…just had a knife pulled on me.

Was out training for my climb up Kilimanjaro and walking some back routes when I felt some guy behind me. I never like people walking directly behind me, so I slowed, adjusted my laces and allowed him to walk by. Ten yards later and he stops and has a piss on the side of the path (as they do out here) and consequently I had to walk ahead of him again. Call it a sixth sense, but something just didn’t feel right and so I walked off into the bush and carried on along a route parallel to the path.

He continued to stare right at me and although it’s disconcerting at times, staring is not uncommon out here. I just continued along my way.

The next thing I know…and he’s running down the side of the bank at me pulling something from his trousers. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but then I saw the flash of the blade…and it was a big, large kitchen knife! He’s running at me shouting, “Stop! Money! Money!”.

It’s the first (and hopefully the last) time I have been confronted with someone who has a large knife they intend to use against me. The sight of the blade was absolutely chilling. Almost disbelief. Is this really happening?
My reaction? I got angry. I got really angry and as loud as I could, just screamed at him “No! No f*cking way! No! No! No f*cking way!”

As he was almost on me, I just sidestepped onto my right foot, sending him one way, whilst then moving back onto my left and then just sprinted. Sprinted for dear life and didn’t look back until I had run into another field and up to the main road. By the time I did, he had gone.
I can tell you, my heart was beating quite fast by then.

The silly thing is that I only had 50p on me at the time. However, I had a rucksack with ipod, mobile and stuff I needed for climbing Kili. However, I just didn’t want to stick around and see what materialised.

It just brings back the harsh realties that Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world and some of its people are so, so desperate. Whilst we all know not to travel alone at night, an attack in broad daylight is incredibly rare.

I think I’ll be choosing a different route tomorrow.

Nick is training for his assault on Kilimanjaro, which he undertakes on the 22nd February in aid of the Amani Children’s Home… Please give generously to this extraordinarily worthy cause.

We’ll be keeping you updated on Nick’s progress on Fingertips, we all wish him well and more than anything else, a safe return.

The rights of women and children are rarely recognized in Tanzanian society. A lack of education and a fear of reprisal actions prohibit them from voicing these rights. Tanzania has signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), but has failed to enact a domestic child protection law to uphold the principles in this international treaty.

Local inheritance traditions reinforce women and children’s inferior position to men in the social hierarchy. An increasing divorce rate in Tanzania has contributed to a large number of boys being driven out of their homes by step-mothers who feel they pose a threat to her own children’s inheritance.

What happens to street-children?
Without help from organizations like Amani, street-children are trapped in a cycle of poverty and neglect that few are able to escape. They lack the basic necessities of food, health care, and a safe place to stay. Like many other Tanzanian children, homeless children are unable to afford an education, and they miss out on the important life skills that are usually learned in the home. Children living on the street face the constant prospect of physical, verbal and sexual abuse from peers and adults. Sniffing glue and petrol is a common way to dull hunger pains and blot out the violence they face on a daily basis.

The problems associated with street-children extend beyond the plight of the children themselves. The entire society is impoverished by the lost potential of homeless children and youth. In the long term, street-children end up unskilled and jobless, often resorting to crime.

Amani’s Mission
Amani Children’s Home is committed to reducing the number of children living on the streets in Tanzania by providing a nurturing place for homeless children to heal, grow, and learn. In addition to providing long-term care, Amani aims to reunite children with their relatives when possible and to equip their families with the tools they need to be self-sustainable. Amani is dedicated to creating a path for each child that leads to a future filled with hope.

Nick Hall climbs Killimanjaro on 22nd February for the Amani Children’s Home

Visit Nick’s Donation page now, and help the Amani make a difference.

Amid the advances represented by Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle I’ve felt like something of a Luddite lately as I’ve made my way through assorted battered paperbacks.

Unlike the Luddites I’ve so far not managed to get my hands on an iPad or Kindle, but then I don’t really feel any inclination to do so either.

This is partly because I’ve got so many unread books lying around – the product of having eyes bigger than my bookshelves and spending too much time browsing in charity shops – but also because I love books not just as literature, but as objects in themselves.

I don’t know what an iPad feels like, but it can’t feel much different to an enlarged iPod which feels cold and soulless. I’d always rather put on a CD album and flick through its sleeve notes than listen to it on my iPod and read about the album online.

But even more than CDs, books have a unique, tangible side to them. Every book is different, be it in size, thickness, hardness, smell, or feel.

As I wrote about the new design of the Granta magazine – a deceptive name as it’s actually produced in book format – on one of my now-abandoned blogs back in 2008:

“When I picked it up, I felt drawn to it. Its matt cover is seductively calm to hold and as your hands brush the gloss cover image something akin to arousal flutters through your fingers.

“This new Granta is engaging more of my senses than the old Granta. It has a new smell, and these thicker pages sound different as I turn them. Maybe I should lick it.”

Just as important as the feel and the smell of a book is its cover.

Covers can define a book, can set the idea of a book firmly in our heads before we’ve read it and be the first trigger points when we remember a certain book.

Penguin’s cover designs

Penguin’s changing approach to cover design is documented in Phil Baines’s book Penguin By Design.
With the arrival of the 60s and Alan Aldridge as art director, the company’s covers became less generic and more about expressing an individual book’s ideas.

This was seen in the cover for Aldous Huxley’s Island and has continued to the present day thanks to designers like David Pelham who developed the idea of giving authors’ books a particular look.

Take for example the Evelyn Waugh covers that he oversaw, which for some readers may define the books as much as the books themselves.

Wayne Gooderham discussed this last year on the Guardian Books Blog:

“Obviously, the text is the thing, but the cover of a book can surely influence our reading of said text. I’m sure there are many readers of Breakfast at Tiffany’s who cannot help but picture Holly Golightly looking uncannily similar to Audrey Hepburn thanks to the cover photograph’s tyrannical hold over our imagination.”

The perfect cover

He goes on to discuss the search for the perfect cover, and that for him the first Faber and Faber paperback edition provided just that for Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.

Yet my copy of New York Trilogy is a later edtion, and this for me is the perfect cover: with its simple blurred shot of a quintessential American image it represents pure Auster – something American, undoubtedly, but seen through the squinted and suspicious eyes of years spent feasting on European literature.

Gooderham’s preferred cover just looks tacky, like GCSE art work. It doesn’t feel beautiful and real yet slightly unsettling in the way that Auster’s writing does.

The point is that books are objects of beauty that hold an individual allure. Your copy of such and such a book is your copy, and every crease in the spine that you’ve fingered for hours while reading it is yours alone. Every faded page or every coffee stain is yours.

Like an animal marking out his territory, you have marked this out as your book, and the cover is a part of that. And the dirty stain that my copy of John Banville’s The Infinities acquired after I put my bag in a puddle is for me an ineluctable and significant part of the cover design.

And this individuality is something that a Kindle or and iPad cannot provide.

My Kindle and your Kindle are the same. They look the same, feel the same, smell the same.

With the arrival of electronic readers the pleasures that one can take in developing a bookcase, rearing it and watching it grow as a part of your home – and as a part of you – are slowly being forced out the door.

My book collection is precious to me, and God only knows what would have happened if it had all been stored on a Kindle or iPad that I’d let into contact with a puddle.

For all your culture, whatever you’re into…Fingertips.net.

Recent attempts by the armed forces to shed their racist image and appeal to religious minorities are failing, according to records held by the Ministry of Defence.

Figures obtained under freedom of information laws show less than 1.5% of those working in the British Army, Royal Navy or Royal Air Force declare themselves to be anything other than Christian or of no fixed religion.

The Army performs best in recruiting soldiers from ethnic groups but still employs around 98% of its workforce from Christian or non-religious families. In both the Army and Navy the figure rises above 99%. In 2009, 188,370 men and women were employed by the three forces. Of those only 2,230 are confirmed members of non-Christian faiths.

This news comes despite recent attempts by the army to broaden its appeal. Religious leaders from minority faiths are now employed by the army and full provisions are made for religious practice where circumstances allow.

The forces have been seeking to rehabilitate their image after a number of embarrassing incidents which left them open to accusations of institutional racism. The most notable of these was last year’s leaked video in which Prince Harry was filmed using the word ‘Paki’ while on army duty. In 2005, it emerged that the number of ethnic soldiers recruited by the Army had been actively restricted until the late 1970s.

The Army has increased its intake of Afro-Caribbean soldiers more successfully. 9% of Army recruits are now non-white but the House of Commons Defence Committee has raised concerns about the number taken from Commonwealth countries, rather than minorities already resident in Britain. It also remains the case that the Navy and RAF still struggle to match the achievements of their Army counterparts.

Predictably, British Muslims are one group particularly under-represented. There are now around 2.4million Muslims in the United Kingdom, roughly 4% of the total population. In spite of this, only 0.3% of those in the armed forces are declared as Muslims. This amounts to only 500 active personnel.

Some breakthroughs, such as the appointment of Amjad Hussain as the Navy’s first Muslim Admiral in 2006, have been made but more work will have to be done if such cases are to cease to become remarkable exceptions.

For all your culture features and headlines, whatever your culture. . . Fingertips.net.

With email, text messaging and now even social networking sites making it so easy for people to keep up to date with the goings on of their friends, family and in some cases strangers, the most basic form of communication – speech – is taking a back seat.

Meal time used to traditionally be a time for families to get together around a table and converse. However, with the increasingly rushed nature of life, such occasions are now rare and so the art of conversation is not being instilled in children from the home at a young age. Even when families do come together, it is often the case that their mobile phones accompany them to the table and so rather than have a conversation, they are busy texting away or checking in on various social networking sites.

Such is the nature of the up rise of technology, that even when not being used it is affecting the quality of writing and verbal conversations. The calibre of face to face conversations is dropping as they evolve to resemble technological communication. People are beginning to transmit in short, sharp chunks, mirroring the nature of text messages or social networking sites. As a result, we are also becoming poorer listeners as we are falling out of the habit of reading facial expressions and body language. We are no longer used to hearing the subtle, natural tones of speech that vary with mood and emotion and thus are not able to respond adequately.

Another thing to consider is whether or not the dominance of technology is having a greater affect on the younger generation. As the young in society become more and more technology savvy, being given phones at a young age and signing up to social networking sites, there is concern that they are transferring the ‘cyber-language’ that they use into their written work and so their grammar, spelling and punctuation is suffering. If this is the case, then it may be fair to argue that if conversation isn’t already dead, it is fast reaching its demise and that we may not be too far away from a time when speech and conversation is deemed wholly unnecessary.

For all your Culture news and features….whatever you’re into Fingertips.net.

Stars of Eastenders paid homage to much-loved BBC sit-com “Are you being served?” in a one-day charity sale of the wardrobe of the late Wendy Richard MBE.

Renowned London department store Selfridges became a time warp of yesteryear as it was transformed into the antiquated Grace Brothers with old ‘Enders pals taking their place behind the counter.

Former co-star and onscreen son James Alexandrou, said of the event: “I think Wendy would have loved it, this would have been right up her alley.”

Richard, who lost her battle against cancer in February 2009 at the age of 65, played Miss Brahms in the 1970s innuendo-laden comedy show.

Soapstar colleagues such as Natalie Cassidy, June Brown and Ricky Groves took on the roles of old favourites Miss Brahms, Mrs Slocombe and Mr Humphries, while original cast member and former Grace Brothers manager Nicholas Smith, who played Mr Rumbold, was on hand to oversee.

Designer clothing, bags and shoes of the late TV veteran were snapped up, with her old pals vying to purchase some of the goods. Former co-star Ricky Groves purchased a black leather jacket for a pound stretching £20 – “It all counts doesn’t it!”.

Proceeds from the “You Are Being Served….Again” event are being donate to The Lady Taverners charity, which provides sporting opportunities for young people with special needs.

A spokesperson for the charity said: “Wendy was always such a wonderful supporter of the charity, and the turnout today has been fabulous. You couldn’t ask for anything better!”

For all your Culture features and news. . . Fingertips.net

The difficulty of coming to terms with Germany’s past was the theme that overridingly permeated Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and it is also the theme that has saturated his next book, Flights of Love.

A collection of seven short stories, Flights of Love chronicles the flawed love lives of various Germans, examining them with the razor sharp judge’s eye that Schlink routinely applied in his professional life away from literature. As well as being a judge he was also a professor of law at Humboldt University in Berlin, and Yeshiva University in New York, before his retirement in 2006.

While his attention to detail and awareness of lovers’ proclivities and sensitivities are beyond reproach, it is only when writing with an eye on the German relationship with the past – their feelings of guilt and need for reconciliation and forgiveness – that his stories seem to burst off the page into the painful realm of the real.

The first five stories all draw on this wound, particularly in Girl with Lizard, The Other Man and The Circumcision, in which Schlink pulls the skin of his stories as taut as a drum. Every word counts, every comma makes a difference, and every breath within the story is felt acutely.

Girl with Lizard tells the story of a young student obsessed with a painting of his father’s. The painting shows the Girl and Lizard of the title, and turns out to have been taken from the Jews in second world war.

The boy falls in the love with the girl and this stops him being able to truly fall in love with any of his lovers: partially because he cannot put up with the sham of hiding the painting under his bed every time a girl comes round – out of fear that they’ll somehow know the painting’s heritage – partially because he just prefers the girl in the painting to the girls he has in real life.

The story ends with him burning the picture, burning the chains binding him to his father’s past, and heading home to begin his life anew.

In The Other Man, a retired widower finds out that his dead wife had had an affair with another man. He begins writing to his wife’s ex-lover (who doesn’t know about her death) in her name, concocts a way of meeting and getting to know this other man, and helps him plan a reception for his wife – all with the intention of humiliating him. Much against his expectations it all ends on the night of the reception; with him reconciling himself with his wife’s death and his own broken relationship with his children. He realises that his wife had simply “shared her happiness in a number of ways,” had been happy with both him and the other man, and had actually brought love into the world rather than shattered love by having an affair.

The Circumcision sees a German have himself circumcised in an attempt to heal the wounds that seem to have arisen between himself and his American-Jewish girlfriend. When he presents her, as it were, with his changes, she claims to have never noticed whether he was circumcised or not. The man’s quiet exit at four o’clock the next morning shows his realisation that getting circumcised under anaesthetic is nowhere near big enough or painful enough a gesture to truly deal with the issues in his relationship.

Just like him, all of Schlink’s heroes in this book eventually come to some point of realisation, they walk up to some kind of pain barrier and have to confront it. Nothing can be changed without pain, and as the protagonist of the final story, The Woman at the Gas Station, relentlessly weeps at the wheel of his car, he has to stand up to his true self and walk out on his wife right then, on a deserted road in the middle of America, in order to face up to his pain and begin his new beginning.

After spending a summer glaring at works by Raphael and Da Vinci, it’s somewhat alarming to walk into an exhibition deemed so “21st Century”. You can therefore imagine the scepticism held towards the new exhibition ‘Decode: Digital Design Sensations’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Porter Gallery. But it’s not exactly what one might expect of Digital Art.

Upon entry stands a great mechanical “waterfall” made of black and white blocks, slowly ticking and shifting in place with a digital rhythmic pattern. Created by German artist Julius Popp, ‘bit.code’ represents the rapid nature of data as it moves through internet networks.

It is this type of ‘Digital World’ along with its technological advances that are a key source of inspiration within the exhibition – often quite literally.

The first section of the exhibition, called ‘Code’, shows how computational codes are used as raw materials for subject matter; as sources of actual artistic beauty. The result is a constant flow of moving patterns and colours – a response to the motion of digital codes (which to most of us will appear similar to our computer screen savers).

But then there are the pieces that remove the coldness often associated with digitalism because they touch a nerve and develop a personality.

Digital Zoetrope by Troika, a multi-disciplinary art and design practice, tells stories through selected words that float to the surface from a sea of unreadable codes, constantly moving only to re-submerge and find us again.

Daan Roosegaarde’s Dune is a collection of LED light reeds that react as you walk through, creating an ever-changing immersive environment – one that had the children running in utter delight.

‘Interactivity’, the second section, focuses on viewer interaction and participation, with many pieces dependent on the presence of an audience.

Dandelion by Sennep and Yoke is a playful installation allowing you to blow the seeds of a dandelion clock using a hairdryer. Using infrared light, it mimics the motion of wind. Alternatively, both Mirror Mirror by the Jason Bruges Studio, and Weave Mirror by Daniel Rozin, inject an element of sentimentality into their work by recreating your reflection and leaving you lingering in awe of their innovation.

Finally there are the pieces that make up ‘Network’, which draw on ideas of increased connectivity and digital tracking. Flight Patterns is an extraordinary visualisation of recorded aeroplane journeys across America, told through colourful moving light-threads.

I believe that in order for this digital art form to evolve, it will have to maintain viewer/audience interaction to trigger the sentimentality and attachment one would muster from a painting, because this is when an exhibition can really succeed. Definitely worth a visit, even if just for those who fancy a one-off experience somewhat out of the ordinary.

It’s official. With La Roux, Dizzee Rascal and even the Black Eyed Peas getting in on the act, dance music has taken over pop.

Dance music is everywhere. Think of Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ – a certified banger and Radio One favourite – or La Roux’s ‘In For the Kill’ – this summer’s Ibiza anthem – a huge commercial hit selling some over 600,000 copies, boasting as dubstep’s first smash hit with the Skream remix dominating the airwaves.

Think of the strange, electro funk of Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Boom Boom Pow’ tearing up everything from the dance floors of Fabric to your 11-year-old sister’s room.

Then there’s Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Bashy and others following Dizzee Rascal’s footsteps; ditching the aggro of grime for dance-pop and on their way to becoming the first British rap stars.

In the dance-averse US mainstream, Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas and Rihanna are clogging the billboards with house and electro.

Even normally limelight-shunning alternative has fallen for dance music’s charms.

Take the Mercury Music Prize nominations as proof: Florence & the Machine, Bat For Lashes, La Roux, Friendly Fires, Kasabian and The Invisible are as suited to the dance floor as they are rock clubs.

Even NME is fawning over the likes of Bloc Party, MGMT, Vampire Weekend and the xx, who all have one foot in clubland. Even the metal kids have swapped jumping around like lunatics to Metallica to, well, jumping round like lunatics to Prodigy and Pendulum.

What started this movement to the clubs and dubstep beats though?

Peter Robinson, curator of the Popjustice website thinks it has something to do with the way that genres come and go in broad brush strokes.

“The broadest stroke of all, when you’re faced with an oversaturated male guitar band pop climate, is to swing to the opposite of male and the opposite of guitar and the opposite of band – so La Roux is the total opposite of, for example, The Twang.”

Although this highlights how the music industry is always looking for something new to sell, this genuinely feels like a new generational shift.

Lining up outside Fabric I found that the new crop of dancefloor enthusiasts aren’t the fanatical acid house fans who used to frequent the joint. It’s the iPod generation with the ability to pick up and access the best of past and present.

Jaimie Hodgson, NME’s new band editor, was recently quoted in MixMag saying: “People and bands might still wear the clothes of different ‘style tribes’, but they’ll still pick the best of all kinds of music.

“The perfect example is the xx. It’s second nature for them to combine amazing low end that close to dubstep with new wave guitar that sounds like the Cure.”

It’s not all about mashing different things together though and hoping it fits.

Dubstep has been the magical missing link, the ester bonds in the DNA of today’s pop music, knitting together the disparate scenes. What’s happening now is merely a return to what Britain has always excelled at, taking music from the clubs out into the open.

In the 1960s the Beatles, the Stones, Kinks and the Who played the black dance music of the time, and every next great band from the Clash to Human League have always had one foot on the dancefloor.

The iPod generation has also brought something far greater to the new sound.

Tired of the closed-knit, sterile markets that have been in place since the mid-80s with major record labels, they have learnt to use new technology and ways to work on shoestring budgets to bring a work ethic and philosophy that is flourishing in today’s digital world.

For more news and views on all things music, check out Fingertips.net

As the noughties draw to a close, people inevitably try to wrap up the decade in a convenient package, slap a label on it and sell it off as a profitable Christmas book that no one will read.

Summarising 3653 days of news, culture and everything else in processed chunks of bland generalisations is a prospect that many people, mostly journalists, find irresistible.

They make such generalisations at the end of every year, but with the closing of a decade they think have a licence to freak out.

There are endless Top Tens and Top 100s all over the internet and in newspapers that no one in their right mind would either read or pay any serious attention to.

Just do a Google search for “noughties” and any other word, and you will be met with a list of some kind about the decade that almost was.

Even “noughties crap” brings up the highly enlightening Sexiest Women of the Noughties (So Far) on Hecklerspray, with its title which implies a woman may still be born this decade who could oust Jessica Alba from her top spot, despite being only one month old.

Hecklerspray’s list does have some hint of originality about it however, as it contains only 24 entries, rather than a round number.

The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the rest would never dare produce a list that wasn’t made up of ten, 50, or 100 entries, a fact which shows not only how eager they are to fill column inches with this easy-to-produce nonsense, but how generic they are.

It’s not as if there aren’t already more than enough awards ceremonies every year that are desperate to tell us what is the best and what we should be spending our money on.

Take books for example. There are, to name but a few, The Man Booker Prize, The Costa Book Awards, The Guardian First Book Award, The Orwell Prize, and what must be the most eminent of the lot, The Galaxy British Book Awards.

The Times’ recent list, The 100 Best Books of the Decade, is little but an amalgam of the winners and shortlisted books from the last ten years of the aforementioned prizes, from 2008’s Booker winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger at number 80, to 2003’s Whitbread (now known as Costa) winner, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, at 25.

What exactly constitutes being “the best” in the eyes of The Times is left open to conjecture. Is it breaking down narrative walls in fiction? Providing insights into unknown areas? Selling the most copies?

No one at The Times seems to know or care, but just to be safe they’ve thrown in some populist numbers – Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code at ten – some political stuff – Naomi Klein’s No Logo at 50 and even some historical stuff  – Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography at 45.

There really is something for everyone here, and that is why it is so dire. It’s nothing but bookcase facism that tells you what should be on your shelves for everyone to see next time you have a dinner party.

To make a generalisation of my own, if anything the noughties was the decade that spawned the culture of what could be called “Bestism”.

Reality TV gave us Big Brother, The X-Factor, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and Strictly Come Dancing, all of which are based on the premise of finding out who is “the best” and dimissing everyone else.

The newspapers’ noughties lists are lodged deeply in this vein. What they are saying is that if you don’t own or aren’t familiar with the contents, you’re not suitable to mix it with the rest of us and should be voted off the social, intellectual and hipness circuits.

Or to turn out a phrase that somewhat epitomises noughties exclusionism, “you are the weakest link, goodbye.”

For all the latest news and views on television, music, books and more tune in to Fingertips.net