48 today. That comes as quite a shock to the system when you still feel half that age, even after three and a half wearing years of living in Nepal.
Why so wearing? Well so many things you see here can really depress. This morning I took Alisha to the zoo where I spotted a middle aged woman throwing a stone at a caged deer in a bid to get it to stand up. I reprimanded her and then reported her to a passing member of the zoo staff, who didn't seem unduly concerned by her misbehaviour. The general public attitudes to everything here seems to be cruel and primitive - to animals, children and the most vulnerable within society. And no one seems to give two hoots about the environment. Since moving into central Kathmandu I have really started to feel the effects of the pollution with a chronic sore throat and night coughs that are suggestive of latent asthma coming to the fore. When I leave Nepal for good I feel it will be this pollution that drives me out more than anything else. In fact it's the other things that justify my very presence here in the first place.
I have been very pleased by a new mosaic that has just been produced at the Godawari studio. It is a translation of the naive Mithili art style that is native to south Nepal/north India into a different medium. Mithili fish in mosaic are pictured right.
