Thursday, March 06, 2008

 

Guten Tag

Being tagged by Cliff means having to reveal one of my many odd habits. I confess that whereas my loved one spends hours sensibly researching our next trip abroad, I leave home knowing virtually nothing about our destination. I know I'll be envious of the head start he'll have when we arrive, but I can't touch a country until it touches me. This means I'll be reading on the homeward flight what he'll have read on the outbound flight. All this is to explain why I'm often reading a book about a country that isn't the one I'm in and why I'm sitting in the sunshine in Morocco this week reading a book called In Siberia. But, a country can touch me through its personalities and Russia weaved its magic on me while reading about some of the most famous and infamous of them.

So, sentences six, seven and eight of page 123 of In Siberia reads:

During the fourth night, at some sad village, a Polish priest embarked. He was the first Westerner I had seen for a month: an elderly man, lean and self-sure. He sat in a vestibule on the lower deck, where passengers loitered to watch him, and rifled through a portfolio of papers oblivious to them.

You may not think that's terribly interesting but wait till you read the extract from my next book. Now that I've been in Morocco long enough to be touched by it, I've started to read a library book called Morocco. It's as dry and dusty as the nearby desert and the writer must have worked really hard to produce such a boring book from such rich material. Still, it's perfect bedtime reading - guaranteed to send you to sleep after only three sentences.

Some became consular agents, except for countries that had very little or virtually no trade at all. Some even naturalised as Europeans, to claim extra-territorial rights permanently and pass those rights on to their children. Yet others took service with the flood of European merchants and then claimed extra territorial rights on their own behalf.

Wake up! There's still one to go.

This is from Letters Home by Fergal Keane - reflecting on the last violent years of our century with articles and broadcasts about Rwanda, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. We heard him speak at the Hay Festival and he comes across as someone not only committed to fair and accurate reporting but who's been genuinely affected by the horror of all he's seen.

That night in my bedroom in the Ibis Hotel I listen to one of those great Rwandan rainstorms and afterwards the chorus of the tree frogs and crickets. They reach a crescendo just before dawn, a sound from a million years ago, full of swamp and fecundity. It is the sound of the world beginning.

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