From Kabul to Moss Side

This journey took place a few days ago in Dublin. I was talking with Concern's new head of operations for Afghanistan and asked him if he was worried about being kidnapped or murdered by insurgents in the course of his work.

He assured me that he took security very seriously, but personally he didn't feel under threat. Why, I wondered, because he had armed bodyguards? There were guards on all Concern workplaces, he told me, but these guards weren't armed. After all the footage I'd seen on TV, I was surprised by his response. But isn't it really dangerous in Afghanistan, I asked, especially for foreigners? It depends who you are and what you are doing, he replied.

He went on to explain that Concern's operations in Afghanistan depended on the support of the local communities in which they worked. If what you were doing was perceived as being beneficial to the community then you received support from that community. He told me that this support included Concern staff being warned when it would be dangerous to travel to and be in any of the places in which they worked.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world: it is ranked 175^th (out of 187) on the UN index of development, calculated from a range of indicators such as under five mortality rate, life expectancy, years of schooling and so on. Concern's operations take place in Kabul and two rural districts and are focused on maternal and child health, water and sanitation, agricultural development and the empowerment of women. Despite the threat of the insurgency, these developments are wanted by the communities in which Concern works.

It was a fascinating conversation, over lunch at a Concern away-day (I am in my tenth year as a member of the Board), and reminded me of an experience I had thirty years previously. Whilst studying for a PhD at Manchester University, I was supporting myself by working on an experimental community project in in Moss Side, Manchester. The team ran a drop-in advice and education project from an empty unit in the Moss Side Shopping Centre. I worked there for two years.

At that time Moss Side was a notorious district synonymous with very high unemployment, enormous social deprivation, drug gangs, drive-by shootings and riots. My friends and acquaintances were shocked at where I worked, they would never have ventured anywhere near the place. Yet the project team were told again and again how valuable our work was for the community and all of us felt safe working there.

There is a further link between Afghanistan and the inner-cities of developed countries. Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the worlds heroin and the production of this cash crop is largely in the hands of the Taliban: this is how the insurgency is financed, how small farmers in remote districts are kept under control and how some people choose to try and escape from the disadvantage that shapes their lives.

 

Have You Seen the Fish?

Over the past year, I've often asked this question. Unfortunately, the answer has been no.

I built a wildlife pond in my garden in 2012 and a botanist installed a mix of plants chosen to provide oxygen naturally. After frogs, water beetles and invertebrates had colonised the pond, I decided to try some fish.

At my local pet-shop I purchased two small goldfish and brought them home in a plastic bag, as if returning from the fair. I needed to find out if fish could survive in the pond; they were going to be the canary in the mine. Last June I put the goldfish in the water. I checked every day and was delighted to see them. They liked to nestle under lily-pads in the centre of the pond.

Pleased that my experiment had succeeded, I began to think about koi. Then, after a couple of weeks, the fish disappeared. I kept checking, but nothing there. Oh dear, I thought, perhaps a heron had eaten them. Or maybe they had died from a chemical imbalance in the water and a crow had scooped them up for breakfast.

As time went on, I stopped looking for the fish. There was plenty of wildlife in the pond after all: great diving beetles, water boatmen and so on. But I couldn't really hide my disappointment.

Then, one sunny day last week, I noticed two orange bodies under a lily-pad. Their fins were slowly moving as they raised their mouths and sucked in air. It was lovely to see the fish again. The prodigals had returned after one whole year. And, yes, they had grown; so there was oxygen in the water and enough food too.

All along the goldfish had been living in the depths of the pond. They had hunkered down and got through the winter: not only surviving, but thriving. I wont be buying koi now. I'm happy with my resilient goldfish.

 

The New Normal

Today is my anniversary. I've been all clear for three whole years now. When I was first diagnosed, I never expected to get this far. Happily I have, and from here on I'm regarded as having a much lower risk of recurrence.

On my first anniversary I had a meal out in a Belfast restaurant, one of the first times I'd done this since my surgery. On my second, I hired a motorbike and relived a much younger normality of mine by doing a weekend tour of the northern counties.

For my third anniversary I'd booked an away from it all weekend on Rathlin with T. This was a place I'd never visited and I was really looking forward to it. But fate intervened and I went down with a bad head cold and sore throat, so the weekend away was postponed.

Instead, I've been at home having a quiet time with paracetemol, vitamin C and throat pastilles. It's been ordinary and mundane instead of celebratory. But in a strange way this is entirely appropriate, for the occasion marks my return to normal, everyday life. After all, there's little so human as having a cold.

Wildlife

I discovered some strange tracks across my lawn this morning; neither sheep nor cattle, both of which had wandered in through the gate before. I followed the tracks towards the back hedge and looking over saw two stags in the field behind my house. I stared at them and they stared back. We eyed each other for several minutes then they sauntered away up the hill - a truly magnificent sight.

 

The stags are fallow deer, they are still in their dark winter coats which will soon become dappled with light spots. Their antlers are growing, covered in velvet, until Autumn when they become unsheathed for the rut. The stags had loped across my lawn as I was sleeping - almost a Narnia experience (no lamp-post in sight).

The most common wild animals I see around my home are rabbits, which live in burrows under the hedge and delight in digging up the lawn for their favourite roots to eat. Because of this we have a love-hate relationship, but I cannot bring myself to harm them. Next are a colony of wild cats that live in an old graveyard nearby and forage the land around my house. They will eat whatever they can, recently I saw one munching a small rabbit it had killed. The wild cat spotted me, picked up the rabbit carcass in its jaws and scampered away.

In the old graveyard is also a badger's sett and at dusk they can sometimes be seen out foraging. I once saw five together beside the hedge. From time to time a fox comes by, sometimes in broad daylight, it follows a route around the perimeter keeping near to the hedge. Overhead are a good cross-section of country birds, the most spectacular flyers being buzzards, ravens and red kites.

I'm a country kid who left home for the city at eighteen, vowing never to return. After decades of city life, I moved here thirteen years ago as an experiment. It's been great to live in the country again, I won't be leaving now.

 

 

A New Girlfriend?

Does Tesco have an aisle where you can find a new girlfriend? I glanced again at the shopping list that T had prepared, below 'Milk' and 'Bananas' there it was - 'New Girlfriend'. Perhaps I needed to look somewhere between 'Seasonal Goods' and 'Tastes of the World'.

Instead of visiting at weekends, T had come to stay with me for a week. The day she arrived she asked to stay for two weeks. I, of course, agreed.

When I told my brother about it, he said, 'she deserves a medal!'

'And what about me?' I replied.

'Oh yes,' he said somewhat belatedly, 'you deserve a medal too.'

I wondered what sort of medals might be awarded. Distinguished Service? Two weeks seemed a bit short for this. Bravery? No frying pans had been raised and no household utensils appeared to have been secretly sharpened.

It wasn't an ordeal. Our couple of weeks passed pretty smoothly with plenty of happy, normal life. I found myself, quite naturally, thinking for two. I'm going to really miss her next week when she's gone.

And about that new girlfriend - there's no vacancy.

Giro d'Italia Stage 3



The riders ignored the fake road sign in Keady, offering a 'short cut'
to Dublin, and sped to the start of the Category 4 climb that would take them over Windy Gap to Newtownhamilton. It was sunny and fairly warm inbetween the heavy showers. A big improvement on the almost continuous rain that had dogged their progress around the North Coast the previous day.

After forking out 5 million Euros for the first three days of the Giro and hoping that tourist numbers would dramatically increase after 170 countries had seen the sweeping panoramas of the Causeway Coast live, NITB must have been worried that the international viewing public would spot the relentless downpour and put NI on a list of destinations to avoid.

Whatever the weather, thousands of people had turned up to watch and encourage the riders. Supplies of pink paint had all but run out and pink balloons, ribbon and all sorts of home-made decorations bedecked the roadsides. I stood at the edge of a long slope that wound uphill between trees in the soft green of new leaf. After plenty of cars and police motorbikes cruised by, a breakaway group of four riders came into view followed by their team cars with spare bikes on top. The four made light work of the gradient and raced away trying to gain as much time at the front of the race as they could.

Five or more minutes passed and then the peleton came into view, 200 riders closely bunched together with a phalanx of team cars following behind festooned with spare bikes. They came up the slope quickly but they weren't sprinting, they were riding tempo in their teams chatting to each other. Then one rider stopped just below me, the team car braked and a mechanic rushed out with a spare front wheel, changed it and pushed the rider back into the road. He was on his way again in under 30 seconds, sprinting to rejoin the pack.

More cars and motorbikes followed on behind, then a series of ambulances and finally a truck and police car with the legend 'race end'. The whole caravan had taken less than 10 minutes to pass. The Giro was gone, over the pass and down to Newtownhamilton and across the border towards Dublin where today's stage would finish. Sadly for NITB the sunshine across the leafy lanes and drumlins of Armagh would not be televised. By the time live coverage resumed, the riders would be travelling through Louth and Dublin and Bord Failte would be rubbing their hands with glee. Perhaps in the end this would not matter too much, as the majority of the international televison audience would not be aware that this small island was subject to two jurisdictions. Indeed, the flag-saturated local audience itself could not fail to notice that the tricolours flying everywhere were those of Italy.



 

 



In the Pink

I began cycling regularly some twenty years ago. I took it up because a back injury forced me to stop running. But soon I became besotted and was riding through the Yorkshire Dales and Wolds in all weathers on my trusty Dawes Galaxy. I'd bought the bike secondhand some ten years previously and it took me up hill and down dale, enabling encounters with lovely places such as Thixendale, Filey, Rievaulx, Masham and Swaledale (amongst many others).

 

Then I moved to NI and began exploring the island by bike. Alongside many day rides with CTC Belfast, I did solo summer tours following the coastline in Donegal, Connaught, Munster and Leinster. Moving to South Down gave me lots of new roads to explore, through drumlins to the Mournes and Cooleys then across the Pale. It wasnt long before I had visited every county by bike.

 

I began to do tours overseas. At first I did solo tours to France, Spain and Italy. I flew with my bike in a padded bag and took a taxi to a nearby hotel where I stayed the first night, then I toured for some weeks on my bike, returning to the same hotel to collect my bags and fly home. These were great adventures, I enjoyed leaving all my normal stuff behind and relying on what I could pack in two panniers. I have particularly fond memories of my tours of Puglia, La Mancha and Castile.

 

Then I went further afield on organised CTC tours. Sri Lanka was my first, the tour took place a month after the Tsunami. I expected it to be cancelled, but we were persuaded to go by the Sri Lankan authorities. On the plane from London we were the only tourists, the rest were aid workers. We explored a fascinating and beautiful tropical island the size of Ireland. At the end of the tour we each bought a bike and donated it to a village that had been devastated. There was a touching handing over ceremony where we and the bikes were blessed. I returned determined to get involved in development work and within a few months I'd joined the Board of Concern Worldwide.

 

A series of overseas cycle tours followed - to Thailand, Laos, Southern China, Patagonia and Vietnam. There is something compelling about cycling in a developing country: you travel at the pace of the local people, stay at local guesthouses and eat at local restaurants. You feel more part of the culture. My most vivid memories: staying with a family in a Lao village, we ate and drank with them then slept on the floor of their stilt house; the striking traditional costumes in a village in the foothills of the Chinese Himalayas, people not dressed up for tourists but because it was market day.

 

All of this stopped when I became ill. Last summer I began cycling again tentatively. After a winter of hillwalking, I'm feeling much stronger and am now back on the bike again. Admittedly I'm a fair weather cyclist these days, it has to be 14 degrees before I'll get the bike out. Over time the Galaxy has been replaced by several others: an Audax (for day rides), a Sardar (for laden overseas tours) and a Bontrager (for supported overseas tours). But my trusty steed is still there in the garage, I'm not able to part from it.

 

And so to the Giro d'Italia, here for the next three days. I'll go and watch it for sure, I'm scouting out the hills near Armagh for a good vantage point. Professional cyclists go so fast on the flat that all you often see is a whirring blur of colour. In 1992 I saw an alpine stage of the Tour de France (the year that Miguel Indurain won), here you could make out individual riders as they sped by. I shall wear a healthy glow, shout and wave.