I'll be "away from my desk" for the next week or so, but before I go, I just wanted to say that the revised, expanded version of André Gorz's text L'Immatériel has finally been published twenty years after it was completed and nineteen years after its author's death.i Artificial intelligence was in its infancy two decades ago, but Gorz (1923-2007) had already understood that capitalism would evolve towards a system in which the source of value would be chiefly immaterial.
But who was Gorz? Born Gerhart Hirsch in Vienna, his father, an Ashkenazi Jew, changed his name to Horst in 1930 in an attempt to shield the family from rising anti-semitism. In 1939, Gérard Horst, as he now was, took refuge in Switzerland. His initial training was as a chemical engineer, but he was also passionately interested in philosophy, and in particular in Husserl and Sartre. Having moved to Paris in 1949, and taking the pen-name Michel Bosquet, he became a journalist. He frequented Sartre and became intellectually invested in existentialist Marxism. As a consequence he accorded an important place in his thinking to the issues of alienation and liberation. Indeed, philosophy for Gorz was focused “on the question of alienation and, naturally, on the means of overcoming it: disalienation, liberation, emancipation – which, in a way, are the cornerstones of Gorzian philosophy, either from an individual or a collective vantage point or, better still, as the connection between the two”.ii In his 1959 La morale de l'histoire, he wrote: "My point of departure was always the experience of alienation”.
Writing in post-war France, he identified consumption, or rather the "obligation to consume", as the fundamental alienation of the capitalist society of abundance: "The obligation to consume to keep the economy going, that one has to consume in order to be able to work, and not the other way around" in a socio-economy where the work of millions of workers "is destined to be wasted, has no meaning and remains enslaved to its products."iii
Work and labour were a central interest in Gorz's journalism as in his theoretical endeavours. In the 1970s he became increasingly interested in the function of technology in relation to labour, writing in 1973 that "Capitalist techniques have the political function of perpetuating the dependence of workers, their subordination, their separation from the means and process of production."iv Gorz saw automation not just as a means of enhancing productivity, but as a concern "with assuring capital the maximum power and control over living labour,"  a "concern for power …at least as decisive as the concern for productivity." v
Ungrowth
But, perhaps, Gorz's major contribution to late twentieth-century political debate was his role in foregrounding questions of limits and developing ecological thinking. It was in 1972 that Gorz started to discuss "décroissance", degrowth or ungrowth, and criticized Marx for his materialism confined to an economism that ignores the natural limits to wealth creation and capital accumulation. Convinced, as was Jacques Ellul, by the need for limiting consumption he wrote: "human activity finds its external limit in nature and ignoring this limit provokes a backlash....the consumption of limited resources will inevitably end up exhausting them completely....the issue is therefore not to consume more and more but to consume less and less." vi
For Gorz, humankind was part of the natural order at the time of the fishers and hunters. However, this perceived harmony was because they lacked the technological ability to dominate nature, not because of a philosophical outlook: "It is not because they wished to live in peace with nature that they did not intervene in its cycles but because they did not have the tools that would have allowed such interventions. The domination of nature began as soon as people became sedentary and developed efficient tools."vii Ultimately, humankind's relationship to so-called "Nature" was cultural, or as he put it: "The relationship of humankind to nature is not a natural relationship but always a cultural one, based on metaphysical or religious conceptions....The question that humanity faces - and already did in Antiquity - is that of the cultural self-limitation (self-restraint Selbstbegrenzung) of its needs and projects…. In pre-capitalist societies, this self-restraint was self-evident. It was demanded by the social order....These restrictions were removed by the bourgeois-capitalist revolution, in favour of the "market society", which in reality is a non-society. At present it is a question of restricting again the rights of economic reason by subordinating it to ecological and social goals." ix
Although Gorz is here very close to the work and conclusions of his contemporary Jacques Ellul he makes no reference to him; nevertheless, just like Ellul, he quoted and frequented Ivan Illich. Was this merely the disdain of the Marxist Gorz for the anarchist Ellul?
The proximity of Gorz's self-limitation and Ellul's self-imposition of limits is something I'll return to in future blogposts. For now, I hope this brief summary of Gorz's thought has been of some use.

i André Gorz, L'Immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital. Paris, Gallimard, 2026. 
ii André Gorz: Thinker of Emancipation by Christophe Fourel & Francoise Gollain , 28 August 2014, translated by Susannah Dale. https://booksandideas.net/Andre-Gorz-Thinker-of-Emancipation.html
iii Gorz, La morale de l'histoire, Paris, Seuil, pp.254-255 
iv Gorz, Critique de la division du travail, Paris, Seuil, 1973.
v In Françoise Gollain, Une critique du travail : Entre écologie et socialisme. Suivi d'un entretien avec André Gorz, Paris, La Découverte, 2000.
vi Gorz, Ecologie et politique, 1975 ; Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA, Southend Press,1980.
vii Gorz, Ecologie et politique, 1975 ; Ecology as Politics, Boston, MA, Southend Press,1980.
ix André Gorz Le fil rouge de l’écologie Entretiens inédits en français, Paris, Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2015

It's a hot summer here in France, and today I was thinking about my first French summer, and what for me at the time – I was 16 – was an epic journey hitch-hiking down through France and Spain. It was the school holidays and there not being much money around it was either hitch-hike or stay at home. What little money I had I invested in a ticket to get me across the English Channel. I remember that even as a boy I deeply resented the economic barrier to my freedom of movement that Britain's insularity represented, the fact I had to pay to get off the island. I found that deeply unfair. It was a sentiment strengthened that summer by my being able to walk across the Franco-Spanish and Franco-Belgian frontiers for free. 
Those of you who read this blog regularly will know of my passion for the photographic image. But, I did not always have access to cameras. And I made that trip without one. And yet, the images I have in my mind of my time on the road are as vivid as yesterday.
For me it was pure adventure. I won't pretend there weren't moments when I was scared of travelling alone. I tried to team up with people in youth hostels along the way, but most people were already travelling in pairs, and in any case if you wanted to catch a ride it was better to be on your own. Of course, I can't imagine letting a child of mine undertake that kind of journey today. My mother later told me that every day I was gone she lived in fear. We had no phone at home and in any case the cost of a phone call was prohibitive, so she had to make do with the occasional postcard.
The trip didn't start well. Having caught the bus down to London's Victoria station I let my self be conned out of some of my precious pounds while in the queue for the boat-train. A man with a trans-Atlantic accent claiming to work for NATO in Brussels promised to give me a lift once we got to the other side. He asked me for change to get some beers for the journey and I gave it to him, only to gradually realize I'd never see him again. The next morning I woke up having slept in a Brussels railway station platform waiting room, and set off hitch-hiking.
The first night I was in Mons, the next day I got as far as Paris. And after a few relatively expensive days in Paris living off bread and cheese, I set off in the direction of Spain and got as far as Bordeaux. The next day I got a ride with a man who evidently was interested in more than just chatting, but managed to fend him off and get another lift as far as Bayonne. I'd arranged to meet a couple of Danish boys I'd met in Mons. Miraculously they showed up. We were staying in a large shed-like dormitory that passed for a youth hostel, and we bought cheap white wine. I didn't drink much of it, but enough to learn the next morning what a hangover felt like. In Franco's Spain, hitch-hiking was frowned upon, and traffic in any case was sparse. So, I spent some of my precious pesetas on trains and travelled down from the Basque country to Catalonia. My cultural referents were not sophisticated, I hadn't yet read Orwell, but I had read Laurie Lee's Spain-based autobiography As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was in the town of Lérida, today better known as Lleida, I first heard that summer's ubiquitous tune, Gershon Kingsley's Moog synthesizer-generated Popcorn which in 1972 was a worldwide hit for Hot Butter. 
One of my most colourful memories was travelling over the Pyrenees from Lerida towards Andorra with a bus full of Spanish army recruits and watching the sun go down over the mountain: an orange golden purple sunset the like of which I'd never seen. It's an image that has remained a reference for me when looking at any other sunset.
With some of the money I still had, I invested in a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker in Andorra thinking it would be good capital at some point in my trip. At the French border, I caught a lift in a campervan with a British family who took me as far as Perpignan. I recall them being horrified that I was travelling alone. But I wasn't the only one doing so, and some were doing worse than me. I met a lad from Liverpool at the youth hostel who'd lost all his money and his passport and was heading for the nearest British consulate to get assistance. He left me a few potatoes wrapped in newspaper. I'd been waiting at the youth hostel for a letter from home which I hoped would contain a few British pounds. But, I fell foul of the youth hostel's 3-night rule, and on the morning of the fourth day they threw me out. 
I was wandering out of town to look for somewhere to sleep when I was approached by a young tramp; perhaps today we'd say homeless person. But, like me he was travelling, and we'd been reading W. H. Davies at school. He had unkempt, mousy blond hair and seemed like he'd tumble forward as he walked rapidly down the road. He took me under his wing and a little way out of Perpignan we found a field where I produced the potatoes. He made a fire and we ate them. He taught me a few useful phrases to add to my schoolboy French and in the morning having slept in the open, me in my sleeping bag and my companion under his overcoat, we parted ways. 
I returned to the hostel hoping the letter had arrived. It hadn't, so I set off hitch-hiking again. I had pen pals in Belgium, some 1200 kilometres away. I walked out of Perpignan as I hitched, I always kept walking. I had a theory that people would be more sympathetic to someone walking than just standing in expectation at the side of the road. After a few hours trudging along the National highway - the autoroute was still a way in the future - I came across a couple of French boys who were surviving on unripe grapes from the vineyard that ran alongside the road. They wanted food and looked like they'd do anything to get it. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, I had nothing for them, neither money nor food. They'd been there for three days without catching a ride. I set off again a little more despondently. My apprehension was made worse after seeing a signboard towards the last fuel station for 100 kilometres. It was very hot and to the boy from Liverpool the surroundings looked desert-like. The song that filled my head during my road trip was Status Quo's 1970 Down the Dustpipe in which the protagonist is travelling with a ten-dollar bill in his jeans. 
I got lucky, a single man in a VW Beetle stopped for me. He confided a few minutes later he'd only stopped because from behind I looked like a girl; I had neck-length curly hair and was wearing patterned, purple jeans. He drove like a maniac, most of the time "on the wrong side of the road", overtaking traffic at what seemed to me like astronomic speeds. He was heading for Lyon. Just after nightfall, just south of the city for the first time I saw the brightly illuminated petrol refinery at Feyzin. Some, thirty years later I'd be drive past them with regularity but they'd always spark that teenage memory.  Just north of Lyon the man dropped me at the side of the road where there was a field on the right side of the road, but also a small corner shop that was still open on the left. I went in to buy some water and bread – by this point it was all I could afford – and ran into a group of four university students from Southhampton. I asked if I could bed down next to them for the night. It turned out they were travelling through France in an old, and very slow-moving black hearse. Two of them slept inside where the coffin would go, and two outside on sleeping bags. I was outside. The next day we progressed very slowly towards Paris. 
I got out at Auxerre at the junction for Belgium, walked out of the town and found a field next to a copse where I put down my sleeping bag; I always felt safer sleeping in an open field. The next morning I woke up to the sound of a combine harvester that was getting closer by the minute. It was a bright, fresh morning and it was my seventeenth birthday. 
After various acts of kindness were shown to me along the way, I eventually reached my destination in Belgium where the bottle of Johnnie Walker was duly handed over to my friend's father – a gruff, Italian, immigrant worker. It seemed to appease him. A week or so later I got back to the UK. 
We are saturated by images, so much so that as the ever-prescient Jacques Ellul could write already in 1981, people live increasingly by and through the image, and "are without a past. Living off a stream of images, each of which contains the entirety of what they need to know, they have no need for memory; they have no need to retain what they learn today."*
I have not a single photograph of that teenage trip to France and Spain. But, I feel no sense of absence. Later on I would start taking photographs of all the journeys and moments I lived through, and they are good to have. Especially when they can illustrate who and what have now disappeared.They're good when they can be used as a supplement to memory rather than its substitute. 
*La parole humiliée, Paris, Le Seuil.

We talk a good deal in academic parlance about erasure: the deletion or at best marginalization of narratives and people(s) from history. Many, most in fact, are simply absent. They've never existed in the narrative and so there's no need for actual erasure. The histories, fiction, plays and films we try to write about colonized and enslaved peoples are more often than not attempts to compensate for such absence. My book The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Chinese Seamen was just such an attempt. There were no written testimonies and almost no oral recollections from the side of the seafarer victims, and naturally no discussion between a seven-year old boy and his eighty-year old grandfather, the Chinese merchant of the title. A few families had recollections of their seafaring husbands or fathers being deported in 1946-1947. However, by and large the story of the thousands of Chinese who were illegally expelled from the United Kingdom by the government, police and Blue Funnel shipping company acting in concert, had been buried for half a century. Only a semi-fictional approach could even pretend to give them voice.
But, then there are also texts and objects that did once commemorate and celebrate, but then later were erased, or "obliterated" to use a term from the lexicon of the US President. In a previous blogpost,  I wrote about long-standing libraries in Palestine and attempts to remove them, but there are many such examples of cultural and politically iconic spaces that have been demolished, erased, deleted. I lived in China during a decade of change, the 1980s, and saw at first hand the disappearance not just of famed buildings and monuments, but also of vernacular architecture, the fabric within which daily life took place. Much of old Beijing was demolished ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but so have many other old city centres throughout China. Those of you who follow my Photographic Archive will have seen pictures of old market streets in cities that were just coming back to life after the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. They are now all but gone; their absence aggravated by the conservation of the occasional isolated building surrounded by high-rise concrete and steel. 
When I was researching The Eighth Chinese Merchant, I returned to Anfield Cemetery to revisit the gravestones of members of the First World War British Army Chinese Labour Corps. I was surprised to find that the original stones had been replaced with bright white, newly engraved ones. What had been special about the original headstones were the Chinese characters that local Liverpool stone masons had attempted to carve into them. They were often ham-fisted and poorly executed, but although clumsy they held a special significance, they had a certain aura. They represented an effort to recall these men for posterity in their own language. I contacted the war graves authorities and several e-mails were exchanged. I simply wanted to know where the old stones had been stored; I'd hoped they could be exhibited in a local museum. Eventually the official in charge told me flatly that my quest was futile since the war graves commission policy was to destroy all old headstones as soon as they were replaced. The men's names are now carved into new stones, but the visual immediacy of how they had been remembered for some eighty years has been crushed out of existence.
I came across a photograph the other day that dates from the mid-1970s. It's a black and white shot of me posing on a podium erected by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) at Mann Island at the far end of Liverpool's famed Pier Head. The metal structure was sculpted by the – then – celebrated former Camell Laird shipyard welder turned sculptor Arthur Dooley (1929-1994). Dooley was an unconventional, gutsy character with a colourful past. In 1945, he'd served in the Irish Guards in Mandatory Palestine. He disagreed with the way the British were treating the Palestinians and deserted from the army. There is even a story about his having stolen and handed over a tank to the Arab resistance.   
 
Having served jail time for desertion, Dooley turned to studying art in London. He eventually returned to Liverpool to establish his sculptor's studio and initially supported himself by working at the Dunlop rubber factory in Speke. Years later, in 1973, when he was at the height of his career, he was commissioned together with the architect Jim Hunter to create the TGWU podium for the Pier Head. In 1971, the first big international strike saw Dunlop and Pirelli workers stage joint work stoppages in Britain and Italy to protest against layoffs, and the TGWU wanted to celebrate this landmark decision of Italian and British workers to strike in unison.  Returning to Liverpool in the 1990s I found the podium had disappeared. It had been removed when the Albert Dock area was developed into a tourist attraction. Labour disputes and their commemoration don't attract tourists. After Dooley's death in 1994, the local newspaper, The Liverpool Echo, discovered the broken-up structure rusting in a council depot.

I suppose the lesson is that remembrance, especially of the underdogs in history, is never a given, is never acquired for ever. Remembrance needs constant and continuous vigilance. The moral for writers and academics: just because you've told the story it won't be carved in stone. And even when carved in stone, as we've seen, there is no guarantee of its survival.

Some ten years ago I wrote a piece set in 2030, a utopian world where diversity of all sorts and a doctrine of limits and  “Slonomics” (slow economics) were the strategies by which disaster had been avoided and a new human culture had been established. It sounds even more fantastic now than it did a decade ago. I wrote that text as part one of an iBook entitled China Dreaming. I worked on it just after the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. Reading it over, so much of what I imagined happening later in that decade, did happen but in a more devastating fashion. For instance, I wrote: "The rich stayed rich, and the poor were disavowed," where in reality the rich have got even richer. But my focus was on the utopian, on the strategies put in place by a world youth movement, called the "Alliance for a New Human Culture", which had organized a planetary summit. The Chinese branch of the Alliance had produced a manifesto entitled Limits or Death  which called for the fixing of ceilings and limits proposed by Jacques Ellul as essential to the drawing up of a “road map for a possible future”. The manifesto concludes: "We believe it now falls to China, once colonized by, and currently the agent of the system, to fix “willed-for limits” since as Ellul taught us “it is not the unlimited that is capable of founding and constituting a culture, or a even a human being....It is by establishing limits that humans institute themselves as human.” I shan't cite any more of the text here, but I do encourage you to go and read it.*
We all now know that targets and ceilings, such as limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, are easily missed. Measures imposing the necessary limits and ceilings to assure a minimum chance of survival for coming generations will not come from governments who are enmeshed in the technical-economic system that refuses to face the reality of the need not simply to institute a policy of low growth but rather a strategy of ungrowth. The pressure to do so can only come from civil society through grass-roots democracy. Looking around at the world today that's quite a tall order. In the past limits on consumption, the sharing out of scarcity, has mainly only been imposed in times of war and its aftermath, such as the system rationing during the Second World War and the decade that followed. However, the so-called "socialist" countries in the twentieth-century also used rationing as a means of distributing essentials. In the case of the Soviet bloc, such rationing was accompanied by widespread corruption and black marketeering. But rationing remains the only logical alternative by regulating by pricing. As the recent soaring petrol prices have shown, consumption may well be reduced as a consequence but the hardest hit are the poor. The wealthy continue to  consume and move about as they please. 
I lived in China for many years under a system of rationing. Buying cloth and clothes were controlled by a system of cloth coupons measured in inches and feet, and rice and wheat products by a system of grain coupons. There were also coupons for cooking oil and so on. Such rationing did not cause great suffering in itself, it was rather the paucity of diet that people suffered from.
Deng Xiaoping appealed to people's desire to consume after the grey times of the Cultural Revolution, and his words were readily lapped up by a population eager for variety and plenty. But we can see forty years later the environmental and health costs of such a society of mass consumption. And then, of course, where restrictions and limits are put in place in China they are not open to discussion, they are not arrived at democratically. But is this a good example? Is autocracy the only system that could impose the limits we need to save the planet?
A "New Human Culture" would look beyond the politics of greed and the economics of penury to the cultivation of individuals within a truly a democratic society. Indeed, mass education needs to be available to inform people's choices, but people also need an education that would equip future generations for fulfilment beyond and outside established patterns of consumption. What we need now is a retort to the old Bluesman B. B. King's classic lyric “I’ve got a good mind to give up living, And go shopping instead.” In order to avoid tomorrow's generation from feeling "they'd be better off dead", we must work towards a world where it is possible and desirable to "give up on shopping and go living instead."

* China Dreaming is available free on Apple books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/china-dreaming/id1046404801. A French eBook version of my text also exists as Sortie Treize in Nathalie Caritoux and Florent Villard (ed) Nouvelles psychogéographies . If you have difficulty accessing either please let me know and I'll make a copy available.

One of the principal missions of the anthropocenic venture has been the growing of food. For much of the past ten thousand years, agricultural activity, the cultivation of fields, did not cause catastrophic, irreversible damage on a large scale, although it did provide the economic basis for the emergence of socio-economic classes, and the accumulation of wealth and its concentration in the hands of a few. But, whether or not you take the view that the anthropocene starts with the Industrial Revolution, or the longer view that it begins with the advent of agriculture, we may agree that the overwhelming damage to the living world, the human and the nonhuman, dates back to the mass industrialization of agriculture, of what is now agribusiness. Only recently have we been experiencing the full effect, and then only a foretaste, of the impact of industrialization of the planet on our climate and on the production of food.
Food production, however, is not only hostage to the human-induced vagaries of the climate – such as too little water, or too much at the wrong time, it suffers from another industrialized practice which is the use of fertilizers that are derived from petroleum. Our ancestors would be stumped by the knowledge that modern agriculture is almost wholly dependent on petroleum-derived, non-organic fertilizers. Grain crops around the globe are now entirely depends on these chemicals. The rice in your bowl, the pasta on your plate, the bread in your hand for the vast majority of humanity is dependent on petroleum.
The current penury of petroleum and its derivatives has not only forced up prices for motorists and holiday-makers, it threatens to lead to starvation on a massive scale in the global South. The current crisis has exposed how the industrialization on a massive scale and the abandonment of hitherto conventional agricultural practices, especially in Asia, has left exposed new economic superpowers. It is the price to pay. Yet another impact of globalization on the twenty-first century world.
Should we be nostalgic for disappearing or already disappeared farming practices? Should we regret the "nightsoil" Asian framers spread on their crops? Should we retrospectively minimize the hard labour growing food has represented for many generations of peasants? Probably not, but that doesn't mean there were not other ways to meet the needs of humanity. I say needs rather than desires. And what I shall say next will underline that distinction.
Those in Europe who are now in their late 80s will still remember Second World War rationing. The rationing of meat and eggs and coffee and so on was detested, and yet despite black marketeering and corruption the system worked. It was a system incompatible with the consumer-driven economy we have all become used to. And yet, it is indeed what we need now. We need it to be sure that scarcity is spread more evenly, we need to prevent the over use of natural resources, we need to ultimately prevent starvation and to allow more food to remain where it is produced for local consumption. 
Rationing is part of the imposition of limits about which, following Jacques Ellul (1912-1914) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), I wrote about during the period of the coronavirus. "How can Ellul, Castoriadis and Rensi, together with Zhuangzi, whose philosophies proceed unwittingly in parallel like four ships in the night, help us to understand and imagine how we might retreat from, or even transcend, the cataclysmic moment that humanity is currently experiencing, a moment of which the coronavirus may be seen as a tragic epiphenomenon." 
You may remember that for a while the non-human living world had some respite. There was very little travel, the air was consequently cleaner, insects made a come back, birds were happier, and wild life in general flourished. But as soon as it was "safe to do so" we went back to our old habits with unconscionable abandon. I'll be writing more about the need for limits over the weeks to come. 

From an early age, I'd always had a halcyon vision of Palestine, alongside a sympathy for its people. My grandmother had spent some time there before World War One. Her mother was in a relationship with a Greek ship's carpenter from the isle of Kassos, and aged seventeen my grandmother had the privilege of accompanying them on a voyage to the Mediterranean. It was a cargo ship, and the ship's carpenter was on board to maintain and repair the ship's wooden parts. And that's how in my childhood I was regaled with stories of the Acropolis, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and camels spitting in her eye. She was there during the dying days of Ottoman dominance and several years before the British assumed their fateful mandate. She met a young man called Naim in Palestine and fell in love. He was about to emigrate to America and promised to write once he'd set himself up and invite her to join him. Some years later, having made good in Texas, he wrote asking my grandmother to make the trip. He'd done very well and boasted he'd acquired "three ranchos".  However, my grandmother, having returned from her adventure, had settled with her mother and siblings in the port of Liverpool where she met Chan Chin Lee with whom she would have five children and spend the next five decades.
The opportunity she'd missed to be with Naim was something she regretted until she died. It was nobody's fault. The 1910s were a time of international strife and chaos; the disorder and uncertainty brought about by the First World War turned everyone's lives upside down. 
The Greek ship's carpenter, Ellefteris Moschona,changed his name to Nicholas,  and settled in Liverpool with my great grandmother, who'd separated from her husband. With the scent of imminent war becoming stronger by the day and foreigners in an increasingly precarious position, he decided to demand naturalization as a British subject. It was granted just ten days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914. So, although her daughter's Palestinian romance was star-crossed, my great grandmother's own happiness was assured, at least for a time. Moschona died in 1926 at the age of fifty something from pneumonia leaving his English lover distraught. In his memory, her grandson born shortly afterwards was named Ellefteris Vassceloas, and thus went through life with an unpronounceable Greek name and a half-Chinese face. Even her Pekinese dogs were given Greek names: Calliope and Cosmos. So, that's the story of my boyhood Mediterranean imaginary... 
And yet, there's a little more. Recently, I was digging around in the family papers. Rejigging the jigsaw puzzle, it became apparent that things were not quite what they'd seemed. At the start of the year in which my grandmother was born, the mariner from Kasos had landed at Barry Dock, near Cardiff, and lodged with my great grandmother. My grandmother seemed never to have suspected Moschona was her father, it was never even hinted at. But now, in retrospect, that Mediterranean voyage seems less a young woman's romantic adventure, and more an unsung pilgrimage to the lands and waters of her ancestors.

Although there is a collective unease amongst the chattering classes regarding the bellicose times we are experiencing, it's still unease rather than panic at this stage. Since the end of World War Two, war has always been with us, although usually – if you're an American or a European – it's happening a fair distance away. But at the current time, war is being waged on the doorsteps of Europe, in Ukraine and on the coasts of the Mediterranean. I'd like to say we are living through a callous age, but again isn't it any worse than many millions have known since the middle of the twentieth century under the seemingly protective umbrella of pax americana? One thing is certain and that is what ever  substance "democracy" and "civilisation" may have contained whilst masking the realities of colonialism and injustice around this planet, the illusion has now been swept into the dustbin of twenty-first century "post history".
I had the good fortune yesterday to attend a book talk by my friend and colleague Rashid Khalidi, historian of the Middle East and in particular of Palestine. He was introducing the French translation of his recent book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. During the question and answer session, someone asked about the impact of the current Israeli war in Palestine on the Palestinian's material culture, particularly the institutional and private libraries that Palestinians have built up over the centuries. The good news was that despite the collateral and intentional damage – intentional because such repositories of Islamic and Arab cultures are specifically targeted by the Israeli authorities and illegal settlers – most have been digitized and when the day comes libraries will be reborn and restocked.

I'd like also to mention non-human victims of the currently ongoing wars around us and the "collateral damage" inflicted on the biosphere. First and foremost are the human victims of war, whether they be in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan or elsewhere, those who suffer directly from the bombing and also endure the deprivations due to the obliterations of infrastructure. But, we tend to forget the impact of war on the non-built environment, the concomitant  destruction of animal life and habitat. Since I left full-time employment in the university, I've had a little more time to indulge my boyhood passion for photography and have been particularly attracted to difficulties and rewards of photographing birdlife. The impact over the past half century of the Anthropocene on birds is news to no-one. Their sources of food have been polluted with pesticides and their breeding sites frequently destroyed. Before you say that thinking about birds and other animals is a luxury in time of war, let us remember how dependent humankind is on the good health of the rest of the biosphere, on the planet-minus-us. As a team of Polish researchers have recently demonstrated, even without war,"in this era of massive biodiversity loss, birds hold the dubious distinction of being at the forefront. Currently, 21% of avian species are vulnerable to extinction, and 6.5% are functionally extinct."* Militarised destruction has made things much worse. A little documented result of Russia's war on Ukraine has been its impact on "avifauna in war-affected areas of Ukraine", where "some of the most vulnerable species in the region – such as eagles, owls, avocets, flamingos, and pelicans" have suffered greatly. Despite what we might imagine as their natural  advantage, their mobility made possible by their ability to fly away, most birds remain in war-torn areas and become  victims, attachment to "breeding grounds and migration routes" exerting "a stronger influence than the adverse environmental conditions caused by war." Still, we may shrug our shoulders and minimise the fate of birdlife, don't they pale into insignificance compared to the loss of innocent human lives?

However, there is one further imbrication of avian life in the ongoing wars. Whilst homing pigeons have been used for centuries as messengers in times of war, birds are now being transformed into biotechnological drones. A Moscow neurotechnology company, Neiry, has implanted microchips into pigeons' brains in order to remote control them for use as instruments of surveillance. The hardware which uses solar power and GPS tracking is carried in a small backpack. Known as PJN-1, the project is seen as "one of the more aggressive attempts to merge invasive neural interfaces with live animals for surveillance and security applications." Other birds such as ravens are being considered for heavier "payloads". Of course, animals have long been used as beasts of burden in times of war as in times of peace. In warfare, the use of horses and elephants as "attack vehicles" is notorious.
After years of nightly televisual exposure to the horrors of war, our senses are becoming dulled to humankind's inhumanity toward fellow humans. Is there room to spare a thought for our feathered friends?

I was thinking about my mother the other day. Her birthday was the 30th April. She would have been 102 this year. She died three years ago. As is increasingly frequent these days, although she was quite physically fit, during the last seven years of her life she suffered from encroaching dementia. The COVID pandemic didn't help. You'll remember it was difficult if not impossible for relatives to visit those confined to care homes. It was during a belated visit during COVID that my mother had to admit she didn't know who I was. We continued to have conversations, however. For me she was my mother, for her I was an interested stranger.
Her memory of the last sixty or so years or so of her life seemed to have disappeared completely, but she could still remember her childhood, her youth. It was a one-sided conversation. I provided her with prompts about her parents and brothers and she happily reminisced. It was during one such conversation that I asked her what she'd liked and disliked most in her life, or at least what she could remember of it. What she'd disliked was almost predictable: having to work in the Chinese laundries her father ran, first in Liverpool and then in the North Wales town of Rhyl. She detested that work. When she still had her faculties I'd asked her to record here recollections of Chinese laundry life. In that account she was very factual, talking about the routine of the laundry life; you'll find it elsewhere on this website. 
What surprised me was more what she had appreciated in her early life, and that was the time she'd spent in the WRENS (the Women's Royal Naval Service) during World War Two. She was stationed in various places around the country, in Scotland and in East Anglia and in London. She said she'd "loved' being in the WRENS and regretted not staying in the service after the war. But she'd left the navy to help out at home in the laundry, the cafe, the greengrocers. All those businesses would soon close down. By then, my grandfather's interests were once again in Liverpool where he had a cafe that served also as a gambling house. That venture, along with his interests in Rhyl, succumbed to historical events and that story, which embraces the history of the mass deportations of Chinese seamen from the United Kingdom during 1946-1947, is told in my book The Eighth Chinese Merchant. 

What brought to mind the reminiscence about the WRENS was not so much that I'd been thinking about my mother on her birthday, but that it coincided with my coming across a photograph of her in her WRENS uniform, and that in turn made me think of her avowing she'd never been so happy as when she'd been in uniform. Perhaps it was the freedom of being away from home; subject to military discipline and yet free of the restrictions of family with a Chinese father. Perhaps, it was the general liberatory, devil-may-care ambiance that many who went through the war recalled fondly.
She hadn't been obliged to join up, of course. She'd been working in a munitions factory when the recruiting agents came along. And the navy, no doubt, seemed a more exciting prospect that the factory workbench.
Moreover, she had no business serving in the British military. My grandfather had taken out Chinese nationality for his children and had them renounce UK citizenship at the beginning of the second world war. He didn't want any of them fighting a war for Britain. He was after all born near Canton at the tail end of the nineteenth century in a country gravely impacted by the Opium Wars and British imperialism. And yet, three of his four children did serve in the UK forces; how else were they to continue their attempt to pass?
I've always said that I'd wait until my grandfather's children (my mother, my uncles) were all dead before I turned to telling their story. Yet, now they've gone I find myself hesitating. But, the day will come.

Lorsque j'étais étudiant à la School of Oriental and African Studies de l'Université de Londres, entre le milieu et la fin des années 1970, j'ai été élu au conseil du syndicat étudiant en tant que « responsable des étudiants étrangers », un titre qui avait quelque chose de désuet. Cela coïncidait avec la décision du gouvernement travailliste de l'époque d'imposer des frais d'inscription « discriminatoires » aux étudiants étrangers. J'ai fait campagne contre cette mesure ; je me souviens m'être entretenu avec le député travailliste local, pour qui il semblait surprenant que cette mesure puisse causer des difficultés. Jusqu'alors, tous les étudiants payaient les mêmes frais d'inscription. On nous avait promis des frais modestes. Mais, bien sûr, les gouvernements et les universités ont jusqu'à aujourd'hui considéré les frais d'inscription toujours plus élevés pour les étrangers comme une poule aux œufs d'or.
Je répète depuis des années qu'il est imprudent de trop compter sur les revenus provenant des frais d'inscription des étudiants étrangers. Un ralentissement de l'économie d'un pays étranger, un événement comme la COVID, ou des représailles politiques de la part d'États retirant leurs étudiants peuvent avoir un impact sur la santé financière de ces universités qui, en l'absence d'un financement public adéquat, n'ont que cette unique bouée de sauvetage économique. Cependant, ce qui est plus troublant, c'est le manque de moralité politique de tout cela. Au lieu de rembourser les régions du monde qu'ils ont exploitées sous le capitalisme et le colonialisme, le Royaume-Uni et l'Occident leur ont pris encore plus.
Au cours de mon mandat de professeur à l'université de Lyon (Jean Moulin), j'ai pu mettre en place plusieurs programmes d'études en partenariat avec la Chine et d'autres pays ; loin d'être des programmes à but lucratif, ceux-ci visaient à offrir une formation solide en sciences humaines à des étudiants qui n'auraient jamais eu les moyens d'étudier aux États-Unis ou au Royaume-Uni. Certains y verraient une forme de diplomatie douce, une tentative de gagner les cœurs et les esprits. Peut-être. Mais j'y voyais une occasion d'aider les étudiants les plus démunis et les plus méritants à réaliser leur potentiel.
Le gouvernement Macron, désormais en phase terminale, a décidé de mettre fin au régime de parité des frais d'inscription pour les étudiants étrangers (non-UE) (Mathilde Goanec, « Les étudiants étrangers sommés de payer plus pour renflouer l'université » Mediapart, 25 avril 2026). Ce serait une erreur majeure sur le plan politique ; le prestige qui découle de l'absence de frais punitifs et abusifs aux étudiants étrangers est énorme. Mais, encore une fois, au regard de la réalité historique et politique, à un moment où la France devrait chercher des moyens de réparer son rôle dans l'histoire de l'esclavage et du colonialisme, elle adopte une position contraire. Il est temps de mettre un terme à cette mesure mesquine, et nous devrions tous nous élever contre elle.