Credo / Mark Oliver

'You never see the Taliban'

Interesting little film on Afghanistan by BBC's Ben Anderson, for VBS. A British squaddie tells him most of the guys he's with have not seen the Taliban even though they have had firefights with them for hours. During non-combat they have probably seen lots of Taliban because, as he says, they only need to "pick up a pitchfork and then they are Johnny farmer".

The most difficult thing is fighting against guys who don't fear death and are looking forward to "27 virgins or whatever". Anderson says some positions that are being fought over are now being administered by "Good Taliban", a scenario they could have reached six years ago with far less bloodshed.

Andy Beckett

Over the years I've always enjoyed the work of feature writer Andy Beckett. Take this piece he wrote for the Guardian's news pages last October on the decline of North Sea oil, which crackles with atmosphere. It starts: "Before visiting a North Sea oil rig it is necessary to become a little more fatalistic."

Beckett then gets into the matter of fact safety information the crews must go through and the suits they wear which are nicknamed "body bags". I think he is great at going somewhere and tapping into something's sensibility. In this article, it is the loneliness and rubbing along of oil crews and the spectre over them of the oil running out. The piece was illustrated with an image of dark seas.

He also wrote a rather legendary piece about Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail in 2001, which includes the quote: "These people couldn't bring up a fucking hamster!"

Battle at Garmsir

  Volleyball under the stars 
  Originally uploaded by Jim Birt

The Guardian's Audrey Gillan has written a powerful, moving piece about an ambush by Taliban troops against a small patrol of British troops in Afghanistan last year that left possibly dozens of Taliban dead and two British fatalities. "I imagined the structure of the article like a film, starting with this big last supper they have before their tour ends" Gillan said.

Guardian.co.uk also produced this interactive graphic and video feature of the troops describing what happened.

I just found some good images on flickr of British troops in Afghanistan on flick by photographer  Jim Birt, including this one of troops at base. I think this must be his professional page.

Falling Man

'It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night'. This is how Don Delillo's 9/11 novel opens (he always has great opening lines).

Before reading Falling Man, I heard a Newsweek podcast in which its book critic said it felt like the "first genuine work of art" about the attacks, though the New York Times critic Kak utani was not so keen. Some critics were uncomfortable with the sections from the perspective of an imagined terrorist (not unlike Martin Amis's Mohammed Atta short story).

I rated the book - any time spent reading Deillo is time well invested. It did not amaze me throughout but I made my way quietly through it, and felt inspired and wowed by the odd passage - like the one at the start in which the central character Keith, a survivor of the attacks, is being looked at by a doctor.

The doctor tells him about how in places where there are suicide bomb attacks, survivors sometimes bumps which turn out to be "small fragments of the suicide bomber's body" because the flesh hits them at such velocity it gets wedged into whatever it hits.

"They call this organic shrapnel," the doctor says.

A poster on a Guardian arts blog about it, attacks this as "semi-digested research" inserted into the book, but I liked it, because it told me about something I didn't know about and did not ring false as something a New York doctor might say.

I also liked the 'Falling Man' of the title, the performance artist who hangs from structures around the city, prompting fury at his perceived insensitivty (I read somewhere that Delillo uses this as a device to acknowledge how fraught it is to create a novel out of an event which caused such grief, so relatively recently).

I remember trying to write around the time of the Spetember 11 2001 attacks and just being totally frozen: that anything I was writing felt unimportant, that there were weeks when it felt like "the only subject" and one that I was not qualified to tackle. I recall being quite awed by how Spike Lee's movie - released in 2002 began with images of the Memorial in Light.

Who is more qualified to write a 9/11 novel than Don Delillo whose great work Underworld had cover art depicting, prophetically, a funereal image of the World Trade Centre?

In Falling Man, the other main character, Liane, obsessively reads all of the New York Times "portraits in grief", the stark profiles of the victims (I remember the Guuardian doing some profiles and being really moved by a guy working there, I think as a painter and decorator who had been a drug addict and had a tattoo of the Angel of Death on his arm but who was clean and optimistic when the planes hit as he worked in one of the towers).

I just read this on Esquire saying the novel is "the best test-case yet for the idea that when the planes hit and the buildings went down we entered the “age of nonfiction,” when journalism, even journalism as modest in means as one of those Portraits of Grief, is able to grasp what’s happened -- and, more to the point, what’s happening -- to us more than fiction can, even fiction by our most accomplished and ambitious writers".

I think there is something in that, though suspect the best books and films about 9/11 may not be created for several decades.

The best article I read about 9/11 was by a novelist, writing in a newspaper: the Ian McEwan article in the Guardian a few days after the attacks.

Belfast peace walls

photo from flickr, georgeclarke107

Listening to radio coverage of the return of power-sharing in Northern Ireland earlier this year I was struck by a line on the report about how there were no plans to pull down the dozens of peace walls that snake through various 'interface' estates in Belfast and Derry.

I thought it would be interesting to hear what people who lived there thought of how the peace process was going and what prospects there were of them coming down. Obviously peace walls are also nteresting at the moment because of their adoption in Iraq.

I thought a trip to Belfast would work well as a multimedia project with pictures of the walls and voices.

In the end, it was trickier than I thought to get people to talk and very hard to get people to agree to be photographed. But with then Guardian Ireland corr Owen Bowcott and freelance photographer Paul McErlane we created a slideshow. Owen had a good angle on the story as there was a school where there were plans to build a new wall after a house in a Nationalist estate was firebombed late last year.

Anyway, this was the resulting slideshow and Society Guardian piece.

photo from flickr, a11sus

We didn't really get a chance to look at the graffiti on the walls, which I thought was interesting. Looking at this Belfast peace wall flickr group  there is a lot of graffiti on parts of the walls. A lot seems to be pro-peace but not all. I also spotted a "f*** the Queen".

A dying breed

At the end of April, I did my first audio slideshow project for work using the soundslides software.

I got up very early and hauled myself to Trafalgar Square and interviewed a retired lady called Shelagh Moorhouse who is part of a group who take turns to do early morning feedings of the pigeons.

The group are warring with mayor Ken Livingstone who has introduced a ban on feeding in the square (the group found a loophole, which Westminster council is about to close). The days of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square do look numbered.

Shelagh was kind of sweet. She said that the birds recognised faces and once got excited when she was there later in the day with a friend, without feed.

It was fun being there during the feedings - I was taking photos like crazy and trying to do the interviews at more or less the same time.

This crazy mass of birds. Thirty minutes later they were virtually all gone.

Snow

The novel lays bare the terrible conflict between political Islamists and  secularists in Turkey. The row over Abdullah Gul's controversial nomination for Turkey's presidency was an obvious, recent crystalisation of the issue.

In Orhan Pamuk's book, the main character is Ka, a poet, who is on a trip back to Turkey from poltical exile in Frankfurt. He travels to a remote Turkish town ostensibly to write a story for an Istanbul newspaper about a series of suicides by devout Muslim girls who have been refusing to remove their headscarves. Ka is also seeking a romance with Ipak, a beautiful divorcee who he knows from his past and who he holds a flame for.

The town is cut off and is seething with political Islamist activity, part of it by a charasmatic terrorist, Blue. The town is then seized in a bizarre secularist coup by a theatre group. Ka becomes embroiled and is torn in his sympathies between the two sides - while all he really wants is to elope with Ipak and return with her to Frankfurt. Ka has suffered from writers block for a couple of years but begins writing poems again. They come to him almost like fits or visions.

The narrator is 'Orhan Pamuk', who visits the town some years after Ka and is searching for a copy of the now lost poems, which Ka wrote in a green notebook. It is a clever narrative approach, skillfully done, especially in how the narrator is such an unobtrusive element at the start as we see things mainly from Ka's point of view (imagined by the narrator, after talking to the people Ka met on his trip and other sources).

I enjoyed Snow, though it is in many ways a bleak book, in which I sometimes struggled - buoyed up  periodically by the glimpses of beauty. It does not leave you very optimistic about Turkey's future, but does, I think, give you a feeling for its conflicted soul, if you buy the idea that country's can have some kind of cohesive sensibility.

My friend Boff said he thought the book showed that you can't force a way of life on a people - I think meaning that you could not force people to be secular or Islamist.

I think in some ways he is right. But, to a degree, is what other option is there in Turkey? Extremist Islam seems to have a tendancy towards dismantling democracy (at the least the Taliban stamp does). This is obviously why the fears around the Gul presidency possibility were so acute: many in Turkey fear that the political Islamists want to traduce or abolish democracy.

I think you have to defend democracy, but obviously it is difficult and you can go too far. And if a majority of people want political Islam - then the pressure mounts that the democratic thing is to give them power, paradoxically traducing democracy.

Only the thing about doing that is that once you give over democracy and remove the system and cycle of elections, you remove the ability of future generations to have a fair say about what political system they have.

It is all very difficult and clearly there is a spectrum of Islamic ideas and levels of severity, relating to elections. Obviously there are (still very controversial / possibly corrupt) elections in Iran and in the Palestinian territories. The extremists do not always want to create Taliban style states, but I think you can forgive secularists in "Ataturk's" Turkey for being worried, despite all the assurances of moderateness from Islamists.

The Falklands anniversary

Photo of the Canberra returning home, from Thunderchild 5's flickr page

From the start of this year, I spent around four months working on a multimedia project to mark the 25th anniversary of the Falklands conflict.

I was part of a team which created this multimedia feature, which is made up of video and audio interviews with service people from both sides, politicians and  islander Tim Miller, who lost an eye after being bombed by the not-so-friendly fire of a Sea Harrier. There are photographs and interactive maps by graphics wizard Paddy Allen and you can either follow a timeline which sketches out the conflict, or look at more in depth interviews by my colleagues James Sturcke, Matthew Tempest and myself.

James did some of the best interviews, including a number with Argentinean veterans, and heard the most incredible story from one British sailor, John Phillips, who lost his arm when he and colleague Jim Prescott tried to defuse a bomb which had hit their ship, the Antelope. The bomb exploded, killing Prescott, and tearing Phillips' arm off. With his life in the balance, Phillips talks about how he was travelling through a tunnel and could see his late father.

We were happy with how the project came out. Neil McIntosh, a head honcho at GU, said he did not think any newspaper website in the world had done anything quite like it and there was also praise from Guardian media editor Matt Wells.

I was aged about seven when the conflict began so I had a lot of researching to do ahead of setting up interviews. The research evoked a lot of sympathy for both sets of men who fought there. I really rate the Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins book on the conflict. It opens with a great  description of the sense of unreality, of fantasy  that enveloped the  war and continued  even as  ships began to be sunk and men began to die.

One thing I was really struck with was that I had no idea what a close run thing the British victory was. All of the Thatcher bombast that I grew up with about it kind of hid for me the sense of how on line it was.

Many of the Argentineans were bewildered conscripts, though some were excellent troops, like the ones Major Alan Crawford told me he and his fellow Scots Guards faced on Tumbledown in one of the most bloody battles.

It must have been hell. Crawling on your belly up a freezing cold wet hill with machine gun nests above you. And then to fight hand to hand, using bayonets.

I was lucky enough to interview Maj Gen Julian Thompson, who was the most pivotal ground forces commander during the conflict. According to John Shirley, a Sunday Times journalist during the time of the conflict and who now works for the Guardian, Thompson was "the hero" of the Falklands.

Shirley told me that some of the battles were "like Waterloo ... men going up a hill with guns, facing men with guns". I met up with Shirely for breakfast and he told me great stories about the conflict and a very moving account of travelling home with Thompson and his brigade on the Canberra, a commandeered liner.

At night as they approached the south coast of England - where many of the men were from - they could see all of these headlamps shining out of the darkness  as wellwishers and family lined the coastal roads to welcome the men back. On deck, a marine band played as the liner neared port.
                                                                                          

Photo: Phil Gyford's flickr page

I also quite rated Channel 4's Mummy's War, which followed Carol Thatcher's visit to the island and to - gulp - Argentina, where predictably she did not get that warm a reception.

She was a bit harsh in a meeting with mothers who lost sons on the Belgrano. There was a priceless moment where one woman says at the end of the interview, very quietly: "One day your mother will pay for what she did."

The doc also featured the woman who became known as Task Force Betty, for helping the British troops find their way on the outskirts of Stanley. She wore white gloves which they followed in the darkness.

Photo: Ben Tubby's flickr page.
Check out his flickr set from the Falklands, which boasts lots of penguin action.

The military covenant

I visited Hedley Court in Surrey on November 21 2006. It is the army's main rehabilitation centre. It is not a hospital. Most of those injured in the "war on terror" are first treated at an NHS hospital in Selly Oak in Birmingham - which has been the centre of controversy because it has mixed forces and civilian wards, though this is to change.

I was invited to go to Hedley Court with other reporters after trying for months to try and speak to an armed forces psychiatrist.

I have been interested in the mental welfare of troops ever since reading a fantastic article by Dan Baum in the New Yorker in July 2004 entitled the Price of Valor. The standfirst of the article is "We train our soldiers to kill for us, afterwards they are on their own."

At Hedley Court, it was upsetting to see so many young men with amputations. They worked on machines in the gym; we saw  nurses  leading them through physiotherapy.

I wrote a straight-ish news story about the government's extension of mental health welfare support to part-time troops, which seems to be a long overdue move. For theguardian, special correspondent Audrey Gillan was also at Hedley Court and she interviewed Sergeant Mick Brennan (pictured; PA) and wrote a powerful piece.

There has been lots in the media recently about the "military covenant" between the public and the armed forces: ie the understanding that, given that they risk their lives in the services, the public should provide them with decent wages, housing, medical care and support.

Commenting on a blog I wrote about the housing problems in the forces, Kelvin Yearlwood writes:

UK soldiers have to learn a particularly hard version of a lesson most of us have to learn. They may devote their lives to the protection of UK interests - all too often national/international elite interests and illegal ventures abroad - but they will only receive, by way of reward, the minimum that the political-economic system can get away with extending to them.

With so many UK troops involved in expeditionary operations, how well the state is fulfilling obligations under the military covenant will obviously be under more and more scrutiny. The media has a role in highlighting the issues to increase pressure on the government to give better care to its troops.

Genuine fakes and fake fakes

I recently visited an exhibition which the Metropolitan police put on at the V& A to educate art industry people about techniques used by art forgers.

It was interesting to discover that the head of the Met's unit recognised that some forged art works had value and ancient forgeries had in themselves become valuable. Other people I spoke to there hated the romance of the idea of the art forgers and made the point that it could ruin someone's life if they invested in an art work as a pension and then found it was worthless.

It was very interesting to see some of the materials which crooked art dealer John Drewe used to create false provenance for art works - such as adding invented art works by real artists to catalogues at the British Museum. The Met exhibition had a period typewriter he used - for authenticity's sake - and rubber stamps he created to forge official documents.

A while ago, Euan Ferguson wrote a good piece after interviewing John Myatt, the artist who Drewe persuaded to create these forged art works. Myatt now has a bona fide business rather wonderfully called Genuine Fakes in which he does copied art works for order. (Before Ferguson's piece a friend who knows Myatt had told me how he was selling copies to celebrities and I thought it was a story but regretably did not act on it quick enough - drats).

The detective I spoke to at the Met exhibition said he had gone to one living artist to say he had found some forgeries of his work and the artist apparently did not care and was kind of flattered. He did not say who it was. My money is on Damien Hirst.