meish dot org: life, unfolding

So we had a leaving dinner for Meester Yan the other night.

It was a great evening. I haven’t smiled so much in months.

The best thing was that while leaving dos can be sad and dismal affairs (because you know you’ll probably never see the individual concerned again, even if they’re just going to a new job down the road) this one wasn’t depressing in the slightest. It was a celebration - of old friends, of adventures to come, of long-overdue reunions and of just surviving the week.

There’d been a corporate shindig on Wednesday, but on Friday, it was just us, the usual suspects: friends (and colleagues, and drinking buddies, and partners-in-crime) from way back, gathered with a sprinkling of significant others for food and drinks and laughter - sharing bottles of wine and silly stories and cold viruses over a long table set for thirteen.

Even though we were partly saying goodbye, it wasn’t depressing because we all realised that there was absolutely no possibility of not seeing Meester Yan - and each other - again, and soon. And that’s just the way it should be.

Some things are really important in life. Long evenings of laughter with friends should be high on that list.

UPDATE: I wrote to Ananova to point out the mistranslation and they have since corrected the story and acknowledged that the original wording was misleading.

New cocaine sweet ‘will help people relax’

A company in Peru is developing a sweet made out of a mixture of caramel and cocaine….
[Ananova story]

Talk about sensationalism. Talk about ignorance. Talk about mistranslation. Talk about fact-checking.

Mrs Lazo added: “I want to demystify the use of cocaine leaves. In many parts people chew or make tea with them to fight altitude sickness.”

Cocaine is not the same thing as coca. One is a manufactured drug, the other is a leaf on a bush with traditional medicinal and ritual uses. It tastes like henna hair dye. It comes in teabags, and in handfuls, fresh from the market - so why not sweets?

Potatoes aren’t vodka, are they? Is someone was going to make a sweet with a potato base, would the tabloids be up in arms about the possibility of pissed children?

We’ve said it before, but not for a while, so let’s go over it again:

La coca no es cocaine: Coca is not cocaine.

Coca is a naturally ocurring mild plant stimulant (see also caffiene; sugar; tobacco; kola nuts) which has many traditional cultural uses in the Andean region, such as chewing or brewing in tea to alleviate stomach upsets and the effects of altitude sickness. Coca leaves can also be used as a highly effective compress on wounds, a well-recognised anti-nauseant (used in pregnancy, by the ill and by those affected by altitude sickness), and as a hunger-supressant, most frequently utilised by Bolivian miners to prolong working stints. Coca leaves are among the most significant ritual items of the Quechua, Aymara and Mapuche cultural groups (descendants of the Inka civilisation, and now numbering around eleven million people in the Andean region), who use them as sacrificial offerings to deities, as well as traditional items of ritual exchange, currency and cookery.

Cocaine, however, is a white powder, based on the stimulating properties of the coca leaf, but activated and intensified using mixing agents such as bleach and other chemicals, which is almost exclusively consumed in western nations by advertising executives who think they’re really funny and that everyone must be interested in what they’re saying. The overwhelming majority of (illegal) revenue made from the manufacture, trafficking and selling of cocaine also remains outside the countries which traditionally produce coca.

To create one gram of cocaine, around a ton of coca leaves are needed. It is only possible to chew around thirty coca leaves in the mouth at any one time. The stimulating effects of this amount of coca can last for up to ten hours, if chewed constantly; longer if the wad is stored in the cheek and chewed periodically. The stimulation is roughly equivalent to the effects of two strong cups of coffee, or one buy-it-in-your-local-newsagent-or-campus-store Pro Plus caffiene tablet. However, the effects of the stimulant are vastly decreased at altitude, and are barely noticable. You get more buzz from half a beer, or a single cigarette.

Bolivia and Peru have repeatedly been put under international pressure to stop growing coca. Bolivia is by far the poorest country in South America, and has become increasingly dependant on international aid and loans in recent years. Bolivia was categorically told by Clinton and other world leaders in 1995 that if coca production didn’t cease entirely by 2000, aid packages would stop and the loans would be called in. Peru and Colombia are expected to be forced into similar situations in coming years.

Coca is a very efficient crop - it can be grown on inhospitable terrain, is not seasonal, can be harvested three or four times a year, has a high acreage/yield ratio and can be harvested and transported to market by a small number of people. This has made it the principal traditional family smallholding crop of choice.

The US and UN recommended that Bolivian farmers could grow pineapples instead of coca, but refused to guarantee purchase of this highly specialised fruit crop. And besides, one person can easily carry a basket of coca to market on their back - the same is not true of pineapples. Now the UN is looking into developing special fungi to attack the coca crops of Colombia and Peru, to knock out production at the grassroots. Biological warfare?

I’m sorry but this whole situation just makes me mad. Coca isn’t the same as cocaine. Small-time farmers are being economically and politically targetted for production of a traditional crop which has been grown, farmed and used naturally and harmlessly in the region for thousands of years. They’re not even the ones who supply coca leaves to cocaine manufacturers: they’re the ones who show up in La Cancha market in Cochabamba on a Friday morning, feet dusty from the road and backs sore from hauling a sack of leaves, who set up their open sack in the central part of the market and sell other locals a handful of leaves (about fifty) and a chunk of banana or lime ash paste to chew it with, for less than one boliviano: about twelve pence. It’s the Bolivian equivalent of chewing gum.

Coca is the big evil bogeyman, though. It’s easier that way. When all the countries were setting up their pavillions at the Sevilla expo in 1992, Bolivia wanted to bring a pile of coca leaves, and give a single one to each visitor to their stand. They were not allowed. It is illegal to transport coca across international boundaries - even if it comes in the form of a mate de coca teabag or a single leaf pressed between two sheets of perspex, as a souvenir key ring.

Coca is not cocaine. It’s a traditional plant, with hundreds of traditional uses. Western nations are attempting to wipe out their domestic drug problems by eradicating the crops, traditions, economies and livelihoods of poorer third world nations. Does that seem fair? Alcoholism is a pretty serious issue in the UK - I propose we head on over to Ireland and dig up all the potatoes, even though potatoes aren’t vodka either. That sounds just about as fair to me.

So let’s just go over this one more time: when someone mentions coca they don’t automatically mean cocaine. To assume they do is mistranslation, or ignorance.

Computerised Female Voice: Hello Meg.
Meg: Hello.
CFV: Please choose your first category.
Meg: [leans forward to touch screen] Faith & Fortune
CFV: Please choose a number on the screen.
Meg: Number eight
CFV: If you came back as a ghost, who would you torment?
Meg: Anyone who had rejoiced at my death. That’d piss them off. Number seventeen.
CFV: Do games of chance appeal to you?
Meg: No. Well, yes, but I try to steer well clear, in case I get too tempted.
CFV: Thank you. Please choose your next category.
Meg: [leans forward to touch screen] Sweet and Bitter, please.
CFV: Please choose a number on the screen.
Meg: Number two.
CFV: What is the nicest thing someone has ever said to you?
Meg: That I inspired them. Number twelve.
CFV: Name one thing that you have in your life and that you would like to be rid of.
Meg: Anticipatory worry. Number five.
CFV: What type of person makes you uneasy?
Meg: Angry people; people who shout or argue.
CFV: The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth. Please concentrate on the following questions and try to answer as sincerely as possible. If you do not tell the truth, you will not be able to show your video.
Meg: Okay…
CFV: Why do you still bother keeping your weblog updated?
Meg: Habit, I suppose. I don’t particularly feel the need to stop, though it’s often difficult to think of what to write - or rather, how to write what I want to say. Too much audience consideration can be stifling.
CFV: What is the most unattractive trait of web users?
Meg: Inability to distinguish between the public and the truly personal. The third place is a sort of public intimacy, which is still public, after all. But it’s not the same as that which is actually personal.
CFV: Thank you. Please choose another category.
Meg:[leans forward to touch screen] Love and Passion, please.
CFV: Please choose a number from the screen.
Meg: Number one.
CFV: Have you ever been in love?
Meg: Yes. Number six.
CFV: Do you truly hate anybody?
Meg: Yes, but I try really hard not to. But yes. Number eleven.
CFV: What is your favourite place to be kissed?
Meg: Not telling.
CFV: Thank you. Please select five characteristics on the screen which best describe yourself.
Meg: [leans forward to touch words on screen] Impatient. Resourceful. Creative. Open. Kind.
CFV: Thank you.
Meg: No, thank you.

Does anybody have any idea what I’m talking about? At all?

To jog your memory: Star Test. 1989. Channel 4. A celebrity sits in front of a camera/TV screen and a well-spoken female computerised voice gets them to select from categories such as Love & Passion, Power & Glory, Bitter & Sweet, Faith & Fortune and so on. Within each category there were twenty blind questions. The celeb answered five questions from each section they chose, in order to win the opportunity to play their latest video or a clip from their new series or whatever.

I always always wanted to be on it. I liked - still like - answering questions. I liked the choosing of categories, the seemingly intimate bite-size revelations. Of course, they only featured celebrities - but I’d play along at home, in my head. Is there anything anyone would like to know?

When I was about seventeen, and at college on the west coast of Canada, I wrote letters home. Email wasn’t an option (I think there was one computer at the college for students’ use, but it was a glorified typewriter, really, with no connectivity - and besides, even if we’d managed to dial up, in 1991 there wasn’t really anything to connect to). So I wrote home to my mum and sister - long missives on ruled paper stolen from my class notes folder, continuing in pages ripped from diaries and the back of photos and brochures - little snippets of everyday life, bundled up periodically - rather than being written in one sitting (I wasn’t organised enough for that) - and then sent home.

Except we were 10km from the nearest post office, and I could never remember to get a stamp. So I just kept writing and writing and writing until I would eventually get around to sourcing one.

Meanwhile, seven thousand miles away, my mum would periodically get increasingly worried. She hadn’t heard from me in months. She hoped everything was ok. Then, sporadically, out of the blue, she’d receive a bundle of scribbled paper - a twenty nine page missive written over six weeks or so. That would keep her busy for a while, and then weeks would pass and the worry would start again.

I think the thing was that I was in the habit of writing to her regularly - it just wasn’t getting through, because it wasn’t being posted. But the very act of writing felt as if it should have been enough. By writing pretty much every day, I was keeping in contact, mentally - telling them both all about what I’d been doing, and how it felt. The rest - the delivery - was just a matter of logistics.

The problem wasn’t in the regularity of writing, but in how often it was posted. I needed to remember that once I’d written it, it wasn’t yet *out there* - that required an extra step, too. And *that* was the problem. So when she complained that I wasn’t writing regularly, I was able to say “I am - you’re just not receiving it regularly”

Is there a difference?

Alan Patridge is alive and well and currently working on bid-up.tv as an on-air auctioneer.

Of course, he calls himself Andy Hodgson, but we can tell the real McCoy when we see it - or rather, hear it. Close your eyes and he’s there.

Picture the scene: it’s Sunday night. We’ve spent the day returning a rental car and then walking home along Chiswick High Street in the sunshine, peering in estate agents’ windows and stopping for coffee along the way. Feeling completely grotty, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon collapsed on the sofa, flipping between BBC News 24, Sky News and ITV News channel. News. News. War. War. News. War. More war.

With nothing else on, and looking for a little light relief, this evening I flipped over to bid-up.tv, the auction channel, to see what I didn’t want to buy today. The answer? Plenty. But Andy Hodgson somehow kept me captivated (well, if you include having him rambling on in the background while I read the paper and folded the laundry) for an hour.

See, Andrew (Andy) Hodgson is an auction TV god. He has the capacity to witter endlessly and with seemingly boundless enthusiasm about products ranging from drill bits to diamond bracelets, and including a perplexing number of limited-edition gold-discs of Queen, Pink Floyd and Bon Jovi albums - yours for the bargain price of only �8976 (RRP). The mind boggles.

In flogging these items, he throws in all manner of personal anecdotes, random asides and inane comments. Is it the studio lights getting to him? Has he hypnotised himself into some sort of trance? How does he do it?

Other presenters on the same channel approach the auction challenge slightly differently - when flipping through the digital channels after dinner, we occasionally stumble across Peter Simon (formerly of Double Dare fame), who always looks as if he’s about to lose it, go postal. It’s easy to picture him in his dressing room before he goes on for a three hour stint, slapping himself in the side of the head and chanting motivational slogans at his reflection in the mirror - “I can do this! I’m going to do this!”.

Jenny Harrison, though endowed with a geography degree from Durham University, seems to be little more than a professional neck, modelling a long series of ugly neck jewellery while trying to supress a bad case of the giggles. Andy Hodgson, however doesn’t appear to give a toss. He just says anything he wants - regardless of relevancy or appropriateness. And it works.

Suffice to say, I’ve found a new media hero.

Either that or the Night Nurse has finally started to kick in.

The book sale is slowing down a bit, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to rave about some of the items on offer - not just for the purposes of flogging them, but because they really are worth a read.

• The Gringo Trail by Mark Mann seems like another on-the-road twenty-something travelogue of a trip around South America. And it is, mostly. Except with a painful twist. When I got this book, I picked it up on the strength of having met loads of people on the gringo trail when I was living in Bolivia, and travelling through other parts of South America. After reading a few chapters, it occurred to me that it was vaguely possible that I had actually met the people involved in this particular travelogue. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t - but the ending shocked the hell out of me all the same.
• Up North: Travels Beyond the Watford Gap by Charles Jennings irritated the hell out of me. His smug southern style seemed to indicate that he was amazed to discover that people north of London had inside bathrooms and soap. After a while of reading it with irritation, it occured that maybe this was his schtick. Blind bigotry disguised as comedy? In any case, I didn’t finish it - but P did, and tells me with authority that the guy is “an arse”.
• Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith is a bit of an anomaly. It was recommended to me by someone a few years ago and, trying to understand more about the man who made the recommendation, I dutifully picked up a copy and devoured it. It didn’t illuminate things at all, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying the book itself, which is not my usual cup of tea at all. Never been a big fan of science fiction books, but this was easier to consume - not so heavy on the fantasy, more focus on the story and the characters and the technology. The book lasted longer and was more enjoyable by far than my quasi-relationship with the man who recommended it.
• Maid of the Mist by Colin Bateman is a complete mystery. In 1999 I was living in Putney, south west London. One morning, there was a knock at the front door. I answered it, and received from the postman a package of six pristine books with dayglo covers, all signed by the author, one Colin Bateman. With them was a slip from The Guardian congratulating me on winning. I have no memory of entering any such competition. I read the books all the same, and enjoyed this one the most.
• Below the Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage by Fran Abrams was a relatively recent purchase, spurred on by her article in the Guardian Weekend of a few months beforehand. A very interesting account of her attempts in three locations to survive on the minimum wage - £4.10 at the time of publishing (though at the end of the year it’s due to go up to £4.50, apparently). This amazes me because when I was living in Edinburgh, aged 19, between college and university, I worked in a cafe for £2 an hour. I have no idea how I survived at all.

This is what the first day at war looks like:

A beautiful spring Thursday, with a clear blue sky. Blossom tumbles from the trees and eddies on the pavement.

A busy Thursday of meetings and deadlines, without time to think.

A man in the passenger seat of a red Golf, clasping a blue china mug as the vehicle speeds along the road.

A long queue at the post office, and a clerk that smells like stale beer.

Suffice to say, there’s a lot going on at the moment.

Walking home this evening, in a perfect spring sunset, I caught myself thinking about waiting. I’ve never been good at waiting. I can’t begin to imagine what it feels like to wait for an attack to come.

In lieu of patience, we turn to information - and opinion. The web is a blessing and a curse. So much information. But on the other hand, so much information.

For highlights, I recommend Channel 4 news (including Lindsey Hilsum’s evocative eyewitness reports), and especially, the always-excellent, insightful Snowmail. If you don’t already get it, do.

In 1980 and 1981, the GLC (Greater London Council, headed by Ken Livingston, now London’s Mayor) put up posters all over the city. They gave them out to schools and churches and mosques, pasted them outside tube stations and near museums and shopping centres. The posters depicted a simplified map of greater London, with blue lines drawn to demonstrate which areas were at greatest risk from flooding, should the Thames ever spill its banks.

The map showed clearly which areas would remain safe - the high ground of Notting and Muswell Hills and Hampstead, for example - and which would be glugging under water when the time came - Pimlico, great swathes of Fulham, Chelsea and South London. The maps were entitled “What To Do If London Floods” to which some cheeky scamp had generally added “swim for it” or “the breaststroke”.

I studied the maps with fascination and awe, slightly peeved that in the event that Lonodn did flood, my home would be perfectly safe, and there would therefore be no possibility of climbing out of the top floor bedroom window into an inflatable dinghy, and paddling off to school - a fantasy which occupied a great deal of my thinking time, aged seven, because it was so potentially exciting.

Of course, in those days, I neither knew nor cared about structural damage, contents insurance and the special health perils of stagnant water. Probably a good thing, too. Kids shouldn’t have their fantastic fantasies intruded upon by harsh reality like insurance.

When the Thames flood barrier was opened in 1982, I was sad, because that meant we’d never see the city flooded.

I soon switched my attention to other disasters, though. In school, aged eight, nine and ten, they teach you an awful lot about the plague, the Great Fire of London and the Blitz. Of all of these, I became preoccupied with the Blitz: incredibly worried about the possibility of London being bombed.

Bear in mind that this was at a point when there was a lot of talk about nuclear weapons and what to do in the event of a nuclear attack (paint your windows white, do something inventive with a door up against a wall, and hide, as I recall). This was the eighties, the time of Thatcher and Reagan and When the Wind Blows.

Nuclear war was (and is!) petrifying. But the stories about the Blitz caused more worry to me. Why? Because the main bit of information that I carried away from my lessons about the bombing raids on London was that when the bombers came, most people were OK because they hid in the depths of the tube stations. Sorted.

Except that my local tube station was Ladbroke Grove, on the Metropolitan (now Hammersmith and City) Line. Above ground. The next nearest was Latimer Road. Above ground. Westbourne Park, Royal Oak, Goldhawk Road - all of them, above ground. Fuck. Where would we go? How would we stay safe?

The worry about where we would go in the event of bombing worried me for years, until I grew old enough to realise that the threat had receded, and that in the event of a nuclear blast in London, we’d all be buggered anyway.

I’ve recently started worrying again.

Acting as a bookmark between the pages of Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, this thumbnail sketch of a man in a bar in Bolivia.

The paper is a Cacho* score sheet, distributed in bars and sponsored by the major singani brand, San Pedro. People always used to tell me that “se puede huele las uvas en el singani San Pedro” but frankly, I’d be amazed if you could smell anything after a couple of glasses of that stuff. Let’s just say it’s an acquired taste. Much much more palatable when you turn it into Chuflay (which involves mixing it with lemon juice, ice and fizzy water/soda water).

I’m no artist, but it’s quite a good likeness of Richard - when I compare it with photos of the real thing, at least. Perhaps the alcohol and the altitude conspired to make me a better artist?

I wonder where Richard is now. Probably still playing cacho in a Bolivian bar.

* I got very good at Cachito - so good that I kept winning bottles of evil-tasting singani. I blame the luck of the wrist.

Say, for example, it’s your birthday. And say, hypothetically speaking, you were sent flowers, which arrived in the office and brightened your day immensely. As you were walking home, you might find yourself in a quandary about how to carry them, without looking ridiculous.

In the process of this gentle perambulation, you might realise that there are in fact six main carrying stances:

1. The Bride

Stance: Single or double-handed, bouquet held in front of the body.

Notes: Tendency to look like blushing bride. Must avoid slow-walking, or wearing of white clothing.

2. Nonchalant

Stance: Single-handed, bouquet held upright but tilted at a slight angle.

Notes: Pose suggests that the holder is unaware that they are holding a lovely bouquet of flowers, or that this sort of thing happens all the time. “What’s that? Nice flowers? Eh? Oh, you mean these flowers? Yes, I suppose they are…” NB: Can play havoc with weak wrists.

3. The Sweep

Stance: Single-handed, bouquet grasped around the base and facing downwards.

Notes: Signals embarrassment about receiving or carrying flowers. Usually accompanied by intense blushes. Very effective for de-petalling the blooms, as downwards-orientation and pendulum motion conspire with gravity to cause petals to drop off.

4. The Torch

Stance: Single-handed, bouquet held upright, slightly aloft and at a right angle to the body, but at some distance.

Notes: Usually adopted by boyfriends/husbands, this posture signals that the carrier has bought the flowers for someone else, and is merely conveying them to their intended recipient, plus do you really think I’d be caught dead carrying flowers around in the street? Do you? Well, do you? What sort of bloke do you think I am? etc etc. NB: Can be painful on upper arms/shoulders if used for a long time.

5. The Award

Stance: Single-handed grasp, with bouquet resting in the crook of the opposite arm.

Notes: The award for best flower carrying posture goes to….*drum roll*…. whoever carries their flowers like this! Impossible not to seem as if you are receiving an award, or holding a large, florid baby.

6. The Microphone

Stance: Single-handed, bouquet held upright and slightly aloft directly in front of the body, near the face.

Notes: Can seem as if you are about to break into karaoke, depending on the type of flowers. Avoid bulbous blooms.