Belfast

Belfast, Northern Ireland, is not the most glamorous place. Conflict between Catholics and Protestants, between Loyalists and Republicans, between Ulster and Ireland has been simmering for decades, occasionally burning at the surface in hot flames. In the 80s, there weren't many days without bombings, demonstrations, paramilitary strikes and police action, or at least red-headed shoutings – spittle flying, veins bulging and all – across the walls separating hostile neighborhoods.

Belfast is more, if you dig deeper, though the associations are not necessarily much better. In the early 1900s, some of the world's largest shipyards operated on the edge of town, at the mouth of the River Lagan. It was here, at Harland and Wolff, that the RMS Titanic was launched in 1912, to eventually catastrophic consequences despite futuristically advanced technologies in the boat. Engineering glory was again pursued in the 80s, in a factory outside Belfast that rose from fields and pastures thanks to generous business development incentives. John DeLorean dreamed of building his own cars after leaving General Motors, and took the bait. Despite much enthusiasm, the De Lorean DMC-12 was the only vehicle ever to roll from the assembly line in Dunmurry. By the time the car starred in Back to the Future, its production had long ended. The manufacturer was bust and the factory had been shut down.

This was the past. Now, industrial production has nearly vanished from Northern Ireland. People work in services or government jobs, or they draw benefits. It's not a particularly wealthy part of the UK, but at least it has calmed down politically. Most mainstream parties have forsworn violence and work hard to bring communities together, deep chasms of distrust notwithstanding. Attacks and politically motivated murders still happen, but most violence is casual these days, as when youths torch cars and taunt the police because it beats yet another night in front of the telly.

The nights were quiet when I was in Belfast last weekend. A friend of mine was getting married, across cultures and across religions. He had washed ashore three years earlier, broken dreams and disappointed hopes his only baggage. Now he is the happy member of a large and very jovial Irish family and realizes that what he had considered broken dreams were in fact nothing more than the tribulations that characterize life.

The wedding took place in a Catholic church and had all the garnish of a Catholic wedding, with lots of praying and praising of the Lord. It was also a very solemn, almost regal, ceremony whose dignity was only briefly challenged when I was called to deliver a prayer for the newly-weds' happy future in front of the assembled friends and family. Chosen by the groom as one of five to speak, I felt tremendously honored but also slightly bemused. I agreed with the words I was asked to say, but it wasn't clear to me why I shouldn't say them straight into the couple's faces but use an imaginary third party as an intermediary instead.

Anyway, if I felt slightly out-of-place, the groom's mother must have truly experienced a journey to mars and back. It was the first time that she had been to Europe and her first time in a Christian church of any sort. With her traditional dark robe and beige headscarf, she wasn't someone habitually seen in this house of worship. But if there's a God, there's only one, and how you pray to it doesn't matter. So maybe she was fine, despite the visual incongruity. After all, her eldest son was getting married.

The day after the celebration, I was treated to some of the background behind the drab facade of dirty brickwork, fading paint and littered strip mall parking lots that characterize some of the outskirts of Belfast. My friend drove me through the western fringes of town. In some of the more deprived areas, feelings of belonging and betrayal still run strong, and history is a continuous guide. The past must never been forgotten. Community and enemy are very clearly defined, and blaringly displayed on murals and with flags. Much remains of the wall that separates the Republican Falls Road from the Unionist Shankhill, and barbed wire tops many a fence. The heavy steel gates are still there, though they're open now, and in places the barrier almost looks like the Berlin Wall's little sister. Hard to imagine that people in the developed world still get worked up, to the point of hate and violence, about questions of nationality, religion and inequities of the past.

morning news

On Sundays, I sometimes leave my house before anything has happened. The scrap-furniture recycling places across the street that, despite the bold sign over the door promising Antiques, offer trash unfit to be touched with an unprotected hand but oddly fitting for the neighborhood are still closed when I make my way to the Co-op store just down the road. Even the Arabic grocers haven't put their disturbing displays of wooden yams, warty cucumbers and mushy tomatoes before the eyes of their peculiarly discriminating clientele. The street is as quiet as this busy street can be, and the sidewalks are deserted.

The Co-op store is open, I nip in and quickly load up on yogurt, milk, butter and Apple juice from Kent, the usual things to enrich a breakfast of strong coffee and home-baked bread slightly stale after a few days on the shelf. Before I pay, I pass the enormous rack from which the Sunday papers, the true religion of this free-thinking country, gush. No weekend would be complete without them, read leisurely and over the course of the day in a pub, over a pint and a roast, and with friends. Heavier in weight than in price by three pounds to two, they are the mandatory accompaniment of every shopper leaving the store early in the morning.

I scan the front pages, surveying the goodies designed to attract custom. There are two-for-one coupons, student recipe books (It's back-to-school, apparently.), a compilation of brightly colored autumn leaves of the English countryside and a box of free chocolate at Sainsburys, but there isn't what I'm always looking for, a DVD. I scored Sleepy Hollow earlier this year and, in a particularly lucid moment, The Graduate. If you haven't seen this movie on a ten-foot screen with the glorious light of the sixties flooding your room, you haven't really seen it. This morning, there is nothing comparable.

In fact, the newspapers' marketing folk seem to think people will grab their rags just for the content. The headlines are double-bold, and countless pieces of analysis, opinion and dissent are advertised just below. The focus of all verbal efforts is inevitably the same. There is only one topic this morning, and it's the reason I am curiously unresponsive to the temptation of newsprint. The Pope is in town.

I don't care much about the Pope; he has no bearing on my life. I deny the claim, made by some historians with a skewed vision, that the previous one had great influence on the coming down of the Berlin Wall. (As little as Reagan is closer to the truth, if you ask me, but do you?) When the current Pope was elected, the largest and most obnoxious German broadsheet ran the unforgettable We are Pope! line on the front page the next morning, celebrating the austere bishop's penultimate promotion with the same childlike enthusiasm with which they'd have celebrated a World Cup win. The country duly felt elated, but the exuberance subsided a few hours later when the brain kicked back in. It didn't matter.

And it still doesn't, except the guy is impossible to avoid. On Thursday, he came to Edinburgh to have tea with the Queen. Next he got sucked into London where he choked traffic with two processions that attracted worshipers and protesters who ululated with equal fervor. Today he's reading mass in Birmingham, and the papers are analyzing his every word and step.

There are devout Catholics that praise the old man for visionary leadership and spiritual guidance. There are humanists grudgingly acknowledging the Catholic Church's tireless charity work. Affirming atheists denounce the waste of tax-payers' money on a religious figure's proselytizing trip, and victim support groups and lawyers demand accountability and punishment for the sexual abuse of children that has been condoned by the Church hierarchy for decades. Thrown in for good measure are the comedians that try their luck at blasphemy but fail. The concept just doesn't exist here.

None of this is new, and none deserves special attention right now. Just because the Pope goes traveling doesn't turn any of these topics into news. I don't want to read about this, and neither do you, presumably. Sorry!

meanings

By a curious coincidence, last night marked not only the beginning of Rosh Hashanah but also the end of Ramadan. The Jewish New Year and the Muslim Breaking of the Fast don't normally fall on the same day; they have no reason to do so. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar. Its events advance, with respect to the solar calendar used in the West, by twelve days a year. The Jewish calendar is more complicated, a funky mix of solar and lunar elements, with an entire leap month thrown in every once in a while to keep the high holidays in their seasons. Ramadan travels through the Gregorian calendar in a journey that takes 33 years, but Rosh Hashanah is always in early fall.

By an even curiouser coincidence and for no other reason than the inexorable passing of time, both holy days fall neatly beside the ninth anniversary of the airborne terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Killing nearly 3000, these attacks were perpetrated by a gang of mentally deranged Arabs wielding box cutters (literally – to commandeer the planes) and copies of the Koran (figuratively – to justify their actions). The connection was made by the terrorists, but the link is tenuous: Most people agree that the Koran cannot be used as a manual for mass murder unless you start reading with a pathologically warped mind. But some don't.

In Florida, a nominally Christian pastor is organizing a Koran burning to commemorate September 11, 2001. Of Eid al-Fitr he, in all likelihood, knows nothing, but he can't be ignorant of the reactions his bonfire will cause. A set of cartoons lampooning the Islamic prophet Mohamed that were published in an obscure Danish newspaper five years ago drove (a small but savage minority of) Muslims worldwide to violence – after the existence of the cartoons was publicized by hate-mongering populists months later. Some Muslims do quite obviously enjoy taking offense and showing it.

The Floridian pastor has taken that into account. He probably has a rational justification for his planned action should anyone ask, but what he really intends, deep inside, is to show the irrationality of the Muslim community. His one little fire will be amplified into thousands of rabid protestations, burnings of flags, calls for boycott and torchings of embassies. And the world looks on and sees, and the press reports that it is clear: Muslims cannot be trusted.

He plays an easy game. Whenever Islam is questioned or its symbols ridiculed, enough monkeys climb down from their trees and pick up sticks, stones and flints to wreak havoc in their habitats and impart fear in observers half a world away – the reaction as much in the name of religion as the initial provocation was, and as little in spirit. The essence of religion – as I dimly remember from my upbringing – lies in compassion and brotherly love, not in fires and violence. It would seem to me that Eid al-Fit, Rosh Hashanah and 9/11 provide a fine excuse to think about that.

driving the world

For a short time in life, just about three years if I remember correctly, I was the proud owner of a car. It was a dull grey Passat wagon that moved at the speed of a badly worn three-seater sofa, sold to me by a hick up Emigration Canyon who was strangely fascinated with "this little car". It was spacious enough for my needs, holding me, my bike, a large blue cooler and a 12-CD changer in comfortable harmony wherever I went in my exploring the West. The comfort was only broken once – when I parked the car in the woods to sleep in it before the race at Brian Head. The rear seats folded flat to create a bed just long enough for me to stretch out diagonally, but the windows didn't keep the cold out. I nearly froze to death on the Fourth of July.

I liked the car but never loved it. In quiet Sugarhouse, it was always parked with its doors unlocked and windows rolled down. When the fall winds stripped the big maple tree in front of our house naked, the rejected leaves found a new home in my car. I didn't mind their presence; the car was not a showpiece. So little, in fact, that I never washed it and only ever cleaned it out when the layer of dust and dried mud was too deep to operate the pedals.

I didn't love the car and didn't treat it like a treasure. I hated maintenance and deplored every dollar I had to put into it (and there were many). Maybe that's why it went belly up on me, the blown head gaskets finally too leaky for any sort of power to be generated. It took me home from southern Utah before it succumbed to lethal injuries, so I can't deny its loyalty, but with this car died the concept of car ownership in me.

I survived the last year in Utah by strategically moving into a pad right next to the grocery store, riding my bike to work, and getting friends give me rides from the coffee shop home. In Grenoble, I rode my bike everywhere, and when I had suffered up all the passes and bombed down all the descents, I joined a car club that helped me extend my range. L'Alpe d'Huez was suddenly doable in a few hours only. I got the pleasure of driving and the flexibility of a car without any of the hassle and little of the cost. No taxes, no inspections, no repairs, no oil change, no insurance. Just a brand new car whenever I need one.

In London, I've rejoined a car club but wouldn't miss it if I didn't have it. The tube and buses get me anywhere more quickly. But I travel more than in Grenoble and rent cars more than ever before. If you've been wondering where this story is headed, here it is: It so happened that I needed a vehicle to go to the car race I wrote about earlier.

On Saturday morning, before leaving for the airport, I booked an economy car through Expedia. The deal was good, even though there wasn't much scrounging for the best bargain involved. I picked the car up a few hours later and returned it the next day just outside the thirty-minute grace period, after having spent a good hour trying to find a gas station near the impenetrable maze that's Heathrow Airport. On the receipt, I saw that I was charged an extra day.

I had rented with Hertz, a company that I always associated with the top end of the market. In the US, Hertz was better than Budget, Avis, Thrifty or Enterprise, and more expensive. In Europe, the situation might be a bit different. Over the last four months I've rented with Hertz four times, and never through their web site directly. It was always a price comparison service that sent me there. And while the rates were reasonable, the vehicles didn't always live up to my car-less expectations.

In Tours I rented a shiny Clio for four days and paid less than a hundred pounds, insurance and one-way fee included. Despite my best efforts on the wheel, the little diesel didn't need a gas station until the very end, running dry after way more than 700 miles. One week later in Jordan, Hertz dished up a Korean-made Chevrolet that had seen better days, many of them. The car was old and worn out, with wobbly wheels, soft steering and poor brakes. Going 60 mph on a highway felt super-scary, the beater bouncing and swaying with a purpose that I could hardly control.

In Bilbao a few months later, I'm upgraded to an Astra. Not bad for thirty pounds a day, I think. But the car has 90,000 kilometers on the clock, more than I've ever seen on any rental, and starts smelling funny when I drive up to the Balcón de Guipúzcoa. When smoke rises from the hood, I turn around as gently as I can and coast down back to the sea. At San Sebastian airport I don't get an apology but a new car. I'm being re-downgraded, but at least there's no more smoke.

The latest in a continuous series of Hertz rentals took place in London on Saturday, the fourth stop in the fourth country. I got a Fiesta Zetec S that instantly turned me into an irresponsible teenager, accelerating, passing and speeding as if fines were certificates worth a frame and a license dispensable. So much fun in such a cute little package! The fun only lasted 24 hours and 34 minutes when, late by a bit, I'm charged a second day. In contrast to what I got, I think I deserve medallion status and an explanation of where Hertz sees itself in the market. I'll call tomorrow to check – and to get reimbursed and maybe score a gift card for my troubles.

day at the races

For a member of the English upper classes, there is no doubt, no need to disambiguate. If you're going to the races, it's too see horses. Ascot might be more famous for millinery than equine delights these days, but the horses started it all, they are at the center of it, and they're the reason everyone dons the silly hats.

On the other side of the social gamut is greyhound racing, a low-cost alternative to the posh people's pleasure. It might be a simple idea, but it's hilarious to watch: Beautiful dogs – not always entirely sure of what's going on – chase a stuffed rabbit on a rail down a racetrack. In the stands, thousands follow the spectacle with a passion that's normally reserved for a Chelsea-ManU match, eat junk food galore and bet away their inheritance.

Yesterday afternoon, after a week in Dresden, I touched down at Heathrow and picked up a Fiesta in fashionable white. The brilliant little car was a sporty Zetec S model that rocked the road and impressed the kids at the drive-thru with squealing tires and mighty jumps forward at the lights. Fittingly enough, I was on the way to the races, though neither horses nor dogs were on my mind.

A family connection who works as a motorsports journalist had procured tickets for the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters at Brands Hatch, complete with paddock access and Volkswagen hospitality. Clueless but excited, I drove to the gate on Saturday night, called my local contact and got picked up by a suit in a fat Touareg who ferried me to the party tent that wasn't quite heaving yet. It was just about seven and dinner was still on.

Enough time to sample all the delights later, tables were cleared from the area in front of the stage. Kids with pimples got enormous silverware for squeezing the most out of overclocked Sciroccos, and some old guys iPods for showing. Those guys were billed as motorsports legends, and they were the focus of the night, but before they could rock, legends of another kind were taking over the stage.

I forgot about the winners and the speeches as soon as The Upbeat Beatles took to their instruments. This unapologetic tribute band pushed accurate impersonation to the limits. Everyone can do stringy moptop wigs, but it takes a bit of guts to put the original logo on the drumkit – Sir Paul might personally chase after you for trademark infringement.

What had me completely transfixed, however, were the looks of the musicians. Old and podgy, they didn't make the least effort to emulate their heroes as they exist in everyone's mind's eye or memory. No, these guys looked exactly what the Beatles would look like had they continued their journey of uninhibited and mutually reinforced drug and alcohol excesses uninterrupted by death or assassination. I wasn't alone in my reaction to this kind of visual inverse time travel. Most of the audience must have been as mesmerized as I was, and the band's countless appeals for the first courageous couple to hit the dance floor went unanswered.

All changed when the legends of the racecar stepped up to lend their seasoned voices in support of the optical illusion on the stage. When an impromptu karaoke of Help! kicked off, I was swept aside by a surging crowd in a mad dash to the front. Elbows jostled but quickly found their way: stretched out and in the air. Dozens of cell phones and digicams were hovering above bopping heads to capture the occasion and preserve it for eternity, giving the performance the treatment it must have surely deserved. A glow of childlike joy lit every face.

I looked on with bafflement and suspicion. The four legends that had caused such a frenzy in the in-crowd didn't look much different from the four legends that had been working the instruments for a good twenty minutes before their luck changed. I blame it on my eyes, unfamiliar as they are with any sort of racing that's not done personally and self-propelled.

I returned to the track this morning to start my education in the arts of track-bound power and speed, but fell short of graduating. The roar of the DTM cars has be heard to be believed. My ears still ring, and that's all I can say.

fire burning

Life, in my opinion and experience, is a continuous procession of events and incidents, of decisions opening new ways and advances into the unknown. This might sound trivial and obvious if you don't think much about it but it's true and quite deep. There's more to life than just hanging on and staying for the ride. There must always be an active motion. If your dreams are dead, if you don't know where you're going, if you don't aspire to anything or work hard towards getting somewhere, you're not really alive anymore.

Over the years, I've moved from place to place, driven by desire for education, novelty, the unknown, advancement, a career – a handy number of goals that hover blurrily in the distance and change shape when I get closer, always more subtly to be recognizable but in the end undeniably. When I realized that the novelty had worn off or the education was depleted or the career imagined, I found a way to move on, to a place that offered similar prospects to a naive traveler as the one before, but with a fresh perspective and renewed excitement.

Times flows in one way only and years have passed. Salt Lake succeeded Jena and Grenoble was followed by London. And still I have my sight set at the Fata Morgana that keeps shifting at the horizon, forever elusive in its precise delineation. The thrill comes from trying hard to get closer, from the pursuit of the undefinable. Satisfaction in life, for me, is every little effort that takes me closer, as far as I can tell, to the point of convergence, to the target of intention, however poorly described that might be and however ephemeral.

The other day I got back from San Sebastian, city by the beach, between the sea and the mountains, in the north of Spain but not in Spain in its self-image. This list of attributes is long and diverse enough to arouse my curiosity even if I hadn't had such a blast there, and it's making me consider my options.

London has been my home for the past three years and the howling madness of the city is becoming routine. The tingling is burning in my toes again, telling me in no uncertain terms that it is time to move on. The fields have been ploughed and the seeds sown. The growth has been tended to with care and the upcoming harvest evaluated for its richness. There are aspects in my work that still burn hot with excitement and the promise of gold, but there are others that lie fallow, having fallen aside in moments of distraction.

In spite of habit and method working their invidious grind, I have been subdued in spirit for lack of options. San Sebastian has changed that. Why not Spain? (Never mind that I was in the Basque Country.) People were nice, the coast and the mountains beautiful and the food extraordinary. What can be wrong with red wine and pickled octopus for price of a slice of old bread? I really enjoyed the week I spent there, so much that I'm toying with the idea of going there for a while. Or at least I'm entertaining the possibility to see what might happen.

San Sebastian is as idyllic as a city can be. It sits by a large circular bay with wide beaches that are perfect for swimming and playing in the waves. Against my natural predisposition I went into the water every day. Clear, warm and free from critters, it was nearly perfect. Pamplona – where the bulls are run in July – and Bilbao – with the beautiful monstrosity of the Guggenheim – are nearby.

The region might not possess much in terms of ethnic diversity. The cultural breadth cannot hold a candle to the daily fireworks that's London. The weather – sunny and hot for the entire week we were there – must have been an anomaly if the lush meadows and deep green forests mean anything. But the positive characteristics have burned their mark into my cortex.

Even more so as I'm getting increasingly sick of London (still the center of the universe and the greatest city on earth, that goes without saying). The lack of nature is part of it: no cycling, not mountain biking, no hiking and the like. But worse is the large gap between rich and poor that creates all sorts of mind-boggling contrasts and disparities and that gives the city a face that is as ugly as it is elemental.

A flat in a new development on the south side of Hyde Park has just sold for 140 million pounds ($200,000,000 for one apartment!!), to some filthy rich dude far away. Such purchases, with the objective of gaining financially from house price inflation, keep driving prices and rents for ordinary flats up, to an extent that average workers cannot afford anything decent and something that's not even close to decent can be rented out for a small fortune. Median for an average two-bedroom apartment is as much as the median salary after tax.

And as with salaries, there's a huge spread in the quality of dwellings. Surrounding the glitter of restored Georgian semis and the luxury of spacious lofts are old flats that haven't been remodeled in decades, in streets that are noisy and messy. The facades of most houses are depressing to look at, with crumbling brickwork, blind windows, peeling paint, and windows of another era. (Inside it's frequently just as bad, with prehistoric plumbing and an electrical system unfit for wiring of the bathrooms.)

Taking the train into London is always a profoundly dispiriting experience, and it's not because of the peculiarities of British Rail. Rows upon rows of crooked, dirty terraces in varying states of dilapidation decry the depravity that calls London home. Beholding this bleakness with eyes that had just got used to modern tenements in clean streets, to a city surrounded by mountains and the sea, to effervescent street cafés instead of thick-necked pubs, the discrepancy exploded in my awareness and a realization filled my vision: The fire is still burning, and it's time to move on. Gotta find a goal and a place to shoot for it.

any gripes

Nearly a year ago I purported to get into the habit of venting publicly. I even introduced tags to the blog to make the rants stand out. If you click the corresponding filter, you will find a good dozen posts, not a whole lot for more than ten months, especially as most contain nothing more than an angry thought here or there. The initial idea, in contrast, was to go over the week and highlight the nonsense that had inexorably accumulated. That my rants have been scarce is not owed to a more sensibly spinning world. Rather, I have mellowed with age and grown indifferent to the more pedestrian absurdities of life. Things are a little different tonight – not my age, but the level of inanity in the public discourse. I can't hold on to myself and have to revisit the format as originally planned.

To start from the top, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, expressed the naive wish that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan who was convicted for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 and killing 270 people in the process but freed a year ago under mysterious circumstances by Scottish authorities, should return to prison. Brennan apparently expressed this wish in front of the world press, but he might as well have written a letter to Santa Claus or talked to the Tooth Fairy. What are the chances?

The British government, concerning the same issue, used the lugubrious adjectives of "tasteless, offensive and deeply insensitive", though curiously enough not to describe the actions of said shallow-water Scottish authorities a year ago. No, they warned Libya not to overdo the anniversary celebrations for the terrorist. Maybe the guy shouldn't have gone free in the first place?

What authority do the Scots have, anyway, you might ask, to put a convicted terrorist back into business? This is where it gets very muddy. In short, al-Megrahi claimed to be dying and the authorities (there they go again) thought it would be a nice gesture to let him enjoy the autumn of his life by a pool in sunny Tripoli. I'm not sure if they do that to all of their prisoners or only to top-terrorists. But I would ask for a transfer to Edinburgh, should I ever have to go to jail.

More important than its treatment of prisoners, at least in the context of this post, is the question of what Scotland is politically. To me, it's the land north of England famous for throat-cutting whisky (good) and ear-splitting music (bad). I always thought they were a province of the UK, but some up there think higher of themselves and imagine a glorious nation. They have a parliament whose members have extracted concession of from the Union and returned ridicule. They still send deputies to Westminster, mostly to siphon off the money to survive, which they would be hard-pressed to do on their own. Up to three months ago, the UK was even run by a Scot, believe it or not, but this nonsense is over now.

The United Kingdom is dear to the heart of many English, probably because they like the idea of ruling of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and equally vilified by many in the provinces. The Scottish are most eager to become independent, though such talk is not often heard down here in the heart of the Union.

That's why it was with so much pleasure that I listened to Any Questions tonight. The show covers all the topics broached above, includes an animated debate about the merits of Scotland as such, and fills the rest of the barely fifty minutes with heated discussion of the other news of the week: A religious community's plan for a cultural center encounters vitriolic opposition; Ummah, the Community of Believers, sits mostly idly as their brethren are swept off their land by an angrily swollen river; and the leaders of two small communities between the desert and the sea agree to meet to bring each other up to speed on why they can't live peacefully together.

You can hear it all here, and I encourage you to do so. It is refreshing.

off the boat

London is full of antipodeans. Some special visa agreement lets them live and work in the UK for up to two years. Not surprisingly, most that come choose London. They pile up in tight flatshares to save money, which is then spent on partying and traveling Europe. In town, they are most visible in a chain of pubs that caters to their tastes and during Australia and Waitangi Days, when they swarm on the streets dressed in nothing but national flags and whiffs of alcohol, ignoring generally frigid temperatures.

They even have their own magazine, the bizarrely named TNT. It was in this magazine that I saw an advertisement for the Liberal Party of Australia. A general election is coming up, and among their campaign promises was the curious stop the boats.

At first I thought they were opposing world trade, maybe because they didn't want to sell Australia's mineral wealth to China, but that didn't make too much sense. Then I realized their policy was against immigration, which is an even stranger strange position for liberals to take. But the strangest thing of all is to target Australians in London with this xenophobic nonsense. Haven't they come here on the rich world's equivalent of boats? Should we close our airports to them?

I don't hold this ad against TNT; they're just trying to run their business. In fact, I quite like the magazine. They are running a travel writing competition into which I've just entered my contribution. Read about the silence of Hama (taken from my trip to Syria last year) and click on the stars and spread the word if you like it.