We Do Adventure

Sometimes it's hard to understand something you've never experienced. Up until two weeks ago my only clear recollection of an earthquake was on a simulator in London's Science Museum. That didn't prepare me for what flashes through your mind when your house actually starts shaking, like it did as we were watching Man City dump Man Utd out of the FA Cup. Last night as I lay in bed, trying to drift off to sleep, the house shook again. These quakes, while big enough to show up on the websites that monitor these things, were nothing compared to the quakes we've seen destroy communities around the world in recent months. I know that my little experience cannot really help me understand the tragedy, and terror, of those situations. This morning we woke to a day where around the world people have joined in celebrating one of the best things about the British: their ability to do pageantry. Rowan and I watched the Royal Wedding thanks to the streaming on YouTube, althoug...

I'll confess that at first the thought made me cringe. Google refused to come to my rescue and the growing realisation dawned: I may have invented a myth. That is a rather grand way of saying that the lies I told as a tour guide my brother took as truth and presented to YouTube. Obviously, I didn't intentionally set out to misrepresent my adopted home, or to mislead my brother, or his YouTube audience. I still maintain that my information came from somewhere other than my fertile imagination, but I have yet to find the facts to back this up. Clearly a video about a different kind of tanning booth has great potential on the internet. It was only after seeing it titled and tagged that I began to doubt the description I'd given. Online all I can find is references to 'mills' or 'water mills'. (Now I know which sounds more glamorous; perhaps the local tourist office is missing a trick!) I quickly came clean to my brother about my reservations and he countered...

“Listen, don't mention the war!” Basil Fawlty famously cautioned, “I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.” He was mocking British attitudes to World War II and Germans but it seems Angelina Jolie could learn from his advice. In a week that's seen her permission to film in Bosnia revoked and restored again I found her grabbing headline space in this morning's Observer online: The star's debut as a director has sparked fierce controversy over who has the right to tell the story of Serbian rape camps . Fact and fiction make uncomfortable bedfellows where people still feel the pain of the recent past. Her crime, according to her accusers, is telling other people's war stories through the Hollywood lens. Last week we were told stories of bullets flying through cars carrying humanitarian aid into the then war-torn, barely-born Bosnia and Herzegovina. The information was volunteered and by people who were actually there. It was their story to te...

We had a timely reminder of the complexities of revisiting history the other night. A friend was recounting a version of the events surrounding Srebrenica in 1995 that she had heard from someone, who heard heard it from someone who had said they were there. The story was very different from the one widely reported, the story the has Karadzic currently on trial in the Hague. It'd be too easy to say they were obviously misinformed. So much depends on perspective. I grew up being taught history from an English (or British, if you prefer) perspective; the things that are invariably told as triumphs are also someone else's tragedies. History is so often left in the hands of the victorious. The official version that is. But if the vanquished live to tell the tale they will tell it and the two will not agree. Is true objectivity obtainable? Somehow I doubt it. Should we seek it? Probably. I know I should type an emphatic yes but permit me my pragmatism. Those who do not want to...