Land Grab

One under-reported aspect of the aftermath of Hurricane Stan is that Guatemala has become a little bit bigger at the expense of Mexico thanks to the re-routing by floods of the Suchiate river.

Ok, we're talking about a couple of hectares here and there, but for farmers in Chiapas who now find that half of their terrenos lie on the other side of the border, this looks like major grounds for a gripe. Still, chapines will snigger a bit, then recall that the Mexicans relieved them of the entire state of Chiapas in three separate land grabs perpetrated in the 19th century.

Batman Begins

Read any review of the new Harry Potter film and you'll pick up on the notion that "darkness" has the power to confer dignity on adolescent fantasy, thereby making it more worthy of adult attention.

Christofer Nolan (Memento, Insomia) took on the task of re-setting and re-darkening the Batman franchise and the result is very successful. There's quite a mish-mash of often unnerving American politics bubbling away under the surface, but it's best just to ignore them and enjoy the ride.

Nolan has successfully re-overcast the Batman myth here in more ways than one - there are enough famous thesps (and material ) to populate two or three films. The director has narrowly avoided biting off more than he can chew.

Bale has bulked up considerably since The Machinist, and delivers a good performance with echoes of his rendition of the self-loathing yuppy Patrick Bateman in American Pyscho. The influence of Zhang Yimou and his new wave Chinese martial arts movies is also apparent.

Sahara

Silly, but somehow not quite silly enough − you keep getting tantalising glimpses of a better, might-have-been movie peaking through; along with mouth-watering vistas of desert dryness, worthy of the Michael Palin televised trek of the same name.

It comes as a bit of a disappointment in Sahara's most Bond-like moments that the baddies are going to wreck the planet more out of incompetence than because they have some secret master plan for a new world order. Good to see that Lambert Wilson isn't afraid of typecasting, as the Americans seem to like their villains French these days.

Peter Bradshaw obviously isn't a huge fan of the film's star: "Once again, Matthew McConaughey proves that he is modern cinema's Mr Zero Charisma. He is the celluloid equivalent of Rohypnol: a deadening whiff of pure boredom that deprives you of the power to think, speak or move your limbs. It wears off after a few hours, leaving you face-down in a stagnant pool of vanilla Diet Coke."

Penelope Cruz is slight in every respect here. Her days as a Hollywood starlet must surely be numbered, especially now that her little niche has been invaded by compatriot Paz Vega who will star alongside Antonio Banderas in the forthcoming Emperor Hadrian biopic.

Anyway, I found it all quite entertaining. Not one for the DVD library though.

Mini-Colombia

Guatemala has been getting quite a mixed bag of coverage for the past couple of months. It attracted a lot of sympathy as a victim of Hurrican Stan and aid agencies have warned that some rural communities lost all their crops and are in danger of starvation this winter. (And Amnesty continues to bang on about the femicides.)

On the other hand the presence in the Petén of yanqui television in the form of Survivor has been used as a platform for a PR story by INGUAT (the local tourism authority) that advises potential (and gullible) visitors that "Guatemala has shed its bloodstained reputation."

But this week the term "mini-Colombia" has cropped up, referring to the Castillo arrest and the belief amongst DEA officials that Guatemala lacks the necessary legal framework for combatting the country's drugs syndicates that collectively handle 75% of the cocaine that ends up in the United States.

V once told me how the manager of el Sindal, the Nestlé plant we pass driving into Antigua, was caught trying to smuggle Bolivian marching powder in the baby milk formula! But the unique challenge for the DEA in this country is the role of the military. Whereas in other Latin American states their role as a supporter of the traffickers is well-established, in Guatemala army officers and former army officers actually appear to be running the show themselves.

It's hard to feel that sorry for the gringos because to a great extent they engineered this long-term problem for themselves from the moment they sponsored the coup that brought down the legitimate government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in June 1954. When the thirty-year civil war this sparked finally burned itself out, many of the generals associated with genocide were pensioned off in a bid to make the military look a bit cleaner.

Two of these, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Francisco Ortega Menaldo, are former intelligence chiefs with very bloody hands that once out in civvy street set up "la cofradía" ("the brotherhood") an elite club that manages the interface between organised crime and the serving military. This might explain why 30 or so of the massacre-prone paratroopers known as the Kaibiles recently headed pa'l norte in order to link up with Mexico's renegade commandos the Zetas.

The connections of these entrepreneurial soldiers are not limited to Central American political institutions. Jerry Weller III, current vice-chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee (Rep, Illinois) is married to Zury Ríos Sosa, daughter of one time coup-leader General Efrain Ríos Montt. He was the power behind the regime of fugitive former President Alfonso Portillo, which introduced legislation removing civilian oversight of the military in matters of criminal justice. The Portillo government was struck off the list of US anti-narcotics allies. (Oscar Berger has since managed to get them reinstated.)

For some time the DEA has shown signs that it has largely given up hope of fighting the traffickers in situ. The Adan Castillo arrest was achieved only after he was lured to the US on for a DEA training exercise. In other cases containment has been the rule - a former air force commander, Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio had his US visa revoked by the Clinton adminstration.

When a huge stash of incriminating police records covering a diverse range of matters from parking violations to spy logs and interrogation records turned up in a munitions depot last summer, ten years after the end of the civil war, there was widespread surprise that nobody had bothered to destroy them. Heriberto Cifuentes, a Guatemalan historian explained the oversight: "Whether there are documents or not, people responsible for crimes do not expect to pay for them."

Underground London

I always wanted to know what went on in that disused tram tunnel in Kingsway...

That and many other facts are are the stuffing of Stephen Smith's Underground London, a book that has left me feeling that I spend my days patrolling the capital's mezzanine floor. It has been written in the ephemeral style of the newspaper journalist, with amiable, self-deprecating humour, rather like a soft-pedalling Tim Moore.

Like myself, Smith can trace his childhood ambivalence towards subterranean spaces to the Moorgate tube crash of 1975 in which 43 people died.

He also recalls the Hole in the Wall pub on the platform at Sloane Square (last orders in 1985) which features in Vile Bodies and mentions the big metal pipe which still traverses the station above the platforms - the long lost river Westbourne.

He visits the silver market and vaults in Chancery Lane, beneath a building in which my company's accounts department were briefly exiled in the 90s. He finds that the people that try to brighten their lives with "costly, shiny, pointless stuff" are more obviously melancholic than the cheery-cheeked folk down in the cellars of Berry Brothers & Rudd, who regularly participate in the "drawing room farce of wine appreciation."

He hangs out with some corpse lifters at the church of St Andrew's located next to the glass-house fronting of the Sainsbury's HQ close to Holborn Viaduct which spans the valley of the hidden river Fleet. This house of God once sat proud and alone atop 'Heavy Hill', down which early modern ASBO types used to roll old ladies in barrels.

He joins the monomathematical society known as Subterranea Britannica and at one of their gatherings listens to a keynote speech by Duncan Campbell, the journalist who one evening back in 1980 managed to get himself (and a bicycle) through a manhole cover near Bishopsgate and proceeded to tour the hushest of the hush - the 20+ miles of tunnels that link up the ministeries with other underground government control centres. Smith discovers that the biggest barrier to composing a guide to this secret complex is that there are basically two types of people: "Those who enter the government labyrinth and don't write about it, and those who write about it but don't enter it".

He warns us that the Thames Barrier is being raised in anger ever more frequently these days, and that there are forty effluent overspills from the sewers into the river each year. He recounts how a major flood back in 1236 resulted in the use of rowing boats inside Westminster Hall.

There are plenty of other fascinating facts to soak up here. Here's my own annotated list of the more memorable:

• Oysters were a poor man's dinner up to and including Dickensian times.
• Battersea park can get seriously whiffy because there's a major sewer directly beneath it.
• If you step on a dead rat it "goes off like a Chicken Kiev". Dead bodies also tend to explode in their coffins.
• Nelson's body was preserved in brandy. Some explosion that would have been.
• Calls for Inspector Sands on the PA system are London Transport's way of announcing an emergency to station staff without creating passenger panic in the tunnels.
• The gunpowder laid down by Guy Fawkes would have blown up the Palace of Westminster 25 times over. It would also have taken out the Abbey and most of Whitehall.
• Mount Pleasant was given it's name by someone with a sarcastic bent- unlike Guatemala's El Progreso and France's Nice where the irony was clearly unintentional.
• Houndsditch meanwhile was the place all the dead doggies ended up. Kentish Town? Let's not go there.

Isola: Multiple Personality Girl

During V's first year in the UK back in 1990 she met a number of Japanese students of English. One of these was a stiffly polite young man who told us that it was his ambition to become one of his country's leading film directors. We're not sure what became of him and his dream, but if he's found his way into the psychological horror genre, he's sure to be making movies with some of the following ingredients:

• An absurdly pretty female lead investigating some sort of curse
• Plenty of schoolgirls in uniform with short, pleated skirts
• Heavy rain
• Muji-coloured muted interiors
• A spook having a bad hair day from hell

Isola has something uniquely its own, the Kobe earthquake, but then it also has all of the other elements thrown in too, as if it was seeking to attain originality through a species of meta-cribbing.

Here the absurdly pretty lead is Yukari, an aid worker in Kobe after the quake that has some personal identity issues and is able to read the minds of others. But her mystery quickly fuses with that of troubled adolescent Chihiro, a schoolgirl alt-tabbing through 13 personalities, the last of which, Isola, is over-sensitive to say the least.

Looks like the result of the great quake jumbling together a lot of pages from different putative Japanese pyscho-horror scripts.

Open Water

This is rather like a slow-dawning version of the buried-alive situation Rex finds himself in at the end of The Vanishing (Spoorloos) - just as primal and fucked, but deceptively panoramic.

Even so it takes this pair of unlucky divers a remarkably long time to panic. Seven hours pass before they decide that it might be a good idea to drop their weights. "This can't be normal", observes Susan some time after that as dorsal fins start to break the surface around them.

When they do realise that they are dealing with something a lot more unpropitious than mere grounds for litigation, they talk themselves into a domestic which sounds a note of black humour.

The director Chris Kentis, himself an avid scuba-diver, has opted for the detached yet ultra-realist Dogme-style film-making. It cost less to make than half of the budget of a typical Hollywood blockbuster's sound effects budget.

The subject matter is based on "real events", the 1998 disappearance off Queensland of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, the result of a run-of-the-mill kind of cock-up on their dive boat. (Bit of a spoiler that link - sorry!)

Kentis deserves credit for the way that the pacing, structure and characterisation have been treated in light of the outcome.

Guaranteed to leave you feeling chilled for some time after viewing - and more deeply than standard-format 'horror' movies like Jaws or Blair Witch Project with which it has been compared.

Ebert puts it very well: "The movie is about what a slender thread supports our conviction that our lives have importance and make sense. We need that conviction in order to live at all, and when it is irreversibly taken away from us, what a terrible fate to be left alive to know it."

Time Capsules

What is it with Londoners and defunct tube stations? What makes many of us want to squint through the windows of a Central Line train to see if we can catch a glimpse of the tiled platform of long abandonned British Museum Station or perhaps even its disorientated Egyptian spectre in loincloths.

Surfer even went to a rave in the then recently mothballed Aldwych station. There's said to be a ghost there too - an actress from the theatre demolished to make way for the station that apparently missed her last curtain call.

I guess it's the frisson of the time capsule effect we're seeking in this skin-shedding postmodern world. I found an unusually well-preserved pocket of old time a few years ago when V and I visited my childhood home in Eaton Square. When we moved out at the end of 1985 the Grosvenor estate already had plans to eviscerate the building which had never fully recovered from the German bomb which landed only a few yards away in Hobart Place on top of the poor vicar of St Peter's. They were waiting for each of the remaining tenants to leave, or die. Our neighbour, Lord Boothby, had taken one last swig of gin and climbed in the cab to the great upper chamber in the sky. He was survived by his wife Wanda and her two shitzus, and they weren't budging.

In the end something like twelve years passed. Aware that the door to our flat had hardly been re-opened since the day we locked it behind us I contacted the Estate and asked if I could visit the flat one last time with V before the wreckers and the modernisers moved in.

It turned out to be a bizarre experience. A poster of an astronaut that I had brought back from the Soviet Union had peeled away from the back of my bedroom door exposing the hide-out it had found the day I packed up the rest of my cachivaches. Outside in the corridor we had to step over one of my school plimsoles lying there accusingly, underside-up. All the wallpaper and fittings were the same as when we left, dating back to our last major redecoration at the end of the 70s. There was even a cupboard in the kitchen full of old cans of food.

It's all gone now, gutted and re-filled from the inside with some of the most plushly espensive des-rezzes in the Duke's portfolio. They even built over the old garden (well, yard really) at the rear.

Putting on the Blitz

If a whispy, ethereal being materialised in your living room and offered you an all-expenses-paid return trip to the summer of 1940 in order to experience the Blitz first-hand, would you take it up on its offer?

The Blitz spirit is of course a pivotal part of our national mythology. We've all seen those black and white images of cheerful cockneys sipping tea on the Piccadilly Line platforms whilst 'orrible Fritz did his worst up above.

Yet in Underground London Stephen Smith reminds us that at the start of the German bombing campaign London Transport put up notices expressly forbidding Londoners from using the network as a shelter, and later on still insisted that patrons needed to buy a ticket before descending to relative safety!

At first anyone seen rushing for the nearest station when the sirens rang was braded a Tube Cuthbert. "We are happy to say that majority of offenders are members of alien races" reported the Railway Gazette.

Sanitary conditions in the tunnels were often akin to those in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina was whooshing outside - which is why the better off sought shelter at a more exclusive tunnel complex beneath The Savoy.

Cecile Beaton's description of the goings on amongst the regulars down there makes it sound rather like Hitler's bunker in Berlin at the time of the Nazi Götterdämmerung . This debauched little circle ("airmen off duty, tarts on duty") was penetrated on September 15, 1940 when Phil Piratin, a communist and a leading figure in the Stepney Tenants Defence League, led a group of one hundred East Enders into the Savoy shelter.

Of the several disasters that befell the crowds huddled on the platforms during the summer nights of 1940, the worst was caused by a German bomb which bounced down an escalator at Bank, killing 117 people.

It seems that the Tube system has a long history of dubious PR. Colonel John Bell, General Manager of the original Metropolitan line had the unenviable task of putting a positive spin on the world's first underground steam railway. He claimed the acid gas had cured his tonsilitis and that such was the health-enhancing nature of the fumes that Great Portland Street station was being used as a sanitorium for sufferers from asthma and other bronchial complaints.

It's now over four months since I went cold-turkey on the Tube. The other morning I had a look in Victoria Embankment Gardens for the ventilation shafts Sir Joseph Bazalgette constructed to allow the District Line passing below to exhale at intervals. Stephen Smith says they are now disguised as plinths, but none of the those I examined were obviously dissembling.

There's a new book out by Gavin Mortimer - The Longest Night, which explores what it was like to experience the particularly heavy night of bombing on May 10-11, 1940. I've been giving it the eye in Foyles.

Are niches navels?

I snagged on this remark by novelist Paul Auster recently:

"We're not interested in others any more. It's hurt us politically and it's hurt us culturally. We've lost our taste for what I would call 'the exotic'."

Whilst this trend is obvious, especially across the pond, is it not strange that our culture should be becoming more hermetic at precisely the time the Web is said to be stretching our collective tail, a phenomenon John Husband refers to as the "mass customisation of life"?

Perhaps this atomisation of interest is also an inward contraction that impedes the kind of macro-level exchange between civilisations that we've been used to.

In my post on Monday I noted how hard the French have found it very difficult in the information age to construct and propagate meaningful political structures around the idea of Frenchness (or Europeanness), and one reason for this surely has to be the cultural balkanisation that the Internet is fostering.

Where are all the Arabists today to balance out the Islamophobes? Otherness no longer fascinates us, it puts the willies up us - and its more violent exponents of know this and continue to exploit it to our disadvantage.

Is it cos I is Kazakh?

Feeling a little left out of the political correctness loop, Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry has threatened legal action against Sascha Baron Cohen who recently presented the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon as the cow-punching Kazakh link-man Borat. It would be a shame if the courts were to deprive us of such an excellent charicature and one that has served to expose Madonna as "a genuine transvestite" and uncover some of the more unreconstructed attitudes prevalent in our own elite institutions.

Thankfully political correctness is not something the Spanish appear to know too much about. Last night's Ankawa was an old classic, featuring a Chihuahua that suckled on its owner's breasts and sang operatic arias, and a magnificent Andalucian horse that can dance to the beat of a Sevillana.

"To escape and to help others escape"

That was John Fowles' answer to one of those what are your goals in life interrogations.

Escape for Fowles meant isolating himself in Lyme Regis from the "chase-after-success", a fate that didn't entirely suit his first wife Elizabeth. On December 18, 1965 he wrote:

"Living here has become rather like climbing a mountain with a corpse on one's back. Every so often there are compensations: views, moments of happiness. But then the corpse starts complaining, raging ..."

Yet in the soon-to-be-published second volume of his diaries he himself raged against the "sadness, smallness, dampness of England...I am split between writing out of my Englishness and against it."

Fowles seemed to enjoy wading through all the reviews of his novels: "It seems healthier, in a sick culture, to be rejected than approved." and "even the harshest reviewer is never the real enemy."

The real enemies it seems congregated at celebrity parties: "Quite what is so unlikable...in these filmbiz people I don't know; it isn't just their egocentricity, their assumption that one must be successful, that today's and tomorrow's fame must be synonymous - the Egyptian quality in show business. Perhaps it is the constant misuse of language; a treachery both conscious (the eagerness to establish links, relationships, futures at the cost of real personal feelings) and unconscious (a pinchbeck vocabulary) that gives a kind of seething, serpentine quality to such congregations: that of a nest or swarm of beings self-adulatory, warming to one another, and yet fanged in every external reality."

Busted!

I reported last week how Adan Castillo, Guatemala's leading anti-drugs investigator had tendered his resignation, leaving the fight against the cartels "in God's hands". Poor old Castillo claimed his government post involved a soul-destroying amount of pissing into the wind, and listed enviously the fancy kit available to the individuals he had been tasked to frustrate.

Well guess what? Along with two other officers, Castillo was arrested yesterday in North Virginia and subsequently charged with criminal conspiracy and cocaine smuggling.

Net-I

The Internet has been the source of a great deal of moral panic since I first started working in the field a decade ago. Up to now I've scoffed at each of the alarmist tocsins as they have sounded, but suddenly find an new one starting to ring in my ears.

Throughout most of Western history possibly the most significant divide in our culture (and especially our political culture) has been that typified by the ancient opposition of Athens and Sparta: the archetypal open and closed societies, the individualist plurality and the enforced collective.

The twentieth century in Europe saw one of the most overt confrontations between the two systems, but in much of history the duel between them has created schismatic antagonisms inside many of our core institutions, such as the Christian church. Studies of bacterial behaviour have shown that some degree of oscillation between the two extremes is fundamental to the way many organic systems respond to changing circumstances.

Now at the start of the twenty-first century the Internet is interfering with this age-old polarity in ways that are already destabilising to the societies we live in.

Many have compared the structure of Al Qaeda to the virtual corporation of the modern globalised economy, observing how well Islamic terror groups have adapted to the wired world. Fewer though have commented on how a networked culture helps to shape the mentality of Al Qaeda's alienated human bombs.

"In an institutional world that lays excessive emphasis on the personal, particular and concrete the abstract finds expression in occasional, extreme eruptions", wrote Andrew Calcutt last week in Spiked. He casts the cultural dispute underlying our current predicament as that between me-centered mainstream society and networked groups of willful outsiders, of a sort we have seen many times before, but given a new anti-Western, anti-imperialist twist by the teachings of radical Islam.

“Our so-called scholars of today are content with their Toyotas and semi- detached houses” mocked Mohammad Sidique Khan, the late ringleader of the July 7 attacks. Noting this mood of disenchantment with secular rewards Calcutt is prompted to suggest that "Islam exists in Britain today as a timely form of British popular culture. Indeed, I have observed young British people crossing over from Muslim culture to its Bling-Bling counterpart, and vice versa." He compares our home-grown suicide bombers with Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners - they are the absolutist beginners of July 7, comprehensively rejecting the personal in favour of an impersonal ideal, and in the process willingly "un-becoming the non-descript individual they might otherwise be."

Is this really just another, more deadly form of counter-culture?

On the ride home on Friday I chatted with Stefan about La Haine burning brightly every evening just across the channel. I related how when we drove down through France in September the sense of national exhaustion was almost palpable. Stefan confided his own suspicion that the UK is in many ways equally disfunctional, but we just don't know it yet.

Both nations have punched above their weight for a half century. Thanks in part to the "special relationship", Britain is still jabbing away, but France is clearly tiring and has been outscored in the last few rounds. No doubt you could write a monster essay explaining all the causes of this tip into decline, but as this particular post is about the Internet, so I will stick to that line of investigation.

In the case of Spain going online has re-opened the country up to the wider Spanish-speaking world. Unfortunately for the French it has simply revealed to them the sad truth that there isn't much of a global Francophone culture to belong to. For much of the nineties the French political elite banked pretty much everything on the EU, but the technocratic rump of this ideal no longer excites anyone. There's little else for them to do except protect the vieux fort of Frenchness from creeping multicultural mongrelisation - which has meant banishing the supermarkets, furniture stores, Buffalo Grills and African immigrants to the margins behind the ring roads.

Yet it's not just French politicians that have been left without a big project with share-eable values, the problem is clearly more widespread in the West. The response from politcians has generally been to jump on the bandwagon of me-centrism in the hope that home improvement and digital lifestyles might together refine into a new opium for the masses.

Meanwhile the Net continues to short-circuit many of our traditional modes of association. Most commercial enterprises have come to see this as an opportunity. But on a political and cultural level the effects are perhaps more worrying. It allows users to be virtual individuals within any number of different virtual collectives and the old rigid dichotomy of open-closed/individual-collective no longer reigns supreme over our political selfhood. (You might say that the dominant state of mind is neither Me nor Not-I, it's Net-I.)

The suicide terrorist is perhaps the ultimate prophet of this phenomenon, committed to an abstract self-negating collective ideal that rejects the evils of modern consumerism, yet at the same time aspiring to the VIP rewards of martyrdom.

Olivier Roy argued in Gloablised Islam that second or third generation Muslims in Europe tend have a more personal, alienated kind of faith owing to the absence of the social framework typical of a traditional Islamic society. Such a lack (or leakage) of the grounding of shared territorial citizenship is a feature of the netizen mentality that has helped to delegitimise traditional political elites and their agendas. Old-fashioned institutions (whether they are open or closed by inclination) may find it increasingly hard to get any traction with individuals whose minds have formed within the network, and the more disenfranchised in the real world they are, the more likely they are to blur into abstracted rebellion against it.

OBL's nihilistic footsoldiers may represent a long-term weakness for his Jihadist enterprise. After all alienated youth is not the best ingredient for an all-conquering horde or any other kind of mass movement - imagine an army of Pete Doherty's! Still, they have the power to be very destructive, especially whilst the self-consciously trashy world order they oppose remains so convinced that the problem can be fixed in the old-fashioned way.

The Descent

I'm glad I didn't see this in the cinema - I think I may even have screamed at one point!

The premise is as crumbly and hollow as the beastie-infested cave system, but you don't really care. Writer-Director Neil Marshall has gone one better than his Dog Soldiers, which had a lot of promise. This is very much the British horror classic that Creep might have been. For sheer terror it's nearly up there with a first viewing of Alien, though the cast of would-be cadavers were better defined in Ridley Scott's classic.

Marshall has described the movie as "Deliverance goes underground". Amongst other references there's a borrowing of Kubrik's famous helicopter tracking shot from The Shining and the use of a camcorder that reminded me of the The Blair Witch Project.

Epigenetics

Another one of Bryan Appleyard's targets last weekend was Horizon.

"This was once a co- production with public television in America, but, as a result of a BBC deal with the Discovery Channel, it has had to go more “mainstream”. Mainstream, in this context, means worse. Americans like action — such as pointless dramatisations — and they like to see what you are talking about, hence more pointless dramatisations. If you don’t lose the will to live and do make it to the end, you will have learnt precisely nothing."

Last week's programme set about telling us how prevailing theories of inheritance have been turned on their head by recent discoveries. There was indeed a fair deal of septic-stirring sensationalism, perhaps not all merited by the starting revelation - an interesting discovery made by Dr Marcus Pembrey of the Gt Ormond Street hospital that children with exactly the same deletion on one of their chromosomes showed the charateristic signs of two entirely different syndromes (Angelman and Prader-Villi)

Yet the key point here is indeed startling - our genetic inheritance is more than the sequenced chemical code of DNA; there's also a supplementary system of meta information that imprints our genes with information about their origins. This extra layer of complexity may explain why we have around 30,000 genes in total, not much more than a house plant. What matters isn't just the map, but which parts of it are tagged as on or off and why.

In the case of Pembrey's children the genome knows whether the deletion came from the mother or the father. The programme further suggested environmental or lifestyle factors that affect us during our own lifetimes can influence the imprinting of the genes of our children: in effect a watered-down version of the inheritance of acquired traits.

I wonder what Richard Dawkins makes of all this. Any kind of meta-genome would certainly shove a major spanner into Selfish Gene theory, at least in its purist form. Other Neo-Darwinists like Daniel Dennet might also sneer at the suggestion that the formulae of evolution operate on multiple, not necessarily complementary levels. Darwin on the other hand would probably have welcomed this partial reconciliation with the discredited Lamarckian model.

In this context The Human Genome Project now looks rather like Deep Thought's first outing - instead of revealing coming up with the answer to end all answers , it revealed a hitherto unanticipated, deeper problem.

The science of epigenetics clearly has a long way to go and this Horizon documentary ended up posing a lot of questions that it didn't even attempt to tackle. Here are a couple:

• Is the system of imprinting an adaptation, or is as fundamental as DNA itself?
• Whilst we may keep the same sequence of genes throughout our lives their activity varies greatly during the lifecycle with many changes occuring late on, long after we have had our best chance to pass them on. Does the meta-genome exist to support individual survival or is it also part of another system operating at group level?
  

John Fowles

John Fowles' death at 79 was reported yesterday, more copiously across the pond than in his native land.

He was the only English writer on my informal list of the world's most-readable living authors:

Milan Kundera (Czech Republic/France)
Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland)
José Saramago (Portugal)
Haruki Murakami (Japan)
Patrick Süsskind (Germany)
Paul Auster (USA)
Javier Marías (Spain)

Judging from certain other literary lists compiled of late, many would have stretched to find a place for either AS Byatt or Ian McEwan. But I've never read Byatt's Possession and my suspicion is that she is a key member of the literary establishment that Fowles so admirably secluded himself from. As for McEwan, all I have to go by is Atonement, and that over-rated pot-boiler alone wouldn't earn him consideration. Don't get me started on Salman Rushdie.

Kapuściński, a journalist and essayist, is the odd man out, but his literary genius has been recognised at home and abroad.

Atonement is certainly a good read, but in that respect was surely outclassed by Fowles' great trio The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, some of the most rivetting and widely-appealing English novels of the last century, yet also stylistically interesting. Auster is perhaps not such a great prose artist, but his novels have the same sense of stylistic fun and storytelling verve that works by Haruki Murakami and (the early) Vargas Llosa have, and certainly the late lamented John Fowles had.

Somewhat Spainful

The Middle Ages arrived indolently late in Spain and ended up having to pull a bit of an all-nighter. The history of Al-Andalus played a significant role in this peculiar shift, yet a newcomer to the topic would only have been partially enlightened by Channel 4's When the Moors Ruled Europe last Saturday: an odd mix of well-researched, insightful TV history overlaid with a Jackanory narrative.

Presenter Bettany Hughes' recent quest for Helen of Troy was the target of a Sunday rant by Bryan Appleyard: "Television, in common with, if I am to be honest, the rest of the media, is currently making a huge mistake. This mistake is to think that, because large parts of the British population are demonstrably stupid, it is therefore safest to assume that everybody is stupid. This assumption leads genres such as TV history to pursue stupid people with the sort of devices stupid people seem to like. But, of course, stupid people are not going to watch a show on Helen of Troy or the second world war. As a result, non-stupid people are just irritated and baffled to find themselves being shown people getting on trains or blowing things up."

Here there was at least an attempt to try to cram two programmes into one - one for the dummies that enjoy the sense of cleverness they can get from the easy-revisionist approach and one for the sort of people that are comfortable with paradox, juxtaposition and unresolved contradiction. Hughes consistently qualified some of her more simplistic assertions, but hardly ever immediately after making them. She began with the Alhambra, Moorish Spain's signature site, and then shunted backwards and as a result the programme lacked shape and dragged a bit.

Anyway, the more interesting facts that cropped up were these: That the capture of Arab singing girls at Barbastro in 1064 by the father of William IX of Aquitaine, acknowledged as the first troubador, may indicate a major Islamic influence on the Western tradition of romantic love. And that the Duchess of Medina-Sidonia claims to have discovered that her original ancestor, Guzman el Bueno, a hero of the Reconquista was himself a Moor. (Though this one is likely to prove shaky.)

To some extent Hughes was attempting to do for the Moors what Peter Addyman did for the Vikings at Jorvik and what the British Museum is currently trying to do for the Persians - setting the record straight about a particular group who may or may not have had a bad historical press or simply been overlooked. But setting up a stereotype as a piñata to bash is a dangerous business. It's rather like starting your expositon with a premise such as "not all black men are muggers". Consequently the programme had to carefully avoid making any mention of Moorish behaviour that might have conformed to the original boiler plate. So the Caliphate "collapsed in chaos", an event more like a natural catastrophe than the result of the politics of a court that made Byzantium look comparatively genteel.

Spanish Muslims were slipped into a replacement template- "sensuous and intellectually curious"- just the sort of people you can imagine wandering around the proportionally perfect moonlit courtyards of the Alhambra - except that in truth they were a unruly lot that conducted their internal affairs with a mafioso mentality. The record reveals that an early and violent death was very much part of the job description for most of the Nasrid rulers in Granada.

Sometimes we were told that the population of Al Andalus consisted of Iberians that just happened to be Muslims, yet on other occasions they were referred to as Arab. Muslim, Moor and Arab were anyway used pretty interchangeably. Ferdinand and Isabella's eventual expulsion of the remaining practitioners of Islam was described as an "act of ethnic cleansing" yet no mention at all was made of the similarly-exiled Sefardi Jews whose own contribution to the cultural exchange and mini-Renaissance in Toledo was surely also important.

Back in 2003 I suggested that "Al-Andalus had an eclectic culture, not because a tolerant, reasonable, non-purist alternative is embedded in Islam (and waiting to be woken up again) but because medieval Spanish Muslims were sucked up by Aristotle and the Greek intellectual legacy."

Prior to this period the peoples of the Iberian peninsula had managed to maintain the cultural levels of the Roman empire for far long than any other region in the West. Yet as Hughes' points out, the Visigothic kingdom was already wobbly when the Moors ventured across the straights in the eighth century. Their ascendency provided a further opportunity to keep the classical world ticking over, not just culturally, but also economically, based on Mediterranean commerce.

But for better or for worse it was the emerging nations of Northern Europe that eventually won the battle for the legacy of the ancients, perhaps in part because they had appreciated far earlier that it was a legacy and because their civilisation was part of a new global model.

In that earlier blog post I concluded that "in the end the open society of Al-Andalus was not simply the victim of simple minded spear-wielding Latins from the north. It was squeezed to death from both sides, as much a victim of Almohad Quran-bashing righteousness before the Castillians were even within striking range."

The makers of this programme wanted to ensure that the Islamophobes amongst were forced to confront the fact that the history of Moorish Iberia demonstrates fairly conclusively that Muslims too can be culturally sophisticated and innovative , given half a chance. Yet in setting out this argument they unnecessarily belittled both Christian Spain and the West's later transcendence of classical achievement. If you offer one side the chance to step out of their monolithic block you really have to extend the favour to everyone else.

Who's the American Idiot?

John Tierney's editorial in today's New York Times (subscription only) takes issue with Diego Maradonna, the man that for him would most epitomise the perfect 'Latin American idiot' if it wasn't for that Chavez bloke.

"Maradona, born in a shantytown near Buenos Aires, became the world's most famous soccer player in the 1980's after he left Argentina to play for teams in Spain and Italy. Besides collecting his $5 million salary in Europe, he played exhibition games in Arab countries at $325,000 per appearance and made $10 million annually in endorsement contracts with corporations based in at least four continents...And what did he learn from this international rags-to-riches tale? During Bush's visit to Argentina, Maradona took time out from his busy schedule to help rally tens of thousands of people against that horrible modern scourge: free trade. "

Yet Tierney seems utterly oblivious to the delicious irony he unleashes when he quotes the line "Maradona embodies the wonderful possibilities of globalization". Does he know anything at all about the biography of this iconic beneficiary of globalised free trade? Next we'll be proclaiming Kate Moss a role model for the world's poor and debt-ridden!

Forgotten Empire

Christmas has been getting a head start on Autumn these past few years. Most of the leaves used to be down by bonfire night, but last week the plain trees in Soho Square were still obstinately well-clad with predominantly green leaves.

This year we watched the fireworks from the bank of the Thames opposite Woolwich Arsenal (having elected not to venture over to the uncivilised side of the river). The big display there kicked off at 7:30pm unhindered by the downpours forecast earlier. We made it back to the balcony by nine and had another couple of hours of drinking and dancing to a loud reggeton beat before our private panorama of starry skies kindled and re-kindled by exploding bulbs of coloured phosphor.

It certainly felt autumnal when we set off on Sunday to see Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia at the British Museum. A few pics here of some of the treasures on show.

Does it deliver on its stated objective to "set the record straight"? Not really. There's not enough insight into the daily life and mentality of the inhabitants of Achaemenid Persia. This was then the largest empire the world had then known - which means that all Alexander of Macedon really had to do to enter the Guinness tablet of records was to append his own comparatively titchy patrimony to it.

To those of us schooled on such matters before the Iranian Revolution there wasn't that much need to set the record straight anyway; we had always appreciated the sophistication of this civilisation, but these days the West feels the need to constantly remind itself of the alternatives it might have trampled on.

I'd forgotten my own misgivings about these Sunday afternoon pastimes. The museum would be well advised to establish a special visiting time just for the buggy brigade, who could then have their own demolition derby in the confined pathways between the exhibits without having to inflict their recent parenthood on the rest of the paying public. Ditto the audioguide zombies, the deodorant-challenged and those old biddies that drag their withered noses along the glass and chatter away as if they were window shopping outside Peter Jones.