November 2006

Too much travelling - fun but very tiring. Full-time building work in England to make my bolt-hole safe and sound.

I think that the combination of a hidden place here and a tiny apartment in Paris will work well. The shop in London gives me a lot of pleasure, especially because someone else makes it happen and I can admire it. Perching above the shop on London visits feels like the Georgian living it is - I don''t have an oven and I get my meals from downstairs. In Paris, there is always good food, and in Barcelona recently, I was amazed at the value and the quality of things to eat and drink. All the Spaniards I met told me it was expensive, but not compared to the UK. I don''t know how anybody can afford to live here.

I am not very good at economics and I don''t understand how everything here costs so much, and yet, we still go on affording it.

My Spanish friends told me that after the 20th of the month, the restaurants are much quieter and there are lots of taxis touting for work. Apparently, it''s a 3-week economy - most people can afford most of what they want for the first 3 weeks of their pay-check, then they either use a credit card or go without.

Yeah, debt is the new money.

But what is it with the voodoos of central banks? The euro has made everything in Europe more expensive for those who are in the Euro, and everything in Britain has become more expensive because we are not in the euro.

I don''t understand it.

Still, I am lucky to be able to travel, though I really think my flying days are done. I do the carbon offsets, but it''s not enough. Part of the Paris decision is to be able to take trains across Europe, and give up the planes. I like the romance of Wagon Lits and Dining Cars. And at least in Europe the trains seem to work - unlike British trains and almost any planes.

How long will it take for us all to return to a slower rhythm?

Mass air travel is so new, surely it will be a habit easy to break? I worry that it is tied up with some wrong-headed notions of freedom and democracy. Nobody has a democratic right to cheap air travel. Anyway, travelling Europe by train would deter nearly all UK yobs, who depend on EasyJet and RyanAir to help them puke up outside a foreign bar. If they can only get as far as Blackpool, so much the better.

I want to thank everyone, and there were many of you, who wrote to me so kindly about my dead Minnie-cat. It means a lot to me, and it has helped me to cope with it. The kindness of strangers is a wonderful thing, and renews faith in the world, and defies the scientific hocus-pocus of selfish genes. Not everything we do is for personal gain, thank god, or even because we hope one day that someone will be kind to us in return. Sometimes there is love - a very unscientific emotion that is always surprising.

When I was writing my kids'' book, Tanglewreck, it was important to me that Silver rescues Gabriel out of the Black Hole because she allows for a miracle. Even light cannot escape a Black Hole, though light travels at 300,000 kilometres a second. Travelling at the speed of light is not fast enough to make escape possible, but through Silver, Gabriel travels at the speed of love.

I suspect that love has a number of different speeds. Sometimes it will belt the universe as fast as light or faster. Sometimes it will take a slow train through France.

It may be that love is a good speed selector, and teaches us the right movement for all that we need to do, Maybe love, the most unscientific of criterion, is exactly the yardstick we need to make our judgements.

I don''t what else can get you out of a Black Hole.

It''s a freezing morning. My little bedroom has no heating and looks out over roofs towards trees. Below are the sounds of life, and the odd not-English sounds of other life in other places, however well-known, always unfamiliar early and late, when the mind is sleepy and thinks of home.

It''s a freezing morning. In England too, I seem to have given up heating, and live in chilly rooms that thaw in front of roaring fires.

This is no hardship - we live too soft for comfort now. It is better to be connected to life, even when it is cold. I like bringing in armfuls of wood, or spending the morning working in a café. Peace of mind is no debt, worthwhile work, good health, someone to love. Central heating is not an indicator of happiness.

And I read in New Scientist this week that it may be our comfort-zone temperatures that are making us fat. The body likes to regulate itself, and providing the extremes are not too extreme, it works best adjusting its internal temperature to the seasons and to the place. The ordinary old-fashioned life of 13-15 degrees indoors in climates like the UK, lots of clothes, and a quick intake of breath through the front door into snow, rain, or freezing fog, uses nearly 300 calories a day - that''s over half a pound of fat a week.

So, not only do we save the planet, we get thin too.

It''s beginning to look like progress is a mess.

I am not a Luddite. I wish we could make clear decisions about what is and isn''t important. Making life in the West ‘better'', has destabilised the planet and is leading to an obese, drug-dependent culture for whom the meaning of life is to win the lottery.

Simplification would be good. Until our global crisis forces that upon us, the best we can do is make choices for ourselves. So maybe ask for socks and a woolly hat this Xmas after all.

Poem of the Month this month is another Don Paterson from his collection ORPHEUS, featured last month.

I have been living with this book for the last month and it becomes more and more important to me. There is also a wonderful essay at the end about the process of writing poetry and what that means in our world. This is definitely a Must Buy.

You will see too, under Journalism, a piece in The Times about a book by Lewis Hyde, called The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World.

I won''t explain it further here - I''ve said what I''ve wanted to say in the piece. This is a book worth reading, and it would make a wonderful present to yourself or someone of like mind.

That''s it for this month. Back in December with a Christmas story, possibly by me, maybe by the fabulous Ali Smith, who says she is writing me a story for my Christmas present. Lucky me!

If you are in London on December 14th, come to the Oxfam shop in Bloomsbury for a special Xmas night where Ali and myself will read Xmas stories and let you eat mince pies. All proceeds to Oxfam.

CONTACT: toddswift@clara.co.uk

And don''t forget - there''s still time to make an Advent Calendar. And if anybody emails to say that Advent Calendars are not multi-cultural, I don''t care. Vive la difference.

PS. This issue (below) is something that I really want to draw attention to - please sign up to help

Dear friends who care about our earth. Judge for yourself if you want to take action.

In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed by 2 glaciers. Water is a most precious resource, and wars will be fought for it.

Indigenous farmers use the water, there is no unemployment, and they provide the second largest source of income for the area.

Under the glaciers has been found a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. To get at these, it would be necessary to break, to destroy the glaciers - something never conceived of in the history of the world - and to make 2 huge holes, each as big as a whole mountain, one for extraction and one for the mine''s rubbish tip.

The project is called PASCUA LAMA. The company is called Barrick Gold.

The operation is planned by a multi-national company, one of whose members is George Bush Senior.

The Chilean Government has approved the project to start this year, 2006.

The only reason it hasn''t started yet is because the farmers have got a temporary stay of execution. If they destroy the glaciers, they will not just destroy the source of specially pure water, but they will permanently contaminate the 2 rivers so they will never again be fit for human or animal consumption because of the use of cyanide and sulphuric acid in the extraction process.

Every last gram of gold will go abroad to the multinational company and not one will be left with the people whose land it is. They will only be left with the poisoned water and the resulting illnesses.

The farmers have been fighting a long time for their land, but have been forbidden to make a TV appeal by a ban from the Ministry of the Interior.

Their only hope now of putting brakes on this project is to get help from international justice.

The world must know what is happening in Chile. The only place to start changing the world is from here.

We ask you to circulate this message amongst your friends in the following way. Please copy this text, paste it into a new email adding your signature and send it to everyone in your address book.

No to Pascua Lama Open-cast mine in the Andean Cordillera on the Chilean-Argentine frontier.

We ask the Chilean Government not to authorize the Pascua Lama project to protect the whole of 3 glaciers, the purity of the water of the San Felix Valley and El Transito, the quality of the agricultural land of the region of Atacama, the quality of life of the Diaguita people and of the whole population of the region.

Signature, City, Country

1. Katharine Proudfoot, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
2. Laura Cole, London, UK
3. David Platt, London, UK
4. Diane Platt, Manchester, UK
5. Tanya Corker, Manchester, UK
6. Nicola Hargreaves, UK
7. Nicholas Jones, UK
8. Johann Don-Daniel, Germany
9. Ashley Berger, Germany
10. Sarah Downie, Leeds, UK
11. Paula Delahunty, Bingley, UK
12. John O''Driscoll, Bingley, UK
13. Jordan-Lee Delahunty, Bingley, UK
14. Claire Mulvey, Bradford, UK
15. Marie Malcolm Bradford, UK
16. Ann Clowes, Halifax UK
17. Jayne McGee, Brighouse UK
18. Jason Barratt Oldham UK
19. Lindsay Torrance, RochdaleUK
20. Maggie Ford, Rochdale
21. Barry Cook, Todmorden
22. Shelley BUrgoyne, Todmorden
23. Libby Ray, Shipley, England
24. Anne Meynell, Bradford, England
25. Jim Meynell, Bradford, England
26. Alec Knibbs, Kings Lynn, England
27. Suzanne Bailey, Valencia, Spain
28. Agnieszka Legierska, London, England
29. Rosanna Bennett-Moncrieff, BristolEngland
30. Kirsten Bennett-Moncrieff, Bristol, England
31. Stephen Haley, Silsoe, England
32. Rob Smith, Bristol, England
33. Basil Anderson, Bristol, England
34. Jonathan Coles, BristolEngland
35. Deborah Weinreb, BristolEngland
36. Rachel Pearcey
37. Stephanie Greenwood
38. Caryne Chapman Clark, LondonEngland
39. Maryam Hashemi, London, UK
40. Duane Melius, London, UK
41. Dylan Chambers, London, UK
42. Anna Chippendale, Brighton, UK
43. Ryan Steer, UK
44. Chris Hatton, Brighton, UK
45. Jo Vear Brighton UK
46. Melanie James, Brighton, UK
47. Alison Pavic, London, UK
48. Belinda Jones, UK
49. Vanessa Brady, UK
50. Steven R Clark, UK
51. Christopher Kelly, Brighton, UK
52. Patricia Silva, Mexico
53. Barbara Magana, Mexico
54. Bharine Kalsi, London UK
55. Elspeth Kent, London UK
56. Rachel Laurence, London UK
57. Adam Thorpe, France
58. Willy Barth, Mainz, Germany
59. Bel Mooney, Bath, UK