Ye Gods, can it only be Monday? Knackered already and it hasn’t started yet.
We spent all last week frantically building, painting and tiling. I must have done two days on my hands and knees laying tiles and then grouting them – without getting any spots of cement or dirt on them. Tiles now OK, knees need replacement.
The plants came on Thursday – including an olive tree we’re hiring just for the week.
I must say it looks pretty good – the fountain from Marrakech despite weighing half a ton made it safely, and is even working – a miracle!
Last night we arrived at Knightsbridge barracks with Emma, our little donkey from our Trustee, Carl Boyd’s farm in Chertsey.
The Blues and Royals had arranged a nice comfy stall for her, but we had reckoned without the hormones in the troop horses. They all fell immediately head over heels in love with her. Silver Stick (the Grand Fromage of the Household Cavalry), and the Commanding Officer both had their huge chargers (17 hands or I’m a Dutchman), stabled just across the corridor. They became completely besotted with Emma, who just played hard to get. These great big softies spent the whole night stomping up and down, yelling and calling out to all and sundry. Nobody got any sleep, except Emma. Or did she? We will never know!
Next morning, she inspected the Queen’s Guard mounting in the Barracks Forecourt, before riding out to Whitehall. Great pictures – especially one with a trooper on a huge black mount who is looking down with horror and amazement at this strange looking thing standing beside him. Of course there were lots of cracks from the boys about Gordon Brown’s defence cuts, and the new cavalry mounts etc etc.
Now it’s Monday afternoon, freezing cold – the judges have been and gone – Clare Balding (very nice, very complementary about SPANA) and the BBC also.
Sadly, it was decided that Emma had not got security clearance, so would have to go, before HRH and the Royal Party arrive.
Jeremy Hulme
Monday, 19 May 2008
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW 2008 - Day 1
Monday, 21 April 2008
Jordan & Syria
Yet look north, across the Syrian border and there are fields of green, orchards and market gardens, before crossing the long sandy coast-line and out over the Mediterranean Sea.
On the ground it is even more striking. There are huge fertile plains around Damascus, along the coast, and in the northern half of the country – we drove past irrigated crops of cotton, tobacco, wheat and barley. Sleek fat Friesian cows graze in long grass beside the road. Bedouin shepherds tend their sheep (the lead sheep is in fact a donkey, who the herd follows wherever he goes).
There is oil and gas, minerals under the soil, and a long coast-line for fishing and tourism. In contrast Jordan has almost nothing – no gas or oil, no coast apart from its port at Aqaba, and so little rain that most of the country is parched desert.
Yet Jordan’s standard of living is about three times higher than Syria.
Investment finance pours into Jordan from the Arab world as well as the west - Jordan’s position as trusted ally of the US has given it a huge economic advantage, but of course at a price. The hated Bush/Blair partnership, makes Jordan a target for Islamic extremists, and the authorities have to be constantly on their guard.
We held a prize-giving for the three hundred animal clubs we have set up in schools all over the country. Princess San’a gave the prizes, Lord Newall, SPANA’s President, and the Minister of Education made speeches, and the children performed songs, dances and plays. Sadly, the British Embassy in Amman was too busy to send a representative.
Meanwhile in Syria, things are not quite the same. We spent a couple of days in the coastal resort of Tartous – ‘Jewel of Western Syria’. Well, not exactly.
The seafront is a five mile stretch of rubble. The city’s sewage system empties directly onto the ‘beaches’. Rusting boats and laid-up tankers sit rotting just offshore. Litter and rubbish clog the open waterways through the town.
Yet at the Education Centre up in the hills above the city, a group of biology teachers listen raptly as Diana gives them new ideas for teaching children. We are struggling to introduce the idea of empathy – difficult in any culture. Yet here, there is an almost overwhelming eagerness to try new concepts and ideas – and a welcome and friendliness to us as outsiders that is truly humbling. My stumbling Arabic is gleefully applauded.
SPANA is probably the only British Charity working in Syria. Sadly, the British Embassy in Damascus were too busy to help in any way.
It’s difficult to pin down, but despite all the obvious problems, there is something very special about Syria and its people.
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
A New Chapter in China
Writing this at about thirty-five thousand feet on the good old BA flight back from Beijing to London (Good old BA cancelled the flight out at one hour’s notice ‘cabin-crew shortage’). Hard to really describe the place, it’s so immense – it takes four hours just to fly up to Urumqi where we’re starting this project (with good old WSPA funding it).
But it’s the strange mixture of the very old, traditional, and the very new. You’ve only got to see the sexy new Airport Terminal – Norman Foster design – state of the art technology etc, two English-speaking 'meet and greeters’ for every passenger, to be stunned by the speed and progress of China’s ‘economic miracle’.
Yet, in the deep and distant countryside around Xinjiang people still rely on donkeys for their transport. And one of the pony herders, and I have to be honest, they’re really proud of their animals, still thinks the only way to cure sand colic is by slitting their nostrils and bleeding them. So how do you square the two different worlds? And those ponies!
Tough and hardy, their black manes and tails streaming in the biting wind – I felt as if I’d forgotten to put any clothes on. Yet with their thick brown coats and black furry legs they were ideally suited to the place. Some of them had the mealy noses – just like our Exmoor and Fell ponies. I wonder if there could be any connection. Ghengis Khan must have ridden ponies like these and he got right into Europe. It’s not impossible, is it? Or maybe some Crusader or silk and spice trader, could have taken ponies from England, and sold them to traders on the Silk Road?
Talking of ancient breeds, this is also the home of the Kiang or Mongolian Wild Ass –ancient ancestor of our patient donkeys (tho’ people argue which wild ass was domesticated first),. They’re as rare as hen’s teeth now of course – I’d give a lot to see one in the wild - but they’re nervous flighty creatures and hard to find. No wonder when everyman’s hand has been against them for so long.
So now we’re heading home.
But I can certainly say I won’t miss jelly fish and fish-heads - the welcome and hospitality is humbling – but please, not for breakfast!
Oh, what fun. The Captain has just come along and stopped all the films – apoplectic with rage – smoke coming out of his ears. Apparently some naughty naughty boy has been smoking in the bogs – the ultimate sin. And if he catches the miscreant he’s going to have him arrested.
Just like me at school a million years ago.
Well that’s better than the naughty separatists caught on the South China Airways
Plane from Urumqi to Beijing last week – the day after us. They got lead injections.
Surely they can’t have been smoking in the loos?
Jeremy Hulme
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
The SPANA Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show
It’s sometimes a bit depressing for us mere mortals when confronted with real experts.
So it was when award-winning garden designer Chris O’Donoghue and international gardening writer Helen Yemm came out with me to Marrakech last week.
You may have read in SPANA News that we were lucky enough to ‘win’ the opportunity of creating and building a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in May this year.
I have to admit, that it was largely through Chris’s expertise and previous success at the show, that we were able to convince the organisers to take a gamble and let us have a go.
It will be based on the idea that animals, plants and humans are all interdependent –so we’re building a Moroccan courtyard garden, complete with fountain, stable, donkey cart, pots of nice smelly herbs, vines, etc etc. Of course it’s all a bit of a fiction – most Moroccan courtyards or riadhs have been bought up by trendy Islington types and turned into chi-chi little hotels or second homes.
But the idea is right, and I thought it would be fun to do. That is until the dread day draws near, and we are actually expected to put together a smart, professional garden, with more than a little of the ‘wow!’ factor.
Absolutely terrifying.
Hence the visit to Marrakech with Chris and Helen checking things out, and Hamid (our director in Morocco, who also fancies himself as a bit of a gardener) and I staring gormlessly at them as they argued about the ‘architectural structure’ and ‘intrinsic purity and vibrance of colour’ of this or that particular plant.
Of course it also gave us the chance to organise a fountain, donkey cart and harness, old window-frames, pots and tiles etc – so fingers crossed, with a bit of luck, and the afore-mentioned expert help we’ll have a garden to attract potential SPANA supporters.
Oh, I nearly forgot. We’re also having a live donkey – after all it is SPANA.
And the Queen visits on the first day. So, if you read the headlines the following day : ‘DONKEY BITES QUEEN – CHIEF EXEC THROWN INTO TOWER OF LONDON’ - have a bit of sympathy – come and throw me a stale crust of bread now and again.
Jeremy Hulme
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Mali and Paris - February 2008
Somebody once said ‘It’s a wonderful thing travel, it confirms all your prejudices'. Certainly, at five o’clock in the morning, on a freezing Sunday pre-dawn, I know exactly what they mean. Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is far and away the worst airport in the world – and that’s up against some pretty stiff opposition – including gems like Heathrow, Algiers and not to mention Nouakchott, Mauritania.
I’m sitting writing this in Terminal ‘E’, after arriving over an hour and a half ago – there was only one bus to unload the whole plane, so we waited twenty minutes to get off, then were bussed for another twenty minutes around the airfield, waving at terminal ‘E’ as we whizzed past the first time, before being dropped at terminal ‘F’.
There a couple of nice secret policemen checked all our passports in case we were trying to invade France illegally. Then we tried to make our way back to ‘E’, being told (gleefully), that the navettes (connecting buses) were probably on strike this morning – having a little go at Sarko and his new bride. Eventually we were dumped at the end of a cold, damp, grey concrete tunnel, to fight our way up and through the next security screen into the mythical Terminal ‘E’.
It all seemed a long way away from north Mali, forty-eight hours earlier. We were doing a check (following a formal evaluation) of the Para-Vet project around Tombuctou and Gao that we started about ten years ago.
There had been a long and bloody civil war between the Tuareg, ‘Arab’ nomads in the north – and the black, West African Malian government based in Bamako.
The UN persuaded the Tuareg to accept a peace deal, and in return they were to get some health-care, a few schools and some veterinary input. SPANA was already established in Mali, so we were asked if we could help.
Over the years since then we’ve trained over fifty of the local tribesmen – they all had to be registered ex-terrorists - provided them with an initial ‘bank’ of basic veterinary
Medicines, established a price scale with the people, and set them going. We still do free prophylactic treatment for the donkeys and camels and follow-up training courses, but apart from that the whole thing is self-sustainable. Of course there have been a few disasters, and unsurprisingly some of the men are better and more dynamic than others, but in general it’s made a big difference to the people of the desert, and along the river, who are totally dependent on their livestock.
This time, we first went to see a Tuareg camp, away up in the sand dunes north of Tomuctou. We had a film producer with us wanting to make a series about Working Animals. After worming some of the camels (they suffer quite badly from mange), we were eating the obligatory goat together, when Mr. BBC asked the Tuareg headman, if the camels were important to him.
He looked at me in amazement. Was this stupid foreigner completely mad?
‘Of course we can’t live without them. Most days we just have camel milk and yoghurt to eat. Any grain has to be transported back on them from town. We ride them up deep into the Sahara to bring back salt. They are our transport when we move camp, carry water, gather firewood, or if one of the women is sick. Then when they are too old we eat them. Without them there can be no Tuareg’.
I wish I could say the same about Air France.
Jeremy Hulme
