Category: General

When she ran out, her little dark brown head skimmed the car bonnet. My heart missed a beat; I slammed on the brakes. Swerved. And waited, for what seemed like an eternity, wondering whether death, or life, would be waiting when I got out.
But then there she was. She must have only been about five years old, and she was blinking, dark eyed and shiny, like a faun. I remember how she was wearing a cherry pink sari, and how a woman – her mother, presumably – then ran out and grabbed her. Continue reading “What Lies Beneath”

So don’t send the cart round yet – might be a bit difficult, anyway, since I’m writing this from my hotel room in Cairo. I have spent the last six weeks in Romania, Kiev, London, Cairo, Romania again and this last week I have been back in Cairo where I will get a bit of a break from aeroplanes and airports until Easter. (Orthodox-type.) As you can imagine, it was all a bit intense with that schedule, and I didn’t get much chance to take many decent photographs, but I snatched a few with my iPhone. (It wasn’t just the schedule that was intense – in the first week in Romania we had to drive 600 km in a blizzard to get to our meeting because our flights were cancelled – then 600 hairy km back on snow/iced up, treacherous roads, at best speed to get to a meeting in Bucharest… during the second trip to Romania we covered about 1,500 km in four days, of which more later. Continue reading “I’m not dead.”

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.

Mrs FEEG and I have just returned from a wonderful trip to Singapore and Australia. We had a great time and travelled around quite a bit.

We were in Sydney while the state elections were on and Labor (the Aussies do most things right, but they cannot spell Labour) party, a totally corrupt, scandal ridden and incompetent government if ever there was one, got the kicking it deserved. Even AV did not save it from ignominy. A corrupt, incompetent Labour government, now where have I heard that before?

One thing that struck me while all of this was on was the prime minister, the appalling Julia Gillard (now beginning to be known as Juliar, another flashback), kept making “impromptu” TV appearances. She is really awful. She even makes Gordon Brown seem erudite and a loquacious orator. In order to hold the position she does, she must be even better at plotting and back-stabbing than our very own Gordon.

Maybe some of the Aussies on here might like to put me straight on this. Will have a few more things to say about our trip, but this is something that really struck me.

A Divine Image

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace seal’d,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

Got here yesterday in teeming rain from Coinjock, the last 50 miles were a challenge, five low bridges and one lock, rained all day and windy too.

Spent the night on anchor opposite the “Largest Warship ever built” USS Wisconsin, that’s her but sticking out from the slip in the mist (sorry about the picture quality, the weather is worse than it looks).

Continue reading “Mile zero, visibility zero, Norfolk Virginia.”

Zen’s post about Neil Armstrong is an ‘urban myth’.  Nonetheless, events in childhood can have a very strong influence.

There are two places I’ve always wanted to visit: China and Australia.

The urge to visit China started when I was about seven or eight and I read one of a series of books about twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins. I’d read most of her other ‘twin’ books, but the story of  the Chinese twins caught my imagination: round doors, a different form of writing and girls not being educated. At eight, I vowed I’d get there one day…

Even stranger is my reason for wanting to visit Australia.

Until I was six and a half, I lived in a flat just down the way from the Oval Cricket Ground. At that age, I moved to Merton Park – Wimbledon for those who don’t know London – into a house with a garden.  Almost immediately, my father bought me a dog – which was black and white and which I, with typical six-year-old inspiration, promptly named “Spot”. Continue reading “Looking for Spot!”