Coming soon...The Origin of Life

Set against the consuming blackness of space, the earth is a beguiling blue-green ball. Barely a handful of people have experienced the emotion of seeing the planet from space. Petty human squabbles over borders, oil and creed. Tiny everyday worries about life, love and money - all these whimsies vanish in the knowledge that this living, breathing, spinning marble surrounded by deep dark emptiness is our shared home. A home which we share with the most wonderful invention in the universe - wonderful, splendid, beautiful life.

How did it begin?

There was a time, many many years ago when night followed day swiftly. When the planet spun madly on its axis and a day was 5-6 hours long. A time when the moon hung heavy in the sky, far closer, and far bigger, than it is today. A time when stars rarely shone through the dull red envelope of the atmosphere. Humans could not survive then, no oxygen - we would have asphyxiated. Our eyes would have bulged our lungs would have struggled to find something to breathe. Yet 3,800 million years ago something momentous happened. This is the story of that high water mark event. This is the story of that showpiece extravaganza. This is the story of us and who we are. This is the story of life itself...everything else fades in comparison. Without understanding this you understand nothing. Without knowing this all of literature, all of poetry, all that has ever been said lacks context. This is the story of the Origin Of Life. Come and join me and I will take you on the finest adventure that Life has to offer.

It starts, well it starts like most great adventures stories, simply. It starts with a tree...

The railway bazaar (revisited)

Diary folio A-1

Earlier we had kissed to a window-framed backdrop of rutted origami fields cropped by belching cows, and as our lips parted, I had opened my eyes. It was then that she had laughed.

'Why are you laughing?'

'Because silly…you kiss with your eyes shut'. Her eyes were shiny with a moist film. Her mouth was clapped tight forcing it into a twisted smile. She was trying desperately not to laugh.

'I've never known a man who kisses with his eyes shut' she said - she of a thousand lovers.

I looked on embarrassed. Did I really kiss with my eyes shut? I was suddenly engrossed in a picture of my own sillyness. To my surprise and horror my cheeks had begun to sprout a blush. I tried to think of something else to get the colour to fade lest she noticed. I thought of something to say but knew not what. I concentrated on the first irrelevent thing that came to mind - A sultry tale from a thousand and one nights! This is not helping. I said nothing, pursed my lips and continued to stare her out (our faces were almost touching). She saw the ripening whorls of rose red colour form on my cheeks and burst out in laughter. Unable to contain herself any longer she raised her hand to her mouth in a gesture of apology. I leaned back, twisted my mouth in a metallic frown, dug a deep furrow in my forehead and sulked. I was upset; or at least feigned to be...

The railway bazaar (revisited)

Forward

The sun hung low like a bloody bruised orange tearing long wreathe like shadows into the flatscapes. It was so low that the light from the sun flooded the carriage in slanting beams whose edges were marked with dancing eddies. The train tottled along in nervous agitation sending the dust motes into ever spiralling orbits. The mood was morbidly portentous; strange forces were a-foot in the country threatening the placid calmness of my thoughts. Opposite me, above her head, warm air currents were stirring friskily in the heated square patch of sun reflection. The smell of mellow cow dung entered through the open windows and wrestled with the smell of passengers curry and fish dinners. It was dinner time in the train. I felt instantly better. I had purchased my dinner from a kiosk at the previous station. It had been handed to me by a skinny dark-skinned Tamil; skillfully wrapped in 'India Times' newspaper print. As I opened the package, the whiff caught me by surprise and I realised the oil had forced the newspaper print to emboss itself onto my fish dinner. 'Terror in Karnataka' ran the headline along the scaly back of my fish. Hence the morbid mood. I stabbed the fish with a rudimentary tooth pick and saw its eyes watching me forlornly. I gouged them out angrily with the tooth-pick (nobody likes to be stared at by their dinner). I separated the bones carefully from the white juicy flesh which I then moulded into a ball with my fingers and sponged with the rice. I was copying the other diners. I pushed the whole messy concoction into my dry mouth. It was saucy and a spicy-hot trickle ran down the side of my lips, then along the inside of my arm and unto my crotch between my legs. She sat opposite -  laughing. I gave her a wounded lion look. She snarled back with her eyes glowing fiercly; showing her perfect teeth and perfect smile - that seemed for moment to be studded with a million diamonds. I was in love with that smile. God! I was in love with a lioness...

Escape from thyself

It is Saturday morning and I am in a charmingly philosophical mood. The freshly ground coffee nesting warmly in the pot to my right has little bubbles on the surface like fish eggs and when I raise the cup to my mouth I notice that the bubbles contain rainbows. I sip the brew...Ahh rich aroma; Ethiopia crashes through the sensory divide and invades my private space. Though I am clearly not in Ethiopia but London, Stoke Newington - the greatest place in the whole Universe. Oh, yes I have been to the stars on the back of aching mahogany beams.

Back on Earth the waitress shuffles busily to my left leaving a trail of sweet perfume and broken hearts in her wake. I look at her and oddly sadistic thoughts flutter into view - thoughts of the sexual things I'd like to do to her behind the counter and on the shiny table tops. Naughty sexual things that I can't describe here as this blog is rated PG. I swipe the thoughts clear; like one swipes a truculent layer of grime off a window pane, and continue with my work. But I am finding it difficult to concentrate.

Presently a man walks in, a Turkish man, and sits down. He is wearing a badly fitting suit jacket with enormous lapels and not-very-shiny brass buttons. He places his elbows self-consciously on the table and looks around wide-eyed, his gaze scanning the clientele and stopping for longer than is necessary on some of the prettier faces. The waitress comes over to take his order. He orders in a series of low guttural barks that betray his lowly uncouth origins. 'I am Man. I want food'. He continues to stare at some of the prettier faces; staring for longer than necessary. How long should a man stare at a woman not to make her feel uncomfortable? I think about 7/10th's of a second is long enough to acknowledge her existence. Anything longer betrays a keen healthy interest. 4 seconds or more and we are looking at unhealthy sexual interest that borders on psychotic disturbances in the frontal lobe area of the brain. It is 20 seconds and the man is still staring - at the same woman.

Oddly enough (or maybe not oddly enough) the reaction of the female in such cases will depend on her perceptions of the man. Is he well dressed? Does he appear as a gentlemen? Well to do? How is he groomed? His mannerisms? Are they coarse and slovenly or urbane and refined? What are his shoes like? His eyes, how deep are his eyes - can you see straight though them all the way through the emptiness or are they impenetrable and how close are they to his nose? It's funny how you can read someone within a few seconds of having seen them. A useful device in the small tribal bands in which we evolved. Women are much better judges of pseudo-psychotic-sexual tendencies - for obvious reasons. The woman shuffles uncomfortably under the murky gaze of the sexual predator. Is he on the prowl? Finally she gets up to go to the loo. Yet the man shifts his gaze not an iota. What is he looking at? An empty chair? Oh! The television! He is looking at the television positioned to the right of the woman and my field of view made me think he was looking at her...oh well. I chuckle to myself and think of something to write.

The waitress returns and I order another pot of special brew. I do come here often and she knows me by face and we do chat occasionally in between the sound of clinking china and wooshing 15Bar pressure espresso machine. I can't quite recall what we talk about, all sorts of pointless stuff, but just to see her smile at a little joke of mine is bliss. I imagine seating her, with legs akimbo, between the knobs of the coffee machine, and making love to her whilst the coffee beans swivel about in the crusher and the milk frother for the cappuccinos reaches bursting point...and starts dripping all over the counter.

Oh God.That's disgusting...

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Coming soon...Tierra Del Fuego

Magellan named it 'Tierra Del Fuego' because of the many campfires he saw dotted along its shores. Fed by continuous Antarctic winds the sea around Cape Horn bubbles and spits in an angry foamy morass. This is one of the harshest places on earth. This is the end of the world. I will go there. I can't help it - Ants in my pants. What me? Never!

Ihaveanitchyfeelinginmybum.com

'Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature: no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body'

(Journal 'Voyage around the world' 1839)

Picture perfect

Food for thought

When did man become truly modern? Is there a seminal moment in our history when we can say 'this is the moment when we became modern'. I believe there is. It is the moment when man (and woman) strolled down the long supermarket aisles and picked strawberries. But this is no ordinary strawberry picking. Oh no, our ancestors may have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found in the bush in summer, viewing them as the gifts from a munificent creator, but we became modern when we gave up waiting for sporadic and capricious gifts from above and instead sought immediate and year round strawberries - in the supermarket. Walk down any supermarket today at any time of the year and you will find strawberries. They journey from Israel in midwinter, from Morocco in February, from Spain in spring, from Holland in early summer, from England in August and from San Diego between September till Christmas. All year round strawberries. No longer do we allow the tilt of the earths axis to decide what we can or cannot eat. Of course strawberries are just one example of our emancipation from the fetters of seasons and climate. Thanks to the genius of logistical science the seasons no longer exist - when it comes to food anyway. But there is, for me, a worrying side affect of our new-fangled modernity.

If you had lived 200 years ago the chances are you would know where your food came from. You would be intimately connected with its providence. Your bread no doubt would have been freshly baked by Mr Crumpet the baker. The cheese you ate would come from the Cheddar farms in Wiltshire. Your beef stew courtesy of the cattle belonging to ole farmer Henry and his wise chickens and nagging missus. Strawberries (only available in July, August) from the fields of East Sussex. Fish from the burgeoning fisheries of the North Sea. The handful of exotic items you consumed would have come from suitably exotic places: tea from Darjeeling and Ceylon, pepper and nutmeg from the Spice Islands of Banda off the coast of Indonesia, coffee from Arabia, wine from Bordeaux and if you were wealthy, Caviar from Sturgeon eggs caught in the freezing arctic waters of the Russian empire.

And today? Today the average supermarket has 20,000 produce. You'd be lucky if you knew where half-a-dozen of these came from. Let's take Tuna for example. Your Tuna comes from the Indian ocean waters off the Maldives. There it is caught by illiterate skinny Indians, hauled out of the water impaled on huge hooks and weighing 50kg's, clubbed to death until the water on deck turns red, lungs and bladders removed, gutted, sliced and diced into cubes and processed in factories in the Maldives. There they are packaged in Sainsbury's own brand plastic wrap, loaded into the cargo section of a Boeing 747 under aisle seats 34-45 headed for England. Finally, it is taken to the central processing warehouse near Birmingham from where great articulated lorries carry your Tuna steaks into the night, to every corner of the British Isles while you sleep, to your local Sainsbury's store. All within 48 hours. 48 hours ago that Tuna was happily swimming away in the warm blue waters of the Indian ocean...now it is seal-wrapped in the 'fish and seafood section' of a Sainsbury's in leaden and cold skied Middlesex. Welcome to modern life.

So what is my point? Why am I describing to you this wonderfully complex feat of logistics? Do you not see? We, in the West, no longer have any idea where our food comes from and how it got here. We cannot even begin to contemplate the human story that unfolds like a comic strip behind the food that finds itself on our plates. But most importantly of all, and this is the point I am driving at, we have lost control. We assume the food will always be there. We assume there will always be bread and milk and eggs in the supermarket in the morning. We have traded bewildering choice for control.  But what if things were to break down? What if the logistics system that brings our food to us, from all over the globe, collapsed? - from a major catastrophe perhaps: war, natural disaster, financial meltdown, alien invasion, nuclear holocaust. Would we starve? Would we Londoner's be reduced to nibbling away at tree barks or foraging for scraps of edible plant matter in Hyde Park?

You have no idea how precarious your existence is. Your entire lives are dependent on the workings of electronic machines, embedded in walls, handing out wads of paper - for the correct password. The card swiping machine in your local supermarket stands between you and your morning croissant and newspaper. The bank clerk stands between the crediting of your salary to your bank account and pecuniary. The delivery of that croissant depends on an army of human robot workers; most of whom are miserable and feel they are nothing but part of a soulless logistical network - which they are. And the sublime irony of modern life? For choice, for selection, for bewildering variety - we gave up control and freedom and have subjugated an army of humans to drudgery and inertness.

Contrast this with the peoples living in the Hunza valley in northern Pakistan. Yes, there choices are limited. Yes, they don't have thirty different breakfast cereals to choose from.Yes, they rarely eat Tuna. Yet, they don't have to suffer the ignominies of standing in front of a cheese counter trying to make an impossible decision.  They are the few people left who know where their rice, bread and corn came from. The rice grows in fields in the Punjab and the wheat and corn they grow themselves on terraced fields. The pears and peaches they grab off the trees and as for Coca Cola and Sprite - who needs such calorie-laden americanisms when you have tea and fresh sparkling mountain mineral water! And most importantly of all, they don't live lives of mindless drudgery.

But does it not scare you? To know that you no longer have control over basic things like your food source? That your entire life is dependent on the efficient workings of banks, ATM's, logistics, crude oil, electricity, gas, share prices, and political stability in the Maldives. Politican instability in Maldives = no Tuna. Welcome to the modern world. I hope this has been food for thought.

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To leave one must first arrive...

'To leave one must first arrive

To arrive one first has to die

Flap those wings and cry:

What dost seeks is nigh'

...so says the peregrinating philosopher...mulching on 'Khat' leaves in the Ethiopian Highlands. But first I must apologise for a digression:

Khat also known as qat, qaat, quat, gat, jaad, chat, chad, is a flowering plant native to tropical East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Khat contains the alkaloid called cathinone, an amphetamine-like stimulant which is said to cause excitement, loss of appetite and euphoria.

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Allow me to whisper something in your ear: 'Khat is good'. There is an alaborate ceremony for its consumption. You lay upon the sand a cloth to sit upon cross-legged and in a circle. The Khat leaves arrive, preferably fresh and not older than two days, and you strip the stems and proceed to thrust them into your mouth...chewing vigorously - like a goat.  Like a bunch of stupid goats you sit there mulching and ruminating until the base of your mouth goes numb, until your tongue has lost all power of brain dependent movement - so what you utter in that Khat induced haze has nothing to do with what you wanted to say. But nevermind, your listeners too have lost the power of hearing and seem to have vanished out of your field of view - you remember what it is you wanted to say. But don't worry your train of thoughts will get lost again. So what was it you wanted to say? Oh yes. Here we go:

The best bit about Addis Ababa is getting out. But first you must get in. As the aeroplane sat on the tarmac I caught a glimpse of the terminal building from the spy-hole of the plane: industrial chic. That was my first impression. Long before the designers of Canary Wharf underground station unveiled their version of industrial chic; a similar, albeit unintentional design experiment had already taken place in Addis Ababa. It was King Menelik who had ordered the construction of a new fangled city. A capital city befitting a modern capital age. Like Albert Speer before him, and his right hand man; Alfred Ilg, plans were drawn to construct a metropolis to wow the visiting delegates. Oh no matter if half the population is on the brink of starvation; this is theatre – this is make-believe - wool over the eyes diplomacy. I have visited many capital cities and the following maxim generally holds true: The more pretentious the capital city the greater the poverty

Oh yes, a seething GutterStink of BuZZingHuman frailty and weakness. I longed for the Ethiopian highlands. But, like most capital cities, I had to arrive before I could leave. Arriving in Africa is like being born again. Recast from the womb that begot you. Instinct tells you to suck from the teat of the familiar. So I latch onto a group of touring Westerners who, after a while of friendly banter, start wondering who I am. So there is nothing to do but head off on my own and find a hotel: preferably a nice safe looking hotel - not too expensive, neatly laid towels, soap and toiletry packs, complimentary tea and coffee sachets, and cable TV with frosty picture. No that's not my style at all. I was joking! I look out of the dust covered window of my grimey hovel of a room that cost me the better part of a fiver for board and breakfast. A couple of syringes greet me in the toilet bowl: Beggar women with band of straggling kids shuffles along outside the window. Same old story. Poverty can be such a cliche. I close the curtains and lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling. It has cracks in it. I imagine they are ancient waterways now dried, rivuletting through parched and scrawny bush. 'Afar' – that is where it all began. In fact it is from Addis Ababa that humans migrated around the world. I am merely coming back...albeit after a gap of a million years or so. I sigh. It's a long dusty trailing sigh pregnant with history and the burden of knowledge. Do I want to do this? Yes! Fuck it I'm off. I’m not hanging about this forlorn shithole - Adios Addis! I’m heading for Harar...Where a man, a famous enigmatic poet once said: 'I is somebody else'. 'I is somebody else' I repeat to myself. But first I must cross the crazy-hazy street traffic with the horns. The city is full of skyscrapers from the 60’s and early 70's – where are the modern glasstop furnished buildings of the promised SpaceAge? It's as if the Ethiopian economic miracle took a break in 1975...and never returned. Probably chewing Khat leaves somewhere.

But this is spurious history. Ethiopia has been home to a sophisticated civilization for millennia. It is home to the oldest Christian, Jewish and Islamic populations outside the Middle East. In fact Islam in Ethiopia dates back to its founding in AD 615, when a group of Mussalmans were consulled by Mohammed to escape persecution in Mecca and travel to modern day Ethiopia. Also Bilal, the first ever muezzin (the person who calls the faithful to prayer) and one of Mohammeds foremost companions, was from Ethiopia. Ethiopia also has its own written language – something that is decidedly rare in the African continent. Its people are tall, high-boned, beautifully crafted specimens of humanity and proud too. But there is much history to be proud. Let's take coffee for example. It was in Ethiopia that coffee, according to legend, was discovered. It is a wonderful fable, probably apocryphal, and I will share it with you:

Once upon a time, circa AD 500 there lived a goat herder by the name of Kaldi. While tending his flock he discovered that his goats were brazen and friskier then usual when they grazed near a certain bush with red berries. He tasted the berries and found that they enlivened and lifted his spirits. So with pocketfulls of berries he ran home to tell his wife of his wonderful discovery:

‘They are heaven sent’ she solemnly declared ‘You must take them to the Monks in the monastery’

So off he went to the monastery where Kaldi presented the berries to the chief Monk, a mousy looking creature with short cropped chin whiskers and covetous eyes, and related to him the story of their miraculous discovery

‘Devils work!’ exclaimed the Monk in indigantion and hurled the berries into the flickering fire

A few moments later the Monastery was filled with the heavenly aroma of roasting beans. The beans were raked from the fire and placed in an ewer with hot water to preserve their aroma. That night the monks sat up till late drinking and savouring the rich fragrant brew and from that day onwards vowed that they would drink it daily to keep themselves awake during their nightly devotions. Coffee then spread to Yemen thence Arabia and finally the rest of the world - Coffea Arabica was born. The governor of Mecca, Beg, saw some people drinking coffee in a mosque as they prepared a night-long prayer vigil. Furious he drove them from the mosque and ordered all coffee houses to be closed. A heated debate ensued, with coffee being condemned as an unhealthy brew by two unscrupulous Persian doctors, the Hakimani brothers. The doctors wanted it banned, for it was a popular cure among the melancholic bipolar patients who other-wise would have paid the doctors to cure them.

The picture of Arabic coffee houses as dens of iniquity and frivolity was exaggerated by religious zealots. In reality the Middle East was the forerunner of the European Café society and the coffee houses of London which became famous London clubs. They were enlightened dens; meeting places for intellectuals where news, gossip and revolutionary ideas mingled in their own heady brew over the hot water soaked beans of coffea arabica. This is exactly the sort of place I am sitting as I type this. Enlightened Revolutionary - yep that's me.

And now we have Starbucks and Nescafe...coffee for phillistines. Coffee for idiots!

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One Life - One World - One People

Classics revisited