JANUARY 2012

22 Jan 2012

Last night, just walking from my room to the dining building – Green Oasis it’s called – was so magical. Despite the cold I kept stopping to look through the snow laden trees to the wonderfully clear sky and marvelling that any of us might be looking at that same sky from anywhere ...

18 Jan 2012

I’m in Tokyo, in Ginza with all those Tokyo lights that we know around the world towering around me. I’m not a city dweller, but I have to say that there’s something about Ginza that always touches my heart and leaves me feeling a bit emotionally dismantled ...

17 Jan 2012

Good morning from Hong Kong where the temperature is about 17 degrees and it’s muggy and misty. It was a good though long flight to here - Lusaka to Johannesburg and then from there to here. But as always I had good company ...

10 Jan 2012

I’ve been thinking about children and what amazing beings they are – tiny bodies undergoing massive change and growth; brains in their critical phase learning so fast, making new and amazing neural connections; speech developing - understanding of the meaning of words long before they begin to talk ...

08 Jan 2012

I love Sundays. I don’t work today (though I love my work so much that it’s never really like work anyway…) but today I do whatever I want to do. And today, that includes talking to you ...

06 Jan 2012

Here the lake is almost still. The fishing boats are exactly where they were when I said goodnight to them, and will soon be chugging their way home I guess. Zimbabwe is blue grey in the distance, the escarpment dipping down into the lake ...

04 Jan 2012

I awoke in a bit of a panic this morning! I was dreaming about Cambodia and for a moment I thought I was back there in S21 – the school that had been converted to a prison where dreadful atrocities occurred. For a while I could see the prisoners’ faces again and also those of the perpetrators ...

03 Jan 2012

Today I’m sending you greetings from Lake Kariba, a huge expanse of water created by the building of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River. It now forms a boundary between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and is a sight to behold, though it is still, even after almost sixty years a cause conflict and pain ...

02 Jan 2012

Monday evening ... I just got home from taking my daughter and Tilly home. It felt strange to leave them at their home twenty miles away after four lovely nights with Tilly and two with my daughter too. It was time for us all to treasure. – Tilly’s first Christmas and New Year in our family. What a gift! What a blessing! So my house feels empty ...

02 Jan 2012

I love the early mornings when the night birds are flying home from their watch – owls back in their tree houses or my roof, bats back to hanging around somewhere (often in a little outhouse of mine) and Crickets and frog, exhausted, sleeping in preparation for tonight’s performance ...