Greetings!
There’s a cultural difference that caught me by surprise and took a bit of getting used to when I first came here, back in 1995: handshaking. In Britain we tend to be fairly reserved and a handshake is often merely a formality. Here, on the other hand, it is a ritual. Everyone shakes hands. You can be talking to an acquaintance in the street and someone they know, (but that you don’t), then they will shake hands as they greet each other but the stranger will almost certainly offer you his hand as well, even if not a word is exchanged between you.
A handshake is not just for when you meet someone for the first time and are introduced to them, it’s an everyday occurrence; a routine. The first thing people do when they walk into the office is to walk over and offer their hand to shake, even if it takes them out of their way and means a making a special trip or detour, (albeit only a few steps), in order to do so. A straight forward “Hello”, or a friendly “Hi” won’t do; it’s obligatory to “touch flesh”.
As you walk down the street, an acquaintance approaches and instead of simply nodding a greeting will swerve towards you with their hand out in greeting. You shake hands and say “Zdrastvuitya”, (“hello”), before they swerve away again and continue on their way.
People don’t only offer each other their right hand; often one of them will grab the other person’s arm with their left hand and hold it whilst pumping the handshake. For someone like me, it can be quite disconcerting as they carry on holding it whilst they start the conversation.
Also, you’ll often see people, (young people and women especially), touching cheeks; first the right and then the left.
I am quite sure that today, (being National Hugging Day in the States), would go down well here if someone ever told the Kyrgyz about it although, I am not sure how many Americans know about the day. It’s one of those strange commemorative days, unofficial “annual holidays” that exist which the people here seem to love marking.
This particular one was started in 1986 by the Reverend Kevin Zaborney who apparently wanted to help everyone show more emotion in public. Even though it is not an official holiday, apparently it is officially recognized by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. (Honest! I didn’t know you patent or register a day like this, but as he apparently holds a copyright on it, I hope and trust that he won’t sue me for this reference.) Apparently, has its own official website which informs us that the day is now known as International Hugging Day as it is also marked in several other countries, such as Austrailia (I presume they mean Australia – we all make typo errors from time to time), Bulgaria, Canada, England (but I wonder why not Scotland and Wales as well), Georgia (they do point out the country as opposed to the state), Germany, Guam, and Russia … but sadly, not Kyrgyzstan.
Handshakes and hugs are not only used as forms of greetings. A handshake is also used to congratulate someone, for expel when handing over a certificate, and to seal an agreement. I am not sure if the representative of the Gold Company whose camp was burned down last year by marauding horsemen sealed their partnership agreement with the local communities that will allow them to resume their activities with a handshake. Work on the site has been disrupted since April last year, but the new agreement looks as if they will be able to fulfill their full exploration work before their license expires in 2015.
One handshake to seal a deal that definitely hasn’t taken place is over the sale of Zalkar Bank, which was nationalized last year. That’s because the sale hasn’t taken place, despite repeatedly lowering the asking price in auctions last year, each one failed with a distinct lack of bids being offered. Now the President of the Union of Banks is suggesting that the government forgets about trying to sell it and operating it as a going concern instead. He thinks that once it is up and running as a successful going concern, with a successful track record, there will be little difficulty in attracting bidders. So maybe it is just a case of the handshake having been postponed.
There is not much handshaking when it comes to inter-ethnic conflict. Last month, we were told by the chairman of the State National Committee, there were 3 such conflicts, although at the time we had been assured that ethnicity had not been the cause of the incidents, it now seems to be recognized that it had played role or, at least, was a factor.
There was an interesting blog post about the position of Russians in Karakol. It began by citing an incident involving a local hero, Dmitry Chernov; a Sambo champion. (Sambo is a peculiarly Soviet invention, a martial art or system of self defence invented in the Soviet Union and you’ve probably heard of one of the most famous aficionados of in the sport – Vladimir Vladimirich Putin.) The post then went on to interview a number of Russians in one of the local Russian Clubs about relationships with the local Kyrgyz, discrimination and the need for “unity” and whether they thought Karakol was a “powder keg”.
I am not sure if this is one of the 147 places on the map that we are told the Ministry of the Interior has prepared a map for the government, which indicates places where such inter-ethnic conflicts are possible. I note that is where they are “possible”, not “probable” or “likely” … at least they are addressing the issue and preparing and planning to meet potential incidents if they do arise … so, hopefully, the government won’t be caught unawares like they were last June.
They do seem to have been caught unawares, however, by a prison riot which erupted in CIZO, the remand prison block here in Bishkek, which is located not far from the actual city centre. I am not sure what led to the riot but conditions in the institution are pretty dire. It was a fairly confused affair with the police sealing off the roads surrounding the prison, the fire brigade called because the prisoners had set fire to mattresses on the third floor, (but, apparently it was too serious a conflagration), lots of photos and video clips appearing on the internet, reports of beatings and that as many as six people being killed, (although it turned out that only one person died – and there is some dispute as to whether it was from a drugs overdose … where did he get them?, I wonder … or as the result of a beating. Incidentally, both drugs and weapons were discovered in a search).
Relatives gathered outside and were obviously concerned, calling for the resignation of the head of the prisons department. The protest led to hunger strikes being declared in all the penal colonies throughout the country, but these seem to have been cancelled.
In what seems to have been a remarkable piece of openness, the authorities arranged a press tour of the scene on Friday. Earlier in the week they had asked for the press to remove photographs, (but, to be fair, that seems to have been directed against pictures which showed individuals, which doesn’t seem unreasonable – they are, after all only on remand). That openness is probably to address the many claims from relatives, human rights activists and even the Ombudsman that something was being hidden.
One of the results of this openness was to bring out into the open the grim conditions in the prison. I’m not sure how many people have seen the inside of a prison, a real prison, not a sanitized one in a blockbuster film, or a bleak house under a harsh regime in a different genre.
In fact, the remand prison isn’t the only aspect of the criminal justice system which been under the spotlight this week. A number of non-government organizations have conducted a study into juvenile crime and the treatment of juvenile offenders. Whereas high profile crimes have grabbed the public’s attention, the question of juvenile delinquency has gone “under the radar”, or so the argument goes, creating recruits or easy prey for criminals. The complex social situation in the country, lack of available work, poor education, entertainment packages, (computer games, films and television programmes), and a consumption based society, all contribute to the situation where there is a lack of regard and respect for rule of law and in which something like 2000 young people come to the attention of law enforcement every year.
Presumably it was some of these who went on a rampage of vandalism last weekend, damaging some 30 cars in one of the city suburbs last weekend; slashing tyres. The oddest thing about this story is that, although the police clearly know that there were about thirty such incidents, only one official complaint was registered.
(As an aside, we also learned this week that there are currently about twenty thousand orphans or children from socially vulnerable families in the 104 boarding schools – orphanages and children’s homes – in the country.)
There also been a whole host of stories of officials that have been detained for accepting bribes or other examples of corruption.
At least it was obvious why the relatives had gathered outside the detention centre. In what must have been the oddest story of the week, journalists went to a protest meeting outside the White House and attempted to talk to the thirty or so protestors to ask what they were demanding. It seems that they refused to say. They refused to say anything at all. Very odd. I thought that the whole point of holding a public demonstration was to draw attention to your cause – but they seemed to be shunning it. Perhaps, I thought to myself, they are another example of “rent-a-mob” and had turned up without having been given their instructions – or payment.
It was quite clear what other protestors wanted – Jobs … and compensation. These were workers from the various casinos and gambling outlets here in Bishkek, that have been put out of work by the change in the law banning Casinos.
Another map has been unveiled this week. The Ministry of Transport has responded to the President’s recent call for new, alternative roads to be constructed by releasing a map showing a number of alternatives for a joining North and South; Bishkek and Osh. There are few, very few, trunk roads in the country; basically just three. Two are North-South routes: the main Bishkek-Osh highway which was renovated in the 1990’s and now offers a vital lifeline for people and goods uniting the two main parts of the country; the Bishkek-Torugart highway, currently undergoing renovation and is important for the transport of goods (and tourists with China). The other is an East-West route from the Kazakh border on the road from Tashkent, through Bishkek and on up to and around Lake Issyk Kul. Currently, there is work on a number of other routes, particularly to Sary Tash and Irkeshtam, the other border crossing with China. Well, the Ministry has identified a number of possible routes for a new road from Bishkek to Osh. Most of them will be longer than the existing route, but one, which is apparently the preferred route, is not only shorter, but will open up new parts of the country and thus be extremely useful for tourism. It will take some time and cost a lot to construct the road, once funding can be found, but will provide new jobs and opportunities if it comes off.
If the roads in the rest of the country present certain problems, those in Bishkek have others. The huge growth in motor traffic in the city not only causes traffic jams there are serious problems over parking, and the authorities are thinking of introducing far more severe penalties for parking infringements. Oddly enough, although I have some doubts about the details, in general I am in favour of this initiative. Although it might seem to be another case of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut, the situation does seem to be getting out of hand and does need addressing.
There have been a number of interesting stories about tax this week. It seems that, according to the leading accountants and auditors in the country that disputes between businessmen and the Tax authorities are becoming more frequent, and that the inspectors are sometimes inventive in the way that they interpret the rules of the tax code resulting in fines that can amount to millions of soms. It seems to me ironical that many of the disputes seem to be about taxes which no longer exist as they were abolished when the new tax code was introduced a few years ago, but because inspections are no longer annual, they are only coming to light now. The others seem to revolve about VAT, which is one of my pet hates. In theory it is great tax, but in practice is far too complex and riddled with “special cases”. A few years ago we faced a similar situation, but I am pleased to say that our inspection this year passed pretty smoothly.
In another, it was reported that businessmen in the South of the country feel that the “tax holiday” they were granted a year ago as a result of need to recover from the disorder that erupted there last June, are now arguing that it needs to be extended.
The last one was about an initiative to remove the sales tax where VAT is also charged. If it goes through then either VAT or sales tax will be levied and not both. Personally, I think that is a sensible idea, but it will have an effect on the budget and will have to be carefully researched and analysed.
Finally, although there is a lot I haven’t mentioned this week, (such as a new book by the veteran ex-pat Giorgio Fiaconni; possible future scenarios for the Manas transit base, and the future of the internet; the burgeoning raps scene in Bishkek and Kyrgyzstan’s victory in the Pan-Turkic answer to the Eurovision Song Contest; the extreme cold weather we are experiencing … -25 last night! but that didn’t stop Tatiana going for a dip on Krisheniya … and the measures taken to cope with it; an alleged shooting in Osh which everyone denies happened; how Kyrgyzstan’s economy has evolved into a service economy; how Kyrgyzstan’s population is now considered to be five and a half million, the problems facing the Russian Orthodox Church, the Jehovah’s witnesses and the Ahmadi Muslims … just to mention a few), if you have been reading these postcards for some time, then you will probably be aware by now of my healthy distrust of published statistics. Here’s another example for you which is based on news headlines about the rate of inflation. Headline 1: “Inflation reaches 5.7% in 2011 in Kyrgyzstan” and Headline 2: “2011 annual inflation rate in Kyrgyzstan was 16.6%”. So, what are we supposed to believe? What made it even more interesting was a third headline: “Kyrgyzstan’s GDP grows by 5.7% in 2010 reaching 273 billion som”. Hmmmm. Someone’s made a “boo boo” somewhere.
Postcard from Bishkek: the weekly postcard that I send out as an email also gets posted on the website ianbek.kg each week – and there are other postcards which don’t get sent out. This week, for example, there were the following posts: Brother, can you spare a dime? about people begging on Bishkek streets; Trouble spot tourism about how places like Kyrgyzstan can still be appealing to tourists even after some form of crisis or upheaval; Float like a butterfly about Boxing in Kyrgyzstan; When is Customer Service Day? - I’m not sure if my diary let me down again, getting the date wrong … or if there really is such a day, but it did give me the chance to reflect on the issue; The Philharmonia, one of Bishkek’s main concert venues and Martians or Earthlings about the plight of the disabled in Kyrgyzstan – especially a new initiative aimed at increasing the number of them who are able to find employment.
It is now possible to follow me on Facebook, (where I have specific pages for Celestial Mountains and ianbek … and also links.kg and Kyrgyz Diary), and on twitter, (@Bishkekpostcard and @celestialMTC ).
If you decide that you don’t want to receive these weekly postcards in your email anymore, please drop me a line to and I will take you off the distribution list. Alternatively, if you know someone who might be interested in being added to the mailing list, then get them to drop me a line and I’ll be happy to do so.
Bishkek
I received this comment on the “Greetings!” postcard by email … and thought that it was worth sharing, (the author kindly says that I am “free to share” it). I did think about editing it … but he makes a number of very interesting and complex points on the subject of Trust, giving examples to illustrate them, so I decided to leave as it was and let him have his own voice.
Couple of thoughts on your most interesting reflections, Ian:
The handshake thing is about Trust, possibly the single most important aspect of the human condition and probably the oldest – going back to the times long before there was a need to perceive a spiritual dimension. In fact most species have some sort of contact process to confirm a) alikeness, b) competitive/social status, c) non-aggression, and d) hmm, ‘other opportunities’. In each case, there are some species that use these things to fatal advantage of course – and that behaviour can also be seen in our own populations.
Species that cannot easily contact one another physically usually have some visual or olfactory equivalent, and yes, we still use these too – we may not be able to identify and label specific pheromones; but (how shall I put this) just as some people would ‘die’ for the taste of chocolate, there are some who cannot taste it at all, and some who find it quite unpleasant. Most are in the middle however. If we plotted them on a graph, we’d get a bell-shaped curve – a few positive and negative extremes to either side of a more flexible average.
Some people can sense human and animal pheromones quite distinctly – even though we don’t yet have a language to describe them. Some people find their dog’s odours oddly pleasing or reassuring, yet others are obliged to wash their dog in order to achieve the same effect. The smells of ‘sweat’ can – self-evidently – be pleasurable or anti-pleasurable. The latter also tend to guide us to perceive the generators of such as ‘not-us’ (or in need of cleansing or purification) and may feature in certain perjorative descriptions of ‘other’ racial tribe groupings or lineages. Children also quickly demonise any child perceived as ‘smelly’ of course, because they are too young to understand the implications. Metaphorical smells still feature as spin in statements of ‘not-us’ in the propaganda of ignorance, because smell is our most ancient way of determining ‘us’ and ‘not-us’, and it still has great resonance in terms of our perception and communication of meaning – a subject that still rather tends to elude us because there are so many ways of interpreting it.
Whilst the West might be perceived to have moved to more cursory appreciations of acceptance or determination of ‘us-ness’, this isn’t necessarily true. For sure, if you’re an American in America then it’s generally safe to assume that a stranger or neighbour is quite likely to be ‘OK’, so a physical gesture of confirmation is not always unnecessary. With a wider knowledge of the world you might then assume that other nations/cultures haven’t moved – or have intuitively chosen not to move perhaps. If you observe these exchanges more closely, the Western ‘initial interaction’ still uses a remarkably broad set of visual signals and checks for trust and ‘one-of-us’ signs – even if only a single word transpires in the interaction. For example, ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ might be said, but without any visual affirmations of note. While that may seem to have little meaning on the outside, we are (internally) deeply analysing the verbal intonation of that single word to check for meaning, and for any clue that a state of ‘not-us’ might have come into being, and to deduce whether any other reason for concern may be present or implied.
We re-check for signs of ‘have they fallen out with us in any way we can determine/detect?’ – or read in to – the visuals we just witnessed; ‘has the level of “us-ness” changed?’, ‘would I like the level of us-ness to change?’ and so on.
The more Eastern approach is more formal and measured, a tradition from when we took more time over such things, and when hands were not necessarily clean. The bow signifies in a very complex visual language most of the things I’ll talk about here. There are combinations of bow and handshake in the Middle East of course. The gesture of putting your head forward (‘I know I can trust you not to damage my vulnerable neck’) is actually quite profound in this regard. Its primate antecedents are about submissiveness within a colony however, which is an extraordinarily important truth, but too profound to discuss in detail here.
OK, one detail perhaps, just to indicate quite how profound this really is: a common Middle Eastern/Med/African – maybe ‘cradle of civilisation’ nations is a better way of conceiving this one – is to ask, upon a first meeting, ‘how many children do you have?’. This is a multi-dimensional question, but its basic intent stems from a primate fact of life: there is one rule that all colony members seem to know intuitively, but it is more likely a learned behaviour, and it has two halves: ‘anyone who attacks the children must be punished’ and ‘the children must be protected at all costs’. This means that the communicated detail of ‘how many children do you have?’ is really one of ‘if you have children, you must be trustworthy, because all ones-of-us value children most highly, and I will be able to tell from your way of articulating your answer just how highly you value yours, and can then gauge just how much I may trust you in almost any matter we may now go on to discuss. Such things are the foundations of intuition.
Actually, there is a further profound detail worth mentioning here. We know that a small percentage of people in modern society – probably about 2-3% – are pathologically unable to comprehend the ‘don’t harm the children’ rule. There are several variants of this, ranging from simply not having the wiring or the programming constituent that goes with the positive protective behaviour, to the mentally ill state where the programming is subverted to a ‘must harm the children’ form. (In the chocolate metaphor, this would be like a taste perversion where the taste of chocolate is perceived as a positively bad thing, and that all chocolate should therefore be destroyed.)
Such things are rather like a Mandelbrot pattern. If I map a large population for the characteristic of ‘protect children’, I will get a bell-shaped curve where the average majority learn to protect children even if they don’t have any of their own – some may have a difficulty in dealing with children perhaps, but they would still rescue one in trouble. If I then focus on the 2-3% at the negative extreme, and examine a population made entirely of individuals with the more dangerous types of negative behaviour towards children – this curve might be called ‘doesn’t protect children’ – I will again see a bell shaped curve. The bulk of averagely-badly-negatives will still be more or less bad for one reason or another, such as I hinted at earlier, but there will be a more sharply defined set of murderously- or sadistically-inclined people in the 2-3% at the extreme negative side. If I were to go on to map a population made up entirely of such individuals, I would again get a range that would generate a bell-shaped curve, made up of even more sharply-defined characters. This curve might be called ‘always harms children’. The 2-3% of this curve are too unpleasant to describe here, but if you looked at any large nation’s prison population made up entirely of child-murderers, then you would find the ‘Hannibal Lecter’ equivalents, and so on, to exist in that 2-3%. Cannibalism was of course rather common in the times before missionaries sought to achieve behavioural changes across the world – in the times before anyone had come along and said ‘no’. The times when a tribe encountering another might have seen them as simply an alternative – or primary – food source. These were after all the times when eat-or-be-eaten applied to pretty much any other predator in the landscape.
If you close-read the Bible and Koran carefully, I think it’s a fair bet that this (and other characteristics of negative human behaviour) would be among the ones interpreted as the most devilish – at a time when neither mental conditions nor genetics were understood. ‘Devilish possession’ was the only way of expressing the unpleasant observations and realities of extremely negative behaviour. The data are also sitting in various other records, but the full picture emerges only when you take a view across several disciplines. I’ve done a fair bit of research now though, and I seem to have a robust theory. The implications are startling.
Back to Trust and handshakes. Whilst checking for the negatives, sometimes because they tell us more than the positives, we very much welcome the chance to assess the positives. The strength of the handshake can range from the cursory, to the ‘wet fish’, to the almost outrageously – yet not – sexual, to the two-hander and the not-letting-go. They can signify anything from a warm personality, to a need for contact, to a need to counter loneliness, to a need to communicate very positive intentions, or a ‘don’t know why we do this, but everyone else does so I do as well’. The experienced know that any of these can be used to deceive, whereas the naive can remain blissfully unaware until they are hurt – they may hear the tell-tale nuances in the vocals, and feel something is a little odd, but they don’t have enough knowledge to know that these are a sign for wariness, and so they suspend disbelief, and may become victims of one type or another.
You would be interested to observe children from your old school meeting at the bus stop on their way home. It’s an ethnically-diverse school, so handshakes are strikingly common, but the ‘native’ white youngsters also seem to have learned that it is a good thing to do. The variants of high-five are also in evidence – ritualised Masonic greetings for very specific ones-of-us. The traditional British unspoken assumption of ‘my word is my bond’ is still around, but words are cheap these days, and this form of trust has lost value – except amongst small circles of very close friends. Levels of trust are very much dependent on scale. The size of the group and the history of that groups’ actions are critical to this. The groups’ actions are then the equivalent of an ongoing visualisation of a collective handshake, in fact. The implications of this are again rather profound, and go to explain many international issues.
The silent protesters. I suspect that they represent a caucus of people who don’t trust the media any more than the politicians. They won’t speak to the media because they know that anything they say will be re-said in at least six ways (the six major chunks of a bell-shaped curve in fact) and this caucus of people is no longer content with that expansion of “truth” or dilution of trust. Trust has been lost then, and loss of trust leads to progressively larger disputes. Such was the meaning of the six blind men and the elephant metaphor in fact, and almost certainly why the metaphor came to be described in the first place. The view from the top of the elephant is no less worrying now than it was then however, and this is the subject of a forthcoming website on meaning and life, which I’ll let you have shortly.
The printed word has ever been subject to spin, and it has been elevated to an art form in most nations. Actually, it has always been this way, even before writing technology was invented. All the major religions’ texts started as oral traditions, but amongst all the good stuff we can certainly see some striking pieces of spin. The stelae, paintings and carvings of the ancient world also contain spin, which allowed its communication to pre-literate and multi-languaged populations. Images are profoundly important to our communications, that’s why 75% of human communication is non-verbal, and why the use of verbal imagery is so abundant in our cultures. You can’t always trust your eyes however, and this aspect is reflected in our ongoing fascination with mage-ic and illusions.
We are at an interesting, and somewhat dangerous, point in our social evolution. One where we can no longer shake hands with everyone with whom we need to test trust. One where even a handshake with a journalist is no guarantee of a veracity of transmission. One where a twittered comment can often be read in far too many ways to have trustworthy meaning – because it is not accompanied by any of the visual or verbal nuances that would guide our judgement. The protesters know this, and may use a video of their own to share on the internet perhaps, as a more trustworthy communication of understanding – and perhaps even a plea for help from like-minded others-of-us.
It would seem that we are entering an Age where a new form of trust communication will be needed. There are technologies arising which may answer this need, but in the meantime we are liable to see a degree of chaos develop. The longer it takes for a new form of trust communication to be developed, the longer that period of chaos will be, and the more enveloping it will become. It’s like a new form of Babel, in a way, except that in Mesopotamian times there were rather a lot of other places to spread out into.
Thanks for this … it’s very thoughtful and you cerainly made me think …
For example, although I am aware of the symbolism of a handshake as an embodiment of trust some of the examples you cite I either didn’t know, (“how many children …?) or had forgotten (the bow exposing the neck for beheading … despite having recently seen the episode of Merlin where Arthur places his head on the block).
I also have to admit that I hadn’t thought of the possibility that the silent protesters simply did not trust the press … which is odd because I always try to be so careful when talking with reporters – for preceisely that reason!
In terms of clarity, etc. there were a few small points which caused me a bit of difficulty. One was very minor: the phrase “ones-of-us” jarred a little bit … the first time I came across it I thought it was simply a typo, but then it is repeated … so it was obviously meant. I suppose it is shorter than saying things like “group membership”, “symbolising ‘one-of-us’” or some other such formula.
Although I follow the arguement, I am not sure that having lots of children is necessarily a sign of trustworthiness … especially in the milieu of modern society, but that is probably begging the question.
I wasn’t sure about the “must harm children” syndrome … it seems so alien a concept that I find it hard to imaging that anyone would/could have such an attitude.
I am also not sure about the Mandelbrot image … my immediate thought was of the “snowflake” curve of the standard Mandelbrot pattern. If we change magnification then we see the same pattern repeated. However, it is all part of one curve …. just seen at different magnifications. Here, on the other hand, I think that you are rather referring to the statistical notion of taking different sized samples and getting regression to the mean which often results in a “normal” distribution. Although we tend to think of the Gaussian Curve as a smooth bell-shaped curve, it’s very rare that when real world examples are graphed, they give exact matches to a normal curve – there will be peaks and troughs but it’s not a repeating pattern like in the Madlebrot set. Maybe I am just being pedantic because the image does convey the idea of repeatedly getting similar patterns depending on the scale (or magnification) … but that was my first thought, it brought me up a little sharp and, for a moment, I was a little confused.
I do appreciate how difficult it can be to compress complex thoughts into only a “few paragraphs” … for the record – you “couple of thoughts” are almost as long as the original postcard.
Normally, writing the weekly postcard is fairly easy. I have some notes gathered from news articles during the week and it’s just of organising them into some sort of order. When writing others or articles I normally have something I want to say and have a few headings for paragraphs and try to limit mysled to between one and two thousand words. Often, however, I fail. It’s either too long so I have decide if I am going to leave things as they are or go through and cut, precis – for example, to cut out the examples, (which often make the point better than I can say them). Just occasionally, however, it’s a pointed piece I am left with just five or six hundred words and I wonder if I should add something … usually, I leave it.
You say that you are prepareing a website, do let me know when it goes live!
You also said I could share this … so I have taken you at your word and posted it as a comment to the postcard on the site. I am not promising that anyone will read it, or comment … but you never know.
Thanks, once again, for the feedback and the food for thought.