September 11, 2011

On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people died. God bless all those souls, and keep their families.

Every day since then, some 16,000 children have died of hunger. 

Every day. 

Every day, 16,000 mothers weeping over a small, broken body.

Every day, a tragedy more than five times greater than 9/11 enacts itself over and over and over again.

9/11 - 10/11 - 11/11 - 12/11 - 13/11 - 14/11 - 15/11 - 16/11 - 17/11 - 18/11 - 19/11 - 20/11...

Every day, the crime of death by hunger perpetrated against the innocent, the most vulnerable, the tiniest. 

Do these 58 million slow and painful deaths get blanket news coverage? 

Are they commemorated in grand ceremonies year on year on year? 

Does anyone build vast and lavish memorials to these dear little souls? 

Shame on all of us.

www.bread.org

Where is he now?

On the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I find myself wondering whatever happened to this little boy after he walked free from the childrens' barracks amid the cold and the carnage. 

And I feel grateful that I am able to raise my little ones without fear of this happening to them, and grateful to all those who died to make our peaceful life possible. But I feel sad and angry that our very own governments have used this peace to inflict similar brutality on children in other parts of the world. Will it ever stop?


Image: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Publishing news

Hot, with a soothing breeze and lots of little clouds.


Every so often, our doughty postina lugs up the hill a copy of The Author, the esteemed Journal of the Society of Authors. When it appears lodged in the grille of a ground floor window, it is a pleasant reminder of what I did before I became an expat dirt removal executive. 

In this quarter's edition I read that Horace Bent has announced the winners of the 2009 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. 

The Diagram Prize was first awarded by old friend and former employer, Bruce Robertson in the 1970s. Bruce was a large-ish man with a ZZ Top beard, a bulging belly, and braces with dinosaur badges on them. He had a reputation for roaring at his staff while under the influence late in the afternoon. "Get on with it yer RABBITS," he would bellow from behind a pile of CRC in his cubby-hole of an office, "I can 'ear ya chuntering on!" As an illustrator by trade he gave us writers and editors short shrift. He always referred to text as 'the wigglies' - in fact he was the only packager I ever met in publishing who didn't really give a toss about whether the editorial was consistent and correct, as long as the diagrams worked and the labelling was straight. I always liked him. His irreverence made me laugh, and I enjoyed his dark sense of humour. 

Bruce and his Diagram colleagues thought up the prize in a bored moment (of which there are many) during the Frankfurt Book Fair, and publishing staff of all persuasions have been playing the game of finding silly titles to add to the shortlist ever since. Beats anything so tedious as doing business.

On the shortlist this year were: Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton, The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by E. Scherl and M. Dubinsky, and the title that made even my German husband howl with laughter, Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A. Yannes. 

I was, however, fairly disappointed in the winner, which was that rivetting bestseller (sales topped 34 in the UK and more than 580 in the US), Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina. Perhaps it's because I've not the foggiest idea what a hyperbolic plane is (anyone? anyone?).

I shall leave you today with a few of the winners from previous years which have had me falling off my seat since I looked them up a few minutes ago. In 1993, we had American Bottom Archaeology and, seemingly along the same lines in 2002, there was Living with Crazy Buttocks. I guess the Brits just love butt jokes. 2006 brought us The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: a guide to field identification, which followed hard on the heels of 2004's Bombproof your Horse. 

The very first award was given in 1978 to The Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, and that was swiftly followed in 1979 by The Madam as Entrepreneur: career management in house prostitution. And finally, two of my personal favourites: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, by Glen C. Ellenbogen, which romped home in 1986, and 1984's Highlights in the History of Cement, which I imagine must also have been the shortest book in the entire history of the awards.


But, you know, I still think Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich was the best of the lot - Mr Yannes, you was robbed! Yer RABBIT!

Little glimmers of joy

Zero at eight. Overcast. Damp. Hibernation-weather.

Amid the horror and the nightmare that is Haiti, two stories to warm the heart.

A 22-day-old baby, Elisabeth Josaint, is rescued alive and well after eight days in the rubble. A baby, alone without food and water, without the comfort of other human bodies around her. For eight whole days. The people of Jacmel say she's a miracle.

I'm inclined to agree.

And this mother, a week with barely a morsel to eat nor a drop to drink, starts her labour in the devastated streets, but collapses before she can get to the hospital. A BBC reporting team drive her there, and after an emergency operation, a healthy baby boy is born: a new life.

Please click here to prove how grateful you are that it isn't you, by giving generously.

Book Notes No. 29: The Dying Light, Henry Porter

Zero at eight. Hazy sunshine, with pink sunrise strands over the snow-capped Alps. The first primulas have started to appear.

Has this ever happened to you? Somebody mentions an old friend, say, or some topic of interest, and over the next couple of weeks the same subject arises again and again in different contexts? I'm sure it has. And many times. In fact, this kind of thing is so common that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung gave it a name : synchronicity.

Recently, I experienced just such a network of interrelated coincidences. First, I read in the news that in Britain the local councils, the equivalent of the Italian comune, have trebled the numbers of CCTV cameras on the streets, despite the clear evidence that they do nothing to deter crime, or indeed to help in the prosecution of criminals. I was none too surprised to find my own home town in the top ten, having more than four cameras per 1,000 residents. The Outer Hebrides topped the list with more than 8 cameras per 1,000 residents. With a population of just over 26,000, that's a staggering 208 cameras.

And they're not cheap.

And surely the Outer Hebrides has nothing more than a bunch of sheep to safeguard...?

Then one day, I was listening to BBC Radio 4 over a cup of tea. A segment came on about a new piece of equipment being tested by the Manchester Police Force - ominously called a 'drone', but in fact a small radio-controlled flying gadget with a camera mounted on it. The Manchester Police Force are ecstatic. Now they can spy on whoever they like whenever they like, without the cost and rigamarole of calling out the local helicopter squadron. Those who like to take an innocent stroll at odd times of the day or night are not so sure.

Later that day, a friend was complaining about New Labour's new biometric ID card, currently compulsory only for immigrant workers and foreign students, but already being offered to British citizens, who despite decades of resistance seem actually to be taking them up voluntarily thinking that by doing so they might in some obscure way be helping to solve Britain's benefits-fraud problem. And worse, its tie-up with the new DNA super-database, which includes DNA information even on people who have never so much as asked a policeman for directions, let alone been arrested or prosecuted.

My mind really started ticking when I saw that our local computer shop here in Italy is displaying a sophisticated range of surveillance equipment for private use, and then that it seems to have become à la mode to mount a sweet little webcam on the handlebars of one's motorcycle, of all things. What could it be for? I asked myself. I could only reach the conclusion that bikers far and wide have finally admitted to a vanity we all knew they possessed in buckets. They have found a way to watch themselves breaking the ton with the sun sparkling on their opaque Darth Vader visors (or dog ends from passing motorists getting stuck in their Lynyrd Skynyrd beards, depending on nationality, age and engine capacity). In the meantime, however, they record the activities of any person who comes within range of the parked machine.

And finally, I read a review of a new novel called The Dying Light (published in the US as The Bell Ringers, I believe), by Britain's self-styled guardian of liberty, Henry Porter, whose name rang a definite bell in that part of my dim and distant memory that related to my early days in the world of London publishing, but that's another story altogether...

The synchronicity was too strong to be ignored. My mind, working on its own, quickly grouped these events by meaning as Jung describes and forced my One-Click-Ordering hand. I bought the book, despite not being a huge fan of the thriller genre.

Here's the blurb. 1.) Former intelligence officer dies in bomb attack. 2.) Estranged soulmate inherits his house, lots of dosh and some disconcerting messages from beyond the grave. 3.) Said soulmate finds herself and a lot of other people under surveillance and in some instances under attack. 4.) All is gradually revealed and the dènouemont rages to a breathtaking finale.

Unputdownable! Really.

The author's note makes it clear, if it is not clear enough by the last page, that while the story is a fiction (bound for Hollywood, perhaps?) the structures within British society that would enable the given scenario to become a reality are already in place. One merely needs to project forward a few years. Spy drones, spy cameras, human spies and computerised spies. It all adds up to a Big Brother-style society in which ordinary people acquiesce in the slow and silent theft of their liberty because they think they are being made more secure.

And as Benjamin Franklin once wrote : "Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither".

Quote of the week No. 30: Today in 1989

Ten degrees at midday. Cold, damp, misty. Occasional gentle rainshowers.

"The Wall ... will still exist in 50, even in 100 years."

I guess Erich Honecker, when he pronounced these words on January 19, 1989 was either bluffing or hadn't reckoned with the "many small people who in many small places [did] many small things [and altered] the face of the world" (for source, see here).

Or, to be totally cynical, the surge of people across the Wall in those heady days may not so much have been down to fear of the Stasi or politcal idealism, but more to do with the pulling power of Coca Cola and electronic goods.

Cynicism aside...

On November 9 1989, I was sleeping fairly rough on the floor of a Bangkok guesthouse. This was not my first taste of Asia (I had already the previous year been in Hong Kong and Macao researching a book), but the months that followed took me on a great adventure inspired in part by the more idealistic elements of what was happening back in the heart of Europe.

And I returned home in time to see the German reunification celebrations. A different person. A different Europe. A different world.

So where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?

A minute for Madeleine/Dedica un minuto per Madeleine

Nine degrees at 8:30am. Every leaf, every twig, every shaggy dog, every child's hat, every cat's ear, every piode, every petal. Everything is dripping. And in the hills not so far above us, it's not dripping but snowing.

Please take one minute of your day today to watch this video...
Per favore dedica un minuto oggi per guardare questo video...






Learn about the work of CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.

Quote of the Week No. 28 : On things presidential

Sixteen degrees at 9am. An overcast start has been blasted into a bright, bright sunshiney day.

Here in the house on The Rock we don't read the newspapers. First, what with the children, the chickens, the garden, the logging operations, the huntin' (of which more soon), the job and the still unfinished house, we don't have time. And second, having done my internship as a cub photojournalist at The Sunday Times, I believe I have a privileged view of what sells newspapers, and it isn't always the whole, unmitigated truth. So why bother?

Instead, we get our news and commentary either from BBC Radio 4, The Economist or from Chairman Bill.

This week, Chairman Bill tells me that Tony Blair, ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain, and ex-leader of New Labour, is addicted to pole position and has his eyes on the top spot in Europe, President of the European Union. Instead of lending his grand socialist statesman's experience and expertise to a beleaguered nation perhaps hit hardest of all its European partners by The Crisis - i.e. the UK - Tony wants to have his Hugh-Grant-little-boy face engraved on coins from here to the borders of Turkey, to whizz about the place in the European equivalent of Airforce One and perhaps be invited to parties at Silvio Berlusconi's mansion (where he might find himself one of those Italian secretaries Silvio mentioned recently). He might even try rebranding the European Union as 'New Europe' and we may soon be thinking of ourselves as 'The Continent of Cool'...

Chairman Bill has noted the strange absence of democratic process in all of this, and I really just wanted to add the words of Douglas Adams, always an astute political commentator, even from beyond the grave : "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

Ye have been warned!

Quote of the Week No. 23 : On martyrdom

Neda Agha-Soltan

"It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr."

--Napoleon Bonaparte

Against the flow

As I leapt, steaming, from the shower at 6:30 this morning, the outside temperature was a fraction above freezing, and the inside temperature was a fraction above that. Outside, it was snowing wetly. Inside, I was shivering but still glad that, because we heat with wood cut by our own fair hands, and not gas, we're not being held hostage by the Russians.

The psychologists would have us believe that yesterday was the most depressing day of the year, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to buck the trend and be happy. How could you not be with a scene like this awaiting you after the morning kindergarten run?

Monday morning, Lago Maggiore

And, finally, even without a tv and no newspaper stand here on Sasso Carmine, we know it's Obama's inauguration day - we can hear the circus from here. Many people like to be present at 'historic moments' such as these. Regretfully, the thought of two million people crammed into so small a place as Pennsylvania Avenue, and sharing a loo with 99,999 other people will be keeping me away on this occasion.

Besides, historic is as historic does...

...and, double-besides, somebody's got to feed the chickens.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008, 2009. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Rant follow-up

Another bright sunny day, with glittering white horses on the lake. A day on which to clear up the garden, prune the roses and haul mulch.

I said two days ago that if you're looking for a rant, A View from Carmine Superiore isn't the weblog to be reading, despite its name. But you may remember that in May I was much exercised by the story of Austrian Josef Fritzl, and in particular about his lawyer's argument that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.

Well, the good news is that a court has ruled he is in his right mind. And that he will stand trial for murder, incest, rape, false imprisonment and slavery.

I wonder how his daughter and grandchildren are.

Baby P rant

Eleven degrees at 9am. A brilliant, bright sunny day. The blue sky is a perfect background for the white-capped Alps. Now I remember why I like winters at the lake.

When I started this site, I promised myself I wouldn't rant (too much) about things I saw in the news. But today, I'm so angry that I have to do something.

Baby P was 15 months old when he was found in his blood-spattered cot. Blue. Dead. He was found with more than 50 separate injuries, including a broken back and several broken ribs, and his face and head were covered in lesions, some of them several weeks old.

Baby P's short life of torture and agonising death are abhorrent to me as to most of us. But if I tell you that all this took place under the eyes of the social services, it becomes clear that something is going horribly wrong. The child and his mother were visited 60 times in the eight months prior to his death (that's twice a week). By social workers, by doctors. The last visit was a mere 48 hours before the child's death, when the doctor failed to spot that he was paralysed from a broken back. The police arrested the mother twice on suspicion of attacking her son, but she was released without charge, declaring that she was a "damn good mum". When the child's biological father started kicking up a stink at social services, they paid lawyers to make him go away.

Baby P's mother and two men living with her at the time have been tried, not for his murder - the court saw that it could never be proven who actually killed the child - but for the lesser crime of causing or allowing the child to be killed. And this week the British press is bitter with recrimination: bring back the death penalty! charge the social workers with neglect! sack everyone involved! deport the doctor! Much of this is understandable, and I understand it.

Like everyone else, I am shocked and disgusted by the story of Baby P's life and death. I abhorr the bullies who launched such a lengthy and savage attack on a defenceless child, I worry about doctors who fail to diagnose broken backs (for crying out loud), and I fail to understand social services management who think this is not their problem. Most of all, it is beyond my comprehension how a mother could allow a neo-Nazi boyfriend to commit such terrible acts of torture against her child. I have two children, and if anyone hurt them that person would have to reckon with a very angry Mama-bear. Neo-Nazi or not.

But what I really want to say is this: our children are our collective responsibility. We all have a duty to look out for them, whether they are our own children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, or whether they are the children of neighbours or our own childrens' school friends. It's not enough to delegate responsibility to overworked and undertrained social workers and then howl for their heads when something goes wrong.

If more of us had the guts to stand up to the bullies who attack toddlers, and took the time to insist on our voice being heard with the police, the social services and the doctors, perhaps fewer children would be forced to live such benighted lives or suffer such horrific deaths.

I support the NSPCC. I hope you might do so too. The link is on this page. All it takes is a click.

Copyright © Louise Bostock 2007, 2008. All rights reserved. Please ask first.

Quote of the week No. 5 : On the current financial crisis

Twenty-two degrees! I'm cheating - that's the temperature in the sun. But at least there's sun and no rain, and I'm off with my cup of tea to the churchyard for a panoramic view of the lake and the Alps.

Let me leave you with this thought from Charles Dickens (1812-1870), English novelist.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. -- David Copperfield, 1850

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

First the good news, then the bad news

Eleven degrees at 9am. Patchy sunshine.

I hear that last week's opening day of the wild boar season brought a magnificent beast, reportedly 100kg, and I believe taken not far from Carmine's southern ramparts. Difficult to say if this was our culprit and it's probable that more than one perpetrator was involved, but this could easily have been our ringleader (click here if you don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about). Whether it was him or not, 100kg is a whole lot of crackling.

I also hear that the local tv station has reported a shocking accident involving a hunter and a local man out in the woods looking for porcini (it's the mushroom season too). This is how it went : boar-hunter stalks prey, boar-hunter hears snuffling in undergrowth, boar-hunter lets off a shot, mushroom-hunter is killed.

We'll be avoiding the woods on Wednesdays and Sundays, hunting days, from now on.

Book Notes No. 9 : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Oh.

Solzhenitsyn is dead.

I came to Solzhenitsyn through a rather roundabout route. Living in northern Nigeria, in the Muslim emirate of Zaria (fantastic mud-built emir's palace - deliciously cool inside - but that's another story). I shared a house with a Fulani lawyer who had only two books on his shelves. A copy of the precepts of Shariah law and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

During the impossible days before the rain came, a chameleon shed its skin on the windowsill, and the driver took off in the night back to his family in Niger, my head ached if I moved and I was pinned to the spot with lethargy. It was during those days that I read every word Solzhenitsyn wrote in this monster of a work.

It's scary stuff, and every 18-year-old should read it. And when you're done reading, washed out, exhausted with the sheer terror of it all, you may want to join those who believe that because Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived, the gates of the gulag are less likely to swing open again.

Solzhenitsyn is dead. Long live Solzhenitsyn.

News from afar

Weather as yesterday. Perfectly warm, perfectly breezy. More perfectly happy windsurfers.

News from darkest northern California, where friend and artist Danielle Eubank has made the cover of the LA Daily News. Here are some of the pics they published.

The reason for the flurry of publicity is Danielle's inclusion as expedition artist on the Phoenicia Expedition, an attempt to sail a reconstruction of a 6th-century BC Phoenician sailing ship in a loop from Syria through the Suez Canal, sailing around Africa and then along the Mediterranean coast on the return leg to Syria. The voyage begins in August 2008.

It's been a while now since I sat with Danielle in a pub just off the Tottenham Court Road in London and she excitedly told me about her inclusion in her first London exhibition. Since then, her work has brought her exhibitions with several highly respected galleries and commissions from a number of distinguished patrons. She has studios in northern California and in London.

Here's her website and, most especially, the blog she is putting together to showcase her work on the expedition.

And for more information on the extraordinary voyage itself, here's the Expedition Website.

Bon voyage, Dani. Have a fantastic time!

Fritzl Rant

Warm, humid and overcast.

AJ is at kindergarten, M is in Switzerland, B is in bed and Mama is angry.

I've been following the story of the Austrian, Fritzl, who is accused of imprisoning his own daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering no less than seven children on her, several of whom also remained incarcerated with her, one of whom died at birth through lack of a doctor. Today, I read that this man's lawyer (who dares represent this monster?) is declaring him insane rather than criminal and I am very angry.

Elisabeth Fritzl, the woman imprisoned since her late teens, is a couple of years younger than I am. And this started me thinking. I thought about the life I have led in the big wide world in the 24 years that she has been without daylight, without medical care, without her freedom, and with only a rapist and her children for company. I have been free to study, to travel, to find friends and to fall in love. I have been free to choose the father of my children and the place in which to raise them. I have been free while she has not. Free to eat and drink what I want, think and say what I want, to feel the sun on my face, to feel cooling water on my skin. Free to wander in the highest mountains in the world, to live on some of the most beautiful Pacific Islands imagineable, to drink the colours of India, to have wonderful adventures and to experience the strangenesses of life.

Elisabeth Fritzl has been denied all this. And I am angry for her.

I know this sounds unreconstructed, bigotted and totally un-Christian, but I want Fritzl to receive the same treatment as he meted out to his daughter and his children. I want him in a prison cell with no chance of reprieve. I want him to lack fresh air, sunshine, medical care, decent food, a friendly face. I want his freedom denied him, and most of all I want him scared for his life every time someone comes to the door.

Anyone who wishes his unspeakable crimes to go unpunished should remember what life has brought them over the last 24 years, and then perhaps they will think again.

Witness box to soap box

Minus one at 8am. A stunning golden sunrise this morning with the merest stirrings of a wind. I miss my babies!

At London's famous Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, it's traditional for anyone who so desires to set up their soap box and hold forth on whatever subject is excerising them, in whatever language they choose and to an audience of one-man-and-his-dog or to a chanting crowd of thousands, depending on his oratorical skills and the vitality of the subject.

At Speaker's Corner, you're allowed to say, with a loud hailer if you want, anything. Anything at all. With only two exceptions. You're not allowed to incite a riot or racial hatred. And you're not allowed to defame the Royal Family. This is because Speaker's Corner is in one of the Royal Parks and it would be "jest too beastly to have people trampling all over one's roses and calling one names too boot." Or so I was told by the bobby on duty the day I was sent to cover "anything that may be going on" for a postgrad course in photojournalism.

It goes without saying that Speaker's Corner attracts its fair share of harmless nutters.

Yesterday, Mohamed Al-Fayed, the richest paranoiac in Britain, had his day in court. And it seems that, unlike at Speaker's Corner, you can say whatever you like about the Royal Family in a British court of law. I once saw Al-Fayed call the Duke of Edinburgh a "f***ing Nazi b*****d in a live tv interview - the no-name afternoon-tv journalist-on-the-spot nearly fainted, poor girl. And so I was sure that sparks would be flying when he appeared at the Diana-Dodi inquest. And he didn't disappoint by all accounts. He called the Queen's consort a "Nazi" and a "racist". He claimed Prince Philip and Prince Charles were involved in the murder of Diana and Dodi because Diana was pregnant and the monarchy couldn't bear to see her married to Al-Fayed's son and carrying a 'forrin' baby.

Sad, isn't it? A man of such advanced age and with successes in business of almost heroic proportions, reduced to name-calling (and with such execrable English grammar). Where's the evidence? Where are the witnesses to support the allegations? Where's this man's dignity!

Now I hate to see a person robbed of a child. I can sympathise with Al-Fayed's grief over the death of his son. But why do I have a niggling suspicion that he's more upset that his scheme to have his son seduce the Princess of Wales was scuppered? That he's more bitter that the couple's deaths thwarted his grand plan to take revenge on an Establishment that continued to cold-shoulder him despite his gazillions?

Perhaps when this battle is finally over, Mr Al-Fayed might consider spending his Sundays on a soap box in Hyde Park. I'm sure one-man-and-his-dog and a shifty-looking girl with a Nikon would be happy to listen. But he should watch what he says in front of the man in the funny blue hat - Marylebone cop-shop is mere steps away.