Globalisation

I'm speeding through the French countryside enroute to Paris. Looks very much like the English countryside: windmills, supermarkets and their grey parking lots. That is the thing with globalisation. We look more and more alike and understand less and less of each other.

I've eaten so much chocolate on this journey, to descend from the contemplative to the banal. Even though there is of course a link. The cocoa in my chocolate (Green and Blacks, 37% Cocoa) came from somewhere outside Europe. My packaging reassures me that it was 'traded in compliance with Fairtrade Standards, total 72%,' perhaps to salve a middle class conscience.

What does that 'total 72%' mean? That 28% of my chocolate bar is unfair? I have now eaten too much to work out how many squares there were originally in the packet but lets say there were 40 squares. Then somewhere around twelve of the ingested squares would be unfair, traded in some dingy room of exploitation, cacao beans unfairly weighed and paid for. As I have roughly about twelve percent of the chocolate bar left, I have not eaten the entire 'unfair' portion.

My chocolate bar also 'meets the Soil Association' standards for organic food and farming.' This is to inflate a middle class consciousness with smugness I suppose. There are people who must read the information on the back of packaging or else it wouldn't be there. Once upon a time, I suppose, it was enough to know you were eating a bar of chocolate, with no nuts, if you were allergic.

I am still not finished on the theme of globalisation because of course there are things to feel guilty over about eating an item of food made with ingredients brought from so far. Of course nutmeg and sugar travelled far to enter the English palette, with the latter making a particularly bloody journey but at least the ships that brought them were wind powered, with no harm to the polar ice caps or polar bears or dolphins. Although considerably more damage was done to respectable middle class consciences by some items shipped to England. Like sugar. British women stopped buying sugar to end the slave trade. Some of them anyway. They should have stuck to honey all along. Apparently it has more sugar in it than sugar. Or more calories. Or something like that. It's true I read it on the Internet.

Anyway, the air miles or sea miles on the cocoa in my chocolate is enough to keep somebody with good heating and a comfortable bed awake in somewhere like Winchester or Cheltenham, which apparently was built on slave money.

We are pulling into Paris now. A lot of graffiti by the tracks. I don't notice it in London anymore. Tower blocks. I wonder if this is council housing here or just ugly housing. I overheard some funny things on the way here but I forgot. A woman in front of me asked a child she met on the journey what she wants to be when she grows up. She replied, 'Home.' With the way the housing market is going, we'll all want a home when we grow up.

Opposite me,  are a British woman and child, talking to a Brazilian performer of some sort with a Nigerian writer eavesdropping and taking notes with a Mitsubishi pen in a journal probably assembled in China with Indonesian trees. I wonder if my paper is fair trade.  

Written on the Euro Star, somewhere between France and England. 

London Lagos Chronicles Part 1

Instead of spending 6 hours watching movies on my last flight home, I decided to write and record the experience live and direct. Here's part one of my musings.

Separate the waters. I'm on the British Airways flight to Nigeria.  From the air on a clear sunny day with no clouds, the blue of the sky and of the sea merge into one on the horizon. All around is blue, no up and no down. Flying over England, the land below reminded me of sayings like the land is in the blood or the blood of England flows through your veins. It really did look like an organ with the thick lines of trees like arteries and veins and capillaries carrying thick green sap to England's people. And who are England's people?

The couple next to me are old. They sneeze and splutter and cough a lot. They cover their mouths when they do. Their hands seem ineffectual. Many germs escape I fear and mostly on to me but their politeness is appreciated. We are over France now. Just across the Channel and the landscape seems dryer, more arid and the pieces of the farmland jigsaw are smaller and browner. There also seem to be fewer trees or maybes it's because we're higher up. Some quite persistent turbulence. I am drinking Coke. I fear for your pages. The engine roar grows louder for a moment and then quietens down. I used the loo before I got on the plane but will it be enough? The flight has quite a few empty seats. Perhaps BA is not longer so popular, colonial mentality unwinding.

We're flying over what must be the Sahara Desert now. It's not the Sahara of shifting sands that is so popular in the imagination but the part of the desert that is craggy and brown, unending dryness to the front and the back of the plane. The ground is so unchanging it doesn't feel like we're moving at all. There are thin cracks in the land that look like the beds of where river and streams once flowed. We are leaving behind the crags now and moving on to the more archetypal Sahara. The cracks in the old Sahara look like dried up capillaries and veins, arid England. There are some depressions in the sand. They must be quite deep but from up here they look like pockmarks.

 There is a dark thin ribbon running along the ground for what must be miles. It looks like a grey tarmac road but it can't be. Once you have a fixed point to look from, you realise how fast we're moving. In the few seconds it took to write this, the strange road has already disappeared beyond craning distance. I will make a way in the desert God says in Isaiah, where rivers of living water will flow. There's a patch of sand a lot redder than the rest of the desert, like a birthmark. There are lines running through the desert, swirling and sweeping and it makes you almost think there must be a pattern, some cosmic Artist whose handwork you would be able to fully appreciate if only you could go a little higher. That's how they saw the Nazca lines. They flew.

Stay tuned for Part 2.