A Lament for Aylan Kurdi

When I first saw the picture of little Aylan Kurdi lying face down on the sand, I thought for a moment he was sleeping. A friend had shared it on Facebook and the accompanying caption was in Greek, so I did not grasp the gravity of the image straight away. I went back to work - the tedious but necessary job of editing the footnotes of my dissertation - and forgot for a few hours about the little boy lying on the wet sand of a Turkish beach.

In the evening, relaxing after a gym session, I opened the Independent website for my daily dose of news and saw the photograph again. Before I could make out the words in the headline, the images hit me with full force: several shots of the tiny body in wet clothes lying lifeless on the beach, the grim-faced Turkish official standing by, then carrying the body away. I don’t remember how long I sat there, tears welling up in my eyes. Nothing broke the silence of my currently solitary room - I might have sat in that state, motionless, for two minutes or twenty. The photographs did something to me that I still cannot understand; it feels as if the great world that surrounds me lost its relevance and meaning in one instant. Having seen many heart-rending images due to the nature of my research, I believed I had developed a kind of immunity against any representation of violence. Aylan Kurdi’s last photographs showed how wrong I had been.

The tiny body has haunted me ever since. I can’t work. I can’t read. To clear my head, I went for a walk but the smiling faces I encountered on the street turned my sadness into irritation: How can they not care? In the Heffers, my favourite bookshop, I hid behind pillars and tables with books to make sure the newspaper stand stayed well out of my view. For every time I saw that Independent front page my heart skipped a beat. Aylan Kurdi was in every song on my iPod, in every thing that I saw on the street. When my wife complained on the phone that our little boy did not finish his food, I thought about Aylan Kurdi. Did he also leave his food unfinished? Was he hungry at the time? Did he choose his red T-shirt himself that day, just like my children do? And the thought that horrifies me: Did he understand, the poor little boy, where he was going and why he had to die in the sea?

What was it that gripped me so tightly? Why wouldn’t it leave me alone? Why would it make me write this now, two weeks before I submit my doctoral dissertation I spent four years writing?

Is it his appearance, I thought. I don’t have to look at the picture again to remember his tiny, pale, upturned palms and curled fingers. His little brown shoes that his mother probably put on him in a hurry. The way that he lies on his little tummy, just as if he were sleeping and would wake up any time now. Is it the perspectives the photographer chose? The one who took the photo apparently had enough time to take several shots before the official removed the tiny corpse to the mortuary. Did the photographer ask the official to wait for a while? What did he feel when he trained his sophisticated lenses on Aylan’s body - that it would be a nice photo essay?

Well past midnight, I had to distract myself with a book before I could fall asleep. I tried to assure myself that the child was not my responsibility, that I couldn’t have prevented his death even if I had to. I thought, rightly, that I would probably never find out about him if I hadn’t seen these images (therefore I cannot blame the photographer too much; in fact, I should probably thank him/her). But the feeling would not leave me alone.

The image was right there before my eyes well until I somehow fell asleep, tired, distraught, angry. And in the morning, there was no way to escape it - it was all over the internet, on every newspaper frontpage, on Facebook and Twitter.

Then, looking once again at the Independent webpage, I understood it all, although I still cannot feel it well enough for it to let go. The Independent story was titled ‘Somebody’s child.’ There is a saying in Uzbek: No child is somebody’s child. It means that all children are my children. Every child is my child and I am responsible for it. This is what makes me human - the quality which I am by no means proud of these days, when being part of humanity brings one shame on a regular basis. But it is my humanity, for better or worse, that has troubled me since I saw the tiny pale fingers of little Aylan’s lifeless hands. It is the humanity that hit the shores, as the viral Twitter hashtag #Kiyiyavuraninsanlik suggested.

Aylan is my child, and I am grieving for him. He is everyone’s child. His tiny body that the sea softly released on the sand is the image of our humanity that has washed up on the shore. The humanity that has failed him and many other innocent angels like him. The humanity that is dying in front of our eyes every day, whose dying we could only notice when Aylan’s pictures made the headlines. No man is an island, entire of itself, and no child is somebody’s child. Yet in our humanity, we do not feel this. We continue to divide the world into us and them, my child and your child. Into Christians and Muslims, like the immigration offices of some European countries that welcomed Christian migrants and refused the Muslim ones.

What a pity, horrible pity it is then that little Aylan had to die and be photographed in this way for us to realise this. To realise, I understand, for one more time, before we forget. Partly for this reason, I am not sharing his image here, the image that has haunted me since yesterday and made me write this piece. While I understand its importance in preventing the many future deaths of migrant children, I am not happy with the idea. I am worried that it will be forgotten in a few days’ time, just like the images of the tiny victims of Holocaust, Hiroshima and Dresden. I am frightened of the idea that little Aylan’s tiny body will become another banal fetish for the cruel media, an instrument for lobby groups and activists. I don’t want to think about him in that way. For me, he’s not somebody’s child. For no child is somebody’s child.

Re: Borderline state

Do you know this condition, this borderline state where you are already not asleep but neither are you awake? In this shallow and ephemeral state, an idea, an understanding, maybe even a realisation of sorts, or a solution to a question that has troubled you for long suddenly visits your mind. You have it by its tail, you're confident it's in your grip. Yet a moment later - you can't tell exactly how long as you don't have a clear sense of time - it's gone, slipped through your fingers. Your mind is completely blank as you try to restore it in your mind, to no avail.

So, do you know this condition? Have you ever experienced it?

Today, I finally found words to describe this condition.

Consumption tax rise and Japan's cautious shops

April 1 is not only April Fools Day where I am now. This year it brings one of the biggest changes in Japan in a long time. For the first time since 1997 the consumption tax goes up from 5% to 8%. 100 yen shops will sell stuff for ¥108 yen, not ¥105, the figure we've come to like in the past years. All other prices will rise, too. As a society averse to major changes, it is interesting to see how the Japanese society, particularly retail businesses, respond to the tax rise. The public, naturally, is not happy, although there are people who understand that change is necessary after years of stagnation.

Speaking of major change, I should point out that I have been surprised many times in the past at how little of it happens in Japan. Of course, it is all relative, and one has to give the Japanese society credit for at least coping well with change, if not welcoming it. What happened three years ago is illustrative here: I admire the way the people and the country responded to the greatest disaster in the nation's history in March 2011. Still, as someone who grew up in a turbulent time (I was nine when the Soviet Union collapsed on all of us), I find the stability in Japan pretty intriguing. Just an example: when I returned to Japan for the first time in two and a half years last summer, I was astonished by how little had changed in my absence, despite the Great Northeastern Disaster. The prices were the same everywhere - not just in kombini, but in pretty much every shop I visited. Railway prices were the same, the train schedules were unchanged, people were as friendly. Of course, two and a half years is too short a time, but even in England, where I spent the last couple of years before coming to Japan, prices change nearly every month (hello, Sainsbury's shoppers!).

Perhaps mindful of this wariness towards abrupt changes, the shops in Japan were very careful considering the psychological consequences of the tax rise in consumers. I am no expert in consumer psychology (although I have taken part in numerous consumer behaviour experiments at Cambridge. As a subject!) but even I understand that sudden rise in the prices will definitely result in a decrease in sales. The shops in Japan responded in their own ways and there was no single strategy, but what some shops did was quite peculiar.

One day in early March, on a trip to my local supermarket (which happens to be owned by Walmart) I noticed that everything there had become cheap overnight. Wow, I thought. I had completely forgotten about the expected tax rise and the only reason I could think of at the time was that the supermarket was going through renovation and the price drop was to lure customers away from competitors.

It took me a few days to understand that all products had become 5% cheaper. Only then did I realise that instead of showing new, increased prices, the supermarket had decided to separate the tax from the price of the product altogether. On my next grocery trip, I looked closely at the fine print besides the price, which, instead of the usual "tax included" now said "tax excluded".

For many people around the world - our friends in the US, for example - this is the usual state of things. They are used to the mathematical acrobatics of calculating in your head the tax and adding it to the price. But not me. My humanities brain, tired after a full day of reading Japanese articles, goes totally blank when I attempt this. Moreover, I feel cheated at the till when I am charged 8% more without being reminded, not because I don't want to pay the tax, but because I prefer to know how much I am going to pay before I go to the counter. So, if they had asked me before introducing this cruel practice, I would have told the overly cautious retailers: I prefer seeing the higher price than applying, in my head, the formula x+0.08x to every price every time, day, week and month!

Onno Tunç, Mor ve Ötesi and the song that moves me every time I listen to it

A few months back, looking to refresh my music playlist, I asked my good friend Durukal Gün to recommend some Turkish bands. Out of the bunch of truly great singers suggested by my friend, there was one that stood out for me: Mor ve Ötesi.

I have since listened to and memorised the lyrics of tens of their songs, but among them one song moves me more than others. True, all of their songs have deep lyrics and the lead vocalist Harun Tekin has an exceptional voice but this song is perhaps the only one that comes close to moving me to tears. And it is not a love song.

1945 is perhaps the most historical song I have ever known. In a few lines the song contains what I feel about history, which is my future profession, and war, which is my main interest in history. The chorus is humanism at its simplest, and I know that I will remember it every time I see or hear someone who justifies wars, past, present or future. It goes like this in my unprofessional translation:

The year is 1945

They, too, were human beings

And they believed in love

They believed in respect

Just like you

Just like me

The video above does a great job in driving home the gist of the song. I don't know where that footage comes from and I doubt it is the official music video. Some guy probably dug up some historical footage and edited it into a film, but the Hiroshima theme fits well with the lyrics.

I think of not only Hiroshima, though, when I listen to the song. I think of Dresden and the children burnt alive there. Of Tokyo under the wings of Allied (mostly American) planes about to drop their incendiary bombs. I think, of course, of the burnt Soviet towns and villages, of the babies smashed against the wall by Nazi soldiers in the presence of their mothers. Needless to say I think of the millions who suffocated in gas chambers, were shot by firing squads, bayonetted, killed with a sword. I think of the Holocaust, the camps, the system created by humans to exterminate other humans. I think of millions that died in that single year, 1945, millions of innocent people, children especially, on both sides of the frontline.

And while I am writing these lines, there are children dying in wars somewhere in the world. And there will be many more deaths in future wars. People, children, just like me and you, with dreams, love, hope and dignity. This is the thought that turns my world upside down.

In my ignorance I would be forgiven, perhaps, for not knowing the real author of the song, until one day I read a comment on YouTube that the song was originally written by Turkish singer-composer of Armenian descent, Onno Tunç, for his friend and long time collaborator Sezen Aksu. Here's her version, sung decades ago, but equally beautiful.

Tunç tragically died in 1996 when his plane, which he was piloting, crashed in some mountains between Ankara and Istanbul. But this song on its own is, I think, a worthy legacy, worth some other singers' whole careers.

Missing food

When I was in Cambridge, I used to miss Japanese food. Naturally, I missed sushi. I missed the cheap kaiten (conveyor belt) sushi at 105 yen per plate. I missed eating 18 plates of it in one sitting, washed down with ice glass or two of Japanese beer. I missed the softness, texture and taste of the noble fish - tuna, or salmon - in the nigiri sushi, but I also missed the taste of not so traditional combinations: onion salmon, salmon with burned cheese on top, the ubiquitous Californian rolls.

I missed karaage chicken (aka Japanese Fried Chicken, or JFC) so much that I learned to cook it after despairing to find it in England. I cooked it so many times that in the end my karaage tasted just like the original.

I missed the furai (from the English 'fry') foods - the ebi furai being the most desired of the whole family. The chicken katsu (you guessed it right - 'cuts') with mayonnaise on it I missed too - in fact, it was the only dish in the world with which I could tolerate mayonnaise.

I missed the salty liquid and the tasty noodles of ramen. I missed the little strips of nori seaweed on top and the tiny boiled quail eggs that rested on the noodle. I missed the soba and udon noodles served in huge earthenware bowls, their endless varieties, of course, but most often the inaka soba and the kitsune soba. And, speaking of earthenware, it was impossible not to miss the nabe stew (but is it stew?). I missed the white fish and cabbage and little shiitake mushrooms that you can fish out of the huge earthenware pot that cooks on the portable stove on your table while you wait.

***

Now, in Tokyo, I miss the sandwiches. I used to eat them because they were a cheap and quick option to college food, but in the end they became a habit. I realise this now as I miss them - I would probably say no if asked, in Cambridge, whether I loved sandwiches. I miss especially the M&S ones - the Coronation Chicken, the BLT, the prawn mayonnaise (I lied - here's another food in which I am happy to tolerate mayonnaise), the chicken salad. Sometimes I crave the Sainsbury's ham hock and extra mature cheddar sandwich. And it was hard to beat the Boots (yes, the chemists who make sandwiches too) bumper sandwiches when you were really hungry.

I also miss the cheese. With all due respect, Japan, you can't handle cheese. Especially the English cheeses - I know I can get mozzarella here, as you're crazy about all things Italian. And maybe some Edam or Gouda if I try really hard. But not cheddar, or red Leicester. I might be wrong, though - I barely know Tokyo after only two and a half months here - so prove me wrong, Japan, do prove me wrong.

What are historians made of? Part 2

When I think about historians, I imagine a group of miners. They are just like your usual miners, wearing their helmets with headlights that send straight beams of light far into the darkness. This light cuts through the cave of the past, snatching tiny bits of history here and there. It also illuminates the way, so to say, retrospectively. Shows us how we came where we are.

I know it all sounds very cliche but this image helps me understand the broader picture, and I think it would be a good analogy to help students imagine the role of the historian. It is handy in outlining the limitations of history writing: no single historian can paint the whole picture with his lonely headlight in the vast and endless darkness. In that respect, every historian is like the blind man from the ancient story about the blind men and the elephant. Only a concerted effort among a group of like-minded scholars can reconstruct the past in a cohesive and meaningful way, but even then it is not guaranteed. Historians might end up as the proverbial blind men if they try too hard to define the whole elephant as one of its parts: its trunk, tail, or ears.

What are historians made of?

What does it mean to be a historian? Does it take a lot to become a good one? Are natural curiosity, good judgement, and passable writing skills enough? Can someone who is curious enough to ask interesting questions and patient enough to sit their arses down for hours every day doing tedious archival work and picking at sheet after ancient sheet of yellow paper write fascinating versions of the past? Are hard work and good imagination sufficient to reclaim from the darkness those little bits of light, hope, love?

Or is there something more that you need?

Can you really call yourself a historian if you cannot cry at the suffering of the generations before you? If the images of broken lives do not move you at all as you look down on them as specimens, objects of study, as mere material. If you can't see the pain, tears and suffering hidden behind every number in that neat table you included in your recent paper. If you can't hear in your mind the voices long lost, can't feel the fear felt long before you were born, can't imagine yourself in the place of thousands - millions - who were fed to the mincing machine of history...

Can you?

Japan and the UN

I have noticed in the past few months that more and more Japanese young people want to work for the UN. Having learned that I have been involved with some UNDP projects back home, they all emit their usual "Eeeee, sugoi!" (Wow! Cool!) They don't know, of course, that my work with the UNDP was very lateral and sucked most of the time. But even if they did, I think it wouldn't matter for them, because just the word 'Kokuren' (the UN) inspires awe in them.

Of course, this is not true about all youngsters in Japan. I am talking about university students with whom I've had contact most of the time. I can't say, therefore, that the group I have in mind is in any way representative of a greater number of young people in Japan.

Nevertheless, the reaction of these few young and very bright people surprised me. These young and bright people understand the importance of having good language and interpersonal skills, and they often put in a lot of effort into improving their English and presentation skills.

Re: productive time wasting

I am a time waster. And I’m good at it too. I waste a lot of time every day. For every hour of work I spend at least two hours not doing anything. Doing anything but work. Postponing the start of the work by all means possible, lazily dragging myself to the point when there’s no chance of escape and my back is finally and truly against the wall.

Well, I hear you say, you’re not alone. What’s so unique about being a time waster, a procrastinator? Nothing, obviously. Every one of us procrastinates on a daily basis, regardless of our occupation, willpower and general state of mind. We all spend away the precious hours (including some of those eight paid-by-employers hours) by doing totally useless things. And don’t tell me that checking email every 10 minutes, reading the news, tweeting and updating Facebook status, munching an apple, etc are not useless things when you’re supposed to be working. There is a theory that an average office worker spends only three hours out of their daily eight actually doing some work. That is five hours, or more than sixty percent of that workers’ time, gone to the gutter. Needless to say, the same can be said about non-office workers too.

But I must say that I am a special time waster. I am different from millions of others who waste time for the sake of wasting time, to make their long hours go faster, to draw nearer the end of the working day. I waste time to be able to work. This sounds absurd, doesn't it? But not only is it not absurd, it is also necessary.

My day always starts with time wasting and I am never able to concentrate on my daily tasks if I haven’t spent a couple of hours on useless stuff. I start the day by checking the email and reading some stuff I usually read on the internet (football pages, news etc). Then on my way to the library, where I do all of my work, the real time wasting starts. I go to a coffee shop to get an americano and linger there for at least half an hour, pretending to be reading that long article in the reviews section of the morning paper. From there I walk to Ryman the stationers on Sidney Street, where I waste another 15 minutes looking at fountain pens and feeling the smooth paper of Oxford notebooks. The nearby Waterstone’s is where I waste most of my time, though: the ground floor with all the new books, none of which I buy, of course; the winding walk up the stairs to the third floor, where I go through the familiar shelves of history and philosophy books. Add another ten minutes wasted in the travel books and guides department, and my time at the bookshop easily passes the hour. From there I walk to Corpus, where I go through the daily ritual of checking my pigeonhole, lingering in the library ground floor near the shelf with the periodicals (Sight&Sound is my all-time favourite magazine on that shelf). Only having made sure that I’ve wasted enough time in the library do I sit down and start working. And I do work for some time, without distractions.

I see this timewasting as a necessary ritual, something to appease my body, to prepare my mind for the day ahead. It is a ritual that helps me trick my lazy mind. It is a kind of ‘no excuses’ approach - having wasted so much time here and there, my mind and body have no excuses at the time when I’m finally at the desk, reading or writing. This understanding, this deal, if you like, between myself and my mind is a part of my attempts to come to terms with my existence, with the problems that only I can solve, the way in which my mind works. I don’t regret the time wasted as it leads to peace of mind and, sometimes, serendipity and inspiration (especially after the long hours spent in the bookshop).

Re: Writing

For someone who spends most of their time writing, preparing for the process of writing, reading in order to write, or simply thinking about writing for the best part of their days, it is easy to forget that writing is a struggle.

It is, first and foremost, the fight with one's laziness (as is the case with any other tedious activity - and writing is tedious!). I believe every one of us is lazy at heart, only some of us can overcome the laziness to actually produce something. I have my own methods of fighting laziness ('tricking' laziness would be a good way to put it), but this post is not about them. Laziness is by far the greatest foe of good writing, because even when you overcome it initially and finish the first draft, it might kick in at later stages (editing, for example) and ensure that you don't put enough effort to finish the work well. Our real selves are our ideal selves minus the laziness. Laziness reduces us to mere mortals and those who can overcome are the ones who can achieve true greatness.

Secondly, writing is a struggle against the endless distractions of the modern age. These distractions - the internet with its Facebook, Twitter, Skype and other networks, as well as the more traditional distractions of sunny weather outside or a crying baby in the room - have actually succeeded in turning us into uneasy beings. We have become unable to sit still without checking Facebook. Our minds wander away after only a few minutes of work. Our attention spans are shortening rapidly. If it continues like this, we will probably become unable to sit down for even two minutes, unable to concentrate, to achieve calm and lucidity of mind so important for thinkers and writers.

Writing is also a fight with one's alter ego. There is no easy way to explain this, but there is another person in each of us that influences the way we think and write. The voice inside us questions the validity of our thoughts, the choice of words, the logic in our argument. Every writer has to negotiate his writing with this inner voice; whatever ends up on the page is an outcome of this consensus.

Re: Coetzee and Auster

JM Coetzee and Paul Auster are the two of my favourite writers. They are also quite alike in style: both explore the vicissitudes of life, the hardships of being a middle-aged man in the modern world. They write about relationships within families. They document their protagonists' fall from grace (and into disgrace, Coetzee's eponymous novel). They are both very important writers of the Anglophone world, masters of the immaculate, perfectly edited prose.

Yet reading Coetzee, I feel that his writing is more powerful, with more sense of purpose. He is perhaps the only writer I have read who knows the insides of our heads and souls so much better than anyone else and, more importantly, can express them with only a few words. He is a sage, in this respect; it is difficult to baffle him. His prose is not flowery and articulate, but through this disciplined style he holds the reader's heart in his hand.

Auster is more romantic, more mercurial, more prone to digress into sentimental and often not very relevant details - this makes him so similar to Murakami Haruki. His prose is also very well-constructed; I am sure he spends three times as much time editing his texts as writing them. The result is impressive - you can't remove a single word from his texts, so well-organised they are.

Yet I find Coetzee's work more powerful, more gripping and, hence, more important and influential.

Re: Making it fun

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received about work is to "try and make it fun." This was especially true about the dull, routine stuff that I had to do in office a few years back. This is definitely true about the exciting but very difficult and lonely stuff that is my main duty these days: writing. But for some reason I have not been able to make writing fun for me. Maybe it is because I take writing my chapters too seriously. Maybe I should learn how not to take them seriously.

This is not to say that I don't enjoy writing. But this joy comes more often after I have printed the whole thing out, the resplendent white pages with rows of black letters making a neat pile on the table. The joy comes from the sense of accomplishment, however temporary, ephemeral and deceptive. It is definitely there with the pleasant dizziness that I feel after saving the document, switching off the computer and opening up a bottle of beer. No quote can convey my feelings about writing as Hemingway's famous "writing is like bleeding."

Since I started my PhD more than a year ago, my supervisor has been telling me to "write as I read." I have understood perfectly well that that's the best way to do academic writing - when the writing evolves, goes hand in hand with reading, and does not come out in one outburst at the end of all the reading. But perhaps the biggest advantage of this method is that by the end of your reading (and before you have even started writing), you already have several pages of writing. That means job half done!

So I've been using Google Drive and Evernote and many pages of good auld paper writing while reading. And today I realised that this is the closest that I can ever come to "making it fun". Because when you're doing it in bits, you are not overwhelmed by the momentous task of typing up 10 thousand words in a week. You do it little by little and the bits add up in the end. I am sure many people have been writing like this for a long time, but for me this has become a revelation. There is light at the end of the tunnel!

It is interesting that in Japanese one of the words denoting "free time" is aima, often used as shigoto no aima, which literally means "time between shifts/work." This made me think about what free time really is, in Japan or elsewhere. It is really the time that is between one working day and another. Nothing more.

Re: Addictions

This thought occurred to me while I unwrapped my foot-long Sub earlier this evening, relishing its smell, imagining the crunch of its crust even before I took a big bite off it: our life is nothing but a string of addictions. From the first moment of our conscious existence until the very last breath, our life can be divided into addictions to various things. We get addicted to food, first of all, then to our parent's care and love, to adventure, music, film, books, sex, narcotics (caffeine included), tobacco, alcohol. Sometimes we kill our addictions, as when quitting smoking; we force our bodies and minds to delete an addiction. But no addiction can be deleted in full: usually another takes its place. I myself quit smoking by eating candies as soon as the craving started - my sweet tooth originates from there. I am not talking about addictions that screw our lives up, like heroin or unrequited love. I have in mind more trivial addictions: the smell of coffee or the taste of a croissant in the morning, the pleasant anticipation of a lover's warm body at night, the sound of a favourite song in the earphones. They make life bearable, these addictions, they fill up the space between the toils, pains, stress and anxieties, the sleepless nights and mornings devoid of sunshine. We attach ourselves to things to feel that we are alive, to feel the world around us still has something to give us, to make us happy. Our addictions arouse feelings in us, and while we feel, we live.

True happiness

Life, real life, passes me by as I try to grapple with my lonesome existence. I dream about my son and having him around me while I work at my desk, dragging myself through one Japanese text after another. If I close my eyes, I see him tottering into the room; as I have yet to see him walk, I have to imagine the whole thing. He hesitates for a moment at the door, knowing that he's breaching the sacred rule set out for him by his mother (Do not disturb your father, he's working!), but he also knows that I will be happy to see him. I imagine looking up for a second to see him peeping at me from the distance and smiling when our eyes meet. I leave everything that I'm doing, stand up and start playing with him, surrendering to his every whim and wish, now carrying him on my back as his horse, now playing with his cars. And feeling, in between the shifts at the desk, that that is what you call true happiness, and looking forward to it once again.

Far from home

Living far from my wife and our baby wouldn't be so difficult if it were not for the great moments that I miss every day. In the last few weeks my son started walking - I wasn't there to witness his first steps. He's learned to punch (with his little fist); the first (and main) victim was his cousin, a little girl 4 months his senior, who until that point always beat him. He has, in the last few weeks, developed an interest in chasing and torturing the cat; he follows it wherever it goes and, gripping it by its fur, "plays" with it. Poor, patient animal: I'm so thankful that it hasn't scratched him so far.

I miss him so much that every time we talk I ask my wife to hold the phone close to him so I can hear his breathing. He tries to grab the phone and, once he does, doesn't give it back. He bites his mother, his uncles, his cousin. He probably tries to bite the cat when he's on his own.

I look forward to seeing him walk, even run, the day we meet. I even secretly wish that he'll run towards me and I'll lift him up high, landing kiss after kiss on his cheeks and neck. Except that this is wishful thinking. Because it is very likely he'll not recognise me when we meet. He probably won't have forgotten me completely by that time, but he'll not easily recognise me either.

Thus, when I think about the sacrifice that I'm making, the rewards of this self-imposed exile seem very dubious.

Death cometh to Cambridge

The festive season is about to come to Cambridge and all the university buildings will be closed for at least 10 days. So will the Grads Cafe on the 3rd floor of the University Centre building, where I like to spend some time off my daily work, reading newspapers and having cup after cup of relatively cheap coffee. So will the many other nice and cosy places where one can go when in need of a change. The town will be literally dead for these 10 days and, because I do not enjoy Christmas, this time promises to be quite boring.

My room is cold and sitting there from morning till night is not the prospect that I look forward to - but it seems that's where I'll spend the dead season.

A melancholy dream

An image visits me out of the blue, a melancholy dream that comes to me while I'm wide awake; in it, I see my baby son in my grandfather's garden. The boy is barely two years old and it is autumn; he chases one falling leaf after another, trying to catch it in its flight before it can join its withered brethren covering the garden ground like a thick carpet. Late afternoon light of late October sifts through the few leaves that keep stubbornly holding on to their branches, forming long straight light sabres that pierce the crowns of the trees above and burns bright orange spots in the leaf carpet. My baby notices neither the melancholic beauty of his surroundings nor the silence of the world that has held its breath listening to him play; he merrily goes on with his game, as mindless of the history attached to this familial garden as he is of the struggles of manhood that await him in the world of tomorrow.

My baby is my greatest teacher

Since he was born eight months and three weeks ago, my baby son has changed me a great deal. He has made me happier, of course, but he has also made me less cynical, less angry, less bad. He has made me a man in full, added to me the bit that distinguishes a man from a father. He is teaching me to be a good father, and I hope I'm making progress. He's given me a new life.

He has made me believe that there is happiness in life, after all. That happiness is to watch him crawl with a big toothless grin on his face in my direction every evening when I come home from work. That happiness is to wake up in the morning and smell his tiny belly, his soft and smooth skin, the fuzz on his head. That happiness is to see him rub his little nose with his tiny fist before waking up every morning and blessing me with one of his sleepy early morning smiles. That happiness is to be touched, even scratched sometimes, by his plump hands. That happiness is listening to his breathing at night.

He has taught me to think more about my parents. Playing with him every day, feeling happy for his every little achievement, I feel a glimpse of what my mother must have felt looking at an 8-month-old me. Pride, happiness, love. I understand my parents better now, looking back at my own childhood and viewing them and myself in a different light. I understand now what my mother meant by saying "You'll never get it until you get your own child." My son has taught me how difficult - and joyful - it is to be a parent.

He has taught me to view other people not just as strangers, but as somebody else's children. It is the deep understanding that some time ago every one of us was a little baby who basked in the unconditional love of their parents. It is the ability to view the world through the eyes of a father, not just an ordinary man. It is the ability to feel, or at least imagine, the happiness and the pain of others. My son has taught me to think about - and feel - things I had never thought about before his birth.

Having my son has taught me to imagine the pain of those who lose their children. It has taught me to fear that possibility. I fear it so much that I am ready to die to prevent it. It has taught me to feel, not only to understand, the pain a parent feels when their child suffers from physical pain, injustice of any kind, loneliness.

But it has also taught me to take care of myself. To look both ways when crossing a street. To keep my feet warm. To keep out of trouble.

My son has taught me to be a grown up man. He is teaching me a new thing every day. I am trying to be a diligent student. I am relishing every second of this education. And I want to relish it until the day when it will be my turn to teach him things.

On happiness

I've had my own moments when I couldn't see any reason to live. I went on living because I couldn't die. I wasn't suicidal, I'm talking about the moments of deep, even visceral understanding that life is nothing but suffering.

I've changed now. I'm happy. My son is my happiness. If I'm asked now why I was ever born, I'd answer: "To see him smile when I come back from work". To listen to his "dadadadadada". My whole life with all its sufferings and hardship is glorified the moment when I see my baby's toothless smile. This is happiness and for me now there is no greater joy.