Sometimes it doesn't take much.

Today is my birthday.(OK, keep the excitement down to a dull roar). At my advancing age it's become something I'd rather ignore.  This year I have struggled with it. No particular reason; a combination of things.  Post holiday blaahs, winter, being underemployed right now with not much work about and friends all being tied up with other things.

It all turned around in the early hours of the morning, however.  Unable to sleep I logged into my favourite new obsession: Twitter. And there it was. Only very short (even in terms of 144 character limitations) but oh so sweet.

"Happy birthday. Have a great one. R."  It made my day. Hell, my life is so uneventful right now it made my week, if not my month. The R. in the tweet is my current lust subject du jour -  Richard Hammond!  I had sent the Top Gear presenter a tweet the day before saying it was my  brithday and would it be possible to have a tweet from him. As he is constantly inundated with messages I had no real hope that anything would come of it . Then a couple of my lovely online friends stepped in and also tweeted him asking to wish me happy birthday and lo and behold he noticed one of them and did.

It's a simple thing.  No great effort on anyone's part.  But thoughtful gestures from friends and a celebrity who perhaps doesn't take it for granted or is mindful that fans are the reason he's where he is, took that little bit of time out of his busy shedule to send that message.  It cost no one anything. Yet it's made me ridiculously happy.  I had a grin from ear to ear when I read that message and I'm  still smiling.

So you don't need to spend vast amounts of money or make huge gestures. Sometimes it's just the little things that demonstrate that others are thinking of you that mean the most.

Thanks Cath, Elaine, Kim and thank you Richard Hammond.

Cambodia

This isn't a book review.  Not long ago I was lucky enough to visit Thailand, Lao, Vietnam and Cambodia. A wonderful, beautiful, vibrantly colourful part of the world.

I knew about the history of the region. I grew up to the backdrop of the Vietnam War on the telly.  My country conscripted young men and forced them into National Service. Many lives were ruined and lost. As a teenager I supported the anti-war movement in that vague semi-informed way that young teens will do . Had my husband been just a year older he too may have been caught up in the draft.

We saw reminders of the war everywhere. The engine of a downed B52 in the middle of a pond in the cente of Hanoi.  The infamous Hanoi Hilton, the Cu Chi tunnels that were so effective in thwarting the US war effort, old bomb craters, but nowhere were these reminders of the recent past so stark and moving as in Cambodia.

I won't go into history here. I'm not an expert.  There are numerous sources that can talk about the what, why and when with far greater knowledge than I possess.

What I want to talk about is the effect Cambodia seems to have had on me. I visited in April as a tourist. In Phnom Penh we had what our tour guide dubbed  "misery afternoon" first a visit to the infamous Tuol Sleng, the High School in Phnom Penh that was turned into a "detention centre"  Photos of prisoners. Hundreds and hundreds of them. All of them "executed".  Men, women and children; staring out at us in black and white. Some wide-eyed with fear and panic. Others seemingly resigned. One young man even managed a slight shy smile.  On the tiled floor of the former classrooms are many dark stains.  The blood of those condmned to be sent there

It is estimated that between 17,000 - 20,000 prisoners found themselves in Tuol Sleng. Of those there were only 7 known survivors.. All but two of whom are now dead.  We were lucky enough to meet one of the surviving two the day we visited. He is now elderly and spends much of his time there meeting people, and selling books and magazines about the prison and his experience in order to supplement the all to meagre pension that was awarded to him by the Cambodian Government.

If I thought that was bad it was nothing to what confronted us when we visited Choeung Ek -one of the Killing Fields.  There are an estimated 20,000 bodies on this site. Serious excavation ceased some years ago, but because of the seasonal nature of the rains, remains are constantly coming to the surface. On our walk around the site we saw part of the top of a skull sitting on the ground. A partial lower jaw bone with teeth poking out of the surface, numerous fragments - probably from limbs, and rotting pieces of clothing.

There is a large pyramid-like structure there with glass sides; several stories of the remains of vicitms of the murderous paranoia of the Khymer Rouge/Pol Pot Regime.

Around the site are a couple of glass cases which hold other remains discovered since the completion of the main memorial. One of them; about the size of a fish tank, has clothing. The most poignant of which are a pair of intact purple shorts - child-sized.

You see, they didn't just murder men and women. Innocent children were killed as well. Mostly, it seems because keeping them alive was an inconvenience. They would have had to be fed and sheltered.

Most of the killing occurred under cover of darkness to a soundtrack of blaring loudspeakers to try and drown out the screaming. Not for them the quick bullet to the brain.  That would have made too much noise. Instead most were executed with sharpened gardening implements. Shovels, mattocks and the like. Some poor souls had their throats cut with the razor sharp-edges of sugar palm fronds.

There is a crater - an excavated pit where the bodies of several hundred women and children were found. Every one of them naked.

But the worst, the very worst was the tree. I can't remember what sort of tree. Its trunk is fairly substantial and snagged on the bark are hundreds upon hundreds of those colourful cord bracelets that are given out when being blessed by a buddhist monk. They are there to pay respects to many tiny ones who died at that spot. How? They were taken by their feet and their little heads bashed against that tree.

Tragic, terrible, brutal.  Horrifying to even contemplate, how can man do that to someone else? What makes it more horrifying was that most of those so-called executioners were little more than children themselves.  Removed from anything resembling family life and indoctrinated at an early age, they were the just right for the purpose.

It was awful at the time. It was upsetting but I was OK. I was OK yesterday and I suspect I'll be just fine tomorrow, but today for some reason its haunting me, and I feel compelled to write something down.

There is so much more I could say. I could talk about how just about everyone you meet in Cambodia lost someone near and dear to them. Numbers are irrelevent. In terms of per head of population the number of lives lost in the insanity of the 5 years of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge far eclipse the Nazis or Stalinist Soviet Union. 

Do I regret visiting those sights of these unimaginable atrocities? No I don't. I'm glad I went.  Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it..
Lest we forget.

Review: The Devil's Double

Title: Devil’s Double
Author: Latif Yahia
Publisher: Arrow Books
ISBN: 0099465558

We’ve all read and heard stories about the brutality and excesses of Saddam Hussein and his regime. His eldest son, Uday , in particular had the reputation for being as bad as, if not worse than his father.

The author, Latif Yahia was the son of a well-to-do Baghdad businessman who attended school with Uday Hussein. They were born within days of each other and bore a strong resemblance to one another. In 1987 while Yahia was serving in the army he was plucked from the front line and taken to meet Uday Hussein where he was told he was being afforded a great honour; an honour he couldn’t refuse. He was to become Uday’s “fiday”, his serf and double. Yahia underwent painful plastic and dental surgery and spent months being forced to copy and perfect Uday’sspeech patterns and every gesture.

THE DEVIL’SDOUBLE bears witness to some of the things that went on inside the heavily guarded compound in which Saddam and his family spent much of their time.

Uday was taken to see his first execution at the age of six and watched people being tortured at age ten. His unrestrained appetite for sex and violence appears to have been the inevitable consequence of a life led without any boundaries or consequences whatsoever. Is it any wonder he became such a monster?

It’s a little difficult to know what to make of Latif Yahia and his story. He claims to have witnessed some dreadfu latrocities, which appear to have been a part of every day life for the Hussein clan, and much of the book is devoted toYahia registering his disgust at the things he saw. However, there does appear to be a great deal of self-justification going on. Yahia describes the invasion of Kuwait and how the Husseins used that invasion to loot as much as they could. He tells of Uday assembling three teams of twenty men each assigned to ransack the country. One team was responsible for “requisitioning”as many up-market European cars as they could, another electrical goods and athird was to take over villas and large houses for use of the new “government”in Kuwait. This little enterprise garnered Uday $125 million from the sale of cars alone. Yahia condemns this , but at the same time admits to having taken some cars himself to line his own pockets.

The book itself is not particularly well written. At times there seems to be a slight overuse of adjectives that don’t always fit. I felt it could have benefited from tighter editing. However, that weakness is over-ridden by the stories Yahia has to tell. Some of them almost defy belief.

If Uday saw something he wanted he’d just take it. Everything from cars to women. There is one horrifying story about him seeing a pair of newly weds and deciding he wanted the wife. The husband, an officer in the Iraqi army who had served for ten years was on leave from the front. They had been married just one day. The husband was restrained and beaten, the wife dragged screaming to Uday’s hotel room. When she resisted his advances he beat her until she was bleeding badly and then raped her. He left the room and the woman feeling too shamed to live, committed suicide by jumping from the sixth floor window. The husband, beside himself with grief tried to attack Uday in the hotel foyer. He was arrested, charged with “insulting the president”and executed a few days later. Just another day in the life of Uday Hussein.

Uday owned hundreds of cars and thousands of suits. He even banned the importation of Ferraris into Iraq so that he would bethe only person to own them. Such wasthe power of the Husseins in Iraq that not even witnesses held back Uday. At a party one day his father’sofficial food taster incurred his wrath so he killed him with an electricknife, in front of tall the guests, including wife of the President of Egypt.

Yahir escaped the country to tell his tale.To be honest, this particular yarn seems a little too far-fetched nto be plausible. It did damage his Yahia's credibility somewhat for me. Just how much of it is completely true is perhaps open for debate but there is no doubt that THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE is jaw-dropping at times.

THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE has been recently made into a movie, starring Dominic Cooper as both Uday and Latif Yahir and Philip Quast as Saddam.

Links: The DevilsDouble – book

Devil’s Double movie website

Further reading:

Latif Yahia: Fiday or Fantasist?http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/aug/13/devils-double-tangled-tale

Review: THE DARK SIDE - Roger Rogerson

Roger Rogerson is probably one of Australia's best known and notorious police officers. Presented with a medal for his services to the police force in 1980, just a few short years later he found himself facing charges of corruption and attempted murder which despite acquittal, ended his career in the police force.

THE DARK SIDE is Rogerson's own version of events. Not surprisingly it doesn't dwell on the events that made him a house-hold name. He focuses more on cases he worked on over his long career in the police force.

Reading the autobiography of someone who has become notorious for whatever reason is always a little difficult; especially if there has been past misdeeds or alleged crimes. Just how much of the truth are you really getting? After all you're only getting their side of the story and there's nothing in the way of critical analysis of that story.

I doubt that Rogerson was telling "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." There is little or no mention about the events that made him so notorious although his accounts of cases he worked on are interesting enough. You get the picture of what would be called an old time traditional detective who isn't averse to bending the rules to achieve and outcome. Just how far those rules were bent is left to the individual to decide.

Top Gear and Richard Hammond

If you are any sort of Petrol-head and even if you aren't chances are you have encountered the juggernaut that it BBC tvs TOP GEAR in some form or other. The show, the books, the merchandise; they're everywhere.

I have to admit I'm a huge fan of the show. It's not about the cars; it's about the British knack for taking diverse personalities and creating some sort of special magic that can entertain millions.

That's why I love Top Gear. Clarkson, May and Hammond, when let off the leash are hysterically funny. They are allowed to fully indulge their schoolboy sense of humour and are probably laughing all the way to the bank. All of them have had books published.

Everyone who watches the show will have their favourite. Mine is Richard Hammond. His boyish good looks and his self-deprecating sense of humour are somehow endearing. So when I hit a reading slump just before Christmas I decided I needed something light and entertaining to get over it. Richard Hammond's books were the perfect antidote.

ON THE EDGE by Richard Hammond tells the story of the now famous crash which nearly killed him and resulted in him suffering brain damage. It's told from the point of view of both Hammond (his memories up to the crash) and his wife (afterwards and his rehabilitation)

Then there's OR IT IS JUST ME? A collection of ancedotes about the antics, expeditions and races Hammond has experienced on Top Gear.

AS YOU DO tells the story of the Top Gear Race to the North Pole from Hammond's perspective. While Clarkson and May were in a custom built car, Hammond was trotting along behind a dog sled. You have to be fit and highly motivated to accomplish that.

Also in the book is Hammond's account of their race across Bostwana and his meeting of his childhood idol, Evel Kneivel.

So while, no one by any stretch of the imagination could call Hammond's writing literature it is entertaining and pulled me out of my reading slump.

So thank you Richard Hammond.