Alfred Nobel and His Prizes

Alfred Nobel was a man of great contrasts. A Swede born in Stockholm in 1833, he spent most of his life abroad. The inventor of dynamite and other explosives, he was even called a 'merchant of death', but aimed to promote world peace. A skilled chemist, he wrote poetry in Swedish and English and prose in other languages too. The son of a man who twice went bankrupt, he became one of the wealthiest people in the Western world.

His great wealth did not bring him happiness, however. He never married, suffered from loneliness and was in delicate health from childhood. Only in the last three years of his life did he have a home of his own in Sweden, where he had bought the Bofors (pr Boo-fosh) armaments factory. He nevertheless died in the Italian resort town of San Remo on December 10 1896. And December 10 is the day on which the Nobel Prizes are ceremonially awarded each year, the Peace Prize in Oslo, the others at the Concert Hall in Stockholm.

His will was written in Swedish without legal guidance, which let to much delay in its implementation as it was disputed. It stipulated that the greater part of his estate should be invested and the income distributed in the form of prizes to those conferring the greatest benefit on mankind during the preceding year in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and what he called 'brotherhood among nations' but which we know as the Peace Prize.

There is no doubt that Nobel had a great interest in each of these fields. Most intriguing is the Peace Prize, which is awarded by a committee of the Norwegian Storting or Parliament, the reason being that Norway was joined to Sweden in a union under the Swedish Crown during Nobel's lifetime. He fondly believed that when the great power of explosives was understood, nobody would use them for military purposes. He knew from personal experience what devastation they could cause. In 1864 the factory where he had been studying nitroglycerine was blown up, killing everyone in it including his 21-year-old brother Emil. Nevertheless, he maintained that his factories could put an end to wars sooner than any of the peace congresses that were held.

He was also influenced by the Austrian Baroness von Sutter, a pioneer in the peace movement who was herself awarded the Peace Prize in 1905. But as with the Literature Prize, some of the laureates selected in Oslo, such as Henry Kissinger and Le Duc To in 1973 and Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978, have been highly controversial, while others generally considered to be worthy of the prize, such as Mahatma Ghandi, have been unacknowledged. And when the first Literature Prize was awarded to Sully Proudhomme, Sweden's foremost author, August Strindberg, who never received the prize, and many other prominent personalities wrote a letter of apology to Tolstoy.

The stipulation about conferring the greatest benefit on mankind in the preceding year has probably been taken into account more for the Peace Prize than the other awards, where it is common to look back over a candidate's career or recognize the person who originally made later developments possible.

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Digital DIY

In this digital age, DIY has expanded far beyond doing household repairs or knocking together a garden shed of varying degrees of permanence and stability. Now ordinary mortals can concoct their own website. Without writing a line of code. Who would have thought it not so very long ago?

Not me at any rate. A simple blog maybe, but a site? “You must have one,” they said, the so-called pundits, as though it were as vital as our daily bread (which has turned out not to be so vital, by the way, so I'll amend that to as vital as the air we breathe – provided it isn't polluted). “If you write, you don't exist without one. It's as simple as that!”

OK. So now I have got myself deeply immersed in the process, for if it is to be done, then I've got to be the one to do it. But thumbing through books on web design, redesign and heaven knows what else has taught me next to nothing. No, the little I've learnt has come from doing, getting my hands dirty, my feet wet.

Thus if like me you have been diagnosed as suffering from severe site deficiency syndrome, I suggest you plunge in at the deep digital end and get designing. Then redesigning, which I anticipate will be a never-ending occupation in my case. So if you have any comments or suggestions about my feeble efforts, do let me know.

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The Sorcerer Of Stockholm

Mention the word 'sorcerer' and you might conjurer up a vision of say Merlin, adviser-in-chief at the legendary court of King Arthur and a master weaver of spells who could foretell the future. According to various, if varying, versions of the tale.

In Roman times, being seen as a sorcerer, far from elevating you to the status of a Merlin was likely to be more than you life was worth, a drastic way of dealing with dissidents. The accusation was often made against women practicing what today we might call 'alternative medicine', for healing was the prerogative of male priests in the temple.

Neither did Christianity improve the lot of the supposed magician or sorcerer. Such unfortunates were deemed to be in league with the devil and to perform all manner of unmentionable acts. This led to the prolonged and shameful period of the witch-hunt, with women again the prime victims.

My Sorcerer, with his passion for antiquarian books and the opposite sex, has not much in common with these predecessors. Perhaps just a little with Merlin, who also had an eye for the ladies. This led to his downfall as he eventually took up with the wrong one, who having discovered the secret of his spells, promptly shut him up for ever more in an invisible tower, or hawthorn bush, or a cliff (in Brittany) or rock on the coast of Cornwall, depending whose version you want to accept. There are many to choose from.

My Sorcerer could produce comic verse, but whether he used incantations or magic spells that could be revealed to a designing damsel, I honestly cannot say. But, they would be of little use in predicting the future as he clearly never knows what is going to happen later the same day let alone what is in store for him. Or anyone else.

What I can say, however, is that he has arrived.

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The Sorcerer

The Sorcerer is coming. The Sorcerer of Stockholm.

Andy, my son on the occasion of his birthday

I don’t know whether you’ve ever stopped to think about it, but we enter the world in a totally undemocratic manner. Nobody gives us the right to vote for who our parents are to be. Thus,  and I want to emphasize this,  through no fault of his own, Andy was landed with me as his Dad.
Having said that, let me make one thing perfectly clear: on the whole, by and large, and to his very great credit, he has borne it remarkably bravely.
I say ‘on the whole’, ‘by and large’ because after all, like the rest of us he is only human and there was the odd occasion in his earlier years when he was tempted to take matters into his own hands. Or feet.
But I ask you to take into account that like so many children these days, Andy had to contend with two languages: English, spoken at home, and Swedish, spoken at school and by almost everyone else he came into contact with. However, he did have one or two school lessons a week with a native speaker of English. Such ‘home language tuition’ as it was called, was for children with at least one parent who spoke a tongue other than Swedish, and included something about the history and culture of the land where such parents came from.
I well remember Andy coming home one day and telling me about a lesson he’d had with his home-language teacher, a pleasant, mild-mannered young British lady, in which he had learnt about the Tower of London. As you know, the Tower was where many a prisoner was thrown in days gone by, probably to be tortured before being sent to a very sticky end. I had forgotten all about this when early the following Sunday morning while still in bed, eyes closed and barely conscious, a large, heavy, irregularly shaped object crashed down on me from what I would say must have been a considerable height. It was Andy. Sitting astride my chest he then made a very serious announcement: “You are going to be executed!” he said.
Well, as you can tell, I survived,  largely intact,  minus only a substantial part of one of my front teeth. It could have been worse. Much worse. But don’t think for a moment that, at least in retrospect, I attached any blame to my beloved young offspring. On the contrary, I saw quite clearly what was to become increasingly evident as he grew older, that he was quick and eager to learn — those things that interested him, that is. And what is more, to apply the knowledge he had acquired. It didn’t remain pure theory.
Nevertheless, I did have a quiet word with the pleasant, mild-mannered, young British lady and asked her if it might just be possible — perhaps — for her to find aspects of British history and culture that didn’t put the lives of innocent people at risk. Difficult though it might be.
This ability of Andy’s to be quick to learn, reached a peak when computers entered our lives. But it is here that he revealed another most commendable quality, tolerance, because it was immediately and glaringly evident that his Dad belonged to the school of computer-users who sweated over manuals and still got everything frustratingly wrong. He, of course, ignored the manuals and worked wonders. Oh I am aware of his conviction that I must have been the one who inspired that revised version of the well-known computer processor manufacturer’s logo to read: ‘Intel inside — idiot outside’. It was doubtless a great embarrassment to him, but he just grinned and bore it. Well, he bore it at any rate.
I can also tell you that the cause of his embarrassment didn’t disappear with time. Who else has a Dad who could obliterate his auto.exec.bat file, without which the computer behaved like a chicken that has lost its head, not knowing which way to turn, haphazardly jumbling letters and symbols and disobeying every command? I achieved that considerable feat without even trying. Naturally, I couldn’t hear his groans or sighs, or see the expression on his face when he read the SOS I faxed to him, as by then he was six thousand miles away, a paid professional in Silicon Valley.
But did he publicly disown me? Did he privately tell me to adopt a child somewhere else and get off his back? Not at all. He may have gritted his teeth, he may have asked himself what terrible sins he had committed to deserve such a terrible fate, I can’t be sure, but for half-an-hour he instructed me on the phone how to reconstruct the file, pressing this key and that, giving for me entirely unexpected results, until all was as it should be once more. It must have been like playing chess without seeing the board.
And so it has continued. An innocent victim in at any rate the paternal part of the parental stakes, he has shown courage and forbearance above and beyond the call of duty. So I had not the slightest doubt he would come riding to the rescue once more when a virus wormed its wicked way into my computer and infected hundreds of files. He didn’t know about it straight away because of the nine-hour time difference, but found out first thing the next morning. Not perhaps the best way to start the day, but I had every confidence in him.
All suggestions that he deliberately planted the infection to put me out of action, I treat with the contempt they deserve. No, he is a knight in shining armour, so if perchance you have a glass handy and there happens to be something in it, I ask you to raise it and join with me in drinking a toast to Andy, my son.
Skål!

Think tanks

‘What do people do all day?’ is the title of one of Richard Scarry’s children’s books, but also a question I ask myself with regard to certain occupations. In particular, I wonder about employees of so-called ‘think tanks’. Do they sit Rodin-style in their offices from nine to five pondering who knows what, before going home, having done their thinking for the day?

This has been on my mind since hearing an item on the BBC World Service about the recent youth riots in some of the Stockholm suburbs. The Beeb had sent their main correspondent in Germany here and he introduced an interviewee as a member of some think tank or other, without any further comment or explanation.

“Sweden is a country with ‘income compression’,” this thinker stated. Asked to clarify the term, he said there was no great difference between high and low incomes. Hmm. The BBC man was clearly unaware of the report issued only very shortly before showing that the income gap has been growing faster in Sweden than in any of the 34 OECD countries, and again made no comment. (New Zealand was said to be in the number one spot when I was there earlier in the year – both countries formerly known for their relative egalitarianism!) But if the thinking gentleman was unaware of the OECD report, he must have been shut away up in his tank for several days with no news from the outside world, or thinking such profound thoughts that nothing could penetrate the walls of his mind.

The interviewer also quoted a headline in one of the evening papers, which said in translation ‘Stockholm is not burning’, and took it as evidence that there were people in denial. Had he understood the language or had the whole article translated or summarised for him he would have known that the newspaper was criticising local media for naming the suburbs where cars were being set on fire, stones thrown at police etc, as though they were not part of the Swedish capital but somewhere else. At the other extreme, Britain and the US warned their nationals visiting Stockholm to take extra care, which was laughable as tourists would never have known what was going on in these suburbs, which are well off the tourist track, if they didn’t have access to the news and besides, what was happening was taking place at night and not in any way aimed at them.

The debate since then has ranged around the causes of the disturbances. On one side of the argument the finger is pointed at alarmingly high youth unemployment, low incomes, run-down welfare services, poor housing, overburdened schools and segregation in areas with a high concentration of immigrant families. On the other side of the fence, the emphasis is on firmer police action to prevent vandalism, on getting parents to exercise greater responsibility and control, on the media not providing a platform for the vandals and finding excuses for such criminal activity.

Where the ‘tank’ man stood on these issues is not hard to guess, even without any indication of what his agenda might be. There are after all thousands of these organisations, and although some are independent and highly respected, a large percentage are little more than pressure groups or lobbyists with a particular slant on life and society, their aim being to influence policy. Nevertheless, introducing someone simply as a member of such an organisation without specifying who or what lies behind it can seem like saying, “Here is someone you should listen to.”

It all makes you think.

Weekend away - 2

Back to the fair in the neighbouring township. Alan drove me there at about ten in the morning and arranged to meet me in the early afternoon, when he would return with Joan. I walked the last part of the way as the central area was crammed with stalls selling everything from pottery to tapa cloth, by way of other arts and crafts from around the country and the Pacific islands.

The sun was hot and rising high. Only the small, round grassy section in the main square gave any shade. A pipe band stood close by, sometimes marching while they played, with a woman banging the big drum strapped to her, while youngsters with side drums wielded their sticks adroitly, in unison.

Eventually, I found a seat at the sole picnic table. Someone else sat down too, and said something to me. “That’s a fine Scottish accent you have,” I commented, not quite sure what he had said.

“I’ve been here forty-two years,” he replied without a trace of anything south of Glasgow in his voice.

He told me he’d been back to Scotland recently and was mistaken by a phone caller for his brother, who had never left the land of his birth. The caller refused to believe he was just visiting from New Zealand, convinced the brother was trying to pull his leg.

When I returned to Alan and Joan’s house that evening after a walk and a picnic meal, Joan was sitting at a table on the patio with a young couple who had moved in next door, but who I initially took for paying guests. The man, I later found out, was of Fijian descent and was armed with a number of cans of beer, one of which he offered me, prompting my usual explanation that it was on my banned list, along with coffee and dairy products.

There was also a young man and woman from the Czech Republic. She was not yet twenty-one. Her name was Jana, but in New Zealand she called herself Jane. He was David, and much taller than his slender girlfriend. They had come to the area to pick apples for three months, but were going to stay for a year.

Two other guests were at a wedding in Wellington and didn’t return until the rest of us had gone to bed. Long before then we were joined by Alan — and his bottle of home distilled rum, or whiskey. I asked innocently whether it was legal to have your own still and was assured, not only by Neil but also the Fijian neighbour, that it was perfectly OK. Of course, it isn’t. Alan produces firewater with an alcohol content of eighty-six per cent (!), then dilutes it to forty-three.

David, the young Czech, had a half-full bottle of Irish whiskey on the table and Jana drank not only from that but also accepted some of Neil’s brew when offered. Joan had told me earlier that Neil had to drink — and smoke — because of a serious injury as a helicopter pilot. And with quite a lot of alcohol inside him, he became very talkative, telling me in a low voice across the table about his past career.

He was brought up on a local farm, evidently a large and flourishing one for it had its own Tiger Moth plane, which Alan learnt to fly at the age of twelve! Flying on your own property was not covered by the regulations, which anyway seemed to be extremely lax. He went on to tell me about the time when he was flying DC3s in Canada, spraying crops in formation with others, who did everything wrong until he pointed out their errors to the man in charge, a former Spitfire pilot in the Second World War.

He also spoke at length about his time flying helicopters, hunting deer in dangerous country, flying low in deep ravines. He called it ‘the wild west’. Farmers could fire shotguns at them and shatter the windscreen. Neil had a ‘shooter’ on board and a winch-man, with an extremely hazardous job. When deer were shot, he was lowered to gut the carcasses before getting them winched up. Neil said they lost I think it was four men and two pilots during his time in this most precarious occupation before he came a cropper himself.

Apart from taking potshots at them, farmers might stretch a wire across the gully and one day he flew straight into one, losing or severely damaging the rotor blades and coming down with a crash. Joan told me he had been put in a body bag and it was a miracle that he survived. But the misadventure hadn’t cured him from wanting to fly helicopters again, albeit for the less hazardous task of showing visitors the surrounding countryside.