Around the World

Six years after accomplishing his dream of becoming a police officer, Michael Bunting was in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.  Hard-hitting and at times heart-breaking, A Fair Cop is Bunting’s graphic account of his life behind bars in one of England’s hardest prisons. In this piece, he recounts the power of the written word and how it got him through this devastating time.

I was about two days into my prison sentence for common assault at Armley Prison in Leeds when I knew that I was going to have to exercise my mind in a way that I’d never done before in order to survive. The relentless coercion and gratuitous violence from other inmates had taken me to a place I never thought I’d be. After a suicide attempt that was rather too close for comfort, I knew that the only way to get through my time was to take control of the psychological pain that had gripped me so hard. My dream career in the police service was over and my nightmare of being a prisoner had begun.

I had never been a big reader, but the one and only book I was allowed in prison, Tony Adams’ autobiography, became my best friend (my only friend, in fact) and I treasured every word on each page. It was my only escape from the abuse, the threats and the violence I endured for much of my sentence.

A chance meeting with the Prison Chaplain resulted in me receiving Daily Strength, a collection of Bible excerpts in a handy pocket-sized booklet that would follow me everywhere I went for the rest of my sentence. It was the influence of the words in Daily Strength combined with the desperation caused by my incarceration that resulted in the first words of my book being written on old envelopes and toilet paper in my cell. I had always maintained my innocence and for the first time in a two-year judicial process, I was able to say things that I wanted to without a barrister or investigating officer trying to make something out of my words. The freedom I got from this was infectious and I would find myself looking forward to every session of writing I’d get in my cell. It would temporarily erase the pain caused by my conviction, something that I, and many others, saw as a miscarriage of justice of gargantuan proportion.

Writing had become my second friend. The discovery of the power that putting pen to paper gave me at the age of 26 in such frightful and unforeseen circumstances meant that my first attempt at suicide was to be my last. My early relationship with writing, far from being an arduous and thankless task reported by lots of unpublished writers, was a harmonious therapy that contributed to my rescue from the demons that had taken hold of my mind in the early part of my sentence.

People often ask me whether I found God in prison. The meeting with the chaplain and the perpetual reading of Daily Strength means the answer to this question is probably yes. However, I also found the power of the written word which led to the publication of A Fair Cop. This has undoubtedly taken me far away from the desperation I once felt to places that without discovering the pleasures of writing, I could only ever have dreamt of finding.

Michael Bunting — 14th June 2009

Author of A Fair Cop.

…over in Australia, 4th Estate has been winning plenty of other prizes. The People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks’ bestselling novel published in January, won the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) Book of the Year Award and Literary Fiction Book of the Year. Then a week later Steven Carroll won the 2008 Miles Franklin Award, the most prestigious Australian literary award, for his novel The Time We Have Taken, the final part of a trilogy now known as ‘the Glenroy novels’. It was third time lucky for Carroll, who was nominated for the other two novels in the trilogy. Finally, Steven Conte recently won the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his first novel The Zookeeper’s War . This is a brand new prize, worth A$100,000 (£44,000) to two winners (one fiction, one non-fiction) which the PM announced in his election manifesto.

I’m not sure I can imagine either Brown or Cameron launching a literary prize in their next campaigns but in the current climate I wouldn’t rule anything out…thanks to Lizzy Kingston of HC Australia for the report.

So here I was at the Adelaide Literary Festival along with fifteen international writers, hand picked, cellophane wrapped and air-freighted half way around the world. Ready to frolic in the South Pacific Sea. Well… almost. Flying that 747 more or less single-handedly had not been easy.

“Well done,” texted the family. “Another triumph!”

I blinked. I had travelled across continents, crossing war zones, mountains and seas; places of horror and romance; Kabul, Samakand, Denpasar. I had watched as one half of the world sank into night and the other woke up, and I had passed over the Indian Ocean for the second time in my life. (The last time had been on it and going in the other direction.) Flying below the equator into Australia I had gazed at the dark enveloping desert. Then as we skimmed over Broken Hill, a single light blinked insistently up at me from the ground, a solitary reminder of humanity. All this I had done in the space of a day.

And now this early morning Adelaide sun, unexpectedly translucent, like honey. Small birds flitted through the ghost gum trees and five fat magpies with unusual markings stalked the undergrowth as the taxi put me down. Twelve thousand miles brought to a close in an astonishing moment. I stared out at the lake and parklands, my writer’s retreat for the next two days. It was hard to believe I had completed last summer’s plans. As I stood absorbing the sunlight, into the silence there came an outpouring of birdsong, magical and fluted. In that moment, the stress of leaving and arriving melted away. England seemed further away than the moon.

On a table in the communal dining room I discovered a pile of books by the writers appearing at the festival. Mine were included. An inspirational move on the part of the organizers who wanted us to relax and by reading them, get to know each other. Slowly through the mist of jet-induced tiredness, a pattern emerged that matched names with faces. I had come here knowing no one. But now, faces hitherto seen only on dust covers began appearing across the breakfast table. Amusingly, however, few bore any resemblance to the publicity images on the books. So much so that I wondered when on earth these photographs had been taken. Twenty years ago, thirty? Walking back to my room I came across a broken bird’s egg.

“Looks as though it was attacked,” a voice suggested, close in my ear.

I looked up. The man staring at the ground beside me was an author known across the entire English reading world.

“Amazing!” the family agreed, when I rang to tell them. “Aren’t you glad you went? Look what an interesting time you’re having.”

I agreed absent-mindedly.

“We’re going to see the koalas,” I mumbled.

“I got a B for my History mocks,” the teenager said. She sounded far away and disconnected.

On the bus, a holiday air prevailed. Snatches of conversation ebbed and flowed. We were passing through a long, straggling town filled with bright, flat-roofed buildings. There was a funeral parlor called RIP, a shop boasting of Ray’s Outdoor Equipment, an aquarium and a supermarket. The road curved, dropping down into a duel carriageway as we sped through wide sweeps of scrubland. The bush with its drooping desert oaks, its majestic eucalyptus, and spiky spinifex was all around. A sign flashed pass. Beyond Land For Sale it stated, somewhat enigmatically.

“Where are the kangaroos?”

“No smoking on the coach please!”

Conversations hummed. The movement of the bus was sending me to sleep. Dangerously, I closed my eyes. I glimpsed the Murray River. A bridge had been built over it much against the wishes of the Aboriginal women. The area, our guide told us, was a sacred site, symbolizing the ‘women’s business’. I stared at the extraordinary Australian light. Kangaroos were stretched bark-brown in the sun. All around the air was fragrant with the smell of the sea; turquoise and motionless with nothing beyond except Antarctica. At lunch we made our friendships easily over glasses of cold Australian wine and fresh Orange Ruffi fish. And naturally, as in every playground, there just had to be a scapegoat. On the coach back ours fell asleep.

“Looks as though he’s taken a powerful muscle relaxant!” giggled my companion.

The scapegoat slept with a huge smile on his face and his legs open in a come-hitherish sort of way. Someone took a photograph amidst ribald laughter. The organizers watched balefully, presumably knowing what a group of drunken writers could be like. But it was only high spirits. Then back to base for a siesta with a novel from the author’s pile. Strangest of all was the act of reading words by someone with whom I had just lunched.

The days of the retreat sped by and all too soon it was time to depart for the hotel in Adelaide. The festival was about to commence. The heat rose by several notches, the pavements were beginning to melt. At the Hilton some of the party were without rooms. I tried to connect my computer to the internet and failed. We felt cut off from the rest of the world. Struggling a little with these small irritations we walked across town to look at the festival tents being set up. I began to feel unnerving twinges of stage fright at the thought of the audience.

Then, subtly, all of us began to change. Call it nerves or insecurity, it amounted to the same thing. We began to drink too much, smoke too much, gossip a lot, and scream with laughter. Feeling more and more dislocated I rang home hoping that the familiar voices would reassure me but home was strangely removed from this new reality. Distance had defamilarized my family, giving their voices an annoying echo that unsynchronized our conversation.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“We’ve put you on speaker phone. Everyone’s here. How’s it going?”

Although they sounded their usual boisterous selves it was hard to imagine the evening in Oxford. The heat was bearing down on me.

“I’ve been looking at the Pacific,” I said, lamely.

“Are you still tired?” my husband asked.

“Mum, we’re all going out to dinner later.”

There was a disconnected pause as I struggled to explain the experiences that had bombarded me in the last few days.

“How was your math’s exam?” was all I could say.

“I’ve dyed my hair.” (Such was my sense of disorientation that I let that pass only to sit bolt upright in horror in the middle of the night.)

That evening, when the room situation was sorted out, a group of us tentatively left our air conditioned castle in search of a restaurant; a subdued group of disparate people who had mislaid their authorial voice while gaining another, more anxious one. Australia was out there somewhere in the darkness. Had I flown across the world crossing ancient civilizations to arrive in 1950’s England, I asked myself? Yet bemused though I was, I suspected there was more to it than I understood.

We ordered wine from this New World. Cold, white, delicious. The Brazilian writer smiled breezily. I love everyone, his smile seemed to say. My wife, my baby son, my computer. All of you. We sighed collectively, a jet-lagged, weary sigh. The air was hot as from an open oven. I felt the sky spin. Tomorrow the festival would begin.

“You’re so tiny,” the tall writer in the straw hat said, faintly. “How can you be so tiny?”

There were no cicadas here, no breeze. I had loved the retreat with its ghost gum trees rustling in the cooler breeze.

“I seldom keep up with the writers I meet on my travels,” the Brazilian was saying, lighting another cigarette.

Scented smoke, from a different city.

“What time is your meet-the-writer session?”

“Mine’s not until Thursday, unfortunately.

“I won’t come to Australia again,” the Irishman said with finality. “It’s too bloody far, really.”

“Such hard work.”

We nodded. The wind blew hotly against our faces.

“I’m longing to get back to my book.”

“All encounters with the writer are events after the facts,” said the oldest and most established amongst us, gently. “And almost inevitably they are a letdown!”

We were silent. Exhausted I scanned the night sky. This was the Southern hemisphere for God’s sake! Why wasn’t I more excited? The bar was belting out music of the most fearful kind as the waitress brought the bill.

“Here you go!” she said with confusing cheerfulness.

“Can we pay by card?”

“No worries,” she replied, guilelessly.

“Perhaps,” said the writer with the straw hat, a shade wistfully, “perhaps she really doesn’t have any.”

In my hotel room I stared at the pulsating neon lights and the empty tennis court below. A building of sand-blasted cleanliness stood unlit and empty. Beyond Land For Sale, I thought. But where was Australia? Where was its heart? I had come all this way; I did not want to leave until I found it.

Bemused, unable to understand the slippages of difference, I could only pay attention to trivia of the most banal sort. Names like Newcastle and Paddington and Kings Cross buzzed around my head. Subtle differences are harder to grasp at the best of times. Now all I could do was worry over my meet-the author session. So no, Australia did not reveal itself to me. Not then. Relentless blue skies and flat David Hockney buildings, the sheer scale of the place, everything, was too much; I struggled in a suffocating blanket of heat- riddled tiredness.

Perhaps, I thought having finished the dreaded talk, I should not have come. Perhaps this place was too vast, too puzzling for me to understand? But then as I began the book signing, people began to talk to me. From all across Australia stories began creeping tentatively out. Of loss and migration and always, they mentioned distance. Of families, separated not by war or need, but by intermarriage or a desire to live in Europe. The feelings of separation were the same. Feelings are feelings.

In Sydney there was an electrifying storm. The sails of the Opera House merged into the sea. Fruit bats dive-bombed across the city. There followed, a dozen radio interviews and later, the desert. The red heart of Australia, looking like a series of Hockney drawings. A child must have invented Australia, painstakingly blocking in its colours. Very soon I would be on the long flight away from this translucent sun.

“You’ll have a shock,” they warned me at home. “It’s freezing!”

In this way, touching briefly down in a night-bejeweled Bangkok, I returned wearily home. To the rain. Leaving the sunshine behind.

All was as before. The cat threaded himself between my legs, purring. The teenager reverted to childhood at the sight of me. All was as I’d left it. Only I, with my strange waking hours and crippling tiredness was different. Memories disturbed my sleep. Life would go on in Australia, I realized with unexpected sadness, the sun would rise and set over the great planes of the red desert, changing from flame red to soft-crayon, purple in Ayers Rock. Small birds would utter their liquid sounds, fruit bats would fly in their thousands at dusk, but I would not see any of it.

At that, a curious transformation appeared to take place within me. For memory, that impossible inner measure of the mind, began working its magic. Here in rain-washed Oxford, the sunset on the yellow Cotswold stone reminded me of another place. The impenetrable distances, the monumental emptiness I had witnessed, began to invade my thoughts. Silently they expanded. More saturated and vivid than I had believed possible. The eye’s lens having refracted the images, pasted down the experiences and began replaying them. Clearly it appeared to me, unforgettably; Australia, recollected in tranquility.

In December I travelled to the Antarctic aboard the Orlova. The continent is a truly great wilderness area, possibly the most important and the most spectacular in the whole world. But there are problems, too.

• There are geo-political problems. Countries are jockeying for position and attempting to gain influence on deciding Antarctica’s future. The Antarctic Treaty which governs what can and can’t be done will come up for renewal; and a lot of countries are looking greedily at the potential for mining minerals and searching for oil (which are both currently prohibited)

• Tourism is having a growing impact, despite the voluntary self- regulation through the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, which specifies that nothing can be taken in and nothing taken out — you are not allowed to remove a single sea shell – or even have a pee.

There is still pristine snow and ice in the areas that tourists visit. But you can now occasionally see beer cans, toilet paper and used condoms washed up on to the shore. Many of the research stations now treat and remove their sewage (after pressure from Greenpeace). But the US South Pole base buries its sewage underground — so that the South Pole itself now rests on a sea of frozen American shit.

Tourism is growing. This year over 30,000 people will visit and over 20,000 will land. And tour operators are starting to offer packages which involve staying overnight on land. Both these are bound to create further problems.

• There is still a vast array of wildlife. But whales have been hunted to near extinction, with only 3-4% of original stocks now remaining, Krill is beginning to be caught, currently only in quite small quantities; but this could become the next marine species to be overexploited, which would seriously affect the wide variety of creatures (including penguins) that depend on krill for their food.

• Climate change. Just seeing the vastness of the polar icecap helped me understand the massive impact that its melting would have on sea levels. The problem is aggravated by visiting tourists flying thousands of miles to get to the Antarctic, and visiting ships burning several tonnes of fuel each day.

All these problems need solutions. It is up to each and every one of us who have enjoyed and been inspired by the Antarctic to be part of the solution — whether we have visited the continent or just dreamed about doing so. But there are two barriers which have to be overcome first:

1) You may believe that anything that we can do will be insignificant in relation to the scale of the problem. But doing something is better than doing nothing. Change has to start somewhere. And your small actions can inspire others and can encourage politicians and business to treat the matter much more seriously.

2) You have to overcome your apathy. In fact it is apathy which is the world’s biggest problem, not global warming, poverty, AIDS, conflict, corruption or abuse of human rights. If you recognise that something needs doing, change will only happen if someone actually gets up off their backside and does something.

Getting involved is a three-stage process:
1. You start by doing little things in your everyday life that make a difference.
2. First get interested in an issue and then do something more substantial about it. Do this with friends, Get a sense of achievement. Let one thing lead to another, go on to do bigger and better things. Try to have fun doing something for a better world.
3. Finally, use your brain to come up with a creative solution which makes a significant impact on the problem.

So here are some little things to get started:

1. Become an ambassador for Antarctica. Find out as much as you can about it. Tell people about this wonderful wilderness of a continent and its importance to the future of the planet. Encourage people to speak up for its preservation. Put pressure on your politicians so that they promote and support policies which are “Antarctica-friendly”.

2. Eat sustainable fish. Much of the world’s fish has become over-fished and is facing extinction. The fish you can eat with a clear consciousness come from sustainable catcheries. The Marine Stewardship Council and Greenpeace with its Oceans campaign both have information on sustainable fishing. For a list of fish that you can’t eat, click this link.

Greenpeace is particularly concerned about the devastating impact of factory fishing on the ocean. It has just launched a new seafood research project to collect data on what fish is available at food stores. You can just sign up to be part of this campaign. Once registered, you will get instructions and a survey form to fill out when you visit your local supermarket or food store. This research shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes to complete. You then report the results back to Greenpeace, who assemble the survey data.

3. Give up plastic bags. It is just a small step in reducing the energy you use or cause to be used, but it will also save animals and fish, who often ingest used plastic bags which makes life difficult for them. When you go to the supermarket make sure you take a reusable bag. It may not do much in itself for reducing carbon consumption, but it is a first step. Then, contact people who are promoting similar or contrary messages in the media, and try to get them to see the perspective from your point of view.

4. Do something for World Ocean Day, which is June 8th. Check out their website, and see how you can help — perhaps by doing a beach clean up for them. The International Coastal Cleanup takes place in September each year. On a single day, 300,000 volunteers in 90 countries — from Argentina to Vietnam — help clean up over 11,000 miles of shoreline. Cleanup Day is also about pollution prevention. Volunteers record the different types of marine debris, and analyzing this leads to a better understanding of the causes. Join in at www.coastalcleanup.org

5. Do something simple to address global warming. Take a first step to becoming more conscious about the issues and as a starting point doing something that will have real impact. Here are two things you might like to do:
• Search on Blackle: www.blackle.com. This saves energy by having white writing on a black screen, and it uses the Google search engine. They tell you how many kilowatts of energy have been saved as a result of people using this, It is a small step, but seeing the black screen will remind you continuously of the importance of the issue of global warming.
• Do the Green Thing. Subscribe to the website and do the simple action each month. You will find their website a lot of fun: www.dothegreenthing.com

6. Click and donate. The money from click and donate sites comes from the site’s sponsors who pay for each click. Check out the different options, which include The Rainforest Site to preserve rainforest in central and south America and The Hunger Site to feed the hungry – you can find a full list of such initiatives here.

7. Save your spare change each night. Before you go to bed, tip your change into a jar, When it is full then turn it into proper cash and find something to donate it to a non-profit, possibly some Antarctic conservation trust. Check out the opportunities. Also look at the idea of helping a poor person out of poverty at www.kiva.org

8. Give up bottled water. Ask for tap with ice and a slice of lemon, instead. Bottled water is an environmentally insane project causing pollution and congestion to get the water to you and creating an environmental hazard through the empty bottles people end disposing of. Indeed if we spent the money we as a world are spending on bottled water, we could solve many of the world’s problems, including the preservation of Antarctica, with the money saved.

9. Plant one tree. This will breathe out more than the amount of oxygen that you will need to live. It also absorbs carbon dioxide which will do a little to address global warming. Check out the UN’s Billion Trees Campaign: www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign. Plant your own in your yard or garden, or just somewhere where you think a tree is needed (this is called “guerrilla gardening”).

10. Have a Whale of a Time. Enjoy changing the world. Have fun. Make new friends. If you want to find out more about whales, go to: www.whaleofatime.org

Each of us can do something. Pledge to do as many of these ten things as you can. Get started; it’s never too early. And remember the old Quaker proverb: It’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.

For more information on how to change the world, read Michael Norton’s two books: 365 Ways to Change the World, published in Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, the UK and the USA, and The Everyday Activist, published in the UK. You can also visit his blog, or sign up to the 365 newsletter.

Nicholas Pearson, Publishing Director of Fourth Estate, is in Sweden to read Doris Lessing’s Nobel lecture.

Stockholm is decorated for Christmas. The windows of the magnificent buildings that border the waterfront are lit with triangles of candles, the Christmas tree near the Royal Palace is ablaze with lights, and the shops and restaurants have oil candles on their doorsteps.

Even one or two of the boats bobbing on the jetties have little decorated trees jutting from their foredecks, their rails wrapped in lights. It is a terrible shame that Doris Lessing isn’t here to see it and accept her magnificent award.

Laureates and their families started arriving days ago, and since then the winners in physics, chemistry, medicine and literature have been giving their acceptance lectures at venues all over Stockholm (the Peace Prize takes place in a separate ceremony in Oslo).

We all stay at the Grand Hotel, the glitziest in the city, where even to stare at a piece of gravalax costs about £50. In the foyer we are met by people from the Nobel Foundation, and if there could be any doubt about the achievement that is the Nobel Prize for Literature, it is quickly dispelled by a quick glance at the poster they offer, showing the photographs of all 104 winners since 1901.

Staring at me is a roll of honour that includes W B Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, T S Eliot, William Faulkner, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemmingway, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Samuel Beckett, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who was one of the first to ring Doris and congratulate her), William Golding, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, V S Naipaul, J M Coetzee, Harold Pinter, and last year Orhan Pamuk. Doris Lessing is only the tenth woman to win the prize.

On Friday evening I made my way to the Swedish Academy to deliver Doris’s Acceptance lecture on her behalf. I was greeted by members of the Committee and shown the great library, where the books of all the Nobel winners are kept. I was taken into a side room and in a small ceremony presented with a book to take to London for Doris. It is a science fiction epic poem by Harry Martinson, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1974. In this well-known poem in Swedish literature, Martinson has space-travellers looking back to their beloved home, Mother Earth, here named Doris.

As 5.30 drew near the committee and I made our way into the great hall, where ambassadors, writers, Doris’s daughter and grandchildren from Cape Town, and hundreds of others had gathered for the lecture. Doris Lessing is an incredibly popular winner here in Sweden. The lecture was broadcast live on television. If you are interested in seeing it, there is a video of the whole speech on the nobelprize.org website. It was the greatest privilege of my publishing life to perform this task for a writer I love.

The highlight of Saturday was without question the Nobel Prize concert, in honour of the laureates, in the presence of the King of Sweden and this year conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy and featuring the extraordinary pianist Lang Lang. This was the first time these two had performed together.

A few years ago Lang Lang recorded Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto and, in his own words, had very much emphasised the darkness and anxiety in the composer’s soul. For this occasion, Lang Lang indicated that his interpretation would ‘tend more towards red — more heat and passion’. His performance was absolutely breathtaking.

Yesterday, there was a small lunch with the British Ambassador at his residency, for Doris’s family, and for Martin Evans and his family. Martin Evans, also British, has been awarded the Nobel this year for his work in stem cell research, which he pioneered in the early 80s. More speeches, a touching one from Martin, who quoted our own Gwyneth Lewis. The British Ambassador’s absence from the lecture was explained — he had been on a plane going to Brussels with David Milliband. In truth, the academy had been rather disappointed. Korea had been there, and India!

Later in the day, there was a champagne reception at the Nordic Museum, next to the Vasa Museum where the restored galleon that sank in the harbour in 1628 is housed. It was pulled from the mud and painstakingly restored over twenty years, and opened to the public in 1990. This is a must for anyone who comes to this city.

From there we were taken to the Bonniers’ great family home for a dinner to celebrate Doris. Many of her foreign publishers were there, from Finland, Holland, Germany, HarperCollins in New York (Terry Karten had flown to London and back the previous day, to have tea with Doris). Inge Feltrinelli, who had dresses made in Milan for Doris, arrived with a lovely scrapbook of photographs of her. All sixty of us wrote messages to Doris which we will take back to London for her.

Today is the big day, the Award Ceremony at the Concert Hall. My white tie and tails are hanging in the cupboard. We think that Doris will be spoken to on the phone from the stage. And then on to the Nobel Banquet in the Blue Hall of the City Hall, where I will dance with the Queen of Sweden . . .

You know things are serious when the lawyers get involved.

Last week I spent two days in Paris, the first time I had been back since Sarkozy was elected, and since the new vélib scheme has brought 20,000 bicycles to the streets. Two weeks previously the metro and train drivers had staged their strikes, enthusiastically supported by the students who had barricaded the Sorbonne and marched with a multitude of banners in the spirit of ’68.

This time barristers were marching against centralisation and had reclaimed the streets as was their birthright. Many of them would have been of an age to have chanted ‘sous les pavés, la plage’ in those heady May days.

I had arrived with a battered copy of Maupassant’s Bel Ami in my back pocket, looking forward to savouring the Paris of carriages and cobbled streets, salons and assignations between the trees in the Jardin des Tuileries, but now that the smell, if not of musket shot, but certainly of protest was in the air, I wanted to seek out the demonstrators.

Paris is often described as a city to be read on foot, and it is easy to see why when, to take one street, rue Servendoni in St Sulpice, there is housed one of Dumas’s Three Musketeers as well as Jean Valjean, Hugo’s hero from Les Miserables. Such a destiny of literature has assembled in Paris that one pictures characters from centuries of literature crossing paths constantly, crowding each other out — a rioting mob of heroes and villains, cads and damsels in distress all clamouring for space in the cafes and across the boulevards.

We followed the good-humoured barristers down rue Cambon where Diana and Dodi took their last fateful trip from the back of the Ritz as they made their way to the Ministry of Justice. What the metro drivers inadvertently did by sending commuters up onto the streets was to remind people that it is possible to walk across the breadth of Paris with great ease.

The heavy breathing of the lawyers we walked with was not just lack of exercise. It was an exhilaration of seeing again how they should be experiencing the city, as an intoxicating abundance of crowds – a huge anthology of tales or as a single novel; a salon one minute, a wilderness the next.

The students have all gone home now, and the lawyers are back in their chambers, and it would appear that Sarkozy will not bend to them, just as he held his nerve against the train drivers. But for this generation of protesters, who may not have succeeded as their predecessors had, they have at least re-discovered the primary generative grammar of their legs, and been reminded that to experience Paris in its true form, as a collection of stories, a memory of itself made by the walkers of the street, both real and fictional, is to put one foot in front of the other.

As for Bel Ami, it remains unopened in my back pocket. For all the parks and cafes, Paris is a city where one’s feet are best left to do the reading.

Research for my book The Long Exile took me to the Arctic twice, once to Inukjuak and once on a more complicated journey first to the Nunavut capital, Iqaluit, then to Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, from where most of the North Pole expeditions now begin. From Resolute I flew on a tiny Twin Otter cargo plane to the world’s most northerly permanently inhabited settlement, Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, where Josephie Flaherty and his family were exiled half a century ago.

The trip to Inukjuak began in July. The summer birds had arrived and there were tiny cloudberries and cranberries ripening among the Arctic willow. With a misplaced sense of romanticism I took myself off alone for a day or two, making my way up and down the muskeg, following the path of the nearby river so I could find my way back easily. The stretch of the tundra pouring out on either side of the water was both thrilling and disorientating to me. But there was something wonderfully delicate and elegant about it too. It didn’t take long to be out of ear and eye shot of Inukjuak.

After six or seven hours’ walking I felt more alone than ever before. I was not alone, though, as I soon saw. On the other side of the river bank a wolf bitch and her cub were following my progress. Alarmed and unprepared, I crouched down and practised heaving rocks along the shoreline, in case the wolf decided to approach and I had to defend myself against her, but she and her cub continued to watch my antics with nothing more than mild curiosity. I realised then that even if the rocks discouraged the wolf they could not, in any more profound sense, protect me from what was all around.

For the first time in my life, I was in a wilderness, one of the last genuine wildernesses on earth. The thought made me feel vulnerable and a little frightened but at the same time I’d never felt more alive or more master of my own destiny. I had tasted what it felt like to be wild, a taste as routinely familiar to Inuit as the taste of beer and takeaway pizza is to me.

The landscape around Grise Fiord had none of Inukjuak’s elegance or delicacy. What it did have was otherworldliness. When I arrived on a Twin Otter in late March, the sea was still frozen but the land wasn’t white and snowy, as I’d assumed it would be, but the colour of a tin can left out in the rain, matt and lustreless, with spots of rust, and scrunched into beautiful but indomitably bleak cliffs and crags.

The extreme cold brought on a brain-freezing headache similar to, but much more intense than, the kind you get when you eat icecream too quickly. The air scoured my lungs. Ice pulled on my nose hairs as I breathed and my tear ducts collected tiny icy boulders. Even if the tundra around Inukjuak was frightening, the settlement itself felt safe and substantial. In Grise nothing did.

As if the freezing air and the eye-blinding dazzle of the light were not enough, the place was constantly troubled by the tremendous churn of the ice pack, the growl of floes grinding one upon another, the shriek of the wind and the roar of the sea ice cracking. Mountains rise up directly behind the heated cabins of the modern settlement, blocking the view into the interior. On the eastern side a huge glacier slides centimetre by centimetre into the sea, and on the western side there are the ethereally beautiful but terrible crags of the fiord. More than half a century after Josephie Flaherty and his family were first moved there, Grise Fiord still seemed unsurvivable. And yet, as I knew, it was not.

While in Grise I ventured out on the sea ice one time with Tom Kiguktok and his dog team. By then, I’d got used to the idea that it was perfectly reasonable to light the barbecue in -28C temperatures, as my host Ken Powder had done to celebrate my arrival. But everywhere beyond the settlement still seemed quite terrifying and otherworldly.

As we sledged out onto the sea, I tried to put on a brave show but my heart was clinging to Tom as fiercely as a toddler clutching her safety blanket. And yet, as we travelled, instead of feeling ever more disquieted as I had on my own in Inukjuak, I began to relax. I knew we were in danger. What with the ice conditions, the extreme cold and the presence of polar bears, we were almost certainly more vulnerable than I had been the previous summer, but neither Tom nor I were fighting our vulnerability. Tom’s competence and confidence in his skills, born of a deep understanding of the land, allowed me to be something of my usual self. In fact, the further we went, the more I felt expanded, both outwards towards Tom and internally.

In Inukjuak the wolf and I had been separate selves, but here in Grise, Tom, the dogs and I were a team, each of us dependent on the others. Tom and the dogs understood the land so well that in a real sense it inhabited them as much as they inhabited it and so I too felt connected and, for all the dangers, strangely at peace. My solo experiment in Inukjuak was never going to be more than a means to survive in the Arctic for a short while. This, on the other hand, was a way to live.

Last night at the British Press Awards Christina Lamb was again named Foreign Correspondent of the Year. This marks her fourth British Press Award — she’s been Foreign Correspondent of the Year twice, News Reporter of the Year and Young Journalist of the Year. This is in addition to receiving the Foreign Press Association award for the best foreign story and the Amnesty International award for periodical writing. She’s also the only roving foreign correspondent for a British newspaper who is also a mother.

Foreign correspondents seem to me a very particular breed, driven to take risks that would terrify most of us. It’s fascinating to try to imagine what impels them to war-torn countries, to immerse themselves again and again in the world’s most desperate and dangerous situations. The closest comparison I can imagine is to the mountaineers who doggedly threw themselves at the Eiger, dying in their droves, or the Arctic explorers who pitted themselves against terrifying expanses of remorseless ice and snow. Again, a different breed.

I’ve pasted below what Christina has to say on the subject, from the introduction to a book of her collected journalism that we’re publishing in July. Sobering stuff.

“The Plane to Kish Islands

Here is a typical morning in my life. It happens to be Sunday July 2nd 2006 and it is the day of my son’s seventh birthday party.

I arrived back on a plane early this morning from Afghanistan. At Heathrow I am one of the lucky people greeted by a name-board: for the first time ever my newspaper has arranged a car to pick me up. London has a grey hung-over gloom and St Georges flags droop forlornly from windows. The driver tells me that England was knocked out of the World Cup by Portugal the night before. Penalties, of course: I needn’t ask.

After dropping off my bags at home along with a bag of Starbucks croissants from the airport, and drinking my first decent cup of tea in a month, we drive to Sainsburys to buy ham and crust-less sliced bread. I have to make ham sandwiches for 20 seven-year-olds.

I make twice as many as anyone will eat, buttering slice after slice of bread with great purpose. Then I take them and a cool-box of drinks to nearby Palewell Park where we are having a football party.

Some of the children at the party are pointing at me and whispering. They have seen me on the news or the front page of the Sunday Times that morning and know that four days ago I was almost killed by Taliban — the “baddies” I hear one of them explain.

My mother is there, looking shocked, though I had phoned from Heathrow to warn her before she bought the paper. My husband, who is Portuguese, has said nothing.

This, after all, is what I do.

It is a sunny afternoon and I throw myself into arranging children’s drinks and ice creams and acting supremely unbothered. I want to keep hugging the blue-eyed birthday boy who I thought I would never see again but I know he will regard that as “embarrassment-making”. My phone beeps insistently with text messages — a bizarre mix of horrified concern from those who have seen the story in the paper and jokes about the state of my marriage after the Portugal-England match from those who haven’t.

My jeans and long printed smock are covering cuts, bruises, burns and thorns that I will still be picking out in six months. Some of them are infected and in a few days I will go to a local GP who will say “you have been in the wars” and I will laugh and let him assume I fell off my bike into a thorn bush.

Almost 20 years I have spent living on the edge. I have been pinned down by Russian tanks in a trench in Kandahar, narrowly missed a brick that smashed through my car windscreen on the West Bank, navigated through roadblocks manned by red-eyed drug-crazed boys with Kalashnikovs in west Africa, been kidnapped in the middle of the night by Pakistani intelligence, survived car crashes and emergency landings in planes held together by tape, and come under sniper fire in Iraq. All around me people have died. My life, I believe, is charmed.

Now I have come as close as possible to being killed. The British paratroopers, with whom I was ambushed, were so convinced we were about to be “rolled up” that they talked of saving their last bullets for themselves. In that ditch surrounded on all sides by Taliban with mortars, RPGs and Kalashnikovs, for the first time I really believed I would die. And I swore if I ever got out I would never go back.

Two months later, I will grab the bag with my flak jacket, helmet, medical kit and satellite phone and be back on a plane to Afghanistan.

Why do it? Every day I run away from that question.

I am not an alcoholic, a heroin addict, or from a broken home. I am a mother of a gorgeous curly-haired boy, wife of a loving husband, daughter of devoted parents, part of a close circle of friends… I have no excuses.

I could tell you it’s a search for truth. A hope that by exposing the evils and injustices of the world I can help make it a better place. Sadly, the pen is not that powerful or else the likes of Mugabe would not still be in power.

I could tell you that when I was a child I loved to read the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson and turn the sheets hanging on the washing line into doors onto faraway places. One of our neighbours had an apple tree that served just as well as Stevenson’s cherry tree for climbing up and looking “abroad on foreign lands”.

I could tell you that I felt suffocated by suburbia, living in a place called Carshalton Beeches where the only excitement was to go “up the wine bar” or “down the pub”. Adventure was missing the last train from London and having to take a series of night buses from Trafalgar Square.

I could tell you that I adored Hemingway and wanted to run with the bulls in Spain, watch big game among the green hills of Africa (though not hunt it), drink mojitos in bars in old Havana and find love behind the lines.

I could tell you that once you see others die and evils such as boys turned into killing machines with AK47s or families forced to bury stick-limbed girls because they could not afford HIV drugs, one’s own life becomes pretty insignificant.

I could tell you that there is nothing more exciting than getting on a plane to somewhere you have never been, particularly with a name like Bujumbura or Cochabamba. That used to be true but these days endless security queues have spoiled the magic of airports.

Maybe the truth lies in Dubai Terminal 2. That’s where you go to catch planes to the bad places. The destination board reads Kabul, Baghdad, Mogadishu and the airlines have names you’ve never heard of like Chelyabinsk, Don Air, Kam Air, Ossetia, Mahan air and Samara Airlines. These are airlines so dodgy that they are not allowed to land at the proper airport. Many, like Ariana Afghan airlines or Reem air of Kyrghistan, are on a list banning them from European airspace and describing them as “flying coffins”. Their planes are old Tupolevs bought second or third hand from Aeroflot or Air India.

The name, Terminal 2, makes it sound as if it is attached to the main airport but in fact it lies a half hour taxi ride away. It seems in another country entirely to that gleaming glass temple to capitalism where sunburnt passengers in shorts and mini-skirts shop for Rolex watches and Fendi handbags and buy $100 lottery tickets to win a Jaguar X-type.

At Terminal 2 there is just one shop and people stock up on Mars bars, tampons and biscuits for they know not what they will get the other end. Mostly they are bounty hunters, Afghan moneychangers, aid-workers, private security guards and journalists. Instead of smart shiny suitcases they have battered kitbags and rucksacks, black plastic crates of survival equipment, or, in the case of the Afghans, large cloth bundles. The ones with briefcases are consultants, being paid thousands of dollars for something called “capacity building”, but they will get on a special United Nations plane. Sometimes there are dead bodies being flown back from comfortable exile to be buried in harsh homelands.

Most people have grimly resigned expressions, particularly if like me they are flying Ariana. For the airlines of Terminal 2 departure times mean nothing and it is common to turn up day after day before a plane finally arrives. Besides we all know that the Ariana pilots prefer staying in Dubai than piloting their ‘coffins’ back to a destroyed country. We debate with those holding Kam tickets whether it’s safer to fly with an airline that has already crashed or one that always seems about to crash. Passengers that make a fuss and try to find non-existent airline representatives are exposed as newcomers.

Some might be committed do-gooders; others are only doing it for money. “George Bush has paid off thousands of mortgages”, says a Scottish ex-para on his way to be a $1000 a day security consultant in Afghanistan after a long stint in Iraq.

But there are a few that have a look on their face that I recognise. It’s a sort of suburban restlessness. Not in a grass-is-always-greener kind of way. But a search for adventure.

These are the people whose eyes light up when they see the name Kish appear on the destination board. Where is that? Kish islands in Iran, someone tells me. It sounds intriguing. I know I will try to go there. It will mean flying Kish air which last crashed two years ago.

Biographers of Alexander the Great used the Greek word pothos to describe his endless yearning to be somewhere else, whether it was to cross the Danube, go to the oracle of Ammon, sail the ocean, see the Persian Gulf or untie the legendary knot at Gordium.

I liked that description. But then I read that the longing for something unattainable expressed by pothos could also signify a desire to die. For pothos is also the name for delphiniums, the flowers that Greeks traditionally placed on someone’s tomb.

I never set out to be brave or daring or intrepid or any of those labels often attached to the phrase ‘war correspondent’. What I wanted to be is a storyteller. I have been lucky enough to live in countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe at a time of huge upheaval when the world was adjusting from the Cold War to a whole new war of terrorist attacks and suicide bombs.

To me the real story in war is not the bang-bang but the lives of those trying to survive behind the lines. This book then is not an attempt to answer the question why but just to present what I have seen as it is. Working for a weekly paper I have had the luxury of time to be able to go where other reporters don’t and tell the stories of those forgotten.

This then is a mixture of memories, articles (where possible the original rather than edited) and impressions jotted in notebooks and diaries. Sometimes the story behind the article is more interesting than what appeared on the printed page and where that is so I have tried to include that. These are my places of hope and despair.

Christina Lamb, London, March 2007″

The 23rd International Jerusalem Book Fair took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel high up on the hills that surround the old city walls. The hotel is nondescript save for the balcony on the 20th floor, which offers a panoramic view of the old city, the Temple of the Mount and the nine-metre-high security wall and runs chaotically through the city, separating the Jewish and Arab communities. From here you can see the layers and tectonics of the city and how they have developed and collided over the millennia. What becomes immediately clear is that everything in this city from architecture to archaeology is political.

The conflict, like the old city of Jerusalem, would take more than the week provided to unravel fully. But at its heart, according to those on both sides of the wall the conflict is one over the historical narrative of the city and not simply territorial possession. It is against this backdrop that the role of the Jerusalem Book Fair is defined both for publishing in Israel and the wider world.

It cannot be ignored that proposals were slipped under our hotel room doors in the dead of the night, and phone messages left in secretive voices explaining that it was a matter of great urgency that we meet. But the book fair plays a very serious and fundamental role in engaging not only Arabs and Israelis in a dialogue about the city and the country’s future, but also the hundreds of publishers and agents who visit from around the world. This at a time when refusal to engage is endemic.

It is a huge credit to the organisers of the book fair that for the first time, after months of negotiation through a third party intermediary, they were able to invite a Palestinian publisher, Samech Dandis, to have a stand at the fair. Such was the media frenzy on the announcement that he almost did not come.

The book fair is also the centrepiece of Israeli publishing. In the organisers’ own words, Israeli publishing is ‘locked in a cage’ by its own language, since the market outside Israel for books in Hebrew is finite. So frustrated have writers become that they are turning to foreign languages as a means of getting their work published, even in Israel. It is not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as the number of young people leaving the country is increasing.

In the last few years even Hebrew novels are suffering as translated fiction takes primacy with Jonathan Littel novel, ‘Les Bienveillantes’, going for $35,000, an unprecedented amount in a country where sales of 500 copies a week can get you onto the bestseller’s list.

But it was not only through the prism of publishing that our hosts wanted us to get to know their country. On our second night the group was split between hosting agents where we were invited into their houses to hear their stories.

Dorothy Harman and her husband hosted a dinner at which their children, recently arrived back from New York and East Dulwich, London, told us their stories. It was the only time that we would hear about the future of the country. A future that they saw to be profoundly sad since there is a common acceptance that there are no fresh ideas in circulation, and each aging prime minister is recycled until his policies are discredited. Maybe for this reason the story always returns to the past: each side engaged in a conflict of ownership of the narrative history of Jerusalem. Jewish areas are referred to as deeply rooted ‘neighbourhoods’ while the Palestinians live in transient ‘settlements’. Arab taxi drivers will talk for hours about their family history, claiming that their connection to Jerusalem goes back 500 years, which is of course impossible to disprove.

For the organisers of the Jerusalem book fair, the historical narrative of the conflict was engaged as a dialogue most obviously at an event called ‘Voices from the Hilltops’, where the agent Deborah Harris had arranged a day of discussions, reading and film screenings dealing with the conflict from a plethora of perspectives, and included the sublime octogenarian poet, Taha Muhammed Ali. Two years previously the joint event had taken place on the bridge to Jordan, in no man’s land. It is testament to the achievements of the book fair that this time the conference was on the outskirts of Jerusalem, within touching distance of the security wall and Bethlehem.

The event included a film called Beaufort, which had just won the Berlin Film Festival award for best director, based on Ron Leshem’s novel If There is a Heaven set during Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. It seems apparent that the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ for our generation can only come from this part of the world.

It was when the level of discussion had reached its most profound that the German literary agent, Michael Gaeb, stood up and spoke for us all when he confessed his confusion over how he should feel as an outsider who felt obligated to have an opinion. Before the discussion could go much further, could the panel provide any orientation to understanding the situation that had come to define their existence?

The question seemed to surprise the panel since the first answer was simply ‘leave’. It became clear though that for all panel that they wanted us to fall in love with the city layer by layer, and to choose our own narrative since for as long as there is dialogue there is hope. They wanted us to go and find the city for ourselves. This became even more personal when one Israeli literary agent asked me to take some photographs of Bethlehem as this was a place that she would never be able to visit.

Along the 1967 border the museum of the Seam has been founded as a means of engaging with the conflict through art. The curator speaks proudly of the group of Israeli soldiers barely out of their teens, leaving the exhibition in silence, shocked at the confrontation with the situation from a perspective other than their own.

The British graffiti artist, Banksy, had got across the check point in 2004 to adorn the Palestine side of the wall with his own narrative. Ironically the curator had not heard of Banksy’s antics let alone seen them, banned as an Israeli Jew from crossing into Palestine. The photograph below, taken to the sound of gunfire, was for him.

At the Ramallah checkpoint with Banksy, 2007.

It was not all about publishing. There was a healthy collection of bad dance moves on display. A visit was made to the Mount of Olives for sunrise over the Old City, after a nervous moment outside a club with a gang of gun carrying Israeli soldiers, who seemed to be as tired and emotional as we were. And an unbreakable bond is forged between semi-naked men tiptoeing out of the changing room for a swim in the Dead Sea talking slightly too loudly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

But it was the visualisation of the history and the geography from the 20th floor that left the deepest impression, intricately bound as it is to the necessity and desire to engage in dialogue that the book fair stands for.

It’s literary love-in time here in Toronto, with the arrival of over 100 writers participating in the 27th annual International Festival of Authors. There are 10 days of readings, panels and interviews scheduled, and the atmosphere is everything you’d expect from a literary festival sponsored by Starbucks (among others): civilised chatter over filter coffee, or perhaps a green tea; polite reverence, the occasional titter or gasp, and respectful applause.

So Gautam Malkani’s debut, reading from Londonstani , is like a collective happy-slap from the desis of Hounslow. “It’s quite brutal” he explains, before launching into the profanity strewn first chapter:

Serve him right he got his muthafuckin face fuck’d, shudn’t b callin me a paki, innit…

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