Having a blast and learning a lot chairing the jury in Shanghai. Fun and feisty. ______________________________________________________ This email is sent on behalf of a member of the Diageo group of companies, whose holding company is Diageo plc, registered in England and Wales with number 23307 and with registered address at Lakeside Drive, Park Royal, London NW10 7HQ, England. This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed. This footnote also confirms that this email has been scanned for all viruses by the Messagelabs SkyScan service. If you have received this email in error please notify the Diageo Servicedesk on +44 (0) 131 319 6000 http://www.diageo.com ___________________________________
Officially no longer clinically obese. If the BMI is to be believed, whatever that is. However, I am officially clinically hungry instead.
Six days in, six pounds down. Simples.
It may well "only be water" but it's MY water and I'm fine with it.
I have a heightened sense of awareness of all things fat-related. Apparently a model is suing her agency for describing her as fat (you can't see every single one of her ribs). Airlines are considering charging people for seats by their weight (my membership card would be made of a very precious metal indeed if that happened). Watching West Ham v Millwall, instead of marvelling at Mark Noble becoming the true heir of Billy Bonds, I found myself thinking "Am I as fat as Sam Allardyce?"
I chose February for the most stringent phase of this transformation because it is the shortest month. In a spiteful joke of the calendar it turns out that this is a leap year.
In the beginning was the flab.
225 lbs of it, to be precise.
A year from my 50th birthday, something must be done. And done it shall be.
I have stocked up on dangerous medications - one will kickstart my metabolism and prolong the effects of exercise ("Is this safe?" "Well, the SIngapore government allows it in." "Er, ok then."), the other, a two-pill combo that smells like a horse's bed and offers the "Ultimate Cleanse", to blow out any gut-inflating nasties that have been lurking in my system since before the Berlin Wall came down.
No carbs. No alcohol. Not too much fat. Frequent trips to the gym. And regular amounts of martyrdom.
Follow it here. If you can stomach it.
Although the levels of poverty so glaringly evident in Cambodia might make you think that the Asian Tiger has failed to growl here, that is far from the truth. But the main staples of the economy - rice and textiles - are not creating the bulk of the new wealth in what was once, during what Vietnamese call the "American War," one of the most heavily-bombed countries in human history. Filling the coffers today is tourism and construction - much of the construction, it is said, being done by Chinese (especially) and Korean companies on land sold to them by the government. The country is literally being sold by the Yuan. How fast this money trickles down to the general population is difficult to tell with the naked eye. In the middle of Phnom Penh, near some sumptuous government buildings and skyscrapers built (but not yet fully occupied) to house some of the world's best-known banks, is a huge lake around which live some 20,000 impoverished families. Or at least, there was once a huge lake there. It has been drained and now there is only coarse sand - the deeds to the area are believed by some to be held by the wife of a senator and, although nobody seems to know exactly what is going to happen, the smart money is on a new and glorious development occupied by rather swankier inhabitants. The current occupants are being moved out. Those taking up what's understood to be the $6000 on offer will be able to buy the equivalent of a garage to live in, far from the centre of town, far from their communities, and far from the prospect of paying work. There is some evidence of the famed trickle-down effect happening in Cambodia, but for people like this the trickle resembles that of an old man with a serious prostate problem. Drew McDowell runs the Lakeside School and 2 others like it, in and among communities like these which I used to think of as slums. Lakeside supplements the education offered by the state with lessons in language, technology and life. Drew's EYC team (Empowering Youth in Cambodia) networks to provide work placement opportunities for kids growing up in these areas, and raises funds to provide a private education for some which has the potential to dramatically transform their futures. A clinic also operates here regularly, offering basic medical services that would otherwise be unavailable. When we were there the tiny building was packed with people queuing to see the medic. Outside children played happily and energetically on the new-found sand while men mended bikes and women chatted and nursed infants on the disused railway tracks running along the refuse-strewn ditch at the edge of the township. Walking around this area at night didn't feel threatening. people live so close to each other around the narrow streets that you can see and hear everything everywhere if you've a mind to. Motorbikes buzz around everywhere, men lie on wooden beds stripped to the waist watching TV, people yell, all sorts of good and bad smells mix with the noise, young couples walk together back from the more private world outside the community - there's an intensity to life that won't be quite the same in the suburban garages. Miles away in Chamcar Bei, a hamlet not far from Kampot, is another "after-school", this one funded by Bridges Across Borders South-East Asia (BABSEA). This is a group that, amongst other things, campaigns against local injustices and provides community legal education - the spine of self-help in a modern state. Dogs and chickens roam the schoolyard which us filled by yet more smiling kids. The area around Chamcar Bei was one of the Khmer Rouge's last strongholds and is unsurprisingly incomprehensibly poor. A small compound, adorned with a tattered national flag and supporting a number of grazing cows with curiously long eyelashes, houses a weaving community who sell their wares under the title "Funky Junk." Hanging out on clotheslines to make sure they are bone dry are multi-coloured plastic shopping bags, the key material woven into handbags, best-sellers in the shop. Rescuing these bags for this purpose also saves animals who regularly choke or suffocate on them, as well as reducing debris and environmental damage. Pegged up, sorted by colour and stretching out around the yard, the bags reminded me of a not terribly good Persil ad I once made to demonstrate the brand's breathtaking care of coloured clothes. Everywhere in this country is poverty so grinding it gives the term "grinding poverty" a bad name. And in so many places you find people who have given up comfortable lives to try to make a difference. Ex-pats and school kids give up their time to go house-building for the poorest (this for very reputable organisations, but it does surprise me that in such a hot country the materials are mainly metal - the houses must be like ovens); more permanently, people like the founders and organisers of BABSEA, like Drew McDowell at Lakeside, like the people at Daughters of Cambodia, and like Hannah Stevens and friends at Epic Arts - kind, brave and determined people who are making a real difference to individuals and communities , and whose every bit of progress also serves to underline just how much is not being done. As long as people like this are there it feels lke there is hope - but how long will they stay? As long as there is something to trickle down, people like this will help what flow there is reach as many people as possible.
Cambodia certainly needs some luck, and some help. You can read about the organisations mentioned here, or even contribute, on these websites: www.villageearth.org is the site for EYC (in the UK you can try CamKids.org ) BABSEA can be visited at www.babsea.org Funky Junk can be found at www.funkyjunkrecycled.com
It can be hard for families to make ends meet in Cambodia so some of them sell their daughters to brothels.
I'll say that again in case you missed it. It can be hard for families to make ends meet in Cambodia so some of them sell their daughters to brothels.
In a country where half the population is under 20 many of the prostitutes are aged between 12 and 17, and 90% of those are sold into the trade by their families. Sometimes they are tricked into it - told they have been found a job in a bakery, for example, only to find that something altogether more sinister has been cooked up.
Why sell your daughter? Well, perhaps to support your gambling habit and various addictions, or to reduce your debt. Or it could be that she has been raped, or even that she has lost her virginity a less violent way - either way she is unlikely to find a husband and therefore has lost a lot of her "value." HIV/AIDS is rife in Cambodia, among the worst in Asia, despite the huge efforts to reduce the epidemic which have started to pay off in recent years. About half of all sufferers are now women, up from about one-third a few years ago. Heterosexual transmission involving the sex trade is by far the main source of the disease.
You don't need to have teenage daughters yourself for all this to cause instant, flesh-weakening sweats and for everything around you to smell and taste of vomit - but it definitely helps. A group called Daughters of Cambodia bases itself in the heart of a brothel area in Phnom Penh and offers skills training, fairly-paid work and a way out. These women learn crafts that can make them a better-than-normal living making clothes, jewellery or household items. A number go on to start their own businesses. Very few go back to being sex workers. The approach is to give people tools for self-sufficiency that will strengthen their own muscles for life. The visitor centre near the Royal Palace sells things made by the "daughters", shows a film about the project which will have you crying for your mother, and has a cracking cafe called Sugar 'n' Spice on the top floor. The religious tone of their website, which isn't much for me I'm afraid, is barely in evidence - and I can't help feeling at least a bit ashamed that I saw the need just now to make that disclaimer. It's so easy to make oneself detached and be even slightly supercilious about others who do a level of good most of us can barely dream of. If you want to know more about Daughters of Cambodia, or even help fund this work, visit http://www.daughterscambodia.org
The journey to Kampot, a sleepy place not far from the Cambodian coast and the seaside town of Kep, takes nearly four hours by car from Phnom Penh. If the roads were finished it would probably take ninety minutes. You wouldn't want to drive it yourself, and certainly not in your own car. Rules of the road are few and far between - people drive on whichever side has least traffic at the time, and use their horn as a sign that they are alive. Margins of error are slim, and it's not unusual to see goods-carrying trucks tipped over, lying on their sides like dead elephants. You'd have to be certifiable to ride a motorbike on these roads, but that is what most people seem to do, three or four at a time, babies on the handlebars like mascots. With some exceptions, the road is either rock or dirt, with soil the stunning red colour of Prince Edward Island or deepest Georgia. You pass through some towns but the scenery is mainly rural, rice fields in flood plains, tended by lone farmers scattered throughout the landscape, and with limestone crag formations in the distance marking the way to the Gulf of Thailand. Kampot welcomes visitors with a brand new statue of a Durian fruit, the skunk of the plant world, inexplicably popular in parts of South-East Asia. Despite its broad river and shiny new town square, it's not the kind of place you'd come across by accident and chilling out is probably high on the agenda for anyone wanting to visit. We were there to visit Epic Arts, an organisation on the outskirts of town dedicated to helping children with disabilities (a number of them deaf) empower and express themselves through all kinds of arts. In a country where one in ten has some kind of disability this would be a noble enough enterprise, but in rural Cambodia disability also brings stigma. Hannah Stevens, who came from the UK to work here, explains that when they started "we had a hell of a job trying to persuade people that someone with a disability wasn't an idiot or worse, he just had a bit of a limp." Now the students are a normal part of the small community, and at least while they are at Epic Arts they seem to be having a whale of a time. The sheer energy and volume of the place is overwhelming and engaging, the boy in the wheelchair dancing alongside the more able-bodied. One boy, Choc, who might once have been defined by his Down's Syndrome now is at least equally well-known for his visual arts skills (you can buy his cards at Epic Arts' lovely cafe on the main square). These students perform in public and the opportunities offered by the centre are expanding. Epic Arts wants to grow its facilities - they need about $100,000 to fund this expansion. It seems such a simple thing, but the impact is precious. Big brand name charities, some of whom are said to place wells with their names on them on the major highways where the water can't be used to reach the communities so touchingly displayed on their websites, may seem to try to save the world in a more dramatic way (and doubtless many make an important difference). But others like Hannah, the Epic Arts team and the many volunteers here are offering dignity, self-respect, happiness and opportunity in a place and for people that need it, in a way that just makes you want to smile.
If you want to learn more about Epic Arts, or even find out how to help fund this wonderful work, visit http://www.epicarts.org.uk/cambodia/
A sign in the middle of the fields at Choeung Ek politely asks visitors not to walk through the mass graves. In the past you might have been asked to dig your own. A van brought prisoners who had no more to give at S-21to Choeung Ek where, until there were too many people to dispose of in a single day, death was a few yards away and immediate. Some consideration was shown to the neighbours - the slaughter usually took place at night-time so there was less chance of anyone seeing it, and loudspeakers attached to a "magic tree" blared out revolutionary anthems to muffle the sound of screaming or similar acts of public nuisance. There were 368 "killing fields" in Cambodia during the height of Pol Pot's power. More than one for every day of the year. Between 1975 and 1979 over 2 million people were killed at these sites - around one quarter of the total population. Prisoners were blindfolded and their hands were tied behind their backs. They were made to kneel, often side by side with others, at the edge of the pits that some of them may even have dug. The Khmer Rouge operated on a strict "no bullets" policy, for cost rather than eco-friendly reasons. So instead they cracked their victims' skulls with farm tools or sticks. Babies' heads were dashed against a tree. When that got boring, they were tossed in the air and bayonetted. One of the graves contained 166 headless bodies, thought to be those of soldiers who had disobeyed orders. A lot of the soldiers doing the killing at the time were between 14 and 17 years old. I was a teenager at the time this all happened. You can't help wondering what you would have done, but it's perhaps a glimpse into the soul too far. Choeung Ek is close to a swamp, so the rains disturb the contents of the ground, much of it still unexcavated. A walk through these fields takes you past fragments of bone, teeth and pieces of clothing belonging to the lost. The memorial stupa contains over 5000 skulls arranged over several storeys. Piles of human bones are exhibited in the grounds, together with some of the rags that once belonged to the owners. The Khmer Rouge regime was propped up by the United Nations and household name nation states as part of the strategy against the Vietnam Communists. One soldier working in the East of the country (a long way from Choeung Ek) at the time was called Hun Sen. Today he is Prime Minister. Pol Pot himself died in 1998, supposedly of a heart attack. It can't have been painful enough.
This picture of a children's climbing-frame was taken in the grounds of Tuol Sleng (also known as Security Prison S-21) in the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is the only remaining evidence that on this site there was once a school.
Between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge used this compound in the middle of the city as a place to interrogate and torture supposed opponents of the regime. When the torture was finished - typically after two months - the victims were driven in vans a short 23 kms to the Killing Fields just outside the city to be summarily bludgeoned to death.
It wasn't difficult to be classified as an "opponent" of the regime. Pol Pot, whose CV included a failed attempt at a degree at the Sorbonne, envisaged for Cambodia a kind of cultural revolution without the culture. He wanted the country to be an agrarian utopia - self-sufficient, free from foreign influence, and certainly free from the influence of pesky intellectuals.
Having captured Phnom Penh, Pol Pot cleared it entirely of civilians - all two million of them. No-one was allowed to remain, even the old and sick, and all began a long march to designated rural areas to start new lives in the fields. For a while anyway.
Lawyers, teachers, former government officials, people who could speak a foreign language, journalists, business people - all were rounded up. So were their families - as the saying went, "if you want to cut down a tree, you have to make sure you remove its roots." The reason people were tortured was to make sure all the "roots" were identified.
Our guide, Maly, was forcibly evacuated to Battambang in the north-west of the country. She talked about how the Khmer Rouge took away her father and brother, who she never saw again. These experiences were common - First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung tells one family history - but hearing Maly's story first-hand was a grotesque kind of privilege.
Everything to see here is horrible, and it's horrible in a way that takes your words and makes them redundant. The cells, 6 foot by 3 foot, which people were only let out of twice a month for exercise unless of course they were being let out in order to be tortured. The tiny cartridge case they were given to shit in. The manacles, welded to hold an industrial quantity of prisoners, the blood stains still on the floor, the photos of the corpses in the rooms as they were found with the "furniture" in the same place too, the barbed wire to stop people throwing themselves off balconies to avoid torture, the skulls, the gallows that victims were hung upside down from until they passed out (only to be "revived" by being dipped head first into tubs of fertiliser)...and there's more...the rack, the water cans they were held headfirst in, and the water-boarding equipment (although George W. would still dispute that this is a form of torture, so perhaps it was there to help the prisoners relax instead).
Approximately twenty thousand people passed through S-21 between 1975 and 1979. Seven survived.
The man who ran this place is called Duch. He was arrested in 1999 somewhere near the Thai border. Claiming to be a born-again Christian, he has fully admitted his supervisory role in the torture and subsequent killing of all these people. It seems that his new-found religion did not, however, provoke enough guilt to make him turn himself in. He was finally brought to trial this year and sentenced to nineteen more years in prison. I'm thinking of sending him an empty cartridge case.
The climbing-frame at Tuol Sleng has not been used for thirty-five years.
>> We - Kiur, Jess, Zoe and me plus friends Aideen and Caitlin - are in Cambodia for a few days. Watch this space for some of the good, the bad and the very ugly indeed. >
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