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Read "The Kite Runner"...if you haven't already....

Hi Blues

No, I haven't read it! It is sitting on my shelves. I'm told it is wonderful.

But I'm finding it very hard to read fiction these days!

(I think it is hormonal! - I'm going through a rather late mid-life crisis.)

It may be fiction, but it reads like true life. It gives an insight into the Afghani culture.

Not to be an alarmist...but here is today's news from Afghanistan.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/0807 ... n_deaths_1

You might want to wait until the furor dies down.

Thanks blues

The situation is definitely getting more violent and will no doubt get a lot more violent still. Bomb blasts in the centre of Kabul are something new, but not unexpected. Although the Taliban have their main strongholds down south and in the west of the country, they do have a foothold in the mountains of Nuristan just to the north-east of the capital. A lot of people have been expecting them to launch a campaign from there. Interesting, then, that the Taliban have denied responsibility for these recent events.

There is always the possibility of involvement from the Pakistani government. Pakistan has long since coveted an open trade route through Afghanistan to the Central Asian Republics and on into Russia. Bhutto certain played a double role during the Soviet invasion and equipped the Taliban during the civil war that followed. It is quite possible that Musharraf is doing the same - taking advantage of the situation in whatever way he can. It is a dirty game. But then, competition between capital economies always is.

It is harder to work out whether there is any support for the Taliban from the Iranian government. Iranian weapons are finding their way into Taliban hands and then across the border into Afghanistan, but whether they are coming from a government source is uncertain. Local views on this are contradictory. American government and media sources are not to be trusted at the moment, IMO, because of all the tub thumping going on. It does appear that the US is trying to soften up the public for an attack upon Iran - preserve us all from the crazy logic of international capital!!!! (It will be interesting to see if the British government follows on meekly behind again or takes an independent view). Right now, the Bush regime will demonise the Iranian authorities any way it can.

On the other hand, Afghanistan has spent much of its three-thousand-year history as a integral part of the Iranian/Persian empire. Ahmadinejad's hysterical rhetoric doesn't disguise the fact that the Iranians have a vey shrewd strategic interest in the region, but it is hard to say exactly what their policy towards it is, at present, or what their policy towards the Taliban might be.

Since the end of the civil war, most of the Taliban activity has been down south in the desert regions of Kuandahar and Helmand. Government sources and local media outlets that I listen in on are worried that Kabul will lose control of these two provinces in the not too distant future. There is also sporadic violence against small communities in Herat and Farah. Some of the news reports from this area have been heartbreaking.

I'm not convinced this is a religious war. There are too many economic factors involved - Islam is just an ideological form through which economic interests are being expressed. That is often the way, but it is particularly easy to mistake political and religious motivation in Islam since the two things so easily coalesce within it. Islam has always been as much a political system as a religious one. (The same is true of Christianity in many of its forms, of course.) The Taliban recruits are fuelled by religious ideology but someone has to motivate that with a hell of a lot of cash. It takes people with a lot of money to keep a war going, even a guerrilla war like this.

Whatever the case, one person killed in an act of violence is one person too many. One person dead is an event of great sadness. And I cannot even begin to comprehened how the Afghan people have coped with the violence of the last 30 years (or the last 3,000 years). Like Poland, Afghanistan is one of those truly unfortunate regions of the world that every petty conqueror wants to march through sooner or later. This is one reason why I want to go there. It has had one of the most fascinating and varied (not to say, tragic) histories of any country on earth.

But you have to keep the situation in perspective. The level of risk to any one individual, especially a mobile one, is still very low. Not that I am thinking of riding into the middle of this right now - I suspect that the situation will rapidly worsen - but I do try to keep a clear head about it.

I lived in the centre of London in the 1970s right through the IRA bombing campaign. I saw the bomb go up in Picadilly Circus and felt the blast. I was also caught in a couple of emergency evacuations. So I have some small notion what it is to live and go about your daily life in a violent situation. You learn to cope. My parent's generation learned to do that right through the Second World War especially during the party blitz on the city. Security is an illusion for any of us. Anyone who rides a motorcycle or who has had someone close to them die unexpectedly of a horrible disease knows that - or they should do.

OK here's some pics. These first ones are digitally hot - taken this evening and downloaded before going to bed. Meet the club (or a few of them anyway - it's a big club)!

Usually on a Monday night we meet at a local pub. Tonight, instead, we rode down into North London to hang out at the Ace Cafe for a couple of hours. Here's a group photo of some of the gang outside the caff. Tony, the guy in the middle who looks as though he's been sniffing engine oil, is the club charman.



And here's a couple of the Ace Cafe itself (The 'greasy spoon' cafe that became a world biker icon!).

Outside...



(Note the really sexy rear end of a really cool silver SV-1000 to the left of the picture.)

And inside...



The place is pretty quiet tonight. Usually it's heaving.

Here's one of a couple of club romances. The pair on the left are recently married, the pair on the right have just been planning the big day. I don't know about 'newly married' but I can't help thinking that in this photo, Big Dean and his missus (on the left) look as though they've been an item for way too long, already. Dean is also looking unusually solemn. He's just downed two huge plates of chili beef (I stayed to watch), so my guess is it's indigestion. He and his new missus are planning to ride Route 66 next year.

Murray and G. (on the right) will no doubt have their honeymoon in this country. Murray is god's own Englishman. If it is English, it is well OK. If it has some connection with'Horatio Lord Nelson' then so much the better. If it is a bike then it has to be a Triumph. If it is food, then it has to be roast beef and Yorkshire puddn.'



The Ace cafe fronts the North Circular which is part of the inner-London ring road. In the 1950s and early 1960s there were no motorways in Britain, and London was (and still is) a city full of narrow, short, twisting streets. At that time, then, the North Circular was the only road where you could thrash your bike (especially in the early days before speed limits were invented - and for a long time after.) The lads used to race each other along the North Circular from cafe to cafe on their stripped down bikes with ally tanks and 'Ace' bars. Of all the cafes on the North Circular, the Ace was the most important to biker culture and it's really the spiritual home of the cafe racer. It's got a great atmosphere and is still good just to hang around in.

I missed out on most of the biker scene of the sixties in London, but still experienced enough of it to make this evening's ride along the North Circular make me feel like a kid again! Yerrowww! Did that bring back some memories!!!

I think it must have got to the others as well, because on the way home we stopped off at the South Mimms services and sat around for an hour reminiscing about all the crazy things with did as teenagers.

Here's a photo of a more regular club meet. This one was taken in a Bedfordshire pub a couple of weeks ago. The lads are playing 'cheeses,' which is a form of skittles peculiar to Bedfordshire pubs. If you want to know why it's called cheeses, look at the wooden blocks used to down the skittles. Mark is just about to try one of his knockout throws. With the intense levels of competition the game generates, Bedfordshire pub evenings can become nail-bitingly dynamic at times.



And finally, here's a couple of photos I took at the week-end during this year's 'Rhythms of the World' festival which is held in my home town of Hitchin. The festival consists of two days of world music on six stages. It's always a great day out. The venue is the Priory Park on the edge of town. I spent the afternoon chilled out under the trees with some traveller friends I only get to see once in a while, and 'Charlie Bear' one of the cutest, friendliest dogs on the planet.

Thanks for sharing all those pics.

Blast.....

I thought about heading down the the Ace last night too, as the weather was nice. Oh well, that's life I guess.

Did it get very busy? Looks pretty desolate in the photo's.

Those last two photos -- the grass, the trees, the sky, they look like they could be just up the road from me...until I reach the background of the picture, and there sits an undoubtedly ancient, undeniably Old World house. So similar...so different...

Hiya Noodle

noodlenoggin wrote: So similar...so different...

So true! And in many ways, so poignant! It is very easy to over-emphasise differences because they are the things that come at you and so easy to miss the similarities because they sit quietly in the background. I’m learning that all the time – on TMW as much as anywhere else.

Mind you, dwelling on differences is a lot more fun. So to pick up on a conversation we were having last year...

I guess one of the big differences between your side of the pond and ours is that Brits really don’t believe in ‘progress’ the way that Americans seem to. (We used to, but that was a hundred years ago and we have all grown wiser since then – or so we like to believe.) Don’t get me wrong - we are all utterly obsessed with microchips, just like you are; it is just that we don’t expect them to propel us into a Brave New World where all problems will be solved, all diseases conquered and all foes vanquished. We like old stuff because it’s been around a long time and it makes us feel secure.

The upshot of this is that we have a lower (more realistic – in our view) expectation of technology. For instance, we don’t expect things to work – and, as a result, generally they don’t. (Why bother to mend things when you know they will only go wrong again?) Instead, we believe in what used to be called ‘acts of god.’ But if it becomes clear that some bad thing was actually preventable, we can always have a public enquiry and blame it on someone else. That way, we can all carry on as before. (Don’t knock it. It’s a very sustainable ideology.)

And what goes for technology goes for us too. We don’t imagine that we are ever going to become perfect human beings, or live radiantly happy lives. We don’t really believe in personal fulfilment. Above all, we don’t believe in Oprah. The fact is, we just don’t like ourselves the way Oprah tells us we ought to, and that’s OK, because if we liked ourselves that much we’d end up sounding like Americans and that would be just too embarrassing ( ).

Another big, difference is that we don’t believe in the ‘individual’ (a gloriously nutty concept only possible in the land of pastrami on rye.) Over here, we have things called queues. We do things in an orderly and sociable way and have a more collective approach to most matters. You can’t be all out for number one without doing someone else down and that is just not acceptable here in the land of the underdog. It’s much better to be apologetic about success. We are very zen about this. We have ways of boasting and showing off which convince people we are really being very modest. We are a cunning lot.

But there is an even more important difference between our two cultures than any of these things: without exception, over here we believe we are all going to die. That’s an idea which appears, somehow, to be very un-American.

All I can say is: good luck guys! And, for those who believe in the afterlife - we’ll be waiting.

Having said all that, you have to understand that this is a British middle class perspective. You can’t generalise about anything in the UK without taking class into consideration. In British middle class eyes, there is one and only one thing that is more embarrassing than Americans (especially fat Americans in Hawaiian shirts delivering their opinions loudly to all and sundry on Westminister Bridge)... yep, there's only one thing more embarrasing than this to the British middle class, and that is the British working class and their thoroughly outrageous habits... Heh! Heh!

noodlenoggin wrote: ..until I reach the background of the picture, and there sits an undoubtedly ancient, undeniably Old World house.

Ah! an opportunity to be nerdy! As to the house, your instinct is right. It is ancient. We know the exact date it was first built – 1351. Most of what you can see in the photo is not really that old (the facade was remodelled in 1770) but some parts of the visible structure (round to the side) go back to the fourteen hundreds. It was originally constructed as part of a religious community.

"In 1317 the king granted to the Carmelite Friars in frankalmoign a messuage in the parish of Hitchin that they might build a church and house there for their habitation. Other messuages and lands were given to this order by John de Cobham. They built a small convent there which they dedicated to the Blessed Mary…"
From: 'Hitchin: Priory church and charities', A History of the County of Hertford: volume 3 (1912), pp. 12-21.

It is now owned by an insurance company. A sign of the times.

Nibblet99 wrote:Blast.....

I thought about heading down the the Ace last night too, as the weather was nice. Oh well, that's life I guess.

Did it get very busy? Looks pretty desolate in the photo's.

Hi Nibblers

No, there wasn't much going on that night. The club livened it up a bit while they where there (as they have a habit of doing wherever they go) but most of them had already left for South Mimms services by the time I took this pic.

blues2cruise wrote:Thanks for sharing all those pics.

You are very welcome blues. My pleasure.

[edit - Now isn't that a ridicuslously British thing to say?]

blues, you are welcome.