Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Punjabi two sided Dhol drum from Gandharva Loka Sir Peter Hall started the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre and the Rose in Kingston - our local Theatre. He was on Desert Island Discs last week and said something which I am sure will now become an established meme. Work brings work. Is this tautological? No. It works. But how about generalising. Does it make sense when we try other examples? Love brings love. Happiness brings happiness. Understanding brings understanding. There is a sense of reciprocity in these statements. Because you love, someone will love you, perhaps. Or because you understand someone then you have more chance of being understood. Or because you are happy then you will cause others to be happy. And yet the relationships between work causes work, love causes love, happiness causes happiness are not the same relationships, they imply a deep knowledge of the world. The kind of knowledge most proverbs imply. This was a subje...

  Grandpa is second from the right

Picture by Eve and Tony Hall

The universe and I Akshobhya Isn't an existence, undivided from the cosmos, great? I use my art and work to unfasten myself from the lens of my body. How amazing that despite the specific properties of the human body, I still exist in a universal self that goes nowhere, that comes from nowhere And yet penetrates everything, like sugar in cane juice. And the universe is pervaded by the phenomenology of the self. The fakir's illusory snake is born when the gawper doesn't see a rope. Jars must become clay, waves must become water, And ornamental bracelets must become gold, become metal. I own my-self. In the end, the pressing in of materialism is unreal, It is the product of all-embracing being, not the cause. My body is a part of reality or it is nothing. Therefore, when I light up my being, I light up reality. Calm and unburdened now, I was once tricked Into believing that matter birthed me. Never again! Look at...

At the request of Sunil Khilnani I'm posting Tony and Eve Hall's assessment of the Emergency in India written in 1975.

Picture by Stephanie Urdang Steph was in training to go into Guineau Bissau with the PIAGC freedom fighters and needed to walk to pactice so we took her to the Rift Valley just beyond the Ngong Hills and then headed out towards another set of hills in the distance. I decided I would carry a big rock in my ruck sack and prove how tough I was. I carried the rock for a few miles while Mom and Dad and Steph chatted up ahead along the dirt track. But after 15 minutes climbing up the ridge I couldn't take it any more and abandoned the rock. When we got to the top of the ridge we were elated. Dad suddenly almost burst with happiness and energy. He surprised us and it was catching. He had been travelling a lot for Oxfam and he was home and he was in top shape we were in the most precious place to our family of all, together with all the hope of the revolutionary and anti-colonial possibilities in us -inspired by Steph's intrepid, intelligent bravery. On a ridge overlooking the g...

Eve Hall in 1972 in Tanzania One summer's afternoon in 1970, by the banks of the river Cherwell in Oxford, I went on a picnic and received a political and culinary education. Eve Hall, who has died aged 70, was the wife of my new boss, and she explained to me that the secret of a good potato salad was to use new potatoes and to toss them in olive oil while they were still hot. Sprinkled with finely chopped parsley, they seemed to me then, aged 19, the epitome of continental sophistication. As we ate, Eve went on to tell me, equally insouciantly, of her time in a South African jail. In a case that had startled the white community in the early 1960s, she was one of four women - "mothers and housewives" - sentenced to six months' imprisonment for a clandestine leaflet and poster campaign promoting the banned ANC. Eve was born in Paris to a Jewish father and a German mother (her uncle was a famous actor in the Munich theatre). The second world war broke ...

  Tony Hall in 1973 in Nairobi, Kenya The day after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the white South African journalist Tony Hall , who has died aged 71, and his wife Eve joined the ANC. For the next three years their home was a closet venue for the organisation, before in 1964, facing jail as members of a banned organisation, they went into exile with their three sons. It would be 26 years before they returned home. Tony became news and features editor of the Nation in Nairobi, and, after drafting the manifesto for the opposition Kenya People's Union, was again expelled. In Tanzania, he was training editor of the Standard newspaper, and did voluntary work for the ANC, Frelimo of Mozambique and the MPLA of Angola. He had been born in Pretoria, to parents who ran a hotel. His grandfather, Arthur Lewis Hall, was a pioneering geologist, while his aunt Connie was South Africa's first woman lawyer. He was educated at Pretoria boys' high school and in the late 1950s read ...

   Illustrator, Dushan Petrich

I love this picture.

Is reading the Harry Potter books like taking a run at a brick wall? J. K. Rowling's failure to impress literary critics doesn’t matter. She has created useful spaces and emanations. In her castle-school are many rooms, and in those rooms are many serviceable personas. My children’s generation, with the exception of a few hoity-toity young people, have inhabited Hogwarts. When I was nine in Abingdon  I remember visits to libraries in winter, watching Czechoslovakian adaptations of Hans Christian Anderson's Snow Queen and my mother reading ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ to me. The best part of the book is when Lucy has pushed her way through old fur coats (smelling of mothballs) and her feet begin to crunch snow. Fern branches brush against her cheeks and here she is; in a forest clearing at night. And there it is, twenty yards away, a lamp post more ancient and hardier than the iron pillar in the Qutab Minar. With wor...

Across the river from Matumi

We used to joke that Dad looked a bit like Captain Haddock, but he never laughed when we did.

I have pictures of all of us. Not to hand, when I locate them I'll add them to this post. The place in the photo is wone of the Hall Steinhardt's favourite places. On the Ngong Hills overlooking the Rift Valley in Kenya.