The others caught a few tiny fish but nothing to take home and put over the fireplace.
Today we went fishing and hired a long-tailed boat. No, I didn't catch anything. But the lake was beautiful , ringed with mountains and dotted with floating islands of water hyacinth. I saw egret, a kingfisher and several kinds of heron. I don't know the names and will look them up back in the UK. Also saw a snake swimming by.
The others caught a few tiny fish but nothing to take home and put over the fireplace.
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On Saturday I went with Viv to see Stockhausen's Mittwoch Aus Licht in Birmingham. You can read the LRB review for details. It was the first time the opera had been performed in its entirety, and tickets for the four days it was on had sold out almost as soon as they were released. I have to thank Viv's persistence that we got tickets at all, despite having signed up for the mailing list ages ago. Unlike the pleasant and amiable John Cage Stockhausen's strange and erratic personality make it often very difficult to know if he is being funny, derisive or just barking mad. I found this performance surprisingly funny, exhilarating and at times almost poignant. It lasted something like eight hours and only the final part -after the camel had sung- seemed to drag, until it finally petered out into something of a fashionable non-ending. The opera is best know for the Helicopter Quartet and though I would like to have been able to see the helicopters circling overhead we had to make do with the video relays. You can watch a recording of it, and the Guardian review, here. I came away wondering what Stockhausen would have made of the performance and the carnival atmosphere of the whole opera. I decided that though he would have approved of the quality of the sound, video and the technical side of things - and the Camel! - I think he would have been less pleased with some of the low tech solutions to problems presented in the libretto. It would be interesting to see a different director tackling the opera. Though I would like a long break before seeing the whole thing again. In my opinion eight hours is a long time for any opera. Despite the fact that there were those so enamoured they had attended all four performances. I also found it strange to feel the music now sounded so conventional, even accessible. Something that would have seemed almost unimaginable in the 1950s and early 60s. Nevertheless some of the critics still seemed to miss the point and continued to try and detach the music from the performance and environment; so a review of the Helicopter Quartet talked only of the music without even mentioning the helicopters themselves thus making the piece totally meaningless. The varying sounds of the rotors being as essential to the work as the other musical instruments. So what small reservations I had did not detract in any way from the enjoyment of such and extraordinary event, the performance and music. Even after eight hours the audience were still smiling and left humming some of the most catchy numbers. Stockhausen, who'd have thought it? I know a few archeologists and archeological camp followers and hangers on.
And what a dull bunch they are! Almost all of them are are only interested in British or European archeology, and every single one prefers the trowel and brush to bulldozer and explosives. I have been trying to persuade them all that Europe is a dead end, all the history has already dug up and all that remains are a few pots and bones. Even the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard is mostly a mess of broken fragments that when melted down would hardly cover the expense of digging them up. To do real archeology you have to head East and it was with some delight at being proved right that I read that finally the lost civilization of Atlantis has been discovered in northern Thailand, As mentioned earlier I am now re-reading Sen's Development as Freedom, as the first time I just skimmed the book looking for certain passages useful for my essays. It makes interesting reading coming immediately after Imagined Communities and the concepts of nationalism, development and freedom discussed by Benedict Anderson. Here in the West it is hard to imagine how emotive the idea of freedom can be in countries that have suffered colonialism and subsequent authoritarian rule. In Indonesia merdeka still has the power to arouse strong emotion and the flag still symbolises the struggle for independence, even for for the current generation growing up in the 21st Century. Sen believes that inequality, poor education lack of public health services and economic poverty negate freedom, and he points out in some areas of the USA life expectancy, usually among black people, is less than in many developing countries. This raises some interesting questions about the degree of non-freedom (there seems to be no appropriate word in English that is neither to strong or too vague.) we are prepared to tolerate for our economic well being. Just recently, apart from the continuing wars in Syria and elsewhere, there have been three issues concerning different kinds of freedoms that have made the news headlines; the freedom to choose an assisted death, the Sun's freedom to print the Harry pictures, and TrapWire. This last issue of public surveillance has not yet caused much public indignation, perhaps because the majority of people are willing to give up a good deal of privacy to combat the perceived threats of crime and terrorism. But the new technologies are creating new forms of freedom and un-freedom. Things have changed a good deal since the book was first published in 1999, particularly the rise of the internet and social media as tools for freedom. The game is changing dramatically. Correction. I have passed on reports that the Indians were building an exact replica of Angkor Wat - only bigger! - but it seems that this is not actually the case; as this report in the Indian Express explains. It will not only be bigger but better Teeth are a bore. I broke the crown off one of mine this evening and now have an irritating sharp piece of metal sticking out the remaining stump. I have to go to see the dentist in a week or so, but don't think I can afford more than a cheap patch up job. I can see why people used to have the lot out and replace them with wooden teeth or a nice mixed set taken from battlefield dead. I am proud of my wild back yard, a tangle of briar, vine like climbers and flowering plants. Look at my roses! Of all my plants the rose bush has proved the fastest grower and given the most extravagant flowers. Flowers only rivalled by the small hibiscus that has been flowering continuously for weeks now on my bedroom windowsill. Last night I watched a Cambodian thriller Vanished. The linked review is rather generous I think, but then as a very low budget, home grown, movie I think it deserves some generosity, and it would be unfair to compare it even with films from countries like Thailand and indonesia which have well established film studios. I was pleased that I was able to pick out some of the very few Khmer words I have now learned. It was reassuring to find my pronunciation was not too bad and the language is more intelligible than it appears on first looking at a text book or hearing a tape. It is hard to imagine that Cambodia will soon be my new home and already Britain feels a little lonely as i think of saying goodbye to old friends and family once again. At the weekend I took the Morris Minor to Birmingham and picked up some friends of Viv's from the station. There was much reminiscence and gossip that I'd like to include, especially as a certain scientific celeb was mentioned, but I am sworn to secrecy, alas. You will have to read the autobiography. I have finished Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. It was very thought provoking and readable. Perhaps because it was not originally written as an academic text I found I could race through it after the laborious Cambridge histories. One thing annoyed me however, and that was the fact that some lengthy quotes in foreign languages were not translated. It seems rather arrogant to assume all your readers have a knowledge of French, German and Spanish. French I can get by in but I know more Cambodian than I do German. But there were plenty of footnotes and it was far less frustrating to read than the Cambridge History of SEA. My next book is Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom, another book it is almost obligatory to quote at SOAS and that I did not have time to read fully. After that I move on the classic Clifford Geetz, Religion in Java. When that's finished I will have completed the books I really wanted to read when I had enough time, though there are still a few histories I want to revisit later on. By the way if you don't want your guilty secrets to be revealed, in great and intimate detail, in pages my autobiography please get in touch and we can arrange a waiver fee. I am already in negotiations with the current Earl of Lonsdale and Ms. G MC. among others. So don't expect a speedy reply.... Madison. And the rest of you. But the young ones don't care, they put all their shame up on Facebook, as if it was something to be proud of. Still there are some secrets that might embarrass even the Facebookettes. Isn't that so? My fee for exclusion is not unreasonable and I am always open to negotiation. Here I am back in NuL after my visit to Kit. It had been a strange few days of visiting old haunts where we used to go and play when he was just a young goat. The safe bits of dangerous places like the vast open sands of the Bay at low tide, the first few yards into the labyrinth of caves beneath the hills, the hidden valleys of the moorlands. Somehow the reality of the past disappears when your parents die and the visible, living, connection is gone. The past then becomes just memory. There are friends and children but these have come later, they are not rooted in your live but more like offshoots and branches. It is odd that the past seems to me now more like a book and not a film or photograph album. It is written in text; a text that has to be re-imagined every time the book is opened, so unlike a collection of pictures the images are never the same. So the visit to Lancaster was not just about visiting old familiar places but more about visiting places for the first time and catching fleeting glimpses of something vaguely familiar and half forgotten, but never being quite sure about what it was no matter how hard I tried to recall the memory. The final walk was on the hills behind Clougha Pike on the way to the Ward Stone. This is all grouse moor and was once the largests area of open country in England until an unsurfaced road (no planning permission needed) was made to allow the grouse shooters to reach the hides without having to walk more than a few feet from their Range Rovers. But the road and the WW1 bunker like line of hides still only covers a small part of the moors, and the view remains pretty much the same. To the south lies the bowl of the Trough of Bowland and surrounding fells, to the north the Loon Valley, while east and west lie Ingleborough and the Pennines and the glittering expanse of Morecambe Bay. We reached the watershed of the ridge, but didn't continue the last few hundred yards to the Stone, we sat a while instead and watched the sun set across the Bay. This morning I read an online piece by Naomi Wolf about the growth of surveillance technology. The article was pretty much what you would expect from Naomi Wolf but I was surprised by the number of comments in favour of greater surveillance and expressing a fear of petty crime and, of course paedophiles. Paedophilia and sex crimes apart. (I cannot help but think that these have been deliberately politicised rather than being considered as psychological problems, so it is hard to discuss them objectively.) I have come to feel that the petty criminal actually plays a valuable role in any healthy society. It is not pleasant, to say the least, to be mugged, burgled or threatened, but neither is it pleasant to break an arm or a leg playing rugby, hang-gliding or any other sport or activity with a risk of physical harm, or to experience any other nasty incidents that will inevitably befall us at some time in our lives. A tolerance for a low level of petty crime is part of the price we pay for freer and less repressive government. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the poorer communities suffer a disproportionate amount of petty crime. I argue that it needs to be democratically spread throughout society. No one should be able to afford to live in a community without an aggressive drunk or disaffected teenage graffiti vandal. I somehow feel that it is from putting up with these people that we learn the virtues of tolerance and simple kindness. They sometimes need support and encouragement too. So once a week go out of the house and leave the front door open and a can of spray paint on your doorstep. I am less sure about the glorification of the big criminals and am certainly against romanticising the Kray Twins or Al Capone and such like, but political 'criminals' are different and one of my heroes has always been Sabate (El Quico) and despite everything I do have a soft spot for Salvatore Giuliano; though I suspect he was more a Jaques Mesrine than a Robin Hood. Learning Cambodian is a slow process and I have only just managed to remember the words for but and train. I had thought that learning the word for train was a waste of time as there are no railways in Cambodia, but then I read that a new line of Royal Cambodian Railways may be opening in 2013 and came across the Bamboo Railway and discovered norries. So for all the trainspotters who read these pages I end with this video. It's a long time since Kit and I went for a tramp on the moors. Luckily we did not see any tramps yesterday, when we went back to visit Ease Gill Kirk, on the limestone hills near Kirkby Lonsdale. I found walking over tussocks, cassocks and cossacks much harder going than I had remembered. In my memory this was no more than a stroll. I have allowed myself to become really unfit since I returned from Indonesia and finished at SOAS. That along with the twins, age and decay. The day was humid and grey and the sun could only be glimpsed slanting down to silver the twisting river Loon far away in the broad valley below. Neverthess, it was still a beautiful day; a pair of stone chat circled high above us. So high we could barely hear the distinctive lonely liquid trill of their song. Flitting among the heather we glimpsed flashes of the brilliant, and unmistakeable, iridescent scarlet and blue plumage of the tussock warbler. A sight that has lifted the spirits of many a rambler on these desolate and lonely hills. Sometimes a sharp eyed walker is lucky enough to pick up a fallen feather to decorate his cap, or take home to make the famous grout fly; irresistable to the shy brown mountain trout. We parked at the cavers' house at the head of the road and took the path that led down past the dark and sinister Bull Pot of the Witches before climbing up over a ridge and down to the dry stream bed of Ease Gill. In search of the dry waterfall that is the 'kirk' we followed the stony course of the gill, and struggled over heather, through shoulder high bracken, stung by nettles, bitten by midges and scratched by the treacherous thorns of the snatchberry that grows in dense clumps in the shelter of these valleys. Such delicious fruit for a thirsty traveller; if one is brave enough to risk the thorns. At last we climbed down into the green shadows of the dark bowl that is Ease Gill Kirk. Kit climbed into the 'pulpit' while I searched for caves. Beneath these hills is hidden one of the longest systems of caves and potholes in the country. The caving here is only for serious and well equipped cavers and after a few hundred feet it is usually a matter of lying down and wriggling through narrow twisting tunnels that seem no larger than a rabbit hole, After picnicing on peaches and bananas we climbed out of the valley and found a level and secluded stretch of hillside where we could shoot arrows. Kit has not used his bow for ages and it was fun to take it out again and aim for the usual targets; balloons tied down with a grass stem.
This time Kit was rusty, but I proved I still had not lost the old skill with bow and arrow. If only I had been called I could have shown those Koreans a thing or two. It was early dusk as we tramped back over the hill. The clouds had begun to break up and bright shafts of late evening sunlight shone through and lit the path ahead. The birds had stopped singing and all was calm and silent, except for the distant screech of a fitch-badger calling to her cubs. Always an eerie and haunting sound at twilight. We stopped and shuddered a moment before quickening our pace homeward. I'm back up in Lancaster staying with Kit again. On Friday after the shop closed we went for a picnic in the public hide at Leighton Moss, as we used to do all those years ago when my bookshop was still going. Leighton Moss is famous for its bitterns, marsh harriers and otters. You often hear the booming call of the bitterns in Spring but they are so well camouflaged you rarely see them.
When we entered the hide was crowded but as dusk came on people gradually drifted away until we had the hide to ourselves to picnic in. There were swans and mallard out on the water and a heron fishing along the edge of the reeds. A marsh harrier circled around lake and we were lucky enough to see a spoonbill fly overhead. I assumed it was an egret until the man next to me, with a camera lens the size of a howitzer, recognised it as a spoonbill. And as it came closer we could see the distinctive spoon shaped tip of its beak. This was the first I have seen in the UK. As the sun lowered over the low hills and tinged the scattered clouds with pink, little egrets came in to roost on a dead tree on the far side of the lake. Alone and in pairs they drifted in until there were a dozen or more. Their white plumage shining clear bright in the fading sun light. When Kit was small no egrets had come this far north and they were not yet a common sight on the south coast. Now, we had been told, sometimes as many as one hundred come to roost at Leighton Moss. On Saturday night we went up into the hills to see the Perseid meteor shower but the sky was too cloudy, only a few stars peeped through and the dim shape of the moon glowed low in the distance. We gave it about half an hour before the cold night wind blowing in from the bay forced us back into the car. I'm trying to learn a little Cambodian, but unlike Indonesian there are few recognisable words from Hindi, Arabic and the European languages so far. Except, 'sra-bier' for beer, lit. 'wine-beer'; taksi, and the words for cheese and butter that have come from French. The words often don't make easy mnemonics, and so just now, I'm having trouble remembering the Khmer (Cambodian) for train and bus. The written language I'm leaving for now, as roman script seems to be commonly used in signs and shops. The number system is base five and nice and easy to remember, except I am so used to base ten that I have to stop myself from automatically counting six as eleven. Today is Sunday and I am having a lazy day, but suspect that at any moment Kit will ask me to use the car take a load of rubbish to the local tip. That seems to happen wherever I go. In the past I have often praised the Aeropress coffee maker Kit gave me: this morning however I have been wondering if it had not been part of a clever long plot of his as the bloody thing exploded. When I came to make my second cup of coffee of the morning and eagerly plunged down the plunger in my hurry I had not correctly tightened the base and hot coffee exploded, covering both me and my kitchen. The was a culinary disaster that will rank alongside the other two great culinary disasters of my life. Neither was my fault. 1) Robin Rowley exploding a rotten egg in the kitchen of the flat in Manchester. 2) Dill exploding a tin of condensed milk in the kitchen in Liverpool. The coffee incident, serious as it was, comes in a poor third, as only myself and the floors and walls were splattered with coffee. I have not noticed any on the ceiling... yet. In defence of the Aeropress method I should say that despite this mornings shocking incident I still don't hesitate to endorse this product, as they say. It makes a damn fine cup of coffee. I have started to read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, a book I frequently referred to while I was at SOAS but never got around to reading from start to finish. Put very simply, its main thesis is the similarity of nationalism and religious belief. Previously nationalism had been considered as a political idea and Imagined Communities became essential reading for international history, and development studies students. After the Cambridge histories the more relaxed style with plenty of footnotes comes as a welcome relief, and I no longer wish for an electronic version to check all the references. During the Olympics © is a good time to be thinking about nationalism, because I can think of fewer more explicit celebrations of nationalism than the Olympic Games ©. I can't help thinking that the combination of commercialism and nationalism is rather distasteful and detracts from the real achievements of of the athletes. Has there been any coverage of the smaller, poorer countries who have fielded medal winning teams? The fact that only wealthy countries can host the games doesn't seem in the spirit of the Games either. It would be so much better if everyone chipped in so any country could benefit from hosting the Games: like Cambodia or Gabon. Or Andorra, if everyone could fit in. There is also the perennial dispute about the chosen sports, and I have to admit that these do seem to favour the western nations. Where are kabaddi, tejo, sepak or buzkashi? All great spectator sports.Look at the video above and tell me truthfully where you would rather be. I would like to add a few suggestions of my own that would make the Olympics © fairer for everyone and more interesting to watch. The 100 metres Burqa Race. This would give the women's teams from Islamic nations a better chance. The Blowpipe. Allowing archery but not blowpipes discriminates against Dyaks and other blow pipe users. Spitting. Everyone spits and no specialised equipment is needed. One of the few truly democratic sports. That is just a selection of three. I would be interested to hear your own selections of new Olympic © sports. I didn't mention that after my expedition with Kit we went to a good ol' country jam session at a nearby lancaster pub. Kit took an accordion, but country is not his usual style. Naturally, this led to a discussion about Cajun and Zydeco music and eventually to The Mayor of Bayou Pon Pon. For those of you who have never heard the story of the eagle and the crawfish, I'll leave you with this, and then get back to learning basic Khmer phrases. I'm spending the weekend with Kit. Claire is away for a couple of weeks so I thought I would visit and make sure he did not starve or burn the house down. The first thing he did was show me his new rats, and the first thing one of the new rats did was sink its teeth into my finger. Blood spurted in the way it does in the goriest horror films. By the time the fountain died down I must have lost at least a couple of litres of the stuff. I think I feel the onset of Weil's disease, or leptospirosis. Rats get nicer as they get older. This principle probably applies to all living creatures. Humans and rats, certainly. Kit has an old arthritic and half blind rat called Wilbur. You would be pushed to meet a pleasanter animal than Wilbur. Unlike the rascally young rats he would never dream of biting or nipping. Yesterday as the shop was closed we went for a walk in the country. I won't bother with a description as it is well known that a picture is worth.... ... whatever the current exchange rate is. Before signing off, I would like to remind my readers that it essential to be properly dressed and equipped before setting off for any walk in the British countryside.
The most useful phrases first!
Cambodia has suddenly become a lot closer. The school needs: white board markers, whiteboard duster, stickers, black board dusters, chalk, pens, pencils, erasers, stick it notes. These can be bought locally but books would be very helpful and I'm going to ask you all to look out for children's books and easy readers, picture and other dictionaries and so on. It would also be very helpful if you passed this information on as publicity is also important. The schools need volunteers, so let all your teacher friends know and anyone you think might be interested in volunteering. Should you, or anyone you know, be interested in volunteering, please ask them to contact me first. I expect every one of you to at least sponsor a pencil for one of my students. You may chose the scale of hardness. |
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