About Vietnam

I have recently returned from a trip for work (and pleasure) to Vietnam and Cambodia. I have been to South East Asia before but this was my first time in these two countries.
I shall write this time about Vietnam, where I spent eight days.

I was working in the capital, Hanoi and apart from there visited only one other place, the ravishingly beautiful natural site of Halong Bay. As I did not have too much free time, it was a deliberate decision of mine to concentrate on only these two places. As I get older I prefer to dawdle and soak up impressions rather than to rush around: quality rather than quantity. My visit fell into three parts: a pure tourist visiting one of the most popular locations in the country for three days; a visiting teacher training young Vietnamese interpreters and in turn being their guest for three days; and a visiting official come to interpret at a high level international meeting for two days.

In such a short time I wouldn’t claim to have won any deep insights into the country, but would like to share with you some initial impressions.

Halong Bay is quite simply one of the great natural wonders of the world. Hundreds of Karst limestone small islands jut up out of the calm waters of the bay, covered in lush vegetation, worn away into strange shapes, providing constantly changing scenery as you cruise among them, in all their myriad colours of grey, sometimes black stained rock, the many shades of the greenery creeping over them, the turquoise sea, the never ending receeding fading green-blue silhouettes of distant islets, while In amongst small fishing boats are rowed by locals in conical hats. You couldn’t devise anything more picturesque.
As this is what everyone wants to see, the tourist industry has geared up to meet the demand so there are numerous boats, some quite luxurious, to take the punters cruising; and let’s face it, it’s the only way you’re going to get to see something. When I was there it was low season so many boats were moored up, but I could imagine it getting very busy. I opted for an up-market “junk” with twenty-eight berths, though not all full, operated by Indochina Sails and I found myself in good company and well looked after by a very pleasant and efficient crew. The whole operation ran like clockwork without seeming rushed.

On the middle day, as I had chosen the longer two nights aboard option, just three of us transfered to a smaller boat from which we were later able to do some kayaking. This was for me the highlight as we slipped away from the chugging of the engines and were able to paddle through caves into hidden lagoons, over which echoed birdsong and shrieks of monkeys. It was quite majestic. There are also plenty of caves with stalactite formations, though the smaller ones you explore with a torch in hand squeezing through narrow passages are more exciting. than the larger floodlit ones.

Quite a few fishing families live in the bay, not on the islands but in floating villages, one of which we visited as locals rowed up offering us sea-shells for sale. Our guide was keen to show us a floating school, to demonstrate that the villagers were being well treated by the government. Ho Chi Minh smiled out from over the blackboard.

With all the tourists and boats there are some parts of the bay where the water has washed floating rubbish together in an unseemly reminder that man has the capacity to mar any earthly paradise. The Vietnamese need to be careful that over-exploitation doesn’t spoil this world heritage site. One of my students in Hanoi also remarked that twenty years ago it was much quieter and the water was much cleaner. I didn’t go in the sea to swim nearly as much as I would elsewhere - there were also some mean looking small jellyfish. So instead I sat on the deck admiring and painting the scenery.

It’s a three hour white-knuckle minibus ride back to Hanoi from Halong Bay. I’m not surprised that it’s illegal for foreigners to rent a car in Vietnam: I certainly couldn’t cope. On the two lane main road, there are push-bikes and motor-bikes everywhere on both sides in both directions and slow moving lorries are overtaken in the face of oncoming traffic in a game of brinkmanship . It’s better to look out of the side window at the passing paddy fields worked by hand, with Asian cows and buffalo standing around.

And so I returned to Hanoi which I had left early in the morning three days before for the peace of Halong Bay, jet-lagged and without really having seen it on arrival. The capital of Vietnam has officially 3.4 million inhabitants but probably anything up to nearly twice that. It’s a big sprawling bustling modern Asian city.
I had chosen to treat myself to the old French colonial grandeur of the Hotel Metropole which is conveniently located near the central Hoan Kiem lake.
I checked in and then sauntered out, crossing a square pausing to watch some men playing a version of badminton where the shuttlecock is kicked, teenagers practising dance moves to a ghetto-blaster and children playing while their parents chatted on benches. I then wanted to cross over the road to the lakeside.
As a Westerner the first thing that strikes you about Hanoi is the sheer profusion of motorbikes. There are not many private cars, but most people have graduated from push bikes, so that what you have is a sea of countless small motorbikes carrying anything from one to four people and loads of all shapes and sizes. They come in a constant stream; it’s pointless waiting for a break in the traffic: you just have to take your courage in your hands and set off undaunted across the street at a steady predictable pace. Miraculously they see you and avoid you, though it’s a little unnerving at first. In fact the amazing thing in this fluid anarchy is that there appear to be no accidents and no one loses their temper. We in the West could all learn a thing or two from the Vietnamese about how to keep cool in traffic.
After this initial excitement a contemplative sit at the Ngoc Son temple on an island in the lake seemed appropriate, acquainting myself with the omnipresent fragrant “frangipanier” tree which the French brought from the West Indies and watching old men playing Chinese chequers.

Hanoi is actually quite a pleasant city once you get used to the motorbike traffic. There are lots of trees, lakes and parks, with people strolling about, though shops and eateries spilling out onto the pavements sometimes make it difficult to get by.
The old town is quite fascinating. I was initially disappointed at its tattiness and lack of interesting historic architecture, but it more than makes up for that in its liveliness. Every street has its own particular trade and once you get beyond those catering for tourists hunting for souvenirs and cheap clothes, you stumble into a genuine oriental world of thriving enterprise and craftsmanship. I particularly liked the street of lamps at night and by day the street of bamboo canes and ladders, of metal workers with fancy bird-cages aloft, of florists, of dried food shops, to mention but a few as any merchandise you can think of seems to have a dedicated street. This is also the case further out where more modern shops vie with each other selling the same wares side by side all displayed outside - fans, sinks, televisions, shop-window dummies etc.

In the evening I took in the entertaining show at the national water puppet theatre. The beautifully made wooden puppets appear to glide across the surface of a water “stage” and are in fact operated by long underwater poles moved by the puppeteers who stand behind the curtain in the water. A series of short vignettes accompanied by live traditional music illustrate everyday scenes of rural life and legends.

Then in the morning it was time for work. First though I had breakfast across the street as it wasn’t included at the hotel. This took the form of “pho”. “Pho”, or noodle soup, is the national dish and it comes mainly in beef or chicken versions. The taste is in the stock of course and you can put in extra fresh flavourings such as coriander, lemon grass and spring onion. Pho is simple, tasty and nourishing giving you plenty of liquid which you need in the heat: it makes for a great breakfast.
The other ubiquitous dish is “nem” or spring rolls, both fried and fresh with a variety of fillings and sauces to dip in. In Brussels, especially in my neighbourhood, there are a lot of Vietnamese restaurants, but as always once you’re in the country the food is not quite the same. Most of the food I had in Vietnam was simple and enjoyable, but for gourmet treats it was necessary to move up market to more fancy restaurants, which I guess is the same in most countries.

A driver then picked me up to take me to the Vietnamese Diplomatic Academy which is where the new interpreting course is run. The SCIC has in the past trained Vietnamese interpreters in Brussels, but now they have people who have been trained they are running their own course in Hanoi. Since I was going to be working in a meeting in Hanoi and I do quite a bit of teaching in European schools of interpreting, I had been asked to visit the school in Hanoi for two days.
There are eight students on the course, seven women and one man, who has since married one of the women! The students are all civil servants in their twenties who work in various ministries and government offices and are released a few half days a week to attend the course. They then have to do their regular job on top of that. I had at first been taken aback at having to work on the Saturday, but it was the only way they could fit in the extra hours while I was there.
In the end it was a hugely positive experience as they were all hard-working and enthusiastic. It was interesting for me to have to adapt my speech material to make sure it wasn’t too euro-centric and accessible to people from a significantly different cultural background. Of course, I don’t know any Vietnamese, so we mainly worked by sending one student out during the original speech by me in English, who would then come back in to listen to the Vietnamese consecutive interpretation and then put that back into English for my benefit. We could then analyse together with some amusement how far we had come from the original by the second version and what the causes of deviation were. It’s a surprisingly effective way of teaching.

For lunch we walked along to a buffet at a nearby hotel (I declined a ride postillion on the teacher’s motorbike) after which I was in serious need of a coffee.
One thing I hadn’t expected about Vietnam is that you can get a really good cup of coffee there. Vietnam is in fact the world’s second biggest coffee producer after Brazil, though most of it is robusta not arabica. It is served in dinky little aluminium filters over your cup and you wait for it to drip through. The result is a very strong espresso which has a full earthy taste and a kick like a mule.
As for Vietnamese tea, I found it too strong unless drunk iced diluted and unsweetened - when it is very refreshing. The Vietnamese also drink plenty of beer, spelled “bia”, some of which is bottled and some a light draught ale from small breweries called “bia hoi”. It’s made from rice but you wouldn’t know from the taste.
It was after several beers by the lake next to the academy after our final class on the second day, that four of my students decided what they would do with my Sunday.

First I was taken by Trang to the Temple of Literature which is not only Hanoi’s prettiest old monument but actually also a place where locals go of a Sunday. As its name suggests it was not only a temple but as it were Hanoi’s first university from the 11th century where would-be mandarins were schooled in Confucianism. So today it is a place where students go to pray for good luck in their exams and classes of schoolchildren come for end of year ceremonies. It was very busy and there were many activities going on including Chinese caligraphy on red good luck scrolls and demonstrations of traditional music. I was quite fascinated by one instrument, the single string monochord which is played with one hand plucking with a plectrum and the other operating a lever which is like the whammy-bar on a Fender electric guitar varying the tension on the string. The resulting eerie wailing is not dissimilar.
We then met up with Duc who had brought along her six year old son who was interested in many things and especially the big ceremonial bell you could stand inside.
We progressed to near the immaculately kept Ho Chi Minh mausoleum which we merely observed from afar sipping fresh sugar cane juice, and thence at my request to the One Pillar Pagoda, another popular shrine with locals.
We were joined by Vinh and Phuong, the married couple, for fast pho and a welcome cool sit inside.
In the afternoon we went to a silk village some way out of the centre where we looked at some silk-worms and looms before browsing the shops. I was the only foreigner here among Vietnamese shopping for clothes.
It was a lovely day out doing the kinds of things those who live in Hanoi might do on a weekend. It was nice to have the little boy along too; he gave the proceedings a family outing kind of feel. I felt there had been an exchange between us which gave my visit a much deeper human dimension than that of the mere tourist buying a service. By teaching them for two days I had given them something and in return they had shown me something of their city and way of life. Everywhere around us people seemed friendly, relaxed, talkative and to be enjoying the simple pleasures of life on a sunny Sunday.

That evening it was back into official work mode. First I had to transfer out of the centre to the more anonymous Intercontinetal hotel. My three colleagues and I learned at a late evening briefing the good news that we would not have to work until the next afternoon and the bad news that we would be taken early in the morning to sort out our tickets for the onward government charter flight to Phnom Penh, which we discovered we now had to pay for by ourselves. This involved being taken to the Viet Com Bank (!) to make a transfer and on to the Vietnam Airlines office in the centre. At least once that was done I was free to resume strolling around the lake and into the old town, for once during the hours of daylight when the central market was also open.

We were duly ferried in the afternoon to the National Convention Centre along streets lined with police, for once disciplining the unruly motorbikes, so that official motorcades could pass unimpeded. The NCC is a vast recent modern building which due to its size had to be built miles from anywhere. Its scale can only be described as pharaonic, though it is not unattractive. The government here is seeking in classic state socialist mode to impress the visiting foreigner. It certainly is impressive, but also quite impersonal. There was no chance here of getting a good Vietnamese bar coffee. The air-conditioning in the well appointed but windowless office we had been given was positively icy.
This was the stuff of big international meetings: men in suits delivered to enormous out of town AC conference centres in AC limousines from AC 5 star hotels; barely coming into contact with the local weather, let alone the local people. It's all very polite and efficient but as I say quite impersonal.
There was one nice moment when one of the students, Anh, who works for the Foreign Ministry sought me out and we had our picture taken in our smart clothes in the main meeting room standing in front of the 46 flags and the grand inscription "ASEM 9th Foreign Ministers Meeting".
The Asia Europe Meeting brings together the EU countries and all the major Asian countries.
The meeting itself was quite fun as these things go, what with North Korea having tested a nuclear weapon that very morning and Burma having put on trial Aung San Suu Kyi to the general embarrassment of its neighbours.
When it was all over at the press conference on the second day, I was struck by the total absence of any prying questions from the media – a far cry from what we're used to in Europe.
For all its economic vibrancy and contented population, Vietnam remains a single party state. I guess in many ways it is not unlike its huge neighbour China in granting much economic but little political freedom to its people.

The country is clearly dynamic and going places. The Vietnamese seem busy and purposeful, but not aggressive. Things work and run on time, there are no apparent shortages of anything. There are already 84 million Vietnamese and the population is young and growing fast. Vietnam is definitely a member of the South East Asian tigers club and on the way up.
People ask if I noticed any sign of the war. The answer is no: that's all a long time ago, most people were born well after it. You get the impression that it's a peaceful, hard-working country where people are quietly proud of their recent history: they threw out two colonial powers, France and the USA, beating their superior forces by their patience, ingenuity and resorcefulness. The Vietnamese have a certain can-do, stand-alone dignity, glad to help if asked, but not there to beg.

So from this brief visit to the capital and one of their places of great natural beauty, I am left keen to return to Vietnam.
Above all, I am glad to have met and spent time with my young Vietnamese colleagues.

About Tuscany

Tuscany is quintessential Italy.
“And where is there, other than Italy ?” - to quote a friend.

Tuscany is where Italian was born as a language, in the sense that of the many Italian successor dialects to Latin, Tuscan was the one that came to impose itself as standard Italian not least because the great city states were Tuscan.
Dante, the greatest Italian poet was, after all, Tuscan.

Tuscany is perhaps the Italian region with the greatest wealth of historic artistic towns and cities, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo - to mention the most obvious. It also has some of Italy’s most striking landscapes, the beautiful hills often topped with old villages and castles, the characteristic tall cypress trees punctuating the vista, a landscape shaped by man over millenia, yet still with wild wooded areas. Tuscany also boasts excellent food and fine wines such as Chianti or Brunello di Montalcino.
Tuscany deserves its reputation as one of the best regions of Italy to visit.

I first explored Tuscany in the summer of 1977 when, while hitch-hiking, I was fortunate enough to fall in with a young man from Antibes as I was trying to get from Pisa to San Gimignano. He was also there to explore but had wheels in the form of a Renault 4 and he had a tent. As we were both glad of a travelling companion we ended up staying together for five days. This was when with his help I first started to learn some Italian.
You really need a vehicle of your own to make the most of Tuscany and get to some of the places off the beaten track.
Clara and I took my parents on a week’s driving tour of Tuscany over twenty years ago, that time staying one night in San Gimignano in style in a fine hotel on the main square, not to mention also Siena and Bagno Vignoni.

My oldest Italian friend, Umberto Cini, who I did my interpreter training with, is a Tuscan from Livorno.
His sister-in-law runs an agriturismo, that is farm-based holiday rooms and flats with food if required, near Volterra. So this seemed a natural choice for a destination, when my father asked me a couple of years ago to come up with a place for a gîte-style holiday for my parents, brother and sister and partners. The project took some time to come to fruition but was finally realized last week.

The farm at Statiano turned out to be in the deepest and most picturesque countryside. Everything is still lush and green at this time of year with a profusion of wild flowers. The buildings are very tastefully renovated and comfortable while preserving their rustic character. Our host Tina was very helpful with advice on excursions and, when we ate in, the local home-cooking food and the farm’s wine were of high quality, including even wild boar one evening.

Sadly the weather wasn’t up to much, confirming that even in the Mediterranean one should “ne’er cast a clouth before April’s out”. It rained at some point every day except Friday when we could finally do some serious sitting about outside in the sun in the grounds around the house admiring, and in my case painting the views. Even so, with the exception of a planned evening stroll around Volterra where we ended up sheltering in a café from a grim 9°C downpour, the weather didn’t prevent us from getting out and about.

Driving up from Pisa airport on the Saturday we struck lucky at a roadside bar/family restaurant in the countryside which hadn’t really intended to serve any customers but did the eight of us proud at a table parallel to their own family’s with a lunch of local prosciutto, wild boar salami, their own pecorino cheese, pickled wild mushrooms, shell your own fresh beans and other delicacies. This rather set the tone for a week of gastronomic Tuscan eating. After arriving at the farm and sleeping all of this off, we took a walk to explore the immediate vicinity, seeing a wealth of cyclamens and finding porcupine spines, though the animal itself was to elude us all week.

Umberto and Silvia (Tina’s sister) came up from Livorno to see us on the Sunday. Umberto, ever a mine of local information, showed us the nearby hill villages of Micciano and Montegemoli, where another ourstanding lunch was had and we later strolled ourselves around Montecatini VC. In a way being off the tourist track seeing these delightful villages is every bit as satisfying as visiting the more famous, and objectively more beautiful, yet in practice overcrowded Tuscan destinations.

This proved to be the case on Monday when we revisited Volterra (where twenty years ago we had seen the square occupied by colourful flag throwers and thunderous drummers) in the morning and San Gimignano in the afternoon. San Gimignano with its elegant towers is still as pretty as always but it has really got very busy.

So instead on Tuesday we did a bit of a Carducci trail to the 4km long avenue of old cypress trees leading up to Bolgheri and the hill town of Castagneto where it was very quiet and also very wet, so we sheltered in a wine bar to sample some local products. Later down at the coast where we had a light fish lunch in a place overlooking the sea, it stopped raining and we visited Populonia climbing the fortress tower for the view towards Elba and up the coast., before a brief look over the fence at the Etruscan burial mounds down by the sea.

Wednesday saw the younger generation more active on a beautiful 8km walk along the track that mainly follows the ridge from Micciano to Querceto where we had left a vehicle to get us back to the farm. It was easy going with some great views. The highlight was an astonishing encounter with a heavily pregnant semi-wild pig that wandered up the track towards us where we stood stock still for ten minutes, as she approached us, sniffed us and then decided it was safe enough to walk past us.

On Thursday we took quite a long drive to revisit Siena. While just strolling about the large old town is rewarding in itself, as too the experience of a leisurely lunch on a terrace in the glorious PIazza del Campo, some of Siena’s geatest glories are indoors in the many renaissance frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico, the Cathedral and the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala.

On the finally warm and sunny Friday the younger ones strolled around the hill village of Libbiano, which while appearing to be a stone’s throw across the valley from Micciano is actually a 12km tortuous drive from it, before doing a three hour walk along the track into the Monterufoli nature reserve, though sadly no wild animals bigger than squirrels were forthcoming this time.

And so all too quickly a varied and enjoyable week in rural Tuscany was at an end, leaving only a desire for more in better weather.

But as with any holiday, what really counted was the company and it was a great experience to have the whole family together for a week in such a pleasant and amicable atmosphere.

About history

History may at first seem a strange subject for “about being here” which seeks to describe and interpret here and now. However, our present is infomed by our past. We are what we were; the sum total of our experience. Regular readers of “about being here” will have noticed how I often give a brief history or biography of my past life in leading up to describe my present one.
Likewise our society is the sum total of its past. To understand where we are today it is helpful to know where we came from. So history is a valuable subject.

I have been prompted to write about history by having just read Graham Swift’s exccellent novel “Waterland”. Its main charcter, Tom Crick, is a history teacher struggling to come to terms with his own past and at the same time puzzling about the very nature of history. One of the root meanings of “history” he says is “an inquiry” (as in “natural history”): we delve into the past seeking explanations. At the same time history as we like it presented is a “story” (the same word etymologically) a narrative that takes us from A to B. History is one way of satisfying our craving for stories - and what happened next?
In Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” there is a memorable moment in a mock Oxbridge entrance interview where the student is asked “What is history?” and gives the answer of unintended profundity: “It’s just one f***ing thing after another”.

All history is related with the benefit of hindsight and from the point of view of the victor or survivor. Today, for example, post cold war, the narrative of the Western world describes Communism as a failed experiment. All societies devise their own more or less official history to explain why they are where they are and to justify themselves, looking backwards from a very specific point in time. So the Communist sates’ history described in Marxist terms how human progress inevitably led to their ideal society. Often societies then indeed prescribe the teaching of that history to their schoolchildren so that they will fit into that society. Even if in our “western democratic society” the teaching of history is less prescriptive, it still embodies a consensual view of our present society’s interpretation and explanation of its origins.

History is by its very nature selective. The historian selects the facts that best explain where he is now. E.H. Carr’s “What is history?” is very good on what is a historical fact. Every day there are countless events but only some will later turn out to have had relevance in deciding the future. Obviously, our own lives are just the same, at one and the same time routine and utterly chaotic, it is only many years down the line that we can attribute importance to an event: I met so-and-so, who later became my wife, as opposed to I met so-and-so whom I never saw again. A logical order is only read into what happened afterwards. Our own invented biography and society’s invented history represent an attempt to make something meaningful out of life. The exercise is at once artificial and reassuring. Above all it tells the story which we like to hear.

History was my third subject at A-level at school. Actually I had wanted to do Art, for which I like to think I have a certain flair, but it was deemed to be not academic enough for a boy aiming to get into Oxford. At our first A-level lesson our teacher, Mr Kilty (who was later to appear on Mastermind on the TV, special subject hagiography), gave us the good news that “history is a slog subject”. There would be mountains of books to read. And so it turned out: I think I spent the same amount of time working on history as on French and German put together. In class we were given the factual outline and then encouraged to read widely. We soon found out that different historians had different views, explanations and interpretations of the same facts. Some of their names I can still remember: A.J.P. Taylor, E. Hobsbawm, E. Thompson, J.H. Plumb,, A. Cobham, R. Blake, to name a few. It was a good education because we were taught to analyse, compare and take what was useful to write an essay.
History like many other subjects is vast and boundless, so you have to specialize. We did 18th and 19th century British and European, (usefully supplemented by the American Revolution), stopping at the causes of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In retrospect it was a very useful area as it immediately preceded what was on our general knowledge radar about the twentieth century. It is a period that covers the building of the modern nation state and I have found that very useful as a background to working in contemporary European politics. I certainly feel that I could not do my job safely without an awareness of history and consequent sensitivities.

I went on to study literature at university, which is now predominantly what I read, but I still enjoy the occasional history book.

I think my favourite is Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. I hasten to add that so far I have read only the first three of the six volumes and even then some of the chapters in abridgement. The point is that Gibbon’s massive opus takes us from the apogee of the Roman Empire, as he saw it, at the time of Augustus all the way through to the fall of Constantinople, or the Empire in the East, in 1453. Writing as a European in the late 18thC, that is for his time almost a universal history. Gibbon is to be relished for his Augustan English prose, which is an absolute delight. He is also very funny in his irony. The historian is always present and we learn as much about Gibbon and his Enlightenment age as we do about his subject. I think that is fine as it is clear that it is his view, something which some historians try to avoid, dressing up their account as the only objective version. Gibbon also has an over-arching vision, he knows where he is going. His is the story of a gradual undermining of the old Roman civic virtues, not least by the introduction of Christianity. I like my essayist to have a clear argument, I can always disagree with him if I want to.
Above all, Gibbon has the good historian’s knack of telling a good story, with an eye for the kind of detail that captures the reader’s attention, the anecdotal and outrageous that illustrate character. He is good at what all readers of history relish alongside the story, that is information that gives some insight into daily life, the human element.
As the title tells us “Decline and Fall” is a story of decay, human failings, baddies. This is the kind of thing that readers of history (and literature) are really interested in.

The kind of history that would have us believe in relentless progress towards an ever better society is a bore and rings false. Life just isn’t like that. Things go round in cycles. Mankind does not really progress. We don’t actually learn from history. We make the same mistakes, because each generation has to learn from experience for itself. History repeats itself; some say, first as tragedy, then as farce. It’s recognizing ourselves in the recurrent cycles that brings history to life for us.

History tells us how we got where we are, but at the same time that we have not really come that far.

About languages

I am a linguist by training and profession, so languages, learning them and using them, have played an important part in my life.
For someone who as a boy grew up in Yorkshire in the 1960’s that may not seem an immediately obvious outcome. Yet paradoxically in today’s age of greater globalization, communication and international travel with potentially greater exposure to foreign languages, language learning is actually taken less seriously in England now than it was then.

I didn’t really encounter a foreign language until I started learning French at grammar school when I was eleven, and even then it was taught by an Englishman as a somewhat academic exercise, not that different from the Latin I started at the same time. Then at thirteen, in the rather odd way that schools are organized and curriculum options are offered, I had to choose between German, Ancient Greek or biology as an additional subject. I chose German, which is why I am where I am today.
My choice was inspired by the fact that we had some new neighbours in Ilkley who were Dutch. Willy and Evert spoke Dutch to each other and their dog, but English to us. They knew other languages too. They had a son who was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. We all watched the news footage from there in May 1968 with some trepidation. Their house was full of strange and different smells (Dutch cooking, coffee and other things no doubt that I couldn’t place) and objects from the many different countries where they had lived. It all seemed very exciting to me, so I decided modern languages was for me.
After all, I was already precociously good at French; about the same time I got my teacher, Tony Kingham, to explain to me the tenses we had not yet come across in class so I could read Astérix books.

The first lessons of the new subject, German, were an intimidating experience. We actually had a native speaker. Dr H.E.H.A. Krips had been a brilliant young judge in Vienna at the time of Anschluss and decided to get out while he could. For his sins, he ended up for the rest of his life trying to foster an interest in German in young schoolboys in Bradford. He was the oldest teacher in the school in my day and his nickname (for all masters had nicknames) was “Daddy” which spoke volumes, as he was well loved. Daddy Krips actually had a radically modern approach to language teaching and spoke to us only in German for the first three classes - to our total bewilderment. He then relented and taught us what it all meant in English.
Later, in the sixth form, for our cultural improvement he once brought along a record of some Schubert settings of Goethe (which I later learned he used to sing himself as a young man). By then we were a small group of eight long-haired 70’s teenagers interested in progressive rock music. Unfortunately, at the melodramatic piano flourishes that open “der Erlkönig” my good friend David Berry subsided into a fit of wild laughter. “Ach! You know nossing!” Dr Krips burst out deeply disappointed.
It was a privileged way to learn German and we got very good at it.

In the meantime French continued apace and we had also been given an opportunity (which we were not allowed to refuse) of learning Russian from scratch to O-level in one year with Mr Lloyd. Sadly in those Soviet days there was little opportunity of contact with Russians and the printed matter that issued from the USSR was diabolical, though I did treasure a copy of “Ogonyok” which had a rather fetching woman tractor driver on its cover. So my Russian lapsed. I periodically try to revive it, it’s a kind of seven year itch; but we tend to part company when I get stuck on verbs of motion. I’ve not given up on the idea totally and a schoolboy knowledge of Russian has often helped me out in spotting key words in countries.where other Slav languages are spoken.

I won my scholarship to Oxford to read French and German in the autumn of 1976, which in those days left me with what would now be called a short gap year from January to September during which I went to live in France. I had been given a teaching job until the summer in a lycée in a town called l’Isle-Jourdain in a department called the Gers somewhere in the South - it took a lot of finding in the atlas. Although only 30 km from Toulouse, it was in fact spiritually miles from anywhere I had known.
My cousin Sheila had married a Frenchman a few years before and I had once spent a fortnight with them based in Clermont-Ferrand. I had also interrailed for a month partly in France with a friend from Bradford one previous summer. However, nothing had prepared me for the total immersion I was about to get into deepest France and the reality of French as she is spoken there.
Spending a lot of time initially with my pupils, some of whom from repeating years were actually older than me, I eagerly relearned a parallel language of “argot” and idiomatic expressions. I’m sure I learned far more French from them than they ever learned English from me. Moreover, all of this was in a strong twangy Southern accent. I remember my first friendly encounter with the school chef who was to give me left-overs from school lunches (actually quite good food) in a metal container or “gamelle” - a new word to start with - that I had been given lest I starve in the evening. He asked “Tu es venu avec le traing? Tu veux du paing? Tu veux du ving?”
South-Western French was all I spoke for weeks on end and people talked a lot. At the end of our first translation class at Christ Church that autumn, Dr Robinson tried to make some French coversation and the whole class was taken aback by the torrent of what sounded like a French peasant that issued from my mouth.
I have lived for more than half my life in French speaking countries and speaking French comes as second nature to me, though without the Southern accent these days. However, out of a certain snobbery I have never gone the whole hog on the Belgian accent. Since I had the grammar thrashed into me from a young age I also have no trouble writing French, probably with fewer spelling mistakes than the average Frenchman. The difference between spoken and written French is huge and to learn to write it after having learned to speak it is a major effort the progress of which I followed with curiosity in my own children. Given how I was taught it though, I learned to speak it after having learned to write it.

I’ve never felt as inside German. I lived in Germany for ten months in 1979-1980 in a small town called Kamen on the extreme edge of the Ruhr. I travelled about the rest of West Germany a lot at the weekends as there wasn’t much doing there (“tote Hose”), though often to see other student friends from England. I was never as utterly immersed in German as I had been in Fench in l’Isle-Jourdain. My spoken German has never been as good as my spoken French and I always find reading German a bit of an effort. It is, however, a language I enjoy immensely because of the way it builds up words out of clear components of meaning. I love signs like “Verkehrswidrig abgestellte Fahrzeuge werden kostenpflichtig abgeschleppt” (illegally parked vehicles will be towed at the owner’s expense - though the sheer poetry is lost in translation). Interpreting from German is great fun, an intellectual challenge syntactically and usually something the audience is interested in given Germany’s importance.

It was while in Kamen that I started Italian evening classes for something to do and by way of preparing to visit that Easter Simon Porter who was working in Naples. The level in the group was not very high. After six weeks the teacher suggested I move up to year two. For two years after that I did no Italian, but when I came to train as an interpreter in Brussels, there were people working with Italian in my group, so I started to pick up a lot hearing it interpreted during exercises. I made Italian friends who talked a lot among themselves in Italian and who were always very encouraging if I tried to join in with my rudimentary Italian. Eventually I came to marry an Italian. So I now speak Italian more spontaneously than I speak German, but my knowledge of it is not so deep or literary. As I mainly learned Italian by listening to it and speaking it, I cannot write it without having to look up every other word to check its spelling.

Given the large number of languages we work with at the SCIC (the European Commission’s interpreting service - see “About interpreting”) there has always been considerable pressure, both spoken from management and unspoken from my peers, to learn new languages for professional purposes. When I rejoined the staff in 1992 I was very keen to learn Spanish properly. I had a passing acquaintance with it from numerous holidays in Spain and also more recently Cuba and Mexico and it had always attracted me as an important world and literary language. Since I already had French and Italian it was not going to be too hard. However, non-linguists may be surprised to hear that there is one hell of a lot of vocabulary to learn if you’re going to use Spanish (or any other language) professionally, even if you’re on relatively familiar ground gramatically. I was also very motivated by the prospect of having three months off work living in Spain, a country I like very much; I find there is a human and social side to life there that is very appealing. Needless to say Spanish remains to this day the least strong of my professional languages and I am somewhat diffident about speaking it because of lack of practice.

Speaking a language is really like playing a musical instrument: you only get and remain good at it by constant practice. However, if you’re going to get anywhere you just have to get stuck in, no matter how inelegantly at first.

Since my addition of Spanish in 1995, I have not sought to learn another language for professional purposes.
Without a strong personal motivation (eg partner’s language) I can’t seem to find the time and energy for what is such a huge task. Also I guess I just feel like doing different activities after a day of working with languages.
Moreover, I have little professional motivation to learn another language as I know it would make little real difference to my career (and pay) given my present seniority; it could potentially affect adversely the range of meetings I do in the light of the language combinations required for them, if I were to become “too useful” elsewhere; and the obscurer the language, the less it is actually spoken and the less you get to practise it, while the higher the responsibility that goes with it as colleagues depend on you for relay (double translation).
Having said that, when I’m actually in a country where the language is new to me I’m brimming with curiosity and want to learn as much of it as I can to be able to read what’s around me and try out phrases on the locals, if only the standard pleasantries of everyday life. I have a shelf full of Teach Yourself books and various accompanying recordings on my iPod. But it’s strictly for pleasure, not business. In this way I have a smattering of Dutch and Catalan and know a few words of Greek, Portuguese, Croatian and Turkish among others. When I say a few words, that is what I mean, a few words. As a language professional I know only too well what the different levels of proficiency are.

For those of us who are actually fluent in other languages it is interesting to observe objectively how we use our different languages.
I’m writing this blog in English because English is my native or mother tongue. Engish will always be and can only ever be the language I know best and therefore my language of choice for expressing my thoughts.
The top level of my consciousness can be occupied by another language, most easily French, as the phrases and words may in that way be ready to be released spontaneously to interact with my environment and those I speak to. In that sense I may “think” in other languages.
Although I rarely remember my dreams, I know I dream in a variety of languages too and have been heard in my sleep to speak in them.
However, I believe I am only capable of deep and original thought in English. I know this because when engaged in a more profound conversation in another language I become aware of the fact that I start having to translate my new ideas from English rather than being able to draw on a ready to use stock of phrases in the other language.

I also do mental arithmetic in English. That is not because it is deep thought, but because as a boy I learned the word patterns for it in English. I don’t actually have a mathematical mind but a literary one: in my head I hear “four plus six is ten”; I don’t see 4 + 6 = 10.

English is the language I prefer to read in and the only one in which such careful use of language as in poetry can have its full resonance. I understand the words in other languages, but they don’t carry the same emotional charge. Words do not exist in isolation but have acquired from shared use over many centuries endless connotations and cultural references that the foreigner is incompletely aware of.
This insufficient awareness of the baggage of a language is why it is very easy to sound rude in another language. It is very easy to pick up swearwords in another language and be quite foul-mouthed, but it is really a very bad idea, because you can never really know the force of what you are saying. I admit I often sin myself in this respect.

In fact we speak other languages at our peril and to our disadvantage, as we lose precision in conveying our thoughts. This is why, at a negotiating political level, interpretation remains important, even if the exchange could take place in simple English as a lingua franca.
However, the fact that we are ready to venture into someone else’s linguistic terrain is usually perceived as a gesture of good will by the listener because of this readiness to expose ourselves and to get closer to them (which is why in some meetings delegates prefer not to use the interpretation even if it is available).
There is also a converse argument that using a language other than your own forces you to reformulate your ideas in a more direct way which can improve their clarity, which has been a choice made by some writers (Beckett, Conrad). However, I don’t think it’s my case.

The readiness to learn other languages, to transcend barriers, to penetrate other cultures and to understand other human beings, their context and motivations, can only enrich one’s experience of life.
Often once you have learned the language of the country you felt so attracted to and actually manage to understand the overheard conversation at the next table, it will remove the romantic verneer of the place, as you realize that these people share the same ordinary everyday concerns as those at home. Yet that in itself, the realization that we are more alike than different, is a discovery of great value which sadly many people never make. because of their reluctance to learn languages.

Speaking another language so you can join in with a group of people from another background, best of all when you are in their country, is a liberating experience that allows you not just to discover other people and cultures but also to discover new aspects of your own personality.

I may be a linguist by profession, but I also find languages essential to my personal enjoyment of life.

About winter

Winter always seems to end for me rather suddenly with the contrast of returning from skiing in the snow-covered Alps to find incipient Spring budding in my garden at home. This year is no exception. I can’t remember when I last saw as much snow at Sölden as last week, while today in Brussels the temperature got up to an incredibly mild 13°. After all, Spring is officially only three weeks away now.
So I have stowed away in the cellar again the salt that it is my duty as a good citizen in Belgium to strew on the pavement in front of my house when it snows and freezes, lest I be held liable for some fellow citizen slipping and breaking a leg in front of my house. The salt was actually needed on quite a few occasions this winter, but I don’t expect to get it out again till the next one... although you never know, a further cold snap is always possible, but I have the inkling it would not be a long one.

Generally it is with a feeling of relief that I see that Winter is on the run. My spirits start to rise already with the lengthening of the days, no longer having to stumble around in the dark in the morning or having to cycle home from work in the dark. I don’t like the darkness of winter. However, during the hours of daylight, winter light can be exquisite with the low sun really bringing out unexpected colours and the sharp contrasts between light and shade. On a clear day in the winter the visibility in the mountains has a quality all of its own. Even in Belgium a walk or ride out on a sunny winter day bring their own bracing satisfaction. Sadly in Brussels though I have to admit there are also a lot of grey, damp and cold days during Winter when I really don’t feel the urge to go out and am anxious to see it pass.

This Winter has been the hardest in Belgium for quite some years: a proper Winter. On the whole I prefer my seasons to be distinct, so I welcome that. Having been through some hardship during winter, especially by going outside regularly, my body and soul feel more exhilarated at the arrival of Spring.

So how does this year’s return to a proper Winter chime with global warming?
There are, I suppose, ups and downs, cycles within cycles and underlying long term trends. I have to recognize that we haven’t had real winters for some time around here, so I won’t deny the long term gradual rise in temperature. Global warming exists; I have seen the glaciers melting. However, I do think that we should be a little bit more humble when it comes to predicting nature; there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the climate and just how it may be changing. While admitting that man-made pollution is a contributive factor, I can’t help thinking also that there is an over-weaning arrogance in assuming mere human beings have total influence and control over such a huge and complicated system as the global climate which we do know has been through long term extreme cycles generating both ice ages and sweltering conditions even far north. After all, if it turns out that we’re staving off the next ice age, however inadvertently, then that’s not at all bad. Or maybe, we’re doing something really terrible. Or maybe, whatever we do, the world will continue as it was going to do anyway and we will have to adapt or die.
I’m not sure I’m going to obsess about how I behave personally given the profligacy I see around me approved by the establishment.: entire buildings left illuminated when empty; security concerns at work that force me to take the lift instead of climbing the stairs for only one storey; people who will take the car everywhere when they could walk or bike there; meeting goers who jet around week in week out and then suggest I shouldn’t use the plane for my holidays etc. My carbon footprint ? - show me yours first.
And don’t get me started on emissions trading: it’s tantamount to allowing criminals to pay someone else to serve their jail sentence for them. It’s simply immoral but that’s ok evidently, as supposedly it’s sound economics.   Just how this wet dream of some now doubtless discredited futures trader could ever make a real difference in practice is a mystery to me.

I’m sceptical about to what extent global warming is solely caused by man and can therefore be reversed solely by man, and even more sceptical about the alibis for action that are touted these days when it is blatantly obvious that no one seems really serious about making any genuine changes to the ways we run our economies. The truth is that tangibe climate change will come slowly enough for man to adapt to its undesirable consequences as he muddles along.

Every age has its own doomsday scenario. In the 60’s and 70’s we were all about to go in a nuclear armageddon. Now we’ll all be drowned by rising seas or burned to a frazzle because of global warming. In previous centuries people were always equally certain that “the end of the world is nigh”. But we are all still here, having adapted.
It flatters the vanity of mankind to believe that we are potentially the last generation ever. If you work on the naive assumption that each generation is, thanks to progress, the most perfect ever, then it is gratifying to believe that you are the highest form of life ever to have existed, as nobody will come after you.
I actually believe though that man does not progress from generation to generation, even if material conditions change. Each and every man and woman in every age faces the same basic fundamental problems of life and has to resolve them to their own satisfaction by trial and error and their own personal experience. I don’t believe I’m any better than 19th, 17th, 15th or whatever century man.
The current obsession with disaster scenarios is fuelled by a misplaced human sense of self -importance. Our ancestors in the North survived the ice age. We will just have to relocate our cities and economic activities and grow different crops elsewhere. The ingenuity of man is boundless. We are not about to disappear, nor is the earth. Adaptation will always be painful: hell you may not be able to use your car as often, but so what!

I appear to have digressed somewhat from my consideration of the eternal recurrent phenomenon that is Winter for those men of the North that we Europeans are. And believe me there is also winter in the Mediterranean: even if it’s not as cold, it is also miserable at times.
It is the rotation of the seasons and the need to survive winter that has produced the highy organized civilizations of the North, the European, Chinese, Japanese and others. These are peoples who have to organize and plan in order to get through the year. Winter instils virtues.

I guess that’s how I see Winter, a necessary inconvenience that is part of life’s rich tapestry. Most of it is miserable, but at the right times it has its charms: especially when it is really cold and sunny. And of course, without the winter snow there would be no skiing.

Still, I’m glad Winter is almost over.

About belief

I’m not so sure, but maybe the title of this piece should be “About doubt”.

I remember as a teenager in the 70’s being inspired and moved by Jacob Bronowski’s BBC documentary series “the Ascent of man”, which celebrated the rise of science. One programme traced the pivotal rôle played by doubt in the progress of scientific knowledge. Only by calling into doubt received ideas, especially when they do not match one’s observation of reality, is it possible for science to move forward. He ended the programme by visiting Ausschwitz where many members of his family had died in the holocaust. Standing in the pond into which the ashes of the dead had been tossed, he concludes that this is what absolute certainty leads to and pulls out a handful of slime... A powerful image.

It is of course the same kind of absolute certainty that leads young men to blow themselves up killing innocent bystanders in the name of Islam.
One should not be afraid of admitting that one is not absolutely certain.
So I myself am not sure; I don’t know if there is a god. Technically that makes me an agnostic (from the Greek for “one who does not know”).
From the point of view of intellectual honesty it seems to me to be the only tenable position in this world. We cannot know.
In its way, to be an outright atheist, taking for certain the non-existence of God, is just as much a leap of faith as to be a believer in God.
Of course, in a sense, belief is not a question of knowledge at all but of faith.

I think I was born without the gene for faith (or I have not been granted that grace, as the theologians may put it). I cannot remember ever believing. As a boy I found there always seemed to be something distinctly implausible and questionable about what I was told in sermons in churches, at Sunday school, in religious instruction, or “divinity” as it was bizarrely called at my grammar school.
Let me say straightaway here that I am grateful for having been taught bible stories and a working knowledge of Christianity as it enables me to make sense of large parts of the history, art and literature of Western civilization which is thoroughly imbued with it. In fact I think it’s a shame that many young people these days do not have that knowledge. Especially in the protestant countries, where from the Reformation onwards the Bible was made available in the vernacular as the first widely circulated printed text, biblical references inform a not inconsiderable part of the very language we use.
So it is important to be familiar with Chirtianity to understand many things around us in the West.
Christianity also offers a useful code of values for living in our society. These values are never fully adhered to of course, nor could they be within the context of how we have structured our society, but as an ideal they are worthy of respect. Religion in its established form is a useful vehicle for public morality and all the major religions seek to promote better social behaviour and none of them can be faulted on that count.
Religion also provides the necessary solemnity for the great rituals that surround the fundamental mysteries of life: birth, entry into adulthood, marriage and death; and in societies closer to nature and subsistence agriculture, the rotation of the seasons. Many of us go to church only at the times of such ceremonies. These are functions common to all the great religions that unify societies and help provide a shared identity. As such they are worthy of respect and most people are happy to go along with them and pay lip service to them. It’s just what one does.
However, actually believing in the whole thing is another matter. Real belief or faith is something quite personal and generally I am convinced that any religion has bits in it that an individual believes in fervently and others bits somewhat less so.

When it comes to Christianity I personally believe in hardly any of it at all.
Christianity contains many odd things which familiarity leads us not to think twice about, yet if you were to transpose some of these beliefs, only changing names, to some imagined tribal religion on a Pacific island or in darkest Africa, they would be dismissed as pure mumbo-jumbo. For the best part of two millenia theologians have struggled to provide plausible explanations for the basically implausible.

Let’s start with the virgin birth. I was taught about that before even being given any sexual education. How bizarre is that? For all I knew it may have been the normal way of having children. Only later did the penny drop. In many mythologies it’s common for gods to beget children on humans to create demi-gods. At least Zeus had the decency to assume human or animal form to do it. In Christianity there is no contact, it just happens. In part it’s all to do with squaring a whole series of gods with a notionally monotheistic religion which takes us into the difficult area of the Holy Trinity that is essentially having your cake and eating it.
The Virgin Mary herself looms much larger in Catholic countries than in England. She clearly subsumes and perpetuates a much earlier cult of motherhood. Motherhood is of course a fine thing worthy of celebrating, as indeed is apple pie. The trouble with doing it through Mary is that she is a virgin. This is actually quite disturbing and disrespectful of the fundamental laws of nature. I would go so far as to blame on this particular belief some very unhealthy attitudes towards women in Latin males and a more general difficulty the Church seems to have with sexuality.

Heaven and hell. This is a strange one as there is not actually any definitive passage in the Bible on them. However, they are very present in the hysterical hard sell of Christianity through the ages: “Believe the whole package or you will go to hell”.
I have just read Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in which the poet is taken on a tour of the after-life, first by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory, then by Beatrice through Paradise. The “‘Divine Comedy” is a work of fiction, a fantasy, not a divine revelation. It is Dante’s attempt to imagine the after-life by applying strictly the religious and philosophical tenets and beliefs of his age. Thus he needs to change guide after Purgatory because Virgil is not allowed into Heaven. No matter how good a poet he is, he cannot enter Paradise because unfortunately for him he was born prior to Christianity. It is rather odd if we are dealing in eternity that there should be this relatively recent cut-off point. Logically of course for Dante, Mohammed is also in Hell, as a spreader of wrong beliefs. It’s just as well Dante is not about today as there would be a “fatwa” out against him. “Inferno” is one of the finest works of literature I have read. “Paradise” , however, is rather boring. In struggling to get to grips with something that is just spiritual and not material, which is in fact a mystical experience that defies understanding, he presents us with something that is just too elusive.
If there is a Heaven, then it is beyond our grasp. It seems to me that all attempts to imagine heaven and even God, for that matter, run into the limits of our human experience. If there is a heaven, then surely entry into it cannot be conditional on having been born in the right century on the right continent. Also the idea that God should cast into outer darkness humans that won’t believe in him smacks of a petulance and vanity that are altogether human.
Anyway the whole craving to believe in an after-life strikes me in itself to be an act of human vanity, a refusal to accept that “this is it”, a sense of self-importance unwilling to consider its own end, an inability to come to terms with the fact that we are but a moment in the endless time of life, a temporary arrangement of matter that will be superseded by another.
I do believe in an after-life in my children in the sense that half of my genes are carried forward in them to assume a new form and that some of my personality and character rubs off on my offspring. It’s not eternal though. However, mortality doesn’t bother me and frankly I find this life in its positive and negative variety preferable to any notional paradise.
Partly of course that’s because my own life is comfortable. In the past, part of the Church’s connivance in the unfair status quo was to offer future Heaven as a sop to the downtrodden whose experience of this life might otherwise have led them to rebellion. Although it was Marx who coined the phrase “religion is the opium of the people”, curiously enough it was also a trick employed by the communist states themselves as they used to promise utopia tomorrow in return for sacrifice today.
No, I believe in neither heaven nor hell. I believe life goes on after us pretty much as before us, without our physical presence but with our having been here having some transient influence on those who come next, in most cases and in the case of a few exceptional individuals the influence stays for longer. Undoubtedly Christ himself was one of these people, for I certainly believe he existed. I’m not so sure everything written about him is true.

Which brings us to the holy book of Christianity, the Bible. The Bible is a strange book in that most of it, the Old Testament, is co-opted from another religion, mainly to serve as a legitimization in the prophets for the coming of the Messiah. I can’t help thinking that there's a lot of unnecessary baggage here. If you look hard enough you can find everything and its opposite in the Old Testament.
To turn to a part of it being debated today: every old culture has its traditional creation myth; most of which are attractive in their ways and can be taken as symbolic rather than literal. I don’t want to get into an argument as to whether Genesis is to be taken literally. Let me just say that I personally don’t believe it but I think it’s a nice story. I prefer Darwin’s version of the “Origin of the species”. We can never know all about creation, but it is certainly clear that it took longer than six days. However, even if science gets us closer to understanding “how”, it does not address the question “why”; of which more later.
If you’re actually interested in Christianity, then it’s the New Testament you should be reading with its four different versions of Christ’s life and texts setting out in greater detail his teachings and then bizarrely the rather odd book that is “Revelation”.
To believe the whole thick book that is the Bible is a bit of a tall order.

To return to the life of Christ, the miracles and the resurrection, I would say that I am at best sceptical.
However, my main problem is that I have never really got the central point of Christianity: the idea that somehow I am saved because Christ died for me on the cross.

I need to start here with the notion that I need to be saved. You see I don’t accept that I am bad and bound for hell (which I don’t believe exists anyway). I don’t believe that man is fundamentally bad. I’m not denying that there are people out there who are evil and have something pathologically wrong with them that leads them to deliberately commit the most horrendous attrocities. Evil exists and is a real problem that cannot be explained away. However, most people I know, including myself, are not intrinsically nasty. We do bad things not so much out of a conscious desire to harm others as out of too great a concern about ourselves and therefore an inability to realize the repercussions of our actions on others. Sometimes we may get bad ideas, sudden desires to harm others, but usually we discard them, because as Adam Smith explains in his “Theory of moral sentiments” our behaviour is dictated by a desire that others should think well of us. There’s a self-regulating enlightened self-interest in a normally constituted person.
At one and the same time we are all outright individualists, yet condemned to live in society. I think the real pulls in the conscience that we have to constantly use our free will to choose between are not so much the stylized black and white of “good and evil” but something much greyer: what is best for me and what is right for others. Ultimately they coincide, because in both a moral and practical sense, since I live in society, what is right for the collective is to my benefit. In the short term they may not appear to coincide and we may make mistaken choices.
People on the whole are good because they work at it, it’s a lifetime effort of trying harder to recognize the bad impulses and say no to them. The Christian virtues and teachings of Christ are all helpful here. But where does Christ himself come in, other than having been an interesting philosopher who lived 2000 years ago and whose teachings were recorded for our benefit?

Probably my mistake here is to forget that Christ is not just human but also divine. Assuming I can get my head around that one, how exactly does his dying a gruesome death, and then being resurrected so as to prove he wasn’t really human after all, mean (if I choose to believe in him) that it no longer matters how many times I made the wrong moral choice, I still have a place in heaven. I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the mechanics of that.
In some way it must be a throwback to propitiating the gods with an animal sacrifice as in Homer or a human sacrifice as with the Aztecs to the sun. Christ is after all the Lamb of God. But how am I redeemed by this sacrifice; what is the link between that historic event and me now ?
But isn’t this propitiation of a potentially vindictive god all rather strange and more in keeping with barbaric religions we have dismissed?
Also have you ever considered another wholly bizarre aspect of Christianity which is the cannibalistic symbolism of the communion: the wine and the wafer as the blood and flesh of Christ ? While I believe that the sharing of food is fundamental to the human experience of community, why should we imagine that we are eating Christ ?
Again we are back to some atavistic pagan beliefs of an ancient society which sit uneasily with a whole elaborate theology thought up by the founding fathers drawing heavily on the work of the Greek philosophers.

At another level it is also implied that as a non-believer all my moral efforts at being a better man are useless; I might as well sin as much as I want, then repent and say I believe. Where is the motivation to be good in that ? And how does the careful weighing in the balance of our good and bad deeds at the Last Judgement, before being allocated our appropriate place in heaven or hell, square with having a “get out of jail free” card in our back pocket because we believe in Christ ? (The answer in Dante is Purgatory.)
Again we’re back to “If you buy into this whole rather improbable set of beliefs, the actually unlikely but still possible after-life in hell will be avoided”. Christianity is reduced to an insurance policy: just in case it turns out to be true after all, you might as well have it - and generations have succumbed to this hard sell of the monopolistic Church.

So in Christianity there is a whole series of things I don’t really get or believe in. I’m not against it as a belief, it just doesn’t work for me.
I was brought up in a notionally Christian society, I say notionally becuase the contradictions between what was taught and what was lived were always flagrant to me. I recognize Christianity as the background noise of my culture. I think the King James Bible contains some of the finest poetry in English. I enjoy some of the greatest achievements of Western art which are inspired by Christianity: the great gothic cathedrals; the painting of Michelangelo and Caravaggio; the sacred music of Bach. Yet actually I believe all these works are a celebration of the creative force and spirit of Man as much as they are a glorification of Christ and God.
I’m happy with the core of the moral teaching without all the packaging it comes in. There is one patronizing argument which says that the packaging of any religion, the rituals, the rules, the stories, are there to pass on the message to those who otherwise are not interested in thinking through all the issues about life for themselves. I myself am ready to respect anyone’s system of beliefs on the evidence of their behaviour.
At a collective level, I see belief as a personal means to a social end. If people are happy to buy the ready made package with no questions asked, conform to it and thereby be good citizens, then I think that’s wonderful, whether that package is called Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or whatever. In fact all the great world religions and teachings have on that level much the same content.
Where I start to have a problem is when a believer subscribes 100% to a perverted version of the religion, usually disowned by the mainstream and then takes it as a justification for harming even killing others. In that sense there probably is a need for organized religion to keep the flock together and prevent slippage into heresy. The downside is that organized religion like any other large organization tends to become self-serving, interested in its own preservation and fuelled on hypocrisy.

I myself am happier with the idea of personal belief.
That’s because at the individual level, I see belief as a personal means to answer the basic riddle of life, why? what is life for? It is a question you can only answer for yourself because as Pascal says, you die by yourself. This is a question which at some stage must cross all human minds. Animals we take it don’t bother about it, they just get on with life; but it is axiomatic that self-aware human beings always have been bothered by the question.

So having discarded the trappings of Christianity, while recognizing its place in our Western culture and its value to society as a moral teaching, do I believe in God? God, after all, is a concept that goes beyond Christianity. In principle, the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share the same single God. So as Lessing’s Nathan says: “Why fight over it between the three?” (that protest is as relevant today as it ever was, thinking of Al-Qaeda and Palestine).
In a broader sense there is through most cultures a belief in the existence of the divine, the numinous something beyond our world that created it and maintains its order. Usually and optimistically, this God, for want of a better word, is benevolent. How could he be otherwise if he has given us the world and life ? However, it need not be the case. Kleist in one of his depressed moments pondering the reason for man’s existence wondered “What if there is a God and he is malevolent ?” That’s perhaps not a belief worth entertaining (Kleist killed himself).
I do see room though, as in some systems of belief, for both a god of creation and a god of destruction, a good cop and a bad cop, God and Satan. However, I don’t actually see the dichotomy in moral terms, because when an individual suffers from being on the receiving end of nature, it is purely random. Beliefs such as “God sent hurricane Katrina to punish the evil people in iniquitous New Orleans” or “God created AIDS to punish homosexuals” are strictly unacceptable in the modern world. The truth is there is a lot of unpleasantness out there in the world and nature that it is hard to account for. The Christian trick is to finesse this by saying that “God moves in mysterious ways”, thereby solving the many problems of disaster, disease, untimely death, injustice, evil and so on, without actually providing a valid explanation, merely stating “God knows what he is doing, even if we don’t”.
In hesitating, then, whether to believe in God or not, I am considering only the existence of a benevolent or just God. But to be honest, I don’t know if there is one.

Nor am I sure that the certainty of God’s existence would increase the meanigfulness of my life. I’m not convinced that “God” is actually a useful shorthand answer to the question “what is life for ?”
I believe we are all part of something larger, society and nature.
I believe the meaning of life clearly transcends the individual.
What exactly it may be is something elusive, but it is worth seeking in many ways, in many places, in many teachings, in many books. There is a real yearning in many people for a spiritual dimension to their lives. The feeling that mere material gratification is not enough is what prompts the present revival in religion in a world that until recently we mistakenly thought to be post-religious. There is a void at the heart of the life of modern man which, if he perceives it, he is eager to fill. I’m not sure the existence of God would fill it for me. I think the answer is to be found more in a mixture of greater physical and spiritual self-fulfilment, a greater engagement with others, starting with our immediate family and those near to us (the Christian “love thy neighbour”), greater recognition of our value to society and greater awareness of the rest of nature. I believe these kinds of experience can enhance our life and give it meaning.

Ultimately the answer to the question “what is life for ?” is simply “life is for life”. The continuing cycle of life, including the further propagation of our species within the society in which we live, is an end in itself.
The rest is properly a mystery and we cannot know, though we may profitably speculate.

Pascal after his many “Thoughts” on the subject reached the conclusion that believing in God is a better bet than not believing in God.
For my part, for the time being as it is not yet time to hedge my bets, I say simply “I do not know”.

About computers

It’s odd how computers have taken over our lives, that is if you think how happily we got along without them until relatively recently. Now they seem to be indispensable and certainly in many walks of life if the computer is down people can’t do anything for you. I like to think life would go on without them, certainly in its most fundamental aspects.

But let’s pause to consider how dependent we’ve become...
First of all, you’re reading this at the computer. Moreover I’m writing this at the computer. In fact, these days, I write most things at the computer. I read my programme for work on the computer. So the first thing I do when I get up on a weekday is to check if there’s been a change to it, and while I’m at it see if there’s anything in my e-mail inbox.
At work all of our administrative tasks have to be done on the computer - leave applications, travel administration, report writing etc.
In my private life, I keep my accounts on the computer. I now make my bank transfers from my computer. I book all my private plane tickets on line and buy many concert even cinema tickets that way too. I store and manage my photographs on the computer. I can listen to music I like while working at the computer and buy tracks off i-Tunes. I can have a video conversation with members of my family on Skype. And so the list goes on. I probably spend more time in front of a computer screen than in front of a TV screen.

Computers started to enter my life at work. Riccardo Ettore, one of the earliest computer-nerds and mac-freaks I know, ran a training session in which he gave us an excellent introduction to how they worked, what they could do and what the future held. It was inspirational and everything was upon us sooner than we expected.
Riccardo himself played a key role in devising the software to write and manage the programme for the interpreters . When I started in the 1980’s we had physically to go into our building at the weekend where the programme was stuck up on the wall on those old long wide print-outs with holes down the side. We had to scan through it all till we found our name and copy down by hand the details of our assignments for the week. As things progressed through the week the office had to correct the metre long paper sheets on a big table with tipp-ex, pencil and a rubber then ring up colleagues individually to inform them of the changes. Needless to say, with the subsequent expansion of the number of languages and colleagues that would never work today. Now we consult our programme on-line or if a computer is not to hand we can ring a number and get a synthesized voice to read it out to us. That’s how much things have changed.

Then at work something called e-mail was made available to us so the administration could send us messages. But then friends everywhere were also starting to have their own e-mail addresses so we used it as much for private as for professional purposes.
I like the way you can leave e-mails for people to answer at their convenience. You can think over a proposal before giving a response, without being put on the spot. That’s definitely positive. I find e-mails particularly great for finalizing practical arrangements before travelling. However, I’ve learned the hard way that e-mails are abused in the sense that although they are meant as spontaneous communication, people keep them and use them later against you. We forget too easily the old adage that it’s always better to think twice before committing anything to writing.

Timidly we were also granted internet access which might be handy for doing some background research and reading for meetings we were working in. But that soon turned out to have many other uses too.
The internet has since become so integrated into our modern Western lives that we take it for granted. It has become the most important thing we use our computers for. Most of the things I do on the computer that I listed at the start of this piece are internet based. Many are very convenient allowing us to do all sorts of things from the comfort of our own desk. The obvious downside of this is firstly that we are now having to do things for ourselves that previously other people did for us, which in some cases may be cheaper but actually takes us longer and has certainly also led to the disppearance of many jobs. The macro-economist will tell you that these people have merely been redeployed to more useful tasks and our overall productivity has increased. At work I know it merely means that I have to spend more of my own time doing things previously done by the administration. Secondly we just don’t get out and about nearly as much as before to “interface” with actual human beings, which must be an impoverishment of our lives.
The internet is potentially a fantastic source of information - if you know where to find it. It’s great to go onto the official site of somewhere you want to visit to check programme details, opening times, how to get there etc. It’s less obvious if you want to find out something and the search engine throws up thousands of possible sources of information whose reliability may be far from clear. Absolutely anybody can have a web page out there: witness this blog. It certainly represents democracy and freedom of expression at work, but without applying a little common sense and scepticism you can easily become the victim of misinformation, disinformation and undesirable influences. I’ve written before that the much vaunted information society often gives people countless little bits of a jigsaw without the bigger picture with which to put them together.
On the whole, however, targeted use rather than mindless surfing of the internet is hugely beneficial.
So what’s in my favourites menu bar ? Work obviously; my bank to manage my account; Metéo Belgique for the weather (and wonderfully web-cam shots so you can actually see what the weather’s doing in the Ardennes before you decide to go); Wikipedia, which is hugely useful, and judging from articles on things I do know about, pretty reliable; BBC for the news and just about everything; die Bahn for train timetables anywhere in Europe; Via Michelin, ditto for road route planning; You Tube for catching those media moments I missed; Ultimate guitar for working out how to play a song; Brussels airport to check timetables and see if a plane I’m meeting someone off is on time; NHS’s A-Z Health; various newspapers in my languages... Yes the possibilities of the internet are infinite.

So to return to my narrative: In short I was starting to be hooked and it seemed like a good idea to have one of these computers things at home too and thus also to make a more formal separation between private and professional use.

So I got my first PC about ten years ago. It was a chunky Packard Bell with a tower and a rather large monitor - that is in terms of the space it took up, not the size of the screen. We invested in a new extra large desk in the office to accomodate it all. It seemed a good idea to introduce the children to all of this young too as it would doubtless loom large in their lives and inevitably they are now more proficient than we are. A significant break-through was the upgrading of internet access from the dial-up connection to broadband which made it feasible to use the internet for many more things..
But the PC aged quickly and I started to lose my patience with the quirkiness and unreliability of Windows. The PC would keep on freezing and crashing on me. Moreover I’d go away for two weeks and come back to find hundreds of junk e-mails in my inbox.
So in 2004, after one crash too many, I decided to change to Mackintosh and bought an eMac. I have never looked back. Notwithstanding some problems with file conversion given Microsoft’s virtual monopoly position, things are generally simpler and more intuitive (just like Riccardo had always said it would be on a Mac). And the machine doesn’t crash on me. Last year as the memory was getting full and things were slowing up I upgraded to an iMac with a delightful large flat screen which is great for looking at photos. So that’s what I’m sitting at now.

Computers are of course great only as long as they work. Few things are more frustrating than being condemned to do something through a system that won’t work for you. I’m not the only one to verbally abuse the computer, but I don’t go so far as hitting it (any more). It’s that feeling you’re dealing with something semi-intelligent when in fact it’s just an inanimate machine that has been badly programmed by a less than competent human being. If they spoke back to us nicely and intelligently like HAL in Kubrick’s “2001”, then we’d never dream of shouting at them. Mind you , remember what HAL finally did: try to dispose of the inconvenient humans who were spoiling his plans and who then had to shut him down - a prophetic movie.
I only get irate at the computers at work, I love my iMac and never feel the need to be rude to it. Partly it’s to do with the less than user-friendly applications we have to navigate at work and partly, I guess, it’s the fact that we share the PCs there. They’re like shared bicycles: nobody looks after them and when you pick one up the tyres are not pumped up, the saddle is at the wrong height and everything a bit clunky and wobbly. They will still go, only you wish you had your own with you.
In the case of the shared PC at work, in a multi-lingual environment, somebody may have changed the keyboard setting so the letters on the keyboard don’t correspond. Yes, I’m one of those sad people who have to look at the keys and I’m used to an AZERTY, living in a French speaking country, so I have a particular dislike for the Germanic/central European QWERTZ layout on which I can never find the “m”. It’s odd really, that inheritance in the computer world of keyboard layouts from the late 19th century.
If truth be told, I’ve actually always liked typewriters so I find the typing part fun (as long as the keys correspond to the characters).

Computers in the end are really toys for boys and it’s nice when they do the things for you that you want them to. I admit to inventing tasks to do, just to fiddle around with the computer. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I write this blog.