Imaginary people

I don’t mean the kind that you summon up when a child, although I did write a poem last year about Imaginary Friends, wondering what it would be like if they turned out to be not quite so biddable as such people usually are (I think I did have one, and I think he was called Simon, but this is the kind of occasion when all the fact-checkers are dead). Jackie Kay’s poem ‘Brendon Gallacher’ is good on the subject, and you can hear her read it here.

No, what I’m thinking of is the process which goes through the brain when you’re rooting through obscure offshoots of your family – the Gowlands I mentioned this week. George Hay Gowland and his wife Mary Creasey seem to have had seven children between 1854 and 1864. Since it’s Gowland’s maternal grandfather – a Hay, as in Gowland’s middle name – from whom I’m descended, this really is an exercise in sleuthing-for-the-sake-of-it – although you never know what you will find. A similar exercise with a similarly related family produced a memoir written about my great-great-grandmother’s sister, which gave a very good idea of the life my own great-great-grandmother had lived. More amazingly, the writer was still alive, and over a hundred.

However, working my way forward (that’s what always interests me), here is a family which is marriage-shy. A son and a daughter die in 1879 and 1883 respectively (aged 18 and 24, so not the victims of infant mortality). One of the brothers vanishes from the records (quite hard to do – it will be a transcription error, I would suspect, although he did have an uncle who went to Louisiana via Liverpool and Canada). By the time they are all nearly or more than forty, three of the remaining four have continued to live with their mother, who moves to Harrogate when widowed, and the fourth has married a man twenty years older, with children almost the same age as herself. There is no sign of any of the others marrying later.

So this is a family which has probably erased its traces by now. One wonders what became of their possessions – did they go to the step-children of the married sister (whose husband had a really unusual middle name – he was Charles Berjew Brooke – there are a few Berjew families, but not many)? Or to the children of George Hay Gowland’s sister, Jane Hay Gowland, who moved to Solihull, and whose children did marry? And what became of his clocks and other chattels (Gowland has papers in the British Horological Institute, so he was plainly a force to be reckoned with)? One hopes they didn’t end up dispersed and destroyed, but that seems as likely as anything.

When I’m researching archive material like this, the people assume faces and attitudes to go with their names. They come alive, even though they are essentially collections of letters on a list, pieces in an inadequate jigsaw. In their large house in Sunderland, and later in Harrogate (the favoured escape-route for well-heeled retirees from the North-East, it seems), how did the ageing siblings get on? What different roles did they adopt?

I know all the answers, but that’s because I am fictionalising them as I go. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a photograph. I’ve turned up stranger things in my time.

February

Almost over. I can never make up my mind whether it is nasty, brutish and short, or perfectly formed (it is certainly the month which has the shortest distance between pay-days, so it must be the month with the highest average daily pay, if you’re paid monthly. This overwhelming sense of being extra-flush must be the reason I always wind up having a larger credit bill than usual at the end of it).

Nobody really knows why it’s as short as it is, other than that the Romans started messing about with the calendar about two millennia ago. Or rather, there are very conflicting opinions. It must have been a mess worth sorting out, mind you, since their years were shorter (which makes all this ‘years B.C.’ business a bit hard to reckon) – shorter by about twenty days, so that, every so often, they popped in an extra month to get the seasons straight. It’s a safe bet that they didn’t do big business in calendars and desk diaries.

People are always messing with calendars. The church messed with it to a desperate degree, which is why Easter is all over the shop. The Book of Common Prayer has any number of handy ways of calculating when Easter will fall, including one just called ‘Another Table’, which is filled with infinitesimal figures, and these fabulous instructions:

To make use of the preceding Table, find the Sunday letter for the Year in the Uppermost Line, and the Golden Number, or Prime, in the Column of Golden Numbers, and against the Prime, in the same Line under the Sunday Letter, you have the Day of the Month on which Easter falleth that Year. But Note, that the Name of the Month is set on the Left Hand, or just within the Figure, and followeth not, as in other Tables, by Descent, but Collateral.

Suddenly, reading this, I realise that the supposedly modern curse of instruction manuals (e.g. on how to programme your video or DVD recorder) is not modern at all. Perhaps this is why the tower in Pisa leans, and the spire in Chesterfield is crooked (‘No, no, no – in the instructions, it says to put stone A234 in after stone D529′).

Easter is the curse of schools, which never have equal terms. But then education boffins from time immemorial, or at least since I started teaching (same thing) have been messing about with school calendars. Two terms, three terms, four terms, five terms, six terms – I’ve seen proposals for them all. The same with start and finish times. The same programme I mentioned about body-clocks had a very earnest head-teacher, who, having discovered that teenagers are at their most alert in the middle of the day, was readying himself to block the major lessons between 11 and 3. He had that gleam in his eye which I imagine must have infested the clerks who constructed the tables in the prayer-books.

Not to mention the tables of kindred and affinity, in which the forbidden relationships are set out so painstakingly, i.e. a woman may not marry her daughter’s daughter’s husband, or a man marry his wife’s father’s mother. (People often assume that cousins are off limits, but I’ve met plenty of people who married their cousins, and family history statistics suggest that many more of you are married to your cousins than you might expect.)

All the same, I know what would have happened if I’d been involved in the compilation of the Book of Common Prayer. I’d have been given the job of coming up with a ready reckoner for moveable feasts, and I’d probably have bodged it up just as badly. Something odd happened in 1973 and 1992, by the look of it, in the Moveable Feasts department. The chart is headed Year, Golden Number, Epact (sic), Sunday Letter, and then by a series of specific Sundays. There is an urgent asterisk next to the number 25 in the Epact column (no, really, no idea) for the two years in question, one which leads to a footnote: ‘But for all calculations 26 should be used.’

I am glad I elected not to be a church mathematician.

Clocks

There was a thing on about body chronology (you are more liable to have a heart attack in the morning, so take it easy) which mentioned in passing that there are satellites which ensure that clocks on Earth are accurate to within a trillionth of a nano-second (I might be exaggerating, but not by much, as you can w0rk out without a calculator). Why? What a waste – pun intended – of time. Even a chromic on-timer like me is happy to leave a few seconds to spare. There are several clocks in this house, and they don’t all tell the same story.

My mother’s father was a clock fanatic. He was known as ‘Grandpa Cuckoo-clock’, essentially to distinguish him from the other Grandpa, but also because he had a cuckoo-clock set, like everything else in his house, to the second. Twelve noon was an exciting place to be in his house. The whole place went off. There was a sound bonanza, a festival of chimes. I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs in wonder, by the grandfather clock (you can imagine why I thought it was called that). Bong. Pish. Tush. Tish. For my fifth birthday, conscious of his moniker and my encouraging interest in his horological house, he gave me a cuckoo-clock, which survived longer than anything else I was ever given, largely because it was annexed by my parents and given pride of place. It lost its ‘oo’ late in its run: just a quick ‘cuck’, and it was done. And the bird came out at five to the hour – but this was twenty or thirty years after the original gift.

Perhaps that it is why I like clocks. Stopped clocks, according to the superstitious, are supposed to be unlucky. In which case, avoid my house like the plague. Everywhere you look, there are stopped clocks. Some of them could be wound up regularly, but some are simply objects of desire, but without a tick.

One of my last (who am I kidding) forays into family trees started this evening, and I’ve discovered that one of my great-great-grandmothers had a cousin who was a clock-maker. His name was George Hay Gowland, and he was well in enough with my great-great-great-grandfather, William Herring, to be the main executor of his will. He seems to have come from a line of watchmaker-jewellers in Sunderland, although sorting his family out is an enjoyable trial (it is through his wife’s sister Jane Hay, and therefore his in-laws, that I am related). Gowland’s children and nieces and nephews seem to have avoided marriage until late in life, and to have made a mint (one of them married a man who is described as a ‘retired farmer’ – at the age of 51).

That was my first forage this year. It keeps the brain ticking. The body chronometrists would be happy that I did it when I did, too. I like to lay off the family history now and then, in case I run out of it. This lot is keeping me happy by spreading across to New Orleans. What’s the use of an easy puzzle?

Off-kilter voices

I’m not a good singer, but I do hit the note every so often. Else why would they have given me the second solo in ‘Once In Royal David’s City’ (the second verse, and I’ve forgotten it, too), in the carol service when I was ten? Not the first solo, notice.

This isn’t the memory which first sprang to mind when I started writing (I don’t plan what I’m going to write: fatal: you may have noticed), so I will digress immediately. I had forgotten that one minute of fame. It was an unspoken rule of boarding schools that, if the child, expelled as he or she had been from the family home in the hope of acquiring manners and a straight path to the City or Army, was chosen to do something special, a parent had to attend. At ten I had only been despatched about sixty miles, into the Deep South of Yorkshire, so my father (selected on this occasion) hadn’t far to drive. But then my father, who worshipped the sensation of speed, and had one of the first E-Types, never had very far to drive, in terms of time. So his calculation of how long it would take was different from that of a normal mortal.

It was very, very foggy that night, and I knew he would be putting his foot down. Like all the other well-scrubbed children incarcerated in this particular not-very-home-from-home, I was looking out for him in the audience (i.e. congregation). But there was no sign of him from where I was looking – I would have been in the choir stalls, and have had an elevated view. So I decided that, since there was fog, and he was speeding, that he was dead. And that was why I sang the solo with tears pouring down my cheeks. I expect the listeners were moved my by devotion to the Christian cause, and put some extra silver in the box passed round. It was an emotional and rather wobbly rendition. After my stint, I retired to the stalls again, and persisted with my sobs.

Actually, he was there, but too late to nab a pew, and listening loyally from the ante-chapel, out of sight, and probably wondering what he had done to be sent down the A1 for such a trifle. But that was me, and still is: fear the worst. I just don’t burst into tears so easily any more.

What I intended to write about was triggered by listening to Davy Graham (‘Folk, Blues, And Beyond’), the brilliant folk-jazz-fusion guitarist, who died last year, and who is rightly thought to have influenced everyone by changing the tuning of his guitar, and experimenting with eastern influences. He never made it very big, but having a smack habit didn’t help. I love his guitar.

But I am not keen on his voice. Why is that so many folk singers (male, I can’t think of a female equivalent) sing so oddly, and off the note (Bert Jansch is another culprit)? I’m not addicted to melody, but I always wish they’d recorded the guitar into one channel, and the voice into another. And yet the moment I’d thought of how odd Davy Graham sounds (to folk purists, I expect this is heresy), it occurred to me that there are plenty of flat singers who don’t cause me anything like the same problem. Astrud Gilberto always sings off the note (desafinado is the technical term, I think), and I’m quite keen on her. Liam Gallagher of Oasis sings off the note, too, but he is objectionable for other reasons, and anyway, vocal sneering was in style in the 1990s. And Bob Dylan’s voice encouraged a host of imitators to think anyone could sing (big mistake).

In fact, what attracted me to Dylan was his voice, not least because I was too young really to understand the words when I first encountered him. Even now, although his voice is wrecked beyond recognition, I quite enjoy it. But that may be blind loyalty.

So, no answers to the conundrum. I will just have to live with the voice for the sake of the guitar.

Pensioner inflation

The Tories, according to an online headline, have attacked pensioner inflation. It is true that, with 8.5 years to go until I can join the queue at the post office (or whatever means is by then available, for it may be that post offices will by then have been re-named ‘centres of community excellence’ or ‘outreach communication and retail network facilities’), I have noticed that pensioners have indeed begun to inflate, as have I, and that the simple business of getting in and out of the post office is getting more and more difficult.

I have tried to kid myself that my personal inflation index is genetic, since my father also expanded his girth at the same age, and had to keep adding notches to his belt. But then he, like me, was careless about eating and drinking, or rather, cared about eating and drinking. His own excuse was that he had been very fit in his twenties (this is true: he was a county rugby player on a couple of occasions), and that he was paying for this by going, ever so slightly, to pot, as in belly.

I have also tried the Jim Fixx defence (no relation to ‘Jim’ll Fix It’) on myself, and I quite like it. Fixx was the man who popularised jogging, made lots of money from a best-selling book on the subject, and dropped stone dead in 1984, at the age of 52, while jogging. But I know in my fatty heart that I am kidding myself (Fixx’s family had a habit of leaving the world early) and that I am not so much drop-dead gorgeous as one of the drop-dead gorgers. This is so unfair to myself, by the way, that I feel better just writing it. For this is another defence, the Say It Loud, I’m Stout And I’m Proud gambit.

All my weight goes to my stomach. This is of course another pre-pensioner self-con. Where else was I hoping it would go? Was I hoping it would distribute itself evenly across my body, that some would slip casually, like the soil they dug up in The Great Escape, down my legs? That my shoulders would shoulder some of the extra pounds and ounces? I even have a further delusionary argument up my (thinnish) sleeve, which is that I have a naturally concave back, which exaggerates the convex nature of my gut (it’s sort of true. My daughter has inherited it, although she is naturally slim, as I was once, and said to me ‘SO THAT’S WHERE I GOT IT FROM,’ in what I would regard as a frankly rather unforgiving way. There is no need for teenagers to talk in capitals).

Plotting the curve (as it were) of the overweight, I suspect that life expectancy in the west will fall quite soon. They have already – this is grim but also true – had to instal larger furnaces in crematoria to deal with the dead weight of the dearly but calorifically abundant departed.

Ah well. I know what I have to do, and I doubt I’ll do it. Gymnasia phase me. Rambling scrambles my mind. There was a song (by Jethro Tull, the big name of 1970-71, and still going) in my teens, which had a line ‘Don’t want to be a fat man: people would say I was just good fun.’  I can live with being just good fun.

Incidentally, as Molesworth would have said, if the phrase ‘pensioner inflation’ referred to the effect of the recession on the wallets of the elderly, I neither kno nor care.

Buying a car

I think I’ve got through seven cars in 35 years, but that includes one which lasted a year, one which lasted nine months, and one which I have just bought. I am a creature of habit as well as the night, so I went back to exactly the same second-hand dealer as last time, even though it was 100 miles away. My argument is that you should stick with what you know, but I know it’s really being terrified witless of what you don’t know which drove me, in any sense, to do this.

A car is a modified tin can. I don’t have any other understanding of it. I don’t know what is going on under the bonnet (assuming, which is not always the case, that I can remember how to look under the bonnet). I don’t get sentimental over cars (or excited by them, as my father was. He was a happy man with an internal combustion engine). Some modifications to the tin can may be more desirable than others, but I tend to think about simplistic things. The one I part-exchanged had a sun-roof and central locking (neither much use to me). This one has a weird thing called a Parrot which amplifies incoming mobile phone calls, while you drive along (which, hands-free though it is, is probably dangerous). It also has a knob for towing a caravan (I don’t think so). But it is also higher up, the seats are comfier, there is no blind spot which prevents me from telling whether the headlights are dipped or not, and it accelerates a bit more swiftly.

Like all cars this side of the millennium, and many before it, it has electric windows. I am very suspicious of electric windows. They seem to have a fatal flaw, which is this: if they go wrong, you can’t wind your window down. Indeed, were I so stupid as to drive off a bridge, into a river, say, I wouldn’t be able to wind the window down. That might mean I would die, and I am sure that might not suit the insurance company (thinking about that, it would probably suit them very well).

The first time I moved out to the country, the car’s insurance company sent me a cheque for eleven quid. Apparently I had moved into an area of such peace and tranquility (“the same as the Isle of Wight,” they said – truly, they did – a claim I am unable to substantiate, since the last time I went there, Jim Hendrix was still (just) alive, and in control of his guitar) that I was due a reward. Those days have gone. When I declared my new car this time, they stung me for £28 for the remaining six months or so. Why? I asked. “It’s a newer car,” they said. Oh.

One weird thing this car has is a cassette player as well as a “six-CD-shuttle”. I thought all my poor cassettes were doomed to a long and pointless shelf life, but, no, those thin ribbons of tape have a new capstan to wrap themselves around. As for this shuttle thing, what’s that about, other than laziness. You apparently load in six CDs, and that’s the journey sorted (if it is seven hours long). I am afraid this won’t suit me. I approach the prospect of a long drive like an experimental disc jockey. But there, I’ve been and bought it, and who am I to complain? The main thing is that it has 55,000 miles fewer on the clock.

Still, it is an emotional business, buying a car. It’s draining. Writing that kind of cheque is about as distressing as it gets.

Facebook, dementia, cancer…

Reluctant as I am to use the Daily Mail as my source, the article here suggests a little gleefully that Facebook can cause cancer, strokes, heart disease, dementia. It cites the research of a Dr. Aric Sigman, who says that people speak to each other face to face less frequently, and that the rot set in as long ago as 1987. Quite how Dr. Sigman has collected his data is not explained, and I’m not a subscriber to Biologist, the Institute of Biology’s journal, and am not likely to become one. Presumably he must have increased the face-to-face contact by conducting his survey (or did he worsen the problem by conducting it over the phone, or even on Facebook? Perish the thought).

The worm in the bud – or perhaps the bud’s absent butterfly – is a hormonal chemical called oxytocin, which apparently helps us to bond together. Facebook, says Dr. Sigman, has sapped us of oxytocin (I have to say I think the biologists could have come up with a cuddlier moniker for a substance that brings us into such proximity and thereby promotes such well-being: oxytocin sounds like something you might spray on greenfly, or worse). And without it, we are DOOMED. However, there are now so many things allegedly racing to wipe me from the face of the earth that I have become a lot more cynical. Surely there is a happy hormone which is saving me from extinction just by forcing me, yes, forcing me to play online chess, online scrabble, and online Lexulous (used to be Scrabulous till the court case, and now comes with a rack of eight letters)?

I admit that Facebook has put me in touch with a whole host of people about whom I know nothing whatever; but it has also put me back in touch with people I thought I’d never see again, including my children, as well as introducing me to a range of interesting and communally-minded writers and artists. I can even see what they look like (and, in the case of my children, at least some of what they have been doing). It is not clear to me how this is going to lead me to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or make me keel over when I least expect it (my preferred method of exit).

Still, I defer to Dr. Sigman (does he smoke, by the way? Sounds like it). He probably has a new survey up his sleeve which shows how blogging can cause palpitations, scurvy, murrain and scarlet fever; how online teaching can make you blind and deaf; how Bebo brings on a bubo; and how watching YouTube can make you combust, spontaneously or otherwise.

It all made me think of the great scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, in which, after waking from 200 hundred years of sleep, the Allen character discovers that smoking and ice cream and fatty food have been found to be good for you. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I couldn’t find the clip I wanted – not quite everything is online – shocking – but I did find this one, in which Allen tries to solve some of the mysteries which have been bugging the historians of the future:

I had better log off before I am found to be doolally.

Magaholic

There is no getting away from it: I am addicted to magazines. Political magazines, music magazines, poetry magazines, and any magazine that is not unworthy of its own weight in adverts (which I suppose cuts out almost all glossy ‘women’s’ magazines, whose adverts support an amazing number of models and photographers). If ever I am called upon to make a train journey (which still seems an improbable luxury, like having a chauffeur), I am in danger of emptying my wallet on the station before I struggle to the barrier, possibly past it, and on to the platform.

I put this down, just a bit, to the fact that my school used to take Life, the National Geographic, and possibly (am I imagining this? Had it not gone out of circulation by then?) Picture Post. And The Illustrated London News. (The latter expired only about four years ago, by which time it had long been a quarterly. Its first edition – no, I did not read it – was in 1842. It contained an article on the war in Afghanistan. Ring any bells?) So much work used to go into making Life good to look at (as against its sober-suited sibling, Time), and there are stories that I can still remember from its pages. One of them – I am guessing this was about 1965 – concerned a man who could look into the lens of a camera, tell you what he was thinking, and produce an image on the film of his thought. I often wonder what became of this man: whether he was exposed as a charlatan, or toured the Earth, or carried on snapping his thoughts in a cruel and forgetful world.

One inevitable consequence of buying magazines is that you are regularly tempted to crank up your habit, since any given magazine is likelier than not to belong to a ’stable’ of such magazines, and to arrive stuffed with adverts and offers for its mates, usually lock-in direct debits for five-year commitments. To get to your magazine of choice, you have to fight through plastic, and fend off a fan of inserts. After a particularly large delivery, I can usually fill the bin.

The downside of magaholia is that you have no time to eat, drink, or talk to anyone. To get the material read, you have to go to bed three hours early, and start in on the articles (especially if you’re in receipt of the New Yorker, most of the articles in which could easily be published as a moderately heavy paperback). You walk around refreshed and informed, and in possession of a very large number of free CDs or DVDs. You also have no friends to speak of, or to, about the many insights of which you are in possession.

Yes, it’s an anti-social disease. And if you have a disease, what do you do? That’s right: you go to the doctor’s to see if he or she can sort it all out, and send you home with a bag of prescription drugs, something to make you cancel your subs without side-effects. It is always best to arrive early for the doctor, for who knows, he or she might not be running late. And if you have to wait a bit, well, there’s always that stash of magazines in the ante-room…

Screen watching

The problem with computer screens is that they are seductive. They provide the user with the illusion of being able to glimpse the world as if through a window, and they glue the eyeballs to them. Whoever coined the term ‘information highway’ (sometimes ’super-highway’) was on to something; the illusion is of going on a journey without ever leaving one’s seat. They are addictive.

Of course, the word ‘computer’ itself is a bit of a nonsense, since the one thing I don’t do with my computer is compute. I can still do mental arithmetic, and I am probably quicker doing sums in my head than on a calculator (and about as inaccurate on both – yes, it is possible to use a calculator inexpertly). And now of course, the computer is a play-station, an encyclopedia, a television, a radio, a music system and a postal service all wrapped into one – and also, in my case, a place of work.

Still, my current screen is a little small. It isn’t rectangular, which it needs to be, just as old TVs are no good any more unless they are rectangular. I went to see a friend last week who has a colossal screen in front of his computer, and I thought, simultaneously, ‘That looks rather big’ and ‘I wish I had one of those’. I would like to be in on conversations at the development sessions they have in the marketing departments of computers (and mobile phones). I think I originally thought my Amstrad PCW9512 would last forever, and that green screens would be what I was glued to for eternity. But I didn’t reckon on progress, and I didn’t reckon on the cunning of the sales brigades. (‘Why not make the computer double as a gas oven?’ ‘Great – with an electric hob?’ ‘Yes, and a micro-wave.’ ) In a few years time, you will presumably be able to drive a Blackberry, and I am not 100% sure whether this means they will have made the Blackberry bigger, or whether they will have found an electronic means of shrinking any individual for a knockdown price.

I know, too, that computer screens mean I am almost certainly living in a John Wyndham novel, and that one day I will wake up blind, and at the mercy of all those who solemnly stuck with their fountain pens and their Olivettis, as well as triffids, and that I will be nibbed or typed or leaf-lashed to doom. But it is too late for me. That pale cream screen, seducing my eyes and my fingers, has already worked its evil magic on me.

In Catholic cemeteries, especially in France, the dead are commemorated not only by stone, but also, very frequently, by photographic images. Can it be very long before they are commemorated, visitor-centre style, by moving images of the dead (sound optional), waving gaily to you? Or before the graves come with computer screens which enable you to surf through the lives of the departed, or – who knows? – email them in whichever eternity they have elected to serve their afterlife?

Just thinking ahead.

The Khmers and Cambodia

Ten years ago, filled with the zealous vim of second-hand knowledge, I used to insist to every student whose path was unlucky enough to cross mine that they needed to know about Cambodia. Understand Cambodia, I said, and you’ll understand how mad the world is, and therefore how international ‘diplomacy’ operates. All over Devon, and of course, across the country, there are people in their late twenties and a little older whose light bulbs may have gone on this week (if they read the papers). Thirty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge’s control of Cambodia, a motley crew of survivors is finally to be tried, including Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, the three major figures from Pol Pot’s inner circle still in this world.

The Americans were fond, in the 1960s and 1970s, of referring to the former French colonies known as ‘Indo-China’ as ‘South-East Asia’. Like the French, they lumped together Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia in a casual way, ignoring hundreds of years of history. What they ignored, and what many still don’t realise, is that the Khmers – the ethnic group in Cambodia – ruled a huge empire in the thirteenth century, an empire which grew and shrank and vanished, to the extent that even many Cambodians actually assumed that Angkor Wat (the ruined temple city) was a myth. And what was also ignored was that the Khmers and the Vietnamese are long-standing historical enemies, and have different cultural and ethnic identies. (James Fenton describes this eloquently in All The Wrong Places, by describing the completely different reactions a simple joke would elicit in each country. He also writes brilliantly about the Khmer Krom, ethnic Khmers who lived in Vietnam in territory long since seized, whose nationalist tendency was pronounced, but who were mistrusted by the Cambodian army for which they signed up, and were put in the first front line going. This is a very typical Cambodian paradox.)

International logic at its most cruel can be seen in the way the Cambodian wars were perpetuated. The Russians funded the North Vietnamese (not the Chinese, who have their own ethnic tensions with Vietnam). The Americans and the British mistrusted the Russians. So when the (by then reunited) Vietnamese rescued the Cambodians in 1979, and drove out the Khmer Rouge, the Americans and British supplied arms and support to any force opposing the Vietnamese. This consisted of a small force led by Son Sann, one of the republicans overthrown by Pol Pot; a force loyal to the monarchy of Sihanouk overthrown by the republicans; and the forces of the Khmer Rouge themselves. So cold war tension meant that three separate Khmer groups, who had successively fought each other, wound up being supported by the West. And Pol Pot was therefore bankrolled by the West.

Just to compound the complications, consider these:

1. Sihanouk, who was installed by the French in 1941, the French meddling in the royal succession, was overthrown by an American-backed coup. He subsequently associated himself with the Khmer Rouge (funded by China, because they didn’t like the Russians), before shifting his position when it became undesirable.

2. Heng Samrin, the first Khmer leader installed by the Vietnamese in 1979, had been a member of the Khmer Rouge. So too was his successor, Hun Sen (still in office as Prime Minister). To be fair, they got out when, as with all Khmer Rouge commissars, they were under threat (Pol Pot had his own deputy, Son Sen, during an in-house spat in 1997, run over by lorries, together with many of Son Sen’s family). To be unfair, they got out when the going was good. It is no surprise that the trials for genocide have taken so long to set up.

3. Although Sihanouk technically abdicated as King in 2004, he still holds the honorific title ‘King Father’, and possesses some constitutional power. Since 1941 (when he was 19), he has been either Prince, King, President or leader-in-exile of Cambodia – in some sort of power for 68 years. No-one else in modern history (in history?) comes close. His cleverest wheeze occurred when the West, trying to tidy up the ‘Indo-Chinese’ mess in the 1950s, banned monarchs from standing in elections. He abdicated, set up his own party, and won by a landslide.

Ieng Sary, Pol Pot, Son Sen

I’ve tried very hard to simplify the complex pattern of factions (and it is much more complex than this) – but my point is that Cambodian political history is as complex as that of the world. It is a tragic object lesson in twisted logic, for which two million and more paid with their lives. The trials for genocide will be show trials. They will provide no answers. Only more clues.