No point mentioning the usual clichés: unsmiling faces on public transport, a preponderance of grey, etc. For all its ferocity, the traffic seems surprisingly disciplined and regulated, actually stopping at junctions and red lights, even when all is quiet. The cult of exercise is still going strong. In the aftermath of the London Marathon, Hyde Park is still teeming with earnest runners. One smartly dressed girl was stepping up onto a bench over and over. Soon it will be like China, with the full panoply of hand-clappers, sword dancers, backwards walkers and the like. (Turning sharply on my heel, gesturing with a cigar, Colombo-style) ‘Just one more thing:’ I had been hoping for better weather at this time of year. But you can’t have everything – where would you put it?
Archive for April, 2005
You may have heard that Genghis Khan and generations of his successors all had scores of children. But have you considered the consequences? From an article in the current New Yorker on Hulagu, the Mongols and Baghdad:
‘Recently, [geneticists from Oxford, China and Central Asia] took blood sampless from populations living in regions near the former Mongol empire, and studied the Y-chromosomes. These are useful in establishing lineage because Y-chromosomes continue from father to son. [They] found that an anomalously large number of the Y chromosomes carried a genetic signature indicating descent from a single common ancestor about a thousand years ago. The scientists theorised [this was] an eleventh century ancestor of Genghis Khan. About eight per cent of all males in the region studied, or sixteen million men, possess this chromosome signature. That’s a half per cent of the world’s entire male population. It is possible, therefore, that more than thirty-two million people in the world today are descended from Genghis Khan.’
I’m always surprised how few people look out of the window. I invariably ask for a window seat, but a terrible conspiracy usually leaves me sitting over the wing.
It’s a paradox of travel that it involves so much waiting around. But there’s usually something to do.