The Zimbabwe of Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe is there in the background of these stories, a country in turmoil, plagued by hyperinflation, corrupt politicians and propaganda-filled newspapers, but these are tales about people, not politics. The stories are sad, angry and funny, focusing on sharply drawn characters and suffused with love for Zimbabwe and frustration at its failings.

It takes a couple of stories to get properly immersed in the atmosphere and emotional turbulence of the collection. The first, At the Sound of the Last Post, told from the point of view of a disillusioned wife at the funeral of her politician husband, is rather a cold opening, and the eponymous second story, dealing with one woman’s desperate need for a baby and the illicit pregnancy of the local madwoman, is perhaps one of the least subtle in the collection. But after this the stories rapidly become deeply moving, full of emotional truth that leaves you breathless.

The stunning endings of stories such as Something Nice From London, in which a family await the arrival of the body of their youngest son from England, and My Aunt Juliana’s Indian, about a the relationship between an Indian shopkeeper and his Zimbabwean employee during the struggle for independence in 1980, stick in the memory. These are stories with twists, but they are twists of feeling, of despair, of fate, rather than of plot.

Gappah’s prose is sparse and economical, pared down to almost the barest observational essentials. But the thoughts and dialogue of the characters are a lyrical hybrid of Zimbabwean Shona and English, making the words on the page dance with life.

It is often the world of African women that the stories inhabit: wives, mothers and daughters tied to husbands, sons and fathers by love, money, tradition or family history. The women in the stories are often trapped in positions of dependence: a maid in a wealthy household, a rich woman with a cheating husband, a student sectioned in a mental hospital. There seems little chance of escape from these confinements, but these women are resilient all the same. They recount stories, pass on traditions, tell jokes, laugh. The voices are angry but never bitter, humorous but never mocking. These are gentle stories full of hard themes, and they will stick around and mutter in your ear long after you’ve finished reading.

Emily

I guess the thing that appeals to me most in fiction is an emphasis on expressionism: the literary equivalent of (bear with me) the German Expressionist painters from the start of the twentieth century.  Those painters broke with realist ways of depicting subject matter so that they could better convey emotion.  Think of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.   It’s not a realistic depiction of a man screaming, but nor is it some kind of fantasy.  Munch has altered the way a screaming man would realistically look in order to try to convey a more realistic expression of a scream.  To try to say this is what a scream feels like using colour and shape.

My favourite kind of fiction is anything that does a similar thing, albeit with sentences and paragraphs instead of oil and canvas.  Prose that breaks with reality in order to address it in a way that can carry more emotional weight than straightforward realism, especially in the shorter form.  Just as expressionism in painting can take many shapes, so too can expressionism in literature.  I’m not trying to lump the following too closely together, but they all have this common: they break realism’s hard and fast rules to better convey human feeling.  There are so many brilliant examples I could pick, but these five seem like quite a balanced bunch, ranging from the light-hearted to the heavyweight literary classic.

1. Dan Rhodes – Don’t Tell Me The Truth About Love.  Although it wasn’t his first to be published, this is the first book that Dan Rhodes wrote.  It contains seven exquisite love stories, each altering reality to express more poignantly or more humorously the feelings of the lovers they concern.  A stand out story is The Violoncello, in which a man takes it upon himself to transform into a cello to be played by the hands of the woman he loves.
2. Stanley Donwood – Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories.  Stanley Donwood is probably best known as Radiohead’s in-house artist and designer of their record sleeves, but he is also a writer of short stories.  You can read most of his work on his website, or order it there in print.  Be warned, this stuff is as dark as midnight on Friday 13^th, but it’s full of striking, nightmarish imagery that cuts straight to your spinal chord.  Fingers is a good place to start.
3. Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings.  There are several beautifully illustrated editions of this book that it would be worth investing in, but the words themselves will paint the brightest pictures.  Borges’ playfully academic style is the perfect medium for this tour-de-force of creatures drawn from the strange depths of human imagination.  You can fill a spare minute by opening it to a random page and reading about a weird and wonderful animal, or you can read the book in its entirety and immerse yourself in the monsters of humanity’s subconscious.  Either way Borges’ conviction is clear: these made-up animals are an important part of humanity’s expression of itself.  ‘Necessary monsters,’ he calls them.
4. Tim Burton – The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories.  This one is just plain fun (and it makes a good present if you’re ever stuck for an idea).  It’s a collection of simple, rhyming poems about children with magical and ghastly problems.   The Girl who Turned Into A Bed and Stick Boy and Match Girl in Love are two examples where the title says it all.  The book is as much about the accompanying cartoons as the poems, but set aside half an hour to read it in one sitting and you’ll be left with that glorious, pleasantly disturbed feeling unique to Tim Burton.
5. Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis and Other Stories.  What can I say about this?  Metamorphosis is the best short story I’ve ever read, and is justifiably as famous as it is.  But the Other Stories part of this collection is remarkable too.  I like dipping into the tiny pieces that make up Meditation and A Country Doctor (among these The Sudden Walk is a choice example, and Kafka in his less-publicised uplifting mode), but the dark masterpiece of the book is, for me, In The Penal Colony, in which a government inspector visits an isolated colony and is given a guided tour of the most elaborately grotesque execution contraption you’re ever likely to come across.   The sense of horror as the machine is described is compounded by the pride its operator feels in it.  So proud is this operator, in fact, that he is determined to demonstrate the machine’s virtues to the inspector, even if that means offering up his own body for a test run…   A perfect moment of expressionist literature – Kafka’s loathing of bureaucratic systems given mechanical form – but not for the faint-hearted.

I hope you enjoy checking out some of these short works if you decide to do so.  Likewise if you have any recommendations along these lines, please do post them below.

With that, it remains to thank you for reading this blog.  See you anon. 

Ali

The Value of Wales, a poem by Paul Lyalls

Once Upon a Time the Medway Literati, by Lawrence John

Playing, by Frank Burton

Dispatches from Cape Farewell, with contributions from Lemn Sissay, KT Tunstall, Marcus Brigstocke and more

Miracle, by Nora Nadjarian

The Reconstruction, by Niall Boyce

On Thirst in mid-Ocean, from the Kon-Tiki Expedition, by Thor Heyerdahl (Litro Classics)

Green Man, by John Turner

Pandemonium, by Inua Ellams

climate, a poem by David Hermann

March Litro Listings, from Alex James

Up to 7th March, Jewish Book Week (www.jewishbookweek.com) holds events around London and beyond, including not one but two discussions with Litro favourite short story-man Etgar Keret. JBW celebrates the culture’s rich literary offerings in the run-up to the reopening of the Jewish Museum, London, on 17th March. A £10 million transformation has created a landmark museum that celebrates Jewish life and cultural diversity. www.jewishmuseum.org.uk

4th – 9th March, East Festival
East is a six-day festival that celebrates the rich creative mix of East London. Curated by the Mayor of London and delivered in partnership with key cultural organisations across East London, the festival will feature around 100 events inspired by the themes of architecture, minimalism, the Asian sub-continent and travel. www.visitlondon.com/events/east

7th March to 1st April, London Word Festival
London’s pioneering celebration of words, text and language returns for a third year, playing host to the most adventurous programme yet. Having scoured the country and beyond, the organisers bring “the finest array of artists working with words” to venues all over the city. www.londonwordfestival.com

10th March, Keats House, 7pm: Poetry at the Movies
With the recent success of Bright Star, Keats House celebrates the world of poetry in film. With poems by Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Frost, and of course John Keats, see: www.cityoflondon.gov.uk

11th March, 6pm, The Gallery at Foyles, Charing Cross Road WC2
Hanif Kureishi reads from his new collection of stories and discusses his literary career in this exclusive London appearance. Kureishi’s provocative short fiction portrays a society stretched to breaking point by political tensions and examines the forces they exert on people’s everyday lives. www.foyles.co.uk

12th March, AVANT! NOIR
Music from Led Bib & Get The Blessing Dark; fiction from Toby Litt, Cathi Unsworth, Courttia Newland & Ray Banks, Toynbee Theatre £10 / £12 from 7pm. A night of criminal fiction, comic art and music of a darker hue. Enter a world where murder smells like honeysuckle in Toynbee Theatre’s art deco, velvet auditorium. Four authors present bleeding-edge crime stories intercut with animated chapters of online, collaborative comic strip Huzzah!! Noir. Illicit jazz comes from 2009 Mercury-nominated ensemble Led Bib with a suitably hard-boiled soundtrack. see: www.toynbeehall.org.uk

15th March, Memory and Imagination, 7pm
William Fiennes, Maggie Gee and Candia McWilliam, chaired by Piers Plowright. What happened when Proust’s narrator dipped the madeleine into his tea? How does memory work and when does imagination take over? If poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, is recollection then a literary technique – and how far is it possible, or necessary, for memoirs to tell the truth? Find out at the Royal Society of Literature; see: www.rslit.org

17th and 18th March, Tales of Naughtiness for the Not So Prudish
40 Winks. ‘Bedtime Story Nights’ at 40 Winks have been included in the Sunday Times Travel Magazine’s ‘14 Most Amazing Things To Do in the World’, which is quite an accolade. These delightfully different evenings will continue throughout 2010. In an atmosphere of dreamy decadence, guests are plied with cocktails and nibbles before being taken on a magical journey back in time to rediscover the wonder and curiosity they often left behind in childhood.
Email: info40@winks.org

23rd March, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad and A Pint for the Ghost by Helen Mort, Jamboree, Cable Street Studios, £8 adv, 7.30pm
Over a century after they were first published, the ghost stories of M.R. James retain their power to terrify and amuse. Following his critically acclaimed one-man show A Pleasing Terror, Robert Lloyd Parry brings James’ classic spine-chillers back to life. A Pint for the Ghost has been nominated for the Ted Hughes award for public contribution to poetry. See: www.myspace.com/jamboreemembersclub

24th March, Tim Turnbull, Laura Dockrill, Luke Kennard, Instructions for Heartbreak by Francesca Millican-Slater. Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club | £6.50 adv / £8 door | 7pm
The cream of contemporary live poetry join forces for a night of surreal storytelling and darkly witty wordplay. A century on from the rise of modernism, hilarious Tim Turnbull offers a satirical survey of our new cultural landscape in a performance featuring poems from his 2009 collection Caligula on Ice and Other Poems (Donut Press). Drawing on popular entertainments such as the ballad, pulp ghost story, folk song and music hall skit, he lampoons human endeavour in all its fields and forms. See: www.londonfestival.com

31st March, The Art of Storytelling. Terry Saunders’ ‘Six and a Half Loves’; Matthew Robin; the Chip Shop Poem; the Tree of Lost Things, St Leonard’s Church | £8 adv, £10 door |7pm
They say the art of a story is in the telling. But a little help from friends can help! A coterie of skilled and acclaimed yarn-spinners augment their narratives with puppets, cartoons, gift-tags from the audience and a live printing press. See www.stkinternational.co.uk

the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period

the weather conditions
the whale congregations
the wisdom constructions
the wish consultants
the whiskied conscience
the worry controls
the worship controllers
the weather conditions
them all
————————————-
David Hermann is completing his Masters in Comparative Literature at
UCL. He writes a lot. Read him at hermannist.com

John RG Turner is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist. He won the John Dryden Prize for Literary Translation in 2009. His translations and original poems have appeared in Poetry and Audience, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and Comparative Critical Studies and on www.brindin.com and www.stephen-spender.org.

The old natives knew well the device which many ship-wrecked men hit upon during the war chewing thirst-quenching moisture out of raw fish. One can also press the juices out by twisting pieces of fish in a cloth, or, if the fish is large, it is a fairly simple matter to cut holes in its side, which soon become filled with ooze from the fish’s lymphatic glands. It does not taste good if one has anything better to drink, but the percentage of salt is so low that one’s thirst is quenched.

The necessity for drinking water was greatly reduced if we bathed regularly and lay down wet in the shady cabin. If a shark was patrolling majestically round about us and preventing a real plunge from the side of the raft, one had only to lie down on the logs aft and get a good grip of the ropes with one’s fingers and tots. Then we got several bathfuls of crystal-clear Pacific pouring over us every few seconds.

When tormented by thirst in a hot climate, one generally assumes that the body needs water, and this may often lead to immoderate inroads on the water ration without any benefit whatever. On really hot days in the tropics you can pour tepid water down your throat till you taste it at the back of your mouth, and you are just as thirsty. It is not liquid the body needs then, but, curiously enough, salt. The special rations we had on board included salt tablets to be taken regularly on particularly hot days, because perspiration drains the body of salt. We experienced days like this when the wind had died away and the sun blazed down on the raft without mercy. Our water ration could be ladled into us till it squelched in our stomachs, but our throats malignantly demanded much more. On such days we added from 20 to 40 per cent of bitter, salt sea water to our fresh-water ration and found, to our surprise, that this brackish water quenched our thirst. We had the taste of sea water in our mouths for a long time afterward but never felt unwell, and moreover we had our water ration considerably increased.

One morning, as we sat at breakfast, an unexpected sea splashed into our gruel and taught us quite gratuitously that the taste of oats removed the greater part of the sickening taste of sea water!

The old Polynesians had preserved some curious traditions, according to which their earliest forefathers, when they came sailing across the sea, had with them leaves of a certain plant which they chewed, with the result that their thirst disappeared. Another effect of the plant was that in an emergency they could drink sea water without being sick. No such plants grew in the South Sea islands; they must, therefore, have originated in their ancestors’ homeland. The Polynesian historians repeated these statements so often that modern scientists investigated the matter and came to the conclusion that the only known plant with such an effect was the coca plant, which grew only in Peru. And in prehistoric Peru this very coca plant, which contains cocaine, was regularly used both by the Incas and by their vanished forerunners, as is shown by discoveries in pre-Inca graves. On exhausting mountain journeys and sea voyages they took with them piles of these leaves and chewed them for days on end to remove the feelings of thirst and weariness. And over a fairly short period the chewing of coca leaves will even allow one to drink sea water with a certain immunity.

We did not test coca leaves on board the Kon-Tiki, but we had on the foredeck large wicker baskets full of other plants, some of which had left a deeper imprint on the South Sea islands. The baskets stood lashed fast in the lee of the cabin wall, and as time passed yellow shoots and green leaves of potatoes and coconuts shot up higher and higher from the wickerwork. It was like a little tropical garden on board the wooden raft.

Extract from Kon-Tiki Across the Pacific by Raft (1950). Full text available from the Universal Library at www.archive.org .

Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer with a background in zoology and geography. Heyerdahl became notable for his ‘Kon-Tiki expedition’, in which he sailed 8,000 km by raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands.

Niall Boyce has published stories with Liars’ League, Tales of the DeCongested, Dogzplot, A cappella Zoo, Sein und Werden, Smoke: A London Peculiar and Loquacious Placemat, amongst other publications. His stories are collected and linked at his blog,
http://strange-powers.blogspot.com.

It will happen, perhaps, and I will be a witness. The earth will miraculously cure itself. Water will turn into ice. Mesmerised, I will watch the white sculptures, remember the Arctic and its magnificence, and shiver on the shore. The sun will play tricks on my mind, engraving on the pure white ice the shadow of a long stalk. A single red tulip.

Congratulations, this flower is for you: the only human still alive, the only one who still believes in miracles.

Nora Nadjarian is a poet and short story writer from Cyprus. She has published three collections of poetry and a collection of short stories,
Ledra Street. Her fiction has recently appeared in elimae, fourpaperletters,
Staccato Fiction, Metazen, PicFic, Up the Staircase, Curly Red Stories,
LITnIMAGE and elsewhere. Blog: www.bettyboopinspired.blogspot.com.

Cape Farewell brings together leading artists, writers, scientists, educators and media practitioners through expeditions to the frontlines of climate change. Together they have mapped, measured and been inspired to bring home stories and make art that communicates the urgency and the impact of climate change. Cape Farewell collectively works with partners to inspire creative and visionary responses to climate change for the 21st century.

Cape Farewell has led seven expeditions to the High Arctic – one of the frontlines of climate change – and in 2009 Cape Farewell led our first expedition outside the Arctic to the glaciers and rainforests of Peru. The ambition is to inspire those who have joined an expedition to respond creatively to the challenge of climate change. Through our expedition programme, we have engaged over 50 artists in the subject of climate, including musicians KT Tunstall & Jarvis Cocker, visual artists Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread, choreographer Siobhan Davies, writers Ian McEwan and Vikram Seth, comedian Marcus Brigstocke, poet Lemn Sissay and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. By exposing artists to the world’s climate tipping points, Cape Farewell are contributing to the development and shared understanding of new scientific data

The philosophy of exploration and personal journey are values core to Cape Farewell. We invite artists to see at first hand the effects of climate change. The invitation to join the expeditions is simple: come, explore, be inspired. Through witnessing the environment, taking part in stimulating discussion and observing and participating in scientific field research, we enable our voyagers to gain a real connection to the subject matter. Our invitation to artists is to help encourage this conversation and through creative enterprise extend the knowledge, understanding and will for our audiences to change their response to the climate challenge.

Central to each expedition is the open dialogue between the artists and scientists, before, during and after, with active promotion of discussion and understanding between the groups of voyagers. This isn’t just about how climate understanding can influence creativity but also about how an artist’s creativity can affect scientific thinking.

Following each expedition, Cape Farewell works with the artists who have joined the trip to develop creative work in response to the journeys…

During their voyage, the crew members of the 2008 Disko Bay expedition were blogging from the Arctic and in 2009 twittering from the Andes expedition on our website www.capefarewell.com .

A selection from the blogs of the 2008 Disko Bay expedition:

David Buckland – Thursday 25 Sep
Almost ready to go

Tonight we head north after 9 months of very detailed planning with the Cape Farewell team. We are collectively relieved, excited and somewhat proud. Vicky, Hannah, Kathy, Nina, Lisa and I have lived and breathed this reality and now we voyage north with what I believe is a quite outstanding group of highly creative artists, musicians, comics, poets, architects, craft based artists, film makers, writers… I’ve been speculating about whether such a powerful creative group has ever been assembled before to address what is a culture- and life-threatening future truth. We will spend ten days together in the High Arctic working with the scientists and crafting our own response. As Vanessa Carlton has put it, ‘to challenge a stubborn world’.

(…)

Many of the artists have projects planned and as you can see from my frantic last minute packing, I too am planning video projections – a physical theatre. Bolted to the front of the ship is a container with all the science equipment, projectors, lighting and a piano [electric]. The ship has passed through two storms getting to the West coast of Greenland so I hope all this stuff is OK.

Tomorrow morning [very early] the US and the European groups get together for the first time in Reykjavik before we complete the final leg of our journey to the ship. This is an outstanding effort with people coming from faraway places, LA, New York, Canada, France, Scotland, Holland, Italy, England… I can’t wait until we can all join the boat and voyage north. The weather promises a bit of a blow for Saturday, which should bring the first winter snow and a whitening of the landscape and next week looks to be very clear and cold, -7C. We are declaring a Cape Farewell independent time zone on the ship to make the most of the daylight hours and to give Peter Gilbert and his film crew the best chance to work. Roll on the northern lights.

Robyn Hitchcock – Monday 29 Sep
Iceberg Television

Two standard responses to the problem of global warming are that either it’s not really happening or, if it is, there’s nothing we can do about it now so why not leave all the lights on? Well, it is happening, and the sooner we tame our energy emissions, the sooner the earth can return to being habitable for the citizens and other creatures of the 22nd century. Time is unlikely to stop when we die, it just seems that way sometimes. It’s true that we on this Cape Farewell expedition used aviation fuel and diesel to get here, but we will take the story back with us and spread it like butter on the toast of our item-rich society. As the scientists aboard research the effects of ice-melt on the ocean bed and trace the possible mutation of the Gulf-stream through salination tests, we artists are being exposed to a landscape that cannot fail to affect our work.

(…)

Earlier in the day, I was lucky enough to see Marcus Brigstocke half way up a snowy crag, doing a stand-up routine in his corduroy suit. As this was for the cameras, we were told not to laugh, which made his show even funnier. As his fingers froze, Marcus ranted on the malevolent spirit of Londoners in traffic, cursing into mobiles about other cell-phone users at the wheel. In the distance behind him stretched miles of slowly crumbling blue icebergs, a terrain most of us had never seen before and, if we leave it more than 10 years, will never see again.

Just prior to that, as we reached the summit, we discussed The Edgar Broughton Band and the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival: the more majestic the ice-scape around us, the more we sheathed ourselves in pop culture. We are stardust, we are golden, and we make one hell of a mess. Greenland has been assaulted by alcohol (‘mad water’) and Christianity; now it has the chance to make some money selling its oil. This would be like giving a terminal lung-cancer patient a consignment of duty-free cigarettes.

(…)

Lemn Sissay – Monday 29 Sep
Things Disappear

Listening to radio, an interviewer asks their interviewee: “describe the experience for the listener”. Description is all the listener needs, imagination does the rest. “well…” comes the reply “its just too beautiful for words”. The answer makes me want to rip out the interviewee’s tongue and slap them with it. The pursuit of description engages and overcomes the possibility of failure (to describe). If something is worth pursuing it means it matters. Ergo “it’s just too beautiful for words” causes things to disappear. You think I am taking this too far. Good. Then we are on the same page.

If a tree falls in the forest and if nobody saw it or heard it fall then did it? We have an obligation: to share what we see. It did. The act of sharing is as important as the information it carries: the action of description and acknowledgement is the greatest gift of language. The first words of a child are often the description and realisation of some body. Imagine it did not speak because the world was too beautiful for words. But the child does speak and therein its power. And in the relatively recent story of colonisation, language was the first to be taken from the children of indigenous peoples. The languages of the Inuit, here in Greenland taken by the Danes, the language of the Australian aborigines taken by the English, the language of the Kenyan peoples, in east Africa taken by the English. This is why I blog. I never had family. I blog because it gives me a point of record or reference that I was alive at any given time. In acknowledging the disappearance of the ice from our earth, in blogging, a simple act of description, we are acknowledging that they were there. Did the tree fall in the forest though nobody saw it or heard it? It did, ‘cause I did, I saw it. And if I don’t say it now there’ll be none left to fall. And what was the first word of the child? And why did it matter?

KT Tunstall – Thursday, October 2nd
Perdlerfiup Sermia Glacier

Woke up with a belly-full of metaphorical tequila. Still feel the shape of the balloon-dog heart in there, but feel altogether better about that. I know it’s good to feel this.

Snap, snap, walking in a Baltic alien landscape and still the grass grows through the snow, all that life that waits patiently beneath for endless sun. Dark red berries fresh under foot stain the powder like blood and trigger thoughts of the hunting that goes on here.

Blood on snow is a disturbing picture, and one that says much about our situation as humans on a planet straining to meet our needs and greeds. But the Greenlandic skill of using every last scrap of animal and knowing what to use it for is undoubtedly impressive.

Suzan-Lori Parks – Thursday 2 Oct
Around 3:30 am

As we leave Uummannaq I wake up, get bundled in most of my layers and head up to the top deck alone in the dark morning to have another look at the Northern Lights. We’d seen them earlier from shore but away from the lights of the town they’re more spectacular. Depending on who you ask it’s God’s curtains or wafts of electrical current or spirits playing football. Watching them I feel a great joy, an expansiveness and then, moments later, as we pass an iceberg and the ship’s light blazes on it, like a dutiful hand keeping the danger at arms length, I feel my phantom tail curl under. Deep fear. Afraid of something so much bigger than me.

Do I travel to get away from myself or to find myself? Is the far-awayness of the place in direct proportion to my need to escape from my little me? They say you can find yourself in a foreign landscape. Is there an equation that can show the relationship between desire for self-discovery and distance? I seem to bring along little chunks of myself stuffed in my overfull suitcase. Will I get seasick? Will I be cold? Will I lose a mitten? It only took two days for my concern about the cold weather to turn into love. That surprises me. Maybe this trip gets me far enough away to lose myself, find myself and, god willing, make a difference.

You can make wishes on the Northern Lights, and so, standing up there alone in the cold, I make wishes. Many wishes. Even though a science book would assert there’s nothing magical about them, but I say they’re science and magic and we’re lost and found; small and enormous; possible and hopeless.

(…)

Marcus Brigstocke – Sunday 5 Oct
Sunny days

I’m going home in the morning. It’s been wonderful and exhilarating and beautiful but I’m ready to get back to my family now who are all of those things only much much louder.

The good news is that we’ve solved that whole pesky climate change fiasco. It turns out it was the sun. It’s heat from the sun that is causing global warming. The sunshine did it. It’s not surprising, I mean when you look at the sun you have admit it does look hot doesn’t it. In scientific terms what’s happened is that the sun has sent a lot of heat energy down to earth for many hundreds of thousands of years making what scientists refer to as ‘sunny days’ (forgive the jargon but it’s important to be accurate I think). Now plants and little creatures have absorbed these ‘sunny days’ and then, sadly but with some degree of inevitability, died with the ‘sunny day’ literally trapped within them. then they have sunk down into the earth in the form of ‘sunny day’ rich fossil fuels. These ‘sunny days’ have later been released as people have needed the ‘sunny day’ energy in the fuel in order to power all the stuff we like – hair-dryers, Toyota Land Cruisers, Nintendo Wii’s, fridges, life support machines, jet boats, angle poise lamps, vibrators, DVD players, aeroplanes and whirlybirds, air-conditioning units to cool the effects of a ‘sunny day’, mobile phones, electric toothbrushes, motorised carving knifes, remote controlled cars, actual cars, car museums, Top Gear, cars and machines which can exactly replicate the browning effect of a ‘sunny day’.

I like a ‘sunny day’ as much as the next man, but it strikes me that if we force several ‘sunny days’ into one 24-hour period things are going to get… well warmer. We can’t control the actual sun – bad news! – but we can easily and without too much discomfort control the amount of stored ‘sunny day’ energy we choose to release – good news. Obviously there are some people for whom it will be agony, but they are mostly old and stubborn and ridiculous and in any case they’ve had their turn, wrecked it, whinged, bellowed and accused, so now it’s up to us. Step aside you flat earth twats.

(…)

Similarly, Ryuichi Sakamoto played one of his compositions on the piano and the hush that gripped the room as everyone realised how much gentle, passionate control he has of his craft was incredibly uplifting. I’ve learned a fair bit about climate change since I’ve been here and exchanged some fascinating and empowering ideas and inevitably talked in alarming terms about how far we have to come but I’d be lying if I said we have not been truly spoilt by many of the people aboard who have given freely of their talent with grace and generosity. Put bluntly I like hanging out with my musical heroes.

(…)

In a moment I am hosting a session, which I have called ‘How to stay positive despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary’. I’m quite nervous, there are some clever people on this boat and I don’t wish to insult anyone. On top of which anyone who is familiar with my work or has shared accommodation with me for any length of time will know that of all adjectives to describe me – positive would not make the list. Hairy, grumpy, troubled, funny, cantankerous, pompous, opinionated, mouthy, malodorous, speccy and sarcastic would all be there but positive would rank down at the bottom end alongside perky and shy (and you should hear what people who don’t like me have to say about me!).

Positivity has become increasingly important for me since Cape Farewell last year. From when I finally stopped the three-week carnival of vomit and disembarked the Noorderlicht – October 2007 until well into the beginning of 2008 I was deeply, worryingly depressed. I had an itch that I was trying to scratch and no matter how loud I shouted, or how many shows I performed, interviews I did, things I wrote, people I spoke to, or personal changes I enacted I could not satisfy the itch. I had accidentally let the threat posed by climate change become something I was trying to solve alone and unrealistically fast. I cannot do it alone. No one of us is capable of saving or destroying the planet and thoughts that lead us to believe we can are as accurate as Fox News and as much use as a chocolate teapot. They are worthless delusions of grandeur on a scale with the ones that so trouble the annoying gitwizard David Blaine. That is not to say that we are not responsible or that we should not care, but letting yourself get depressed is worthless. It doesn’t help the cause either, how can you convince anyone of the pleasures the greener life can afford us if you sound like Morrissey having just stubbed his toe on his way back from burying a favourite pet in the rain, near Hull on a Tuesday in February? You can’t, and so positivity is the theme.

Now I must track down and then pack my things and head back to reality. For anyone who has followed this blog or any others on the Cape Farewell website – thank you. The Arctic’s still really cold, warmer than before but still really bloody cold. Oh and we saw some Whales this afternoon – life’s good and every positive action is worthwhile.

The 2009 Andes expedition members were – due to bad internet connection – limited to twittering:

Day 1 – 3 (23/06/2009 – 25/06/2009)
The expedition launched from Cusco on 23 June, and the first three days saw us hike around the Salcantay and Humantay Glaciers, camping overnight at 4800m and at -10 degrees. We had blankets and tents to keep us warm and a spectacular view of the glaciers to wake us up.

Hannah Bird 26/06/2009, 2:20pm
“Learning about 2 glaciers, Salcantay and Humantay. Hiked nearby this morning but with time tight we couldn’t get too close. Glaciers are what water most of Peru. All glaciers below 5000m are in danger of disappearing by 2015…”

Day 4 – 7 (26/06/2009 – 29/06/2009)
After returning from the glaciers via Cusco we started our descent through the forests. Beginning in the Puna (which is both the top of the Andes and grasslands) at Tres Cruces and watching the sunrise over the rainforest below, whilst scientist Kathryn Clark completed a study of new landslides in the area.

Yadvinder Malhi 26/06/2009, 7:36pm
“In Iquitos on my way to join the expedition. Looking at the Amazon River, already over 3km wide but 3000km from the sea.”

Day 8 – 11 (30/06/2009 – 03/07/2009)
We arrived at Wayquecha field station, a science station in the Cloud Forests. Cloud Forests account for 0.1% of the world’s forests. They are a unique environment that we were privileged to work in and experience. At the field station the crew participated in some of the science research undertaken there, including measurements of temperature, humidity and carbon levels in the soil in plots both in Wayquecha and other plots across the Andes, so that direct comparisons about the way in which the soils and vegetation are behaving and responding can be monitored. We also collected Bromeliad samples and water samples from the river, helping the Environmental Change Institute gain a better understanding of the carbon dynamics of the systems we were interacting with.

Brenndan McGuire 30/06/2009, 1:37pm
“Walter walks us through his antiquated yet fascinating measuring equipment.”

Daro Montag 29/06/2009, 6:48pm
“Just saw posters drawn by children requesting an end to the burning of the planet. A global perspective from an isolated community.”

Day 12 – 14 (04/07/2009 – 06/07/2009)
The Trocha Union is an area of elfin forest and over a period of two days we descended approximately 2,000m through the woodlands. The landscape was incredible; camping on the edge of trees, of moss, of tree roots and a complete immersion into forest life. During the trek Kathryn Clark led the team in collecting leaf samples at each 100m descent for research being undertaken by the University of Durham and University of Oxford.

Yann Martel 30/06/2009
“Greenery so dense we walk through tunnels of it, roots falling like rain”

Marije De Haas 03/06/2009, 10:12am
“Feeling like the bug in the rug – unable to see the pattern”

Day 15 – 18 (07/07/2009 – 10/07/2009)
After descending the Trocha Union we headed into the rainforests for 10 days, first traveling along the Madres de Dios river on the outskirts of Manu National Park, visiting amongst other places Manu Learning Centre and Los Amigos Science Station before traveling along the river through Laberinto and Puerto Maldonado into the Tambopata reserve. The area of rainforest the crew were fortunate to experience has one of the highest rates of biodiversity in the world. For example, there are more species of trees in 100m2 of some Amazonian forests than in the whole of Europe.

Charlie Kronick 09/07/2009
“Failure to express is, fortunately, not a failure to experience. The challenge is to make sense of all the fertility/decay.”

Yann Martel 05/07/2009
“For science stumbling
and slogging in the jungle,
nature mocking us

In a boat
down an amazon river –
like a blood cell in a vein?

A jungle trail,
We go along, burdened,
while cutter ants laugh ”

There is more to read at www.capefarewelll.com, where you can also digitally accompany the next Art & Science Voyage that will set out to the Russian Arctic this September. During our previous seven expeditions to the Arctic, the Cape Farewell scientists and cultural team have engaged with both the Atlantic and Canadian Arctic and we have a huge track record of exhibitions, events, films and education materials developed as a result of these expeditions. However, nearly 40 per cent of this cold northern place is contained above Russia and there is a void in our knowledge of this icy landscape.

Summer ice at the North Pole decreased by a staggering 25% in 2008; in 2009 a major survey dated most of this as new ice. Cape Farewell has invested in plans to navigate from Spitsburgen to the Franz Joseph Islands with a crew that includes a team of international oceanographers from Russia, UK and France to verify evidence of climate change, attempt atmospheric measurements of CO2 levels and other pollutants and investigate the consequences of the ice melt, rising sea temperatures and the release of DMS gases. This epic 22-day sea exploration will also include 15 artists and writers, making individual artwork inspired by the environment and experience.