Several degrees of separation. I had such a strange series of thoughts today that I just have to put them down before I forget.......mostly because they made me laugh out loud at the fancifullness of them. When I was a callow youth of nineteen years I began work as a trainee cinema manager, and one of the first films we were showing when I joined was South Pacific. Some twenty years later, when I was in publishing, I met and had lunch with Joshua Logan, dir...

Imagine a day when you start, at 3.30 am driving up a mountain to watch the sun rise over a live volcano........and eighteen hours later find yourself sitting in a bar full of football fans watching, live, transmission of Arsenal v Chelsea! Well that was Sunday. Began with a four wheel drive up some mountain roads to watch the sunrise over Mount Bromo and then followed that by a horseback ride up the volcano side to a point where you then walk to the crater e...

Well I should just say that I am having a better time now that I have escaped from Jakarta. If 'they say' that travel broadens the mind they haven't sat on an Indonesian tran and local bus for fourteen hours or they would know that its much more than the brain that gets broadened....and deadened at the same time. Never mind, we passed trees hanging with mango, banana, jack fruit and, strangest of all, snake fruit whose skins so resemble their namesake that ...

........so think attractive, appealing, welcoming, safe, friendly, interesting and smiling then add the prefix UN and you've arrived in Jakarta. From the airport taxi driver who asked me, before we had cleared the car park, "you are not scared to be here?", to the state of the pre-booked budget roach palace where I was assigned for the night, Jakarta got off to a bad start. The hotel I changed, after I had exterminated two thumb sized roaches within fiv...