isis_mt12

“Sometimes you have to be really high, to see how small you really are. I’m coming home now.”

Felix Baumgartner, October 2012

ISIS What does the earth look like from outer space? Only a handful of us will ever know.

Will we ever be able to fly? Not in an aircraft, but alone - with total freedom in all three dimensions?

We’re getting there. At the annual International Birdman competition, people take-off from the end of Worthing pier, with any variety of ‘non-mechanical’ wings. The record flight flown before hitting the sea was hit by Steve Elkins in 2009 at 99.86 metres.

On 7 May 2011, Yves ‘Airman’ Rossy flew above the Grand Canyon in Arizona, armed only with a jet pack. Last month Felix Baumgartner jumped into the record books, launching himself into the Arizona Desert, from 39,045 m above the ground. Earth and Space are getting closer: the sky is no longer the limit.

But Felix didn’t really fly. He somersaulted from the stratosphere. Which, in the words of a one famous spaceman, “isn’t flying, it’s falling with style”. And the Birdmen in Worthing aren’t actually flying; they’re racing to be the last to fall into the sea.

We’ve probably got a while to go until we’re all flying freely through space. We rang some fortune tellers to find out when exactly, but none could give us an answer. Apparently even Nostradamus never gave guessing a shot.

But anyway, even from space you can only see half of the world at once. And only at that single point in time. Maybe it’s not really worth the wait. Might as well sit back and expand our horizons through other means. Books? Television? Internet?

We’re not up in space, yet. So, in the meantime, here is something with more humble claims for transcendence.

The ISIS MT12 - and a collection of views from across time and space.

P.S. for what it’s worth, we’d like to make a prediction: We’d like to guess that maybe someone will manage to fly, unaided by machines, by 2048.

CONTENTS

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23 28 32 33 35 37 41

CULTURE TRAVERSING TIME AND SPACE MOST MOVING PERSON GREASE IS THE WORLD BRAINWAVES SHAKESPEARE FOR SALE A LARGE SYMBOLIC GROVE OF TREES?

ISIS EYE

THE HEALERS OF DOON WELL AND DONEGAL STEZAKER

POLITICS ARIEL CLINK SORRY DAY

ISIS EYE

JOHN SCHOOL BELARUS: INSIDE THE BELL JAR A PIG AMONG PANTHERS

PEOPLE 43 46 49 51 53 55 60

MISHA GLENNY JEREMY WOLFENDEN TOBY MOTT LAXMI NARAYAN TRIPATHY CAMILA BATMANGHELIDJH COMMUNITIES OF CONTEMPLATION

ISIS EYE

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TRAVERSING TIME AND SPACE JUNE 2010

MARCH 2012

Shenzhen, China. A class of children watch David Tennant traverse time and space in an episode of ‘Doctor Who’. The following morning, as their teachers walk to class, the corridors echo with insistent chants of “BBC! BBC!”

“Girls’ Time Travel Attempt Leads To Suicide In China”. The Huffington Post is among the first to report the story in English. The two twelve year-olds’ desire to travel back to the Qing dynasty had, tragically, led them to imitate the method of Time Travel depicted in a popular television show: death by drowning.

APRIL 2011

OCTOBER 2012

“China bans films and TV shows featuring time travel” runs a typical headline. The Western press reports that the Chinese State Administration of Radio Film and Television, at the behest of the Government, has announced the censorship of any plot featuring time travel. Sino-sceptic bloggers are quick to pounce : China had decided that Time Travel was a dangerous notion, because if a kid thinks he can change the past, he might think he can change the future too.

“Sci-fi blockbuster Looper achieves Chinese box office first”. Rian Johnson’s neo-noir Time Travel film is reported to have made more money at the Chinese box office than in the US, bringing in $24m in its first week alone, compared to America’s $21m. Many attribute this unprecedented success to the last minute Chinese investment in the film. In exchange for this funding, script edits were dictated (scenes set in future Paris were transported to future Shanghai, Chinese cash was shown as the currency of value), and so China bought itself a prophecy to project in front of the West. It is the heralding of a global shift in the cinematic hegemony of Hollywood and the US, commented the commentators.

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or the West, the East is always on the horizon: looming dangerously, perpetually imminent.

The media succumbs to this Orientalism all too easily. The coverage of the “Time Travel ban” was initiated by a mistranslation: in fact, the statement issued by the administration was intended to merely discourage a popular genre of tacky television from treating China’s long history irreverently.

Similarly, the Time Travel aspect of the double suicide was over-emphasized. They killed themselves out of fear of their parents anger, as stated in their suicide note, which briefly refers to a television show but with no suggestion of cause or effect.

Some weeks after the release of Looper, it emerged that the box office figures had been botched by a hapless analyst who couldn’t distinguish between dollars and yuan. It had, in fact, made an unremarkable $5m in its first week.

But the unremarkable does not make good headlines, and this is why the press can breeze through the paradox of an accidental suicide; why it can present China as both oppressively backward and inexorably advanced in the same sentence; and why it can’t remember if China hates Time Travel, or loves it to death.

JAMES MISSON

MOST MOVING PERSON

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he first instalment of the Chinese televised ceremony ’Most Moving Person’ was held in year 2000. Since then ten groups or individuals per year have been honoured by having their life stories broadcast throughout the billion-strong nation. There is the now 90 year old rural doctor who all of his professional life has daily climbed a rope bridge to the village of ethnic minority, and who is still working. There is the teenaged girl, abandoned at birth and adopted only for her adoptive mother to be rendered paralytic in an accident, who now cares for her paralytic adoptive mother while working part-time jobs and, despite all her tribulations, getting very good grades. There is the urban couple who moved to Tibet to help with primary education, and eventually wound up with so many responsibilities that they had to place their own child in the care of a local orphanage. There is Jackie Chan, who won the price in 2002 for his extensive philantrophic efforts.

Videoes of the broadcast are shown in middleand high school classes nationally. April, who is about to start her final year of high school, says that every year many of her classmates cry during the programme, boys as well as girls. She likes the programme herself: ’It shows me that not all Chinese are bad,’ which can be important when your peers are devoted to a mix of homework and video games. ’And unlike CCTV1,’ the main government news channel, ’it tells people what life really is – c’est la vie.’ The cynic, who is either abashed or self-deprecating when affected by televised sentimentalityfests, has to wonder whether it also helps that re-hashes of the programme are nigh-guaranteed high marks in the essay section of the all-important Chinese university entrance examination. For him it is easier to make a joke about Jackie Chan than to cry in class. C’est la vie.

OLE ANDREASSEN 4

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GREASE IS

THE WORLD

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M E N , M U S C L ES A N D O B S ES S I O N

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he famous 1977 docudrama Pumping Iron focuses on the 1975 Mr. Olympia bodybuilding world championships and the competitors’ routes to the final.

On the well-oiled surface it is an hour and a half of knotted muscles and grunts of exertion and notably features Arnold Schwarzenegger only a few years before he conquered Hollywood.

On the psychological level it paints a bizarre, often comical, picture of machismo obsession: men stand for minutes at a time, almost nude before full length mirrors, scrutinising their physiques to decide what needs ‘sculpting’, as they commonly put it. As the fetishistic proceedings reach their climax, one cannot help but look past Schwarzenegger’s gleaming trunk of a chest to wonder what spurs individuals to such levels of narcissistic commitment.

The beginnings of bodybuilding are far removed from the Californian gyms and bronzed bodies which now spring to mind.

In 1889 a 22-year-old Prussian called Friedrich Müller immigrated to London, dodging his homeland’s military service. He had worked across Europe as a circus strongman and sometime wrestler, but it was in London that he would reach stardom. Under the advice of a friend, he challenged to a contest of strength ‘The Cyclops’ - a famous Polish strongman who offered a thousand pounds to anyone who could better his feats of strength. Adopting

the stage-name Eugen Sandow, he defeated Cyclops in front of a packed audience at the London Aquarium, and a star was born.

Sandow represented something new. Strongmen had been carving out a living as circus sideshows across Europe for decades, their feats of strength often represented as something primal and savage. Sandow, by contrast, obsessed over his perfectly proportioned body, his sharply defined musculature and statuesque beauty; he sold out concert halls and went on an international tour. At the 1893 Chicago World fair, he dusted himself with white powder and assumed the poses of famous classical statues - The Dying Gaul, The Discus-Thrower, Michelangelo’s David. Sandow surely possessed great strength, but his enduring legacy was his image. It was by seeming, rather than just being strong, that he became a star.

With the skill of a great salesman, Sandow turned this image into a marketable commodity; everyone he claimed, could, with hard work, look like him. Through his best-selling magazines and fitness manuals, he offered what he claimed was the first ever scientific method of training one’s body. He said that his system, which he named ‘Physical Culture’, was “exercise reduced to a science... a logical system which will produce certain calculable results.” Sandow claimed that his perfect body demonstrated moral righteousness and good character, the definitive exam-

ple of abstemious behaviour and dedication: “the man who cultivates his body also cultivates self-respect. He has learned the virtue and the happiness of rigid personal cleanliness; his views of life are sane and wholesome”.

Since its Victorian beginnings, bodybuilding has grown into a global multi-million dollar industry, with many millions of practitioners. The International Federation of Bodybuilders is one of the largest sporting federations in the world, but bodybuilding’s ever-growing popularity has not translated into its acceptance as a sporting discipline – a possibility precluded by the fact that contestants are judged not on action, but on appearance.

Gone, too, is its wholesome moral image and the connotations of a search for a higher moral standard. What Sandow once praised as showing moderation is now seen as an obsession;

On the welloiled surface it is an hour and a half of knotted muscles and grunts of exertion what was once considered a physique in tune with nature is now perceived as highly unnatural, almost a caricature of the human body. For decades, analysis of unusual subcultures and specu6

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Apparently chasing the “elusive and unobtainable goal” of the perfect male body is a form of deviant behaviour to be somehow explained lation on their adherents’ motives has been a fertile domain of research in psychology, anthropology and gender studies.

Sociologist Alan M. Klein, author of several studies on bodybuilding culture, catalogues some of the theories: they range “from views of men as warriors without weapons, men without jobs, men in search of missing fathers and in flight from overbearing mothers, to men grappling with issues of sensitivity and manliness.”

The common thread to these theories is that all of them view bodybuilding with suspicion, and that chasing the “elusive and unobtainable goal” of the perfect male body is a form of deviant behaviour to be somehow explained, from a psychological or a sociological perspective.

Unsurprisingly, the body-

building industry itself clings on to its wholesome image. The old motto of the best-selling bodybuilding magazine Muscle and Fitness, Klein points out, reads like a passage from the Old Testament: “strive for excellence, exceed yourself, love your friend, speak the truth, practice fidelity, honour your father and mother. These principles will help you master yourself, make you strong, give you hope and put you on the path to greatness.”

But anecdotes from professional bodybuilders tell another story.

In a 1990 interview, former Mr. Universe Steve Michalik laid bare what had been his motivation to become strong - he sought protection after a childhood full of abuse from his father. His ordeal makes for harrowing reading.

“His favorite way to torture me

was to tell me he was going to put me in a home. We’d be driving along in Brooklyn somewhere, and we’d pass a building with iron bars on the windows, and he’d stop the car and say to me, ‘Get out. This is the home we’re putting you in.’ I’d be standing there sobbing on the curb - I was maybe eight or nine at the time and after a while he’d let me get back into the car and drive off laughing at his own little joke.”

Michalik died in May aged 63, after suffering a plethora of medical complications resulting from his prolonged use of steroids.

But neither the suspicion of scholars nor cautionary tales about its practitioners has prevented the pop-cultural relevance of modern bodybuilding.

Pumping Iron made film stars out of its protagonists. Arnold

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His quick rise to superstardom led the way for a new breed of bodybuilder film star, creating blockbuster after blockbuster.

Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, Predator - the quintessential action hero was sculpted in the bodybuilding gyms of the 1970s.

The forerunner of the many beefed-up action hits of the early 1980s was the boxing classic Rocky. The breakthrough role for Sylvester Stallone, who would later gain further fame under the guise of his Herculean supersoldier Rambo, is at its core a heartwarming affirmation of the American Dream; a man’s hard work and determination enables him to realise his ambition and become what he wants.

The message was enthusiastically received by American audiences, and not without reason.

The term ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ would enter American political consciousness in the early 1980s to denote a collective moral malaise and fear for the future; a national trauma to complement the soldiers who had returned home from Southeast Asia with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The image of the new cinematic heroes, of utter indomitability, determination and strength, was lapped up by a nation afraid that it was losing its own.

Nowadays, little could be easier than identifying a fear for the future in the UK, a crisis of confidence weighing on the public mind. Does today’s pessimism contribute to a desire for the impregnability found in bodybuilding? At my local gym, I watch three hulking men go to work in front of one of the long mirrors, each in turn striking poses perfected decades back

by Sandow and Schwarzenegger, while the other two critique the pose and the physique. They have a regional qualifier for the national championship coming up. What’s the attraction, I ask?

Dave, a bricklayer, gives me his view. “It’s about being what you want, you know? The only limit’s how hard you’re willing to work for it. Not everybody gets to look this way.” There is, he admits, a price for his extraordinary physique: “some days I can barely get out of bed, it hurts so bad.

I spend a lot of the time feeling like an old man, but that’s just the price you pay to look like this.” He grins and flexes his colossal bicep. When I ask about his lifestyle, he gets to talking about his diet - the simplicity of endless pasta, vegetables and white meat contrasted with lists of unpronounceable vitamins and hormones. It certainly deviates from the norm; every influence on the body is regulated and controlled to the maximum possible degree.

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Dave and his friends will soon go head-to-head against other like-minded enthusiasts, all pursuing a similar goal and image.

It is impossible to say if all those individuals are obsessively chasing Klein’s elusive, unobtainable masculine ideal, or if many of them are happy with their own achievements. Are they all really individual nodes in a problematic network, their obsessive

diets and schedules symptoms of social, cultural and gender issues that they might not even be aware of? Sandow claimed that it was the most fundamental human desire to be strong: “wealth, talent, ambition, the love and affection of friends, the pleasure derived from doing good to those about one; all those things may afford some consolation for being deprived of life’s chief bless-

ing, but they can never make up for it.” Most people would surely laugh at the suggestion, thinking that the reality is the other way around; associating strength and physique with a facade to mask a lack of fulfilment.

Whatever the competitors think and whether they are misguided or not, it seems there’s always the impression that they’re compensating for something.

HARRY HALL

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BRAINWAVES A

n historic picture’ – this was how a UK based Buddhist organisation – the Samatha Trust – described an image generated from a recent brain scan. The brain in question belonged to an experienced meditator entering an ‘energised state’.

It is by no means the first time neuroscience has focused on meditation and what some might call its ‘real’ effects on the brain. Since the 1950s there have been over 3000 studies covering a range of physical and mental functions affected by meditative practice. Most reports are predictably burdened by neuroscientific jargon. Even if the inquisitive spiritualist can navigate the labyrinth of alpha, gamma, delta and beta waves (as well as their relative frequencies) they are unlikely to find many answers. Studies are fraught with lack of evidence, lack of funding, lack of subjects and lack of firm conclusions.

However, some of the tentative conclusions that have been drawn over the last fifty years point towards exciting possibilities. Prolonged meditative practice seems to result in long- as well as short-term physical alteration to the brain. In some studies, different brain sectors that usually work independently have been found functioning simultaneously. In others, electronic frequencies across the whole brain have been known to synchronise to a bewilderingly rare extent.

One group of Carmelite nuns claiming to be able to enter into union with God through meditation were found to be engaging far flung areas of the mind that average humans rarely touch at any point in their lives.

Some scans have so closely resembled those of people asleep that doctors have struggled, and occasionally refused, to accept that the subject is wide awake and in total control of their thought processes.

Non-scientific accounts of meditative experience are no less bizarre. Vivid hallucinations, intense moments of energisation, involuntary physical movement, inexplicable feelings of compassion, complete disassociative separation from physical reality, orgasm – these are just some of the effects reported by both experienced and inexperienced practitioners from around the world. It is no wonder that meditative practice has held an often uncomfortable relationship with drug experimentation. Unsurprisingly, the strange psychoactive phenomena that can arise are of more interest to some than any spiritual path.

Why does the Samatha Trust call the image “historic”? Because the erratic brain activity it shows looks like that of an epileptic seizure, the primary difference being that the subject was in complete control of entering and leaving the state, and showed no signs of discomfort, pain or confusion. It is one of the first times something of this magnitude has been caught on screen in relation to meditation.

Our knowledge of the subject is still severely limited. Most aspects of the mind, let alone the meditative mind, have yet to be fully explored.

Studies such as these give us no firm conclusions.

However, what these snapshots of objectively measurable and visually presentable brain functions do give us is a doorway into the exciting, uncertain, unsettling and unfathomable world of meditative practice. They are tantalising glimpses of the conscious and sober mind’s potential to push itself to new and intense levels of cognitive experience.

ROBERT YATES 10

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SHAKESPEARE FOR SALE A SECRET PARISIAN GEM AND HOW IT SOLD ITSELF TO THE WORLD

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estled in the heart of Paris, with a view of Notre Dame across a scenic stretch of the Seine, a small bookshop is tucked away, heaving with ageing tomes and densely packed wooden shelves. Bookish staff bustle and browsers amble pleasantly, discovering classics they never knew were lost. Gentle melodies from a distant piano, tuned with only a passing resemblance to a key, waft through the space like scents through a patisserie; small writers’ groups meet in an upstairs room and time itself seems to slow down in reverence.

Shakespeare and Co. is a Paris

institution, frequented in the past by Joyce, Hemingway and Ginsberg. However, at the shop’s core, there lies an insoluble paradox. How can a place remain charming, independent and little known when “charming, independent and little known” is exactly how it is billed in every tourist guide ever written about the city? Can a shop which markets itself as a socialist haven remain a socialist haven when it feels the need to market itself?

The tale of Shakespeare and Co. is a story in two chapters.

It begins in Rue de L’Odéon in 1921, with a woman called Sylvia

At the shop’s core, there lies an insoluble paradox.

Beach who founded a shop called Shakespeare and Co. However the version which Hollywood and popular legend have since embraced begins only in 1951, in Rue de la Bûcherie, with its scenic Seine-side location, when George Whitman, Shakespeare and Co.’s now recently deceased owner, opened a shop called Le Mistral.

Whitman’s shop was as much a writers’ retreat and socialist 12

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commune as a capitalist venture, one where artists could gather and anyone could claim free residence. The two narrative strands converge in 1964, following Sylvia Beach’s death. Her original store had closed after Paris’s surrender to the Nazi forces, during the city’s occupation, and was never revived in its original location. However, Whitman – a friend of Beach’s – inherited the name, and so Shakespeare and Co. skipped across town, uprooting itself from one set of walls and installing itself into another.

Today, the client base in the Rue de la Bûcherie shop is a strange mix. There seems to be something schizophrenically disjointed about it all, with a real ideological divide that runs down its centre. You have the tourists, who make up the majority of shoppers – the American Midwesterners on their first trip to Europe, innocently accepting everything placed before them; the Spanish school groups who bundle noisily through the cramped, enclosed space and English citybreakers who have read about Shakespeare and Co. in their hastily purchased tourist guides.

Mingled among them, however, are the self-styled grand intelligentsia of the Paris scene – American and British expats who have set themselves up in what they see as their spiritual home away from their (otherwise mundane, unappreciative, philistine!) home. Emanating either from tumbleweeds (young folk who have taken up residence) or passing shoppers, the Shake-

speare and Co. air is filled with the chatter of self-appointed intellectuals. It becomes thick with the tremulous hum of conversations that trundle, creakingly, between Joyce and Sartre, Spinoza and David Foster Wallace, capturing passing glints of Gore Vidal and Chaucer in transit.

Afraid that this was simply my own cynical take on the shop’s demography, I asked a regular customer, Ted, to characterise it for me. With an ironical tone, he responded simply: “expats very impressed with their vast literary knowledge... who do not shy away from making loud and unapologetic comments”.

One day, during my own stint volunteering there, an ageing American woman came in, confidently coaching the rest of her group on the correct pronunciation of various French words (“pardon” is said “bahrrdongg”). She approached a member of staff and began: “So, when did Shakespeare set this book-store up then, s’il vous plait?”

“The shop was founded in the 1950s by George Whitman.”

“Oh really? I thought Shakespeare died in the 19th century!

Merci!” ...or something like that. I think. Maybe.

In the same store, however, Ted assures me, it is not uncommon to hear deadpan East Coast US accents discussing esoteric book readings or hyper-sophisticated poetry slams. Apparently Lithuanian poetry conventions are just the only place to be at

the moment. If you’re not in Vilnius, then... what’s the point?

But that’s just it – the shop is sirenic. It draws you in and cradles you and tells you that you live in a small enclave of crystallised intellectualism, until soon you find yourself talking loudly but ignorantly about something obscure, hoping against hope that passing strangers are listening. The shop creates a phantasmagorical image of the world as you would like to see it, or perhaps just a romantic version of yourself. Ted claims that the main product of the store is not the books themselves but “the fantasy of an artist living in Paris”. And this, as far as I’m concerned, summarises the paradox which haunts the place - the shop is a pedlar of dreams, not things.

It is not controversial that a brand should make its money by presenting you with seductive images of yourself. Gucci CEO Robert Polet, on working at Unilever frozen foods, famously declared: “I didn’t sell ice cream.

I sold concepts. I sold worlds in which people consume ice cream, but I didn’t sell a piece of vanilla with a chocolate topping on a stick.” So too, Shakespeare and Co. don’t sell you copies of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Ulysses or Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which according to a fellow volunteer Jenny are amongst a small group of books that are purchased far more than any other. They reinvent you as the type of person who buys these things.

But Hollister does this, as does Gucci, as does Starbucks. It is the

MT12 principle underlying consumerist capitalism. So where’s the paradox? Well, it’s because at Shakespeare and Co., unlike Hollister, Gucci, et al., the image itself depends upon the shop’s inherent free thinking, pro-intellectual, anti-capitalist-corporations vibe.

Essentially they cry: prove just how anti-consumerist you are by purchasing a price-inflated copy of Das Kapital from us.

Theirs is an image rooted firmly in their own past – a history of integrity which has been forcibly co-opted into a brand identity.

I wouldn’t want this commentary to sound like a criticism, or even a complaint. It is rather an expression of wonder – wonder at just how subtly the sleight of hand has been done and on just how thin a tight-rope the whole operation treads.

A potential customer

(from either side of the divide) will notice the charming store front whilst passing through the Latin Quarter, and maybe he’ll go ahead and amble in. He will remark on what a unique and charming place this is and pick up a charming book or two, amazed at his luck, having just stumbled across this (unique and charming) place out of the blue.

And then he will look around and see all the dozens of other people just like him, all equally enraptured and awed at their own luck at having happened upon this charming one-of-a-kind experience, all easily bundled up next to a rack of postcards, ready-made to commemorate the event.

And yet,

The shop is a pedlar of dreams, not things despite this clearly bogus vision of personal uniqueness upon which the store’s fantasy depends, business booms. What can you say? It’s impressive.

Shakespeare and Co. seems to be a natural outgrowth from its home city. There is something about Paris now that brings to mind the boy in China last year who sold a kidney on the black-market in order to buy himself an iPad. It has turned

PH OTO : PATR ICIA GLOGOWSKI

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itself into a product, ready to be sliced up and dealt out to visitors.

It is not a phenomenon limited to Paris though: in the view of French author Michel Houellebecq, France is deliberately transforming its own reality to conform to the image held in the Asian and North American imagination. He writes that France is a “wonderful country... at least from the tourist’s point of view.”

And so, if this is the state of Paris today, it seems churlish to expect anything else from Shakespeare and Co. – petty to demand some utopian authenticity in an

otherwise jaded city. The shop works hard on its presentation and is rewarded through sales, like Starbucks or Abercrombie.

If once it was a meeting place for great writers, it is now an easy place to fill up a tall take-out cup with self-satisfaction. But, I think this is what we expect from Paris – surely everyone at least once has queued and paid to get into the Louvre, only to walk directly to the Mona Lisa and then exit via the Venus de Milo, subsequently spending the rest of the day feeling vaguely smug... Shakespeare and Co. sells

us a creation. And even if we claim to revile this artifice, the true product, that feeling of selfcongratulatory intellectualism, was almost certainly why we ventured towards it in the first place.

As another volunteer put it, “it caters to tourists - and it does it well, so you can’t fault that.”

ANDREW IRWIN

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* *Uiphawâtļûxe’ň?* *MIGHT IT HAPPEN TO BE A LARGE SYMBOLIC GROVE OF TREES?

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hat may be the most perfect language in the world has no native speakers. In fact it has no speakers at all. What it does have is a website and over 400 pages of grammar collected into a book or, as is more often the case, a series of binders. The language is Ithkuil, a constructed language that took 25 years to create. Constructed languages – ‘conlangs’ - are languages that, unlike the ones we speak every day, have been made to meet a particular need. One of the most famous conlangs is Elvish, the language that J.R.R. Tolkein wrote an entire set of books to explain. Elvish is an artistic language, built to answer a question about a story. The need that Ithkuil meets is a problem of philosophy and logic. What if we spoke a language that took all the best features of existing languages and streamlined them? A language made sense, every feature following a cohesive and incredibly extensive set of rules? What if those rules; pages and pages of them, allowed us to be more exact than we could be in any other language?

Ithkuil, to give the exceedingly simple explanation, is constructed from a series of roots. Mathematically, based on the alphabet and grammar of Ithkuil there are around 3,600 possible roots. Only a fraction of those have been attached to actual meanings.

From the root, a stem is formed, and then a variety of letters are slotted in, each adding a layer of meaning. At its most extreme this results in words like the 24 letter, heavily apostrophized term for “being hard to believe, after allegedly trying to go back to repeatedly inspiring fear using rag-tag groups of suspicious-looking clowns, despite resistance” (qhûl-lyai’svukšei’arpîptó’ks). This structure is a large part of why Ithkuil may be the most perfect language. It allows for an incredible degree of expression in very few syllables, complicated though those syllables are. One doesn’t simply state a fact, one states how one knows that fact, numerous specifics about the nature of the fact, and how the fact is meant to be received by the listener. It has been posited that to be able to comprehend and relate all of this in a conversation, someone who speaks Ithkuil as their native language would have to think several times faster than people currently do. The stunning amount of information that Ithkuil can transmit is also its greatest weakness; to date, nobody is fluent in Ithkuil. People have expressed interest in trying to become fluent, but it remains to be proven whether our brains can actually hold all the rules of the language, let alone be able to think fast enough to speak it.

So can Ithkuil really be the most perfect language that we have? Can it even be one of the better ones available to us, given that it’s a language that will never be voiced? We rely on language to convey meaning and to specify meaning. We need to tell the person at the market that we would like some apples, but we would also like to be able to tell them that we want some apples that are ripe. On the graph of utility versus specificity, Ithkuil has proudly planted its flag at an extreme.

And that calls into question whether it can be classified as a language at all. If languages are means of communication, and no one can actually actively communicate in Ithkuil, Ithkuil becomes something else entirely: an extended essay on how we describe our world.

ABIGAIL BURMAN

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Brighton Beach, New York. All types congregate here: babushkas who teach their granddaughters to apply eye shadow and distrust other women; the tall blondes, the smoking blondes, and the sometimes-red-head blondes; my grandmother and everyone else’s grandmother; couples who were looking for a beach, and families who figure their kids are too young to tell the difference anyway.

MASHA GINDLER

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czema is difficult to treat. Olga Breslin, one of a number of people in Ireland with a gift for curing skin conditions and other ailments, will cure the symptoms once you wait out the four-week backlog for an appointment.

Donegal, in North-West Ireland has particularly suffered from Ireland’s property crash.

Evidence for this lies in the thousands of empty houses that were built on optimism and which now litter the beautiful landscape. People may be reverting from the sudden, and now seemingly failing, material culture to the old spiritualism that was always there in the background.

Olga lives on a winding road of new houses. Her driveway is filled with Northern and Dublin-registered BMWs; the 35 euros she charges to remedy the chronic skin condition is a bargain. “She takes as long as she needs to take,” a cure-hopeful tells me, “I’ve been waiting for three hours, but sure, it works.”

“At some point when I am passing my energy to you the clock will stop,” she tells me.

“Don’t mind that.” She clasps my wrists as she whispers prayers continuously. Her hands aren’t as manicured as the rest of her appearance. She makes me hold nine sweets in my hands, to be taken in three doses, nine days apart.

I sit awkwardly. “Can you feel the intense heat coming from my hands?” she asks. The ten minutes that she keeps her eyes closed clasping my hands feel a lot longer. Maybe my wrists do feel a little warmer. I wonder whether the clock is broken.

She says her gift was given to her when she was still a child.

“Until I was eight years old I thought it was normal to be able to see into other people’s bodies,” she tells me, before warning that she “can’t guarantee it will work”. The throngs waiting outside seem convinced.

When she releases my wrists Olga can see that my liver is “half full” of the poison which causes

eczema. Do I suffer from back pain? Stomach pains? Do I have any problems in my personal life?

There are many other healers like Olga who offer cures, mostly for minor physical and psychological problems. Sprained muscles can be healed with a special ointment administered by a healer at midnight on three consecutive nights. The number three is seen as particularly powerful.

At midnight on May Day of this year over two thousand people made their way to Doon Well, an ancient pagan pilgrimage site where the ‘peasthe’, a mythical serpent that lives in the well, is said to cleanse those who suffer from problems with their health. Disabled children are regularly brought there in the hope that they will ‘recover’.

Other, darker beliefs persist.

The behaviour of people with mental disorders is predicted in parts of rural Donegal. Those with the gift can tell how they will feel that day from the movements of a named piece of paper in a jar.

THE HEALERS OF DOON WELL AND DONEGAL SWEETS, SUPERSTITION AND SOLVING THE WORLD’S PROBLEMS

MT12 This is only the tip of an iceberg of submerged beliefs in Ireland. Enthusiasm for the supernatural has not waned, even among a highly educated and modern population. And superstitious belief can suddenly become dangerous as healers have the power to make vulnerable patients do whatever they please.

Yet there is a stigma attached to believing in ‘superstitions’.

“I don’t know if she has a gift,” one woman who had been healed

by Olga told me, before adding, “I don’t know how it works. If my husband knew I was here he wouldn’t let me come, he doesn’t believe in this sort of thing.” Others cite placebo as an explanation for healing powers.

Folk beliefs are becoming less conspicuous. Ceremonies at Doon Well are not advertised and the whereabouts of healers are spread by word of mouth. As one woman from the town of Ramelton in Donegal told me, “people who believe in the supernatural don’t like to talk about it.”

Still, there is no doubt that the population of Donegal are spiritually charged. Father Sweeney of Ramelton, a semi-retired priest, attracts swathes of the sick and

desperate who come to his Friday evening prayer meeting in search of help. He describes himself as a “channel” through which God’s power to heal can work when it is stimulated through prayer.

He is “closer to God,” as he explained to me, and is thought of as a mystic by some members of the local community.

Ireland has long been associated with superstitious belief and the supernatural. Yeats broadcast this image to the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through the ‘Celtic Twilight’ and other dubious, high-profile rituals practiced by the Golden Dawn, an influential magical order popular throughout Britain at the time.

Belief in supernatural healing is not confined to Ireland.

A woman from Kerala in India called ‘Amma’ (mother) tours America followed by a band of devotees, healing through her embrace, which has earned her the nickname ‘the hugging saint’.

She has started charities across the world on the back of the huge wealth she has amassed.

Lynne MacTaggart has tried to rationalise folk belief with the Heal America Intention Project.

She has applied the principles of scientific hypothesis and experiment to the ‘power of thought’, which she sees as a solution to America’s “greater national debt, poverty and unemployment”.

Her first experiment involved a group of people instructed to use their ‘specific intention’, or their power of thought, to change the position of algae in a remote laboratory. The Heal America Intention Project was launched at 12pm during the Coast to Coast Radio show on 6 June this year. The USA’s sovereign debt crisis has yet to be solved.

Two months and nine toffees on, I still suffer from my minor skin condition. For some, I believe, it is different.

It’s scarcely imaginable that superstitious beliefs will die out. The modern world is in some ways more receptive to them. Amma can run an international multi-million pound business built on her spirituality and Lynne MacTaggart can try to harness the spirituality of the masses to change the world.

And then there are those like Olga Breslin, who simply feel they’ve got something to give.

PHILIP BELL

She makes me hold nine sweets in my hands, to be taken in three doses, nine days apart.

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JOHN STEZAKER

THE FUTURE OF PHOTOGRAPHY?

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he Photographer’s Gallery is tucked away behind the bustle of Oxford Street, a converted warehouse hosting three floors of gallery space. It is, it proudly boasts, the largest public gallery in London dedicated entirely to photography, and an institution “instrumental in establishing photography’s important role in culture and society”. Founded in 1971 by Sue Davies, it has been the champion of a medium that has often struggled to be regarded as an art form. Since 1996, its’ annual photography prize has offered a £30,000 reward to an individual who has “significantly contributed to the medium of photography”, with a list

of previous winners including Juergen Teller and Corinne Day. This summer the prize was awarded to John Stezaker, a collagist. Stezaker uses ‘found’ images, 1950s photographs of classic film stars and old postcards, and juxtaposes them to create new, hybrid images. In his series ‘Marriage’ he exploits concepts of portraiture and overlays faces to witty and often surprising effect. The images echo Dada/ Surrealist photomontage and reference the collages of Hannah Höch and Joseph Cornell. But they are not his photographs, and Stezaker, from this output, cannot be called a photographer.

Despite visual brilliance, the technique and nature of Stezaker’s work has ignited fierce debate regarding the development of photography and the perceived failure of the prize to uphold the medium as a progressive art form. Stezaker’s work is fundamentally different to those of the other finalists.

Included in the exhibition are several stark portraits by Pieter Hugo, taken from his series ‘Permanent Error’, and the works of the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi.

Both Hugo and Kawauchi approach photography in a manner clearly in tune with the ethos of the Gallery; through his photojournalistic approach to portraiture, Hugo poses ethical, social and environmental questions, while Kawauchi captures brief moments of temporality that in themselves reflect the nature of photography.

The prize advertises itself as a “focus for debate and discussion”, which this summer it certainly proved to be. But it also advertises the forward-momentum of photography, and an individual’s significant contribution to the form. While recognition of Stezaker’s work seems to represent a move towards a greater appreciation of collage and oldfashioned techniques, the crucial paradox lies in the judges’ awareness that Stezaker is not a photographer, in the sense that he doesn’t use a camera and, more importantly, he doesn’t create his own images. This begs the immediate question: how and why did he win a prestigious photography prize?

HARRIET BAKER

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A R I E L

STUDENTS AND SETTLERS IN A SHININ G CIT Y

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ver there is Shiloh, where the Tabernacle was. And beyond that hill is Shechem, or Nablus as they now call it.”

A wide sweep of the arm takes in over 2,000 years of biblical history, brushing over the Palestinian towns and villages sprinkled in the valleys below.

We turn to gaze over the sunbaked hills that undulate down to the Israeli Mediterranean coastal plain, where it merges with the cloudless sky, a pale blue haze, shimmering in the west.

“And on a clear day, you can see all the way to Netanya on the coast, and to the south even the skyscrapers in Tel Aviv.”

From a roof terrace outside the canteen of Ariel University, my friend and I are shown the glorious panorama that the city of Ariel commands. But this is no ordinary city, and no ordinary university. Ariel is 25km inside the West Bank, on a hilltop in the heart of land which Zionists think belongs to a ‘Greater Israel’, but which Palestinians hope will become part of their country should the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict ever be realised.

Following the Israeli cabinet’s sign-off on September 9th 2012, Ariel is now Israel’s eighth and newest university. The Israeli military commander for the region has the final word on the decision, but for Ariel and Israel’s right wing this is a mere formality and they are celebrating a victory over liberal Israelis, the international community, and all the others who think that there should be no Israeli settlements in the West Bank, let alone a university. “Today we make history,” Ariel’s mayor and founder Ron Nachman proclaimed.

The settlement of Ariel was

MT12 founded in 1978, and is now home to some 20,000 people, with over 13,000 students, and an aim to have 20,000 at the university by 2020. This is not a settlement of volatile youths camped out in caravans. Yet Ariel, and its university, are contested and controversial.

The university’s opponents may have failed to stop the Israeli authorities upgrading Ariel’s status, but they certainly aren’t going down without a fight. The heads of Israel’s seven other universities have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to block the decision, and over 1,000 Israeli academics signed a petition against it in February. “We think that it is endangering the whole of Israeli academia, because it is recruiting it for a political agenda,” Nir Gov, a professor of chemical physics at the Weizman Institute of Science, and one of the originators of the petition, tells me. International academia, for the most part, shun Ariel University, as all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law.

With news from the West Bank filled with stories of violent attacks by extremist Israeli settlers on Palestinians, the debate over Ariel stood out. Working for a Palestinian news service had exposed my friend Anna, a Polish graduate studying conflict resolution at the University of San Diego, and I to one side of the story. Yet a question remained for us: just who are these settler scientists and students?

“Ignorance is not the answer to anything. We are suggesting that people should know the facts and realities first,” Eldad Halachimi, the university’s Vice President for Resources, tells us enthusiastically. “This

university, instead of an obstacle to peace, is a window. Arabs and Jews working together. I encourage anyone to come and see for themselves, it’s a great lab of people working together.”

While the Jewish holidays mean that the campus is eerily calm when we visit, Ariel’s staff take great pains to repeatedly remind us that there are over 500 Arab-Israeli students at the university (referring to Arabs rather than Palestinians – a controversial distinction in itself, as many Palestinians view being labelled solely ‘Arab’ as rejecting their national identity). We are told that Ariel academics have been “quietly establishing cooperation” with their Palestinian and Jordanian counterparts, and that one third of the workers in the city’s industrial zone are also Arab-Israeli. “Everything

“Even if it’s called a university, it is in fact no more than an occupation’s apparatus.” to do with Ariel is political,” Dr Azi Lev-On, head of new media at the university’s School of Communications, explains, “but most students here don’t care about this. The large number of Arab students here proves this.”

Ariel’s efforts to prove itself normal, respectable and a part of Israel proper are palpable, and they seem to be paying off for its students at least. Less than 15% of them live inside the West Bank, and most of the rest commute from Israel every day. “I didn’t really think about the fact that [Ariel] was in the West Bank,” Talya, a media and communica 24

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tions student from Ashkelon, told the New Statesman earlier this year. “The main reason I chose Ariel was that my grades from high school were bad, and I couldn’t get into Be’er Sheva.”

Walking around the campus in the glorious Mediterranean sunshine, amid well-kept lawns and a hodge podge of old concrete blocks and shiny new developments, it is indeed easy to forget that you are anywhere but an ordinary, modern Western university. But one look beyond the 10 mile-long hilltop that Ariel clings to, towards the Palestinian towns and villages below, reminds you of where you are.

Later, we sit in Halachimi’s office, about to interview him, when an old man with a skullcap covering his snow white hair walks in and talks rapidly to Halachimi in Hebrew. He leaves just as quickly, without acknowledging my friend and I. At his hip was

a small handgun. “Our founder,” Halachimi says reverently when we resume the interview, “this guy is allowed anywhere.” Hala-

“When we want to build a Jewish community here in Judaea & Samaria, we build a university, a ‘shining city on the hill’” chimi speaks with an almost messianic zeal: “It’s a very Jewish thing for us to have a university.

When we want to build a Jewish community here in Judaea & Samaria, we build a university, a ‘shining city on the hill’.”

But for Palestinians, the international community, and a significant proportion of Israelis,

Ariel is anything but “Princetonon-the-Hill”, as Ariel’s mayor envisions it. “Even if it’s called a university, it is in fact no more than an occupation’s apparatus,” Tariq Dana, an assistant professor of political science at Hebron University, tells me.

“It comes down to the Israeli systematic policy of imposing facts on the ground,” says Haitham Tamimi, a former Reuters correspondent in the West Bank, “to further entrench the presence of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and create an additional barrier to peace with the Palestinians.”

“It is not about ‘can academia be separated from politics’,” he adds. Tamimi’s view is something that Ariel is constantly trying to counter. Academia should not be dragged into politics, we kept hearing. “The average Ariel resident wants to live a normal life. It’s the same with Arabs -

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the controversy is not rooted in people,” Avi Zimmerman, Executive Director of the Ariel Development Fund and American Friends of Ariel, informs us in a breather in his “very busy” schedule, his arms folded back nonchalantly behind his head. “People are using both Palestinians and settlers as pawns in a political game. In my humble opinion.”

Yet the reasoning of those fighting for Ariel inevitably turns political, merging with the general right-wing Israeli argument that the West Bank should be part of a ‘Greater Israel’, either as a God-given right, or for safety.

Halachimi dismisses the arguments of other Israeli universities that there is not enough funding to go round if Ariel enters the fold, labelling them a “cartel”. Yet he is also eager to lay down the security reasons for Ariel’s seemingly precarious perch, on a hill that Palestinians appar-

ently used to call Jabel Mawat, the ‘Mountain of Death’, due to its inhospitable terrain. “If the other guys are here, then there’ll be no Jews. They will shoot rockets onto the coastal plain, where 5 million people live,” Halachimi’s eyes are lit up and he presses his point. “You know it will happen because of Gaza – there were rockets this morning at Sderot. At 800m above sea level, Ariel is a natural buffer protecting Israel from Iran.”

For the Israeli academics battling Ariel’s existence, it is also anything but apolitical. Gov tells me, “If you want to work there you have to agree with the political agenda of the settlements. I don’t think you can disentangle the two... You might say that Israel is playing a double game, with a democratic regime inside Israel, and an apartheidlike regime on the other. You can’t claim to open an institute

in the West Bank, and want it to be a full member of Israeli academia, which is democratic.”

Ariel presses the idea of ArabIsraeli cooperation, and Lev-On tells me that they would be “very happy” to accept Palestinian students, were it not for the Palestinian Authority’s ban on cooperation with settlements. However, for Palestinians this is a mere fillip. As Gov points out, Palestinians cannot study anywhere in Israel, let alone in Ariel. Tamimi, too, is adamant, “There is a double standard system used in [Israel]. Why is Israel providing 5,000 permits for Palestinian workers whilst none for students?

What kind of academic cooperation can there be in the absence of justice and human dignity?”

What then, is the future for Ariel and its University? Some supporters argue that it has “consensus status”, that it is one of many “fingers” that will

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“Why is Israel providing 5,000 permits for Palestinian workers while none for students?” remain part of Israel when the two-state solution is finally realised. Xavier Abu Eid, one of the chief Palestinian Authority negotiators, thinks otherwise, telling me: “we have never accepted [Ariel’s] presence and for anyone who believes in the twostate solution, this illegal settlement won’t remain as part of Israel if there is any agreement.”

Others, including some Palestinians I met, are now calling for a single state – Zimmerman is adamant that “the two-state solution hasn’t worked”, while Halachimi says that “nobody’s interested in the two-state solution anymore – people belong to the same neighbourhood.”

However, Gov raises his eye-

brows at this. “If you press [the settlers] into a corner, some of them will say yes to a fully democratic state which includes everybody. But then this is not the state of Israel, it is Israel and Palestine together...

It would be a new state. I don’t think this is the state they are imagining, I don’t think they can imagine how it would work.”

Sure enough, before we leave, Halachimi fervently imparts to us his belief in a single Jewish state, where “Arabs will be the minority”. After all, he tells us, there are 23 “Arab states”, including Gaza. “Is that racist? I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “They call it Palestine, we call it Israel.

What difference does it make?”

Waiting for the bus back beyond the 1967 borders to Jerusalem, the sleepy afternoon sun glows golden over families enjoying a swim and couples walking arm in arm. For now, with the support of a right-wing government who look likely to hold power in the upcoming elections, Ariel and its university will remain sheltered from storms that are, at least partly, of its creation.

RACHEL SAVAGE

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CLINK CRAB RAVIOLI AT HER MAJESTY’S PRISON

W

e wanted to leave the restaurant, but we’d been locked in. As we waited for someone to escort us out, we studied the ID tags we’d all had to wear round our necks during the meal, and pored over the Christmas menu: home-

made duck pate with plum chutney, roast free-range Norfolk turkey, parsnips with maple syrup…

The restaurant is called The Clink, and it’s run within HMP High Down, a working prison in Surrey. Twentyeight prisoners form the staff, as

chefs, waiters and cleaners paid at a wage of £14 per week. Applying for a job here is like trying to get into a top university: thousands from across the country submit their names and, once they’ve passed security clearance, are selected on the basis of interview.

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But if all this conjures up the image of a mock restaurant, created more to mimic the real thing than to provide a genuine dining experience, you’ve got it totally wrong. The Clink was designed by ITV designerpresenter Derek Taylor, and it looks like a swanky upscale restaurant you might find anywhere in London.

Neon lights shift above the diners’ heads from purple to green to orange, and colourful displays of poetry written by prisoners decorate the walls (some of it is a little bizarre; for example, this one written to Father Christmas: “Pop in for a cup of tea/ There isn’t any brandy/ I haven’t got a key/ Please pop up the toilet/ I promise not to pee”). The tables are made of glass, the clientele is mostly old and well-dressed, and the bathroom gets five stars for its 360 degree mirror coverage. The only flaw in design is the waiters’ outfits, which consist of baggy grey trousers and retro chequered waistcoats.

In fact, if you’d forgotten the walk to get inside the restaurant – go past some barbed wire fences and clinical flowers, place all electronics in a locker, and exchange your passport for a security lanyard – you would be hard-pressed to notice that all this is taking place inside a prison. Other than the plastic cutlery (all metal tools have to be placed on a ‘shadow board’ at the end of the day, so they try to minimise the number of implements which pose a threat), the fact that all the bread has to be sourdough (yeast could be snuck into the prison to make alcohol), and the aforementioned regulation that diners must be

CRAB

The Clink serves as a training school for the prisoners – all of whom have three to eighteen months of prison time left – and as the beginning of a support programme which will continue upon release. The programme helps the prisoners (who receive official qualifications for their training at the Clink) find jobs, and mentors them through their first six months post-prison. The reoffending rate for graduates of the programme is an incredible 10%, in contrast to about a 50% rate for prisoners nationwide.

The ultra-selective nature of the programme may skew the statistics a bit, but it’s worth noting that the prisoners here have been convicted of all sorts of crimes, from corporate fraud to drug offenses.

RAVIOLI

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escorted in and out, there’s virtually no hint that this place is anything but a normal restaurant. The fact that it’s prisoners working here “doesn’t affect anything,” says Chief Executive of the Clink Charity Chris Moore.

“Sometimes when you try and put a plastic fork in a carrot, the carrot bounces off. That’s it.”

It took us a while to choose off the menu, which runs several pages long and consists of dishes which, whenever possible, contain locally sourced and grown ingredients. Eventually my three companions – Sean, Tom

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tion to the prisoners working in the restaurant, another fifteen work in farms and gardens, which are equipped with a community of beehives. As co-founder of the (now and always) defunct Oxford Beekeepers’ Association, I found this very exciting. Thus, allow me to describe the pinnacle of the menu: the Clink’s “A Celebration of Honey”. This dish came in three parts – it included a honey sorbet (which turned out to be a honey jelly), a honey tart, and

honey ice cream with a meringue. The fragrant jelly was an innovative concept, and required a very small spoon in order to eat it out of a dish which was more or less the size and shape of a shot glass. The tart was a bit custardy and creamy, and had a delicate yet pleasing taste. The ice cream and meringue were smooth and heavenly. Upon placing our order for the Celebration, our waiter said: “that is a sensible choice, I’m not gonna lie.” He was so right.

The future of Clink restaurants seems secure, with another one recently opened in Cardiff, and plans for three more in the near future. It’s obviously not a money-making enterprise; it costs half a million pounds to open the restaurant, and the charity loses £150,000 per year per site (“almost half of that loss goes on mentoring,” Moore told me). But the restaurant is a stunning example of how effective work and educational programmes can be at reducing reoffending, and it is hard to disagree with Moore when he argues that taxpayer money should go into the projects (they’re currently privately funded).

Moreover, as Moore points out, there is a persistent skill shortage in the catering industry despite nationwide unemployment, something which charities like The Clink can help fill.

The Clink also helps change public perception of prisoners, and their capabilities post-incarceration. Most of the diners are prospective employers or members of charities, but local groups and associations pass through as well although reservations must be made weeks in advance, so that

WITH A

and Philippa – and I decided to share a starter, splitting prawn, lime and chilli salad with avocado sorbet, alongside warm sage-seasoned bread. “The avocado sorbet tastes more like avocado than avocado itself,” declared Tom in wonder. “And the bread is special.”

Sean was a little less starstruck, noting that “the spice dominated over the prawn and avocado taste.” His opinion was later vindicated when our waiter told us the only complaints he’d ever received were on exactly that matter. Tom was right though: the bread, especially the crust, was really incredible, probably the highlight of the meal.

Twenty-eight prisoners form the staff, as chefs, waiters and cleaners

For mains, Tom had saddle of rabbit with confit leg and creamed leeks en croute with cranberry sauce and sauteed potatoes, Philippa had goats’ cheese and red pepper tart with onion relish and salad, Sean had grilled mackerel with lemon, caper and olive salsa, horseradish mash and fennel salad, and I had crab ravioli with crab bisque and a salad. The mackerel was definitely the standout dish – really salty and fresh. “The potatoes were a bit rubbish, but the fish was so good it didn’t matter,” said the ever diplomatic Sean.

But dessert was where the Clink really captured our hearts. In addi-

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all visitors can be cleared by security (“we’ve got to make sure none of the prisoners’ friends or enemies are coming in” Moore pointed out). The clean, professional environment – “I’ve never heard a raised voice, ever” said Moore – and the high quality food are testaments to the skill and dedication of the men working in the restaurant. Our waiter told us that he has been offered a job as a restaurant manager at another Clink upon re-

Allow me to describe to you the pinnacle of the menu: the Clink’s “A Celebration of Honey”

ISABEL PATKOWSKI

FORK.

PLASTIC

lease; if all goes well he will join the 34 prisoners successfully released into full time employment, out of the 85 who have been trained or who are training in the Clink Restaurant.

Perhaps most tantalizingly, Moore raised our hopes with this one last comment. When asked where new Clink sites might be cropping up, he mentioned that the restaurants need wealthy communities which can support them. “Oxford,” he said, “would be an ideal location.”

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SORRY DAY T

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

he Montenegrin author Borislav Pekić wrote that the greatest mistake of the modern intellectual is to believe that words can excuse deeds. Recently Nick Clegg made the contrite but unrepentant declaration that the Liberal Democrats were sorry (so, so sorry).

But if we want to talk of mass apologies, the real distinction goes to Australia’s ‘National Sorry Day’. On May 26th each year the whole of Australia ‘apologises’ for the suppression of aboriginal culture, languages, and traditions undertaken by Australian governments for almost two centuries.

(The principal indignity was the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, in an attempt to assimilate these ‘stolen generations’ into ‘white’ society).

Though ‘Sorry Day’ was instituted in 1998, an official apology was long dragged out. For a decade the Liberal government of Australia was wary of an expression of sorrow that might be tantamount to an admission of guilt. It was only in February 2008 that the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, made his apology, and pledged to address the legacy of two centuries of economic and social injustice.

‘Sorry Day’ was conceived as part apology, part history lesson. The national enquiry into the scandal of the stolen generations argued that no reconciliation could be achieved without combating public ignorance of this part of Australian history. An apology was meant only to be the start: ‘National Sorry Day’ has since been recast as a ‘National Day of Healing’.

For some, though, ‘Sorry Day’ leaves a bitter taste. Critics complain that while it may raise awareness of historical injustices, without meaningful challenge to the systematic anti-aborignal discrimination inherent in Australian law, such an apology is mere sound and fury.

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PHILIPPA BYRNE 32

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V IENTIANE , LAOS

PHN OM PENH , CA MBODIA

NYAUNG -U, CENTRAL BURMA ALEXANDER DARBY

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JOHN SCHOOL

A NEW ‘CURE’ FOR THE ‘WORLD’S OLDEST PROFESSION’

C

ynthia is talking to a room of men about her first husband. She married him for a kilo of crack cocaine, only to discover he was a hit man. While they were married she was shot twice – the second time landing her in a coma for three months.

It was then that she decided she “needed to get out of the life”. And that is what she is telling her audience to do too.

Cynthia is one of many exprostitutes involved in the First Offender Prostitution Program (FOPP). Set up in 1995 by the police department in San Francisco, FOPP aims to reduce the demand for commercial sex, rather than just punishing the problem away. When arrested for soliciting a prostitute, the ‘john’ (male client) is given a choice of paying a $1000 fee and attending the FOPP programme, or facing the traditional punishment of prosecution and a criminal record. If he chooses the former, he must attend a one-day workshop teaching him about the true nature of the prostitution industry – a bit like a speed awareness course, but for sex.

The day begins in a classroom with a whiteboard headed “Pimp Dynamics”. This first class explains to the johns what happens to the money they spend on a prostitute. Most pimps have a financial quota they try to reach, typically around $1200 per night. To make such a huge profit, the girls working under the pimp are usually required to have sex with well over a dozen men every night – depending on their

market value. Even after this, very little of the money makes it back to the prostitutes themselves. One ex-prostitute speaker recounts how she was chewing gum, but when the pimp realised she had bought it without his permission he beat her, for spending ‘his’ money. All the exprostitutes who speak in the class describe how they robbed johns to help reach their pimp’s quota,

When one offender was asked how prostitution had affected his life he claimed, “it made sex very convenient whenever I needed it. That way I didn’t have a chance of raping anybody. either instead of sex or when the johns were on their way back to their cars. Conveniently, since the johns were acting illegally too, the crimes went unreported.

The next presentation is reminiscent of a school sex education class. The speaker uses a slideshow and handouts, leaving nothing to the imagination as she explains the high risk of contracting an STI when soliciting a prostitute. An average of 64% of johns in the class did not know that they could get an STI from oral sex. Even more worryingly, many johns in the class believed that not wearing a condom was a sign of emotional intimacy with their prostitute. In reality,

of course, many prostitutes will lie about having unprotected sex with only their current john, in order to charge a higher fee while passing on a cocktail of STIs. Sex addiction too is a big problem among johns. After a talk from Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, about 20% of the johns thought they were addicted to sex and should seek treatment, rather than resorting to paying for a prostitute. When one offender was asked how prostitution had affected his life he claimed, “it made sex very convenient whenever I needed it. That way I didn’t have a chance of raping anybody.”

Indeed, while sex addiction is a problem for the johns, rape is an even bigger problem for the prostitutes. 73% of prostitutes in San Francisco have been raped while providing sex, and 59% of that group have been raped more than five times. Statistics like these are central to the FOPP scheme. The post-class survey found that what struck the johns most were the testimonials given by survivors of the sex trade.

Their accounts reveal quite how dangerous and horrific sex work is, while prompting the johns to reassess their conceptions of ‘whores’ - to see these women as people, not just sex objects.

A recent study found that prostitutes have a mortality rate almost two hundred times greater than other women with similar demographic profiles.

One ex-prostitute talking to the johns described how she was beaten, strangled and raped whilst working, both by her pimp

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and clients, requiring hospitalisation several times. Once she was beaten so badly that her parents did not recognise her.

Jennifer, who was kidnapped at gunpoint and forced under the control of a pimp, explains to the johns how prostitutes often have to be “very good actresses”, disguising the real desperation they are living in. She recounts how her pimp forced her to pretend to enjoy the sex, while really she frequently fantasised about killing her clients during intercourse. She would often lie, claiming that it was her first time, or that the current john was her favourite client, or even that he was especially well endowed, all to get more money. After her speech one enlightened offender claimed he had “never realised hookers were human before”.

Sasha, who started her career as an exotic dancer, explains that girls who end up in prostitution are typically financially and emotionally vulnerable. In San Francisco the entry age into prostitution is typically between twelve and sixteen, many girls having run away from home after childhoods of sexual and physical abuse. Emma, another speaker, describes her persistent molestation in a series of foster homes. While still a young girl she “learned about sex play and not to tell about it”. One recent study even claimed that 90% of prostitutes in San Francisco had lost their virginity in an act of commercial sex. The FOPP scheme aims to teach johns that by paying for sex they are actively reinforcing the cycle of abuse that the prostitutes are trapped in.

Emma was frequently arrested for selling sex, but she returned to prostitution after each

release. Having been sexually abused since three, she had such low self-esteem that she thought it was all she could do. Jennifer, on the other hand, married a man to help protect herself and to support her financially – while still working as a prostitute. They had children. Later she found out that her husband had been molesting her children, and even more disgustingly, had given her seven-year-old daughter herpes.

Rather than seeking help, Jennifer had to keep working on the streets to support the heroin and crack addictions encouraged by her pimp. The workshop seeks to underline this simple

message: by buying sex these johns are partly to blame for the wider problems he transaction creates – placing the burden of responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the soliciting client.

In the history of society’s approach to the problem of prostitution, this is a significant step.

But does the FOPP scheme work? A recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice seems to think so. Nearly ninety-five percent of the men who attend the class successfully complete the programme by avoiding arrest for one year after being caught.

Indeed, since the scheme’s introduction in 1995 there has been a sharp drop in reoffending rates in San Francisco, which have remained low ever since. Then again, these impressive results are not the whole story. The

scheme’s efficacy can never be fully established, because even if a john avoids arrest for one year, they may not have given up paying for sex. Offenders could be using prostitutes but avoiding re-arrest, slipping out of sight of the law, or just keeping themselves zipped up for a year until the charges are dropped.

Yet financially the scheme has been an unquestionable success. The $1000 fee that the attendees pay not only covers the costs of conducting the classes, but also subsidises police ‘vice’ operations, and recovery programmes for girls trying to get out of the sex trade. Encouraged by the perceived success of the San Francisco pilot, john schools have been established across the US, in Canada, South Korea and in the UK. The ‘world’s oldest profession’ is a tag which tends to naturalise prostitution, encouraging the perception of it as a human inevitability. History may suggest this is so, but as schemes like John School demonstrate, many governments – in shifting the emphasis from supply to demand – don’t seem ready to give up just yet.

DAISY FLETCHER

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BELARUS INSIDE THE BELL JAR

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he detention hall at Minsk National Airport is a large, canteen like room sparsely populated with a handful of visaless vagrants and one chubby, bored soldier slouched in the corner, drenched in sweat and chain-smoking questionable Belarusian cigarettes. At fifteen pence a packet, who can blame him? If you’re foolish enough to end up here, duped by the promise that a visa can be purchased at the border, you can be detained more or less indefinitely without any guarantee of food or drinkable water. At about one in the morning, the sweaty guard covertly produces a bottle of vodka from a carrier bag, with all the panache of a fifteen-yearold truant, and offers it to the inmates. In Belarus it’s rude to decline. Besides, the prostitutes will arrive soon, and it helps to have a little alcohol in the blood for when the elderly Armenian takes one behind the toilets, winks at his fellow convicts, and fills the hall with the sounds of muffled, loveless coitus.

As far as first impressions go, Belarus seems like hell. It’s a place where Soviet kitsch reigns supreme, where poorly photoshopped images of grinning soldiers and policewomen look down upon row after row of concrete apartment blocks, where billboards remind the populace that they “love Belarus”. The face of the president smiles from the pages of books given to every Belarusian student. He is Alexander Lukashenko, famously named by Condoleezza Rice as “Europe’s last dictator,” and accused of shamelessly rigging presidential elections in 2006 and 2010 with the help of the police and the Belarusian KGB. To add insult to injury, he is powerfully ugly. Bemused children are exposed to pictures of him in their school books. He cuddles babies, shakes the hands of war veterans, and jocularly plays ice hockey – all complete with greasy

MT12 comb-over and mismatched moustache. Officially, the children enjoy the attention he pays them. In 2008, they presented him with a giant teddy bear as a Christmas present. If you watch closely you can see the fear and loathing in their young eyes.

From Britain, it is easy to sneer at the Belarusian president’s frankly laughable PR. His talk of national strength, of “smiting his many enemies,” of the smogchoked slums of the decadent West; it all seems so depressingly

If you can find a British person able to locate Belarus on a map, sandwiched between Russia and Poland, they’ll most likely describe it as a Soviet timecapsule, with Minsk as the city that forgot the USSR fell. blatant, so obviously detached from reality. At least British politicians have the decency to lie consistently and convincingly. No crass Lukashenko-esque doublethink on show. Upon receiving criticism for some unambiguously complimentary remarks regarding Adolf Hitler made on national radio in 1995, Lukashenko quickly excused himself and relieved his subjects by exposing an elaborate plot to shame him, implicating Belarusian opposition parties, the Polish, and of course, the CIA. Phew.

Although Lukashenko’s image of the hockey player defending Belarus from American and European wreckers is clearly paper-thin, so too is the typical European perception of Belarus.

If you can find a British person able to locate Belarus on a map, sandwiched between Russia and Poland, they’ll most likely describe it as a Soviet time-capsule, with Minsk as the city that forgot the USSR fell. Belarus is full of grey people living in grey apartments, their lives determined by the whims of a bizarre Communist dictator. However, amid the statues of Lenin, monuments to the heroics of the Red Army and the grandiose Soviet architecture are Slavic hipsters sipping skinny lattes in trendy cafés which blare out squishy Europop and American hip hop.

The Lonely Planet guide (banned in Belarus) famously called it “communism with a cappuccino”.

It is this eerie juxtaposition of continental artiness and totalitarian imagery which really defines Belarus. In truth, the Belarusian opposition movement is far more complex than a struggle for democratic freedoms against an all-powerful state. It represents a new culture, a new nationalism of the young, looking to Europe rather than Russia and the Soviet past.

Economically, Belarus is no sluggard. Although a threefold devaluation of the Belarusian Ruble in 2010 led to an enormous rise in the prices of imported consumer goods, in that same year the Belarusian economy grew by 7.6%. All of this with 70% of the economy still in state hands. Part of the consequence of this economic vigour, however, has been the creation of a new class of young, urban, educated and relatively wealthy professionals employed by large IT firms catering to the enormous bureaucracy of Belarus’ state owned industries.

It is this educated youth who look to European political and economic models as a more desirable future for Belarus. They proudly study and speak the high, literary form of the Belarusian language, and pour scorn upon the provincial dialects, 38

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the so called ‘trasianka’ (literally meaning ‘low quality hay’), which are a mix of the Belarusian and Russian languages. The campaign for democratic reforms often appears to be more of a clash between these two nationalisms – that of the rich and that of the poor; urban and rural, young and old. One looks towards Europe and the free market, the other towards Russia and the Soviet past.

Away from the cappuccino sipping youth, who wear skinny jeans and talk of revolution, Minsk reverberates with a sense of resignation, rather than revolutionary fervour. In August 2012 a Swedish PR firm illegally flew a light aircraft, packed with grinning yuppies, over Minsk and dropped 800 teddy bears bearing pro-democra-

cy and pro-human rights slogans.

Aside from increasing diplomatic tensions further between Belarus and the EU, and leading to the

In spite of the young nouveauriche, Belarus as a grey society teeming with suppressed political activity is largely a mirage. arbitrary imprisonment of two entirely innocent Belarusians, the bear incident simply unleashed a wave of public frustration. This

was, however, directed not at the god-damned government, but at the insidious West. “What would your government have done if Swedish planes illegally crossed the British border? They would have shot them down” remarked Elena Pavlovna, a middle-aged lecturer at a Minsk university.

“It’s not just a violation of our territorial sovereignty, but why try to get at our children by attaching slogans to toys?” This incident reveals a misjudgement of the political and social situation in Belarus. The Belarusian people may allow themselves a giggle at Lukashenko’s ostentations, and occasionally fill October Square to demonstrate against electoral fraud. Nonetheless, an atmosphere of cynicism pervades.

MT12 There is suspicion of the West, with its dubious track record of self-righteous preaching and ‘humanitarian intervention’, and most Belarusians shun politics altogether. One Belarusian student tells me that “it’s not worth getting involved. Why bother?

It’s not so terrible here, not like the Western press makes it out to be. Besides, to join the opposition can make things difficult for you.” In spite of the young nouveau-riche, Belarus as a grey society teeming with suppressed political activity is largely a mirage. The Lonely Planet guide excitably informs its readers of the secret compacts, of the Belarusian people putting candles in their windows for fifteen minutes at seven PM on the 16th of each month as a show of silent solidarity with sixteen political prisoners. You are unlikely to see many candles in Minsk.

Not one Belarusian I spoke with knew of such a practice.

At around three in the morning in the detention centre of Minsk National Airport, a tall captain marches into the room. The chubby soldier manages to hide his bottle of vodka under his jacket, and feigns sobriety long enough to manage a salute. The captain wakes a young Spaniard and informs him that he is to be sent on the next plane to the European Union, to Vienna. Of course, he can stay here indefinitely if he likes, but without food, water, or any way to drown out the sound of the old Armenian and the prostitute. This daft young man is better off out of Belarus anyway, back in the West, where he can swagger back into the home of his parents and talk of political repression and the underground struggle against the ironfisted Belarusian government.

He’d be wrong, in a way. There is repression in Belarus, serious political repression. The educated ‘revolutionaries’; who sit in the expensive bars and talk of a revived, European Belarus,

It is this eerie juxtaposition of continental artiness and totalitarian imagery which really defines Belarus. are aware of the late-night arrests, the torture, the disappearances. But they aren’t a representative sample. A more common attitude to the government is defined more by weariness and cynicism than by fear.

Perhaps it’s the face of the president smiling from the pages of children’s books, or the imposing Soviet architecture, but Belarus can feel like a bell-jar of carbon monoxide. You enter a bubble of stale air. Things are bad, but why bother to speak out? Why bother to question it when there are soldiers with tanks and

guns, and in the villages labour camps and barbed wire where the babushkas will spit at you and shout ‘freak’ through the chain link fence. It’s better to accept the old culture, to accept the weight of Lukashenko on your back, leave the questioning to the Euro dissidents. Belarus is relaxing, carbon monoxide is relaxing.

But the longer you stay there, the more likely it is to kill off the Old You, the Western You, and let you slip into a warm, inertial malaise.

JOE ZAYTSEV

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R

ichard Aoki was not your typical member of the Black Panther Party. Most famous for both arming and training the young Panthers in their early years, Aoki was a streetfighter belonging to many radical groups in the San Francisco Bay Area before joining the party. Rising to the rank of field marshal, Aoki was the highest profile Asian Panther, yet it was not Aoki’s ethnicity that now makes him significant. Unlike the Black Power movement, the Black Panther Party was a communist group of all ethnicities that saw racism as merely a symptom of the wider system of capitalist oppression. The Black Panther Party was therefore open to all.

No, Richard Aoki was significant as many now believe him to have been an FBI informant.

In an interview with reporter Seth Rosenfeld, former FBI agent Burney Threadgill Jr. claimed to

after he left high school. There he developed an extensive understanding of weaponry before leaving to join the Communist Party. These firearm skills made Aoki particularly valuable to the San Francisco radicals.

In 2009, two years after the Rosenberg interview, Aoki laid out his old Panther uniform before committing suicide, following long complications with dialysis. While doubts had already been circling around the informant claims, the FBI then released a series of reports – whose existence had previously been denied – following several Freedom of Information requests by both Rosenberg and the Centre for Investigative Reporting. In these documents Aoki is clearly referred to as an informant, using the code name Richard Ford and it is expressly stated that he had provided “unique” information of “extreme value” over the course of 16 years.

A PIG

AMONG

PANTHERS have approached Aoki in the 1950s, asking him to gather information on the various Left groups that were taking off in the radical hotbed of the San Francisco Bay Area. “he was my informant, I developed him,” Threadgill stated, “he was one of the best sources we had.” The legacy of the man, locally revered as a committed and militant radical leader, was once again thrown into disarray following an interview Aoki gave to Rosenfeld. When asked directly whether he had been an informant, Aoki simply replied with “‘Oh’ is all I can say,” followed by an ambiguous “people change…It is complex. Layer upon layer.”

Drawn to radical groups ever since his family life had been shattered following internment with thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War II, Aoki joined the military three days

With Aoki now unavailable for further questioning, the doubts being cast over his character have provoked much anger among his supporters.

While proof of his status as an informant is yet to be found, some have even claimed that the FBI simply fabricated the story to cause distrust among radical groups. With Aoki having become a lecturer in Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a full-time faculty member at Peralta Community College, many find it difficult to reconcile these revelations with what appears to be a lifetime of work dedicated to ‘the cause’. However, despite many refusing to believe that this “Japanese radical cat” worked for the FBI, the smell of the pig will continue to linger on this Panther.

COURTNEY YUSUF

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I

was not a war reporter.” Misha Glenny is careful to distinguish himself from the legions of war correspondents that arrived in the Balkans in the early nineties. “I had basically been a political journalist and analyst of Central and Southeastern Europe. I witnessed the slide into armed conflict, in a sense, like a lot of the people who lived there did… in slight disbelief and horror that this was happening.”

Glenny was appointed Central Europe correspondent for the BBC in 1989. Yugoslavia was by

MT12 then veering towards collapse, its constituent republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Montengegro and Macedonia) chafing against central institutions which aimed to balance, if not bury, national interests.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence – a reaction against Serb attempts to dominate Yugoslavia’s central institutions and the steady drumbeat of nationalism emanating from Milošević’s Belgrade.

Slovenia was allowed to claim independence without much of a fight. Croatia was a different case: it had a large Serb minority who, wary of the treatment they would receive from a Croat state, mounted armed resistance. This

Glenny, a speaker of SerboCroat, was better placed than most to understand the fiendish complexities of Balkan politics.

In 1992, he wrote The Fall of Yugoslavia, updated in 1993 and 1996 to include events in Bosnia.

Considered an unparalleled account of the wars that bedevilled the Balkans in the early nineties, it quickly became a focal text.

Glenny subsequently wrote a history of the region, The Balkans.

ISIS interviewed him to mark the twentieth anniversary of the war in Bosnia.

“For me,” Glenny explains, “the project of an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina was a risky affair, simply because it didn’t have the wherewithal to sustain

It was, for many, a formative experience. Earlier this year the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen described how : “the war opened up its bitter heart, and drew me right in,” on Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent. “It was my war, in my continent, at a time when I was growing up as a foreign correspondent. It made me angry that some people in Britain were ignoring the slaughter that was happening even in our backyard.”

Bowen concluded, “The shame and the impotence of those years left a mark.”

Glenny is more sceptical, noting that “a lot of people came to Bosnia with only a very vague notion of Yugoslavia, and of the history.” For many, “the situation

MISHA GLENNY BOSNIA AND THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT precipitated a long and bloody war in the south of the country.

Bosnia, whose population was truly mixed – part Serb, part Croat, part Bosniak – was faced with an agonising choice. Hold an independence vote, which its Serb minority would never support; or remain part of a shrunken Yugoslavia increasingly beholden to Serb nationalists. They chose independence.

The world was slow to wake up to the crisis in the Balkans. The parting of the Iron Curtain left little room in news cycles for pessimistic stories about a Balkan state wrestling with internal nationalisms. When conflict broke out, reporters covered the crisis with surprise and some degree of confusion.

that independence.” The Bosnian Serb and Croat populations – “close on fifty percent of the country” – did not support it, and Bosnia’s two neighbours, Croatia and Serbia, “were opposed to the independence project, and indeed saw [it] as an excuse to rip up Yugoslavia.”

The judgement that independence was a mistake, in Glenny’s view, holds. “Even when the international community decided to support Bosnian independence… and deploy sufficient military forces to compel the Serbian side… to the negotiating table, even then it didn’t create a functioning state.”

At the time, Bosnia was seen as something of a cause célèbre by journalists around the world.

on the ground was very clearcut… you were seeing superior military forces, the Bosnian Serb army backed by the remnants of the Yugoslav People’s Army, terrorising a largely civilian population.” This invited an unambiguous reading of the situation, and fuelled demands to intervene.

“There was an element of regarding it as that generation’s Spanish Civil War… where it was worth engaging on behalf of one side.” The political realities, the very fact that Bosnia’s Serbs were Bosnians – with a stake in the country that they would never willingly give up – were often lost.

A generation of foreign correspondents cut their teeth in Bosnia. Maggie O’Kane, then 44

MT12 a freelance journalist doing occasional pieces for the Guardian, exposed Bosnian Serb concentration camps near Prijedor and Trnopolje. Anthony Loyd turned up in Sarajevo with a degree in photojournalism and a taste for adventure. He now works as a foreign correspondent for the Times. The title of his book about the Bosnian war, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, hints at journalists’ ambivalent attitudes to the war.

A terrible conflict – but also one that fostered camaraderie among reporters. A huge press corps set up residence in the Holiday Inn, the large custard-coloured building on Sarajevo’s main thoroughfare known throughout the war as Sniper Alley. In anniversary pieces about the conflict, one can sense at times an odd flavour of nostalgia.

The Bosnian state today is in an uncomfortable position.

“It only worked for a long time because it had the High Representative, who was not part of the democratic system, but whose power was so considerable that essentially politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina was reduced to competing for [his] ear,” says Glenny. The post existed to ensure no one group could dominate the country. Its powers were legendary – including the ability to enforce binding decisions on Bosnia’s elected representatives and remove obstructive officials from office. Not for nothing was Paddy Ashdown, who held the post from 2002-2007, nicknamed ‘the Viceroy of Bosnia’.

Looking to the Bosnia’s future, Glenny is “a big public supporter of integrating all of the territories of the former Yugoslavia into the European Union”.

By entering the EU, “you agree in critical areas to shift your sover-

eignty to a supranational state… a lot of the existing provisions in Dayton peace agreement would be rendered redundant,” he suggests. The relationships between Bosnia and Croatia, and Bosnia and Serbia, would be – to some extent – normalised. “Basically, people would be able to live wherever.”

But the European Union is in flux – and nearby Greece is possibly on the way out. Expansion looks a distant prospect. Bosnia survives on a bundle of aid and a little tourism, its political institutions essentially frozen by ethnic differences. In 2012, the foreign correspondents returned – to meet old friends and turn over forgotten details from the past. And then they left, perhaps with wry regret, remembering Bosnia in the nineties – where there was right and wrong, and some things seemed certain.

VIOLET BRAND

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ISIS ICON

JEREMY WOLFENDEN

WOLFENDEN: FATHER, SON, REPORT

O

n the morning of 27 December 1965 Jeremy Wolfenden was found by his wife sprawled in his bathroom, with his head up against the bath. He was rushed to hospital but died soon after. The coroner’s report pointed to liver failure from years of alcohol abuse.

He was just thirty-one.

Earlier in life, he had seemed destined for a brilliant future.

After Eton, and national service in the Royal Navy, he read PPE at Magdalen College, took an outstanding first in finals, and was later elected an Examination Fellow of All Souls.

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MT12 However, rather than fulfil expectations, he left almost no mark on the world: he worked as a journalist for the Telegraph, though all his work was lost in the paper’s move from Fleet Street to Canary Wharf, and has since been depicted by Sebastian Faulks in The Fatal Englishman (1996), and by Julian Mitchell in his BBC history-cum-documentary Consenting Adults (2007).

The only other written fragments of Wolfenden’s life are to be found in back issues of this magazine. He wrote prolifically for the ISIS during his time at Oxford, and edited the magazine in Hilary Term 1956. The following term, the ISIS printed a short biography of him; the article’s accompanying photograph shows its subject in sunglasses and a cravat, enjoying a cigarette.

His article “Encyclopaedia Satanica” – published in Hilary Term 1955 – is full of the absurd (“Ping Pong: see Table Tennis; Table Tennis: see Ping Pong; God: see the Bible), as well as some typical student jokes (Agonizing: see Bank Balance; Bank Balance: see Tragic; Tragic: Not our fault”). It also features the bitterly political (“Ideology: Coherent system of beliefs not held by the free people”).

At Eton, Wolfenden’s schoolmaster had noted his charge to be “quite liked by his contemporaries, though some of them find his cleverness tiresome.”

Wolfenden, however, could mock himself. In Trinity Term 1955, he wrote a series of articles on “Oxford Types”; in the last of these, written under the guise of “A Typist,” Wolfenden lampooned himself: “Every day, when he wakes up and washes the taste of gin and orange out of his mouth with gin, Jeremy Wolfenden says

a prayer, ‘Please don’t let me be like other people.’”

Despite his marriage, in earlier years Wolfenden had been openly homosexual. His sexuality, along with his alcoholism, proved to be his undoing. While working as a Telegraph correspondent in Moscow, he was photographed in compromising circumstances by the KGB, who then blackmailed him for information about other Western journalists. When he left Moscow for Washington, DC, he was blackmailed by the British Embassy and the FBI. As a married man, Jeremy Wolfenden had much to lose with the publication of such evidence.

“Every day, when he wakes up and washes the taste of gin and orange out of his mouth with gin, Jeremy Wolfenden says a prayer, ‘Please don’t let me be like other people’” Today the name Wolfenden is most associated not with Jeremy, but with his father John, who chaired the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (CHOP). In 1957, the committee recommended the legalisation of adult male homosexuality, and an increase in fines against prostitutes for curb-crawling. The latter recommendation was acted upon quickly, but the former took ten years to pass into law; by this time, Jeremy Wolfenden was already dead.

In his memoirs, the elder Wolfenden writes about a family holiday taken in the immediate aftermath of the publication of CHOP’s findings: “our quiet little Guernsey Hotel was invaded

by BBC interviewers, journalists flown in to take photographs, and a sudden blaze of notoriety.”

John Wolfenden spent years justifying his committee’s recommendations; he always did so from a theoretical point of view, about what aspects of people’s lives the law ought to cover. In a BBC Television Service Press Conference in 1957, he was interviewed by a panel of broadcasters, one of whom referred to homosexuality as “this unfortunate strain in some people’s characters.” John assented, noting that his committee “do not approve of homosexuality morally, just as [they] do not approve of adultery.”

John Wolfenden certainly knew of his son’s tastes. On being asked to chair the committee, John allegedly wrote to his son to ask “1) That we stay out of each other’s way for the time being; 2) That you wear rather less make-up.” Yet even twenty years later, in his memoirs, he does not make a single mention of his eldest son’s homosexuality.

But then, as Wolfenden senior wrote of his own parents, “the deeper the feelings, the less they were spoken.”

ALEXANDER WOOLLEY

See more of Wolfenden’s articles for ISIS in the Archive section of our website.

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MOTT ISIS MEETS PUNK CONNOISSEUR: ARTIST AND BUSINESSMAN, TOBY MOTT.

I

n 2004, two philosophy professors published a book called The Rebel Sell: Why Counter-Culture Became ConsumerCulture, a judicious explanation of conformity and its rebel inverse, non-conformity. It began with an anecdote. In 2003, an American anti-capitalist, counter-culture magazine called Adbusters introduced its own brand of trainers.

According to the book’s authors this was the point of no return: the moment after which “no rational person could possibly believe that cultural rebellion... is a threat to the system - it is the system.’’* Rebelliousness – or the belief that something can mark you out as distinctly rebellious – has, since the 1960s, become one of the key tenets of consumer economics. To illustrate their point, the book’s cover has a picture of a coffee cup with Che Guevara’s face on it.

A pair of Doc Martens probably would have worked just as well.

Toby Mott made his name in the 1980s as part of the ‘Grey Organization’, a subversive art collective which attracted attention for its public acts of ‘art terrorism’ – such as painting all the windows of Cork Street grey. These days, however, Mott’s name is as much associated with punk as it is with art.

Drawing on a collection of punk ephemera – posters, flyers, record covers – which he has been accumulating since his days as a teenage punk in 1970s London, Mott has become a sort of punk historian-cum-entrepreneur.

It’s the entrepreneur part that tends to raise eyebrows. Whilst the more far-reaching implications of The Rebel Sell (dissent/ rebellion/countercultures are all pointless and flawed) may be a bit abstruse or even slightly annoying, the Mott case is, on the surface, striking evidence in support of its basic argu-

ment. Has he not become one of punk’s exploiters, guilty of commodifying the dissent he was once part of? He looks down on bands like Green Day from the standpoint of a punk purist – “most of it is commercialised and branded” – but has his own clothing line and makes money out of his punk collection.

I arrive at his flat in Bayswater with a stockpile of earnest arguments like these. But I also don’t want a man who used to live in a squat with Boy George to cringe at the cliché of the sanctimonious student reporter. By the time I’m through the door and sitting on his sofa listening to – amusingly – Kraftwerk, the contest between these two conflicting impulses has resolved itself into a slightly crippling inertia. I decide to avoid rudely placing the ‘are-you-a-sellout?’ card under his nose, and instead opt for the sideways route: perfunctory questioning about

* In the interests of full disclosure, it should be mentioned that Adbusters saw things slightly differently: by marking each pair of trainers with a small dot to signify that they hadn’t been made in a sweatshop, they were aiming to shame other trainer manufacturers into declaring their own ethical standards.

MT12 his life and his work, hoping that disarming blandness will eventually yield serendipitous results.

There appear to be two major lines of attack when it comes to punk. One levels the accusation of inauthenticity, the other claims inconsistency. Neither carries much truck with Mott.

It can’t be inconsistent because it was just a “raw thing”, just a bunch of messy kids with spiky hair who were bored of life in drab 1970s Britain. To be politically or ideologically inconsistent it would have to have had grand, voluble views from the beginning – which wasn’t the case. “It became ideological in retrospect,” he explains. At the time it was just a wave of visceral discontent, focused primarily on the stultifying claustrophobia of being a kid in London at this time. Of course, there were “more sophisticated people” who got involved, like Jamie Reid of Sex Pistols’ iconography fame, who were out to make more elevated statements, but for the most part it was just “zeitgeist”.

And anyway, Mott himself had moved on from punk by 1980, in part because he regarded punk’s more explicitly political manifestations, the anarcho-communalism of Crass and various splinter-groups, as a “dead-end”.

Mott dismisses inauthenticity with the same reasoning, and with a hint of irritability that suggests he’s bored of the debate. He expressly does not go along with the idea that someone like Malcolm McLaren packaged punk: “I don’t believe it was dreamt up by a few people in an office off Oxford Street – I believe it was a real explosion, during a time of massive social change.”

Most significantly, he believes that punk was unique in postwar

British history, as a cultural phenomenon that was authentically British, and authentically devoid of commercialization. Punk may have ended up on Top of the Pops pretty quickly but that was because it was popular, not because corporate interests sensed an opportunity: “it was popular because it was different – but that doesn’t mean commercial interests caught up with that and exploited it – because they didn’t.”

Perhaps somewhat inevitably, his argument requires drawing a rather hazy line between “real punk” – authentic and consistent – and the fakers. Punk as it emerged in the mid-1970s, snarling and dynamic and creative (“the real wave”) was different to both modern day imitators – Green Day, Blink 182 etc.

– and the stereotypical image of punk that has been passed down across the decades: mohawks and pink hair and tattoos on the Kings Road. “Those guys aren’t punk – that’s just a theatrical pantomime version of punk.”

In fact, it is this distinction between ‘commercial’ and ‘noncommercial’ which informs most of what he’s got to say about youth culture more generally: skateboarding, for example, is of little value in his eyes because “it mainly revolves around what you are buying, a lot of it seems to be about your trainers – whereas punk wasn’t about that sort of stuff.” Of course, this is a tricky position for him to argue. His money-making may not be strictly commercial – his clothing brand, ‘Toby Pimlico’, is not exactly Nike – but he does sell in Topshop. And what better symbol of the corporate suit than Sir Philip Green?

In a sense, Mott is the living embodiment of The Rebel Sell.

But he’s also refreshingly honest and pragmatic. He calls himself a “Gold-Card Anarchist”. He’s not pretending to be a rebel, nor is he living in some self-deluding dream-world where he is still dangerously subversive. “I haven’t opted out, I’ve opted in,” he explains; which probably means he’s not a hypocritical wanker.

So, if the obvious criticisms of someone like Mott don’t really ring true – if he is, on balance, authentic and consistent – then maybe those attacks on punk which focus on its spokesmen, those ‘old sell-outs’ like Mott (or most famously, Johnny Rotten), are themselves fairly useless. And anyway, as the authors of The Rebel Sell argue, perhaps those tedious arguments about so-and-so ‘selling out’ are ubiquitous in movements like punk

Has he not become one of punk’s exploiters, guilty of commodifying the dissent he was once part of? because they’re actually a reflection of deep-seated anxieties: that really everyone had sold out from the beginning. Mott’s claim (maybe in part retrospective justification) that he’s “always been interested in being successful” kind of extricates him from this merciless logic. Particularly so, in fact, given his agility at by-passing most criticism by reminding everyone that punk was, after all, mostly “just a bit of fun”.

TOM GARDNER 50

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F

irstly, I want you to refer to me as a ‘she’.

I feel like a woman.”

These are the words of Laxmi, a brazen, red carpetworshipping, Mumbai socialite.

She is eloquent and charming, a middle class Brahmin and, of course, English speaking.

Like many minor celebrities, she publicises her life. She is on Twitter, was recently evicted from the Big Brother house, has appeared on celebrity game shows such as Sach ka Saamna (a show that tests the honesty of its contestants), parades the pages of gossip magazines and has reached the holy grail that is

fabric of the country, yet to many they are a joke – men parading around in garish saris, tacky costume jewellery and offensive amounts of makeup.

“I became a celebrity and I use my status to help my community. People want to associate with me, not beggars.”

Laxmi speaks with the striking sense of frankness and honesty for which hijras are renowned.

Yet, by finding fame it appears that Laxmi has become the ‘other’ within her own community. While clearly proud of her social station, she seems to regret being an anomaly, a token celebrity transgendered person.

twelve million female foetuses over the past three decades.

This superstition surrounding the health of new-born boys has been easily exploited by hijras.

For centuries they have been appointing themselves as dancers at weddings and births, offering their blessings in exchange for a negotiable fee. Fear of their curse, very public and vulgar abuse, or the threat of genital exposure forces most to succumb to their demands.

This cultural idiosyncrasy further loses its charm when one considers that hijras have never been able to exercise their basic human rights. Denied

LAXMI LAXMI NARAYAN NARAYANTRIPATHY TRIPATHY ISIS MEETS CELEBRITY AND HIJRA, LAXMI NARAYAN TRIPATHY a nude tape scandal. Considering that she belongs to one of the most socially ostracised communities in South Asia, it is a somewhat startling portraiture.

Laxmi is a hijra, one of an estimated 750,000 transgendered people living in India.

They are usually characterised as biological males who assume a feminine gender identity. Hijras – who for centuries have constituted a distinct caste in Indian society – are said to be neither men nor women but part of a ‘third sex’. The overwhelming majority of the community do not share Laxmi’s spot in the limelight. Instead, they are regularly on the receiving end of the malign glares, insults and taunts of a nation that has turned them into social pariahs.

The hijras have left an indelible mark on the ancient

Laxmi is atypical. She is fortunate to have retained the support of her family. Shunned by their loved ones, most hijras tend to organise themselves into alternative familial structures. A guru will lead her adopted family of hijras, offering shelter, sociability and, more often than not, her services as a pimp. In a country obsessed with status, the hijras can’t be touched – unless you’re in the back seat of a car and it’s past ten o’clock.

However, armed with all the confidence and flamboyance of performers, hijras are by no means your archetypal victims.

In fact, folklore has dictated that hijras possess the unique power to curse and bless newborn boys with impotence or fertility.

The desire for male offspring in India has, according to a 2011 study, led to the abortions of

the right to claim formal identity through any official documents, they have been barred from voting, marriage, healthcare, employment and education. Whether it be through prostitution or the strength of superstition surrounding the ambiguity of her sex, it is the body that is the hijra’s primary source of income and identity.

In November 2009, however, an historic shift occurred. The Delhi High Court took steps to tear down some of the legal barriers encountered by the community. Homosexual activity was decriminalised and transgendered people won the right to check ‘other’ as their gender on voter identity cards. This tick enabled many to vote for the first time.

Nevertheless, it remains a hollow victory. Hundreds of thousands of hijras are unaware of

MT12 their newly won rights and those who try to cash them in facediscrimination at all levels. Identity card applications are lost in a bureaucratic abyss, politicians express their reluctance at the prospect of progressive changes in the law and as far as employers are concerned, nothing has changed.

Educated and fully accepted by her family, Laxmi might appear to inhabit a different world from the typical hijra. But ac-

cording to her this is not the case. “I am a guru. Some gurus are bad and some are good. For me, I want my hijras to enjoy life. They use computers and are on Facebook and Twitter.”

It is an odd kind of poverty.

Privation does not necessarily inhibit engagement with the modern world. With many wondering when India’s economic growth will ‘trickle-down’ to the poor, perhaps it is symbolic of the entire country’s entry into the developed world: piecemeal, disorientating and leaving the impression that it hasn’t quite got its priorities right.

“I blame the British. Imperialism screwed up our community.”

65 years on and the ghosts of India’s colonial past have not yet been stripped of their worldly influence. When asked to elaborate on this charge, an incensed Laxmi pauses. She struggles for a moment to articulate the strength of her indignation. “Before the British arrived we were considered to be normal,” she eventually exclaims. “We were cooks and advisors.” In a way this is true – eunuchs could find employment as harem servants under the Mughal emperors – but to claim that they were fully integrated, or even normalised, is tenuous. Still, that is not to strip the imperial gaze of its role in stylising the hijra as the ultimate pantomime villain in Indian society: under the Criminal Tribes Act colonial law vilified eunuchs as hereditary criminals, confirming their denigration and legitimating the caricature.

Today, an increasing number of organisations that work for the advancement of sexual minorities’ rights are beginning to form.

Laxmi is very much involved in this movement. “Not enough is being done,” she asserts. “Socio-economic reform is needed.

Hijras require education, housing and dignity.” In 2006, Laxmi set up an NGO which organises workshops for sexual minorities with doctors and members of the police force in order to promote sexual health and discuss harassment. It is an encouraging step but Laxmi recognises that combatting social stigma and human rights abuses is a process which “requires many hands”.

As for the future, she foresees a long journey ahead. “It might take 50 years. I don’t even know,” she says almost apathetically.

For the moment, the plight of the hijra continues. Laxmi tells the story of one of her disciples – a young hijra woman abandoned by her family. She found solace in the arms of a married man who deceived her for every penny she earned. When she had nothing left to give, he set her alight.

“She died in my arms,” recalls a forlorn Laxmi. She is not surprised. A desire for acceptance – borne from years of social exclusion – renders hijras vulnerable to manipulation and abuse.

It is a desire that Laxmi has by no means suppressed. Unlike her disciple however, Laxmi refuses to be a victim. “No, I am not in a relationship.” She hesitates a little and a nervous giggle escapes. For the first time a vulnerability seeps into her sassy exterior. “I would like to be in love with someone who loves me for who I am – the real Laxmi, not the one on the silver screen.”

GURPREET NARWAN

IN A COUNTRY OBSESSED WITH STATUS, THE HIJRAS CAN’T BE TOUCHED UNLESS YOU’RE IN THE BACK SEAT OF A CAR AND IT’S PAST TEN O’CLOCK.

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ISIS MEETS

CAMILA BATMANGHELIDJH I

’m actually quite shy,” laughs Camila Bathmanghelidjh.

“I’m much more of an introverted intuitive type; it’s paradoxical because anyone looking at me wouldn’t believe it.” Camila’s personality and strength of ambition have driven the establishment and work of pioneering organisation Kids Company – a project which, combining charity work and innovative zeal, has made Camila Batmanghelidjh a household name.

I arrive at an office building looks that like any other – until you step inside. The Kids’ Company headquarters are coated in children’s artwork, and, taking a look around while waiting for a repeatedly rescheduled interview, I can see the success stories of ‘lone children’ who had found themselves, their support and their motivation through the organisation. Camila was personally dealing with a child’s crisis – which explains the delay: “it’s the culture of the place.

Everything gets dropped for the kids. Very significant meetings have had to take second place.”

Offering services to 17000 children across London, Kids Company acts as a surrogate family for some of the most inneed children in the country.

Working to help children with everything from applying for social housing to giving them lifts to school, Kids Company helps to alleviate childhood poverty and works with ‘lone children’ who are not in care but have parents who are – to varying degrees – not fully capable.

MT12 Camila’s own life has been shaped by hardship. Born in Iran to an Iranian father and a half Belgian mother, she was held back from achieving her potential at schools in Iran due to her dyslexia. Sent instead to a school in Dorset, Camila became a permanent resident in the UK when her father was imprisoned as a result of the Iranian revolution. Believing her father to be dead, and with her sister having committed suicide as a result, Camila persevered with her studies in the UK. Her resilience in the face of emotional struggle would become one of her greatest skills as she set out to revolutionize social services for young people.

First venturing into the third sector by founding Place2Be, an in-school therapeutic programme, Camila realised how deeply trauma affected the lives of the most at-risk children: “there was a cohort of children who were absolutely terrified of the holidays coming about and not having the safety of the school – just simple things like school meals.” When children told Camila how they were scared of the domestic abuse that they would suffer in the school holidays, she realised that something was clearly and unjustifiably lacking in the sector and, in 1996, established Kids Company.

Having worked with over a thousand of the most at-risk young people in the country, Camila has come to understand the importance of wide-ranging, broadly-conceived care: “it’s all about avoiding siloing these kids and their issues. If you don’t have a pair of shoes, or you’re hungry, it will impact you right across your day.” In her opinion, existing care provisions are unacceptably myopic in approach: “it’s no good saying ‘we’re only in mental health provision’ or ‘we’re only in housing provision’; if you don’t address the whole picture then what you provide isn’t robust.”

The charity fulfils a huge range

of roles for the young people they help. A loving, holistic approach is at the centre of its work. “My staff are turning up at parents’ meetings, they’re going to the housing department when a kid is in arrears, and negotiating with the housing officers,” she explains enthusiastically. “They’re taking kids who’ve committed crime and helping them to give themselves up, and then visiting them in prison”.

to encourage more adults to act as advocates for young people.

Yet the authorities tend to be resistant to change. In fact, Camila explains, “local authorities actually are not all keen on us being around because it tends to be when we’re around that the real figures of childhood maltreatment show up.” So far Kids Company have received no local authority funding, but, Camilla argues, if there were more centres like the London office, then they could greatly enhance their ability to ensure that statutory bodies fulfil their duties; there would be more people to “give all of them hell on behalf of these kids.”

Although she has gained recognition from a huge range of universities, think-tanks and charities, and is almost as well-known for her personality as for her work, Camila insists she’s still not in it for the fame: “when I get awards and things like that I give them to my PAs to hide them.

I think I’ve got something like 14 honorary doctorates. I’m very appreciative and very touched that people think this of me, but I have to confess that I simply can’t embody it – that’s the truth.”

Kids Company has travelled a remarkable distance in just sixteen years, but it has much further to go in changing the perceptions of, and provisions for, ‘lone children’ and at-risk young people. Until then, its founder will undoubtedly continue to work as their indefatigable advocate. As she says, “if you paid me money and said ‘Camila do exactly what you want,’ I would always want to do the direct work with the children. I’ve ended up in the public eye, but actually that’s not what I enjoy. What I enjoy is work with the children.”

“It’s no good saying we’re only in mental health provision or we’re only in housing provision; if you don’t address the whole picture then what you provide isn’t robust.”

The organisation believes that community integration is the way to really affect the lives of young people. It measures success on each young person’s terms, rather than the discriminatory goal posts they are so often measured against: a criminal-turned-caring father; a struggling child who completes a qualification; fewer days missed from school; a movement towards getting clean. They help young people to express themselves through art, in exhibitions at the Royal Academy as well as shows and workshops throughout London, and bring them “a sense of pride and dignity, and also diminish their invisibility”.

She is emphatic about the need to combat the self-perpetuating cycle of violence endemic in society: “people keep talking about climate change as being a risk to the world. I think the insidious and viral violence we encounter every day is a bigger risk.” One of the ways to solve this violence, she argues, is for the government to make bold, structural changes to the care system: “I really want the government to consider a model like ours: a re-parenting model within the community.” At the heart of her strategy is a push

HELEN ROBB 54

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COMMUNITIES OF CONTEMPLATION ISIS MEETS OXFORD’S SPIRITUAL SONS

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Decre consuli caeque ari, nihicasdam teroratque efatandit, cessula occhum ununte

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BLACKFRIARS

O

f the friars, the Dominicans were the first to arrive, in 1221,’ reads Oxford & Cambridge, an illustrated history of the two universities.

Today the Dominicans, or Blackfriars, can be found in a discrete two-storey complex on St. Giles which houses the Priory of the Holy Spirit. Here live two handfuls of Dominican friars, having sworn themselves to a life of chastity, poverty and obedience to Christ.

A priory, Prior John and Rector Simon stress time and again, is not a monastery, and a friar is not a monk. While a monk is geographically tied to his monastery, a friar moves from priory to priory, spend-

ing a handful of years in each, and a priory is more open than a monastery. The Dominicans, Friar Matthew reminds me, are the Order of Preachers, and so they seek an active role in their local community. The Blackfriars complex, for example, serves as a Permanent Private Hall for the University, and the friars all do some kind of pastoral work in addition to the study most of them are undertaking: one of the main vices of a Dominican is a love of books. Theirs is not to toil in the field; one of the friars jokes that the most physical exercise he gets is standing up and sitting down during Mass.

The Dominicans are a global order, and this is reflected in their

Oxford Priory. Friars travel frequently to destinations all over the world, having spells in priories as far apart as Cairo and New York, and they come from a variety of backgrounds, including a Grenadan, a Norwegian, Irishmen, a friar of partly French descent and a friar who knows a variety of Polish Christmas carols. Novice Gustave grew up in Rwanda during the genocide; he became an altar boy at eight before joining a Rwandan religious school, and studied under the Order for several years in South Africa and Burundi before coming to St. Giles. He hopes one day to return to Rwanda as an ordained friar.

Yet while having moral purpose, the priory is not a dour

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place. Friar Matthew admits to a fondness for the occasional drink among the brothers, and friars repeatedly press home the Dominican Order being one big family. “Fraternity!” they say: no matter where he goes a Dominican will always feel at home among his own. As in a family there are the challenges of living together, but when ISIS came to dinner the atmosphere was one of laughter and jokes. This sense of fraternity also leads to democracy and equality among the brothers; positions of authority are decided by election among the friars, from the lowliest Prior to the Master of the Order himself, who serves directly under the Pope in Rome. Timothy Radcliffe, who was Master of the Order from 1992 to 2001, now lives in the Oxford Priory, and like every other brother his sense of fraternity means that every so often he has to do the dishes.

VIHARA

T

he Oxford Buddha Vihara is a non-descript two-story building down Abingdon Road, marked with a little sign and a plaque which reads ‘Est. 2003’. ‘Vihara’ is the Sanskrit word for ‘meeting place’, but its meaning is closer to ‘monastery’.

The building houses five monks – if you peek around the back you

might see their saffron robes hung out to dry. The monks wake at six every morning and eat their two meals (breakfast and lunch) before noon, after which they fast until the next morning. They have two communal two-hour sessions of chanting and meditation daily, the first from 7am and the second from 7pm. This schedule is laxer than the one the Venerable Khammai Dhammasami, the Vihara’s founder and abbot, faced as a thirteen year old novice in his native Burma.

His apt reply: “As a child, often you feel good and cannot explain why.”

The monks at the monastery were all born in South-East Asia and trained in Sri Lanka. Langsai, now forty, became a novice when he was ten years old, and has lived in monasteries ever since. He came to Oxford seven years ago, and briefly complains about the ‘extreme’ British weather. When I ask him if he ever regrets becoming a monk, or coming to England, he gives a benevolent shrug. “You just carry on.”

Theirs is not to toil in the field; one of the friars jokes that the most physical exercise he gets is standing up and sitting down during Mass.

On the Thai-Burmese border it is traditional that all children spend a month in a monastery, to receive lessons their parents cannot give. The abbot was the youngest of four brothers – all his elder brothers returned after their monastic month, he did not. His aunt was a nun in the monastery and she lavished him with attention, and there were other young novices to play with. I somewhat facetiously ask him if personal, not religious, reasons made him stay.

And the monks have a lot to carry on with. Some Buddhist monasteries are ‘forest monasteries’, where meditation takes place in splendid isolation. The Oxford Vihara is not such a one.

The abbot presents the following congregational maths: there are five Thai restaurants in Oxford.

Each restaurant requires roughly ten families to run smoothly.

That alone makes 50 families in need of birthday blessings, funeral rites and wedding ceremonies.

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MT12 Every week the monks can expect to lead at least four ceremonies. Moreover the Vihara provides for the spiritual needs of all Buddhist students through the University’s Buddhist Chaplaincy, and receive educational visits from primary school up to sixth form. In addition they hold meditation sessions and arrange meditation retreats for laypeople.

I attend one such meditation session. The lights dimmed, myself and a dozen others spend almost an hour in silent lotuspositions. After this hour the abbot leads us in a discussion of what we have thought about (in my case a picture by the door which looks uncannily like Stephen Colbert, but I keep that to myself). At the end the abbot unpretentiously reminds us of the universality of pain: “if you are a United fan, you need to meditate on Liverpool pain.” Meditation and contemplation aside, monks do not lose all contact with the outer world.

OLE ANDREASSEN

When I ask him if he ever regrets becoming a monk, or coming to England, he gives a benevolent shrug. “You just carry on.”

Wors h i p p e rs e n j oy t he s h ade o f t he B ad s h ah i Mo s q ue in L ahore CHLOE CORNISH

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