Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch was born in 1931. With huge personal wealth, he is judged to be the 117th richest individual in the world. Across the globe, he has exerted enormous influence upon our political landscape, being feared and revered by a succession of ephemeral leaders. Murdoch's fingers have been in many pies - from local newspapers to film and television. Early on, he sniffed the potential of satellite broadcasting and over in America formed Fox Broadcasting. He was never elected to office and yet through his arrogance, his empire building and his ultimate control of the mouthpieces of democracy he has wielded a power that has been almost divine in its magnitude.

But now this eighty year old Australian-American magnate with intellectual powers waning is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Closing Britain's famous "News of the World" will not be enough. The ruthlessness and egotism that coloured Murdoch's rise to power filtered down to his employees. Phone hacking and interception of electronic mail were commonplace - anything to get a good story and damn the ethics or the effects.

This afternoon he will be spotlighted by a parliamentary committee - at last being brought to book. No doubt he will squirm and use his vast personal wealth to deflect blame but he was the farmer who sowed the seeds of News International and nurtured the crop. No matter what he says, he knew exactly what was going on.

Round the world, politicians of different hues need to ask themselves how it was that they allowed the Murdoch Monster to grow unchecked, how they danced to his tunes, how they accepted his gifts and opened their doors to him. That is not democracy.

We don't know all the ins and outs of Murdoch's dealings - perhaps we never will - but at last this pompous puppeteer is having to face a different kind of music. Whether or not his inquisitors have the guts and the capability to force him against the ropes remains to be seen. No doubt Murdoch will want to drag others down as he falls. The soap opera will run and run.

People

I have been looking back over the many photographs I snapped in South East Asia. Mostly they are of landscapes and buildings but I was always very pleased when I managed to snap pictures of local people. Doing that is rarely easy. I mean, you can't just walk up to complete strangers and say "Watch the birdie!" Sometimes people pictures are taken sneakily when the subject isn't looking and occasionally they might even involve the exchange of money. You have to keep your eyes open for opportunities.

We all see the world through our own eyes. No one else has our particular perspective but throughout our lives we wonder about other people's stories - what they have seen and how they look at things. We are all fascinated by the other people around us - from close friends and family members to the lives of total strangers. This may explain why I am not alone in cherishing pictures of others. Here's a selection:-

Cambodian landmine victims band.

Happy friends at Choeung Ek, Cambodia

Coconut girl at Angkor, Cambodia

Little boy at Angkor

Muay Thai boxer at Hua Hin, Thailand

Leila, the Serene receptionist at Rama IX Park, Bangkok

Squid fisherman on Koh Poda

Schoolboys at Ang Thong, Thailand

Washing in a stream in northern Laos

Tiger keeper in Chiang Mai

Karen "long neck" weaver near Chiang Mai

Songkran Parade, Chiang Mai

Woman weaving a new roof in Laos

Hilltribe woman in Luang Namtha, Laos

Our "mahoot" in Koh Chang

Days

The one memorable moment of this week was supposed to happen today - Thursday: Frances's graduation from the University of Birmingham. It's why I came home from South East Asia when I did. But - life being what it is - we were presented with another memorable moment on Wednesday afternoon. This one was unexpected and very much unwanted.

Around half past two the phone went and at the other end of the line was a wailing dervish, speaking some kind of gibberish. Fortunately, someone else grabbed the receiver and I heard the professional tone of an ambulance woman telling me that Shirley's sister's husband had died and that we needed to get to their house as soon as possible.

I put our phone down in stunned disbelief. Shirley's sister is just fifty and her husband is/was just forty nine. Parents to two teenage boys. I zoomed to Shirley's workplace and we sped towards their unexceptional village near Selby.

Shirley's sister remained a gibbering wreck - as if a hurricane had passed through her normal and unremarkable life. The police had arrived and her husband's body still lay like a sack of flour dumped on the floor of the utility room between the kitchen and his little office. His face was changing colour rather unpleasantly. He had gone forever.

He was always very civil to me and I felt at ease in his company. He had been married to Shirley's sister for twenty years and had had no significant health problems but the last couple of years had been laced with financial worries. He'd lost jobs and had taken, like a gambler, to playing the stock market but with very little success. In fact, he had been driven to re-mortgage their house. He was quite secretive about it all and my sister-in-law was left in the dark about most of his difficulties. He has unluckily left her an awful mess to sort out and it won't be easy for her. But I will remember his pleasant nature and his lilting Scottish accent - he came from the Scottish Borders - and I will remember how he was loved by his boys and tried to be a good father to them. Forty nine is too young to die. May he rest in peace.

And so to Thursday. Driving down the M1 and the M42 and along the A38 to Edgbaston on the southern side of the city of Birmingham. Me and Shirley with Ian and Frances in the back. I had never been to a graduation ceremony before, having deliberately missed my own many moons ago. There were perhaps three hundred graduates in the congregation we attended in the university's Great Hall. It all went like clockwork and traditional rituals were followed. The address by the Vice Chancellor. The playing of the national anthem. The gowned and capped graduates announced one by one as they climbed on to the stage to shake hands with the Chancellor - Sir Dominic Cadbury. And amongst those graduates was our own Frances Emily. I felt so proud - at least as proud as she must have felt at that moment.

The future is uncertain for so many graduates these days but such practical concerns belong to another day. Today was all about the celebration of achievement in one of England's finest universities and our lovely clever daughter was amongst them, bearing my mother and father's name and Paul's. Like Wednesday, a day to remember but for very different reasons:-

Escape

So, I am standing outside the newly refurbished central market in Phnom Penh. It's hot and I have just been taking pictures of fish and fruit sellers. A man and a woman stop to talk to me. They say they're from Vietnam and they are well-dressed. Venus is a nurse in a recovery ward and her male cousin is a car mechanic with a supervisory role. I forget his name. They invite me into the nearby department store for a cold drink and there I meet their jolly auntie. She's about sixty and is a primary school teacher. She lives in Phnom Penh at her brother's house.

Auntie tells me about her niece who is soon to start nursing in Manchester. She even shows me a photo of her. She asks if I'd like to come for lunch and talk to her niece about England. We all travel into the suburbs together in a bumpety red tuk tuk.

The house is quite spacious and clean with tiled floors and wooden furniture. As lunch is being prepared, I talk to the head of the household - "Uncle T" who tells me he is a croupier in a casino in Siem Reap. He is about sixty, wearing a lemon coloured open-necked shirt and golden signet rings. There is the aura of stale cigarette smoke about him and I suspect his slicked down hair is dyed. The young nurse is nowhere to be seen. She has, apparently, gone to the hospital with the aged grandmother. On his request, "Uncle T" and I swap contact details on yellow post-it notes. He promises that after lunch he will show me a couple of card tricks.

Lunch is nice and simple - river fish in a mild sauce, barbecued pork and fluffy white rice. All is very pleasant and I am thinking - what nice people.

After lunch "Uncle T" invites me and Venus upstairs to show us his card tricks. Actually, they are not tricks at all but methods of cheating punters in casinos. There are various simple hand and finger signs to let you know what card is next.

Now I have always despised card games. I remember at Beverley Grammar School "when I were a lad", some of my fellow schoolboys seemed to spend every lunch hour in intense card schools. I couldn't see the attraction. Playing cards has always made me glaze over with abject disinterest and I have never bet a single chip in any casino anywhere in the world. Clearly, "Uncle T" thought differently - for him cards and the exchange of money were a huge part of his life.

Just then the doorbell went downstairs. Rapidly, "Uncle T" said he thought it would be his friend from Singapore. He asked me and Venus to open our wallets and gave us a couple of hundred dollar bills each as stake money. What the hell was going on?

The upstairs room door opened and in walked the visitor "from Singapore" who had clearly not been to drama school - such was his ham acting. He was also wearing a lemon coloured open-necked shirt and chunky gold signet rings which probably symbolised his prowess as a gambler. He greeted me and promptly sat down at the card table, pulling out a wedge of American banknotes - amounting to some two thousand dollars.

Then the penny dropped for me. I realised in an instant that this was a set-up and the guy "from Singapore" we were supposed to be ripping off via the clever hand signals was actually there to aid "Uncle T" in ripping me off! I crossed my hands across my chest and said "I'm not playing" immediately and I gave Madame Venus the hundred dollar bills that "Uncle T" had urged me to stuff in my wallet.

My heart was racing. There I was in a strange house in the suburbs of somewhat lawless Phnom Penh and I had been identified as a dupe - a foreign white fool to be cheated of his money. I had visions of fighting my way out of there. I have long believed that cards and gambling mean trouble and that is partly why I have never been interested in that kind of activity.

Realising that the sting hadn't worked, the bespectacled visitor "from Singapore" took his leave after no more than five minutes. Afterwards, "Uncle T" seemed angry with me - saying I'd lost his two hundred dollars and demanding the yellow post-it note back. I wanted to yell, "You cheating little bastard! I told you in the first place that I am not remotely interested in cards you money-grabbing little worm!" but I didn't think that that would go down too well in the circumstances.

I was just so relieved to get out of that house in one piece. A few minutes later I was riding in another tuk tuk with the jolly auntie, Venus and the car mechanic cousin. They said they were going to the hospital to catch up with grandma and the young nurse. They dropped me off near my hotel. It's possible that they were always part of "Uncle T's" little con trick and they were simply riding back to the central market to find another tourist to be duped.

I guzzled an "Angkor" beer from the fridge in my hotel room before diving in the pool, sensing that without doubt I had just had a very near miss and had been extremely lucky to emerge from "Uncle T's" house in one piece with my wallet intact. The next day my lovely tuk tuk driver "Peter" said he had heard of this kind of trick happening before and an Australian visitor he had transported a few weeks earlier had lost $600US in a similar card game set-up. Phew!

Darkness

At Choeung Ek, The Killing Fields

...Now I am back home. I arrived at Manchester Airport at midday on Sunday. There was Shirley with Frances and Ian waiting for me as I emerged from the ante-room of "Nothing to Declare". So delightful to see them in the flesh again - my dearest loved ones - and we travelled back to Sheffield over the Pennines via The Snake Pass, calling in at The Snake Pass Inn for sandwiches and drinks.

How lovely England is in the summertime. The rolling moors of The Peak District, deciduous trees in full leaf, sheep grazing in fields walled by rough limestone, echoes of history everywhere and my beloved Yorkshire, the true heart of civilisation. As we drove into our city the local streets were thronged with flag-waving schoolchildren and older Sheffielders, pleased to see their most esteemed resident returning from his missionary work in the far East. Home.

So why is the title of this post "Darkness"? Well, I'm still thinking of Cambodia. Specifically I am thinking about the estimated two million who died under the rule of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Who died? City dwellers, teachers, educated people, former police officers or members of previous military forces, people who wore glasses, people who were too ill to get out to work in the rice fields, people who ran away, babies, people who collapsed on long treks or got stuck in the mud, people who did not bow their heads or looked "funny" at their Khmer Rouge guards. It was a dark and evil madness.

I realised that the judicial system that operated after the Khmer Rouge were ousted by Cambodia's Vietnamesse liberators was weak and narrow in its outlook. So many of the cruel foot soldiers must have been absorbed back into regular Cambodian society. Now in their fifties or sixties, they will be husbands and fathers, grandfathers, tuk tuk drivers and rice farmers, mechanics and builders, guarding memories of their madness, their black pyjama uniforms, the corrupted Communist dream and the sound of wooden hoes breaking skulls.

Their evil leader - Pol Pot died in luxurious exile as late as 1998, never having faced the official justice he so richly deserved. Though Cambodia is trying to move on, the legacy of the past fills the air like the foul odour from the sewage farm I noted as my tuk tuk driver - "Peter" took me to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre (The Killing Fields) on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

Earlier he had taken me to the eerie Tuol Slong High School, once a torture centre for the Khmer Rouge. I found myself whistling the same lament I had whistled under my breath at Sachsenhausen near Berlin. Why and how? And where will this darkness surface again in another part of the world? Perhaps it's already reappearing in Afghanistan and Libya, Syria and Yemen. Perhaps it never went away. At Tuol Sleng, I saw classrooms meant for enlightenment, discovery and learning turned to prisons and torture chambers and displays of the dead, like this frightened little girl:-

And this nameless baby-faced little boy:-

Never to wait at the airport gate for their fathers. Never to see another summer. Innocent victims of the darkness in men's hearts. Needless to say, these children did nothing wrong. But who shall remember them and ensure that their deaths were not entirely pointless?

Pictures

Just back from Cambodia. As well as delighting in the wondrous remains of the great Khmer civilisation, I could also tell you the tale of how, in Phnom Penh, I was so very nearly fleeced of all my money by a greedy Vietnamese "croupier"/ card swindler in what may have been one hell of a tried and tested set up to sting innocent lone tourists. He didn't get a penny from me or a dollar or a Cambodian riel. But I'll save that story for another time. For now, six photos from the many ruins of Angkor:-

Awesome

"Awesome" isn't a word that normally figures in my vocabulary. It's similar to other "trendy" terms that young people have historically adopted to express approval - from "fabulous"to "wicked" or "cool". However, I think that "awesome" is probably the best word I could pick to describe the building complexes that make up the historical park known as Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Quite astonishing.

I think of all the man hours involved in hewing all that stone and then transporting it along jungle tracks. Then the brilliantly well-organised assembling of huge buildings, then the intricate stone carving - miles and miles of it - all expertly done. Thousands and thousands of man hours spread across five centuries before Angkor Wat was regurgitated by the jungle and almost forgotten. And I think - why? Why do this? What was it all about? Clearly it was driven by all-consuming religious commitment married with the characteristic egotism of any civilisation's most powerful leaders.

For two days, I have ridden in the back of trusty Savuth's tuk-tuk, visiting over twenty ancient sites. I have seen so much and yet I almost think that I just scratched the surface as I picked my way over broken stones or dipped my head as I moved along endless corridors or scaled mighty temples shaped like some mythical Hindu mountain. Awesome indeed. I have already taken over three hundred photographs.

I'm writing this in the lobby of the lovely Angkor Spirit Palace Hotel on the southern edge of Siem Reap town - just twenty US dollars a night for a double room with breakfast. Such friendly, helpful staff and the other guests are okay too. After lounging in and by the pool for an hour, it's now raining cats and dogs but like yesterday. I expect that today's tropical downpour will be over almost as quickly as it began.