So, today I met again with Sofia, a refused Zimbabwean asylum seeker who is destitute in Manchester….unable to be returned home and with no recourse to public funds (ie benefits, healthcare, housing) but prohibited from working.
Life for someone in her position seems to me to be an endless cycle of catching buses and walking miles in order to do the simplest of things that the rest of us take for granted.
In order to get her £10 a week food voucher (top) from an independent charity, Sofia must travel into the city centre and another three miles or so in another direction, to the little church where the drop-in is held. She can only spend her money in one supermarket chain…needless to say they aren’t always near where she has managed to find a sofa or piece of someone’s floor to sleep. And £10 doesn’t exactly go far…especially when you are suffering from high blood pressure and need a healthy, low cholesterol diet.
Then there is the work involved in running an anti-deportation campaign…collecting signatures wherever you go (picture 2), gathering evidence that you are in danger if you are returned….etc. Yet she is one of the most positive and active people I know…it’s inspiring, humbling and every other cliche you care to throw out. I’m hoping to dedicate some serious time to this one over the coming weeks…we shall see. I’m great at ideas and dreams but not always so good when it comes to following through. Luckily for Sofia, she is far less of a flake.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in London yesterday to talk about the threat posed by Iran with Gordon Brown. Settlement building – illegal under international law which prohibits the transfer of civilians to land under military occupation – was an afterthought, if the media are to be believed. On Radio 4’s the World at One a former Israeli ambassador talked down the problem of settlers in the West Bank, describing it as – and I’m paraphrasing now – a “minor issue.” I’m clearly no expert but I beg to differ.

Settlements are one of the top complaints of any Palestinian you care to speak to in the West Bank. They cling to every hilltop and choke the towns and villages…their well-watered lush green gardens stand out a mile in this arid land – sucking up precious water resources from the aquifers which often they have been positioned above. Cynics – and there are a lot of them in Palestine – suspect this is a deliberate preparation for the inevitable land grab that would accompany any kind of peace agreement.

I met and interacted with some fairly extreme settlers during my time in the Holy Land last year, and wrote about it here, here and here, so I won’t repeat myself today.

But I have written something else about it now over at the duckrabbit blog.

(settler graffiti, Hebron. JDL = Jewish Defense League, radical Zionist group)

I love this photo for two reasons. Firstly, it’s just wonderfully random. But secondly it reminds me of my years as a reporter on a very small local paper.

You may sneer but local news is great fun and great training for journalists. I don’t think I’d be able to survive doing what I do today without the fantastic training I got at the Evening Leader in North Wales, where I spent my last year as chief reporter. Day after day we had to fill a newspaper against the odds and find a splash – or front page – when literally nothing newsworthy was happening.

This particular picture was taken during a mini bomb scare in a village, where someone thought they had dug up a hand grenade and got the bomb disposal squad out. It turned out to be something completely harmless like a stone, or a piece of debris. It probably still made page one.

A number of stories and experiences from my time there stand out for me, and sadly most of them involve death. One was the time an elderly man committed suicide using a chain saw. Another was when someone’s ashes were stolen from their grave.

Another – admittedly not my story – was when a bereaved father killed himself on his adult daughter’s grave. And another was when some suspected drug dealers set fire to a young man they had doused in petrol before putting him out again and dropping him home.

A police inspector I became quite friendly with, and who had previously worked in Merseyside, once told me that the level of violence in small-town North Wales was always about 10 times greater than in the nearby cities.

Despite all this, it’s a few other moments that stick with me most. In terms of strangeness without a doubt the winner is the morning I had to interview someone with their dead son’s corpse in an open coffin also in the room. It remains the one and only time I have seen a dead body. I am well aware how lucky that makes me.

But in terms of stories there are only a couple. One was the time I managed to get the issue of refugees into the paper, by telling the story of a young Kurdish man who was working locally but who had arrived in the UK in the back of a container lorry after losing half his family to Saddam Hussein’s regime. For me that was a definite awakening and a taster of things to come.

The other was my first really big ‘scoop’ – and remember we are talking local rags here. I uncovered the story of a 65-year-old ‘sex pest’ primary school head teacher who was being taken to a tribunal by three of his female employees. I later covered the hearing itself and as a local hack it really was gold dust…just very, very salacious – to the point of ridiculous.

quoting:
…she said: “He once rubbed my bottom and called it a ‘prime piece of rump steak’, and once when he tried to kiss me he attempted to part my lips with his tongue.”

“the headmaster made regular sexual advances towards her, and nicknamed her ‘pillows’ in reference to the size of her breasts”

“It felt sleazy and wrong. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of his heavy breathing as he bent close to me,” she said.

I really do miss working for local papers sometimes. I hope they survive their current crisis because it would be a tragedy, were they to disappear.

The tide may be turning in favour of a proposed eco-bridge across Morecambe Bay. From this week’s Big Issue in the North.

Today I found out that I haven’t made the shortlist of the Guardian international development writing competition I mentioned a couple of weeks ago…slightly gutted, of course, but I’m pleased to have made it onto the longlist – the final 20 professionals – at least. Hopefully they’ll run it again in the future. Well done to everyone who was selected.

On the upside, I discovered where the Appleby Horse Fair shoes (see blog masthead) live for the other 51 weeks of the year. The answer in New Look. Who would have guessed…

Yesterday was the 64th anniversary of Hiroshima. There are some powerful images from the time on the Boston Big Picture site. But something that really helped me put a human face on the event was an article I read in the Independent a couple of months ago: namely an interview with Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, two days later. 240,000 other Japanese people were not so lucky.

Today, Mr Yamaguchi believes that God “planted a path” for him. “It was my destiny that I experienced this twice and I am still alive to convey what happened,” he said
“I can’t understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?
“As a double atomic bomb survivor I experienced the bomb twice, and I sincerely hope that there will not be a third.”

It certainly doesn’t feel like almost a year since I went to Palestine for a month. But I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot, since someone currently planning a trip there asked me for advice. I really hope to make it back there over the next year or two, if funds and life allow for it. I still feel very angry about what I saw there and feel everything I felt during those weeks very acutely. Anyway, I just heard that a family I visited and wrote about during my time there have just been evicted by Jewish settlers who have long been trying to take over their homes…an all too common scenario in ‘occupied’ – or ‘disputed’, depending on your politics – East Jerusalem. The Al Jazeera report is here:

(for more images click image

…urban degeneration in Liverpool’s Kensington neighbourhood, above.

I’ve spent this afternoon with Elizabeth Pascoe, the Edge Lane resident who failed in her bid to derail the council’s project earlier this year, despite two appeals at the High Court. And this morning I revisited the community where I did my first housing regeneration story three years ago – Anfield and Breckfield. The link to that piece, finally published by the Guardian after the paper I worked at then folded, is here. Three years on and zip has changed. Incredible.

I wonder if any other young people who work in the media spotted the irony in yesterday’s Guardian front page story.
Newspapers, and I think the media generally, are notorious for expecting students and graduates to do unpaid placements – a month is usually mandatory on NCTJ postgrad courses and many of the keener or more connected hopefuls do quite a bit more.
For the students, it gives you the chance to play the game – to collect much-needed bylines that you then have to produce when applying for jobs. But for editors, who in my six year career have visibly relied more on more on untrained students, it’s easy way around the redundancies and cost-cutting they’re all being forced to put through.
The losers are the readers though – you can’t send a work experience kid – even one in their 20s – to court, and really shouldn’t be using them on sensitive or legally tricky stories. The Guardian and its stable-mates – Manchester Evening News included – are as bad as any other media firm when it comes to this kind of “exploitation”.
I’d be amazed if Private Eye doesn’t have some comment to make about this next week.

I had some exciting news today. I’ve been offered a place on an MA course in photojournalism and documentary photography, at the London College of Communications, and will begin in January.