From Dreams of Flying

First published in The Independent on Sunday Review

Christopher Honey stands on a building site like no other and tries to conjure from the sands his vision of the largest museum in the world. He flips up his camera and points it towards the treetops beyond the northern escarpment, then eastwards where the dunes tumble away to the Cairo-Alexandria desert road, where the jagged rim of the city rises through the haze. Honey is a large man, whose total displacement is as much a product of his personality as it is of his bulk. Turning southwards, he strikes his forehead with the heel of his hand, semaphoring his amazement: ‘I have this incredible sense of solid eternal presence,’ he announces, surveying the skyline. ‘Of a staggering achievement aesthetically and technically.’ He is looking along the northern axis of the most fundamental expression of architectural endeavour in the history of the world and he’s wondering how the hell he ever presumed to design a building with views of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. *** Earlier this year architectural journals carried an announcement from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. Beneath a photograph of a 3000-year-old pottery shard, depicting a plan of the Tomb of Ramesses IXth, was an open invitation to architects around the world to design a building in Giza that would be called the Grand Egyptian Museum. One minute Chris Honey was thinking about redeveloping a knickers factory in Nottingham, and the next he was wondering whether to design a museum complex that would fit in nicely with one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He’s never built a museum, his wife Rebecca was expecting their second child in June, he was in the middle of three house renovations, the knickers factory was his biggest ever opportunity in the UK…haven’t you got to call the joiner about the Oxford job? When’s that planning application due? What time’s Sam getting home from the childminder? It was impossible. But Chris dreams of flying. In Melbourne, where he turned a 1000-acre salt-mine into a luxury resort, he liked to fly over the site in an old Tiger Moth, and encouraged the pilot to test the strength of his stomach. In 1994 he had resigned his job with a large London firm and set up shop in Malaysia, the country of his birth, gambling everything on the move. Things were going well when the Malaysian economy nose-dived in 1997. Starting from scratch in the UK meant house renovations. They were satisfying as far as they went, but lacked the thrills of a forced stall over Melbourne in something little bigger than an Airfix model – or, say, designing a museum in Egypt. In late March, Chris walked into the Abbey National and wired a $350 registration fee to the Bank Misr account of The Supreme Council of Antiquities. That the likes of Foster and Rogers were probably $350 poorer around that time as well, ought to have been the final reason to abort take-off, but this was an anonymous competition under Union of International Architects’ rules such as the one for the Pompidou Centre in 1978 that had launched the then unknown Richard Rogers to superstardom. It was there for the taking, reasoned Chris; the defining architectural challenge of his generation...

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From The Last Fire

First published in The Guardian Weekend Magazine

They were eating in it, sleeping in it, working in it - their cars rotted and babies in their prams were painted red. From 1964, when the Consett Iron Company introduced oxygen steel making, until 1980, when The Works closed, thousands of tonnes of iron oxide dust rained down on the people of Consett, County Durham. In one six month period alone, two-hundred-and-seventeen tonnes of red dust fell on one square mile of the town. People used to pray for rain, because it settled the dust, and when it did rain the streets were like bottles of red ink and the nylons on the washing lines melted. When the stacks on the steel plant blew, the sheep in the fields turned red, says Alex Watson, leader of Derwentside District Council: "The red dust belched out, clouds of it and it rained dust in Consett - everybody got covered in muck. Windows, trees, roads, the entire infrastructure corroded and crumbled." From time to time the Consett Iron Company, and later British Steel, would announce it had found a solution to the "red menace". It never did. Consett lived with the problem for 16 years. The dust came to define the town. It became a metaphor for life in Consett - the appalling working conditions and the endless pollution. Dot Atherton blamed the red dust for Jack’s pain; it was just a theory - most people would have left it at that. It was December 1994 recalls Dot. "Why, it was when you got the throat cancer Jackie, wasn’t it?" "Aye." "Joe had died and...who else was it?" Dot asks herself. "Lawrence Eccles, he had it." Now Dot has to think hard. She decides Lawrence wasn’t dead at that time. "But it wasn’t until you contracted it that we went down to the General, eh Jackie? We were going down for the treatment. I looked about, and there’s Teddy Eccles and Joe Thompson…" Jack is chuckling. "Just like a works outin’, you know," he says. "And I said, ‘Well, there’s a lot from The Grove.’ And I stopped to think, you know, Joe Rhodes died of it, and Lawrence died of it. I thought, ‘That’s a lot for this area’, and I says, ‘I think there’s a problem here.’" She leans forward on the settee in her front room, in this little house in The Grove, a village suburb of Consett, and helps herself to another slice of malt loaf. "D’you know’, I says, I bet that red dust had sumut to do with this."...

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From How to Boil a Kettle

First published in The Independent Saturday Magazine

A force five blows through the old market town of Swaffham in Norfolk. In the poetry of the Beaufort scale, small trees begin to sway, and crested wavelets form on inland waters, but here the breeze is measured by the rising murmur of three blades larger than jumbo jet wings that harvest wind. They are turning at a steady 20 revolutions a minute, but their tips whip by at over 100mph; it is a scale and motion without frame of reference, and it might be sorcery that as they turn, like some ancient primum mobile, 1.3 million watts of electricity are surging down the 67-metre tower to pepper the dusk with light and boil the water in kettles. If local, green generation like this is the future of energy production in the UK it will require a complete reversal of the story so far. The existing National Grid of high-voltage cables, capable of carrying electricity great distances between huge power stations, was built in the Thirties to ensure security of supply. If local generators failed or demand suddenly exceeded capacity, others far away could pick up the load instantly. Today, in the UK, there are 30,000 or so pylons carrying 8,500 miles of overhead lines. Roughly 10,000MW of electricity is always flowing from the North, where most of the fuel is, to the South, where most of the demand is. Although the first giant battery storage plant is currently being built using the latest fuel cell technology, for now electricity must be used as soon as it is generated, and supply and demand has to be balanced from second to second. National Grid engineers ensure that enough generators nationwide are putting enough power into the grid – and not too much – at any moment in time. In his fascinating history of the National Grid, Power to the People, Rob Cochrane quotes one engineer who describes this incredible balancing act as “rather like being asked to prepare a cooked meal and have it ready piping hot at the moment the guests arrive – when you can’t even be sure just how many are coming or precisely when they’ll turn up.”...

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From The Mystery of F4J40

First published in Esquire

At 1755 hours and fourteen seconds on June 2, 1994, a barely audible message was logged on Prestwick air traffic control’s initial contact frequency, “Scottish Military: Good Afternoon. This is Foxtrot Four Juliet Four Zero.” This routine transmission would be the last contact flight F4J40, an RAF Chinook helicopter flying low over the Northern Channel, would have with the rest of the world. Approximately five minutes later, according to the RAF version of events, Chinook serial number ZD576, slammed into Beinn Na Lice, the 'Mountain of the Stone Slab', at 147knots- over l50mph. Eighteen thousand kilograms of aircraft, packing 5,000 kilowatts of energy, punched into the rock face and started to thrash itself to pieces. The nose cone was high in the air as the landing gear and the floor of the central fuselage disintegrated. The forward rotor chewed into rock, tearing the life out of its drive shaft, but incredibly the aircraft stayed airborne. As it careered through the fog, the power to the aft rotor flipped the helicopter over onto its back and for four to five seconds the blades chopped up the landscape and amputated parts of the aircraft. The passengers and the crew died instantly. The Chinook's spine shattered when it smashed violently and finally into the mountainside. ZD576 came to rest in two main pieces 810ft above sea-level. At 1804 hours a broadcast was picked up on Strathclyde police airwaves: "Location: lighthouse, Mull of Kintyre. Think helicopter has crashed in hills... approximately three-quarters of a mile from lighthouse." It was the worst peacetime helicopter crash in the history of the RAF. The list of fatalities was astounding. The army lost a colonel, the most senior officer to be killed while serving in Northern Ireland, and eight lieutenant colonels, mainly army intelligence and SAS. The Royal Ulster Constabulary's Special Branch lost a total of 246 years of experience including the head of Special Branch, the man who knew more about the IRA and covert operations than anyone else alive. The Northern Ireland Office lost six MI5 agents, including the Deputy Director General of MI5. It took the MOD twelve months and thirteen days to publish the Military Aircraft Accident Summary which purported to have all the answers. This terse, two-page report was released to the press on June 16, 1995. Its authors claimed both Special Forces pilots, Flight Lieutenants John Tapper, 28, and Richard Cook, 30, had been negligent to a gross degree because they had continued to fly towards high ground in thick fog below a safe altitude. The summary, which became the basis for newspaper reports, failed to mention that the secret RAF board of inquiry had in fact concluded there was no evidence of human failing. Even when the public inquiry, held in January this year, cleared the pilots of all blame, the RAF still stuck to its guns and maintained that they were guilty...

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From The Colour Hunter

First published in The Independent on Sunday Review

On a hillside near Buxton, Derbyshire, where three shires and four streams meet, the earth is bleeding paint. A slurry of pure ochre bubbles continuously from the ground. “It never loses its colour, never alters,” says Geoff Tunnicliffe, the farmer who owns the land. Standing on a bank of ochre some 15ft thick, he says: “Every now and then a great lump will break off from here and the water it gets into will turn the colour of orange juice.” There was once a glazed earthenware pipe, a foot in diameter, carrying the ochre down the hillside to the large brickwork and flagstone settling pans where it was collected. Mounds of it still fill the pans - abandoned there early in the last century after it became uneconomical to work the deposits. When Tunnicliffe was a boy, local artists would visit Manor Farm to scrape the ochre off stepping stones in the stream with their penknives, and for his part, he still uses it to mix a pale yellow wash to paint his house and puts a little in the sheep dip to give their fleeces a nice sheen on market day. "Come away from the edge. I've lost a cow in there you know," scolds Tunnicliffe, addressing a wiry bespectacled and moustachioed man splashing excitedly around in the large puddle of ochre. In book three of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift has his eponymous hero visit the Grand Academy of Lagado where scholars research the new-fangled and far-fetched. He meets a blind man who is training apprentices to mix paints by only the touch and smell of the colours. Swift wouldn't have thought the notion outlandish if he had met the man now scooping colour into a carrier bag and turning orange as the ochre stains his hands and clothes: "It's a beautiful and unusual orange," Keith Edwards says to Tunnicliffe admiringly. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if Edwards could tell one-shade of red from another just by its taste -which is to say that here is a man who knows a thing or two about colours...

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From The Lake Taupo Invert

First published in London Review of Books

Three and a half hours into the auction at Westbury Hotel in London earlier this year, Jason Chapman is smoking Old Holborn rolled in liquorice paper. In the inside left pocket of his blazer is the ‘Lake Taupo’. He has been assigned to guard it with his life. The stamp has a caramel brown frame, with ‘New Zealand’ at the top, ‘Postage Revenue’ and ‘4d Four Pence 4d’ at the bottom. In the centre is a circular vignette in blue depicting New Zealand’s central volcanic plateau, Lake Taupo and Mount Ruapehu, with two palm trees in the foreground. It is hard to see the illustration clearly because of two thick black cancellations which almost obliterate it, but this vignette is of some significance – it is upside down… The stamp was discovered in 1931 and in that same year vanished. ‘No one in New Zealand is known to have seen it, let alone possess a copy,’ wrote the philatelist Jim Brodie in an article for the NZ Stamp Collector in 1974. The most important 20th Century New Zealand stamp had gone missing. I would like to think the story begins on New Zealand’s North Island one day in the late 1890s. One of Wellington’s early stamp designers J. Gaut, is looking in a south easterly direction across the blue expanse of Lake Taupo at a large volcanic crater out of which rise the snow-clad peaks of Mount Ruapehu, an active volcano standing just short of 2800 metres. He is perched some where on the west bank of the lake a few feet from a pair of palm trees and he captures this remarkable view in strict, stylised lines…

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From Life After Death

First published in Night & Day

The skin is a little discoloured, dark and waxy and wrinkled; otherwise, her hands and feet are much the same as they were in life. The rest of her skin has been carefully removed to expose the muscles and blood vessels and fascia of the human body, and so it seems that the extremities alone serve as a reminder that Number 47 was a human being before she became the most sophisticated learning aid on the planet. On this Monday afternoon in October, she rests on a tubular steel trolley in the dissection room at St George’s Hospital Medical School, south London. A register of the nine students who will dissect her lies by her head. In just a few minutes, she will introduce them to the arcana of anatomy. Little light enters the room from the small, louvred windows near the ceiling. An unnatural brightness, shed by the banks of fluorescent tubes on to the white lab coats, the white-boned skeletons and the 14 white body bags, is more unnerving than the ubiquitous smell of the preserving formalin. To the uninitiated, Number 47 might appear grotesque, and the first year medical students waiting anxiously in the corridor outside will take their time getting used to her; but Dr Ceri Davies would say she is remarkably beautiful – the way she’s arranged, the simple mechanics, everything in the right place to do what she had to do. Dr Davies, the head of dissection at St George’s, says: “It really is a privilege to be able to dissect them.”...

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From Brainstorm

First published in The Independent Saturday Magazine

Close your eyes and conjure a memory. Select a special place from your past: the view from a hotel room, or through a lych gate, or across a valley.  Visualise the image in your mind. On the right side of your brain, neurons are firing in your frontal lobe:  monitoring, sequencing and organising. Remote regions of your brain are working  in parallel. Chemical reactions and electrical charges travel through neuronal  circuits and across synapses, reaching the temporal lobe at the side of your head, meeting signals from the hippocampal system below. Memory is the "most fundamental and elusive of human powers", writes Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory. Now imagine that it all stops. Imagine  amnesia. The sun on a coastal road. Stopping to repair a puncture in the early morning  light. It's 5 July 1994. The next memory that Peter Wheeler can be certain about  is six weeks later. He is being driven to his parents' house near Solihull in the West Midlands and he is reciting the street names. He was a postman, and the  names still come easily. He desperately needs to prove to himself that his brain is still working. In the five years since he came off his bicycle near Bishopsbourne, south of Canterbury, fracturing his skull in three places, Peter has devoted himself to putting his past back together. Like all amnesiacs who have suffered a head  injury, he will never be able to recall the accident. He has no idea how he came off his touring bike so suddenly. Police who examined the scene found no evidence of a collision or holes in the road and so the accident will always be a mystery, but Peter is determined that the rest of his life won't stay that way. When he eventually returned to his own flat, Peter couldn't remember it, or  the accumulated stuff of ordinary life: the photographs, records and books. He sat and listened to all his music, record by record, to find out what he liked - jazz and reggae - and he finally realised that the picture on the wall of his spare room was of Bob Marley. Hung on the walls of his living room are photographs of mountain views in  clip frames, mountains he has walked up. When he first saw them he couldn't remember their names and he couldn't remember being on them. It drove him to  despair. For weeks he pored over maps spread across the carpet of his mother's  home, cross-referencing the routes marked on them against diary entries and photo albums, talking for hours with his brother about their walking holidays  together. His memories of the weeks following the accident are still cloudy, and he  still prefixes most statements about the past with, "It's all very vague." He can't remember much of his childhood: a vivid memory of being caned for smoking  at school, and of going to buy his first bicycle with his dad. But the memories  of his adulthood have filtered back week by week, day-by-day. They are  hard-earned. Very little is known about how the brain recovers from a head injury. Most of  the improvements seem to take place in the first year, as the bruising goes  down. Retrograde amnesia, the name psychologists give to the loss of memories  formed prior to the illness, can gradually shrink, sometimes right up to the  hour before the accident. The parts of the brain needed to store long-term memories start working again with varying degrees of efficiency. Some psychologists believe that the brain compensates by forming new pathways, but there is no solid evidence. Relationships have proved to be one of the worst problems for Peter. A few days after he left hospital, his brother Paul took him into The Navigation, his local in the village of Lapworth, near Solihull. Although Paul had warned them, old friends took offence when Peter didn't recognise them. Months later he saw a  woman drive by and smile at him. He turned to his mother and said, "I think that's my girlfriend." The woman had heard about his injuries and didn't come round anymore...

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From Little Brown Book

First  published in The Independent Saturday Magazine

On 340kms of shelving, 40ft below the British Library, in soft-white, dust-filtrated, air-conditioned serenity, where the relative humidity is about 50 per cent and the thermometer rarely reads more or less than 17oC, the most important collection of books in the history of the world steadily turns to dust. Acid seeps from paper and leather, fibres degrade, pages discolour, bindings crack. Things fall apart. Perfect environmental conditions only ensure they fall apart a little more slowly. For those entrusted with caring for the nations books, delaying their destruction for as long as possible is a formidable task (the bookish might say Sisyphean). It’s a charge which is under-resourced and often overlooked, especially at a time when national library policy focuses mostly on access and pays scant regard to the need to conserve something for future generations […] No book is too mean to gain admittance. Hang a right by the 1985 Titbits Crossword Puzzle Book, straight ahead, and then right again at volume 26 of The Bartender – George Beaumont and Monty Gates were “the two happiest men in London” after winning the 1959 Scotch-pouring contest. Keep Schelling’s Shakespeare and Demi-Science on your left. Halfway down the right-hand side of Area Six, Basement Three, stands bookcase 550. Turn the spider-like handle to open the mobile shelving, pull the light cord. In the softly-lit space between two stacks, almost opposite The Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of the Liver protrudes a slip of card where a book belongs: 20047.bb.36 lived here until someone upstairs noticed it needed surgery. Lying on a bench in the conservation studio, 20047.bb.36 smells of coffee. This 18th-century volume containing five unusual religious tracts has seen better days. The full goatskin binding has worn bald and title-less from use, holes reveal the battered boards beneath, and the raised bands on the book’s spine have split wide open. The cover has separated from the pages, exposing the intricate but cruel hand-sewn stitches running like a freshly sutured wound along the spine. Mould lives on the edges of loose pages, and these are variegated brown and yellow by acidity, dirty fingers and foxing caused by micro-organisms that feed on traces of metal in the paper...

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From So You Think You Can Get Away With the Perfect Murder

First published in Esquire

Bloodstains Tell No Lies Chapter I London on a balmy night in June, under a lover’s moon. This city can be one mean Lady – she don’t forgive and she don’t forget. And George Limey knows all about it. George is a big man, big as the skip in which they found the stiff. But right now he’s looking for all the world like he’s just been kissed by a leper and she’s gone and left her tongue in is mouth. Now, I know some ‘tecs who hate the sight of blood, makes them nervous just to be in the same city. George ain’t that kinda guy. Then again, George ain’t no common ‘tec. He’s a forensic ace – a professor of crime. Yet this is no ordinary stiff, and George don’t like it. For one thing, there don’t seem to be much of it left. Makes even my stomach turn. The name’s Joe Gumshoe and, believe me buddy, old Joe here has seen a lot of wormbait in his time. But I ain’t seen nothin’ as pretty as this piece of work. “This killer’s real class,” says George, wearing a frown like a ploughed field as he leans over the torso. “Gone to great lengths to make this a genuine nobody.” “It fits,” I says, stamping out my stogie and beginning to wonder how we are gonna ID this John Doe. After barbering with the pathologist, George gives the recipe – and it ain’t no apple pie. Male, wrapped in a carpet, badly burnt, head hanging off, no arms, no legs. What’s left has been half eaten by the maggots. All we have to go on is the teeth and some hair.   Dave Loxley is one of the UK’s most senior forensic scientists. One of only five scientific advisors on serious and series crime, he is a true-life professor of crime, a scientist superhero. On call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, he is in the front line of the battle against Britain’s most violent killers. Loxley’s job not only demands that he keep abreast of the plethora of developments in forensic science, but that he is one step ahead of the increasingly sophisticated criminals he helps to hunt down. When the police have a murder, a rape, a kidnapping or a serial killer on their hands, they call Loxley. “I go along and kick-start the inquiry,” he explains. “Forensic science is going off right, left and centre at the moment. We’re getting better and better.” Glancing up from his evidence book at the Forensic Science Service laboratory in Birmingham, Loxley gives me the distinct feeling that he’s looking to see if I’ve got the stomach for all this. Our eyes meet, but he’s expressionless. Looking back to a gruesome scene-of-crime photograph, he continues to explain why there’s so much blood around the corpse, and what it means...

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From The Archdeacon’s Doodles

First published in the booklet The Archdeacon’s Doodles

I One evening in the spring of 1935, the Venerable George Henry Cameron sat in his vicarage at Furneux Pelham and doodled. He was designing a cover for his history of the village. What to put on it? Perhaps the 13th Century church, an angel from the roof of the nave, or just a detail from the William Morris window. Too obvious? Something more bucolic might be better: a labourer at the plough or an ear of barley to illustrate the importance of farming and brewing to this little village on the Hertfordshire-Essex border. I imagine him rubbing his long, bald head and visualizing the village’s inns, its tombs, its manor houses; mentally surveying the key events in the history of the parish. What a shame there was no great monument thereabouts! Then again, who’s to say there was not one long ago, a megalithic wonder, or perhaps a giant pagan figure, painstakingly scoured into the chalk slopes of the Ash Valley by the Ancient Britons? Some such idle thought must have made the Archdeacon decorate his cover with the White Horse of Uffington, a 3000-year-old, 374-foot-long chalk-figure cut into a hillside in the Berkshire Downs some 114-miles away. The perfect image to illustrate a history of a Hertfordshire parish? Why be parochial? But better have something closer to home as well: the Long Man of Wilmington would do nicely. The 230-foot-high giant, clutching a pole in each hand, was only 100 miles away in East Sussex. To complete the cover of his typescript, he doodled an early British coin depicting another white horse, said to represent the Sun god. After all, just because there was no circle of standing stones on Tinkers Hill in 1935 did not mean that 3000 years earlier there had not been a great temple to the sun on the very spot where the church now stood. Did it? ... II Find Audley End House. It’s in the care of English Heritage, near Saffron Walden in Essex. Make for the parterre garden, face the little circle of dahlias with your back to the cast iron fountain and walk to your right – toward the southeast corner of the north range. If you cup your hands to the glass, and the shutters are open, you can peer into Lord Braybrooke’s cabinet of wonders. For over half-a-century now, it has been a museum of nail holes and fading pencil marks. That pencil line on the west wall, two foot from the ground, marks the position of a shelf once laden with funerary jars, amphorae and Samian ware. That circle of holes to the left of the hearth recalls a trophy of weapons. This is all that is left of Lord Braybrooke’s great passion; all that is left of the room that housed the evidence for Furneux Pelham’s Bronze Age. Richard Cornwallis Neville, who became fourth Lord Braybrooke in 1858, built the collection. His father had been a keen scholar, writing a history of his house – once the largest in England – and editing the first published edition of Samuel Pepys’ diaries. He encouraged his eldest son in his natural history and antiquarian pursuits – buying him a cabinet for his fossils in 1832 when he was just 12. By the late 1840s, this one cabinet had become many – mostly filled with stuffed birds – then Neville transformed a dressing room into his archaeological museum. He filled it by excavating sites in the countryside around Audley End, most notably the Roman Fort at Great Chesterford. The fourth Lord died young in 1861, but the family preserved his collections. The Saffron Walden Yearbook for 1866 described a, ‘Museum abounding with relics, antiquities, and curiosities.’ Some thirty years after Neville’s death, The Illustrated London News recorded, ‘the little museum that is also a smokingroom. Here are great Roman vases, arms, jugs - not unlike our modern claret jugs – heavy chains and implements of iron; with primitive British ornaments, bracelets of mere pebbles (and then, a little later, of bits of coloured clay), and bone knife-handles, and – a ghastly survival – some human skin of a Dane once nailed to a neighbouring church-door.’...

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From Blood From a Stone

First published The Independent’s Saturday Magazine

Fed through an inline ending in a 15-gauge needle slid into the median vein, the primary bag of a Compoflex pack grows firm and plump and unsettlingly warm to the touch. Inky red with venous blood, it hangs from a scale beneath a trolley bed, deliberately below the donor’s line of sight, and gravity begins to separate the contents into life-saving components: red cells, platelets, and plasma. They are given for the price of a custard cream and a cup of tea. It is a singularly one-sided transaction without which our hospitals would come to a standstill. That only 6 per cent of eligible population in the UK can be induced to make the trade – less than the number of people who regularly go to the opera – might be called an indictment of the society we live in. Or it might be called what it is: a bloody disgrace.   And now a commercial break. (To be sung to the tune of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Fall in Love’)   In Wong Tai Sin all the Wongs do it The Hos, the Los, the Lees and Tongs do it Let’s do it, let’s give some blood Chauffers do it Sir do it En-tre-pre-neurs do it Let’s do it, let’s give some blood   (1980s Hong Kong Red Cross Television Campaign)   “Short of examining humankind itself and the institution of slavery – of men and women as market commodities – blood as living tissue may now constitute in Western Societies one of the ultimate tests of where the ‘social’ begins and the ‘economic’ ends.” The economist Richard Titmuss wrote those words in 1970, in his groundbreaking work The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. How much more relevant to us are they 30 years on? Market research published last month revealed that 10- to 13-year-olds are so economically sophisticated they won’t even tidy their rooms if there ain’t a quid pro quo. Where does the economic end today? Blood donation is a measure of the kind of society we live in. To what extent are we prepared to give a gift to strangers in need, at the cost of a little inconvenience, and with no expectation of recompense or reward?

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From Search for the Golden Owl

First published in The Times Saturday Magazine

Max Valentin is tired, he is tired of being Max Valentin – the name he picked at random out of a phone book, “on the third attempt because the first two were ridiculous”. This man, overweight with untidy grey hair and an unkempt beard, is one of the most hunted men in France. One night four years ago, Valentin drove his car to a secret location, dug a hole 80cm deep, buried a statue of a bronze owl and challenged his compatriots to find it. The bronze figure can be exchanged for a solid gold and silver owl with diamond cheeks, tiger-eye eyes and a ruby-encrusted zoisite plinth. It is vulgar but valuable, with a price tag of one million French francs (about £100,000). At any one time more than 20,000 people are searching for the owl, but no-one has yet solved the 11 puzzles that reveal its whereabouts. It began as a game and a seemingly fun way to make a living, but La Trace de la Chouette D’Or has come to dominate Valentin’s life with an endless cycle of questions, love letters, bribes, crank phone calls and death threats. For many it has become an obsession, and a handful have stopped playing by the rules: instead of looking for the owl, they are looking for Valentin.

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From The New Pioneer

First published in Malaysia for the Property Developer Michael Tan

Chapter 1. Start the Clock   It is June 1995 and two men in a 4x4 pull up outside an abandoned salt works in Western Melbourne and one of them stops his watch. David Hunter, the driver, is usually an unhurried man, but he knows the sales agent has claimed this site is only 15 minutes from the city, so he hit the freeway as quickly as possible and put his foot down. In the passenger seat is Michael Tan, a Malaysian property developer who at that moment is looking at his watch and doing a double-take, it really did take 15 minutes; there really is 1000 acres of land for sale, just 15 minutes from a major international city. Timing was to play an important part in this story. David Hunter opened the gates, got back behind the wheel and drove out towards the coastal lagoons. He knew the site well. As an engineer with Coomes Consulting he had been helping its owners try to come up with a plan to develop the site for the last four years. They bumped across the vast mosaic of the delta flats, startling a billion rabbits as they went. The glare from the saltpans was blinding. Bearded Glasswort, Boxthorn and Briar Rose clung to the unusual landforms that channelled the seawater between the lagoons. They drove eastwards past derelict buildings and rusting relics of machinery, negotiating drainage channels spanned by delicate-rotting boardwalks, crossing the remnants of an old tramway. They stopped at the banks of Skeleton Creek. The men stood at the edge of the snake-infested creek and looked out over the Wetlands to Port Phillip Bay and beyond to the city. David was surprised to hear Michael Tan say, “This is the sort of project I enjoy.’ Michael was incongruous in that landscape – cool, unflappable, always elegant. It’s been said that if he landed a hot air balloon in a sewage works he would emerge spotless. Yes, this was definitely the sort of project he’d enjoy; he liked nothing more than making something nobody wanted into something everybody would want. And as they drove back across the site Michael already had an idea how that could be done. He pointed to the patchwork of salt crystallizers where the earth was most stricken by its former harvest. “Why don’t we turn that into a lake,’ he said. It was the most brilliant suggestion David Hunter had ever heard...

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