The township of 12 people
which sells four million
cans of beer a year
Scotland
in the
heat
John Cameron
Exactly a century ago, Robert Falcon Scott and his forlorn little party turned north into a storm having narrowly lost the South Pole race to the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. As he sat trapped in the storm a few weeks later he wrote: ‘Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority’.
It is a matter of record that he was beaten to the pole by Amundsen and yet it is Scott’s brilliant scientific legacy which has endured and flourished during the century. His meteorological data, rocks, fossils and marine samples laid the foundations of our understanding of Antarctica’s geology, climate, wildlife and oceanic biodiversity.
His beautiful, artistic, wayward wife Kathleen sculpted a simply fabulous image of him in his polar rig which I went to see some years ago in Christchurch, New Zealand. Like so much to do with Scott, it is almost unbearably poignant because as he lay dying she was having an affair with Fridtjof Nansen the mentor of his rival Amundsen.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, Scott was a national hero and along with Eric Liddell the subject of many prize-day speeches in school and children’s talks in church. Sadly the last third of the 20th century was a poisonous period when every British icon from Gladstone to Churchill, from Livingstone to Scott, was comprehensively trashed.
He was targeted by US journalists like Paul Theroux and the Guardian sports reporter Roland Huntford – not one of whom had the remotest experience of polar conditions. Recent years have seen his reputation restored by major polar explorers like Ranulph Fiennes, the naturalist David Attenborough and the meteorologist Susan Solomon.
As Solomon made clear in ‘The Coldest March’, Scott’s fate was really sealed by the extraordinarily adverse Barrier weather conditions of February and March 1912. I am still inspired by Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ written as he awaited death in an endless blizzard on the Ross Ice Shelf:
‘We took risks and we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’
A country turned
upside down
by corruption
Ronnie Smith
They are waiting. Waiting for a new settlement to be agreed among the actual rulers of the country. Waiting to see what opportunities they can
find in this transition period.
Are the protests truly spontaneous or are they being manipulated by the president’s opponents in the real regime that operates in the shadows? We won’t know for some time yet but we do know that they are big enough to have destroyed the president’s credibility, he is now a lame duck. However they are not large or intense enough to pose a genuine challenge to the existing order and that tipping point may not be reached. The announcement of a date for this year’s elections, the resignation of Mr Basescu (though not of the prime minister) with a credible replacement taking office, the opening of a real dialogue with the population by one or more of the political elite – any of these things could calm things down quite quickly.
Why are none of the political elite engaging with the reality on the streets? They are waiting. Waiting for a new settlement to be agreed among the actual rulers of the country. Waiting to see what opportunities they can find in this transition period. The joint opposition had a plan for this year and popular protest against their opponents had not been fractured in. They saw their job as simply replacing the current government in a system that would not change; they have no real interest in restarting the revolutionary process begun in 1989 because they are very much a part of the establishment.
Meanwhile the government is transfixed, they have been so lazy in power that they have no idea how to engage with concerned citizens other than to call them names. It seems that the president has been told not to speak as he will only make things worse. In any case there is hardly a minister who is not generally despised now.
This is a period of transition but the transition may turn out to be small, leaving the great issues bearing down on the country, particularly the awful corruption in society, untouched. If Romania and her people are to grow this situation cannot continue.
But remember this. There are still no dates set for the elections that should be held this year, so they are not happening. The suspension of elections is one of the fundamental elements present in a state of emergency.
I’ll leave you to think about that.
Ronnie Smith was born in Largs and now lives in Romania, working as a professional training business consultant and communication coach. He is also a teacher of political science, a political and social commentator and a writer of fiction
