new year travelling: Year Zero in the Khmer lands

as I have posted previously, changes gonna come. Be careful what you wish for ... in spring last year I was thinking that my life was in a bit of a rut and I needed to make some kind of change, but could not think what. The cancer scare that turned out not to be, but likely to be within five years, was part but not all of that thinking. I didn't know then that significant other was thinking just the same thing, and wishing for something to change. He didn't have the quantity or quality of work he wanted to do in Strasbourg, and I did but was feeling trapped and hoping to do something different before retirement and consequent loss of income and/or health problems caught up with me. Well, with that, significant other was offered and accepted a job in Cambodia. He went off in June to do the summer work at a UK university he has done for the past few years, came back in September for three days, and went off again to Cambodia for a year. At least. He left all his possessions for me to sort out and put into storage, without even mentioning them before he left - and he is a hoarder and I am very much not - but that is another matter. So I put our place on the market - we had discussed this - and asked to work at 90% of contract instead of full time for 2016. This was agreed, so I carry on working as normal, except that I get another 21 days' holiday for this year. I took 31 days' leave, starting on 8th January, and flew off to join him in Cambodia. I have always wanted to be a trailing spouse, and this is as close as I am going to get at my age.

I had never been to South-East Asia at all before coming here. Er, it's hot. Cambodia is tropical. Half the year in an oven and half in a sauna, they say. This is the oven half. I chose this time of the year to travel here because (1) the Alsace winter is no fun; it's more the dark than the cold that's hard to bear (2) in January and February there's nothing much to do on the allotment. Our place is sold - the keys were handed over 48 hours before I left, and the last three days in Strasbourg spent in a hotel - so with no housing or utility costs for the next few weeks, and significant other with his own flat, it was feasible for me to travel and stay there for a while. So, hey, a big change.

We know the history of Cambodia, or we think we do. The Killing Fields, the Khmer Rouge. It was 40 years ago, thus in living memory. In Phnom Penh, and elsewhere, you quite often see people with no foot, no leg, or no arm. They are all, pretty much, or appear to be, fifty-something. You don't see many others that age at all. About a quarter of the population was lost to starvation, murder and death by forced labour. Genocide, let's not mince our words. The effects are still felt now, as the intellectuals were killed first and the universities closed, meaning that when it all reopened there was no one much left to do the teaching. If you were alive and could read and write after that you could teach, so quality education is only starting to be available now.

Anyway, enough of the history. Others have written it better than I could. I'm currently reading Ben Kiernan's 'How Pol Pot Came To Power' (pub. 1985, updated 2004 - an academic history which is readable and a good source book) and in the first few days I was here I re-read Margaret Drabble's 'The Gates of Ivory' (pub. 1991 - the Kiernan is in the bibliography: a novel which is full of great stuff and picks up most of the characters from the earlier two in her trilogy 'The Radiant Way'). Recommended. The late Doris Lessing wrote somewhere that her generation (born in the 1920s and 30s, the one before the boomers, with the war babies' mini-generation slotted in between, what has been called the Greatest Generation, though not by me) was the first to go primarily to works of fiction for information about the world. And so it is and has continued.

The Khmer Rouge wore uniforms like these. They wanted the purest communist land, starting at Year Zero. They left behind - well, not much really. And the Khmers picked themselves up and started rebuilding their country. What was left of it.

photo taken by me at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Phnom Penh

And here is a survivor. I met him today near Battambang, Cambodia's second city. He speaks OK English and better French. His name is Suon Som and I was pleased to hear some things about his life. He says he is 74 years old. He says he was a general in the army - careful not to say which army or exactly when; the framed picture of him in uniform he showed me is very hard to date, and you can't see the uniform properly. He also showed me a certificate authorising him to be an election observer in the Cambodian National Assembly election of 2003, an observation mission partly funded by DFID. He also says that Johnny Hallyday came to see him in Cambodia. Well, maybe he did. Though so far I can't verify that Johnny ever went to Cambodia, but why would he not, he has many fans there, or had. I'd love to go back and talk with Suon Som again.

Suon Som.photo taken by me 22nd January 2016

downsizing life

a lot of people downsize some time after their children are grown and gone. Move to a smaller house, move away from where their children grew up, perhaps take early retirement. That last is less likely for my generation - we are fitter and healthier than our parents were at our age, for the most part, because we were better nourished as children than they were. We boomers were pre junk food, remember, and we played out unsupervised for hours every day in almost any weather. Our own children (I had mine when I was young, and they are in their 30s now) were more supervised than we were, and their physical activity was more organised - things like swimming club and gym club, which my siblings and I did not have. Mine played out, and rode bikes on the road on their own, but a lot of their friends did not, and of course we lived an urban life. Even then rural children were less likely to be physically active than urban ones, and more likely to be driven everywhere. It's much more so now. My two granddaughters are in outer London, and are lucky enough (because their parents were committed to the idea) to live in a housing development where there are safe places for them to play more or less unsupervised.

I am likely to be forced to retire in three or four years' time. I don't want to. I want to work until I really need a rest, and/or until health problems force me to stop. But I work for an international institution that is not subject to EU law and has a fixed retirement age. This is pernicious, but is how it is.

The cancer I had a scare about a few months ago may become a reality: my French gastroenterologist has told me he thinks it will, in that cheery way they have, and if it does I may have five years maximum from that point. But if, as I think is more likely, it does not (oesophagus, since you ask, caused by smoking), I may have getting on for 40 more years to live. As I now have arthritis, kicked off by the accident I had last year (nobody knows why this happens, but it nearly always does), the quality of that life may deteriorate unpleasantly as time goes on - or I may have one joint replaced after another as technology improves, and still be riding my bike when I am 100.

Whatever happens, one lesson I have learned in recent years (I learned it from my daughter, but that is another story) is that if you are going to make a change in your life, make it when you choose to and when you can control the process - don't make it when you are in a cleft stick and have no other choice. This applies to the ending of a relationship or a marriage (and no one says "bravo" to  you about that one, no matter what the outcome or prior situation) and to moving house/changing the way you live. Move from a house with stairs to a flat on one level before you start falling down the stairs and breaking your hips. Move to within walking distance of shops and public transport before you are forced by health problems to stop driving. End a bad relationship before it damages you so much that you're no longer capable of positive action of any kind, and don't worry about "whose fault" it is that the relationship is bad. Become an accomplished online shopper and consumer of services before health problems make you housebound.

All this means that you will often be seen as doing things "too soon", or that those around you will be bemused as to why you are doing them at all. I am currently in the process of selling my home. Well, I think I am, but you know how these things are. I know that some around me think I am crazy for doing this. I intend, not to buy another place, but to rent, at least until I have the retirement plans I am being forced to make firmly in place. In any event the place I live in after this will be smaller than my current place, which is too big to live alone in. Why live with rooms you don't use but have to clean?

Alone. Yes. Significant other has departed. Not from me, but from Europe, to work in Cambodia for at least a year. This has been part of the inspiration for me to make these changes. But not the whole of it. It's time to do it. Live in a clean, clear, smaller space, and use the income I have to do things rather than to have things. As part of this I will be working 90% instead of full-time from 1st January, which will give me enough time (I'm using the pay cut to buy more holiday) to travel. First, of course, to Cambodia, where I have never been. I'll be there in January and will stay for six weeks. Part-time, but keeping up full pension contributions. I'm not THAT daft.

No one was ever on their deathbed saying they wished they'd spent more time scrubbing the skirting boards.

I'm 62 next birthday. It's time to live.   

P J O'Rourke and the boomers

Ghastly right-winger that he is, I have always found P J O'Rourke hilarious. I particularly loved that his book on international conflict and crisis was called "Give War A Chance". Anyway, his latest tome, "The Baby Boom, How It Got That Way And It Wasn't My Fault And I'll Never Do It Again" is a bit variable. You have to love a writer who puts in ahead of the foreword a quote from Ecclesiasticus, in the Apocrypha bit of the Bible (I always used to get him mixed up with Ecclesiastes, because I could never remember which one you were supposed to read and which one not, but Ecclesiasticus is the Wrong One) "How can he get wisdom... whose talk is of bullocks?"  But a lot of this is a description of a 1950s-to-early-60s childhood in Ohio, attracting the reaction "So what?" And why do Americans have to refer to brand names all the time? For us ration-book Brits the only brand names with any nostalgia quotient are probably Spangles and Golden Wonder, neither of which exists any more. He refers to Depends and Levitra, both of which I had to look up (incontinence pants and Viagra variant, since you ask, neither of which probably existed when US boomers were children).

But O'Rourke's boomer credentials are impeccable. He used to be editor of National Lampoon. Largely because he was/is funny. He took a lot of drugs, at the right time. He lived in a shared house called Big Green.

Who are the boomers? Opinions differ. Most agree that the oldest ones were born in 1946, conceived usually by returning soldiers. The youngest, however, were born anywhere between 1959 and 1964, depending who you believe (O'Rourke goes for 1964). What did boomers have that was cool, and that has lasted? Our music, of course. We had the Beatles. We had the Rolling Stones. We had the Kinks. We had the Who (none of these American, just saying). Except that all these people are/were war babies, born in the 1940s. Not boomers. Who are the boomer musicians? The late Sid Vicious? Morrissey (at the younger end)? Elvis Costello? Well, I grant  you him, but it's not the same, if you get my drift. So what did our generation produce? We went into politics, some of us. The Clintons are boomers, at the top end of the age group, and so may Barack Obama be, at the bottom end. Tony Blair definitely is. Angela Merkel. But the boomers' time in the political sunlight was brief. David Cameron is younger than that. Nigel Farage doesn't count. Our time there is over. Fun while it lasted. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Like the rest of our lives really.

Artists? Writers? Not that many. Martin Amis, if  you like him (I do) scrapes in (born 1949). Jonathan Coe. David Mitchell is too young. Margaret Drabble is too old. The writers I choose to read, mostly, are older or younger than the boomer generation.

But P J O'Rourke is funny. And concise. He notes, rightly, that the tax bills to fund the boomers' retirement are barely starting to come in, adding that that ought to galvanise those Generation X slackers into doing some work, besides which it would help them get over the death of Kurt Cobain. Just as well, then, that we don't want to retire. If we did, we'd have to admit we were old. Our parents wanted to retire. Some of them did so in their fifties, because their working lives were quite hard, and they were glad when they were over. Us, no. We've been having a pretty good time, all told. Quite a lot of us died young without any wars to kill us off, unlike now (I've lost several friends my own age and younger), but (and I'm talking about Brits, here) we had home cooking not junk food when we were children, we played out, we were not driven around, we were allowed chips only once a week, and we acquired self-reliance by being outside the house without adults from early on. We never grew up, and we are going to live for ever.

That's not an indictment of my generation, it's a snapshot opinion of it. Will later generations think of us kindly?

Kurt Andersen, 'True Believers'

You can get this book here.  I can't tell you that much about the plot without spoiling it, but be assured that it is a cracking read.  It's set in the 1960s,  not among hippies but among radicals, of a kind, in America, who are very young.  It is about friendship, and memory, and lies.  The writer is a man, and has created a terrific female lead character, a kind of sexy grandma.  Perhaps the book, when it is not a political thriller (which it is, a lot of the time) is a study of the danger of being certain about what is and what is not.  As an aside, kind of, I discovered from this book that only one film has ever been made entirely in Esperanto.  It was called Incubus, and starred - William Shatner.  You can see a clip here.  Looks terrific.  Although I object to Esperanto as pointless.

the debt owed to the Poles

Cllr Richard Willis of Reading has posted this to mark Battle of Britain Day.  He urges remembrance and recognition of the part played by Polish airmen in the RAF during World War II, and he is right to do so.  The contribution they made was out of all proportion to their numbers.  They had lost their country, and in many cases their families, but they fought bravely, and often recklessly, for the cause.  I was a child in west London in the 1950s, and a neighbouring family, with a daughter my brother's age, had a Polish father who had been a fighter pilot and who had married a British woman, as many of them did, and settled in South Ruislip, not far from RAF Northolt where most of the Polish RAF men were posted.  Their daughter went on to become rather famous, but that is another story, and not one she would (probably) want me to repeat.  My novel has its starting point in those west London streets, among those postwar families who wanted quiet and stability and to raise ordinary families.  But most of the men had combat or other war experience which had marked them, and had shown them other lives, and most of the women were looking for glamour in those years of austerity.  All of them were part of a changing Britain and a changing world.  My story is a tribute to them and the lives they made, but it is also the story of what their daughters' lives became.  It is a Kindle book, and you can get it here.  You don't need to own a Kindle to read it.  Although my life is hard to imagine without mine.

This post is to thank Richard for remembering the Poles. 

Gdansk

It is also to encourage readers to visit Poland.  I went to Warsaw several years ago when significant other and I were on our mission to visit all the capitals of Europe, and did not like the city much.  But this year we went to Gdansk, and were bowled over by the beauty of the place, impressed by the energy and spirit of its inhabitants, and stunned by the beaches and countryside.  We are going back next summer for a holiday.  Poland is a big country which probably has as much to offer the visitor as anywhere in Europe does.  The weather is better than you'd think - the summer is short and hot, the winter longer and colder than in western Europe: the northern coast has a cool maritime climate, and a Baltic summer on the icing-sugar beaches is a great joy. English is quite widely spoken, as so many people have worked in the UK and Ireland and have now gone home again, and the food and drink are excellent.  Prices compete very well - our holiday budget was about half what it would have been in France or Italy.  Don't order wine in Poland, but everything else is great.  I'm a believer.

The third reason for this post is to ask readers if they would prefer my book in print form.  It can be done,  And in fact probably will be before Christmas.

the boomer President

Only a few months ago I was having a conversation with someone in which I remember saying that the baby boomers - my generation - have had their day in the sun, they have been n political power and are now out of it, the world's leaders are a new generation.  I was thinking of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton now out of power, and of Obama, Cameron and Clegg, all born in the 1960s, but I wasn't right.  Francois Hollande, the new President of France (technically not yet, as the investiture has not yet happened) is my age.  There have been a number of programmes about him, his family and his political career so far, as you might expect, given that he is France's second Socialist president ever and the first one was Francois Mitterrand, whose shoes cannot be filled by anyone alive.  And of course pictures of a young Hollande, the clothes, the hair, all that, remind me of my youth.  Though Hollande was too serious and too political even in his teens to have been in any way counter-cultural (as we used to call it then) or cutting-edge (as we didn't).  But none the less, we are talkin' 'bout my generation.  Here, and not only here, the boomers are giving something back.  Because that's what we wanted.  We didn't want to tear down the society we lived in, despite what the older generation said, we wanted to improve it.  That's why we didn't do much in the way of creating paintings and symphonies, we were more of an activist generation.  The Beatles were the soundtrack of our youth, but they were older than us, war babies.  The visual artists shaking things up in the 21st century are younger than us.  Writers, yes, there are some.  William Boyd (whose latest, Waiting for Sunrise, is unopened on my table in hardback, a pleasure to come) and Hilary Mantel (whose latest, Bring Up The Bodies, currently has me in thrall to my Kindle) were both born in 1952.  Ian McEwan and Martin Amis were both born in 1949.  So those are all boomers.  But you don't find out much about how our generation grew up from any of their books.  Interesting that you don't.  What they all do is tell stories, mostly from other times and other places.

The surname Hollande comes from how those Protestants fleeing religious persecution in the Low Countries, then under Spanish rule, were dubbed by the locals in northern France, where some of them found refuge.  So Hollande may well have Protestant heritage.  This would be most unusual for a French President.  It would be most unusual for a French person outside this part of France, which anyway has been German in living memory. Although I suspect Hollande is an entirely secular individual, and the question does not arise.  His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, has Hungarian Jewish antecedents, and that was never really an issue, despite the terrible history of Jews in France in the twentieth century.

It's too soon to say what Francois Hollande will do.  I fear for the international future - I cannot see him providing the kind of leadership Sarkozy did in the Arab Spring, but I hope I am wrong.  He is going to reduce France's dependence on nuclear power, he says.  Wrong.  And the unionised workers at the Fessenheim power station not far from here will not like it one bit when he closes them down.  His government will be formed next week, and will probably include at least two Greens (those Greens are not a bit high-minded, you should see them treading on each other's heads in the hope of a ministerial post) which will tie his hands a bit.  Parliamentary elections take place next month, and in some places the Parti Socialiste is trying to kick out PS incumbents or selected candidates to make way for Greens.  With predictable and messy results.  This is happening here in Strasbourg too.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left candidate for the presidency, is to stand against Marine Le Pen of the Front National in Pas de Calais in the north.  Should be fun.  What's going to happen there?

RIP Vidal Sassoon

cutting Mary Quant's hair

he was a real revolutionary.  I always dreamed of getting my hair cut by him, one girl from my school, Louise Taylor, did and boasted about it for the next two years.  He got the nation to say goodbye to the crimped shampoos-and-sets of the previous decade.  My own hair is naturally very curly, with a tendency to frizz, true Celt, so you can imagine a haircut like this was hard to come by, but I did manage something like it for a while when I was twelve.  I'll find a photograph and scan it in so you can see.  Sassoon was a great anti-fascist who spent his early years in an orphanage.  No north London Guardianista he.  Thank you Vidal Sassoon for changing the way we looked at ourselves.  We the baby boomers salute you.

we were beautiful then...

Bill and Hillary, 1975.  I am a boomer too.  All of us boomers were beautiful in 1975.  That was our year.  Just saying...