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Sunday, January 30, 2011

Egypt's neverending cycle


I am riveted to TV's news channels as the Egyptian revolution unfolds. It's too soon to tell how it will go, but my mind is full of Egyptian memories from nearly 10 years ago. It was 2002, just after 9/11, and it was a good time to visit as Americans were too scared to visit - wary of anywhere Islamic - and many of the great sites were virtually empty of other tourists. I loved it. The wonderful temples in the south, the fabulous statuary, art and sculpture, the stupendous skills of its pyramid builders, and the profound myths and legends.
Here's a papyrus painting I bought then, of Nut (pronounced Noot), the sky goddess.
The Egyptians were fond of painting ceilings inside temples a deep rich blue, sprinkled with stars - a design theme copied much later by medieval church builders in Europe. Nut was in charge, giving birth to the sun each morning and swallowing it each night in an endless round of light and darkness. The idea was that her great body arched protectively over the earth and all its inhabitants. So here she is carrying out her neverending duties with the starry sky above, and the busy earth below.
If Nut was still worshipped she'd sure be busy now, struggling to protect the land below as her country stumbles towards a new, uncertain future.
Even in '02 the poverty was plain to see, the infrastructure crumbling. Even then it was a bit dodgy. Fully armed tourist police accompanied us everywhere. The authorities were desperate to maintain tourism as a foreign exchange earner.
That cash flow must already have plummeted. Jobs will be disappearing. Food supplies must be running low. Cairo, always a tough city, will be an ever harder place in which to survive. Cairo is huge. Nearly 8 million are crowded in there, most of them scrabbling a life together on tiny incomes.
Even 10 years ago, people we met were derisive of their leader, Mubarak, but he had an iron grip. But it seems his time has finally come. He's just not admitting it yet...probably too busy with his hairstylist, ensuring that at 83 his hair is still black as kohl. It's as if he pretends, like the ancient mummy makers, that he can stay youthful for ever.
But one of these mornings, as Nut gives birth to the Sun yet again, the old man's reign will end. Even the pharoahs lost their power in the end.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Door knocks after midnight

I have a new TV show up and running,Let's Talk", running weekly on Stratos TV, 5pm Mondays. Haven't had time yet to put a clip from it up on YouTube but here's a chunk of script I used in the show. It's something I really wanted to say...

After yet another horrendous car crash last weekend, killing two teenage boys, maiming two more and also killing a man who had the terrible luck to be in the way, all of us must be asking ourselves if there isn’t more we can do to stop this happening so often.

It was, as usual, all about booze, speed and bad driving and the kids who died were just 16 and 17. The man in the other car, who was 45, was on his way home after work to his wife and three kids.

Once again we’ve seen the ripped up cars at the roadside, so totalled they look like a monster has torn them apart.

We’ve seen pictures of shocked relatives clinging to each other. We’ve heard again how it looked like a war zone.

And a police sergeant told a reporter how he’d had to knock on the doors of four separate sets of parents and the wife of a dead man in the middle of the night, to deliver the bad news.

A friend of mine who was a police officer once told me how that feels – to stand at a door with your fist up, knuckles ready to go, hearing calm and happy sounds or peaceful silence inside and knowing that in just a moment you will blow these people’s lives apart.

We still don’t have it right, it seems, when it comes to tragedies like this. The license age is still too low, the drinking age is still too low, driving skills aren’t good, and of course you can never underestimate the desire in teenagers for the sheer thrill of speed, no matter how often parents say ‘drive carefully’.

Apparently there was a beer box and alcopop cans littering the scene of the last disaster… and that’s something we can at least try to get right. In California they have a simple rule about alcohol and vehicles. Having any drink inside the car at all, whether opened or unopened, is forbidden. If you’re carrying booze it has be out of reach, locked in the rear compartment.

We can’t tell what happened in that car at Waihi but over and over again we hear of accidents where booze was being knocked back even as drivers and passengers rode to oblivion. We can’t stop people drinking either before they get behind the wheel.

But at least we could do more to discourage anyone from drinking while the car’s in motion, and thus cut down the yahooing and the egging on. It’s such a simple idea. And wouldn’t it be worth if it at least it prevents just one more family from hearing that knock on the door after midnight?