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.