Dollars anyone - part II

The Lebanese economy consistently defies gravity.

What do I mean by that, well, imports exceed exports every month, but the economy grows and the amount of money in the place increases. How can that be? There is a huge Lebanese Diaspora which supports the home country’s economy as the exiles keep sending cash back home. Lebanon has the distinction of being world number one for remittances (the technical term for spare cash sent home) compared to total GDP (that's roughly total income)

The Lebanese dream seems to be to send enough money home to be able to build an apartment block, reside in the penthouse and live on the rents from the flats below. Judging by the number of finished apartment blocks sprouting all over the place, the dream often comes true. Sadly, judging by the number of unfinished ones, sometimes it doesn’t. But I digress.

Now, as explained in the last item most currencies are losing value against the dollar. So the dollar value of the total input into Lebanon from remittances is going to go down, for the simple reason that although some comes from North America, a lot finds its way from Brazil, from Europe and from Africa.

Lebanon is itself a dollar zone, in the sense that the Lebanese Lira is pegged to the dollar. I can understand why Arab countries with oil do that, as oil is traded in dollars, but apart from the Olive variety, Lebanon has not been blessed with much in the way of oil. So on world markets, Lebanese products are set to look more expensive which will push down the revenue to Lebanon from that source too. And if you’re an economist, please send learned papers on elasticity elsewhere, personally I do the simple thing of finding cheaper alternatives for stuff when its price goes up, or just buy less of it.

Whatever way you view it then, the effect of the PIGS and BRICS problems, which as shown yesterday are tending to push a dollar resurgence, is going to be negative as far as the Lebanese economy is concerned.

What’s going to happen? Well, if I could confidently predict that sort of thing I’d be a lot richer, but my guess is that the traditions and skills developed by five thousand years of entrepreneurship and trading will inspire ways to continue to escape Newton’s universal pull to earth.

Dollars anyone?

Do you remember the story of the three little pigs?

Well, for those whose memory of children’s bed-time stories needs a bit of a refresh, three little pigs beat the gluttonous intentions of a Big Bad Wolf by staying inside a house built of brick by the little pig who was the cleverest, most far-sighted and hardest working of the three. Yes, s/he does sound a bit of a pain in the back bacon, but it’s meant as an allegorical fable on the benefits of planning and hard work.

Obviously the world’s financial wizards took it rather more literally as they named the collective financially walking wounded of the Euro zone (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) the PIGS, which rather messes up the allegorical message. Not content with that, the BRICs are the world’s emerging economic wonders (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

Two of the PIGS have had to have financial help this year. Though heaven only knows how forcing enormous loans at interest rates that would send the discerning home buyer scurrying off to look for a different mortgage lender immediately if not before can be described as “help”, I certainly don’t. Now where’s this helpful money for the PIGS to support their banks, ‘cos that’s what it’s for, to support the piggy banks (sorry, couldn’t resist it) come from? Well from other countries in the European Community, including non-Euro Britain. And where did they get it from? Err, well, they borrowed it; which presumably is why the UK government posted its biggest borrowing ever in November, the month that Ireland got bailed out. So Sterling dipped against the dollar, investors in Euros and Sterling having taken a bit of a fright at the sums involved and moved their money elsewhere. So I, as an ex-pat paid in dear old pounds and living in a dollar zone got poorer.

And then the BRICs got a hit. One of them actually. To be precise, the C. Since the days of Mao’s Little Red Book, China has supported its communist neighbour, North Korea. According to wikileaks, C is not too happy with NK but they go back a long way. The Koreas (NK and SK) had a bit of a spat a few weeks ago with NK being all active and aggressive, and that frightened investors in “emerging markets” – the BRICs and their satellites. They took out some of their money and put it into … Good question, where do you put money when you need a safe haven?

The traditional answer is either gold or a strong currency. Gold has had a ride like you wouldn’t believe, ever since Gordon Brown (remember him) sold off a lot of the UK’s yellow stuff at just under $300 an ounce. It hit $1,400 an ounce recently but no-one is expecting another five times growth in the heavy metal, so try to look for something better. Good time for the American economy to post a growth rate knocking on the door of 3%, so it did! And thus, for the first time since sub-prime entered the public lexicon, the green-back, aka the once-almighty dollar became attractive again. Investors went in and the dollar rose in response. So I, as an ex-pat paid in dear old pounds and living in a dollar zone got poorer. The Swiss franc is the other star when it comes to defensive investing, so no surprise that that hit a record high last week.

Now it’s pretty clear what all this means to me, I’ve said it twice and that’s enough, but what about Lebanon? Enough for one day, I’ll put that up tomorrow. Anyway it’s lunch-time, roast pork anyone?

After Christmas time

Well that’s it then. Santa Claus has done his job for the year, gone back home, fed his sled and polished his reindeer while we’ve all been polishing off turkey with or without the trimmings.

Listening to “oh, little town of Bethlehem” takes on a different feeling when Bethlehem is about the same distance from Beirut as Birmingham is to London. Yet, sadly, it is probably easier to get to from either of those English cities than it is to travel to it from Beirut.

This year, the Dickensian ideal of a White Christmas has come to pass in London and in some of the mountain villages here in Lebanon. A good friend even invited me to ski with him on Christmas day but I couldn’t accept – I was too busy with mulled wine, champagne and mince pies on offer at another friend’s house about half way up the skiing mountain.

Christmas is not just a time of presents, families, celebrations and over-indulgence, it carries with it connotations of peace, of renewing friendships, of burying enmities, of resolving, or at least patching over, differences. The BBC web-site carried pictures of Christmas celebrants in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bethlehem and Korea. But I don’t get a good feeling about imminent resolution of all conflicts. What is missing for me is the evidence of reaching out, of trying to find points of contact rather than points of difference.

On Boxing Day, I walked into Beirut’s main Bridge Club. And everyone was wishing “merry Christmas” to everyone else with warmth and enthusiasm, even between some whose mutual antipathy had been apparent in times past. Religious adherence didn’t seem to matter, Protestants, Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Muslims of both flavours, Druze and Armenians (whose Christmas is twelve days after 25th December) all joined in, as doubtless did members of all the eighteen official religions or confessions recognized in Lebanon. Forgive me for not listing them all.

Now if only we could capture that and keep it going rather than putting it away with Santa’s sled and the Christmas decorations.

We've upgraded our service to you

Now there’s another phrase to dread – “we’ve upgraded our service” and once again it’s a bank that’s stuck it to me.

“We’re revoking your on-line service” said my bank - BLOM, here in Beirut.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we’ve upgraded the service.”
“Ah, well, if you’ve upgraded it, why can’t I keep using it?”
“You need to come into the bank and apply for the new improved, upgraded, bigger and better service.”
“Can’t I do it on-line.”
“No, you have to come in”. Sounds like a Len Deighton spy thriller, or one of the Bourne trilogy, where “coming in” is a euphemism for “we want to damage you”.
“Could you fax me the documents and I’ll fax them back?”
“You have to come in.”
“Well what if I don’t?”
“The on-line banking service has been upgraded, so yours will be withdrawn if you don’t come in.”

Realising that I’m not even close to winning this, I give in and “come in”. I’m looked after by a charming, attractive and sympathetic young lady who stays all three while I deliver my tirade on compulsory inefficiency bordering on stupidity. She gets out the form and asks me to choose user name, password and secret question with answer. She writes down all my replies and asks us both to sign.

“What do you mean, both of us??”
“Well, it’s a joint account.”
“But my wife is off visiting her daughter … in Saudi Arabia, she didn’t have to sign last time, only one signature was needed”
I suppose you can guess the answer by now …
“We’ve upgraded the service.” At least the pretence at improvement had gone.

This time we compromised, I could take the documents home, get my wife to sign and then bring the forms back.

We did this (why insist she signs and then give me the opportunity to forge her signature? Oops, this is Lebanon, I think I've just answered my own question!) and I logged onto the service for the first time.

As far as I can judge there are three changes. The first is that instead of clicking on a desk-top icon, I now have to hunt for the portal, as it is NOT available or even referenced on the bank’s web-site. Second, I need my mobile phone to get information from a previously sent text message. Finally, I keep a history of all transactions stored in the on-line service, one of its really good facilities. And the history has gone. Oh, and there’s a piece of paper somewhere with all my detailed security data on it.

Dear BLOM, please think harder before you upgrade anything else.

Christmas and a Pension

Christmas has come early this year, for me anyway. Santa has taken the unfamiliar guise of a buff letter from Her Majesty’s Department of Work and Pensions. “We have decided that you are entitled to a UK State Pension”.

Now there’s a lot in that sentence. That “we” (no I don’t think it’s the Royal we) suggests discussion and debate, not just ticks in boxes. The “decided” adds weight to that idea, with the extra thought that there was an alternative, presumably containing the word “not”. Then comes “entitled”, a real teaser that one, “you are entitled to a refund, but we aren’t giving one”, “you are entitled to a free a bag of chips with every large fish”.

I think that the key thing here is that, although popular perception is different, getting a pension from the state as a UK citizen is not a right, it has to be earned, by paying National Insurance contributions for thirty years to get the full benefit. And then by filling in a twenty page form listing, amongst other things, the current addresses of all the payroll departments of all the companies that you’ve ever worked for. Actually I gave up on the first company I ever worked for, as it had been the object of a hostile takeover and then broken up in 1992. It didn’t seem to matter.

Which brings me to another little thought – that form took some constructing with great attention to detail and the kind of questions that need to be preceded by a drum role and serious voice intoning “you have three days to answer questions on your specialist subject – your personal history since the age of sixteen”. Since I got most of the answers to the difficult ones through talking to HM Pensions, perhaps someone should be giving some thought to what can be removed from the twenty page form and so save the odd tree or two from the reduced printing – oh! yes I forgot to mention that the form has to be completed with pen and ink, none of your electronic stuff.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted with some extra cash, particularly as, in accord with family tradition, we’ve already spent it about three times over and before the first payment has actually been made.

And where has all the yet-to-be-paid-money gone? Well on preparations for Christmas of course. Just as well Santa arrived early.

Is there life after the Large Hadron Collider?

After a few false starts, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been switched on at CERN, the European research facility for experimental physics. It's already producing some amazing results and those with the imaganation and energy to get it going are to be congratulated. The following little poem is intended as a tribute, poking a little bit of fun at those who thought the facility being swtched on might have dire consequences.

For those familiar with "Albert and the Lion" read out loud with the same accent ...

Th’experiment had started well
No-one dead, nor yet unwell
Director said, “good work from all
“To make that bang from things so small

“Of course we had to whizz them fast
“Around a circle deep and vast."
So vast, in fact, that Switzerland’s
not big enough to hold said band.

A bit of France is needed too,
they gave some hectares, quite a few.
Germany when asked, of course
considered the request a sauce

Now, in that subterranean cave
Things strange, not particle nor wave
Had come to be, but none could see
them. Strangelets some and black holes wee.

Yes, holes in space and time there were,
So tiny no-one knew that there,
Beneath the rocky snowy alps
Were nasties seizing all the scalps

Of protons, neutrons, other things
For nothing has sufficient wings
The dread black hole e’er to escape
Till they, says Hawking, ee’vap’rate

You ask yourself, now why do this,
And risk creating an abyss
Into which the earth might fall
(and after that ’t would be quite small).

Well, ’tis a quest called find the Higgs
A boson, generous, it gives
its mass to all the other bits,
then t'universe forever quits

To make the Higgs appear again
A massive bang, like way back when
The cosmos, it was young not old,
Will do the trick the Higgs to unfold

Guess what, a most surprising thing,
Some Higgs were made inside that ring
And now there’s something new to note
The Higgs are black holes’ antidote!

That’s why results there were so few
And earth’s still here – a planet blue
Not black, nor charred, nor gone from view.
Th'experiment it lived right through.

Dealing with grief

The telephone rang at about half past nine in the morning. Silence at first, then a rasping gasp – “he’s gone.” It was my wife’s best friend from school days. “G.’s left me”, “when did this happen?”, “in the night, he wouldn’t wake up and now he’s gone.” He and I had been friends for nearly twenty years. My wife took the phone from me, scream, tears, questions and listening all at the same time. “We’re coming” my wife said, then called her two sisters.

Funerals have to be within twenty-four hours, so that means today. This is Lebanon, so the right clothes have to be worn, with the right accessories and the hair and make-up need to be ‘done’ to match the sombre mood. Preparations completed and the sisters having arrived, we set off up the mountain to support the new widow.

Arriving at her home an hour later, it was, predictably, deserted. No dogs, no barbecue going, the house itself seemed to have shrunk and died too. My wife had just returned from a trip abroad during which she’d bought her friend a new mirror to replace one that had been broken and supposedly was bringing bad luck. It seemed very important to my wife that the mirror be delivered to the house that day, so we left it tucked away in a safe place. We all deal differently with grief.

They lived just outside a small village, with one Greek Orthodox Church. We set off to find it. After about a quarter of a mile, the eldest sister felt we’d gone too far and must have missed the church. For some reason, she rarely addresses me directly, but speaks to my wife instead. “Let him turn back” spoken as would one to the mother of a toddler “would he like a glass of milk?” – the great advantage is that I can dial it out so carried on. All three sisters have a desperate desire to turn off main roads at the earliest opportunity and dive down dirt tracks left and right until lost; fortunately the church appeared before I had to cope with all three in unison.

First into a huge receiving room, where already over a hundred and fifty people were seated. The chief mourners are expected to stand and receive everyone who comes. The widow wore dark glasses, her brother-in-law openly showed his tear-stained face not really able to believe his brother was gone. More people kept coming in, and an overflow group formed on the terrace, at the centre of which was Mr. A, a lifelong friend of the deceased. He, poor fellow, had arrived at his friend’s house summoned to try to revive him, he’d called an ambulance and a doctor, but nothing could be done beyond confirming death. And Mr. A’s healing process - to talk, about his own brother, his friendship with G, the state of the country, the events of the morning “He just switched off, like both his parents.” We all deal differently with grief.

Time for the service. Three priests and four responders speaking Arabic. In a Greek church. With over three hundred people. After a while the widow gets up and starts polishing the coffin. Her brother tenderly and gently takes her arm and leads her sobbing back to her seat. Only six hours before she’d been making him coffee.

Then it’s over and we all troop back to the receiving room where the chief mourners go through another ordeal – saying good-bye to all those who have come to pay their respects and have formed a long queue. “Don’t leave her alone” whispers her sister-in-law as we leave.

We go home, our emotional engines drained and running on fumes. We remember that some other friends are holding a party. We don’t feel we want to work at putting on the happy, entertaining face, but decide it might be our turn to wake up dead tomorrow, so we make a short appearance. We all deal differently with grief.

State of the Nation

UK Trade & Industry is the arm of government with a brief to promote British companies and products. In the last few weeks, the two most senior civil servants in that department have both visited Lebanon and have explained that the efforts of HM government will be much more directed to assist in developing trade and investment in the growth markets (of which Lebanon with a reported annual GDP growth of 9% is certainly one) rather than the large but comparatively slower growth regions where most of the UK’s exports currently go (Europe and North America).

The British Lebanese Business Group – the BLBG – has been mentioned in a couple of earlier blogs. It’s a tradition that Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Lebanon addresses the group once a year.

The current ambassador, Her Excellency Frances Guy, has given a reception at her home for members of the group on the last three occasions and, in spite of the cuts in government spending, was able to make the same kind and generous offer this year.

Billed as a “state of the nation” speech, HE took us through the tensions in the region and in this specific country and gave her view of the ways in which these might develop and thus impact or present opportunities for business here. Questions were lively, broad ranging and responded to with candour and clarity.

While we all promised not to quote directly, it will come as no surprise that the questions of relations with the neighbours (Israel & Syria), the external influencers (KSA and Iran amongst others), Hezbollah and the impending indictments from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (investigating the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri) all got an airing. Rather less expected was an excursion into earthquake proofing of buildings.

Now this is my blog, and if anyone disagrees with my reading of the meeting, then please comment, but I’m going to give them anyway. Put simply the mood was, on the whole, more positive than negative, with a different feeling from the times when the government had collapsed, when the presidential chair was vacant and when civil disobedience produced no-go areas in down-town Beirut. Yes, it could all go pear-shaped, but no-one actually wants that to happen.

So what is the effect on doing business? “Do we re-stock or not?” “Do we invest or hold back?” are permanent questions in all lines of business, anywhere in the world, and it’s the business people who will ultimately answer these questions, not the governments and their diplomats. Let’s realize that growth in business comes from addressing growing markets, so if the GDP growth here really is as shown above and the mood is more positive ….. well it’s your money, you decide.

Money Talks

“Money talks.” How often have you heard that expression?

It’s true though, and I know because mine keeps saying “Good Bye”.

Having been in England for three weeks, I got back late on a Monday, the eve of Eid al Adha or Festival of Sacrifice. It’s also Independence Day on the following Monday, so the Banks, Public Services and many of the shops (in predominantly Muslim areas at least) have closed down for a week. So, it seems to me, living here in West Beirut, that Lebanon just closed for my return. It shouldn’t have, but it took me rather by surprise, never mind, it’ll be a cheap week.

But wait a minute, there is a tradition that on the big Festivals, Ramadan, Christmas, Easter, and Eid al Adha gifts of money are given to trades people, concierges, and others who’ve given good service. Boxing Day comes four times a year!

At the same time, all those services that had continued in my absence, basic stuff like drinking water and electricity, fell due this week.

It’s got to the point that when the door bell rings I hide. I’m neither mean nor stingy, but being a Yorkshireman with Scottish ancestry I am a bit “careful” – I like to know where the spondoolicks have gone and that they got good value, but really I just want to leave the steadily lightening wallet by the door and nail up a notice asking anyone who comes just to help themselves! It isn’t that I mind paying my dues and giving, I just want to know how all these people knew I was back – and while the country is closed. Cash is just dashing madly off in all directions. Perhaps envious of my semi-vacational English sojourn, it’s just packing its bags and leaving as fast as possible. When will the blizzard stop?

The answer is today. Why? Because my wife came back today (although we left together, she extended her trip by a few days) and she normally deals with all these demands, so at least I won’t see the dripping, nay gushing tap.

The purpose of her extension by the way was partly to … wait for it … SHOP. “So how’s the plastic?” I asked her. She looks a bit blank for about half a second and then realizes that I mean the credit cards. She smiles. “Worn out from overuse” she says.

Hmmm, it seems that they’ll be getting a rest for a bit then, but no way will they be packing their bags and saying “Good Bye.”

Landing at Beirut

Arrived back late on Monday evening at Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport.

The Nokia tune and about 200 other assorted cell ’phone start up sounds all seem to play at once within a few milliseconds of the aircraft hitting the runway. Fortunately the pilot knew where the terminal building was and headed straight for it, rather than worrying about what the navigation systems must have been saying after this supernova scale radiation burst from so many ’phones being switched on together.

“… the outside temperature is twenty-five degrees …” announces the captain, to which the man in the seats in front reacts by dressing up in parker, scarf, woolly hat and ski gloves. “Wrap up well,” he says to his son, “you’ll feel this different from the sixty we’re used to in LA”. Busybody here has to tell them that Centigrade rather than Fahrenheit is the scale used outside the US of A. They look confused until I tell them that in old-money that means seventy-seven, so off come the parker and accessories.

Clutching my various travel documents – passport, residency permit and landing card – I manage to join the queue with the trainee immigration officer, as always seems to happen. “Progress” is occasional and only just in a forward motion. The landing card asks for all the usual stuff, plus father’s name and sex (mine, not my father’s – steady now); I have somehow restrained the desire to write “ask my mother” and “yes, please”. Clearly someone further up the queue has allowed imagination to get the better of him with said card, as, after a noisy exchange, he is led away by a couple of serious looking chaps with side arms.

I’m wondering why there are so many people wearing white, and then memory kicks in, it’s the end of Hajj – the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Beirut airport isn’t on the scale of London’s Heathrow or Chicago’s O’Hare except in one area, the number of people waiting to greet those off the plane. Normally there’s a ratio of about five to one (for those who can’t find a calculator, that means an average of, oh!, a thousand people waiting to meet someone off each flight). There have been two landings and families of those returning from Hajj have swelled the ranks, so the noise is less that of staid airport arrival and more akin to that at a middle ranking sporting event, with tears, hugs, kisses and even the odd scream added. Although never much good at rugby football as a boy, I’m grateful for the “hand-off” and “scrum-down” training to get through the waiting crowds.

As I walk out of the airport into the warm at nearly mid-night, I look forward to home, a really good night’s sleep and then … full-blown re-entry tomorrow.

Oh, the joys of flat packing!

Oh, the joys of flat packing!

In London at the moment, I ordered a couple of lamp tables from a well-known and highly reputable department store chain. Yesterday they were delivered.

The price should have warned me. Whereas a lot of the bedside furniture on display in the store had price tags to make the eyes not just water but positively gush, those chosen were about the same price as a pub lunch with a couple of glasses of whatever takes your fancy.

So what arrived via furniture van were not, as expected, a couple of tables, but a couple of flat packs.

As a child, I played with Meccano, a wonderful construction toy that was a sort of generalised flat pack, from which toy cranes, model trucks with working steering and even rotary engines could be constructed from bits of metal with holes in and a variety of things that fitted in those holes, like screws and axles. The point is that I was trained early in life to make things out of odd bits through following instructions.

Each pack contained five lumps of wood with holes of various sizes drilled into them, sixteen bits of dowelling, twenty screws, eight very odd lumps of metal, four small cubes of wood, various stick-on things and two tubes of glue. And six pages, yes, six pages of instructions. “This item takes one person fifteen minutes to assemble,” was emblazoned on the first page. It took me that long to read the instructions.

Now we’re off, with the first few screws going in fine, and then there is the inevitable one that goes in at the wrong angle, the one that the slot for the screw driver is missing and the tube of glue that explodes when I try to squeeze the glue out.

Finally it’s done. It took me an hour and half – to make the first one.

Was it worth it? Well there was a sense of pride at the result, which looked as it should do and now does “what it says on the tin”. But an hour and half? For a supposedly fifteen minute job??

I’ll be back in Lebanon soon, where you can buy finished articles. Maybe I just haven’t been looking hard enough, but I haven’t seen a flat pack there - yet.

We've improved our service to you - Oh No!

Don’t you just dread the words “to improve our service to you ….”?

It usually means that something has gone seriously, disastrously wrong or will do shortly.

Lebanon is no longer on the short list of “do not go to” countries. Its central bank is looked at as a centre of excellence in the Middle East for attacking money laundering. Nevertheless, certain companies, iTunes for example, will not accept a Lebanese credit card and yet others, Microsoft springs to mind, will not accept any kind of banking plastic issued by one country with a home address in another. My solution to those problems is simple, keep one UK credit card registered at a UK address. This isn’t fraud, as I own the property where the card is registered, and live there for a period of time in most years.

So far so good, until NatWest, in their infinite wisdom decided to “improve our service to you” and send me a new credit card, of course, to the UK address. Now the number of emails and text messages I get telling me of some wonderful new product or to give me advance warning of something, is legion. NatWest themselves go to great lengths to ensure that I keep my email address with them up-to-date and to offer me special on-line credit card services, they send me emails, telling me when my eStatement is ready to be viewed eLectronically. Nevertheless, nothing appeared to warn me of the impending debacle.

The property where the card is registered had tenants in, and they, the tenants, God bless them, did the decent thing and returned the new card to the bank.

At which point NatWest cancelled my credit card account; still no email, so I found out in the usual embarrassing way of having a payment declined. When I called the bank to find out what had gone wrong, the following Catch 22 conversation ensued.

“To improve our service to you, we’ve issued you with a new credit card and cancelled your old one – the new card was returned to us”.
“Thank you. Could you please un-improve the service and re-instate the old card, then I could use it to buy things again?”
“No, but we could send you a second new card.”
“OK, would you please send it to me here?”
“Certainly, just give me the security code on the back of the card so I can change the address where the card is to be sent”.
I gave the security code.
“Oh no, I mean the security code from the new card!!!!”
“But it was returned to you – you have it, how could I possibly know what it is.”
“It’s what our procedures require!!!!!!”
“But that’s just plain daft, HOW CAN I KNOW THE SECURITY CODE ON THE BACK OF A RETURNED CARD?????”
“Please don’t take that tone with me, Sir, it’s a security requirement ….. to improve our service to you.”

As luck would have it, I am in England for a few days, and so have managed to arrange going to the local branch to pick the thing up in person. I hope it’s there, as I can only speak to a call centre now, not somebody who is actually in the branch. Of course, the reason I can’t is that they’ve “improved the service to me” … again

You can choose your friends ...

“You can choose your friends … but not your relatives.” So said a friend of my father.

He might have been thinking about Lebanon, where every second cousin even the “once removed” ones that have joined the diaspora in Brazil or Canada or Mexico, are sheer musts for the wedding list. Two Lebanese meeting for the first time feel much happier when they’ve established some sort of family connection, even a linkage as tenuous as “so that means my niece’s husband is your first cousin, by marriage” . Trust me, I actually heard that one last month.

It’s difficult to imagine any market here for the type of relative tracking service offered through, for example, ScotlandsPeople, a government web-site with all the births, marriages and deaths recorded and indexed to help someone, well, er, track down their relatives. They charge you for looking at the results of each search through the index – by the page – and then five times as much to look at an entry, re-enforcing the time honoured belief that the Scots are serious about money.

But I’ve been using them, partly to build a family tree for my grandson, should he ever want it, partly for myself in wanting to verify, or debunk a variety of family myths. My task has not been made simpler by having fertile ancestors, for example, my maternal grandfather was one of fifteen children. “What, surely not all by the same mother?” asked a Lebanese friend, “er, yes, but she stopped having them when she got to thirty-five”. Ah well, there was neither television nor internet in those days.

Two pieces of received wisdom about our ancestors have been handed down to my sister and me. Apparently there was a “rich miller” in the distant past and a “sea-captain” as well, both on my mother’s side.

My mother was an avid recorder and keeper of information. One rather macabre list was the dates when friends and relatives (choose from “died” - unimaginative, “popped their clogs” – vernacular, “breathed their last” – poetic but clichéed) from about 1920 onwards. Armed with this, my sister’s memory and the aforementioned relative tracking databases, I managed eventually to find not just the miller, but the Mill, still standing in Burnham in Norfolk but long passed into the hands of the National Trust. Another fecund union the miller and his wife made, with lots of children called things like Harrison and Hubert, nine horses and a string of domestic servants, so small wonder that all the money has long since disappeared.

I haven’t found the sea-captain yet. Students of history will recognize Burnham as the parish in which Admiral Lord Nelson was born (his father was rector) but I am absolutely unable to claim any connection.

Pity we can’t choose our relatives.

First rain of Autumn

Yesterday it rained.

No! Please don’t run away and do stop yawning, in Beirut that’s serious news.

Talking about news, I get it from a text messaging service, which tells me about earthquakes, murders, air crashes and other happy, happy stuff. The day before yesterday, it sent me, for the first time ever, a weather forecast. “There will be rain and the temperature will drop” said the message.

Now, being British I’m used to going out for any trip lasting more than five minutes carrying sun-glasses, an umbrella, a pair of shorts and an overcoat. OK, I exaggerate, ten minutes maximum though.

So I just deleted the message without giving it too much thought. Something of a mistake since the forecast was an understatement. About mid-day, the clouds lowered, the sun disappeared and the lightening started, spectacular, regular fork lightening. The darkness increased and then it happened, although I was driving along the Corniche – the road beside the sea – the Med just disappeared, drowned in rain.

Neither the city, nor its inhabitants are designed for the wet stuff. There is a ritual storm drain opening which takes place after the first rain of winter, so, when the first rain happens, roads became little rivers. Trying to drive through said little rivers, taxis stall with damp electrics and the simple result was that Beirut was grid-locked less than 20 minutes later. Eventually the place got sorted out, but not before a ten minute trip had taken me more than an hour to complete.

Today it rained again, but this time, the storm drains were open, the taxis that were likely to break down stayed off the road and, best of all, there’s no school on a Saturday.

But who am I to jest at the expense of Beirut, when at the sight of a snowflake in Kent, it seems that all the trains in Britain stop running.

The moral of this story? We’re all good at coping with what we are used to. In England we can cope with rain, in Beirut sunshine is fine, in Tierra del Fuego wind isn’t a problem and in Bermuda houses can withstand hurricanes. Stick with what you know is the message.

Note to self, must check the windows on the balcony, in case it rains again tomorrow.

Electricty plans for Lebanon

Why is electricity such a problem in Lebanon?

Last night Dr. Raymond Ghajar explained the problems, and the proposed plan to solve them, to assembled members of the British Lebanese Business Group at its monthly meeting. Britain has significant skills in the area of power supply and thus British companies are expected to be bidding for some of the projects that the plan will create.

Clearly this is a man steeped in his subject, he spoke with neither notes nor visual aids yet quoted numbers, dates and people with the same ease he answered a string of questions later. Not difficult to see why he is both a successful university lecturer (teaching practical economics to engineers) as well as being chief advisor to the minister of Energy & Water.

The issues are apparently threefold, technical, financial and legal/political.

The technical issues span the three arms of electricity supply; they are generation which needs power stations and fuel, transmission which needs an efficient grid and, finally, distribution which is about local supply from substations to consumers together with billing and collection.

Perhaps one example from the generation area will suffice. Gas is the fuel that gets used most efficiently by modern thermal power stations. There is a gas pipeline running between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Not one of those four countries has its own on-stream gas reserves. Qatar has offered gas in the past, but there is no way to pipe the stuff over the Arabian Peninsula. Lebanon’s supposed gas power stations are therefore running on cheap, but much less efficient heavy fuel oil or HFO. The solution to this is to import liquid natural gas (LNG) by sea, but there is no LNG storage capability. Solution, convert an old oil tanker to store the gas. So that is what is in the plan as well as building additional generating capacity.

Meanwhile, there is a flourishing grey market in power generation (we buy extra from our local bakery, at over 35 cents a unit) where people buy the stuff at up to 10 times EDL’s loss-making price (just under 10 cents a unit on average).

We have heard plans before, three things give me hope that this plan will work. The first is that there are actions and a ministry agreed budget for this year. The second is that the finance is needed in easy stages, with a capability of some coming from the private sector. Finally it is a short term plan, not one finishing in 20 years. But there are hurdles to overcome too, not least that not even the Minister of Energy has the authority to agree the building of a new power station, each one needs a new law to be passed by parliament. So will there be the political will to agree on such a law?

If not, we’ll still be asking the same question next year and the one after that and the one after that, ad nauseum.

Keep breathing, it's good for you

The village of Meriden is about as far as you can get from the sea in England. I lived about three miles from it (Meriden, not the sea) during most of my teenage years. Add to that that neither my mother nor my father ever learned the trick of how to swim, and that’s my excuse for not learning till past thirty.
Even then it was only enough to be able to say to my kids “look, Daddy’s doing it, so you can too!” Once they got better at it than I, like when they were about five, I felt my duty done and stopped. Other disincentives include inhaling enough water to drown a small army of rats, and watching Spielberg’s Jaws; all three of them; I even read the book.
Fast forward to nearly now and for reasons explained in an earlier blog, I’ve started to swim a couple of times a week. OK, so it’s good exercise and if you don’t count the pool, requires little in the way of equipment, at least compared to golf and motor racing. But it still feels like an experiment in controlled drowning and invokes sheer panic when the bottom gets too far away for my feet to reach.
Under such conditions there are only two alternatives, stop doing it or get help, so yesterday I had a swimming lesson from coach Ramzi.
It was a revelation. Apparently I’ve been breathing all wrong. Yes, I know not to do it underwater, but the all the childhood admonitions of “breathe through your nose, not through your mouth” had to be forgotten. Breathing is such a regular, not to mention important, habit that controlling it voluntarily requires a considerable effort of will.
And do you know what? As I concentrated on breathing air through the right orifices at the right moments and learning how to keep the water out, the panic started to evaporate too.
My reward was to be able to play with flippers, goggles and polystyrene floats, oh, and I’m going back for another one next week.
Google Meriden, and you’ll get the namesake in the USA, and hey, guess what, that one is a centre for swimming pool manufacture. No excuse for non-swimmers there then.

Structure is a fine thing

Atoms are pretty small things, but they can still get excited, albeit in a very controlled way.
What atoms do to show their excitement is to send out light, but light that is restricted to very particular colours. We all know the characteristic yellow of sodium lighting, try throwing a bit of salt on a gas ring and the same yellow briefly appears. Strictly speaking it isn’t just light that is emitted but radiation. Radiation in the microwave, infra-red and higher frequencies is there too, as well as ultra-violet and even x-rays, given sufficient energy to do the exciting.
Scientists got quite excited too when this phenomenon was first noticed, because each element, iron, hydrogen, carbon and so on all give out different frequencies, different colours if you like, so that each different atom has a unique signature. Suddenly they didn’t have to capture something, stick it in a test tube and torture it to find out what it was. They could just look for the signature when the stuff was heated, like in a star. When those scientists started looking at the sun, they found a signature they’d never seen before and decided it must be being given off by a new element, which was given the name Helium, since found in small amounts on Earth and used to make diving safer and to make your voice go all funny and high-pitched at parties.
Then someone started looking more closely at the “spectral lines”. The light from a load of excited atoms is split up and recorded on a long, thin photograph; the different colours appear as lines, hence the name. Anyway, it turns out that the lines have a width, and different lines had different widths, line by line and atom by atom; this phenomenon is called “fine structure”.
There is a lot of rivalry between experimental and theoretical scientists. The experimental ones like to find new things that the theory guys haven’t predicted and the theory people like to send the experimenters off to look for things that no-one has found yet. This time the experimenters were way ahead, with the theorists having a lot of catching up to do, but eventually they cracked it and worked out some mind-numbing formulae that predicted the behaviour of the spectral lines and in particular the fine structure. In doing so they made use of a constant, the fine structure constant.
Now that in itself isn’t very strange. There are lots of constants, things whose size have to measured rather than worked out theoretically, in our universe, the speed of light and the charge on an electron for example. The fine structure constant, however, is a bit special, it’s a number with no units attached. The speed of light, for example, needs centimeters per second to qualify the number, but the fine structure constant just is, well, a number.
The fact that scientific theories have lots of constants in them worries some people, they’d like to know why the constants are the size they are and maybe even derive them from other, deeper theoretical ideas. This has spawned an interesting set of discussions and researches into how much these different constants could vary, without the universe as we know it being affected much. When that is done, rather interesting conclusions get arrived at, specifically, some of them have to be pretty much the size they are, and the most crucial found so far is our new friend, the fine structure constant. Learned scientists claim that if it changed by as little as 4% our universe would just not work!
I can only think of two possible conclusions to that, one is that the chance of our universe happening by accident was very, very, small indeed and the other is that something designed it and set it going. I’m still trying to work out which is the more terrifying.

Lebanese Bridge Festival 2010

My grandmother used to call them the devil’s pasteboard. You’re right, good guess, she was referring to playing cards. She played a pretty mean hand of Napoleon (Nap for short) in spite of her apparent denigration of the cards.

For those who haven’t come across the game of Nap, it has two phases, bidding, where you announce the number of tricks that you are going to take in the play and then the play of the cards. A rather more complicated game, but with the same two phases, is Bridge.

Although the country sits firmly in Asia, according to my map, Lebanon’s Bridge Federation (LBF) was a founding member (one of eight countries I believe) of the European Bridge League. The LBF is holding its twenty eighth “annual” international festival; actually it’s been more sporadic than annual, the last one was in 2005. As the President euphemistically phrased it in his opening address, the festival has been suspended “due to the recent events in the country and the region”. He meant mayhem and war. So, the fact that the festival is being held again is a small measure of the increasing belief in stability here. Players from Italy, France, Poland, the UK, Greece, Syria and Egypt have come to participate with the local Lebanese players, lured by the hope of getting amongst the considerable prize moneys. Over three hundred turned up for the first session yesterday evening.

My wife and I decided to have a go too. This involves considerable personal risk for both of us, as down the years, we’ve had more spats over bridge hands than pretty well everything else put together. At the height of American fever over bridge in the thirties, one woman shot her husband in the middle of a game, claiming as her defence that he had misplayed a hand – amazingly she was acquitted. I checked my wife’s handbag for guns before we left home. We didn’t star, but it’s a three day event, so, ever the optimists, we are hoping for a better session today.

With all the games available on WIIs, Xboxes, Playstations and the internet, I’m pleased to see that a game based on thousand year old technology still has the power to attract a sufficient following to stage such an event.

More, I feel grandmother’s ghost at my shoulder exhorting me, as always, to “draw trumps”.

The Med from the Mountains

From 2,000 metres up in the Lebanese mountains, you can see the Mediterranean Sea – the Med.

A friend of mine has recently bought a chalet up there. It’s intended as the summer retreat away from the heat, humidity and pollution of Beirut. There’s also easy access onto the pistes of the biggest ski domain in the country, Faraya, so it’ll get great winter use too. Something of a perfectionist, he is putting the final touches to the recently created garden, with sun-deck, barbecue area, hammock and ready planted already half-grown trees, floodlit at night. The view is simply, sorry but no other word for it, fantastic.

Quite a place, yet the demand for such retreats is running strongly, with land prices jumping by a factor of about hundred in the last ten years. Concrete, stone, marble, tower cranes and all the paraphernalia of construction are discretely hidden from view but are all there if you care to look.

After banking and finance, Lebanon’s biggest business sector is construction. And that is putting demands on water (twenty-odd dams are proposed to be built), transport (improvements to the coastal, North-South motorway have been followed by extra, modern roads being laid to get up the mountains), electricity (there’s a five year plan to build more power stations and upgrade the distribution system) and the other utilities like telecommunications. Let’s hope all those plans come to fruition.

But perhaps the biggest demand is on the air. Looking down from the mountain, Beirut is often covered with what looks like a cloud of pollution and the biggest contributors are the rush hour traffic jams. Pictures of old Beirut show trams and buses which look well-appointed. The defunct railway station is still a land-mark, at least by name. The long term solution has to be to recreate that first class public transportation system and then market it strongly to wean the Lebanese off their cars.

That is going to take half a generation at least, but is essential to grasp and start work on now, otherwise our children and grand-children may well not be able to see the Med when they take the trip 2,000 metres up in the mountains.

Busy doing nothing

A good idea is promiscuous: it needs to be had and doesn’t care by whom.

A good friend reminded me of one of his mother’s favourite sayings and I promised to put it on my “plagiarize as soon as possible” pile. “Think before you decide to say something – and then don’t!” is as close as I can recall it. This is not really the spirit of blogging at all, but does explain why I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks. When I thought about what I was going to write, I realized that I didn’t have anything particularly useful, interesting or even mildly amusing to say. Because I’d fallen victim to a nasty end of summer cold, one of the two mini-epidemics doing the rounds; the other is conjunctivitis.

Once upon a time, I would have purchased a box of panadol, some Strepsils and a packet of tissues, then gone out into the world, performing all tasks with less than usual enthusiasm and effect, probably infecting a good percentage of those with whom I came into contact as well. Not any more. The purchases are the same, but I retire with some books, countless cups of tea and some cough syrup to my favourite chair, where, mainly thanks to the codeine in the cough syrup, my best thing becomes falling asleep.

The result is a quicker recovery for me, less infection of others and no poorly performed tasks, err, yes, I know, no tasks performed at all actually. But I feel better for treating myself thus.

So what was the good idea that inspired this? Well sometimes the best course of action is just to do nothing.

Ramadan in Beirut

Ramadan, considered the most holy of Islamic months, is now in full swing.

Those who wish to follow the recommended path should fast from dawn to dusk each day, giving the money that would otherwise be spent to those in greater need; if preferred, food prepared for meals not taken can be given away instead.

It is not a gentle routine to follow, fasting means not letting anything past the lips, not solid, nor fluid, other than the air for breathing from sun-up to sunset. That means water is out, and so is smoking. It must be difficult enough when Ramadan falls in the winter months, as it did when I first came here, the implication being an abstinence of some ten hours, but now, in August, sixteen hours of no sustenance of any kind is indicated and it’s seriously hot as well. Denial on such scale needs stamina.

So what’s the coping strategy?

Start the day with a good breakfast; Lebanese breakfasts are described elsewhere in this blog, so I won’t do it again, just be sure to finish it before sunrise. Stay out of the sun, conserve energy, take a siesta if you can, oh, and be born with the right genes. I like to have a cup of tea, coffee or glass of water beside me during the day, but for many in this region, a drink before leaving home in the morning keeps them going till the evening meal.

Talking of the evening meal, it’s known as Iftar during Ramadan. It’s usually of a celebratory nature, involving either the extended family or business group. For about an hour before sunset, you see people running hither and yon with bread, cakes, skewers of meat, and warm bags of I don’t know what in preparation for the event. I’ve never dared ask how someone can cook without tasting! Cannons are fired to mark the hour of sunset, at which point the first fluid, in the form of a fruit drink laced with nuts, is taken. Called a jellab, it shares etymology with the American South’s julep, but the ingredients are rather different! And then the meal is served.

For about an hour after sunset, shops are closed and the roads deserted, then the district comes alive again as shops open late, sweets and ice-cream are purveyed on street corners, friends and relatives are visited and the streets are filled.

Yet the general daily rhythm doesn’t appear to me to have suffered, businesses operate more or less as usual, restaurants open for lunch, banks stick to their usual hours and the sounds from the street stay much the same.

I remember, some years ago now, seeing a banner across a street in Hamra, a mixed business, retail and hotel district in Beirut. It said, "Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Ramadan Karim", Ramadan was running over the Christmas and New Year periods then. Perhaps, now the feasting is separated by months, each festival will help to inspire us all to embrace diversity. I certainly hope so.

T-shirts and a wallet combat Global Warming

Never really been a T-shirt man myself. It’s always been shirts and jackets with going casual implying discarding the tie.

Messing about in boats in British waters meant being prepared to combat hypothermia in June or staying dry in a downpour. T-shirt and shorts doesn’t really cut it for that sort of duty.

Chaps carrying handbags is a continental thing. I once asked a Glaswegian friend, living in Paris and having taken up the Gallic man-bag habit, how he’d get on it if he tried going out with the same appendage in his native city: “if I were lucky I’d be abused” was the response. So wearing shirts and jackets brings another advantage, the pockets offer somewhere to put your stuff. “Stuff” in my case used to include, cigarettes and lighter, money, mobile phone, house keys, car keys, business cards, credit cards, receipts for things, car park tickets, sweets, pills and old cinema tickets. At least.

Now I’d like to show you chaos theory in action. If you haven’t come across Chaos Theory before, it’s also known as the Bermuda Butterfly effect. The idea is that very small changes can lead to huge consequences if the circumstances are right, for example a butterfly flapping its wings in Bermuda could conceivably be the trigger for a later hurricane rampaging around the Caribbean.

A friend’s daughter opened a discount clothing and accessories shop. I went during the opening week and felt I had to buy something, mainly out of courtesy. Not having used a wallet for some time (well, I had my jackets, didn’t I) I bought one that I rather liked. Liking it, I put all my credit cards, business cards, cash money and driving licence into it. No longer addicted to cigarettes, what did I now need pockets for? Well, a mobile, keys and said wallet. Mobile and keys can go in a trouser pocket and I can carry the wallet, so jacket no longer required, nor the breast pocket in the shirt: wow - I can start wearing T-shirts.

Everyone is complaining about climate change and global warming making for a stifling summer, but me, in my new short-sleeved-singlety coolth am more comfortable than in previous years, and the jackets are all resting until autumn. The implication of that is that, pandering to vanity, I have to take more exercise to flatten my T-shirt covered waistline. So, here we go, buying a wallet is making me swim more; now, if that isn’t chaos theory in action, I don’t know what is.

There’s even more chaos now though, ’cos I can’t remember where I left the damned wallet!

What's a lunar month?

What is a lunar month?

Well, you can have a quick look at Wikipedia and get thoroughly confused with unpronounceable words. Or we can have a little think and get some idea of what the problems are with trying to answer that question.

Start with the Sun, use an orange or a melon or a vase in the middle of your dining room table to represent it. If you want to be a bit more abstract stick a dot in the middle of a piece of A4 paper. Put an apple about half a metre from the Sun, this represents the earth. Finally following the fruit thing to the end, use a plum to represent the moon and put it about ten centimetres from the earth, sorry apple. This is NOT to scale, and has no intention of being, it just helps the ideas. Line up the three pieces of fruit, with the moon-plum between the earth-apple and sun-melon. This represents a new moon, that pretty little crescent visible just after sunset once a month or so.

Now move the earth round the sun a bit, about a twelfth of the total circle that would be made in a complete circuit. This would take about a month, so send the moon all round the earth at the same time until the three are back in line for another new moon. Can you see that the moon has done actually done rather more than a full orbit of the earth in that time, actually close to one and one twelfth? So in a full year, we’ll get twelve new moons but the moon has had to go round the earth thirteen times to achieve that. Is it just the planets and moons spinning or has your head joined in?

We do have a possible candidate for a lunar month though, the time from new moon to new moon. Is there another? Well, yes, there is. Whatever we may say we think of astrology, there are not many of us that don’t know the name of our birth sign, Aquarius, Taurus, Scorpio and so on, even though we may not actually recognize it in the night sky. As the year progresses, these are the constellations that the sun appears to rise in. A moment’s thought will convince you that the moon, when new, appears to be in each of these constellations in a year, at least to a first approximation. For example, the moon is in Leo at the moment, so tomorrow’s new moon will also appear to be in Leo. Another important measure of lunar progress is, therefore, how long it takes to be apparently (this word being used here in its literal sense) back in the same place, relative to the constellations or fixed stars. A little bit of playing about with the bits of fruit will convince you the moon will have to go round the earth about thirteen of these circuits in a full year. Each one of these circuits of the earth is called a sidereal month.

OK, I confess, it’s been simplified a bit, but we have two candidates for the title of lunar month, one about twenty-nine and half days long, the other about twenty-seven.

Actually, it gets more complicated yet, as the moon is subject to little bits of gravitational pull from the other planets in the solar system and it also appears to wobble in its orbit, for reasons way outside the scope of this little piece.

Now what has all this to do with living in Lebanon? Ramadan starts tomorrow, or at least is widely expected to, but the new moon being sighted is needed to confirm it. Perhaps this little discourse explains why that old fashioned method still holds sway.

A fatal border skirmish

Three Lebanese soldiers and a journalist died Yesterday in a “border incident”. My wife cried. “They’ve all got mothers” was her simple yet heart-stoppingly painful assessment.

Four years ago, I met my wife at Heathrow, off a flight from Damascus; she had no makeup, no luggage and had had little sleep and less to eat for twenty-four hours. She’d run from the bombs and rockets being rained on Lebanon by the Israeli war machine, after having first ensured her children and grand-children had been safely evacuated to Saudi Arabia. Two hundred thousand pieces of ordinance (the majority cluster bombs with multiple anti-personnel war-heads) were fired into Lebanon in the 2006 conflict, and, states a report on Mine Action’s web-site, many did not explode and are still causing casualties, in spite of significant and continued efforts to clear affected land. My wife didn’t run for nothing. In previous incidents (the Israeli invasion of 1984 for example), she’d retreated to Baghdad, to Riyadh and to London; and sometimes she’d stayed, like when the electricity power plants had been taken out about ten years ago, bombed by, yep, you've guessed it Israel.

Have a look at any of the news web-sites, the belligerent rhetoric has been ratched up a good few notches in recent weeks and many people here are wondering if this is merely sabre rattling or a pre-cursor to hostilities – certainly the verbal preparations are being made for the “I cannot tell a lie, I did nothing, it was all his fault, he started it” sort of statements, should the worst happen.

There’ve been more or less successful efforts to divide and conquer the Lebanese on previous occasions, but there’s something different about the climate this time. Today, the country’s President called on all Lebanese to be prepared to make “huge” sacrifices in resisting attacks, and the head of Hezbollah “put all its resources at the disposal of the army”, both according to the agency LibanCall. This comes only a couple of days after a highly visible mini-summit of the heads of state of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Syria and Lebanon, held on Lebanese soil. Solidarity seems to be breaking out.

The economy is enjoying a healthy growth rate, tourism alone seeing an increase of 27% in the first five months of this year according to one major bank’s weekly reports. Tower cranes abound, Beirut real estate prices are still rising rapidly and a massive new shopping centre has appeared in the downtown area, host to Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney labels amongst others. Is there some truth in the oft repeated suggestion that there is jealously from Lebanon’s southern neighbour whenever success threatens? I’ve always dismissed this as paranoia before, and yet, and yet …

It is vital to differentiate between a state and its government. Germany has recovered from Hitler, Russia from Stalin and China from Mao Zhadong and his little red book; all have learned to live with, even embrace their neighbours and thrive. Is it too much to hope that Israel may one day learn from their examples?

An Israeli soldier died too in yesterday’s clash. And the whole incident was about a tree. Let’s all recognize that each death is not just a statistic but a tragedy. Every single one is one too many: remember that in peace sons put their fathers to rest but in war fathers mourn their sons.

Post-modern white man's burden

Mediterraneans like the sun and claim to be happier in summer than winter. The Frenchman who coined the simile “a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine” must at least have come from the south of that country; the basic assumption is that both are good things.

Lebanon claims to be a country with four proper seasons, certainly the weather changes around the quarter days, but I would describe the seasons as early summer, high summer, late summer and then there are finally a couple of months of cool-and-a-bit-rainy-rather-like-Springtime-in-Yorkshire making up the fourth.

The first full summer season spent here, I noticed that the sky was blue. Yes, we all know that, but what I mean is unrelieved, “not a cloud in the sky”, blue in all directions, for day after day after day. After a few weeks I used to get up in the morning and immediately go from one side of the apartment to the other, looking hopefully out of the windows for the hint of a fluffy white thing in the sky, even a little one would have done. As the days clicked past, I began to feel more anxious, checking morning, lunchtime and in the evening. Finally, after four months, I saw one, a little whiff of cumulus out over the sea to the West. It seemed that every cell in my body screamed “YES!” at the same time.

This year things are different, I see clouds every day, and from all directions. For example, today’s were altocumulus coming in from the North East, the result presumably of Turkish moisture condensing over Lebanon's mountains. I think it is just as well since so many are saying that it’s the hottest summer they can remember and asking me how, in my white skinned Englishness, can I possible stand it. Well I’d rather be here than in Moscow with the temperature there standing at thirty-nine (yes, in Centigrade) earlier this week.

I stand it fine thank you very much and the reasons are simple. I play at being a vampire during the day, trying not to let a single ray of sunlight hit my body. In years gone past, this was achieved with an ‘Englishman abroad’ linen jacket, over a white shirt with linen slacks. Now I just wear T-shirts and stay in the shade. Oh and I don’t go to the local swimming pools and beaches very often either. This is not completely the result of eccentricity, but rather a bit of a scare that an oh-nasty had to be removed from my right hand; the biopsy confirmed the suspicion that sun-damage was the root cause. But I digress.

Now I used to be embarrassed about the whiteness of my skin. I wanted the olive complexion and the easy tan rather than the freckles with the pink-stained alabaster look. But I’ve made a discovery, albeit a bit late. Oh how I wish I’d known this as a young man. Women worry and fuss over me, they strike up conversations, ostensibly to be sure that I’ve got enough factor 500 in all the right places, they want to make sure the umbrellas are giving enough protection and that my hat is shading not just my face but neck, shoulders and, well, wherever. Apparently all that paleness in strong sun-light brings out the motherly, big sisterly concern for my welfare.

Well, guess what, if I’d known that forty years ago, maybe I’d have been better able to share the Mediterraneans’ love of sunshine.

Breakfast Culture.

As noted elsewhere in this blog, similarities between the two countries, Lebanon and Britain, abound. Amy Winehouse is well enough known to be impersonated, sellers of Liverpool and Manchester United football shirts do a roaring trade and I get silly calls on my mobile from people trying to flog me stuff I don’t want.

But breakfast is where the differences show. Perhaps people need the truly familiar first thing in the morning.

I have two personal favourites when visiting England. Orange juice, prunes, a buttered kipper, then finish up with brown toast and marmalade, all washed down with English Breakfast Tea: that makes up one of them. The other starts and finishes in much the same way but has rashers of back bacon, egg and sausage with a few sautéed mushrooms in the middle and that cholesterol nightmare, fried bread: it’s accompanied by strong, percolated coffee. There is no particular order in those two, it depends on mood and inclination; and either fuels me up for the whole day.

Both are improved, in my opinion, by having a copy of the Telegraph to hand. I know it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (pretty obvious how that metaphor came about now, isn’t it), but it’s been my morning read of choice since a teenager and especially since the Times moved its classified ads off the front page. Once, in desperate need of a Sudoku puzzle, all I could get was a Guardian, so I bought a copy of Playboy to hide it in. I do realize, though, that morning newspapers are very much a matter of personal taste, so, as long you get the food right, be my guest.

So what does a full Lebanese breakfast look like?

There’s a plate of greengrocery, which includes huge tomatoes that look more like painted melons, radishes and sprigs of mint. There’s a bowl of dried thyme eaten either with lebneh (like strained Greek yoghurt) or spread with olive oil on unleven bread. Choose from plates of beans stewed with garlic, again in olive oil, and plates of chick peas, both whole and made into a paste with Tahini, the mix better known as hummus. There’s more, some Olives, both black and green, with olive oil, oh, and peeled boiled eggs. A bowl of whatever fruit is in season and fruit juices are on the table, and of course, jam and butter and white cheese to go with more or that pita type bread. It’s all washed down with tea, without milk added, or stand-your-spoon-up-in-it viscous black Arabic coffee.

Whereas English breakfasts, mine anyway, tend to be solitary and silent, the spread listed above is expected to be a group affair with loads of chatter and gossip. Reading material isn’t needed, although Lebanon is rich in Daily Newspapers, in three languages to boot.

There’s a question posed on an earlier page “where can I get a good kipper in Beirut?” The answer, I’m afraid, is still “I don’t know.” Ideas anyone?

The eco-village

Green, organic, recycle, bio-degradable and eco are all new-speak for good: disposable, packaging and synthetic are by extension new-speak for not so good any more.

One way of being environmentally friendly was the back drop to a highly successful British Sit-com of the seventies, “The Good Life”. A middle-aged couple turned their Surrey stock-broker belt house into an organic small-holding complete with pigs, chickens and herb garden. Everything was apparently being re-cycled to make gas for cooking, generate electricity for light and the need for water and drainage removed. The comedy came from the reactions of the upper-middle class neighbours juxtaposed with the stoicism and determination, one might almost say pig-headedness, of the “back to the land” couple.

Another way is to use technology and design. Apparently part of Britain’s M1 motorway is de-iced in winter from heat stored up from, wait for it, the previous summer. The system is called Inter-seasonal Heat Transfer or IHT for short. Solar panels for providing hot-water have been around for years, but advancements in solar-cells have led to a pleasure boat on London’s Serpentine being powered that way entirely. Add triple glazing and the clever use of courtyards and cloisters and you can begin to see how technology can be brought to bear to run a building without external energy input.

So I was very interested in our proposed trip to Lebanon’s eco-village http://www.ecoecovillage.com . Which would it be, looking toward the future or the past? Actually it combines both; a water-wheel in the local river generates electricity to power modern light bulbs. The cafeteria serves a variety of tasty dishes with all the vegetables organically grown on the eco-village’s land, which also supports free-range chickens and larger livestock. Re-cycling points are frequent and unobtrusive. And then there are swimming holes in the unpolluted, crystal waters of that local river, as well as the tree houses. There are a few small buildings, made of bamboo, which grows a-plenty, wood from local trees and walls made wattle and daub style using the clay rich earth. The organic cafeteria, by the way, is a very large tent, insulated with traditional rugs and in spite of the heat, there was a cooling flow of air which was both gentle and effective.

Only trouble is that to get to it, a long drive down a rutted road is needed that is really only practical on horseback (but I didn’t see any of them) or in an SUV (of which I saw a lot). That’s because it sits in a remote valley surrounded by tree clad mountains of the Chouf.

A model for future living, I’m afraid not; it’s a real back to the land approach and I’ll wait for the design and technology led solutions, thank you. As a demonstration of how to use land to produce additive free food with real taste, yes. And as a day out? Once you’re there it’s great.

I have doubts about the carbon footprint, but it’s certainly green, organic and with a focus on re-cycling. If left, the site would bio-degrade to nothing in months, so it can truly claim to have the right to use its “eco” appellate.

The woman who "does"

My sister has a largish family house to run, somewhere in the West of England. She is not well at the moment, so, to lighten the household chores, has acquired a cleaner.
I should say that my sister has had a life long passion for helping the unfortunate and the disposessed. That passion usually manifests itself in terms of dogs from the shelter, taking in an unwanted guinea pig and the like. Two legged animals are not immune though.
The cleaning woman comes for a couple of hours, two or three times a week. My sister described her most recent visit thus:
“There’s a routine. When she gets here, the first thing she does is to put the kettle on and wait for it to boil, then she makes a cup of coffee for us both.
“Over the coffee there’s a discussion about what she’s going to do. Agreement having been reached, she says
“‘I don’t want to light up in front of you in your condition’ but she has a cigarette anyway, in spite of herself.
“After doing whatever it was we agreed, she has another break complete with cigarette, then we chat for a bit and after that I drive her to the bus-stop.
“I think it’s doing her good, though, coming to me!”
I wondered aloud who paid whom and for what service.
“Oh, I pay her, but it nearly all goes on bus fares now she’s moved to the next town.
“Mind you her brother’s even worse, never worked at all and just came out of prison.”
I asked her what he’d been in prison for.
“A failed armed robbery, he tried to hold up a post office with a toy gun” she said. “I was thinking of getting him to come round and do something here, but I’m not going to bother: I haven’t the strength to pick up any more waifs and strays at the moment.”
Good decision.

Thoughts on seeing a new moon

Some years ago we took a vacation in mid-June in the Scottish Highlands. To be accurate we rented a cottage not far from Fort William close by Loch Ness, the deepest lake in the British Isles and near Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Scotland. A miracle occurred in that it forgot to rain for the whole week, so the evenings were beautiful and very, very long. As I recall, darkness was never complete, but what passed for it lasted from just after eleven until about half past two.

Digging even further back into the mists of time, I remember as a child, living in South Yorkshire, going to bed and falling asleep before it got properly dark.

Now that doesn’t happen here. On the longest day, dusk passes into night not long after eight in the evening. I have never really got used to the idea of night falling so early in summer, but tonight one of the advantages showed as I drove back home across Beirut. It’s the first day of the lunar month and that means a new moon; the tiniest sliver of golden (not silver, whatever the songs might say) crescent showed just above the horizon at dusk. It is one of the narrowest new moon crescents I recall seeing and it became more distinct by the second as the daylight rapidly faded, possibly because it was only occasionally visible through the infrequent gaps between buildings. By the time I got home, night had properly fallen and the new moon had chased the sun down below the horizon, leaving Venus as the brightest object in the evening sky.

The magic of the heavens still has the power to engender awe and wonder. So do we plan our next vacation where we can see more of the night sky? No, because it is quite literally everywhere, all we have to do is to look up and we too can have our senses and imaginations fired just like the ancient Greeks and Romans, the thinkers like Einstein and Newton and the inspirational dreamers like JFK setting the target of putting a man on the moon.

Short and partial as that night-time in Scotland was, I remember us all going outside one night to watch a shower, not of rain, but of shooting stars.

Two weddings, no funeral

What’s a wedding for? A right of passage? A public commitment? An excuse for a party? Affirmation of a contract? A union of two houses? Please tick all that apply.

Perhaps it’s just as well that I wasn’t blogging last year when my daughter got married, I would have written a lot. In summary though there was a white dress, a Spanish bridegroom, a ceremony in Battersea park, a signing of the register, Big Red Buses to take us across London to where the bride, groom and families received us all, a super meal, speeches in two languages, dancing, a bag of favours for everyone, two best men, a big cake and a lot of champagne. It was a really great “do” enjoyed by close to a hundred people, an average sort of size for a British wedding. My darling daughter announced afterwards with pride that she’d come in on budget: you can see why she chose to become a chartered accountant. A success in every way it was.

Over the weekend we went to a Muslim wedding celebration here. A small wedding by Lebanese standards, about two-hundred and forty were catered for. The guests were greeted by the families of the couple, then headed off to be seated. When the assembly was complete there was a beating of drums to herald the groom’s arrival accompanied by an all male entourage (rather more than two best men) drawn from friends and family. Next the bride entered (in a white dress) with her Dad and waited for the groom’s group to progress across the floor to "claim" her, after which the finally united couple, accompanied by singers and dancers mixed with the original group of supporters went to sit side by side at a raised table by themselves. Later there was dancing and a big cake.

Most of the weddings I’ve been to here follow much the same pattern. It’s noisy and boisterous and fun to watch, and my guess (no research done to prove it) is that it echoes rituals from pastoral and even nomadic ways of life, the groom’s accompanied procession across the floor being the equivalent of a trip across the village or perhaps even to a neighbouring yurt. The ceremony and contract signing was essentially an all male affair in private and done earlier.

When I started this, the idea in my mind was to show how different things were, but what comes through are the similarities too. OK, so there was no champagne, indeed it was dry, but forewarned, a couple of hip flasks made rather a dent in that. And there were no speeches, so no public gaffs as popularized by Four Weddings and a Funeral. But the meal, the dancing, the cake, the walk, the public union, the white dress and the groom’s supporters are all elements in common.

It should come as no surprise then that I’d give both weddings ticks in all five of the boxes suggested above.

Solar power anyone?

What would the Wright brothers have made of the solar powered aero plane?

It’s just started a test flight that is supposed to last for 24 hours. One objective of the flight is to check out how well it flies at night. Err a solar powered ’plane flying at night? Has Graham finally lost his marbles, I hear you say? Actually I have mislaid a couple of very pretty multi-coloured glass giants, but that’s a digression. If you don’t believe me (about the solar ’plane, not the marbles) have a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10534960.stm.

It is a truly amazing machine, made using some very clever light-weight materials: presumably that’s why it looks ever so like the balsa wood constructions of my boyhood; however, it’s on a much larger scale and with four engines attached. Going back to the night flying test, the idea is that the photo-electric cells built into the wings not only provide power but recharge batteries which provide the juice to operate the controls at night. The aircraft gains height during the day, and then gives back that height (potential energy for the technical) at night using a bit of battery power only when necessary.

Now that machine makes me wonder about the potential solar power going begging in Lebanon. Go to Greece, Turkey or Cyprus for example, and all buildings have solar panels for heating water. Even in the comparatively sunless UK, more and more electricity bills are being lowered by tapping into the ultimate energy source – the Sun. So why not here? Try to eat into the gap between supply of generated electricity and the significantly greater demand. Ah, well, solar heating doesn’t work with apartment blocks, according to some. Actually it does. Technology has evolved to be able to cope with any block up to eleven floors high and the majority has eight or ten. Does Lebanon have a surfeit of Oil and Gas reserves? No, it has to import the lot. Do the mountain peaks attract enough winter snow to create lakes and waterfalls that drive hydro-electric power? Well there’s a grand scheme for some twenty-seven artificial lakes to be created by dams, but they are to meet the demand for water, any power creation would be seasonal and supplementary at best. And after twenty years, one has been completed (actually the only one to be started), because everyone is quite happy about the others being built, but not the one that takes their valley, stream or orchard – the classic NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. Solar power would eat into the electricity company’s profits? It makes a loss.

So it remains an unanswered mystery, just like the question at the start of this little piece.

And then a party happened

And then a party happened.

That could almost be a tag line for Lebanon. Let me state the obvious, the Lebanese like to party. Birthdays, feast days and public holidays will provide an excuse, but it isn’t really necessary to have a reason any more persuasive than “It’s Tuesday” or even “There isn’t a reason”.

They can be pretty spontaneous, or so it seems to the casual observer. A Friday evening gathering for about twenty friends had been a little more arranged than some, but, as we were leaving at around one in the morning, our hostess addressed us with “you haven’t eaten enough, it’ll all go to waste – come again tomorrow and we’ll finish what we started!” So we did: this time until two in the morning.

Last night we were guests in a Beirut night club and supper bar - Le Grey. One of the owners felt like having a gathering of again, just over twenty people. Now I’ve been to small dinner parties where the givers spend all their time in the kitchen, opening and sampling bottles, changing CDs and attempting to orchestrate a particular mood. They don’t seem to have any time left for guests, let alone being able to enjoy it themselves, oh! perish the thought. Owning a night club takes away a number of those awful possibilities, so we all, including host and hostess, enjoyed ourselves.

Never mind anything else, it was a joy to be confronted by a TV screen with something other than twenty-two sweaty young blokes, dressed in garish colours chasing a ball about, and being chased in their turn by an older bloke. Even more of one to listen to real music instead of badly played vuvuzelas. I know, you wouldn’t think it possible to play an instrument badly that only has one note, but it is.

A video clip was showing of J. Lo doing something erotic with a well-muscled chap, they both wore a lot of oil as well. After that Beyoncé and Shakira did a rather amazing double act. Then the four tenors came on and the ladies of the party rather outdid the men with suggestive comments that brought on much giggling. A live singer did a brilliant impression of Amy Winehouse; salmon and wine and jokes and calamari and whiskey and cake came and went and everything was punctuated by dancing.

At about one in the morning, we headed back home. A bit lily-livered of us to pack it in so early? Maybe, but we’ve got a wedding to go to tonight! So another party’s happening.

It's a small world

Yesterday the world shrank. Let me explain.

We keep of couple of vehicles here. There’s a Chelsea tractor (otherwise known as a 4 x 4) of the Honda variety for going up and down the mountain roads and when we need to look a bit flash; and the other one is a chic little Renault for running around Beirut and its suburbs.

Anyone who has owned a car will know what is meant by an expensive noise. Early this week the sound coming from under the Honda’s bonnet seemed well into second mortgage territory, so off I drove it to car hospital. Was it sensible still to drive it? Well I’d discovered that the noise stopped when the air conditioning was switched off.

Now before you all start yelling “softy” or worse at me for worrying about air conditioning, let me remind you that the daytime temperature here is in the mid-thirties with the humidity number being rather bigger. If you need a Turkish bath in a hurry and can’t find one, just drive around for a bit with the A/C turned off.

With anticipation of a rather lighter bank balance, I headed off a day later to the local Honda dealer to pick up the restored car. At the collection and payment counter there was one other customer, a lady, likely of Northern European origin, judging by the lighter than local colouring. And then I heard English tones. There aren’t a lot of us Brits here, so that’s always enough to strike up a conversation, and after a little while, the following exchange took place

Me: “Whereabouts are you from, do I detect hint of the North of England?”
She: “Yes, you’re right, South Yorkshire”
Me: “Oh, really, where?”
She, “Sheffield, well, its suburbs”
Me: “Really, me too, I was born on Eccleshall Road”
She: “No, that’s where our house was!”

Now for those who may never have seen the glories of the city of Sheffield, Eccleshall Road is quite long, but even allowing for that, the chances of such an encounter would be expected to be limited.

Where would we be without that much maligned speech aid, the cliché. There’s one in the last sentence and here comes another. The world’s a small place, and, in my case, yesterday it got even smaller.