My Faithful Friend, Who Thinks I'm Crap

Apparently I have got this web lark all wrong. I have a friend who prides himself on Speaking His Mind, and though I occasionally wonder whether this famed candour is not sometimes just a way of making himself feel better at someone else's expense (I shall pay for this later) it can be useful.

When I tell him I am going to start a blog, he heaves a great mock-sorrow sigh. "Not YOU as well," he groans, eyes rolling "there are too many people spouting self-centred drivel and expecting other people to be interested." I tell him I realised it was indulgent but I needed something to stop myself careering into mental vacuity. I tell him it is for ME, not them.

"Read a book" he suggests.

I do read books; these days, I can sometimes reach the end of a page before I fall asleep. I then have to re-read it the next night, and so it continues, nights and nights on the same chapter, with me wondering why I fail to be gripped before I give it all up and go for some inane women's magazine instead and read a pointless article on decluttering, which I finish.

"And anyway," he continues "everyone knows what your blog will be about. It'll be all dictators and recipes." Pause. "And Dutch idioms. And you'll do that wide-eyed thing about it all being massively fascinating, and it won't be. You'll expect people to know random stuff about nothing important and you'll pay no heed to the fact that they might not. SO, no one will read it. And then in a few weeks, it will just be something you do which you think no one appreciates , and that will remind you of all the other unappreciated bits of your life that make you fed up, you'll get p'd off and you'll wish you'd never done it. I'm only saying this, "he adds, in his soft, shoulder-patting tone he uses when he is about to tell you, for your own good, that you dress funny, or that all your best friends have regular meet-ups without you (ok, none of these were to me, but they have been said) "to be helpful. And" - the familiar trump card - "you know no one else will be honest with you".

So, I tell him to have a look, which he says he will do. He rings back almost immediately. His unrestrained sense of glee is unmissable.

"See? You are SO predictable" he chuckles, glowingly proud of his insights into what I find interesting. "It IS all dictators and recipes. And you've got a link to a Dutch blog, which is practically what I said about you blathering on about the glorious Dutch. You're perverse. Think about normal things like everyone else, and they might read it. "

I am offended. And I am now worried. Am I perverse? I do find totalitarian regimes interesting. I do love Dutch. Does this make me odd? Am I now not just a boring Surrey housewife but also one of strangely singular interests? Is this why some mothers don't talk to me in the nursery queue?

I have the presence of mind to stop myself. I will not be led into self-flagellation by a Bad Friend who can't tell the difference being blunt and being beastly.

I ask him what he thought. He pauses.

"Welllllll, " he says "I didn't read any of the girly shit, about you moaning on about being a housewife and how you're so bored, because I've heard it, bla bla bla bla. And that WINOS thing sounds utterly frightful. Unless" he checks himself, thoughtfully "any of your friends are fit. But I was right. You expect people to know random crap, and if they don't, you lose them. For instance, I don't know what the Dergue was. I didn't know who Mengistu was, until you made me google him, which actually I didn't have time to do. And I still don't know what Sky Burial is."


We finish our conversation pretty much here, after he has scored an invitation to supper, "when your Elderflower Champagne is ready."


I have chewed over his response and I, for once, remain unmoved.

However, I feel I do owe him for his ingenuousness. So here it is. This is for you.

ONE
The DERGUE was a communist junta headed by Mengistu which grabbed power in Ethiopia after the ousting of President Haille Selassie in 1974. It is now blamed for directly causing Civil War. It copied the Mao's lamented land reforms by nationalising all tenanted land and put peasants in charge of running the show, resulting in widesperead mismanagement and corruption, and leading to the horrendous famines of the 1980s, which you no doubt remember Bob Geldorf singing about.
Like most power-crazed juntas, the Dergue relied on vicious repression of citizens, and kept them in line with widespread assassination, mass murder, enforced resettlement, torture and plenty of locking people away without trial.
Mengistu, along with about 70 others, has been convicted in absentia for genocide and is safely ensconced in Zimbabwe. He has occasinonally nipped over to South Africa for medical treatments, but the Saffers, bizarrely, have never seen fit to extradite him. He has also apparently abandoned his communist beliefs, which, considering his life on a private estate surrounded by starving millions, couldn't be more convenient.

TWO
Sky Burial is a funerary practice which used to be common in Tibet and surrounding areas, where a body is cut in specific places and left exposed to the elements on the top of a hillside, so it may decompose naturally or be taken by the birds.


See? Now you have something to think about while you do your housework this morning. And when I tell you I'm writing about you, YOU will no doubt read my blog. Ha! Victory!

Sky Burial

A Chinese friend emailed me this morning to say how he and his wife liked to think of a group of English people sitting around making momos. And if I were about to develop a renewed interest in Tibet, did I know you can now "watch traditional sky burials on youtube"?

Because X-M is quite capable of living life with his tongue placed firmly in his cheek, I don't for a minute imagine he expects me to watch any burials, Tibetan or otherwise. But I couldn't resist seeing if it were true. And it really is. I didn't go further than that - without meaning to sound pompous and disapproving, it feels like mawkish rubbernecking of the worst kind, and even if the footage is of events well past, I'm sure it would still feel like an intrusion into someone else's grief.

There does however seem to be quite a fascination over here with the idea of this burial practice. A Tibetan student once pointed out how it made perfect sense, as much of Tibet is high enough above the trees to make Western style cremation impractical, and the ground too rocky for easy interment. And in any case, is the practice any more grisly than sending someone into flames? I actually don't think I find it that horrific. I know the Chinese government decided to ban it for while from some kind of moral stand point, but am fairly sure the ban has since been lifted.

My student also went on emphasise that there are a million other things to talk about, Tibet-wise, and so why did it all just come back to sky burial and throat singing? He has a point, and I'm guilty as charged. Look at me doing it right now.

Some time back, I was delightfully lost for a couple of nights in Xin Ran's Sky Burial. Emerging from a dazed reverie at the end of it, I promised myself that I must learn a lot more about Tibet. I still know very little and there's no excuse.

Tibetan momos

I can't go to bed musing about Bad Men Who Get Away With Beastly Things, so I'm going to think instead about the super day we had yesterday making Tibetan momos. D and T arrived with baskets of vegetables and pastry and set to grating and chopping and finally crafting these little dumplings, which makes them the most excellent type of visitor indeed.

D, being Tibetan, is evidently imbued with natural momo-making super-skill, and while the others seem to get the hang of it, mine ended up like pastry road-kill and then split, wilfully spewing their contents over the steamer. It was all darn tricky, which might be why the recipe linked to above suggests that you "pleat if capable"... (it also recommends yak, which I think might be a step too far, even for our butcher) Well, I evidently wasn't capable, but I will try them again. For one thing, what a dastardly way of sneaking mushrooms into the unsuspecting children.

Perhaps the best thing about it was the hour of the five of us sitting around preparing them. I think some of the most interesting conversations happen either over a cooking pot or a bucket of manure. In preparation, they are very similar to Japanese gyoza, only in a slightly different shape, which I think I like even better.

It also reminded me to complete something I started a while ago, namely going through all the children's books with maps, in search of any accidental or pro-China omission, and filling in the outline of Tibet. For someone whose life these days is so suburbanly housewifely, such a task feels almost like activism.

Not so very daring though, is it? Not really. Well, this is Surrey after all.

Anyway, it's taken my mind off the old men dictators a bit.

But It's Not Fair

Why is Mengistu living on a private ranch in Zimbabwe? Of course, I know why - Mugabe lets him and nobody can get him out, despite the Officially Conviction of Genocide. But isn't it bizarre how - just sometimes - somebody can do something so atrocious and get to live on a private ranch at the end of it?

I had a Ethiopian student once who told me he and his family had "suffered a lot" at the hands of Mengistu's Dergue, though didn't go further than that. By coincidence, in the same group there was a Ugandan who hadn't been much liked by Amin and a Turkmeni, formerly from Ashgabat, who had got himself roughed up for accidentally misquoting from the RUHMANA in a business meeting. It had been a grammatical mistake rather than one which changed any sense of meaning, but even so, it got him into a bit of a jam, he said.

None of them elaborated further on what had happened, and I never found it quite right to ask, but after that conversation there was a tangible sense of understanding between the three. And all of them, when I knew them, held calm and convinced religious beliefs. When you consider Amin's death in a Saudi hospital, Niyazov's heart attack while still happily in power and Mengistu now strumming away on his ranch, I supposed faith in some ultimate come-uppance must be your only refuge against self-destroying bitterness.

J and J were outraged with me earlier when I said no to them getting out of bed and randomly eating ice cream, even though the prince in tonight's bedtime story had done it, and treated me to a properly enraged and indignant bellow of "BUT IT'S NOT FAIR". To which I responded, tired and snappish and conscious of my evening time being hijacked, with the stock-pile answer that "Life Is Not Fair".

With them finally off into their aggrieved sleep, it occured to me while cleaning up the muck of a million wellingtons that I don't think that they, or I, ever spoke a truer word.

There's nothing new in that. But what I want to know is - how old do they have to be before you start trying to get that across?