Dear Donkins

Did you know there are 4,770 of us sharing this surname in the UK? The biggest concentrations of Donkins are in County Durham and Norfolk. Donkin is the 2,178th most common name in Great Britain.

This compares with 729,862 Smiths, nearly 40,000 of them in Greater London alone. There are enough British Smiths to populate a country like Iceland twice over with plenty to spare.

A few years ago we were holidaying in the US and had just driven south out of the Sequoia National Park. I noticed a road sign that said Donkin Drive by the side of an orange grove. So we stopped our car and the family lined up under the sign while I took their photograph.

A man appeared on a quad bike with a rifle straddled across the handlebars. The owner of the land, I assumed, who wanted to know what we were doing. "Hello," I said, extending my hand. "I'm Richard Donkin."

"So am I," he said. It turned out that our fathers both shared the same Christian names but we were not related. He had emigrated to the US from Zimbabwe which he still called Rhodesia. A Rhodesian flag flew over his house. Funny people, these Donkins.

The site link above allows people in the UK to check the regional spread of their own surnames. Personally I was shocked, there are just too many Donkins.

The clock is ticking

There doesn't seem to be much happening today, not from where I'm sitting anyway. But one look at this Earth clock is enough to get you holding on to your seat. Just look at that oil disappearing.

Rugby dump

If you have been enjoying the Rugby Union World Cup you might like the chance to see a few of the best clips again. Some of the best moments, plus a great selection of rugby incidents and tries from the past can be found at Rugbydump.com. Enjoy.

Hotel TV in Ulaanbaatar

Sitting in a Mongolian hotel bedroom I have been fascinated by the TV offerings. I flick to a Korean channel and there is a computer basketball match played out with three geeks on each side with excited commentary from a couple of chaps who are talking it through as if it is a real physical game.

Flick: women’s pool. Yes, women’s pool. Bring back curling.

Flick: a superhero elimination game on Star TV, complete with dramatic music and drum crescendos.

Various people are dressed up in superhero-style costumes. Commentary: “Let’s go to the ref. It’s time for elimination.” Cue drums etc.

People in capes, external underpants and silly helmets are standing on dramatically-lit boxes on some office rooftop when the camera switches to an older man – the judge - at a desk in an office somewhere.

He says: “The purpose of this show is to learn which candidate has all the qualities to be a superhero. Today we have been looking at the quality of self-sacrifice, something that no superhero can be without. But some of you have been less than generous.”

The camera switches to various contestants betraying sheepish looks. “Superheros would never sacrifice a fellow superhero,” says the sage-like judge who looks as if he would rather be tending his roses.

The camera switches to one of the contestants in a shiny helmet and the judge says: “Tyveculus, turn in your costume.” Other superheros give him a big hug and everyone cries.

Tyveculus puts his helmet in a dustbin that emits a puff of smoke.

The sage says: “Let’s all get some rest. We’ve come another step closer to immortalising one of you.”

I switch channels to a Mongolian balalaika player in a white hat with feathers who is playing and singing in a field to one of those audiences that looks as if it would rather be elsewhere. I know how they feel. This is Mongolian hotel TV.

The Birth of Venus in Ulaanbaatar

Ulaanbaatar is like a very large building site. The road from Genghis Khan International Airport passes among Soviet era concrete utility buildings and factory plants in the outskirts of the city that is home to a million people, a third of the Mongolian population.

In the distance is a large power station. Its cooling towers, belching steam in to the morning air, look like giant re-enforced barrels. A shanty town,a collection of poorly built houses and gers - the traditional circular Mongolian tents made from felt - houses the overspill from the areas of more modern housing.

My hotel is surrounded by cranes and half-built apartments. There is a fun fair on one side with a big wheel that looks like something from a Meccano set. The room isn’t ready so I go in to the dining room for a coffee. There are chandeliers and a kind of stage in front of a copy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. I have seen the real thing and can confirm that this is nothing like the real thing.

I get up to my room which I discover is still not ready but that doesn’t matter. There is no hot water but that doesn’t matter either. There is a bed and after two nights with no more than a cat nap on the flight from Moscow I am ready for some sleep.

They told me there would be no hot water before 5.30 pm so I take a cold shower. I tell myself I’m tough enough to deal with cold showers. I am not. It is cold, cold, cold.

Getting ready for this trip was a rush and I have forgotten a few things such as camera batteries. That’s the problem with modern digital cameras. I go looking for a battery. You would think that a city of a million people would have heard of Nikon. No, it doesn’t wash here.

I’m wearing a warm coat - too warm. All the locals have jeans and the girls have bare midriffs juts as they do everywhere these days. So, they have global warming here too, I’m thinking.

Places like this are difficult to gauge these days. It’s a boom town, but the new building, combined with low taxes, has outstripped the supply of infrastructure.
It’s a modern city that seems to have everything but doesn’t. The architecture is all of a certain style. Generically I would call it: East European Crap mixed with Central Asian Crap.

The bad taste is so ubiquitous it almost qualifies as a style. You have to work hard at getting things so wrong. There are a few essentials; one of these is inadequate utilities, so there must be open man-hole covers in the streets, lots of unburied black electricity cable floating over head and broken flooring tiles of different geometric patterns everywhere. The wallpaper must have brown flowers, there have to be some tacky chandeliers and, in hotels at least, there must be copies of cheap Victorian soft pornography, posing as art.

Bread must be chewy, meat, tough, and fruit just a bit dusty. Bananas must be sliced in their skins. Here is a fruit made for peeling, the handiest fruit in the world, and they slice it in its skin. Unbelievable.

From Russia with love

Tuesday, Moscow, Irish pub, no Guinness. I last slept on Sunday night before leaving for Moscow on Monday evening and arriving in the early hours today (now yesterday at the time of publication). I could have kipped down in the transit lounge but chose instead to “do” Moscow in a day.

I turn up on the doorstep of an old friend, Neil Buckley, the FT’s Moscow Bureau Chief who opens the door in his pyjamas as if he does this all the time. I’ve known Neil a long time. He has just become a father for the second time and seems to be taking the new arrival in his stride. Well he can because the baby is back in the UK with his mum awaiting his visa. A few weeks old and he already has a passport. I hope the passport control people can tell it’s the little guy in the photograph.

The cabbie who brought me from the airport must have been a getaway driver before turning to taxis. He drives as if the rest of the road users are competitors in some big urban grand prix. Indeed he takes the chequered flag.

I ask him for a receipt and he proceeds to write what looks like a comprehensive précis of War and Peace. It’s the first receipt I’ve ever had in paperback. All that precious time won on the road is lost in the paperwork

Neil shows me how to use the Metro. I try to memorise things in the street: the advertising hording that looks like football jerseys on a washing line – that’s where we turned right. The station stops are in Cyrillic script so I count the stops and try to memorise the artwork at each of the stations.

He’s going to a conference so I leave him not far from the Kremlin. The Kremlin only takes about an hour – all that Russian history knocked off in a few camera shots. I stand in the road to get a cathedral in the frame. A policeman with a hat the size of a dinner plate blows his whistle in shrill sharp, bursts. He talks “whistle,” the language of officialdom everywhere, possibly because it is so easily understood. I translate this particular series of blasts as “get off the road and back behind the fence if you know what’s good for you.”

Red Square takes marginally less time than the Kremlin, I photograph St Basil’s Cathedral from every conceivable angle, onion by colourful onion. It’s easy to overdose on onion towers in Moscow. The Gum store is not what it was. You can buy things there these days.

There’s time to pop down to the Pushkin Museum that has one of the world’s great collections of Impressionist art. The Degas pastel drawings, the “Blue Dancers” and his “Nude wiping herself” are stunning. So is the Renoir “nude sitting on a couch.” No-one, not even Rubens, could do flesh like Renoir could do flesh.

There is Van Gogh’s “Prison Courtyard”, Matisse’s goldfish, Picasso’s “Young Acrobat on a Ball” and Monet’s “Luncheon on the grass.” I can’t think of another gallery anywhere that has this quality of Impressionist and Post Impressionist art concentrated together.

I call back at the FT office for my shoulder bag that weighs almost as much as my luggage after I stuffed my hand baggage with heavy stuff in a bid to escape excess baggage charges. I’m going fishing in Mongolia and fishing means a lot of gear. There’s not much room for luxuries such as clothes.

I’m wondering if I’ve seen the last of my bags. Even the Aeroflot woman at the check in desk in London seemed to have little faith that it would pass smoothly through transit in Moscow. “A lot gets lost,” she said reassuringly.

At the airport I ask the taxi driver for a receipt. This time it’s Anna Karenina. Where else could bureaucracy demand a record of payment that reads like a book plot with a twist at the end?

Whatever happened to Madeleine?

The story of four-year-old Madeleine McCann and her disappearance while on holiday in Portugal in May has occupied the media all summer long.

In dinner-party chatter it has overshadowed house prices, medical complaints, political issues and sporting events.

First there were the exclamations of sympathy: that poor girl, what must her parents be going through? My heart goes out to them; that kind of thing. Then there was discussion about the wisdom of parents who left their three children in an unlocked apartment so that they could eat and drink with friends at a tapas bar about 100 yards away.

But the public reaction was forgiving. “We’ve all done it,” we said, even if we hadn’t. They were a nice-looking family as well: professional backgrounds, attractive mother, articulate and intelligent in the way they made themselves available to the media. They were middle class totems in a world that belongs to the middle class.

Xenophobic undertones

There were guilt-fuelled xenophobic undertones too, in Portugal as much as in the UK. No-one in either country wanted to imagine their respective societies were capable of producing the kind of people that prey on young innocents such as Madeleine.

And every day there was Madeleine’s photograph: the big eyes, cute eyelashes, even teeth, staring out from newspapers, posters and the badges created to publicise her disappearance.

When the police had no news, the newspapers ran stories anyway, worrying about the lack of developments, speculating about next steps, wondering how long they could sustain interest among their notoriously fickle readerships.

A young boy was shot in the head while kicking a ball around in Liverpool. For three or four days until the end of the funeral, the British nation’s collective shock, grief and incomprehension was transferred to the family of 11-year-old Rhys Jones. “What’s the world coming to?” we asked.

For the media and its readerships, if not for his family and friends, young Rhys can rest in peace. But not Madeleine. The story has changed. Police are saying openly they believe she may be dead. More than that, they are now questioning her parents who they have named as suspects in the disappearance of their child.

More public disbelief; but this time it’s accompanied by some niggling doubts: could they? Emotively, the answer has to be no because we cannot imagine a parent who would dispose of his or her own child and conceal the truth. I covered a story once in my home town of a couple whose children had disappeared. Some of the babies' remains were found in the garden. Yes, it can happen.

"They are doctors," said a friend at the weekend. "So was Harold Shipman," I said. Sometimes I hate my own cynicism. But cynicism is as close as your shadow if you work in the media, as it must be for police officers. Nothing should be discounted.

So we're all playing detectives now that the national outpouring of displaced anguish has dimmed.

Cluedo game

Newspaper writing and the interest of readers has switched to the forensic. Suspending our emotions (guiltily) we are beginning to approach the McCann case as if it was a “whodunit.” Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick?

Dispassionately – and, believe me, the media are masters of dispassion – Madeleine’s disappearance has proved the dream story: a story that feeds on itself as the prose adopts ever deeper shades of purple. We all have our opinions and our opinions are changing with every development.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if little Madeleine turned up on the doorstep of a Portuguese police station, confused but unharmed, cared for all these months by a misguided middle-aged Portuguese woman who had lost her own child in infancy?

But that is not going to happen. We refuse to imagine her fate. We may never know. We continue to sympathise with her parents, but no longer unconditionally. Most of all, however, we go to our beds at night and sleep well, relieved that our nightmares, if we have any, will end with a new day. For others, they go on and on.

Darwin shortlist?

I'm thinking I might have come across the shortlist for this year's Darwin Awards. Who needs health and safety regulations?

Things I need: 1. Clock cosy

This is the first in a series. The idea is to list and describe things I need but which I never seem to get, often because no-one makes them and instead of making whatever it is myself I use some stop-gap measure that quickly and annoyingly assumes a sense of permanence.

Ever since buying a replacement bedside clock-radio I have needed a clock-cosy - a light-proof cover in a subdued colour, ideally black - that I can place over the clock.

The history to this is that we had a Sony bedside clock-radio for years that was no picture but that functioned pretty well until it began to crackle. The crackling came in a short burst some time at either side of "thought for the day" on Radio Four's Today Programme. Had the crackle run throughout thought for the day I would have put it down to divine intervention and thought nothing of it. But usually it interrupted something interesting.

So we bought a new clock (after enduring the crackle for about three or four years). The Sony shop had a choice of about four or five and we bought an egg-shaped clock that looked sort of futuristic.

The old clock had a dial setting. The new one had little buttons on the top. I set the buttons for lots of stations, all of which, apart from one, we did not need because we only listen to the Today programme.

Now the most important button on a radio-clock is the "off" switch that you need for weekends when you don't need to get up quite so early. Organised people might set their clocks before they go to sleep but I can never remember so I have to reach over to the clock in my slumbers, pressing the wrong button and knocking it to the floor.

Pressing the wrong button almost always knocks the station out of synch so we lose every station, including Radio Four and I have to go through the setting process all over again. Even worse than this, however, is the ridiculously bright LED display that, at its highest setting, bathes the room in an eerie blue light. I need total darkness so even a chink of light is too much.

For a while I covered the clock with a beer towel - stolen from a pub clothes line on a barge holiday during my teens. The towel, however, is one of my most useful items and gets borrowed for trips to the gym. So it's rarely there when it's needed. I have tried a sock but it's not ideal and doesn't look aesthetically pleasing. A handkerchief is too thin.

I have tried placing the clock upside down on the floor. But this makes it a devil to find when I need to turn it off at weekends. More than once the bedside table with the table lamp has come crashing down.

No, what I need is a neat cover but you can't find them in the shops. In fact I would take two if they were also sound padded and I would use the second for my office phone. This cordless BT phone does not have an off-switch or a divert to the answer phone. I have used a tea-cosy on this one but it's not ideal and means that the tea-pot goes begging.

I also need a phone-finder homing device for the cordless phone and all the other cordless phones that are never where you need them to be, but that's another story.

I should add that we did not get rid of the old Sony clock but put that on Gill's bedside table instead. Now we have clocks going off in stereo - one with it's annoying intermittent crackle and the other with just too many confusing buttons.

Life is too short for this. But we have yet to settle on a satisfactory solution. Any ideas?

Lunchless in London - Facebook to the rescue

The joys of London during a tube strike. In fact the Northern line was running yesterday. It's not much of a life down there in those jam packed train carriages. No-one can hear you scream.

One tube journey was one too many. My morning appointment, as one of the judges of the CBI's Human Capital Awards, ended early as we sprinted through the categories with not much disagreement about the winners.

Out on the streets it suddenly occurred to me that I had nothing to do. A lunch appointment had fallen through, my next appointment was at 5pm and there was a dinner in St James's in the evening.

There are guide books stuffed with things to do in London and not one of them appealed. This was a work day which by noon meant only one thing: lunch. Lunchless in London is a bleak prospect.

Yes I could have nipped to any Pret a Manger but lunch is about meeting people and conversation. The eating bit is ritual. I walked down Tottenham Court Road and cut through to the Strand and John Adam Street where I often take refuge in the Royal Society for the Arts. In the library there I could sit behind a computer and look at my emails.

I popped on to Facebook, the social networking site. One of my favourite features is a little box where you can describe your situation or mood at any particular time. Mine begins "Richard is....." and I can fill in the rest. So I filled it in: "Richard is at a loose end in London (RSA) and looking for a lunch partner, so come on Facebook, do the business."

Within a few seconds, I had a message from an old friend in the recruitment business inviting me to lunch at the Gherkin where he works. The Gherkin is the somewhat phallic tower designed by Norman Foster. At the very top, in the atrium there is a restaurant and bar for the exclusive use of those who occupy the building - and their guests.

Top lunch, excellent conversation, some of it work-related too justifying the experience if any justification is needed which it isn't. I much prefer this sort of thing to lunches that are booked in the diary, weeks in advance.

So what does this mean? It means that Facebook works. It can put two people together spontaneously in a city of 10m within half an hour's notice. It made my day. Dinner in the evening was good too - business/social with people I know and like. Work? It didn't feel like work.

The dustbins of history

I have just been speaking to an old friend and colleague, Robert Taylor, who was employment editor of the Financial Times before he retired in 2001. We were discussing the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington that I had visited in the summer.

The museum is a thoughtfully put together record of the Holocaust but I thought Robert made an interesting point when he asked why it should be in the US rather than Europe.

"Why don't they have a museum that documents the killings of North American Indians or slavery in the US?" he asked. "Is that too close to home?"

It is time that the US came to terms with both its slave-owning past and its treatment of Native Americans. One of the finest displays of Native American clothing and artifacts can be found in the Museum of Natural History in New York. There was nothing I saw there, however, that told the story of the Indian wars; nothing about the way the native people were moved out of their hunting grounds on to reservations and deprived of the food source - the North American Bison - that had sustained their way of life for hundreds of years.

Each visitor to the Holocaust museum is given a card with the name and details of someone who was persecuted in the Holocaust. The idea is to remind us that each of the six million victims of the camps and those that survived was an individual. Robert said that on his visit he found many of these cards discarded in the trash cans outside the museum.