Religion and sex in Kyiv

Kyiv has some of the most beautiful and least well known churches in the world. At least, they are not well known to Westerners. Orthodox monks lived in the caves under the Lavra monastery from the sixth century onwards, eventually bringing Christianity to Russia. Now the Lavra monastery is a UNESCO world heritage site. It's the only place in Kyiv where you might see groups of elderly American tourists of the sort that are everywhere in Florence or Siena. They go down in single file into the tunnels and caves carrying thin candles. The orthodox style is to carry the candles between the fingers of your left hand leaving your right hand free for repeated crossing of yourself. The tunnels are so low that the head of someone of medium height brushes the ceiling and tall people walk along stooped and uncomfortable. In the caves are small wooden altars.

In niches in the tunnels are the covered bodies of saints, whose holiness has apparently ensured that their bodies remain intact and undecayed. Small coffins, covered in silk, contain the remains of child saints, some of whom had compelling religious visions and others were said to be able to perform miracles. Most of the walls are now white but some paintings remain. They are brown with age and are done in the iconic, pre-Rennaisance style, presumably frescoes painted on wet plaster. Given the number of people in the tunnels breathing on the paintings, their continued survival depends upon a miracle. One short, stout, female American tourist, whose plastic hip made her walking slightly unsteady and gave her a wary respect for steps, wore a tee shirt which informed everybody "I'm not dead yet", reminding me of the Dorothy Parker joke. When she was told that President Calvin Coolidge had died she replied "how could they tell?".

Above ground restoration is busily going on everywhere. Mechanical diggers gingerly excavate around ancient walls and towers and in one corner of the monastery new gold cupolas are arranged in rows on the ground alongside a stack of huge golden crosses, soon to be levitated and erected above the restored walls of the church. One of the two great churches is closed and being restored but the other, smaller church remains pretty much as it was, without the golden cupolas and with the paint flaking on the white walls. Inside the paintings have turned brown and indistinct with only the golden haloes surounding the heads of the saints shining out of the murk. This rather unrecontructed atmosphere creates a simpler, much less ornate aesthetic, which is paradoxically more appealing to contemporary sensibilities.

The church is crowded with people standing for the service. Most of the congrgation are young-ish women, all wearing headscarves. There are lots of priests in black cassocks, many of them young, singing the mesmerising orthodox chants in contrapunctal to the most senior, bearded priest in a tall hat. He intones in that remarkable basso profondo, which is the envy of male opera singers all over the world, but only to be truly encountered in orthodox priests. The devotion is remarkable. An extraordinary religious revival is clearly well advanced in the Ukraine.

The other great churches of Kyiv are St Michael's Cathedral, also now fully restored, and Santa Sophia, restored but as a museum, no longer as a church. St Michael's is more recent than the churches in the Lavra monastery. The walls are powder blue and flying buttresses hold them up. A plethora of gold cupolas, all crowded together, rise above the church alongside the bell tower. The interior is baroque, with golden screens and icons in gold frames. But, to my mind, Santa Sophia is the most remarkable of the three great churches. Set in its own tranquil gardens behind high walls, this 11th century church has a similar shape to Aya Sophia in Istanbul with half-domes surrounding the main dome. Above the main altar in the big dome are icons in gold moasics of Christ and the saints. Looking at these gorgeous mosaics the golden thread of Byzantium from Constantinople to Kyiv to St Marks in Venice is immediately drawn. Living in the penumbra of Ancient Greece, the Italian Rennaissance and the European Englightenment, westerners forget too easily the gorgeous stretch of the mystical Byzantine world, the Holy Roman Empire, and its continuing hold in the countries where orthodoxy thrives.

Santa Sophia has all its frescoes intact and restored and they are as lovely as anything in Rome or Florence. The angels and saints are set against pale blue skies and white clouds. All the faces express an intense human sensitivity. Here, a couple of centuries before the Italian Rennaisance, is the place where the iconic tradition of aloof, remote Gods and saints, disapproving of and judging humanity, are transformed into the saints who sympathise with our human failings and supplicate on our behalf to a forgiving God. That remarkable religious and aesthetic joining which dominated religious thinking from the Middle Ages until the beginning of our Godless twentieth century all over Europe seems to have happened here in the east first. Visiting with Arjeta, an Albanian from Kosovo, we were both moved to note that the orthodox heartbeat which is so profound in the Serb community (and coming here one can see why) will not be so easily surrendered for the banal secular prosperity promised by the European Union.

The strongest echoes of the Soviet era in Kyiv are to be discerned at the war memorial and in the Opera House. The war memorial is shaped like a concrete bunker and rusting Russian tanks encircle it. Monumental sculptures of the suffering people of the Ukraine, cut from the stone in the crude socialist realist style, line the walls of a tunnel. At the end you emerge into a park over which looms the gigantic silver Motherland statue. The iconography is the same as the Statue of Liberty, but the aesthetic is crude and the feeling engendered more tragic than heroic.

The people of the Ukraine suffered greatly alongside Russia in the Second World War. Many millions of Ukrainians died. More than 600,000 died in the defence of Kyiv alone. The sacrifices were tremendous and unimaginable and they loom vivid in the contemporary mind. Young people in Russia today will have been told by their Grannies when they were children to finish their food with a reminder that so many million Russians had starved to death and even those that had survived, had survived on little more than love, courage and fresh air. Now the feeling, so far as one can tell, Ukrainians have for Russia is ambivalent. Their culture, identity and history are almost mystically intertwined almost to the point of being indistinguishable, but their contemporary political interests are fraught and divisive.

The revolution that brought Viktor Yuschenko to power has been followed by internal division and international uncertainty. The Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, complete with the (false) plait across the crown of her head and the innocent appearance of a country girl, battles for eventual power in the Ukraine. Apparently many peasants in the Ukraine believe that the Ukraine will be saved by a woman and Tymoshenko seeks to appeal to that folklore. Russia and the European Union contemplate the political scene with concern, wondering which way Ukraine may turn and with what consequences.

The Opera House is an entirely unreformed Soviet-style institution. It is an ornate 19th century building, laid out in the same style as La Scala or La Fenice, with one set of stalls and five stacked rows of boxes in semi-circular balconies. The interior is mostly wooden and has been painted a pinky-biscuit colour, with gilded cherubs and curlicues. It's an attractive example of the form. The opera itself, Verdi's Macbeth, is played well by the orchestra and the singers have strong, distinctive voices, particularly MacDuff, but the set and the costumes are execrable. Great flats have been painted with hell-ish characters and they shake and tremble from time to time, like the set of an English sitcom in the 1970s. The costumes are standard-issue amateur dramatic: lacy, flowing red robes for the women, and loosely crocheted 'chain mail' for the men. Most of the time the performers are static. The entire mise en scene completely lacks the dramatic quality that should characterise operatic singing. The best thing to do is to close one's eyes and imagine that one is listening to the radio.

There are three intervals each more than half and hour long, but the bell starts ringing encouraging you to return to your seat after five minutes. In the interval you can have a delicious but unchilled glass of Crimean champagne, sold by quantity, with a bar of excellent Ukrainian chocolate. At the beginning of the third interval the lady selling the drinks and the chocolates is busily putting them away, removing any chance that you might buy one and thereby delay her early departure after another undemanding evening behind the bar.
Customer service in many places in Kyiv is appalling. When asked if we could order a second bottle of excellent Georgian wine the waitress in a (rather expensive) restaurant simply shrugged indifferently. When we asked the woman at the airport where we check in for British Airways she replied "you're too early. Go home."

But in the local fruit and vegetable market where no tourists go, except those with local friends, everyone is friendly and smiling. The Azerbaijani fruit seller gives a free peach to Katya, a pretty girl. The elderly woman selling cream cheese, offers a large blob to taste on the end of a knife. It's delicious and sour-sweet. Even the pig's heads sold at the butchers are smiling, with ears removed and tongues extracted laid neatly by the side. Next to them lie great rolls of pork fat, a great Ukrainian delicacy served cold or, if you like, dipped in chocolate. The Ukraine is a great food-producing country and it seems being close to food makes Ukrainians happy.

Out in the streets many pavements are broken down and many nineteenth century townhouses remain unrestored. One has a tree growing out of its roof. Belle epoque Kyiv evidently doesn't attract the beneficence that religious Kyiv does. On a backstreet, a young couple dressed for the occasion, are having their wedding photos taken in front of a graffiti-ed wall. This is a dress rehearsal, not the big day. The photos, if the setting is anything to go by, promise to be post-modern. On the same street a building site has been excavated but a disused train carriage remains rusting on the site. On the boilerplate an elderly man sits absolutely naked in the sunshine, crossing his legs and fixing me with an aggressive, disdainful stare. My resolve crumbles and I put the camera back in the bag.

Crossing the square with my three female friends, all senior international officials, two elderly women pass us and one says to the other "He must be rich to be able to afford three wives." I don't have time to think about this remark because I am too busy trying to get out of the way of the British Ambassador's Range Rover which is heading diagonally across a pedestrianised square and, in pursuit of another perfect photograph, I am in their way. Another diplomat tells me that the far right is rapidly on the rise amongst young unemployed men and a racist stabbing or murder occurs about once a month. Since I've only seen one other black person in Kyiv, I guess it's him or me next, so I'd better be careful, something I'm not generally keen on.
Back in the hotel, at 2.30 in the morning, my next door neighbour is on the phone. Only semi-awake, I think he is ordering room service. "how long will it take? twenty minutes is fine." As I soon discover he is ordering a prostitute. The walls of this quite expensive hotel are as thin as paper and I can hear everything. After much turning taps on and off and flushing toilets, everyone seems to have a satisfactory experience - twice - and then it's time for the girl to leave. Before she goes she asks if he would like her to come again the next day. He says yes; same time, same place. My heart sinks. She leaves. He goes to sleep. I remain awake for a long disturbed night contemplating the sacred and the profane.

www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets for pictures of Kyiv

Why diabetes is so high in South Asians

Medical statistics in the UK have persistently shown that diabetes, heart disease and other related conditions grouped together as the metabolic syndrome are far more common amongst people from the South Asian sub-continent than in other communities. Most of the speculation for the reasons for this has ascribed it to a diet full of sweet and fried food combined with a lack of exercise, though why the effects of those shortcomings (which are common in other communities too) should apparently have more negative effects in the South Asian community has never been clear to me. Apparently, central obesity, tums and bums in other words, is more common in South Asians. What's more, the extent of central obesity is more or less in direct proportion to the likelihood of diabetes and heart disease. I got the explanation for all this in Chennai from Dr Ramachandran, who probably knows more about diabetes than anybody else in the world.

The statistics in India are even more striking. One in five Indians has diabetes and in the urban areas and the middle classes the proportions are even higher. Something similar has been noted in communities in the Gulf States. Richer, more comfortable lifestyles, it would seem, have their cost, but why should the cost, at least in diabetes, be so strikingly frequent in some communities more than others. The answer is climate-related. In hot countries the problems of food storage are extreme. Sir Francis Bacon tried to prove that freezing a chicken would preserve it. He was right, but the attempt to stuff the chicken with snow gave him such a bad bout of influenza that he died in the pursuit of knowledge. As a result, people whose genetic make-up has evolved in cold, northern countries are less good at storing foods in their bodies. They have less need to do so. The beneficial effects of a cold climate have meant that food is more evenly consumed through the seasons. In hot countries food was plentiful after rainy seasons and scarce in dry seasons. As a result the metabolism of the denizens of hot countries developed the ability to better store food and therefore to go for longer with less food if need be. The same chemical processes that go into storing food in our bodies are also the ones, when food is consistently in excess, which produce diabetes and its metabolic cousins. Now that food, at least for the urban middle classes in India and for almost everyone in the Gulf states, is in consistent and plentiful supply, no famine comes to pass, only constant feast. We Indians eat too much for a while and then, instead of eating less for a while, we continue to eat too much. The result is diabetes and heart disease. Geneticists argue that the rate of human evolution has slowed and may even have been stopped altogether because of better medicines, changes in philosophical and social attitudes to people with congenital disabilities and a reduction in the wholesale risks to groups of humans such as famine, flood and pestilence. So whatever genetic predilections some communities have are likely to remain.

What then is to be done? Well, the increased risk of suffering from the detriments of the metabolic syndrome remain and persist. They can be partially ameliorated by less red meat, less alcohol and more exercise. But that will postpone the metabolic effects, not remove them entirely. The day of shuffling off this mortal coil can be postponed, not indefinitely avoided.

Painters of secrets in the Hague

In the lovely Mauritshuis in the Hague so many of the paintings from the Dutch Golden Age seem to portray an unrevealed secret. Almost all have a domestic setting, but something intruding from beyond is frequently suggested. Jan Verkolje's painting is of someone delivering a message to the housewife in an impeccable Dutch home, but we don't know what's in the message. There is no melodrama, scarcely a hint about whether the message is tragic or joyful. The message seems important, but enigmatic. One of the greatest of all Dutch painters, Pieter de Hooch, portrays a man reading a letter to a woman. Again we don't know what the letter says, and their facial expressions give only clues, not answers. Judith Leyster's painting is of a man offering money, but for what? So strong are the hints and the innuendoes that even where there appears to be no hidden meaning, no secret, such as in Jacob Ochterveld's painting of a fishmonger at the door, the viewer, having looked at all the other paintings with their incinuations and implications, starts to wonder whether there is some hidden possibility. Why exactly is the fishmonger at the door?

Everywhere under the pall of discretion is hidden the possibility of joy or loss. Whether the emotions are glad or tragic, they must best be expressed in private, so privately that even the person looking at the painting who has been admitted into the domestic space cannot know the whole story. The door must be closed on solitude before the entire truth comes out. Until then everything is hints, echoes and possibilities. As in Chekhov, the turbulent world always incinuates itself into even the most orderly existences, but only in private and beneath the surface calm. Without the surface calm all would be chaos.

Adriaen Coorte is a minor master painter of the Dutch golden age. His life, not just his work, is a total secret. Nothing of note is known about him. All is guesswork. And his exquisite painting offer precious little to guess at. He emerges fully formed as a painter. His palate of colours, his subjects and genres are decided from the off and they never change throughout his life's work. There is no development, no journey, no destination. He painted still lives almost exclusively. Almost all are set against black backdrops, rather like Spanish still life paintings. And the subject matter is always selected from the same range: bowls of strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, grapes, redcurrants. All are shown, shining, ripe and unspoilt. Occasionally the white flowers produced by all these fruits which grow in the cool, soft shade are depicted. Bundles of white asparagus endowed with an almost ethereal luminescence are set alongside the bowls of fruit. Exquisite butterflies with filigree wings as fine as a spider web hover over the fruit. He also painted sea shells covered with patterns of random symmetry that only nature and evolution could produce. No human eye or mind could conceive them. Nothing happens, nobody is present. The infinite refinement of the natural is complexity enough. That's not a secret, it's a revelation almost divine.

No more vultures circle the Towers of Silence in Delhi

The Parsi community of northern India have a unique burial tradition. They put their dead out at the sacred Towers of Silence and the vultures that constantly circle, sometimes turning the sky dark by their numbers, devour the flesh on the bodies until the bones are picked clean and white. This tradition dates back centuries but is shortly to end if we're not careful.

Since the 1990s the vulture population all over South Asia has rapidly depleted to the point where 99.9 per cent of them have died. For several years no one understood the phenomenon, but in 2003 a scientific study of the post mortems conducted on vulture corpses in Pakistan made a breakthrough. The anti-inflammatory antibiotic drug widely used on cattle diclofenac, produced by the Swiss company Pfizer and sold at a discount in South Asia, had produced a toxic reaction in the vultures that fed on the cattle carcases. The drug is highly beneficial to cattle and, for that matter, to humans. It has a short half-life, produces no toxic waste and has few side effects. No wonder it rapidly grew popular amongst Indian and Pakistani farmers. But when red meat containing the drug, and some others like it, are eaten by vultures, despite their notoriously resilient digestive systems which can processes all manners of other substances in meat that would be toxic to humans, it causes uric acid to form and that quickly leads to renal failure and the vulture dies. Hence the collapse in vulture numbers. Vultures breed only once a year and produce only one egg. To restore their numbers, even if the causes of their decline were eradicated, would take a hundred years according to environmental filmamker, Mike Pandey, who drew this sad story to my attention. The benefits to humans once more in conflict with the welfare of the natural world and the natural order.

But the story gets more complicated on closer scrutiny. Vulture numbers are also depleting in countries such as South Africa where diclofenac is not in common use. Here this has been attributed to power lines, climate change and, controversially, to the harvesting of vulture body parts for medicinal purposes by Sangoma, traditional Southern African healers. Nor would simply banning the drug necessarily solve the problem according to scientists. No one knows whether the substitutes may have the same, different or worse effects.

So the large, dark vultures, with their priestly white collars, once so common circling hopefully and watchfully in the shimmering, hot, white-grey Northern Indian sky have gone and a deeper silence has fallen on the Towers of Silence.

The Old Flower Market, Beijing

The city of Beijing took on its current square layout in the Ming dynasty. Taking the Forbidden City as the centre, a street grid was laid out around it emanating out to a high grey wall which encompassed the city in a square. Sections of this wall remain, roughly where the second (of five contemporary) ring road now runs. Were it to have been built on similarly arduous terrain it would be as remarkable a construction as the Great Wall itself. It is wide enough for fifteen people to walk abreast. At regular intervals on the wall the Ming emperors built watchtowers. These are large rectangular buildings, with the long face parallel to the wall. Built of grey Chinese brick with a pagoda roof, they are probably the height of a modern six-storey building. The walls are covered with parallel lines of slit windows, like a cheese grater. From behind these windows archers would watch for the marauding armies of the ever disloyal warlords. The most famous of these watchtowers is, of course, in Tian An Men Square. Its cautionary effect has rather been tempered because its perfect feng shui alignment with the Forbidden City is starkly interrupted by the Mao mausoleum, a perfect acknowledgement that Communism represents a decisive break with China's imperial past.

About two kilometres from Tian An Men to the east at what would have been the South Eastern corner of the city is the next watchtower, called Tung Bian Men. Just outside this stretch of wall, during the Qing dynasty, a flower market came into spontaneous existence. The aristocrats, senior Mandarins and the imperial household would come here not just to buy fresh flowers brought in from the countryside but also to buy handmade silk flowers. According to legend they were the most beautiful and the most well-crafted silk flowers in the whole of China. Small workshops run by master teachers grew up around the main street which was the flower market and for decades it was a hive of industry, employment and community, with those that worked in these workshops and the flower market, living in the streets and hutongs nearby. All that was brought to an abrupt end in the Cultural Revolution when the market was closed, along with all Beijing's markets, the furniture market, the market for horses and donkeys. These were examples of capitalism and rightism and therefore had to be removed from the face of the city.

The neighbourhood fell into poverty without the market and many of the people who had worked in the local industry could not get registrations and jobs in a daan wei because the system then was that you had to be resident in the area to get a job in the factory and you had to work in the factory to get a flat, the combination of household registration (hu kou) and employment effectively excluding the former small business people and craftsmen - as the system was designed to do.

In 2003 the neighbourhood was rebuilt. The old 1950s and 1960s brick flats were demolished and much of the land was sold off to private developers who also had to provide replacement housing for the poor people who had been living there. Attracting the interest of private developers was not difficult. The neighbourhood, by the standards of the modern city is very central, a few minutes from Beijing East station from where the new white bullet trains with noses like dolphins rush from the city to the big cities of China's eastern seaboard. The new homes for sale have been built in high blocks with their south sides glassed over to attract light and heat during the many cold, grey, polluted months of the Beijing winter. In the middle of the blocks is a gated courtyard with a strange sculpture of a flowering cabbage.

On a Saturday morning there are few young couples around, they are too busy shopping and doing chores in their smart new flats. But there are plenty of children, mostly being tended by indulgent grandparents, for whom their sole grandchild is a precious gift to be nurtured and cherished. All grandparents are more lenient than all parents, but when there is only one grandchild, how special must that relationship be. Many of these little emperors have the latest in expensive childhood accessories, including motorised jeeps and scooters which whirr around the square guided by a three year old, kitted out in designer baby wear, complete with baseball cap at a tilted angle. Others are on roller skates. None have nothing. China has changed and who would begrudge these families these luxuries of love and generosity so long unavailable?

The old flower makers are still around too. They now live in small flats, the smallness of them being their principle complaint. Mostly they have televisions and refrigerators, supplied by their children in some cases. But something has been lost. Many old people in China still feel superstitious about living off the ground and there is nowhere amidst these flats for those communal activities that are the mainstay of Chinese community life, Tai Qi and Mah Jongg. In the older communities based around the daan wei there is always a place to gather, gossip, gamble; a place for communal singing, ping pong and exercising. Since the flats were so small and the interiors often unappealing many old people spend hours and hours out and about with friends and neighbours, not so much with families. Many of their children have moved away to find work, some have moved out of Beijing to the cities of the Pearl River delta where jobs are easier to come by, particularly for those with few qualifications, and salaries are higher. But in the old flower market too much time is spent cooped up at home with your spouse and the Pekinese dog for company.

The community is still called the East Flower Community and many of the elderly residents still make silk flowers as a leisure past time. They also make fruit out of glass under the tutelage of the acknowledged expert whom they call Master Grape, because his glass grapes are utterly life like. There is one other echo of their flower-making past. Along the pavement a flower bed has been laid. Plastic grass has been put down and the real stumps of small trees have been stuck into the ground. On to these living branches the local people have attached the silk roses and cherry blossom they have made which will bloom all year round forever - never withering; never dying.

More pictures of the old flower market in its new form on www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Memories of the Cultural Revolution, Dashanzi, Beijing

Victors in war often memorialise their darkest hour, thereby stressing the magnitude of their achievement, not just in winning, but winning from extreme adversity. Hence the British obsession with the Dunkerque landings, which were in reality a brave but ragged retreat. If they had been a precursor of ultimate defeat perhaps they would not now be so celebrated. The Long March has a similar place in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang which led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The Long March was in fact a long retreat from the advancing Nationalist troops, ending in the mountainous North East Shanxi province in the Yan’an area. According to the mythology more than 800,000 Communists embarked on the Long March and about 25000 made it to the end. Jung Chang has suggested in her biography of Mao that Mao didn’t do much marching, spending much of the time being carried in a Sedan chair.

In the Dashanzi area of Beijing, adjacent to the hyper-contemporary art zone, 798, a theme park celebrating the Long March and the Shanxi region has been established. You enter a courtyard to the sound of revolutionary songs broadcast across a tinny public address system. Around the courtyard are revolutionary statues and red stars. One of the buildings contains a museum about the Long March and the Yan’an area of Shanxi. Most of the exhibits are photographs of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Mao and Zhou En lai. They are dressed in thickly padded and very crumpled Chinese suits, swathed against the cold which would have been extreme, and they look sternly out of grainy black and white photographs against a backdrop of grey mountains. Mao looks haughty and, relatively speaking, well-groomed. Zhou looks determined with a firm expression and that dignified, upright bearing which was so much a part of the grace and style with which he approached foreign relations in his long years as Chinese premier. There are a few exhibits, some chairs said to have been used by Mao, his calligraphy brush and inkpot, the binoculars and leather bag supposedly carried by Mao’s bodyguards. The photos are prints and they are a mix of pictures of meetings, where a crowd of seated participants listen to what one suspects were long-ish speeches from their leaders. The guide tells us all the important decisions about the foundation of the People’s Republic of China were taken in these meetings in the mountains. There are also pictures of the warm reception the Communists received from local farmers. These are, needless to say, wholly unconvincing.

One section of the display contains photographs of Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. Schoolchildren had been brought to live there and are being ‘educated’ by farmers. The pictures are of meetings, more meetings, and students working in the fields alongside the farmers. We know from the testimonies of people who subsequently emigrated to the USA that, in fact, the children from the cities had contributed little and learnt less. They had been distributed amongst local families, often miles apart across fields and mountains. They had just been another hungry mouth to feed, though occasionally they brought with them useful things like medicines which could be shared.

Suddenly we discover that the group of middle-aged Chinese people in the museum with us are in fact a class reunion of the pupils in the photographs who had been sent to Yan’an in the Cultural Revolution. We get talking to one of them. He looks about 40, thin and dressed entirely in black, on the surface every inch the modern Beijing-er. He tells us he was taken straight from school with a group of his classmates. Taking classes of schoolchildren to the countryside at short – or no- notice was fairly routine at the height of the Cultural Revolution. None of their families came with him. He was about fourteen years old, just at the school leaving age. He points out himself in one of the photographs, an earnest, worried looking adolescent marching along a dusty rural street. In other photos unhappy-looking people have banners around their necks bearing slogans and pictures of Mao. These people are probably being denounced by the Red Guards, but in the photo of the marching students no one is carrying banners, nor are they surrounded by a watchful crowd. We ask him if it had been hard. He looks down at his shoes, wary and evasive but certainly not wishing to be disingenuous, smiling weakly. It had been very hard he says softly. He was there for a few years until he was an adult, working in the fields and ‘learning’ from the peasants. Then he was assigned to a job in a factory in Shanxi province and did not return to Beijing until 1990, by when he was middle-aged. We want to ask what had happened to his family, but the interpreter is becoming anxious and tells us we must be going. “It’s controversial”, he says simply, again combining discretion with a wish not to be dishonest.

Human failings in Budapest

At a conference in Budapest about identity the Eastern Europeans and those from Southern countries still outside the European Union talk only of national and ethnic identities. They talk, paradoxically, about their pride in their reclaimed national identities while claiming ‘there is no problem with minorities in…’. They strongly resent the suggestion that all national identities are coded for violence and carry the implication of inevitable past and future violence. My friends from Kosovo, all Albanian, try to appear dignified in their fresh victory, not gloating or triumphalist. Independence was declared on February 17th with tacit EU and American support. They are keen to stress the spirit of reconciliation; the secular nature of the new state; the protections for the Serb minorities – and how all these high-minded ideals are guaranteed by their aspirations to join the European Union. All talk of tradition, religion, memory, landscape and separate cultures is banished. Inherited identities are too dangerous even to mention. I, rather rudely, point out that it profits a man nothing to lose his soul to gain the whole world, but the European Union? Even more rudely, I predict that the Albanian elite may end up prosperous, deracinated cosmopolitans eager to get the hell out of Pristina to Geneva or Brussels. Meanwhile the Serbs, with their spiritual home (as they would see it) now in the territory of Kosovo will be the only ones with memories and meanings drawn from a rich and troubled past which lives on vividly. The question on the minds of the young politicians, none of them Serbs, is the question of St John of the Cross, Tolstoy and Lenin: what then is to be done?

The Western Europeans listen politely but are probably a little bored and a little impatient with all this national/ethnic old-think, described disparagingly as ‘anthropological’. Waving flags is so over. For them also, but for different reasons, inherited identities are a thing of the past. They want to talk instead about gay adoption, Pop Idol and plastic surgery makeover television shows. Even in Northern Ireland apparently more people attend the Gay Pride parade than the St. Patrick's Day parade. These concerns all seem narcissistic and, sometimes, insufferably smug – the pain of alienation only being the flipside of carefree prosperity. The question for the Northern and Western Europeans is not what is to be done, but what have we become?

In a field outside Budapest is the ‘Statue Park’. It’s not really a park at all. It’s a windswept field, halfway up a hill with ugly views, criss-crossed with power lines. Electricity pylons march unrelentingly across the landscape. Onto this field the Hungarian authorities have towed all the old Communist statues. Lenin, Marx and Engels guard the entry. Inside, statues of a few besuited, bespectacled men represent Hungarian Communist leaders. They don’t look like much of a match for Russian tanks. But the most monumental statues are the ones of anonymous heroes. They are huge, bulging, muscular men in dramatic action poses. They are crudely crafted in the Social Realist tradition and, to our post-modern eyes, have a homo-erotic tinge. The statues of women and children represent symbols of purity and clarity. Strength lies with the men. You don’t have to be an ex-Communist to feel some sadness at the loss of idealism and the descent into an unheroic (cowardly?) era where no one seems willing to fight for anything much anymore. In order perhaps to reduce the sense of complicity and guilt, the park presents Communism as kitsch. The souvenir shop sells mouse mats with South Park-like figures saying ‘They killed Lenin, the bastards.’ Kitsch - and the ironic language in which kitsch speaks - is all that is left. There are no Hungarian visitors to the park and only a few foreigners.

The Hungarian National Art Gallery is popular with Hungarians. The exhibition about the Medicis is crammed. Hungarians are voting with their feet about which bits of their past they intend to validate as part of their contemporary identity. The gallery is in Heroes’ Square and is one of the greatest collections of old masters in Europe. The stars of the show are their collection of Spanish masters and the best of these are the several El Grecos. El Greco’s most important insight in these paintings is a profound understanding of human fallibility and failure. One picture is of the agony in the garden, the sky at dusk showing a red version of that stark, unique El Greco chiaroscuro. In front of the kneeling, praying Christ are the apostles asleep and oblivious. Another picture is of the disrobing of Christ. As in the Gethsemane picture he stares upwards, his face brightly lit, from within and from above, transcending the ugly and violent scene. Behind Christ El Greco has painted two thickset Roman soldiers looking shame-facedly at each other, as if to say ‘We know this is wrong, but what else can we do?’ They are not asleep and unaware. They are awake and active, but don’t seem to have any choice. These pictures of human shortcomings next to the transcendent and translucent Christ move Yvonne to tears. Her tears are not for what we have become, but for what we are.

for pictures of Statue Park, Budapest go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

The possibilities of silence in Egypt

All cities are noisy. Cities in developing countries are noisier still. Cairo, so they say, is the noisiest city in the world. Using the car horn to get through traffic is the main offender, but people also say that the Egyptian way of talking is loud and guttural. The latter point is debatable. However, if you are in Egypt for a while you do start to long for silence, so here are a few suggestions of where to find it.

Outside all the big hotels in Cairo which are ranged along the banks of the Nile and on Zamalek Island you can hire a felucca. The best time is sundown. The Nile in Cairo runs almost directly south to north; so on a clear day the west bank is bathed in the most beautiful golden light while the east bank becomes completely dark. The asymmetric effect is disorienting. It’s only a shame that most of the buildings on the river banks are hideous concrete monstrosities – evidence of a dictatorship combining its interests with capitalism. Feluccas rely on sail power and so once you get out into the middle of the river complete silence falls, it’s a very relaxing, hypnotic feeling. At about 5.50 pm, the first distant wail of a muezzin starts up from somewhere. Quickly all the mosques call out to the faithful. Apparently there are 1000 mosques in Cairo and in a few minutes you can hear all of them, each in a slightly different register. The total effect is like listening to a harmonious polyphony in a low volume echo chamber. It is transfixing.

The other place to find a beautiful silence in Cairo is in the Coptic Museum after hours. The Coptic patriarch established the museum when European archaeologists were removing Egyptian antiquities as fast as boats would carry them back to the Louvre, the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum. The Coptic Museum was established to save some of these antiquities for Egypt. It is a beautiful building set around a tranquil courtyard full of date palms and orange trees. The windows are in traditional Egyptian style, covered with dark wooden intricate trellis work, to filter in the light of the sun while keeping out the heat of the day. At sundown the golden light plays through the windows in filigree patterns on the sandy walls. Inside the museum are lovely frescoes from desert monasteries, some of the earliest sites of worship in Christendom. You can see the beginning of the Iconic tradition still strong in the Orthodox tradition. Perhaps even a little hint of the Romanesque, but that might be your imagination.

Christianity is said to have arrived in Egypt in 45 AD, just 12 years after the death of Jesus Christ. Since then the Coptic Church has flourished, waned and flourished again. But it flourishes now and has a special place in the cultural, linguistic and archaeological history of Egypt. The Coptic era is the bridge between Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt and Islamic Egypt. To this day prayers are said in Aramaic, the language of Christ’s preaching. Many of the items on displays are funerary ornaments and feature the dead person laid out with their arms splayed back beside their head, like a baby asleep. They are often set in alcoves of Corinthian pillars with a Coptic cross above showing the long exchange of decorative and religious ideas between Egypt’s great religions, both past and present. This tradition of syncretism, borrowing from past religious and cultural traditions to establish new ones, is a feature of all ancient cultures and societies, including for example India and China. The Coptic tradition does not have the glamour and drama of the Pharaohs and is therefore readily ignored, but it should not be ignored. The pleasures of the Coptic tradition are the pleasures of heartfelt devotion set against a vast historical backdrop going back to the several roots of our civilisation.

The Coptic tradition has been very much revived in the last 150 years or so by enlightened, outward looking Patriarchs and monks. Sadat, Egypt’s second military ruler, exiled the Coptic Pope from Cairo, which is perhaps some kind of compliment. At least he must have been relevant. There are now six million devotees, almost all in Egypt. The sites of the Coptic monasteries in the desert are around the ancient oasis of Wadi Natrun, now a poor and dusty desert town. The monastery of St Bishoi attracts many thousands of devout Coptic pilgrims. It is nearly, but not quite silent. You can hear the quiet sobbing of a troubled pilgrim asking for the saint’s help while family members look on morosely. Who knows what troubles they face, illness, penury – perhaps the Saint can help. The pilgrims gather around the tomb of the saint and stroke the casket, which has been worn shiny by the hands of the faithful. The casket is shaped like a body and has an effigy of the Saint on the cover. The structure and style is not dissimilar to the tombs of the Pharaohs.

You can also hear the Monks praying at small altars behind a curtain with a painting of the Saint. Once they have finished praying they emerge from behind the screen in their long black soutanes and their tight fitting caps which stretch down like veils to their shoulders and flap in the wind as they walk. All have long beards but they have tidily trimmed and squared off at the bottom. They leave the church one by one, still munching the bread broken in the name of the body of Christ in the service. Again silence is not quite possible, because they greet passing strangers cheerfully. They all seem to speak good English:

Monk to tourist: “Hi, how are you?”

Tourist replies: “Fine, thanks. This is a lovely place.”

Monk: “What religion are you?”

Tourist pauses and decides to avoid a long complicated explanation of their doubts and certainties and replies: “Catholics.”

Monk, still chewing bread, replies: “Ah well, you’re the same as us. You have seven sacraments and we have seven sacraments. Anyway, nice to see you.” And he wanders off between the ancient red domes of mud and sand looking down at the ground with his hands behind his back, humming to himself. Silence returns.

The monks are not enclosed and are passionate social actors and agents. An Abbot of one of the nearby monasteries set his monks the target of producing enough food to feed 1000 people each. The monks rose to the challenge and have mastered pinpoint irrigation, greening the desert with, for example, banana trees. They have also mastered bovine embryology; not for them a life of irrelevance and sequestration.

Alexandria, another noisy city, has one or two places where silence is to be found. One is in the basement of the National Museum in Alexandria, one of the most beautiful and - beautifully lit – museums in the world containing a remarkable collection of Greek, Ptolemaic and Coptic artefacts. The basement is a Pharaoh’s tomb. In the centre is the boy God-King’s golden death mask and casket covering his mummy. Another casket is suspended open to show how the intricate designs and hieroglyphics are repeated at each layer of the casket. Statues of Horus, the hawk, and Anubis, the dog, guard the entrance. No living person was ever meant to enter here so take care.

Absolute silence can be guaranteed diving in the Mediterranean. Under the ocean are sphinxes and statues of Pharaohs and Egyptian gods which have been submerged in earthquakes during the long centuries of Alex’s decline during which the great capital of Alexander the Great was reduced to a fishing village. Cleopatra is said to lie somewhere beneath this ocean as her palace was on an island long engulfed by the Mediterranean. Nobody knows exactly where Alexander is buried. His silent sleep, unlike so many of the Pharaohs, is for the moment undisturbed.

Egypt photos at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

A hope of home in Beijing: Akram Khan's bahok

The Akram Khan Company new contemporary dance piece had its premiere in Beijing. The show is called bahok, which is Bengali for carrier. Akram's artistic genius stems from his capacity to create new striking movement sequences, drawing on Indian classical and contemporary dance languages, to convey some more profound truth about a universal experience. In this show the context is journeys and the setting is very simple and totally familiar: people are gathered under one of those signs that you see in stations and airports on which place name, times and messages revolve every few moments. We have all stood staring up at one of these signs waiting for our destination, or feeling apprehensive about some problem which is about to be revealed about the journey we want to undertake. Wanting to get the journey over with, particularly if we are going home.

Over the length of the show the dancers, from European contemporary dance traditions and from the National Ballet of China, configure themselves into pairs and groups and movement is set to some small scene we have all witnessed in stations and airports: someone asleep who keeps tilting and tumbling on to the person next to them; boys arguing about a computer game; someone humming the tune they are listening to on their IPod - all instantly recognisable, but not the movements or the meanings drawn from them in the show: are these people really going anywhere? do they have homes - or destinations? In our world of frantic motion has the business of being on a journey from one place to another - from one identity to another - become an identity in itself? Perhaps if we keep on moving, home isn't a place anymore. Home becomes just an idea, a sentiment, a memory. It no longer has a physical meaning. Home, in Akram's piece, becomes your body and your memories - disconnected entirely from the actuality of place.

These are all the thoughts that go through your mind, but what you are watching is a scintillating display of exuberant, original movement by a fantastic young troupe. That excitement counterposed against the reflections about home and memory that the piece brings to mind, in that juxtaposition of movement and reflection, that's where the power of the work lives - as in all Akram's work.

Watching this in the evanescent streets and spaces of Beijing, which change from week to week and month to month, particularly as the Olympics draw nearer, of course, makes one wonder what Chinese people think of their home now, now that everywhere is so changed. Tian An Men Square is probably the most iconic and notorious space in China, filled with symbols of power and tradition: the Forbidden City; the Great Hall of the People. But right next to the Great Hall of the People a hyper-modern temple has been unveiled. It is shaped like a gigantic half of an egg laid on its side made from silver titanium and glass. The egg sits in a glassy moat, which reflects the other half of the egg. No entrance is visible. The entrance is below ground, under the moat. This building is a dramatic piece of theatre in itself, set against the classic backdrop of Tian An Men Square, and how right that it should be theatrical because it is the new National Centre for Performing Arts.

It is designed to inspire awe in anyone looking at it, awe at the drama of the building, but more importantly awe at the audacity and speed with which the Chinese authorities are embracing modernity in its most extreme variants. Sadly the work performed in the centre will take longer to reach the levels of quality and modernity achieved by the building. The Chinese leaders are rushing to the future, perhaps leaving the people who live in the ancient hutongs behind the Forbidden City wondering if all they will shortly have of their homes are their memories and their bodies.

For pictures of Akram Khan Company's bahok go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Modern Rome

Since Rome finds it impossible to shake off all those associations of antiquity that attach to its brand, we thought we would go in search of modern Rome. In the centre of Rome, just off the Via del Corso, is Richard Meier's museum of the Ara Pacis, probably the most important antiquity in Rome, it is the altar Augustus built to celebrate peace; in fact he meant victory. The Museum, like all Meier's contemporary buildings is intersecting slim, sheets of white concrete, set at harmonious angles to glass in the roof and in the walls. The whole effect is simple and dramatic, celebrating all the renunciations and clarity of the modern and setting them against the ambiguities and paradoxes summoned up by all great historical monuments. Tradtional Romans wished for something more, well, traditional, but the effect of the glass ceiling and walls is to bathe the altar in an ethereal light, whilst allowing the person looking at the altar to see beyond into the city and the world. The altar is given its special aura without being disconnected from the city, past and present. If architecture is the relationship between light and space this building is a triumph.

Richard Meier has another amazing building, his Jubilee church built for the Millennium, which for the Roman Catholic church was a Jubilee year. John Paul II, with the audacity for which he was renowned, decided that Rome needed another church (some might say like a hole in the head) - and what a church they got, designed by a Jewish American. It is in the outer suburbs, getting there involving a longish drive from the centre through many underpasses and flyovers. The neighbourhood is undistinguished, apartment blocks like barriers and barracks surround the church. At ground level are the random selection of disconnected shops and bars which Italian town planners never succeed in resisting. In the midst of this the Church soars three parallel, sail-like curved white planes, evoking a dome without being one. The other side is straight and flat and, as with the Ara Pacis, glass intersects everywhere. Inside the church all is light and white, creating, as intended, a heavenly quality. High above the altar is a solitary, unadorned crucifix against a backdrop of sheer white. All the wood inside the church is light and warm and, the organ is set against the light oak, its chrome pipe standing out against wood and white.

The parishioners are standard issue modern Italian Catholics, disproportionately old and poor, many of the men hanging around outside smoking for much of the mass; lots of pushchairs in a country where reproduction has largely been abandoned for the higher pleasures of consumption and lifestyle. The locals seem quite at home in their hyper-modern settting - but all simplicity and clarity quickly unleashes a suppressed force for entropy (it's kind of thermo-dynamic law). The application of the irrepressible urge for disorder comes in the form of cheap indoor plants, distributed around the church, arbitrarily interrupting the clear lines the architect so carefully sought and so brilliantly achieved.

You can find modern art, as well as architecture, in Rome too. No modern art museum is complete without its acronym and in Rome it is MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. The show we saw was an identikit contemporary art show, you could see something similar in twenty European cities. The artist must have several implausibly mixed ethnic origins, there must be a large element of fairly ponderous video and the work should tell the viewer something of the (usually rather banal) passion and horror with which the artist contemplates contemporary society - the personal perspective being apparently easier to communicate than the scientific or technocratic. This show was by a Iranian-Italian and was her animated videos of mankind's confused and horrible relationships with animals and biodiversity. So one video showed a man stabbing an irritating pet dog in his living room. Another longer video described the collapse of biodversity as witnessed by a modern day voyager on a modern day Beagle. This was juxtaposed with a video of a family argument. Geddit?

An even more flash up to date acronymous museum is planned for Rome designed by the Queen of flash modernity, Zaha Hadid, for whom the greatest sin is that a new building might in any way refer to its surroundings. She has that in common with one or two other superstar architects: Frank Gehry; Daniel Liebeskind. The building was scheduled for completion in early 2006. In February 2008 it remained a deserted fenced-off scene of large, angular, grey concrete lumps randomly distributed. The architecture may be modern but Italian builders are apparently immutable. Maxxi is yet to come.

As well as architecture and art, you can encounter the modern in food too. Gusto is a whole collection of food buying opportunities - shops, cafes, restaurants - on the same square as the Ara Pacis. The food is delicious - but all Italian. Another, perhaps even more cutting edge restaurant is in a backstreet behind the Pantheon. Its confusingly traditional name is Trattoria. The restaurant is all pale wood and digital art installations. The kitchen is encased in glass so you can watch Africans and Bangladeshis cook modern Sicilian cuisine. My pasta starter came with oranges, potatoes and deep-fried anchovies - how modern is that? Delicious, actually; from Sicily via Southern California. None of the waiters were Italian. Ours waitress was Chinese and had dyed her hair blonde - a little echo there of life at the cutting edge in London or New York.

But one can't suppress the feeling that Romans have an abiding attachment to their traditional dolce vita. In Gusto and Trattoria only Italian food and Italian wine are sold. Most of the high end fashion shops on the Via Condotti are Italian. A few global French brands make it -Chanel, Lanvin - but the Brits, the Japanese, the Americans are nowhere in sight. If you buy a hat in Rome the shop still has a hand-operated machine for stretching the headband to fit. And perhaps the biggest signal of all are the smoothly dressed elderly Italian men in pastel coloured v-neck sweaters, carefully ironed corduroy trousers and unbuttoned, swinging, pleated green Loden overcoats, leaning close together and muttering to one another as they stroll past an ancient monument with their hands behind their backs. Italians have not - and perhaps will not - embrace the future, why should they?

(Thanks to Paul Docherty for finding the Jubilee church and restaurant recommendations)

For photos of modern Rome go to www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

School's out in the Netherlands

One of the most important aspects of Dutch identity is that they talk about their identity a lot, even more since the murders of the sociologist and politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Both these events asked the Dutch a host of uncomfortable questions about immigration, multiculturalism, their globally famed liberal values, their commitment to consensus and so on. In short these events made the Dutch think about who they were. And more than that, to talk about it. That was a few years ago. Now they are feeling a bit better. The far right seems to have stalled and the measures taken to re-assert Dutch traditions, such as citizenship classes and lessons in the Dutch language, as well as a tax on importing spouses, have re-asserted a feeling that there is a national identity to hold on to. Everything has not been lost in a post-modern haze of anything goes cultural relativism and insoluble inter-group conflicts.

As part of the national process of reflection and debate, a commission was established to identify and set out the fundamentals of Dutch identity and values. Liberal democratic governments all over the world have a touching faith in the ability of committees to answer questions that everyone else, including the government, find impossible - and impossibly tedious. They almost invariably reach conclusions that represent the lowest common denominator. If consensus is being sought where no consensus exists, reductionism is inevitable. This committee concluded that hallmark of Dutch values were democracy and the rule of law. That raised two immediate and enormous difficulties: many nations would claim democracy and rule of law as their birthright. The French and the British might even claim copyright. Secondly, Dutch people, when thinking about themselves, did not immediately think about democracy and rule of law. So that commission was all set to be a damp squib, until it was electrified by a throwaway remark from Princess Maxima, the Argentine born Crown Princess of the Netherlands. She observed that there was no single Dutch identity. Not an unreasonable assertion, you might think, given the rather anodyne conclusions of the Commission. Unfortunately for the Princess, the sky fell in and the Dutch debate and consensus model was threatened once more with the possibility of a collective nervous breakdown. The poor sociologist who chaired the Commission, a woman of considerable academic distinction and unimpeachable integrity, has lost a lot of weight and looks very stressed. There is indeed more than one Dutch identity. If identity partly resides in appearance and outlook, her identity had been altered by the debate about identity.

But I was in the Netherlands to talk to some senior people about a different aspect of identity: the attitudes of young people and what the generation gap looked like in 2007, if indeed it still exists at all. I suppose they thought I would tell them what I thought of young people today. Instead I told them what young people thought of them at least in my interpretation. I said that the brightest and best young people were angry and bitter about the legacy left them by the smug babyboomers. Sexual liberation, at which the Dutch had been at the forefront, had proved a pretty mixed blessing. AIDS and abortion left deep social and psychological scars on gay rights and feminism. Female equailty, in the having it all variant, had just made a lot of women feel stressed and inadequate, no wonder increasing numbers of professional women choose not to have children. Whether or not you choose to have children, you live with some uncomfortable consequences of the decision all your life. Liberal attitudes to drugs had simply left moral confusion and a trail of broken lives. Young people wondered how our developed societies had managed to radically increase prosperity and even more radically increase inequality at the same time. Internationally, global propserity had also left so many behind, most notably in Africa. Anti-poverty campaign members are heavily biased towards young people. And the consequence of inequality was instability, war and genocide. Above all the babyboomers had tragically neglected and raped the environment, leaving a disaster that may prove irreversible.

These were the matters of their discontent, but they also had many criticisms, not just of these matters, but also the manner of the political process. Politics as usual was no answer, either nationally or through international institutions. National politicians seem to have large ambitions and small minds. Most of their debate was self-seeking and power hungry. They were engaged in a private slagging match, only fascinating to the soon to be extinct newspapers. International politics looks and sounds like a dialogue of deaf competing factions. Kyoto and Gleneagles, to name but two, were just broken promises.

You might think, given all that, young people could be forgiven for being cynical or pessimistic. On the contrary, they were energetic and optimistic, if only the babyboomers would get out of the way. They were keen to look for new approaches and solutions - and they knew that those new solutions would be found in new ways. The potential of technology was something that the young felt could be a powerful force for good. International dialogues in the spaces being created in civil society were not all backward-looking neo-Marxism (though those tendencies still exist, courtesy of not yet retired once-Marxist academics who still leave a transitory mark on young people in their early 20s; mercifully it is generally eradicated by their thirtieth birthday). New kinds of international co-operation are emerging across cyberspace.

Once I had finished speaking, a very senior police officer said, "But you do know what is going on in the Netherlands today, don't you?" I looked baffled, wondering whether he met 'today' in the general sense or what. In fact he meant today literally. He said that for the very first time Dutch school children had gone on strike. They were protesting against the Dutch's government insistence that pupils should remain in school for 1040 hours a year, although there were not enough teachers to teach that number of hours. As a result, school students just sat round bored watching the clock go round. A charismatic 17 year old, Sywert van Lienden, had organised the first protest using the internet and mobile telephones and it had quickly spread across the school system and taking the authorities completely by surprise. Within hours he was a media hit, articulately setting out the students' case on the TV news. Fifteen thousand school students gathered in Museum Plein in Amsterdam for the second demonstration instead of going to school. The Government was left looking flat-footed and out of touch - as indeed they were. They compromised, and then stonewalled - which was almost certainly the wrong way round. Then there were the usual oldie remarks about students not knowing what they were protesting about, just having fun, not serious politics etc. This incident, whilst not an exact case study of what I had been theorising about, was pretty damn close, giving me the flush of prophecy almost totally absent in the life of a researcher. A small, harmless, meaningless gratification.

Before going to the airport I spent the afternoon in the Boijmans museum, a very fine private art collection in Rotterdam. It contained many world class exhibits, paintings by Van Gogh and Monet and so on, but the Dutch exhibits were the most interesting. Pictures of dark grey stormy skies and emotion-charged seas battering the flat, fragile lowlands of Holland, the boats tilting dizzily towards collapse. The high, white, unadorned vaulted ceilings of Dutch protestant churches, with their clean, symmetrical perspectives. All those flower paintings made out of a similar spirit of modest, understated protestant aesthetics, a counterpoint to the overblown, decadent outpourings of artists in Catholic countries. The serene merchants' houses and housewives painted so precisely by those warm humanistic artists, Pieter de Hooch and Gerrit Dou (less allegorical and more likable than the austere, brilliant Vermeer). The harmony and order of the domestic interior represents a psychological and emotional as well as an aesthetic counterpoint to those stormy, challenging seas always threatening to overwhelm the Dutch (in the era of global warming perhaps more than ever: the centre of Amsterdam is now 5 metres below sea level). Rembrandt's son Titus at his homework; his mother bearing all the wisdom, worries and weariness of the long years in the lines on her face. In the modern part of the collection were the beautiful compositions of Mondrian, who, for me, represents more clearly than any other modern artist, the Dutch blend of order and harmony on the one hand and randomness and unpredictability on the other.

Here, seen through the eyes of Dutch artists were the enduring aspects of Dutch identity and they seemed as vivid and enduring to me as they ever had: the respect for nature, the value of order and the high premium on human co-operation, combined with a distinct scepticism for messianic simplicities. A subtle harmony matters more to the Dutch than a strident melody. Pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins, and one of which the Dutch would never be convicted. They incessantly question the things they should be proud of.

see photos of Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

The last Tamil in Budapest

The last time I was in Budapest I was arrested. It was early in 1990, a few months after the Berlin wall had come down. Hungary had already had its uprising and I watched the red star being taken down from above the parliament building, a slow, painstaking business undertaken by workmen, not the result of a surge of popular sentiment. I wasn’t arrested because I was associated with the fight for freedom. I was arrested coming out of church after mass on a Sunday morning. The church was a rococo spectacular of gold cherubim and seraphim and the mass, though Roman Catholic, had many touches of the Eastern orthodox: incense, chanting and old ladies in black bowing repeatedly.

Outside in the bright sunlight in the square in front of the church were many Tamil young men, presumably having escaped from war-torn Sri Lanka. I was assumed, I guess, to be one of them. I am indeed of Tamil origin, so in a way the two burly policemen in grey and navy blue were right. I was taken firmly by the upper arm, a policeman at either side, put in the back of a police car and taken to a police station in a dingy suburb. There they put me against the wall and demanded my passport, which I didn’t have with me. It was in the hotel. I explained this in my best schoolboy German, which only served to incense them further. In their minds there was clearly something frustrating and unacceptable about the difficulties of locating who I was and where I came from. They laughed at the suggestion I was British. They searched my wallet, examining each credit card and looking particularly derisively at the BMW rescue card. They made me remove my shoes and pulled the inner soles of them out. I was baffled by it all and they were increasingly irritated. Then they left me on my own in a grey, windowless corridor for twenty minutes or so. After that a more senior, but smaller, police officer appeared in civvies and told them to release me. He had confirmed my identity with the hotel and had clearly angrily denounced the hotel staff for not registering all foreigners with the police station. The old Soviet practices were not yet extinguished.

Budapest is still the same beautiful Austro-Hungarian city it was then, now much cleaned up and restored. If Berlin is a miracle, Budapest is a fantasy. It is a city of castles and palaces; of dogs hunting outside the classical museum, angels poised to fly down from the Pest hillside across the city and lions guarding access to the bridge. The city that looked to Austria, but also to Transylvania is once more evident and points the mind to the fairy tale and fantasy traditions, of magical castles and terrifying wolves, that emanates from central Europe.

The churches are brightly lit at nights, their illuminated tracery like filigree. And through it all runs the broad, curving, river Danube, looking almost organic as it sways through the city. The metro is something like the New York subway and something like the Paris Metro. It is older than both. The wood panelled funicular still climbs the hill to Pest. Hungarian wine is much improved and Zara and H&M have replaced the old shops selling Austrian hunting jackets and pipes made from deer horn. Amazingly the Luxus department store, though re-located, remains and still has a certain drab GDR-chic. It doesn’t look like the window dressers have been made redundant.

No sign yet of Gucci and the other top end brands. Hungary is the least successful of the accession economies. Unlike the Czech Republic, the growth rate is pathetic and the Government unpopular. Nor have a million people left to seek their fortunes elsewhere, as in Poland. The old Magyar aristocracy have returned from Vienna and other European cities and reclaimed their place in Hungarian society, arranging congenial jobs for their children in the Brussels bureaucracy. They are, according to more ordinary middle class Hungarians, staggeringly sentimental, becoming dewy-eyed at the mere utterance of the word Mozart or Sachertorte. They are also un-self-critical and incompetent. The Budapest Sun says Ferenc Gyursany, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has ‘become synonymous with lies and disliked reforms in Hungary…He is, without doubt, more popular everywhere else than at home…the majority of a non-Hungarian audience (at the London School of Economics) is simply more optimistic, gullible or just not affected nor interested’. Freedom of the press, in Hungary as elsewhere, has evidently been worth fighting for. Irony and sarcasm are the beneficiaries.

There is nothing here for Tamils now. I am the only Tamil in Budapest now.

See the photos of Budapest at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Where to buy a tweed jacket in Dublin

If you’re cool, when you visit Dublin you’ll stay at Morrison’s Hotel. It’s on the other side of the Liffey opposite Temple Bar. The staff are all handsome men and women under 30, dressed in black and universally not Irish. The interior is all white stone floors, horizontal dark wood panelling and low sepulchral lighting. Over the curved dinning room hangs a gigantic sculpture of a male athlete, with a mildly Soviet air about him. The lifts are black outside and in. In the rooms are TVs which are also computers, with a personal welcome message on the screen. There is also a stereo system with an LCD display of the names of Irish radio stations. If you are the sort of person whose sleep is disturbed by too many winking lights the only solution is to unplug the lot. That probably destroys the finely balanced computer programme. Let’s hope so.

You can get into the heart of historic Dublin in a moment or two. Walk along Ormand Quay, past the lovely Winding Stair bookshop, cross the river and into the narrow cobbled streets of Temple Bar. Trinity and the Bank of Ireland are just up the road to the left. They are your first brush with neo-classical and Georgian Dublin.

Head down Grafton Street for the shops. The first stop in search of the Donegal tweed jacket is Brown Thomas. The department store is full of the coolest, cutting edge global fashion brands, Prada, Y3, Gucci etc. Some of the fashion brands are only available in their home towns and, of course, New York, such as the Hong Kong brand, Vera Wang. Hong Kong, New York, Dublin. No tweed jackets here.

Angela says that she remembers her first visit to Dublin. There were no restaurants. Priests and nuns were everywhere. Everyone was small, pale and looked miserable. The centre of Dublin is now one of the most diverse places in the world. Women wearing the hijab, origin not obvious, sit drinking coffee and talking to their friends in Starbucks, gently pushing a baby buggy back and forth in the hope of the child staying asleep a little longer. The buggy is festooned with carrier bags like a Christmas tree. On Grafton Road a Roma woman stands holding her child on her hip next to a big flower stall, not begging, just watching. Young men of various non-white ethnic origins stand with billboards pointing you to Timberland, Guess and other shops just off Grafton Road, lest you don’t spot them. They are busy talking and laughing together and don’t look like they care much whether you see their signs or not. From time to time they give their signs to each other to hold while they answer their mobile phones. So one young man is holding signs pointing to two different shops in opposite directions.

The only nun visible is black and looks like she comes from Africa. No priests are evident on the street, but they are still a part of Irish life. Father Brian D’Arcy told the Irish Times of his concern (apparently shared by many other priests) that the shortage of priests mean that they now have to say several masses a day. As a result their increased consumption of communion wine may take them over the legal limit for alcohol consumption when driving. “I don’t like to use the word wine, as it is the precious blood in the Eucharist, it still has all the characteristics of wine when in the blood stream”. Apparently the Vatican bans the use of non-alcoholic wine even if the priests have confessed to being alcoholics.

The great influx of migrants to Ireland (now ten per cent of Ireland's population, mostly arriving in the last decade) from all over the world has left the authorities scrambling to work out the ways and means of identity and integration. The subject is hotly debated. NGOs have sprung up to research, campaign and lobby. Academics are busily researching. Officials in local authorities and the Civil Service have started drawing up plans and strategies to promote anti-racism and equality. They look for ideas and a compass from universities and from other countries. Should they be accepting the new arrivals as new Irish citizens, here to stay, or are they travellers in a global labour market, here today, gone tomorrow? Politicians are wary of the issue, speaking with forked tongue, pointing to economic benefits, talking about the need for fairness and tolerance but also seeking to assuage the fears of more traditional Irish people. They may feel that, whilst much has been gained by economic growth in the Celtic Tiger, something else - durable and significant traditions and certainties - has been lost. Something of the Irish identity is going, perhaps gone. And the loss has been unplanned; a casual destruction. Or perhaps their anxieties and fears are less clearly defined than that, just a feeling that things have changed and the consequences will be unfamiliar and maybe unwelcome. The fear is of the unknown, the different; the feeling that they may become outsiders in Ireland's ill-defined post-modern future. Bertie Ahern's says that immigrants must be 'Irish first'.

From the other perspective, Ireland has at last become a cosmopolitan place, not only because of migration, at peace with freedom, individuality and diversity. The theocratic reactionary past has been discredited and shaken off, and not a moment before time. On this wing of the debate they think that too little has yet changed and too late. The referendum on divorce was divisive. The forthcoming referendum to legalise gay and lesbian civil partnerships promise to make the debate about divorce look like a well-mannered discussion over tea in Bewley’s. And on migration and diversity, they look for leadership which clearly states that diversity is an irreversible benefit, fairness a requirement. Intolerance is unacceptable and will be punished. From both perspectives change has been so rapid that consequences are confusing; destination unknown.

The lovely Bewley’s Oriental Cafe is still there unchanged on Grafton Street, with its beautiful art deco gold mosaics. In the window behind the grinning pumpkins (today being Halloween) are three elderly ladies having tea and a glass of sherry. Why not, even if its’s only 3pm? Behind them are a group of Chinese people having tea. No sign of any tweed jackets for sale anywhere on Grafton Road.

St Stephens Green looks magical with the last of the red and golden autumn trees losing their leaves and taking on the skeletal air of winter. If you come out by the Shelbourne, you can walk down Kildare Street and have a look through the windows at the sleek diners in the Shelbourne’s restaurant. Down Kildare Street are some of the most distinctive Georgian buildings in Dublin. The National Museum and the National Library and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. All are elegant unadorned statements of clarity and symmetry

At the bottom of Kildare Street you come out on Nassau Street, opposite Trinity again. Here there are some Irish souvenir shops. None of them sell Donegal tweed. And then - at last - I spot Kevin&Howland Ltd, an old-fashioned shop containing every imaginable pattern of tweed for men and women. Mostly it’s brown. The outside is painted brown; the furniture is brown and most of the items for sale are brown. The suits and coats are in long rows. Not for this shop is the modern retailing habit of hanging just a few identical black clothes a respectful distance apart from each other and bathing them in sharp white down light. The selection of tweed fabrics is enormous though the styles are rather more standard. The staff are formal and friendly. A trendy, bespectacled, overweight, bald young man is encouraged to think that a pillar box red tweed waistcoat is not too ‘shouty’. Another young male customer is reassured that the floppy ‘Great Gatsby’ cap will return to its original shape after a soaking of Irish rain if you squash up plastic carrier bags and stuff the cap with them until it dries. The fabric I especially like is not available in my size. It appears that virtually every item is unique. I settle on one quite like my original choice, but the pattern is ‘herringbone’ not ‘window pane’. The middle aged man who serves me has a tiny pair of scissors in his pocket to cut away the threads keeping the pockets stitched. If you want a lovely tweed jacket go to Kevin&Howland, but you’d best go soon.

In the National Library is an exhibition about the life of William Butler Yeats. The photo of the poet shows a romantic young man, fine hair flying, with a firm jaw line, a serious expression and a romantic look, his far-sighted eyes behind wire-rimmed lorgnettes. The exhibition has a mock up of his library and the backstage area at the Abbey Theatre, displays of his manuscripts under glass, first editions of programmes for his plays, portraits of Maud Gonne and large backlit photos of the Lake Isle of Innisfree and Coole House. There is also a dark moody photo of his mossy gravestone and his famous epitaph.

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

A recording of WHAuden’s In Memory of WBYeats, read by the author, is playing softly in the background. Then a recording of Sinead O’Connor reading Easter 1916.

All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.

see the photos of Dublin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

How to open a shopping mall in Hong Kong

1. Find a piece of real estate which you already own in a central location, such as an airport or an underground station

2. If it is an underground station you will need planning permission to build on top of it. You will have to compensate all those who hold low value ransom strips and leases at ground level.

4. Conduct a global search for architects. The best architects are likely to be international and have done big shopping malls before, in the USA or Japan perhaps. The newest shopping mall in Hong Kong, above the Jordan MTR station, called Elements was designed by the architects of Bluewater, built on an old quarry, south of London

5. Work out your concept; develop a brand and a brand identity. Elements wanted a more contemporary, less conventional feel than the other top end mall in Hong Kong, Pacific Place. In Pacific Place, the identity is rigidly controlled. All the shops have to do their fascias in white and chrome. The only latitude they have is over the choice of font. This gives the whole place a uniform white-ness and chrome-ness.

6. In Elements, along with global brands like Gucci (the biggest Gucci store in the world is in Elements), they also persuaded funky and less well known Japanese brands to take out leases, such as the design shop BALS Tokyo. Many of these have no other outlets in Hong Kong. British fashion brands, some of which do have a quirky alternative appeal, at least to foreigners are notoriously parochial and almost impossible to persuade. Hence you rarely see a Paul Smith or a Kilgour or even a Top Shop. Meanwhile Zara (Spanish) and H&M (Swedish), along with all the French and Italian luxury brands are absolutely everywhere in Hong Kong and everywhere else. The only British brands in Elements are Kent&Curwen and Karen Millen. Karen Millen is now owned by Philip Green who was reluctant to expand in Hong Kong and the store in Elements is a franchise. Fewer restrictions were placed on visuals.

7. Build the space, Elements is more than a million square feet, not including a huge open air 'civic space' on the roof.

8. Hire an international art consultant from New York or London to buy and install cutting edge contemporary art, particularly large sculptures, in the public areas of the mall.

8. Make sure there are plenty of nice places to eat with cutting edge fusion cuisine and the best European chocolate and patisserie. That will re-energise your customers for another bout of wandering and spending.

9. Make the loos fabulous and build luxurious baby changing facilities. They should be like a first class airport lounge, not just a fold down plastic table falling off the wall of the loo. There is almost nowhere to go in Hong Kong with a small baby. A mall is perfect, air-conditioned and plenty of places to sit, eat, drink and talk whilst the baby sleeps. Then a nice lounge for baby feeding, changing and chatting to other mothers.

10. Use your launch marketing to get yourself on the front page of the newspaper. Elements had aerial acrobats acting as flying advertisements. That got them the photo slot on the front page of the South China Morning Post.

11. When you open make sure you have loads of handsome, well-dressed, knowledgeable staff everywhere to point people in the right direction.

12. Watch the queues form with quiet pleasure on the opening day.

13. On the opening weekend check that all the restaurants and cafes have queues and stop at a bar incognito and enjoy a glass of champagne and a bowl of noodles (a little known but wonderful combination). Sit on your own, savouring the taste of your own success.

14. Don't go near the place for another two or three years, just check the rentals on-line, while keeping an eye on commercial rents generally.

15. Pay off the debt in three years.

16. Build another one.

Source: Betty Leong over an espresso and a chocolate cake on the opening Saturday in Elements, with my own additional suggestions