The joy of eating birdseed

Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion to wear them didn’t arise, unshown film sequences from my travel programmes are carefully edited and stored. The cancellation of this year’s long trip along the Spice Route made us look at these stories again; with not much prompting we have made three whole programmes from them. In the few years since we made these series the world has changed. The champion wrestler in Mongolia, the softly spoken Mr Battulga, for example, has become president of that country. He told me of his plan to build an eco-city on the plains, the streets radiating from the focal point of a colossal figure of the Buddha as a young man. We drove to the remote site: cranes and diggers were at work, and sections of the statue lay on the grass, gleaming gold under the cobalt sky. One holy hand lay apart, each finger three times bigger than my whole body. Battulga’s utopian dream may not have been realised yet, but the thought of solar-powered factories and windmills was attractive in every way. Battulga’s other huge monument, the immense equestrian statue of Genghis Khan stares across to the east where he was born near Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, with approximately the same amount of water as all of America’s Great Lakes combined. Everything is on a different scale in Mongolia.

Most popular

Stephen Daisley

David Lammy’s imperial overreach

Sunflower seed hearts are sold in our local supermarket in two different aisles. One has small packets for human consumption; in the other they are marketed as birdseed and among the pet food. I buy the latter, as they are exactly the same, only much cheaper.