At The Fringes of Belief

I have great respect for the positive influence of Buddhism in Thailand.

Buddhism is a fine personal philosophy and the temple in our village in Isaan along with the school is an institution of huge importance in holding together an agricultural community under considerable strain.

In the modern world Buddhism is much threatened by an opposing religion, namely materialism, and it often falls short of the ideal. Its focus for example on building more and gaudier temples is contrary to the essence of a simple and ascetic religion and elaborate rituals seem to supplant its true spiritual core.

Nonetheless many young men still see it as an important part of their lives to become a monk even for a short period and this rite of passage is often observed in the villages. Recently a cousin of Cat’s became a monk along with many others and it really was a good party!

We went along to the house and watched as his thick black hair was shaven off to much laughter. Then we all went to the temple and processed around it and of course there was loud music, food and drink for the rest for the day. All was sanuk as it usually is!

Buddhism has always had to coexist with older beliefs such as animism and spirit worship and, in the absence of the jealous god of the mono-theistic religions, it tolerates them remarkably well. The result is a tangle of rituals and practices where the elements of the different beliefs become intermingled and indistinguishable. The monks regularly participate in ceremonies that are far more animist in content than they are Buddhist.

At the fringes of belief the monks thus bless amulets for sale at high prices, provide lucky numbers for the lottery and take part in the ancient rites of blessing a new house or car. Very worldly they sometimes seem.

And people often turn to the monks when they fall sick.

Cat’s Mama suffers from a painfully stiff knee. She’s had it examined at a hospital in Bangkok who say nothing can be done but when conventional medicine fails, like everyone else, she’ll try the alternatives. She’s recently been told of a temple not far away where there’s a monk who has special powers of healing and sells strong medicines and she’s asked us to take her there. The visit proved very interesting.

We drove for an hour or so and when we got there it wasn’t like approaching a traditional Buddhist temple at all. The place was more like a shanty town with a few permanent buildings surrounded by shacks of corrugated iron and cardboard. Literally hundreds of elderly people were lying around on the ground under tarpaulins being fanned by their relatives in the oppressive heat. These were the sick and dying who’d come to seek out the famous monk for a last chance cure.

There were old people bent double on sticks with terrible disfigurements and skin diseases, deranged old folk jabbering wildly and the aged struggling in the throes of death. It was like a medieval picture of hell.

Just as we arrived, there was a big commotion, everyone running round and shouting, their attention focused on a big pond. Someone had just tried to drown themselves.

After they’d all calmed down and dispersed, I walked over to the pond. I think they’d been bathing because spread around on the banks were clothes and sarongs strewn around in abandon , the tattered residue of desperate humanity. This must be how it looks at the scene of a genocide.

I’m not sure how you define poverty but the condition I saw people in that day looked as desperate as it gets. To be old and sick and to come here as a last resort exemplified poverty for me as strongly as I’ve ever seen it, whether in Africa, India or elsewhere.

Yet for these people the monk and his temple represented hope and so some benefit must come of it. In the West we have access to modern medicine but we now also accept the importance of alternative, holistic and herbal medicines. This was what seemed to be on offer at the temple.

I watch as a group of evidently sick people sit in a group in the blazing sun close by the monk’s verandah. At last he comes out and chanting loudly begins tipping buckets of water over their heads. Then they turn towards him and he throws water hard into their faces. They sit and wait and the ones who can walk go up to him. Taking a mouthful of water from a plastic cup, he then spits it over them before they walk away shuddering with cold.

One family arrives in a large Toyota Vigo pickup, top of the range with alloy wheels and a Bangkok registration. They help their old Papa out of the front seat. He can hardly walk and they half drag him to the monk who performs the same rituals. Money changes hands and they leave with their bag full of medicines.

Cat’s Mama stays dry thank goodness but buys potions from the monk which she later swears are highly effective in helping the pain in her bad knee. It wasn’t particularly cheap and for less money I’ve been treated by a specialist at a top Bangkok hospital. With hundreds of sick constantly in attendance at the temple, the takings for medicines must thus be substantial.

The Thai government provides treatment in small hospitals in every town and they look clean and well managed. Other than a nominal thirty baht fee, treatment is free. Like all public health systems this one isn’t perfect but it seems to provide a reasonably good service and so people are not unprovided for.

So where does this now leave the traditional healers such as the Buddhist monks? They still have an important role to play, though I’m a bit sceptical about those who work on the fringes of medicine wherever they may be. But then placebos really do work and perhaps it's the holy men who offer the strongest ones.

Mama certainly wants to go back again to the temple when her medicine finally runs out and I guess I'll have to take her!

Oh Blogger!

A bit over a year ago I didn't know what a blog was. Then Philip and Vera visited us in our village eight hours out of Bangkok and the trouble started.

Philip said he could set up a blog for me in a few minutes before dinner and he did. Cat kept calling that the food was ready and I was madly trying to decide what to call the blog and I came up with something pretty silly. Then Vera told me to be careful I didn't get too obsessive about blogging and oh blogger, she was right.

Now the blog's just had a total of 50,000 hits and writing it provoked me into finishing and publishing MY THAI GIRL AND I which is now on Asia Books' bestseller list.

And there's another amazing new listing of blogs about Thailand just come on line. If you go to www.thai-stars.com you'll find THAI GIRL rated in the mid-thirties.

Push me up please! Click on a ten and give me a boost please! Obsession should have its rewards.

Cat's English Club

When last year Cat built a big wooden house down the garden while I was away in England, I asked her why she’d made its verandah so huge.

‘It’s because I want to run a school,’ she said, as irrepressible and zany as ever. I had little idea what she was talking about but I’ve since found out.

I wanted to write about the school as a last chapter to my new book, MY THAI GIRL AND I, but I realized that if I did, new events would keep making the book longer and longer. I just had to stop somewhere and publish the book. So I mentioned it briefly in the epilogue and now have the chance to tell the story in full.

Cat calls it her English Club and that’s exactly what it is. From time to time she’s had a number of children around to learn English before but now it’s become quite a big thing. Every weekday after the school day finishes twelve kiddies aged about nine to twelve arrive and sit down and chat excitedly on the verandah floor. Then teacher Cat appears and they all fall silent. This is serious stuff!

Then she teaches intensively for about three hours, both written and spoken English. It’s a very long day for them but they love every minute of it. She’s bought eight of those low school tables that Thai children use, a white board and various pictures and teaching aids, but the biggest teaching aid of all is a real live native-speaking farang.

Yes, I’ve been doing my half an hour or so and it’s been fun. Concentrating on oral English and pronunciation, I’ve usually arrived with a rucksack full of things like cups and spoons and toys and I pull them out and show them to the kids.

‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a…’ I drill again and again. Eventually something sinks in and they’ve really learned quite a lot.

It looks professional too, a full thirty hour course with a proper invoice issued, a school outing to the lake where we all ate and swam and with certificates of completion nicely printed and handed out at the end of term dinner.

What quite impressed me was that the kids were not all from our village and the parents delivered them and collected them on their motorbikes. Cat is at last realizing her dream even in a small way of being a teacher and she’s much in demand.

When term had ended at the local school, she then began a second course for younger children in the school break. As it was getting much hotter, a cooler place to teach was our own concrete house. The main room downstairs is huge and again was perfect for the purpose.

This time I found them harder to teach. They were like puppies falling about the place and fighting, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes. It was hard work to keep them engaged. Most of all they loved the two stuffed toys that sat on my knee and talked to each other. One was a dog, an ugly boy who loved the pretty penguin and did the children shriek with laughter at their silly courtship.

It really was fun and having the house full of noisy, happy kids a wonderful tonic for an elderly farang. For Cat too it was rather special, but already there’s something new in her life. She too has just become a full-time student!

What Is Matt?

The crowd passes our gate during the Songkhran New Year water festival

Vanity of vanities! This is to tell you two things.

Firstly my new book, MY THAI GIRL AND I is on Asia Books' bestseller list. Amazing!

More importantly, for anyone interested in Thailand there's a great new on-line listing of the top hundred blogs about the Kingdom.

If you go to www.whatismatt.com/top100/ you'll find them listed on a combination of Page Rank, Technorati (WhatisTechnorati?!) and user votes. (Or click on the link to the right and at his home page click 'Top 100'.)

So if you've enjoyed my blog, please vote for THAI GIRL! Scroll down to find THAI GIRL and click on the fifth star! The traffic on this blog is not massive so, just like Hillary, I need your votes.

Vanities apart, the Top 100 is an excellent listing and I have found some fascinating and useful sites about Thailand that I didn't know existed.

Matt himself is a young Englishman who was working in Bangkok but has now escaped to Phuket where he is a freelance journalist. The byeline on his very popular blog is 'The Lost Boy'. Matt is a fan of the late singer songwriter, Nick Drake. Sometime ago there was a documentary about Nick which was called 'The Lost Boy', hence the name.

Matt was intrigued when I told him that Nick was my childhood friend and that on the new CD of his early recordings called 'Family Tree' one of the essays about Nick in the sleeve notes is by none other than me.

Cat's Building Yet Again!

Life goes on as usual in the village and true to form Cat’s been building yet again. This time it’s a chicken house.

To be honest I’m not that keen on keeping chickens. I’m constantly cleaning up their mess from the verandah and shooing them off the table in the kitchen. And they scratch the leaves from under the bushes in the garden and I spend my life raking it all up again. Not to mention thoughts of avian flu!

On top of that I’m also ambivalent about having a personal relationship with the protein I eat, though I’d as easily stop Cat producing food as Canute held back the tide.

So now there are chickens everywhere.

When recently I came back to the village from Bangkok after doing the design work for my new book, “My Thai Girl and I”, I soon noticed something strange by the side of the fish pond. Thankfully Cat had never put pigs in the pig house that came free when we bought the pond, though I knew she had designs on it.

The strange thing was that on my return the pig house had gone. It wasn’t there by the pond any more.

‘Why did you knock down the pig house?’ I ask Cat accusingly.

‘I didn’t. It disappear!’ she tells me.

Apparently nobody saw it go. Nobody heard the clash of rusty corrugated iron or the thud of hammers tearing the woodwork apart. It had been spirited away by persons unknown.

Cat too was shocked to see it gone so she went to see the neighbours who’d sold us the pond. It was all smiles as usual and no, they knew nothing about it. They couldn’t explain it at all and had no idea who had taken it.

It was strange though, as Cat pointed out to them, that all the timber and iron from the pig sty was right there, dumped in a heap by their house.

They couldn’t explain this either they said, but since it wasn’t included in the sale and was theirs anyway, they weren’t going to give it back to her. It was a very Thai confrontation, like angry ducks paddling fast on the pond but making as few ripples as possible.

It took a visit from the police to persuade them that as a buyer of land takes anything affixed to it, they now had to tip it over the fence back onto our patch. Which is where I saw it in an untidy heap when I got back from Bangkok.

There could be something else behind all this of course, though I have to accept her story at face value as Cat is as the sole modem between me and the unfathomable web of smiles and intrigue that makes Thailand so constantly amazing.

The upshot is that we now have an ugly pile of old old building materials, which isn’t a problem as Cat wants to build a chicken house. The rainy season is coming and unless the chickens have shelter they’ll often sicken and die.

She now takes on the two of the frailest old men she can find and in a few days they create for her a new chicken house from the recycled pig sty and the bamboos they cut from nearby. It stands on the banks of the pond, has an upstairs for roosting and a steeply pitched roof. Unfortunately the roof is approximately eighty percent corrugated iron and twenty percent hole, so she’s going to have to put on some rustic grass roofing panels as well.

With the chicken house now almost complete, we drive in to Sangkha market to buy pork and vegetables as she’s going to do a Mongolian barbecue to celebrate. You may not pay your workers in gold but instead you entertain them to good food and an ample supply of lao khao, a white rice whisky which at forty percent is well worth a day’s work.

Cat has the little round barbecue glowing hot and the thin slices of pork are cooked on the aluminium dome which is placed over the top. We’re at the bottom of the ‘garden’ by the wooden house sitting under the grass roofed shelters that have recently become a regular living space. The great thing about cooking outside and eating on an earth floor is that you don’t have to clean up afterwards. All is organic as it should be and the dogs see to it that nothing’s ever wasted.

The two old men are sitting under the thatch with a big bottle in front of them. It’s half empty but also half full and while gentlemen prefer blondes and the devil wears Prada, I’m quite partial to a tot or three cheap rice whisky. So I help them to finish it off before we buy another bottle.

Still sober I’m humbled by the immensity of the heavens as we eat, the stars sharp pinpricks in the inky blackness. Then, as the alcohol sears its way down my throat, I find myself at its very centre, the hub round which the universe revolves. This is my rightful place in the world and it’s mine, all mine!

The alcohol mellows my senses but also intensifies them. The heat is thick, the sweat pricking at my brows, my clothes clinging to the interstices. The wet blanket of the night envelops us and the scream of the insects is raucous and intrusive.

I’m now definitely under the influence, the world has become benign and I no longer care about the dust and chaos around me. The two old farmers next to me are my best mates, though we have nothing in common and can hardly communicate.

But suddenly we can understand each other with a few choice words. The conversation isn’t profound but so what. Maybe it’s better that way.

‘Muang Thai sanuk mai?’ they ask me. Thailand’s fun, is it?

‘Sanuk’ I say sagely. ‘Chawp maak!’

Yes, living in Thailand is fun. I do like it. I’ve got a new hen house, it isn’t cold and my brain’s comfortably soggy with the glow of lao khao.

We can’t celebrate having a new chicken house like this every night but Cat won’t ever stop building so there’ll be more feasts and celebrations to come. Not that the Thais ever need an excuse for one anyway!

"My Thai Girl and I" At Last It's Out!

I can hardly believe that in my hand I'm holding a book of 250 pages with 115 photographs that's all about the five years I've lived in Thailand with Cat. Writing about myself is the last thing I'd choose to do, but really it's about her, her village, her country. They are my inspiration.

I started writing it when we'd been together about two years. I went back to my diaries and I racked my brains but it wasn't difficult as I had a vivid recall of the many special experiences we'd shared together. I wanted to write about Isaan, the dry North East of Thailand where we live among the rice fields and that's exactly what I've done.

I hope it's funny and I hope it's fair. I hope that it portrays the agonies and the ecstacies of reinventing oneself and finding a new life in a context I could never before have imagined I'd find myself in. And it's about a very special relationship and of building bridges across our vast differences of culture and age.

So how hard is it to retire in Thailand in the bosom of a Thai family and to find happiness then? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out!

I loved every moment of the writing but the final editing and proof reading, creating the book itself has been hard work. I've twice travelled nine hours to Bangkok, the first time spending seventeen days there dealing with all the work of design and production.

My designer Khun Nont, a Thai fluent in both English and German was unbelievably patient and we sat at his computer for no less than fifty hours, doing the design and typesetting, piecing every photo into the page so that it directly related to the adjacent text. My eyes are still sore.

The book is distributed throughout Thailand by ASIA BOOKS who have given me an enormous amount of their time and been so very helpful. They now have 1,200 copies in shops round Thailand which means that if there's an average of four copies in each, it's for sale in 300 outlets which is amazing. Even so if it's not in your book shop, get them to order it from www.asiabooks.com or go direct to their customer services by email.

I'm now back home again in the village and am sending out a few press releases in the hope of some reviews. The most difficult thing is writing a blurb about one's own book but I've tried and I've pasted in the PRESS RELEASE below to see what you say about it.

Cat's not qute sure what she thinks about people reading about our life together. I'm not too sure either but I've gone and done it and we're now about to find out. This is the first publicity for the book but, like dropping a coin down a deep well, I don't really expect anything much to happen at all.

Only time will tell!


PRESS RELEASE

“My Thai Girl and I” by Andrew Hicks

This new book about the author’s life in Thailand has been distributed by Asia Books to bookshops and outlets throughout Thailand as from early April 2008.

Written by Andrew Hicks, author of the best selling novel, “Thai Girl”, it is expected to sell to readers looking for an accessible story about expat life that also informs about the local culture and living in rural Thailand.


Review Copies are available on request to… arhicks56@hotmail.com .

See also www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com
www.thaigirl2004.com.

The author will be pleased to assist with any interview, media review or feature about the book.

ISBN 978-974-9898-90-1 250 pages including 8 colour pages with 20 photographs and 95 monochrome photographs in the text.


The Blurb on the Back Cover

“This is how I met Cat, a ‘Thai girl’ half my age and how we set up home together in her village out in the rice fields of North Eastern Thailand.
I’ll tell you of toads in the toilet, of ants’ eggs for breakfast, how we took up frog farming and how I got married without really meaning to.
It’s also a book about the countryside, of the old Thailand where the rhythm of the seasons and belief in the spirits and Buddhism remain strong.
Though how could I, a greying English lawyer, ever fit into the lives of a Thai rice farming family. Can Cat and I with our many differences really be compatible?
If you’re curious to know what it’s like to start a totally new life as I did, to slow down and ‘go with the flow’, I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading the story of ‘my Thai girl and I’.”


Five Brief Reviews of the Book for Free Publication

This new book tells the story of how the author, a former law professor set up home in an Isaan village with a rice farmer’s daughter half his age. With all their incompatibilities and the many problems of adapting to rural life, how could such a relationship ever succeed. A funny and engaging tale, it shows that anything is possible if Andrew throws off his cultural assumptions and learns to go with the flow.

Available at Asia Books and Bookazine and all good bookshops. Price 450 baht.


****

There are many ‘culture shock’ handbooks written for foreigners settling in Thailand but another way to get an authentic flavour of living in the Kingdom is to read a new book just released called, “My Thai Girl and I”. Written by Andrew Hicks, author of the successful novel, “Thai Girl”, it describes how he met his Thai wife Cat and how they set up home together in her village in the North East of Thailand.

The many lessons to be learned are amusingly told, that smiles can mean a thousand things, that yes can sometimes mean no and nothing is ever what it seems. Building a new house involves a thousand crises and compromises and running a thirty year old jeep can turn into a nightmare.

Lavishly illustrated, this is the story of five years in the lives of two people who are as different as can be but offer each other the same thing, namely a totally new start in life. For the author, an older man used to the comforts of city living, there are many lessons to be learned and moving to live in the real rural Thailand presents many challenges.

How Andrew coped with these challenges, struggled with his own cultural assumptions and learned ‘to go with the flow’ will amuse and enlighten those who long for a slower way of life and contemplate retirement in Thailand.
At Asia Books and all good bookshops throughout Thailand. Price 450 baht.


****

In many Isaan villages the ageing farang resident married to a local girl has become a familiar sight. It’s hard though to imagine the reality of these unusual relationships, but a new book now gives the inside story. In “My Thai Girl and I”, Andrew Hicks, author of the best selling novel, “Thai Girl” tells how he met his Thai wife, Cat and how they set up home together in her village in Isaan.

He describes the tortuous business of building a house, of maintaining a thirty year old jeep and all the difficulties of a new life in a very rural environment. How could a sixty year old former corporate lawyer possibly come to grips with the volcanic local food and culture and co-exist with an army of in-laws that he can’t even speak to.

Fully illustrated, “My Thai Girl and I” is a pleasant read that takes the armchair traveler on a quest that is both funny and informative about cross-cultural relationships, the rhythms of the seasons and life in a rice growing village in Surin.

Available from Asia Books, Bookazine and good bookshops throughout Thailand. Published by Konstrukt Books, 450 baht.


****

What’s the story behind the smart new concrete house that’s just been built in a remote village in Isaan? Who’s the tall farang often to be seen drawing wads of money at the ATM in the local town?

A new book, “My Thai Girl and I” now tells the inside story of how one Englishman retired from the rat race and came to accept a much slower way of life with a family of rice farmers in Surin.

Its author, Andrew Hicks tells how he met his Thai wife, Cat and of his culture shock when first she took him to her village. A former corporate lawyer and academic, how would he succeed in adapting to so different a life out in the remote rice fields of Surin?

He tells of the discomforts of living with no bed, no chair, no news of the outside world and with no way to get out of the village except by bicycle. An old Asia hand, he nonetheless finds the local diet of ants eggs and fermented fish spiced up with volcanic chili more than challenging.

The story takes you through five years of his life with Cat and describes the problems of building a house and of keeping a thirty year old jeep on the road and how their relationship confronted the strains and pitfalls of an unusual cross-cultural marriage.

The book thus offers the reader an upbeat and amusing read, with many insights into life for a newcomer to rural Thailand. For Andrew it wasn’t always easy, but ultimately life with his ‘Thai girl’ allowed him to look for a new balance in his life and to learn ‘to go with the flow’.

Fully illustrated, the book is now available at bookshops throughout Thailand. Distributed by Asia Books, price 450 baht.


****

Thailand offers an enticing haven for European men wanting to retire to a warm and welcoming climate and huge numbers seem to be flocking this way. The food is amazing, the cost of living is reasonable and the ladies do really know how to smile. Some of these men succeed in finding happiness but theirs isn’t always an easy path.

In “My Thai Girl and I”, author Andrew Hicks describes some of the pitfalls that can be encountered along the way. Ants eggs for breakfast and toads in the toilet are the least of his troubles and with his energetic wife, Cat, life is a roller coaster as they deal with the stresses of marriage and the cultural gulf that separates them.

After life as a lawyer in London, Hong Kong and Singapore, Andrew finds a small village in Isaan takes some getting used to. He discovers that he’s not only married his wife but her family too, her village even and that their collective way of life is in stark contrast to the individuality of the West.

Andrew describes the problems of building a home, of running a thirty year old jeep and most difficult of all, his isolation from his own world; from world news, family, food, language and culture. How can two people of such differing age and experience possibly make a life together?

The book tells of all the ups and downs of a cross-cultural relationship and, drawing on the humour of the author’s predicament, offers the reader an upbeat and amusing read whose conclusion is distinctly positive.
Available at Asia Books and Bookazine and all bookshops throughout Thailand.
Published by Konstrukt Books, price 450 baht.

Andrew! Leo Die!

The Thai newspapers are often filled with images of utter horror, of accidents, murders and bombings... in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and sometimes much closer to home.

How can people go on with their lives after something like that? I cannot begin to imagine the horror of it all.

Everything is changeable but so far my life has been peaceful and my tragedies have been small. Even so, the story that follows happened many months ago and I have not been able to tell it until now. As I write I feel a tightness in my throat and am reluctant to relive it.

One day I was sitting at my laptop upstairs in our house out in the rice fields when I heard my wife, Cat walking round the side of the house. With no warning she called up to me.

‘Andrew! Leo die!’

My favourite dog is Pepsi and some time earlier she’d presented us with five adorable puppies. Cat wanted to keep one and Leo, a little bundle of trouble then became part of our lives. He was white with comic blobs of black, mischievous and bouncy and a total charmer. When tired, he’d retreat to his basket on the verandah and watch all the goings on, his cute little head poking over the side.

I marvel at the pure magic of a very ordinary dog. He was utter joy. Few things on this earth have such innocence, such appeal as a puppy. I marveled at his intelligence, his zest, his sense of fun.

In so many ways he was just like us, sharing the same experiences of hunger and fear, the same need for warmth, contact, companionship and affection. He was not a lesser being, only different, unaware of being on a mortal conveyer belt that can abruptly reach its end at any time.

‘Andrew! Leo die!’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He couldn’t have died. He’s too young, too healthy, too much a part of us.

I rush out to the verandah and look down and there’s Cat cradling Leo in her arms. He's so still he must be sleeping.

I run downstairs and take him from her. He’s warm and soft, exactly as he always is… my puppy. But he’s limp and floppy, totally lifeless. He’s unmarked and beautiful and desperately I will him to wake up. But he never can be Leo again.

‘Big ice truck in the road,’ says Cat. ‘Go too fast.’

Why, why did he have to go so far from the house.

Only an hour ago I’d been out to shut the gate but they just don’t care. They always leave it open. If only he could have survived a few more months, he might have learned a little road sense and survived much longer.

We let Pepsi see him and she sniffs around him in alarm. It seems as if she understands. She seems sad.

Cat says we’ll bury him down the garden and goes to get the hoe. I help her dig the hole and then I take him in my arms and carry him to it. Nan and little Ping are with us and Ping is crying bitterly.

I have my dark glasses on so they can’t see my eyes but as I bend down to lower him into the hole, the tears fall into the lenses and I can hardly see a thing. Even months later I can’t get through writing this either.

Cat chants something in Thai over the little body. I know she’s distressed but she’s composed as Thais always are. And then finally we shovel in the soil and make a little mound over him. Cat has made a little cross… he must be a Christian dog, and she strews flowers over him.

For the next few days I cannot go anywhere near but Pepsi is always there, lying quietly beside the grave. I feared she’d dig him up, but no, she just seems to want to be close by. She really seems to be grieving.

Once while I was living in an African village, I heard the screams when early in the morning they woke to find their baby stone cold beside them. How intolerable that must have been. It’s always struck me that a little of my paracetamol could have saved the child, or simple oral rehydration perhaps. Death is sometimes avoidable and far too often we invite him in.

The lives of my parents were cruelly disrupted by two global wars but in comparison I have lived in peaceful times. The world has become a better place and is more stable than at any time for centuries, even while our powers of destruction increase. Paradoxically we think it’s getting worse because the media alerts us to all the horrors.

Today’s apparent conflict, a so-called ‘war’ is fought, not on the battle field, but is played out primarily in the media. Terror is a state of mind and not a state of war. It’s only becomes such if we call it a war and want to make it one.

After the twin towers atrocity the West was running scared. It was a big media event with great images and our leaders did everything they could to play on our fears, to promote the bogey men and to give them the oxygen of publicity. They told us that this small cell of deviants, a tiny cancer, was a malignant and fatal tumour that could end our very civilisation. How very foolish that was. How dangerous was their aggressive rhetoric, a desire for revenge that nourished and aggrandized the cancer.

And how foolish it was to unleash the dogs of war. Wars are rarely just and they provoke atrocities on all sides… in the heat of conflict men are not restrained by rules. Be it communism or terrorism, have we not had enough lessons in the last fifty years that you cannot drop bombs on an abstraction? You cannot assert your principles however valid they are, nor do you make friends by sowing death and destruction.

I find it hard now to grasp the sheer horror that has been unleashed in the name of freedom and democracy, but I do know that gratuitous violence solves nothing.

I’m angry too at the ineptitude of our leaders and the suffering they’ve caused, and I’m still upset about my puppy.