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Patagonian and Fuegian Tales

August 23, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘I passed through three boring towns’ was the start of a chapter that changed the way I thought about travel writers yet again. It helped that I would visit them after I read the chapter. Both visits were stopovers of a kind. One by commercial jet, the other by ship seeking shelter from two cyclones that seemed to merge just to scare us off.

I had found In Patagonia in a shop in Buenos Aires in late 1995. I was living in a hotel on Avenida de Mayo just a stone’s throw from the Casa Rosada, the Presidential Palace. Carlos Menem had just been re-elected and there were almost weekly protest marches on Thursdays. Once, a firework cannister was directed at me for watching the passing flag, banner and placard waving throngs from my third floor hotel balcony window.

The Squid Fleet ran with us from the storm to Rio Gallegos.

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Tax Collectors II

August 21, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I have already been told that my first post on Tax Collectors was pretty dark. This second story will not be much brighter despite being desert based.

Tax collectors have often been brutal down the ages. Just ask the residents of Isfahan why they killed Tamerlane’s tax collectors in the late 1300s. Unfortunately for them, as when the city of Khiva upset the great Timur in 1370, he then slaughtered Isfahan’s citizens and razed the city. Arguably, his most infamous atrocity was that he commanded a pyramid be built from the skulls of the tax renegades. He treated Damascus and Baghdad with similar contempt. Yet he transformed his city of Samarkand to a place of wonder that persists today.

Tamerlane / Timur is a folk hero these days. He’s on the money in Uzbekistan and I’ve seen him on a horse in central Tashkent. Not bad for someone whose no-nonsense ruling style was accentuated by the slaughter of as many as ten million people across the Timurid Empire that once stretched from Ankara to Delhi and Hormuz nearly to Moscow.

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Tax Collectors I

August 20, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

I first visited Algeria between reading The Plague and A Savage War of Peace.

‘…the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good …’

Albert Camus’ fiction of the plague in Oran from 1947 is quoted as the Afterword in Alistair Horne’s visceral history of the decade leading to Algerian independence (as written in 1977).

1997 link fences, sand berms and watch towers – protected or jailed in the Sahara?

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Book Borrowers

August 18, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

Do you ever wonder where your books end up after they leave your shelves?

At one point in my career, I would leave some of the novels I’d finished in airplanes or airports. I realised that English language books ended up in other language skips so I only left them in English speaking destinations.

My walking weight loss in books 2012 and another in 2017

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Life Tripped Me Up

August 9, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

‘Life tripped me up’ is a line from a poem dictated in Turkish over a phone line from a prison, a series of which have held the poet since he was 21.

Participation in a protest over the government’s treatment of Kurds sent him into a cell as a young man. He confessed to crimes he had denied before torture that has left him scarred for life.

His pre-trial detention lasted for twenty-two years before his sentence to life imprisonment was confirmed. He wrote recently that he ‘can’t touch or communicate with other people or animals’.

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Thought For The Day

August 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

‘I keep getting asked for a list of the next four black swans’ Nicolas Taleb said recently. Taleb wrote The Black Swan in 2007 and the people who ask this question are showing that they don’t understand his observations. The book wasn’t always easy but it was compelling. [Cliff’s Notes might help if you’re short of time.]

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