Megalomaniac!

Never one for taking one step at a time, Blair - who appears to have failed to create peace in the Middle East, and whose ambitions to become President of Europe look unlikely to be fulfilled, now wants to spend the rest of his life (he's 55, father still alive, potentially long life ahead) 'uniting' the world's religions. For this he's launching a 'faith foundation' in New York on Friday. He wants it to do things like getting the faiths together to provide bed nets for malaria, that sort of thing. It's probably safer than asking them to provide condoms against AIDS.....

Is he looking for a sainthood? If so, who would he expect to provide it - the Pope, Islam, the Jewish community, the Dalai Lama?

That's three major ideas in less than a year. Wonder how long this interest will last...

I should not let him rattle me, should I? But he's a dangerous person to be near power.

Rising food costs

We've all noticed that food costs have increased tremendously recently. It's a catastrophic issue for people who've lived at subsistence level (unless they grow all their own food, and very few people in the world do that nowadays), but even in Europe it is having a major impact on family budgets, as this article and this story confirms.

The second story, a food diary of a single parent from Guildford, reminds me of the time when I was a low-paid single parent from Scotland - quite a long time ago. There was a time when I could feed both of us on 20 quid a week (that's 20 years ago with a boy of roughly the same age as this lady's child; before that we lived on even less). She lists the meals she and her 7-year-old eat in the course of a week. While it says something about the food, it actually says more about family interactions.

I'm not sure if maybe the mum is trying to lose weight - but she hardly ever eats the same foods as her daughter, and misses out breakfast. Even when they both have, it would seem, fresh chicken, mum and daughter eat different things. Think of the work that involves - I wonder if they actually eat together in the evenings at least?

I suspect that the daughter is a bit of a fussy feeder, what with her having pancakes every morning (says she, who's most fussy about her Kellogg's cornflakes every morning - but if I were skint, I'd be very happy indeed to have a bowl of warming porridge). The daughter seems to get two cooked meals a day - eg steak and chips for Sunday lunch, roast chicken for dinner. Is that not a bit excessive? There's also much processed food, like fish fingers, chicken nuggets, chicken burgers...That's despite mum buying a chicken every week, and treating it, it seems, much the same way as I did (roasting it one day, using the next bits of meat for different things - lasting me a couple of days, boiling up the carcase - which makes lovely soup) - but most of it goes into mum's lunches. They seem to have meat twice a day most days. Would not have thought that was necessary.

It would be good if the daughter could be persuaded off her nuggets and fingers, and they could try other food. Many other kinds of meat, eg mince, stews, can be extended with the addition of beans (even porridge oats in the case of mince, though that becomes a bit serious...) - though of course these do not lend themselves to being taken to the office (but maybe the office has a microwave?). It's not necessary to eat meat every day - my son was raised on a vegetarian wholefood diet for 3 years of his early life, and his development did not seem to suffer. She could learn about complementary protein, which vegetarians are familiar with, where grain and peas,beans, or lentils (or milk products) interact to (somehow) create more protein. Unfortunately leguminous foods do have side effects.... I don't know how many years I took cheese sandwiches to work for my lunch (oh god, they were awful - brown bread and a slab of cheese, so dry that they would glue themselves to the roof of the mouth. But needs must!).

It's great that the family has an allotment (at the bottom of their garden - what luxury!). They should be able to grow almost all their vegetables, and freeze them, or bottle them, for the winter. Leeks, and some cabbages, store themselves quite happily in the garden in the winter - as long as you can get them out of the ground!

A first?

Mr Saakashvili says that Mr 'Kaczynski is Georgia's hero' (on account of the latter stating that Georgia is where the borders of the free world are going to be). As reported on Polskie Radio. Will we have a Kaczynski Avenue next, or will it even replace the President George W Bush avenue to Tbilisi airport?

Saakashvili may have been the first to make such a bold statement about the little Polish president. How many Poles would agree?

Lenin only got as far as Lüdenscheid

Lüdenscheid is a dead-, dead-provicincial town in darkest provincial Germany, quite close to where I grew up (in a virtually identical location). When was Lenin in Lüdenscheid?

He was not. It's an autobiographical book by Richard David Precht, a German philosopher journalist type of person, who wrote a book of this title - and it seems a film based on the book will come out on 5 June. But it's archetypally German, full of references to a particular time and place; not sure how marketable it will be outside Germany.

Precht was born in Solingen 9 years and 29 days after me; Solingen is not so far from where I grew up, and if he describes this as 'provincial' he does not know 'really provincial'! His parents were left-leaning, to the degree of communism , which in the 1960s and particularly the 'terrorist' 70s was not necessarily the best move. But since his father worked in private industry, rather than for the state, it was ok.

Given his parents' left-leaning sympathies the family was involved in all sorts of leftish activities, like the 'Naturfreunde' which seems to be a leftish-leaning environmental organisation, various communist outfits, but also with Terre des Hommes, through whom the family was one of the first in Germany to adopt Vietnamese war orphans. The children's reading material was strictly censored (oh God, don't remind me!) though with a slightly different emphasis than my censorship was - though it seems both he and I were not allowed cartoons. The musical tastes tended to be anti-establishment, and when he was allowed to bring an LP to school to listen to during art lessons, it lasted a whole two minutes. The mother toyed with the idea of the 'Summerhill' style of raising her family, but only in as far as 'her nerves could stand it'. Nevertheless, it seems that things like cleaning teeth, clean and unrepaired clothes, and behaving well in school did not have the highest priority in the family; on the contrary, the parents seemed to be quietly pleased when bolshy young Richard stood up to the sometimes very elderly teachers (I should have tried that - I would have been dead!). This made it difficult for the Precht children to fit in with the average Solingen provincial crowd - the mother's way of dressing the children, often in cast-offs regardless of the gender of the previous wearer did not help either (I notice that on the cover photo the about 6-year-old Richard appears to be wearing a girl's vest).

He writes about the confusion caused in his leftist worldview when the Baader-Meinhof group and its associates started murdering people, and when, at the end of the 70s all sorts of people, former commies or otherwise, suddenly moved to the Green end of politics.

I can relate to a lot of the feel of that period, even though by 1975 I was out of Germany. Some of the aspects of the upbringing were similar, like the absence of a TV, the censorship of reading materials and music (though I would not have dared reading or listening to anything that might not have been approved), the move to dull grey houses in the 'burbs, the music lessons (despite appearances to the contrary, his mother was surprisingly bourgeois).

It's quite an interesting book, though I find it a bit hard work trying to understand all the ins and outs of German politics; quite often he goes into the politics to such a degree that I wonder if he is padding things out a little - after all, the book was supposed to be about him. I also wonder how the present-day generation of young Germans will be able to relate to this rather interesting and exciting period he is describing, which is now long-gone. The rot set in with the year after mine at school, when the young ladies all became very conservative.....

Lenin and Lüdenscheid? It seems that Lüdenscheid was the furthest west point reached by 'Young Pioneers' type camps....Never knew it had that in it!

The bubble's bursting?

Headline in today's 'Lietuvos Rytas' newspaper suggests that Lithuanian house prices might fall by as much as 30% - already, it seems, newly built apartments are being sold with a 'discount' of 20%.

That was a problem waiting to happen. Prices had shot up in the last five years to a level which had no relation to people's incomes. Whole new neighbourhoods are mushrooming all over Vilnius - in a country where the population is shrinking. Or perhaps the population of Vilnius is growing?

Maybe now houseprices will connect a bit with reality. Bit of a pain for those of us who have mortgages attached to our homes; let's hope we get through this - eventually things will bottom out.

Suitable books?

A British friend has just been admitted to hospital here in Lithuania - nothing life threatening. Since it's a bowel complaint grapes are probably not suitable prezzies. I looked at my books - she has a different style of reading from me, I suspect - homed in on Donna Leon (of whom a new episode is on German TV tonight!).

'Blood from a stone' and 'Death in a Strange Country' I decided were perhaps not the most suitable titles, under the circumstances.....

-ism in Lithuania (Chapter X of many...)

Today's '-ism is once again 'racism'. Story in today's 'Lietuvos rytas' newspaper about allegedly (I say 'allegedly', they don't) illegally resident Chinese building workers in Lithuania, who appear to have taken over some empty houses in one of the little garden colonies surrounding Vilnius.

The boss of the migration department comments that currently few Chinese building workers are here legally; most of the arrivals are chefs (must go to a Chinese restaurant!). The worst thing is, he says, that several people arrive with one passport. The faces of the people of this nationality are similar ('they all look the same to me, guv') and therefore it's hard for the immigration workers to tell them apart.....

What they do, he says, is that one guy arrives and is here legally, and then sends his passport home. Shortly another person arrives with the same passport.

Forgive me for being a bit puzzled. Surely Chinese people still have their passports stamped into the country and out of the country. So, if a guy sends his passport back, and someone else uses it, does that not mean that it is missing a 'stamp out'? Would that not ring alarm bells?

Apparently migrant workers are becoming a bit of a political story these days. God help them.

My life as an 'Aryan'

I'm not talking about myself.....though 'thanks' to Hitler's efforts to get all Germans to list their ancestors several generations back, in case a Salomon or a Rebekkah popped up, I know I am one (and do I care? No, I do not).

Had an interested chat last night with my devoted reader Anne (you know who you are) about anti-semitism in Lithuania, and other anti-isms brought west by the population of the former 'East'. The levels of awareness of prejudice, even among very educated people, are quite appallingly low.

So it was with a bit of interest that at lunchtime I happened across a TV programme about Jerzy Czarnecki, a Galician Jew who fled Galicia during the war, Poland after the war, and after a long time ended up in Switzerland of which he is now a citizen (and possibly a professor for something). He survived thanks to false papers, and sympathetic Germans and Poles - yes, there are some.

In this programme he travelled back to his home village, Mosty Wielky near Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg and had a lot of conversations with a lot of people, who all appeared to be quite moved by what they talked about (though not half as much as he was). I was a bit astonished when the current owner of his family's former house welcomed him quite so effusively, given that there might have been a danger of him wanting the place back. But perhaps a TV camera helps. Given my experiences, though, of Eastern Europeans (I am sorry to say), I did wonder just how many of his interlocutors were genuinely feeling empathy with his situation, or whether, after he departed, they would say 'Good, there's another Yid gone'? (Freely adapting what protestant colleagues of mine in Scotland would say every time there was a funeral at the catholic church across the road....)

What if he had been black and poor?

Today's headline news in the UK is the story of a young barrister with an income of 500,000 GBP per year, living in Chelsea, who died in a gun siege - not clear whether he shot himself or the police shot him. There's a huge amount of debate about this case.

I wonder if he would have got as many column inches had he been a poor black man in East London?

Russian interest?

For some reason, the title of this blog has attracted a lot of debate from Russia here. I'm not sure why - there seems to be a lot of debate about 'good buy', 'good boy' and 'good bye'.

Ho hum. Guys, it's 'Good Buy, Lenin' because I'm thinking that in Russia these days you can buy anything, oil, fancy cars, houses, justice.....if you have the money, the law belongs to you! And this applies to many other post-Soviet countries.

Does anyone do any work around here?

Came home to Vilnius on Monday. Discovered that Thursday, 1 May, was a public holiday (don't think it has always been that in recent years), which meant that Friday was automatically also a public holiday (people work off this bridging day on a designated Saturday). On Saturday discovered that Monday is a public holiday because Mother's Day, 4 May, fell on a Sunday.

A 5-day weekend! That's really irritating when you come back here to see people, and all you get is holidays (though the person I really needed to see gave up a bit of her Thursday for me, which was nice).

Mr Algirdas Sysas, the chairman of the social affairs committee of the Parliament, and a guy who I respect enormously (what vision!), apparently was not too bothered about this, saying that Lithuanians work almost the longest hours in Europe, so this is ok.

Not sure that everyone works the longest hours in Europe - the military police opposite my flat usually deserts its posts not much after 1pm on a 'working' Saturday.