone's happy.

Everyone, that is, apart from me. I'm still being stared at by a wild mammal approximately the size of a post office. We're sitting in our open-topped 4WD down a shady sidecanyon. The herd of elephants we have encountered are busy scoffing their way through an entire tree - branches, bark, leaves, and all. Now we have interrupted them during lunch and they don't seem too chuffed. Can't say I blame them. Eventually the elephants give a snort of disdain, and slowly move on down the gorge, caressing each other with their trunks all the way.

For several more hours we track and assess the elephants as they move about the desert. It's a gruelling but exhilarating experience. The sun is hot and the mopane bees are annoying, occasionally we get bogged down in the sand of the arroyos, but I also know that I am a hugely privileged observer of one of Africa's last and greatest wildernesses.

As countries go, they don't get much more untamed than Namibia. A vast land almost as big as western Europe, Namibia boasts some of the world's driest deserts, sunniest mountains, and weirdest wildlife. On the extraordinary, fogbound Skeleton Coast - where the hot waterless desert meets the cold Benguela sea-current - there are beetles which stand on their heads, 2000 year old trees which burrow into the sand, and lions which hunt springboks in the life-giving mist.

Further inland are the plateaux - full of hyenas, jackals and ostriches which run across the barrens like alarmed Victorian spinsters. These interior regions of Namibia are also home to some unusual human communities. Like the Basters.

The name of these people literally means "bastards". Yet the Basters wear this apparently pejorative name with pride: because it tells them of their unique background. The Basters are the crossbred descendants of strapping Dutch settlers and petite Khoisan tribesmen who intermarried in the 18th and 19th centuries. The unusual lineage of the Basters makes them extremely beautiful - cocoa coloured, high cheekboned, sometimes blond yet simultaneously dark. They speak pure Renaissance Dutch and are fiercely Lutheran. They also like a drink.

But there are many such tribes in Namibia - ex-imperialist Germans, Lhosi, the herding Herero, nomadic Himbas, Caprivians, Owambo, Kavango. The nation is a patchwork of ethnicities, white and black, Christian and animist, African and European.

Here in lonely and beautiful Damaraland - between the coast and the mountainous heartland - the tribesmen are called, yes, Damaras. And they are just as intriguing as any Namibian ethnicity. The women sometimes go bare breasted; sometimes they wear big, vividly coloured dresses with bizarre flat hats. The Damara people are friendly, charming and aware of the specialness of their land and the elephants it harbours. They just need a little help to balance their precious ecosystem.

Help which they are going to get from me. Well, when I say me, I really mean everyone else in the group I have joined. The fact is, I have missed the first week of the two week EHRA rotation - and it's the first week when all the building work is done. The second week is dedicated to tracking and monitoring the ellies, and exploring the wilds of remotest Damaraland.

As we make camp that night - building our own fires, laying out our sleeping bags, barbecuing our meaty dinner, sitting around the roaring flames drinking whisky in the African moonlight - I confess to the rest of the group that I'm glad I missed the building week. Because it sounds too much like hard work. This rough camping is quite tough enough for me, without the need to construct rockwalls every afternoon.

The response to my confession is unanimous and dismayed. Every single member of the group - which ranges from gap year student girls, to thirty-something actors rediscovering themselves, to that lady authoress of a certain age - is adamant that the building work is essential to the whole grubby, challenging, punchy and enriching experience that is EHRA. As the gap year girls explain to me, it's during the wall-building in the hot African sun that the group dynamic is established. People learn to rely on each other (or not), they find out each other's virtues and weaknesses, they establish friendships and develop camaraderie, and all of it under the determined alpha male gaze of Johannes and his facilitators.

'We were so good at building the walls,' one girl breathlessly tells me, 'we actually ran out of cement!'

The others laugh around the fireside. There is certainly a very strong esprit de corps in this group. There are catchphrases and nicknames, in-jokes and gossip. This isn't a "holiday" for someone who dislikes close contact and teamwork: you're forced to rub along - but in a good way.

Nor is this a "holiday" for someone who needs their creature comforts. The food is basic but nourishing. There’s no showers, and the toilets are the nearest thorn bushes. If you want refreshing snacks you'd better bring them with you. The same goes for cold beer and wine - you may stumble across tribal liquor stores - then again you may not. But if you like to chill out with a nice Merlot after a hard day's elephant tracking, or a long afternoon mixing cement with a Zimbabwean artist, then my advice is to pack a couple of decent bottles in your rucksack, along with your sleeping bag, bedroll, wet wipes, loo paper, etc etc etc (the staff at EHRA will advise you on essentials. It’s quite a long list).

Surprisingly, one thing you probably won't need - even though I've packed one - is a mosquito net. The desert is generally too dry for mossies, which means you get to sleep out, in the open, underneath the dark African skies.

And what an experience it is. I've never seen so many stars, sprinkled across the blackness like a Tsarina's diamonds. The moon is a scimitar of silver. And every ten minutes or so a shooting star scores an exuberant gold slash across the heavens. It's such a giddy feeling I want to stay awake, but the day’s exertions and the tots of whisky have defeated me. I fall asleep to the sound of the mild desert breeze in the acacias.

Mornings at EHRA start early. Before dawn David the "Zimbo" artist is up and about brewing coffee. Lucy from Dublin is on breakfast duty (people take it in turns to make meals, do dishes, clean up, and so forth); as the sun peeps over the desert horizon she starts making the porridge. Soon the whole camp is alive with people scratching and yawning.

And it's not just the camp that's alive. As we have an hour to spare before we light out for the wilderness, I take a stroll into the bush. The dry wooded riverbed next to our camp is buzzing with critters. Guinea fowl trot from rock to rock. Songbirds warble in the tamarisks. Duikers, oryx and other antelopes skitter in the distance. And then I see a curiously bounding animal, ears pricked and eyes burning - it's a very rare feline called a caracal - all tawny and sleek.

When I go back to the camp I tell the others excitedly of my sighting. They are politely enthusiastic but maybe not that impressed. Some of them have already seen leopards, and there are rumours of lions hunting black rhino just a few kilometres downriver. This is real wild Africa - raw and glorious.

Soon we are back in our jeeps and heading into the toughest territory of all. For several hours we sloosh our way through a remarkable and hidden gem of the Damaraland desert - the wetlands.

It seems contradictory, to have an emerald swamp in the middle of a desert, but Namibia is laced with underground rivers. Indeed if these subterranean waterways didn't exist those water pumps wouldn't work half so well. Sometimes these aquifers rise to the surface, and when they do they create long green ribbons of life, in the middle of the sunburnt wilderness.

The sensation of driving down these linear fens is unique. Like tunnelling into Eden. Reeds crack against the cars, waterbirds flee the splashing wheels, more than once the vehicles get stuck in the sucking black mud and have to be towed free. And when the cars give up, the volunteers wade down the water course, worrying about leeches.

At last we emerge onto dry land. Almost immediately, Johannes spots some telltale spoor - big balls of elephant dung, as fibrous as a vegan's breakfast. The desert ellies are nearby.

For an hour we track them, on foot. The sun is setting. It seems we are out of luck. But then we turn a canyon corner - and run smackbang into a dozen elephants gathered around a waterhole. This is Mama Africa's herd, named for its dominant matriarch. The encounter is edgy. Big elephant ears are twitching. Johannes tells us the animals are nervous.

As darkness falls we beat a sensible retreat to the car. But again, as we drive along, we run into the animals. And this time it's serious. They are snorting. Johannes cuts the engine. He tells us that the ellies can get violent at night - they hate disturbance. In the twilight one of the female animals, Medusa, actually drops her head - and then she charges.

Hearts stop. I am sure Johannes is going to be pinioned on a tusk. Someone screams. But it's just a mock charge. A warning. With a shake of her head Medusa gives us another angry glance - before trotting back to her herd. We have survived.

That night we camp out of danger, up on the plateaux. When the sun rises I rub my eyes and look around the camp. We are lost in the middle of astonishing scenery - an endless vista of blue-tinged mountains and dreamy dunelands, threaded by tracks made by migrating elephants.

It's an awesome and uplifting sight. And it suits my mood. Because I am happy. In my own tiny way I have helped to save this landscape - and this ecosystem. I feel good, rewarded, and remarkably virtuous. And you don't get that buzz after a week in Marbella.

News from Egypt

2007-12-03T22:57:00.000Z

Me, my mate, and the city of the Aten, Tell al Amarna. Yes it really is that bleak.

The Doomed and Monotheistic Pharaoh Akhenaten.

Salaam.

Very recently I spent three weeks in sunny Egypt. Now I am back in England, but tomorrow I am off to Rome to interview schizophrenic goalkeepers. I'm not joking.

One day soon I will post more fully on my recent Egyptian experiences. But right now I just wanna say this. As I blog, King Tutankhamun is in the news, due to a huge new show of his funeral goods in London - and I think I have discovered something pretty amazing about his dad.

Tutankhamun's father, as any fule kno, was the crazy, weird-looking pharaoh Akhenaten, who introduced monotheism to Egypt (specifically, worship of the Aten, the universal sun god).

A few days back I actually went to the lost city of Akhenaten, Tell el Amarna, in the remote middle Nile. This city was built by Akhenaten for him and his beautiful but loopy wife Nefertiti.

Akhenaten was madder than a bag of tadpoles. He had several daughters and had sex with most of them, as documents attest. He then buried the daughters in their own tombs at the back of Tell el Amarna. I saw these desolate tombs for myself.

For many centuries people have wondered what happened to Akhenaten's mummy. It apparently disappeared and has never been found. His own tomb is empty.

But now I think I've worked it out.

Let's go through the facts we have about Akhenaten.

He liked building, he looked like a nutter, he had a mad wife he loved very much, he had sex with his daughters who he then buried in the back yard.

He reincarnated as Fred West!

That's my theory! I know it's shocking but I think if you look at the facts it's almost incontrovertible. Akhenaten disappeared because he reincarnated many centuries later as deranged Gloucestershire odd job man Fred West.

I intend to present a paper on this to the British Musuem when I return.

Salaam aleikum.

Homicidal Gloucestershire handyman Fred West.

Warning: Don't Think Too Much

2007-11-03T23:24:00.000Z

The favourite food of philosophers.

Thinking Is Bad For You

The common image of a philosopher is probably that of some wise and gentle greybeard, calmly sorting out the world's problems. Yet the truth is often the opposite. Whether it's the pressure of cogitating so much, or the weirdness of spending your time wondering whether you really exist, the world's greatest philosophers have had some of the wackiest lives in history.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778

A towering figure of western Philosophy, Rousseau invented the phrase: 'Man was born free and everywhere he is chains' - a slogan employed by revolutionaries ever since. Rousseau also formulated the notion of the noble savage, the idea that man is an intrinsically virtuous creature, at his best when living in a state of primitive harmony with the natural world.

Yet Rousseau himself exhibited little harmony. Born in Geneva to a mother who died soon afterwards, and a father who supplemented his watch-making salary by giving dancing lessons, Rousseau was brought up by a neighbourhood clergyman, Pastor Lambercier. It was in this household that the infant Rousseau was vigorously spanked, time and again, by the pastor's alluring, 30 year old sister. For the rest of his life the great philosopher would revel in the notion of being spanked by a beautiful older woman.

Eventually, despite the glorious spankathons, Rousseau fled Geneva. For years he wandered around the Alpine countryside as a teenage tramp. In Turin he got a job as a nobleman's gofer, but was sacked when he pilfered a ribbon. After this he considered becoming a priest, and toiled for a while as a gigolo to an aristocratic Scotswoman.

True peace was found in the house of Madame de Warens, a plump older woman who took on Rousseau as tutor and toyboy. Rousseau called Madame de Waren maman, and shared her bed when he reached twenty-one. During the same period the matron was also being pleasured by an elderly odd job man - when this geriatric love-rival fixed his last toaster, Rousseau literally took the man's clothes.

The rest of Rousseau's life was less happy. He became a famous writer, yet he also fathered five children by an ugly laundry girl, and abandoned every single one of them to an orphanage. He got memorably upset when a whore in Venice revealed to him that she only had one nipple. When he retired to his estate in Switzerland Rousseau would have furtive affairs with young ladies, masturbating as he strolled to his assignations in the pinewoods. His later years were clouded by a strange urinary problem which prevented him receiving honours in public.

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

Relatively unknown to many, Schopenhauer is regarded by his fellow philosophers as a major thinker, a man who single-handedly created the philosophy of pessimism: the idea that there is no personal God, and that man must stand alone in a hostile universe. This idea has influenced writers like Hardy, Mann, Tolstoy and Beckett. Schopenhauer also recognised the essential importance of sexuality in human culture and self-image.

Nonetheless he was a total loser when it came the ladies. He was a lifelong misogynist, regarding women as inferiors. Schopenhauer actually believed the larger bottoms of women meant that they were designed by Nature to spend their time sitting down: sewing. He never married.

In the latter half of his life Schopenhauer became eccentrically rigid in his doings. Every day he rose at seven, bathed, eschewed breakfast, then wrote his unread books until noon; work was followed by flute-practise for an hour (he was never any good), then he took lunch alone in a Frankfurt hotel, before retiring on his own to the public library, where he read the Times of London. Then he walked his miniature poodle called Atman, before attending a concert alone, dining alone, and retiring alone.

Why was he so lonesome? His mother and father were wealthy but cold individuals; the family atmosphere got worse when Schopenhauer's father jumped to his death from a warehouse window. Bizarrely, his mother then became a famous poet and socialite, who rarely saw her irritable son.

Schopenhauer was highly sexed. Between bouts of extreme solitariness he took several lovers, and fathered an illegitimate child. But his irascible character usually got the better of him: in 1821, he was convicted of throwing a woman down some stairs, following a dispute over the noise she was making outside his rooms. After a lengthy court case, Schopenhauer was obliged to pay the crippled woman 60 thalers a year, for the rest of her days. When the woman finally died, Schopenhauer mordantly wrote in his diary: 'Obit anus, abit onus' (‘the old woman dies, the debt departs').

After decades of anonymity and isolation, Schopenhauer was belatedly recognised as a great philosopher, and achieved a measure of wealth and fame. Frankfurt's citizens noted that, in those final months, as the aged philosopher walked to his lonely hotel lunch, dragging his miniature poodle, he was, on occasion, seen to smile.

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900

Most famous philosophers are lauded for their ideas, not their prose. Unique amongst the great thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche was famous for both. In works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Gods, and Beyond Good and Evil, he perfected a writing style that was at once lucid, lyrical and hypnotic.

His ideas were also immensely influential. Nietzsche openly despised Christianity - as a 'slave' religion; he also coined the phrase 'God is dead'. Instead, Nietzsche cultivated the concept of the Superman, a nobly self sufficient human being, able to impose his superior personality on the world through sheer willpower. Unsurprisingly, the Nazis were later drawn to this philosophy; Nietzsche himself was no Nazi.

What he was, was a deeply troubled man. Like Rousseau, Nietzsche had a passion for dominant women - he was photographed with women bearing whips. Yet he seldom if ever consummated these “affairs“. The one single certifiable sexual encounter in the philosopher's entire life - with a cheap prostitute in Cologne - infected him with syphilis which eventually drove him mad and killed him.

For many years the young Nietzsche hero-worshipped the world's most famous composer, Wagner; the two became firm if unequal friends, to the extent that Nietzsche regularly bought Wagner silk underwear. But then they fell out, and Nietzsche violently accused the musician of being a compulsive masturbator.

Despite his personal oddities, Nietzsche was recognised as a brilliant thinker, and rose quickly through academic circles. However his career was interrupted by service in the Prussian army, where he was badly wounded in the chest.

Soon afterwards the syphilis started to kick in, sending the philosopher half blind. He suffered vomiting attacks, and terrible headaches; he tried living only on cocoa and dry bread, but this was ineffective. In the middle of this chaos he fell in love with Lou Salome, a posh Russian girl seventeen years younger than him. But she drove him to tears with her inconstancy, and eventually she ran off to work with Freud, with whom she developed a theory of anal sexuality.

Heartbroken, Nietzsche turned to his long-supportive sister Elizabeth for succour, but she had fallen in love with an anti-Semitic politician, Bernhard Forster, who then migrated to Paraguay to start an Aryan colony; after a year Forster committed suicide when he was revealed as an embezzler, and Elizabeth returned to Germany and her brother.

She was just in time. Nietzsche was churning out ideas but his mind was teetering on the edge, a situation not helped by the enormous draughts of chloral hydrate - a sleeping potion - that he imbibed every day. His letters now bore ominous signs of incipient madness; one to August Strindberg in Christmas 1888 had the sentence: 'I have ordered a convocation of princes in Rome. I want to have Kaiser Wilhelm shot'.

On the 3rd January, 1889, Nietzsche was wandering the streets of Turin when he saw a horse being whipped. Always an animal lover, he rushed to save the beast but then collapsed. When he "recovered", he was gibberingly insane.

He lived for ten more years, “looked after” by his sister. His increasing fame - and infamy - made him an object of rich curiosity. Nietzsche sister capitalised on this by exhibiting her brother to paying visitors. When the tourists entered the great prophet's room, they would find him decked in a white sheet like a priest, staring silently into space, lost in his world of high-flown insanity. In his own words, he was finally 'living above the snowline'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951

Such was the reputation of this Austrian-Jewish philosopher, when he first came to England in the 1920s, the famous Cambridge economist J M Keynes wrote in his diary 'God has arrived: he came by the 5.15 train'.

Yet explaining the vital importance of Wittgenstein to non-experts (i.e. the rest of us) is difficult. Wittgenstein's philosophy was abstruse, and often concerned with the proper use and meaning of language. His most "popular" work had the catchy title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Perhaps Wittgenstein's philosophy is best explained by his most famous phrase: 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'. That is to say: language and logic can only take us so far. With the big questions like God, death and the purpose of life, silent intuition is as good as anything.

Wittgenstein's background was remarkable. He was born into one of the richest families in the world. The fortune had been made by his Jewish father, who founded the Prague steelworks and went on to monopolise steel production in the Austro-Hungarian empire. The father cleverly shifted his riches into foreign assets before the German hyperinflation of the 20s and the Great Depression of the 30s. Between the wars the Wittgenstein dynasty was worth eighty billion dollars by today's prices.

However the ascetic young Wittgenstein, despite his siblings' protestations, gave all his billions back to his family. For the rest of his life he would have to endure penury and debt, something which utterly confounded his friends, who know how much he was once worth.

Wittgenstein didn’t care. He relished simplicity, even austerity. He also liked total isolation. For years he lived along in a hut in northern Norway. When he returned to civilisation he got a job as a teacher in the poorest parts of the Austrian Alps, where he lived mainly off cocoa, sleeping in a tiny kitchen, even though he was qualified to teach in universities.

In these schools he was famous for lavishing attention on certain pupils; he would go on ten hour walks into the valleys just to bring back bananas for his favourite students. Yet less bright pupils were subject to Wittgenstein's famous temper - he lashed out at them with fists and sticks, and once nearly beat a dull schoolboy to death.

Even by the brutal standards of the times, nearly killing a pupil was a no-no. The resultant scandal was hushed up, but Wittgenstein was obliged to emigrate to England, where he taught adoring students at Cambridge University.

Not everyone liked him, even in Cambridge. Wittgenstein had a thuggish conversational style: hectoring opponents, belittling their arguments. He once got so enraged in a debate he picked up a poker and threatened the great logician Karl Popper. Other times he would spend entire seminars in cryptic silence, waiting for the thoughts to emerge. He was quite odd in person, with his piercing eyes and his strangely ageless face. He always wore a tweed jacket, loose trousers, and laceless plimsolls. His disciples copied him. When he lectured an audience in Vienna and found the crowd inattentive, he turned his face to the wall and began reciting mystical Indian poetry.

Wittgenstein harboured a deathwish. He volunteered for strenuous frontline service in the First World War when a hernia could have excused him. All his life he toyed with the idea of suicide. Perhaps this was genetic - three of his brilliant brothers did commit suicide.

The end of Wittgenstein's life saw the onetime billionaire and world famous thinker subsisting, once again, in a dingy hut, this time on the west coast of Ireland. To the end of his days he was tortured by his repressed homosexuality and his love for submissive younger men. On his deathbed he said: 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life'.

Five more bizarre philosophers

Englishman Jeremy Bentham devised the important philosophy of Utilitarianism in the 19th century. When he died he had his own body stuffed and pickled; it is preserved in University College London, where it can be seen today, in its own special box. The head, however, is a waxwork: the real one rotted and fell off.

Bertrand Russell was the greatest British philosopher of the 20th century. He also slept with his son's wives and founded a school without discipline, where children bathed nude; he believed the America should pre-emptively attack the Soviet Union with nukes.

Simone Weil was a French-Jewish intellectual who published thought-provoking works about man's path to God. During the second world war she fell seriously ill. Yet she refused extra rations, in “solidarity with the workers“. She thereby starved herself to death.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most revered German thinkers of modern times. In the 1930s he became a passionate Nazi, concluding his lectures with a ‘Heil Hitler!’; yet he conducted a spirited affair with a much younger Jewess. All his life he wore knickerbockers.

Jean Paul Sartre was the founder of the post-war French philosophy of existentialism. He was also five foot tall, half blind, and seldom bathed; he hated animals, had deeply incestuous desires for his mother, spent much of his life in a menage a trois, and wore oddly oversized clothes.

Withnail and Me

2007-10-24T00:29:00.001+01:00

That's I on the left.

Withnail and, well, Me

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of cult Britcom Withnail and I. Various events are being planned to mark this important moment, which is especially poignant for me - because it marks 20 years since I had a very strange curry with the film's onlie begetter: the writer Bruce Robinson.

I was a callow student at the time. I hadn't even seen Withnail and I. But a friend of mine was raving about this crazy new film. "I know where the writer lives," my friend said, "let's just go and see him '

Being incredibly young and brazen, that's exactly what we did. One drizzly October evening we fetched up at a large Wimbledon house. The door was opened by Robinson himself. He cut quite a figure. He was forty something. Handsome. He was wearing football shorts. And he was inhaling from a clear plastic mask attached to a wheeled oxygen tank. He never told us why.

Despite the fact Robinson didn't know us from Adam, he was taken by our chutzpah, and invited us in. He fed us the finest wines known to humanity, decanted by his much younger wife. We discussed the film, his career, and his previous girlfriends: including actress Lesley Anne Down (with whom he eloped when she was 15).

Robinson took us for a boozy and hilarious curry around the corner, then we all staggered back to his house, where he showed us the lectern where he wrote his scripts - standing up. As we left him he was inhaling from the oxygen mask, and glugging more wine. And he was writing hard.

Since then I have seen Withnail many times. Every viewing reveals some new felicity, some inexplicable cleverness. The only thing that never mystifies me is the movie's charm. I know exactly where that comes from.

Popular in Vladivostok

2007-10-21T13:35:00.000+01:00

Yes, my book is now available in Moscow, St Petersburg and possibly Vladivostok. I wonder how you say the word hootermania in Russian?

Gordo the First

2007-10-15T00:02:00.000+01:00

Gordon Brown, yesterday.

Political Analogies

Whenever British politics are especially fluid and capricious, pundits and thinkers seek out historical echoes, so as to gain some intellectual purchase.

Right now, the parallels for Gordon Brown's brief but troubled premiership seem obvious. The brooding Brown took over from his charismatic Labour colleague Tony Blair, so surely he is a Labour version of John Major, the stiff and unexciting Tory who assumed power after the iconic Margaret Thatcher.

Alternatively, some see a parallel with Labour PM James Callaghan, who succeeded the mercurial Howard Wilson. This comparison is apt, as Callaghan turned down the opportunity of a winnable election. Just like Gordon Brown this month.

But there is a much better comparison, deeper in British history. Consider the hapless James II, who took the English throne after his debonair brother, Charles II.

Here's one historian, talking of this succession:

“James II seems in every way a startling contrast to his brother Charles II. Where Charles was personable, witty, and popular, James was stiff, formal, and not well liked. Both brothers sought to increase their personal power, and both faced powerful opposition, but where Charles employed patience and subterfuge, James sought open confrontation. James frequently appeared arrogant or haughty.”

The analogy is closer the more you examine it. Just as tensions grew in the Blair camp, when it became obvious he had no obvious successor but Brown, so anxieties intensified in Charles’ court, when everyone realised the king would produce no legitimate heir.

Similarly, the reign of Charles II was notorious for its Blairite laxity and hedonism, epitomised by the "merry monarch" himself; Charles was also, like Blair, quite happy to lie to parliament.

James, by contrast, was a prickly and forbidding puritan, with a powerbase in Scotland. Just like Brown.

The moral of the story? James II lasted just three years, then lost the throne to a popular young newcomer.

Stone Heads

2007-10-04T15:27:00.000+01:00

One of the "joke" heads of Harby.

The Great Stone Head Mystery

It's got the whole of Yorkshire talking (quite a feat in itself): just who is leaving the stone heads?

For a fortnight now, an artistic prankster has been depositing finely carved stone heads in various moorland villages in North Yorks - like Kilburn, Goathland and Selby. The stone heads have been dropped overnight in patios, phone boxes, and gardens. Occasionally they are retrieved - with equal invisibility.

Who is to blame? Locals talk of guerilla sculptors, others accuse diabolists. Some think it is all a joke.

But there is one aspect to this bizarre incident that is going unnoticed. The prankster seems to have a historical bent. Because the north of England has been associated with mysterious stone heads for two thousand years.

The ancient Celts who once lived around Lancashire and Yorkshire had a cult of heads: they would cut off the heads of their vanquished enemies and display them as bloody trophies. Eventually they began carving stone heads as a magical emblem of their victories. Modern archealogists working in the North regularly dig up these sinister items. Some of them are said to be cursed. They bear an uncanny resemblance to the "joke" stone heads of Selby and Kilburn.

The northern head motif has continued into this century. In the 1970s two small weird stone heads were dug up in a garden in Hexham, Northumberland. They were taken to the home of Anne Ross, an expert in Celtic history - and Celtic stone heads. Immediately her family was visited by hideous apparitions; her children reported seeing a wolfman in the bedroom. The Hexham heads disappeared soon afterwards.

Of course it is possible the head-carving riddler knows nothing of these historical echoes. Latest rumours claim the heads might belong to a hoaxing local sculptor, Billy Johnson, who is merely seeking publicity. If so, that only makes the synchronicity more intriguing.

A Celtic stone head.

Practically the Pulitzer

2007-09-27T22:16:00.001+01:00

Me in Utah, last year.

Hooray!

Right now I am in Monte Carlo, in a hotel suite bigger than Hyde Park. It may sound like I'm living it up but travel journalism is...

Oh fuck it. No. I can't pretend. Travel journalism is just a gas. You go to amazing places for free where people grovel and scrape to keep you happy and then you go home and write about it and get PAID. I mean, how bad can it be?

It gets even more ludicrous. The other day I heard I had won an award from the American Tourist Board, for Travel Writer of the Year (magazines)(general consumer)(American subject). Not exactly the Pulitzer, but still - nice. Indeed getting an award for travelwriting is not just nice, it's stupidly pointless and slightly embarrassing. It's like getting an award for eating the most caviar, or having the best sex with Swedish girl gymnasts in the previous twelve months.

Anyway. Here's the piece that won me the award for Travel Writer of the Year (magazines)(general consumer)(American subject)

The Best National Parks in America

Choosing the five best National Parks in America is a complex business, Because there are fifty eight of them. That's right: fifty eight. What's more, they are all unspoiled, well-organised, and heart-bustingly beautiful. And they all cost about 10 bucks to get in.

Nonetheless we had to choose. So we applied certain criteria. What we've looked for is something different - and something special. Put it another way: each of our chosen parks had to represent the best of its type: desert or mountain, forest or volcano. That's why our parks come from right across the Republic, from way out west in Hawaii, to the feral cloud forests of the East.

But to make the grade the park also had to give us an extra kick: it had to offer that ineffable but grandiose poetry, that essence of the sublime, that marks the best of the American Wilderness.

It may seem strange that we've left out some of the obvious candidates: Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Everglades. This isn't because we wanted to be contrary: these famous parks, magnificent as they are, genuinely failed to impress quite as much as our selection.

On the other hand, we also had to exclude some spectacular sites - like Glacier in Montana, Big Bend in Texas, and Katmai in Alaska - simply because they were too inaccessible. There's no point in raving about a place if it costs a new mortgage to get there.

So in the end we came down to these five. Enjoy.

Best for Nature and Wonder: Kings Canyon NP, California

My eyes are tearing up. Because of a tree. And I'm not talking about hay fever - it's the sheer damn size of this thing that's making me blub: the nobility, the epic scale, the Gothic majesty.

Does that sound a little sentimental? Then you should maybe try it for yourself. People react to the famous giant redwoods of King's Canyon National Park, in the foothills of the great Sierra Nevada, in very different ways: some are struck dumb, some run up and hug the gnarly trunks (as much as you can hug something as wide as a post office), some lie on their backs, and stare for ages at the redwood's lofty green canopy, maybe 300 feet in the blue Californian air. Some like me feel humbled and exultant at the same time, and then they have to turn away and pretend they've got grit in their eyes.

Given the tremendous poetic power of these 3000 year old trees - the biggest living things the world has known - it's amazing they don't get more visitors. Compared to nearby National Parks like Yosemite, King's Canyon is often deserted outside the high summer months. Yes, King's Canyon is slightly off the beaten track, but it's not impossibly remote (maybe five hours drive from LA). So: what's going on? Perhaps some visitors don't like being confronted with the evidence of man's ravages - these precious groves are virtually the last of the regal Californian redwood stands.

There are other things to do in King's Canyon besides getting emotional next to massive plants. You can hike the lakeside trails, you can camp in Alpine meadows straight from a Toblerone advert, you can ascend to the Tolkienesque heights of Moro Rock. There's also a mighty cavern, the Crystal Cave, which descends three miles into the living rock, and boasts a 45 minute tour of the gleaming stalactites that's great for kids. If none of this tickles the touristic tastebuds, you can just hang out at the parkside lodges, some of them with enviable views of the chasms, forests and ski-slopes.

But really it is the silent, cathedral-like trees that make this place so special. Take your time, and some Kleenex, and wander through the Giant Forest area, where you'll find the biggest of the redwoods - like General Sherman, or General Grant. You might just come back a different person. I know I did.

Best for Forests and Americana: Great Smoky Mountains NP, Tennessee

Every country has a region that somehow embodies its essence, in a way that other landscapes, however beautiful, do not. For England it must be the Cotswolds, for France perhaps the Dordogne - "La France Profonde". For America it is surely the Great Smoky Mountains, a rugged range of misty, handsome peaks that straddles the border of Tennessee and South Carolina.

One drawback to the quintessentiality of these mountains is their popularity This is the most visited US National Park of all - receiving maybe 10million annual trippers. Simple proximity has a part to play here: unlike many great western parks, the Smoky Mountains are within easy driving distance of huge cities. But the main reason the Smokies are smokin' is because of the incredible hikes and trails through the verdant woods - the Smoky Mountains, in their warm southern dampness, boast more species of tree than the whole of Europe.

Yet the crowds should not dissuade you from visiting. This is still Big Country, and the protected mountains stretch for hundreds of square miles. Once you have left behind the motel-ish sprawl of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, the main gateways in eastern Tennessee, you can still get gloriously lost in the moonshine-brewin' boondocks.

A good place to aim for is Clingman's Dome. It's the loftiest peak in the park, at nearly 7000 feet. Then there's Chimney Tops, twin summits that loom theatrically over the wildflower meadows (as with trees, the warm rainy mountains are known for their sparkling variety of flora - from orchids to azaleas, from roses to rhododendrons).

Culture junkies can also get a fix in these parts. The Smoky Mountains are full of curious sites that offer a glimpse of old Appalachian ways: the Cherokee Indians were only dislodged from here in the 1800s, and left behind some poignant remains. Cades Coves, an 11 mile biking trail, speaks of a slightly later time when these dripping green valleys were some of the most lawless purlieus of the 48 states, a remote fastness where strange white tribes, descendants of the very first European settlers, flourished amidst the ginormous mushrooms.

Still another attraction of the "Smokies" are the wild critters - 66 types of mammals, thirty odd reptiles, fifty species of fish in the crystalline river systems, many dozens of amphibians. Add in the relative accessibility of this unique chunk of old-growth deciduous forest, and the result means that you have a better chance of seeing some of America's most wonderful wildlife in the Smokies than anywhere else on the continent.

And when you're done with your binos and walking boots, you can take a cheerful trip from the sublime to the ridiculous, and visit Dolly Parton's Dollywood. It's an entire theme park on the edge of the mountains, dedicated to the mammacious Country & Western star. In these rich soils, it's not just the millipedes that grow to record size.

Best for Deserts and Wildness: Arches/Canyonlands NPs; Utah

Often overlooked by visitors, in favour of more famous desert parks like Grand Canyon, these neighbouring parks - Arches and Canyonlands - constitute some of the most savagely dramatic scenery in the West, thanks to a unique topography.

Because this is where two noble rivers, the Green and the Colorado, collide in the desert, creating an enormous labyrinth of scorching sandstone ravines, an outback famous for its rigours, its remoteness, its indifferent hostility to man. And I mean hostility. The American writer Edward Abbey, who spent summer here as a park warden
in the fifties, recalls the telling sign that used to hang in the Arches Park loo:

‘Attention: watch out for rattlesnakes, coral snakes, whip snakes, vinegaroons, centipedes, millipedes, ticks, mites, black widows, cone-nosed kissing bugs, solpugids, tarantulas, horned toads, Gila monsters, red ants, fire ants, Jerusalem crickets, chinch bugs and Giant Hairy Desert Scorpions before being seated.’

Or course, some people find such horrors attractive. Part of the reason for coming to this exhilarating place is its challenges. If you like adventure sports, Moab and environs are unbeatable: mountain biking was born here, on the baking orange slickrock, there’s also great hang gliding, quad biking, white water rafting, climbing, swimming, bunjee jumping, fishing, trekking, camping, and horseriding. You can also go on hikes into Arches Park itself to see those hundreds of stunning sandstone formations that give the park its name; alternatively, you can rent a 4 by 4 and head into the fierce red wilderness of Canyonlands, the very last place to be mapped in America. Here you’ll find views (used in the movie Thelma and Louise) that make the Grand Canyon look sadly underwhelming. And when night comes you can take a boat down the Colorado and watch the yellow shooting stars in the desert night sky.

You can also, of course, nearly get yourself killed.

On my last day in this magnificent place - with my mind slightly befuddled by the spleandour of it all - I decided to go on the hunt for a spectacular rock formation called Corona Arch. At first, all was fine.The guidebook had told me that the trail I was following was ‘moderately easy’ and ‘ideal for kids’. So no problem there.

But then, as I clambered on: scrambling up rock faces and squeezing through crevices, I started to wonder: what kind of kids would find this ‘ideal‘? Bionic ones?

An hour passed. Another hour. Now the nerves were jangling. I was beginning to wish I was back in my hotel in laidback Moab, sipping local microbrews with the students, bikers, ranchers, and retired uranium miners.

Then my canyon came to a dead end. What next? The other chasm? But how should I get there? I couldn't work it out, because my head was swimming. I had drunk all my water - and it was 90F in the shade. And, you know what? Those circling buzzards could be vultures and…Yikes!

I looked down. Right under my boot was a great big rattlesnake.

Somehow, this terrifying sight brought me to my senses. Suddenly I knew what to do, and how to do it. Wiping the sweat from my brow I turned and bolted: I leapt down gulches and scooted past junipers and vaulted over glistening green puddles - and ten minutes later I emerged by the mighty Colorado, where the goatee’d mountain bikers were taking a nap in the shade near my car.

OK, I was an idiot. I should have been prepared. I should at least have taken a map and proper amounts of water. But boy, did that cold Wasatch lager taste good when I got back to town.

Best for Volcanoes and Adrenalin: Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii

The island chain of Hawaii is full of superlatives. It's the most isolated archipelago in the world. From the sea floor up, Big Island is the biggest mountain in the world. On Maui and Molokai you'll find some of the rarest birds in the world. And the whole place boasts some of the fattest hotel staff in the world.

But it's the volcanoes that really take the biscuit. They are probably the most active volcs on the globe - constantly erupting, like some mountainous Basil Fawlty of basalt, spewing red lava into the distant sea. By night these glowing rivers of coals can look like vast traffic jams of red brake lights, edging along M25ishly.

There are actually two volcanic national parks in Hawaii. On Maui you’ll find Haleakala, which is beautiful but inert - the volcano here spat its last lava-bomb centuries ago.

If you want real to see the real thing in action you have to visit Kilauea, also known as Mount Pelee, in the middle of Big Island; Kilauea/Mount Pelee is the volcano mother God of all Hawaiians, and she’s been suffering her geological ‘time of the month’ for as long as anyone can remember.

Getting to see the moody Ms Pelee isn’t that easy. Most visitors to Big Island stay on the sunny west coast - maybe at affable and languid Kona Beach - or in the trendier but rainier east coast - at Hilo. But these are both a two to three hour drive from the mountain herself - and the roads through the lush green coffee plantations can be annoyingly narrow and serpentine. You can stay at the pretty old-school lodge, Volcano House Hotel, right on the crater rim of Pelee: but this means you’ll be stranded here in the hotel, where it can get quite cold, and lonely, and where, just occasionally, everything is burnt to cinders.

Whatever your choice of accommodation there are three must-sees. The first is the great crater itself: a hundred years ago this mile-wide bowl of ashy-yellow rock was literally a lake of fire - as the lava simmered at the earth’s surface. These days the lava has subsided but you can still smell the thick sulfur in the air, like Chemistry lesson at school, and watch the toxic smoke billow up from fissures in the crater floor. Sometimes this smoke just belches from hidden vents in the surrounding woods - an extraordinary sight.

The next thing to do is hop in your car (or your tour bus) and head down the road that circuits the latest lava flows. These modern convulsions have slowly swept away villages, roads, and gasoline stations, and buried a visitor centre to boot, and the cooling rock now presents a frightening vista - mile after mile of tortured grey stone, boulders of sunbaked pumice, and pewtery coils of congealed magma, broiling in the relentless sun. This is the earth as adolescent, suffering her growing pains: hectares of new land have been added to Big Island since 1990.

Finally, when the long hot road gives out, you park your car and load up with water and start trekking over the craggy older lava. Why? Because at the end of the trail the new lava is still pouring into the sea: pouring slowly but surely: and where the 1000 degrees rock meets the cold Pacific waves, the whole ocean explodes in a geyser of superheated steam, a fountain of scalding white gas that bursts a quarter of a mile into the cloudless sky and falls as a corrosive acid rain.

You might want to take a hat.

Best for History and Wine. And Bears: Mesa Verde NP, Colorado

I’m standing in the centre of a kiva, a ceremonial round cellar. The kiva is at the bottom of a medieval Indian house, inside a Puebloan village. The entire village is secreted inside a cave, the cave is halfway down the wall of a mighty canyon, which is lost in the heart of the Mesa Verde National Park.

I’m surprisingly impressed. When I say surprisingly I mean this: like any European I’m not normally overwhelmed by America when it comes to history. We’ve just got so much more of it than them, and they’re so easily pleased by relatively feeble degrees of ancient-ness. Wow, you say this post office was built in 1913? And this church is over one hundred years old? Amazing!

But the native American settlements that are the jewel in the crown of the Mesa Verde Park in cool, clear, mountainous Colorado are a case apart. For several reasons. First, they represent the apogee of a culture, the Anasazi Indian culture, that flourished here for a thousand years - and you can follow that millennium of change entirely within the park itself, from the first hunter gathering to the very last kiva ritualising.

Second, the crumbling settlements and corn-cob farmlands are surrounded by pristine and untouched high country wilderness - where turkey vultures soar above pinon pines and prickly pears. Third, there’s a really great hotel with a nice restaurant right inside the park. That might sound shallow - but America’s National Parks are sometimes let down by their mediocre catering and accommodation; here you can sip fine pinot noir and eat buffalo rib-eye as you gaze through the picture windows at the elks attacking the mule deer.

Lastly, and most importantly, there are the later villages themselves. In the final century before they enigmatically departed Mesa Verde, in 1300, the Anasazi Indians built a series of confounding and beguiling settlements, within the actual crevices that lined the canyon walls of their homeland. Some of these villages were so tucked-away they could only be reached by enormous ladders - indeed if you want to visit some of the crazier villages, like Balcony House or Cliff Palace, make sure your vertigo is under control beforehand.

What was life like here, in these surreal townships halfway up a cliff? It’s hard to say. Why did the natives abandon them?No one knows. These people were no fools - some of their houses are precisely aligned with the summer solstice, so they receive the perfect light at the perfect moment. Yet the clever Anasazi were forced to give up their serene if peculiar lifestyle by an unknown force.

What is undoubted is that these places exact a notable spell, even now - especially if you stay within the park, as I did, and get to see them at sunset when they are quiet, tranquil, and deserted, and possessed of a certain spooky sadness.

I’d like to say, from an intellectual point of view, that my very last evening spent staring at the towers-in-a-cave of Cliff Palace was the highlight of my Mesa Verde visit. It wasn’t. On the slow drive back to my lodge, all sunburnt and happy, I was so lost I in contented thought I nearly ran over a bear.

A bear. It was just running across the road. A bear. A big black bear. A bear!

Yes, I was childishly excited. But that’s what America’s great national parks do to you: they turn you into a child again, staring in wonder at the awesome and innocent world.

This Erotic Story is Bollocks: Discuss

2007-09-24T15:03:00.001+01:00

There's a reason for this photo. Honest. No, really. Seriously. Read on. Really.

A few weeks ago I was asked by the sexy website Nerve, in America, to write a "humorous" short story for the site.

So I did. At first they liked it, which was nice. But then they said they didn't like it, and they said they weren't going to publish it. I asked them why didn't like it, and they said Because it's crap (I paraphrase, but you get the idea).

Were they right? Search me. Read on and decide for yourself. The story is certainly slight - it ain't War and Peace. It's not even Somerset Maugham on an off day. But then again the story is what they asked for: frivolous and lighthearted. Fuckers.

But then again, who cares? I'm off to Monte Carlo this week. On a helicopter. So life isn't all bad.

A bientot.

The Breast Sharers

The Breast Sharers

Sean Thomas

I remember when we first had the idea for breast sharing. I was drinking with my old friend Matt in a pub on Charlotte Street in London. We used to meet there after work - me when I had finished my underpaid copywriting for the day, Matt when he had finished his shift as a bored bookshop manager. We let off a lot of steam during those beer frenzies - we'd get drunk and shoot the breeze and ogle women, argue about soccer and sex.

One coolish evening in May, Matt and I were sitting there, in the Fitzroy Tavern. If you don't know it, the Fitzroy is quite a famous London boozer. Karl Marx used to drink there during his Soho pub crawls. Aleister Crowley the Satanist was another regular -- he used to walk around in a big green cape.
These days it's mainly students because it serves cheap beer. But what students. Beautiful students. Girls of 18, 19, and 20, with their toothpaste-ad teeth, implausibly glossy complexions and lovely young bottoms, taut enough to bounce tennis balls against.

For Matt and I, this ogling was just that: all we did was look. And maybe yearn a bit. No more. Because, you see, we'd both been happily married for years, so it didn't matter to us whether these girls were all gong and no dinner. We were going home to a nice hot supper, anyway.

However, this evening Matt seemed less happy and relaxed than normal.

'They're spreading,' he said bitterly.

'What?'

'Beautiful girls. Every year there's more and more of them. It's starting to get me down.'

I looked him over. Hair thinning, jowls developing: he was definitely headed for middle age. But usually he was sanguine about this. His wife was still quite a beauty. He was a lucky man.

'They're like algae in the Adriatic.'

'Sorry?'

'Girls. With their amazing breasts. They bloom inexplicably in summer. Like that algae you read about.'

'Maybe you need another drink.'

Mildly concerned by my friend's angst, I visited the bar. Between the crush of happy young undergrads, I managed to catch the bargirl's eye, always an achievement in the Fitzroy on a Friday night. On the way back, I saw that my friend had his head slumped in his hands. I placed the drinks on the table and leaned over.

'What the fuck is wrong?'

He sighed. Then he said:

'It's Laura's breasts.'

'What about them?'

'Well...'

He tailed off. I tried to nudge him along:

'How can there be a problem with Laura's breasts? I mean, she hasn't got any!'

It was true. Laura, Matt's wife, was an A cup at best. Her breasts were like "two bee-stings on an ironing board," as she once described herself. But Laura was also funny, clever, sexy and very beautiful in a cheekboney way; she also had a fabulous arse. Who cared if she didn't have any tits, in comparison to all that?

Certainly not Matt. At least, that's what I had always presumed. I'd always imagined Matt was the same as me - not a breast obsessive. Otherwise, why would he have married a woman with one of the flattest chests of her generation?

It now turned out I was wrong. Very wrong. As Matt sank drink after drink, it all came spilling out. He was totally obsessed with tits, as he mournfully admitted. He loved breasts. Adored them. Needed them. He liked big ones. Bouncy ones. Massive ones. Breasts like two baldheaded Zen monks having an argument under a woman's shirt. Whacking great hooters. Ginormous Bristols. Wombats. Mozzarellas. Gazonkas. Matt liked them all and he loved them big, and yet he was married to a girl with breasts like two bee stings on an ironing board.

'Don't get me wrong,' he slurred. 'I really love Laura and I don't want to be unfaithful to her ... but... sometimes...' He burped, morosely. 'Sometimes when I look at the girls in here with their big happy wotsits I just get really sad.'

My God, he was nearly crying. This was not good.

'What makes it worse...' He added. 'Is Sarah's tits. Wasted on you!'

Sarah was my wife. My pretty, curvy, 28-year-old wife with the fantastic breasts.

He was right. As I have already implied, I don't particularly care about breasts. My only concern with breasts is that they shouldn't be too weird, but other than that, I'm studiously neutral: big, small, pert, voluptuous, large-nippled, pink-nippled, extra-nippled - it's all the same to me. I'd much rather focus on a girl's bottom or her legs, which I find way more interesting and erotic.

Yet ironically I was married to a woman with some of the finest breasts imaginable.

Looked at one way, this was quite sad. Sarah's breasts were internationally acknowledged as being superb, yet they just sat there. On the shelf. Unused. Unnoticed. Ignored by me from one day to the next. And eventually they would be... not so good. They would droop. And what a waste that would represent! No one would have appreciated them at their finest. It was like someone without a driver's licence being given a new Ferrari, then letting it simply rust away in the garage.

At that moment a weird but amusing idea entered my rather drunken mind. Perhaps I could... share Sarah's breasts with Matt.

The concept was striking. But it needed pinning down. I didn't actively want any of us to "swing." No - that would have been too stressful. I don't agree with infidelity, and I despise the idea of open marriages. My parents had an open marriage, and it sucked.

But how about just sharing some breasts? That would be different -- not so profound but possibly quite rewarding. And I did want someone to appreciate Sarah's breasts before they inevitably declined. And who better to appreciate them than a close friend -- one, moreover, who was a real connoisseur of breasts, who would really get a kick out of them because he wasn't getting any decent breast action at home?

As we sat there, in the heaving pub, the deal was done. We'd share Sarah's breasts.

The only problem with this was Sarah. And maybe Laura.

The following evening I made a special supper for Sarah and I. Baked wild sea bass with potatoes, and two bottles of proper chilled Riesling. She needed sweetening. This was a tough sell.

At least, that's what I expected. I had forgotten that my wife Sarah is bold, libidinous and slightly crazy, which is why I had fallen in love with her in the first place. As soon as she heard the idea, she laughed uproariously and said, 'Why the hell not? But he can only touch my breasts, and look at them. No kissing. And Laura's got to be okay with it.'

I rang Matt that evening with the good news. To say he was very pleased would be understating the case. He started singing a Burt Bacharach medley. For Matt that was a sign of the purest joy. Hastily he reassured me that Laura was absolutely fine with the breast-sharing. Then he asked me when it should happen.

'I dunno...' I thought for a moment. 'Well... How about now? I mean, while Sarah's cool with the idea?'

He slammed the phone down. Three-and-a-half minutes later I heard his car pull up outside our flat.

'Quite keen then?'

'You don't realize how long it's been,' he said. Then he grasped me by the arm and shook my hand firmly, like an overly sincere politician. 'Thankyou, thankyou.'

We went into the sitting room. Sarah was there, on the sofa, looking pretty in her white T-shirt and laughing at Matt.

'You weirdo,' she said. This seemed to throw him, so she clucked encouragingly: 'Come on, hurry up, before I change my mind!'

Matt went quickly over to my wife. I stood in the doorway, observing. Matt sat on the sofa next to Sarah, then gingerly peeled off her T-shirt and sighed when he saw she wasn't wearing a bra. I felt proud of my wife's young and joyous bare breasts, swinging pertly before my friend. I felt happy as my friend touched the breasts, in awe. I watched contentedly as he stroked one breast like it was a puppy, and then stroked the other like it was an even nicer puppy. Matt was like a kid with two brilliant Christmas presents, unable to decide which to play with first. He was actually whimpering with pleasure. Over Matt's head I could see that Sarah was trying to stop herself laughing.

'Can I photograph them?' asked Matt.

'Nope,' said my wife.

He smiled, shrugged and thanked us anyway in a rather strangled voice.

Then he went home, happy as I had ever seen him.

The next day at work I got an angry call from Sarah.

'Laura didn't know!'

'What?'

'I just spoke to her. I mentioned the breast-sharing thing - and she knew nothing. She went nuts.'

'Jesus. So what do we do now?'

'She wants you to sing to her, when she's masturbating in the bath.'

I paused.

'Sorry?'

Sarah's tone was brisk and businesslike.

'She says she's always liked your singing voice. I said I couldn't care less about opera. So there we are. It's a swap. She wants you to go over there and sing to her when she's soaping herself. I guess we'd better agree, to keep things smooth.'

That night I did it. I went over to Laura and Matt's house and I watched Laura take a bath and use a vibrator while I sang "Che Gelida Manina" from the opera La Boheme. I noticed she had a nice pussy. Very neat. Then she got out of the bath and showed me her arse, the arse that I had always liked. The soapsuds were running down the golden firmness of her buttocks. It was all very exciting. And it was getting out of hand. Two days later Sarah said she wanted some thrills on the "breast-sharing front," as she was the only one going without. The trouble was, she didn't fancy Matt at all - but she had always admired the thighs of a colleague of mine: Andrew M, the accounts manager at work. So he came over one night and Sarah rubbed Boots bodylotion into his muscly, rugby player's thighs, while I went off to play with Andrew's girlfriend's long red hair; meanwhile Matt persuaded a friend to let him tweak the neglected left nipple of his fiancee, and Laura was massaged by a lesbian friend of Sarah's with gorgeous lips.

Three weeks later we started up a company based on the concept. BreastSharers.com. We advertised for couples who didn't want to be totally unfaithful, but who did want to pep up their sex lives. The special attraction of our concept was that we promised to utilize bits of your partner that you might find unattractive, or aspects of their sexuality that disinterested you, that another might just go crazy over. All the spare sexy stuff going wasted around the world: it would now be properly admired. In a way, we were being environmentally friendly. Recycling.

On the website, we told our own story. We used Sarah's breast-sharing tale as our prime example: how some beautiful breasts unappreciated by their present owner had been swapped for a glimpse of female bottom and some operatic bathing fantasy, and how everyone was satisfied.

The site was an instant hit. Within weeks we were on TV and all over the press. Then it went global and people started making us offers for the concept. Across the developed world people were breast-sharing, swapping unwanted but voluptuous hips for delightful but unappreciated cunnilingus skills, and so forth. It was a total triumph. We made the world a happier place, and we also made a lot of money.

One day, maybe a year after it all kicked off, Sarah was standing in the garden of our big new London house. She had that mischievous yet sexy expression on her face, the one I'd seen when I'd first suggested "breast-sharing". She was staring at the neighbour's garden, at the cocker spaniel that was chasing a football.
'You know,' she said, 'I wonder if the neighbours appreciate just how sexy that dog is?'

Gnomes. And Whores

2007-09-19T16:19:00.000+01:00

The Land of Gnomes. And Whores

I'm standing in the middle of a pretty Czech town called Cheb. With its pleasant colonnades and mouldering Gothic churches, it seems unexceptional. Yet this small town is the centre of the world's greatest concentration of hookers. And gnomes.

The main reasons for these bizarre proliferations is the proximity of Germany (just ten miles down the road), and the gulf in income represented by the border. Since the old Iron Curtain collapsed, rich Germans have driven over the frontier to buy favoured items from the poorer Czechs.

One thing they come looking for is gnomes. Garden gnomes and other kitsch ornaments are incredibly popular in southern Germany (they have never been anywhere near as popular in Czechia). Germany used to have its own gnome industry. But in the last few years German gnome moguls have discovered they can manufacture and sell gnomes much cheaper on the Czech side of the frontier.

The effect of this is that every shop around Cheb appears to stock gnomes. You can buy gnomes on roadsides, in grocers, and in petrol stations. You can buy them from stalls, supermarkets and newsagents. The centre of Cheb has a huge bazaar, run by Vietnamese, almost entirely given over to gnomes. They specialise in the more adventurous end of the gnome market.

Naturally, there is a humorous side to this. Less amusing is the market for commercial sex. According to a recent study, Cheb has more brothels per head of population than anywhere else on the planet: at least 35 bordellos have been counted, in a city of just 30,000 people.

There are underlying factors behind the explosion in Cheb's sex industry - besides the proximity of Bavaria. Decades of communism have made the Czech Republic a secular society that sees little shame in sex, of any kind - at least when compared to Catholic areas of western Europe. A swirl of nationalities in this region - including Ukrainians, Roma, Slovakians, and Asians - arguably makes for a certain rootlessness, that encourages vice. Moreover, the age of consent in the Czech republic is just 15.

Whatever the precise sociology, the impact of this widespread prostitution is intense. A few hundred metres from the cutesey centre of Cheb, the whores begin. Every streetcorner has a knot of blonde women, loitering and beckoning. Every third or fourth building seems to be a "club", or a "night bar" or a "playhouse". The brothels have ancillary service industries, of sex shops, solariums, and hairdressers.

The surreal atmosphere extends beyond the city limits. The forests and meadows surrounding Cheb are adorned with placards showing the way to yet more cat-houses: the Happy End Bar, the Eden Club, the Vanesa Night Bar. Lines of German trucks stand parked in the forecourts.

Unsurprisingly, prostitution makes Cheb a sad and even sinister place. I'm keen to leave. But halfway down one particularly dingy street, I am accosted. Four drunken gypsy youths, brandishing plastic cups of beer, stop and stare at me. With them is a girl of maybe 16, possibly younger.

Is she their sister? Maybe their niece?

Who knows. She offers herself to me, for money. The lads grin in approval. I flee to the safety of my rented Volkswagen and make for the German border. On the way, I see that the roads are lined with hundreds more prostitutes. And thousands and thousands of gnomes.

Rugby a l'Anglaise

2007-09-16T21:20:00.001+01:00

I took this exciting pic, in Biarritz.

My blogging has been a tad patchy of late, because I have been travelling across France and Spain. I hope to say more soon. Here's something mildly relevant I wrote for the firstpost last week.

Vive le Rugby

I've never heard such a stirring rendition of La Marseillaise. Grown men are linking arms; lovers are carolling in unison. At the same time, three or four excitable lads are waving the vivid, Union Jack-like flag of the Basques.

The setting is a noisy brasserie in Biarritz: the raffish resort in Le Pays Basque. We are waiting for the first match of the Rugby World Cup to begin: France versus Argentina. And I couldn't be in a better place: because this far southwestern corner of France is, paradoxically, the throbbing heartland of French rugby.

The local side, Olympique Biarritz, have several times won the French championship. Toulouse, just up the road, is another major force. The great Serge Blanco is an Olympique alumnus. But why rugby? Why here?

As the game kicks off, the excitement really surges. It's much livelier than I expected: French people watching sport, even soccer, often seem self conscious about their enthusiasm. In Biarritz there is no such detachment when it comes to rugby. The fans are jumping about, spilling their cider. One classic French lady, complete with yappy dog, is yelling like a Bayonne fishwife at the ref.

Then, quelle horreur, the Argies score a try, from a cruel interception. The brasserie goes eerily quiet. I use the sudden, anxious silence to ask the locals why they love the sport.

Isabelle is a tour guide of Basque-Italian descent: she says: 'Basque men adore rugby because they like to show they are real men. Look at Basque peasant sports - carrying huge stones, sawing big logs - they are all tests of virility. Rugby is a version of that.'

Standing next to her is Paco, a wealthy builder. He reckons, by contrast, that rugby is popular here because it filled a niche when traditional Basque ball games, like the fiery pelota, were repressed. ‘Or maybe it is the violence‘, he says - with a wink.

Suddenly there is a groan. The hapless French fly half has missed an easy penalty. The crowd hisses, Paco tuts, the little old lady slaps her dog. The referee blows for the break.

The second half begins more promisingly. There is an enormous surge by the French pack, which ends with Isabella panting. But then the Argentineans return fire. One man kicks over a chair in disgust.

The final minutes are unbearable. A climax of whistles, jeers, and impenetrable Basque curses makes the commentary inaudible. Lots of contumely is being hurled at the English ref Tony Spreadbury. I start to speak in an American accent.

The game ends. France, unbearably, have lost. The atmosphere is deeply tense.

As we exit the brasserie something happens which I have never seen before in France. There is nearly a fight. Two Aussie surf dudes are chortling rather obviously at the pitiful French performance. Someone chucks a wild punch, the barman intervenes, the fracas breaks up It could be a Salford pub after a spiteful Manchester derby.

I'm not sure why the Basques are so keen and aggressive when it comes to rugby, but I think I recognise the trait. Recent genetic tests show that the Basques share significant ancestry with the British; indeed a new theory holds that the Basques were crucial early settlers of the British Isles, around 8000BC. They are, in a sense, our forefathers

Want to know where the British acquired their warrior spirit? Come to Biarritz. And watch a rugby match.

The Lurchers

2007-09-01T12:05:00.000+01:00

A lurcher, yesterday.

The Lurchers

Most journalists know the power of a good cliche: that hackneyed phrase that gets over an idea, without too much effort. Political journalism, especially, could barely survive without the use of world-weary metaphors and timeworn conceits.

Right now the cliche of the political moment, in the UK, is "lurch to the right". As David Cameron's Conservatives trot out a number of robust Tory policies - the ending of inheritance tax, opposition to the EU Constitution - so the massed ranks of political scribes have lined up to describe this as a "lurch to the right".

So common is this cliche (I've counted it a dozen times in two days) the reader's eyes glaze over when they see it. Yet the phrase merits closer examination.

For a start it feels like we read "lurch to the right" more often than "lurch to the left". But is this perception true?

Yes. Google the phrase "lurch to the right" and you get 25,000 hits. Google the phrase "lurch to the left" and you get barely half as many. This is especially striking, in that the second phrase alliterates. And if there's one thing journalists like almost as much as a cliche, it's a phrase that alliterates. Yet the hacks don't seem keen to say "lurch to the left".

What's going on? I think there's a subtle, and maybe subconcious agenda here. The idea, for many liberal-left journalists, that a move to a more rightwing position could be timely, sensible, clever, or deft, just feels ridiculous. No, such a move has to be stupid and clumsy, a staggering "lurch": like the monster of Doctor Frankenstein on lithium.

By contrast, a move to a more leftwing position feels, for many journalists, radical and exciting, daring if controversial - never a lumbering, Neanderthal "lurch". That's why such a move to the left is more often described as a "swing" or a "shift", or even a "veer".

Interesting things, cliches.

Small town Satanists

2007-08-19T11:13:00.000+01:00

Yezidi Women in Celle, near Hanover, last week. They were NOT very keen to be photographed.

I've been on my travels again - Czech Republic and Germany. I'll post something about Prague and all that at some point, maybe. But in the meantime my trip to the Luneburg Heath has just produced this article, in today's Sunday Telegraph.

The Devil Worshippers of Iraq

I'm in a community hall, on the outskirts of Celle, a north German town. On the walls are pictures of dark blue peacocks. Sitting at various tables around the room are dozens of Devil worshippers. At least, that's what some people call them.

Though we don't know it yet, right now several suicide bombs are going off near Mosul in Iraq, killing maybe 400. The victims belong to the same faith as those gathered here today.

They are Yezidi. And I'm here to unearth the reality of their fascinating religion. Why do they have such troubled relations with outsiders? Do they really worship the Devil?

The Yezidi of Celle are one of the largest groups of their sect outside the homeland of Kurdish Iraq. There may be 7,000 in this small town. Yezidi across the world number between 400,000 and 800,000.

Today the Yezidi in Celle don't seem keen to talk. I'm not surprised: I have been warned about their wariness of strangers, born of centuries of appalling persecution.

Eventually a dark, thickset man turns to me. He points to one of the peacocks on the wall: "That is Melek Taus, the peacock angel. We worship him." He sips his tea, and adds: "Ours is the oldest religion in the world. Older than Islam; older than Christianity."

After this cryptic statement he returns to his friends.

Luckily there is another Yezidi organisation in Celle that is said to be more forthcoming. On the way to meet its spokesman, I go through the bizarre beliefs of the Yezidi.

It's an impressive list. The Yezidi honour sacred trees. Women must not cut their hair. Marriage is forbidden in April. They refuse to eat lettuce, pumpkins, and gazelles. They avoid wearing dark blue because it is "too holy".

They are divided strictly into castes, who cannot marry each other. The upper castes are polygamous. Anyone of the faith who marries a non-Yezidi risks ostracism, or worse. Some weeks ago a young girl was stoned to death by her Yezidi menfolk in Iraq; she had fallen in love with a Muslim and was trying to convert. The sickening murder was filmed, and posted on the internet, adding to the Yezidis' unhappy reputation.

Yezidism is syncretistic: it combines elements of many faiths. Like Hindus, they believe in reincarnation. Like ancient Mithraists, they sacrifice bulls. They practise baptism, like Christians. When they pray they face the sun, like Zoroastrians. They profess to revile Islam, but there are strong links with Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

It's a remarkably confusing picture. And I still haven't got an answer to the main question: do they worship "Satan"?

In the centre of town I am greeted by Halil Savucu, a westernised spokesman for the Yezidi. Also with us is Uta Tolle, a German scholar of Yezidism.

In Halil's Mercedes we drive into the suburbs. On the way, the two of them give me their view of the faith. "Yezidi is oral, not literary," says Uta. "This is why it is sometimes hard to pin down precise beliefs. There are religious texts, like the Black Book, but they are not crucial. The faith is really handed down by kawwas, sort of musical preachers."

And who is Melek Taus? Halil looks slightly uncomfortable: "We believe he is a proud angel, who rebelled and was thrown into Hell by God. He stayed there 40,000 years, until his tears quenched the fires of the underworld. Now he is reconciled to God."

But is he good or evil? "He is both. Like fire. Flames can cook but they can also burn. The world is good and bad."

For a Yezidi to say they worship the Devil is understandably difficult. It is their reputation as infidels - as genuine "devil worshippers" - that has led to their fierce persecution over time, especially by Muslims. Saddam Hussein intensified this suppression.

But some Yezidi do claim that Melek Taus is "the Devil". One hereditary leader of the Yezidi, Mir Hazem, said in 2005: "I cannot say this word [Devil] out loud because it is sacred. It's the chief of angels. We believe in the chief of angels."

There are further indications that Melek Taus is "the Devil". The parallels between the story of the peacock angel's rebellion, and the story of Lucifer, cast into Hell by the Christian God, are surely too close to be coincidence. The very word "Melek" is cognate with "Moloch", the name of a Biblical demon - who demanded human sacrifice.

The avian imagery of Melek Taus also indicates a demonic aspect. The Yezidi come from Kurdistan, the ancient lands of Sumeria and Assyria. Sumerian gods were often cruel, and equipped with beaks and wings. Birdlike. Three thousand years ago the Assyrians worshipped flying demons, spirits of the desert wind. One was the scaly-winged demon featured in The Exorcist: Pazuzu.

The Yezidi reverence for birds - and snakes - might also be extremely old. Excavations at ancient Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, show that the people there revered bird-gods as long ago as 7000BC. Even older is Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site near Sanliurfa, in Kurdish Turkey (Sanliurfa was once a stronghold of Yezidism). The extraordinary temple of Gobekli boasts carvings of winged birdmen, and images of buzzards and serpents.

Taking all this evidence into account, a fair guess is that Yezidism is a form of bird-worship, that could date back 6,000 years or more. Over the centuries, new and powerful creeds, such as Islam and Christianity, have swept through Yezidi Kurdistan, threatening the older faith. But, like a species that survives by blending into the landscape, Yezidism has adapted by incorporating aspects of rival religions.

We've reached Halil's house. "Look at this," he says, showing me a picture of the peacock angel, and a copper sanjak - another representation of Melek Taus. When I have taken some photos, we all sit down to spaghetti bolognaise, with Halil's wife and their chatty kids. It suddenly seems a long way from the weirdness of Devil-worship, and the violence of the Middle East.

"We Yezidi are not saints," says Halil, "but we are a peaceful people. All we want is tolerance. We do not worship evil, we just see that the world contains good as well as bad. Darkness as well as light."

His words are timely. While we eat our pasta, the news comes through from Iraq of the bloody slaughter of Yezidi near Mosul. Halil is deeply distraught. "I feel absolute shock and horror, I feel sick to my stomach. All Yezidi are my family. But we are so alone in the world. We need friends. Many Yezidi would like to leave Iraq, but no one will give us visas."

He sighs, and adds: "The Yezidi have been persecuted for thousands of years, we are used to it. But we thought the new Iraq would protect minorities. We thought that things would get better when the Americans came…" And then he turns, and stares at the serene blue image, of the great peacock angel.

Halil Savucu. On his right is the peacock angel, Melek Taus. In front is the copper sanjak.

Aliens Over England

2007-08-16T11:26:00.001+01:00

A cider festival in Herefordshire, yesterday.

UFOs or Too Much Pimms?

Early Sunday morning, two weeks ago, various people across Britain - in Bristol, Herefordshire, Norfolk and elsewhere - saw UFOs. Some of them called into BBC Radio 5 Live to report their experiences.

All spoke of weird light effects. Some saw singular star-like objects. Others saw a parade of orbs. One eye-witness captured his sighting on camera

Already various theories are being advanced - and shot down. The first and most obvious answer is meteorites. This was the idea Radio 5 put to Patrick Moore, the veteran TV astronomer.

Moore was unimpressed by the theory. He thought the lights were unlikely to be "astronomical" - because the witnesses had not seen contrails, and other phenomena, closely associated with meteor storms.

Another theory doing the rounds is that the lights were "Chinese lanterns". This solution has a credible backstory. Early on Sunday morning partygoers at the Big Chill Arts Festival, at Eastnor in the Malverns, released a number of illuminated balloons into the sultry night sky.

The lights certainly look rather floaty on the video - and the Youtube video was shot in the Forest of Dean. That's quite close to the Malverns.

But this answer ignores the many eye-witnesses spread across the whole of southern England.

The same problem attaches to a third explanation: that the lights were fireworks. You'd need quite a rocket to get from Norfolk to Shropshire. Yet another idea - a satellite breaking up - doesn't square with the slow drifting motion described by observers.

A final theory is military experiments. This sounds ludicrous, but according to UFOlogists, a similar flap, in Ireland last year, was provoked by just that: a secret military exercise.

What is the real answer? Maybe midsummer madness - and too much cold beer. That weekend in England was the hottest of the year, by far.

Pete Implanted

2007-07-28T13:08:00.001+01:00

A molecule of Naltrexone, yesterday.

For Pete's Sake, It Doesn't Work

Over the last week, Britain's newspapers have been full of pictures of a gangling young man wearing two hats, stumbling over himself. The sad casualty in question is, of course, Pete Doherty, the onetime beau of Kate Moss, ex-Babyshambles frontman, and Britain's most famous smack addict.

The reason for the renewed interest in Doherty's twilit lifestyle is that he has just entered a very expensive detox clinic (paid for by Moss, apparently), where he will undergo rapid and sedated withdrawal from his dependency.

A few days later - i.e. early next week - he is slated to have a Naltrexone implant inserted in his thigh, to prevent his regressing into addiction.

It sounds weird and maybe even dangerous. And it is - as I can attest. Because I too have taken Naltrexone to come off heroin. And I still bear the scars.

The way Naltrexone works is like this. It blocks the receptors in the brain that are particularly susceptible to the euphoria-inducing effect of opiates, like heroin. These receptors exist because the body has its own heroin-like painkiller - endorphin. Heroin "works" by mimicking endorphin, like an uninvited partygoer pretending to be on the guest list.

So far so good. With Naltrexone in your system there is no need to take heroin, because it simply won't work. You can't get high, no matter what you do.

This is where the dangers lurk. A few addicts become so desperate to get a rush they consume more and more heroin, even though they know that, with Naltrexone inside them, the smack won't have any effect. They consequently overdose and die. It's rare but it happens.

There are subtler dangers, too. Because Naltrexone stifles all endorphin-like substances - natural and unnatural - you miss out on life's normal "highs". Things that used to give you pleasure leave you cold. This can provoke a fairly serious depression. Anhedonia, my doctor called it.

All this might be acceptable if Naltrexone worked. But that's a very moot point. Naltrexone is good for stopping a serious addict going into even steeper decline. But it's a drastic and temporary measure. Rather like moving to Saudi Arabia to give up the booze. In the end, unless you want to live in Riyadh all your life, you have to come back and deal with the addiction at root.

And how do you do that? You go to NA and do the twelve steps programme. Or you just grow up.

Surveys shows that heroin addicts tend to drift away from the drug in their late 30s, almost of their own volition. They seem to get quietly bored of it. I know I did.

The trouble here, of course, is that you have to make it to the age of 37 in the first place.

Men in Love

2007-07-26T18:40:00.000+01:00

Bless.

This appallingly sentimental piece, by me, appeared in Glamour magazine a few weeks back. Hey, it was commissioned, OK?

What Makes A Man Fall In Love?

Over the centuries, there have been many attempts to explain what happens when men fall in love. And women, for that matter. The Greeks thought love was a kind of brief and bittersweet madness. Medieval theologians thought love was an intimation of the Love Divine, a shard of the Holy Mirror where we see the Face of God.

Meanwhile, modern scientists, in their charming way, say that love is a neurochemical glue, meant to stick us together for long enough to sprog. Notice, they say, how the first, fiery phase of love lasts eighteen months to two years - just the right time to conceive, give birth, and wean a child.

All these perspectives have validity. And yet none of them, to my mind, quite pins it down. And that's because love comes in so many different forms.

The first time I fell in love was with a wastrel of a girl at my University, a girl with dark eyes and a bizarre habit of burning herself with her hair crimper. We fell head over heels, we fell laughing into haystacks, we kicked through the Autumn leaves of romance. And then she dumped me.

Why did I fall in love with her? It was lust, of course, but it was also a kind of sentimental echoing. We were both a bit screwed up and the sharing of similar teenage agonies was blissful. People often neglect this aspect of love: the discovery that you are not alone.

The next time I fell in love was even more powerful, because the sex was better. Indeed, if I am honest I think I fell in love because she had this youthful gap at the top of her thighs. I know that sounds shallow, but that's because love can be shallow, and selfish. It's only human, after all.

The last time I fell in love, I fell in love because, though the girl was very pretty - I wouldn't have cared if she weren't. Being with my last partner was like that feeling you get on a frosty day in Christmas, when you walk to the pub through the snow.

All of which just goes to show how difficult it is to dissect and explain falling-in-love. But that's how it should be. Love is the inarticulate speech of the heart, that we somehow translate; love is that distant music you hear on a summer evening, that makes your heart throb yet you don't quite know why.

What makes a man fall in love? Love.

Nostradamus and the Neo-Cons

2007-07-14T12:16:00.001+01:00

Not so comical now.

I'm still in Asia. Here's something semi-serious about Iraq.

Pre-War Predictions Assessed

Are we near the endgame in Iraq, at least for the Coalition? With Dubya himself admitting his country has "war fatigue" - and senior Republicans contemplating withdrawal - it looks that way.

Which makes this, perhaps, a good time to look back at the various predictions made about the war, over the last few years.

Here are some of the statements made by members of the Coalition.

"My belief is that we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators... I think it will go relatively quickly." US Vice President Dick Cheney, March 2003.

"The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator." Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, March 2003.

Tony Blair, Spring 2003: "That we will encounter more difficulties and anxious moments in the days ahead is certain. But no less certain, indeed more so, is coalition victory."

"I think we are in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." Dick Cheney, June 2005. "I believe you are going to see the rise of democracy in many countries in the broader Middle East, which will lay the foundation for peace." George Bush, June 2005. "Saddam Hussein will be responsible for many, many more deaths even in one year than we will be in any conflict." Tony Blair, January 2003.

Four years later, after 100,000-600,000 deaths, two million refugees, an ongoing insurgency and the bloody retreat of Coalition forces, those predictions don't look so good.

But who was right? Saudi Minister Faisal told the BBC before the war that "US and British troops will be bogged down in Iraq for years. The real beneficiary will be the government in Iran." That now looks pretty accurate.

Also accurate were the German politicians who foresaw "hundreds of thousands of deaths", and Jacques Chirac, who predicted civil war, in a private dinner with Tony Blair, weeks before the conflict. Then there was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who wrote: "We risk the lives of hundreds and thousands in a region that could rapidly spiral down into chaos." Even Richard Littlejohn, the much-ridiculed Sun columnist, said this, in January 2002: "This war could last for decades."

However, the most bizarrely accurate predictions came from quite another sources, and a rather unlikely one at that. Comical Ali.

Remember him - Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? He was Saddam's war spokesman, who was globally ridiculed for predicting the triumph of Baathist forces - even as the Abrams tanks visibly rumbled into Baghdad. Sahhaf now lives quietly in the United Arab Emirates, with his family, following a brief arrest.

But perhaps he should consider a new job as a soothsayer. Because some of his predictions about the Iraq war now read as horribly and unamusingly prescient.

Take this one: "Do not be hasty because your disappointment will be huge. You will reap nothing from this aggressive war.. except disgrace and defeat." Or this one: "Washington has thrown its soldiers on the fire". He also said: '"We will embroil them, confuse them, and keep them in the quagmire."

Just before the US forces marched in, he said this: "They are deceiving their soldiers and officers that.. invading Iraq will be a picnic. This is a stupid lie. What they are facing is a definite death."

In the light of this, here's one reasonable prediction we can all make: we won't be invading anyone else any time soon.

Bathory Redux

2007-06-30T03:45:00.012+01:00

Weird stakes in the Bathory marshes.

Greetings. I'm in Asia right now, on the hunt for... babyrat wine. This is proving difficult, hence the hiatus in blogging. To make up for the lack of info, here's a longish piece I did for the Fortean Times, this winter, about my hunt for one of the most notorious murderesses in European history - Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the Tigress of the Carpathians.

The Truth About Countess Dracula

As nondescript places go, this one takes some beating. It's a muddy little town, in the corner of a forgotten swamp, a dozen miles from a remote section of the Hungarian/Romanian border. I'd guess the locals don't see many foreigners like myself: one farmer is staring at me so hard he's almost fallen off his bicycle.

But I'm not here to astonish the peasantry. I'm here to trace the lifestory of the most notorious murderess in European history. Elizabeth Bathory. A woman whose name was once so fearsome, the people of her native Hungary were banned from mentioning it for a hundred years. A woman, it is further said, who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

The tiny town in which I'm loitering is called Ecsed. According to historians Ecsed is where Elizabeth grew up, in the 16th century, in a large castle belonging to her illustrious family.
Yet not a trace of a castle can I find. Dowdy bungalows, yes, scruffy bus-stops, sure. But no ancient buildings. In desperation I head for the town hall, where, using my schoolboy German, I explain to a secretary what I'm seeking. 'Ah ja!' She says. ''Erzsabet Bathory!'

Soon we are joined by an amateur local historian, Zoltan, who "teaches theology and English" in the Ecsed school. We get in a car and drive past a yellow church to a concrete shed. Inside this shack I find a desultory display of stone coffins, bits of cannon, and a broken coat of arms - featuring a dragon-like creature strangled by its own tail.

Between the shed and the church is a flat swampy field. This chilly expanse of mud is, Zoltan tells me, the site of the great Bathory castle. The edifice was levelled when the Bathory family fell from grace in the 17th century. And these few dismal relics, collected in the shed, are all that remain of Elizabeth Bathory's childhood home.

There is a picture of Elizabeth Bathory on the wall of the "museum". Zoltan shakes his head.
'You know,' he says. 'They say she killed many people. But I think she was just an intelligent and independent woman - who would not kneel to men. Maybe they made up those stories to destroy her?'

Zoltan, it seems, is a Bathory Revisionist - he belongs to that school of thought which claims that Elizabeth Bathory, the infamous "Blood Countess", was really the victim of a lordly conspiracy.
This contrary perspective has been around for some time. During the 20th century it was promulgated by Hungarian scholars, keen to cleanse the national record. At the same time, a feminist perspective on Bathory has seen her as a smart and spirited woman condemned by a misogynist patriarchy. A new film, starring Anna Friel, and due out this summer, reiterates this feminist take.

Meanwhile, many writers, artists and historians have gone to the opposite extreme, citing Bathory as the quintessence of female evil. A cannibalistic lesbian who slaughtered hundreds of virgins.

They can't all be right. So my job is to sort the revisionist wheat from the hysterical chaff. And to do that I need to follow Bathory's trail across three countries.

Climbing in my car I bid goodbye to Ecsed. As I set off across the lonely marshes I go over what we already know - what is historically undisputed - about Bathory's background.

The gory tale begins in the mists of the Dark Ages, when a clan of German warriors settled in these Hungarian fenlands, between the towns of Nyirbator and Ecsed. The family was known as the Gutkeleds.

Through the medieval era the Gutkeleds distinguished themselves in various battles and repressions. As a result their name was officially changed to Bathory, which means "brave" in Hungarian. For centuries the Bathorys claimed their name was given to them because they slew the last dragon in the swamps. Hence that dragon - actually a "wyvern" - in their coat of arms.

Of course this is myth, the name probably derives from the name of the nearby town:
Nyirbator. But the conceit does reflect a violent streak in the Bathory character (a psychological flaw which might have resulted from inbreeding - the Bathorys were keen on marriages between noble relatives).

Elizabeth's uncle, for instance, was the ultra-violent Prince of Transylvania: he once roasted a rebel on a red-hot iron throne, then had the man's charred corpse force-fed to his followers. Other Bathorys were drunks and rapists, one was accused of devil-worship. Yet the Bathorys were not entirely rotten: amongst them were bishops, cardinals - even a King of Poland.

It was into this brutal but remarkable family that Elizabeth was born, in 1560. She was first raised at the ancestral manor in Nyirbator, next to the fine Calvinist church built by her Protestant great uncle.

After a few years she was moved to that Bathory estate at Ecsed, in the middle of the marshes. By the age of six she was afflicted by epileptiform seizures: perhaps a hint of the madness to come. Yet she was a very intelligent child, learning German, Greek, and Latin.

Elizabeth Bathory was also quite beautiful, with hair the colour of "sumptuous ravens", and a milk-white, northern complexion, inherited from her Gutkeled ancestors. Her fairness would have stood out strongly in a land of swarthy peasants. Even today the Hungarians I can see from my car - as I drive towards Budapest - are darker than the European average.

In the late 1550s, Elizabeth had her first encounter with real savagery. A gypsy musician was caught stealing by the Ecsed guards. The thief was dragged into the forecourt of the castle, where he was sewed inside the stomach of a horse. The screaming gypsy was left to die as the horse decomposed. Elizabeth witnessed this before her tenth birthday.

In her fourteenth year Elizabeth appears to have had an affair. The details are obscure: Elizabeth was highly sexed from youth, so she might have instigated the romance herself. Other stories claim she was raped by a serf. Whatever the truth, the resultant pregnancy was concealed and the scandal hushed up. Elizabeth's parents decided that their brilliant but troubled daughter needed a husband. And quick.

A match was duly arranged. Count Ferencz Nadasdy de Nadasd of Fogasfarold was the groom.
The couple seemed a perfect fit. The 26 year old Nadasdy came from a clan of warlike Hunnish nobles, who were almost as distinguished in lineage as the Bathorys. Nonetheless the 15 year old Elizabeth kept her maiden name, in recognition of her superior ancestry.

Following the splendid wedding, Elizabeth moved into one of her husband's castles: Sarvar, near the modern Austrian border.

It's a long way to Sarvar from Ecsed - even today, on EU funded motorways, I have to stop off three times for petrol and goulash. By the time I arrive in Sarvar it's very dark, but I still can't miss Sarvar castle. Large, brooding and severe, the castle dominates the little spa town.

Next morning I linger in the castle, sheltering from the wintry drizzle. These passageways and halls, now converted into offices and gallery spaces, are where Elizabeth Bathory spent her early married life. This castle is also where the newly-wed Elizabeth first showed her tendency to sadism. At least, that's what most believe: it's at this point that we reach the disputed evidence.

According to witness statements, at Elizabeth's trial, the young countess had a portfolio of special punishments for "erring" castle servants. One of her supposed methods was to jab pins under her serving girls' nails; on a different day she might have the young women thrashed with stinging nettles.

In some of these acts she was apparently abetted by her husband. Count Nadasdy also had a taste for violence, as he proved in his many wars against the Muslims. After battles the "Black Bey", as he was known, was seen to juggle the severed heads of his enemies in the air.

When he wasn't soldiering, or juggling, Ferencz apparently chose to pass the time at Sarvar by teaching his eager young wife more ingenious methods of "punishing" the staff. One involved smearing a naked girl with honey, then leading her out into the castle grounds. There the girl would be endlessly stung by insects, to the amusement of the chortling nobles.

That the couple shared an interest in witchcraft is inarguable. In one letter to her husband, when he was away at the wars, Elizabeth said of her spells: 'Thorko has taught me a lovely new one. Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear it on your enemy.'

"Thorko" was a manservant. During the long absences of her husband, Elizabeth had begun to surround herself with some very strange people. Within her own family there was her bisexual Aunt Klara, supposedly a sorceress. Elizabeth and Klara became great friends at this time.
Other accomplices were even odder. Amongst the Countesses servants there was a demented crone, a lesbian witch, and a dwarf called Fizko. This motley bunch helped with Elizabeth's household affairs, and her childcare (the Countess was by all accounts a 'good mother' to her several offspring).

Accompanied by these bizarre friends and underlings, Elizabeth began to travel. She specially liked to visit the other castles her family owned, like Forchtenstein, Lockenhaus and Kerezstur. It would of course have taken weeks to tour these places in the 16th century; today the castles are just an hour's drive from Sarvar - as I discover.

At Kerezstur, just across the Austrian border, I find the castle overgrown with vines, and practically derelict. Twenty miles west is famous Forchtenstein: this is still a grand edifice, inhabited today by the Esterhazys, distant relatives of the Bathorys. My last stop is Lockenhaus, high in the gloomy forests of the Burgland. It's here that I experience a truly sinister frisson.
On my arrival at the Dracula-esque castle gates, the place seems deserted, apart from a taciturn woman running a bizarre Christmas market in one of the towers. She lets me roam the empty dungeons and hallways. At one point, with the winter twilight encroaching, I am startled by a strange figure standing in a shadowy corner. Panicked, I turn the light on.

It turns out to be an iron maiden.

This is weirdly fitting, as Elizabeth Bathory was meant to have used iron maidens on her victims - in this very castle. Somewhat shaken, I retreat to my car and get out my notes. It seems the iron maiden story, despite the fine coincidence, is probably a legend. Yet there is firm evidence from Bathory's trial that, wherever she went on her travels, the Countess sought out young girls to abuse.

According to the allegations, one of Bathory's favourite tricks was to press red hot coins into the hands of girls she accused of stealing; alternatively she would iron the soles of the girls' bare feet. In more severe moods Elizabeth would cudgel her servants until she was so drenched in blood she had to change her clothes. On another occasion, she was seen to rip open the jaw of a maid with her hands.

Early next morning, I leave Sarvar, to trace the last and bloodiest part of Bathory's peculiar life. In 1602 Count Nadasdy died; some say he was poisoned by an unpaid harlot. Elizabeth was now rich, alone, untrammelled, and obsessed with her fading looks. She moved full-time to her favourite castle of Cachtice (it's pronounced Katch-teet-say).

Cachtice is quite hard to find. A good seven hours from Sarvar, its across the Slovakian border, way up in the Carpathian foothills, surrounded by enormous pineforests. When I reach my destination, and survey the silent ruins, I realise it's a suitably isolated place for anyone intent on murder.

If reports are to be believed, it was at Cachtice Castle that Bathory's crimes became truly insane - and homicidal. For instance: one wintry day at Cachtice Elizabeth ordered a wench stripped naked. The girl was led out of the keep into the snow, where she had water repeatedly thrown over her until she turned into a pillar of ice. Elizabeth watched.

On another occasion, Bathory demanded that maids be brought to her room: the girls were forced to lie unclothed on the floor: then they were tormented so viciously the blood had to be soaked up with ashes. The wildest rumours claim that this blood was used to fill Elizabeth's baths: as a cosmetic remedy for her ailing beauty.

There is an obvious sexual element in these and other alleged crimes. One of Elizabeth's penchants was, it is said, to have her girls do their chores nude. Elizabeth also liked to burn her maid's pubic hair with a candle-flame. During a stay in Vienna, Elizabeth supposedly had a naked housemaid put in an iron cage, which was then hoisted into the air; the girl was speared to death by Fizko the dwarf, while Elizabeth shouted obscenities from below.

Is this believable? Surely not. Yet the inhabitants of the monastery next door were so disturbed by the screams they threw pots at the adjoining wall.

Back in Cachtice the local villagers had, understandably perhaps, begun to hate and fear the Countess. When Bathory travelled she needed armed guards to protect her from the mob. Priests refused to bury all the mutilated corpses emanating from the castle; local girls refused to work within the castle's sinister walls. But Bathory was unabashed. As the supply of local serving-girls dried up, Elizabeth attracted aristocratic young ladies from further afield, with offers of patronage: these young women were, it's claimed, attacked in turn.

In these last desperate months Elizabeth was allegedly so deranged, when she was too tired to rise, she would have girls stripped and brought to her bedside - so she could bite them, ripping out chunks of bare flesh with her teeth.

Whether these rumours were true or not, the authorities had to act. Bathory might have been one of the noblest names in the country, but such inflammatory behaviour risked a peasant rebellion, and the disappearance of blue-blooded girls was unignorable.

One cold night in late 1610, the Palatine of Hungary, Count Thurzo, arrived at the isolated castle. He was accompanied by a platoon of guards. In his hand was a warrant from the king.
Refused entrance at the gate, Thurzo's men smashed the doors down, and marched right in.

According to some reports, they discovered Elizabeth hunched over a prostrate figure: she was torturing another girl. The Countess was arrested and taken away, along with her servants.
Thurzo's original intention may have been quite unambitious: to force Elizabeth to stop her crimes, preferably without the embarrassment of a trial; another motive for the arrest might have been blackmail: the Hungarian King wanted his debts to the Bathorys forgotten. But in the end there was no "hushing up", no backstage deal. A public trial was arranged, in nearby Bytca.

Bathory was actually tried twice. Each time, hundreds of witnesses were called, to testify to her cruelties. Some witnesses were tortured; most spoke freely.

It's here we approach the truth about Elizabeth Bathory. Yes, some of the allegations were clearly concocted. The blood-bathing, for instance, was a lurid embellishment (it only appears in accounts of her life from the 18th century). Many of the other tales were, presumably, embroidered, as is often the case with terrible tales.

But the sheer weight of evidence against the Countess was - and is - overwhelming. Aside from the many witness statements, we have contemporary letters, between priests, civil servants, and other notables, loudly complaining of Bathory's crimes. The fear and loathing the Countess provoked amongst the common people must also be taken into account; likewise the confirmed reports of mutilated corpses.

Finally there is the mortification endured by the nobility, and the Hungarian royal family, following the scandal. If the trial was just a conspiracy to defraud an uppity woman, why the centuries of shame? And why did the authorities feel the moral necessity for a trial at all, given the embarrassment this must have caused?

The answer is simple. Elizabeth Bathory was a brutal and murderous sadist, whose crimes were too atrocious to ignore. This is the only explanation that fits the many facts; any other perspective is incredible.

What we do not know is the true extent of Bathory's savagery. Did she kill 30 or 40, as seems likely? Or did she butcher 600 - as some have wildly suggested? The exact answer will always elude us.

After the trial, Bathory's female accomplices had their fingers torn out, and were then burned alive. The dwarf was summarily decapitated. The Countess herself was, by contrast, sentenced to a kind of living death. She was walled inside her room in Cachtice, with only a small window onto the world.

As I wander around the castle ruins, I see several such apertures. Any one of them is possibly hers.

For nearly five years the elderly murderess rotted away. Then, on August 21, 1614, a guard looked through the window, and saw a figure slumped on the floor. Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the Bloody Lady of Cachtice, was dead.

One mystery abides. Where was she buried? A popular theory holds that she was first entombed in her castle, then moved to the church in the valley.

But this is far-fetched. Would the villagers really have tolerated the body of this hated woman in their crypt? Much more likely is that Elizabeth's remains were taken across Hungary to the ancient family tomb: in the church built by her forebears. In Nyirbator.

My last drive is therefore a return journey: across the Hungarian plains, past Budapest, all the way to Nyirbator. Turns out it's not much of a town, the best thing in it is that church, a fine piece of central European Gothic, with a bizarre wooden belfry. Underneath the church is a sealed family vault. My hunch is that she is interred here.

If so, it is a suitable resting place. Even today Nyirbator has a bleak and eerie atmosphere, partly due to the bitter cold that sweeps in from the marshes. By nightfall the grubby streets of Nyirbator are usually deserted, and all you can hear is the howl of that wind. On a particularly bad night, it sounds like someone being tortured.

Lockenhaus castle - 'Leka'

Iron maiden, Lockenhaus Castle

Forchtenstein Castle. Bathory tortured girls in the dungeon here.

The bizarre belfry at Nyirbator church.

Kerezstur Castle. Now semi-derelict, and owned by an eccentric Austrian artist.

Ecsed Marshes.

Cachtice castle. Where Bathory committed her worst atrocities, and where she was imprisoned, and died.
Me! At Cachtice. Cold and a little spooked.

The Beautiful People

2007-06-11T22:27:00.000+01:00

Two Baster girls. Note the cheekbones and skintones.

The Most Beautiful People on Earth?

It's been a long drive across Namibia. I've trekked from the coastal mist of Swakopmund, through the great deserts and mountains, into the vast tablelands of the interior. I'm seeking a lost tribe before they disappear for good.

On the way I've encountered plenty of other Namibian racial groups. I've met Lhosi, Ovango, Herero, and Himba; I've seen stolid German burghers in Walvis Bay, rugby mad Boers in Windhoek, and the bare-breasted women of the north. But according to reports the group of people I'm about to encounter are the most extraordinary of all. The Basters of Rehoboth.

If the name "Basters" sounds a little pejorative, that's no coincidence. The term actually means "bastards" in Dutch. Yet the Basters wear this term proudly, because it speaks to them of their heritage: they are the offspring of 18th century crossbreeding, between Dutch Afrikaaners and Khoisan Bushmen.

Such interbreeding created an awkward situation for the colonial psyche of the time. The Basters were deemed "superior" to normal black people, by the Dutch and English, but the Basters were still too black to be accepted as proper Europeans. Black people in turn regarded the halfbreeds as somehow traitorous.

The Basters understandably found this situation insulting - and uncomfortable. Consequently in 1868 they quit the Cape Colony, and headed for the empty farmland of central Namibia, where they established the so-called Free Republic of Rehoboth. And there they remain to this day.

As I walk around the dusty market town of Rehoboth, I can see one result of the Basters' unusual lineage: those tall blonde Dutch genes, married to petite Khoisan physiques and high cheekbones, makes for great beauty. Some think that the Basters are the most beautiful people on earth.

The Basters are also notably old-fashioned. They speak pure 18th century Dutch, and they practise a fierce Calvinist faith; they also, according to anecdotes, like a drink. Perhaps this helps them get over their famous shyness.

So what's the problem? The Basters themselves worry that their culture is going to dissolve into the ethnic melting pot that is Namibia: there are only 30,000 of them compared to, say, a million Ovambo. So this week they are taking their case for autonomy to the United Nations. They hope that the UN will help them preserve their precious if peculiar heritage.

In a Rehoboth bar I stop for a refreshing lemonade. The decorously polite girl behind the bar has one of the sweetest faces I have ever seen in my life. I hope the Basters of Rehoboth survive.

Millions in America

2007-06-09T12:08:00.000+01:00

My book has just been published in Korea. How do you translate "booblicious" into Korean?

As all fans of great literature are well aware, my memoir, Millions of Women are Waiting to Meet You, came out in the USA a few weeks back.

To my surprise (though I'm not sure why) it has got an even weirder array of reactions than it did in the UK. Some like it, even love it, and think it hilariously entertaining, some dislike it, even loathe it, and think it repulsively boastful.

Indeed, some of these differing opinions appear in the same review.

Here's my favourite, from a family-oriented website called infodad. It's probably the best terrible review I've ever had.

Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You. By Sean Thomas. Da Capo. $24.

Self-important, self-centered, sexist, oversexed, and so full of himself that there’s unlikely ever to be room for anyone else in that semi-mind of his – if that’s your type of guy, you’re going to love Sean Thomas. Of course, he can’t be entirely the empty-headed, always-fornicating twit that he seems to be the vast majority of the time, because the first and last chapters of his book – the framing tale, as it were – show that he appears capable of forming a real relationship with a woman, to the point of asking her to marry him. Or maybe she just has colossal bad judgment. Or plans to sell the rights to her story next time.

Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You proves that everything you thought about Internet dating is true, and then some – if you happen to be Sean Thomas, who picks up genital crabs from an Australian girl, is convinced (by his doctor, no less) that all Aussie females are total sluts, offers a long pseudo-intellectual discussion of sodomy when one of his Web dates requests it, and, lest we forget the story of his first sexual experience, exposes himself to his parents’ cleaning lady. Nice guy. And not entirely without self-awareness: “I didn‘t get where I am today – in dire need of Internet dating – without being incredibly shallow.”

Actually, that’s not quite how he got there. Thomas is a British freelance journalist, and the basis of this book is a request that his happily married 37-year-old editor made to the single and promiscuous Thomas when Thomas was also 37: try Internet dating for a year and write about it.

And oh boy, does Thomas write about it, and about the women in his life in general. “In Provence we fell for each other. Helplessly. I’d like to say this happened in a very romantic way; I’d like to say it happened as we talked about Cézanne over the tapenade or watched shooting stars from the lavender fields. But it didn’t. For me, the clinching moment was when Eleanor became the first girl to give me head successfully.” Or: “It turned out that Ellie liked to be spanked. Vigorously. And to be handcuffed. She wasn’t afraid of a belt, either. Or a gag. She also liked to have sex in broom cupboards where we might be discovered. And in royal parks right across London. And on the verge of a motorway with juggernauts racing past and honking.”

That is one woman. There are lots of them; Thomas, who has “had some periods of quite profound promiscuity,” is a (self-professed) expert at this. “Casual sex should be wordless, sudden, unvoiced, spontaneous. Casual ‘loveless’ sex should be a sudden and wonderful recognition of each other’s pressing and identical needs. I’m talking clothes thrown over the stairs. Panties lassoed over wine bottles. Broken zippers. Remember?”

Thomas remembers very well, thank you, and is a skilled enough journalist to have chronicled many, many details of the many, many encounters (most of them too short to be called “affairs”) that he has with the many, many women he meets online. Or maybe he makes some of the stuff up – there’s no way to tell, just as there’s no way to tell how much truth there is in an online-dating post. Thomas happens to write very well, as you can tell even when reading about his umpteenth sexual encounter (actually, there are more than umpteen). The problem is that he’s never a likable human being, especially when he’s trying for introspection: “I don’t want to go back to my utterly ruthless womanizing ways, at least probably not. Well not for long. OK, I do. It would be fantastic.” Presumably the women Thomas meets and quickly discards – and who discard him – are equally interested in throwaway lust and non-relationships. They do not appear to be exploited by Thomas, or he by them.

But the superficiality of Web-based dating is scarcely news. You will learn almost nothing new about the online-dating scene from this book, but it has to be said that you will learn that almost-nothing very entertainingly, so long as the many sexist asides and the constant self-inflation don’t bother you. What was Thomas’ wife – whom he met, yes, through his online dating – thinking when she said “yes” to him? (To marrying him, that is?) Thomas gives good hilarity, true. But for any genuine insight into the latest twists of the mating game, turn somewhere else. Almost anywhere else.

See what I mean?

Chick Fic

2007-06-06T00:18:00.000+01:00

Novelist Jane Austen making a surprise appearance at the Macau Grand Prix, yesterday.

This column by ME appeared in this weekend's Sunday Telegraph. Ahem.

Why Men Don't Read Women

Next Wednesday the annual Orange Prize will be awarded in central London: for the best novel written by a woman. The winner can expect the usual fanfares, a bundle of cash, and a pleasurable boost in sales.

What she cannot expect, however, is a lot of male readers, no matter how big the publicity splash. Because men don't read books by women.

Proof of this comes from various surveys. Over the last couple of years, for instance, academics Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins have been asking men and women to name their "watershed" books - the books that changed the way the reader felt about life. The list of books cited by women readers includes plenty of titles by men: Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye and Catch 22 all get a namecheck, alongside the expected "female" titles like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice.

Contrast this with the male list. As with women, men like Tolkien and Salinger; men also like Camus and Orwell. What men don't like are books written by people who wear skirts: only one book by a woman made it into the male list: Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. And some have suggested Lee's book only found itself on the roster because the men believed, thanks to her ambiguous name, that Lee was a chap.

Of course one obvious explanation for women enjoying male authors, while men apparently reject female writers, is simply that women read a lot more books - written by either gender - whereas men read more newspapers, magazines and websites. That's according to an investigation by the Book Marketing Trust. Men do, however, read more on the toilet. Who was it said men can't multitask?

Another simple explanation for this difference is that men don't read fiction (and fiction is what women tend to write most): maybe 70% of fiction readers are female, right across the genres. By contrast, men slightly outnumber women in the non-fiction reading stakes. Put it another way: Men like Facts, Women like Stories.

But is that all there is to it? Maybe there is something deeper here: an antipathy to the female fiction-writing mindset. Take a look at the 2007 Orange Prize shortlist, and there is arguably a clue in this direction.

The list is dominated by cloistered emotional dramas. One of the favourites is Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park, an eloquent and melancholy tale of stifled desperation amongst middle class Englishwomen. Another favourite is Anne Tyler's Digging to America - a tragicomedy of adoption amongst Baltimore suburbanites. Even the books with supposedly bigger canvases - like Kiran Desai's the Inheritance of Loss - tend to focus on the minutiae of feelings rather than the theatre of actions.

As a novelist myself, I would venture to say this kind of writing puts men off: you can only read so many subtle chapters set in tense kitchens where, erm, not a lot happens, before you want a big punch up, or a gratuitous sex scene, or just some stirring and shocking event - nuclear war maybe. A lot of men consciously or subconsciously think fiction is a waste of time, because it isn't true - so if they are going to read it they need to be either violently entertained, or brilliantly enlightened, to justify the effort. The gentler designs of many female novelists don't feed this masculine appetite.

But then again, maybe this is sour grapes - from a male novelist operating in a world dominated by women. Because the world of books really is dominated by women. Trust me. Not only are most readers women, most fiction fans are women, most fiction writers are women, most publishers are women, and most of the important book buyers (Tescos, Richard and Judy) are women. Most librarians are also women. In fact maybe there should be an Orange Prize for Fiction written and read by men. It's time we boys had some encouragement.

thetoffeewomble

Movie Idea

Toffeewomble Redux

Window, Majorca

A Poem I Wrote. On Twitter

It's here!!!!

The Road Untravelled: Laos

Bathory Redux

Where I Was Yesterday

My New Cover

A Photo For Red Meteor

Gridlock for Millionaires

Lucy in the House with Fountains

What I Did On My Holidays.

Kolkata

The Toffeewomble: An Announcement

Door 78

Happy Birthday Lucy Lamorna

The Truth About Our Leaders

Gordon Brown's Manboob Moment

HOORAY!

Most Ominous Roadsign in World, Maybe

It's here.

I *heart* Bangkok

Window of Rock!

Door with V Cool Name

Back to Doors and Windows Hooray!!

Things You See On A Walk In Namibia

Nice View of Dachau

A Spooky Door, from Navarre

Another Door, How Exciting is My Blog?

Window 2

Window 1

Door 2

Doors, and More

A Door In Palermo

Oil!!!

Warming Down

How To Yodel

My Daughter, Yesterday

Copper Canyon

The Saddest Grave in the World

The Worst Suburb on Earth

Football Saves The World!

Tiocfaidh Ar La

Cheer Up, England

Polygyny, Technically

Jetting to Constantinople

Holidays in Hell

A Brief Interlude of Gloating

O Tempora, O Mores...

Nobels

Poem for the Day

Vote for Frankenstein

Thai Punks on Bulb

What I Did On My Holidays

The Japanese are Mad, part Seventy Three

Naziphobia, Redux

Parroting

The Exorcist

Christmas Repeats

Howler

Namibia

News from Egypt

Warning: Don't Think Too Much

Withnail and Me

Popular in Vladivostok

Gordo the First

Stone Heads

Practically the Pulitzer

This Erotic Story is Bollocks: Discuss

Gnomes. And Whores

Rugby a l'Anglaise

The Lurchers

Small town Satanists

Aliens Over England

Pete Implanted

Men in Love

Nostradamus and the Neo-Cons

Bathory Redux

I heart Bangkok