International – Page 19 – For the fainthearted . . .

Turning off the news

I deleted the BBC News app from my phone. Should I need to know significant headlines, then everything will be on the Financial Times app, a subscription to the FT online being the one indulgence I allow myself, anything else is dross, most of it being annoying dross.

If there is such a thing as “news addiction,” then I was definitely a news addict. If there is not such a condition, perhaps there should be. It is a clinical condition whereby one feels compelled to turn on the radio or …

Balanced days

The minutes fall away from the days, the long hours of May, June and July recede into the past as the dark half of the year approaches. Journeys to and from work will soon be made in darkness, the landscapes of the Severn and the Avon disappear into a dark blanket. Sometimes changes can take place which only become noticeable when the light returns.

An email from Rwanda reminds me that a friend lives in a permanently equinoctial land. Two degrees south of the equator, it is said that the …

Seeing the world differently

“No, a Kenyan Covid-19 victim did not come back to life” reads a BBC headline. The story explains that a man dressed in PPE was someone who had collapsed at a funeral and revived, not someone who was being taken to be buried who had resurrected. Stories that the man had been dead and and come back to life had circulated widely on social media.

It is a story that reminds Europeans that not everyone sees the world in the way they do. In Africa, people may see things …

Powerless to change things

Attending an Open University summer school at the University of Sussex in the summer of 1989, the final afternoon was a workshop on industrial relations. The case of the 1978 closure of the British Steel works at Shelton Bar was the background for a role play exercise. A group of us were cast as workers in the plant. The workers were efficient and productive, yet they were unable to do anything to save the plant and so save their jobs.

Reading through the script of the role play, there was …

The weather breaks

Days of steadily rising temperatures and increasing humidity have reached a crescendo with rolls of thunder, a lightning-lit sky and sudden squalls of heavy droplets.

Heavy Weather was the title of a P.G. Wodehouse book featuring Lord Emsworth and the Marquess of Blandings. The earl’s stately home is filled with an array of irascible, conspiratorial characters. The oppressive heat of an English August saps the energy of those gathered, becomes the mood of the story that unfolds. Imagining the discomfort entailed in dressing for dinner on such evenings, one almost …

Pistachio paint

“My Dad still has a 1970s African house. He has pistachio-coloured walls.”

The BBC radio broadcast was a podcast, so there was no opportunity to send an email and ask the interviewee why pistachio had been such a popular choice.

The colour he describes as pistachio runs between shades of green and blue, it is one to be found throughout the developing world. Not having a vocabulary for colour comparable with that of the speaker, I might have called the colour turquoise.

Whether pistachio or turquoise, why was it chosen?…