I have several friends who live in a place called Cappadocia. This is a central Anatolian province characterised by many weird and wonderful structures known locally as ‘Fairy Chimneys’. They are made, as are the surrounding escarpments and caves, from volcanic tufa rock thrown up millions of years ago when Turkey was a land of fire and lava. Over the centuries many people have lived in and then left Cappadocia. The caves and the chimneys have, over that time, been used as houses, dove-cotes, churches, wine cellars and as refuges from many and various invading armies. Now Cappadocia is a national park and is a vital part of the country’s tourist industry. I’ve been there many times and know Cappadocia to be a beautiful, fascinating, mysterious and crazy place.

Just to sum up, in the past I have met men weirdly reminiscent of characters in my Çetin İkmen books (one with a name identical to a character!), I’ve flown in balloons over this weird landscape with a bunch of wildly enthusiastic and very camp boys (and my mum!), danced in the moonlight amongst the chimneys, tried to sleep in a cave with wolves howling outside, listened to otherwise very sensible people talk about fairies and laughed for hours at the often staggered responses of new tourists to the chimneys. Because the thing about the chimneys is that they do indeed look like chimneys but they also look like huge erect penis’s too. It has to be faced and the sooner a ‘newby’ to Cappadocia gets it over with the better. Whenever I’ve arrived by bus, from İstanbul or Ankara, it has usually been in company with a load of other Europeans who, upon seeing the chimneys, don’t know what to do with themselves. They look at the Turks, who are of course completely accustomed to such sights and at me, who is likewise, inured, and they just don’t know how to respond. Some I believe, think that they might be having some sort of psychotic episode. But someone somewhere will eventually laugh and then we’ll all be off. Even otherwise very demure Turkish grandmothers will laugh until they cry as the entire bus explodes in a riot of unspoken ‘nudge, nudge’ gags and ‘Carry on’ style internal innuendo. That said I do remember one very memorable occasion when all the tourists were screaming with laughter when suddenly a very respectable Turkish man got up and said in English, ‘Yes, they do look just like that!’

Like most places, Cappadocia has a dark side. There are wolves in the mountains, the winter snows are heavy and can be deadly and not everyone you meet will want to be your friend. But for me it is one of those places that I can visit again and again and again and never get bored. İstanbul and London are my first loves, but Cappadocia makes me laugh and now that (hopefully) the winter is over and my leg is on the mend I am beginning to dream about being there. I need a good laugh as well as some truly peculiar experiences just to restore my faith in life. Even though it is raining today, I do feel very much as if summer is finally on the way now and I am determined to be hopeful. Last time I was in Cappadocia I danced in the moonlight amongst the chimneys. In the past I’ve witnessed a solar eclipse, climbed out onto the top of a chimney via an ancient monk-built staircase and met a very odd Englishman who wanted to bury himself alive in one of the warrens of caves that were used by the ancients as underground cities. What this time, I wonder? Quad biking Hare Krishna’s? Oh, no done that already.

With all the talk about politics and history and bio-chemistry in my colleagues’ blobs these last few weeks I’m starting to feel like a bit of a light-weight. Not only am I second-to-last slack-head (ahead of only Guest Blobber) in the Blobbing Premier League tables you see to your right, I’m also perhaps the only person on the planet who hasn’t passed on my opinion of the democratic principles of governance in Southeast Asia. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of you out there might have the opinion that I’m a bit dim and lacking in insight on matters of major concern to the world. So, it’s time to address these misconceptions and put in my sixpenny worth on the topic of hemorrhoids. I apologize if you’re engaging in a meal right now and to make hemorrhoids easier to swallow, I’m including them together with a number of other ailments that concern old people like myself. Apart from probing the above, I shall also be bending over backwards in my expose of lumbar pain, following through on kidney stones, and straightening out a few knee misconceptions.

I shall take these topics in reverse order. When I was little, I recall my granny telling me that granddad’s knees had ‘gone again’. Me, being a curious six-year-old, would head off in search of them, being careful not accidentally crush them underfoot in my endeavors. Little did I know then that granddad’s knees would eventually catch up with me. I recently watched an excruciating movie called Bad Lieutenant. I cringed the whole way through it, not only because Nicholas Cage is such an awful actor, but because the character he almost played was suffering from chronic back pain. I could feel it every time he jumped onto Eva Mendez. ‘Don’t do it,” I’d shout, to no avail. Luckily for him he had access to heroin and cocaine. All I had was Aspirin. Suffering from kidney stones, as I have, becomes much worse when you hear a comedian on TV describe it as a blowfish passing down a rubber hose. And, yes, I’ve had hemorrhoids, buckets of ‘em. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

But here’s the rub. All those old-person complaints hit me before I reached thirty. At the age of eighteen when all the other boys were out getting their first nooky-noodles, I got my first hemorrhoid. I worked out a lot so for the first few months I thought it was a new muscle. My coach had instilled the ‘no pain – no gain’ philosophy in the team so I know I gained a lot that year. My initiation in the world of kidney stones was at the tender age of twenty-five and they remained faithful compadres through to the age of fifty. But then I discovered a wonderful weed called ‘Cat’s Whiskers grass’ and I haven’t weed a blowfish since. (No, I do not own the CWG rights nor have the owners paid me a handsome fee for promoting their product. It really is magic.). I didn’t get my first dodgy knee till I was 29. It had something to do with me training for marathons I never had any hope of winning. Nobody remembers the runner up in a race. The doctor told me my left knee was degenerating. I took this to mean it was ageing rapidly and I wondered what I’d ever done to my left knee to make it get old before the rest of me. At thirty my back went out for the first time. (presumably in search of granddad’s knees). So you see, I was an old guy even before I’d had a chance to sample middle-age.

I realize I still have a lot to look forward to; not the least of these is when my bowels decide they’re taking over the decision making on when to evac. But I’ve weathered greater deluges. I’ve had hepatitis, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, bronchitis, tuberculosis, appendicitis and myxomatosis. But they all passed. I’m through the worst of it. I have survived. For the last five years I haven’t had anything more serious than a cold. Last weekend I kayaked forty kilometers down the Lang Suan river. Yes it almost killed me but we’ll show those body parts who’s in charge here. Our local fortune teller told me that if I didn’t die unnaturally in my fifties (I have two years to go), I’d die a natural death in my nineties. I think she’s misunderestimating me. The newspaper today said that with recent advances in medicine and technology, the first person on the planet to reach one thousand might have already been born. I think it was talking about me.

It’s for your descendants.

Seven minutes isn’t a long time. Days fly past as if they were seven minutes. Months travel like a bullet train. The way we think of time is likely very different than the way authors and readers and just about everyone else one hundred years ago.

I want you to watch this YouTube video of a film shot in San Francisco in 1906.

Time seems to stop as you look at the people, wagons drawn by horses, streetcars, early automobiles and the pedestrians scatter like free range cattle on the street.

It is because we recognize and don’t recognize a moving picture of the past. Such footage is exceedingly rare. Turn the calendar back 200, 300, or 500 years and there are only word trails creating images of those who walked the trails. But we can’t actually see those people moving, the expressions on their faces.

Our 7 minutes takes will likely have far less impact on our descendants who in 2114—the same distance was we now are from the 1906 San Francisco movie. Because our images won’t be a rare fine, to the contrary, they will likely have consciousness.

Our descendant’s reaction to us may be the same as ours looking back a hundred years—the technology looks more than basic, it looks primitive (how did they cope?) The way people in public space moved was either directionless or chaotic. People, horses, vehicles—not of them look particularly unclean, in good repair, or safe. That’s quite likely what our descendants may be saying how we looked a hundred years earlier, way back in 2010.

A story can be told in seven minutes.
What seven-minute story—labeled don’t open until 2114—do you want to leave behind?

Mega thanks to my friend, author Joe Glazner for sending me the link to the 1906 video.

When you live in a foreign place, it can become home. You forget how foreign it is.

Then you go to another foreign country, only to discover that it doesn’t seem so foreign. And you realize that the place you live actually IS extremely foreign.

That’s what happened to me during the last week, when I toured Germany to read from my third Palestinian rime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET (just published by CH Beck Verlag as “Der Tote von Nablus.”)

I was in Munich station when I noticed in a pastry shop that Germans spell pretzel with a B (“Brezel”). I felt a little blown away, as though I’d been living a lie all these years offering my son “pretzels.” But that’s as foreign as Germany got. Otherwise, this Welshman felt right at home there.

Right off the plane on my return to Israel, however, the country which has been my home since 1996 and where I’ve grown accustomed to the way people behave, the foreignness hit me anew.

Actually even before that. The fellow in the seat next to me on the flight from Frankfurt kept talking to me – Israelis have a way of talking a lot and they can also be rather clueless about my oh-so-subtle signals that I’d rather read my book. While I was eating, he reached over and took part of my bread roll with a smile and gentle touch of my forearm. (Bread is something you share in Middle Eastern meals, although it usually applies to pita and flatbread, not to tiny airline rolls. This was pretty extreme space-invasion, even for a Middle Easterner, but the reassuring friendly gestures while he was taking advantage of me were very familiar.)

Then in the airport, the dimensions of personal space shrank from the yard kept by Germans to an elbow-brushing, back-nudging Middle Eastern minimum. I smiled, because the Tel Aviv airport is very flashy and new – you could be anywhere in the world. But it’s most definitely not the unflustered calm of Dresden airport, where I boarded my first flight of the day.

Arrival in a “foreign” country means a lot of things that’ll sound deeply negative – or at least they’ll sound like I’m being negative. The shoving and noise and the passport lines where people don’t actually wait in line but prefer to edge around you. But I’m not entirely negative about them. I like it (mostly), because I enjoy being an outsider. To be sure, I don’t think I’d like it much if I looked around and thought, “These are my people. This is my culture. This is ME.”

Then, I expect I’d want us to be more organized, more respectful of each other, less suspicious, more…foreign.

It struck me that “foreign” countries are simply the ones where things aren’t even remotely fair. That’s why everyone at the Tel Aviv airport hovers over the baggage carousel, shifting from foot to foot, edging in front of others closer to the bags. It suggests an absolute fear that the bag never will come and, most of all, that if all the bags happened to arrive all at once you must be the first one to grab yours and get away before the other suckers. Life in a “foreign” country is a zero-sum game, in which someone else’s success or happiness comes somehow at your expense and must be envied, hated, usurped.

That’s not a German quality. Germans have a sense that there’s some degree of fairness in their society and it makes relations between them less devious and Machiavellian, less on the make. They drive fast, but they don’t think someone else driving fast is attacking them on a macho level, signaling superiority and disdain for them, and, thus, respond by semi-subliminally trying to run them off the road.

So here I am, back in Jerusalem, back to being a foreigner.

Though I shouldn’t forget that at least Israelis spell pretzel with a P.

Introduction

Has an important source for your book lied to you?

If the answer is yes, and the book is published, then what happens? Ask Charles Pellegrino.

Charles Pellegrino’s “Last Train from Hiroshima” was receiving rave review and racing up the amazon ranking like the bullet train. Then the publisher, Henry Holt Company, pulled the plug and announced it was recalling the book as if it were a runaway Toyota. The reason was that the one of the sources may have been a fraud and another “character” in the book might not have existed. A non-fiction book which has built a story structure based on what turns out to be an imposter, is no longer non-fiction. It becomes fantasy. This has to be an author’s worst nightmare. His source material is tainted. His publisher is demanding an explanation and the author fails to satisfy the publisher as to authenticity of his sources.

The case is right up dark alley of the International Crime Author’s Reality Check. As a group, we have our radar out for reality lapses.

“Last Train from Hiroshima” is a non-fiction book. It is supposed to be based on fact. The stuff that happened was supposed to have happened. The characters involved were supposed to be actual people who lived through and participated in World War II. It was supposed to debunk the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. One of the author’s sources turned out to be an imposter.

The press had a field day with the circumstances surrounding the writing of the book, the author’s response to questions about his research, and the publisher’s dramatic decision to withdraw the book. Not to mention that James Cameron optioned the book for a major Hollywood film.

The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/books/09publishers.html

The Telegraph (UK): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7361952/Hiroshima-book-pulled-from-shelves-over-doubts-about-sources.html

The Mercury News: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14498194?nclick_check=1

I asked veteran author Bob Bergin to give us his views, based on his research experience. Bob is the right author to talk about these matters. For years he’s researched material for a number of books about the World War II Flying Tigers and has interviewed many of the survivors of that small group of pilots. He has first hand experience about talking with people who participated in events that happened sixty years ago. Bob has also come across some imposters.

In the essay below, Bob shares his experience of the difficult research stage that all writers must proceed through and what dangers to look for on the way.

————————————————————————-

On Being Duped by a Source:
Thoughts on Interviewing Airmen – and Anyone Else

Bob Bergin

Christopher Moore and I both like a good war story – particularly when it’s told by a man who was there. When Publisher Henry Holt pulled back The Last train From Hiroshima, it quickly got our attention. A source told untruths to the unfortunate author – and the author built a good bit of his book around them.

Now that is an awkward thing to happen – and happen it does. It could happen to any one of us who does interviews. It makes one think. Can a writer protect himself from being had? And how does an author keep from becoming a dupe? I think there are two ways: one can be lucky, or one can go into an interview prepared.

The interviews I’ve done over the years have involved a variety of military types, but in my earliest efforts I was a specialist of sorts – and that taught me something.

My focus was the American Volunteer Group (AVG) Flying Tigers. Fewer than 100 pilots and 200 support personnel comprised the group. They existed as a combat unit for only the first seven months of World War II. In that time they were credited with destroying 297 Japanese aircraft in the air and another 150 “probably destroyed,” which makes the AVG Flying Tigers one of the most effective units in the history of aerial warfare.

I had an affinity for the Tigers from my earliest youth. They were a colorful lot, rowdy on the ground, exceptionally effective in the air. And they operated in the skies over Burma, Thailand and southwest China, the part of the world I would become much involved with. Through one of those quirks of fate, I found myself involved with a Thai aviation foundation when it came across the only wreckage ever found of one of the AVG Flying Tiger’s 100 original P-40 aircraft. My long and close association with the Flying Tigers stemmed from that.

By the time I did my first formal interview of a Flying Tiger I already knew the group well. I had arranged their visit to Thailand to see the P-40 wreckage, joined them on two trips to China and attended their reunions. Two of the pilots lived near me and became good friends. When an editor suggested a formal interview of one of them, I had already heard all the stories and read their history – several times. But for that first interview I did a lot more reading. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about the man I would interview. When I started asking questions, I wanted to know as much about his AVG career as he did.

I may not have reached quite that stage, but knowing as much as I did, made that first interview a reasonably smooth process. That was the way to go, I decided, and from then on, solid preparation preceded any interview I did, be it of airman, soldier, or spy.

All the Flying Tigers I knew had good, vivid memories. The events we talked about had taken place 50 years before, or even longer, but there were few problems. A forgotten name or place was no big deal. It was misremembered situations that I had to be careful of. One pilot told of strafing passes he made during a raid on a Japanese airfield. Years after he was gone I located the combat reports of that day. Under “ammunition expended,” he had written: “none.” He had flown top cover and was not one of the shooters. There was no intention to deceive, I’m sure of that. He said what he believed. He had been on many raids and his mind had probably transferred the vivid details of one raid to another. But there were few instances of that.

Looking back, the AVG interviews were easy. I was dealing with known quantities, the real McCoy. But there were others out there: impersonators, fabricators, the ones who wanted to be Flying Tigers. I met one of those only once, at an air show. He was regaling some young people with his tiger tales, but vanished quickly when he learned that I had a bit more knowledge of the AVG than those to whom he usually told his stories.

I was well into my relationship with the AVG, when a friend passed me a paperback, China through the Eyes of a Tiger. “Must be one of your friends,” he said. “Do you know him?” The author’s name was not familiar. He could have been a pilot with the 14^th Air Force, I thought. They came after the AVG, and were also called Flying Tigers.

I started reading. The book purported to be an account of an AVG Flying Tiger pilot. It took only minutes before I was sure: The man was a fraud, not a Flying Tiger. It’s hard to describe, but given my familiarity with the real tigers, what this man was saying simply did not feel right. This was not the world of the Flying Tigers I knew. His was a different reality. And I suddenly realized what I had. I had heard about him so long before, that I had already forgotten: Captain Incredible!

Captain Incredible first came to prominence in 1990, after he started selling his book. One of the AVG pilots, R.T. Smith wrote an expose for a popular aviation magazine. Captain Incredible was a veteran, and he had served in China, but he was an enlisted man, not an officer, and he had never been a pilot or in any way associated with the AVG. Yet here he was, claiming to be an AVG pilot, to have shot down at least four Japanese aircraft, and probably seven more – and he had the chest full of medals to prove it. He spoke at VFWs, schools, air shows and other venues to which grateful citizens frequently invited him and where he sold his book. After he was exposed he didn’t go away. He ducked under the radar and continued with his book selling and speaking engagements. A second expose, a lengthy newspaper article in 1999, got considerably more attention and apparently finally did him in.

Captain Incredible was a charming and convincing man, so much so that no one ever bothered to check his credentials. Even in years gone by that would have been easy enough. In today’s world of the internet, it’s unforgivable.

But I never crossed paths with the Captain. My interests in aviation expanded and I went off to do other things: to Burma to explore a mysterious shoot-down of a World War II bomber on the Thai-Burmese border in 1961; to China for the first interview of a Korean War era Chinese Mig ace, and much more recently to interview the pilot who dropped China’s first h-bomb. Investigating the fate of two AVG POWs in Thailand, I became interested in what happened on the ground in WWII’s China-Burma-India theater. I focused on the operations of the Free Thai and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). It was a series of new worlds, each requiring a lot of research before I felt competent to do interviews. But that was all part of the fun. And somewhere along the way I met the Me 262 thief.

An acquaintance who knew my interest in aviation history told me he had met someone I really had to talk to: an American WWII pilot who had been shot down over Germany, then stolen a German airplane to get back to friendly lines. The airplane was a Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet fighter. Now that was worth a telephone call.

My prospective interviewee was eager to tell me all about it. He had been attacking an airfield when his aircraft – a twin-engine P-38 fighter, as I recall – was hit by ground fire. He bailed out and reached the ground unobserved. Realizing he was close to the airfield, it struck him that he might just be able to steal an airplane to get back to friendly lines. And indeed he found an unattended Me 262. He had never seen one of these before, but from briefings he knew they existed. He managed to get into the aircraft, took off and made his way back to friendly lines – concerned all the way about being shot down as an intruder by Allied aircraft. But of course he wasn’t. This was the first example of the Me 262 to fall into American hands.

I didn’t know much about Me 262s, but after hearing him out, I said the first thing that came to mind: “How did you even know how to get the engines started?” A jet would have been so different from the piston engine aircraft he flew.

“Ah, well,” he said. “I can’t tell you. That has to remain secret.”

I replied to that with an astonished, “What?”

“When I was debriefed back in England, I was told that knowledge of this new airplane had to be restricted, and that I could never speak of it – even after the war was over.”

“But the war was over fifty years ago,” I said, “And you have been telling people that you flew it.”

“Yeah, but I haven’t been telling the details. I can’t tell the details. They’re still secret. ”

And there my interview of the Me 262 thief ended.

I’ve had several similar, if more mundane encounters, usually with individuals who were vets with great war stories, told with great gusto, but which came apart on close examination. On the whole, the people I choose for interviews are known quantities. They’re in the history books, or otherwise well known. Often members of the same unit could confirm their legitimacy – even when clouded by the fog of espionage like the Free Thai Movement or the Office of Strategic Operations (OSS).

In the end it all comes down to knowing your subject matter – and knowing it well. Alexander Pope said it: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Beware that your incomplete knowledge could make a charming fabricator’s tale sound credible. Know your stuff, check your facts – all of which is just part of your job as a writer – and in the end you will be smarter than the bad guys.

Bob Bergin is a former U.S. Foreign Serve officer who writes about the history of aviation and OSS operations in Southeast Asia and China. He has written three novels set in Asia. His most recent, Spies in the Garden, was released in February 2010.

Disturbing scenes from Bangkok this week with mass protests aimed at forcing the current government to hold new elections. As yet, thank God, there has been little in the way of violence, but one aspect of this protest that did catch my eye was the use of the protesters blood. Symbolising the protesters perception of a country so desperate it is willing to bleed for a general election I can see what they were doing and why. But still my toes curled when I saw footage of young people hurling buckets of the blood they had collected at the prime ministers residence.

To be clear, I know very little about Thai politics and so my balking at the protesters actions had nothing to do with any political stance I might take on their plight. It had everything to do with the blood. Again, to be clear, I am in no way squeamish. I worked in hospitals for many years and have been on wards where fresh, dripping blood has stained the walls. My objection, if that is the right word, to it is what it means psychologically for most people and for me and many others physically too.

I remember back in the dim and distant past when I was a psychology student, we studied a series of social psychology experiments that had been carried out in the USA in the late 1970s. These included studies on ‘helping behaviour’ in other words what does and does not determine whether people help others in distress. Negative factors when it came to helping were drunkenness or obvious drug addiction of the distressed person. To get involved would carry with it too high a cost for intervention to be ‘worth it’. True altruism may or may not exist, I don’t know, but according to most social psychologists it is rather unlikely. However, one of the most ‘high cost’ scenarios when assessing whether to help another in distress was the presence of blood. This was a huge no no, carrying with it fears about disease, about the unpleasantness of its texture and about the ancient taboos that still surround blood to this day. Even the latest craze for sexy blood sucking vampires is undercut with disgust. We only like the pretty vampires who want to reform, give up the blood and get nice jobs in insurance companies. The wild, red-eyed bitey types make us hide under the duvet and reach for the garlic. So blood is a problem for human beings and watching it being chucked around is not comfortable even if we agree with the reasons for it.

Personally, I have a problem with blood because I am a bleeder. This means that I bleed more copiously and for longer than most people. I am not a haemophiliac and the bleeding does stop eventually but I do have some tough times with this and suffer from frequent bouts of anaemia. I have to have a troublesome back tooth extracted at the dentist today prior to having a nice new implant inserted in the gap, and I must admit that I am scared. My dentist will of course do everything that he can to limit the bleeding, but I know I will come home looking like Dracula with thirty tissues stuffed into my livid red mouth. Laying down a lot will be the order of the afternoon which means that I will flop down on the sofa with yet more tissues in my mouth, furious at my own ‘weakness’ because I really should be working. But there’s nothing I can do. The bleeding will stop eventually and I will get over it. But I don’t think that if there is more footage of the Bangkok protesters slinging buckets of blood around on TV tonight, I will be watching. I think I may do the thing people usually do when blood is on the metaphorical carpet and pass on by, flick the button on the remote control and tune in to good old comfortable ‘Antiques Roadshow’.

You probably think I’d be sick of that question after the sixtieth time of hearing it but I’m not. I look forward to it. I love it. it’s my favourite question. Even more favourite than, “Do you have any special clothes you wear when you’re writing?” and, “What’s the very first word you ever wrote?” (Mauve flannelette jimjams and  ‘mummi’ respectively in case you were curious). The reason I like it so much is that I can try out more and more outrageous answers every time.

I once told a gentleman in the audience that I go to second-hand bookshops and buy a dozen novels nobody’s ever heard of, take them home and steal all the good ideas. I thought he’d be disappointed but he merely took notes, nodded his head knowingly and smiled. If I remember rightly his name was Dave Brown, or Don or Dan. Something like that.

I’ve tried the, “I get disgracefully drunk and when I  wake up in the morning I find scribbled notes all over the house chock full of ideas. (In fact this version was a little too close to the truth so I only used it once.) But that answer naturally morphed into the channeling of Agatha Christi. I sit in a darkened room, a pen poised above a notepad and I go “Ohm” for an hour. Agatha steers my hand across the pages.

I have shorter responses for those events where they only give me three minutes of Q&A:

“I find them on the refrigerator door.”

“I get them from my dog who used to be Ernest Hemmingway.”

“I have them delivered.”

“I eat a lot of pickled onions.”

“Actually it’s just the one idea written in different sitting positions.”

I never fail to amuse myself with my answers to the WDYGYIF? question. And the good news is that people who ask it have no concept of sarcasm. “I asked him, Mother, and he said he gets them from his dog. Who’d have thought it?” The only answer I haven’t yet given is the true one. And, viewers, it’s your lucky night because here, in a rare moment of exclusivity, for your eyes only in this blob, I am going to divulge my source. As with all good sources it comes with a little spice and takes some shaking to get it out of the bottle. But here goes.

A few years ago I started to lose my mind. No, don’t laugh. It’s not funny. Hot on the tail of my mind went my memory. Finding myself with neither a mind nor a memory complicated every day chores like kissing whoever that was beside me in the bed every morning claiming to be my wife. Like confusing hair gel and toothpaste even though they contain subtle clues in their titles. Like writing to tell my fans how pleased I am that they enjoy my Harry Potter series.

But every cloud has a silver lining and little crystal chandeliers. As my memory shriveled to a juiceless grape my imagination became a huge pregnant watermelon of the bizarre. There are a number of precedents on record of people losing one sense (as opposed to me who lost all of them) and being compensated by mother nature in another area. Stevie Wonder lost his sight as a baby but his left leg grew four inches longer than his right. Concert pianist Merslov Digitzeroski lost both his hands in a lawn mower accident but learned to play the harp with his nose. Michael Jackson has been dead for several months but he just signed a 270 million dollar contract with Sony to keep producing albums. And I lost my mind and was compensated with an almost unfingerable dyke of ideas. They come at me all the time from all directions. My brain fluid is LSD. I dream of a time when my imagination will just give me a few seconds rest. The woman claiming to be my wife is sick of it. “What time is it, Colin?”

“Here or on the planet Bongk where there are only five minutes in a day?”

“Forget it.”

There. You heard it here first, folks.

Every time I’m writing a book I am reaching out as if in the thin air of imagination. Readers are reaching out, too. Where we meet is inside a story. This blog is about the making of a story in Bangkok on a wet Wednesday morning as I walked up Sukhumvit Road from the Asoke intersection. The street was choked with demonstrators. Thousands of them dressed in red shirts, hats, beating their hand clappers. Traffic had virtually stopped. The stated goal of the red shirts was to march to the prime minister’s family compound on Sukhumvit Road, Soi 31 with the announced intention to spill blood.

It’s not what, on the face of it, what you think. This is a story with a twist.

Blood had been collected by the red-shirted demonstrators and kept in large plastic jugs. The idea was to pour the human blood on the front gate of the prime minister’s compound. Liters of blood had earlier been collected with much fanfare from demonstrators. Nurses and doctors apparently assisted. The organizers had hit upon an attention getting device. Rather than shedding blood in a clash with authorities, someone had the idea it was better if protestors donated blood and allowed their leaders to use that blood in a ritual. Some called it a cursing ritual. Others called it symbolic of sacrifice. As with most such things in life, people can pretty much read all kinds of meaning into the gathering and dispensing of demonstrators’ blood.

I photographed and wrote a blog on my personal website about the hours between 11.00 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday 17^th March. I’ve posted my photos of that morning. They aren’t very good photographs.

One photograph from Wednesday, I’ve back for my Friday blog. I took the shot standing at the top of Soi 31, Sukhumvit Road. The exterior of this building doesn’t have windows visible from the street; it looks like a hive, a kind of prison. If you look close enough you see something sticking out of round holes in the building. Those are arms up to the elbow. I wasn’t the only person who noticed the hands. It was a strange feeling as hundreds of people looked skyward at the side of the building, watching the movement of the hands.

As you can see from the photo, there are no faces; just disconnected arms and hands waving at the crowd, one of them clutched a piece of red ribbon. From the street, it was impossible to tell if the arms belonged to a man or woman. Old or young. Employee or boss. A fat person or a thin person. Someone tall, or someone short.

The arms could have belonged to anyone.

What I witnessed seemed like a perfect metaphor for the alienation of large urban centers, for political frustration. The people inside were isolated and anonymous. One might say that about people in the middle of a vast crowd, too. A modern building in Bangkok had found a way to separate people from the world beyond their office. It made them headless to the exterior world. Those workers were sheltered from the outside. But they couldn’t resist communicating with their hands.

The separation and isolation of people may be part of the modern political problem. There is always a price to pay. Separate or not to separate, a decision that depends on education, attitudes, culture, history and money.

The design of a modern building might dehumanize its occupants. One way is to make people faceless, and mute. There will always be those who nevertheless find a way to reach out and seek connection. Everywhere, a few people can be counted on to overcome their prison. Perhaps these are the people who should be running governments and companies. The people who will do whatever they can to overcome obstacles to communicate with others. It is what I try to do as a writer: punching the sky with my hand, and you see that I’m waving at you.

In the midst of a major demonstration, what surprised me was how a small number of hands stopped demonstrators by the hundreds as the people registered the hands in the sky. The demonstrators had returned from a blood ritual. I watched the faces of crowd looking to the hands above. A connection was made between the sky and street. A few office workers found a way to show that they cared about those below.

A rather unusual figure turned up at Kadikoy district court in İstanbul earlier this week. Michael Dickinson is a 59 year old Englishman who, until recently, worked as a teacher in İstanbul. A rather eccentric, slightly hippy-ish figure, Mr Dickinson is also a writer and very vocal anti-war activist. So why was he in court?

Mr Dickinson was accused of insulting the ‘dignity and honour’ of the Turkish Prime Minister, Mr Erdogan. He did this by producing a collage in which he placed Mr Erdogan’s head on the body of a dog around whose neck ex-US President George W Bush was tying a bow. The piece, which was originally produced in 2006, was entitled ‘Best in Show’. Kadikoy district court found Mr Dickinson guilty of the offence he had been charged with and sentenced him to 425 days in prison. Luckily for Michael Dickinson this was then commuted to a fine of £3,000 provided he does not insult the PM again within the next 5 years. Although totally committed to a country he has called his home for the past 24 years, Mr Dickinson did allude to his native land, after sentencing, by saying, ‘At least in Britain I could make satirical pictures of Gordon Brown and not go to jail.’

At first I thought, yes, damn right you could! But then I wondered – not about whether anyone in the UK would go to prison for creating satirical pictures – they almost certainly wouldn’t, not yet. But would or could they be given a hard time by those they had offended? And the answer to that is probably, yes. In Britain today it is becoming increasingly difficult to say what you think for fear of being taken to litigation. I’m not talking about people banging on about ‘political correctness gone mad’ or all the so called ‘freedoms’ those of a right wing bent tell us we have lost. I’m talking about everyday, common or garden expressions of opinion and/or criticism. There are, and I have to be careful here, certain organisations in this country whose members take anyone who makes the slightest criticism of them straight to court. Vast amounts of money are involved and if you sling in the odd offended celebrity for good measure you are talking telephone numbers.

Mr Erdogan has attracted a huge amount of criticism over the Michael Dickinson affair and it is very easy to see why. But at the risk of letting Mr Erdogan off the hook, I can see why things took the turn that they did. We live in a world of jostling egos, many of which require some sort of validation for the pain they suffer or perceive that they suffer. One’s ‘rights’ are sacred and should be respected, but other people have their ‘rights’ too and so it isn’t easy. Once, not so long ago, I apparently made a colleagues life a misery because I was in the habit of swearing to myself when I became upset behind my closed office door. Just the thought of me doing that in there, although she couldn’t hear me, made her feel anxious and unwell. Now I happen to think that swearing, not at anyone but to blow off steam, is both big and clever and I do it in the privacy of my own home all the time. Back then I shut my office door in order that I wouldn’t cause offence. But I still bruised someone and I was disciplined for it. From then on I had to just shut up – completely. My personal way of dealing with stress was denied to me and it was then me who felt unwell. Rather than complain, I left. Demoralised that my rights had been trumped, I had to accept that conformity had won the day and that if I continued to be as obviously eccentric as I was, I could be putting myself in harms way.

As a species we are becoming less and less tolerant. Maybe it’s because most of us in the west, at least, do not live in crowded tenements any more? Perhaps we’re just too precious and delicate to put up with each others foibles? Compassion, give and take, understanding are completely bypassed in favour of a quick trip down to a solicitors office. Mr Erdogan cannot be blamed for what he did simply because that is just the way things are now and everyone does it. I am sorry his ‘dignity and honour’ were offended, just as I am sorry that my colleague was so upset by my swearing, but had he talked to Mr Dickinson about how that made him feel then maybe that court case would not have happened. Maybe if my colleague had spoken to me instead of going straight to my boss, I would not have left that organisation when I did. But then perhaps, in the 21^st century, that is cloud cuckoo land. Litigation, it would seem, is here to stay.

I’m very sensitive, me, which is why I now do my swearing at night, underneath my pillow. There I offend no-one, but I get it out of my system. What is more important however is that I do still do it and I always will. Litigation does publicly muzzle, but it can’t, as yet, alter our feelings and our thoughts.

I suppose it’s just as well that Mr. Gillette started to put his blades in those little plastic cartridges because once they’ve read this week’s blob, more than a few publishers will be reaching for razors. You see, I have a confession to make. When I intimated that I liked the covers you put on my books, I lied. I’m sorry. I often go out of my way to not hurt other people’s feelings to the point that I make myself a miserable wretch. I know I didn’t exactly say the words, “I like it,” but I may have been too free with expressions like, “It has a certain unrestricted simplicity”, or “It’s rather interesting”, or, “It’s orange”.

I need to begin this confessional by pointing out that, unless you’re somebody with literary weight (my own weight being merely flab) your publisher won’t send you a cover and say, “Tell us what you think and we’ll make all the changes you recommend.” Heaven forbid that they should ask you to design the thing in the first place. They actually have first and final say on the cover. They have a little trick. They tell you that everyone at the publishing house (including the tea lady and the man who cleans the drains) and the marketing department and ‘the industry’ all love it. Then they’ll say, “What do you think?” Of course you aren’t going to tell the truth after such a build up. You aren’t going to alienate an editor who has probably put several minutes into the selection of stock photographs and gone down the Dulux paint chart to find a colour for the title that matched. She’s the expert. (Notice I didn’t put that in inverted commas cause editors pick up on little details like that.) With one or two very rare exceptions, I have hated the covers they put on my books. They’re either twiddley, arty, flowery McCall Smith look-alikes that make those not-in-the-know believe Colin Cotterill is the nom de plume of an ageing lady horse rider with pink hair from Sussex, or they stick on Asian postcard pictures, irrespective of what country they’re taken in. Of course the photographers and artists have produced beautiful work but I don’t want their pictures stuck on the front of my books any more than they’d want my prose plastered across their living room walls. They aren’t how I see my books.

“So”, you ask, “how do you see your books, Colin?” Good question. The two words that come to mind are, ‘dark’ and ‘funny’. My novels describe gruesome murders and tortures; gore with a whimsical twist. I don’t want to be responsible for giving some chronic heart patient that final push when he picks up a book with bicycles and flowers on the cover and comes across a man’s head being split open against a tree. No, I’d go the black humour route. You remember the photos in the movie: The Others, with Nicole Kidman? The photos of the dead, dressed up and posed? In the Victorian era they used to go to all kinds of extremes like having their dead sister in her best party dress propped up on an unseen wooden stand in the family group pic. Professional morgue workers used to come along and draw on smiles and paint open eyes on the departed’s eyelids. I think that is extremely cool. So my covers would feature an obviously dead – preferably beginning to rot – body, shot from above, perhaps in a grass-lined grave or a coffin completely filling the cover. There would be some comedic element to the photo like the corpse playing a guitar in death with a pick between his teeth, or listening to a walkman and wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Which brings me to my next point. The kinds of books I’d buy because of the cover are probably not those selected by the vast majority of readers. This, I grant you, might have an influence on the marketing department. The only covers I’ve been moderately attracted to were those produced by Random House Canada. They looked like real books, not cut and paste primary school art projects. They were quirky and colourful and had my name in big type just like the ones you see in the shops – and four books into the series they dumped my arse because nobody was buying them. Unceremoniously hacked. Could I be wrong about covers? I self-published a book of short stories recently with a ‘different’ cover I’d put together myself. I loved it. iUniverse sold four copies. Despite that, it was picked up by a real publisher and the first thing they told me to do was change the cover. They let me paint it myself but to their specifications and I still don’t like it so it’ll probably do very well.

But my taste bodes ominously for the cover you see to the right of this blob. It’s book seven, LOVE SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE, the final book in the Soho version of the Dr. Siri series (Although they have the option to buy the continuing series from the UK) and it’s as close as they’ve come to my taste. A stark, black mysterious cover that leaves the buyer asking, “What stark, black mystery lies within the pages of this book?” I’m tempted to think they’re trying to scuttle me. “We’ll teach him for fleeing to England” they think. We’ll do him a stark mysterious cover and show him just how many Goths waste their Edward and the Squashing Little Fluffy Animals CD money on cozy crime novels. So, I guess it’s time to start going through the sits-vacant ads. I’ll see you all on the street sometime. Or, alternatively, you could all prove me wrong and arrest my decline by rushing out and buying the book.