Sweetness and Light

All is not, as you may pre-suppose, sunshine and roses living in a tropical paradise.

We do not skip about, scantily clad, on glorious sandy beaches, surrounded by lush green vegetation, on a daily basis—although those beaches are there to be skipped about upon.

Our daily lives are not governed by the need to explore jungles and observe magnificent blooms nor to stroll endless paths amid the warmth of the midday sun.

You will be, no doubt, relieved to know that we are not continually dodging predators.

Our friend has seen, and measured, a pugmark nearby our house but the perpetrator of that footprint in the mud has not been seen or heard from. Tigers, known as Harimau locally, are notoriously shy as well they may be.

There are sections of the community here who regard pieces of dead Tiger as being beneficial to their health. This is in spite of evidence to the contrary, the availability of manufactured medicines and the considerable disadvantage to the health of the Tiger. The Tiger that is now in serious decline amongst us.

Perhaps it would be better for the Tigers to take refuge in our garden but, sad to say, they will find the hunting sparse there.

Many people remark that they could not possibly live ‘over there’, as if it is some mystical place that exists only in the fervid imagination of a science fiction writer, because of the ‘bugs and things’.

‘Things’?

Perhaps they mean snakes.

We do have ‘bugs’. The one that bothers us on a routine basis is the mosquito. There are several types. They all bite.

River Klang at the Front of our House

Our house is by a river. It is the River Klang near its birthplace. The considerable amount of water in close proximity means that mosquitoes abound. So people tell us.

“My word! So many mozzies!” they exclaim—almost as one.

“Really?” we answer, puzzled.

Only visitors notice them and get chewed.

There is very rarely any sort of infection here that derives from mosquito bites. The last case of malaria that I heard of was twenty years ago in a small town over in the jungle to the north of us by, maybe, a hundred kilometres (101.2, to be precise). It was a Frenchman that died.

Just to digress for a moment. An unusual event, you may observe.

The Frenchman had arrived on a tourist visa twenty plus years previously and disappeared. Immigration had no clue where he was. Until he died. He died surrounded by his family. He had settled happily into this small town and lived there until malaria caught up with him.

Life is full of these little stories of personal happiness, tragedy and loss.

There is also a thing called ‘dengue fever’ that can be lethal. A friend of mine had dengue; he was close to death but the doctors here managed to save him with the help of hundreds of people who came to give blood. Really—hundreds. There were queues stretching around the hospital grounds. Big hearts abound.

The varieties of dengue fever are spread by a mosquito that revels, inasmuch as mosquitoes ever ‘revel’, in the name of Aedes. The malarial mosquito is called the Anopheles. The Aedes mosquito has black and white stripes rather like a miniscule flying Zebra.

Aedes Mosquito

We have all sorts of bugs that are, for the most part, harmless. They are attracted to the lights over my aquarium, fall into the water and drown.

Perhaps I should purchase an Archer Fish or two (Toxotes Jaculator as they are known to us ‘fishy’ types!) to eat them.

Cicadas arrive, make a hellish noise and expire. They look like houseflies but many times bigger. They are also harmless.

Snakes? Very occasionally we get the odd snake. In the last ten years we have had one, small, tree snake in the garden. I was asked if it was poisonous. I told the enquirer that I don’t know because I didn’t eat it.

One of our neighbours has had several snakes. They appear when he is out but his daughter is at home thus requiring a telephone call to me to go and get rid of it. As if I should know anything about tropical snakes. Perhaps it is me from whom they are trying to rid themselves!

Our Neighbours

The flora and fauna notwithstanding—and the flora is sometimes quite poisonous, this is a wonderful place to live.

Except right now.

We are not all happiness and light at the moment because we have the dreaded ‘haze’.

It catches in your throat and makes your eyes water.

It happens every year when the Indonesian farmers and Corporations go about their ‘slash and burn’ practices to clear land for crops and for mass planting of oil palm plantations.

The extreme danger is that the peat that these fires rage over is also capable of catching fire. It is almost impossible to put the peat fires out and that, dear hearts, will extend this accursed ‘haze’ indefinitely.

We pray for heavy, torrential, tropical downpours—there and here. So far we are out of luck. We continue to suffer.

Pity us as we inch our way painfully up to the nearest restaurant to tuck into our repast of chicken curry, mixed vegetables, white rice and boiled duck egg in a light sauce or, perhaps, a salt egg ‘cooked’ in rock salt for two weeks so that the salt permeates the egg and makes it so delicious and so terrible for the blood pressure!

Pity us as we sip hot tea or coffee by the roadside with the tears streaming down our faces. My tears are caused mostly by getting my wallet out!

It is a passing phase.

Soon we shall, no doubt, be back to sweetness and light in the land of sweet delights.

Locked Up Abroad

Everyone, since the dawn of time, has complained about ‘shortage of manpower’. There are never enough people to do the work that is piling up in front of us.

Imagine, if you will, the early dwellers in caves. Man goes out, clubs woman over the head, drags her back to his well appointed cave with the southerly outlook and grunts at her in a way that will indicate a need for the cave to be kept clean and dinner to be on the table at eight o’clock sharp each evening.

It is a large cave. Very soon, with the arrival of small person(s), the woman will start to complain, as they do, that there is too much work in the house. She will tell him relentlessly and remorselessly that she had a career sewing skins together before he dragged her off and now that career has gone; her whole life is consumed by taking care of him and the small one(s).

She needs help. There is more work than there is day.

He nods and grunts in a manner that will indicate to her that he will see what he can do to resolve this problem.

That very evening he drags in another woman.

First woman will want to know where she came from, who she is and what is her background?

He will grunt that he met her down at the club.

So it goes on. In no time there will be more small ones and more work. Cooking, cleaning, repairing of skins, feeding minors, etc.

There is never enough manpower.

Never.

And so it was some years ago when I was in the military.

Beloved and I saw an advert for a television programme on television. Odd that. The television channels spend an awful lot of time telling us what they are going to show us in future. This happens so much that, by the time that programme is aired, I have no wish to see it since we have already seen all the best parts.

This particular advert was for a programme called ‘Locked Up Abroad’. I mentioned to her that I had been locked up abroad many years ago.

She was horrified.

“Oh, no,” I assured her, “It was fine. We enjoyed it, really.”

Explanations seemed to be in order.

 Due to a shortage of manpower I was dragged away from my other duties to go on a trip with our aeroplanes to Oman. That was fine. Nice people, generally, the Omanis.

A colleague and I were working on our aeroplane when a chap came over and asked us if we knew about this Rolls-Royce engine.

We assured him that we did so he asked us if we would look at his because his aeroplane was equipped with similar engines. He had, he told us, done the course but this was the first time he had actually seen a live engine of this type.

We assured him that there would be no problem. After a short time we finished up with our task and strolled over to his aeroplane. We asked him what the problem was. He told us that the pilots were concerned about a lack of thrust.

This seemed odd because the engines were new but we said we would assist him in checking it anyway.

The first thing to do was to take out the thermometer from the aeroplane and take a reading. We went into the shade under the wing and found the ambient temperature to be fifty two degrees celsius. In the shade!

Here’s an odd thing. We had been told that if the temperature hits fifty degrees all the ex-patriate labour should be sent home. For this reason all the official thermometers never go above forty-nine point nine degrees. So it was on the airport terminal building where it said forty-nine point nine and our thermometer read fifty-two.

Now we had to explain to him that when doing thrust checks the reference graph only goes up to forty-five degrees. This means that we should have to wait until the temperature dropped to below that before the engines could be ground run and checked.

He gave us the aeroplane keys and left. He had things to do.

We had things to do, too. As a result we forgot about this other aeroplane until midnight. The temperature was now low enough to do a ground run so we opened it up and did the run. Easy. No problems. Engines good. It was just ambient temperature that was dropping the thrust output on the engines.

Until.

A voice in my earphones said, “Shut down.”

“Just cooling the engines down for three minutes,” I replied.

“Shut down now, please. There is a small gentleman with a large gun pointed at me out here.”

“Right you are,” I said and shut down, locked up and came out.

Sure enough, there was a small fellow in a baggy uniform with a very big revolver pointed at my colleague.

He spoke no English but I guessed we were under arrest and preceded him to a van that took us into an office where we were fingerprinted, photographed and locked up.

In the morning we were given a superb breakfast and released. Apparently the aeroplane that we were running was the property of the Sultan of Oman who wanted no fuss made.

However (posh ‘but’).

We were politely informed that the ground running of engines was forbidden after evening prayers because people needed their sleep to get up early for morning prayers.

We were also informed that there was a detuner on the other side of the airport but we knew nothing of that.

Thus we were arrested and locked up for ‘disturbing the peace’.

We were also treated very politely and with great respect, fed very well and given a lift back to our hotel.

Don’t get events like that on ‘Locked Up Abroad’ or on ‘CNN News’!

All because we had a shortage of manpower and so, it seemed, did the Sultan of Oman.

Australia the Goal

There has been mention of ‘Kenanga Wholesale City’ before. We have been there again. With any luck this will be the last occasion that I am lured there.

Lunch was taken at a small stand inside on the third floor; this was followed by a rapid search for the... er... amenities. Not good.

Still, it gave time for thought. Plenty of time. The ladies of the house—two nieces, Mother-in-Law and Wife searched diligently for sundry items of bargain apparel while I went to the car and worked on the lap top.

I thought of Australia.

Don’t know why. It just sort of sprang to mind.

Some years ago a comedian called Lenny Henry was telling an interviewer on television that he had been to Australia. He said that it should have been called ‘Far’. Because it is so far away.

In 1999 I took a flight from Frankfurt to Singapore by ‘LuftHansa. The fellow next to me on the A340 was from Manchester; he was en route to Sydney. When we arrived in Singapore he got up, stretched and said, “Thank heavens. We’re nearly there.”

I was loath to tell him that he was only half way. ‘Leave him,’ I thought, ‘to his dream!’

This was travel in comparative luxury. Hundreds of years ago the prisoners were being taken out there by sailing ship. It is a wonder any survived the trip.

Shall we just think about this for a moment or two?

Transporting convicts to Australia took over four months. There were ships that could do it in less but these were expensive, high-speed ships called ‘Clippers’. They were reserved for valuable cargo; they took around two months.

Between a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty days. On a sailing ship. This was no pleasure cruise. The boat would creak and groan all the time because it was made of wood. The wood made noises when it rubbed on itself while the ship was under way.

No steel nails, no bronze rivets and roves, these boats were held together with wooden pins.

The sails were the engines that transferred the power of the wind to the masts that acted as levers—dragging the boat through the water and trying to push the stem (front end) down into the waves.

The boat would pitch, heel, yaw, plunge and ascend. The stress on the planks was enormous.

They didn’t last long.

It was a wonder that, over a relatively short period of time, they managed to transport a hundred and eighty thousand convicts to the ‘New World’.

Four and a half months locked in with a crew that were rough, abusive and, largely, illiterate. The food started out bad and became worse; water that was barely drinkable.

Going from Britain to Australia they would follow the coast. They went around the Cape of Good Hope. At night the port side (left hand side) would catch the cool land breezes.

Coming back from Australia around the Cape it was the right hand side (starboard) that got the cool breezes—hence POSH (Port – outwards, Starboard – Homewards) because rich people could afford the more expensive cabins on the ‘cool’ side.

We complain about twenty-four hours to get to Australia. Think of eighteen weeks!

New Zealand doesn’t bear thinking about!

Imagine you’re a sailor and you are about to go to Australia. It will be nearly a year before you return to your loved ones again—if you ever do return.

Sailing on these long journeys was hazardous in the extreme. There was no guarantee of good weather—you were dependent upon the skills and experience of the Captain and his best men for their meteorological knowledge and experience. There were no coastguard helicopters to drag you out if you were in trouble and no fair maidens to help you sleep!

In modern times the equivalent of these people pushing out into vast unknown marine territories would be space.

Now we have technology to help us. Computers to assist in keeping us safe but... still...

Space is vast just as those ancient oceans were vast. Like space those oceans contained unknown terrors, unknown dangers.

We know, in spite of all our technology, very little of what is ‘out there’. The risks and hazards of going into space are huge. It will take brave people to undertake such journeys. Very brave people.

But there have always been brave people who will risk all to find things out, to explore, to seek adventure and fresh knowledge.

People who are brave enough to venture into ‘Kenanga Wholesale City’...

Nudity, Rubens and Corporate Wiles.

Today saw one of those occasions when getting out of bed becomes an exercise in mind over matter.

In my case it is often more likely that the mind doesn’t matter.

However, needs must.

We had a meeting.

Meetings are deplorable things. People sit around and talk to other people about things that other people only have the vaguest notion of understanding; many words are spoken, little is said; the whole things culminates in puzzlement, usually on my part, because I have no really clear idea of what happened or what I am supposed to do.

Following the meeting there are several days in private chat with others who were at the meeting trying to discover if there are any actions to be taken as a result of decisions made by other people in areas of expertise where they, invariably, are inexpert.

It was with some relief that I discover that this particular meeting was more of a ‘briefing’. Somebody, in this case a charming little lady speaking excellent English, told everyone there in clear and simple terms (ideal for me!) what to do, how to do it and when to do it. The whole thing was carried out efficiently and with great composure; it lasted just an hour. Precisely. Almost, it could be said, to the second.

It was carried out in a local centre of learning. A highly respected, and respectable, institute of higher education.

I was impressed.

Afterwards I decided that I was hungry, my inner man required immediate replenishment.

There is an excuse... sorry—reason, for this. One has a mild form of diabetes. Not eating for a while brings on a sugar deficiency that causes trembling and much weakness.

It is necessary to eat little and often. Well, OK, perhaps not quite so little. My inner man is quite a large chap as denoted by the size of the ‘outer man’!

In the next block from where the briefing was held there is a refectory. There does seem to be a number of places on the campus where it is possible to obtain sustenance but the refectory beckoned.

A large juicy chicken drumstick in a slightly spicy batter, some long beans, white rice and a fried egg—nicely runny plus a large cup of tea for RM7.50 (£1.52 or US$2.37) seemed a fair purchase.

It was. Delicious. The chicken was suitably juicy and tasted like chicken should. Unlike other fried chicken products from local franchises that taste like... well... pieces of carpet*. The lovely runny egg ran into the rice invitingly and stuck to the pieces of long beans.

So good.

However.

(A ‘however’ is like a posh ‘but’. There is, as you may have noticed, invariably a ‘but’.)

When I looked up from my repast there was a realisation that I had rarely seen such nakedness since visiting a London strip show in 1962.

Is there no dress code for Universities now?

Well, of course, it is warm here. It is, as a matter of known fact, on the high side of warm on oft occasion so there is a recognition that skimpy clothing might be the order of the day.

On the beach.

But in a University refectory?

Quite distracting for a respectable elderly gentleman such as I!

How times change. Fifty years ago during my youthful hey-day, my female colleagues would dress, albeit in a milder climate, in a more chaste fashion. If it was suggested that they may like to show more ‘skin’ they would be shocked—horrified, perhaps. Well, most of them.

These girls, because most of them were late teens and very early twenties, showed no coyness in their displays at all; it seemed to be all perfectly normal.

And so fashions shift.

Rubens’ young ladies reclining gracefully in their nudity were, no doubt, sexy in their day and are still considered so by a few but the majority would now regard them as being ‘chubby’, perhaps.

A friend of mine just posted some fashion photographs of leg wear. The legs were inordinately thin—almost to the point of emaciation.

Presumably that is now the new ‘sexy’.

Not for me. I lean more towards the Rubens ideal.

'Saturn' - Rubens

We change. Tastes change. Perhaps they are changed for us. Perhaps it is the media and advertising that decides what we should, and should not like or enjoy.

We are toys, guinea pigs, for the corporations who pour money into achieving ways of inducing us into our purchases; they make us see things, feel things, their way.

They get together and discuss how best they can induce us to part with our hard-earned cash.

They have meetings.

I dislike meetings. Have I ever told you that I try to avoid meetings?

*I should like to point out that the expression used here is only a premise it is not something that has been achieved by practical experimentation. At no stage, even in extremis of hunger, have I ever tasted carpet!

Mermaids - or not?

Well. Mermaids, eh? Where will it all end? They should leave science fiction to science fiction writers.

Two hours ago I was asked if I should like to cosy up with the missus and watch a documentary on ‘Discovery’ channel.

I have some respect for ‘Discovery’ as I do for ‘National Geographic’ and ‘Animal Planet’. What I do not have, as a general rule, is time to watch these channels.

Still, tonight an offer of a cuddle and a mug of hot tea was too much to resist and, after all, ‘Discovery’ funded the BBC’s Natural History Unit in making all those wonderful documentaries—mostly involving Sir David Attenborough.

The settee was suitably adorned with pillows, hot tea was delivered as promised and so we settled down to watch the show.

Oh, dear.

The ‘mockumentary’ was so full of holes, the film clips were adorned endlessly with assumptions and false premises about apes leaping from the trees and into the water followed by false conclusions—guesses, about mermaids following whales around the planet on migratory routes. There was even an interview with a hoary old German trawlerman called ‘Bauer’ (of course – any relation to Jack?) who operates, purportedly, a boat out of Bremerhaven.

Bremerhaven is real. It is a Hanseatic Port in Bremen who, in Werder Bremen, have a pretty fair football (soccer) team in the Bundesliga.

The rest was a fairy story.

What can be deduced from this?

Firstly, that ‘Discovery’ channel assumed that everyone is a dunce and would swallow it hook, line and sinker? (Sorry, couldn’t resist that!) Maybe they thought that everyone would immediately realise it to be fiction and laugh at it.

If it is fiction from end to end, why was it on ‘Discovery’? Why not put it on ‘SyFy’ channel which is known World-wide for its awful home made programmes.

What else? Well, for a fact, there is an awful lot of sea out there. They said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the sea. That is true.

The ocean deeps are a mystery to us. Who knows what lurks down there?

Only a short time ago we thought that the Coelacanth was extinct and yet now, we are told, it is relatively common. Common as opposed to extinct.

In the Pacific Ocean there are thousands of miles of drift nets floating around. These nets are ‘lost’. The people that set them lost track of them and now they patrol the ocean snaring all sorts of things that we know nothing about, very likely. Certainly they catch dolphins, sharks and sundry other creatures that die uselessly as a result of the loss of these nets.

Containers. There are thousands of containers that float around the World’s oceans being a hazard to shipping of all sizes. They have fallen off, or been pushed off, container ships that see them as dangerous to their own well being in the event of a storm. Who knows what poisons these things contain?

If we don’t know where these nets and containers are then how do we know what is living in the oceans?

The likelihood of there being mermaids swimming about, cooperating with dolphins and whales is too far fetched to contemplate but, who knows, maybe there are oceanic chimpanzees who have adapted somewhere out there.

In spite of our considerable knowledge there are still huge gaps in our catalogue of wild things. Not least because there are creatures out there that are evolving on almost a daily basis—viruses and bacteria, for example. If they can then so can other, higher, organisms.

Now we enter the realm of the science fiction writer. We are good at imagining things like this, it is what we do best.

‘Discovery’ channel should stick to what it does best and show us real discoveries, factual ones.

Not all science is fiction and not all fiction is fact.

Let’s keep the two separate and save ‘snopes’, ‘wikipaedia’ and ‘Google’ a lot of trouble.

Bananas

Conversation in Texas.

“Where are you from?”

“Malaysia.”

“Where’s that?”

“Do you know where Singapore is?”

“Guess not.”

“Vietnam?”

“Nope.”

Thinks, ‘Good heavens. They tried to wipe the place out...’. Says, “What about Australia?”

“Is that near Europe? They is mostly white folks, right?”

Oh, dear. The World Leaders know nothing of the World. We are, as one, doomed.

Another conversation.

A friend of mine has a map of the World in his office. It is huge. Where it came from is a mystery, he doesn’t tell me that. I suspect a measure of dishonesty somewhere!

This map is, probably, around fifteen feet from one end to the other.

We were entertaining an American businessman who was here, in Malaysia, to promote some sort of aviation spare parts supply business. He was from, he said, Springfield, Illinois—home of Homer Simpson.

It seemed, somehow, appropriate given the following:

He was running his finger over Europe.

Me: “I am from Europe. Perhaps I can help you with what you seek?”

Him: “Can’t find Japan.”

Me: Stunned. Walks to other end of map.

Him: Bats not one eye.

Me: Puts finger on Japan, thinks, says, “What makes you think Japan is in Europe?”

Him: Scathingly, “There’re only two guys (sic) that make cars—Amurricans and Yurrupians.”

Ergo, Japan is in Europe.

Me: Goes and sits down.

Sadly, the World’s view of geography is not limited to Americans. Those are the worst two cases from my personal memory files but there have been others that are not quite so... stark, maybe.

It is not uncommon for people to ask me where Malaysia is but the thing that worries me a little about these two is that they are from the richest country on the planet.

These are people who should be highly educated; their country runs with money, it almost falls from the sky so rich are they.

Yet their education is sorely lacking. It is not, as one might pre-suppose, all that it is cracked up to be.

During the Olympic Games held in the United States, athletes from all over the World were agog at the shops and their contents.

They were stunned at the choices available. To everyone.

This array of goods was not just for the President or his close friends; it was for anybody who walked in off the street.

Such richness. Unimaginable to the average Earth person.

These goods come from all over the World. The World is chopping down its timber to feed the requirements of the American public yet they have no clue as to where that timber comes from.

Do they know where their cocoa beans come from? Do they know why American, European and Asian chocolate tastes different?

Bananas. Does the average American shopper know that there is a Trade War going on that involves, at its root, bananas? Probably not.

There is so much there. There is everything that anybody could possibly want—not just need.

Except education.

One of the problems I have with my aviation students is that they know, when they come to me, all about the latest technology, they can tell me about electronic gizmos and glass cockpits and all sorts of wonderful things but they know no basics.

Basic knowledge is a closed book.

I ask them, “If I hand you a lump of air that weighs ten pounds—how big is it in diameter? Roughly. I don’t need exact numbers.”

They look at me as if I have just fallen out of a tree.

One said, “Air weighs nothing. That’s a stupid question.”

So I asked him what the atmospheric pressure is at sea level according to the International Standard Atmosphere.

He laughed and said, “Fifteen psi, of course.”

So I laughed and said, “That’s fifteen pounds of air sitting on a one square inch disc on your hand. Fifteen pounds. I only want two thirds of that.”

Basics. We are so technologically advanced that we have no comprehension of basic knowledge and how important it is.

That is why I worry when the people with the most funds available for education can go and blow up half the World but they cannot tell me where Malaysia is or where bananas come from.

My World, Your World

Readers are telling me off. Reprimands have been coming in by ‘Personal Message’ and by e-mail.

I shall try to address some of the points.

Firstly:

My ‘Blogs’ are as long as they need to be. They are all, pretty much, the same length.

I’m sorry if you think that they are too lengthy and that they consume too much of your time.

I do understand that the television companies have rules about how many laughs per minute there should be in a half hour show and that shows should not be too long because we, as modern people, have a limited attention span... (breathes in!!) but there are certain lengths required to ‘make a point’.

I can make the ‘Blogs’ shorter, no doubt, but then I should not get sufficient information into each one. This is why some of the ‘Blogs’ are split up into two, or more, chapters in order to make them all similar lengths.

To give you an example, try writing a novel and a short story. You will find that writing both are difficult for different reasons; a short story gives you no time to develop a character or a story line, it has to be sharp and concise—telling the reader everything that they need to know to accomplish the reason for that story.

Novels are hard to write because you have to keep the end in sight for much longer and weave a more complex story line. Characters can be developed, changed, to suit their growth and the story.

I write a lot of stories that are ‘novella’ and ‘novelette’ length so that I can combine the two ideas without boring the reader.

Secondly:

Two of my very recent ‘Blogs’ have upset people because of my use of, quote, “insulting terminology” in that I referred to certain Nationalities by their nicknames—most of which have unpleasant or insulting connotations.

Sorry about that. There was no animosity involved—I even have friends who are Pakis and Chinks. They can call me what they like, I shall join in the laughter whether I am a Gwei Loh or a Mat Salleh! Perhaps you are a German and refer to me as an ‘Inseln Äpfen’ (Island Ape) or ‘Kanal Schwimmern’ (Channel Swimmer); or an African who says I am a ‘White Monkey’. It’s fine. Someone who has no nickname is in trouble because they have no friends.

Third:

Killing insects is not ‘fine’.

Yes, I understand that we kill thousands of ants by treading on them accidentally over a lifetime but that does not console me.

Yes, I understand that many of these creatures are ephemerals, their lives are vanishingly, to us, short but they are still valuable to that creature.

It may be that their perception of time is different to ours. Perhaps they see their time alive in the same way as we see our ‘three score years and ten’.

How can I tell if I have killed a baby bug and snuffed out sixty of its seventy years of bug years.

We often speak of ‘dog years’ and ‘cat years’ why should insects not be the same.

The thing that worries me about this is the standards that we have set and have become accustomed to living by.

Rats are vermin because we have said that they are vermin. A rat is not vermin to another rat.

It is our classification of creatures that determines whether they should live or die.

It is our disrespect of their lives that has created the need for special homes for cats and dogs and the associated need to euthanize them.

I do understand your points about my ‘Blog’ but I also understand my need to write for me, for my opinion.

I respect your right to put comments underneath stating your opinion. We are different, we have different perspectives and different tastes.

Fourthly:

(Sorry to take so long over this!) Of course I shall not eat my shampoo! The scent in my shower gel and shampoos is for cosmetic purposes only, not to make it appetising. It is the idea of it that I was objecting to,

Similarly, the concept of ‘Dogs**t’ scented aftershave was not really a serious one, I was just making a point, really. Perhaps it was badly phrased or stated—or was it the word ‘dogs**t’ that you object to my using?

Fifthly:

Your views on marijuana are your own. These are mine. Right or wrong, this is how I feel about it.

Sixthly:

I don’t care if you are... whatever it is that you are, as long as you are happy with it.

Yes, I understand that you feel that other people’s beliefs are affecting you but mine are not. How other people with similar beliefs to mine affect you is a problem between you and them—you must deal with it, it is not my concern.

I have friends of all belief systems including ‘non-belief’ systems of various sorts. Long may that continue.

Seventhly:

The World is a rich and varied environment.

We all live in it—with one another.

As I often tell my students, they will find that, from time to time, they will work with someone they don’t like. That person is still a colleague.

Suck it in and get on with it. You are co-dependent you and them.

The World is the same.

We live with people of different races, shades (we are all the same colour!), beliefs and sizes. We should enjoy the variety and stop killing one another for those differences.

I understand that you feel I should take a more ‘patriotic’ view of my own people but I don’t.

This is the World I live in. This is how I see that World.

It is beautiful.