The Different Faces of Power

I have been reading a provocative book about “development” which came out recently and whose very title gives a flavour of its thesis - The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (the link gives the full text!).

From its many reviews, it has already created quite a furore in the extensive community which has been earning its (considerable) living from advising poorer countries for the past 50-60 years.

I found myself engaged in a bit of a confessional when I tried to put down my initial thoughts about the book’s thesis. This post explains why - the next post will try to summarise the book’s content and the arguments it has produced.

“Development consultancy” is a term used for people funded by international agencies who fly into countries which have been designated as “underdeveloped” and write reports and implement programmes designed to increase their social and economic wellbeing….(that of the hosts that is (!) Sadly the reality has generally proved disappointing and had, by the 80s attracted a considerable backlash led by the likes of PD Bauer.

The collapse of communism in 1989 gave development (and other sorts of) economists the kiss-of-life…..not least in central and Eastern Europe where I found myself occasionally rubbing shoulders with some of them. By then I had morphed from a specialist in “urban and community development” (with both academic and political roles) in the West of Scotland (1970-1990) to a role as a technical consultant in “institutional development” – working on programmes in central Europe (and central Asia) designed to develop the capacity of state bodies to serve the interests of citizens in democratic societies…….if the reader will forgive me for the jargon……I offered some thoughts about this experience in a recent post (more fully developed in one of my E-books Crafting Effective Public Management)

Some 20 years ago I penned a small autobiographical book entitled “Puzzling Development” marking that change of role – a book whose cover carried the famous 1871 painting “The Geographer” by Henri de Braekeleer and whose subtitle was “Odyssey of a Modern Candide” – a theme which has run though quite a few of my scribbles since the 70s. 

The introduction promises to cover issues relating to bureaucratic, urban and policy change; public involvement; privatisation; and technical assistance and covered experience of four countries

In 1977 I had produced my first little book – “The Search for Democracy” whose cover showed community activists poring over a map and, I noticed yesterday for the first time in 25 or so years, a puzzled little boy cut out from the main group and standing alone at the side…….my alter ego and hero no less - Hans Christian Anderson’s creation who dared utter the magic words “but the Emperor has no clothes!!). Its sub-title had been “a guide to and polemic about Scottish local government” and it tried to answer 43 questions which people I worked with would ask me

Was it significant that the cover of my later and most rigorous book - In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) – written as a calling card for the younger generation I was by then working with in ex-communist countries - showed simply a rock on an Atlantic beach with the geological strata starkly revealed by the ocean’s pounding…..???? Had I even then become fatalistic about human endeavour???

But “revenons aux moutons” as the French say…..the author of The Tyranny of Experts is an American guy called William Easterly who published an earlier book in 2006 with the equally provocative title - The White Man’s Burden – why the west’s efforts to aid the rest of the world have done so much ill and so little good.

Easterly, clearly, is a sceptic – but scepticism is a feature I value – have a look at my Sceptic’s Glossary if you don’t believe me. It’s actually called “Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power” 

Sceptics challenge what JK Galbraith wonderfully called “the conventional wisdom” and, providing they actually embody the spirit of sceptical inquiry, are a necessary and critical element in any intellectual journey….I add the qualification simply because quite a few contrarians do have an agenda (generally a libertarian one). 

We have an ambivalent attitude to “experts” – even medical ones – conceding that engineers and surgeons deserve our respect but rightly questioning the “expertise” of many experts in the field of social sciences….particularly those employed by powerful international bureaucracies which certainly have agendas of their own…..

But it is the development economists that Easterly has it in for……who seduce the powerful with talk of the wealth and progress which will come if only they follow their advice….

I found the opening section of the book very worthwhile because –

- it gives a rare insight into the start of the discipline of development economics; some of its key figures and arguments; and its “divorce” from mainstream economics

- it questions the focus on the nation, reminding us that the infrastructure of economics is based (questionably for many of us) on the “rationality” of the individual consumer and (small) company

- it reminds us of how important to the development of capitalism was the challenge to power of the spirit of liberty

As it happens, my University course developed an interest for me in the space between the nation and the individual company – and how its operations might be improved ie regional, urban and, latterly, community development.

And one of the people whose writings made a big impression on me (some ten years later) was Ivan Illich whose challenge to the power of health and educational professionals was a breath of fresh air for me and profoundly influenced  the community power element of Strathclyde Region’s Social Strategy for the Eighties which I helped shape.

Illich was, of course, your quintessential anarchist – distrusting the sort of well-intentioned power held by those of us who managed a social strategy which went on to shape the strategies of the system of the Scottish governments which have held power in the past 15 years……But governments have to select priorities for both their attention and funding. With some hesitation we did designate what we called in the late 1970s “areas of priority treatment” - initially 45 of them whose inhabitants’ lives we tried to assist with the help of community structures led by community activists assisted by development workers….

I doubt whether we got the balance right between community, professional and political power – and subsequent events demonstrated how easily economic power caps everything……But at least we tried

The question for readers of Easterly’s book is how well he deals with those different faces of power……….

The cartoon is by a brilliant Romanian - Bogdan Petry - whose exhibition we saw this week in the Campulung gallery. His savage work is on a par with the great Ralph Steadman......

New Blogs

Like most active bloggers, I have a section on the site which lists my “favourite links” – and, like most bloggers, I rarely update it or even reference them myself all that often.

And I find that my taste for blogs change – some soon pall for their rants; others (eg Craig Murray) begin to annoy for their predictable contrariness even although I will still access them.

A few of the good ones send me automatic updates – generally the collective sites such as Eurozine journal, RSA and the Real World Economist blogs; the great Scottish Review E-journal; and one single blogger How to Save the World.

Those I have discovered in the past year which deserve a special mention include –

- Poemas del rio Wang - the most amazing site which tends to focus on memories of old central and east European lands; which runs some trips to them; but whose current series is on Iran

- That’s How the Light Gets In – the imaginative site of a retired Liverpudlian Polytechnic lecturer with strong cultural tastes

- Michael Roberts blog - an elegantly written Marxist economist blog

- Econblog101- a blog about economic matters written by a German

- Club Orlov – a very original “end-of-oil” blog by a writer who has written several fascinating books

- Stumbling and Mumbling - a rather academic blog with, however, good hyperlinks 

- Britain is no Country for Older Men – an informative (if rather sexist) blog which celebrates the life achievements of various unsung heroes

- Paul Cairney; politics and public policy – one of the best academic blogs for me, written by a Scottish Professor who explains in clear language the approach to various aspects of public policy

And a recent one whose title Economy for the common good resonates with my own new website - Mapping the Common Ground - leading in turn to another new interesting site - Take Back the Economy which was discussing Paul Mason’s new book Postcapitalism – a Guide to the Future

Schuld

I’m conscious that my big readers these past few weeks have been from Russian servers – although I’m not sure if they are from heartland Russia or, perhaps, from places like Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan where I lived for 7 years – ie friends who happen to have Russian servers…….

So far they don’t seem to have been turned off by my recent posts on German subjects – so let me pursue the thoughts aroused by the latest book I have been reading these last few days…….

  

Gunther Grass - writer, artist (not least gastronomic) and political activist – was a larger than life German who died last April at the age of 87. I was never a fan of his novels (I preferred Heinrich Boll) - although I did appreciate his social activism (so typical of the post-war German generation).

I found a lovely English first edition of his autobiography – “Peeling the Onion” – in Sofia’s great second-hand bookshop (The Elephant) a few months ago and was bowled over when I eventually got round to reading it. It’s not just that it charts so powerfully the trajectory of an intelligent youngster (from an area which is now in Poland) facing the monstrosities of the times – but the sheer poetry……….

It apparently caused a sensation in Germany  a decade ago when it revealed that he had been in a youth SS group for the last year of the war – something which he had carefully hidden until the last phase of his life……

But Timothy Garten Ash, the indefatigable chronicler of the 1980s central European spirit of revolution, was able to rise above that furore in the NYRB review (in the year of its English translation) entitled The Road from Danzig 

this is a wonderful book, a return to classic Grass territory and style, after long years of disappointing, wooden, and sometimes insufferably hectoring works from his tireless pen, and a perfect pendant to his great “Danzig trilogy” of novels, starting with The Tin Drum.

An account of his life from the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, when as an eleven-year-old war-enthusiast he collected fragments of shrapnel from the first fighting in his native Danzig, to the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959, “Peeling the Onion” repeatedly surprises, delights, and moves with passages of great descriptive power.

 He enables us not merely to see but to hear, touch, and smell life in the tiny, two-room apartment in Danzig where he grew up, with a shared lavatory on the staircase—“a stink-cell, the walls of which fingers had smeared.”1 From this suffocating narrowness the teenager longed to escape into what he saw as the romantic, heroic world of service in the Führer’s armed forces. So at the age of fifteen he volunteered to fight on a U-boat, but his offer was not accepted (although he was called up a year later to a SS brigade).

One of my favourite British blogs - That’s How the Light Gets In - picked up the story in a recent post-  

What follows after this last admission (which stunned the world) is a brilliant evocation of scenes that the teenager  witnessed when his unit was taken to the collapsing front in Lower Silesia,  passing through a burning Dresden: 

Soldiers young and old, in Wermacht uniforms.  Hanging from trees still bare along the road, from linden trees in the marketplaces.  With cardboard signs on their chests branding them as cowards and subversive elements. […]Off to the side I see peasants working their fields, furrow after furrow, as if nothing were wrong.  One has a cow hitched to his plough,  Crows following the plough.Then I see more refugees, filling the streets in long processions: horse carts and overladen handcarts pushed and pulled by old women and adolescents; i see children clutching dolls, perched on suitcases and rope-bound bundles.  An old man is pulling a cart containing two lambs hoping to survive the war. 

His first encounter with the enemy comes with a ‘Stalin Organ’ rocket attack that leaves bodies strewn everywhere. Soon he is stranded behind enemy lines, in woods with Russians close by. Twigs crack underfoot – someone is nearby; a figure approaches and, terrified, the young Grass sings a German melody which is answered in kind.  

Grass the memoirist can now only identify the man who appeared, the man who became his guardian angel, who led him out of the woods, over the fields and across the Russian front line, as ‘the lance corporal’.  He had fought with the Polish campaign, in France and Greece, and as far afield as the Crimea. The lance corporal is his saviour, but then, in a Soviet tank attack, the lance corporal’s legs are ripped to bits. The last sight young Gunter has of him is of him being wheeled past from a battlefield operating room, his eyes wide open, amazed and unbelieving – a legless torso. 

Soon the Fuhrer is no more and Grass, having been transferred to a military hospital in Marienbad finds himself, a seventeen-year-old priapic youth, under the care of Finnish nurses. Hungry for sex, he is even more hungry for nourishment. Finally freed from the American POW camp at Bad Aibling, a displaced person in the British Occupied Zone, Grass found his first officially-registered residence as a free man in Cologne,

‘a pile of debris with an occasional miraculously-surviving street sign stuck to what was left of a façade, or hung on a pole sticking out of the rubble, which was also sprouting lush patches of dandelions about to blossom.’

He scavenges ‘like a stray dog for food, a place to sleep, and – driven by that other hunger – skin on skin contact’. An encounter in the station waiting-room leads him to Hanover and his first job of work after the war is over: an encounter with ‘the eternal lance-corporal in his dyed Wermacht uniform’, his wooden leg stretched out in front of him, smoking a pipe filled with ‘an indefinable substance only distantly related to tobacco’.He looked as if he had survived not only the most recent war but also the Thirty Years’ War and Seven Years’ War: he was timeless. The veteran suggests Hanover where there is work underground in the potash mines.

There, Gunter finds work as a coupler boy, hooking up dumper wagons laden with potash to form underground trains.  It is there in the mine that, for the first time by his own account, he entered the world of politics, albeit still only as a teenage observer.  During breaks in the intensive work routine caused by regular power cuts, the older men would sit and argue politics – the Communists, the Nazi nostalgists, and the Social-Democrats: 

Even though I had trouble making sense of the issues that infuriated them so, I realized, coupler boy and idiot on the fringe, that when push came to shove the Communists inevitably teamed up with the Nazis to shout down the Social Democrat remainder. 

One Sunday morning Gunter’s locomotive driver took him into Hanover to hear the head of the Social Democratic Party, Kurt Schumacher, speak to an open-air audience of several thousand (mull over that number for a minute). No he didn’t speak, he screamed, the way all politicians … screamed. And yet the future Social Democrat and unflinching supporter of “ontheonehandandontheother” took to heart some of the words that the frail figure with the empty, fluttering sleeve thundered down to his ten thousand adherents in the blazing sun. 

Later, of course, Grass would be a supporter and speech-writer for Willy Brandt and his ‘policy of small steps’, and in “The Diary of a Snail” would prescribe ‘crawling shoes for the ills of progress. The snail’s track, not the fast track.  A long road paved with cobblestones of doubt.’

And, finally, to the NYRB review - 

Fear and hunger are the twin sensations that permeate these pages. His chapter about seeing action with the Waffen-SS is entitled “How I Learned Fear.”

His hunger is threefold. First, hunger for food, especially in American prisoner-of-war camps. Second, hunger for sex, described in a kind of lingering, amused physical detail that reminds me of the work of the English poet Craig Raine, whose poem “The Onion, Memory” anticipates Grass’s book-long metaphor. 

The object of Grass’s final hunger, after food and sex, is art. He calls his chapter about becoming an artist “The Third Hunger.” Battling his way, alone, with a strong will and professed egoism, up the physical and social rubble mountains of postwar Germany, he becomes first a stonemason and part-time sculptor, then a graphic artist, then a poet, and only at the end, in his late twenties, a writer of prose, inspired by Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Joyce’s Ulysses, both discovered and devoured in the library of the well-heeled, cultivated Swiss parents of his first wife, Anna. “Anna’s dowry,” he calls it.
The memoir ends with his finding, in Paris, what would become one of the most famous first lines of any novel—“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital.” And the rest is literature.

The Loss of German Identity?

In the post-war period academics were about the only British writers who tried to deal with Germany – and then only historians such as AJP Taylor and Richard Evans or political scientists such as Willie Patterson. John Ardagh was the exception with his large book on contemporary German society - Germany and the Germans - which came out in the early 1990s but was quickly out of print. Those wanting to read about Germany had to make do with books about the Nazi period or knock-abouts such as Ben Donald’s Springtime for Germany – or how I learned to love Lederhosen (2007) whose German edition ("Deutschland for Beginners") I found a good read when I picked it up in a remaindered pile for 1 euro a couple of years ago.

About five years ago, things began to change with Peter Watson’s monumental German Genius and Simon Winder’s rather eccentric Germania. Now a trickle has turned into a stream with serious books such as Germany - Memories of a Nation (focusing on cultural objects); Reluctant Meister - how Germany’s past is Shaping its European Future; and Germany - beyond the Enchanted Forest (a literary anthology) vying for space on the bookshelves. Last year a long book actually appeared with the title The Novel in German since 1990 (which is actually the only one of this new stream now to be wending its way to me)

And Berlin's new role as a tourist hotspot has produced a variety of tantalising books such as Cees Nooteboom’s Roads to Berlin (2012); Peter Schneider’s Berlin Now – the City after the Wall (2014);  and Rory McLean’s Berlin – Imagine a City (2014) – all of which await on my bookshelf for my attention

Curiously, however, still nothing on contemporary Germany to vie with John Ardagh’s book of 20 years ago!

These last few days, however, I have been devouring a large book which has just appeared - Death of a Nation; a new History of Germany - a delightful and enlightening read which I could hardly put down (despite the weight of its 700 pages). The provocative title gives a clue to the author’s approach – which focuses on the loss of German identity and lands since its heyday a century ago…..

This is a real history – whereas Watson and Winder concentrate on intellectual achievement and cultural monuments respectively. But it’s not your typical dry academic stuff! It’s highly committed and doesn’t pull punches – opening my eyes, for example, to the behavior of Czechs and Poles in the early part of the last century…..

And he really makes the history of the German lands (and key actors in both Germany and Europe) come alive in a way I have not experienced with other history books. Although I lived in Prague for more than a year in the early 90s, I never real understood the remnants I saw there of its German past (despite my 2 years of German studies at university)….Unusually for an historian he doesn’t hesitate to “contextualize” German brutalities by citing the extensive history of  massacres perpetrated by Belgian, British and Soviet authorities in Africa, Russia and Asia.

The author states clearly in his Preface his intention to 

" put in a much broader historical context the enormous human and cultural cost to Germany and German Austria of losing two world wars and the damage that has done to their sense of national identity"

This focus becomes clear in the second half of the book - which covers the fate not only of Jews but of the people who, in 2 World Wars, suddenly found themselves (by the massive border changes) living as minorities in foreign countries – a tale which has been ignored until recently in the huge literature of the second world war. As someone who has been living in central and eastern Europe for the past 25 years, I find this is an important and highly commendable objective and one rarely attempted by an outsider.

I have to confess, however, that my focus wavered in the section dealing with the death struggle of the Nazi regime (more than 100 pages after page 400). He had carried me with him until that point – and then lost me…too harrowing????

I will complete the reading and give a final assessment in a few days…….   

The Puritan Gift

I’m always on the lookout for books which challenge how we look at the world which, I’ve realized, rarely come from the incestuous and patronizing world of academia – let alone from the battalions of cheerleaders for “new management thinking”. I should know because I chose, twenty years ago as part of a career change, to undergo a crash course of reading the literature on “change management”. It’s true that I did find some useful stuff (which I summarized on pages 145-165 of my book In Transit) – particularly the (neglected) writings of Robert Quinn – but most material was pretty superficial and I probably got more out of two devastating critiques – Management Gurus – what makes them and how to become one (1993); and The Witch Doctors – making sense of the management gurus (1996)

A month or so I read a really original book - The Puritan Gift (2009) – which told a powerful story of how and why American business had changed its values in the second half of the 20th Century. A book which one of the great management writers of the 20th century - Russell Ackoff - has called 

"one of the best books I have ever read in my long life......a social history of the American nation which doubles up as a commentary on management culture"

The argument of the book (written by brothers in their 80s) is that the mid-20th century strength of American business, and the prosperity and cultural confidence that created, was due to key characteristics inherited from the country's founding fathers, the Puritan dissenters, and reinforced by many of the subsequent waves of immigrants.

The Hopper brothers list these characteristics as:

- a sense of moral purpose in life;

- a liking and aptitude for mechanical skills;

- collegiality, giving the group priority over individual interests; and organizational ability.

As they sum up: “The Puritan Gift is a rare ability to create organizations that serve a useful purpose, and to manage them well.”

The book falls into three parts. The first is a history of the early days and heyday of US corporations, which they start with Colonel Roswell Lee's Armory in Springfield, Massachussetts. It demonstrated to many subsequent businesses the importance of technical know-how, it was innovative organisationally, it was an enlightened employer, and was collegial – including outside the boundaries of the Armory itself, sharing know-how and best practice with other gun-makers.

One fascinating chapter describes the transplantation of this American approach to Japanese business through the actions of three communications engineers employed in the MacArthur occupation. The Japanese communications and electronics industry was remade in the image of the best of America, and the Hoppers attribute the success of the consumer electronics industry to the adoption of these management practices. A war-destroyed, impoverished country became the world's second biggest economy in the space of three decades.

Decay set in early, however, and the Hoppers' first villain is Frederick W Taylor. He started the process of turning efficient organisational structures into social hierarchies, with top managers increasingly less likely to be engineers or technicians working their way up from the shop floor.

Business schools continued this evisceration of the actual process of business, creating a professional cadre of managers, superior in status in pay, and with purely financial and abstract knowledge in place of the tacit skills and experience previously displayed by management cohorts. The downfall was completed by the steadily increasing celebration of greed, sucking the moral heart out of American capitalism.

It's hard to disagree with the outlines of this argument, harder to know what to do about it. The final part of the book is a brief attempt to suggest some ideas, with a list of 25 principles of Puritan management. Most of these seem very sensible without setting the heart racing. The key aspect of the Puritan Gift seems to be the sense of purpose. As John Kay has argued (in The Foundations of Corporate Success), a good business is one with a clear sense of purpose. The profits are a by-product, but without the core purpose there is no hope of sustained profitability.

Perhaps a benefit of the crisis is that the penny has dropped with some business leaders. Of course all too many are still driven by short-term financial engineering and their own bonus, linked to the share price. But it could be changing. One encouraging straw in the wind was the declaration recently by Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, that shareholders after the next quarterly profit were not welcome:“Unilever has been around for 100-plus years. We want to be around for several hundred more years. So if you buy into this long-term value creation model, which is sustainable, then come and invest with us. If you don't buy into this, then I respect you as a human being, but don't put your money in our company.”
(Quoted by Michael Skapinker, FT, 24/11/10)

Hugh Stretton - polymath and social democrat - RIP

Most “social scientists” are actually narrow technical specialists – in such subjects as economics or political science – loathe to threaten their career path by taking on big issues or using clear language…

Hugh Stretton, who died earlier this month at the age of 91, was a polymath whose work should be a powerful reproof to the rubbish most social scientists inflict on us. His work ranged from The Political Sciences (1969); Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (1976); to a 900 page anti-Samuelson textbook Economics; a new introduction (1999)

Forty years on, I still feel the tingle brought on by the clarity of his writing in the second of these books - and regret that I failed to notice his 1999 blockbuster which looks to deserve inclusion in any short list of key books about Economics.

There is a nice vignette of his work in this paper which stresses the social democratic essence of the man and should shame those of us who come from that tradition to do more to reassert it….(Craig Murray has a recent post about the present UK Labour leadership contest in that vein)

Sadly, Stretton’s work does not seem to have impacted beyond Australia although Steve Keen (of Debunking Economics fame) carries on the tradition.

JK Galbraith is one of a handful of social scientists who has been able to surmount the ostracism and ridicule generally heaped on those who challenge what he called “the conventional wisdom” with superb clarity of writing……

While googling for more material on Stretton, I came across this fascinating 734 page Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists which, curiously, fails to include him…….not specialist enough??????

For those wanting more on Debunking Economics – there are a couple of freebies here and here

Culinary and cultural delights despite the Sofia heat

I don’t remember such heat as I’ve experienced this past week in Sofia – although I lived through 4 Tashkent summers; 2 Baku ones and 2 Bishkek ones. 

The saving graces for the latter 2 were the sea (Caspian) and the mountain respectively. And Vitosha mountain does give Sofia delightful breezes……

The afternoon trips to the (indoor) pool also help. The (ageing) body needs such compensations – which is why I look forward to returning shortly to my (Carpathian) redoubt which was still in June a bit cold and damp…..

In the meantime I’m enjoying the culinary delights of Sofia in my new neighbourhood – Papa Joe’s and a great street café with very tasty Czech beer….And a great Chardonnay from a new winery in Svilengrad – Santa Maria, for only 3 euros….courtesy of Sofia’s best little wineshop (at the Russian Monument) owned by young Asen Tsekov

Sofia’s big event a couple of months ago was the opening of its new art complex in what was its Museum of European Art. It took me 4 hours to do it all justice – but I am a copious note-taker (for my ongoing project about Bulgarian art - Memory’s Veil – lifting the shroud concealing Bulgarian Art)

I shall shortly create a new folder about this on my Flickr file

In the meantime, here's a little paintings we were gifted this week by Yuliana Sotirova.....

German Musings

Tourism is one of the biggest global industries and yet gives us few real opportunities to fathom the soul of a country – although a retired generation with time and education is now beginning to experience some of the treasures which Europe offers…..and can access books from such publishing houses as The Collected Traveler, The Intercultural Press and Cities of the Imagination which offer great cultural insights not only into countries but even to a few cities  

Readers will know that I recently started my own contribution to this genre when my daughters started to visit me in Romania and Bulgaria – see the list of E-books at the top-right of the blog…..

Now I want to announce a little one on……..Germany based mainly on posts I made during a 10 week stay in Koln in 2013. The booklet is called German Musings

I have been out of the UK for 25 years – spending about 2 years apiece living and working in about a dozen countries on projects designed to improve the capacity of their state institutions. I was in Bulgaria in early 2013 when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had to decide where to go for appropriate treatment.

But first I had to learn more about the condition and its treatment – which helped me understand that the surgical treatments which had become routine were now being questioned – not just because of their invasive nature but because there was every probability that the symptoms would reappear after a few years….

 

As an expat Brit I quickly ruled out that country – partly for the delays trying to go as a citizen without medical records would entail but also because the French and German health systems were performing better (in general terms) in the various international league tables (not least WHO). But I did want to go to a country whose language I spoke.

I narrowed the internet search to hospitals in those two countries which seemed to have a good record for treating prostate cancer and E-mailed off some queries….The French hospitals were quickly ruled out for two reasons –

-       Their focus seemed to be on surgery and I was determined to avoid that

-       They required bureaucratic paperwork which annoyed me

The West German Prostate Centre (Koln) simply asked me to send electronic copies of the diagnosis I had received and quickly gave a detailed commentary which persuaded me that this was the place to go. A few weeks later, on the first of May I touched down in Koln and remained there until mid-July – undergoing initially daily radiation treatment and then three minor operations…….

Time weighed - but Daniela and I were lucky in the choice of flat we had made – even although it involved a couple of moves….

We were in the outskirts - with great parks to walk in (the cemetery was our favourite); trams to ride; and bookshops to visit…..Unhappily. however, we found few people to talk with – apart from our last landlord……

When I eventually was able to connect with the internet, I started to blog and surf again (the habit had started in 2009) and that is what forms the core of this little offering….

I hardly mentioned Koln in the posts – let alone the treatment I was undergoing. This was rather an opportunity to sink into another culture – using the immediate environment as a trigger for questions and casual insights…… One of my delights, for example, was the open-air charity stall near my treatment which offered free second-books……..

I think you'll find the booklet an interesting read - and the annotated reading list is, I think, quite original.........