Good morning, Vietnam
Living images
In this corner of Vietnam, the open bay, just a curve on the coastline is lined with coconut palms. The beach is shockingly littered. In the water mysterious things underfoot could be slugs (seen stranded at the water’s edge) or squelchy plastic bags of discarded stuff. They could be nimble, nipping crabs or half-buried beer cans. And things that brush your leg or arm could be strange weed, stranger jellyfish, or fishing nets.
One afternoon the water was warm and a million, trillion green spores were released, like tiny leaves of maidenhair fern. I was nervous at first to swim in such spotty water, but there were no stings, just a broth of new life, with me for exotic flavour.
The fishing boats here are small round bowls woven from coconut palm. They hold one person, standing, who with a paddle at the front wiggles the boat forward with one hand, playing out (or hauling in) a long trailing net with the other. There is much mending of nets in the daytime and evidence that fishing is a slow, often disappointing labour.
Meanwhile, a minute boy with a whippy stick exercised authority over a herd of bony brown cows, marching them along the beach, cutting short their investigation of my things on the sand. He reminded me of Heidi’s Peter, a tough little so and so, with his work sometimes made harder by marauding kids roaring out of the fishermen’s shacks to scatter the herd just for fun.
At night I went to sit on the sand, under the stars, looking at the fireflies on the horizon which meant the fishing fleet was out. Large crabs cut through my peace, their forays magnified by shadow, clattering, scuttling zigzags of startling swiftness.
Marg Honner
The new Spain
Views from a train
In the bar of the railway station, the only people present are silent old men wearing berets and playing dominoes.
Two soldiers, armed as if ready for Iraq, wander in and order a coke. With each movement, their machine guns swing without malice, covering the room. It is Wednesday afternoon and a storm is brewing. Great leaden clouds sweep in from the west. The clatter of dominoes is the only sound until the rain rattles against the roof.
On this afternoon in Sigüenza, a medieval town in north-western Castilla La Mancha in central Spain, the soldiers are the only reminder of the