French balcony-builder will have some explaining to do

Last night at 11 o’clock, in the centre of the city of Angers, a third-floor balcony suddenly tore itself free and slid towards the ground, killing four students who had been calmly standing on it, celebrating the recent renting of the flat by friends. On its way down, the balcony tore away two lower balconies. The mayor announced that an inquiry will be held with the aim of detecting construction flaws. Click here for a video.

Sensing nerve "repairs" in my body

After my fall down the Gamone stairs, just over a year ago, medical staff examined me to discover if there had been any brain damage, and they said no. Later, in Bretagne, I had several clear indications that my brain seemed to be working successfully. Above all, I found that my technical computing skills on the Macintosh were still perfectly intact (regardless of how family members looked upon this question).

I was still intrigued by the undeniable existence of certain traces of my accident in parts of my face and head, not to mention minor eyesight problems. For example, I have a document that presents an image of a part of my head (I won't provide details) containing a small "pool of muck" that flowed there after my accident. Obviously, I often asked myself how and when this "pool of muck" might disappear, if ever. That's to say, I couldn't imagine that it would simply dry up magically. Surely the liquid "muck" had to flow somewhere.

Well, believe it or not, there have been moments, quite recently, when I suddenly "picked up" an unexpected series of "movements" in my head, as if a process had started. It might continue for ten minutes, during which time I would remain totally incapable of deciding what was happening. There would be no unpleasant sensations, and certainly no pain. Only unexpected noises, like static in an old radio. Then the noises would suddenly stop, just as rapidly as they had started.

Today, I'm persuaded that I was in fact listening to various nerve-repair operations. Besides, these alleged activities have been accompanied, in more-or-less the same time frame, by clear demonstrations that my thinking and memory were returning to normal.

Antipodean adventures

People imagine that the great island continent of Australia is far away from everywhere. In fact, as the following map indicates, the northern tip of Queensland is only a few hundred kilometers from two foreign lands: Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of Papua.

A few weeks ago, five Australians decided that it would be fun to take off from Australia—more precisely, from Queensland's Horn Island in the Torres Strait—in a light plane and drop in at Mopah airport. They thought naively that, once they touched down on Indonesian soil, it would be easy for them to obtain tourist visas enabling them to do a bit of sightseeing before flying back home. Well, the latest news is that they've been fined several thousand dollars, and they're still in jail. In this context, my sister Susan Skyvington has been interviewed in The Australian:

Susan Skyvington, whose son Saul Dalton was detained in Papua for six months in 1999, said the similarities with her son's case were chilling.

"In the first few days he was under house arrest in a hotel and (we were told) we were going to be able to get him out in a few days ... when the documents were sorted out.

"Then they were saying he was not going to be released, they were going to put him through a trial and he was moved to a military police outstation in the jungle."

Mr Dalton, then 25, had gone to East Timor to hand out how-to-vote cards during the referendum on independence from Jakarta. Indonesian-backed militias were intimidating independence supporters at the time and took a dim view of foreigners participating in the political process.

Ms Skyvington said that when violence erupted her son boarded a ferry to Papua to escape, and was told he could sort out his documentation when he arrived. In Papua, he was put to trial and given 10 months' jail, which was reduced for good behaviour. He ended up spending six months in detention.

Ms Skyvington said that her son had never fully recovered from the experience, and now suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another affair. In the above map, I've highlighted a magnificent place in northern Queensland called Cooktown, at the mouth of the Endeavour River, where the navigator James Cook berthed his vessel for a few weeks in 1770, to carry out repairs and replenish their stocks of water and food.

Today, tourists are warned that it's crocodile country, and that they must be constantly "crocwise".

[Click the banner to visit the Cooktown website, which lets you download a
page of survival instructions that should help you to avoid getting eaten alive.]

A few days ago, a 62-year-old Brisbane man who had been camping there with his wife strolled down to the edge of the water to retrieve his crab pots before driving off home. His wife never saw him again, but police discovered the man's camera on the river bank, along with his wristwatch and a sandal. There were track marks of a crocodile, and the line to the crab pots was cut.

Another local animal, the kangaroo, is in the front-page news. An Australian specialist on climate change, Ross Garnaut, has just suggested that people should give up eating beef and lamb and change to kangaroo meat, since our marsupials have the advantage of farting in a less noxious fashion than conventional livestock.

When I observe the quantity and variety of Oriental herbs, spices and Thai fish sauce that are recommended by chefs, to make kangaroo dishes tender and tasty, I'm wary about the possibility of a new source of urban flatulence pollution. Before implementing a change to local mammal meat, Aussie authorities might carry out comparative methane-rejection tests on humans who eat spicy kangaroo dishes as opposed to the ordinary farting of old-fashioned beef eaters.

Things that never happen

Everybody knows that certain theoretically-imaginable events simply never occur in reality. In modern computer-oriented jargon, they might be described as nightmares of a purely virtual nature. Often, in the middle of a long flight, I've wondered—while standing up in the toilets, say, and calmly peeing—how events might unfold if the floor were to give way. Other passengers might complain that somebody's spending a hell of a long time in the toilets, but it's possible that I wouldn't be seriously missed until the plane touched down. And then the experts would start trying to determine the place where I might have fallen. Finally, the investigating committee would announce solemnly that I had simply disappeared down a hole in the toilets, and that my body was no doubt lost forever. A jet set disappearance. In fact, when you think about it, not such a bad way to die.

On flights between Europe and Australia, I've always preferred to travel with Qantas, because Australia's national Flying Kangaroo airline has always had an excellent reputation. I liked the style of their personnel, who seemed to care genuinely about the comfort and well-being of their passengers. I'll never forget the case of a Qantas cabin steward, long ago, who took pleasure in describing, over the aircraft's audio system, the various places in the Australian wilderness over which we were flying. It was like being driven along in a tourist coach with a competent guide.

In any case, concerning my archaic anguish about falling through the bottom of the plane, everybody knows that such things do not happen, neither on Qantas aircraft nor anywhere else.

Correction! Unlikely events of this kind can in fact happen from time to time... such as this morning, over the Philippines, when a hole suddenly appeared in the right wing fuselage of a Qantas Boeing 747 carrying 350 passengers and 19 crew members. The aircraft nosedived through an altitude gap of some six kilometers, with everybody aboard breathing through oxygen masks, before landing safely at Manila. Although many were scared, nobody was hurt.



As I said, Qantas is a great airline, and nothing bad can ever happen to passengers in the cozy warm pouch of the flying kangaroo. Well, almost nothing...

BREAKING NEWS [no pun intended]:

A short well-written article on the BBC News website [display] reveals that the presence of corrosion had been detected in this 17-year-old aircraft back in February. A Qantas spokeswoman reacted by saying: "There was nothing out of the ordinary in these checks." There are, of course, several different kinds of hypotheses concerning the sudden appearance of a gaping hole in such a position of the fuselage... which, incidentally, may have resulted in passenger luggage falling to earth like bombs of a novel kind. An interesting feature of the above-mentioned BBC site is that they've set up a reader-feedback device designed to receive testimony from passengers aboard the Boeing with a hole in its belly. I hope, though, that the website management verifies the authenticity of input, otherwise we're likely to find tales from imaginary travelers on that ill-fated flight.