The Boy and The Coconut Tree

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.” — Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird I started this post with a quote from one of my all-time favourite books, To Kill A Mockingbird.  It as applicable now as when it was first published, so this is what I see, what I hear and what I feel. I don’t expect all my audience to agree with it but anyone who knows me knows I have strong opinions on the EU, though it is a flawed and imperfect institution it had potential to be better and we could have been a catalyst for improvement but due to Europhobia in the Conservative Party and xenophobia stirred up by UKIP, we are in a mess! It has been one week since we voted and chose to leave the EU but we are still in a limbo, a level of hell that Dante couldn’t envision when he wrote his ‘Inferno’. Our PM has resigned but will stay on until September 10th or so.  We have an opposition in disarray, fighting over the leadership but ignorin...

Momentous and disastrous, foolish, a leap into the unknown driven by petty nationalism.  That sums up my feelings today regarding the Brexit, the decision by 52% of the voters to leave the EU, few of them knowing what it means, what is has meant or has done for them. In fact, I am  so bloody angry about Brexit. My life since 1988 has been positively shaped by the EU and Europeans since I left my small town. Looking at the results show me I was right to leave. I may be from there but I don't belong there and that is sad! What many of them back there do not realize is, much of the economic renaissance since the dreadful 80s was due to the EU, money from it or access to its markets.  Ignorance of many economic realities and the belief that the UK will be better somehow if we turn our backs on 70 years of neighbourly cooperation is what has fed people’s fury.  I am lucky to have experienced the EU and its positives, I have worked for a French company that sent me t...

I visited Vietnam in February 2011 and took a train from Saigon (HCMC) to Hue. The journey was 20 hours and I shared a berth with 3 locals. One of them was Dang Ngoc Hieu a 24 year old shopkeeper from Tuyen Quang. Only one person in the berth could speak English so using my phrase book and drawings, we chatted. For 20 hours I was overwhelmed by a sense of being the centre of attention in the most innocent way. This boy from Tuyen Quang had never met a foreigner; he lives in a small village, an 8 hour drive north of Hanoi, closer to China than Hanoi.  He asked for my phone number and in rough English asked me to visit Tuyen Quang province if I ever returned to Hanoi.  A totally innocent experience that felt like my first ever crush and so hard to put into words.  Our lives are very different.  And the coconut tree? Hieu was delivering it to his village from relatives in Saigon. He carried it almost 2000km by the time he reached his home in Thuong Lam village....