Outside a hotel in another city

We stepped out of the hotel, where the three of us had just had tea and headed off. The concierge retrieved our newly acquired suitcase, and insisted on carrying it out to the car park where he sounded disappointed we had no car. I explained we were going to the metro station. He wheeled the suitcase as far as the gate, where the gateman took over, insisting he wheel the bag to the metro station.

Just before the metro station entrance, a man, sat on a low stool, stood up and came over and offered to read my palm. Travel, it seems to me, must involve risky interactions such as this! So I named a number between 1 and 9, and he flipped a piece of paper over revealing the number 7 I’d chosen! Then he said to my waiting companions that he’d demonstrate his ability by predicting my choice of colour. Quite at random (or so I thought) I chose blue, and he flipped over a small scrap of paper to show me he had successfully predicted that too.

I thought I should allow this to go a little further, and before I knew it I was seated on another low stool tucked a little behind a hut announcing that he was a travel agent. Over the next half hour he told me all sorts of things: he used a noughts and crosses arrangement to lay out numbers creating the atmosphere of a predictive science. Suddenly there was my date of birth laid out on the paper. Then he asked me to think of the name of my mother, which he promised to predict. My mother changed her name in mid-life, so I insisted that we were only thinking of her name at birth. Suddenly there was my mother’s name, but it was the name she adopted when we moved back to England in the ‘60s. Then he offered to tell me my wife’s name. Again I said it had to be her name at birth, but the name he produced was the name that I know her by which she was finally given at her christening! In between each prediction there was a certain amount of waffle: sort of pop religious advice, plus the prediction that I was having amorous problems with an old girlfriend. He then took pains to inscribe on another small square of paper a mantra he wanted me to recite each morning on waking. It was the work of genius, a cross between a psychic medium at the village fair, and the guru from the High Himalayas. Then came the fee! He said that poor travellers only put in 100US$ (about £80), medium rich travellers $200, and the very wealthy $500. I could see that this self-assessment process was a psychological brilliant strategy: I’d place myself in the category of my own choosing, and the fee appeared non-negotiable. Of course I had free-will, I insisted to myself.  I looked in my top pocket for a small note: he protested that I had more money around my waist! Feeling my inner secrets were known to the man, I pulled out my money belt and put 100 US$ into his folder of fan mail. I could sense that he felt I should be more generous making my contribution to the childrens’ home he claimed he was supporting.

Then he asked me for a gift from ‘your home country’: my pockets were empty, but then he jumped up and fetched from his office a set of prayer beads which was his gift to me. He would have detained me for at least another hour with predictions and revealing information of my (misspent?) life. It was all conducted in a rapid-fire English I was not always following, with him very concerned about a loan in May which would go sour. Here I am writing this on the last day of April. My sense of being held by invisible bonds suddenly snapped and I made my excuses and left: his final words were that I must not breathe of word of this encounter to anyone. So here I am telling you!

But I want to reel back to my tea in the hotel: it’s a grand place probably built before the First World War. Taking people there is a bit like a conjuring trick in a magical setting. We sat on the terrace over tea and cake. Suddenly using the hotel’s wi-fi seemed to make sense, so I asked the waiter if there was a code I could use. He asked for my passport and disappeared for quite a while before returning with a string of numbers on a slip of paper. As it turned out there was no wi-fi on the terrace, but I managed to send a message once I was back inside the wide corridor, full of 19th century prints. It’s a place of unashamed old world detail. Nothing ostentatious, just luxury of another age. The carpet pile is a little deeper, the paint on the wide pillars confidently smooth. As we left, the staff bowed deeply, and wished us a good day. The concierge insisted on seeing us out, carrying the suitcase. It all seemed a little over the top: we had after all only had a cup of tea!

But looking back after the palm reading exercise, I began to wonder if my passport had been mined for biographical details: were the concierge and the medium working in tandem? The hotel staff had been in possession of my passport for 20 minutes, and may be able to log into the government’s visa records, discovering my mother’s name perhaps!

But this doesn’t quite answer the palm reader’s ability to look at my palm and say: you say you have two children, but what happened to the third child, pointing to a faint crease in the side of my clenched fist? He predicted I would live to 94 (Lord preserve us). His final conjuring trick was to ask me to write down three favourite flowers, but only after he had written down the name of one of them on a small piece of paper which he had folded into a small packet, popping it in my top pocket. I named ‘fritillary, daffodil and daisy’. It was only later after getting home when I was putting my shirt into the washing machine that I discovered the small piece of paper, on which the obvious choice of ‘rose’ had been written.

A charlatan, a wise man, a con-artist, a man with a certain gift? I was glad to have spent time with him, and very relieved to get away.

Next time a soothsayer stops you to tell you your fortune, work out where you last left your passport details!

Indian Visa Muddles

On 5th December 2022, the very welcome news has arrived that the Indian High Commission is once again issuing electronic visa for tourists wanting to visit the sub-continent. Evisas were available before the pandemic, and then were suspended perhaps because the UK were not being generous to Indians applying to visit the UK…at least that was the rumour. I’m sure our new Prime Minister and his Indian counterpart have been discussing this, and have now resolved the issue. India’s largest flow of tourism comes from two countries: Canada and the UK, so blocking those two countries will have diverted many tourists (in search of warmth?) to other countries. Those wanting to visit India to see family and friends will have been very frustrated. So it’s a great relief that this has been resolved.

What camera should a secret agent carry on an assignment?

In 1942, my father was head of an outfit which equipped S.O.E. agents before they were infiltrated into the Balkans. You can think of him as Q in a Bond novel: Q stands for ‘quartermaster’. His unit was wound up in November 1942, so the last mission he equipped was his own, when he and Xan Fielding were to be landed on Crete by submarine.

You can’t take a great deal of kit on such a mission, but it seems that he included knives, coshes, ether pads to knock out sentries (very good for lighting fires) and two cameras. When his commanding officer Brigadier Keble saw the cameras on the inventory, he reportedly said “I don’t know what you want with those, but you can at least photograph each other.”

In late November, just as the German occupation of North Africa was crumbling, following the Battle of El Alamein, a small party on the Greek submarine the Papanikolis was brought to the southern Crete coast and put into small boats in which they rowed ashore.

Just as they were reaching dry land, my father and Xan Fielding’s boat split in half on a submerged rock and their belongings sank to the bottom, including, presumably, the cameras. The following day they came across two Australian stragglers (following the German invasion of Crete a very large number of Allied troops wandered the island depending on Cretan hospitality to survive) one of whom was a talented diver: in an official report my father was to write “Pte. John C. Simsoe – This man, a brilliant diver and underwater swimmer, helped us recover from the sea the bulk of the stores lost during our crash landing in November”. I am assuming the cameras were amongst the possessions salvaged!

A few years ago, with two friends, the British historian Chris White and Heraklion museum curator Costas Mamalakis, I went to try and find one cave where my father and others had hidden from the Germans. Chris White has successfully identified many of the hiding places, but one cave, used in January 1943, had eluded him! In a second day of searching we met an elderly gentleman in a café and he pointed to a distant hillside and said in Greek to Costas Mamalakis, “You see that tree and that rock, well the cave you are looking for is in front of them!” The vista at which he pointed was full of trees and rocks!

However we followed his instructions and eventually turned off the road onto a downhill narrow track and coming to a gate found ourselves facing another car coming uphill. I couldn’t follow the entire conversation with the other driver but it seemed friendly, and we were then led down to where he was feeding his sheep. On foot we followed our new guide Dimitri through an olive grove and then down a series of terraces until lo and behold we were in front of a cave. Dimitri announced “Here you are”. Chris pulled out his copies of war-time photographs, and we began to match the details of the rocks in front of us with the background of the photographs which showed Patrick Leigh Fermour, George Pyschoundakis, Xan Fielding, Yanni Tsangarakis and my father Arthur Reade. The men must have taken turns photographing eachother: George Pyschoundakis relates how he took a photo of Xan Fielding searching for lice with his trousers down!

We were soon joined by another man, Niko, who’d spotted unaccustomed activity around the mouth of the cave, and I took a number of photographs, loose re-creations of those images from January 1943, using those present as stand-ins for the characters from 75 years ago.

Our two new-found guides then kindly invited us back to drinks in both their homes. We were very glad to accept this hospitality. After drinks at Dimitri’s house we drove about 5 miles to the Niko’s home, and sat at a table out of doors with his elderly parents. We’d only been sat there five minutes when the old man Yeorgios said to me in a Greek so heavily accented that Costas had difficulty understanding him; “Was your father a lawyer and lived in Cyprus?” I was open-mouthed! We had barely arrived and he had correctly identified my father from almost no information. He went on to explain that during the war, as a small boy, he had carried food up to the fugitives in the cave, and that after the war my father had written from our home in Cyprus enclosing a photograph of his children. He added, pointing back at the house “I have that photograph and that letter still!”

Very moved by that encounter, we drove back to Heraklion.

For some time I’d been wondering what sort of camera these British agent would have carried. I’d thought about British cameras available during the war. And then I came across an account by Xan Fielding in which he referred to the cameras as Leicas. And it dawned on me that the best equipment would have been German: not only technically superior but also in the event of a discovery the cameras would have not given anything much away whereas a British bit of kit would have announced the presence of British agents.

So I have begun to look for pre-war Leicas, and suspect that my father’s department might have issued Leica II or Leica III. Some of them may have been captured from the retreating German army as the tide of the war turned in North Africa.

What would an agent carry today? Probably a smart phone!

Rufus Reade

Cities cut in half

I was brought up in Cyprus, and was 9 years old when the island became independent. Archbishop Makarios’s name was known to me, and I was aware that he’d been exiled to an exotic sounding place called The Seychelles. The rival slogans of the Greek community and the Turksih community were familiar. My father was staunchly pro-Greek, and my mother had good Turkish friends. I think, looking back, that most of our British friends were spies! I returned to Cyprus this April. Its divisions pain me but are not surprising. I wandered along either side of the Green Line that separates the Greek and Turkish communities in Nicosia. Large oil barrels or sandbags close off short streets. Idle soldiers sit at vanatage points supposedly on guard. And then there are the crossing points where anyone with an i.d. card or passport can wander over. I chose the Ledra Palace Hotel crossing as I’d seen on the BBC that there was a cafe jointly run by Greeks and Turks sitting in No Mans Land. I popped in for a coffee and rejoiced at the sounds of Turkish and Greek being spoke at adjacent tables. The piped music was English! As I was given my very good latte I made sure to say thank you three times: in Greek, in Turkish and in English. I was staying in the northern/Turkish part of the city, but had a lunch date in the southern Greek half. Late in the afternoon, my hosts’ daughter took me to see the Greek side of the Green Line. She led me into a house (see image) which has stood empty since 1974. We crept upstairs, skirting rotten floorboards and peered out through sniper holes in the sandbagged windows. I was looking at the Turkish defensive positions, but it could have been the other way round. Later I went to lunch with an old Turkish friend whom I have known for 60 years. She told me that the next day she’d go and see her doctor, a Greek, whose surgery is in the Greek south. I shifted to Kyrenia, the town where I lived until I was nearly ten. Settling down to supper in the harbour, I asked the waiter where he came from: Pakistan came the answer. And the answer was the same at my next stop for coffee. The island is seeing some sort of net emmigration, and the vacancies are being filled by people from the Philipinnes and Pakistan glad to work on this lovely island. What strikes me is that the Turkish Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots have much in common. Less separates them than divides them. The division of the island into two federations ‘works’…well just works! Each side is bolstered by the mainland states of Greece and Turkey, but the arrangement runs the danger of being backdoor colonialism. And in this divided state, each side can have fantasies about the other. Both the Greeks and the Turks I met asked me about the ‘other side’, even though there are no barriers to prevent them from crossing. Those who do cross over find that they are welcomed. To hear Greek voices strolling around ‘Turkish’ Kyrenia Harbour, or Turkish voices shopping on Ledra Street in Greek Nicosia gave me enormous hope for the future.

Lament for Palmyra by Simon Loftus

In 2006, Simon Loftus travelled with Rufus Reade to Syria.

Palmyra, a lament

 In the Tower of Elahbel, in the Valley of Tombs, it was cool and dim, with only a shaft of sunlight slanting across the threshold. Tall pilasters crowned with fronds of acanthus (waving in a phantom breeze) framed stone shelves on both sides of the chamber. I reached into the dark recess above one of those shelves, stretching towards the fragment of a pale bowl. It was almost weightless, smooth and rounded on the outside, delicately fissured within. With a sudden shock I realised that the bowl was bone, the crown of a skull. Gently, carefully, I placed it back where I found it, deep in its slot in the wall, and made a wordless prayer for the dead.

The tower originally contained three hundred of these funerary pigeonholes, each of them designed to hold a single corpse - a condominium for the departed. One of many such towers on the edge of this ancient city, it was built two thousand years ago as a place of eternal rest for the wealthy citizens of Palmyra. Their rest was disturbed many times - robbed of jewellery and other valuables, long ago - and then the archaeologists arrived and looted the sculpted portraits (which had once sealed each slot) and sent them to museums around the world. But that fragment of a skull survived through the centuries, until the tower was blown apart in August 2015, less than ten years after my visit.

Palmyra had a long history of devastation, being attacked and ruined, re-built and shattered by earthquakes, before eventually it was abandoned to the winds of the desert, which covered much of it in sand.

It was ‘rediscovered’ towards the end of the seventeenth century by English merchants based in Aleppo, and a panoramic engraving of the ruins was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in 1695. The leader of this expedition, William Halifax, described his first sight of the place, gazing down across Palmyra from an Arabic castle on a high crag to the northwest – as I did three centuries later, looking over his shoulder from the castle, with the setting sun throwing long shadows across the sand dunes, of colonnades and towers and a jumble of honey-coloured stone – a deserted city, silent, empty, breathtakingly wonderful. The next day at dawn (with a pale moon in the sky) I explored the ruins alone, and imagined I was the first for a thousand years.

Later, as the sun rose and a few boys with camels arrived and sellers of souvenirs, the illusion faded, but the sense of time foreshortened persisted. The 12th century Arab walls surrounding the sanctuary of Bel seemed a barricade against imminent attack, with sections of Roman columns hastily piled on rubble from the ruins. The sanctuary itself (dedicated to a Mesopotamian god in 32 A.D.) was later used as a church, and then as a mosque, and the pattern of its coffered ceiling (published by Robert Wood in 1753) served as a model for some of the great houses of 18th century England. On fallen stones nearby, carvings of vines and leaves, crisp as if done yesterday, evoked an immediate delight in fruitful abundance, while an image of veiled women following a camel laden with a small palanquin (also heavily veiled) was resonant with mystery. On the walls of the Tomb of the Three Brothers names of the deceased were painted in red, in fluent brush strokes that resembled Japanese script. It was in fact Aramaic, a ‘dead’ language that I had heard spoken as a living tongue in the hill village of Maaloula, two days earlier, when I bought a couple of bottles of sweet red wine from the local priest, Father Toufic. Made from semi dried grapes, the wine was a distant cousin of those enjoyed in Palmyra, in classical times.

And then there were the date palms.

The Roman name Palmyra, and its older name, Tadmur, hint at the palm trees that surrounded this oasis, four or five thousand years ago, and still do today. Hidden springs gave water and the dates provided sustenance for caravans carrying goods across the desert, on trade routes from the East to Rome. Palmyra acted as host and entrepot, and levied taxes on everything that passed. It grew enormously rich, and powerful enough to defeat the Persian emperor. Then its queen, Zenobia, challenged Rome itself. She was forced to surrender in 273, taken captive and died in exile. The city declined, new caravan routes were established and the trade on which it had prospered dwindled and vanished. But the dates survived.

Carrying his nargileh (water pipe) - as he did wherever we went – our bus driver Adnan shouted for us to follow as he roared off on the pillion of a motorbike, steered by a local date farmer. The farmer’s brother led us along a dusty track, between crumbling mud brick walls that bordered the patchwork of small plots which subdivided the palm groves. Eventually we arrived, to discover Adnan seated in the shade, smoking his pipe (tobacco scented with rose petals) beside a trestle table laden with sacks of dates, a few of the twenty different varieties cultivated at Palmyra. Each was named as we tasted it, and then a small boy was sent to shin up a nearby tree and cut down a bunch from the golden clusters that gleamed above our heads. These, we were told, were Ibrahim dates – lighter in colour than most, slightly less sweet, but with a delicious nutty flavour that I preferred to all the others.

I bought a bag of them, munched them throughout the rest of my time in Syria and took some home to Suffolk. The taste of these dates was what I remembered most vividly from Palmyra. That distinctive flavour, with a hint of the dry desert air, seemed a direct link to the ancient past of this city, alive, evocative, cutting through history. It was the taste of the caravanserai, when Palmyra was young.

Then came news of the catastrophes that overtook Syria, the destruction, the killings, the savagery of fanaticism and its repression. So now, when I think of Palmyra, I remember the Bedouin woman (two small children clutching at her skirts, and pregnant with a third) who tried to sell me souvenirs at the Tomb of the Three Brothers, and our driver Adnan with his water pipe, and the date farmers. And I wonder with dread what happened to them.

And I think of the old barman at Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, and the hotel itself, almost unchanged since T.E. Lawrence shot wildfowl from the terrace - where I drank whisky, sunk in a leather armchair, dreaming of a past that I never knew. And of the family celebrating a wedding in a famous restaurant in the city, who invited me to join them and plied me with wine. And the Druze children, waving to me as I strolled through the Roman city of Shahba. And the young bakers at Deir es-Zur, on the banks of the Euphrates, who gave me a taste of unleavened bread, blistered by the heat of the oven, late at night. And the veiled girls, graceful as gazelles, harvesting cotton stalks in a field near Halabiyeh. And the baby asleep in an improvised hammock, slung from an olive tree outside the ‘dead village’ of Kfer al Bara, as three generations of her family gathered the olives and piled them into sacks. And the men travelling to work in the back of a builder’s truck in Damascus, who grinned as I passed, early in the morning on my first day in Syria. And Yusef the shoeshine boy, who haggled with me for quadruple his usual fee, as he polished my shoes on the pavement, on my last day.

In all that destruction, did they survive?

The young woman selling postcards at the Palmyran Tomb Tower.

Burnt to a cinder

On 10th August 2018, a wooden church at Kondopoga in Northern Russia was burnt down in what appears to have been an act of madness by a teenager. The church sat on a low promontory on the shores of Lake Onega. It was built entirely of wood and without nails. Its wonderful proportions, a tall elegant spire are now reduced to a pile of ashes. The Russians of Karelia know how to build in wood, so hopefully a church will be built to replace it. The inside of the church was blessed with the most wonderful painted dome, which my composite image tries to convey. I was prompted by the tragedy of the fire to write, by email, to the Russian Consul General here in Edinburgh to offer my commiserations. His deputy was kind enough to write back 5 minutes later. Hopefully a fund will be created to rebuild this lovely church which dated to 1774, when it was built in memory of the victims of an uprising, brutally suppressed by the Czar. There has been a sad history of those seeking fame by committing such appalling acts, as my friend Warwick Ball pointed out, when I wrote to tell him the sad news. Herostratus burnt down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus so that his name would become well known: 'Herostratic fame'. The Temple of Artemis had been called one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, by among other people the historian Herodotus (484 – ca. 425 BC) and the scholar Callimachus of Cyrene (ca. 305–240 BC). This church of the Dormition has rightly been called 'the most beautiful wooden church of Northern Russia". Its survival through the Soviet period was all the more remarkable.

A real gentleman of Swat

There was that poem about the Akond of Swat by that prince of the absurd, Edward Lear. It was his ear for the good rhyme which must have led him to write a poem full of questions about a character who must have seemed almost mythical. In 1989 I travelled to the Swat Valley in Northern Pakistan, and you may be amused by an encounter I had. I was travelling around in search of stock for my shop Out of the Nomads Tent, and trying to work out if I should bring a group to this beautiful part of the world. I decided to stay in the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation hotel in Maidan. As I was costing out a tour I was keeping a close eye on expenses, to get a full understanding of how to price a tour. I was shown my nice bedroom and told the time for dinner. In due course I made way over to the dinning room and after a good meal I asked for the bill. The waiter apologised, saying that bills were normally only presented when guests left the hotel. I made a bit of a fuss and insisted that a bill be brought. The pound signs began to stack up in my imagination and I could see my costs spiraling out of control. Eventually the manager was summoned and politely asked what the matter was. I once again asked for the bill for my supper. He too repeated the mantra that bills were normally presented on departure but he said he'd prepare a bill immediately if I wanted one. In due course a waiter appeared bearing my bill for the equivalent of 75 pence. I felt so ashamed that I'd made such a fuss for a bill that amounted to less than £1. I settled up. I checked out of the hotel and went off to Baltistan (Devla Murphy wrote her account of that place in Where the Indus is Young). After a week away I returned to Swat and checked into the same PTDC hotel. The following day I checked out and when I cam to pay my bill I could see that the cost of dinner the previous night had been omitted. I pointed this out to the man at the reception desk who explained that dinner had been their gift to me!

In due course I did bring a group to Swat and you can guess where we stayed. As we were leaving after a lovely couple of days in this very special valley, the same manager, Mr Habib Afridi invited the group to a corner of the garden to formally plant a tree in memory of our visit. I was handed the spade and unaccustomed as I am to planting commemorative trees, solemnly put the soil onto the roots of the sapling.

A few years later, I was at home in Edinburgh when got a phonecall from Mr Afridi to say that he was in Vienna and would like to fly over for a night: could he come and stay? I made him welcome and in due course he arrived. He only with me for one night and during the following day I showed him round Edinburgh. I could see that he was unexcited about all that I could show him. We walked past the museum in Chambers Street, and then along George IV Bridge. Still nothing made him enthuse. I could see that as a tour guide I was failing. At the end of George IV Bridge, right next to the magnificent Bank of Scotland building we leaned on the railings and looked north over Edinburgh. It's a magnificent vista, but Mr Afridi was unmoved. And then suddenly his eyes alighted on the trees that cover Corstorphine Hill and he exclaimed 'Trees', and I realised I'd have done much better if I had taken him to the Edinburgh Botanic Garden.

It's nearly 30 years since my first visit to Swat, and I am still in touch with Mr Habib Afridi via his nephew, who rang today from Peshawar with Eid Greetings. What gentlemen.

Did I ever tell you about the time I was kidnapped?

In May 1979, I was travelling around Nepal. I decided it was now time to leave Nepal and re-enter India. I caught the bus from Kathmandu to Darjeeling.

The road runs on a raised dyke west to east in the south of the country, much of it across a relatively flat landscape. I had an aisle seat towards the back of the bus. I was the only foreigner on board. I was travelling very lightly, surviving for 9 months out of an ex-army knapsack (but managing to include two cameras).

We left Kathmandu in the early morning and we’d been travelling for a few hours when we found our road blocked by a lorry whose load of huge logs lay across our path. Young men with handkerchiefs drawn up over their faces approached from several sides and explained to the driver that we weren’t going anywhere, as a protest against the Old-Etonian King Birendra: King Birendra was subsequently assassinated along with many other members of the royal family (on my 50th birthday). Just to dissuade us from turning back, they explained that they had just set fire to the bridge behind us.

Travelling as I had been (mainly walking in the Himalayas) I had been unaware that a government minister had been held incommunicado for 10 hours only a few days earlier. He had been freed when the police turned up firing live rounds. In our situation, the police also turned up firing their guns, but a better organised force of student demonstrators had circled behind the police and set fire to their headquarters. My neighbour on the bus explained that the smoke we could see was what was left of the police station.

The police realised apparently that they’d been out manoeuvered and withdrew. Meanwhile I was itching to get out and take some photographs but I thought I should keep a low profile. My neighbour explained that the students were likely to hold us until their conscripted brethren in the army were sent to fee us at which point the students would withdraw, and we’d be free to go on our way. I thought it an unlikely scenario.

In fact the army never appeared, but as night fell the driver realised that our captors had all disappeared so he could resume the journey. We crept around the fallen logs, and continued to the border check-point with India at Simana Basti. It was midnight when we arrived, so the customs post was closed. I stretched out on the concrete slab (where the customs officers opened bags) and fell asleep. At dawn, I was gently prodded awake by a customs officer who wanted me off his work bench, but at least I was first in line to have my small bag checked. So I entered India. A year later the students’ demands were met with a referendum to decide if a multi-party system should be introduced (though the majority vote was actually for the old system). As we now know, the Nepalese monarchy would be destroyed from within (royal massacre of 2001) as well as from without. In 2008 the last king,  Gyanendra was deposed, and the monarchy abolished.

Looking for bears in the Carpathians

The Carpathians snake through Europe, from southern Poland where they are called the Tatras through to the Alps.  A friend of mine who cycled from London to Delhi seemed to mainly remember steep climbs into the Carpathians when I told him I was visiting Romania! I was there in search of brown bears. I had heard that the largest concentration of bears in Europe is in Romania. The story, as you might imagine, is a mixed one!  Bears are iconic, but close up they are very dangerous. They don't like being surprised! So singing loudly as you walk through the beech woods is recommended. I saw the bears from the safety of hides. Some hide owners feed the bears with so much food that the bears alter their lives in light of reliable feeding. The males who are normally solitary will allow other bears to share their territory. Bears who get habituated to regular food (for example the rubbish bins in Brasov) may become dangerous when humans gets close. Where hide-owners are less generous in the food they put out, visits by bears may be fairly regular, but the small tit bits won't alter the bears behaviour. In the fading light of an October evening I photographed this bear who'd be lured to the hide by maize. The debate about bears is highlighted by the desire of some people to shoot this 'trophy' animal which can earn the landowner £25,000 per head. Paying to visit the hides seemed to me the better option.

Meditation on Raqqa

The Syrian news may not get the front page as often as it used to. But the fall of Raqqa is widely heralded as the last stand of the odious forces of a barbarous so-called caliphate: if only life could be that simple.  I've only been to the city of Raqqa once. Although today in 2017 largely abandoned it used to be the 6th largest city in Syria, situated in the very east,  on the banks of the Euphrates, 300km from the Mediterranean. It reminds of me of a time when the border of the Roman world butted up with their rivals, the Persians. In those the days the major centres of the world were Rome, Byzantium, Baghdad, Ctesiphon, Alexandria. My suspicion is that ISIS/ISIL/Daesh seized the city because of its remoteness from Damascus. Over the last two thousands years it has been captured, devastated and seen an unfair amount of warring nations: Romans, Persians, the Omayyads, and the Abbasids. When the Mongols sacked the city in the 13th century, they destroyed a remarkable ceramics tradition. I am grateful to the distinguished potter, Laurence McGowan, for pointing this out when we were there: he told us that the term Rakka or Raqqa ware is still used to describe the distinctive pottery which was once produced there with lovely examples in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.  It was a sad city when we were there in 2006 with very high levels of unemployment, though we were warmly greeted by school boys in their blue uniforms. Some of the kids who were not in school clambered up the brick walls of the Baghdad gate, as you can see in my photograph. The city's capture/liberation in October 2017 by a combined Kurdish/Syrian Arab force supported by the USA will I am sure now open another can of worms, since no doubt the Assad government supported by the Russians will claim that it should be governed from Damascus. Pray for the people of this sad city.