Kindly spare a thought for the beautiful people of Nepal who are in the midst of suffering an earthquake and its after-effects. In all my travels I've never come across a more consistently positive, decent and honest nationality, and this in the face of extreme hardship and appalling government.
So far this year 33 millimetres of rain have fallen on the sand – not enough to quench a camel’s thirst. As a result, not much survives and I wake up each morning amazed I’ve lasted five years. To make up for this liquid deficiency, seawater is boiled in a process known as desalination (oil-rich states only) which extracts the salt thus making the water drinkable and usable for cooking, cleaning and nonsensically irrigating acres of turfed lawns set on the sand’s surface with the sole purpose of looking pretty. The irony is that the desalination plants require vast quantities of oil burned to keep the water at a sustained boiling point: not only a disaster for the environment but bad news for an ever-expanding population when the oil wells eventually run dry followed by bathroom taps reduced to a drip, then all you have is zilch. Stench whichever way you look at it. Catastrophic news has now arrived that the natural springs in al-Ahsa (my favourite Saudi city) have dried up. The name 'Ahsa' means ‘the sound of underground water’ and is (soon to be was) the site of one of the world’s biggest oases which some cretin once nominated as one the Seven Wonders of the World, neglecting the fact that roads, dust, concrete pre-fabs and electricity pylons don’t exactly exude beauty or wonder. The water in the Ahsa wells has drained down into empty spaces (see above diagram) left by oil extracted from the massive Ghawar oilfield sitting below the sand - a huge sea of the black stuff measuring 280 by 30 km and accounting for more than half of cumulative Saudi oil production. Five million barrels of oil are pumped out of it every day - 6% of global production. The 10 million palm trees in the oasis are wilting as the water – source of all life - disappears down black holes while an insatiable thirst for black gold sees it frantically pumped up from below. Additionally, average water consumption in the Kingdom is double the world's average, thus highlighting the truth in the sandy adage: Screw the water, we want cars! Despite these calamities one creature that does survive in the sand is the thub, a chubby, slow moving lizard that doesn’t appear to do much other than lie around eating and sleeping: a highly popular pastime in these parts not exclusive to lizards. A thub can grow up to two feet long and weigh more than 10 pounds and an American hunter commented with great poignancy, “These guys are feisty if disturbed and trying to sneak up on a thub for a photo is a real challenge. I’ve got one on a wall back home in Spearman, Texas.” However, like water, thubs too are now an endangered species thanks to locals who kill and eat them or Texans who nail them to walls. In fact al-Ahsa has a Thub Restaurant called Chez Mustafa’s Reptilian Bistro and from the menu diners can choose from Thub burger, Thub cheeseburger, Thub pizza, Thub rice with raisins (or without), Thub sandwich, Thub dog, Thub kebab, Thub nuggets and Thub pie with gherkins and/or ice cream. “The meat of the lizard becomes delicious in the spring season,” bon viveur and lizard hunter, Hammad Al-Fawaz, informs us, for want of anything else to eat. “The lizard feeds itself from spring plants and therefore its taste changes. This is the period during which it becomes delicious.” Doctors warn against over indulging as it is high in cholesterol and protein. On reptile.com, or some such weird shit, a local aficionado, Mr al-Matrudi, said, “There are several ways to hunt the dabb (Ahsa vernacular) lizard. One is by pouring water into the hole and forcing it to come out.” Thus demonstrating an additional insane manner by which water is completely wasted. But this doesn’t deter his thub-lust because he adds enthusiastically, “Another is by chasing and hunting it - especially if it is far from the hole - using a firearm.’’ As a result, numbers are now dwindling, just like the water. This reminds me of the time at primary school when Kentwood Brooks brought in a lizard in a shoe box. His uncle had smuggled it home from a job in the Gulf and Mr Rouch, the grouchy headmaster, got him to show it to everyone at assembly (Wendy Goldthorpe ran out screaming and had to be taken home). Then at lunchtime the lizard escaped and Mr Collard the caretaker whacked it on the head with his broom and killed it, after travelling all that way. Kentwood Brooks, a hefty child, then punched the vigilant janitor in the face and the police were called. Alongside the dopey thub is the malicious scorpion, a different creature altogether. A cunning and nasty inhabitant of the sand that is difficult to spot and will go behind your back and attempt to eliminate you with its venom. An entirely untrustworthy little bugger, in much the same way as a wasp, in it has no value in the whole scheme of things other than being (often literally) a pain in the backside that attacks for no obvious reason other than spite. They’ve been around for 430 million years, way longer than early man who appeared between about two million and four million years ago, with the ability to walk upright and climb trees, a useful attribute when escaping tigers. The Homo group (snigger) — including our own species, Homo Sapiens — began to evolve about 2 million years ago and has been ravaging the planet ever since. As Greenpeace so eloquently put it, ‘If we condense this inconceivable time-span into an understandable concept,we can liken Earth to a person of 46years of age. Nothing is known about the first seven years of this person's life, and whilst only scattered information exists about the middle span, we know that only at the age of 42 did the Earth begin to flower. Dinosaurs and the great reptiles did not appear until one year ago, when the planet was 45. Mammals arrived only 8 months ago; in the middle of last week man-like apes evolved into ape-like men, and at the weekend the last ice age enveloped the Earth. Modern Man has been around for four hours. During the last hour, Man discovered agriculture. The industrial revolution began a minute ago. During those 60 seconds of biological time, Modern Man has made a rubbish pit of paradise. He has multiplied his numbers to plague proportions, caused the extinction of 500 species of animals, ransacked the planet for fuels and now stands like a brutish infant, gloating over his meteoric rise to ascendancy.' All this goes to show that people need nature. Nature doesn't need people. A storm ripped through the sand the other night, wind thrashing at windows, dust seeping in under door, sky brown, all rendering the flat a jail cell albeit with key in my pocket and nowhere to escape to. So on just such an evening all I can say is thank God for the BBC and what at first looked like a game show complete with that witch who is rude to the contestants. It turned out to be a debate among British party political leaders vying to win next month’s general election. Five minutes in and it still looked like a game show. After Little Johnny a clever-clogs from a posh school got up and asked a question about the National Health Service, UKIP chief Fuhrer Farage, standing out like the jovial fool who crops up in middle-class sit-coms, blustered, “I’m passionate about it as I've had more scrapes than most.” Pub fights? He did appear to be gagging for a pint and gasping for a fag, in need of a good night’s sleep. Then he’s on to health tourism and his bête noire - immigrants – specifically immigrants going on the dole and getting free medical access, which “costs a lot”, i.e. they’re scrounging tax-payers money. “60% of AIDS sufferers (in UK hospitals) are foreigners,” he explains, i.e. foreigners scrounging drugs and hospital beds. He hates foreigners, but that’s not a trait exclusive to British bigots. You should get out into the big wide world, Nige, and you’ll find more racism there than you can shake a stethoscope at or buy a drink for. By now he’s broken into a sweat and it pours from his brow at the mention of the European Union and the other bee in his party’s bonnet: Mrs. Merkel, who “is the real boss of Europe.” Meaning: she’s a kraut with clout. On other party leaders he scoffs, “Most of them haven’t had a real job in their lives”, i.e. more scroungers and spongers, and loses his rag when everyone turns on him after he gets in a bit of Scot-bashing, “English taxpayers are a bit peed off with money going over Hadrian’s Wall.” Ed Milliband, a 40-something-year-old looking like a schoolboy in the debating society and jolly keen to win the grand prize – five years vacation in 10 Downing Street - desperately tries to look prime ministerial and can’t stop talking about it. Each sentence begins with “If I were Prime Minister …” while staring pleadingly into the camera, but his tongue is too big for his mouth so he sticks his index finger out instead and jabs it about like a drunken vet attempting to induce a calf’s birth. He talks woodenly and unconvincingly and at times sounds like he’s about to cry. Now he has his hand in the shape of a gun. With fantastic economic foresight he announces, “If I’m PM I’m going to get a load of cash from smokers to turn the NHS round ” as if the current 80% tax on cigarettes isn’t enough. Farage splutters convincingly. Cameroon, a windbag and general nasty piece of work with the appearance of a smarmy North London landlord, pipes up that he is going to build 200,000 houses. The audience is non-plussed and a pause ensues … build them by himself? Not only is he superman of the construction trade but, like Clint Eastwood going after villains, he’s also going to sort out tax evaders - I know one, Dave, he’s well dodgy, you’d like him - then he gets down to his specialty of waffling his way around accusations of spending cuts in the well-practised manner of a seasoned bullshitter. Heard it all before. Nicola Sturgeon, a Scottish lady, is easily the most eloquent and level-headed of the seven, which is all good training for talking a majority of Scots out of the UK in the next referendum. In one sentence she sizes up the beast in the room, “There’s nothing Nigel Farage won’t blame on foreigners”. CUT TO Nige doing an impression of Frankie Howard miming “I won’t deny it.” He follows this buffoonery by shouting out, “If you have to build a house every seven minutes to keep up with immigrants then we’ve got a problem!” Don't worry Nige! Cameroon can do it all by himself. A Welsh lady for Plaid Cymru (bloody daft name), Leanne Wood, in a lovely red dress says she comes from the Rhonda valley and therefore speaks in a wonderfully mellifluous voice telling us, “It wasn’t Lithuanian barmen who caused the economic crisis, it was the bankers.” Bravo Mrs. Taff! Mr. Farage perks up at the mention of barmen. Nigel Clegg gets asked a question … but he seems forgotten … and proves why by painting a picture of a dull but well-meaning middle-class sit-com husband, sounding just like Cameroon voice-wise, and therefore entirely untrustworthy. He’s going to invest in the NHS just like his promise before the last election when he said he would not put up university tuition fees then did. For some reason during the Green Party leader’s speech (Natalie Bennett, an Ozzie … must be lost) the picture cuts to a green fuzz when she’s in full flow – perhaps a subliminal party political broadcast – telling us that we have to stop trashing our planet. She’s right of course and no doubt has the most logical manifesto out there. Problem is that when money and the resultant greed are the name of the game, environmentalism takes a back seat, ignored entirely by the majority and most importantly doesn’t make money. In fact it costs money! Next! As a finale, a heckler jumps to her feet in a fluffy jumper and starts screeching about the plight of the homeless. Unfortunately she isn't given a microphone so we don’t hear the details but she’s probably giving Dave Cameroon notice to get his spade out and start shoveling: they’re dying on the streets drinking meths. Mr. Farage looks on approvingly. Victoria Prosser, the interloper, later told The Guardian, “I can’t vote for anyone who I know is lying or omitting facts. That means I couldn’t vote for any of the people that I saw tonight. Even though some of them had good ideas, I know that they are all out for the same cause.” “David Cameron mentioned giving a fair deal to everybody in this country, including people such as our fine military service people. Yes, they are fine. But they are not treated fine after they have left the army, when they are in poverty and destitution, homeless on the streets and no hope of getting housed. He is using their name just to garner votes, because it might be a vote winner.” The report added: Prosser was escorted from the studio by seven security guards. “They didn’t say hardly anything. They just moved me,” she said. “When we got around to the back, I said ‘am I in trouble now?’ and they said ‘no, it’s alright’. It was all fine.” A fine two hours entertainment sent me chuckling off to bed and next morning the dust had settled. An opinion poll concluded that the Scottish lady’s common sense won it and Nige Farage came second, either for comic value or more worryingly that 23% of UK citizens agree with him. You can either go this way ... Or you can forget greed and GO GREEN!
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‘I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress.’ Ed Begley Jr. * "The more I see of Humans the more I like my dog." Mark Twain * Only when the Last Tree Is Cut Down, The Last Fish Eaten, And the Last Stream Poisoned, Will Man Realize That Money Cannot be Eaten Cree Indian proverb Nb. Doesn't work in Google Chrome, no idea why not...
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January 2016
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