Monthly Archives: July 2016

A Simple Ten-Page Tale from India

Until this year I’ve got away with watching the final presentation at the Children’s Theatre School in Shiroka Luka without understanding anything at all. Elena Panayotova’s narration in Bulgarian has whizzed through my brain without depositing a single iota of information, and I’ve been able to enjoy the costumes, dancing, puppetry and other forms of theatrical wizardry, undisturbed by knowledge.

Not so this year. On our arrival in Shiroka Luka, we foreigners were handed a ten-page story, in excellent English, and encouraged, indeed commanded, to absorb the plot before Saturday’s performance.

In summary:

Young, rich, eligible bachelor king Nal is unexcited by the local girls.

SL01

But, so famous is he, that a distant princess, Damayanti, falls in love with the idea of him before she’s even seen him.

SL02

In due course Nal hears about Damayanti from his soldiers (apparently whilst dancing), and he falls in love with her, again, sight unseen.

SL03Pi

Pining by the shore of a lake in the palace garden, sometime later,  Nal sees seven beautiful swans and can’t resist grabbing one.

SL04

The swan begs to be freed. In return she will fly to Damayanti and tell her of Nal’s love. Which she does.

SL05

Then, Damayanti’s father, the king, noting her new-found happiness, decides it’s time she got married. He invites all known nobles to present themselves, assuming that the man Damayanti loves will be one of them.

SL06

Indeed, Nal sets off to make his case, but along the way he meets four Gods (Indra, Varuna, Agni and Yama) who are also bent on winning Damayanti’s hand. They demand that Nal should be their messenger and that Damayanti should choose one of them.

SL08

Reluctantly he does as they command, and rapturous as Nal and Dmayanti are at meeting each other, he explains that she must marry one of the Gods. Damayanti refuses and promises that when the Gods present themselves she will choose Nal.

SL09

And that’s all I’ve got time for today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being at your own Pre-Funeral

mother2

My mother is 95, and in good health, both mentally and physically, facing the last years of her life with equanimity, good grace, and a total absence of self-pity. Her powers are failing, but, as I remind her, so are mine. So are everyone’s. She might well have another ten years to go, or even more, and if she can maintain her mental acuity, and her sense of humour, and of the ridiculous and the absurd, they will be good years for her and for those around her. She has no expectation of immortality and is determined to make the most of the time that’s left.

I spoke to her yesterday on the way home from the airport. She’s been cajoling me into playing the oboe at her ‘final’ concert party in Salisbury in September, and I’ve been teasing her by pretending to demur. There have, after all, as I point out, been several ‘final’ concerts – almost as many as the great Spanish soprano, Montserrat Caballe, has given.

Our family concerts involve my brother and me, his children, their spouses and partners playing classical music on the oboe, flute, violin, bassoon and piano, often awkward arrangements of well-known pieces such as the Rite of Spring. These concerts serve as reminders, in some cases, of how much better we used to play when we were children or young adults.

So, I have pretended to be unsure of whether I can take part, citing business travel, lack of practice, broken reeds and hugely more important things to do. My mother has countered with various powerful arguments, most of which boil down to the unreliable suggestion that ‘this really is the last.’ But I am not convinced.

Yesterday, however, on the spur of the moment, she launched a new line of argument.

‘You played at that old lady’s funeral last year,’ she said, referring to my two-minute oboe solo at the funeral of my dear friend Jane last May (my mother has total recall, it seems, and I should never have told her about it).

‘So, I really think you should play at my pre-funeral.’

Pre-funeral!

What a marvellous idea! All the ceremony, glad-handing and fun of the funeral itself, with the added advantage that you can actually BE THERE to enjoy it.

We had a good laugh about it. She can still be funny, inventive and absurd. And it is true that we shall probably play the same music at the real one, assuming we do not pre-decease her, and as long as we are still young enough to play.

But the question is, how many pre-funerals can you have? I am afraid this may be the first of many.

Nevertheless, I suppose I shall play at it.

The Consolation of Cakes

Cakes

The Children’s Theatre School in Shiroka Luka ended yesterday with the most harrowing ritual of all – the giving out of diplomas to the children who took part, and the saying of goodbyes to children, artists and sponsors – an occasion for torrents of tears. Many of the children look forward to the Theatre School all year, and all of us remember how long a year lasts when you’re a child. Tears are followed by the consolation of cakes and then we’re gone.

Cakes are, indeed, one of life’s great consolations, and I must admit that food still occupies as important a place in my mind as it ever did when I was a child. I remember that at the end of the very first Children’s Theatre School just before Christmas in 2001, Elena Panayotova, who directs the School, asked the children to tell her their dreams for the future. Some of them mentioned becoming a footballer, or having loads of money, or being a film star, but I remember, with great affection, one small, slightly plump boy saying, ‘As many kebabche as I can eat.’

The kebabche is the local sausage – minced pork flavoured with cumin – and in 2001 orphanage food wasn’t as good or as plentiful as it is now. At the party we held for the children following the show I saw him pile a plate high with kebabche and cakes, and then take himself to a quiet corner to eat them all on his own. As much as he could eat was quite a lot.

I’m afraid I’m the same, and I saw myself in that child. I still haven’t entirely mastered the art of restraint. This morning in Sofia, we found the best patisserie in the city – the Orsetti Pasticceria, owned and managed by an Italian couple. Anything to avoid the appalling breakfast offered at the Arena di Serdica, an otherwise very good hotel. The cakes were delicious, and I ate too many of them.

cakes2

 

India – The Children’s Theatre School

It’s the last day of the Children’s Theatre School in Shiroka Luka in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria, after three weeks of workshops in masks, drama, photography, music, mime, dance, martial arts and yoga, and the children are getting ready for this afternoon’s final performance. This year’s theme is India.

The costumes are the best ever, a colourful, though sometimes fragile confection of silks, linens and acetates gathered from India, Oman and London’s Brick Lane. There will be a story, of course, told in Bulgarian, concerning the doings of a large handful of Indian Gods, Princes, Princesses and Devils (the latter role easy to cast from the 90 children who’ve come from schools and children’s homes around the country). Cultural accuracy isn’t our highest goal, but we do our best, and this year we have two dancers from Aurangebad in India to guide us.

SL6

If you’re not here already, it’s probably too late, but in any case the village is full of colleagues, children, teachers, social workers, politicians, artists, musicians, journalists, spectators, and tourists. Talking to some of them last night, I was reassured, as I am every year, that what Elena Panayotova and her artists do through three weeks of hard and difficult work, and through their final presentation, makes a difference to the lives of the children who participate. Many of them come from the more disadvantaged sectors of Bulgarian society (a large number of them are Roma), and through the Theatre School they acquire confidence, openness and reassurance that they matter. If some go back to their classrooms believing that if they work hard they can achieve something for themselves and their families then it is all worthwhile.

But above all it is enormous fun, and for me, immensely rewarding simply to see how much the children enjoy themselves.

 

A Gulf of Disbelief

When Nikolai Khrushchev visited the United States for twelve days in 1959 he refused to believe what he was seeing. The vast choice of tacky consumer products available in a typical US supermarket, he thought, was entirely a put-up job – smoke and mirrors. There simply couldn’t be so many different things available to ordinary citizens. This reminds me of a soprano I once knew slightly in the 1980s. She’d escaped from Romania to sing in the United Kingdom (and to obtain British Citizenship as a singing asylum seeker). On her first visit to a well-stocked Woolworth’s she cried – not so much, I suppose, with joy at what she’d found there, though she did buy a pair of multi-coloured slippers with bright pink pom-poms, as for the miserable paucity of choice available to the family she’d left behind, and for all the other indignities of living in a ruthlessly misruled nation that she had escaped and in which they still languished.

kruschev

That it would have taken implausibly extraordinary efforts to deceive Khrushchev so extravagantly counted for nothing. The almost impossible was easy enough to believe because the Soviet Union would have stopped at nothing to deceive a visiting President, Prime Minister or Monarch.

Blunt denial, lying, and deception, have characterised Russia’s response to the West ever since. Take the allegations in yesterday’s WADA report into doping at the Sochi (and other) Olympics. If they are to be believed, which, probably, they should be, the FSB and the Russian Sports Ministry colluded in massive deception, substituting clean urine samples for contaminated ones. The scale of their operation was vast – agents pretending to be plumbers passing samples through a wall separating the testing laboratory from the FSB building next door. They also employed special methods for opening ‘sealed’ test tubes but these, it turns out, were not quite clever enough because they left tiny scratch marks invisible to the naked eye, but detected by WADA.

Smoke and mirrors

doping

Some Russian media have dismissed the WADA report as part of an organised conspiracy against Russia. But even  if they know the allegations to be true, those involved will simply believe they were unlucky to get caught, and that the rest of the world must be doing exactly the same kinds of things, only doing them better, and getting away with it. That is their mind-set – all governments deceive their people and each other. If no one can prove it, then they’re just doing it vey well indeed.

From the Russian point of view, truth and moral principle are irrelevant, because the assumption is that every government must share their point of view and their methods, whatever they might say. I am sure the President Putin sincerely believes that, whatever assertions there might be to the contrary, the so-called independent judiciaries and media of Western states MUST be, in reality, tools of the state.

The report into the murder of the ex-FSB agent Litvinenko in London MUST be a fabrication. Well, of course, they also know it to be correct, but they could never believe that the truth was independently arrived at. The allegation that Russian troops have been assisting the rebels in Eastern Ukraine MUST be false, just as there was no advance guard in Crimea before the referendum on its absorption into Russia (well, actually, they later admitted that the ‘little green men’ were theirs, but it was certainly a false allegation for a while). And the suggestion that the rebels in Eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian passenger jet using rockets supplied by Russia, MUST be false. Carefully fabricated photographs showed, beyond a shadow of doubt, that a Ukrainian jet shot the ill-fated Malaysian jet down from the air.

Somewhere in the Kremlin, Putin’s henchmen will be smarting at the fact that they’ve been caught out doping their athletes, but you can be sure that they will simply be smarting at the fact they lost at a game that everyone else plays, but which they believe they’re generally best at. Perhaps I am a victim of Western ideology and too credulous in believing that by and large we’re not dupes of our Western governments in the way Russian citizens are of theirs.

The Decline of the Village

I first came to the village of Shiroka Luka, high in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria, by accident, on a walking holiday, in 1988. Bulgaria was then a more or less functioning socialist economy, if not the socialist paradise it had set out to become forty years earlier, and the village thrived as an agricultural community and as host to four substantial state institutions – an orphanage for children and teenagers, an orphanage for babies, a specialist folk music school for instrumentalists, singers and dancers, and a primary school for children from the village and the orphanage. There were jobs to be had in these institutions as well as in the fields and woodland that surround the village.

Even so, the population of the village and the surrounding area was lower than it had been a hundred years earlier. Subsistence farming and the simple rural life were even then less tempting than decades earlier, when villagers rarely left the valley, dressed in the local colourful styles and played the bagpipes and flute.

Since my visit in 1988 the population of the village has halved. Farming in the high meadows above the village has all but ceased, and this year, for the first time, not a single cow can be seen ambling in the early morning from the village to the nearby pastures to graze, and back again in the evening. Even fifteen years ago, cattle were housed in stables beneath the villagers’ houses, and in the evening you would see each cow break away from the herd to find her own way home as the cowherd led them through the village square. Villagers, presumably, milked their own cows and made their own cheese and butter.

The orphanage housed nearly 70 children in 1988, and there were 20 babies in the baby home. The primary school taught 100 children and the music school boarded more than 200. That was then. The baby orphanage closed about ten years ago, the children’s orphanage closed this year, the music school boards only around 100 pupils now and the village school teaches only 17 pupils.

You would think, looking at the village, as I have, over the last few days, that it still thrives, albeit in different ways. The village square is lined with restaurants and craft shops, selling Rhodope rugs, slippers and bells. But this occupies the village only for a few months each year. With these four institutions in decline or closed there is nothing to keep young people here, whilst in Plovdiv and Sofia there are jobs, and modern life and a more comfortable way of getting through the winter. However sentimentally we might regard the old way of life, we would be the last to choose to live it.

There’s an idea now that the orphanage might become a special centre for artistically gifted children, or a centre where the arts might be employed to inspire ordinary children – I’m not sure which.  All of this stems from the work that my friend Elena Panayotova and her colleagues have done through the Children’s Theatre School, but I can’t see how this could be enough to keep the village alive, or where the money might come from to finance it. It is a desperate, but a barely plausible hope.

It is, of course, sad to see village life, indeed a way of life, decline. But Shiroka Luka is too far away to serve as a pretty weekend bolt hole for the middle-classes of Plovdiv and Sofia, and, in any, case these are not yet sufficiently prosperous cities. What’s happening here happened fifty years ago in the United Kingdom and most of Europe and no one can stop it happening here. Things change.

Belonging

I’ve just arrived in Shiroka Luka to take part in, but mainly to enjoy, the annual Children’s Theatre School that LLP Group and systems@work  sponsors. Shiroka Luka is a beautiful village, high in the sparsely populated Rhodope Mountains of southern Bulgaria, a place where, in the days when disadvantage was a political inconvenience, orphanages and other institutions for disadvantaged or disabled children were placed, out of sight and out of mind.

DSC00276

Through the Theatre School we try, in a small way, to bring attention to, and give confidence to, children who are otherwise marginalised. Many are Roma children (‘gypsy’, to use a word imposed by the majority) and they will face discrimination almost every day of their lives. If we can give them a little more confidence we can chip away at the wall of prejudice that they must overcome, though it will be many years before the opportunities for a Roma child in Bulgaria are the same as for a ‘white’ Bulgarian.

I loathe prejudice and I loathe the marginalisation of any community. Marginalisation breeds despair, frustration, anger, and sometimes even violence. It is the marginalisation of those left behind by globalisation that led to the Brexit vote. It is the anger of the left-behind in the USA that is fuelling Trump’s unexpected, irrational popularity. And dare, I say it. whatever the causes may be, it is the marginalisation of the Arab and the Muslim world that fuels the irrational cruelty of extremism and violence. Religion is not the reason. Religion is simply a convenient justification for feelings that stem from a deeper frustration.

I strongly believe that most people want the same things, whatever their nationality, culture, religion, location, colour, gender, or sexuality. They want freedom of opportunity, access to education, opportunity to travel, impartial justice, free access to information, freedom of expression, health and prosperity for themselves and their families. I do not believe that people are fundamentally different from each other. Those who enjoy these freedoms are usually happy to live and let live, to tolerate colourful difference in any form, as long as it doesn’t diminish their own opportunity.

So, building walls and closing borders, when frustration and rage spill over into appalling violence, as in Nice, will never solve the problem. Isolation isn’t the solution. Inclusion is the only long-term solution.

Here in Shiroka Luka we are bent on inclusion, showing disadvantaged communities that they have opportunities in a society that has hitherto neglected them. It may take us a hundred years to achieve our aims, but we must start somewhere.

Don’t ask me how we can persuade those attracted by the ideology of IS that they belong to the same world as we do, and can be equally successful in it, but surely we must. There is no other solution.

 

Brexit and Me

I opposed Brexit, though my resources were few and my reach very limited. I sat up all night as the results were declared, as bad news was piled on bad news, until, towards six o’clock in the morning, as dawn broke, Brexit was a done thing. The very first result, in Newcastle, augured poorly for the entire referendum, and the pound fell precipitously within minutes, seeming to fulfil the expectations of the scaremongering Remainers.

brexiteconomics

But putting aside the emotional scars, which I believe I will survive, how will Brexit affect me and my businesses?

The first falls of the pound and the stock markets were hysterical, and I immediately halted all exchange transactions from GBP into our home, European, currencies. I’m not at all surprised, however, that the stock markets have more than rallied and the pound is back to only about 3% lower than it was (around 1.24 EUR = 1 GBP) before Brexit became real. We may resume exchange a few days from now.

As for my personal savings and possessions, I value my assets in GBP because I plan eventually to live in London. In fact I measure my prosperity against the possibility of buying a two-bedroom flat within a mile and a half of the West End. But my assets are largely located in Europe, and I have some shares in USD, EUR and GBP. So, in terms of personal finance, I’m actually better off after the Brexit referendum. The fall in value of the pound makes the dream of a London flat more realistic. And everyone is saying that UK, particularly London, property prices will fall.

And from the business point of view, the picture is a mixed one. systems@work sells software and services in GBP, largely in the UK market. We price in GBP, so our pricelist now brings us fewer Czech Crowns that a month ago. Our costs are in CZK, so our margin is squeezed. Other parts of the business, such as LLP Group, buy software in GBP, so those parts are better off.

But in any case, now that the hysterical first reactions are over, the exchange rate issue is a smaller one. For now, then, I see no serious immediate issues arising from Brexit. We deferred conversion of GBP to CZK whilst the exchange rate was low, but I believe that in a day or two, with the EUR at 1.20 EUR = 1 GBP we will soon be back to business as usual.

But none of this surprises me. There’s always overreaction. And the economic arguments against Brexit were about the medium and long term, not the few days following. And even if it seems entirely plausible that a mild recession might come in the coming months what will follow is unpredictable. But that’s nothing new.

I was never convinced by the half-truths and half-lies of either Michael Gove or George Osborne, and I feel no sympathy for either of them following their expulsion from the Government. For me the Brexit argument had little to do with economics. It was about European values, joining-in rather than leaving, and accepting that sovereignty, democracy, and global integration aren’t simultaneously attainable in today’s globalised world.

So, so far, from a business and personal point of view, Brexit has done me and my colleagues no harm. I expect mild damage in the medium term, because recession in the UK and Europe is likely. But what the long term promises, economically, I have no idea.

All that said, I think that I will always believe that Brexit is an enormous moral and political mistake.

 

 

Other People

I endured an interesting but disappointing lunch today on the terrace of Aromi, one of Prague’s finest restaurants, just a stone’s throw from my own kitchen in Vinohrady. One of my closest friends had invited me to meet two American IT entrepreneurs who are developing a business software system here in Prague, as we do at systems@work. Our common interests might have drawn us together, perhaps to mutual advantage.

They were two energetic, humorous, good-looking, middle-aged men just a few years younger than me, and they buzzed with excitement about what they were doing. They were eager to tell me and my friend everything they possibly could about themselves – how they came to be living in Prague and how they came to be developing their software. Clearly the project interested them hugely, but I can’t say that I was very much the wiser, after half an hour or so, as to what they are actually doing, except that it is revolutionary and awesome, and everyone absolutely loves it as soon as they see it.

But if I was only a little the wiser as to what they are developing, and what their ambitions are for their product, they must have left the lunch table knowing absolutely nothing at all about me, simply because they asked me no questions at all.

anyquestions

Perhaps I am dull. But surely politeness demands that we show a balanced curiosity about other people as we chatter about ourselves and our own achievements. I know that cocktail party chit-chat becomes ever more insufferable as we get older, but showing no interest at all in others makes the experience even worse than it needs to be. If you have no curiosity about other people you might as well join a queue in Zurich and end it all. You certainly shouldn’t go to parties, or, indeed, to lunches.

From time to time I popped a question, such as about database performance issues, that suggested I might know at least a little bit about the development of scalable business software, but these questions were swatted away in favour of yet another monologue about how great their own ideas, achievements and prospects are.

I cannot think of another recent occasion when I felt so purposeless. I might as well have been a blown-up balloon instead of a living human being. I don’t think they would have noticed. I don’t think that an inability to speak, listen, even nod, would have been any discouragement to them.

But, I wonder, how can you learn anything if you never listen, if you have no curiosity about others?

It ruined my day -that, and getting soaked when the rain poured on me as I made my way home.

Sadly, I couldn’t resist a little barbed email when they wrote a follow-up note to suggest we might meet again sometime (for another purposeless monologue?).

Thanks for your note. It was interesting to hear about your various ventures, including the bicycle story, and especially how your software came into being. It sounds as if the opportunity is a great one and that you’re working with very competent people. I wish you every success. 

And I know very well how it feels to be an entrepreneur and how one’s own immediate concerns and achievements leave little time for curiosity about others’!

One might was well call a spade a spade.

 

Will he or won’t he?

I dreamt last night that I had a talk with David Cameron. It was an after-lights-out talk at a generic Public School (it couldn’t have been Eton, because I didn’t go there) and we should have been snug in our dormitory beds rather than whispering in the corridor. He was kind enough to ask me to call him Dave.

Dave and I had one of those frank man-to-man talks that late nights encourage. He was carrying a cricket bat, which was odd, because sports equipment isn’t allowed in the bathroom or the dorm, and he was practising shots as we whispered.

davecricket

I was very much the Junior Boy in the conversation, though in real life I am older than he is, and I was very privileged to have the brief attention of the Head Boy. I timidly asked him what he’d be doing after Wednesday when he steps down as Prime Minister. Perhaps the cricket bat was a clue, but I can’t now remember what he told me. He agreed that he would neither be offered, nor would accept  a Cabinet post, and he didn’t find the idea of an academic career appealing. Village cricket, it might have to be. But I suggested, sympathetically, that it would be a trying time for him and Sam, whatever happened. I pointed out how utterly bereft I would feel if I were suddenly to have nothing more to do with LLP Group or systems@work, two companies of which, I suppose, I am Head Boy.

So, Dave will travel to Buckingham Palace on Wednesday after Prime Minister’s Questions, leaving from the Palace of Westminster in the Prime Minister’s armoured Jaguar but returning from the Palace to his suburban semi in a Mondeo or something similar. In the UK the trappings of power are removed immediately and savagely. He’ll be putting the kettle on himself come teatime.

Poor Dave. He’s been a decent sort of chap, on the whole.  He puts you at your ease when he’s talking to you, in my experience, at least in dreams.

So, PMQs on Wednesday will be an emotive affair. I well remember Margaret Thatcher’s defiant last performance, and Tony Blair’s nine years ago. David Cameron did a rather decent thing on that occasion, the sort of thing you learn to do at Eton. As Blair’s last performance came to an end, David Cameron urged his Tory colleagues to stand and applaud as Tony left the House. ‘Come on,’ he called out. ‘Let’s show appreciation for his years of public service.’

It was a decent thing to do, and so English Public School, reminiscent of the kind of honour celebrated in Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada (‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’). It was a way of saying, more slyly, that, winners or losers, we’re all in the game together, and it’s decency and how you play the game that counts. It was also cleverly patronising, almost suggesting, ‘We’re the winners. It’s our time now.’

So, my question is, will Jeremy Corbyn do the same thing on Wednesday?

Now as it happens, I did go to the same school as Jeremy Corbyn, the Castle House School in Newport in Shropshire. He’s eight years older than me, so he would have been a very senior boy or not there at all, when I was there at the age of five. Perhaps he, too, was Head Boy. But it was a private school and his parents paid for it. Corbyn’s background is not so utterly different from Cameron’s. And, as it happens, I was at the same Oxford college and at the same time as Corbyn’s strategic adviser, Seumas Milne, who studied at Winchester College, an English Public School almost as illustrious as Eton. But, of course, Lenin was no working-class lad either.

My guess is that Corbyn will be mealy mouthed. He won’t fall for the cliché of decency and we’re all in it together and there’s more that unites us than divides us and Play up! play up! and play the game!. I suspect that he and his cadre will staunchly hold the line. They’ll have nothing to do with all that Public School nonsense. Rather, ‘Tories to the firing squads.’

And my second question is, what will all the other Labour MPs do? Will they break ranks, with their leader?

It’s a tiresome truth that an hour, a day, a week, is a long time in politics. One of the great unknowns is now resolved, and hard-as-nails Theresa May will be PM by Wednesday evening. But the other great unknown, what will happen to Corbyn, is a game that’s far from over.

———-

Vitai Lampada
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling‘s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind—
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”