In Istanbul where an April spring has turned to winter, with temperatures below zero but toasty warn compared to the sight of my savings and pension etc. I picked the wrong year to become interested in my finances, it was far more freeing to have none. I recently re-read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s […]
He’s back
So Trump is back. After being uncertain for several weeks, yesterday I decided that Kamala Harris would win and that it would not actually be that close. The best result, I thought, would be if Kamala Harris won the presidency easily, but lost Michigan due to the Muslim vote, and this served as a wakeup […]
Experiments yield fruit
My first encounter with the bizarre side of Chat GPT, in requesting a song about duck farming in the style of Bruce Springsteen. This came after a few questions about duck in Pakistani cuisine for which the answers were the usual plausible + suspect. But this song is just weird. I mean, terrible – an […]
Rabbit
Read a good SF short story, called Rabbit Test. It was exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to cry. It’s a very American story of course, as it’s about abortion and control of women’s fertility, but the story is such an old one for women, of constant control, of advances and setbacks, […]
Intensity of youth
I’ve just read Elif Batuman’s two novels, one after the other. They are very good I must say, or so I think. For all the mannered-ness and the somewhat terrifying literariness of the protagonist. I found it hard at first to tell if the first one was good because I started reading it without knowing […]
Unimpressed
With the great burden of my life these days being the GF’s arrant vegetarianism, I decided to do something unprecedented and signed up for a food tour. There is an entire industry of these in Hanoi, but the one I picked was one of the oldest and definitely the most expensive, with ecstatic accounts in […]
First visitor
We had our first house guest staying for the last few days, fortunately a very easy going and easily pleased one. Fortunately she is happy shopping by herself, so could be dispatched to the Grand Bazaar when I had work. She also brought over some things I’d requested from the US, which are very pleasing […]
Rat race
The rats are diving off the sides of the Boris barge like lemmings. What a happy sight. It has been a shameful few years, and while I daresay the shame is far from over, any more than Trump’s election loss made a real difference in the US or Imran’s deposition did in Pakistan, it’s still […]
Stormy weather
This morning Russia invaded Ukraine. Is this the start of something new? In the past years of growing fragility and certainties shaken, it has felt as though we are ratchetting up to catastrophic breakdown. It this it? Or is it a story and actually history just keeps going and there is no cataclysmic moment? Two […]
American obcenity
The day after I read the impassioned, clear and very rational testimony from David Miliband and Graeme Smith at the US Senate about the necessity of allowing Afghanistan’s economy to restart, not least by releasing its central bank funds with appropriate conditionalities, I saw the news that the White House had decided to release its […]