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Does anyone get mail these days?  I have received one letter since the beginning of the year and that was a request for me to prove that I was still  alive.  I am.  

When I lived in Sudan there was no telephone network,  no postal service and of course it was before the age of the internet.  The newspapers were in Arabic, which I couldn't read and the one English language publication seemed to concentrate on haboobs (dust storms) and when the next cloud of locusts was going to arrive.  At work we had an old telex machine.  Anyone remember those?  Frankly life was so hard there, survival replaced the need to know what was going on in the rest of the world.  

One night I went to the airport to collect someone.  Flights always arrived in the middle of the night because the heat during the day melted the tarmac.  The man I was meeting came down the steps of the British Airways flight waving a British newspaper.  'We've sunk the Belgrano,' he shouted.  'What's a Belgrano?' I asked.  Apparently  the Falklands war had been going on for some time and by the time the Argentinian ship, the Belgrano, was sunk it had nearly ended.  Ignorance is bliss sometimes.

Last Saturday someone set fire to 10 cars in the car park about 70 yards from where I live.  This is one of those strange French pastimes, although normally they choose New Year's Eve to indulge in it.  For those owners of the cars their lives are totally disrupted, they can't get to work, take their children to school, keep  appointments, go shopping,  and sorting out insurance claims is no walk in the park.   Why do they set fire to cars, do they ever get caught and what is their punishment?  One lesson to be learned is don't leave anything inside.

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