A girl stands on a dry, rocky path, her shoes scuffed , her shabby green dress brushing against her ankles. Above her is a clear blue sky. Behind her a cliff rises, pocked with caves and empty alcoves where two proud statues of the Buddha once stood. Now their bodies lie in ruins, red-tinged fragments of sandstone limbs indistinguishable from the other rubble. She cries a low, muffled sniffle like an animal, but her sounds are masked by the brown paper bag pushed low down over her face; two holes for eyes, a slit for her mouth. Around her, in a rough arc, stand a dozen boys. Some point their guns, others grip stones. They too look grey and aged by the dirt. Their faces are cold like glass and their eyes unflinching.
“Girls don’t go to school. Hold up your hands. You are a sinner. We are the Taliban. We will stone you.”
Two more scrabble at the earth with their bare hands.
“Look. They’re digging your grave.”
Her fingers close around a small, red, cylindrical object.
“What are you holding? Lipstick is for heathen women. Repent.”
They manhandle her roughly towards the hole. But a paper kite, soaring overhead, distracts her tormentors.
“The American bombers are coming…….run.”
They pretend to shoot with their stick guns. The kite falls anyway.
Baktay pulls the bag from her head. Her fear is real.
“In god’s name let me go to school to learn funny stories. I don’t want to play the stoning game.”
Later the boys change roles, become Americans.
“Die bastard terrorist liar” they shout.

Baktay is six, the boys little older. Their country is Afghanistan. The scene is from Hana Makhmalbaf’s affecting film Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame. In early 2001 The Taliban exploded the 6th century Buddhas, two colossi approaching 180 feet tall, carved out of the cliff at Bamiyan, because they were un-islamic and the idols of infidels. Later that year another pair of towers would be brought down in the homeland of an infidel, this time unleashing not words but weapons upon the Afghan people.
As I watched the disturbing drama of those children I was all too aware of the hearses which, since 2005, have driven slowly through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett bearing their union jack-draped coffins. Of the friends and relatives along the way who clutch each other dignified in their grief. Of young men and women who left this country whole but continue to be returned home dead or maimed.

What, I wondered, is this distant, landlocked, barren country to me? Is the war really for my own safety, the freedom to leave my house each day without the fear of a terrorist bomb as politicians try to tell me? Or just easier now to close our eyes and walk away. Forget our history there. Look after our own. The more I agonised the more I needed to know the Afghanistan behind the immediate stories of death and war. What of the children born into a country where war of a sort has raged since 1973? The average life expectancy is 45 years. Do the maths. How many have seen peace? Or of the mothers, aunts and sisters hidden for years behind mud walls and underneath their chadors or their sky blue burkas? What is it that has been destroyed? I at least owed it to both those being sent to fight and the people they are purporting to protect to try to understand.

I read some native literature: “My forbidden Face by Latifa, Samir and Samira by Siba Shakib, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Reading them was like looking through the slats of blinds, tiny glimpses of what I was wanting to know. And also sad and desperate and deeply moving.

But then I found three journalists, all of them women, who between them have twenty three years first hand experience in the region, all of whom had put their lives on the line for their reporting. Christina Lamb, who was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the British Press Awards in 2002, wrote the book “The Sewing Circles of Herat.” Asne Seierstad, an award-winning Norwegian reporter, lived for four months in Kabul in the home of an Afghani bookseller and his family. Kathy Gannon’s book “I is for Infidel”, catalogues eighteen years of holy war and terror.

What these women showed me was somewhere far more complex and far more beautiful than any three minute clip on the national news ever could. They told me how long before the Taliban the ravages of war had already laid waste to cities, killed thousands, divided tribe from tribe and drawn great scars across the rugged, ancient, mountainous land; a stolen crown in 1973, cousin toppling cousin; five years later a coup by Marxist army officers followed closely by an invasion and years of Soviet occupation. Immediately America and her allies poured billions of dollars of arms into the hands of the resistance mujahadeen (warlords) to end the soviets’ ambition. Ten years on, in 1989, they conceded defeat. The retreating communist army left the detritus of war; rusting tanks, 4 million refugees displaced including much of the intellectual population, bridges and irrigation ditches destroyed and orchards felled.

The bitter civil war which followed between these same warlords was yet more brutal. Gorged with donated weapons Pashtuns turned against Uzbek against Tajik against Hazara. Alliances were forged between warlords and then just as easily betrayed. A shifting patchwork of fiefdoms each with their private militia seemed to have no shame, no limits to the atrocities they would commit.

Kathy Gannon describes how she watched women and children being blown up.
“The victims were usually the children who scurried out whenever there was a lull in the fighting to scavenge and collect scrap to sell or who had been sent by their parents to retrieve some essentials items left behind during the heat of a battle. The mujahedeen were maliciously clever. They never booby-trapped the entrance to a home, where even the young knew to be cautious. Instead they would string the tripwire across a second storey staircase or at the entrance to a bedroom”

It was to stop this unfeeling carnage that the Taliban was born. The promises they gave were seductive; an end to bloodshed, corruption and excess - and a purer society. They would disarm the warlords and clear roads of chains and bandits. Their leader, one-eyed Mullah Omar, was a man from humble beginnings, not well-educated, from a conservative southern Pashtun state where women had always gone fully-veiled and no girls went to school because there were none.
“Omar wasn’t a big talker” Gannon writes. “His interpretation of the Koran was literal, basic……he didn’t know big meanings but he loves Islam.”
Sixty men reputedly founded the Taliban.
“In 1994 it was just a group of angry men, looking for an end to the lawlessness.”
“We didn’t know where the Taliban would go,” says a former soldier. “We didn’t begin it with the idea of taking over the country.”

“The Taliban promised our people security,” Malalai Joya, a young female Afghan politician wrote. “They were so exhausted by the years of war and anarchy that once again our people welcomed the new regime with hope that they might bring a positive change. But unfortunately hopes quickly turned into ashes…….and their security was like that of a graveyard.”

As the movement gathered momentum it gained recruits. Many talibs had not even lived in the country they hoped to save. They had grown up in the refugee camps in neighbouring Pakistan, poor, young, uneducated. And ultimately malleable. Many boys were sent to the madrassas or religious schools where they would be housed and fed for free and where the Koran was the only text and sharia the only true Islamic law. They had no sense of history, of their origins, only what the prophet taught. But it was a perversion of the tenets of Islam, a brutalisation not recognised by ordinary Muslims.

Christina Lamb recalls a conversation in a madrassa with two young boys.
“I was intrigued by these young boys who rather than wanting to be pilots, engine drivers or astronauts longed to die in combat.”

Then Arabs came from the strict Wahabi sects in Saudi Arabia. An austere philosophy took hold: to purge society by reverting to a 7th century world, the time of the prophet. These new, narrow purists despised intellectuals and technocrats, refused to negotiate with more moderate Muslims or ethnic groups. They went into battle with a Kalashnikov in one hand and the Koran in the other. Many detected the hand of the Pakistan Intelligence service, the ISI. The clean-up operation soon became much, much more. Gradually the country fell to them – Kandahar, then Herat then Kabul.



In The bookseller of Kabul by the journalist Asne Seierstad, Sultan Khan, the owner of three bookshops, described to her the arrival of the Taliban in the city on 27th September 1996.
“The city was totally quiet ………two bodies hung from a pole outside the presidential palace. The larger was soaked through with blood from head to foot……….the other had merely been shot and hanged.”
The first was the former president Najibullah who had been living in safety in Kabul since being deposed by the mujahedeen. The second was his brother. The mujahedeen had fled.
“Kabul’s inhabitants gathered in disbelief round the pole in Ariana Square. …..The war was over. A new war would start – a war that would trample all joy underfoot.”
Within weeks the regime issued their decrees.

Women and girls were virtually to disappear into the home, forbidden to work, to attend school or to leave the house without a mahram (male relative). They were not to stand so close to windows or on balconies as to be visible to men outside. In public they had to wear the full burqa with only a small mesh hole through which to see. Ankles could not show, shoes could not be white or make a noise on the road. Their voices must not be loud. They could no longer wash clothes in the river, talk to or shake hands with men or attend hospitals with men in them. Tailors would no longer be able to sew women’s garments or measure women.

Music, movies, dancing, television, portraits, photographs and images of people were banned, even from packaging. No books except the Koran. Men were to grow beards, wear Islamic clothes and to observe prayers five times a day. Bird rearing and fighting, kite flying and most games, including the traditional buzkashi – an aggressive form of polo - cards and chess were forbidden as was gambling. Only golf and cricket were approved. Non-Muslims were to wear a yellow cloth stitched onto their clothes. No-one was to cheer or clap at sports events, only to chant Allah-o-Akbar.

Except in the privacy of the home there was to be no laughter.

“Women didn’t live under the Taliban,” a young woman tells Lamb. They just stayed in their rooms doing nothing “like cows in their sheds.”
But amidst the ruins she found people who had taken enormous risks to defy those edicts: the professor whose sewing group for women was a clandestine literature class; the poet who hid his writing behind a false wall; the artist who saved over a hundred oil paintings in the national gallery by painting over the forbidden human and animal figures with watercolours which could later be wiped away. All had witnessed the book burnings, the whippings, the hangings in the streets, the shootings and stonings in the football stadium. Still there were a hundred silent heroes. She asked one why he did it.
“A lot of fighters sacrificed their lives over the years for the freedom of this city. Shouldn’t a person of letters make that sacrifice too?.............If we had not done what we did to keep up the literary spirit of the city, the depths of our tragedy would have been ever greater.”

The Taliban fell to the Northern Alliance and the United States two months after 9/11 and the population rejoiced. Marri, a young woman in Kabul, sees her brothers come home without their beards.
“They say everyone is shaving them off. Our new neighbours have small children and they are laughing ………how long is it since we heard laughter…..Now I can hear Indian music playing along the street.”

Afghanistan was once a land of colour, of orchards of pomegranates, figs and peaches and vines of grapes; of fields of flowers; of mosques and minarets once covered in turquoise and opal glazed tiles. Statues and vases filled the museum; women wore reds and primrose yellows, pinks and greens, bright emerald and midnight blue. They had tambourines, drums and poems. But it was also a land mired in poverty and illiteracy and a deep urban-rural divide.

When the maverick humanitarian campaigner and author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson, arrived in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 he found a country where two thirds of people over the age of 15 could not read or write. For him, education is the key to break the cycle of suffering and bloodshed. He has helped local communities to build schools for girls, in places so remote that they sometimes have no telephones, faxes, email or postal services and materials have to be transported on the backs of yaks or Bactrian camels.

“If you teach a boy,” he quotes a proverb, “you educate an individual. But if you teach a girl you educate a community. No other factor comes close to matching the cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write….. to deprive Afghan children of education is to bankrupt the future of their country.”
An educated woman’s children are less likely to die, just as later they are less likely to hold extremist views. He discovered a thirst for learning - people re-opening schools in buildings without roofs, basements, toilet blocks and disused shipping crates. Sadhan Khan, a local commandhan, pointed to the mountain slopes from his rooftop home.
“Look here….there has been too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder you see before you is one of my mujahdeen, shahids, martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn those stones into schools.”
His skills at winning hearts and minds has been noticed by top US army officials and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.

I didn’t set out to answer the web of political, military and economic questions now confronting Afghanistan, its neighbours and its NATO occupiers. Should talks be instigated with the Taliban and if so with whom? Can people with a fierce tribal loyalty work together in a single government and one army? How hard should the west fight to promote the fair participation of women in Afghan society?I am glad that those decisions are not mine. What I did do was embark on a journey into the heart of a people in whose lands my fellow countrymen and women are laying down their lives, to learn how their history has brought them to this desperate point. Insurgency or no insurgency it is still a country crying out for help. And Al Quaeda has shown it has many other havens, not least in the borders of Pakistan. As I travelled I kept coming back to the words of Christina Lamb back in the eighties.

“It was about being among a people who had nothing but gave everything. It was a land where people learnt to smell the first snows or the mountain bear on the wind and for whom an hour spent staring at a beautiful flower was an hour gained rather than wasted. A land where elders rather than libraries were the true source of knowledge and the family and the tribe meant more than the sum of individuals. …At a dinner party in north London I listened to friends bragging about buying porches with their bonuses and sending out from their offices for pizzas and clean shirts because they were clinching a deal and could not leave their desks. I wanted to tell them of a place where every family had lost a son or a husband or had a leg blown off, almost every child seen someone die in a rocket attack and where a small boy had told me his dream was to have a brightly coloured ball. But, when I began to talk about Afghanistan, I watched eyes glaze and felt as if I was trying to have a conversation about a movie no-one else had seen.”

Today more people have an opinion but it is invariably to turn our backs and walk away. But listen to Malalai Joya.
“Afghans are a brave and a freedom loving people with a rich culture and a proud history……….today the soil is full of landmines, bullets and bombs when what we really need is an invasion of hospitals, clinics and schools….We need a helping hand of friends around the world.”

Another young girl writes this:
“Peace is not sold. Otherwise I would have bought it for my country.”







2887 words

My Children Opened My Eyes to the Wonders of the World……………

In my fusty all-girls’ school, in the backwaters of Cornwall, over thirty years ago, science was definitely the poor relation: a subject to be endured but not enjoyed (one compulsory O level – I chose physics). Even the word brings back the smells of the dank and dismal old laboratories - biology of pickled gherkins and furniture polish, chemistry of baking soda and toilet cleaner. I remember holding a test tube over a bunsen burner, watching light refract through a prism, staring into murky tanks at newts and frogs which I dreaded having to dissect. There were strings of formulas - SO4, CAC03, 2Fe - a language with no attraction for me, not like the French and Latin I eagerly lapped up. If only it had been Hogwarts and we’d made cupid crystals and befuddlement potion.

My ancient teachers, quietly stagnating amongst the sea of mud brown and yellow uniforms – which earned us the insult “brass knobs” from our rival school - made little effort to capture our imagination. When the physics master – surely reincarnated as Grantly Budgen on Waterloo Road – retired a year before my exam his new, younger successor was appalled at how little he had actually taught us. I scraped a C, breathed a sigh of relief and moved into the sixth form and the comforting embrace of the arts.

And so I have continued untroubled. I read novels, quote poets, write grammatically correct prose and spell in my sleep. David Starkey beats Eastenders. My favourite book is a thesaurus. I love to feast on the words as I roll them over playfully in my mind before committing them to paper. The quick crossword is my morning fix, the cryptic one a sporadic pleasure. I know where I am with the humanities; words are my bread and butter.

So of course my children would love them too. It started so well. Proudly, at primary school parents’ evenings I listened to Jack’s teacher praise his story writing, his painting and his project on the London blitz. He played the piano and the violin – and with polar bears in his imaginary games. For two whole weeks one summer he dressed as a mouse. At bedtime we rattled through the Narnia novels, Doctor Doolittle, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. His sister Morwenna wrote a book called Little Cat, with seven pages. Childish art covered the walls. No hint of trouble.

Yet ten years on my son has been lured to a degree in chemistry, my daughter to A Levels in chemistry, physics and maths. They read New Scientist and Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. No love of metaphors, Matisse, The Culture Show or Sylvia Plath. They’re hooked on positrons, covalent bonding, string theory, quarks. I have Shakespeare, they have Schrodinger – with and without his cat. They have Einstein, I have McEwan. C is a letter: to them it is the speed of light. When did I go wrong?

They laugh when I tentatively ask if there is gravity on Mars (Yes, but not quite as strong as on Earth). Are there elements in the solar system which have not yet been discovered? (Definitely not) Isn’t the Large Hadron Collider just a very big boys’ toy, an excuse to propel things very fast towards each other and then watch them collide? Eat your heart out Richard Hammond. I call myself educated yet there is a vast gaping hole in my essential knowledge of the world. My ignorance is no longer good enough. Time for a bit of self-improvement.

It seems I’m not alone. Suddenly “popular” science seems to be where it’s at – in bookshops, in documentaries, in magazines. So I’m curled up on the sofa, watching a man on my television who claims to be a particle physicist but looks more like a member of a minor rock band. That’s because he was, in his early days, on keyboards for D:Ream. Yes, Professor Brian Cox – complete with OBE (Overwhelming Boyish Enthusiasm) – is science’s first pin up. Okay, Einstein coined the archetypal mad scientist look but he was hardly hot. Brian – I already feel I can call him that - is young, has cool hair and likes fast military jets (I’ve just watched him go up in one to the thin blue line, the edge of earth’s border with outer space, 18 km almost vertically straight up and it’s stunning.)

He’s very excited - in an over-exuberant puppy sort of way. I fancy bringing him home, giving him a cuddle, feeding him up. But he’s far too busy eulogising about the laws of physics and the solar system. As is Jim Al-Khalili, as he makes a diamond disappear into a cloud of gas. So who said they were forever? (“Chemistry: A Volatile History”). Or the Egyptologist who pushes an endoscope up a two and a half thousand year old mummy’s nose (“The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion”). This no longer feels the enigma it used to be. It’s just what stuff is and what stuff does. And it’s all around me.

I’m growing to love the periodic table in all its brilliant beauty – and not just for its names, though I must admit that antimony, lutetium and titanium sit elegantly on the page. I’ve learnt the second law of thermodynamics: that left to their own devices hot things get colder and not vice versa. Like my cup of tea. That entropy (science’s posh word for chaos) will always catch up with us in the end; my daughter’s bedroom is proof of that. I can now balance a chemical equation and explain electron sharing. A reaction is not just a scowl on a teenager’s face, a mole not only a furry mammal. Precipitate is not to hurry. I know an angstrom from an isotope, my loops from my buckyballs. Neon is a cocky, noble gas. Cosmic rays are real not a fiction. It’s not so hard.

My family are impressed. I still get stuck on the space-time horizon and the uncertainty principle, never mind the gluons. Hawking lost me at the six flavours of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom. Is he kidding? For now I’ll pass on Planck’s quantum hypothesis, the singularity theorem and red shift. But I’ll hold my own in the dinner party conversations about black holes and all that missing anti-matter. (Just put a mother on to it – believe me, we find things all the time!)

And have I enjoyed it? I can honestly say yes. My children have given me a story just as gripping, magnificent and magical as the ones I read to them. Only this one’s true. And that Large Collider and its quest for the elusive particle, the mythical Higgs Boson? I can hardly wait - bring it on!




Annie Hitch
oliver@ohitch.eclipse.co.uk

A Veritable Stew of Visions aka The Labour Leadership Race

The Guardian recently invited the six contenders for the leadership of the Labour Party to set out their stall. Here they are in a nutshell in their own words

David Miliband will make the party "a living breathing movement that is necessary for the modern world." He will turn our dreams into reality. (Thanks for that). His own dream is for a "different, not just a better society." How different? Everything, it seems, is up for "reform" - sometimes "progressive" - alongside some "fundamental change" and a bit of "progress." He acknowledges our anger. Better get started then. This will be some makeover.

Brother Ed agrees as he urges his party "to put our values at the heart of our vision." He wants "a party that gives voice to members and is a living social movement." Sound familiar? He'd give everyone a fair chance; the economy would be "just," wages "decent," jobs "good." He'd rebuild. Responsibility is needed, a new, more imaginative response. We must all value "environmental sustainability, time, love and compassion." I feel it already, Ed. Go on, go on.

Over to Andy Burnham who has "made plenty of tough decisions" in his political life. Stop the "hand-wringing", cull the "introspection." This man is looking forward. He has a vision of his party as "a force for progress and good." Labour needs to "act pragmatically, identifying and delivering solutions." He identifies anti-social behaviour as a huge concern to people. Now we're getting somewhere. Members and supporters felt the party was "no longer on their side." He'd listen even if it was uncomfortable. It might be. Can he handle it?


"A grassroots social movement" driven by "pragmatic idealism" is John McDonnell's vision for the Labour Party. The "penetration of neoliberalism into the government's psyche meant we let the market rip, finance dominate, manufacturing decline and debt reach crisis point." Hold on. You did what?. But we get some specifics: withdraw from Afghanistan, scrap ID cards and Trident, end privatisation and bring in a fair tax system. This is the nearest any of them has got to a policy. There's a "progressive coalition" in there though and another bit of "reforming." Still, nice try.

Diane Abbott is another breath of fresh air and the only woman. She gets down to the nitty gritty. Stop making immigration, she says, the scapegoat for Labour's defeat. Complaints about immigration "are a proxy for concerns about housing, low wages and job insecurity." And someone needs to say that the Iraq war was plain wrong. She marched against it, the only one of the six to do so. "Rediscover our sense of moral purpose" she tells her colleagues. Forget the three Ps: Pop Idol, Personality and Presentation and choose a leader who learns from what went wrong. Who will honour the commitment to diversity. It's time to turn a page. Rest in peace New Labour.

And so last, but not least, to Ed Balls. Ah, dear old Ed, Gordon Brown's rottweiler, the loyalist who faithfully savaged anyone who dared to threaten his beloved master. Do we really want to unleash him on the wider world? Can a dog ever change its spots? But he's been listening, he reassures us. So what has he learnt? We must forge a "clear strategy to rebuild that winning coalition" for one (which one was that - PM and Chancellor?) ; have a "vision for the future;" " promote fair chances," and "narrow inquality." Above all "get it." Scrap seminars and party forums and reconnect. Oh, and green jobs would be good. Yes Ed - we get it: you are the past. It's not going to be Blairite or Brownite anymore for which we can all breath a sigh of relief. Does he deserve a chance? Maybe, but keep the muzzle on just in case.

So what did we learn? It is a veritable stew of visions, with a dash of home truths, few apologies, jargon spiced up with the odd suggestion of a real policy. Topped with a generous helping of self-belief. But what will they actually do? It's hard to fathom.

New Shoes, Blue Shoes

Annie's blue shoes - right
16 years old

Morwenna's blue shoes left
2 weeks old

The wheel of fashion
turns full circle

Puppy Love

Something strange has happened to the women I know: the mothers I met at the nursery gate, the founding stalwarts of the baby sitting circle, the ones who’ve sold their buggies at the nearly-new sale and their cots on e-Bay. Women who eat lunch, get sleep, re-train. Women, that is, like me.

I’ve hit the big four five, half way to ninety. Out have gone fish fingers, parenting classes, jelly shoes, the hokey-cokey. No more combing hair for head lice or sticking stars on charts. No glue on the carpet or glitter on the cat. Hand-me-down clothes are now drainpipe jeans. You Tube is the new Bambi. My teenagers tweet and read Twitter not Biff and Chip. Tricycles rust unridden. They join Facebook groups not brownies and beavers. They shower not bath. I never see them naked. All too soon it will be student loan forms and no look back. The nest, though not quite empty, is feeling sparse.

But - there is a spate of new arrivals. First is Poppy, flaxen blond with big, seductive eyes. I gaze intently and deep down something stirs. Bella, next, is smaller, darker, satin-skinned. The older children bunch around her, all jostling for a cuddle. Archie, Django, Maggie, Meg – is that a tinge of the green-eyed monster? Surely not. I smile, make the right noises. No surprises here. Not on my watch.

But that was before Fergus. Fergus was family. He smelt of new sawdust and baby blanket and worked the room with his puppy dog eyes. We adults all bunched around, jostling for a cuddle.
Mary, my sister-in-law, was evasive.
“He’s for David really.”
Of course. David was retired, chasing seventy. It would get him out each day, be company now the girls were at school. But I have learnt the signs of a mother smitten. Deep down in me something stirred.


That’s when I get it. These canines have got canny. They’ve found our weak spot, our Achilles heel. Their disguises are in every shape and colour: whiskered, wiry terriers, silky collies, black labradors, pugs, poodles with wet noses, setters with long, crimpled ears.

Feed me, play with me, love ME the eyes all say. Those other ones, the humans, they’ll pack up and go. Look, their toys have already been forgotten but me, I could do with a ball, something to chase, a kick around in the garden. An old, squashy teddy, a slipper, a cheap rubber bone – I’m easily pleased, not faddy or fussy. I’ll eat all my food. And I could never ignore you. It’s just not in my nature, nor is slamming the doors or pouring scorn on your clothes; to me you look great. And won’t evenings feel good cuddled up on the sofa; you scratch my tummy and I’ll keep you warm. But, hey, if you want to go out I can look after myself - just leave me some water and I’ll wait by the window. Before long I’ll be your bosom pal, your biggest fan, your fiercest defender. And oh think of those walks – who’d disown YOU in public?

That sounds like a deal. Now the patter of tiny paws is heard here too. Hettie is small, black and tan, a cavalier, a one-walk-a-day dog. But give her a mile, she’ll take five. As I walk around the house she’s there behind me. We talk about the state of the country, my job, her favourite biscuit. She tells me when the postman is coming, the meter reader, the neighbour’s cat. And when we’re out together people stop us and coo; so pretty, a boy or a girl? I beam foolishly, feel pride. So I’m in the club - in the park, by the river, over the styles, with the other women with leads in their hands. Besotted. Which is yours, how old? (Is mine better behaved?)

And obedience classes, toilet training, ticks? A doddle, I’ve done it before. Sunday night, once more, is bath night. I get to brush her coat. One more photo for the album – look, how cute! My teenagers roll their eyes and shrug, play Dragonforce loudly, go back online.

What do you think, I muse to my partner, should we stop at one or not ……….?


NB: a dog is for life. He will not rifle through your purse, leave smelly jeans on the landing, roll up drunk or miss the last bus home. Dog owners get fitter, live longer and are never alone.

Next test post

Ring-a-ring-a-Roses

My mother-in-law Susan sang all the time to her children. What else could they be doing in this photo but the old favourite nursery rhyme (and did they then “fall down” onto the muddy beginnings of their new lawn?)

I married Oliver, the little boy with the blond curls and red coat but I knew his sister Mary, on his right, first. They invited me to stay one Christmas and I found a family who really did stand around the piano and sing carols, something I thought only happened in story books.

Music was a huge and fun part of all their childhood and teenage years. When the little local church needed a choir the family enrolled en masse. Susan and her husband Richard sang in a choral society but did not play instruments. But the three children were lucky and learned piano, guitar, violin, oboe and french horn between them. They sang in many school musicals and, free from parents, on slightly chaotic youth choir tours to Europe. There had to be a “no singing” rule at mealtimes because it got too noisy! They were never pressured to rack up successes but maybe because of that they did and they have all kept music in their lives in a big way.

Now the love of music-making has been passed down to the next generation and I have children, nephews and nieces who sing in school, cathedral, university and gospel choirs and play in string and jazz bands. It has taken them to Venice, St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Spain and so many other places. And me? Well I snuck into the family somehow as the only non-musician but when my son was a baby I joined a ‘take-all-comers’ choir for a year to see what I was missing. And although I have now gone back to being in the audience I did get a taste of what they have and believe me, it was worth it.

(As appeared in The Guardian Family Snapshot 26.09.2009)

Afghanistan Schools and Greg Mortenson

This is a long article (only read it if the subject matter interests you)

Preface: Last year media coverage of British soldiers' deaths in Afghanistan was intense - but how had this remote, impoverished country become the focus of the world's hatred? What history, what culture, what unique difficulties led it to this point? And should British troops be there at all? Probably, like me, you are ill-equiped to answer. That was my project. To inform myself through the writings of both native afghan authors and western journalists. The more I read the stronger the pull. Somewhere so different to anywhere I'd ever been got under my skin.

This is not the full answer to my questions. But it is of interest and will give you a flavour of the place.

It is a short introduction to a remarkable maverick humanitarian campaigner who I met along the way. He has given his life to building schools for Afghan children, especially girls. Or rather he enables Afghans to build schools for themselves. In the remotest places on earth.

When Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last year Mortenson was a nominee. This is an introduction to his work which I wrote as a review of his second book. It also supplies a tiny part of the background to this whole fraught country, a place described by one of its own female politicians as a "land of tragedy". I hope it may whet your appetite to go on a similar literary journey. Or just admire the man.



STONES INTO SCHOOLS: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
By Greg Mortenson

At the end of his book Three Cups of Tea Greg Mortenson stands on a rooftop in the remote town of Baharak in the far north eastern corner of Afghanistan. The whitened peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains rise all around him. Beside him, in brown robes and a photographer’s vest, is Sadhar Khan, the local commandhan. A man who had led his people through almost twenty four years of fighting – for a decade of soviet occupation, in a bitter civil war and finally against the Taliban.
“Look here. Look at these hills,” he tells Mortenson. “There has been far too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my mujahadeen, shahids, martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn those stones into schools.”
Minutes earlier the slight, wizened Tajik leader, a man wielding absolute power over the impoverished poppy farmers in the surrounding valleys, had thrown his arms about the tall, polite and astonished figure of the American.
“Yes, yes, you’re Dr Greg……..this is incredible. To think I didn’t even arrange a meal or a welcome from the village elders. Forgive me.”
The two men grin excitedly at their unlikely meeting.
“War has caused us to starve not only our bodies,” says Khan, “but also our minds. This should never happen again to my people.”

Mortenson’s journey to that rooftop is remarkable. In 1993, as the people of Afghanistan were gripped in the jaws of a savage fight for power between rival warlords following the fall of the communist government, he was stumbling – lost and exhausted - down the lower reaches of the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan. He had just failed to fulfil his dream to summit K2, the second highest peak in the world and to leave there a necklace, as a memorial to his sister Christa who had died on her twenty third birthday. Separated from his guide he eventually staggered into Korphe, a village so obscure it failed to appear on any of his maps. During three weeks of recuperation he experienced the hospitality and care of people who had nothing.


“Everything about their life,” he wrote, “was a struggle.”
But it was when he asked to see the school that he properly realised how great that was. Seventy eight boys and four girls sat on a vast, rocky ledge in the open air. Those without slateboards scratched in the dirt with sticks. A teacher would have cost the equivalent of $1 a day but the Pakistani government would not supply one. For three days each week one came from the neighbouring village – until the ground they were sitting on froze. Yet, he says:
“There was a fierceness in their desire to learn….I knew I had to do something.”



As he parted from Haji Ali, Korphe’s chief, he made him a promise. He would return and build a school. And Mortenson, we learn, always fulfils a promise. He kept his word. But only after he’d first had to construct a bridge to get his building materials over the river where the only crossing was a wooden cable car – a big fruit crate - suspended from a 350ft greasy cable. In December 1996 the school in Korphe was completed. And there the story could have ended, with a debt repaid. But something was begun that day which was to take him on a far more ambitious and arduous challenge than any mountain had ever posed. For within a decade he had built not one school but eighty two, raised not just the $12,000 he needed for a single school but over a million. A man who describes himself as “nothing more than a fellow who took a wrong turn in the mountains and never quite managed to find his way home” had become extraordinary.


Then in 1999 he made another pledge: this time to semi-nomadic Kirghiz horsemen who had crossed four mountain ranges from their home at the far end of the Wakhan Corridor in north east Afghanistan to seek him out. They too wanted one of these schools they had heard so much about. Even by Mortenson’s standards their homeland was remote. The geography of Afghanistan is harsh. But here was a place with no phones, faxes, email connections, postal systems or roads which was cut off from the rest of the world for seven months of the year by snow. A place where materials would have to be transported on trains of yaks and bactrian camels. A school it took another ten years to bring to fruition. A school on the roof of the world.
“These are areas that few people in the outside world even know about, the regions where almost nobody else goes,” Mortenson writes. “They are the places where we begin.”
(“We” is the Central Asia Institute which Mortenson set up to channel donations and front his work)

Tenacity does not even begin to describe the mechanics of fulfilling this second pledge. Readers of Three Cups of Tea will recognise the soft-spoken, unassuming man bewildered by the attention his story attracted. Persuaded now to write in the first person, Mortenson continues his story and recounts the day by day struggle to bring education to the children – especially girls – of Afghanistan, a task often chaotic, exhausting and at times outright dangerous.


Thirty hour drives over barely-serviceable roads, hitching a ride under a pile of rotting goatskins or caught in crossfire between rival opium traffickers – yet here, you sense, with his feet on the often barren, war torn soil, he feels his true calling. For Mortenson it is very simple.
“If you teach a boy,” he quotes a proverb, “you educate an individual. But if you teach a girl you educate a community. No other factor comes close to matching the cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write….. to deprive Afghan children of education is to bankrupt the future of their country.”

When he is finally able to cross the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan in late autumn 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, even Mortenson is shocked by what he finds. A terrible price had been exacted by the long years of war. A beautiful and mesmerising country, on the old Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean, had been broken. And not just by the black-turbaned, young fundamentalists and their Arab companions who called themselves talibs or religious students. Much of it was in ruins before they swept in, millions displaced, thousands dead, a nation traumatised. In retreat in 1989 after a decade of occupation the soviets left destruction in their wake. The warlords who tried to rule in their stead were no better. There was rivalry, bloodshed and betrayal.

But the Taliban had surpassed even these. They attacked the cultural fabric of society itself. A movement which was begun to replace anarchy and lawlessness with peace and order soon degenerated into a draconian regime with deadly edicts and strict sharia law. Music, movies, books, television, photos, dance, card games, bird keeping, kite flying - and even laughter itself - were banned in a twisted attempt to return to a pure, Islamic, 7th century world.

But worst was what was done to women. All girls’ schools were closed. Overnight mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters were ordered out of universities, hospitals and places of work - and out of sight beneath suffocating, sky blue burkas. Any rights or independence they might have gained in a still ultra-traditional society were utterly obliterated. Brash young men in pick-up trucks policed the streets with whips and guns, fed a radical interpretation of the Koran.

Women didn’t “live” under the Taliban, a young woman tells the reporter Christina Lamb in The Sewing Circles of Herat. They just stayed in their rooms doing nothing “like cows in their sheds.”
A few, in the cities, were luckier. Lamb and others – Kathy Gannon, Asne Seierstad, the author Khaled Hosseini - write of underground classes which took place in homes, basements and even caves. In their bags, hidden beneath sewing fabric, young women carried notepads, pens and copies of the Persian poets. Booksellers concealed books in attics and behind false walls. Librarians buried them in gardens to escape the burnings. Men and women, by teaching girls, risked punishment or public execution, hanged or stoned. Then 9/11 happened and the world woke up to Afghanistan once more. For giving sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden the Taliban had to pay.

As an account of a humanitarian campaign Stones into Schools is humbling.
But it is not just Mortenson’s story. While he crashes between family and fundraising in America, barely catching sleep, and the steep walled gorges of the Hindu Kush a colourful cast of a dozen men (the Dirty Dozen he calls them) push through the work on the ground.

Men like Sarfraz Khan, a peddler who speaks seven languages, Wakil Karimi, for 23 years a refugee in Pakistan, Suleman Minhas, a snoring taxi driver. Mortenson does not choose them – mostly they choose themselves. A cook, a goatherd, a former Taliban accountant, a high altitude porter. A third themselves unable to read or write, their qualifications are their ferocious passion for schools and their sheer dogged refusal to be beaten. When the Vale of Kashmir is shaken by an earthquake, they are there, to put schools in tents, then rebuilding stronger, better buildings. Mountains can never reach each other despite their bigness Mortenson says. But humans can. In what they achieve these men are giants.


It is also a tale of ordinary proud Afghans who, after the fall of the Taliban, emerged to restart schools in buildings without roofs, in animal sheds, garages, old toilet blocks and shipping containers. And of former fighters like Wohid Khan. Surrounded by men armed with kalashnikovs and shoulder held rocket launchers he seems an unlikely advocate for the education of girls. Yet for him, to help build a school in his homeland, is “one of the greatest honors of my lifetime.”

And finally it is of girls who never had them before now dreaming dreams. Female literacy in Afghanistan is in single figures. Nine years on from the Taliban women and girls still suffer huge levels of violence and discrimination. In half of all marriages wives are under sixteen. Average life expectancy is 44. Infant mortality is one in five before they are five. But an educated woman’s children are less likely to die; just as later they are less likely to hold extremist views. Girls want to become doctors, healthcare workers and teachers but need, too, to become community leaders, government officials, politicians. There are few prominent women in public life in Afghan society. Educating girls is the way to set that right.

These are the people we never see on our television screens or in our newspapers, the people beyond the roadside bombs and the struggles for power. Mortenson too feels like a big man. He looks tall in the photographs. There is something of the maverick about him, a character who might be more at home in a boys’ own adventure strip than taking tea with an American Admiral or the President of Pakistan. He is obviously consummate at both.

What Mortenson eloquently describes is the humanity of individuals caught in the most brutal of times. He succeeds because he instinctively respects a culture built on status, courtesy and patience. Central to this is drinking tea.
“The first cup of tea you share with us you are a stranger. The second you are a friend. But with the third cup you become family – and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.”
So spoke Haji Ali all those years ago in Korphe; a simple act of hospitality. To win hearts and minds works both ways.


For decades the world, and especially the USA, quietly armed Afghanistan with guns and bombs. He is clear about his country’s responsibility now to help it to rebuild and credits the US army with good intentions and a willingness to engage with and be of service to the Afghan people. Maybe. Or maybe it is just better to keep them on side, their wives and children supporting his fundraising efforts back home.
“Fighting terrorism is based in fear. Promoting peace is based in hope. The real enemy’s face is ignorance. Most Americans aren’t aware of all the good things going on.”

CAI projects are conceived on the ground, often literally, with the elders of a community, the Shura. When people take charge of their own development progress can be made. It is unclear how his schools will tie in with a national education system. But at the moment there is none.

Afghanistan is still a land of tragedy, as Malalai Joya calls it, a young female member of parliament in Karzai’s first government. Taliban insurgents have not gone away – the opposite. Several hundred girls’ schools have been attacked; schoolgirls had acid thrown in their faces. But in a country of mistrust, crippling poverty and still too much dying – including British and other NATO soldiers – this story casts light in a tunnel of darkness. Thanks to one man’s wrong turn in the mountains its future just got a tiny bit brighter.








Visit http://www.stonesintoschools.com/ for more information and for how to donate to the Central Asia Institute.
Also http://www.penniesforpeace.org/ for a fundraising project for schoolchildren.

Reading:

Greg Mortenson	Three Cups of Tea
Christina Lamb	The Sewing Circles of Herat
Ahmed Rashid	Taliban
Ahmed Rashid	Descent into Chaos
Rory Stewart	The Places in Between
Asne Seierstad	The Bookseller of Kabul
Johnson and Leslie	Afghanistan: the Mirage of Peace
Kathy Gannon	I is for Infidel
Khaled Hosseini	The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini	A Thousand Splendid Suns
Ann Jones	Kabul in Winter
Hamida Ghafour	The Sleeping Buddha
Ursula Meissner	Afghanistan: Hope and Beauty in a War-torn Land
Frank Gardner	Blood and Sand

Annie Hitch is a charity fundraiser.

A Letter to . . . . . Science

You don’t know me. I’m from the humanities: english, history, latin. Those are my subjects. I read novels, quote poets, write grammatically correct prose and spell in my sleep. David Starkey beats Eastenders. My favourite book is a thesaurus. I love to feast on the words as I roll them over playfully in my mind before committing them to paper. I know where I am with words. They are my bread and butter.


You, on the other hand, are alien to me. Yet my son, the boy who once met polar bears in his imaginary games, you have lured to a degree in chemistry, now my daughter to A Levels in chemistry, physics and maths. My other half reads New Scientist, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and dreams of computer code in bed.

Not one language between them, no love of metaphors, gerundives, the early Anglo-Saxons and New Hart’s Rules. You’ve hooked them instead on positrons, covalent bonding, string theory, quarks. I have Shakespeare, you have Schrodinger – with and without his cat. You have Einstein, I have McEwan. C is a letter: to you it is the speed of light. Where did I go wrong?

We have met, you and I, in the dim and distant past. I remember holding a test tube over a bunsen burner in a tired old school laboratory, watching light refract through a prism, staring into murky tanks at newts and frogs. But your ancient teachers in my all girls’ school made little effort to capture our imaginations. I dropped you, breathed a sigh of relief and moved into the comforting embrace of the arts.

So no - I don’t know you either. But I have decided that that is no longer good enough. My children laugh when I tentatively ask if there is gravity on Mars (Yes, but not quite as strong as on Earth). Are there elements in the solar system which have not yet been discovered? (Definitely not) Isn’t the Large Hadron Collider just a very big boys’ toy, an excuse to propel things very fast towards each other and then watch them collide? Eat your heart out Richard Hammond.

I call myself educated yet there is a vast gaping hole in my essential knowledge of the world. You’ve skirted past me, maintained an air of mystery, kept yourself aloof.

So I’ve been to the library and to Amazon. For weeks I’ve immersed myself in you. And I’ve found you’re not the enigma I once thought you were.


I’ve grown to love the periodic table in all its brilliant beauty – and not just for its names, though I must admit that antimony, lutetium and titanium sit elegantly on the page. I’ve learnt the second law of thermodynamics: that left to their own devices hot things get colder and not vice versa. Like my cup of tea. That entropy (your posh word for chaos) will always catch up with us in the end. My daughter’s bedroom is proof of that. I can now balance a chemical equation and explain electron sharing, say why carbon can form both a diamond and the shavable graphite in a pencil lead, know an angstrom from an isotope, my loops from my buckyballs. Neon is a cocky, noble gas. Cosmic rays are real not a fiction. It’s not so hard.

Are you impressed? I still get stuck on the space-time horizon and the uncertainty principle, never mind the gluons. Hawking lost me at the six flavours of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom. Are you kidding? For now you can keep Planck’s quantum hypothesis, the singularity theorem and red shift.

But I’ll hold my own in the dinner party conversations about black holes and all that missing anti-matter. (Just put a mother on to it – believe me, we find things all the time!)

I’ve enjoyed our short time together. Maybe we could keep in touch – just now and then. Yes, I’d like that. I could even show you a rhyming couplet or two. Oh, and about that Large Collider of yours - bring it on!

A Letter to ......Reporter Frog

We bought you at a village fete, over ten years ago now I think. You lay there with several others on a trestle table, each of you handmade from a slightly different material, all filled with beans – red lentils we found out when one of your seams split - about the size of an adult hand.

Maybe Jack liked the soft feel of you in his fingers or your patchwork of deep pinks and blue, or your eyes, two white beads which did seem to look at us.

I don’t know why, one day, he decided you were a journalist. That’s how you got your name – Reporter Frog. And that summer he made you all the equipment you needed to do your job: a notepad and pencil, a tape machine and microphone, a computer and a printer, a mobile phone, all carefully and lovingly constructed out of cardboard. So it was obvious you would come on holiday with us to Scotland, looking out of the aeroplane window so you could describe the unfolding landscape below us: the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and then down into busy Glasgow, towards lego houses and snaking roads. He kept you safe, in your own little bag, but we grown-ups checked up on you too. At the holiday cottage he made a space for your belongings on a table beside his bed.

It was hot, for Scotland, and that first day the beach was a welcome relief. We peeled off clothes, relaxed our guard. He must have put you on the rock quite soon while he paddled and played. None of us missed you for hours. And of course by the time we did the sea had long since washed over your stone. The next few hours and days were torture: the times we scoured that beach at both low and high tide, reaching under seaweed, scanning the damp brown sand. I even wondered if you had been dragged out to sea and swept back onto a neighbouring beach so we went there too and looked. It was at night that Jack cried the most and to listen to it nearly broke our hearts.

The “Lost” poster on the toilet block beside the beach was one last desperate shot, more something to do than anything. To have left no stone unturned, so to speak. I drew your shape and tried to recall your exact colours. The days passed, bringing our holiday close to its end. I confess that we bought a beanie baby tortoise in a shop but it was not the same, no substitute for you.

My husband took the phone call in the early evening. I heard his excited voice, our address being spelled out. We could hardly believe it. The woman described how you had been saved by another little boy just as the waves were about to swamp you, an innocent rescue. You were in Leeds now. She’d put you through the washing machine so you were cleaner. Back home we waited anxiously until the envelope bearing you at last tumbled through the letter box.

I am looking at you now on the desk, faded and tattered with the beans spilling out in places. Jack is at University and you are only a faint memory of his, a childhood legend. But for a reporter – which is what you were – wow did you have a good story to write . . . . .

A New Post

Here is my new test post. From her ears Hettie must be about 4-5 months old

Mitchell and Webb effervesce in The Bubble

The studio lights went down on David Mitchell and his last trio of wisecrackers on The Bubble (26 March BBC2). Since its start six weeks ago it has amused with a mix of gentle badinage and droll wit. And what a safe pair of hands David’s are. Nothing too risqué, only mildly-worded forays into mockery and celeb-bashing.

Even the set was comforting – walls of books, cream armchairs, a soft pink lamp. Terribly civilised. Only the garish red lights of the voting panels seemed out of place. But somehow the score did not seem to matter. We were here for the sheer jocular fun of the game – spotting the true stories in the web of fictions dreamt up by the programme makers – and the spin-off repartee.
One wonders how hard the BBC had to work to persuade the likes of Reginald D Hunter, Miranda Hart and Sue Perkins to spend a week cut off from the world, with only their fellow humorists and a pack of cards for company. The best guest was kept for last. Question – the comedian David Mitchell has announced he is splitting from his writing partner Robert Webb. Real or fake? Fake, fake, cried Robert to “my David”, their mutual chemistry fairly effervescing. Thank goodness for that.

Which brings me to my final question: can they find another eighteen willing, quality contenders? Please.