I always have several books on the go. I have a bed-time book, a lavatory book, a sitting-room book, a dog-walk book and a day-time book which I read at odd moments during the working day when I am uploading or downloading large files. I don't allocate books according to their subject matter but as to their portability.
Thus I don't read Samuelson's "Economics" while dog-walking. This is not so much because it's a heavy tome and also large enough to cause accidents but because I can quickly curl up a paper-back and put it in my pocket when I meet fellow dog-walkers and stop to exchange local gossip with them. (After all, I am already known as an eccentric -- "the man who reads while he walks" -- so I must make efforts to show that I am really quite an ordinary guy in other respects.) At the moment, my dog-walking book is "Health and Medecine in Britain since 1860" by Anne Hardy, a scholarly paperback showing just what immense strides in health were being made in the 19th century at all levels of society long before the National Health Service was started in 1947. My bed-time book at present is "A Mad World, My Masters" by John Simpson, the BBC Foreign Editor. John Simpson is a brave reporter and has been immensely courageous on numerous occasions. He once ventured into deepest Columbia in order to make contact with the drugs barons. He visited the wilder parts of Afghanistan in the previous era when the mujaheddin were fighting the Russian occupiers and was caught by one group which contained Osama bin Laden, newly arrived in the country. When pressed by bin Laden to kill him and his TV team, the group narrowly voted not to: "They are our guests," they said. In Bosnia, he greeted Arkan, one of the most cruel of the Serbian warlords by saying: "How much ethnic cleansing have you carried out today?" In one country, which he does not name (but it could be one of several in my understanding) he attended the trial of a man for theft and I had a troubled night's sleep after reading this: <<<< I once sat through the trial of a man for theft and the resulting amputation of his right hand. It was the single most single experience of my life: worse than seeing a trio of murderers hanged, worse than watching people die in gunfire or shellfire. what made it so horrific was the calmness and silence of it all. The trial was very brief, and the accused man didn't deny the charges. Anyway, he had been caught with the stolen goods on him. When the trial ended, the judge, a Sunni cleric in the whitest of robes, proclaimed the sentence so easily and converstaionally that I assumed it was just another stage of the trial until his words were translated for me. The accused man had been expecting the sentence. Immediately, he rolled back the sleeve of his grubby robe and stood there, his arm bare, with stoic dignity. There was no ceremony. The executioner, a thin staid little man with glasses who doubled as the clerk of the court, reached into a wooden box and pulled out a large kitchen knife, then walked over to the thief, swiflty tied a tourniquet round his arm and took hold of his hand. With the deftness of considerable experience he worked the knife between the bones of the wrist, and the hand came away in less than a second. The thief kept his eyes on the wall behind the judge the whole time and made no sound. The involuntary intake of breath I gave was the only sound in the room. Then the thief's wife took him away, with as little emotion as he himself had shown. The hand was thrown out onto the dusty ground outside the court, close to a pair of feet which had been amputated earlier and which stood together, like a pair of brown shoes in the dust. >>>> Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
