Hallo and Welcome

Hallo and welcome to the EuropaWorld blog.

Everybody's writing one it seems. And here at EuropaWorld we shall take turns in thinking about the issues, both deep and trivial, and hopefully producing something entertaining at the end of it.

Even serious issues can have their amusing sides. Like the story of the Cairo sheep we carried a couple of years back in EuropaWorld. This was being fattened up for the Eid celebration and kept on a flat rooftop, as is common practice. However, when the appointed hour came for the sheep to meet its maker and for its carcass to meet the celebrants, the animal had other ideas and simply butted its poor owner over the edge of the roof, whereupon he fell to his death.

Quite tragic, of course, for the family - and indeed the sheep didn't survive long after that either - but amusing nonetheless.

I am a firm believer in triviality and facetiousness as an antidote to the unpleasant and boring seriousness of so much of the news. This does not mean that I underestimate the suffering that there is in the world, nor the injustice. But too much seriousness risks losing the human dimension; people can become statistics. Something that makes us smile can remind us that whether we are happy or sad is up to us. While clearly one has to show respect, the aftermath of a natural disaster is not mitigated by a long face or a ringing of hands. Indeed, the reverse is true - one may work better, write better, with a smile.

I still keep to this day a glorious press release from FAO, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation about hunting the rats in Tuvalu that climb the trees and attack the coconut crop. The problem was how to kill the rats without harming the Godzilla crabs, the size of small cats. The FAO answer, apparently, was to use recycled Australian pineapple cans strategically hung from wires. Crabs, I learnt, could do anything a rat could do, except jump.

That story needn't blind us to the fact that Tuvalu, whose highest point is a mere five metres above sea level, will not exist should sea levels rise as a consequence of global warming. Today is the feast of St Hilary, or so my radio tells me, supposedly the coldest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. Yet I have already had to turn the heating down. Outside my windows the weather is wet and mild, a light breeze. Even my geraniums, which once would have been killed by frost and rotted away by January would still be blooming were it not for the gales that have blown away their flowers and many of their leaves as well.

The climate is certainly changing. If anybody has not yet viewed Al Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' - now is the time to do so.

Peter Sain ley Berry, Editor