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Just as the Taliban swept into Kabul, I was coming to the end of Eric Newby’s famous 1956 account of his hiking trip to Afghanistan, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. 

I’d been avoiding news media for a month previous, preferring old books, and was unaware of recent developments. It made the end of the book, especially the 2008 epilogue, very poignant. 

Newby travelled to Afghanistan during a period of unusual peace and stability. He and his climbing companion, Hugh Carless, visited the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul (where fighters are still holding out against the Taliban as I write), and then attempted an ascent of Mir Samir, a mighty peak in the Hindu Kush. 

Entering Nuristan

They failed, but then turned to perhaps the real object of their trip, the attempt to penetrate the mountain passes into Nuristan – an impossibly remote series of valleys known, prior to 1895, as Kafiristan, due to the paganism of the locals (kafir is an Islamic term for a non-believer).

In 1895, Emir Abdur Rahman came from Kabul to subdue and forcibly convert the inhabitants to Islam. I found it extraordinary that little over a hundred years ago, Afghans so close to Kabul were still being forcibly converted from paganism to Islam. 

It throws the Afghanistan of devout Islam, the one I thought I knew, into a new light. Even when Newby travelled there in the 1950s, there was much evidence of pagan practice beneath the recent adoption of Islam. 

A quick google of this mysterious land of Nuristan (renamed since Rahman had brought the light (nur) of Islam to the inhabitants), brought up only familiar images of US soldiers on patrol along mountain paths. 

Only scratch the surface a little, and so much more is revealed. 

Want more? Read my blog about Afghanistan in the 1930s in Robert Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana

Photo credit: nasim dadfar

I’m pretty sure my great-grandparents on my mother’s side were Irish. Their surname was Tandy (ironically, unusually close to my own paternal surname). But it’s hard to know for sure.

It’s amazing how many people have been digging up their Irish connections over the past year, in order quite understandably to acquire the Irish passport that is their green card back into the EU.

And there is a beautiful irony to such ancestral excavation work. It requires many of us to dig through the humus of our middle class English pasts to find the telltale signs of Irish migration.

No Irish need apply

If we could all get a free crack at an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? – the BBC’s ancestry show – I suspect there would be a lot more Irish labourers and housemaids in the closet than many English people suspect.

Because, of course, Irishness used to be buried. When my mother suggested the Irish lineage to her elder brother, it was dismissed out of hand. The infamous ‘No Irish need apply’ and ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs are not so old.

Steve Coogan (himself of Irish descent) brilliantly captures the latent seam of anti-Irish feeling in England today through Alan Partridge’s occasional throwaway comments.

It lends the sudden scramble to unearth an Irish relative all the more comic. Even if I were to confirm the Tandys as Irish, a great-grandparent is no qualification for Irishness, apparently.

My mum is in, but I miss by a whisker. No cigar. It seems patriotic loyalty can be countenanced over two generations, but by god, not three!

On the subject of roots, you live in the right place, right?

Uzbek apricots cost a fortune from my local supermarket. They are the only Uzbek apricots I’ve ever eaten.

Almost every apricot you ever bite into will be from Turkey. Why? Because Turkey has, by and large, monopolised the global export of apricots.

And because it has, an Uzbek apricot will cost ya. Not because an Uzbek apricot is intrinsically better than a Turkish apricot. Simple because it is not Turkish, and therefore your purchase of it flies in the face of economies of scale, thereby upping the price.

My global yet structured diet

This led me to thinking about all the foods I eat that are not local, and how they are global, yet each product is usually specific to one place in the world. Not because that’s the only place it grows, but because that’s the only place that exports at scale.

Every raisin I eat grew in the California sun. Every avocado I eat is from Israel. Every orange, from Spain.

This isn’t a blog about the merits or otherwise of global food supply chains, but rather the simple oddity that foods that can grow in a whole swathe of places are generally only every brought to our supermarket shelves from one specific place.

Would my palate appreciate a Greek raisin, or a Trinidadian avocado, or perhaps, a Pakistani orange?

Talking of eating local, if we go local do we end up divided?

Last week, I finally saw compelling evidence of a highly infectious obsession among our children. I was in a pine forest in rural Sweden, among deer, wood anemones and goldfinches, when I spied a small boy with a Ninjago baseball cap on his head.

My son will be six this month. He wants a very fancy Ninjago Lego set. Very fancy indeed. It was then I realised. This is the latest franchise to hit the jackpot. It doesn’t matter where you go, what language you speak, or how much social distancing you observe – your child will catch Ninjago.

You can’t quarantine the Ninjago

Your child will catch Ninjago, and so will you. It’s that contagious. We watched the trailer for the Ninjago movie, and like all kids’ movies these days, it’s designed specifically to make Mums and Dads say to their friends, “Honestly, it’s really funny for adults, too. In fact, it’s probably my favourite movie of the year so far!”

The Ninjago are cool Samurai warriors from Japan (disclaimer: part or all of the following may contain errors and omissions). They are super fighters in Lego form, each with a colour. There’s Lloyd (the Green Ninjago), Cole (the Black Ninjago), Kai (the Red Ninjago), Jay (the Blue Ninjago) and Zane (the White Ninjago).

They all sound a bit male. My son has suggested that there is a female Ninjago, but it’s unclear to me what her colour is. It’s a bit fighty, and it’s aimed at boys, in the same way the hysterical Lego Friends is aimed prettily and pinkly at girls, with no boy characters in sight. Very old skool.

This post will mean absolutely nothing to anyone without an under-10 year old, but suffice to say, just because you don’t know a virus is spreading, doesn’t mean it’s not out to get you. Watch out! I’m thinking of getting a Ninjago baseball cap for my birthday. Ironically, of course.

(Editor’s note: The Ninjago franchise is in fact a decade old already, but then that’s about how out-of-date every parent’s pop culture knowledge is, so there)

What more? Try talking to a three-year-old