Coventry, Colchester:

Rubbish places. Thank God for education; without that distraction, I’d have fried myself long ago.

Tehran:

Tehran, 40 degrees Celsius, but the low humidity made for a pleasant stay. The one hotel still standing in Tehran was the former Hilton hotel. Persian women are so beautiful. Persian men treat their women very badly. Cuisine: kebab, repeat ad infinitum. Things have changed now, of course. The women are so beautiful and politics remains a lifetime away in a space that is detached from and is inconsequential to daily living.

Laussane:

Atop the hill over-looking the lake, as the sunset cast a calming orange on the water’s surface, one could almost re-live the feeling of the early Reformers. The Swiss are a peculiar lot. I have no idea why, but the kantons survive. It is here, in Lausanne, that Amnesty International has its European headquarters. It is also here in Lausanne that you find Halloween celebrated. Among these valleys are workshops – fabriques, ateliers – manned by studious men who deal in the mechanics and minutiae of time.

Tashkent:

One of the loveliest places this side of the Silk Road, Tashkent is a marvel; a jewel of Uzbekistan.

(ex-)Yugoslavia – Macedonia:

Back when the blue helmeted UN folks were buzzing round Skopje (circa. 1998). A little like the rest of Soviet Russia (see Uzbekistan): the vodka, the extortionate prices, the extorting mafioso. Interesting fact: the national carrier was privatised and acquired by the owner of Skopje’s largest restaurant chain.

Hampered by forces natural and unnatural – bad weather and good old-fashioned bureaucracy – we stayed the night in the wild west town of Medan. We flew into Bandar Lhokseumawe, the second city in Aceh province, on the first of only two scheduled commercial flights the following morning.

Lhokseumawe was all that you couldn’t imagine it to be. Posters in the airport terminal – a simple building built in the 1980s barely large enough to accomodate the modest hundreds of visitors that flock to the region – identified the GAM leadership, each wearing the uniquely red beret of the movement; most of the photos were blurred, barely an improvement on the Wild West sketches of wanted men. Some of men shown on the posters were crudely crossed out, while others simply had “Mati” written over their faces. “Dead”, and no longer a problem for the military.

The airport perimeter was heavily fortified, belying the view from the outside world that the peace had been won. Army (TNI) checkpoints peppered the 10 km route, a stretch of road quite unlike any other in Indonesia: there was not a street peddler in sight, no advertising hoardings that screened your vision from the untended fields on either side of the road.

The short distance to the project location was quickly covered, not surprising given there was scarcely another civilian vehicle. The arterial factory road was overshadowed by a large bilboard which sold not a consumable item but was a rousing depiction of Indonesia, “Our Motherland, for whom we shed our blood”. Business matters proceeded smoothly and satisfactorily concluded. All that was left was the journey out.

SMAC failed to deliver and, with no commercial flights scheduled, we faced the prospect of spending longer than expected in what remained a “war-zone”.

A little imagination and monetary manoeuvring secured a ride on the next outward bound military transport. The propeller driven Fokker touched down just before dusk while we waited from afar as the ground crew prepared various items of cargo.

A sense of urgency enveloped the small plane and, though less noticeable, we discerned a subtle change of atmosphere as we walked the short distance from the terminal; as we climbed onto the plane, we simlutaneously slid from relief to confusion and disbelief.

I sat across a young soldier, barely out of his teens and head in hands for the duration of the flight. If that failed to convey the circumstances he and countless others faced, the “cargo” that was being air-lifted out were the remains of 5 soldiers. Four wooden coffins lay centimeters from where I sat. The hour long flight stretched painfully slowly, no longer merely a journey between two geographical points. The tightness that grew and gripped my chest was not due to being strapped to the seat. In the short twelve hours since their death, a growing vapour seeped from their coffins, a mixture of nature’s course and – as one of the flight crew observed – an over-enthusiastic infusion of formaldehyde.

The fifth coffin, draped in the Indonesian flag, lay at the rear. He was killed in action – he did not merit a mention in any of the local press reports that week.

Here is a news report on the incident from The Jakarta Post.

It’s not all “Me, me, me!”, however, as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron indicates, while the gravity of Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities spins us close to our dancing star. On a more serious note: due to consolidation within the book trade, whereby independent bookshops die slow, painful unnatural deaths, London is, alas, now the book-buyer’s Paradise – though precisely not the bibliophile’s. The latest to depart its terrestrial home and meet the Great Librarian above is the SPCK bookshop specialising in theological volumes. When will it end? (or when will the ending cease to end?)

Exile ends the tyranny of the émigré novel; reading is self-defeating and itself becomes a byway to neurosis. Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons (from nineteen eighty eight) and EB’s Marlene Dietrich lived here compete with melatonin for space on the bedside table. Eric Alliez’s Capital Times, a dense, incisive, distinctly French, treatment of St. Augustine, our holiest Bishop, founder and architect of incipient modernity. Something to really wake you up in the mornings: industrial strength caffeine to counter chemically-enhanced Cynicism.

Chris Groves’ agent wrote with news that Northwestern University Press is poised to publish his first book. Well done! (I jest about the agent) Incidentally, Chris and I once trekked through Berlin snow to visit Hegel’s grave on the 167th anniversary of his death.

The following anniversary fell during the week and I arrived after the Dorotheenstädtisch Friedhof along Chausseestraße had closed. Darkness was no obstacle as the cemetery walls were scaled in the service of the Absolute.