India’s Thar Desert isn’t Peter O’Toole desert, too scrubby for that, but still desolate enough for a bend in the road to be viewed as a major feature. You can pass a hundred miles of nothing and then something. Like this – a perfect circle of a dozen sheep, their bowed heads facing inwards and touching as they doze, matched by another circle a quarter mile ahead. No one knows why. Maybe they’ve learnt how to shade their heads from the heat which can top 48 degrees; maybe they’re just attention seekers, and who could blame them?

Pushing ‘India Exposed’ at the Jaipur Literature Festival yesterday, I was unable to quote early sales figures which are not out for a month. Our driver, overhearing my frustration, suggested Alex asked the local palm-reader he had recommended to her.
This proved to be a Mr. D.D. Sharma, resident astro-palmist and face-reader at the Glitz Hotel who sat cross-legged on a stool in their car park, revealing her lucky day, lucky jewel, lucky precious metal, lucky colour, even her lucky point on the compass. Yes, yes, but what about book sales? He checked her lifeline again and revealed it would prove a successful year for me. That’s it? No more detail for our 500 rupees, no year-on-year projections for US/European sales? He gave the enigmatic head rock suggesting the consultation was at an end, and then confirmed it by donning the motorcycle helmet from under his stool and riding off into the Jaipur rush hour.

Dear Dr. Irving Finkel,

I read this week you’d like to save as many private diaries as you can for the Wellcome Foundation’s Identity Project. I would have passed on mine, all fifty eight years and two and a half million words of them, but they’re promised to the children. Neither racy nor revealing, more mundane and nerdish in fact, but as I point out to them they include all the details of their lives from Day One.
Practically, they’ve proved of value when catching up with expenses, and a boon with my autobiography of Fleet Street days, ‘Lost in the Reptile House,’ with dates, places, and people triggering the memory. If, after reading these extracts from the five decades they cover you really fancy them, feel free to pop round and Xerox the lot.
Regards, Clive.

January 15th, 1951, (the year the diaries start), I’m at Beckenham Grammar School, aged fourteen and worried about imminent arrest on my bike in the dark.

‘Nothing much happened except Mr. Rule put me in detention for Wednesday. So I must get a back lamp before then. I made an effort tonight to get one, I unscrewed Auntie Con’s but found the interior was smashed. I looked for my one but couldn’t find it.’

Hello, Dr. Finkel? You still there? It gets better. Well, sort of… Ten years later, on January 15th, 1961, I’m a fledgling photojournalist on the sports page of the Eagle comic shooting a British Olympic gold medallist.

‘Drove to Alperton Sports track where we met Don Thompson who we’d passed earlier who told us he had walked from his home 17 miles away. With two boys from his club he showed us the do’s and don’ts of walking and we finished four rolls of HP3 in cold wind.’

By January 15th., 1971, I’ve reached The Sun, (with diary entries growing shorter as lunches grew longer), recording Action Girl, a reporter who performed death-defying stunts dreamt up by readers.

‘I joined Tricia at Fairfield Hall where we did her on the trapeze.’

Tricia survived, moving on to a career on television; I survived, along with my liver, and moved to the Daily Mail as a photographer. By January 15th.,1981, I was seeking an office car, but as I tried to sell my first written feature, got an early warning from my accountant about the freelance writing world.

‘I found a Honda Accord 4 door available in W3 in beige but Alex didn’t like the colour. Sent Features Editor of The Times the Dunchideock Fete piece. Henry Bach sent his tax papers settling them at nil profit, but a £70 bill.’

Another decade and the entry for January 15th., 1981 could, spookily, have been written today…

‘To Bow Streeet for an MP on a rail fares fiddle charge, but he didn’t turn up. Switched to a vox pop in Regents Park mosque where they said to me yes, Saddam is a monster but you and the US made him one with your aid.

By January 15th., 1991, we finally got the Battersea flat we’d been after – and the bed.

‘We went to our solicitor and signed for No. 92, then to Lillie Road where we ordered a 5’ bed for around £300.

And today, January 15th., 2010? A New Year’s Resolution that the diaries will be less embarrassingly mundane and nerdy – and more embarrassingly racy and revealing.

With the ceaseless media bombardment of war, murder, mayhem, entertainment crap and celeb dross, we subconsciously build an apathy firewall to prevent numbing overload. Yet once in a while a sliver of news pierces that shield and embeds briefly in the brain. As the year ends, just two sad items remain lodged in my Teflon memory. Don’t ask why.

The first was a paragraph in The Times reporting a Parachute Regiment corporal, selling his Falklands War Military Medal after losing his job, said it was the second hardest thing in his life. ‘The first was telling my soldiers to fix bayonets,’ he said.

And the second was news that Mickey Rooney was appearing in pantomime this Christmas in Milton Keynes.

A Happy New Year to everyone.

Back in August I asked readers for a new word to describe the weasel words dished out by Governments, politicians, PRO’s and other slimeballs in the shit. Snowed under with replies, (sent from the four corners of our village), and overwhelmed by their uniform brilliance, I’ve decided it fairer to stay with ‘weasel words.’

Today’s example comes from Bhopal, India, on the 25th anniversary of the worst industrial accident in history when forty tonnes of lethal gas leaked from Union Carbide’s factory, killing up to 15,000 within days, with thousands remaining injured and dying prematurely as a result – a local water sample taken recently contains 1000 times the WHO’s recommended maximum for the carcinogenic carbon tetrachloride.

Such an anniversary caused an upsurge in weasel words, with the weaselist coming from the Indian Prime Minister who states, “The enormity of that tragedy of neglect still gnaws at our collective conscience,” as he reaffirmed his government’s “commitment to resolving issues of safe drinking water, expeditious clean-up of the site, continuation of medical research, and any other outstanding issues connected with the Bhopal gas tragedy”.

For the busy social anthropologist seeking Paris’s zeitgeist, Sunday lunch at the Brasserie Lipp provides rich pickings.
This St. Germain landmark remains Paris in aspic, (with an unchanged menu for the past 50 years), thanks to its mix of minute tables, uber-Gallic waiters and the house policy of allowing clients to queue inside the packed restaurant – think of twenty fully-dressed passengers in a Jumbo aisle queuing for the toilet being wrestled aside by a dozen disgruntled cabin crew balancing hot meals with an urgency suggesting a forced landing is imminent. There’s more seating on the first floor but upstairs is a social graveyard inhabited by foreigners and sad losers, to be avoided at all costs by Parisiens who would rather run the risk of first degree cassoulet burns as they wait with a practised nonchalance, studying the walls as if they’re interesting whilst conversing without listening. (As the Lipp website points out, this is ‘where time seems suspended’).
Occasionally they crack, glancing surreptitiously at the seated diners, noting the course they are on, their speed of chewing and if conversation is flowing or strained. There is nothing surreptitious about the seated Chosen Ones, however, who study the faces of the unfortunates, their clothing, their shoes, then sip languidly and chew slower till you could cut the schadenfreude with a blunt knife.
Yet keen anthropologists will note one small change to this timeless institution; en homage to the growing internationality of their clientele, Brasserie Lipp now permits one line of the menu to appear in English. And it’s right at the top, in bold red – ‘No Salads Allowed as a Main Course.’
Bon appétit.

In 1994 a magazine sent me back to Derry to find what happened to the boys I’d photographed for ‘The Battle of Bogside’ book twenty five years earlier, amongst them this kid attacking an armoured car who proved to be John, by then a 34 year-old oil rigger, whose photograph and quotes were prominent in the subsequent feature.
“Oh, aye,” he told me, “I remember that picture well, the secret was to leave it as late as possible as they drove at you before you jumped aside – it was a game to me, a bit of crack.”
Fast forward to last week when James, a Belfast university lecturer, came across the book as he was clearing out his deceased parents’ home and wrote to say that actually he was the boy, enclosing a family snap of himself taken in 1971 which confirmed it beyond doubt.
Looking at the published photograph of John, nothing like the boy attacking the armoured car, you ask yourself how I could get it so wrong? The Americans have the expression ‘cognitive dissonance’ which can mean a subconscious change of mind to suit one’s purpose – here’s a kid saying it was definitely him and giving good quotes to a receptive journalist with little room for cross-checking.
As the distraught owner of an old peoples’ home told the police last month investigating the tragic death of one of his clients who’d choked on a sandwich, “Shit happens.”

(a larger version of the picture can been found in the photography section)

“We made love with the passion and intensity of two condemned people, each striving to satisfy the other’s needs and succeeding. Exhausted, our hot bodies touching along the full length to extract the last morsel of our lovemaking, I wondered if we’d ever be normal again.”

It comes from the autobiography of John Darwin, now serving time with his wife Anne for faking his drowning from a canoe in an attempted insurance fraud. If the jury feel it not strictly fiction, they might be won over by these latest shots of the passionate pair.