One of the initiatives I did know about before the Queen issued her list was the Olive Tree project. Because the man honoured, Steve Miller, is a colleague of mine at City University. This is the essence of what it does:

The project brings together, each year, a group of up to 20 Israeli and Palestinian undergraduate students to study at City University, London. The programme includes:-

• Three years’ study for a BSc or BA degree in one of the subjects offered by the University;
• Participation in a cultural and social programme designed to encourage dialogue and commitment to a positive shared future for Israelis and Palestinians;
• 6 - 12 months work (after completion of degree) on projects designed to support the development of the communities of the region.

Steve Miller started it in 2003 shortly before his retirement. He is actually a psychologist, who did his degree in the days, when British psychology had more to say about the behaviour of rats than the behaviour of human beings. Steve learnt his human psychology in the university of life and spent more of his career talking to sociologists than to other psychologists.

If only there were more courses like this the world might become a more peaceful place.

Another interesting New Year’s honour goes to Ed Posey who has been beavering away since 1984 from his house on the edge of Hampstead Heath translating some of those New Age ideas into practical reality. He has built an international organisation doing his bit for climate change and encouraging people friendly businesses. Gaia works

in the field of environmental protection, socially and ecologically responsible businesss, and sustainable livelihoods.

Despite the grey beard he is still recognisably the same chap as the businessman I knew slightly in the 1970s.

Gaia Trustee awarded OBE

One of the delights of doing the old journalistic chore of ploughing through the New Year’s Honours List is that you always find something interesting. My favourite this year is John Wilding, who must be well into his eighties. But he is still making clocks, not the Casio variety, but the way they used to be made.

John Wilding, FBHI

He bought his own lathe, did everything himself, and taught other people to do the same thing. He has replicated many of the great clocks from history, like the one pictured below. They look beautiful. And they also tell the time.

This is a typical sixteenth century clock, allegedly very easy to make. Find out more by visiting his web site.

A few samples

In the Page 3 slot The Sun had a picture of Saddam in his underpants, but by the time I went in to copy it here, it had been removed. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch had been on the telephone?

The Guardian extracts a comment from another viewpoint.

Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper

The timing of this execution [during the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha] is an affront to all Arabs and Muslims. It is an act of scorn against a great religion by the United States and the Iraqi government.

Arab public opinion wonders who deserves to be tried and executed: Saddam Hussein who preserved the unity of Iraq, its Arab and Islamic identity and the coexistence of its different communities such as Shias and Sunnis … or those who engulfed the country into this bloody civil war.

The Times Iraq correspondent, Ned Parker, has an instant thoughtful comment on what the execution means.

Perhaps, Saddam’s death will embolden Mr. Maliki to take real risks for peace. But many of Iraq’s Shia elite carry deep suspicions that Iraq’s Sunni politicians are just looking to overthrow them.

Saddam’s death is Mr. Maliki’s moment of truth. He must take the political capital from executing Saddam to prove that the Shia have moved beyond their fears of the old regime.

If he cannot lead the Shia on a moderate path, Iraq looks likely to fall into civil war, if it hasn’t already done so. The current fight between Sunnis and Shia could very well be Saddam’s legacy. Two years ago, during the battle of Fallujah, a Marine commander told me Iraq reminded him of Yugoslavia. After the country’s strongman Josip Broz Tito died, the country’s ethnic and religious demons bubbled to the surface and sparked war. He feared the same thing was happening in Iraq.

The Daily Express, which used to be first with the news, was out of doubt when I checked five hours after the execution.

Saddam will hang today

30/12/06

By Tom Whitehead

EVIL Saddam Hussein was due to swing from the gallows at dawn today.

In The Independent, Robert Fisk, one of the most experienced journalists covering the Middle East, gives his assessment of the effect on Arab opinion.

Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America

Published: 30 December 2006

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a “great day” for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi “government”, but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

And further down, this paragraph.

But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a “martyr” to the will of the new “Crusaders”.

Overall the coverage showed the British press at its best. A much wider range of views than is common in the American papers. Some first rate comment by journalists who must have still been suffering from Christmas hangovers.

While preparing to comment on this morning’s execution I checked the blog of the Iranian President. He last posted on 21 December with a Christmas message! And it reads like propaganda for George Bush’s religion. Here are the first two paragraphs.

Make of it what you will. But I studied it carefully. And I cannot find anything about him wanting to give up his weapons of mass destruction.

I am struggling to present my blog in a way which fits in with Technorati, which seems to be the main influence on the ratings.

I may temporarily be making things worse. So please bear with me while I deal with these technical problems.

Manic depressives don’t like the currently fashionable label for the condition: bi-polar disorder. As Randy, who added his comment to one of my recent blogs said, this is the personality type we are stuck with and we don’t like well-meaning doctors labelling it a ‘disorder’. No manic depressive would want to minimise the difficulties the condition can cause. But most have reason to be thankful for some of its advantages.

In Darwinian terms, it has survival value, particularly when it comes to filling some of the work roles in modern society. It is particularly useful for jobs like those of the journalist, working an a big story against deadlines, and the manager who has to pull out all the stops and work for several days and nights meeting the demands of a cruciial big contract.

Manic depressives would not cope well with working 10 or 12 hours a day or more, five or six days a week, for months at a time, as is demanded by some employers in our highly competitive work places. But working those hours is almost certainly not good for the health of non-manic depressive human beings.

The term ‘bi-polar disorder’ came out of the same kind of thinking which turned rat catchers rodent operators and the elderly into senior citizens. Political correctness run wild.

Manic depressive is a good descriptive label for the condition. It is also a useful descrition for families, friends and colleagues who have to deal with them. They can be wary when they notice the switch from normal moods, to excessive elation or over-powering gloom.

The number of manic depressives who murder other people in the manic mood or kill themselves in the depressive phase is a tiny minority of the total.

Many people are much more fearful than they need be of manic depressives. This, I think, is because there is some confusion between manic depressives in the manic phase and psychopaths, schizophrenics and people who suddenly have a psychotic break. Unlike psychopaths, manic depressives do not lack any moral sense, though when manic they do pay insufficient attention to the needs of others around them. Unlike schizophrenics, they do not lack the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, they are simply over-optimistic about what they can do themselves and what they can persuade other people to do. Unlike the person who has a psychotic break, they do not exhibit behaviour which is totally different to their behaviour in the past. (They do not, as one university lecturer I knew, suddenly believe that malign electrical forces are threatening the house and that the only way to deal with it is to turn on all the taps and leave them constantly flowing.)

This is my own rule of thumb. I am not starting a new career as a pyschiartrist. I do not envy their job in the field of mental illness, where there is so much which still do not know. Particularly, since the individuals they may be trying to heal, may happen to be schizophenics as well as manic depressives, etc, etc. But I do wish today’s psychiartrists would listen more to some of the sages of the past, like Ronald Laing, the Scottish pychiartrist, who took

the expressions or communications of the individual patient or client as representing valid descriptions of lived experience or reality rather than as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder.

Laing did not get everything right. But his insights into mental illness arose from the fact that he had to battle with his own schizophrenia and bouts of depression and alcholism. He had to learn how to manage his own conditions first. But his work is also permeated by his impressive and unusally wide-ranging scholarship. His books are still worth reading today.

(The Wikipedia biog does not mention Laing’s schizophrenia. My source is the man himself in a conversation with me a few years before his death. )

This morning I woke up early. It seemed like the middle of the night. I felt refreshed but I hesitated before I got up although I felt refreshed. Manic depressives learn that they must be careful not to overdo it during manic phases, because human beings need some sleep to function properly. Manic depressives can manage for longer periods than most with little sleep. After all, they make up for it in the depressive phases, when they might not feel like getting up at all.

What other people need to know is that manic depressives quite often have irregular sleep patterns. Most children of my generation were sent to bed too early by their parents. I used to read novels or listen to my two-valve radio set until I was ready to drop off. It was only gradually I realised that my sleeping patterns were more irregular than the average.

And, more important, that this had advantages as well as disadvatages. I remember going on a bicycle ride to Ireland in my early teens, my first trip abroad. The woman who ran the youth hostel at Cork impressed me with her energy, vitality and gift for story telling. She told me that she was quite often slept for no more than four hours a night.

It was the first of many encounters in my life which alerted me to the fact that human beings are born with huge individual variations. For many years now my habit is not to go to bed until I am ready to sleep. Even if it is 3 AM. Even occasionally if it means not going to bed at all. I probably sleep on average about seven hours but the daily variations are huge. And I find that after a few nights with only a few hours sleep I frequently have a few nights when I sleep for nine or ten hours.

This morning, when I woke up, I found that it was 6.35 AM, which meant that I had had about seven hours of sleep. So I bounded out of bed and started sketching out in my notebook the ideas for ‘Ten things you need to know about manic depressives’. I wrote the first one this morning, by which time I had only identified eight things. The other two will emerge as I am blogging on the first eight. How long that will take depends on how much else I have to do.

And today I have had to spend a lot of time trying to update my typingbytouch web site, which relies on a complicated computer program.

You probably know several, because research has proved that there are a lot of them about. But they do not walk around with badges labelled ‘Help the manics’ or ‘Manic depressives of the world unite’. They do not go around in gangs with other manic depressives. Nor do they walk Hampstead Heath at night looking for other manic depressives to bond with.

So the first thing you need to realise about manic depressives is that they are difficult to spot. This is because there is still a taboo about mental illness in our socitey, so the manic depressives themselves do not advertise their condition. For very good reality reasons of self preservation.

Not a few journalists are manic depressives but I cannot remember a single case in the hundreds of would-be journalists I have interviewed of anyone outing themselves at the interview stage. Contrast them with the gays, who have gradually over my lifetime been accepted by most people as being different, rather than sick or wicked. These days they even boast on their application forms of membership of gay societies. 

Some manic depressives do not even realise themselves that they are manic depressives. They are all aware that they have swings in mood, between elation and sadness that are greater than most people they know. But they do not consider themselves to be suffering from mental illness. Unless they have been sectioned and officially diagnosed by the hospital psychiartrists. Or unless they have talked about their condition to a listening GP who has helped them to understand and manage their condition either with the help of the talking therapies, or, as a last resort, pills.

Many manic depressives develop their own kind of coping strategies for surviving, even prospering. So, if the extended family is still with you, look at them afresh. Odds are there is at least one who will score very high on this ten point scale. There are likely to be several amongst your friends and neighbours. And when you go back to work keep your eyes and ears open as you go to the water cooler. Lots of manic depressives actually do quite well in the work world. Your boss might even be a manic depressive.

Randy, writing from somewhere in the US, has responded to one of my pre-Christmas blogs about manic depression, from his own experience. He makes the point that people are most often hospitalised in the manic phase, although their behaviour, is eccentric rather than dangerous. By contrast, his depressive behaviour was ignored.

it was not till after my hospitalization that I became again suicidal, as I had been for a year before that manic period…and nobody lifted a finger to help me during either of those gloomy periods…What fools ye mortals be!

His comment is worth reading in full. He makes the point that he does not like the term disorder attached the only personality he has available to him. That manic depressives are radically different to depressives. He prefers to call himself a ‘maniacal yo-yo’. Which is something like the thought I expressed to a neighbour last night.

Being a manic depressive is something like riding a roller coaster. Hospitalisation makes it worse by throwing you off the rails. Pills may work for a short time for some people, but they make it more difficult for the yo-yo to control his own behaviour. The downers put the brakes on. The uppers produce a chemical euphoria disconnected with the reality of internal moods.