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by Dr Jehad Al-Omari As we say in Arabic, these days are pregnant with events which invoke many memories to those who follow history like I do. Three events in the last century that shaped modern Jordan and the wider Middle East occurred in February and March and even though they may seem ancient, even irrelevant, to those of you outside the region, their impact is still felt and remembered, and should never be underestimated. Modern Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and many countries in the region were created in the aftermath of the First World War. The Hashemites, the clan who ruled the city of Mecca for almost a thousand years until the last century, played a decisive role in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire. It is to this clan that the royal family of Jordan belongs. Indeed my country’s official title is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Just over 22 years ago, on Sunday, 7 February 1999, I travelled to Liverpool from London ahead of the course that I was due to run for 5 days, starting the next day. It was a heart-aching journey as I had just heard the news of the death of King Hussein of Jordan a few hours earlier. It was not that the news had come as a shock; tens of thousands of Jordanians had held a night vigil outside the hospital in Amman where the late king had spent his final hours. Rather, like many Jordanians, he was the only king I had ever known, having come to the throne in 1952. Less than 3 weeks earlier, on 19 January, the king had returned from his cancer treatment at the Mayo Clinic in the USA to be welcomed by almost one million Jordanians. They lined the streets of Amman to cheer their king, believing that he was cured. However, as his condition worsened, he returned to the USA on 25 January, only to return to Jordan severely ill, prior to his death 13 days later. The funeral was scheduled to take place the next day, Monday. It was painful for me to know that I was going to miss watching it. Instead a colleague and I would be spending the day training some 25 scientists in multi-cultural team building. That Sunday night and the next morning, the British media covered both the death of the king and the imminent funeral extensively, with lots of reports about Jordan, the king, and the legacy of his long reign. The course began with the usual introductions and warm-up exercises. Two things happened which will stay with me for the rest of my life. First, we gave the delegates – half of them British, the rest a mix of Europeans, Indians, Chinese, North and South Americans - a questionnaire that explores the stereotypes that people have of various cultures, including the Arab culture. Having used this questionnaire with similar groups of scientists from the same company, it was a shock to hear this group speak so positively about the Arab culture, contrary to previous occasions. In fact, the Arab culture came through shining for the first and last time when doing this exercise. For me, it plainly showed how important the media is in shaping stereotypes. The delegates had been closely following the news from and about Jordan and this had moulded their view of the wider Arab culture. Yet it also showed how fickle such stereotypical views of another culture can be, even among those whose opinions one would expect to be evidence-based. When we repeated the same exercise with another group of scientists a month later, the Arab culture got the usual negative reception. The second thing that happened was that a few of the scientists asked if we could all take time off to go and watch the king’s funeral. This was seconded by the rest, for which I was most grateful, and I was able to say goodbye to my King, albeit remotely, from my Liverpool hotel. The fact that the funeral was attended by so many world leaders, never before or since assembled in one place, is a testimony to the esteem in which King Hussein was held amongst the world’s politicians. As much as it is a sad day for Jordanians to commemorate, it is also a source of pride that our king won the respect of friends and foes alike. He is still fondly remembered by Jordanians of all ages, including those who never witnessed his reign. There were many times in the mid-70s and early 80s when I was asked in the UK where I came from. Whereas Jordan would not ring a bell for the majority, I would subsequently utter the magic words “King Hussein” and everyone would nod their heads in recognition. He was a man with great charisma, a king of hearts who ruled his kingdom for so long and against all odds amidst all the instabilities of the Middle East. Next month we Jordanians will celebrate the centenary of the birth of our kingdom. We have much to celebrate. Whereas Jordanians remember 8 February as a day of mourning, our next-door neighbours in Iraq remember 9 February with mixed feelings. It was on that day in 1963 that Maj. Gen. Abd Al-Karim Qassim was executed, having mounted a bloody but successful coup 5 years earlier against the Hashemite King of Iraq, Faisal II, the second cousin of King Hussein. The coup on 14 July, 1958 came only a few months after a union was announced between the kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq. Some, including conspiracy theorists, believe that the coup was mounted to stop such a union. Whatever reasons Qassim and his associates had for overthrowing the Iraqi monarchy , the nature of its end remains fiercely debated by many Iraqis. Some say that the bloodiness of the coup – all but one member of the immediate royal family were eliminated mercilessly - left a curse on Iraq given that the royal family were Hashemites and hence direct descendants of the Prophet of Islam, Mohammed. Others though celebrate 14 July 1958 as the day that Iraq won its true independence from the British, irrespective of the bloody vicious circle in which Iraq has found itself since then, not least the events of 2003 with the downfall of Saddam Hussain. Talking of the British and their involvement in the Middle East leads me to the third event which Jordanians recall at this time of year. Not a lot of people outside Jordan know that the Chief of Staff of the Jordanian Armed Forces until 1956 was a British soldier who is popularly known as Abu Hunaik (man with little jaw) by Jordanians but whose real name is Sir John Bagot Glubb or Glubb Pasha. The nickname Abu Hunaik refers to Sir John’s shattered jaw which he sustained while serving in France during the First World War, whereas Pasha was the Ottoman title given to senior ranks in the army and other forces. Having arrived in Jordan in 1930 following a 10-year stint in Iraq, Glubb Pasha went on to lead the Jordanian forces even after Jordan’s independence from Britain in 1946. To this day, Jordanians are divided on the role and contribution of Glubb Pasha in the building of the Jordanian Army and its defeat in the war of 1948 with Israel. As I write this article on 1 March, Jordanians are celebrating what we call “the Arabization of the Jordanian Army”. This was the day in 1956 when the services of Glubb Pasha and all his British advisors were terminated. This took place against a rising tide of Arab nationalism across the region and, amongst Jordanians, growing antagonism towards Britain, firstly as a colonial power and, just as importantly, for its role in the creation of the state of Israel. Whereas feelings against Glubb Pasha were high back in 1956, 65 years on they have mellowed and matured somewhat, giving the man credit for his integrity, his role in modern Jordan, and his lifetime commitment after he left Jordan to explain Arab peoples, cultures and history to an international audience. He was a true Arabist of the old school who from his retirement in 1956 till his death in 1986 wrote many books including his most famous: “A Soldier with the Arabs”. A personal anecdote: my father, who served in the Jordanian Army, likes to tell the story of how Glubb Pasha once sent a letter in Arabic to the Jordanian Prime Minster of the time. It consisted of 18 pages. There was not a single grammatical or spelling mistake in it. Those of you who understand the central importance of the Arabic language to the Arabs will know why that story explains some of the admiration that many Jordanians still have for Glubb Pasha.

by Richard Pooley “O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion:” “To a Louse”, Robert Burns, 1785 For many years I used to run cross-cultural skills courses for businesspeople engaged in doing business across borders. This was not diversity training, designed more to tick boxes on some Human Resource department’s management development programme than actually change anybody’s behaviour towards their foreign colleagues. I chronicled my low opinion of such courses in September last year and got plenty of abuse and some praise for doing so. Nor was the cross-cultural training an instruction in etiquette – e.g. don’t show the bottom of your shoe in the Middle East, never arrive late for a meeting in German-speaking Switzerland, don’t use a handkerchief to blow your nose in Japan and then return it to your pocket. You can find all that stuff online for free. My aim was not to change my clients’ world views, remove their prejudices or radically change their behaviour. It was to get them to understand the world views, prejudices and behaviour of other people and, armed with that information, successfully manage, persuade and negotiate in the real world of international business. One of the exercises I and my colleagues did (including fellow Only Connect writer, Jehad Al-Omari) was something called As Others See Us. The title comes from Robert Burns’ poem addressed to a large louse which was crawling inside the lacy bonnet of a pretty woman in Church. She thinks all around are admiring her beauty and fine clothes when in fact they are watching this “wonner” (nasty creature) creep into her hair to suck her blood. In the last verse Scotland’s national poet wishes that if only we could see ourselves as others see us, it would stop us making stupid mistakes. The same can be said for those who work internationally: learn what stereotypical view of you and your fellow citizens that foreigners may have. You can then work out how to overcome the negative aspects of that image and build on the positive elements. In the exercise, I would ask the participants what stereotypical image they thought the people from the target culture had of the participants’ culture(s). I would usually have some research ready to show them how, for example, the Chinese really did see them. If I’m honest, I probably learned more about cultural differences from the participants’ reaction to doing this exercise than they learned about how other cultures regarded them. The British would invariably think that others had a much more positive view of the UK than they, in fact, do. If I had an American HR manager in the room, I would probably be told that the exercise encouraged racism and must immediately stop (much to the chagrin of the non-HR Americans in the room). The Germans hated doing it because they assumed, wrongly, that everybody dislikes them. The Swedes loved doing it because books on “What the world, aside from those devious Danes and dim Norwegians, thinks of Sweden” have long been a source of income to Swedish publishers. The Japanese knew that everyone regards them as peaceable, hard-working, environmentally-conscious people who were only difficult to understand because they did not speak English well. Very sorry. And the French? They knew exactly how the world sees them – arrogant, rude, selfish – and could not give a damn. I have been reminded of this exercise over the last few months as I have followed the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccination programmes in different countries around the world, especially in Europe. The relative failure of countries such as Germany and France to get going quickly and proceed at pace is partly because of the negative stereotypes that the Germans and the French have nowadays of other countries, in particular of Russia and the UK. Let’s look at Germany first. Last summer the German government was trying to decide which vaccines it should be ordering in addition to those being acquired by the EU Commission (N.B. British Brexiteers: several EU countries chose to order and approve vaccines independent of the Commission, as has always been their right). When Russia’s Gamaleya Institute announced in August that its Sputnik V vaccine was well on the way to being approved after swift clinical trials had proved its efficacy, German officials, politicians and media dismissed the news as typical Russian propaganda and said they would not order it. The image of Russia as an irredeemably corrupt country whose rulers care little for human life blotted out the fact that Russia has some of the world’s leading scientific institutions, the Gamaleya Institute being one of them. It has, in the past, produced effective vaccines against Ebola and MERS, and in January The Lancet published an analysis which showed that Sputnik V has 92% efficacy. Some German medical scientists did try to point out these truths last year but their pleas for a rational response to the Russian claims were ignored. Russia bad; ergo Russian vaccine bad. Something similar happened when German newspapers reported in late January this year that the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine was not effective in people over 65 years old. This was, at best, a misunderstanding of the results of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine’s clinical trials. At worst, it was a deliberate attempt by German officials and politicians to punish Astra Zeneca for saying that it could not deliver as many doses as their contract with the EU required. Way back in March last year the scientists at Oxford had decided not to test the vaccine on many people over 65. They had good reasons for doing so but it meant that they did not have the data to prove that the vaccine was effective when given to the over 65s. Astra Zeneca immediately said that the German media were “completely incorrect”. Data they released a few days later showed why. But the damage had been done. Only recently has the German government allowed this “Anglo-Swedish” vaccine to be jabbed into the arms of Germans over the age of 65. Too late. By 23 February Germany had taken delivery of 1.45 million doses of the vaccine but only used 240,000. A quarter of Germans polled by YouGov between 17 November and 10 January said they would refuse to get any of the vaccines on offer. Anecdotal evidence from doctors reported in German media indicates that a combination of factors is making it especially hard for them to “sell” the Astra Zeneca vaccine to their patients. Other than the false news about its efficacy for the elderly, one reason given is the perceived origin of the vaccine, its Britishness. The Oxford scientists are an international team, Astra Zeneca is as much Swedish as British, many of those who took part in the clinical trials were not British, much of the vaccine’s production is taking place outside the UK, and the boss of AZ, Pascal Soriot, is a Parisian. These facts mean little to those many Germans whose stereotypical image of the British has become more negative over the past few years. We Brits, once admired by Germans for our perceived trustworthiness and pragmatic approach to life, have, post the Brexit referendum, lost this reputation for telling the truth and applying common sense when making decisions. If they don’t trust us, why should they trust “our” vaccine? It’s even worse in France. The French have never trusted “perfidious Albion”. In January President Macron rubbished the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine, saying: “everything points to thinking it is quasi-ineffective on people older than 65, some say those 60 years or older.” Whatever his reasons for making this evidence-free statement – his anger at Astra Zeneca’s apparent failure to honour its contract, his frustration with the bureaucracy of France’s much-vaunted medical system, his irritation at the success of the British government in getting so many more jabs into British arms than the French were achieving – his words backfired so spectacularly that they may be used in evidence against him during the presidential election next year. That YouGov survey indicated that nearly 40% of French people would refuse any vaccine offered to them, the highest proportion of anti-vaxxers among the rich countries polled. Macron’s administration needed to work hard to persuade enough French to be jabbed. Instead he completely undermined the case for accepting the Astra Zeneca vaccine, one of the three vaccines on offer and the one expected to be easiest for doctors’ surgeries and, later, pharmacies to store and use. In recent weeks Macron and his health minister, Olivier Véran, have tried to repair the damage. But, as in Germany, too little too late. By the end of February out of 1.7 million Astra Zeneca vaccine doses received in France, only 273,000 had been used. One surgery in Paris reported in late February that half of their patients with co-morbidities who had been offered the Astra Zeneca jab had refused it. However, it’s not just Macron’s ill-judged words that have made such refuseniks put their lives at risk. It’s also that image of the untrustworthy British. Why trust “le vaccin anglais”, especially now that the more infectious Covid mutant which has invaded France is “le variant anglais”(entering, some French media reported, via Dunkirk...oh, the irony!)? A book by Sylvie Bermann, France’s ambassador to the UK from 2014 to 2017, has only reinforced this French image of the UK. Entitled “Goodbye Britannia”, the book is already a bestseller. Mme Bermann is, in fact, that French rarity, an anglophile, loving the “land of Jane Austen and Monty Python.” But she has made Brexiteers apoplectic with her description of Boris Johnson as a “congenital liar”. The image she had of Britain when she arrived from China in 2014 was of “a flourishing economy”, “pragmatic", "very open, very indifferent about whether you belonged to one religion or another...more free than ours, more optimistic.” But that positive image has largely disappeared and she has, regretfully, joined her compatriots in thinking that the British can no longer be trusted, exemplified by Johnson himself (who she says she still likes!) Clever readers will have spotted the logical flaw in the title of this article. If the Germans and French are stupid enough to be so influenced by their stereotypical image of the British that they refuse to take the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine, then it is their health which suffers and not that of the British. True. But what effect will our new reputation for untrustworthiness in countries such as Germany, the USA and Japan do to our long-term economic health? And what about the health of the United Kingdom itself? The Scotsman who wrote To a Louse shared some character traits with Boris Johnson. No one is quite sure how many children Robert Burns had (probably ten by two different women) nor how many women he was actually married to. But I am confident he would have shared with most present-day Scots a strong aversion towards Johnson. I will run the risk of alienating that goodly portion of my family who live in Scotland and who vote Conservative and Unionist by saying that the current British prime minister personifies the negative aspects of the Scottish stereotype of the English, especially its ruling class – superficial, supercilious and untrustworthy. If the United Kingdom is to remain united it had better not be Boris Johnson who leads any future campaign to persuade the Scots to again vote No to independence. Perhaps he will have the sense to ask Ruth Davidson, the current leader of the Conservative Party in the Scottish Parliament, to take on that task once she enters the House of Lords later this year. She is a Scot who many Scots admire for her no-nonsense approach to political life. I can’t imagine a louse surviving long in her bonnet.

by Dr Mark Nicholson Thirty-six years ago this month (1977…yes, I can subtract, so be patient) I was driving south from Addis Ababa to my house in the Ethiopian Rift Valley lake region (Haykoch) when I caught up with the mother of all convoys going slowly the same way. Try overtaking 600 gigantic Russian trucks on a narrow road. It took well over an hour. We eventually pulled up alongside one that had broken down and tried to engage the driver without success: not only did we not have a language in common but he was probably under instructions not to talk to anyone. The epicanthic folds of almost all the truck drivers reminded me that the USSR covered eleven time zones and that the cheapest labour clearly came from several thousand miles east of the Urals. Actually, the year was 1985 but the Ethiopian calendar is seven years and nine months behind the Gregorian calendar (Ethiopian New Year’s Day is 11 Sept in the Gregorian). In October 1984 I had flown with the RAF in a Hercules C-130 to experience how grain was delivered by air to the famine areas. Ferenjis (foreigners) were banned from the war zones in the north and so for the first time I saw the breath-taking northern mountain landscapes (Ethiopia has 80 percent of all upland areas in Africa above 8000ft – 2438 metres). The drop zone, shorter than a football pitch, was the flat top of an eroded mountain plateau. At each end was a sheer drop of about 5000ft (1524 metres). Once the load-master ensured we were all tied to safety leads, the back of the plane was opened, the plane dived to under 100ft and the nose was yanked up so we could push out the pallets. Within seconds the ground proximity radar spun back to six thousand feet and a ragged horde of hungry villagers ran towards the partially broken pallets. In December of that year Band Aid came out with a song entitled ‘Don’t they know it’s Christmas?’. No, they didn’t know, because it wasn’t: in the Orthodox calendar Christmas Day is the 7th January. A lot more about Ethiopia is unique: it is the only country of the 53 in Africa never to have been colonized (the Italians tried twice, both times unsuccessfully). The Amharic alphabet has over 250 characters derived from Ge’ez (the ancient language with over 500 characters and still used in orthodox Bibles,). And the staple diet is derived from a grass called Eragrostis teff, or teff, a grain markedly superior to grains like wheat and maize. The year is significant; it was towards the end of the Ethiopian famine that killed well over a million souls. The convoy was significant because it was laden with Russian wheat heading south to the storage depots. Why was it not heading north to the famine areas? The answer was that those in the extreme north, the Tigray, were fighting a civil war against the Communist regime, and were being denied food aid by the latter in order to crush them into submission. Overall, there was probably never a shortage of food in the country. Central and western Ethiopia is a fertile grain-growing land, and there was little sign of food shortage in the rest of Ethiopia. It is ironic that it is small farmers, the food producers, who suffer famines, not city dwellers (unless it is a siege during wartime), as George Bernard Shaw attested when he dined lavishly in Moscow during the Russian famine of 1931. Fast forward six years and the northerners (the Tigray People’s Liberation Front or TPLF) from Tigray swooped down on Addis Ababa and overthrew the communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who fled south to his pal Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The brilliant leader of the northern fighters was Meles Zenawi, known to be able to recite reams of Shakespeare in English. He then formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and rewarded the country of his Tigrayan-speaking cousin and brother-in-arms, Isaias Ifwerki, an Eritrean, with independence, making Ethiopia a land-locked country. Eritrea and Ethiopia then fell out. Trench warfare on the border resulted in the death of another 100,000. The Tigrayans and their neighbours the Eritreans became enemies. At the time of his death in 2012, Zenawi had transformed Ethiopia into one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. Understandably, arms, wealth and development also migrated north and corruption took over. In 2018, a new Prime Minister was appointed, Abiy Ahmed Ali, a Muslim Oromo who inevitably was forced to yield to pressure from the Oromo south. He brought all ethnic groups together by changing the name of the party from the EPRDF to the Prosperity Party. Democracy remains paper thin: in the 2015 election the EPRDF won 91% of the seats. In 2019 Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for making peace with Eritrea after 20 years of hostility. Ethiopia has always been a mixture of (mainly Orthodox) Christianity, Islam and Judaisim. In 1991, most of the Falashas (Ethiopian Jews) were airlifted to Israel. Religious tolerance has been widespread since the Muslim-Christian war of the 16th Century. In contrast, ethnic rivalries have persisted to the present day, as in many African states. The old name Abyssinia is often equated with Ethiopia but this is incorrect. The Abyssinians were Semitic in origin, contrasting with the Southerners (the Oromo), who are mainly Cushitic. Nevertheless, the nation state of Abyssinia existed centuries before the artificial carve up of Africa at the Berlin conference of 1884. So where do we start with the Tigray question in relation to the history of Ethiopia? With Makeda, Queen of Saba (Sheba) 3000 years ago? With Moses’ Ethiopian wife? With the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant in 650 B.C and its reputed reappearance in Axum (now in Tigray) 1000 years later? Or the Jewish persecution of the Axumite Christians under Queen Yudit (Judith) in 1000 A.D.? The traditional rulers of Ethiopia since the 17th century were from the Amhara group, the last one of the emperors being Haile Selassie who was murdered by the Communists in 1975. Let us begin with Emperor Menelik II (1889-1913). His empire approximated the boundaries of modern Ethiopia and encompassed many squabbling kingdoms (hence the other title of Haile Selassie as the ’King of Kings’). In the north were the Tigrinya-speaking provinces of Eritrea and Tigray. After the former’s independence, Tigray now makes up only 6% of Ethiopia’s population of 115 million. In the South live the Oromo (34% of the population), now eager for power, and in the south-east is arid Somali Ethiopia (Hararghe) with about 6%. The Oromo claim Addis Ababa (or ‘New Flower’), the capital, as rightfully theirs, as the Amhara moved their capital south to Addis in the 1880s. The once dominant Amharas make up 27 percent of the population. Late last year the Tigray party (TPLF) illegally held its own regional elections, winning all contested seats in the region's parliament. In response, Abiy redirected funding from the top level of the Tigray regional government to lower ranks in a bid to weaken the TPLF party. Conflict broke out. The Ethiopian militia were joined both by Amhara forces and the Eritrean army to crush the rebellion. Abiy had got into bed with the Eritreans, and the Tigrayans continued to be enemies with the one group who spoke the same language (Amharic/ Amarigna is distinctly different to Tigrinya, even if they share the same script). The result has been destruction, bloodshed, refugees and accusations of genocide. But if Abiy had allowed autonomy or independence for the Tigray region, the Oromo might be next. It may be unwoke to refer to a sovereign state as a failed state but if there were Olympic medals for failed states, they would be won by three of the last four new states in the world, South Sudan, Eritrea and Yemen (formerly North Yemen & Aden/ South Yemen), all neighbours of Ethiopia. The success rate of newly created countries is not high and Abiy is probably not keen to see his country broken up. On the contrary, his close ties with Eritrea may lead to reunification, which is clearly on the cards. Abiy is “damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t”. He has been vilified but I believe he had no option but to put down the Tigrayan rebellion.

by Richard Carr Without wishing to join the legions of armchair epidemiologists, I do have a perspective on how matters have been handled in the Antipodes - as a frequent visitor to Australia, with more cousins there than in the UK, and a house in New Zealand. In the UK, where I spend the bulk of the year, the swift deployment of vaccines enables us to contemplate a return to a more normal life by the summer, including being able to travel abroad again. The British experience of the virus over the last year contrasts markedly with that of Australians and New Zealanders, whose governments reacted swiftly to the pandemic last March by sealing their borders and imposing a rigorous regime of managed quarantine for the few nationals and residents allowed back in. In the UK managed quarantine has only been introduced recently and only for travellers from some countries. These measures in the Antipodes have largely kept at bay the pestilence afflicting the rest of the globe. Their geographic isolation made it easier to do so and has also helped keep death rates very low. Whilst New Zealand had a tough lock-down initially and has experienced very few cases since, allowing life to continue more or less normally, Australia has had more mixed success in containing the virus. There have been periodic outbreaks in some states, necessitating the closure of state borders and subsequent lock-downs, some quite lengthy, e.g. in Victoria. With the borders in both countries closed, returning Aussie and NZ nationals and residents have had to compete for the limited number of quarantine hotel rooms available for the mandatory 14-day isolation. There are still currently tens of thousands of Aussies and NZ nationals and residents living abroad who have been unable to return to their home country over the past year. Newspapers and television recently showed large crowds attending the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne and the Americas Cup sailing in Auckland, with no social distancing. For those of us in wintry lock-down Europe we could only look at these scenes with envy. As things stand, we will start to get back to life like that from late June in the UK. We hope. The Antipodean elimination strategy appears to have been very successful in the short term. Their populations have been able to live life more or less normally in both countries after lock-downs and contact-tracing reduced infections to almost zero. This strategy was possible in two island countries largely on the periphery of the world. In the UK, it would have had much less chance of success because of factors such as cross-border truck movement for essential food supplies and London being a global hub. In continental Europe, even more so with its land borders and freedom of movement within the EU. The decisions taken by the Antipodean governments took them down a path of no return (once you go for elimination it’s difficult to modulate that choice without conceding defeat). Going the other way and a transition back to reopening the borders may be difficult. A recent poll showed that a significant majority of Australians think the government should keep the border closed until “after the pandemic is under control globally”. All adult Aussies can expect to be offered a vaccination by October, but it could be a while (late 2023 according to The Economist) before all other countries have completed their programmes. There has been an on-off travel corridor between New Zealand and New South Wales and Victoria, and the Aussie and NZ governments are contemplating an extension to the Pacific Islands. However, problems may arise as constituent countries may decide they wish to open up to other countries at different speeds. And then there is the issue of what happens if a virus gets into one country and starts to circulate. Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, has the challenge of getting New Zealanders used to what the Covid future looks like. The same applies in Australia with the Scott Morrison government. As The Economist pointed out recently, expecting vaccines to see off Covid-19 is mistaken. Instead, the disease will probably circulate for years and is likely to become endemic. It seems we are all going to have to live with it for some considerable time. Getting most people in NZ to understand that, and living with Covid post-vaccination will be tough, particularly as they have become used to having zero Covid in the community. Ardern has slowly started signalling this, and recently compared the future to the way we live with flu, with an annual season accompanied by vaccinations. “It does mean that from time to time people will still have Covid,” she said. She did not mention Covid deaths, but each year around 500 Kiwis die of causes related to the flu. Getting New Zealanders to accept anything close to that number of Covid deaths might be difficult after their experience of the last year where life has been normal, albeit with the borders closed. For the UK and many other countries which have experienced high numbers of Covid deaths, the much lower toll in future compared to the past year, is likely to be less of an issue, tragic though they are for the families of those who die. In the UK, the number of ‘excess winter deaths’, many of which are flu-related, are in the tens of thousands annually. To take one recent year as an example, excess winter deaths totalled 50,100 in 2017/18. What will happen after NZ and Australia have jabbed most of their populations and opened their borders? Perhaps the way Australia has managed matters provides the answer. There the localised infection outbreaks have meant that contact-tracing systems have become very effective, with people becoming used to using QR codes wherever they go. There is a degree of confidence that the government now has the tools to isolate hotspots very quickly, particularly in New South Wales where lock-downs have largely been avoided. Victoria though, had a 5-day snap lock-down as recently as mid-February. An Australian friend tells me “The atmosphere in NSW is a bit different to the rest of the country where fear is still the first reaction to a new case of Covid”. Neither country can remain sealed off forever. Nor, like in the UK, can government support for businesses and jobs continue indefinitely. For New Zealand, international tourism is an important contributor to the economy. Prior to the pandemic, tourism accounted directly and indirectly for 9.3% of GDP and was responsible for 13.6% of the total number of people employed in the country. Tourism post-pandemic may not look the same; recent years have seen a sharp and unsustainable rise in tourist numbers. The pandemic has brought an opportunity for a possible reset to attract higher value tourists, with fewer twenty-somethings roaming the country in clapped-out vans, doing what Kiwis call “freedom camping” – overnighting where they please - with little benefit to the local communities they stay in. This may not be a bad thing, but NZ still needs lots of tourist jobs, many of which are currently furloughed or lost. Border reopening looks however to be some time off as the first vaccines have only just started to be deployed in NZ and Australia, putting them way behind countries like the UK. Their respective national carriers have said that international flights are only likely to resume in 2022, with the exception of some trans-Tasman corridor travel before then. Reluctance to receive vaccines also appears to be an issue. A December poll in NZ showed 25% of people would not wish to have a shot and there have been anti-vaxxer marches in Australia. A recent Imperial College London study of global attitudes towards Covid-19 vaccines showed that vaccine acceptance in 4 out of 15 rich countries fell between November and January. The countries were Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, all with impressive records in handling the pandemic. So there appears to be some evidence of risk aversion in countries least affected by the pandemic and where population immunity has not built up. For the Antipodeans, there are some clear downsides to the borders reopening and public acceptance required before it happens. How soon will it be safe to do so? Will there have to be an agreed level of immunity? A few have begun to ask themselves: “Have we become the victims of our own success?”

Dr Mark Nicholson Every Sunday morning for many years now, I walk through the tea-fields next to my home in Kenya to have breakfast with my 85-year-old neighbours (when I or they are not “up-country” or out of the country). They were born three days apart, shared the same crèche and have been married for well over 60 years. Mister is a modest but highly successful tea planter achieving tea yields that the large international tea producers would be profoundly envious of. If it has rained, the first question he or any Kenya farmer will ask is “How much rain did you have last night?” (We know because we all measure.) The ex-colonials will reply with something like “Oh, 95 points”, which translates to 95/100 of an inch, or in modern parlance 24mm. The secret is to try and impress (or depress) them by responding “Oh, bad luck, we had 33mm”. Yes, rain is usually our friend. But not now. It is February and at this time of year we expect blue skies and brown, parched lawns. But for several years the skies have been cloudy for much of the year, the temperatures at 2300m (7600ft) lower than in the past, and February is no longer dry (last Saturday night we had 79mm). We can blame El Niño, La Niña or simply a changing climate. One theory is that as the Indian Ocean heats up, the evaporated water (moisture) blows over the equatorial African highlands and dumps increasing amounts of rain on us. For a tea farmer at this time of year such rain spells gloom: more rain at the wrong time of year means more tea to pluck, a higher wage bill, oversupply on the world market and falling prices. But don’t think the overall effect is cooling. I spent the weekend on Mt. Kenya. Fifty years ago glaciers gleamed in the sun. Today there is only a pathetic covering of ice which will be gone within a year or two. So, what is the explanation? The answer is, indeed, climate change. With us it seems to mean a cooling climate as the cloud cover increases, sunlight decreases and temperatures fall. For most of the rest of the planet, it means the opposite. 99 percent of scientists now concur with the view that the driver of climate change is increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and that the source are burning fossil fuels and other activities such as cement manufacturing where limestone (CaCO3) is ‘slaked’ and CO2 is given off. For the less scientifically inclined, let me give a brief overview. Most (78%) of the air we breathe is nitrogen and the rest is oxygen (19%). A tiny fraction (0.00028%) is, or was, CO2, one of the main ‘greenhouse gases’. That is such a small figure that we use parts per million (ppm). From the examination of ice cores, we know that this level has been the same (280 ppm) for the last 10,000 years and at that level or quite a bit lower for the last 800,000 years. Since the Industrial Revolution, the level has been rising and it is now over 400 ppm and increasing steeply, more or less in line with the human population. That figure is more than alarming, it is terrifying. But even more terrifying is that the majority of people are still blissfully unaware of the danger. CO2 is a heavy gas, so it traps heat, and the result is global warming or what British chemist and earth scientist James Lovelock calls global heating. Lovelock is the creator of the Gaia hypothesis which suggests that the biosphere and all the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains climatic and biogeochemical stability on Earth. But mankind is breaking down this stability. Later this year in Glasgow, insh’Allah, the world will watch and listen to the grandly titled Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty addressing climate change, originally negotiated and signed by 154 states in Rio in 1992. It is known informally as the Earth Summit. These Conference of the Parties develop into a bun-fight with countries all trying to minimize the impact on their economies. The problem with all these UN Protocols, Declarations and Accords is that after endless hand-wringing, the COPs promise everything and deliver almost nothing. Do you remember the result of COP3 in 1997: the Kyoto Protocol? It was doomed from birth because it excluded the world's fastest growing economies (notably China, also one of the largest) and developing countries (e.g. India) from binding targets. Moreover, the USA refused to ratify it. Twenty-three years later, and despite the Covid blip, the world economy is still growing. Look at any graph of CO2 levels and extrapolate to 2050 and you will arrive at 500 ppm or possibly much more, as the natural carbon sinks (mainly the oceans) fail to absorb more CO2. That is only part of the problem. As the Earth warms up, two much more dangerous things will happen. The first is that the permafrost – currently almost 25% of the northern hemisphere - will start to melt, liberating vast amounts of methane (CH4). Methane is 84 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2. Secondly, as polar ice disappears, the amount of solar energy reflected into space (the albedo) goes down. Ice-albedo feedback is a vital aspect of global climate change: in polar regions, a decrease of snow and ice area results in a decrease of surface albedo, and the intensified solar heating further decreases the snow and ice area. So global heating will accelerate and the existing predictions for global warming may be hugely underestimated. If you are a Texan, don’t be deceived by the cold snap you have just endured: our world is getting hotter every year. ‘Net zero’ will become a buzz phrase this year. It means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gases emitted and those removed naturally from the atmosphere, so that we become carbon neutral. COP26 will attempt to persuade governments to be net zero by 2050. The reality is that we have little hope of achieving this because so many small economies are on the verge of a growth surge. But let’s say that we do achieve net zero by 2050. All that means is that we will allow CO2 levels to be no lower than the catastrophically high levels of 500-1000 ppm. Let me introduce an analogy here: the human body, like most homeotherms, maintains a very narrow range of core temperature of 2 or 3 degrees Celsius. The last time I had malaria my temperature hit 42 C and I felt as if I was about to cook to death. At that level all physiological systems begin to break down. It will be the same when CO2 levels go past 1000 ppm. Temperatures could rise more than 8 C, leaving many places uninhabitable, coastal cities inundated, and mass extinctions inevitable. Our atmosphere is thin and precious: only 12 km thick. Yet we pump 35,000,000,000 to 45,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into it every year. So what is needed is not net zero but finding ways of reducing atmospheric CO2 back to levels that ensure climatic stability. The technology is not there yet, but it may come. This is likely to be geochemical engineering on a huge scale that captures CO2 and turns it back in to carbonates such as chalk or limestone which can be buried underground. I have learnt over the years that humans ignore slow-onset catastrophes. Droughts and famines take time to develop yet kill as many or more than earthquakes, tsunamis or even genocides on the scale achieved in Rwanda. But we ignore climate change at our peril. A few years ago, I ended my Christmas letter to family and friends by saying “Climate change is affecting our lives but we ain’t seen nothing yet”. My view has yet to change.

Dr Jehad Al-Omari I must admit that my favourite subject after History is Food. It is an obsession. Prior to relocating to Jordan from London in 2004, the one thing I worried about most was the lack of international cuisine in Amman. After all, when you have lived in the UK, especially London, you are truly spoilt for choice. Living in Wimbledon for a considerable period of time, I could find good quality Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Italian or Thai food in my immediate neighbourhood. If I ventured to the West End, just 30 minutes away on the Underground, I could sample other cuisines - Iranian, Indonesian, Mongolian or even fusion dishes. As an Arab, I sometimes used to go to Edgware Road to gorge myself on Arab food from the many Arab Restaurants which have made Edgware Road a truly Arab road since the 1980s. “Arab Road”? Yes, because apart from restaurants, the street and side streets are filled with Arab cafés, Arab supermarkets and Arab newsagents. Why did the Arabs colonise Edgware Road? Maybe because it was near Hyde Park Corner when, in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was the only place Arabs could hear political debate openly and freely. It could also be that it is near many good five-star hotels that were filled with rich Arabs from 1974 onwards, following the Arab Oil Embargo and the rise in oil prices. These two reasons could have been why a Jordanian entrepreneur opened the first Arab restaurant in London, called Petra, in 1975. I remember as a teenager my father taking me to this restaurant after two months of bland English food at King’s College’s canteen. It was as if I was entering heaven. I was so hungry that I even ate okra, a traditional ingredient of many Arab dishes and one which I found disgusting at the time but now love. Most Europeans can be excused for assuming that Lebanese food is representative of Arab food or, rather, that it is the main Arab cuisine. There is logic in this view; it was the Lebanese who took the initiative to open restaurants outside the region, just as the Bengalis did with Indian food. Strictly speaking, the Lebanese kitchen is a toned-down version of the otherwise very Levantine kitchen of the Eastern Mediterranean and in that region, it is the Aleppo kitchen that wins every time. Forget the Hummus and the Falafel, the Shawarma (Doner Kebab) and the Grills, and the Baklava and Kunafah which every Levantine kitchen has. Dig deeper and you will find that the Aleppo kitchen is the master at blending tastes. Think of cherries and meat and you get my drift. There is a good reason for the supremacy of the Aleppo kitchen. Aleppo is in the north of present-day Syria, in the centre of a rich agricultural region, and, historically, towards the end of the Silk Road from China to Europe. It might come as a surprise to British readers but the Levant Company was established in the reign of Queen Elizabeth in 1592, 6 years earlier than the East Indies Company. The former was headquartered in Aleppo precisely because of its rich trading history. In fact, the Levant Company had the final say in who got appointed as British Ambassador to the Ottaman court in Constantinople, proof of its strategic importance to British trade and interests at the time. Although Mosul is today part of Iraq, the Mosuli kitchen is very much associated with the Aleppo kitchen and they are indeed similar. The reasons are both geographic and historical. Both cities are at the northern frontier of what is now called the Arab world. They have multicultural populations with strong Turkish and Armenian influences, not to mention the Persian and Kurdish influences to be found particularly in Mosul. Another Arab cuisine that stands out and is fundamentally different in many respects from the Aleppo kitchen is that of Morocco. The country lies at the far western border of the Arab world. Moroccan kitchen is greatly influenced by European, especially Andalusian, cuisine and that of west Africa. Finally, there is the rich Yemeni kitchen in the deep south-east with its Indian and east African influences. Whereas the poorest Arab cuisine, despite its long history, is the Egyptian kitchen. As an Arab living in London, there was a time in the 1970s where it was difficult to get hold of Arab bread, never mind other ingredients, especially those vegetables, grains and fruit so central to Arab cuisine. Finding okra, aubergines or pomegranates in supermarkets was an event to be celebrated. But now, even leading supermarket chains compete in their recipes for Hummus or Couscous. What attracts many westerners to Arab cuisine, particularly the Levantine. is the rich mixture of vegetarian dishes. There is a reason for this emphasis on vegetarian food. The Levant, being the birthplace of Christianity, was for many centuries before and after the advent of Islam still a predominantly Christian land. Vegetarian dishes were a religious necessity during the 40 days of the Lenten fast. This practice of fasting is still observed among Christian Arabs and equally observed by their fellow Muslims. During the month of Ramadan, when Muslims abstain from eating or drinking during daylight, it is not unusual to find Christians distributing water and dates at traffic lights for Muslim drivers and passengers rushing home to break their fast. Now that I am settled in Jordan, people often ask me what I miss most about Britain, and I would say that London’s international cuisine is one of the five things I really miss. The others? My UK-based friends, walks in the countryside, theatre and shopping. I still find it difficult to find truly authentic international food in Amman. This has forced me to take up cooking. But finding the ingredients for, say, Chinese, Thai or Mexican dishes is difficult. Only a few days ago I tried to find Cayenne pepper in several shops but in vain. It is not that Jordanians do not enjoy international cuisine, it’s just that we still have a long way to go in developing our palate to accept certain tastes. This is not to say that Jordan does not have a rich cuisine of its own. It does. The most famous dish is the one pictured at the top of this article: Mansaf - lamb cooked in a kind of sour yogurt sauce called Jameed (see image below), served on a bed of rice and sprinkled with almonds, pine kernels and parsley. Another well-loved dish is Macmoora, most popular in the north of Jordan. It is often cooked during the autumn when the olives are harvested, producing fresh olive oil*. It is composed of meat or chicken between thin layers of dough, and onions soaked with olive oil, all roasted in the oven. A favourite of mine is Akoob عكوب, a type of thistle plant that is otherwise known as Gundelia. It has a taste very much like wild asparagus cooked with or without minced lamb and sometimes with yoghurt. We Jordanians may be slow to adopt cuisines from outside the Arab world but we are willing to accept new tastes. For example, we have recently started to eat fish in a big way. This despite living in an almost land-locked country with only a very narrow opening to the Red Sea at the port of Aqaba. Bon appétit or Sahtain صحتين everyone *Jordan is believed to have the oldest olive trees in the world, some more than 3,000 years old.

Stoker Joe Biden has had a month in office now and his to-do list is very impressive. How much will get done is another matter. That is the trouble with occupying the Oval Office; as Harry S. Truman observed, “the buck stops here”. Harry, of course, was talking about responsibility, but that saying has another edge; everybody escalates everything that troubles them about the world to the presidential office. And in the last few months a new problem is causing much trouble. It is, it has to be said, a rich person’s problem, but rich people are better at getting attention for their problems than the poor. Even so, we suspect that Joe will not be paying too much attention to this one. The problem is in New York, where rich persons and problems often meet. Now, if you are a rich person, and you happen to be reading this in your 75th floor double-height condominium, you may just wish to adjourn to the coffee shop down in the lobby. The problem? The latest generation of high-rise apartment towers. Like models, it seemed that high-rises can never be too tall or too thin. Except, it turns out, that may be true for models, but there is increasing concern that high-rises are a different matter altogether. High-rise buildings are after all a bit of an economic absurdity, to tell the truth, however beautiful or elegant they look soaring above the New York skyline, or the Great Lakes, or even the Gulf shoreline of Dubai. The higher the building, the more the technical complexity and cost of getting all those vital support systems to the higher floors, albeit slightly less so for apartments than offices - the people density is less in residential buildings. But this very factor, combined with new technology, has led architects, always a profession to seek to do things differently to how it has been done before, to make their residential designs thinner and thinner but taller and taller. This means that in any tall thin building large parts of each floor level must be taken up with elevators and service conduits – so that it is not uncommon for more than a quarter of each upper-floor level to be occupied by those essentials of living with a view. You might think the high-rise developers might baulk at the costs of such construction, but from a profit point of view there are enough buyers prepared to pay enormous premiums for living very high up that they more than meet the extra expense of constructing their skyward dreams. Whether they are paying for the views or the sense of isolation or a cloud-shriven superiority, who can say. JG Ballard had a go in his wonderful novel “High-Rise” which may take you further into the curious minds of those who want to build or live high (the film version with Jeremy Irons is also well worth a viewing). Now, even those of us who know little about these things may yet spot the problems of building tall and thin. The wind. Hopefully, it will not come inside your beautiful apartment, though it may on occasion take a window or two out in a playful sort of way (not so playful if it lands on passing cars or heads, of course.) But from time to time the wind gusts quite hard, and what that will do is to cause the building to sway. Anybody who has worked in high-rise offices will be used to that slight sensation of things not quite being nailed down, but that is nothing compared to being, say, on the top floor (96) of 432 Park Avenue, NYC, NY. This is the crème de la crème of high-rise apartment towers, the acme of what are known as “pencil towers”, and the highest residential building in New York, for now anyway (another higher thinner version will be along soon no doubt). It is 1,396 feet (425 metres) tall and was completed in 2015. The sales value of the building is estimated at over US$3bn, and guestimates are that it cost around $1.25bn to build. That does not include the land and finance costs, but even so you can see there is a profitable attraction to developers in building high. The very top apartment sold for $88m. But the statistics of the building are even more compelling. Let us use the Empire State Building as a handy comparison. That building is 1,250 feet (381 metres) tall, about 424 feet (129 metres) across, and is in floor-plan more or less square; on a windy day in down-town New York it can sway up to six inches (15cm). 432 Park Avenue (such a modest name incidentally for such a flamboyantly visible building) is 1,396 feet (425 metres) high but only 93 feet (28 metres) across. It is square, giving about 8,300 square feet (771 square metres) per floor, of which 6,000 square feet (557 square metres) is usable for living space, at the top as single penthouses, two or three or even four apartments per floor further down, and the rest being devoted to elevators and pipes and cables. And emergency staircases. If you stand an inch square foot ruler on end – don’t try it, it’s very unstable and you may knock your coffee cup to the floor - the height to width ratio is 1:12. Mind-bogglingly, the height to width ratio of 432 Park Avenue is 1:15. So, let’s get back to the swaying. On a very windy day the building, its occupants, their beautiful things, and their hard-working staff will find that they could be moving through the clouds a couple of feet back and forth, maybe even up to three feet. That's just under a metre. Nothing to worry about; the building is designed to move that much to manage its wind resistance. The side effects though seem to be more troublesome. In very high winds the elevators automatically shut down as a safety measure, to stop the luxury cabins engaging the shafts and problems with cables swinging around. Those closures on a good old stormy night in the Big Apple may go on for a while, not ideal if you want to go to your office on Wall Street, or shopping, or have an ex-President over for supper and you want him to leave. Flexing pipes tend to spring leaks and a leak seventy floors up can do a lot of damage below ($9.3m of damage from one last year). Flexing cables can make fitful connections causing power outages. Flexing buildings groan and creak as they sway, with all those designed-to-yield bits rubbing and grinding against each other. 432 also howls as the wind sweeps through, a particularly annoying problem exacerbated by having several floors without facades at various points, a feature designed to reduce wind resistance. The upshot of all this creaking and wailing, water cascading down, power flickering on and off is what you would might expect. Lawyers. 432 Park Avenue is of course exclusively inhabited by rich people and after an aggrieved resident has called building service (or an all-night plumber) the next call is generally to New York’s second finest. Outcome: the building has almost as much litigation as cladding. A particular target of residents is the service charge. That went up by 40% in 2019 and is likely to go up a lot more in the current year. Much of that is insurance costs, reflecting claims for water leaks, but also repair charges are higher than forecast, and so are litigation costs. But the one which will really make readers’ hearts bleed is that the cost of the (compulsory) subscription to the tower’s in-house restaurant has gone up from $1,200 five years ago to $15,000 this year. And the free breakfasts for residents have been done away with. Oh, what? It is of course easy to laugh at the noise-cursed, damp plight of those who paid a lot of money for their super-rise apartments, even if most of them have residences elsewhere (especial tough luck on those who bought an alternative dwelling at Mar-a-Lago and find themselves with THAT new neighbour). But there are lessons for us all in this. One for developers is that if you are going to build so high and so thin it has got to be done with no possibility of faults, because an 80-mile per hour gale will find all your errors a thousand feet up. One for purchasers, is that at that height you look silly rather than superior stuck in a dark apartment without power. And having to make your own breakfast. And one for everybody, in the year of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, is that there was a time, not that long ago, when we all vowed never to live, work, or shop in such tall buildings ever again.

Richard Pooley A large bonus please to whoever is the public relations person at BPP University’s Law School in Leeds. What do you mean, you have not heard of this prestigious seat of learning? Actually, neither had I until last week. It’s an American-owned private university, which in 2007 became the first publicly-owned company in the UK to be allowed to award degrees. Perhaps because British education journalists are as out of touch as I am, the new module that BPPU’s Leeds Law School has just launched was universally greeted by the UK media with derision. The law students are going to be taught “the art of ‘business small talk’ to better prepare trainee lawyers for the world of work.” Cue cod course descriptions and mockery of Generation Snowflake. If there is to be mockery it should be of the title of Jonny Hurst, head of outreach and student recruitment at BPP University. What he said last week, however, was no laughing matter: “… junior lawyers are expected to start working in a legal environment able to chat easily with strangers before a meeting begins properly...The ability to have good conversations with colleagues and clients marks out the future partners. In most cases no-one has taught them how to do it.” Oldies like me may scoff at the notion that anyone needs to be taught how to chat but we were not brought up with a sleek oblong of metal and plastic apparently glued to our palms. BPPU has done its research: “44% of 18-24 year olds feel more comfortable communicating over digital devices with people they don’t know than speaking face-to-face.” Moreover, us oldies are not nearly as good at small talk as we think we are. In my forty years of experience as an international salesman, negotiator and management trainer, I have seen at first hand how effective it can be in winning business if deployed in the right way. It all reminds me of the media reaction to a new course my training company launched in 2005. It was entitled Offshore English and was designed to help British and American businesspeople speak and write English in a way which could be understood by clients and colleagues whose first language was not English. “What?! Teach the English to speak English?” In an interview with me on CNN, Richard Quest ridiculed the idea that foreigners could not understand Brits speaking English, showing as he did so that he badly needed the course himself. No matter. We got the publicity we wanted. And several European and Japanese companies asked us to teach their British and American staff to speak English in a way which was comprehensible to non-native English speakers. Mind you those Offshore English courses were never more than a day long. If I were designing BPPU’s Business Small Talk module, I would keep it short too. What’s important is to get the law students to understand why small talk can be so useful in winning business. What, when and how to say stuff will follow naturally once you’ve worked out why in any particular meeting small talk will give you an edge. The reason usually given for becoming a good small talker in business, and the one given by Mr Hurst and his colleagues, is that it helps to build rapport with those you are meeting. Good relationships lead to good business. That’s true to an extent, especially in countries where the rule of law is not as strong as it is in the UK. People want to know they can trust you and hence see a personal relationship with you as vital. But the most important reason for spending time on small talk before a meeting gets into the nitty-gritty of business, is the information it can give you. However, I have learned the hard way that not all cultures like small talk at the start of a meeting. My own enthusiasm for it has got me into trouble several times. I once flew into New York after a week of sales in Tokyo. Mentally I had not left Japan where they love small talk (as long as it is conducted in Japanese or through an interpreter). I met a senior American manager at the US subsidiary of Nomura Securities, our biggest client at that time in Japan. After four or five minutes of me asking him what it was like working for a foreign company, the kind of question which yields useful information in many other countries, he looked at his watch and asked me if we were ever going to get down to business. He probably thought I was a head office spy. No business came my way after that sales call. In general in the US, especially in the north-east, small talk is considered a waste of time. And, as we know, time is money. A lawyer at Statoil in Stavanger accused me of being “dishonest” for wishing to indulge in small talk. “You are not really interested in what I do outside work; so why do you Brits ask this kind of question?” It was one of my first sales trips in the Nordic and Baltic region. I gradually learned that Scandinavians, Finns, Estonians and Latvians are only too happy to tell you what they do outside work and love small talk. But naked, with a bottle of beer, in the room outside the sauna. And they, in turn, use the information they have gleaned about you and your company when negotiating with you the next day. As a Swedish manager at Ericsson told me: “We feel it’s somehow corrupt if you are trying to be too friendly in the formal business meeting.” If you want to get useful information during small talk, it’s important that the other side talk much more than you do. You need to ask them the right questions. If it’s an online meeting, the norm in this Time of Covid, do some research beforehand. Go to the Press section of their website and see what they have recently been trumpeting about themselves. Ask them about it. You’ll learn how much they know about their own company, what they think about it, where they are placing their investment bets. A tip if you’re meeting someone for the first time from China or Japan, whether online or in the flesh: ask them how they wish to be addressed and get them to explain the characters that make up their name. Not only are they delighted that a laowai or gaijin is keen to get the right order (family name-given name) and correct pronunciation (vital and hard in Mandarin, less important and easier in Japanese) but it can lead to a fascinating discussion about what a particular character means (it can often mean more than one thing). The whole process, lasting just a few minutes, marks you out as an unusual foreigner: someone who wants to do the right thing and wants to learn stuff; someone, in other words, who it might be worth doing business with. Indeed, whenever operating outside your own country I find there is always one sure way of both creating a warm atmosphere and learning new things: ask them to explain some cultural behaviour you have observed. This can work just as well in a neighbouring country as somewhere more exotic. Even after five years living full-time as a British expat in France, I was asking French businesspeople to explain some bit of Gallic behaviour I had recently come across. Everybody thinks they are experts on their own culture and will love you for letting them tell you about it (even if you know about it already). It’s amazing how often this subject leads back to something going on in their workplace. The first big contract I won in Japan was with Sony. Luckily the Japanese manager I was dealing with spoke good English. So, when I, a new arrival in his country, asked him to explain one or two things about Japanese business culture, he was delighted to become my guide. We soon discovered a mutual love of history too. He was not the person my company normally dealt with but he became our salesman inside Sony and within a few months of arriving in Japan I had secured a training contract worth initially several million yen (and much more over subsequent years). I have sometimes divulged information during small talk which has been used against me. I’ve never forgotten a training and consultancy fee negotiation in Seoul in which, during the small talk, I praised the 5-star hotel I was staying in. I had hoped that the flattery and sign of my status would impress my Korean client. I felt an idiot when the fact that I had booked into an expensive hotel was used against me as a reason why my company’s fees were too high. Two years ago I had a meeting in London with a TV production company. They wanted to come to a trademark and consultancy agreement with the literary estate I run. I had already discussed the project – a TV series based on the stories of a once-famous fictional character – with an executive producer and a scriptwriter. So, it didn’t take long to come to a provisional agreement. However their lawyer, let’s call him K, had been too ill to attend. We agreed that I would contact him and introduce him to our UK lawyer. The two would then draft a contract. I rang K, an affable chap who plied me with questions about the estate, the stories and why I loved them so much and was so keen for them to be turned into a TV series. I had never encountered a lawyer who wanted to find out about me and what I did and thought. A week or so later I spoke to our UK lawyer. How was the negotiation going? I could hear her smiling. “Fine. They want to license two of our trademarks. And he’s agreed to a better consultancy deal than I expected. It seems you won’t be the usual consultant from a literary estate - getting in the way of the film crew, trying to censor the script, unable to offer practical advice. So, I’ve been able to get you more days at a higher than average daily fee.” Maybe I should recommend K to the people at BPP University’s Law School. He’s a lawyer who knows how and why to small talk.

Vincent Guy What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself. - Franz Kafka August 1962, Jamaica In my hand are two letters: one from my mother, one from her brother, my Uncle Walter. I’m 18 years old, in Jamaica, staying for a week with friends of friends of my family back in England. I’ve broken my journey from Peru to New York and home, heading back from a gap year in Lima. In South America I’ve earned my living, learned the Spanish language and Cuban dancing, faced gunfire and a cavalry charge, spent a night in jail and afternoons in the arms of a lovely Limeña. My hosts, British colonial types, have gone out for the afternoon, leaving the house empty except for me and the aged aunt, or is she a great-aunt? In fact, how she fits into the family is puzzling: she’s black, a descendant of slaves. The letters are puzzling too, so I ask the old lady about them. “Look, this is from my uncle in Montreal, inviting me to come and visit.” “Do you know him? Have you met him?” “No, my sister, my mum and dad, we’re close, but the rest of the family, well, it’s all a bit vague. Uncle Walter, well, it’s just a name. And then this other letter…” I hand her the blue airmail. “It’s from my mother. She says: ‘You’ll be receiving an invitation to visit your Uncle. I give you my permission to go.’ Why should she need to say that?” “Well, who knows. But you should go and meet him. Because you will learn something important about your family” Late August 1962, New York & Montreal After a week in New York, I jump on a Greyhound bus for Montreal. Uncle Walter is there to meet me with his wife Irmgard. He’s strongly built, on the tubby side, not much hair left. Something of the showbiz intellectual, with a bow tie to prove the point, he works for Canadian Broadcasting, and in his spare time translates German comic verse into English. Something about him strikes me as rather like me. In some ways he seems more like my own kin than do my family back in suburban Cheltenham. Irmgard is a simpler soul, warm, attractive, straightforward. May 2020, Scotland At this point I hit a writer’s block. This is the time of Covid lock-down and I have put writing this on my list of things to do with all the empty hours. The shape of my memories is part of the problem. I remember that certain things happened or were told to me, but often have no clear picture of exactly where or when. I’d like to write it in dialogue form, but can recall only the odd scrap, a one-line here, a joke made there. Should I make it up? Should I write the whole thing as fiction? Well, let’s try. The spoken words I shall invent; the content, the story they convey, will be the truth as near as I can make it. Back to… 1962, Montreal I stay with my uncle for a weekend, Some time we spend at their flat in Montreal, then go to their cottage in the Quebec countryside. Fine August weather. We sit by a small lake sunbathing. My uncle’s back is rather hairy, a trait I’ve not inherited; Irmgard’s back, already quite tanned, I massage with sun cream. Apart from that, only two things stick in my mind. The first is Walter unfurling a family tree. It goes back two centuries, spreading across northern Germany from Hamburg to Königsberg. I am amazed. As the old lady predicted, here is something I have never known about my family: it is packed with rabbis and classic Jewish names. How many of these, I wonder, did the Nazis cut down? The other moment was Walter casually asking: ”Do you ever go up into the loft at home?” “Sure, I played about up there lots when I was a kid.” “Ever come across something called Das blaue Balladenbuch?” “Can’t say I have. A lot of books in Gothische Schrift that I couldn’t read, but a Blue Ballad Book, no” Scotland, 2020 A scene from the loft comes to me now as I write. Playing old 78s on a wind-up gramophone with my friend Bill. One I quite like is Bruch’s setting of the Jewish ritual melody Kol Nidrei. Bill hates it, saying “You can see Hitler had a point”, an anti-Semitic wisecrack that struck me as odd but hardly shocking. My father would make remarks of that kind; PC was a long way off yet. A Jewish connection in my family was somehow in the air, but hazy. In my mind, my mother was German, from Danzig, which I knew had been separate from Germany proper. She’d left for England because of Hitler, an understandable move given what I knew about Hitler. She’d married my Daddy, 100% English, before the war. And I still have clear memories of my grandfather Heinrich Ruhm - “Opa” – who lived with us, bouncing me on his knee to a German nursery rhyme: Hoppa hoppa, über’n Graben Wer will den Kleinen Vincent haben? (Hoppity, hoppity over the ditch. Who wants to have little Vincent?) 1962, Montreal to Cheltenham, England Weekend over, Walter stays on in the cottage to write, Irmgard has work in the city so she and I travel together back to Montreal. Some more adventures, of which later, and I leave New York for England. Back home in Cheltenham after a year away, I chat to my mother. She asks me: “So how did you get on with Walter?” “Oh, really well! In fact, I thought I was a bit like him.” “Not too much like him, I hope!” “What… do you mean?” For a moment she hesitates, then, “Come into the kitchen. I’ll tell you. There’s a lot to tell.” Puzzled and intrigued, I follow her into the kitchen where she’s preparing lunch. “Back in Danzig growing up, Walter and I were very close. In our teens there was tennis and dancing and bathing at the beach. You might say Walter was a bit of a playboy. He always had a pretty girl on his arm, with something more than that probably going on behind the scenes.” “And what about you?” “I was his companion, sometimes a go-between. I was a good girl but I did enjoy having fun. I loved dancing and all the social life and I was never short of money. Opa was one of Danzig’s leading lawyers.” “What about Irmgard? Was she part of the scene?” “Irmgard? No, in fact he met her here in England.” “So how come you left Danzig?” “Eventually Walter joined Opa’s firm and I went off to study law in Berlin. I got my degree but when I tried to find work there was nothing.” “Was your degree not up to it?” “Yes of course it was! At first I thought it was just because I was a woman. But no, it was something else. I was Jewish, this was 1935, and the Nazis were in charge. Well, they were not quite in charge in Danzig yet, but their influence was everywhere. I had never thought of myself as Jewish; I’m German! Like so many Jewish families in Germany, we thought of ourselves as completely integrated, formally converted or not, we’d lost touch with the old traditions. Opa’s only “religion” was the philosophy of Schopenhauer!” “But Walter, he showed me this genealogical tree. He gave me a copy. Look, it’s all Jewish-sounding names.” “Yes, that’s all that was left of it really. We tended to marry other Jewish people.” “But how come you never told me about this? Why did I not know I was Jewish? It comes through the mother’s side, doesn’t it?” “True, but to me it just seemed to do more harm than good, holding onto the Jewish identity. It seemed to matter to others, evil others, but it didn’t to me. So I just blanked it out.” “So what did you do? How did you finish up in England?” “You could say I saw the writing on the wall. Prospects in Germany, in Danzig, were bad and getting worse. I packed my bags and got on a train across Germany to France.” “Why France?” “Friends found me work there as a governess.” “And England? You met Daddy on the steps of the National Gallery, didn’t you? I know that bit.” “Yes, by then I’d moved to England. Wanting to get to grips with the language really. My cousin introduced us– your Uncle Eugen. You’ve met him, remember? Your Daddy and I knew at once there was something serious between us, we just couldn’t stop talking, never went into the Gallery!” “And then came the war?” “Well, before that we got married and moved here, to this house. That was in 1938.” “So what about Walter? Did he stay in Danzig?” ‘At that point, yes. He was still working for Opa. But he went a bit off the rails, maybe with the rising threats, the insecurity. Anyway, he took to gambling at the casino. We got this letter from him saying that he’d got in up to his neck; borrowed – well, stolen– some cash from Opa’s office and then lost that too. Could we help him out and lend him the money?” “Oh. Dear me. And did you?” “Well, I talked it over with your father. You know Daddy, he’s absolutely straight and honest. He would never dream of doing something like that himself, but he said this was family, we had to help. It wasn’t a fortune, perhaps a hundred pounds, but substantial. We sent him the money.” “Hm. But then Walter ended up over here in Cheltenham, didn’t he? And Opa too? How did that happen?” “The Nazis closed in. Hitler invaded Poland to take Danzig back into Germany. That was what made Britain declare war on Germany. As the German tanks rolled in, the family got out on the last boat to leave the city. Opa and Oma, your aunt Edith and her son - that’s your cousin Harald - and Walter of course. They all ended up here in this little house. And it was only because I was here, married to an Englishman, and we had this house, that they were allowed into the country at all. Lots of Jewish refugees were turned away.” “Gosh, that must’ve been quite a crowd.” “It certainly was, though they weren’t all here all of the time. Walter was interned on arrival, as were all so-called ‘male enemy aliens’. Edith and little Harald spent some time as guests of the Bishop of Gloucester. And Harald was one of the naughtiest boys I’ve ever known, totally undisciplined. They managed to bring a lot of their furniture too.” Looking around the room, I see Opa’s desk, an oak filing cabinet, a china cupboard full of Meissen porcelain, an oil painting of my mother in her twenties. All must have come on that boat from Danzig. Much of it is in my own house today; the filing cabinet with its roller front is by my elbow as I write. “Do we still have Uncle Walter’s Blaue Balladenbuch in the loft? He asked me about it.” “No, we certainly do not!! But I’ll come to that later. The war was a hard time for everyone and certainly for us, even if the Blitz didn’t hit Cheltenham – just one bomb fell on the town.” “Your father was called up. So our crowded household was struggling along on a private’s pay. Everything was in short supply. Although other people seemed able to get hold of things. I would try to get eggs and things on the black market, but I never could.” “I don’t believe that! You’re usually pretty good at… persuading people.” “That may be, but my German accent will have been the barrier at that time.” “But your English is perfect!” “Well perhaps it was not so good then. Remember I’d only been here a couple of years. To English people, I came across as German, not Jewish” A few weeks later I would be phoning my mother from university in Oxford. Only then did I realise her accent really was quite noticeable. Face to face, it was just my beloved mother’s voice. “What about the wider family? Where did they end up? Or were they rounded up by the Nazis?” “Well, Eugen somehow managed to conceal his Jewish connections; wound up in the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front, and still survived. My cousin Peter lost his job as an architect. He played in a dance band all over Germany, then got to Istanbul. Others made it to America. My friend Mimi’s husband died of typhus in one of the camps. But as far as I know, everyone you might call our family came through.” Words like ‘miracle’ and ‘survivor guilt’ float through my mind. To bring my feelings under control, I turn to something lighter. “Tell me more about Walter. How did he get on here? Must have been very different from the way he carried on in Danzig.” “One thing didn’t change: his outrageous flirting. Plenty of young wives were around with husbands away in the forces. A big affair he had with your godmother Connie across the road. That was embarrassing, to say the least.” “Oh dear, you must’ve been glad he wasn’t here all the time.” “Yes, he joined the Pioneers, digging trenches. Then things got a bit more exciting for him later on. As a native German speaker, he got recruited by the British as a spy.” “Wow! Behind enemy lines?” “Yes, he claimed to be the oldest person ever to parachute into Germany. Soon after he landed he went into the nearest bar and ordered a drink. Straightaway the man at the next table called out, ‘Na Walter!! Was machst du denn hier?’ (Hey, Walter!! What the Devil are you doing here?) So his cover was blown and the RAF had to come and haul him out.” “Gosh, some story.” “Well, I don’t know how true it is.” “Oh, but somehow you fell out with him, didn’t you? He wouldn’t say much about it when I asked him.” “Well, you see, after the war he got himself a nice job with the BBC, in the German Department. He met up with Irmgard in London and was nicely settled. We’d been taking care of Opa right until he died in 1947. So we thought it reasonable to ask him to pay back the £100. We wrote to him.” “Oh, I can guess: he got angry and refused.” “Worse. He didn’t get angry, he went mad. He wrote to everyone we knew. Poison pen letters. Family, neighbours, friends, everybody. He claimed we had driven your grandfather to his death. 1947 was a very cold winter. He wrote that we had forced Opa out into the snow to fetch coal for the boiler, and that it had killed him. Well, Opa did help around the house, where he could, but there wasn’t a word of truth in this story.” “What did you do?” “What could we do? We explained things to people as best we could; I think they believed us. Then we packed up all the stuff he’d left here and sent it to his address in London. We’ve never spoken since.” “Oh Mummy, how very sad.” Later in the day I ask her, “Did those things you sent him include Das Blaue Balladenbuch? He asked me specifically about it.” “I suppose so. We sent him everything. But yes, he did write to us to say it was missing.” “What did you answer?” “We didn’t. As I said, we cut all contact with him.” Montreal, 1962 Irmgard and I return to Montreal by train, leaving Walter at the lake with his holiday writing. We get back to the apartment, have a bite to eat, a few drinks and exchange what we both think is to be a goodnight kiss. Two things I still remember she said later in the night: “You could be the son I never had.” “Be careful. I don’t know what I could tell Walter if I got pregnant!” (She is in her early forties, so it’s still a distinct possibility.) Next morning I am on the Greyhound bus back to New York. A few days later an invitation comes for me enclosing the bus fare to Montreal, with a strict instruction to destroy the letter. I return to Irmgard for another weekend. London, 1985 Decades later cousin Harald is staying a while in my London flat. He’s come over from Canada to be with his mother, my Aunt Edith, who has only a few days to live. He’s easy to get on with, his eyes shining gently through thick pebble glasses. A long while back that “undisciplined boy” had joined the elaborately named Foursquare Elim Pentecostalist Church. We’re alone together sharing a pot of tea and I ask him casually, “Harald, how do you feel about our family’s Jewish background?” Harald goes down on his knees, with an air of transfiguration: “I am as John the Baptist, a sign, one of the first among the Chosen, a fulfilment of the prophecy. The Conversion of the Jews shall lead to the Second Coming.” All I can think to say is: “Umm… I’ll just go and pop the kettle on for another cup of tea.” ………………………………………………………. Looking back on those brief moments with Irmgard I sometimes wonder: was I caught up, an unconscious player, in some great Oedipal revenge drama? But no, for me it was a tender surprise, an innocent delight. ……………………………………………………….

Richard Pooley Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is still studied by most US American children at some stage in their education despite the many attempts to ban it by school boards. Its strong language (including use of the n-word) and discussion of rape are the most common reasons given. I suspect Lee’s depiction of bigotry in the Deep South is not appreciated by many of its White denizens. A school board in Mississippi banned it in 2017 for making people "uncomfortable". It was also on the England and Wales GCSE curriculum until Michael Gove had it removed in 2014. Even so, it remains one of the UK's favourite books. So why is it that so few people these days follow the advice that Atticus Finch gives his daughter in perhaps its most oft-quoted lines? “...if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Why is it, to use a less racially-charged metaphor, that we find it so difficult to put ourselves in other people's shoes? To see the world through their eyes? To understand why they are, to us, voicing stupid opinions, offering absurd arguments, believing obvious lies? Is it that we are stuck in our social media silos communicating only with people who think like us, cancelling anyone who doesn't? This appears to be today's received wisdom. I'm not so sure. Have we really become less curious about how others think and behave? After all, before Covid-19 hit, more people were travelling outside their own country, for work or pleasure, than ever before. Did they travel in bubbles, oblivious to the new places and people around them? I learned the value of climbing into someone else's skin in my first month at university in 1971. I had just come back from a year teaching in Botswana. The first society I joined during Freshers' Week was the Anti-Apartheid Society. The second was the Debating Society. The third-year student tasked with finding people willing to debate approached me early on. He asked if I would like to speak at the debate condemning the racist policies of the South African government (we said racialist in those far off days). "Right on, man!", I probably said. "That's cool, man," he no doubt replied. "You'll be arguing against the motion and in support of the South African government." Before I had time to refuse, he explained the Society's reasoning: "If you are forced to argue in favour of something you don't believe in, you'll learn why some people do believe in it. Know that and you can then look for the weaknesses in their case, and use those when you are arguing against them." He was right. But that was not the main thing I learned. In finding out why the South African government imposed such a vile regimen on their country's disenfranchised Black, Asian and mixed-race inhabitants I gained a greater understanding of the fears and needs of those White voters, especially the Afrikaners, who had brought the National Party to power. Without addressing those fears and trying to find ways to meet those needs there was little chance of anybody persuading the government or its supporters to abandon apartheid. Arguments based solely on logic don't persuade people to change their minds. Nelson Mandela and the leaders of the African National Congress knew that when, in May 1990, they began official negotiations with the still-White South African government. I recommend reading the detailed accounts of how Mandela conducted those first negotiations. Did he start by producing a list of demands? No, he spent much of the time discussing history. The history of the Black people and his own tribe, the Xhosa? No; that of the eleven Afrikaner men in front of him. He impressed them with his knowledge, some of it picked up from his jailers during eighteen years on Robben Island, where he also tried to learn Afrikaans. He talked of their ancestors’ battles against the British as much as those waged against his own people. He was walking around in an Afrikaner’s skin. The Afrikaners had expected to be negotiating with a Marxist terrorist who hated them. Instead they were dealing with a man who knew how much they had suffered under British rule. They were charmed. If only the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had done the same as Mandela almost seventy years earlier. It was 11 July 1921. The British Government and the leaders of the self-proclaimed Irish Republic had just agreed to a ceasefire in the brutal guerrilla war which had been going on in Ireland since January 1919. It was time for the two sides to negotiate. The following week Lloyd George, met the Irish Nationalist leader, Éamon de Valera, in London. They had four meetings that week in which they tried to agree the framework of a treaty that would give most of Ireland her independence. They made little progress and it wasn’t until October that the British and Irish started formal negotiations again in London. Although Lloyd George attended these later meetings, de Valera stayed in Dublin. The Irish leader’s absence from the negotiations made it easier for him to repudiate the Anglo-Irish Treaty after it was signed in December 1921. In fact, the terms of the treaty were not that different from those proposed by de Valera himself. Nor were they much different from those proposed by Lloyd George to de Valera at the end of their week of meetings back in July. Hence, many people have asked why the two men could not have reached a tentative agreement at those talks. Some of you may, I hope, be having a feeling of déjà vu after reading all but the first sentence in that paragraph. I’ll come clean. It’s lifted from a book on international commercial negotiation a Danish colleague, Søren Hilligsøe, and I wrote in 2013-14.* We needed to find a title which reflected the central message of our book: only by learning the real needs and wishes of the other side can you get a good deal for yourself. By chance I read about the negotiations between the British Prime Minister and de Valera and in particular the comment by a frustrated Lloyd George about the Irish leader’s negotiating style “Negotiating with de Valera is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork.” When de Valera was told of this remark, his response gave us the title of our book: “Why doesn’t he use a spoon?” Historians have long argued about what really happened in the meetings between these two men. Lloyd George had a good idea what he wanted to achieve and how he was going to get it. But he does not appear to have been that interested in what might motivate an Irish patriot like de Valera**. Lloyd George was a Welshman, whose first language was Welsh. As a young man, he had campaigned passionately for Welsh autonomy within the UK. So, one would think, here was someone who would understand the emotions that were driving de Valera to demand total independence from the UK for all of Ireland. But instead Lloyd George complained that the Irishman kept referring to what the British had done to the Irish three hundred years earlier under Oliver Cromwell and since. He could not see the relevance of such ancient history to their discussions. The British Prime Minister was a highly experienced and successful negotiator but in this instance he failed badly. He stuck to his predetermined plan and appears to have made little attempt to understand the person he was dealing with, nor adapt his negotiating style nor change his tactics to achieve an agreement. He was not prepared to switch from a fork to a spoon. The consequences for the ordinary negotiator of not being prepared to adapt their style or change tactics can be serious but are seldom life-threatening. Lloyd George's and De Valera’s failure to reach agreement in July 1921 had momentous consequences, as anybody living on the island of Ireland will tell you. That failure cost many lives and blighted many more, right down to the present day. So, what should we do to get inside the skin of someone with whom we wish to reach an agreement or just get along? Learn their history and language, as Mandela did? Us simple folk haven’t got time for that. There is one “trick" to play above all others: Ask the person questions about themselves, about what you are both discussing, and listen, really listen, to the answers. Let the questions emerge naturally from the answers and not from some prepared list. Don't hurry it. Don't interrupt. Let them finish what they want to say. You'll be getting inside their skin. And you know what? Atticus was right. You may be able to get along with each other. Only connect. * a pdf version can be sent to you for £18 if you write to me at richardpooley@only-connect.com ** though he was born in New York and his father was Spanish.

Dr Mark Nicholson The short answer is no. I make my living by identifying and planting East African plants and shrubs. In 2000 we started a forest and ecological restoration project in the Kenyan highlands at Brackenhurst, north of Nairobi. The purpose was to convert back into native forest what was cleared 100 years ago to make tea and eucalyptus (known here as ‘gums’) plantations. Gums were planted to dry the tea: every four acres of tea requires one acre of gums. We estimated we would achieve complete restoration by 2030. In the UK there are 60 native tree species. In East Africa there are over 10,000 ‘higher’ plant species (i.e. flowering plants covering everything from daisies to huge trees), about one percent of which have English names. So, I have to deal with (and learn) Latin names that roll off the tongue like Pseudolachnostylis maprouneifolia. Many trees have local names but we have over 200 languages in East Africa and Ethiopia so it is not very easy getting to grips with the numerous vernacular names for any one species. Let me start by dispelling one of the great environmental myths. The Amazon forests are not the “lungs of the earth”. Mature tropical forests are more or less carbon neutral. Yes, green plants give out oxygen and small amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) by day but at night they give out only CO2. Animals and decomposing leaves also produce CO2 all the time. If any forest biome could be called the lungs of the earth it is the boreal forests of Russia, North America and Scandinavia. In the summer they photosynthesize for 20 hours a day producing oxygen as the by-product, and in winter they shut down and therefore produce almost no CO2. The boreal forests are also twice the size of the Amazon forests. However, their tree biodiversity is very low, probably around 20 species, whereas the official tree species’ tally for the Amazon forest is 6000. Don’t you believe it. 3 years ago, during a collection trip on the Rio Negro, upstream of Manaus in the Amazon forest, we found unknown species almost every day. Mike Hopkins, the British curator of the Manaus Herbarium, showed us over 100,000 undescribed specimens in cupboards and reckoned the real total is in excess of 20,000 tree species. The danger of biodiversity loss is this: plants and other organisms are rapidly going extinct during the current Anthropocene extinction; so we risk losing the cure for Alzheimer's or other diseases if a plant becomes extinct before we know what it is good for. The importance of the Amazon region and other tropical forests is both their biodiversity value and the ecosystem services they provide, such as rainfall and carbon sequestration (storage). Climate change is a minor cause of biodiversity loss. Kenya has lost 90% of its large mammalian fauna in the last 50 years owing to land use change, land degradation and human population rise. Even so, the total mammalian biomass in Kenya has probably not changed at all; as non-human mammalian biomass has crashed, human population has soared. In the richer ‘West’, biodiversity has fallen for other reasons such as pollution, the use of toxic agrochemicals, urban expansion and monoculture. So yes, if the Amazon forests were felled there would be a massive increase in atmospheric CO2 as wood was burned and the fertile organic matter (leaf litter) in the soil oxidized by sunlight. Evapotranspiration from trees produces local rainfall, and the tree canopy protects the soil. Removing the trees would leave bare, mineral-poor soils and semi-arid conditions. How does tree planting affect global warming? Put simply, photosynthesis converts CO2 into glucose, which in turn is slowly converted into complex carbohydrates, ending as lignin (otherwise known as wood). But if the wood is chopped down and turned into firewood, charcoal or paper it will all go back to CO2 when they are burned. But if Mr. Chippendale turns the wood into a chair, then CO2 will be sequestered in perpetuity. Unfortunately, the word ‘carbon’ in modern pseudo-science parlance is equated with CO2. When reporters and commentators talk about the emission of one tonne of ‘carbon’, they mean one tonne of CO2. Carbon is found everywhere in all life forms as well as in rocks, from chalk to diamonds. Equally annoying is the frequent use of ton/short ton (907kg) instead of the metric tonne (1000kg). I will use the latter (or t) and stick with CO2. So let’s look at some figures: a growing tree will sequester about 20kg of CO2 in its first five years. A tropical seedling in a high rainfall area will sequester more because the growing season will be much longer. Once it becomes a mature tree, the amount of wood manufactured each year is much lower and leaf-fall much higher, hence its carbon neutral status. If a tree sequesters 4 kg of CO2 per year, then a million trees will sequester 4 million kg (or 4000 t), and a trillion trees (1012) 4 billion t per year. That is a significant contribution but a long way from annual carbon emissions arising out of humankind’s activities. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions (i.e. those resulting from the influence of human beings on the environment) are now roughly 40 billion t per year. The BBC website reported on 26 January that someone had come up with the “10 golden rules of tree planting” - Scientists address myths over large-scale tree planting - BBC News. As a tree-planter myself I was not hugely impressed. 1. Protect existing forests first Sensible advice but no need for ‘first’. Protecting existing forests maintains the status quo by keeping sequestered carbon in situ but planting trees will increase CO2 stocks. 2. Put local people at the heart of tree-planting projects Studies show that getting local communities on board is key to the success of tree-planting projects. It is often local people who have most to gain from looking after the forest in the future. I disagree. The really large projects need to be carried out by philanthropists, governments or big corporations such as Wilmar International, Unilever and the other monocultural behemoths. Only they can revert large areas of oil palm or tea back to forests. 3. Maximise biodiversity recovery to meet multiple goals Reforestation should be about several goals, including guarding against climate change, improving conservation and providing economic and cultural benefits. Here biodiversity recovery is conflated with climate change, which is a separate issue. 4. Select the right area for reforestation Plant trees in areas that were historically forested but have become degraded, rather than using other natural habitats such as grasslands or wetlands. 5. Use natural forest regrowth wherever possible Letting trees grow back naturally can be cheaper and more efficient than planting trees. Certainly not more efficient. In most forest sites, ‘passive’ restoration leads to a massive infestation by invasive species - plants from elsewhere that are aggressive and will eventually take over if allowed to. One-third of our budget in the last 20 years has been used to control invasive species. 6. Select the right tree species that can maximise biodiversity Where tree planting is needed, picking the right trees is crucial. Scientists advise a mixture of tree species naturally found in the local area, including some rare species and trees of economic importance, but avoiding trees that might become invasive. Yes, horses for courses. If we had used Kenya coastal species at our altitude of 2000 metres, 95 percent of them would have died. Above all, avoid monocultures of eucalyptus (‘gums’) etc, except in Australasia, where they originate. 7. Make sure the trees are resilient to adapt to a changing climate Use tree seeds that are suitable for the local climate and how that might change in the future. Apart from this not being very good English, we do not know how much the climate will change so we do not yet know which species are most resilient 8. Plan ahead Plan how to source seeds or trees, working with local people. Whether one works with local people or not it can be very difficult to find seed. 9. Learn by doing We all try to do that. 10. Make it pay The sustainability of tree re-planting rests on a source of income for all stakeholders, including the poorest. Not necessarily. The main benefit of tree planting on vast areas is carbon sequestration which provides no direct income but huge indirect benefit to humanity So let me add two Golden rules and two Golden questions. 11. Don’t imagine for one moment that tree planting will get us out of the hideous environmental disaster heading our way. 12. It’s not about tree planting; it’s about tree growing. For us, the initial five years is about weeding, removing and replacing dead trees, and controlling invasive species. Many donor- or corporate-funded projects fail because whilst they trumpet that they have planted, say, a million trees, only 100,000 survive the ravages of livestock, people, weeds and wildlife. Two Golden Questions: Who is going to pay? Local people that we work with are poor, land-poor and hungry. If you think they are going to devote a substantial part of their farms to tree planting, have another think. Our modest 40 ha. forest of 140,000 trees and shrubs on private land has cost US$1million over 20 years. We were lucky enough to have international funders; most are not so lucky. Where will the land come from? We are part of the optimistically-named Trillion Tree Campaign. Well, a trillion mature trees at 400/ha would require 2,500 million hectares. That’s 25 million km2. Russia is just over 17 million km2. If we planted trees in the density normally found in plantations (1000/ha), 10 million km2 would be needed. That’s the size of Canada and larger than China. So, plant one tree or plant a million, it all helps. But what is really important is to answer this question: will tree planting save the planet? The Center for International Forestry Research, The Global Landscapes Forum and other large international institutions might say Yes but most scientists say No unless there is a global and concomitant reduction in the use of fossil fuels. This will be the subject of my next article: “Glasgow 2021 and the fallacy of Net Zero”.

Dr. Jehad Al-Omari Reading an article on a recent archaeological discovery in Jordan from the 9th century BCE in what was then the Kingdom of Moab, I was struck by the words on a Canaanite engraving. It referred to King Sheet who is quoted “… and I came and I saw ....” with the rest of the text missing. It immediately reminded me of Julius Caesar’s famous saying “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (“I came; I saw; I conquered”). Living in Jordan and working across the Middle East I am so often reminded how old civilizations were interconnected and how they constantly borrowed from one another. Today we are the product of these many civilizations; yet some people insist on taking a monocultural view of our origins. As a Jordanian I find myself at the centre of the Old World from which so many civilizations have sprung. These are civilizations that predate the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, yet were the origin of all three religions. The Moabites, like their contemporaries the Edomites and the Ammonites (whose main city is now present-day Amman, the capital of Jordan), peopled the three most well-known kingdoms that flourished in Jordan from around the 13th century BCE to, in Edom’s case, 125 BCE. They, in turn, were frequently overshadowed by the Nabateans, famous for their pink city of Petra, built possibly as early as the 5th century BCE. Coming from Jordan means that you are surrounded by history from north to south and east to west; you cannot escape it. The Decapolis, for example, was an alliance of 10 (or perhaps 12) Hellenistic cities established between 63 BCE and AD 106. 8 of these cities are in present-day Jordan. You simply cannot travel in Jordan without stumbling over an ancient city. You do not only sense, touch and feel history everywhere but smell it even in the Roman olive trees that still survive and are everywhere in mountainous north Jordan. On the 31st January, Jordanians celebrated the end of Marbaaniyya - the 40th - referring to the first 40 days of winter. It’s followed by Khamseeniyya - the 50th - the second 50 days of winter. Marbaaniyya is considered as one solid block. If it starts sunny it will largely remain so for 40 days but if it starts with rain, it will rain throughout. The second block of 50 days is divided into 4 distinctive periods, each lasting 12.5 days and each with its unique features. These are called the Saud days. The first period is supposed to be the coldest when dogs are too cold to bark; the second is a rainy one when the land will absorb all the rain; the third is when the twigs of the trees will begin to show life; and the final period is when snakes and other reptiles emerge, marking the traditional beginning of spring. As ancient as these weather forecasts are, they are still believed to be the most accurate and are celebrated yearly as an integral part of everyday life. These traditions are shared across the Levant and the western parts of Saudi Arabia, suggesting that they are of Canaanite origin, although we cannot rule out Mesopotamian origins (present-day Iraq). Mesopotamians are legendary for their pioneering work in Astronomy and Mathematics. The most famous Canaanites are the Phoenicians. They were a seafaring nation who at one time ruled the Mediterranean from Tyre in modern Lebanon to the shores of Iberia in present-day Spain, not forgetting their colony of Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Driving from the city of Ronda to Malaga some thirty years ago I enjoyed seeing miles after mile of olive tree groves, first introduced into the Iberian Peninsular by the Phoenicians. On this road to Malaga, I stopped by a roadside café to have a lunch of bread, olives and cheese and I could easily imagine myself in the mountains of northern Jordan. The name Malaga is believed to be of Phoenician origin. It means “Queen”, as also does the ancient Jordanian city of Malka. Not only that. It is said that in the initial days of the Arab conquest of Andalusia the first Arab tribes who settled in Malaga came from today’s Jordan. No wonder I felt so at home. Just as Arabs conquered half of the known old world in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, we were conquered by every Tom, Dick and Harry. There is a fallacy about who the Arabs are, particularly of the eastern Mediterranean. To suggest that we are racially pure, or even semi-pure, Arabs is to fly in the face of all historical records. We are the descendants and inheritors of many ancient races, civilizations and cultures that were either indigenous to the land or conquered it at one time or another. We are the ones who made it into the 21st century, despite all the diseases, ethnic cleansing and conquests, to inherit this land. The fact that we call ourselves Arabs (to the annoyance of some) only refers to our language and the commonalities we share with our neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula. Where I come from in the north of Jordan, to look at someone it is impossible to determine if the features are Arabic, European or African. Deep blue eyes coexist with dark features and frizzy hair in a mosaic that is not only true for north Jordan but the entire Levant. Some can trace their roots as far as Yemen in southern Arabia, yet others to the Crusaders or to Russia. There is no limit to the racial variations within this region and the best of DNA testing will flounder in our part of the world. We are the sum total of the ancient world and we are proud of this. If only others would see it this way. Moreover, as I hope I’ve made clear, this racial mixture is not a recent phenomenon but dates back to ancient and pre-biblical times. As the biblical records, among many other sources, attest there were an astonishing number of intermarriages between those ancient kingdoms I mentioned at the beginning, from the time of Abraham through to that of David and Solomon. If ever there was an original Melting Pot in history, it was to be found in the Levant and Mesopotamia, thousands of years before the cosmopolitan cities of present-day America, Britain and France. Despite the instability of the Middle East today, there is so much we can demonstrate to the world in terms of coexistence versus dominance. Our current troubles stem from those who perceive their strategic interest lies in continuing to interfere in our affairs. The Paris Peace conference after the First World War that was supposed to produce a Peace to End all Wars remains the very conference that produced all the future wars that have afflicted the Middle East to this day. The heart of the matter is that this ancient land and its people have survived bigger calamities than it is facing today. Like the Phoenix it and they will rise from the Ashes to take their place under the sun.