What is this doing here I ask myself repeatedly. How did it get here?

I mean I know her partner bought it. But how did it get to somebody selling it for loads of cash? I have no reason to believe that the sculpture was ill-gotten.

I couldn't help but think of my friend Pedro Lebre, who lived just outside of Dili running a small guesthouse. He’s been helping malais (foreigners) visit East Timor since the Portuguese times, when they used to fly in from Australia to Baucau, with its massive airfield.

He was a collector of Timorese sculpture during the Indonesian occupation. By the late 90s, he had accumulated quite a collection of tall, totemic sculpture pieces, many from Ataúro Island, just north of Timor’s capital Dili. When the Indonesians scorched everything during their violent departure in 1999, they were sure to steal and sell off sculptures.

I remember Pedro telling me he saw pieces like the ones he used to own for sale on eBay from sellers in Bali. This was a crime in the open for all to see. How many hands did these sculptures pass through from a burning Dili to eBay sellers in Bali. We’ll never know.

Only the wooden objects themselves know.

The fact the sculptures had even reached Pedro seemed significant, given they were intended to be a link with ancestors. But the early part of the Indonesian occupation was a desperate time, there was a lot of food insecurity. (In fact, Ataúro was used as a prison island by the Indonesians, and another friend was starved there as a child, but that is another story.)

Now I have a couple of tabs open from the Met Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, and one called “Art of the Ancestors”.

I find a Sotheby’s auction, bidding closed, for Ataúro sculptures. Estimate: 70,000-100,000 euros. Provenance: “Acquis dans les années 1980 auprès d'un collectionneur natif de Timor”. (1980s Timor was occupied by the Indonesian military. Were they considered “natif” by Sotheby’s?)

Christies. Estimate: 700-100 euros. Price realised: 5,292 euros. Provenance: Philippe Guimiot (1927-2021), Bruxelles. Collection Line et Hippoliet Verbeemen, Bonheiden. This 10 centimetre man has a neutral look on his face, and a smaller man stuck to his torso, clearly a nod to ancestral ties.

Here’s a pair of “Itara ancestor figure” sculptures for sale by “tribalarthouse” in Netherlands, on eBay. Buy it now price: $850. They claim these are from “Atauro, Indonesia”. The figurines are “wearing” cloth, which my cursory research tells me dates them from after the 1930s, when Dutch Calvinist missionaries arrived on the small island. But they look quite different – suspiciously different – than other sculptures I’ve seen. Tribalarthouse is selling loads of once-sacred items from India to the Solomon Islands.

What happens to these once-powerful sculptures when they become JPEGs, museum pieces or decorative pieces in the houses of the rich? Are they frozen like Han Solo and Chewbacca? Could they become powerful again in if returned to the right hands?

One of the pieces I read about Ataúro sculptures said that many sculptures had been hidden away as early as the 30s to save from European missionary scrutiny. Some were or are probably still in sacred houses and caves of Ataúro.

And some of Pedro’s collection survived – he hid it away in anticipation of the Indonesian destruction. My last tab is a UNESCO video showing a current day Ataúro sculptor at work talking about he learned from his father who learned from his father.

It's consoling to know that the sculpting skills survived colonialism, genocide, and commodification. (And also to remember that now there is a cooperative of women who make rag dolls intentionally for sale to tourists and for export, to complement the male carvers.)

I stood looking out of the window of my lodgings, looking at the orange earth against the green grass, and the eucalyptus trees against a bright blue sky. What caused this?

Luckily it stopped fairly quickly with some pressure, and I was there for work with a radical Catholic aid agency, which kept me busy.

But it happened a number of times, in different trips to the city.

Brasília is famously built on a “plan” that from above looks like an airplane, or a bird depending on your inclination. It was designed by communist architect Oscar Niemeyer and urban planner Lúcio Costa, its construction kicked off by Juscelino Kubitschek, known as JK. The project to move Brazil’s capital from Rio was no joke.

Tens of thousands of workers from the impoverished northeast were brought to this spot in Goias state, in the middle of Brazil, a country whose population was mostly on the coast.

While a university exchange student, I remember hearing about its inauguration in 1960 from my landlady in Rio de Janeiro, whose late husband was involved in progressive politics and was invited to the various balls and events to open the city. She said even the skeptics were dazzled by the place.

The idea of Brasília went quite far back, even before the country’s independence in 1822. And there is a story about the Italian founder of the Salesian order Dom Bosco vaguely prophesizing the lake and the location. (The church loved a good prophecy.) But the location was chosen by a Belgian astronomer and a team of twenty researchers who surveyed the area in the 1890s.

The city lies on an elevated plane, the planalto. Next to the airplane-bird is a large artificial lake.

Something about the city attracts mystics and UFO sightings. Somebody told me there are ley lines intersecting there. I don’t know what a ley line is. But I know it does feel like no other place.

Partly the curves and shapes of Niemeyer, partly the open stretches of grass in the middle of the “plano”. (Where there are virtually no pedestrians, as the city wasn’t built for them, just cars. I was walking once and broke into a run when somebody on foot appeared out of nowhere and showed a dogged attempt to cross to get to us. And my Brazilian colleague gave me this frightened look, like “let’s not find out what this person wants from us”.)

Marches and protests all look small in this space. And perhaps vulnerable. Proof of our cosmic or political smallness.

For my job, I spent most of my days there conferring with radical Catholics who were trying to bend the church towards supporting the little people. Hearing how disappointing politics was, even in the age of a President from the northeast, a worker.

The dry air was the culprit for my nosebleeds. But I’m a big fan of deserts and I never experienced one there. It must have been in the combination of the altitude – 1000m – and the dryness. But my nose didn’t bleed on the dry Altiplano above La Paz, Bolivia. So Brasília was special.

In my dad’s times, a “nosebleed” was a geek. Or it was used to describe the seats in the stadium so high up, that the tickets were cheap. Appropriate then that I would experience my only nosebleeds in life in a city of civil servants and policy wonks, designed to look majestic from above.

I haven’t been to Brasilia since 2010. And I haven’t had a nosebleed since.

But I read nosebleeds are affecting Brazilians when the country is set on fire during the dry season by farmers trying to clear land and forest. The open nasal blood vessels of Latin America.

A week later, we got invited to his inland public high school for a match. I checked the forecast (33C / 91F), and I did some reconnaissance online and discovered that there were few trees, no shade and pavement everywhere. We weren't just thinking of my elderly family members when we declined the offer.

In spite of all of the air conditioning and creature comforts, life for the not-super-rich in southern California seemed harder than it was in Portugal when I lived there twenty years ago. And this was all down to expectations that life should carry on as normal with hostile weather conditions.

In retrospect, I too probably played high school tennis in 30sC / 90sF conditions. (Or wet bulb equivalent, as I grew up in a much more humid place.)

What surprised me the most was that my nephew's family were simply not bothered by the heat, saying they have played in 40C / 104F before.

Later during the same trip, we contemplated stopping for a short swim (in my case float) at a public pool while elderly family members waited 20 minutes for us. But again, based on a recce of the pool, which revealed almost no shade, we had to cancel that plan.

It's not that Southern California does not have shade – in fact I was admiring Ventura's ample jacaranda trees while there. And my nephew's public high school was new enough that, perhaps in 20 years time, there will be shade from the trees planted there. And it's true that sometimes trees close to buildings exacerbate fire risk. So I'm not saying that it's not complicated or expensive to face these problems.

But I was struck with how unprepared the region was to live with Gulf-like conditions which are here to stay. Nobody should be playing tennis outdoors at 40C/104F. Outdoor recreation facilities should be built/based around shade, air circulation and access to water. And certain activities should simply not occur over certain temperatures.

In a sense, in England, we are unprepared for climate breakdown and heatwaves in different ways. I would say shade is more of a justice issue here than what I witnessed in southern California (where even relatively well-to-do communities lacked it) – the tree equity index shows how England is only a “green and pleasant land” for some.

Here, those who can will simply cancel plans in heat and shelter in place. But there are many who must continue to work in the heat and the UK has nothing like California's safety standards. In fact the discussion has only just seriously begun.

There is a raging debate about air conditioning here now, with the reactionary mainstream media suggesting that environmentalists want to ban it. Nobody is suggesting it shouldn't be deployed in public places and on public transport. And people in accommodation they cannot improve should be given access to battery-powered units that can charge overnight, like they are doing in New York City.

But take it from me, a USian who has lived in Portugal: those who say we need to learn more from the Med than from the States are 100% correct. In Iberia, cities and streets were designed to provide natural shade. But even if we can't redesign the cityscape, we can borrow some features – like persianas, which are blind/shutters that block out the heat and can allow a little daylight in. Kris at Lowtech Magazine has a great article about the “dressing” of streets and houses.

We can also just learn to be more agile about work/life patterns like the people of the Med. The “siesta” is still often depicted as evidence of Iberian laziness, but it should be understood as ingenuity. Why fight the natural world? I've written before about how all of us need to understand our collective energy consumption to truly respond to the climate crisis, and this is potentially a good entry point. Instead of running air conditioners to be working through the worst hours, why not wait until better hours?

As I write this, in England there is a burgeoning middle-class (USians, read: bougie) movement to bring back lidos, or outdoor pools, that were destroyed due to Thatcherite policies in the 80s and 90s. It's genuinely hard to believe this country once had 300. I live in a major city and the nearest lido is an hour away by car and almost two hours on public transport. As much as I would love to get the local lido back (which is now a “Pirate Park” playground), these campaigns need to broaden to include communities most affected by the heat.

Natural shade, outdoor pools, protecting buildings from the sun, changes in work patterns and conditions, are never going to be given to us by capitalists and policymakers without a fight.

But we need to understand these as rallying cries as part of a climate justice agenda, that recognises that those dealing with deprivation and vulnerability are already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

Something I've recently detected is a quieter and equally damaging complement to this activist, in-your-face white nationalism, and it's a deeply seeded, mostly-male cynicism. And it is like fertiliser for the far right.

I honestly can't say I get out much with my energy impairment. I use most of my energy to work, and then I rest. But these days, when I talk to people, it's medical staff (mostly women but only for like five seconds), other dog walkers (mostly not cynical people, must be something about dogs), people on my street, and taxi drivers (mostly men).

But I've started to notice among some men, perhaps a loud minority, this attitude that “nothing can be done” and anybody that thinks we can get out of this hole, let alone who wants to start climbing up, is worthy of a talking to at best, or mockery at worst.

A good example recently was at the delivery of some planters and perennial flowers that we finally got from the council for our treeless street, in a place with 4% tree canopy cover. People on our street having been pushing for this for at least six years. (Ironically, our neighbourhood is called Forest Fields.)

At the urging of our local councillor, who was crucial to securing these small patches of hope, a number of men joined the launch event, an old school trade unionist, some younger (queer?) men. And of course there were a number of women, including a woman who attended with her mum who had lived on the street for 25 years.

Kids joined in and helped plant the flowers and shrubs.

Snacks were munched on.

A local journalist who covers the “flytip” beat interviewed residents – illegal dumping was one of the motivations behind putting flowers in these spots.

There was a lot discussion about fears that the planters would be littered on, that the flowers would be stolen (recently over 100 plants were stolen from the urban Arboretum not far away!). But everybody agreed it was worth a shot, except two people.

What struck me was the separate intervention of two men (of different ethnic backgrounds and age groups, neither past middle age) who swooped in to make disparaging comments about the initiative. They could have simply ignored what we were up to, or walked by. But they felt moved to approach the group and make their voice heard, stating that our neighbourhood is a dump site, and nobody will allow anything nice to take root here.

When I lived in Portugal, I learned of the archetype of the “Velho de Restelo” (The Old Man of Restelo), a busy-body pessimist. Portugal's Shakespeare, Camões, created the character in his epic poem The Lusiads, an old man who shouted from the foreshore of the Tejo River to tell Portugal's early nautical explorers in their big wooden boats that navigating into the Atlantic mists would end in tears.

What new disaster dost thou here design? What horror for our realm and race invent? What unheard dangers or what deaths condign, veiled by some name that soundeth excellent?

Were these (relatively young) men our own Old Men of Forest Fields? It seems like there was much more at stake with a massive, state-funded seafaring enterprise than two planters on my street. Why did these men feel the necessity to intervene? Were they deeply pessimistic in their world view like the Old Man of Restelo?

I got to thinking about other conversations I'd had in passing with men I didn't know recently, about growing inequality, electoral politics, and technology. While the conversations rarely made it as far as taking political action, I could hear a base-level cynicism in these conversations too.

Some of these men I would have considered socialist in their views in past. Some seemed to idealise the individualist “hustle” culture and listen to the Diary of CEO podcast. The political outlook of many seemed a patchwork of different, sometimes contradictory views, with an occasional strong dose of conspiracy thinking. I don't think these men were pessimists, with an existentially negative world view. But they were strongly skeptical of any suggestion that things could get better collectively in our time.

I can't help but surmise that this cynical outlook is at least partly product of online algorithms. But I'm not quite sure how. Maybe it also comes from bitter life experience: experiencing decades of neoliberal economic damage, micro/macroaggressions, or witnessing the genocide in Gaza.

Wherever it comes from, I believe it is complementary to this mass, white nationalist mobilisation. Many of the men I heard these attitudes from came from a racial minority group. I'm not saying it's all on minorities to stand up to white nationalism alone, not at all. But it feels like it is going to take all of us to unite ourselves, at different moments, all the way down to seemingly inconsequential little moments like new flowers to build pride of place.

I'm not trying to deny these men their own agency, if even it comes in the form of cynicism. But it feels this cynicism is a potent political force and something we need to factor into political organising and education to combat white nationalism.

I'm sure there are pollsters and social scientists who can explain the trend I am anecdotally perceiving with actual evidence.

In any case, it's been over a week, and we've only picked one energy drink can out of the planters. And the flowers are looking lovely.

Of course our quest for renewal of our downtrodden street doesn't stop there – for us the flowers were just a first step. Now we are pushing for flowers in hanging baskets for houses on the street, an actual rubbish bin near the planters, and murals in all relevant languages asking people to take care of the street. (A young person, resident in the house with one of the walls we'd like to feature a mural, came up to us on the street and thanked us for the flowers... And a muralist lives on a cross street...)

Eventually, we'd like to convene in-person community meetings where residents can discuss our shared problems and seek solutions together. And our Old/Young Men of Forest Fields will be welcome to participate.

He was leading a course on global empires. I remember him being keenly interested in the dozen or so students as individuals, as people. Even at an institution where this was not unusual, it didn't feel normal in a history seminar of this nature. To be fair, up until this point, I'd taken mostly lecture-style history courses so I didn't have a frame of reference. But I felt intuitively that history was for very serious, bookish men of a certain type. His interest in us as people was, well, kind of “disarming” for lack of a better word.

He was interested in our intellectual development. I remember him asking very personal questions like “tell us about a moment that served as a rupture in your education”.

I'd never heard this word used in this way. And I understood that he wanted to know how reading and learning changed us as people, in ways that might change the way we inhabit the world. While he loved theory, it seemed this was grounded in what it could do, not just for its sake.

To be honest, taking Diogo's class was a rupture for me. He taught in a place where social history was the main attraction, where we read (and really enjoyed!) books about, say, the lives of Afroperuvian washer women in Lima in the 17C. I learned historiography from him, like about what “durée” meant, and how Fernand Braudel had completely shaken up the historical establishment with his works inspired by the “longue durée”. While we're often taught to think in terms of definitive events or periods of a decade, Braudel and his mates were concerned with economic and political processes that played out over centuries influenced by geography, space and climate.

So thinking about history in terms of world systems, and shifts in these systems, was an amazing development for me. And it grounded my major in “development studies” which was basically political economy of economic development in the present moment.

He also taught us that unconventional people produced quality historic scholarship. Braudel himself had a quite unusual trajectory. Diogo rated Charles Boxer, an auto-didact historian who we read at length on Asia. In retrospect, this is part of the reason I felt permission to apply for an independent Fulbright to study colonial Portuguese Timor in Lisbon, with no affiliation to a university and no set plan to become an historian.

I was super sad then, to read a couple of days ago, about Diogo's untimely death at the age of 66. I thought of his family; I thought of Ondine, a similarly vibrant friend I lost last year at age 65.

But I was also comforted by reading how he'd returned to Portugal, and shaken up the establishment after some years in the US and other European countries.

After taking his undergrad course, during my Fulbright, I later learned about the Portuguese establishment from my time living there, and I spent a good deal of time at the National Library, which he had recently taken the helm of. I knew how set in their ways and how deferential to seniority many are.

I read in his obituary how he kindly but firmly challenged some of the most canonical historians and their work (heralded in the headline as “non-conformist”), and how he continued his humanistic focus on the intellectual development of the next generation.

His take on history centres our agency here and now – my translation of quote cited in his Público obituary

I really struggle to accept that there are lessons to be drawn from history. People taking malicious advantage of them are greater in number than the reverse. History as a vocation, as a way of investigating and disseminating these conclusions serves, above all, as a way of liberating ourselves from the past... History is not the tutor of life; it's life that is the tutor of history.

What's more, he had an irreverent disrespect for disciplinary boundaries. And as somebody who was asked to choose sides during my Lisbon masters defence: whether I had written a history or anthropology thesis, I can appreciate his belief that history was too important to be left to the historians.

I know it might sound twee, but I really feel compelled to say that Diogo taught me that individuals and their love for others do make a profound difference in the world. Teaching makes a difference. Caring for the intellectual development of others – that is, meeting people where they are and truly listening to them, and provoking them when the time is right. In the age of generative AI, stunting the critical faculties of a new generation, I feel we need to heed the lessons of the Diogos of the world and live up to their legacy.

Six years is probably enough time for this bottle to have arrived intact on some far away shore, and to have been discovered by others. Personally, it feels like the message was read, crumpled up and thrown back into the ocean.

For six years, we've been asking for recognition, research and rights. In recent years, Long Covid Clinics have closed, been scaled back and to be honest always left us disappointed. The truth is, while some have recovered, many of us are still missing from society since the first wave of the pandemic. And while the UK Office of National Statistics used to count us, it no longer does. The closest we have to a count is the responses in the annual GP Patients survey for England – in 2025, 4.2% reported having Long Covid and 9.5% were unsure. The scale of this suffering is still hard to take in, all these years later.

And we haven't just been concerned with ourselves, the unlucky ones to be disabled so early by this novel virus. We've pleaded with other people to protect themselves and their families from this serious disease, and we've pleaded with a largely moribund public health sector to play its role and take action to protect health workers, patients and school children.

We've been met with a wall of silence, including from a public health secretary who struggled with Long Covid himself.

Society and policy makers have decided that repeat, frequent Covid infections will be our way of life now. In spite of very worrying data about the impacts of the disease.

As I write this, a very close friend's teenage child has just been diagnosed with POTS and is showing very worrying signs of extreme post-viral fatigue. For her post-viral condition, there are no new treatments, there is no new help for her. Six years later, all I can recommend some intensive vitamin supplementation, and radical rest and pacing. Her mother doesn't dare to call it Long Covid.

I live mostly at home, a very Covid-cautious life. I've even stopped checking on the project to create a sterilising vaccine, that would allow me to stop masking indoors when I do have the energy to go out. A couple of years ago, I still held out hope that I could one day socialise “normally” indoors. Now I've simply given up. This is our life now. I can hardly handle the noise in indoor cafes and restaurants anyways. Same with music gigs, or anywhere people talk loudly in numbers.

To be quite honest, I feel like an outcast from society. This society hates the sick and disabled, and it definitely hates mask-wearing people who remind them they could become sick and disabled through the air they breathe at any time.

Today is labelled a day of awareness, but we must recognise in the case of Long Covid, we are not merely raising awareness. We are combatting willful ignorance. People actively do not want to know about Long Covid, and the long-term health consequences of Covid infections. They do not want to see us. This is the plain truth.

In light of this, and my hermit life, I must recognise the organisations and projects that are actively standing up to ignorance. They give me hope and make me feel slightly less alone.

• Just added Breathe Easy – Sheffield / London
• Long Covid Justice (they just co-launched the Long Covid Oral History project)
• Long Covid SOS
• Mask Blocs
• Patient Led Research Collaborative
• Public Health is Dead podcast
• The Sick Times (news outlet)

I hadn't realised it was the fiftieth anniversary of the violent day around the time my dreams encouraged me to seek out the novel. I'd just remembered how deftly he had created this distant world for the reader, and invoked the sense of dissociation that occurs with the fog of war descends on a city.

After re-reading the powerful first chapter, which ends with the true-to-life Indonesian special forces mass murder of political prisoners on the capital city's docks, I stopped.

I needed to understand how Mo was able to conjure these scenes.

In a piece he published just over 10 years ago about a visit to the country, now independent at last, Mo shared that just like me, many Timorese readers could not believe he was an outsider. Many thought his pen name was meant to sound like a garbled “Timor”. From the moment it was published, his text circulated among political prisoners in Indonesia, just like it circulated among people in Dili when I lived there a decade later, a dogeared paperback that had been devoured over and over again.

I did not get an answer for Mo's craft, his secret. It seems plausible that in the late 80s, he was personally friends with now-president José Ramos-Horta, whose character of a different name he gently mocks in the text. But Ramos-Horta was not present the day of the invasion, he had been sent to the UN to plead for help. Mo must have debriefed multiple witnesses, sought out numerous archival sources.

In any case, this book is by far the most effective account of the invasion of Timor-Leste. And it is fiction.

I think what Mo proves is there is something simultaneously beautiful, horrifying, sensorily fragmentary and perhaps so ineffable in a dissociative way about an invasion (and subsequent military occupation) that only an artist can do it justice.

I meant to write this blog post in a couple of weeks time, but it feels so relevant today given the US' direct attack from the sky on Venezuela.

Like the current invasion by the US, Timorese had anticipated the Indonesian invasion for months. (Australians will remember the October 1975 Indonesian special forces killing of Australian journalists in the border town, Balibo.)

Mo's protagonist says

In fact, the invasion hardly took us by surprise. We'd all been expecting it. The weeks, months, of move and counter-move, the destabilising, the broadcasts of our neighbour, the marching songs, the relentless playing of their anthem, the incessant messages of support for the Amalgamationists, that is the party who favoured integration with the larger neighbour, the incursion over the mountains, the burning of villages and crops, had evoked a popular mood of near-hysteria. We'd been waiting for it, sure, but when it came it was still a shock. Like being struck in a bar if you're a peaceful person: even as you know the shock of the blow, you cannot acknowledge it has been struck, refuse to believe in the enormity.

I aim to create an audio file of this first chapter as soon as I can, so that anybody can appreciate it in their preferred format.

In the meantime, there are copies for borrowing on the internet. But if you can, please support Mo directly himself, as he battled with the UK publishing industry and ended up re-publishing the book himself in 2002 (an echo of Timor-Leste's own re-independence that very same year!)

—

Update: This post on Global Voices seems to capture the Venezuelan experience of invasion quite well. Gabriela Mesones Rojo writes:

There is something particular about realizing that war is moving closer to you. The images, the emotions, the sounds, even the smells. The way we slowly grow accustomed to new forms of violence, repression, and exploitation.

The soundscape of war — another sound added to an already brutalized country, another terrifying entry in our glossary of violence.

If anything, at this time I realise I need to focus on the cyclic and more-than-human timescales that we can observe in the natural world.

This year, I wrote about a particular kind of tree, that reminds us that what could appear to be an end can in fact be a new beginning.

I submitted the essay on a whim to the New Nottingham Journal and got it published! I'm sharing here but I encourage you to subscribe and/or support the fledgling NNJ if you can.

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Phoenix Trees

There is a row of cherry trees in the Forest Recreation Ground, leading to the playing fields. They are generously sized – clearly the oldest in the park, their flowers heavy and humid when cupped in the hand. The trees form a canopy, this tunnel of petals that I imagine being like Kyoto. These cherries bloom during a certain week or fortnight in April.

In 2020, when I got up from my Covid sick bed for the first time to leave the house, they were in full bloom. It was Easter Sunday. While I’m not Christian, I did feel a certain new start that day, fancying myself free of the frightening new virus that loomed over us. I didn’t know then that this feeling – rising from my sick bed and coming back to life – would become familiar.

Five cherry blooms later, I am still sick. My energy is severely limited; I spend most of the day with my feet up.

As I’ve come to learn in outings on good days, there are other notable cherry trees in the Forest Rec: the big one at the café, which creates a big pink corona over the space, and the white cherry grafted on top of another pink one.

Or the row that runs near the park-and-ride car park, where they’ve been interplanted with delicate birch trees.

But the other cherry trees that marked me are the ones just outside the wall of the Rec, in the Rock Cemetery.

They’re found in a sunken, walled section of the burial ground, where the victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic are buried.

These trees are massive, perhaps the size of a gigantic tropical ficus – the ones with the hanging aerial roots. When their leaves come in, the cherries provide shade for the massive stone markers made to honour those stricken by the flu. Names had once been carved on the markers, but are no longer clearly decipherable.

There is no gentler way of putting it – this is a mass grave, and it was designed to be hidden from view. To reach the space, you wander to the back of the cemetery and take a set of stairs – each one tall but spaced widely apart. The place feels like an imagined hypnosis prompt. One cherry flowers early, the other waits until April. They rise above the cemetery wall and, as we walk in the Forest Rec between January and April, they wave to us with their thousands of bright hands.

Besides the cherries, the centennial oaks are the other trees that mean the most to me in the Rec, and recently I found myself discussing them online. This was unexpected.

I’d joined the ‘Queerdos’ Zoom for disabled queer people in the Nottingham area, and towards the end, our facilitator Evie proposed an exercise where we’d give voice to trees.

She sent a photo of eight tree types – oak, chestnut, spruce, and so on. Then she floated off to the next breakout room, and there was a long silence. I think perhaps everyone had expected to give voice to an individual tree, a lone witness to our world, not a variety – a tree stereotype!

Somebody expressed this thought, which was greeted with nods. I said I often imagined the oaks in the Forest Rec had harboured chats between Luddites. The person who’d spoken replied that their ancestors were Luddites. Then they talked about a conker tree from their childhood that had fallen but remained alive, recumbent – a phoenix tree. Their siblings used to climb up and down it, practicing key tree-climbing skills.

That sparked a discussion about these trees, which only need a couple of roots in the ground to live. I mentioned I’d just seen a mature birch like this – with perhaps 90% of its roots just floating in the air, dried out and inert. But while it lay down, the birch was thriving.

There were nods, and an unspoken recognition about the symbolism that such a tree had for us. The Descendant of the Luddites interjected that the exposed roots of these trees can unearth archaeological treasures – as if the tree were performing a grand reveal, just for us. Then they mentioned the massive tree in the Arboretum that’s supported by sturdy iron braces. Oh, I chimed in, the fig tree. We were the only ones in the room who seemed to know what we were talking about.

I had immediately remembered the Scottish Covid Memorial, the work of Alec Finlay, an artist with ME-CFS and Long Covid who I’d met in an online support group in the early days of my illness. Despite being unable to walk beyond his garbage bins, he had conceived and created the memorial in Pollok Country Park called ‘I Remember’, which is made up of 40 ‘tree supports’ – wooden braces made for oak trees which have begun to lean. Some look like stick figures, pushing back against the trees leaning onto them. Others look like utilitarian objects. Each one has been custom-designed and imprinted with a short phrase: ‘I Remember’.

Here in Nottingham our Covid memorial is one hornbeam tree, still-juvenile, planted in the Forest Rec. The dedication took place on a grim March day; there were maybe fifty people there, bearing daffodils. Some brought printouts in memory of their loved ones, in plastic sleeves to resist the rain. It was such a profoundly lonely event.

Not far from this young hornbeam tree, there is an old recumbent oak, which fell over just after the Covid tree was dedicated. It’s part of a line of oaks that I figure are between 150 and 200 years old. It might have heard the Luddites’ conspiratorial conversations.

After the online discussion I found a paper called ‘The Ecology of Scotland’s Wonderful Recumbent or “Phoenix” Trees’. It suggests that only older trees tend to fall and stay alive; it is not uncommon for a 200-year-old tree to fall and then live for another fifty to eighty years. The authors aren’t sure why none have been found to live longer than this: whether it’s because they die off naturally, or because people use them for timber.

The paper argues for an effort to raise awareness about phoenix trees, and the ‘value and significance’ they hold. It says that professionals and landowners need to be brought along so that they don’t just consider them waste and chop them up. I was pleasantly surprised, I confess, when our park staff didn’t dismember and remove the recumbent oak.

‘Phoenix trees,’ the paper reads, ‘combine several compelling elements: their enigmatic sculptural beauty, their compelling efforts to survive against the odds, and the unlikely stories of how they adjust themselves to their recumbent positions.’

On days when my health allows me to walk to the Rec, we visit this oak, taking the dog up the reclining trunk, mining its bark with treats. My partner complains, justifiably, about the litter and used condoms at its base. We often talk about leaving a sign in the voice of the tree, asking people to respect it. Still, I have no doubt that – if the chainsaws are kept away – the sideways phoenix will outlast me.

June 14, 2011 Dear “Development,”

By the time you read this letter I will be gone. We have been together a total of five years, with a long separation in the middle when I nearly eloped with social anthropology…. In our first stormy year, I was the “local hire” expat on a bicycle. The other four, I have been based at headquarters, where the biggest crises seem to revolve around lack of milk for tea.

I studied you, Development, at university, never really imagining myself working for an INGO. I was always more interested in culture, history, the lived experience of people coming out of colonialism than in “you,” the economic development part. Okay, so I was interested in human rights, but that was an indulgence – I always perceived that the rights obsession has its own perverse consequences in certain contexts.

I have been lucky in the two jobs I had – both allowed me to dodge the massive compliance edifices being constructed around me. These jobs allowed me to make other friends, they were not the jealous types.

In my last job, at an organization majority funded by individual supporters, people gave to us for who we were. Something I thought could free our hands to focus on the causes of poverty and to avoid what I have seen in many agencies. You know, the ones more dependent on government monies hence spend so much time bean-counting and measuring that they are unable to work with the people closest to the reality on the ground… the ones that treat development like a massive Rube Goldberg machine, where you put some inputs in, a series of technical and scientific interventions are applied… et voilà. People are pulled out of poverty, and “sustainably,” at that.

Thanks to Andrew Nastios, I learned that this approach is actually more Ford and McNamara than Rube Goldberg. That the reason “development” feels so bankrupt to me is that all of its tools, its systems, its approaches emanate from the managerial thinking that gave the world the car culture, and that made the Pentagon so powerful.

In my latest post, I worked in an environment of total cognitive dissonance. Where the language was of solidarity, of partnership, but in our day-to-day we tangled with massive compliance systems. Forcing them on social movements and NGOs in the Americas, Africa and Asia. All of these systems totally overdone, considering the level of trust our supporters had in our work. Obviously we needed strategy and to know partners were doing good work – but systems balloon and mushroom out of control. Even those creating them recognized their Frankenstein(s).

I was one of the only people given the slack to actually get to know our partners without jamming their words into required tools and reporting forms. I often wondered why people did not express greater envy about my job – the fact they did not was worrying in and of itself.

Against this backdrop, I was involved in trying to create a responsive, light monitoring and evaluation system that would “protect” the work we did on the crucial stuff that Duflo and co. cannot “randomize” – campaigning, policy influencing and social change. A worthy thing, and I feel almost like I am betraying those I have worked with on this by quitting now.

But our leadership does not really get what is at stake. Even in my relatively enlightened corner of the aid business, people are busy just simply being busy. Defending their little corner. Stuck building systems that are not for people but for abstracted automatons.

Our leaders are not serious about scanning the horizon, about admitting that the public is right to scrutinize aid. I hear none of the kind of serious soul-searching that the moment requires.

We repeat transcendent values like dignity and justice as mantras yet we are blinded by bureaucracy and relentless self-interest. We keep running into the breach and doing the work that governments must do for their own citizens. As much as Dambisa Moyo annoys me, why can’t we set a date for when this should be over? What would it look like if INGO staff actually dedicated themselves to the sensible cliché of “putting themselves out of a job”?

People all over the world want to feel good, or even maybe just more ok. Even though most know humanity is screwed in the long run, people yearn to go where the energy is. Yet INGOs keep appealing to them with the same negative images, and collecting cold data for their institutional donor patrons. Individuals, and I would venture even taxpayers, do not need experts to spew evaluation data at them. They want to feel a stake in what is generative, what is life affirming. Statistics have a role, but their role is a backstop. People in the US and Europe want to support others in their struggles to make things better, and they want to see the connections between here and there.

In the end, the truth is that I feel very exhausted. And hurt. How is that possible? I am not hurt because of a failure of leadership per se, or a lack of vision in the sector. (I am more than aware of my borderline pathological disdain for authority, which I done my best to keep in check.)

What hurts is being there. Taking this daily battering of double-speak, seeing my peers stripped of illusions slowly becoming jaded, mercenary aid worker hacks. Or seeing them simply jump ship to do the same thing elsewhere, like a change of scenery will make everything better. Or even worse, seeing them bury their heads in the sand.

Oh, Development, no amount of earnest critique, satire, or wounded camaraderie can save our relationship now.

So while I am disappointed in you – I tried so hard to make it work – I am not bitter. In spite of this hurt, I remember back through the last couple of years. You introduced me to amazing people. Some of these mutual friends we can keep. (That is if you do not make a voodoo doll of me after reading this letter.)

I am going to be starting some projects with like-minded friends, that are not about the same old patron-client relationship, repackaged in managerial logic and dragged out for post-colonial generation after generation. These projects are about trying to link people of good will, with energy that does not come from a knee-jerk guilt reaction.

If I fail, great, but I have failed as a human and not a cog in a lop-sided machine.

After feeling that I landed on my feet, I wrote this advice for others wanting to leave that Alessandra Pigni republished on her blog and later in a book she wrote. She is sorely missed.

Our dear friend Fausto Belo Ximenes, known as Nino, who died recently at the age of 43, was brilliant, always curious, funny and stylish. He worked incredibly hard, and achieved what he set out to do, including becoming one of the first Timorese country directors of a major humanitarian agency (Oxfam) in his home country of Timor-Leste.

Nino grew up on the slopes of Mount Matebian, during the Indonesian occupation, in the years after Indonesia’s relentless bombing campaign on the mountain. He said in retrospect it was a time of profound fear.

In 1999, when Indonesia retreated from the territory destroying everything and massacring civilians, at the age of 17, Nino fled to the jungle. One of the few things he took with him during his 10 days in hiding was an English dictionary, and he learned enough English to get a job with the incoming United Nations (UN) administration as an interpreter.

We first met him as this bright young man, who had postponed his formal education to learn firsthand about human rights and development. Even then he had a constructively critical sensibility, with unbounded energy and genuine care for others.

Whether being stranded in the middle of a rice paddy after a breakdown, or searching for an open dry cleaner on a Sunday in Manhattan, Nino was the perfect, upbeat companion.

His intelligence, love of reading and work ethic led him to academic success. Nino graduated in 2017 with a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, the first East Timorese student to graduate with a degree from Oxford, a town with a disproportionately large Timorese population.

In his prior Masters degree in Human Rights, Nino was also the first East Timorese Erasmus scholar, and he delighted in his time studying at the Arctic University of Norway in Trondheim.

He most recently held a prestigious Yale World Fellow post in 2024, where he reflected on his life and work leading teams in post-conflict societies. The World Fellows Program wrote of his “relentless optimism” in a tribute.

Prior to Oxfam, Nino worked as a Graduate Researcher at Oxford’s Changing Character of War (CCW) Centre, a Senior Access to Justice Manager on a USAID project, an adviser to the Timorese Ministry of Education, a Human Rights Officer with UN, and a legal researcher with a local NGO monitoring transitional justice.

Nino dreamed of a big life from the village where he was raised and he made it happen. And his dream wasn’t just for him, but for his newly independent country.

Nino is survived by his parents Rosa Vitória and Vítor Belo Ximenes, a nurse, his nine siblings, and a large extended family in Quelicai, Timor-Leste.

We're currently working on endowing a prize for young people to remember Nino in Timor Leste. If you'd like to contribute, please contact me directly.