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by John Preedy Health Effects “So, why are you against nuclear power?” “Because it’s so dangerous! Look at what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima!” “Yes. Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident that the world has seen, and in the area affected by the fallout there have been about 4,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer among children and at least 9 deaths. There are also the expected premature deaths among the over 600,000 people who were directly involved in making the remains of the power station safe, which have been variously estimated at between 4,000 and 6,000 individuals. If you look on the internet you can find whatever figure you wish for subsequent long-latency premature deaths. Accurate numbers are impossible to deduce but the World Health Organisation and the IAEA have agreed on a figure of 4,000. All energy production incurs risks, accidents and fatalities, and as the graphic below shows, coal is among the worst. Coal contains uranium and its radioactive breakdown products. It's a fact that a typical coal fired power station releases 100 times more radioactivity into the surrounding area than a nuclear power station and they are not monitored or controlled. The figures quoted above are just fatalities caused directly by accidents. They don't consider the more general effects on health associated with air pollution and the release of radioactivity as particulates in the fly ash - a by-product from burning coal for electricity." “OK, but don’t forget the upheaval to people who lived in the exclusion zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima, where radioactivity is going to remain high for thousands of years. They’ve lost everything - their homes, their jobs, their whole way of life!” “Yes I agree. And on top of that many of them live in constant fear for their health and that of their families. The WHO report states that the psychological damage is the real harm done to the health of residents in areas affected by the Chernobyl accident.” “So just taking the case of Chernobyl you agree that it’s resulted in major economic losses and political upheavals, as well as direct physical health effects and indirect psychological harm?” "Yes and the same is true for Fukushima, although since there was much less radioactive material released, the direct health effects have been orders of magnitude lower. Also, after the Fukushima nuclear plant failures, which seem to have eclipsed the fact that 23,000 people died as a result of the tsunami, it’s such an obviously attractive and vote-winning posture for environmentalists and politicians to be against nuclear power.” Satisfying the Base Load “So why do you still support nuclear power?” “Because, in spite of having many reactors in operation worldwide which are inherently unsafe, there have been very few accidents. Even then, with the exception of Chernobyl, which was an RBMK plant which didn't even have a reactor containment structure, their effects have mostly been local. I also believe that there are no fully viable alternatives, capable of continuous running, that don't contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Nuclear power is a source of energy which is available all day and every day, not only during daylight hours or depending on weather conditions, but unlike fossil fuels, it doesn’t contribute to climate change.” “But surely energy conservation and renewable energy is the way forward.” “I agree that both have a place in any future energy strategy, but there are limits to energy conservation; and renewable energy, like all of the options, has associated problems and disadvantages.” “Such as what?” “Well the fundamental problem with most renewable sources is that they can’t supply the continuous base load of power generation that’s necessary in developed countries. Of course, if you think that we should all change our lifestyle to be like that of someone living in a religious order, you could go to bed when it gets dark, do without street lights, television, washing machines, computers and electric cookers after dark and get up when it’s light to work on your vegetable garden. I like cooking with charcoal or wood but I would miss my computer and my TV!” “ I still don’t get it! Why can’t renewables satisfy the base load?” “Well, photovoltaic power only works during daylight hours; and on cloudy days in Northern latitudes it produces very little. Solar thermal power has the same problem, although versions exist where heat is stored to allow overnight generation. Wind power only works when, and where, there is wind. And wave power needs a coastline. Hydroelectricity needs water to be able to run, but when river flows dry up in the summer it often can’t be used. You could burn wood or biofuels to generate electricity, but then you’d need huge areas of sustainably-managed forests or agricultural land dedicated to raising fuel crops. There have been some power stations built to run on biomass fuels, and there are circumstances where it’s feasible, but it’s not a universal solution for most developed economies. Or for highly-populated countries that use as much of their land as possible for agriculture, like China and India. There are also the problems associated with transmitting electricity from one region to another. In Germany the wind is in the North and people are objecting to transmission lines being installed from North to South across the country.” The Problem of Energy Storage “Well, they will just have to get used to the new ways. But why can’t we store the energy somehow? What about having lots of electric batteries?” “They’re not yet viable on a grid scale, and they won't be until new technologies allow batteries to be built with a much greater energy density. At present they're expensive, they need replacing after a few years and they use toxic metals, like lithium, manganese and cobalt, for their construction. Using batteries as a large scale storage option is being done in South Australia at Hornsdale Power Reserve but output is currently limited to 3 hours at 30MW, not enough to substitute for a lack of wind power generation on a calm day." “But there must be other ways of storing energy.” “There is a pumped storage scheme at Port Dinorwig in Wales that was completed in 1984. It works by pumping water up to a high level when electricity is abundant or cheap, then releasing it down through turbines to generate power when electricity is scarce and expensive. This simple article explains it. It’s possible to use schemes like this to store renewable energy, but they don’t store much energy, Port Dinorwig, for example, can only run for six hours, and they are expensive. Firstly you need to have the right location where you can construct a power station between two lakes, separated vertically by a few hundred metres, and after you’ve built the station, you have the problem of efficiency.” What do you mean by that?” “Any pump can only convert a percentage of the supplied electrical power into hydraulic power. For a typical pump you might get 70% of the electrical energy back in terms of mechanical/hydraulic work. The rest is lost as heat in the motor or the pumped fluid. But with a pumped storage scheme you have the same efficiency problem in both directions. When you convert the water stored at high level back to electricity using turbines, you once again lose about 30% as heat. So overall you are left with 0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49 or about 50% of the energy that you started with.” “So we would need twice as many wind turbines?” “Well it’s not as simple as that, because it depends on when the wind is blowing, what the demand is at the time and how many pumped storage schemes you can build. But you would certainly need extra generation capacity and you can see that it would be a lot more expensive than satisfying the base load with power stations capable of generating the base load requirements in the first place. Assuming that all your electricity is generated from renewable sources and ignoring the cost, I don't believe that there is any European country where it would be possible to find enough pumped storage sites to satisfy the base load at night, if there was no wind. There are many other possible ways of storing energy and proposals to use surplus power from wind and solar to generate hydrogen that could be stored, and then used to power vehicles and fuel cells are interesting, but the concept is still being considered in feasibility studies." “But we don’t want to build any more gas, oil or coal fuelled power plants, which are the only other power stations capable of running 24/7.” “Yes I agree. Climate change is a threat to the well-being of everyone on the planet! In addition I don't like the fact that fossil fuels have finite reserves and are mostly under the control of undemocratic regimes. So why not re-examine nuclear power?” Inherently Safe Nuclear Reactors “But you‘ve already agreed that it’s not safe!” “What I actually said was that '.... in spite of having many reactors in operation worldwide which are inherently unsafe, there have been very few accidents and even then, with the exception of Chernobyl, their effects have been local'.” “So you do agree that nuclear power is not safe!” “Yes at the moment, with the existing fleet of 50-60 year-old reactor designs. But what if there was a type of inherently safe nuclear reactor that can’t explode, can’t meltdown, can’t overheat and shuts itself down safely if there’s a total power failure?” “But we all know that nuclear power stations aren't like that, and if that was possible someone would have built one by now!” “Someone did! Alvin Weinberg built one in the sixties at the Oak Ridge National Nuclear Laboratory in the USA, and it operated between 1965 and 1969. It’s described here in this Wikipedia article about the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). It was a small 10MW reactor and it was the first of its kind. In spite of that, it operated successfully and demonstrated that the technology was feasible. Alvin Weinberg ran a very well-managed research laboratory and the design, with all of the results, operational experience and engineering detail, were written up in a series of papers. They’re available here. (be patient the pdf’s take a while to load)! The MSRE used molten liquid fluoride fuel running at high temperature, but at atmospheric pressure, so it couldn't explode. Since its fuel was already molten it couldn't melt down. In addition this demonstration reactor used air cooling, not water cooling, so it didn't need to be near the sea or a river. They didn’t want to staff it at the weekends, so they used to switch off the power, which stopped the fan cooling a 'freeze valve'. This allowed the liquid reactor contents to discharge by gravity into a set of tanks. These tanks had no neutron moderator and a geometry that didn't permit a critical chain reaction to continue. Since it was a small reactor the decay heat was limited and it needed no special cooling systems. Basically they let it shut itself down on a Friday afternoon. It was walk-away safe!” “That’s amazing! But why wasn't this work pursued further?” “Because at the time of the Cold War the priority was to generate nuclear material suitable for weapons, and this type of reactor doesn’t do that! Unlike the MSRE, those reactor development programmes which bred plutonium from uranium continued to be fully supported and Alvin Weinberg, who wanted to work on the thorium fuel cycle, which he considered was inherently safer, was asked to leave his post. He was subsequently reticent to continue promoting this type of reactor in the US because he was concerned about what the nuclear establishment of the period might do to his career.” “Ah, where would we be without politics!? But what’s thorium?” “Without going into too much nuclear physics, thorium is a naturally occurring radioactive element, about four times as abundant as uranium and it's geographically widespread. As thorium 232 it can be used to breed uranium 233, which is what was used to fuel Alvin Weinberg’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment.” The Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment What About Nuclear Waste? “Hang on, what about the nuclear waste issue. Nobody has found an answer to that. It stays radioactive for thousands of years!” “Ah that’s where it gets even better. If thorium is used, the amount of waste is drastically reduced. Thorium-powered reactors generate about 35 times less waste from spent fuel, a fraction of the nuclear waste generated by a uranium-fuelled reactor, with only 17% of the waste having a long half-life, and in the case of thorium that means about 300 years instead of tens of thousands. Liquid fluoride thorium reactors can burn most of their fuel instead of the 1% consumed by a uranium-based plant before the solid fuel elements need reprocessing. This slide tells the waste story better than I can! In addition the wastes generated from thorium are radioactive for only hundreds of years and don’t decay into plutonium. If you bury spent nuclear fuel from the uranium fuel cycle, after thousands of years the other radioactive components decay, leaving plutonium. In effect you create a plutonium mine for future generations of terrorists! This 40 minute video presentation from Kirk Sorensen explains it well. But Kirk Sorensen also suggests that a liquid chloride reactor could be designed to burn weapons and reactor grade plutonium in the fast spectrum, and at the same time the neutrons could be captured in a thorium blanket to generate U233 for burning in Liquid Fluoride reactors. We could permanently get rid of redundant plutonium stocks whilst producing energy and new fuel, but I should say that the research work on that hasn’t been done yet.” “Now you’ve lost me in technical detail!” “Sorry! It’s a complicated and technical subject. I think that’s one of the reasons why not many people know about it yet.” Not in My Backyard? “So you wouldn’t be concerned if a Liquid Fluoride Thorium fuelled nuclear power plant was built near you?” “As long as I couldn’t see it or hear it and I had had the opportunity to satisfy myself about the safety aspects of the design before it was built, it wouldn’t worry me. A couple of kilometres away would be no problem. It might even slow down the house-building that’s happening all around us. What a shame that would be!” “So you think that inherently safe nuclear power is possible? “ “Yes, not only possible, but investment in safe nuclear power is essential if, thinking globally, we are to avoid expanding the burning of fossil fuels to fulfil the rapidly growing energy needs of countries like China, India and Brazil. I’m far from alone in thinking this way, because, as well as nuclear enthusiasts, there are a number of environmental campaigners who’ve publicly stated that this is also their opinion, and they’ve accepted that Liquid Fuelled Thorium reactors are the best choice.“ “I’m still not completely convinced.” Back to the Future “Well others are, and it’s a case of back to the future! Alvin Weinberg, if he was still with us, would be very pleased, although he would probably be campaigning for more active US government involvement. China has announced that it’s pursuing the development of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors ( LFTRs), the US has a number of private companies promoting them, Russia and France are doing research work and India has already built reactors fuelled with metallic thorium. Even Japan has people promoting LFTRs but after Fukushima they are having a tough job doing so ! This review from the World Nuclear Association, written in 2020, gives a detailed account of the many different research programmes associated with molten salt reactors and also explains many aspects of the technology. If you want to read more, here’s a list of links that might help you, but be prepared to put some effort in! “ Websites promoting thorium and LFTRs: http://energyfromthorium.com/ Kirk Sorensen http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ http://sites.google.com/site/rethinkingnuclearpower/aimhigh Robert Hargreaves Other posts about thorium nuclear power written by the author: Thorium - Safe, Clean, Cheap Nuclear Power Who is Developing Thorium Power? Thorium- A New Direction in Power Generation Thorium- Energy Cheaper than Coal The Chinese Thorium Programme

By Tina Moskal "Once I had a colon but now I have a semi-colon" - a friend’s father’. The hospital which has just relieved me of half my gut gave us patients a journal to fill in during our stay. This was to record physical progress along with personal joy and angst. All of my angst became fixated on a pair of linked banalities: agonising constipation and cruel wind. Here I offer the experience to those who have the stomach for it: a slice of life in the time of Covid. My first suspicions coincided with the beginning of lock-down, so I held back from 'bothering the doctor', but new symptoms led me to get a diagnosis. Then things took off with impressive momentum. The breathlessness I felt just before Christmas last year turned out to stem from anaemia, which in turn led to suspicions of a digestive tract tumour. Given my decades of gut-friendly diet, I couldn’t imagine this would be a primary: it must surely have seeded all over the place. I started to accept with grace my God-given three score and ten. So when surgeon Shaban told me I had an isolated colon cancer, he may have been startled when I said rapturously “Is that all?”. Straight away, half a dozen preliminary procedures are booked before the surgery date in two weeks’ time - not easy under Covid. We live on the coast 40 km east of Edinburgh. To qualify me for a 'green' (Covid-safe) as opposed to 'amber' (Covid-iffy) hospital ward, our whole household has to shield pre-op, so our usual train and bus are not an option. Husband Vince insists on driving me back and forth. Unfortunately for him, extraneous bodies are not welcome in the hospital; no nearby friends can be legally visited, nor cinemas, theatres, bookshops, even cafés. So, Vince spends a lot of time palely loitering in parks and looking for loos (though surgeon Shaban, on hearing of this, began at once trading with colleagues and rescheduled three of these visits into one). During these appointments I, of course, experienced more social life than I have over the whole of 2020. So much for shielding… Finally, the day of the op… I can’t say “dawns”, since we have to leave before five of a February morning in order to arrive for seven: double travel time because the Beast from the East is ravaging our coastal roads. We set out over fresh-fallen snow which completely obliterates road markings and verges – not to mention yesterday’s ice – and the horizontal blizzard in our headlights draws a dazzling curtain across the windscreen. Somehow, we fumble through to street-lit Edinburgh where, on a short gentle slope up from Princes Street, our horse refuses the fence, wheels spinning sadly on the slush… Nevertheless, with exactly one minute to spare, we skid to a halt at the hospital door. Vince turns around to retrace his tyre-marks into a hesitant dawn, and I enter the operating suite on time, to scattered applause. A nurse immediately sends my perishable foods off to the ward fridge, and stashes my luggage in a corner. I climb onto the gurney and they wheel me in to get gutted. By way of conversation as we wait, I ask how long the op will last. They startle me with “Four hours” and, had I died on the operating table, my last words would have been recordable as “F*ck me!” After the Covid-complicated slew of out-patient appointments leading up to admission, once we check in to our wards, we in Green Zone are hardly aware of new restrictions. Traditional protocol against sitting on or in other patients’ beds or chairs is tightened and, of course, no visitors are allowed. These being the usual bearers of gifts, grapes and clean undies, we had been advised to bring in ample clothing, and favourite foods. The staff wear masks at all times, but one is, of course, used to the image of masked medics. Patients are only required to mask up and sanitise when we leave our own ward rooms. We are free to visit the hospital shops or the cafés for a decent take-away espresso, and to wander the in-patient buildings, except for the designated Amber areas. We were Covid-tested three days prior to admission, and at intervals thereafter, by an apologetic wandering adolescent with cotton buds. Our post-operative journals are for personal navel-gazing, yes, but primarily to furnish data on appetite, energy, mobility and the passage of wind and stool. The wind question is especially crucial in Colorectal: during gut surgery, the patient is pumped full-to-bursting with air, in order to provide good firm tubing to work on. Presumably this air penetrates beyond your previous day’s meals and gets trapped. You’re encouraged to expel most of this wind before expecting your traumatised colon to process solids again. Thus, alongside the time-honoured “Have your bowels moved today?”, the staff enquire tirelessly, “Have you passed wind today?”, rejoicing with those who have. Until wind has passed and bowel movement begun, they’re reluctant to let you home. What with inactivity and the need for opiates to control pain, constipation can follow any operation; but with colorectal surgery there is a complication: oral laxatives are strictly off-limits. They work by causing spasms of the bowel, which could tear the new stitching apart and lead to all sorts of leaky problems. Nor are doctors keen on approaching too soon from the other end. For some reason I fall full foul of these complications. My journal entries begin here: Day 2. Today far worse than Day 1! No longer dopey enough to ignore wind and wound pain, head- and musculoskeletal ache, bone-dryness. Sudden midnight flit from High Dependency to open ward meant no sleep –– due to previous excess, along with all manner of sleeping sounds and everyone’s bleeping things, randomly erupting on hair-trigger. On the bright side, I was able to add to the general cacophony by starting to pass wind. Over the day, wind power carried discreetly on. By this second evening, I can just about sit up and turn over in bed. Once on my feet, I’m fine. Day 3. But it’s there! I can feel it from outside, but it won’t budge! Dry, hard, large as an infant’s skull! I am fully dilated; it’s crowning, but I can’t birth it. Midwife, please tell me Push/Don’t push. What to do? I tried going for a long evening lope along yawning empty corridors. Suddenly, the dam threatened to burst there and then, and I dived into a providential loo. But when I sat down, ‘twas not even hot air. And now the old wind-type pain has returned, more localised. Day 4. Yesterday’s woes continue. I feel like a beached body bag around a barbed-wire-in-concrete colon. A pessary inserted at noon forged but a narrow passage through to… more caverns of wind. Spent the day doing T’ai Chi and yoga, trying to squeeze out… matter, air, anything. I feel hard-done-by; the initial recovery pains seemed fair enough, but this turn-up for the books came out of left field. Now I cannot pee either! The entire area has merged into one agonised, undifferentiated super-sphincter which doesn’t know where to turn. My bladder hanging grimly on to the gallons of water I have been trying to slacken my bowels with, mercifully relieved by the night nurses with a temporary (I hope) catheter. Day 5. Double pessary today. No go. The pain is excruciating. The ward doctor assures me that all will come to pass in the fullness… I disagree. I need a pickaxe. I adopt crouching postures reminiscent once more of labour; kindly nurses commiserate. Then the feisty one says she’ll go and “Kick doctors’ ass” and, blimey, turns up with a prize in the form of the lovely Shaban (my surgeon), who actually investigates, and proceeds to excavate my interior by (gloved) hand! Pain, yes pain, but productive, and the certainty that this is what was needed … though I’d envisaged something more mechanical… but hey, fingers before forks. As poor Shaban could only reach in up to his wrist, he left me with a silky enema for penetrating beyond, and I am promised more tomorrow. Day 6. Felt great, first thing. Long and peaceful pacing in the Recovery Walkway with insides again blocked, but more pliable, ready to respond to the promised enema. But where was said unguent? By late morning, getting more rigid by the minute, I was told there had to be 24 hrs between treatments. That would mean, by the time 6pm came round, I would be hard back where I’d started. Kind, sensible souls finally consented to give it to me after lunch, and lo! I have managed to pass a modest first stool, stony as a petrified porcupine, but all my own work. This relief has left me with, yes, much thanks, but the remaining petrification starting a little farther up; not so much a lump of concrete, more a stalagmite, stone dagger or needle of Dolomite, on which I am impaled like Edward the Second. One must walk very upright to avoid puncture, yet walk one must, in the hopes of grinding it down. By the end of tonight’s trudge through the corridors, groaning like a ghost, I have dislodged enough crumbs to be able to lie still sans pain, and so sleep, sans offending opiates. Day 7. More stone chippings dislodged throughout the night have me lying more comfy. Another enema and some Slippery Elm pills delivered by Vince have done the final trick (Vince just happens to be up in Edinburgh for HIS skin cancer excision). I guess I could have gone home today, if push came to shove, but feel safe here where there’s no panic. Rapid serious action when necessary, as with Pam opposite, but panic is not what you (nurses) lay on us patients. Just your patience, and your willingness to succour us in our whines or whims. Day 8. …I had my quarrels with some bits of timing, and one of treatment, but these were heard, and ironed out. You have a wonderful balance of heart and head: touchy-feely and science-of-steely. Thank you. Ten days later, I am now confirmed cancer free, and leaping like a goat.

by Stoker Many years ago I worked for a company majority-owned by Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corp. (HSBC), that leviathan of east Asian banks, then pursuing a strategy to become the biggest bank in the world. A major objective was to acquire other banks in the USA. Trying to break into the American market has been the downfall of many a business and HSBC was determined not to commit the same errors, but to work out a culture that would enable it to meld American customer-friendly ways with those of a tough Eastern trading bank that had fought its way from a toehold on the China coast to domination of third world markets. There was a standing joke that HSBC was run by a coterie of Scottish Grammar School boys who wanted a more exotic life. It was no joke; Scotland was precisely where the bank had for generations recruited its senior management, straight from school if possible. “Bank or Army?” was the choice for bright Scottish lads wanting to travel. It gave a certain outlook: hard-working, straight-speaking, dry, Presbyterian. Just the outlook on life that makes for a successful banking business. Until HSBC began to force its way into Britain, then Europe and the US. That slightly grim, hard-working, hard-drinking culture was a shock to many of those hoovered up in its march for growth. Senior management decided that HSBC must exhibit more polished Western ways and manners. Accordingly, the UK chief executive, an ambitious man of traditional background, told his London staff department that it had to introduce a new culture across all levels and ranks. They went off and got on with it, as was the HSBC way, designing a programme to increase informality, bring different levels and areas closer, and generally introduce a gentler, huggy-feely, culture. Literally, in some senses. When it was up and running it was suggested to the CEO that it would set a good example if he did the course. He agreed, and turned up to a London branch training session. “So”, the trainer said “let’s start with a group hug”. HSBC legend has it that our man did not actually fight off the hugging juniors, but he made a very early excuse to get back to head office and cancelled the rest of the programme for the whole UK. Which may, as it happened, have saved HSBC from later rafts of inappropriate behaviour claims. Hugging is best confined to those known to us very well indeed, and after glaring out those huggers (usually male), whose hands seem prone to gravitational fall. But it also demonstrates a more fundamental risk to businesses. Going along with fashionable ways can seem an easy win at the time, but when fashion swings round, accepted behaviours change. When what was right and good turns out to have been wrong and bad, then a business can find itself with real problems. And the dangers of that for business have never been greater in Western democracies than now. It is of course very tempting to go with the political flow. Indeed, any business that has not responded to, for example, concerns about diversity in modern mixed societies is foolish. Foolish because its customers will know and most want a society that does not exclude minorities. Foolish because its staff will know and resent any organisation that does not give fair chances to all. Foolish if its employment policies do not accord with the law, and to quite an extent, the spirit of the law. And most of all, foolish if it still does not understand that to be inclusive means that it acquires, promotes, and uses the best people to the maximum of their talents. Around 1987, the City of London woke up to the fact that the talents it needed were not those of a particular class or education or sex or colour, but were of character and energy and attitude. That was triggered by Big Bang in 1987 when changing social values and the liberalising, monopoly-breaking Thatcher government forced the City to scrap fusty old boy habits and reinvent itself to compete in world markets (especially American). Within a short time the City was the prime financial centre of the world; and one of the easiest places to succeed on merit and hard work, irrespective of creed, colour, or orientation. It was one of those happy coincidences where free enterprise, government, and society all had the same impulses at the same time. That is not the case now. The dominant voices in our on-line society hate capitalism as the work of the devil, citing it as a relentless grinding down of working folk and enslavement in the cause of private profit. Politicians, always trimmers in search of votes, pay at least lip service to these chants (though ‘unconscious bias training’ proved too mad even for the British government to embrace). And worst of all, the tendency is for business to keep its head down and hope this will all go away. In 1930’s Germany there were business leaders who genuinely espoused the Nazi cause; equally there were those who opposed it and stood against the creeping Nazification of every aspect of life. But most quietly tried to find an accommodation with what was happening. Understandably, owners and managers wanted to run their businesses and went with the flow, some more in the main stream than others. But to the chagrin and regret of many senior managers and business owners after the war, as every aspect of their collaboration was investigated. In our current wave of anti-capitalism, every failure, every error, every wrong step is used to demonstrate the failure of free enterprise to deliver, to support, to do good things. Yet, one of the magnificent successes of free enterprise just now is how it has risen to the challenges of the Covid-19 virus. Whatever has been asked, private enterprise has delivered, exceeding targets in volumes, delivery times, and price. The state has failed over and over; but capitalism has made up for that again and again. But do the owners, executives and managers of these fantastic businesses proclaim the merit of their many successes? Why do they not trumpet the benefits of the capitalist system that enable them to rise to the endless challenges we face? Let’s hear it for new forms of power generation, for our ability to feed more and more people at lower and lower costs, for new, faster, cheaper and efficient ways to build houses. Add your own list of all those things which have so much benefited the world. Of course, no system is perfect and, in particular, anything that starts to approach monopolistic tendencies, whether public or private, is not likely to act for the public good for very long. That was clearly understood by a past generation of politicians; the Thatcher government and the Reagan administrations both beefed up protections against misuse of market domination. Now though we in Britain have moved a long way from a government which morally, intellectually, and practically promotes free enterprise and private businesses. Politicians cringe at being associated with free enterprise; every financial scandal is used to beat the government to the floor. Tory ministers have a terrible habit of not defending free enterprise but on retirement quietly taking the board seats and the fees – yes, Mr Cameron, well might you blush. And yet the defence is easy. So many young people are starting their own businesses and wanting to be their own financial masters; others still queue up to join major City corporations and care not a jot about the working hours (probably shorter than their fellows starting up their own enterprises). They are all engaged in free enterprise: they are all, to a greater or lesser degree, capitalists. Any politician who thinks that free enterprise is just as important as free speech should be making robust speeches and writing ringing endorsements of the system now. So should the entrepreneurs and the capitalists. Yet so many free-market firms do so little to defend the system that enables their existence. Indeed, many nervously go along with the endless criticism and the gradual imposition of behaviours that are nothing to do with a free society, but all to do with the erosion of its value and its eventual destruction. Socialism, having failed after World War Two to gain access to control via the front door, is now creeping through the back door. Growing a successful business in free democracies is not easy. Often the business world is competitive to the extreme. Our rapidly changing times bring fresh challenges only too often. Immense corporations impose unfair terms and control semi-closed markets. Taxation is high and the legislative environment hostile. But if business does not make a better case for free markets, it will see things get worse. Time for a protest march: “Freedom for free markets!”. *Apologies to Andrew Marvell

by Mark Nicholson Central Kenya is on the UK Red list and is in lock-down again, one year to the day since it was first locked down. This time, serious Covid-19 infections are on the rise and total deaths have passed 2000, a figure thankfully still low compared to many other countries. Most air travel has ceased and Corona (Swahili abhors words that end in consonants, so I will use that term for Covid-19/ SARS-CoV-2) has ruined Easter plans for many. Angela Merkel, of whom I am usually a great fan, annoyed me the other day by linking the latest German lock-down to the arrival of the British (or did she say Englisch?) variant. Since when do viruses have nationalities or passports? Every day we hear of Brazilian, Indian, South African variants, which makes people panic, politicizes the pandemic and has led to Sinophobia, already ramped up by The Donald. Yet of one thing we can be sure: by the time a new variant has been identified, it will already have spread to hundreds or thousands of others, and is probably already in other countries. Last week I was asked by a UK history student, currently locked down in Kenya, to explain the difference between viral immunology and molecular epidemiology, phrases he had read in a newspaper. He asked why he had to be blinded by science, to which I replied that it was time he was enlightened by science. It reminded me of an argument we had at University years ago when an art student scoffed at a physics graduate who had not heard of James Joyce. Why is it that the ‘reasonably educated’ are expected to have heard of Dante, Donne, Durer and Michelangelo but not Dalton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, Crick or Edwin Hubble? If I wanted to start an argument, I could suggest that the latter group’s contribution to modern life is far greater than the former’s. Is the gap between the scientist and the ‘ordinary’ person widening? So I told him the next time he thought he was alone, he should contemplate the fact that his body is a mere biome, providing a home for hordes of ‘living’ creatures (I write 'living' in quotation marks because viruses cannot really be called alive). These include an estimated 380 trillion (or 380,000,000 million) viruses, which have set up home in his body and are doing no harm at all. No, it’s the recent immigrants that are the problem. Many of humanity’s nastiest diseases originated in animals, including both influenza and smallpox viruses, which together killed around 320 million people in the 20th Century alone. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel has a chapter entitled ‘The lethal gift of livestock’, which I would retitle ‘The lethal risk of proximity to animals’ because having pets and eating wild animals is no less dangerous than milking cows. How do viruses hop from one species to another? Transmission of an animal virus might start with a human acting as an accidental host. The person may get unwell but is unable to pass the virus on to another person (e.g. Foot and Mouth in humans). Later in its evolution, a virus may go back and forth between animal and humans; this is called a zoonosis (e.g. brucellosis). Eventually, an animal virus (e.g. rinderpest) may mutate sufficiently as to cause a new disease in humans (measles). Epidemic diseases have four characteristics. First, they thrive as 'crowd diseases' spreading quickly in densely populated areas from infected persons to healthy people, so that most of a population is exposed. Second, they are acute illnesses; so we either die or recover completely. Third, those who do recover develop antibodies, or are vaccinated, often resulting in lifelong immunity. Finally, viral epidemics may die out, unless the virus is super labile (like influenza). Bacterial spores such as anthrax can persist and hide in the soil for centuries but a virus cannot. If it persists in the body, it may eventually merge with a host’s DNA and live happily ever after. Coronaviruses have been around for at least 8000 years and the arrival on the scene of a new virus infecting humans is no surprise either. These viruses are small (26-32,000 bases compared to 3 billion bases in the modestly-sized human genome). They comprise a single strand of RNA, as distinct from the more stable, mostly double-stranded DNA viruses like smallpox. Corona is transmitted faster than DNA viruses and it mutates faster, but nothing like the high rate of mutation seen in other RNA viruses like influenza or HIV. The first coronaviruses were identified in humans in 1962. SARS-CoV-1 appeared in 2003, then MERS, both of which were much more pathogenic than ‘our’ new Corona (SARS-CoV-2). In 2013, a coronavirus (RaTG13) was identified from the Chinese horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus affinus). A very similar virus was then recovered from a Malayan pangolin, 98% similar to the 2020 ‘Corona’, so it is almost certain that the edible pangolin served as the intermediary host between the bat and the first human to be infected. Ignorance is mother to conspiracy theories and I will continue to believe the official Chinese line. I went to Wuhan a few years ago. It's one of the most polluted cities I have ever visited but it hosts one of the most prestigious virology institutes in the world. The most likely scenario goes like this: a blood sample from a sick patient was sent to the institute and identified as a new Covid virus. The officials probably kept quiet, hoping it was an accidental host infection, but it was too late: other humans were already infected. But this hardly suggests anything sinister. I think the Chinese were just keeping their fingers crossed and hoping for the best. Corona in humans is a wonderful example of evolution in action. It is much easier to demonstrate evolution in a virus than trying to show how humans evolved from the first fish which crawled out of the sea hundreds of millions of years ago. A virus cannot replicate on its own so it inserts its genetic material in the host’s cells, co-opting proteins to create viral replicates, until new viral particles burst out in their millions. As the virus replicates, its genes will undergo random 'copying errors' called genetic mutations (substitution of one nucleotide base with another). Over time, these mutations can lead to alterations in the viral surface proteins, or antigens. Mutations on key sites on the Corona genome (e.g. K417N or 501 etc.) lead to ‘variants’ which are only noticed when they have characteristics that make life harder for the hosts (us). Most mutations are harmless, while a few are deleterious to the virus. From the virus’ point of view, mutations are useful if it increases its chances of perpetuity, such as adapting itself to a new host species. New variants of Covid are just better adapted (e.g. faster at transmission or cleverer at evading the host’s antibodies and immune system) but not necessarily more pathogenic because it is not in the interest of a virus to kill its host quickly. A coronavirus with a small genome of 30,000 base pairs still has lots of opportunities to mutate. Stage one in viral evolution is where it has mutated well enough to jump from one species to another. Stage two is where the new host species is able to infect another of the same species. The virus may have a negative effect (illness) on the new host but if it kills the host within a few hours of infection, it has to find a new host quickly. With Ebola, just touching a victim is enough to transmit the virus. If it kills its host before the host can infect others, the virus will also disappear. At 20-50 nanometres coronaviruses are small (a nanometre being one thousand millionth of a metre) so high numbers will ensure efficient transmission. One millilitre (ml.) of nasopharyngeal fluid in a patient contains between 8-10 million copies of the coronavirus, plenty of scope for a mutation. Meanwhile there is an endless battle going on between the host and the virus: antibodies lock onto the outer surface proteins of a virus and prevent it from entering host cells, so a mutation in the virus can trick the antibody. A virus that appears different from other viruses that have infected the host has an advantage: the host has no pre-existing immunity (antibodies) to that virus. Many viral adaptations involve changes to the virus’ outer surface. This is evolution in action and it takes only hours or days. Fortunately, most of us have been lucky with Corona. Up to 80% of cases are asymptomatic and the death rate among symptomatic patients is low, about 2 percent and falling, giving an overall death rate of 4 per thousand. Compare that to Ebola, another RNA virus which has a mortality rate of at least 50%. Epidemics have destroyed civilizations, as illustrated by the European conquest and depopulation of the New World. As humans become increasingly urban and travel faster and wider, the chances of more deadly viral epidemics increase. Novel RNA, DNA and protein-based vaccines may save the day for most of us this time. I read that films such as Cassandra Crossing, Contagion and Outbreak have become hugely popular recently. They remain fictional but if we do not learn from what is historically a minor epidemic, we may be in for a nastier shock next time.

by Richard Pooley It was in the south-western Japanese city of Kumamoto when I first cursed myself for not downloading the app.. It was the afternoon of 5 October 2019. I had just flown in from Europe via Osaka, taken the airport bus to Kumamoto’s central station and after a 15-minute tram ride was trying to find the hotel I had booked to stay in for two nights. I was there for the Rugby World Cup and to explore parts of the country I had not been to when living and then visiting Japan between 1990 to 2012. In the article I wrote at the time I mentioned why I had not taken a taxi to the hotel: “Don’t head for the taxi rank. Taxis are too expensive and anyway no Japanese taxi driver I have ever met understands English, wants to understand English or can read our alphabet.” I could have added that Japanese taxi drivers are also incapable of reading a printed map, even one written in Japanese. Tell them the name of your destination in English or attempt the same in Japanese and you will get a shake of the head. “Wakarimasen”. He doesn’t understand. Show them a printed map, with instructions in Japanese – take the second right at the gas station, then the third left at the 7-Eleven … - and often as not they will turn it upside down with much sucking through teeth. “Wakarimasen”. Satellite navigation has made life easier for the Japanese taxi driver burdened with a gaijin in his cab but even with a sat. nav. to guide him he can still fail to get you to where you want to go. The problem, as anyone who has been to Japan will know only too well, is that there is no logical address system. Houses are not numbered. Only major streets are named or signposted (and even then seldom clearly). People live on numbered blocks of land. 7-7-202 is the start of the six-line address of one Japanese friend of mine living in Yokohama. I had a detailed tourist map of Kumamoto. On it I had marked my hotel, written in English only. But the marker, I was to discover, was placed 2 streets away from the hotel’s actual location. Accuracy is little better with an electronic map in Japan; the marker or dot will often hover over a point hundreds of metres from where you want to be. Not a problem when you can read the building numbers going from 1 to 200 along each side of a European city street. But a major problem when there are no such numbers and instead there are hundreds of banners written in characters you cannot understand telling you what lies within each floor of each building. Such was the case with me on that October afternoon in the back streets of Kumamoto. I know most of the 46 syllabic symbols of Katakana, the script in which Hotel is written in Japan, but that’s of no use if there are many hotels along the same street. I found my hotel in the end. But only after 15 minutes of walking up and down the street where I was sure it lay. I was saved, as is nearly always the case in Japan, by a kind stranger. Yuki saw that I was lost and not only took me to my tiny hotel (I had passed its open door 3 times) but pointed out that the even tinier bar opposite was showing every rugby match (I bought him several Kirin beers there that same evening). So, what was this app I wished I had downloaded? Several of you will already know from my title. It’s called What3Words, a company founded by two young Brits in 2013. One, Chris Sheldrick, had spent the previous 10 years organising live music events across Europe. Getting suppliers and bands to the right place at the right time using standard addresses or GPS coordinates had proved a nightmare. He and Jack Waley-Cohen came up with an idea both beautifully simple and incredibly ambitious: to divide the surface of the planet into 3-metre by 3-metre squares and give each square a unique 3-word address. One of these 57,000,000 million squares is stitch.stardom.caves. That’s the name given in English to the square outside the door of my Kumamoto hotel. If I had had the What3Words app on my phone 18 months ago, I could have entered the name of the hotel in English and it would have shown me that square on the map. If I had been a French rugby supporter, the app could have given me the name of the same square in French. Even better if the hotel itself had given its What3Words address, in Japanese as well as in English, among its contacts details. Those 57 trillion squares are now named in 49 languages (Amharic and Canadian English were added last month). They are not translations of the original English. The address must be 3 words; a single word in English – e.g. potato – can be more words in another language - e.g. pomme de terre in French. So, the company’s algorithm has had to choose 57 trillion addresses in 49 different languages. But once chosen at random, the addresses are not changed, something which can cause trouble and may, in the end, be the system’s undoing. I shall come back to this. So, who is using What3Words for what? Drivers of new Mercedes, LandRover and certain Ford cars can simply speak the 3-word address of their destination to their sat.nav and it will find it immediately (they hope). Mercedes so love the company that they bought 10% of it in January 2018. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a boon to What3Words and to the delivery firms, like Hermes, DHL and dpd, which have begun to use What3Wordsto allow their drivers to deliver to the exact 3m square which their customers choose. Out for the day and want that parcel to be put put of sight of passers by? Give the delivery firm the 3m square on which your dustbins sit. As one survey recently found, “70% of addresses in the world don’t lead to the front door of a property”. Tens of millions of people, mostly in developing countries, have no address at all. Now, with What3Words, small businesses and villagers in India are beginning to have one. Emergency services in the UK and many other countries were early adopters of What3Words to enable them to find lost souls on mountain tops, deserts, forests and oceans, or to locate the exact place where an accident has occurred. The UK’s AA will now ask a member whose car has broken down to download the app and give them the 3-word address of the square they are calling from. Ride-hailing companies such as Uber-owned Careem in the Arab world use What3Words… You may think after reading this that I work for the company’s Marketing department but I don’t. I’m just of one its fast-growing legion of fans. Go to https://what3words.com/daring.lion.race to find out more (the 3-word address in their url takes you to a 3m square in Trafalgar Square, London). So, what might stop Messrs Sheldrick and Waley-Cohen becoming multi-billionaires? Critics have been quick to point out that having trillions of fixed addresses chosen at random are bound to throw up inappropriate word-strings – kill.peace.pins at a war memorial say (I made that up). An innocent word in one country may be offensive to a speaker of the same language in another (e.g. fanny in the US and the UK). Such critics have argued that it would have been better to use numbers, assuming wrongly that they are somehow neutral. Aside from the fact that a string of numbers is less memorable than a string of 3 words, and that it harks back to the confusing GPS numbers that caused Sheldrick’s clients and suppliers to get lost, people in China and Japan would shun addresses with too many 4s and hanker after ones with lots of 8s. But the biggest obstacles to the company’s long-term success are likely to be governments and peoples who worry that a private company based in the UK owns this system of addresses all over the world. What3Words does not charge emergency services, private users or businesses which don’t use it much. It makes its money from businesses which use it a lot in order to be more efficient and competitive. Even so, as Sheldrick says himself, “There’s a lot about addresses that is deeply personal and historical.” Does someone sitting in Texas, Shanghai or Abu Dhabi want their address to have been unalterably fixed by an algorithm owned by a private British firm with a major German corporate shareholder? You could compare it to the fixing of 0° longitude by the representatives of 24 countries who met in Washington in 1884. The UK ruled a fifth of the world. So, it was hardly surprising, if still a diplomatic triumph that, much to the chagrin of the French, the Greenwich Observatory in London was chosen as the point at which the Prime Meridian would run through. I’m quite sure Washington itself would have been chosen if that decision had been taken in 1984. So, maybe China, in the end, will decide a new universal address system for the 21st century and not some British dudes in London. Whatever happens we should thank Sheldrick and Waley-Cohen for the poetic pleasure they have given us. There is a What3Words haiku bot on Twitter that turns the 3-word strings into nonsense poems. I prefer to find out how appropriate, or inappropriate, are the 3-word addresses of famous ordinary addresses. American readers, the White House has hundreds of 3-metre squares. Surely you can find one which chimes with your view of the present or past occupant. Go to the front door of 10 Downing Street and those with no love for the current prime minister might relish that the square outside is slurs.this.shark. Step inside though and a Tory supporter will prefer the next square – input.caring.brain. The square outside my front door is enters.hers.winks. I have put that as my UK address under my email signature; my wife does not approve.

by Dr Jehad Al-Omari I am a people person and my favourite hobby, especially when travelling, is to observe people and their behaviour sitting somewhere strategically in a coffee shop, preferably offering quality coffee. So, imagine my distress over the past pandemic year at not being able to indulge this pleasure. Cafés where you can observe people are not easy to come by, even in normal times. They should be reasonably crowded with customers. Outdoor cafés are ideal for the opportunity they give of observing both fellow customers and passers-by. It is an acquired skill to develop the tools and techniques to sit patiently for hours reading newspapers or a book and silently observing people interacting. I don’t care much for listening in to conversations. Anyway, in foreign countries I may not understand the language. Best just to observe how people greet one another, shake hands or kiss, talk or argue amongst themselves, express happiness or anger, ignore one another or otherwise engage in intimate conversations or exchange rumours, laughing, joking, ruminating or otherwise relaxing in the company of friends or loved ones. No wonder that I gravitated into cross-cultural training which at the heart of it is all about human behaviour and interaction. Cafés are excellent cultural observation posts. During my time in cosmopolitan London coffee shops were where I researched and wrote much of my cross-cultural course material. Coming from the Arab world means that I am a born coffee lover. After all, coffee is generally regarded as having originated in Yemen. Some in Ethiopia however beg to differ, saying that the Yemenis may have developed it but the first coffee was grown on their side of the Red Sea. Mocha coffee refers specifically to the port of Mokha in Yemen from where it was first exported to the rest of the world. It is said that at one point Yemen forbade the export of coffee plants but in the end determined coffee lovers managed to smuggle them out to the rest of the world. There are no specific dates that one can rely on for the discovery of the delights of roasted coffee but historical records from the Abbasid era (750 – 1258 CE) and from the time of the Crusades suggest that it was not known in the region until the 13th century. Two of the recent books I read on Constantinople (now Istanbul) agree that roasted coffee was first brought to that city in the early 16th century by two traders from Aleppo. They made fortunes from their coffee houses in this thriving and cosmopolitan city. In those early days of coffee there was a fierce debate whether or not it should be allowed on religious grounds. There were a few times when it was forbidden on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan only to be allowed again until it finally became a fixed ritual of life in the city during which its leading intellectuals would meet to discuss the state of the empire. Other historical records show that the same debate was held in Makkah (Mecca), Islam’s holiest city. Sadly, Yemen is no longer home to good quality coffee. This has nothing to do with competition from around the world or the current civil war but rather that the cultivation of Qat (or Khat) has resulted in a decline in the popularity of coffee. Qat is a green leafy bush. Its leaves are picked and rolled into a small ball which is placed on the side of the mouth, providing a drug-like effect. It is now a social ritual where several people will gather to join in a Qat session. I have never tried it even though at one stage it was available in the UK in Yemeni stores but my friends who have lived and worked in Yemen sing its praises for the feeling of euphoria it gives. The World Health Organisation (WHO) classified Qat in 1980 as a drug of abuse that can produce psychological dependence, although the WHO does not consider Qat to be a serious problem. Within the Arab world there are two types of coffee that are traditionally consumed. There is the one we call Bedouin coffee or Bitter coffee (Qahwa Murrah). This is a brewed coffee with no sugar, normally consumed in very small amounts in handless cups many times throughout the day and night. The coffee is normally mixed with small amounts of cardamom and in some countries, saffron. It is served from a coffee pot known as dallah. The other type of coffee is called Turkish Coffee even though it was the Arabs who introduced coffee to the Turks! The name primarily refers to the way it is made: it is boiled briefly, consumed with or without sugar and with or without cardamom but definitely without saffron. Like Bedouin coffee there are many rituals associated with this coffee, the most famous of which is when a man wants to propose to a woman in an arranged marriage. The potential bride will make and serve the Turkish coffee, giving the groom an opportunity to see her in person and, allegedly, test her cooking skills. Getting back to coffee shops, I remember being in Italy one Christmas in the mid-nineties. Late one Sunday morning I went into a café at a corner of the Piazza del Popolo in the heart of Rome. I had the most expensive espresso I have ever drunk. I don’t know if it was the location, the quality of the coffee or just that I was yet another gullible tourist, but it was definitely worth it. I sat for almost two hours watching Italian families going about their normal Sunday ritual, hurrying into the churches, dragging their children and grandchildren behind them. I had heard of Italian Mamas but never seen them for real with all their pomp, glamour and grandeur. Fat and beautifully made-up Italian Mamas with ornate hats going to Church is a sight not to be missed if you ever find yourself in Rome on a Sunday. And so are the well-dressed Italian policemen showing off their colourful cloaks, presumably also going to Sunday service. There are cities that lend themselves to outdoor coffee shops and others that don’t or simply have not developed the infrastructure for it. The Champs Elysées is the stereotypical avenue for outdoor cafes but you do not see Parisian life unless you go deeper into the back streets. My favourite for cafés has to be Amsterdam. It is a good city to walk from one neighbourhood to another and in doing so finding yourself hopping from one café to the next. Go also to the historic city of Utrecht where you can spend an afternoon tasting their delightful coffees and sweets while observing Dutch students and professors go about their business, including visiting the specially marked marijuana shops. Copenhagen too, although the first time I was there was in the middle of winter it was like a ghost city. Walking around it for 3 days gave me few cross-cultural insights. However, when I was there next, in May, it was like visiting a completely different city. The social scene around the New Harbour with its restaurants and cafés was an entirely different experience and a great example of how the weather can have a great impact on our behaviour. I never thought the Danish had any sense of fun until that May visit. In the Arab world the greatest city for café lovers must still be Beirut in Lebanon. It can be expensive but worth it for few days. Cairo comes second; its outdoor coffee shop culture is so ingrained in Cairene city life. I just love the way one can spend the whole day drifting from one restaurant to a café and back until well after midnight. Cairo is probably the only Arab city that I know that simply does not sleep. Damascus is perfect when it comes to great quality food and on a one-week holiday you can try two restaurants per day and never get bored with the cuisine but I avoid its cafes. Even before the civil war, the security grip in Damascus made you feel that when in a café you were the one being watched. Amman, where I live, does not have much of a coffee shop culture. There are few ancient cafés in Amman; the ambience is not there and they are male-dominated. Don’t get me wrong, you can get truly great coffee in Amman but that is not the only thing I am after. I like observing life in coffee shops and the ones in Amman do not let you do that. When I was in the UK, there were two periods when I lived in Guildford. The first time was as a student until 1992 and the second one in 2001, having become suffocated by life in London. During the second period and on the days when I was not teaching, I got into the habit of drifting into town around 11.00 am. I would buy the day’s newspapers, including any copies of Arabic newspapers still available, and then spend a couple of hours in a busy coffee shop before meeting friends for lunch. On 11 September, 2001, the day of the appalling attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, I returned from London to Guildford earlier than planned, having cancelled dinner with friends. The tension in the air was palpable. British friends rang to ask if I knew of any attacks on Arabs in London and if I wanted to come and stay with them. The next day I was not sure whether I should go into town or give it a miss for fear of any reprisals against Arabs or Muslims. In the end, I decided to go into town as usual though I felt on edge. I went straight to the newsagent. There I discovered that they had not sold a single copy of the Arabic newspapers they normally supplied. I collected up all the Arab papers, paid for them and went into my favourite café. It was busy as usual. I threw my newspapers onto the only empty table. Once armed with my coffee, I sat reading them with all the scenes of devastation and carnage on their front pages, knowing that I was sticking out like a sore thumb. Soon a good-looking and smartly-dressed middle-aged woman approached me and asked if the chair opposite mine was taken. I told her she could have it and returned to my newspapers. After a short pause her Englishness came out in the question to which she clearly knew the answer or at least suspected it: “Excuse me, what language is this?” I replied as matter of factly that it was Arabic. You could almost immediately slice the ensuing silence in the café with a knife. The lady asked her next question just as delicately and politely: “So what are they saying?” I started translating the headlines as clearly as I could, knowing that everyone was listening although pretending they were not. As I went on reading out loud, I could feel the atmosphere easing and gradually getting back to normal. I thanked my God for sending me this angel of a lady and for being in the UK and not in a hostile place where they would have torn me to shreds. I saw her a few times in the café after that. We would nod and smile to each other but we never had a conversation again. I became a more recognized face in the café and felt welcomed. This is unusual for a foreigner like me. No matter how many times you go to a café or shop in the UK, you rarely get the warm greeting you normally get anywhere in the Arab world. This brings me to my last café story. I lived in Wimbledon in London for many years. On my route to and from Wimbledon Common I used to stop at a classy café/restaurant. It was my treat after any walk for though it was very expensive the coffee and cakes were superb (brought especially from Cambridge no less). One day I was sitting there with my brother talking in Arabic when we were approached by an Arabic-speaking person who introduced himself as the new owner. Well, to tell the truth I was pleased. I still had not tried their Savoy-style lunch menu and thought with the new Arab owner I would get a good discount. However, on subsequent visits I noticed that the owner would chat to all his customers and even sit at the table with them. The British reserve and wish for privacy ran up against the enthusiasm and warmth of this Mediterranean Arab. I strongly advised him to stop badgering his guests but to no avail, until bit by bit he started losing his customers. The coffee shop eventually closed down. I have never forgiven him for that. What works in one place does not necessarily work in another. Why won’t people accept this truth?

by Vincent Guy “Forecasting is tough – especially about the future.” Attributed to Sam Goldwyn, but probably Niels Bohr Alex Salmond, ex-leader of the Scottish Nationalists, has just announced that he has formed a new party, Alba, to fight in the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary Elections. Salmond tells us that, by a wrinkle in the Scottish devolved constitution, this will help to create a super-majority for independence. However, it may split the independence vote. Or it may even disillusion wavering voters about the coherence of the independence cause. It could also keep attention on the vicious spat between leader and ex-leader that has dominated recent Scottish news. Then again, the move could be largely ignored – just some members of the old guard struggling to stay in the game. As an English resident in Scotland for the last 25 years, I have an interest in the outcome. Ten years from now we may be looking back on Mr Salmond’s declaration as the decisive moment when independence was clinched, or when it failed, or we may have forgotten the incident completely. And if independence does come, will it leave me with no choice but to decamp to Berwick-on-Tweed, just involve me in filling in a few extra forms, or find me facing a drumhead court of my nationalist friends saying “Sorry, Vincent, times have changed; the cause requires us to shoot you.” Hard, indeed, to predict. Let’s go back a little. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” William Wordsworth recalling his feelings in France as the Revolution broke out around him. What followed? The Terror, the retreat from Moscow, the restoration of podgy old Louis XVIII. Admittedly Edmund Burke saw the outcome more clearly: within months of the kick-off he wrote that it would all end in tears, “Men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Imagine yourself in 1914 reading this headline in the Washington Post, June 29: WAR DANGER IS LESSENED BY SLAYING OF ARCHDUKE This was the opinion of Sir Thomas Barclay, described as Britain’s foremost international lawyer, so he knew what he was talking about. There were some who didn’t fully buy into his view; war might even be more likely. But they were thinking about war in central Europe; nobody imagined the Brits, the Aussies, yet alone the Turks and the Americans, being dragged into the affair. Nor did anyone think this war to end all wars would kick off again a few years after it ended. All of us have had moments of bliss in our lifetime too: The Fall of the Berlin Wall: I was almost there. At the end of a business trip to Frankfurt, I’m in a taxi to the airport. News on the radio is all about events in East Germany. “What do you think about it all?” I ask the driver. “Oh, I’m from the East myself; my folks are still over there.” “How does it look to you then?” “Well, I tell you one thing I really would love: it’s that damn Wall coming down, but I won’t see it in my lifetime.” That evening back in London, I watch the TV news: protestors tear at the wall, the authorities declare it open and the Soviet Empire starts to crumble. Obama: such a moment of hope, friends of mine actually flew to Washington to join the inaugural celebrations. How will he be remembered? The man who shot bin Laden, some minor if useful adjustments to U.S. healthcare. Yes, the first black man in the White House, but little has changed for black people in America: police methods, prison populations, life expectancy. The Arab Spring: a heady moment, as new technology enabled youth to wipe away decades of dictators; now largely back in power across the region, while the Syrian war, with its millions of victims, rumbles on. Can business and technology do better? The Millennium Bug: enough said. Cars: in about 1900, some captain of the auto industry whom I’ve not been able to trace said, “The potential for car sales is a few thousand at most. There are not enough working-class men intelligent enough to qualify as chauffeurs.” Comfortable in the blinkers of his era, but you’d think he might have hoped for more. Computers: in the early 1940s, IBM's president Watson reputedly said, "I think the world market for computers is about five." We currently have billions, especially if you include smartphones and that thing in my car that told me I was dozy and should get off the road for a cup of coffee. But now Greg Papadopoulos, of Sun Microsystems, tells us Watson might not have been so far off the mark. Grids, clouds, the internet, mean that all those devices are joining up into a handful, or even a single mega-computer, just as a nest of millions of ants is a single super-organism. Talking of ants, E. O. Wilson, ecologist and specialist in Formicidae, describes the complexities of the food chain, somewhat on the lines of: Big fleas have lesser fleas Upon their backs to bite ‘em, And little fleas have lesser fleas And so – ad infinitum. “Take out any one species and the effects will spread unpredictably throughout the system. Take out the ants, the principal predators, and the effects will be even more intense – and the details even less predictable. Physicists can chart the behaviour of a single particle; they can predict with confidence the interaction of two particles; they begin to lose it at three and above. Keep in mind that ecology is a far more complex subject than physics”.* As a humble reader of popular science books, I wonder if physicists can achieve even that. Wouldn’t Schrödinger’s cat have a spanner to throw in the works? My point is that human behaviour – individual, group, societal, global – is yet more complex and unpredictable. Perhaps this is where the quantum universe intertwines with human experience. For some people forecasting is easy. A story used to go the rounds back before ultrasound and whatever else they use nowadays to tell the sex of an unborn child. A bunch of con-artists went about saying they’d predict your baby's sex. “Guaranteed results,” they’d say, “If we get it wrong, you’ll get your money back”. They always honoured their promise. And laughed all the way to the bank with 50% of their takings. *Edward O Wilson: The Diversity of Life, Penguin Books 1994, page 169

By Stoker It is the classic classroom clash. The blustering, roaring yet brilliant thug shouting down the neat, scholarly, quietly-determined swot. The classroom roars with laughter, the master watches thoughtfully, the noisy bully shouts another clever line of abuse. The swot pushes his glasses back up his nose, blinks and gulps, and ploughs on with his exposition. Sir Keir Starmer, for it is he, certainly wins many points for dogged determination. But alas, not so many for charisma or popularity. Starmer is surprisingly little known, considering he is the leader of one of the UK’s two leading political parties. Unlike recent Labour leaders – Blair, Brown and Miliband - he makes little of his background or of his undoubted success in life (his predecessor in the Labour hot seat, Jeremy Corbyn, also made little of his history, but suffered the Press making much of it on his behalf). Yet Starmer has every reason to be proud of his achievements. He was born in humble circumstances in south London, passed the eleven plus and attended a grammar school in Surrey, was gifted in music (playing several instruments), and graduated in law with a First Class degree from Leeds University. From there he became a barrister with a glittering career, which included much activity in human rights advocacy, often performed pro bono. He became a QC at the age of 39 and topped all this off by being appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008. He is generally regarded as one of the most successful holders of that office in recent years (and hence the knighthood awarded him in 2014). If Sir Keir was a Tory grandee, he would be loudly feted as a great Conservative success story. If his politics had ever inclined to the right he would have had every likelihood of achieving cabinet office. But there was never any possibility of that. His parents were lifelong Labour activists, indeed naming their son after the first leader of the Labour Party, Keir Hardy. Young Keir was campaigning for the Labour Party from a very early age, and Labour Party politics remained from childhood the mainstream of his life, albeit slightly paused whilst he was Director of Public Prosecutions (it is and has to be seen to be a non-political office, albeit holders are perfectly entitled to hold political opinions). In late 2013 Starmer resigned as DPP and in the following year was chosen as Labour candidate for an inner London constituency, a safe seat, a bonus not often given to first-time candidates. He was appointed by Jeremy Corbyn as shadow minister for immigration but resigned within a year in protest at Corbyn’s left-wing leadership of the party, saying that the party would never win office with such policies. Rather surprisingly, within a few months he was back in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as minister for Brexit (Starmer was a fervent Remainer). What had changed? Probably that Corbyn had been overwhelmingly re-elected as leader of the Labour Party shortly before; so maybe Keir realised that a long period on the back benches might be rather dull. In December 2019 Boris Johnson thrashed Labour at the general election, rather proving Sir Keir’s original leadership theory right, and in early 2020 Corbyn resigned; Starmer stood in the subsequent leadership contest and won on the first ballot. That concludes a remarkable rise to the top; one even more rapid than that of another (but not so legally gifted) lawyer, Tony Blair. But all this zealous and admirable activity conceals one thing. What exactly are Starmer’s politics and beliefs? Therein lies a mystery. Starmer says that his place is on and with the soft Left, but that does not really get us far in understanding what drives the man, or what a Starmer government might do if it were to achieve office. Indeed, there are Vicar of Bray tendencies (a C17th century clergyman who by frequent examinations of conscience managed to retain his appointment throughout various political and religious upheavals); Keir does have an ability to, shall we say, amend and move on. He changed his position on the fundamentals of immigration during his first front bench stint, his demands for a confirmatory referendum on Brexit were quietly filed away during his second, and more recently the Prime Minister has had sitting opposite a true friend on most matters concerned with the UK’s lock-down. It is hard to imagine Jeremy Corbyn sitting quietly through all the reversals and chaos of the government’s handling of the pandemic. Indeed the Labour party (still strongly influenced by Corbynistas and Momentum) are also finding this increasingly hard to imagine, and Starmer seems to be becoming unpopular within his own party. He is also losing popularity in the country with his personal rating falling to 13% negative compared with 21% positive nine months ago. Which seems a bit unfair. It is the tradition in the UK, as in most democracies, that at times of national emergency, Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition should support the government in its endeavours. Indeed, it might be thought very unsporting and also unpopular with the electorate to do anything else. Most notably, in May 1940, at a time of great crisis and failure of leadership, Winston Churchill and his supporters were criticised in abusive terms by all three parties in the House of Commons for their temerity and disloyalty in wartime in opposing a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. (Indeed, it is often forgotten that Chamberlain won that vote by a large majority and it was Chamberlain himself who realised that he could not go on.) So Starmer is doing the right and honourable thing, as would seem to be in his character, but is getting, at least now, no political benefit from it. But there is more to Starmer than honour and correctness. Careers such as his are not just founded on behaving like an old-fashioned English gentleman. He is undoubtedly bright, has a great clarity of mind and forensic abilities of the highest order, is said to be unfailingly polite and considerate, and is very hard-working. His exterior gives clues: chiselled, perfectly groomed, self-disciplined, smartly dressed. Starmer without a tie looks wrong – it is his natural finishing touch (Johnson with a tie looks wrong, something he has been forced to wear and half pulled off). But Starmer is also ruthless. He seized an early opportunity to ditch his leadership rival Rebecca Long-Bailey from his shadow cabinet, and he fired three more frontbenchers (all women) last autumn when they rebelled against party policy on a minor matter. Others have been suspended or warned. This is a hard-line leader, make no mistake, much more so than Corbyn. Again, a comparison with Blair comes to mind; a strong disciplined leader whose politics are relatively flexible; a leader who wants to win office, not to maintain ideological purity. It often used to be said that Labour party members were either Marxists or Methodists, either disciples of Marxist dogma looking towards the perfect collectivist socialist dream, or with Christian foundations of kindness, gentleness, and fairness. Although Starmer claims to be a true socialist together with that mysterious soft-left tendency (how he must regret accepting that knighthood), really he displays Methodist-like roots, like Blair and Brown, Callaghan and even Kinnock, not like Foot and Corbyn. And he wants power; he is willing to compromise many fringe matters of policy to maximise votes, he would lead a moderate administration. And yet… And yet, we must temper this analysis by a quick glance across the Atlantic. We would six months ago, even three months ago, have continued here to compare him with Joe Biden. Indeed Sir Keir has drawn that comparison himself, recently. But now look at Biden. A moderate Democrat with minor radical flourishes, we would have said. But, and it is not clear quite what is going on, we seem to have a hard left President whose company Jeremy Corbyn would enjoy. Is that also the real Starmer? If somehow, unexpectedly, four years hence, he is acknowledging the cheers before entering 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister, will the pinstripes be ripped off to reveal an all-red bodysuit below, a socialist in tooth and nail, and no softness about his leftism? We don’t know. We don’t know if he will last long enough to reveal his true identity one way or another. He has a real test coming up in May which could blow everything apart. The unexpected Hartlepool by-election has come at a bad time for Labour: the Conservatives leading strongly in the national polls, things seemingly going right for Boris, Labour perhaps selecting entirely the wrong candidate - a mini-Starmer, middle class professional, clever, a Remainer, a loser of his seat at the last election, not a local. Everything that seemed to help Labour do so badly in the north at the last election. With a bit of luck and a good local candidate the Tories could walk this contest. What will Keir do then? And how much time will his fractured party give him to do it?

By Richard Pooley “So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle, The doll and its maker are never identical.” “To An Undiscerning Critic”, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912 The question posed in the title of this article may strike you as absurd. No, I hope you will answer: Sherlock Holmes was the fictional creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you do say this, I can tell you on good authority that you are right. But I would be prepared to bet you £100 in whatever is your choice of currency that not everyone reading this believes you are correct. Millions around the world are sure Holmes was a real person. I suspect the vast majority have never heard of Doyle and have assumed that all the stories about Holmes are merely embellishments of the life of a real British detective who existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fair enough. But there is a significant minority who know who Doyle was and have read the original stories either in English or in translation but who still either insist that Holmes existed or want to believe that he did. It is this belief of the last group of people – those who want him to have lived in order to have solved all those crimes in the way that he did – which has intrigued me down the years. Think of other famous fictional characters. Does anybody think that Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were real people? Unlike Doyle, Christie is probably still more well known than her creations. That can’t be said of Ian Fleming. James Bond must be better known than his creator. But does anyone really believe Mr Bond existed (or exists and is spending his retirement tending bees in Sussex)? Doyle himself despaired that so many thought his creation was real. Letters poured in to him and his publishers from people convinced that the detective could solve their problems. After Doyle’s death in 1930 his widow continued to receive such letters. They did not stop at her death in 1940 (by which time how old would Sherlock Holmes have been?). The British building society Abbey had moved into its new head office at 219-229 Baker Street in 1932 and immediately found it had to employ a secretary full-time to answer letters addressed to Holmes at 221B (where he could not, in fact, have lived; the numbers did not go higher than 85 in the much shorter Baker Street that existed at the time of the Holmes stories). Abbey merged with National in 1944 but the letters continued to arrive from all over the world long into the second half of the last century. Doyle was especially irked by those who, knowing full well that Holmes was fictional, still assumed that Holmes was Doyle’s alter ago and thought as he did. Arthur Guiterman, an American writer of humorous poems, was one. In 1912 his poem “To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” was published in Life magazine. In it he praised Doyle’s work but attacked him for not acknowledging that he had borrowed Holmes’ methods and his stories’ plots from Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories of the 1840s, featuring C. Auguste Dupin. Guiterman wrote: “Sherlock your sleuthhound, with motives ulterior: Sneers at Poe’s Dupin as ‘very inferior’” Doyle had indeed put such words into Holmes’ mouth in his first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. But Doyle had also many times acknowledged his debt to Poe, writing in 1907, for example, that “Poe is the master of all.” He skewered Guiterman with a poem, “To An Undiscerning Critic”, published in London Opinion on 28 December 1912: “Have you not learned, my esteemed commentator, That the created is not the creator? As the creator I’ve praised to satiety Poe’s Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety. He, the created, the puppet of fiction, Would not brook rivals nor stand contradiction. He, the created, would scoff and would sneer, Where I, the Creator, would bow and revere.” Note that Doyle uses the capital C when he refers to himself as the Creator of the “puppet of fiction” Sherlock Holmes. His frustration is palpable. Time for me to declare an interest. My step-grandmother was Dame Jean Conan Doyle, the fifth and last of Doyle’s children and the only one who was successful in her own right (retiring as head of the UK's Women's Royal Air Force). I also run the Conan Doyle Estate, which manages the literary, merchandising, and advertising rights in Doyle’s works and all his characters. The question I get asked most frequently, other than a host of abusive ‘questions’ in social media, is: “How do you account for the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes?” My answer usually goes something like this: Holmes is the cold, rational problem-solver who thinks laterally and remembers only what is useful to him. Watson is the warm, intelligent Everyman who thinks linearly and unimaginatively. We are astonished by Holmes' powers, intrigued by his observational methodology and infuriated by his arrogance, but glad that he is around to put the world to rights. He is beholden to no one and dismissive of authority, yet a patriot. He is incorruptible. He brings order to muddle. He is the cerebral hero of the nerds and schoolboy swots who wish brainpower could always overcome muscle power. The differences and tensions between Holmes and Watson are crucial to the success of the stories and novels, especially those written between 1887 and the First World War. The death in that war of Doyle's son, Kingsley, and his obsession with Spiritualism in the last decade of his life may have been the causes for the changes in Holmes' character which appear in the last twelve stories, published in the Strand Magazine between 1921 and 1927 and put together in 1927 as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes becomes softer, more empathetic. As a result the stories are less compelling. Holmes' otherness no longer frightens and fascinates Watson or us. Personally, I believe Doyle had grown so tired of his money-spinning creation that he put little effort into writing these final stories. My step-grandmother, only 17 when Doyle died, used to tell me how Doyle would discuss the later of these stories with her, sometimes even seeking inspiration from her. Jon Lellenberg was for long the Conan Doyle Estate’s literary agent in the USA and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Doyle and Sherlock Holmes (do get hold of the award-winning Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters that he co-edited and was a BBC Book of the Week when it came out in September 2007). Jon has this to say: “What has struck me to explain the unending popularity of Sherlock Holmes are fundamentally two things: First, most people's desire for justice in the world and in people's lives, and admiration for Holmes's way of bringing it about, not by force like the Mike Hammer sort of detective, but principally by reason, and by applying science (including psychology, the most personal of the sciences) to human and also social problems. And second, by perhaps the best depiction of a friendship in English literature (and for all I know, anybody's literature). There are two ways of depicting characters in serial fiction, one in which the characters never grow older, staying the same as they were, individually and in relation to each other, from the day they were first created, and the other having the characters grow older as time passes in the stories as well as in their creation. Conan Doyle's stories stretch chronologically from the beginning of 1881 to the eve of World War I in 1914, with both Holmes and Watson growing older in the process, going through all sorts of life's changes and issues in the stories, with their friendship becoming even deeper in the backward-looking stories Conan Doyle continued to write in the 1920s. This makes Holmes and Watson realer as people than those characters in other fiction who never grow old.” I think there is one more thing which accounts for Holmes’ enduring popularity and also why so many believe that he really lived. Many authors identify with their creations. They are their alter egos. But Doyle’s alter ago was Watson, not Holmes. Watson is you or me, the ordinary person. This allows readers to imagine themselves accompanying Holmes on his adventures. It also allows them to believe that Watson is really Doyle recording the life of an extraordinary but real person. I have visited over 55 different countries and lived for at least a year in another 5. I cannot remember meeting anyone who, if I mentioned Sherlock Holmes, had not heard of him. Yet the name Conan Doyle is seldom known. When running my training company's subsidiary in Tokyo in the early 1990s, I deliberately hid my connection to Doyle. I had to sit through many meetings with Japanese clients hearing how wonderful Holmes-san was (or Holmes-sama, indicating his God-like powers). Many clearly believed he had existed. I could not disabuse them or they would have lost face and I would have lost business. When a visiting professor at the Stockholm School of Economics’ campus in Latvia in the last decade, I taught many highly-educated Russian, Belarus, Ukrainian and Baltic businesspeople. Some simply would not accept my assurance that Holmes was the creation of my step-great grandfather. One, a Russian, wanted to know if the street in Riga which stood in for Baker Street in the most popular Holmes television series in Soviet times had borne any resemblance to the one where my step-great grandfather had lived. He was referring to Dr Watson. I don’t think he was joking. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the most famous of the Holmes stories. Doyle located it on Dartmoor. Do you doubt this? Here is the proof, a postcard of Dartmoor on which Doyle has written to his 9-year old son Adrian Malcolm: “This is where the Hound used to run about in the Story” He signed it D for Daddy. Yet there are Sherlockian “scholars” who still try and prove that the Hound ran about somewhere other than Dartmoor in order, presumably, to deny Doyle’s authorship. The Conan Doyle Estate’s main purpose these days is to bring Sir Arthur out from under the shadow of his greatest creation and make the world aware not only of his other once-famous creations – e.g. Professor Challenger, Brigadier Gerard – but also of his own considerable achievements outside literature. Have a look at the Conan Doyle Estate website if you want to know more. However, try as we might, my fellow directors (the great niece and great nephew of Doyle) and I come up against this refusal by so many to accept that Sherlock Holmes was the product of Doyle’s superb imagination. My copy of one of the best biographies of Doyle – Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle by Daniel Stashower – has this quote from T. S. Eliot in its frontispiece: “Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence...Poe is more real than Dupin; but Sir A. Conan Doyle …, the author of a number of exciting stories which we read years ago and have forgotten, what has he to do with Holmes?”

By Dr Jehad Al-Omari Some time ago I was one of a team training people working for a Europe-wide electronics retailing company. The subject was Global Leadership and Intercultural Management. The location was a hotel somewhere in Suffolk, UK. The trainees were shop managers from Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Most of them had not met each other before. The training was conducted ahead of an ambitious expansion programme catapulting the company from a regional one into a multi-national one. On the first day of the course and following an extensive induction lecture, the trainees were given a questionnaire on national cultures consisting of 120 questions. The time given to answer this was 4 hours - 2 hours before lunch and 2 hours after it. The trainees were divided into their four respective national groups. The British and the Germans were the two biggest groups with roughly 15 trainees each. There were about 6 French people but only 3 Italians; so we asked a Brit to join the Italians. No instructions were given to the groups on how to tackle the questionnaire and each group was assigned a trainer to oversee the process and to answer any questions. I was assigned to the German group. As we settled down the suggestion was made that since there were 120 questions and 240 minutes, and so only 2 minutes per question, it would be best to start immediately, take a vote on the answers to each question and round up or average the answers of the participants. The process went flawlessly. Someone was appointed to receive the scores and calculate the average score for each question, and so it went on like clockwork in a most democratic and civilized manner. No discussions or disagreements took place. The trainers had agreed beforehand to switch rooms after the first hour. I went to observe the British. They had appointed a chairperson at the start to oversee the discussion and record the scores. As time went on they discovered they needed a moderator to aid the chairperson and they duly appointed one. Most fascinating to me was the humour and boisterous atmosphere present in the room, particularly when discussing embarrassing and soul-searching questions. After lunch I joined the French group. The first thing that struck me was the fact that they were not paying much attention to the scoring of each question. They were more interested in the philosophy behind the questionnaire and each individual question. I witnessed some very lively discussion in which everyone was engaged but no one was in charge or keeping an eye on the clock or trying to make progress with the questionnaire. I went to the Italian room last. With one hour left, the Brit was almost tearing his hair out, reminding the Italians that there was a task to complete. They were relaxed and jovial, telling him that one important component of the training was team-building, for everyone to get to know one another, and this is what they were doing. The Germans were the only group who actually finished answering the questionnaire. They had interesting and credible results on German culture but had had zero discussion of the nuances that make the study of culture both controversial and interesting. The British finished about 80% of the questionnaire. They had been the most fun to be with. Their approach had been to deal with difficult questions by showing British reserve and diffidence punctuated by explosions of humour. The French camp showed a deep understanding of culture and how it impacts organizational behaviour. There were heated debates because of the polarization within the group. They answered about 70% of the questions. The Italians completed about 50% of the questionnaire or perhaps less. But undeniably, as the 5-day course progressed, they were the most cohesive and creative of the four teams. We reached a point in the training programme where everyone recognized that there was merit in each approach. There were times when we needed to do it the German way and other times the British way, and times when we needed to relax a bit more and do it the Italian way or take it to a deeper level and approach it the French way. As an Arab observing this exercise, I could not but help ask myself how an Arab team would have behaved. Definitely not the time-conscious, task-oriented German way and most likely not the “let’s have a committee” and elect a chairperson British way. Rather a cross between the Italians and the French but leaning towards the Italians: what a friend of mine calls the “Olive Oil Factor”, or what I would call “the Mediterranean way”. This brings me to another incident relating to how different cultures learn. I was asked by a global communications company to look into their approach to training at their campus in the south of England. I was particularly advised to listen to a veteran American trainer who had been with them longer than anyone else so that I might benefit from his wisdom and experience. I asked him simply to tell me how different cultures learn. He said “Well, we can start with the Chinese people. They don’t ask many questions and as long as there are one or two people who understand what you are talking about, you are OK. You know they will help and teach the others. As for the Indians, again you have to be prepared for few questions, but unlike the Chinese, it has nothing to do with Face. They don’t like to ask you questions for which the answers might benefit others. They are fiercely competitive, and therefore they will ask the questions afterwards in the corridor and one-to-one.” I asked him who asked the most questions. His answer was immediate: “The Israelis; you have to be prepared for challenging questions and long discussions and you can forget about saving face”. I then asked him about the Arabs, to which he answered with a big grin: “I have not trained many Arabs but I would group them with the Africans. They like to learn by reverse osmosis”. I asked him what he meant: “African students expect lots of handouts and manuals which are unnecessary sometimes but which they put under their armpits and hope that somehow the information will get to their brains by reverse osmosis”. I still don’t understand why the osmosis had to be reversed. Maybe Americans like two words where one will do. I have noticed though that Arabs do indeed like and expect lots of handouts, irrespective of the type of training and its duration. However, they are not as demanding as the German students I taught when working at a Dutch university for several years. In the Netherlands I could get away with showing slides that I had recently designed – to show new data perhaps - but which were not included in the official handouts. In Germany this was unforgivable; everything I taught had to be documented. I’m glad to say that my Arab students align with the Dutch on this matter. However, my worst nightmare with Arab participants on MBA and in-company cross-cultural courses is when I start talking about the Arab culture itself. The problem was perfectly expressed by a Korean delegate attending a lecture on Korean culture given by a friend of mine: “You have made me feel naked”. Some 20 years ago I was working alongside a British professor of management when training a group of top-level oil executives in an Arab country. They all worked for the same company: Danes, Norwegians, Finns, French, British and Arabs. I was there, in part, to explain to the Europeans the Arab way of doing business and managing staff. But from the start, the Arabs were especially hostile towards me and kept contradicting much of what I said. I did in fact have prior warning from the French human resources manager to expect this, but it was worse than I had thought. The company’s chairman, a Finn, was aware of it too. At dinner that evening he deliberately placed me between the two most important and antagonistic members of the Arab group. Perhaps revealing the Finnish way of solving such problems, he openly asked them to challenge my thesis on Arab culture. I turned to the most hostile of the two and asked him, in English, to spell out what exactly was wrong with what I was saying about our shared culture. He answered in Arabic: “Nothing, but you should not be saying these things to foreigners”. The Arab culture is still driven by Shame and Face (on my lecture slides I start each with a capital letter in English to show Westerners just how important these concepts are). This is much like many oriental cultures. The very worst thing that one can do is criticize someone in front of their peers, irrespective of whether this criticism is justified or not. I guess with those Arab oilmen I was exposing the Arab culture in front of outsiders when, in their opinion, it should be kept in the (Arab) family. Keeping it in the family is another fundamental aspect of Arab and Mediterranean cultures - another manifestation of the “Olive Oil Factor”. Irrespective of the numerous socio-cultural changes that have taken place in the Arab world over the last 20 years, and despite the advent of the internet and social media, the family must remain screened from prying outsiders. An Arab man next to you on an airplane will volunteer all kinds of information – his age, job, wealth, his hobbies, his political opinions. He’ll happily tell you how many children he has, how they are doing at school or university or where they work. But if you dig deeper about his family, especially its women members, he will clam up. Don’t ask for a photo of his wife, for example. Some of the questions he will ask you will no doubt seem far too intrusive if you are British: “How much money do you earn?” Money generally is not a private matter to Arabs but almost a way of bragging. From my perspective as a cultural observer and living in Britain in the 90s, it was interesting to begin to see TV talk shows where people where prepared to expose themselves and their families to public scrutiny. I felt then as I feel now that such programmes were alien to British culture. But maybe Meghan Markle’s recent remarks about the British Royal Family to Oprah Winfrey indicate that this American habit has become the norm in the UK and other cultures, including even the Arab one. Whether this change is positive or negative only time will tell but suffice to say that people will only change when they feel it is time to do so and not for the sake of change.

By Dr Mark Nicholson I began a tour around western Kenya 2 weeks ago on the perimeter of the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, part of the world-famous Serengeti ecosystem where 1,500,000 wildebeest (gnus) munch their way annually in a large oval from central Tanzania, across the border into Kenya and back. I was there to work, not to sight-see, but my way to work entailed long drives on bumpy roads past thousands of animals, varying in size from pygmy mongooses to giraffes and elephants. This ecosystem includes huge areas of Maasai-owned land traditionally used for grazing but much of it recently subdivided into thousands of small plots. These were gradually being fenced and cultivated, resulting in yet more loss of habitat. Now though 100,000 ha. of these plots have been converted into ‘conservancies’, and so doubling in size the land set aside for wildlife. In the conservancy model Maasai plot-owners lease land to conservationists, who pay a rent equal to or greater than any income derived from livestock or smallholder agriculture. The conservancies in turn derive their income from tourists staying in the upmarket camps and provide much-needed employment to the Maasai (the people who speak maa), most of whom have now moved into nearby settlements. The central Maasai Mara Game Reserve is normally overrun by tourists, though not last year or this. 3000 bed-nights mean 17 ha/ tourist. In the conservancies, a tourist will have an average of 140 ha to him/herself but pays for the privilege; some of these luxurious camps charge more than $1500 per person per night. Provided the rich tourists return, the conservancy model should prove to have benefited both people, wildlife and the environment. In 1970, the vast majority of wildlife in Kenya was outside the National Parks on ranches, farms and pastoralist grazing lands. Hunting was banned in 1977, which was a death knell to wildlife conservation outside reserves: poachers moved in, land was sub-divided and fenced, and habitat destroyed. Today almost all wildlife is confined to parks, reserves and a few large ranches. In 50 years, wild animal numbers have crashed. The number of lions in Africa is believed to have fallen 90 percent, from 250,000 in 1970 to 23,000 today. It is the same for pachyderms, giraffes and many other species. Vultures, which perform a vital ecological function, have almost been extirpated in the Mara and most of Kenya owing to the use of pesticides put in carcasses to kill lions which have eaten pastoralists’ livestock. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari reckons that it took many thousands of years for humans to remove the Giant Diprotodon from the planet, which had been around for 1,500,000 years and survived 10 ice ages. With it went 90 percent of Australia’s megafauna. It then only took 2,000 years for humans in the Americas to get rid of large animals such as the Sabre-toothed Tiger and the Woolly Mammoth. But with nearly 8 billion of us today we are succeeding in 100 years what it took our ancestors 20,000 years to achieve. Do we really care? If you have always lived in a city and never seen a rhino, maybe what the eye doesn’t see, the heart does not grieve. Do I really care that the Sabre-tooth Tiger is extinct? Our ancestors would doubtless have been delighted, once there was no longer a risk of them becoming lunch for one of them. But if we have seen a tiger or a Javan rhinoceros in the wild, it would surely sadden us deeply if we knew the last one had gone. At the start of my safari I came down to the mess tent one morning and saw a large and stunning-looking moth (pictured above) underneath my table. I know little about moths but I do know that moths outnumber butterflies (15-20,000 species) by around ten to one and some are exceptionally beautiful. And these 150,000 moth species are only those that have been described: many more remain to be discovered. As an aside, I recently re-read Nabokov’s most famous novel, Lolita, after 50 years. One may strongly disapprove of the theme but he was undoubtedly one of the great writers of the last century and he was also writing in his third language. Nabokov was a polymath and also a world-famous lepidopterist, who could have helped me identify my specimen. Having seen this wonderful moth, I pondered how sad I would be if one day I learnt that this species had become extinct. I am no entomologist but I am an enthusiastic amateur herpetologist. I get paid to lecture companies on snakebite and its treatment. My purpose is not only to help save human lives but also to save snakes’ lives. Most people here will kill snakes on sight. Yet of the 200 or so species in East Africa, only about 10 species are going to spoil your day and only about 3 are really going to spoil your day. Snakebite fatalities in Kenya are rare, around 1000 people die a year. Worldwide, around 100,000 die from snakebite, compared with 1,250,000 who die annually in road accidents. Those who do succumb are generally the poor in rural areas who are usually bitten at night and have no access to nearby hospitals. The strangest snakes here are the burrowing asps (or, if you prefer, mole vipers or stiletto snakes). They are quite short, very dark with tiny pin-like eyes, spend most of their life underground and hence are rarely seen. I am fairly sure it was one of them that finished off Cleopatra. My youngest daughter loves going to the snake park in Watamu on the Kenya coast. 20 years ago, the park would get calls every day from some house-owner who wanted a boomslang or mamba removed from their house or garden. Today these garden plots have been turned into grass and frangipani, the snakes have gone, and the calls to the snake park are monthly. But the mice and rats have returned in numbers. Back to my journey. After leaving the Mara, I continued north and then west. Western and central Kenya comprises the highly fertile and densely populated one-third of the country, the rest being semi-arid rangeland and desert. Between the large town of Nakuru and the northern lakes, we passed hundreds of motorbikes each laden with up to six huge bags of charcoal. Most Kenyans cook with charcoal, which means cutting down yet more bush and destroying more habitat. Although both geothermal and wind-turbine electricity is now being generated, it is expensive and not nearly enough for 50,000,000 people. The answer has to be nuclear energy of which I, however unfashionably, have always been a strong advocate. Years ago, I chatted at a party with an Afrikaner Professor of Physics at Potschefstrom University who had returned from a ‘Pariah’ (Taiwan, Apartheid South Africa and Israel) conference, with plans to increase greatly nuclear power generation in Africa. When Nelson Mandela took over the reins in South Africa, the nuclear power stations were scrapped (lest enriched uranium should get into the wrong hands) and now 30 years later the country is chronically short of electricity. Turning west, just south of Lake Baringo, took me up to the small town of Kabarnet, home of the last dictatorial President of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi (L’Etat, c’est Moi). I lived there for 5 years: above my office at that time were 5 huge Podocarpus trees in which every morning gathered my favourite birds of the more than 1100 bird species in Kenya. Lady Ross’s Turacos are part of an endemic African family known as the Musophagidae (or plantain eaters, though the turacos much prefer figs to bananas). They are beautiful birds with a pompom of scarlet, violet-blue feathers, yellow face & bill, scarlet primaries, and an expression of utter inanity. Every morning they would start their morning chorus: a high-pitched, bubbling, gossipy but euphonious call. But President Moi wanted a palatial hotel built where the trees were. The average occupancy in this hotel in 2019 was 9%; in 2020, 4%. I stayed there this month, and opened my window at dawn to be greeted by silence, apart from two raucous hornbills. The turacos had left town. From Kabarnet, after a steep hairpin descent into the hot Kerio valley and up the 5,000ft (1,500 metre) wall of the Keiyo escarpment, I arrived at another old colonial town, Kitale, now seething with humanity and Chinese & Indian motorbikes. In the Kitale Club bar hangs the huge head of the last buffalo shot on the golf course by a Mr. Tweedie in 1934. No wildlife remains in the area outside the Mt. Elgon National Park. Finally, onwards to Kakamega, the most densely populated region of Kenya. Kakamega forest is the last remnant of the Central African rain forest in Kenya. 100 years ago it covered 250,000 ha; today 20,000 ha. remain, and even this patch includes exotic plantations. The forest still contains over 375 species of butterflies, even if the buffalo have gone, but the forest continues to be nibbled at by firewood gatherers and cattle. So the megafauna are fast disappearing in Africa; the snakes are going, the birds are going and maybe the insects are going too, as in Europe. This is the Anthropocene extinction and we are right in the middle of it. Extrapolate and what will we be left with? At present there are 7,800,000,000 people on Earth, with the UN forecasting 9,200,000,000 by 2050. At Kenya’s independence in 1963 there were 6,000,000 people here. Today there are over 50,000,000 with predictions of twice that in a few decades. The intern who worked with us in the Mara quite joyfully admitted to having 19 siblings. Yet population growth is still not even mentioned as a major problem, least of all in Africa, where politicians still urge their own ethnic groups to go forth and multiply, so they can get more votes. When Rachel Carson wrote her seminal work, Silent Spring, in 1962, she was talking about the effect of poisons (DDT) on the environment. A new Silent Spring is approaching when the sublime dawn choruses of Africa are hushed or drowned out by the cacophony of human expansion. Do we continue our hand-wringing or can we find a constructive way of reducing our numbers? If we don’t, Nature will surely find a less benign method.

By Peter-J Alexander “Rudi, we Brits know so little about Germany. There used to be a popular BBC radio programme: ‘Letter from America’. I’d like you to write a ‘Letter from Germany’. To educate us about Germany. Just like you and I did with the Japanese in Tokyo back in the 1990s.” So said my British friend, Richard, trying to find someone, anyone, to write something for his new magazine. This one in fact. He was speaking fast, too fast for a German like me but I think I have got what he said right. I have a Japanese wife, you see. Richard sometimes forgets that English is not my second language. Anyway, he’s the editor. So, he can correct my German English with Japanese characteristics. Yes, Richard and I worked together in Japan. Together we agreed to organize intercultural workshops for Japanese managers from companies like BMW, Bosch and Bayer. Working with the Germans. A strange title, chosen by Richard. Was working with us Germans so difficult for these polite, hard-working Japanese? You may have noticed that Richard calls me Rudi. This was my stage name in our workshops. Richard called me the ‘stooge’ but I never liked this word. My job was to role-play Dr Rudi Friedrichs, a northern German. The beginning of each workshop: a meeting between a German manager and his Japanese subordinates. Dr. Friedrichs grips each limp Japanese hand, looks at each Japanese person in the eye and commands them to have a Guten Morgen. 29 seconds after some short welcoming remarks, in his typically efficient and formal manner, he places the agenda on the table and orders in his best English “Let’s get down to business.” The Japanese wish they could be anywhere but here. Richard beams. Rudi is his German stereotype. The Germans don’t waste time on small talk. They’re so efficient! But – are the Germans really that efficient? Let’s leave those happy days in Japan behind and look at my country today. More than one year after the Covid-19 pandemic began in earnest in Europe, Germany has failed to deal with it effectively or, dare I say it, efficiently over the last few months. Although, for a long time, Germany’s famed efficiency appeared to be working perfectly. Low infection rates in 2020 were envied by many countries, its health system was praised highly, the German people obediently followed the rules set by the government, Chancellor Merkel and her party scored high in the polls. Recently, however, Germany’s Corona-championship bid has waned – endless discussions but no agreement, no clear decisions, no efficiency. The previously strict lock-down policy was abandoned and followed by ‘lock-down-light’, and waves of ‘shut-down-light’‚ ‘open-up-light’. The bickering and inconsistency left people in distress. The virus was not bothered. It had become British, according to Mrs Merkel, and went on its way more aggressively. The weekly incidence rates are rising fast again. Germans have been left bewildered. A clear, efficient way of coping with Coronavirus has not been visible. A heap of rules have been created, which many can’t understand. And suddenly the Astra Zeneca vaccination process was stopped - luckily for only a few days - because 8 people out of 1,600,000 vaccinated patients had had complications. If all 80,000,000 Germans were vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine, about 400 cases with complications could occur - a risk of 1 in 200,000. To do without the vaccination would lead to a death rate of 1%, which is equal to 800,000 people. The economic damage of not using the AstraZeneca vaccine at all could add up to 4,000,000,000€ per week! Nevertheless, German media still accuse the AstraZeneca vaccine of having severe side-effects, of being a second class vaccine, amidst the efforts of experts who insist that the vaccine is very useful in the battle against the virus. German Angst prevails! Richard made similar points in his article two weeks ago - A lousy image is bad for your health. It’s called Freedom: each federal state decides their own fate, their own rules. Many German people are confused. And – as a national German sport – they complain. Whatever happens, my countrymen and women complain, undermining the previous success of Covid 19-management. Here they are, the complainers, the mavericks, criticising every step the central government has taken, sabotaging well-meant strategies. Having fun is more important than caring for others. The media also do what they do best: they support the critics. No more are we the champions of pandemic control. Now, there are other countries showing how efficient state management can be. Great Britain excels here with its vaccination success and is much envied. Germans are asking how it is possible that Israel has vaccinated nearly 60% of its population, the United Arab Emirates more than 50% and Great Britain around 38%, while ‘efficient’ Germany is lingering somewhere around 8%. What has gone wrong in ‘efficient’ Germany? The list of failures is long: 1. In 2012 the Federal Government of Germany imagined what would happen if the country was hit by a pandemic caused by the SARS virus. They worked out what to do. Nobody listened, nothing was done. Had the government reacted properly when the Coronavirus arrived, masks and protective clothes could have been bought in time. 2. Instead, when the first wave arrived and politicians acknowledged that nothing was prepared, panic ensued. The export of masks and protective clothes to European countries in need, such as Italy and Switzerland, was forbidden. National egoism gained, European solidarity lost. Politicians were in a frenzy. 3. Too late and too expensive, the procurement of FFP2 masks became another disaster. Some politicians got involved and were bribed to award contracts to undeserving suppliers who could not fulfil the orders. 4. A ‘Corona-App’ was developed, following the best practice examples of South Korea and Taiwan, at a cost of about 20,000,000€. It turned out to be an expensive flop. Even now local health departments aren’t able to follow chains of infection quickly. Why? Because our bureaucrats still operate with pen and paper. We call this Zettelwirtschaft. You will think I am joking but many of these people still communicate with each other and with us citizens by letter and by fax. In the middle of a pandemic! 5. Testing became a very important tool in the pandemic: the government organized a task force but there was little co-ordination. Companies, kindergartens, schools and others were left on their own to work out how to test their staff and students. 6. Old people are the most vulnerable to Covid-19. Many of them live in nursing homes. The government could have used the period of low infections last summer to work out how best to protect old people from the second wave. Tests were available; they only had to be purchased. But bureaucracy slowed the decision-making to a snail’s pace. Zettelwirtschaft! 7. Great Britain is analysing the virus in order to understand it better and detect mutants. Germany could have learned from this best practice. Instead shops and restaurants have been closed without anyone knowing how or why infections occur. 8. The procurement of vaccines was handled by the EU Commission. Another complete failure. Not enough vaccines were ordered and were ordered too late because European politicians wanted to save money. 9. Germany doesn’t have sufficient production capacity to make enough vaccines itself. While Great Britain enlarged its capacity quite early, Germany hesitated to do so. Delays in delivery from outside Germany, though not the fault of the German authorities, have made the problem worse. 10. Financial assistance for stressed companies was promised by politicians and carried out by government institutions. It often took months for the bureaucrats to send the urgently needed cash injections to the right recipient. What a surprise! Have I mentioned Zettelwirtschaft before? By the way, the German government was much quicker in agreeing to lend to poorer EU countries in dire straits, such as Greece or Portugal, without asking the German taxpayer. 11. Schools didn’t take the chance of upgrading their digital equipment quickly during the first lock-down in March 2020. They got no support from the ministry of education in each state. Instead these ministries pleaded that schools stayed open, denying that there was much risk of infection. Teachers, students and parents alike were left alone to cope. Although money was available, inefficient German bureaucracy prevented the schools from taking the necessary steps to make them Covid-safe. Better ventilation, free express-tests (the Austrians stand out here) and effective masks – the list of promises is long, the list of unkept assurances is longer. At least the universities reacted smartly: during the last 12 months lectures have mostly been held online. Here efficiency still seems to exist. 12. At the moment medical doctors are not involved in the vaccination process, though this is probably about to change in April. Again, numerous discussions were held, but decisions have been postponed because not enough vaccines are available. Furthermore, the bureaucratic procedures accompanying the vaccination process are slowing its roll-out. 13. Germany refuses to learn from those east Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan which have been...er...much more efficient and successful in combatting Coronavirus. So, am I a typical German complainer? Yes but, as Richard would say. It’s not all bad here. We did pretty well at the beginning and for much of the last year. But we did not take advantage of this relative success. And now many Germans have become more careless and more selfish. They believe in fake news, they take part in unauthorized parties. Wearing masks is increasingly regarded as an attack on individual democratic rights and freedom. Even some politicians ignore their own rules. Many bureaucrats have tried hard to do their best. Even so they won’t take responsibility for their many mistakes and tend to blame others for them. Friedrich Nietzsche’s egoistic will dominates. Poor Immanuel Kant; his categorical imperative is going downhill. He would turn in his grave... Can I say that we Germans are efficient? I still believe that we admire reason and efficiency. But admiring something is one thing, being it is another. Our handling of this pandemic has made me doubt that we are as rational or as efficient as we once thought we were. Maybe we will learn from our many mistakes and do better in future. Rudi still exists though. After all, he managed to get this written (on a computer) and delivered (electronically) to his friend, Richard, on time and in budget. Budget?! What budget?