International – Page 32 – For the fainthearted . . .

New Hampshire and old England

The half-term holiday brought a visit to the dentist in Somerton and a visit to an old acquaintance who lives in the town. In his eighties, he is a treasure trove of memories and stories. Always cheerful, he laughs at many of his remembrances and smiles at the thought of the approaching spring and the new growth in his garden. A former local councillor, he is well-versed in all that happens in the community.

On my way to his house, I had walked past the police station , which still …

Escaping the ugliness

One of the lessons from five visits to Africa between 2009 and 2015 was that beauty could be a vehicle with which to transcend ugliness. Travelling to Rwanda on each of those visits and to Burundi for three of them, there was much in both countries that might have been a cause for gloom or despondency or even despair. Rwanda still bore the scars of the terrifying genocide of 1994, while Burundi had continued to suffer social and political instability and the detrimental effects of endemic corruption.

There was an …

There is no immutable law of progress

Being born in 1960 meant being born in the closing years of the post-war baby boom with its years of economic growth, personal freedom, and buoyant optimism. When the British Conservative Prime Minister Harold declared in 1957 that “most of our people have never had it so good,” it was not a piece of political bluster, it was a statement of objective economic fact. Of course, by the 1970s, political instability and economic stagnation had changed perceptions, but, even then, the many people who recalled the realities of the 1930s …

No more books

It is sad that we hardly use books at school. Students are mostly educated on a diet of PowerPoint slides and photocopied handouts; opening books and reading them seems to have become a practice of former times. Even the library has been designated the “learning resource centre,” as if admitting it was a repository of books was somehow no longer appropriate.

Generations will grow up with no understanding of how much books meant to their forebears, with no concept of how books changed the world, with no appreciation of how …

Keep on trucking

Pass the handful of lay-bys on the A39 in the darkness of a January morning and there will frequently be articulated lorries pulled in, the blinds across their windows showing they have been stopped for a driver’s statutory rest period. England is a small country and the stops along a Somerset road are probably not the quietness before a long journey.

Stops elsewhere can punctuate journeys of a different scale. A service station on a French autoroute can have ranks of lorries, their registration plates an alphabet of European nations. …

Oh for the 1990s!

BBC Radio 6’s Steve Lamacq asked listeners for memories of their 1990s email addresses. One listener, a Kate Bush fan said her address had included, “itsmecathy, from Kate Bush’s song Wuthering Heights. It had led people to mistakenly assume her own name was Cathy, when it was Clare.

Clare was lucky to be able to choose her own address. Going online in February 1997, paying a monthly subscription to a service provider, a company in the United States, the address was the easily forgettable 106522.740@compuserve.com. There was some provision …