*
Pat was pleased to see John Ennis again. Their first meeting went back to an art fair in Paris, it was when Pat had sought the advice of a specialist in Asian art after acquiring his Cheney Walk home in London. Together they had visited museums and art collections with Ennis enlightening him on the history of Asian art, followed by auction rooms where they bid for decorative collectables.
Ennis owned galleries in London, Paris and Zurich. More than ten years earlier his sensational discovery of the bones of the last known surviving Homo erectus, had made international news headlines. It happened during one of his expeditions to remote areas of Malaysian Sarawak, on the Island of Borneo, in search of tribal heirlooms.
The Hong Kong Fine Art Asia fair was a must for all lovers of collectible fine art. With the presence of museum-quality artworks spanning five thousand years of history, from archaic Chinese bronzes to contemporary art, it was a venue that attracted dealers and buyers from the world over.
John Ennis was present amongst the ninety or so renowned international dealers presenting some of the finest examples of Asian and Western art, both ancient and modern. Pat’s interest was in ancient Chinese bronzes, ceramics and works of art, which had grown after a guided tour by Lili of the Shanghai Museum’s remarkable collection.
That morning he had met up with Ennis the Peninsula Hotel and after a late breakfast they headed for Central on the Star Ferry. Pat, like his friend, never missed the opportunity to take a ride on the ferry, nothing pleased them more than the chance to mingle with the crowds of office workers and tourists during the ten minute trip across the harbour.
The contrast between China and the UK always came as a pleasant surprise on those fine Hong Kong days. The crowds, the movement, a sense of purpose. The economic climate that stifled the North Atlantic nations economies was depressing compared to the seemingly endless boom that China was thriving on. European and American growth had plunged to near zero whilst that of China hovered around ten percent, as it had done so for as many years he could remember. Of course China had started from zero, but that did not comfort Western leaders faced with the dilemma of paralysing stagnation and debt.
More than two-thirds of all global growth was expected to come from countries of the developing world, where demand was solid and was not dependant on recovery in the West. Ennis understood Pat’s optimism, which his friend reminded him should be tempered by past experience, which had always demonstrated, however good the figures appeared to be, there were always unexpected dangers lurking in the shadows, ready to ensnare unwary and inexperienced investors.
At the ferry terminal in Central, Pat’s driver was waiting to take them for the short ride to the Convention Centre and the sale preview. It was a spectacular modern building that over-looked the harbour which had played a central role in the 1997 hand-over ceremony ending more than a century and a half of British presence in China.
That evening Pat with Lili accompanied by John Ennis, arrived for the opening seance of Sotheby’s annual Hong Kong sale at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre situated on the North shore of the Island overlooking Victoria Harbour in Wanchai.
It was one of the high points of the former colony’s art season.
LIBYA
Libya had become a dysfunctional state. Before the demise of Muammar Gaddafi there had been order. Watching the smoke and ruins on the TV screen John Francis was reminded of the trip he had made to the country with friends from Trinity’s department of classical history, soon after the enigmatic colonel had eased travel restrictions for Western visitors.
The news that NATO had refused to commit itself on the possibility of air strikes on Leptis Magna, if it was discovered military equipment had been hidden there, was yet another sign of increasing human folly to academics and archaeologists.
After visiting the stunningly beautiful ruins of the Roman theatre at Sabratha, perhaps the finest piece of extant Roman architecture Francis had ever seen, they had flown east to Cyrenaica where more marvels were to be discovered.
Their visit was a precursor to a new cooperation programme with Libyan archaeologists and researchers in the planning. It included a field trip to the Akakus Mountains in the south-west of the country where a number of prehistoric sites were being explored. Francis remembered their journey through the southern desert, their proximity to unspoilt nature, sleeping under the star filled sky in tiny one man tents, an unforgettable experience.
At that time the Gaddafi family reigned over the country with an iron fist, a situation that then seemed immutable. The ‘mad colonel’ could not have imagined that in so short a time he would meet a bloody end, surrounded by a throng of rebels in the dusty war torn market town of Sabha on the edge of the Sahara, with a bullet in his head.
Was Libya better off? Certainly not. Perhaps Nicolas Sarkozy’s philosopher friend had been as crazy as Gaddafi. Bernard-Henri Levy, flaunting his bouffant hairstyle, a ridiculous French bobo intellectuel, had harangued rebels with a fiery oration from the top of a gun carrying pickup truck, camping a latter day Fidel Castro before fawning reporters of French television.
Akakus Mountains – Libya
Unlike Castro he was a foreigner, and Jewish to boot, in an Arab Muslim country, without the means to back his inflammatory discourse. Tragically a worse fate than the self-proclaimed philospher’s harangue awaited the war torn factions of the benighted country. It was almost as if the eternal destiny of Bedouin tribes was internecine conflict: killing their leaders; and replacing them by like tyrants.
The savage nature and beauty of the Libyan desert was highlighted one morning when Francis crept from his tent to find a suitable spot to relieve himself. Crouched between the rocks he overlooked a vast reg − a rock strewn plain, unmarked by man, which faded into a purple haze, shrouding the distant mountains. A staggeringly breathtaking setting for an early morning shit.
Francis, who had seen the Himalayas, the wonders of the Serengeti, Pacific Islands, the Russian Steppe and the Andes, contemplated the scene in awe. It was an existential moment, the realisation of his own insignificance and of civilisation's fleeting existence.
Man had left few if any mark on the majestic scene. A million hues of ochre decorated the panorama before him and only the soft whisper of the morning wind fitfully interrupted the silence. The beauty of nature moved him to tears, more powerful than the legendary Mountains of Mourne at home in County Down, celebrated by the sad laments of his own tribe’s tragic history.
Later that day, in the valley that lay below them, they collected stone tools left by passing hunters ten thousand or more years earlier. As far as the eye could see was a carpet of stone tools left by prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Middle and Upper Pleistocene eras, who had shaped the landscape of the Messak Settafet escarpment.
As Francis held one of the smooth chocolate coloured stone tools in his hand; polished by time and the dust of the desert, he was moved by a deep sense of communion with the hunter, bridging the millennia that separated their different worlds. It was an epiphany, a moment of realization, a holistic vision, a flash of understanding. As William Burroughs, the American writer who had lived in Tangiers, crudely put it; ‘a frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of the fork’.
Francis wondered about the meaning of life; earlier ways of life; past civilisations, the vestiges of which lay in ruins on the shores of the Mediterranean, more than one thousand kilometres to the north, the modern world, its obsession with money, religion, and senselessness killing.
UKRAINE
Barton was not in the least surprised to learn Blair’s strange spin doctor, now a peer of the realm, was about to trade up to an eight million pound home in London. The lord had been a recent guest speaker at a conference organised by the Foundation for Effective Governance at the InterContinental Hotel in Kiev, invited by the Ukraine’s richest man, the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, partnered by the mouthpiece of capitalism: The Financial Times.
During his address in televised debate, the lord lavished praise on the host country: ‘As a British and European politician, I have come to admire your country... Ukraine needs to be put on the map - where it is, its people, beauty and its landscape and coastline.’
The strange lord had been flown in on an all expenses paid trip for the event sponsored by the controversial oligarch. The costs paid for by a foundation set up and funded by Akhmetov, though the peer denied claims he had received a substantial fee.
Akhmetov, who had paid one hundred and thirty six million pounds for the UK’s most expensive penthouse near Hyde Park, had been accused by his enemies of having underworld links. True or untrue, the question remained: Who had he robbed? For the average Londoner, struggling to find decent accommodation, the accusations did not come as a surprise, conjecture apart, how else could he have come by such a vast fortune in a poor strife torn country with few natural resources? Some suspected underworld links, others questionable business dealings, money laundering and dubious financial affairs.
The revelations concerning New Labour’s fellow travellers no longer surprised. Whilst the British working man and his family continued to suffer from the policies implemented under New Labour, its former leaders and cohorts, profited from the generosity lavished on them by the super-rich who had been afforded help to become even richer during the so called socialists period in power. Its former leaders were invited to the tables of their benefactors and in return they lavished praise on countries of doubtful human rights, frequenting, all costs paid, post-Soviet robber barons, whose fortunes had been built on the industrial heritage stolen from their people.
Sudden wealth, secret loans, questionable friendships were of course all about ‘people getting filthy rich’.
Barton had witnessed the lord’s links to Russian oligarchs five years previously in the Aegean, since confirmed by his connections to Oleg Deripaska and others including Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev.