By Theo Panayides

The “Reception & Accommodation Centre for Applicants of International Protection”, just outside the village of Kofinou, houses migrants who are seeking asylum and waiting to be told whether their applications for refugee status have been successful.

At present, the camp houses close to 300 people.

We visited the camp and spoke to some of the inhabitants – though, for security reasons, we weren’t allowed to show the interviewees’ faces.

From stock broker to Pilates instructor to mature student at UCLan. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man who believes the less you are given the happier you become

There are aspects of Roger Brignell’s life which might strike an outsider as unusual. Some will find it unusual that he worked for many years as a stockbroker in the City of London, retired at 52 (he’s now “nearly 70”), then became a personal trainer and wrote a bestselling book on Pilates. Others may find it unusual that he was adopted, and grew up – without knowing it – in the family of a distant relative who he thought was his mother. And some will certainly find it unusual that he was married for 30 years, has two sons, but is now living with a man – a Cypriot named Yiannis who’s “half my age and twice my size” as he cheerfully puts it.

Roger himself, of course, doesn’t find any of this remotely unusual; it’s just who he is. The disjunction is partly inevitable, because Life always seems totally normal when you’re on the inside. It’s a bit like his childhood, when he didn’t see anything suspicious in the fact that his four ‘siblings’ were all six foot tall, with brown eyes and blond hair, whereas he was relatively small, with blue eyes and white hair; that was just how things were. Yet it’s not just blind acceptance that prompts him to play down the more unusual aspects of his life: he gives the impression of having thought a lot about these things, and discerned how they all fit together.

His sex life, for instance, is irrelevant: “I think sex is important, [but] I don’t think sexuality is – anything”. His professional life just happened, almost without his volition: “All these things happened to me by accident, I never chose them! I never had a Plan A, I never had a Plan B or any other. I just listened to what people said to me, and said yes or no”. And as for his extraordinary childhood, it was actually “a great lesson” – an enforced independence which outsiders might view as a hardship, but which actually taught him to stand on his own two feet.

Indeed, it wasn’t even that extraordinary. When he was born, at the tail-end of WWII, “soldiers were rife everywhere” and accidental babies were a common occurrence – though of course “in those days women couldn’t keep the babies they had, if they weren’t married”. Roger assumes that his real father was a soldier, though he never knew his identity; he only found out who his real mother was by accident, when he was visiting his grandma in hospital and Gran (presumably too sedated to think straight) said “‘Oh, here’s your mother’ – and when I looked around, it wasn’t my mother”. His mum was related to his foster-mum, as already mentioned, which was why she happened to be visiting at the same time.

Roger was about 18 when the truth came out, and the cuckoo-in-the-nest revelation explained a lot: why he didn’t look like his siblings, why his adoptive mother always seemed so resentful when he did much better at school than the other kids (“I can understand it in retrospect, at the time of course it felt very unfair and I felt I was being badly treated”), even why his ‘parents’ more or less gave up on him when he entered his teens, leaving him to his own devices. Yet, human behaviour being what it is, knowledge of the adoption didn’t really change his life. “I kind of suppressed it all,” he admits, and his birth mother – who had since married and had more children – was also disinclined to pursue it. Only years later did he even try to contact her, for the sake of his own sons – but she didn’t want to talk, and “essentially was cold and off-putting… Well, you can understand that,” he adds. “She’d come from a time when she was forced to do things, and the only way to manage that, I’m sure, in a psychological way, was to actually pretend it never happened.”

Repression, denial, the rejection of one’s own flesh and blood… For all of Roger’s sangfroid, sipping a beer on the seaside patio of Makou in Larnaca – a trim man with very blue eyes and a carefully-groomed white beard – there’s a lot of drama in his early life. It almost makes you wonder if that was why he did a degree in Maths and Psychology, to try and understand the perverse behaviour of his so-called loved ones – and he insists that wasn’t why, then again he’s currently studying Agriculture at UCLan Cyprus and explains his choice by saying that “Life sciences” fascinate him: “What makes animals, people, plants work. How do they work, and why do they work”. What makes a family keep up a pretence for decades, even with an obvious cuckoo in their midst. What makes a boy grow up solitary and mostly unloved, then look back in late middle age and tell an interviewer (i.e. myself) that he’s been “unbelievably lucky” in life.

The Maths and Psychology degree was in Manchester. Roger had a place at Cambridge, but Cambridge was where he’d grown up – a council estate on the outskirts of town – and going there would’ve meant living at home, an indication of how badly he wanted to escape. Getting a degree, on the other hand – any degree – was a big deal in those days. “There’s a huge difference from what life is like today. When I left university in 1967, I had 10 offers of jobs without going for a single interview! If you had a degree, you were very employable – and so people like [chemical company] ICI would write to you, because they’d got a list of all the people who’d got a degree, and say ‘If you want a job, you’ve got one’.” He worked for a while as a clinical psychologist, then ran into the father of an old schoolmate – “Life is full of serendipity” – who got him a job interview. “It was a firm of stockbrokers called Phillips & Drew, who eventually became UBS. And they offered me a job.”

By the time he got married, at 27, he was running a department; by the time he retired, he was set for life. Roger was happy as a stockbroker. He was good at numbers, and even better at talking to people – a fact that’s abundantly clear on the patio at Makou. “It sounds arrogant, but I do interview quite well. If you talk to me, I can talk back”. And he had another talent, a talent for “sniffing the air, getting a feel for what’s actually happening and moving in that direction. I mean, it paid huge dividends when I was a fund manager: I was very good at spotting trends”. Maybe that explains how he managed to segue so smoothly from the old Britain to the new, from a married-with-children stockbroker to a personal trainer and Pilates guru who’s fit, cosmopolitan and yes, bisexual.

“Actually, I take issue with the way the question’s phrased,” he says, when I ask at what point he found out he was gay. I’d assumed he’d always led a double life, maybe even that his 30-year marriage was a sham – but it wasn’t like that at all. “The sexual act is just an act,” he explains. “It’s just like having a meal, as far as I’m concerned. And if you meet somebody who fits you, then gender doesn’t come into it, it’s not an issue. At all! And if I get fed up with Yiannis – or we don’t stay together, or whatever – I might just as easily choose a woman”. That said, he doesn’t seem to have had any same-sex experiences till after his divorce, when he was living alone in Central London. “I’m a sexual being,” he shrugs, “and it’s much easier to get sex from men than it is to get it from women – in London, anyway. It’s just easier. I got hit on all the time, everywhere I went. And in the end, you think ‘Well, why not?’. You know, if you see someone you like, and you’re talking and everything seems to be fine, why wouldn’t you?”

So, does he not even accept ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ as categories? “I think there’s human and non-human,” he replies. “Though I think there are a lot of non-humans in our lives, they just look like us!” That’s a joke – or a half-joke – but the principle remains. “If you say ‘I’m human’ that hasn’t got any gender in it, it hasn’t got any ideology, it hasn’t got anything. It means I’m part of the species Homo Sapiens and I’m just trying to get by, like any other species.”

No gender, no ideology – “and no religion too,” as John Lennon might’ve added (religion is one of the systems people make up to protect themselves, says Roger). Maybe that’s the key to understanding Roger Brignell, the philosophy he espouses so fiercely – a kind of rigorous austerity which asserts that the less you’re given, the happier you’ll become. His childhood was a blessing, he believes, because he learned to look after himself. When it comes to his own sons, he recalls that he worked a 9-to-5 job when the older one was a baby, hence was always there to tuck him in, but was much more absent (having moved to a different job) with the younger one. Result? The older one felt “abandoned” whereas his younger brother learned to cope – and now, “although the older one is much more like me in temperament” they’re practically estranged, whereas he gets on better with his younger son.

Tender loving care as a recipe for disaster? That’s another part of Roger’s life which might strike an outsider as unusual – yet there’s no doubt he means it. Is it simply tough love? Is it his way of rationalising his early life, and turning it into an advantage? I suspect it’s just his personality – a tenacious, flinty personality that believes in taking responsibility for one’s life, and despises “sogginess”.

No, he wasn’t happy as a child – but, “as an individual, if you’re not happy it’s your fault. It’s not anybody else’s fault”. Roger would be mortified if he came across as a victim (“This is not looking for sympathy, OK?” he says by way of preface, when describing how poor his adoptive parents were) and is totally opposed to the “soft” thinking that’s infected public life, especially in Britain. “When I was young, I thought I was very liberal. Now I sometimes catch myself on the verge of fascism!” he admits with a wry laugh. It pains him that policy on Syrian refugees, for instance, “can be influenced by a picture of a dead child on a beach in Turkey, or wherever. Of course that’s very sad – everybody would admit that it’s very sad. But it’s not a reason for changing the way you think, or what you do… We can’t be the world’s social workers”. In a way, he’s a link between old and new Britain, illustrating how the latter’s trendy individualism and rejection of labels has its roots in the former’s emphasis on thrift and self-sufficiency. Neither of his sons (both work as artists) has ever asked him for a penny, says Roger proudly.

What if “sogginess” had been fashionable back in 1945, though? His real mum would’ve raised him, he’d have been loved. “I’d have been ruined, wouldn’t I?” he replies pointedly. “And I’m now going to be rude about Cyprus, [but] I would’ve been indulged in exactly the same way Cypriot children are indulged – and I think the way children are treated in Cyprus is ruination!” He’s lived here for almost three years (he moved to be close to Yiannis), and his lifestyle is enviable – tennis and gym every day, building a house on a hill overlooking Ayia Napa – yet he still can’t resist pointing out a few failings, from ugly buildings on the beach to 17-year-olds with their own cars (“Why does he have a car? Why do the parents pay for it?”). He is quite grumpy, in many ways. It’s amusing to learn that his older son – the one who’s very like him in temperament – hasn’t come to visit him in Cyprus because he “doesn’t like sunshine”.

There’s a lot more one could say about Roger Brignell. He has an MBA from Insead. He wrote his Pilates handbook in eight working days. The clients at his personal-trainer studio once included Madonna. Much of this is unusual, or impressive or remarkable – but, in the end, they’re just facts, things that happened in the course of his seven decades. Life per se, life as a collection of experiences, doesn’t define who he is, insists Roger – it merely defines his history. “I don’t think what I do, or what I say, or what I think, defines me at all. I think there’s something here, which is what defines me,” he adds, and points vaguely to his chest, “but it hasn’t got anything to do with external things at all”. He won’t call it a soul, but “a core, at least” – an essence, a Roger Brignell quality. Otherwise he’s part of the species Homo Sapiens, trying to get by like any other species.

Ecosystems under stress and helping communities that rely on them have taken one recent visitor to the island around much of the world. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

Ecosystem management isn’t a subject that leaps off the page; yet Gill Shepherd’s life has been rather fascinating. For the past 30-odd years this bespectacled, grandmotherly woman – she is indeed a grandmother, or at least a step-grandmother – has been roaming the mountains, mangrove swamps and (especially) forests of the developing world, getting in a long canoe with an outboard motor to reach places which are inaccessible by road, talking to nomads and village elders, trying to shame and browbeat intransigent governments – then heading back to her townhouse in Islington, where she’s lived since the 80s and is currently putting in a new bathroom.

And Cyprus? Where do we fit into all this? Well, it’s true our ecosystem could use a little management – but she’s actually here for another reason, a Memorial Lecture for Peter Loizos, her late husband and fellow anthropologist. Gill and I actually meet in the home of Nicos Philippou, an Associate Lecturer at the University of Nicosia who’s putting her up during her stay – and Peter Loizos, a London half-Cypriot who only discovered Cyprus in adulthood and became an authority on the subject, was immensely popular at the University, where he taught during the last decade of his life (he died in 2012) after retiring from the London School of Economics. He had a talent for encouragement, recalls his wife fondly – “he facilitated you going forward” – a skill he employed both as a teacher and in his personal life.

“I was lucky with Peter, because Peter always believed women should have a career,” she muses. “He made me aim higher than I would’ve done, probably”. They were married for 37 years, having met at the LSE where Loizos, six years her senior, was Gill’s tutor. His background was a bit more turbulent (his English mother and Cypriot father separated when he was two), hers was “very straight down the line”. Her mum had been a schoolteacher, dad was a civil servant; “Both my parents were quite shy, so I think we were brought up to be quiet”. Gill never went anywhere very exotic as a child – just a few family trips to France and Italy – but something gnawed at her regardless, a desire to discover new cultures and a dawning realisation that she probably wouldn’t be happy following in her mother’s footsteps as a teacher.

Anthropology was actually her second degree; she’d read English Literature at Oxford – but had also done something quite adventurous, going to Sudan for two years when she was 23 (she’s now 72) just because she wanted a change and didn’t want to start teaching in England right away. Travelling widely – she’d become fluent in Arabic before starting out – exploring the interior then trying to teach Shakespeare to young Muslim girls at a posh school in Khartoum, Gill was deeply smitten by the newness and strangeness of it all. Or, as she puts it in her nicely self-deprecating way: “I thought, ‘My goodness me, I’d rather be experiencing all of this with a bit more of a framework’.”

Cue the LSE, then a PhD studying the Muslim community of Mombasa in Kenya, then a second stint in Sudan working for Oxfam – this time with Peter and their kids, Daniel and Hannah. “You know, we did it as a job share – the two children were quite small, so we did two weeks on, two weeks off.” One spouse would go on a field trip while the other looked after the children, then they’d swap roles; “It was a very nice bit of work, very democratic between the two of us”. That was surely a key to their marriage, that the two were similar but different. On the one hand, Peter was a cultured, gentle soul, like her: “We were quite quiet when we were in London. We enjoyed reading books and discussing them together”. On the other he complemented her free-spirited side, staying home on his academic’s timetable to raise kids (with the help of a nanny) while she roamed the world; “My daughter has complained to me, and said ‘You weren’t around for me as much as you should’ve been’,” admits Gill, with a smile both amused and rueful.

The inhabitatants of Papua

It must’ve been a sight, this no-nonsense, very English lady trekking through jungles and forests. Indonesian Papua was perhaps the roughest: “I’ve worked in the highlands where these guys are more or less naked, wearing these sort of penis sheath things”. She wasn’t exactly an explorer – she always consulted on existing projects, liaising with staff who were already trusted by the villagers – but still inspired some puzzlement. “Why does your husband let you travel all by yourself to other places?” asked a bunch of old men in Nepal, parleying with the strange Western woman around the village campfire one night. “Well, he’s very happy that I can earn some money as well as him,” replied Gill. “But why does England let women have this kind of job?” they persisted, a question that has no easy answer except perhaps to give a potted history of women’s rights in Britain – which she did, much to the men’s bemusement.
What about the argument that what she does – telling people in poor countries how to manage their forests – is a form of benign colonialism, though?

“Yeah, yeah,” she replies briskly, with the air of having heard it all before. Gill is quite brisk in general, hence the air of no-nonsense Englishness. I suspect she’s not the type to give very effusive compliments – though equally not the type to lose her temper. “Oh no, I don’t think that’s me,” she replies when I ask if she might’ve become a militant activist, had she been born 50 years later. “I think I always do things the quiet way. Some people are good at shouting and stamping and so on – I’m not. I’m more inclined to persuade people by reasoned argument.”

What about the charge of benign colonialism, though?

“Obviously, at one level, it’s true,” she says candidly. “[However], at another level, local people will often say to you: ‘It’s easier for you to tell our government something than it is for us’. So they’re quite grateful to have a neutral third party, who doesn’t have a political interest in the situation”.

Her very first project – during her time in Sudan with her husband and children – is a great example of that. Gill explored the semi-arid “rain-fed areas” and met with nomads, who bred cattle and camels. The animals could only live on grass for about one month, then ate leaves off the trees for the remainder of the year. That had always been the nomads’ way of life, and they knew exactly what to do and where to go – but now the central government “were allowing the World Bank to come in and cut these trees down, to do some sort of rain-fed millet production”; they didn’t even realise they were destroying another economy in the process, and were quite surprised when Gill told them. It’s a common problem, national governments – whether through prejudice or simple ignorance – unaware of the way of life in rural areas; and these rural people, she says, “will never get a chance to explain what they’re doing at national level unless someone like me is in the middle, kind of facilitating.”

Has she ever been in physical danger? Not really, she says, trying to remember; maybe just once in Guatemala, when their guide unexpectedly got antsy and hustled them out of a hamburger place. “I said ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said ‘I suddenly saw there were four guys with guns in that place, and I thought any minute they’re going to do a raid, so we’d better get out as fast as we can’.” Generally, though, people are welcoming – maybe because they think she can help them, maybe because it’s just how they are. “People are the same all over the world,” says Gill, trying to glean a lesson from her travels. “I mean, you really have a strong sense that there’s a common humanity”.

That’s one lesson to be gleaned; but there’s another, less heartening one. “Money is the lever,” she admits. Money talks, all over the world. Sometimes money can be an incentive for good, as in Congo-Brazzaville where she helped a logging company work more sustainably so they could earn a quality-control stamp from the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) – a European plan to label timber logged in a way that respects the local environment, for which European customers then pay a premium. More often, though, money is a force for evil, or at least venality and irresponsibility. Exhibit A is Indonesia, where acres of high-value timber lead to cronyism, illegal felling of forests, and corruption in general. “However much you try to do something good at the local level, if you can’t fix the political level, forget it,” admits Gill sadly. She’s tried the softly-softly approach, others have tried being confrontational, but it’s no use: “I think nothing works when you have a rich country like that”.

It doesn’t bode well for climate change, obviously our biggest environmental problem and the one where “big-scale government commitment” – usually against vested interests – is absolutely crucial. Villagers in Ghana a few months ago (Gill still travels, though not as much as she used to: this year she went to Ghana, Mexico and South Africa) told her they first noticed change in 1994: before that, Nature would give them signs about when to plant – “Certain birds started singing, certain insects hatched out, and we knew if we planted seeds then, the rain would come in about 10 or 12 days” – but for the past 20 years the signs have ceased to mean anything; “Now you just have to guess”. 20 years, she observes without rancour (not an activist, just an anthropologist), yet the West is still arguing about global warming. It’s unlikely the developing world will prove more efficient.

What will the world be like when her grandkids reach the age she is now? Hard to say, but the forthcoming “movement of peoples” is going to make today’s migrant crisis look like a stroll in the park – millions fleeing the lands where water has vanished – not to mention “water fights” which indeed have already started; Ethiopia and Kenya are currently at loggerheads over a proposed dam that’s going to stop a river flowing from the former to the latter. The next generation, or the one after that, will have hard decisions to make. As for Gill herself – well, she’s not quite hors de combat yet, but the years are inevitably catching up a little. “I’m at a stage of my life,” she says wryly, “when I feel I should be sorting out all the family photographs”.
Instead she keeps going (she’s even putting in a new bathroom), and her hobbies – in addition to pleasant pastimes like cooking and going to the theatre – include helping to run “a local community association that fights issues at the local level”. They argue with the local council, and Gill – being a writer – is often enlisted to write the “red-hot, five-page document” that sets out their arguments, drawing on a lifetime of reasoned argument against African bureaucrats and illegal loggers.

She seems like a strong person; there’s a touch of asperity in her manner – I get the sense that, if I were to ask a stupid question, she wouldn’t hesitate to let me know – though she also, like a lot of strong people, seems to dislike being hemmed in. It may be significant that she tried acting while at school and hated it (“The idea of having to get your words exactly right, so you can cue up the other person, is terrifying to me”); she needs freedom, even if it’s freedom to fail – and may have needed someone like Peter, who encouraged and enabled her. He died suddenly, of pancreatic cancer, and their kids had very different reactions to his death: Daniel moved back home, as if needing to be close to Gill – but Hannah quit her job and moved to Barcelona to teach English, as if unable to be physically in the same town as the memories of her father.

And Gill? She doesn’t say – but she surely consoled herself, in mourning the man of her life, with memories of her time in Mombasa, when death was enfolded in ritual. “If there was a death, everybody immediately knew what to do”. The bereaved family didn’t have to cook for 40 days; all meals were provided by the neighbours. Excerpts from the Koran were handed out and read aloud, the belief being that reading the Koran sped the soul on its journey. Different cultures work in different ways, all doing their best to make sense of the world – and Gill has experienced so many of them. A fascinating life, indeed.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a philosopher engaged in building robots who is convinced they will never outsmart us

There’s often a moment in American films when our heroes meet someone like Selmer Bringsjord (he is indeed American, despite the Norwegian name). He might be a small-town judge, or a sheriff. He’s deadpan, and rather doleful. He speaks slowly, in a deep bullhorn voice. He says ‘darn’ to express annoyance. The cinematic Selmer soothes our heroes’ fears, and talks some sense into them. In real life, however, Selmer isn’t a judge or a sheriff but something much less folksy – an academic researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), building robots for the relatively near future when machines will have penetrated deep (or even deeper) into everyday life.

How near is that future? “Two years ago, at a ski trip in Colorado, we had a very intellectually violent debate about the timeline,” he replies in his booming, deliberate voice. He himself believes that, when it comes to self-driving cars for instance, 50 years is a reasonable estimate; at that point, it’ll be “a complete done deal. Humans may enjoy driving, and driving fast, but the machines will be doing all of that”. Selmer may or may not be around to witness this (he’ll be 57 next month), but he’s fairly sure it’ll happen; the twist, however, is that – unlike most of the excitable folks who work in AI – he also thinks the human mind will forever be superior to machines and robots, however intelligent.

This is not always a popular view in his field. Futurologists love to talk – and not just hypothetically – about the so-called Singularity, a point in the future when computers or robots will be smart enough to build computers or robots even smarter than themselves, resulting (per Wikipedia) in “a runaway effect… creating intelligence far exceeding human intellectual capacity and control”. In short, many people are convinced that machines will eventually outsmart us, and presumably take over the world. Selmer, however, remains sceptical – though “that doesn’t mean that powerful autonomous machines can’t wreak havoc, and they will. They will, they will.”

The reason for that upcoming havoc is something called formal programme verification: this is essentially the process (a very technical, very expensive process) by which we check that a computer programme is behaving as intended – “and most countries, the US included, are spending next to nothing on it”. Hardly anyone knows how to do it, so we’re building these increasingly autonomous and powerful machines while shutting down the process of keeping an eye on them. (The problem is compounded by the fact that operating systems are privately owned by the likes of Microsoft and Google, so researchers who might want to work on the machines don’t have access to them.) Selmer is aware of this problem yet he’s also, among other things, Director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Laboratory at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York – and his work in the lab consists of trying to make precisely the kind of machines he’s talking about, the self-aware kind that may eventually ‘wreak havoc’.

Why does he do it? Practically speaking, I assume it’s because the robotics revolution is coming one way or the other (some would say it’s already here), so he might as well be part of it. Philosophically speaking, I assume it’s because he’s convinced (as already mentioned) that robots will never overtake us, though they might go rogue once in a while – and Philosophy, after all, is his turf, having been the subject of both his BA and PhD. When I ask whose theories of the future he finds most plausible, he mentions Leibniz, the 17th-century German philosopher.

It’s heartening to find a philosopher engaged in building robots – because AI brings with it dilemmas that can only be described as philosophical. Take the self-driving car, for instance. Selmer’s recent talk at TEDx Limassol (we meet at the Elias Beach Hotel, the day before the event) was entitled ‘Can Robots Be True Heroes?’, ‘heroes’ being this year’s TEDx theme – and his point was that, at the end of the day, “robots cannot be genuine heroes” because they don’t have emotions, and heroism consists of “rising above deep emotions that are militating against doing this”. The man who walks into a burning building to save a child is a hero, says Selmer, because every sinew in his body is shouting “No! No, you have a family, and you’ve got 20 years left of your life, and you’ve got great things to accomplish”. Robots have no such qualms, hence they can’t be true heroes.

Maybe so. But what about the self-driving car that decides to sacrifice its own ‘body’ in order to prevent carnage? A child runs into the street, and the robot calculates that crashing the car – i.e. destroying itself – without injuring its owner/occupant will prevent loss of life. Isn’t self-sacrifice a kind of heroism? And, if robots can be heroes, how far will they go? “I think this is an enormous looming issue that no-one is really thinking about,” notes Selmer, looking even more doleful than usual. After all, “this kind of thinking is what machines do. This is what they’ve done in chess… If we don’t want the machines to do this, we will have to programme them somehow not to, because they’re going to see these things that we currently, for the most part, don’t see”.

Think about it. A child runs into the street, and the robot crashes (without injuring its occupant) to save the child’s life. But what if it has to choose between running over the child and crashing into another car? And what if there’s a whole bunch of children in the street, and it calculates that killing its occupant – by crashing into a wall, say – would still be a better option than ploughing into the kids? One assumes there’s some sort of Prime Directive to protect the car’s human owner, as in Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novels – but an intelligent machine keeps learning and expanding, that’s the idea. Robots already use “naïve utilitarianism,” says Selmer; could they also learn “Kantian ethics”, the idea of basic rules (e.g. that human life is intrinsically valuable) that you never contravene? “This kind of dimension is really hard to figure out how to capture mechanically. I mean, I’m personally working on that, so I know it’s hard”.

Does he think his work with robots has given him a deeper understanding of what it means to be human?

He pauses, his deadpan expression giving no indication that he’s about to be funny. “Well, it would be hubristic for me to say yes. But I will say yes.”

Nothing like artificial intelligence, it seems, to make you appreciate real intelligence – and Selmer Bringsjord comes across that way on a personal level, as a man who appreciates the world and all who live in it. His small-town-judge demeanour is the opposite of arrogant; he’s very approachable, and spends a good 10 minutes after the interview asking for tips on what to see in Cyprus (he and his wife plan to come back soon, and explore more thoroughly). He seems, for want of a better word – or maybe there is no better word – very human.

For one thing, he appreciates travel, having given lectures and interviews in two dozen countries. For another, he appreciates family. He and his wife have been married since 1982, and have been a couple since Selmer was 15: “We were effectively childhood sweethearts”. (So these high-school relationships can work, I muse. “They can work,” he confirms, adding pointedly: “It takes a very understanding, patient woman for it to work”.) He’s also very close to his brother, and it’s long been a Thanksgiving tradition for the two Bringsjord families to go on a trip together – which suggests that he’s also close to his children, a son and daughter working for PWC and Macy’s, respectively.

Maybe he treasures family because he grew up without it, or at least without a part of it: his parents divorced when he was five, and his dad went back to Norway where he promptly dropped out of his son’s life (they only met once more, when Selmer was 16). He was raised by his mum, an entrepreneurial beautician who also dabbled in real-estate – and she always pegged him for a future academic, despite the non-academic family background (his absent father had worked as a builder). “She’d tease me about it. I remember when I was extremely young, she would say: ‘You’re basically not doing anything, it’s really hard to get you to do anything. You’re just sitting there reading!… The only thing you can be is a professor’.”

So he was always a bit of a dreamer?

“I certainly like to dream. I certainly like to read, and have always loved reading”. The internet is like crack cocaine for him; he can sit and read for hours, flitting from research papers to travel pieces. “I have to control myself, yes,” he says soberly. “I love reading about different places in the world and then travelling to them… I mean, to get online and say ‘oh, Cyprus. Darn, I’ve never been to Cyprus, this looks really interesting’, and I start to read about the history of Cyprus – it’s amazing!”. When he’s not reading, he’s writing – not just on robots but, for instance, a spy novel called Soft Wars (“What was the secret passed on from Russian top espionage master Andreev Kasakov to his even more ruthless son?” runs the Amazon synopsis) or a kind of philosophical tract called Abortion: A Dialogue, in which various characters debate the titular issue in a coffee house.

An academic who dabbles in spy novels, a robot-maker with no great faith in robots, an avid traveller who’s never lived outside the Hudson Valley (he was born in White Plains, New York, just a few miles from his current workplace). There are many facets to Selmer Bringsjord – and in fact his low-key style is also deceptive; he’s not just a reader and a dreamer, but also an athlete. He’s a serious skier, a “ski patroller”, and also plays golf and tennis. None of those are team sports, I note, and he shrugs thoughtfully: he does ski and golf with other people, he points out – “but I [also] have no problem enjoying solitude in those two sports, and really enjoying it a lot”. I suspect he may be one of those idealistic maverick types who love humanity but could probably live without actual humans.

Meanwhile, the robots are approaching – autonomous weapons getting ever closer to the battlefield (this is where formal programme verification might be useful), plus of course more benign applications. The Japanese have invested hugely in elder care, especially for patients with Alzheimer’s, and there’s also a huge growth market in education, robots as teaching assistants (maybe as “intelligent agents” rather than physical machines). Won’t people resent the incursion? Evidence shows that “most humans, including children, seem to have no problem developing an unusually strong bond with robots,” he replies. “The robot has to be respectful, courteous – maybe even seemingly loving. It can’t screw up all the time, people don’t have a lot of patience for machinery that screws up. But I think long-term there will be great acceptance.”

Robots can’t be heroes, though – and it’s unlikely they’ll ever be quirky and multi-faceted as Selmer is, and indeed as we all are. I don’t know if he’s right about the human mind, but certainly AI will have trouble replicating the human soul – the lattice of traits and contradictions that make each of us unique, the inner sense of what it’s like to be us. “The US is increasingly an AI economy. But the AI itself is not exactly deep”. You buy a book at Amazon and the online robots make recommendations, cross-referencing your tastes with millions of other readers’. “That is great, I love it, it pays the bills” for whoever designed it – but it’s not really deep thinking. Selmer points to my tape recorder: “You having to rationalise, systematise, take this information from the audio of what I said and produce a document makes [those robots] seem like absolute child’s play”. I feel better already.

For one wildlife conservationist months of boring work can be offset by half an hour of activity to burst apart a crime ring. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

Onkuri Majumdar sits in the Elias Beach Hotel in Limassol, poised, elegant. She poses for my improvised photo (our photographer couldn’t make it), and gently points out that it might be better to stand with the sun behind me. When she speaks, she punctuates her words with graceful hand movements and prim, almost embarrassed little chuckles – for instance when she talks about the reintroduction of predators in areas where they’d been hunted out (wolves in parts of North America, say). When they brought the wolves back into the ecosystem, explains Onkuri, “the prey population became healthier, because the weaker ones were” – embarrassed chuckle – “killed, basically”.

She’s not really embarrassed; it’s just that violent animal slaughter seems incongruous coming from the lips of this soft-spoken, 36-year-old Indian lady – and also, perhaps, that she works with animals (she’s a wildlife conservationist) but has no delusions about their, well, animal behaviour. Does she feel there’s a purity in animals, perhaps, an instinctiveness that human beings have lost, or never had? She shakes her head.

“No, I would say assigning qualities like purity or sweetness or innocence to animals is unrealistic. There’s a lot of savagery in the animal world – only you can’t call it savagery in the sense that humans are savage, because humans are capable of much more thinking. [But] it’s not like animals are these pure creatures who only kill when they need to. They can go on killing frenzies. Snow leopards, for example, go on killing frenzies and they just kill entire flocks of sheep, for no reason! … Lots of animals bully other animals terribly, just for fun”. Generally speaking, the more intelligent an animal, the more likely it is to be “naughty” – like for instance orcas (aka killer whales), who like ‘playing’ with seals even when the seals aren’t particularly enjoying the game. “They don’t want to eat it,” marvels Onkuri. “They just want to torture the animal, whack it around”.

Don’t expect wide-eyed sentimentality from this rather practical woman. Don’t expect much personal sharing, either. Almost all I get about her private life is that she’s married, to an American – they work for the same NGO, the Freeland Foundation – doesn’t have any children yet, and, since she travels a lot for work, tends to do “sedentary stuff” when she’s at home: “I knit a lot. I’m quite a big knitter”. She’s due to speak at TEDx Limassol the day after our interview – and TEDx tends to attract exhibitionists looking for the limelight, but that’s not the case here. For Onkuri, it’s obviously work, a chance to spread the gospel about what she does. Her speech isn’t going to be some cute-sounding, what-if-God-were-an-animal flight of fancy, but a simple overview of her work.

What exactly is her work? “I work in wildlife conservation, and specifically we work on wildlife law-enforcement support,” she explains, meaning that she mostly works with local cops in India and South-East Asia (she’s Managing Director of Freeland India, but divides her time between Delhi and Bangkok). “We bring government investigators together, we do our own investigations to support them, we go undercover to help gather evidence for police stings”. She plans to describe one particular investigation in her TEDx talk, a recent syndicate operating out of Laos: “They had tentacles everywhere,” she says – making me wonder, for one mad moment, if they were smuggling octopuses – “all the way to South Africa, and they were involved in poaching rhinos”. Onkuri and Freeland liaised with investigators for years, and finally secured the conviction of some key syndicate members – not “low-level transporters,” she notes, but the “big syndicate heads”, the ones who matter.

That’s a key point – because the trade in wild animals is extremely lucrative, attracting not just opportunistic local poachers but “dangerous characters” and very well-connected ones. When she goes undercover to gather evidence – quite a thrilling task, despite her low-key demeanour – it’s not necessarily evidence that’ll stand up in court. Sometimes the cops want an illicit video of the animal traders accepting cash, “so they can use that as leverage to get information about other members of the syndicate”. Sometimes they want “visual footage of where a person is hiding the animals” – so Onkuri and her team have to build a relationship, getting the poachers to trust them so they’ll take them to the animal enclosure. Does she go in disguise? I ask excitedly. “Not really. I just pretend to be a regular person,” she replies, the low-key demeanour returning.

In the end, if they’re lucky, there are raids and arrests – but the end doesn’t come until hours and hours of tedious analysis work, cross-checking phone numbers and perusing old files. Onkuri’s conversation is studded with exotic names like pangolins (a small scaly anteater, apparently) and slow lorises, but her life – unless she’s in the field, training local lawmen – is mostly spent in offices and meetings. What’s the most exciting part of the work? “I think it’s exciting when something just explodes into action,” she sighs. “Because most good investigations actually take months or years – it’s not like a movie where you get a clue and you follow it and immediately something happens. And most of it is boring, it’s just watching and waiting and watching and waiting, it’s boring for months and months and months. Until finally there’s half an hour of extreme excitement!”

In a sense, the animals are almost incidental; she could be doing much the same work about, say, human trafficking – and indeed, Freeland are now starting to investigate that as well (the two crimes often overlap, human victims used by traffickers to transport wildlife products). Yet animals have always been her life. “I always knew I would work with animals,” she affirms in her LinkedIn profile – and she always did, ever since she was a little girl in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh; it was just a question of discovering in what capacity. It’s strange, in a way, since she never had any pets (her mum is asthmatic) nor did she have much contact with animals in general. “There’s no logic behind it,” she admits. “It was just an innate interest, right from my childhood.”

Was she very solitary, perhaps? Was it a lonely childhood?

“No, I don’t think so,” she replies, looking puzzled.

I only mean because that’s the stereotype: the shy, sensitive girl who finds solace in animals.

“Yeah, I am not a very sensitive person!” replies Onkuri, the prim chuckle rising to a merry laugh.

Really? Not sensitive?

“I mean, I didn’t turn to animals because I was hurt by humans. Not like that, no. I just always liked animals, and my family were very supportive, and they’d buy me books and videos and things about animals”. (The family are typical of India’s social transformation in the space of a single generation: Onkuri’s mother was a housewife, but Onkuri is an NGO executive and her sister is a Web designer.) She does admit to being more of an introvert than an extrovert – hence perhaps all that knitting.

Does she ever feel like she prefers animals to people, though?

“Well” – the embarrassed chuckle again – “I would say that’s too general a question. Obviously, I like my family and friends more than any random animal!” She shrugs gracefully, indulging my question. “But I would say I’d much rather be in a natural place than going to a meeting and socialising with boring people.”

Maybe it’s just as well that she’s “not a very sensitive person” – or she’d never be able to stand the cruelty that’s endemic to the illegal trade in wild animals. Beasts may be captured or killed for trophies, for traditional medicine (as with rhino horn), for consumption, for ornaments and trinkets as in the ivory trade. Then there’s the trade in exotic pets, “which is one of the biggest and it threatens all the most endangered animals”. Irresponsible pet-owners in Europe, Japan and Russia will pay thousands of dollars for a big cat or a bird of prey, or indeed a slow loris.

A slow what?

More chuckling: “It’s a little – well, it looks like a teddy bear but it’s about that small,” says Onkuri, indicating with her hands. “And because they look cute, people want them as pets”. They do look insanely cute (do a Google search, if you haven’t already) – but slow lorises are also nocturnal, so being exposed to daylight in their new homes upends their whole metabolism, and they also have long, decidedly non-cute teeth which can bite and infect their new owners. “So the traders usually just pull the teeth out,” she explains flatly.

“So a lot of cruelty, a lot of mortality in the trade. A lot of mothers are killed, so the babies can be exported for the pet trade.”

The problem is huge, and has recently spiralled – fuelled by growing prosperity in Asia – after a period of relative calm in the 90s and early 00s. Some countries in Africa have lost 90 per cent of their elephants in the last five years, partly (says Onkuri) because millions of young Chinese men think that wearing ivory trinkets “makes them look cool”. The number of rhinos poached in South Africa soared from 15 in 2007 to 688 in 2012, mostly – according to an article in The Atlantic – because rhino horn has been touted in Vietnam as a cure for both cancer and hangovers (at one point, rhino horn was fetching up to $100,000 per kilo in that country). In the middle of it all are people like Onkuri, patiently tracking down crime syndicates and trying to build a culture “where people recognise that animals have a right to live. Not just because they can be useful to humans, but by themselves”.

What about more militant animal-rights activists? Does she ever sympathise with those who refuse to be patient, destroying fur farms and firebombing animal labs?
Her poise never falters. “More than emotional, I’m a very practical person. So I always go with what works. And militant approaches almost always do not work. So I think it’s a waste of passion. If you have that much passion, then direct that passion into something that will give you long-term results.”

Don’t the militant approaches sometimes work, though?

“Yes, sometimes they do,” she concedes, “but it requires continuous repeating of that same fiery action. If you really want long-term results, you’ve got to make the people in charge think it’s something they have to do. And institutionalise it – make people think that is the normal way to be. That it’s their job to look after the animals.”

What animal would Onkuri Majumdar be, if she were an animal? Unsurprisingly, she likes the smart ones: “Maybe a chimpanzee,” because they’re intelligent and develop complex social structures. Yet there’s also a larger question that goes beyond human intelligence, namely what would we lose – if anything – if we lost wild animals? Assuming that technology could repair the effects on the environment (a big ‘if’, admittedly), what would humans of the future have lost if they lived in a world where animals had become extinct? After all, the link is almost broken, at least for urbanites. Big-city kids learn about horses and cows in their kindergarten reading-books – but they never actually see these beasts, let alone lions and tigers.

Well, OK, admits Onkuri. “Of course they can survive without it” – but our lives are so much richer with the presence of wild things. It’s “a way of feeling connected to the world around you,” she asserts. “Not just with human society, but the larger context of the world that you inhabit”.

Yes, but that’s the point: animals are less and less a part of that world.

“I wouldn’t agree with that,” she says softly, with another of those prim, embarrassed chuckles. “I think at some point people will realise how much we need Nature, and we need to reconnect with Nature.”

Will they? Or is modern Man beyond redemption when it comes to the pangolin and the slow loris? And what of Onkuri herself? Does she ever get people questioning her work? Is she ever decried as a traitor to her species?

“I think the most negative reaction I’ve ever got is ‘Why don’t you work with children, or humans? Why animals?’,” she replies thoughtfully. “And I say ‘You can’t pick what moves you’. You know? It’s like saying, why do you love the colour red rather than the colour orange? You do. You just love it. You do what you want”. Ah, sweet mystery of animals.

With a career in banking looking dull, one Brit upped sticks to Cyprus where he now runs a fortnightly auction. Amid the traces of other people’s lives THEO PANAYIDES meets a man keen on looking forward

It doesn’t look like much, a 500-square-metre warehouse in Latsia, just off the highway. I suppose it isn’t very much, just an empty space filled with “stuff” as Duncan Wills puts it – but the stuff in question is a great eclectic mess, as if someone took a snapshot in a hundred random homes then dumped all the photos in the same mad collage.

There are mugs, beds, a pool table. There are sofas, handbags, trinkets, a “collectible” set of Harrods biscuit tins, a video game from some 80s arcade, a souvenir cake-slicer with ‘Karlovy Vary’ (a town in the Czech Republic) emblazoned on its side. There’s a bag of rock salts. There’s a gold Baume & Mercier wrist-watch. There are paintings, including an original piece by Vasilis Vasiliou (signed ‘Basilio’) which, at €1,800, is the most valuable item in the whole warehouse. This is the Nicosia saleroom of Castle Auctions – they have another, even bigger one in Limassol – and Duncan stands in the middle of it all, looking around at the odds and ends he’s agreed to try and sell. None of these items are new; all had previous owners, and their presence seems to brush against their former possessions, tinting and smudging them. They bear “traces of lives,” he muses.

It might be nice to carry on in this poetic vein – but Duncan isn’t really the type to wax poetic. He’s 46, with a pale, clear face (he has a touch of David Cameron), thinning hair and candid blue eyes. What type of man is the company’s founder and chief auctioneer? Well, take for instance the fact that he walked the Camino de Santiago in 2011, a 600-kilometre pilgrimage route across northern Spain: “A lot of people describe it as spiritual,” notes Duncan – but his own reason for going was simply that he saw The Way, a film starring Martin Sheen that takes place around the Camino, and “it just looked good”. He doesn’t come across as very spiritual; on the other hand he did go on the route, and walked those 600 kilometres (having first trained for six months), and had an unforgettable experience: “You walk through fields of sunflowers one day, you walk above the cloud-line the next, you walk through mediaeval towns…” In a word, he gave it a go.

Duncan is a doer. “I’ve not explored to the North Pole and things like that,” he demurs when I ask if he’s led an adventurous life. “I’m not into wrestling alligators, I’m not expecting to be the first man on Mars” – but he has jumped out of a plane, and he’s recently learned to ride a motorbike, and he plans to dip a toe in the world of stand-up comedy in the next few months. “I do have a little streak in me,” he begins – but doesn’t finish the thought, going off on a tangent. He’s not the most introspective person.

‘What kind of streak?’ I prompt, trying to get him back on track.

He pauses, thinking about it. “It’s not exactly stubbornness,” he replies hesitantly, “but I think it’s a case of remembering to live in the moment, and do some stuff”. One of last week’s victorious All Blacks warned that you can “get a very sore neck” from looking back all the time, says Duncan – “and I agree, I’m not into looking back into the past, but I would like to have those little milestones where you’ve DONE something, you’ve LIVED something. It’s very easy to get to Christmas and look back at your last 12 months, and [find that] you can’t pick too many great highlights”.

Maybe that explains his move to Cyprus in 2009, when he’d just turned 40 and the British economy was in the doldrums. “In a different life, back in the UK, I was a retail manager for a building society,” he recalls. At the time, he was married (he and his wife separated in 2012, though they remain good friends) and had worked in financial services for about 20 years – but was also starting to recognise that the structured life of banks wasn’t what he really wanted, so he made “a conscious decision to have more time to enjoy living”. A project to transform a struggling hotel into a retirement community brought him to Cyprus – a place he already knew, having visited some years earlier to meet his long-lost half-brother – then, when the project stalled, he started the auction house as a Plan B.

Not an obvious choice for a business venture – but in fact it made sense. Business-wise, there was a niche in the market: auctions were rare on the island, the highest-bidder model not being something that comes naturally (Cyprus is a haggling culture, where you start high and slowly come down; the notion of starting an item at its minimum price is surprising to many people). More importantly, auctioneering was a good fit for Duncan – first, because he likes public speaking, and second, because he likes people.

It’s true: the world’s most common phobia – the fear of being tongue-tied in front of total strangers – holds no terrors for him. He’s often been entrusted with wedding speeches and eulogies, and was “often nominated to be the speaker” at corporate events in his old job; he’s also on the committee at the Cyprus chapter of Toastmasters, an organisation devoted to good public speaking (he’s also a member of the Lions Club; he seems to be a joiner in general). Getting up to talk isn’t a problem for Duncan, a handy talent for an auctioneer who sometimes has to talk for four hours straight. (What’s the trick to public speaking? The thing to remember, he quips, is that your audience “aren’t judging you, they’re just pleased someone else is doing it!”.) His upcoming foray into stand-up comedy – he plans to do a course in the UK next year – is just a natural progression.

He’s convivial; he’s also sociable. Again and again, he talks of friendship and camaraderie, whether it’s sharing communal meals with fellow hikers on the Camino de Santiago or organising barbecues and rugby parties with fellow expats in Limassol; he likes to think of his customers as friends, he says earnestly, and swears he’s not being disingenuous. Sociability seems to run in the family. Both of his parents (he grew up in Devon) worked communicative, people-centric jobs – Dad a salesman, Mum a very senior occupational therapist – his sister’s a psychologist with a thriving care-in-the-home network, while his 22-year-old son is training to be a teacher; only the aforementioned half-brother (Dad’s little secret, revealed later in life) is a bit of a black sheep, currently in Equatorial Guinea with a Texas oil company. Duncan was always an extrovert, the kind of boy who acted in school plays and sang in the choir. “Everyone’s always been outgoing,” he recalls of his family. “Pushed in front of people, told to get on with it, yes.”

It helps to be a man who likes people in the auction trade, if only to accept what they give you with a good grace – all the detritus of their lives, sometimes magical, more often moth-eaten. It’s not entirely indiscriminate. On the wall of the saleroom is a list of items Castle won’t normally accept for sale: no clothes or shoes, no curtains or soft furnishings, no old TVs, etc. It’s an auction, after all, not a garage sale. Then again, the most recent auction was a few days before our interview (the next one is this coming Saturday) and that auction featured 1,200 lots; inevitably, they included a lot of tat. A pair of bookends for children’s books (bidding starts at €5); a set of Russian dolls (€30); a pink money box with a “lucky coin” (€10); a figurine of Pope John Paul II (€35); a pair of decorative water features, one not working (€10); a 20-volume Greek encyclopedia (€1); a “collection of items” including vacuum-cleaner bags and a Snakes & Ladders drinking game (€12).

“People think of Sotheby’s and Bonhams, but there’s also your general auctions,” points out Duncan – auctions selling “everything from a washing machine to a Picasso”. The name of the game is inclusivity, the everyday cheek-by-jowl with the unique and amazing. “I’ve held Judge Jeffreys’ ivory gavel. I’ve held Nelson’s personal drinking glass from when he was a prisoner on Elba, things like that,” he marvels. “You can come here because you’re interested in coins and stamps, and go away with a Bo Concept settee.”

Auctions are humanity in microcosm – mostly unexceptional, sometimes incredible. Gems appear out of nowhere. One man, he recalls, brought a bottle of vintage whisky which he’d always planned to open on a special occasion and never did; the bottle, it turned out, was worth nearly €5,000. One lady brought her late husband’s collection of model racing cars, aircraft kits and model soldiers; if you’d set them all up, says Duncan, gesturing around at the vast warehouse, they’d have filled up this entire space. When it comes to something like that, the reflection of a man’s entire life, the selling takes on an emotional hue. “There’s an entrusting,” explains Duncan carefully. “Sometimes you feel very responsible. They’re trusting you to do right with something special.”

Auctions are unpredictable: a lamp in the shape of the ‘Titanic’ (!) didn’t sell at €40, went into the next auction at €30 and ended up selling for €120, “just because two people both really wanted it”. Auctions are also “very social” (he wouldn’t have it any other way); people meet old friends, and make new ones. Auctions are also addictive: there’s a hard core of about 100 regulars who appear almost every fortnight, and call to complain late at night if there’s a delay in uploading the catalogue. Around 60 per cent of customers are Cypriots, calculates Duncan, but expats are inevitably well-represented, given the peripatetic nature of their lives – expats like Duncan Wills himself, a convivial chap who seems to have found his mid-life métier in uniting people with the objects that speak to them. One man’s junk is another man’s bargain.

Like that All Black said, you can get a very sore neck by looking back all the time. Duncan doesn’t give the impression of a man with regrets, or a man who dwells on the past. Instead, he lives in the present – and thrives on thoughts of the future, all the “stuff” he still plans to do with his life. He’s planning a motorbike trip across Europe next year, plus a car-rally treasure hunt in Cyprus that’s being organised by the Lions. He’s also “picked up a guitar for about the fourth time in my life recently”, and is dead set on learning how to play it. Not to mention Stanley, with whom he spends a great deal of time – ‘Stanley’ being a car, an Austin A35 vintage car (“It’s like a Wallace and Gromit car”) whose problems he discusses, endearingly, as if the car were a person. “His bodywork was good, mechanically the poor chap was in a bad way,” reports Duncan with a straight face. “He’d been standing for three or four years, and he was quite clogged up.”

He made his move in life, and doesn’t regret it. “I could’ve slogged on in the UK,” he shrugs, “or, if you like, had a bit of an adventure, and seen if I could make it work. So I went for that option”. His building-society days are behind him; now he stands in a warehouse in Latsia, just off the highway, surrounded by traces of other people’s lives. A box of assorted children’s games and DVD films. An assortment of faux bijoux jewellery. A foldable wooden stand with two matching trays. A stuffed Western capercaillie bird perched on a log. A glass biscuit jar. A porcelain tureen. A bust of Elvis Presley playing guitar.

Lively and opinionated with a taste for revolution, THEO PANAYIDES meets a writer who generates an amazing amount of hate mail

With the large and obvious caveat that providing only excerpts of a person’s work risks misrepresenting it – and is no substitute for reading the work itself – here are some of the things Frank Furedi has written in the past few months (all articles were published on the libertarian website www.spiked-online.com).

On the recent wave of refugees and migrants from Syria and elsewhere, in an article titled ‘A crisis of Europe dressed up as a drama about migration’:

“Virtually anyone of any influence in Europe is calling for ‘more compassion’ and ‘more generosity’ towards the refugees. Those who dare to raise doubts about this supposed humanitarian approach risk being denounced as ignorant fools who have not learned the lessons of the Nazi experience…

Migrants in south Serbia

“In this climate of moral posturing, it’s important to take a reality check. Yes, Europe has its share of narrow-minded xenophobic political movements, which exploit the unease that many EU citizens feel towards the flow of strangers into their communities. However, their behaviour is no worse than that of the ‘let them all in or else’ crowd. These seemingly polar opposites in the migration debate are actually captive to a very similar illiberal impulse: one side expresses prejudice towards migrants; the other expresses contempt for citizens of EU nations.”

On radical Islam, in an article titled ‘Islamic State: built on the West’s cult of victimhood’:

“The most powerful driver of jihadist influence in the West is the sacralisation of victimhood. In recent decades, the victim has acquired a quasi-sacred status. Competitive claims-making about victimisation has become widespread, and misfortune is frequently represented through the prism of victimisation. From a victim of bullying to a victim of a heart attack, the variety of victimising experiences is continually expanding. Coincidentally, one of the most powerful themes promoted in radical jihadist propaganda is the representation of Islam as the universal victim of Western aggression.”

On research claiming that the children of Holocaust survivors are genetically altered by the bad experiences suffered by their parents, in an article titled ‘You can’t inherit Holocaust trauma’:

“The Holocaust needs to be understood, rather than experienced as a transcendental, malevolent force that continues to traumatise its targets. Engaging with the tragic consequences of the Holocaust does not demand that it be perpetually treated as a contemporary fact of life. And the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors need to define themselves through their own accomplishments, rather than through an experience that has been related to them second or third hand. In other words, they need to grow up.”

I meet Frank himself on the day before his TEDx talk in Limassol – a small, rather wrinkly, soft-spoken man with prominent front teeth and mild green eyes which, when he looks at me, seem to be moist and full of sadness. Maybe he’s just tired, having spent the past half-hour rehearsing his speech and fielding suggestions from the TEDx organisers. I watch a bit of the rehearsal: a rather overbearing woman chides him for not having brought enough photos, tells him he needs more “visual stimulation” and worries that people will start to get restless. Frank hears her out, looking chastened but not overly concerned. Just to reassure you, he replies affably, “I’ve never bored an audience in my life”.

That’s easy to believe – especially in Britain, where a lot of what he says is dynamite in the increasingly timid sphere of public discourse. “I’m in a very strange position,” he points out, his words coming fast and slightly garbled by a Mitteleuropean accent, “because I get criticised by the Right and by the Left, but for different reasons”. He comes from a radical-left background, having co-founded the Revolutionary Communist Party in the late 70s, but is totally out of step with current Labour policies. On the other hand, far-right UKIP types read some of what he says – like his doubts on the current response to mass migration – and mark him out as a kindred spirit, only to back off when he makes it clear that the problem, for him, isn’t with migrants but “Britain’s inability to bring people together”.

“I would say that I’m a radical humanist,” he tells me, standing outside the Rialto Theatre in the afternoon sunshine, “and what I’m really concerned about is the way in which – despite the fact that society has become more and more affluent, and we have a better life in many ways – we tend to continually see the worst side of the world, and we’re constantly restricting the scope for the exercise of individual and collective freedom”. Freedom is a central plank of his philosophy, threatened and curtailed on the one hand by external forces – terrorists on one hand, mass surveillance and War on Terror on the other – but also by the rampant political correctness (especially in Britain) that seeks to ban everything it deems ‘offensive’. “The very idea that offensive ideas should be banned is so anti-democratic, and so much a sign of our defensiveness and insecurity about open dialogue”.

His biggest fear is perhaps what he calls “the politics of identity”, an increasingly trendy movement in the US and Northern Europe (maybe not among the populace at large but what he calls “the cultural elite”, those who “run the media” and influence the next generation). Identity politics is about groups, not ideas. It focuses on who you are – white or black, man or woman, straight or gay – and assumes that your politics must be shaped by your identity. Frank, on the other hand, believes in ideas, not identities, which may explain something about the articles I quoted above. Nowhere in his piece on migrants does he mention that he was himself a migrant, having fled Hungary at the age of nine (he’s now 68) after the failed revolution – just as nowhere in his dismissive piece on Holocaust trauma does he mention that he is himself the child of a Holocaust survivor, his mother having endured many months in Ravensbruck and Buchenwald.

He lost nearly all his family in WWII: “At the end I had one aunt left, one grandmother, couple of cousins, that’s it”. (The family were Jews but “kind of cultured Jews”, having been “pretty much atheists since the 18th century”.) His dad, he recalls, was a real character, thumbing his nose first at Nazis, then Commies: he survived for a few months in Budapest by getting a room at the Hotel Astoria (where the German High Command were staying) under the name ‘Schwartz’, reckoning correctly that the Nazis would never suspect an actual Jew might be staying there – then, in 1956, was so active in the uprising against Hungary’s Soviet masters that the family had to flee for their lives, like today’s unhappy Syrians. “We had, like, $5 in our pocket and a rucksack on each [of our backs], and we walked 30km to go to the Austrian border, like these people.”

The Furedis ended up in Montreal, where Frank did Sociology at McGill University and quickly – without really meaning to – found himself involved in radical politics. “I think my big moment was probably in 1967, when I was well on my way to being a really boring, conventional, unexceptional, I-feel-sorry-for-myself person. And I met a girl, and fell in love, and I remember saying I’ll do this and that – and she kind of looked at me one morning at breakfast, and she said ‘You know, Frank, you’re such a bullshitter. You always talk, but there’s no action!’”. Stung, he began attending political meetings – and ended up as a ringleader in an occupation that nearly shut down the university, getting blacklisted by McGill and moving to Britain for a PhD on the Mau Mau uprising. He still lives there, writing books – his latest is called The Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter – penning articles and participating in events like the annual ‘Battle of Ideas’, devoted to debating and discussing “even those things that you’re not allowed to debate and discuss”.

Like what? Lots of things, from “trigger warnings” in books to laws that try to micro-manage sexual intimacy, to cases where free speech gets censored in the name of minority rights. His main subject, though (fortunately more relevant to the UK than Cyprus, at least I think so) is the fragmentation of secular, post-modern Western society, a major reason – among other things – why so many young Europeans get seduced by Islamic State. “One of the problems you find in many Western societies is that there’s very little that we share in common, so even our moral outlook is very fragmented. What some people call ‘murder’, other people call ‘a right to choose’… The only moral value that really binds us together is we don’t like paedophiles”. Unsurprisingly, his attacks on child-abuse hysteria in the UK are the subject that’s provoked the most hate-mail.

Needless to say, he’s not arguing for child abuse; but he is arguing for moderation, and – above all – he’s arguing for togetherness. “I’m worried about a world where the worlds of adults and children have become totally ghettoised. You know, where there’s almost no interaction,” he explains. Northern Europe and America seem to have isolated children in the name of protection; that’s why he loves going to Mediterranean countries, “because at night you see everybody out together – and that, to me, is the way it should be”.

Recall his description of himself: not just a radical, but a radical humanist. Frank Furedi has an old-fashioned, cosily inclusive belief in humanity – that’s why he loves the cut and thrust of free speech (because it means people thrown together, hashing out ideas), that’s why he hates the fragmentation of society and the hollowing-out of communal values. “Take for example TV in America, there are hundreds of channels and different people watch different TV programmes. There used to be a time when everyone on a Sunday would watch the same TV programme, and you’d talk about it together at work, at school, and it would have a kind of meaning to all of us”. He recalls his childhood in Budapest, “when the word ‘stranger’ had an exotic, nice quality about it. I wanted to meet strangers, and my parents would welcome strangers into their house, precisely because they were not like us. Whereas today we equate stranger with danger.”

Not that he meets too many strangers in his own life – though he goes to football games (he’s a big Spurs fan) and has “gym friends” who are all sorts of people; “but at the end of the day I do rely on my old friends, who know me inside out”. For a man who gets hate-mail and generally acts as a gadfly, Frank is surprisingly low-key. “I’m a little bit shy,” he admits, and not always good at social graces. “People call me a loner, and make fun of me because I’ll answer texts with one word, [or] when they call me up I say ‘Yes’ and just hang up”. His lifestyle is simple enough: he gets up at 6.45, writes for five hours, has lunch, goes to the gym, tries to write some more in the afternoon. He and his wife Ann have been together since 1981 – longer than anyone in their circle, he reports with a chuckle – and have a 20-year-old son. Ann is a public figure in her own right, being the chief executive of BPAS, one of Britain’s largest abortion providers; strong women seem to be a feature in his life, starting with that no-bullshit girlfriend who set him on the right path back in 1967.

“The thing I’m most concerned about at the moment is that we live in a very presentist world,” says Frank Furedi, his thick hybrid accent (Budapest by way of Montreal, London and god knows where else) nearly swallowing his words. “We’ve given up on the past – which I think is bad, [because] the legacy of humanity is not all crap – but at the same time we also fear the future… Whenever we think about the future, we always think of it as a worse version of the present”. Politically, too, we’re squeezed between a Scylla and Charybdis: the Right’s selfish, narrow, market-based individualism on the one hand, the Left’s spurious solidarity – “based on a kind of almost quasi-religious desire that we should all be similar, or the same” – on the other.

In between is Frank, or at least that’s his story (those who find him odious no doubt have a different story) – now pushing 70 but still lively, still opinionated, still with a taste for revolution. Unlike the Left, he wants strong individuals. Unlike the Right, he’d like them to unify society. Like he says, it’s a strange position.

The most public face of the Sophia Foundation, Marina Shacola is also a photographer of note. THEO PANAYIDES meets a fiery woman driven to philanthropy

Who is Marina Shacola? What does she do? “I love going out with friends, I love drinking wine,” she enthuses. “I hope I’ll stop loving to smoke very soon! I love going on holidays in the summer. I love the summer, I love the Greek islands, I love the sea. I love Paphos. I love dogs. I love films – going to the cinema, watching movies. I still love travelling, though I don’t get to travel as much to new places anymore.”

Is that all? Not by a long shot. Sport is also “one of my passions in life”. When she was young, or younger (she’s now 52), she played basketball for the Cyprus national team. Later, having become established as a well-known photographer, she wrote a photo book about the Athens Olympics, following athletes from all the five continents represented in the Olympic rings – from an NBA star in New York to a passionate no-hoper on the Pacific island of Palau. “I’m a bit of a romantic regarding the Olympic Games.”

So is that all? Well, not exactly – because, for the past few years, she’s also been the co-founder and public face of the Sophia Foundation for Children. Working in Kenya (and, more recently, in Cyprus), the non-profit Foundation has completely restored a dilapidated death-trap of an orphanage for sick and abandoned children, taking care of the kids through to adulthood. They’ve also taken on other projects, now run a school in the notorious Kibera slum outside Nairobi, and have brought clean drinking water to parts of the barren Turkana region. It’s no exaggeration to say that the woman sitting in front of me – on a sofa in the huge airy living-room of a single-storey flat on a sleepy Nicosia back street – is directly responsible for saving dozens of lives.

She’d deny it, of course – or perhaps she’d inwardly agree but make a big show of denying it, it’s hard to tell. Certainly, Marina makes it clear again and again that she’s not the Sophia Foundation, “we’re all volunteers” and “I don’t exist for one minute without the group”. At best, she insists, she’s a spokesperson – maybe because she co-founded the Foundation or maybe even because of her name, because she comes from a well-known Nicosia family, because she’s the daughter of millionaire businessman Nicos Shacolas. Either way, it doesn’t matter: “The only reason you talk to me is because I’ve got the exposure, not because I do more work than other people. And because I have the luxury of going [to Kenya] more often than the others.”

She goes there every couple of months, to the Makarios Children’s Home in the town of Nyeri in Kenya’s Central Highlands (the orphanage used to be a convent for Greek Orthodox nuns, hence the name), to keep up the property and check on the kids, 175 in all, some of whom – having been in their early teens when the Home was reconstructed eight years ago – are now entering adulthood. She first went to Kenya in 2003, for the book on the Olympics, then again in 2007 for a Doctors of the World project which was when she discovered the Makarios. “The conditions were appalling,” she recalls; the roof was leaking, the kids were malnourished, many had AIDS, “you could see the signs of AIDS on their faces”. She and her friends created the Sophia Foundation specifically to raise funds for the reconstruction (estimated cost: €400,000), naming it ‘Sophia’ after a little girl whose precise connection to the project I don’t quite catch. Why not ‘Marina’? She rears up indignantly: “That’s the only thing I would never, never, never call it!”.

The trip to Nyeri may have reminded her of an earlier trip to Africa – to Nigeria, when she was 15, tagging along with her dad who had business in Lagos. That was “life-changing,” she declares solemnly. “That was the summer that changed me”.

Why?

“Because, until then, I was a very, very happy person”. She was happy at the English School, where she played lots of sports and had lots of friends. She was “on top of the world. And a bit arrogant as well. Actually, very arrogant”. More so than most adolescents? She shrugs, as if to say ‘it makes no difference’: “I knew after that trip that what I was, I shouldn’t be”.

The inequality shocked her, unimaginable wealth co-existing with “the most freakish poverty”. Kenya today is the same, she explains – huge malls and skyscrapers just a few miles from the biggest slum in Africa (the aforementioned Kibera); “You’re on this huge, huge road”, then you see “a half-person” – a man with no legs – dragging himself by the side of the road, flip-flops on his hands, crawling along “like a hurt animal”. Marina leaps up from the sofa to illustrate the scene, dropping on all fours and dragging herself across the floor of the living-room. She does this a lot, physically acting out the moment, especially when talking of the photos she’s taken. Later, when the subject turns to her own shortcomings, she falls back in her seat – for a joke, but it’s still unexpected – and weeps theatrically. She’s quite demonstrative.

Some of those photos appear in a just-published book called Green Room (there’s also a two-day photo exhibition – ending today – at Argo Gallery in Nicosia), a collection of black-and-white snaps of the kids at the orphanage. Most are grave and unsmiling but also confident, facing the lens without fear. Some have brought their own props; one has a hula hoop, another a paper mask, another a rubber tyre. One two-page photo shows a young boy clenching his fists; he was four years old and seriously ill when Sophia was created, now he’s a strong-looking lad with a determined expression. You saved his life, I point out. “We did,” she agrees.

Still, I add rather tactlessly, what happens now? Isn’t he going to be just another poor boy in Nairobi?

The explosion is immediate: “You’re killing me, Theo!” cries Marina. Seems I completely misjudged the scope of Sophia’s commitment: “When we take a child under our wing, or we take a child out of the juvenile prisons” (many of the kids were hooked on drugs, or stealing to survive), “or when they’re abandoned in hospitals and we take them to the Makarios Children’s Home, from then we follow this child right after secondary school”. The older kids are sent to boarding schools (which cost money) so they can be socialised and “mingle with children from normal families”, then go on to technical school or, if they have the marks, university. Three of ‘her’ kids have just achieved that rare honour, one of them – John, a former child criminal – now studying criminology.

That explosive reaction is typical, though. Does she tend to get angry when things go wrong, or does she keep it all in? “No, I shout,” replies Marina with a frank, happy laugh. “I like shouting. Usually to the people who are closest to me!”. She and her father had “huge fights” when she was a teenager, though they’re now reconciled: “As I grew up and wanted to go my own way, and not work for the family business, and do my photography, we were like two bulls fighting each other” (she makes a gesture of bulls butting heads). Did they ever become estranged? “A few times. And many times [we had] very, very – huge, extremely huge rows. Even in public places!”. It wasn’t just his conservatism, she says now, it was also her own insecurity: she spent years not really knowing if she was ever going to make it, going from a somewhat reluctant Law and Sociology degree to carving out a niche as a magazine photographer without the usual parental support. She was almost 30 by the time she could earn a living from it.

Easy to imagine that the rows were “titanic”, as she puts it. Marina is a striking-looking woman: big brown eyes, curly hair, all-black attire broken up by the vivid colours of African bracelets and necklaces (they were given to her by the kids, and she never takes them off). She must be quite a sight when she’s angry. “Everybody in the world has a bad side,” she shrugs. “Everybody. Otherwise we would all be like angels, and quite boring.”

So what’s her own bad side?

“Sometimes I’m too competitive,” she replies, not even having to think about it. “Sometimes I’m impatient, and many, many times I don’t let people express their opinion before I express mine – and while they’re expressing it, I STILL want to express mine!” She laughs again, shaking her head. “I’m competitive in everything I do… And it comes naturally to me, and I have to really stop myself – ‘Marina, no, you shouldn’t act in this way, just take a step back, its fine, you don’t ALWAYS have to win the argument’ – but it comes naturally. Even now, I’m not letting you talk!” (It’s true; I’ve been trying to get a word in edgewise.) She screams, as if exasperated by this impossible Marina Shacola: “No! Stop that!”.

There’s a through-line here, a kind of recurring motif. Marina talks of her 15-year-old self and bemoans her old “arrogance”. She talks of the Sophia Foundation and is constantly at pains to insist that she’s no more important than anyone else. (At one point, a fellow volunteer named Nopi Telemachou comes in and starts packing boxes at the dining-room table; “As you see, we don’t have offices,” notes Marina airily.) She doesn’t just hate arrogance, she fears it and is constantly on the lookout for it – maybe because she knows that her strong-willed personality is always in danger of toppling over into it. She’s like a heavy drinker who knows she’s just a few careless nights away from becoming an alcoholic.

“There is a fine line in many things,” she concurs, “and I’m very critical of myself about crossing the lines. Because one side of the line is something that I like, the other side is something that I loathe, in terms of characteristics. So, to have a strong character and an opinion about things, and a unique personality, I really support this for everyone. But, if you go a little bit overboard, then you become arrogant”. She tells a revealing story, of how she used to play squash (one of her many sports) but quit because she’d see fellow players – invariably men – getting too aggressive, swearing and shouting and breaking rackets, “and gradually this really put me off”. It wasn’t sportsmanlike, she explains; it went against the nobility of sport. It went beyond competitiveness, and became arrogance.

Nobility may be quite an important word for Marina Shacola – and perhaps a sense of noblesse oblige, a duty to help the less fortunate (you could call her family a kind of Cypriot aristocracy). After the haircut in 2013, the Sophia Foundation expanded to Cyprus – though still with the same philosophy of direct funding: “We follow the money, always” – and launched a programme called ‘I Cook and I Offer’, building kitchens in schools that couldn’t afford to buy lunch for their pupils and hiring unemployed mums to cook it; it still operates in 16 schools all over the island. I recall what she said about being “a romantic” when it comes to the Olympic Games – and perhaps she’s also a romantic when it comes to philanthropy, moved by an old-fashioned notion of doing the right thing.

Or maybe she’s just a rich woman who does it to salve her guilty conscience, I suggest cynically, and brace myself for another explosion.

But it doesn’t come. “No, no. Why should I feel guilty?” says Marina mildly. “I did it for me,” she adds, meaning the Foundation. “And I think that everything we do, we do it in a selfish way. Doing that [in Kenya], I feel much more fulfilled. Out of my years of going there, I get richer and richer every time, happier and happier… I do it not because I feel guilty – it’s even worse: because I feel good!”.

Those 175 kids in Nyeri are surely her greatest accomplishment, even more than her work as a photographer – and indeed it’s quite strange, in a way, a woman’s life changing so significantly in her mid-40s. “I think each person has a certain point in time when things are ripe,” she opines, “and the universe, let’s say, brings everything to you, in order to take a decision that will follow you for the rest of your life”. She made her decision, and became something more. Though she still loves dogs, and films, and drinking wine.

After years suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, one peacenik is walking from Rome to Jerusalem. THEO PANAYIDES meets him as he passes through the island

By the time you read this, Paul Haines should have arrived in Jerusalem – though how to get there was still uncertain at the time of our interview. When I left him, he was definitely planning to set off the following morning – either to walk to Limassol and find a boat to take him to Haifa, or walk to Larnaca and take a flight instead. The former was by far his preferred option, just because sailing (i.e. staying at ground level) is closer to walking than flying is – and walking is the point of the exercise, Paul having set off from Rome in late July and trudged across Southern Europe “for peace and reconciliation”, one man with a rucksack on the so-called ‘Peacewalk 2015’.

He shows me the rucksack, adorned with a small British flag and (more importantly) the word ‘Peace’ in several languages; the words have been stacked quite deliberately, making up a logo which – especially when seen from a distance – appears in the shape of a dove. He also has a pilgrim’s “passport” and a book with a light-purple cover, which he offers to people he meets for their comments. Paul is 66, thin and rather diffident, with a neatly-trimmed beard and calm blue eyes. His handshake is soft, either the handshake of a gentle soul or the handshake of a man who’s shaken a lot of hands in the past few months.

Does he look tired? He does, in a way. Not tired in the sense of fed-up or impatient, more the serene tiredness of a man who’s just climbed a mountain and is now looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Then again, maybe I’m projecting – because, in a sense, Paul Haines is the last person who should be attempting this kind of walk, hiking his way across half a continent. For about 18 years he suffered (and maybe still suffers, for the disease is incurable) from chronic fatigue syndrome – also called myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME – a mysterious illness that produces a pervasive feeling of exhaustion, limiting patients’ ability to perform even everyday tasks. Never mind walking from Rome to Jerusalem, for most of the 90s and early 00s Paul could barely walk from his home to the corner shop; “I know people that can’t leave the house,” he says grimly, “and have to have help every day”.

His own case wasn’t quite so crippling, mostly because he was able to pace himself. Many people, those with young kids or without a support system, try to do too much – they have no choice – and make it worse; if you fight the illness, “it becomes more chronic”. Paul, on the other hand, never married, has no children, and received support from his then-employer, the BBC, where he’d worked quite happily as a set designer. “I loved it,” he recalls of his pre-ME years, “it was a very good job”. He worked on all kinds of programmes, from quiz shows to dramas to Top of the Pops. The hours were long – 100-hour weeks weren’t uncommon while filming – so you ended up socialising with the people from work and “it became your life, in a way”. There was camaraderie, and a sense of community.

He’d been working at the Beeb for about a decade when a friend pointed out that he seemed to be getting sick all the time. Before that, “I’d always been very healthy” – but it was true, he’d been coming down with the ’flu more and more in those last few months before he was diagnosed (the causes of ME are controversial, but one theory is that it attacks the immune system). There was stress at work, which may have contributed; he was also in the throes of splitting up with his then-girlfriend. Then, one day in 1992, he was in a shop finding furniture for a TV show “and I just thought ‘I can’t move’, and I had to sit down. Then someone got me a taxi, took me back home, and I just couldn’t do anything”. The days passed and he didn’t get better, needing help with the simplest tasks. For nine months, the doctors probed and prodded – then finally reached a diagnosis of chronic fatigue.

Stamps from some of the places he has passed through

What were his symptoms? How did he feel? That was part of the problem, says Paul: when doctors asked him to describe his symptoms, he didn’t know where to begin. “It does affect so many different parts of the body. So I’d have headaches, sore throats. I’d get cramp. I’d get pain in the muscles, the muscles twitch… It was difficult to walk sometimes. The sleep pattern was very bad, my appetite was very bad. And just tiredness!” he exclaims, his voice trailing off as if to say that further explanation is unnecessary. “Also concentration was bad, memory was bad…”

His employers were patient, allowing him time to get back to work – but eventually it became clear that, even with a slight improvement in his condition, the work was too much for him now. He was pensioned off in 1996, a development that shouldn’t have shocked him but somehow did; he was only 47, yet was being treated like an old man. Did he get depressed? “I tried not to think about the work I had been doing,” he replies wistfully.

His girlfriend at the time was German and they relocated to the Austrian countryside for a year and a half, living in the mountains; she went off to work every morning, he just pottered around doing “a bit of walking, a bit of gardening”. It was quite relaxing, but eventually it palled. They broke up, and Paul moved back to England – actually Cornwall, where he used to holiday as a child. He began an MA in History of Art, specifically Surrealism (a long-time interest, even before his own life became surreal); he sang in a community choir and also got into permaculture, a kind of sustainable agriculture. “Those are the three things that sort of kept me interested, motivated. [But] I still struggled”. He eventually dropped out of the MA, as “mentally it was very difficult”.

How does one get from that quiet, rather plodding, rather undemanding life – undemanding by design, since anything more would be impossible – to walking from Rome to Jerusalem? Actually, the Peacewalk isn’t even his first such project: he walked from London to Rome last year (raising awareness of Alzheimer’s) and previously walked the pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela, across northern Spain. It’s as though walking these old paths speaks to the new life inside him (“There’s something that is very magical about walking these historical routes”) – and as though walking in general is a way of thumbing his nose at his years of inertia, a celebration of how far he’s come.

Yes, but how? The simple answer is that ME is a very strange illness that operates differently on different people. Working with a noted immunologist named Anthony Pinching, Paul tried a variety of medicines throughout the 00s – and finally hit on one that exhibits very mixed results: on some patients it doesn’t work at all, others see a marked improvement but only if they keep taking the drug for life. For him, on the other hand, two batches were enough for a cure (though neither Paul nor Prof. Pinching can be sure if the disease is gone, or is merely dormant) with no further treatment. A mystical person might’ve called it a miracle; Paul, being a sensible person, started walking instead.

Something has changed within Paul Haines in the last few years; he says so himself. It’s not just the walking; he’s also started volunteering with the NHS and the Alzheimer’s Society, and credits it with giving him more confidence. Whatever the reason, he’s not quite the same person he used to be. “I think my friends would say basically I’m the same person,” he demurs, not wanting to make any grand claims. “But I think a lot of my friends would say: ‘I don’t understand Paul’.”

His personal style is low-key. He’s not larger-than-life, or a born leader. “I was always quite shy,” he agrees. “I didn’t like to talk in public”. He tells me of his one major mishap on the journey from Rome to Jerusalem, an encounter with wild dogs in northern Greece that almost proved fatal – yet, even here, it’s not his style to embellish or pump up the story. The dogs (four of them, bigger than wolves) were almost upon him, ready to tear him to pieces; he was literally saved by a passing car that opened its door to him. “I’ll always remember that, because I was very scared. So I was very pleased that the car stopped and took me away,” he says mildly, stretching the British gift for understatement as far as it’ll go. Paul, in short, is a quiet fellow. Yet his recent experiences – allied perhaps with his earlier experiences, i.e. the illness – seem to be stirring something new inside him.

He shows me his book, full of comments from those met on the road. “This was from a monk on Patmos,” he says, leafing through the pages. Here’s a Nepali man who drew a dove in bright colours and wrote “Peace while walking” in Nepalese; here are Syrian refugees met on the island of Kastelorizo, one of whom addresses her words “to his white heart, to my brother in humanity”. Her husband lost his leg in a car bomb in Damascus, says Paul, they showed him a photo of the shattered car. Here’s “another lovely couple, they had both been tortured and they showed me cigarette burns, electrical [marks]. I think he was quite damaged from the torture… To hear their stories, and then to see them writing a piece, that was quite – quite –” he searches for the word, “quite strong”.

Last year, he talked about his London-Rome pilgrimage – and pilgrimage in general – at Canterbury Cathedral, to a congregation of 600 including the Archbishop himself. They phoned to invite him and “I said ‘Ooh, not sure’,” he recalls, “but then overnight I thought ‘Yeah, why not?’.” Now he’s almost in Jerusalem where the media will ask about the Peacewalk, and solicit his thoughts on peace. “Something’s happening with me. It’s difficult to describe what’s happening,” he explains uncertainly. “Something’s driving me to do this. Because, a year ago, I didn’t know I’d be doing this. So something inside is making me do this.”

Something spiritual?

He sighs, looking ready to cringe with embarrassment. “It’s a really difficult question, because I…” He pauses, frowning. “I think it must be, but I’m not sure – where the focus is”. Then he tells me a remarkable story of something that happened on his first big walk, to Santiago de Compostela. He met a fellow pilgrim while having dinner at the hostel, an Italian who called himself, unusually, Robert. That was also the name of Paul’s brother, who’d died some years earlier, “so overnight I thought ‘Ah, my brother is walking with me’. So the next morning I started walking, and I was walking along and suddenly my hands went like this” – he turns them away from his body – “and I felt my mother and my brother, who’d both died. So I was holding their hands”. Then “I started to hear noises, and see colours, and I sensed – because I was walking this historical path people had been walking for thousands of years – I started to sense people that had walked this path. I then had to sit down,” chuckles Paul, turning shy and sensible again. “But it was a very strong moment.”

Whatever it is that now drives him, he’d like it to continue. When he goes back to Cornwall he won’t put his feet up, however tired they might be from all those hours of walking. Could he see himself becoming a peace activist? “Well, I – I’d like the idea of being an activist,” he replies hesitantly, but in fact “what I feel I am is a bringer-together of people”.

Yes, but for what? After all, I point out, the only reason he’s in Cyprus now, wondering whether to take a boat or a plane to Haifa, is because the obvious land route from Rome to Jerusalem – through Syria – is impassable, due to the war. So much death, so many bombs. Can one man with a rucksack really make a difference?

He gazes at me calmly. “Well, I don’t want to say I would make a big difference. I hope I can make a small difference – and I hope that my small difference inspires other people to make their own small difference”. It suddenly occurs to me that ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ perfectly describes the cynicism that afflicts most people when it comes to peace – the exact opposite of his own low-key idealism. “In my head, I’ve got this image of maybe a million people like me, walking around with a Peace sign. And I think that might make a difference”. It might indeed.

With cinema in his blood the owner of the Pantheon in Nicosia is trying to ensure his concern changes with the times. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man driven to see the human side of everything

The story of George Papageorgiou is the story of a building, which his family has owned since the 50s. It’s a story of persistence – and a kind of philosophical detachment – in the face of adversity. It’s a story of an industry that’s changing, and may even be dying. It’s a story of a few disappointments, some mistakes made, and a story of bad (or unfortunate) timing. “Timing,” he admits, “is a thing that’s always stalked me throughout my life. Always.”

The building is on Diagorou Street in central Nicosia. If you wanted to describe its location you might say it’s ‘opposite TGI Friday’s’ – which is ironic because Friday’s only moved to this location to be opposite the building, back in the 90s when the Pantheon Cinema was selling 500 tickets a day (and once sold 5,000 tickets in a three-day weekend, showing the execrable live-action version of 101 Dalmatians). The five-storey building, as it is today, was erected in the late 1970s; before that, the place was an open-air cinema – also called the Pantheon, owned by George’s father who used to be in partnership with Napoleon Sarris, father of Michalis Sarris who was Minister of Finance during the 2013 haircut.

The connection is ironic – because it was the haircut (along with the emergence of the Kings Avenue Mall) that finally put paid to George’s most ambitious project: Planet Adventure in Paphos, what he calls “a really beautiful entertainment centre” with three restaurants, two cafeterias, a bowling alley, a 1,800m² kids’ play area and (above all) seven state-of-the-art cinemas. He built it with childhood friend Marios Herodotou, who owns the Rio in Limassol, heading to Paphos which was then virgin territory with a booming population of expats: “I remember when we showed Skyfall, there were British couples who came dressed in tuxedos and frocks and formal gowns. They went to the restaurant, ordered a martini each – shaken, not stirred – then they went upstairs to watch James Bond. An evening out”. The project thrived for a couple of years, but couldn’t survive in a shrunken economy; it closed down in 2014. George gives a rueful shrug. “OK, unfortunately it’s another of the unexpected things Life throws at you”.

Planet Adventure was a one-off. George, it should be noted, is not in the mall business, or even the entertainment-centre business; he’s in the film business – but the business is changing, and indeed films are changing. “When you get the head of a studio, like Fox – I’m talking about Jim Gianopulos, a Greek-American – saying ‘We’ve got the rights for this franchise, or that franchise’… re koumbare, are you selling hamburgers and milkshakes?” He shakes his head in dismay: “Everything’s just for commercial reasons now, to sell the movie. None of the actors have the status that a Paul Newman used to have, a Robert Redford, a Marlon Brando, a Jimmy Stewart, a John Wayne”. Everything is noise and sound, cinematic shock-and-awe, special effects and commercial gimmicks. “And it’s the same with the people we do business with nowadays”. Distributors used to be owned by “film families” – but now they’re run by lawyers, accountants, financial controllers, PR people.

When he speaks of “film families”, he may be thinking of his own (though it’s unlikely that his children, aged 13 and 8, will follow in the family business). George’s grandfather, also named George, ran the Ireon Cinema in Famagusta – a 1,200-seat behemoth with an even bigger open-air cinema attached. Those years, from the 1940s to the Turkish invasion, were the age of the movie palace: the open-air Pantheon – now the building on Diagorou Street – was a thing of beauty, with opera boxes where the great and good could look down on the Nicosia plebs. “It was like a miniature version, in our own way, of La Scala in Milano.” As the oldest of three, George’s own fate was sealed: since his mid-20s (he’s now 48) he’s been running the building on Diagorou, first with one screen, then three, then – for the past few years – without any cinemas at all, just some offices and a theatre company.

The main Pantheon screen is still there, of course, indeed it’s now seeing some use after years of inactivity (more on this later) – and that’s where we meet, in the old cinema foyer on a rather chilly Saturday morning. Given his love of old movie stars, it’s ironic that the one he most resembles is a TV character – but it’s true: with his bear-like gait, pouchy face and watchful, reserved expression, there’s an unmistakable trace of a kinder gentler Tony Soprano. He’s been married for 14 years (his wife is a PE teacher), and his greying beard testifies to the fact that he’s turning 50 in a couple of years – but age, like most things, doesn’t seem to faze him. “Not at all,” he replies when I ask if he thinks about it. “It doesn’t bother me at all. I always say that life is like the four seasons. Every season has its good points, you just have to be a bit philosophical and enjoy them”.

Another man might be less philosophical, or at least might find more to resent – not about getting older per se, but about the way his life has panned out. After all, even the first of his four seasons – his spring, his childhood – wasn’t the usual carefree romp and proverbial skipping through meadows. The family came from Famagusta, and of course were uprooted by the invasion. Their plan was to emigrate to the UK – and, since George had just finished primary school, he was sent to boarding school in Slough, outside London, as a kind of advance party, to await his parents and siblings. The plan then changed, however, and they opted to stay in Limassol – but his parents preferred to let him finish his education in the UK, keeping him at boarding school for six years (1979-85) away from the rest of the family.

The school was called LVS, the Licensed Victuallers’ School, originally founded for the children of publicans (its houses are named after breweries). This year was the 30-year reunion, says George, and he went back to see his old classmates and headmaster, “a very fine gentleman called Mr Bland”. So it sounds like he had a good time, I suggest – and his only reply is a long silence. “At the time, it was hard,” he replies at last.

It was hard growing up without your family – especially, perhaps, when the rest of the family was still together. It may be significant that one of his best friends was a rather troubled boy who felt like an outsider in his own family – an adopted child whose parents, having thought themselves infertile, succeeded in having a child of their own soon after adopting him. This boy didn’t go to the reunion, having suffered a nervous breakdown in his early 20s due, in large part, to the abuse he’d endured at school. “There was a lot of bullying,” says George noncommittally. “Even by the standards of the time”. The British kids clashed with the foreigners, the day pupils clashed with the boarders, their school battled rival schools. The early 80s were a tough time in England; George and his schoolmates were only allowed into Slough in twos and threes, for fear of being attacked by local gangs. “Trouble would flare up for any reason, whether important or trivial,” he recalls of boarding-school life. “Things changed from one day to the next. Maybe it was a question of survival – but it really and truly builds character. You either come out of it really strong, or else you carry baggage all your life.”

George himself was a small kid, “but I had a temper”. By and large, the bullies left him alone, but the constant state of war made him tired; he took solace in sports, horse riding (his most treasured memory is of pony trekking in the beautiful Welsh hills around Abergavenny) and, to some extent, movies: “When you’re born into the business, it never leaves you!”. At 20, he had notions of studying Film Production in the US, maybe making documentaries (he’s always loved “the human side of Cinema”) – but it didn’t happen. His parents couldn’t afford to send all three siblings to university, so his brother and sister – who’d stayed in Cyprus while he was stuck in the UK getting a ‘superior’ education – went abroad to study, while George himself was assigned to the Pantheon and told to get on with it.

I scan his face, looking for resentment; I don’t see any – yet so much of what he’s told me might legitimately offer grounds for feeling hard-done-by. Having to fend for himself in a strange and difficult place for six years while his siblings were allowed to be normal teenagers. Coming back from exile only to be thrust into the family business, his creative dreams cast aside (he’s screened hundreds of other people’s films, but never did make his own). Then the second season of his life – his summer – with its various disappointments. The cinema business declined in Cyprus, ending as a multiplex monopoly aimed at undiscriminating teens (the Pantheon closed in the mid-00s). An attempt to diversify by opening a printing business was a fiasco, George unwisely placing his trust in a close family friend who ultimately proved unreliable and fled the country, leaving a mass of debts. And of course there was Planet Adventure, his biggest creative project, and another inglorious ending.

“It’s all part of life’s experiences,” he tells me, sipping a coffee in the chill of the empty foyer. Yes, but surely he hasn’t always been so philosophical? Surely he’s been angered by things going wrong, at some point?

“You know, for better or worse,” he says ruminatively, “I’ve always applied a philosophy that says you should always take responsibility for your actions. You can’t go blaming other people just because you have problems”. Taking over the cinema was “a conscious decision,” he insists, and something he wanted to do, irrespective of family pressure. The Paphos venture was “a fantastic creation” which he doesn’t regret, despite its ultimate failure.

Most importantly, perhaps, looking back in anger is a very poor substitute for living in the present. Even now, in whatever season he finds himself (late summer? early autumn?), George Papageorgiou isn’t short of ideas – and the Pantheon has now re-opened, more or less, the building on Diagorou once again showing films, though only as part of a larger strategy. Daily screenings are no longer worth it, he says; selling half-a-dozen tickets in a 400-seat cinema just isn’t viable. Instead he wants to host events, like a recent Back to the Future marathon, or three nights of a local documentary called Beloved Days, or “alternative content” like operas and concerts and sporting events. If he’s busy four nights a week – five at most – he’ll be happy, he says.

Times have changed, he’s trying to change with them. But he’s not yet ready to accept that films are franchises, and the way forward lies in expensive gimmicks; he’s still more attached to “the human side”, whether of Cinema or life in general. Years ago, around the time of Avatar, he attended a seminar in Amsterdam where James Cameron himself – that film’s mega-successful director – talked up the future of 3D; sometimes, however, in searching for new ways to impress, we end up forgetting “simplicity, the human side,” notes George wistfully. “That’s what’s going to bring someone to the cinema. The personal touch – making a person feel welcome, saying ‘Hello my friend, how are you, welcome’.

“Man is what gives substance to everything,” he intones, full of gravitas. “To anything, whatever you do. Man is what gives life, and direction, and character and identity… Look, these things are lifeless,” he adds. “Without human beings it’s all dead, soulless, there’s nothing. It’s just walls,” says George dismissively – and gestures around him, at the building that’s marked his whole life.

THEO PANAYIDES meets an activist bar owner who has lost his fiery side but still skirmishes with authority

Who is he? More to the point, where is he? The second question seems more urgent than the first as I scour the unfamiliar environs of the Turkish half of Nicosia, looking for ‘Fidel’. Our initial appointment was for 12.30, but his voice was rough and unhurried when I called to let him know I’d arrived: terribly sorry, he drawled, but I just woke up. Half an hour later, I finally cross the checkpoint – but now the heavens have opened, and I’m dodging puddles on streets which (even though I spend my working day just 200m to the south, on the other side of the checkpoint) I barely know.

Fortunately, my half-Turkish contact is on the ball – and, a short phone call later, we track Fidel to a nearby café restaurant called Ada Mutfagi, sitting outside with his dog Zeyto (from zeytin, meaning ‘olive’). He apologises for being late: “I’m an alcoholic, so I went to bed at five,” he explains with a ghost of a smile – though his voice isn’t slurred like an alcoholic’s, his brown eyes are alert and he’s sipping Efes beer, not the hard stuff. His beard is like Fagin’s in Oliver Twist and he brings out a comb to groom it before I take a photo, his eyes twinkling with a touch of irony as if to say he’s aware it looks ridiculous. A cigarette dangles from his lips; a Rasta cap hides his hair.

When did he become a Rasta? Was it during his time in the UK?

No, no, he demurs, “I’m not a Rasta. I like the colours and yes, I like Bob Marley’s vision, his music and philosophy. I mean, I am a Communist but I also like ‘One love’, the slogan… Love everybody, unification of the people, you know?”

But is he a musician, like Marley?

“No, no, I’m just…” He pauses, looking for the word. “I’m just – a survivor, shall we say.”

Yes, but who is he? He shows me two ID cards, Greek and Turkish Cypriot. One has him down as Mustafa Shevki Kemal – but in fact ‘Kemal’ is a remnant of his father, who deserted the family when Fidel was two. His own preferred surname is Yoldash, meaning ‘comrade’ in Turkish – but it’s fair to say that few people know him by either surname. He was known for years as ‘Barish’, or ‘peace’, because of his peace activism (or sometimes ‘Bob’, after Mr Marley), but adopted ‘Fidel’ when he went to London (he was there from 1986 to 1997) and it seems to have stuck – though old nicknames die hard, and a passerby calls out a greeting as we talk in which I discern the word ‘barish’. “The voice of peace,” translates Fidel, the passerby having made a pun about Mr Peace being interviewed. Other passersby call out greetings in the course of our chat; he’s obviously something of a fixture. “I’m quite popular,” he admits amiably.

He is, as they say, a character, one of those lifelong free spirits who starts off as a rebel and eventually becomes an institution. He’s edgy, but not too edgy; he inspires more sedate, conventional types with a vision of life on the margins – though also reassures them, since many will inwardly feel that he’s wasting his life compared to their own steady existence. He drinks too much, though not as much as he used to. How he makes his living is a bit sketchy, though he sells jasmine necklaces in summer and hemp seeds (for snacking) in the winter. He’s 54, an atheist and a Communist; he’s never been married – he doesn’t believe in it – except once in England “for political reasons”, when he wed a Turkish refugee in a marriage of convenience so she’d be able to stay in the country. He’s also able to say certain things that many Turkish Cypriots would perhaps be reluctant to say in public: “We consider Turkey an invader in Cyprus… We are being ruled by Turkey. And this is not a good situation with Cyprus”.

We’re interrupted by a loud, furious bark; Zeyto’s being pestered by a cat – though it’s not just the cat, says Fidel sympathetically, it’s because she’s been tied up (what can we do? “this is a restaurant”). Zeyto had some problems in the past, he reports; another dog “tried to be an older sister to her, and she didn’t accept it”, so the spurned mutt came back with her violent boyfriends to “punish” Zeyto: “She was on the run for nine months”. Dogs take after their masters, or perhaps vice versa – and Fidel too has a lifelong aversion to being tied down, not to mention his own eight-month exile in a British prison for forgery. This, he suspects, is why his British passport (his dad was born in England; his paternal grandmother was Irish) hasn’t been renewed, because the old one was dog-eared due to being in his pocket as he crossed the checkpoint back and forth every day. Officialdom in Britain was suspicious, and refused to issue a new one – probably because “I was tried in England for forgery, [and] they thought I’m doing it again,” he concludes, and shakes his head at people’s prejudice.

Even when he did it, it was in a good cause; the presiding judge admitted as much, calling it “an exceptional case” as he handed down a sentence of eight months instead of the usual 4-7 years. “I was a professional activist,” explains Fidel, forging passports and documents to help dissidents escape from Turkey – though he also, quite illegally, forged car registration papers to sell cars outside the UK, changing their number plates and using the proceeds to finance the organisation. He seems pretty sanguine about the whole thing, maybe because he has a history of falling foul of the law. Has he always been part of the radical Left? “Radical, yes. I mean, I was arrested since I am 15.”

Most of his stories revolve around that, tales of unjust harassment and skirmishes with authority. “This was since my childhood. I was naughty boy, maybe because of the family situation,” i.e. growing up without a father (he seems quite attached to his mother, and came back from England to look after her; she helps him make the jasmine necklaces in summer). As a younger man, he read Marxist literature and organised demonstrations. Later, he took part in the anti-government peace protests of the early 00s, making himself a target for subtle reprisals. Police raids were a weekly occurrence at the Living Room, a bar/hangout he owns in Nicosia, arresting him “for drinking and loud music” and locking him up for 24 hours. Then there was the time someone smashed his shop window and the cops came along, dragging their feet – “and I was loud again, and I was arrested again”; he was charged with assaulting an officer (in fact, he says, the opposite was true) and ended up with his passport confiscated, unable to leave the country for five years.

It seems a little odd hearing these stories as he sits there so amiably, sipping beer and greeting passersby, but I guess he must’ve mellowed a bit in middle age – and besides, even now, he’s not that mellow. The laid-back, one-love, friend-to-all-the-world demeanour is a bit misleading. “I am a difficult man. I’m not an easy person,” says Fidel frankly. “I am annoyed if people are not respecting, or not understanding”.

Long-term relationships aren’t his forte, whether personal or professional. By the time he left London, his relations with his activist comrades were “not so good”. He’s not the type who plays well with others. Romantically speaking, it wasn’t till his mid-40s that he managed a serious relationship, staying with a woman for one and a half years. “I like a free life,” is how he puts it. “Responsibilities I can take, but only for myself. I mean, if I want to drink, I drink. And this is usually the reason for not having long-term relationships – because I’m drunk, [and] I don’t come home for a night.”

Does he really drink that much?

“Well,” he replies, “four years ago I was drinking from morning till I was…” he makes a gesture to indicate total collapse. (“Passed out?” I offer. “Passed out,” he agrees.) “And the amount was five bottles of raki.”

A day?

“Yes. The large bottle. 70 cl.”

Friends were worried, justifiably so. He was drinking so much that his skin was changing colour, turning dark and greyish. Then one day he found himself in the Living Room: “I was playing music and I say to myself what a nice, beautiful day it was. It was spring, sun was shining. I was listening to Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Doors, whatever. And I say ‘I have a nice life. I have good friends. I have good music’.” Just like that, for no reason in particular, he decided to stop drinking – and didn’t touch a drop for four months, though of course it couldn’t last forever. Fidel is never likely to become a poster-boy for temperance and moderation. He still drinks, and indeed gets drunk – just not every day, and not to the point of passing out.

Does he change when he’s drunk?

He looks suddenly thoughtful. “Lately, yes,” he replies. “I’m a bit aggressive – I mean, verbally aggressive. I am tired, I think, of people who are not respecting. And I get annoyed, and I swear a lot these days.” Did he used to be more patient? “Eeh…” he shrugs. “I have been like this, most of the time. But recently it’s – rising, shall we say.” He gives a rather dry, awkward chuckle.

Fidel plays his role, the beloved eccentric. People buy him drinks, or stop to talk; “Wherever I go, people want to take a photo with me”. A local TV channel sat him down for a one-hour interview. There are videos of him on YouTube, filmed by devoted friends. Yet there’s also a hint of weariness, both with his own life and the life of his isolated pseudo-country. He himself isn’t politically active these days, or at least not affiliated to any organisation. (“I have friends,” he shrugs. “When there is a demonstration, we are alerted and we go”.) He barely even hangs out at the Living Room anymore. He seems a little tired – and Cyprus too is tired, depleted by the bad economy and the endless, interminable Cyprus problem.

It may be even worse in the north, with the “unspoken dividedness” between Turkish Cypriots and Turkish settlers (though of course, on a personal level, he has many Turkish friends, he adds hastily). “They say that, because of the bad economy, [the settlers] are turning back to Turkey, but this is bullshit. If one goes back, two come here. And the postponing of a reasonable agreement is not helping the situation in Cyprus.” There was optimism for a while – maybe there still is – thanks to the “better atmosphere” between the two leaders. “People relaxed, they said ‘There is Anastasiades and Akinci, they will solve this. Barish is coming’. Something like this… But time is passing, [and] it makes them bitter. But, yet again, there is hope, I think.”

He himself is ‘Barish’ personified, of course. ‘Talat’s mouth is bitter because of Barish’ punned the newspaper headlines some years ago, when he heckled then-leader Talat at the so-called ‘Bridge of Peace’ and added another little brick to his local celebrity. (Talat meant well, he says now, but any Turkish Cypriot leader is inevitably going to end up giving way to Turkey; “You have to find some ground to survive. Cyprus is a survival situation, I guess”.) Barish is peace, and ‘Barish’ – or Fidel – is a peace-loving sort, despite a lifetime of combat; he is, like he says, a survivor. “I’m a calm person,” he insists, “but sometimes I get – what do they call it? – lighted”. Lighted? “You know, a spark,” he says, and flicks his hands to suggest an explosion.

He looks around, contemplating the scene: the restaurant tables, the rain-slicked pavement, Zeyto chafing at her leash. “I’m an entertainer nowadays,” he admits, with amusement. “If you were not here, I would be helping – I would be working like a waiter here. But without money”. He chuckles amiably. “We enjoy life here. After we finish the job here, we sit, we drink for one hour. Then I start going to the bars, you know.” He gestures vaguely at the streets of the walled city, and takes another tiny sip of Efes.

By Theo Panayides

I interviewed 42 people for our Sunday profile page in 2015, and a little tinge of existential doubt is perhaps inevitable. What’s the point of all these interviews (and many more, over the past few years)? Does the writer – let alone the reader – really connect with the profile subject? What remains, at the end of the day?

For me, what remains are vivid mental images, often allied to specific places. I don’t remember much of what Odysseas Michaelides – our muck-raking auditor-general, who granted me an hour of his time last February – actually said (as with all public figures, there were no shocking revelations), but I do recall his tidy, spacious office, and the card on the sideboard reading “From all of us” with a handwritten message of support inside from his old comrades at the ministry of communications. Then there was ancient Idalion, an archaeological site described with great brio by Pamela Gaber, then her cosy, burrow-like house in the village of Alambra – an old stone house with a run-amuck fig tree outside – where we decamped for the actual interview.

Tell me a name, and I’ll flash on a place. A packed coffee shop in the Mall of Engomi on a cold winter’s evening where I met children’s entertainer Costas Schiniou, a.k.a. ‘Nikolakis’. An entirely nondescript flat in Limassol – the only unusual detail being the diving fins left to dry in the corridor outside – where William Trubridge, freediving champion of the world, elected to stay during the AIDA Depth World Championship in September. A table at Ravioli’s in Protaras on a summer afternoon, chatting with local mega-rapper A.M. Sniper and his entourage. Crossing the checkpoint in torrential rain to meet amiable activist Mustafa Shevki, also known as ‘Fidel’. Surrounded by everything from furniture to bric-a-brac as I sat in the Nicosia saleroom of Castle Auctions, talking to its founder Duncan Wills. Surrounded by the madness of Comic Con, geeky young people of all descriptions, physically shifting a metal bench out of the hot sun as I tried to steal a few minutes with comic-book creator Neil Gibson.

That’s not to say that the stories I heard weren’t memorable – especially when they came adorned with adventures and near-death experiences. Three in particular stand out. Shadi Issa and Bashar al-Masri told me of being rescued from a sinking, unseaworthy ship as they tried to make the crossing from Syria to Europe (the place? McDonalds on the Larnaca seafront, apparently a magnet for Syrian refugees judging by the faces around me). Marios Kittiras was astonishingly honest as he recounted the travails of 25 years as a heroin addict. And of course there was Sean O’Neill, bistro owner and entrepreneur, telling me a hair-raising tale of almost being murdered by corrupt cops in Brazil.

I’m happy to have met Alex Tsouloftas, officially the strongest man in Cyprus, and happy to have met – however briefly – French cartoonist Plantu, who found himself mobbed by journalists (and changed our profile interview to a press conference) when his visit happened to coincide with the Charlie Hebdo massacre. But the one profile that stands out for me this year – my most cherished memory – is perhaps with Pambos Ioannou, almost exactly a year ago.

The problem with so many interviews is that people only want to talk about certain things: the event they’re attending, or the book they’re promoting. Seventy-five-year-old Mr. Ioannou, on the other hand, wanted to talk about everything – not just the kebab shop in Aglandjia where he’s been turning skewers for decades (that’s my mental image of the place, sitting at a table with one of those old-fashioned checkered tablecloths) but also his previous life as a chef in some of Nicosia’s glitziest restaurants, back in the 70s, and his life before that, as a young EOKA recruit who came this close to blowing up a roomful of Brits with a time-bomb placed under a restaurant table.

We talked in the early evening, before the customers came, Pambos breaking off to check on his marinades. He regaled me with stories from the old days – then, as we parted, gave me a gift as well, a grey flat cap to protect from the cold. I regret that I’ve only gone back (as a customer) once or twice in the past year – much to my delight, there’s a copy of the profile pasted on the wall as you come in – but I wear that cap all that time, and it doesn’t just remind me of the past coming to life in a dusty kebab shop, it also cures my existential doubt because it makes the memory so tangible. What remains of that interview? Simple: the cap remains.

For the shiny new future that TEDx talks around the world buzz with, we need a re-invention of the system one academic tells THEO PANAYIDES

It’s the first week of a new year, and our minds teem with thoughts of the future – but in fact it was late November when I spoke with Dr Tom Clonan on the sidelines of TEDx University of Nicosia, and the future was even more conspicuous. ‘The Future Is…’ was the title of the event, the walls at the entrance to the Filoxenia Conference Centre in Nicosia plastered with posters as I wandered in search of Tom, each poster offering a different rather twee alternative. The Future is … Disruptive. Digital. Challenging. Exciting. Out there.

Tom’s own talk was perhaps less ambitious: ‘The Future is Possible’ he claimed – “but only under certain circumstances,” he adds as we sit down in the lounge area, just a few minutes after he’s left the stage. A group of kids in white T-shirts – the Larnaca Municipality Children’s Choir, I assume, having glanced at the schedule – are practising quietly on the other side of the room, marshalled by a choirmaster; clumps of people sit in twos and threes, looking animated, buzzing with the visionary thrill that TEDx talks, with their anything-is-possible mantras, bring out in the audience. Already – among other speakers – we’ve had Stuart Armstrong talking artificial intelligence and George Danos (a former Profile on this page) urging mankind to colonise Mars.

“We have all these talks about space exploration, shiny new technology, artificial intelligence, intelligent clothing. The future is a bright and shiny, unimagined place,” says Tom in his soft Dublin brogue. “But I’m saying that, based on my experience of the world – and particularly what I hear from women – for any of this to be possible there must be an emphasis on humanity, empowering women, and on love.”

I meet him backstage in the dressing room, chatting with other speakers and sipping from a bottle of beer. He gets up, shakes hands and leads me to the lounge, still toting the bottle. He’s used to journalists, maybe because he is one himself – not his only job (these days he’s primarily an academic, teaching at the School of Media of the Dublin Institute of Technology), but he writes on security and defence for the Irish Times, and does a lot of radio and TV. He’s 49, ruddy-faced, with unblinking blue eyes and a smoothly assertive manner. I barely have to ask any questions; he does all the talking.

“We’re in a cycle of history at the moment where we have patriarchal systems,” he goes on – then pauses, seeking to refine that last phrase: “The very expression of patriarchy is the slaughter of innocents by young men. Air strikes, austerity – they’re all the products of neo-conservative patriarchy, which really came to prominence at the beginning of this new century. So we’ve had a deregulated, devolved financial-services sector – and the Greeks and the Irish have suffered from that – and we’ve had to endure austerity so that bankers’ gambling debts can be paid. We’ve had the deregulation of foreign policy – we’re in an era of pre-emptive strikes, air strikes, drone attacks… When you kill remotely you’re removing the ethical decision-making from the process, and it’s indiscriminate killing. And if we keep doing that in the West we’re going to reap the whirlwind. Absolutely no doubt about that. Every time someone’s killed by a drone strike it enrages and provokes people in the developing world, and rightly so.”

What he says is a spiel, or perhaps a manifesto – maybe not rehearsed, but certainly pre-packaged. I don’t really get very much of Tom Clonan the private person – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I get quite a lot of Tom Clonan the private person, but only the parts that are no longer private. Frivolous questions are batted away (What does he do for fun? “Come to Cyprus and do a TED talk! I don’t have any hobbies”) – though, paradoxically given the theme of the event, we dwell on the past more than the future, the vivid experiences that have shaped him in the past 20 years.

What experiences? Well, let’s just mention that the title of his second memoir (published in 2013) is Whistleblower, Soldier, Spy – a book, as he puts it, that documents “a loss of belief in certainty”, above all the certainty of the ‘patriarchal systems’ he mentioned earlier. You may wonder why a mere academic is an expert on security and the ethics of drone attacks – but in fact Tom used to be a soldier before he became an academic, a Captain in the Irish Armed Forces whose deployment included, most traumatically, Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. Irish peacekeepers were sent to Lebanon to protect local civilians caught between Hizbollah and the Israeli Defense Forces – “the most fanatical Islamic resistance group in the Middle East [and] the most mechanical killing machine on earth,” as he puts it.

When he went to Lebanon, his “belief in certainty” was absolute – a belief in the culture and norms of army life, and of course a belief in the mission, “a narrative of ‘We’re the good guys, we’re going to come in like the cavalry and help the people’”. Needless to say, it wasn’t like that. “We couldn’t stop the slaughter,” he says grimly, recalling “night after night and day after day, taking the bodies of sometimes whole families out of buildings that had been struck by missiles… As a young guy from Ireland, suddenly in the Middle East, and you see the killing of children, and human beings harnessing all of their ingenuity and prowess and skills to actually kill a child – it’s like the end of the world. And it had a profound effect on me.

“But I buried that experience, as all soldiers do, and it was only when I lost my own daughter in 2003 – it was a cord accident at birth and she – she – she didn’t survive – when I buried my daughter Liadain and, you know, put her tiny little coffin into the ground, I suddenly realised as an adult, as a parent, exactly the meaning of how precious life is, and how much the people of Lebanon have suffered. I knew it on an intellectual level, but I didn’t understand it on an emotional or psychological level.

“My daughter’s death taught me that we’re all the same,” adds Tom soberly. Now, “when I wake up at four o’clock in the morning I think of my parents, who’ve passed away, I think of my daughter, who’s passed away, but now I [also] think of Aylan Kurdi, washed up on the beach in Kos this summer, and I think – is he not my son? The Meaud twins, Charlotte and Emily, who were murdered in the Paris attacks – are they not my daughters?… We’re all brothers and sisters, and I don’t see a distinction between Jewish, Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, Sunni, Shia, Druze, Maronite, Cypriot, Irish, we’re all the same. And if we want to have this shiny new future with all these things in it, we have to get to grips with that pretty quickly. We need some kind of an alternative to patriarchy.”

This is all good stuff, though it sounds like … well, a TED talk, or perhaps the talk of a man who’s written books about his life (the earlier one is called Blood, Sweat and Tears) and turned it into a narrative. He talks like a politician, which he is in a way – he’s running for the Seanad (the Irish Senate) in the next election – though in fact he’s running as an independent, it’s his first foray into public life, and he’s running for a very specific reason: because one of his four children, 13-year-old Eoghan, is wheelchair-bound due to a rare neuromuscular disease. “And because of austerity he’s lost his physiotherapy, his speech therapy, his occupational therapy, his surgical review,” rants Tom hotly. “He’s in a wheelchair that’s too small for him – and Christine Lagarde comes into town and stays in the top hotel in Dublin. She’s no feminist. She’s not about equality, or sorority. She’s a patriarch. It’s not gender-specific.”

It does seem a bit odd, this constant talk of patriarchy. It’s easy to agree with Tom that the world is in a mess, that austerity isn’t working, that we need to acknowledge our common humanity, that we need, as he puts it, “a radical transformation of our power structures” – but does gender really have much to do with it? Isn’t it a question of the powerful imposing themselves on the less powerful? Isn’t violence simply the means by which power is extended and perpetuated? Wouldn’t a world run by women – assuming it contained power inequalities, as it inevitably would – be much the same as a world run by men?

That’s “a meta-narrative,” he retorts, reminding me that he is indeed an academic; “It doesn’t fit with the logic of what I’m saying to you,” he adds, not very helpfully. Still, he may have a point. After all, the world’s most “masculine” systems – the ones where women are most obviously oppressed and excluded – are the nightmarish likes of Islamic State and Saudi Arabia. Even in the West, he points out, the financial-services sector “is almost exclusively dominated by men. And they have f***ed it up. The so-called global war on terror is almost exclusively dominated by men. And – answers on a postcard, and send them to me in Ireland – is it working?”

Above all, perhaps, his focus on patriarchy may reflect his own personal journey. He seems to have been very close to his mother (she died of cancer in 2003), mentioning, for instance, that she sent him a letter for every day of his deployment in Lebanon. His dad, on the other hand, was a patriarch, albeit a benevolent one: “He was a big man, he was a cop, he was quite authoritarian and he was a hard man. I mean, we had a good relationship with him, but it was of a particular type”. Then came the army, and “you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see that [becoming a soldier] was a way of gaining my father’s approval, and his love” – but then came Lebanon, and then came the ‘Whistleblower’ part of his book title when, in the course of his PhD, he uncovered unacceptable levels of sexual violence towards women in the army, became “the subject of a very sustained programme of character assassination by the military authorities” and, having won his day in court, moved on.

In short, Tom Clonan has changed fundamentally on the path from youth to middle age. He’s outgrown that old belief in certainty, just as he outgrew the army and machismo to return, wiser and grateful, to “what my mother taught me” – though I actually suspect he’s still a warrior, just for a different cause. “I’m a very relaxed, easy-going person,” he insists at one point, but surely that’s not true all the time. After Lebanon – understandably – he began to experience “undirected anger, I was angry a lot of the time but couldn’t tell you why”, and a lot of that anger is still there, just no longer undirected. It’s there in his fluid, articulate rants, it’s there in his verbal flourishes – and it’s definitely there when he talks about Ireland today, crippled by years of austerity.

Aren’t the numbers getting better, though? I thought Ireland was the anti-Greece, the poster child for doing what you’re told and staying with the programme. “That’s all bullshit,” he snaps. “That’s the government’s position, but you talk to ordinary citizens…” Tom shakes his head: “We all know what austerity is, austerity has been a redistribution of wealth. The extremely wealthy have become wealthier, and there’s a huge increase in inequality in Irish society”. The health system is shot. Wages are down. Everyone’s having to work twice as hard just to survive. “I mean, it’s the Greek experience.”

Maybe something is stirring in the world, something getting ready to explode (or explode even louder) in 2016. Maybe the future is Tom Clonan and those people like him, those calling for a wholesale reinvention of the system – those who demand less violence, more nurturing, an emphasis on ending divisions and loving our fellows and sharing our feelings. “It doesn’t matter who you are, Life comes knocking on everybody’s door at some point,” he notes poetically. “And I think, as I grow older, I realise that we all need help, and we all need to talk to each other”. The future is possible? Whatever the future is, we’re all in it together.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a creative who wears many hats, but in all of them is certain of the need to be flexible

I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t really fancy a tea. Marilena Zackheos looks crestfallen. We have “munchies” too, she says hopefully, indicating the kitchen of the spacious flat she shares with her husband Brady (he’s back in the US, visiting his folks) – and points to a dish of home-made olive pies, the so-called ‘village’ ones with the pebbly exterior and doughy insides flecked with flakes of fresh coriander.

I pick one up and try it, somewhat dubious despite her assertion that she’s “passionate about food”. To my slight surprise, it’s delicious. It’s as good as the ones you find in bakeries, I blurt out. Actually, I’d like them to be even better than the ones you find in bakeries, she replies brightly, smoothing over my faux pas, and explains how she uses orange juice instead of water to make them extra-fluffy. A little later we’re sitting at the dining-room table, with her laptop open for easy reference. The laptop is adorned with a stencilled image of Snow White, beaming out her virginal simper as I try to take a picture. A guitar rests on a chair; the books on the bookshelf range from Derek Walcott to the Marquis de Sade to 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. Marilena herself sits at the head of the table in a black dress, smiling and sipping coffee from a Pisces mug. Pisces people, says the mug, are “creative, intuitive, loving, trusting”.

That’s one side: Snow White, the cosy domesticity, the home-made olive pies. Another side of Marilena may be glimpsed on YouTube, though only imperfectly – at least till an album called Oh My by the Grendel Babies comes out sometime in 2016. The Babies are her band, or the band she used to have in Washington DC (she and Brady moved to Cyprus about four years ago) – a four-piece with cello, keyboard, drums and violin, drawing influences from vaudeville, swing and chamber music, known primarily as a live act with skits and outlandish costumes alongside the songs.

She gets on the laptop and plays me a song called ‘Wife of Bisclavret’ – a song about “the harm that people do to each other”, based on a 12th-century Lai (i.e. short narrative poem) by Marie de France. It’s about a wife whose husband is a werewolf (!), and the mayhem that ensues once she learns his secret; she leaves him for another, he finds her (in wolf form) and tears off her nose, etc etc. It’s not a song that goes with Snow White and delicious munchies; it’s a rollicking, theatrical, angrily ironic kind of song, like something from The Threepenny Opera – and Marilena’s voice is especially startling, ranging from a leer to a yowl to a crisp Joanna Newsom falsetto. “I was in a punk-rock band called Maenads,” she explains – this was in Cyprus, back in her early 20s (she’s now 35) – and she lost her voice from too many punk-rock exertions, forced into a months-long silence which in turn led to opera training to make sure it didn’t happen again. The result is a voice to be reckoned with.

The album version isn’t out yet (the making of the album is a saga in itself); all that’s available on YouTube is a live version from 2009, with the Grendel Babies – still a duo at that point, just Marilena and her friend Jennifer – performing ‘Wife of Bisclavret’ at some outdoor festival in Washington DC, dressed in white togas, yowling out their tale of mediaeval werewolves in mid-afternoon to a smattering of suburban parents and their kids. The song isn’t quite as impressive, of course – yet the setting makes it seem even bolder, its creativity even more unabashed. “One of the things I tell my students,” she says at one point, “is that, when you go up there, you need to be 100 per cent unapologetic about what you’re reading. No inkling of shame or fear!”.

Students? Yes indeed, that’s another side – though let’s mention the professional side first, the one she leads with on LinkedIn (which one is her main hat? “All of them. I’m a multi-tasker”): Director of the Cyprus Centre for Intercultural Studies, and Assistant Professor at the University of Nicosia. She teaches at the University, but that’s not where the quote about students being unapologetic comes from – because she also teaches (or leads) poetry workshops at Write CY, a “creative writing joint” that’s mostly the brainchild of American writer Max Sheridan. “You can’t dictate poetry. But you can inspire,” explains Marilena, her aim being to nudge budding poets into looking at the world in a new way – “What colour is this texture? What does this texture sound like?” she’ll ask her blindfolded charges, having them touch different objects and think synaesthetically – and reading out the results, with no inkling of shame or fear, at workshops or Open Mic Nights.

I’m wary, and can’t help showing it. My problem with creative-writing classes, I explain cautiously, is that they make writing seem easy, when in fact it’s very hard.

She looks dismayed again, like when I didn’t want any coffee or tea. “Well, it needs to be fun, right? Because it’s play.”

No! Not at all! It’s the opposite of play.

“Of course it does. Freud talked about this,” she insists gently. “We lose touch with play, the older we get, and this is a space where you can do that. Where you can play with words, play with structure, play with form, with ideas.”

Play doesn’t need to be frivolous, of course; that’s the point. Marilena herself is extremely serious – most of her time is spent at the Centre for Intercultural Studies, running events to promote diversity and anti-racism – yet she doesn’t have the rigid mindset one associates with ideologues. “I see things as more fluid,” she admits at one point. “I don’t think anything is forever”.

‘Diversity’, for instance, is one of those words (like ‘multiculturalism’) that’s become a shibboleth for a healthy society – and she obviously agrees, but not because she read it in a book. Diversity is part of her life, from her marriage (she and Brady are an “intercultural” couple) to her many sides, and indeed her many friends. “My husband kind of makes fun of me, because I have a lot of different friends. Very different backgrounds, very different personalities. I have friends who are the artist type, I have friends who are kind of more buttoned-up.” What do they all have in common? “I find them very interesting. And I learn things from them. And even if I don’t agree, I’m very interested in hearing that point of view. Very much so. Like, for me, it’s really important to be around all these different views. I can’t imagine just hanging out with one type of person, one type of view”.

This too is perhaps a kind of play, mixing and matching those around her – not in a cold or exploitative way, more as a form of creativity, like the eclectic mix of genres that informs her music. She has very bohemian friends and, for instance, very religious friends who don’t always share their views, afraid of giving offence. “I’ve always been kind of the defender of the underdog,” says Marilena, so it bugs her that God-fearing types now feel ostracised. Yes, I point out, but not long ago it was atheists who felt out of place. Is she just going to keep switching sides, and helping whoever needs help? “Why not?” she shrugs disarmingly. “I think you should reserve the right to always change your mind. Because things change, nothing is constant, nothing is permanent… You need to be flexible. Flexible in your viewpoint, flexible in your outlook.”

as part of the grendel babies

Maybe it stems from her childhood (speaking of Freud, as we almost were earlier) – a childhood where things did change fairly regularly, and being flexible became a survival mechanism. “I was born here, but then – I guess my parents were living in Moscow at the time?” she says, her intonation making clear (if it wasn’t already) that she did some time in the States as well. And Beijing in between. And Geneva, for a year and a half in her mid-teens. Her father, Sotos Zackheos, was (and remains) quite a big-shot, a diplomat whose high-level postings meant frequent uprootings for Marilena and her brother.

Other places meant international schools, growing up with a multitude of cultures – the offspring of expats and diplomats – in a kind of tolerant bubble-world. Other places meant you could re-invent yourself each time, though you also had to make new friends and try to fit in. She was something of a Goth-punk in those days, and still has a touch of that gloomy streak (“I don’t get to dress like this at work,” she notes, contemplating her all-black look with approval: “I think this is the animal in its true habitat!”), though I also get a sense that much of her energy went into not feeling gloomy. It’s not really shocking to learn – though she only confides it reluctantly, and with all sorts of qualifiers – that she went through “kind of a heavy depression in my younger years”. Marilena comes off as a person who needs a complex balance to be at her best, her different sides working in tandem, a person who’d easily suffocate without the freedom to play – the freedom to always change her mind, as she puts it. She’s sensitive to a fault, and can barely watch a film without getting weepy. And of course she’s a poet, among other things.

She likes the “confessional” poets, she admits, the likes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton – troubled women who poured out their pain in poetry. (Strangely, or not so strangely, she’s not so confessional in real life, and shakes her head at the loss of privacy embraced by the Facebook generation.) As well as the Grendel Babies album and a children’s book she’s currently working on, 2016 should see the publication of her poetry collection titled Carmine Lullabies – and she quotes me a line from the title-poem: “A farewell adds something to this world”, her own farewell being to whatever traumas lie in her past. “It’s about saying goodbye to this past, a haunting past or a painful past, and moving on”. It’s surely significant that her academic work was initially on island cultures’ literary response to national trauma – but that, “after reading a lot of very depressing accounts”, she decided to change her focus from trauma to recovery from trauma, “stories of victimhood turned into narratives of empowerment”. She’s learned not to wallow in the darkness.

“I feel now more grounded than ever,” Marilena Zackheos tells me – ‘now’ referring to her marriage, her life back in Cyprus, her mix-and-matched diversity of interests, Snow White on her laptop and a book about female evil (it’s called Vile Women; she co-wrote it with Anthony Patterson) available on Amazon. Cyprus has changed, just like her: she often felt like an outsider when she was younger, “but now I’ve carved my way [in]… It’s like ‘I’m here, whether you like it or not’.” There are like-minded people here now: Write CY is a big deal in her life, a writers’ hub where one can feel less alone.

That’s the point, at the end of the day – especially perhaps for someone who went through childhood having to make new friends every couple of years, and whose work now (i.e. the Centre) consists of trying to bring people together. That’s the point for any writer and musician, the burning need to connect. Marilena tells me a story of having a poem published in a journal while she was still in her teens, and receiving an email from a woman who thanked her for her poem, told her that the poem had made something click inside her and that, as a result, she’d finally decided to leave her husband. “And I’m thinking ‘Oh God, what have I done? I’ve just wrecked this marriage!’” – but of course the woman’s feelings were already there, the poem merely crystallised them; the woman, in effect, had become Marilena’s co-writer. “The act of conversing is also, I think, in a way an act of creation,” she adds, possibly with a nod to this Profile – and it’s true, we created it together. She had me at the home-made olive pies.

Seeing the Cyprus problem through the eyes of a woman gives it a new understanding one lecturer tells THEO PANAYIDES

It’s a big flat, actually two flats joined together, more than big enough for a woman living alone with a dog named Eros. Then again, Maria Hadjipavlou needs the space – not just for Eros to feel comfortable (he’s a sort-of terrier, and very lively) but also for her books, which fill up two rooms. Her first degree was in English, and her favourite poets – Eliot, Auden, Keats – doubtless appear on the shelves, but I also note Gloria Steinem, and the book she’s reading now is about “the creation of spoilers in peacebuilding” (whatever that means). Her Wikipedia page calls her “a well-known expert in conflict resolution and feminism”, and she can talk like a feminist when pressed: “The way we structure our society favours male over female, in every society”. But mostly we talk about the Cyprus problem.

It’s there on TV as I come in, a talk-show dealing – coincidentally – with the testimony of Greek Cypriot women who were raped during the invasion in 1974, and are only now coming forward. The rapes were silenced, notes Maria later, like the atrocities committed by Greek Cypriots in 1963 were silenced. She herself was 16 in 1963, living in Kaimakli – just down the road from Omorfita, where much of the killing took place – yet she didn’t really know what had happened. Most of her father’s Turkish Cypriot customers stopped coming, and of course there was talk of “insurrection”, but details were scarce and hard to glean. “One couldn’t understand it very well. At school they wouldn’t tell us anything”.

She’s brought out a folder of papers and clippings; the table in front of the TV is scattered with photos. They’re about her, not the Cyprus problem – partly to help me with the interview, partly because she’s writing a book of her own about her life: not quite a memoir, more “an auto-anthropological approach where I’m the subject of the book”. On her shelves, in the room full of books, alongside Gloria Steinem and the poets, there are piles of other folders as well as a collection of chess trophies won by her son Giorgos in childhood (he’s now in London, making his moves in the world of finance). Each folder contains notes from a speech or presentation made at this or that conference; even now, in retirement – or especially now – she gets frequent invitations. “I presented a paper at Harvard in September,” she recalls, apropos of the current talks (so we’re back to the Cyprus problem). Her paper analysed recent statements by Anastasiades and Akinci – and she knows the Turkish Cypriot leader well, having worked alongside his wife as trainers in conflict-resolution workshops.

Is she academic or activist? Obviously the former, having taught partly in the US but mostly (for 19 years) at the University of Cyprus – but the latter as well, having been politically active since the 70s. “I always associated the two, and connected the two,” she explains. “Living in a country with a conflict, and having a social conscience, you cannot stay only an academic. I call myself what my professor later at Harvard called people like us, who are academics and activists, ‘scholar-practitioners’.”

In Lebanon with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat

She’s just the right age (69 this year) to have been politicised by the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s – though in fact the family was always political, her businessman father (a staunch Communist) shaped by the rapacious moneylenders of his own youth. For Maria, the defining event was the military junta taking power in Greece in 1967; it took a few years for its enormity to sink in – she was in England, doing her English degree – but when she returned to Cyprus she became very active, supporting EDEK which was the most fiery anti-junta party. She was out in the streets, taking part in marches; she became involved with the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece; she wrote theatre reviews for Ta Nea, the party newspaper; she met other young firebrands like Takis Hadjidemetriou and Evie Meleagrou, “people who became my mentors”. She introduced Meleagrou’s daughter to the man who became her husband, a visiting Englishman named Christopher Hitchens. And of course then came the invasion, which she took “as a personal attack on what I believed in”.

Then again, she wasn’t even in Cyprus during that time; she was back in London on a British Council scholarship, doing a two-year Masters in Education. “I intended to stay in England,” she admits, “because I was so fed up with materialism in Cyprus. Everywhere I went, everyone would talk about their furniture or whatever, and I felt extremely alienated that I couldn’t find people to communicate with”. Her political life was rewarding, her job as an English teacher less so. Some of her schoolfriends were already getting married, and the family was piling on the pressure: “‘You don’t need any more studies, your role and fulfilment as a woman is to get married, have a family and so on’. Whereas I was very curious about the world, about ideas – so I thought ‘I will stay in England’. And then ’74 happens, and that transformed me”.

That’s a recurring motif in our conversation, an image of Maria always at the edge of life in Cyprus, half in half out. “My life has been so rich. I’ve travelled so much!” she exclaims at one point – and travel is indeed a rare pleasure, but it’s still intriguing that her mind goes directly from a rich life to thoughts of foreign places. Her best friends are the ones she made in Boston, during those “very beautiful” years in the 80s when she did a PhD, got married, opened her mind to a new approach in conflict resolution and met a wealth of interesting people, not necessarily in that order. “I’m here with Hitchens and [Noam] Chomsky,” she notes, handing me a black-and-white photo of a ‘teach-in’ at MIT to protest the creation of the TRNC in 1983. Then there’s a newspaper clipping, this one from Cyprus in 1999; “That was very sad for me, and I felt at times that I wanted to go back to the States,” she recalls, bringing up the motif of leaving again. “Had I had the chance, I would’ve gone”.

The clipping in question is an interview in Alithia: ‘I never expressed any gratitude for the Turkish invasion in Cyprus’ is the headline, which is also a quote by Maria. The interview refers to an earlier article in Simerini which accused her, in effect, of being a traitor; that article, she says, had been “full of insults”, claiming – among other things – that she consciously tried to alter the Greek identity of the students she taught at the university. (Maria sued the paper and won, though the case dragged on for years.) The controversy wasn’t a one-off, “I was called ‘traitor’ many times” because of her beliefs – and a modicum of anger still smoulders, as when I ask if she’s a socialist and she demurs that she never called herself that. “I’m a leftist,” she clarifies. “The way socialism was practised in Cyprus…” she shrugs as if to say ‘It’s not for me’ – “especially in the later years, after I started my bicommunal peace work and I was a ‘traitor’ for the socialists. Because how could I speak to ‘the Enemy’?”

In a way, it seems like another time – whether because we’re in the EU now, or because the checkpoints have opened, or just because a large proportion of Cypriots weren’t even born at the time of the invasion. Rabid nationalism still lingers, of course, and it’s not like people have become more bicommunal (more apathetic is closer to the mark) – but, as she says, many of the things she argued in the 90s and early 00s are now “mainstream”. Maria is a product of a very specific time, a left-wing intellectual who ploughed a lonely furrow during a period of total political stasis. “The intellectuals of both sides, we needed to get together decades ago and articulate a different voice in this society,” she laments. What was stopping them? On our side, “recognition phobia, as I call it,” she replies. On the other side, Denktash.

Her particular contribution was perhaps the theory of conflict resolution she’d picked up at Harvard – and of course she was also the first to observe the Cyprus conflict through the prism of gender, starting in the 80s when she sent a questionnaire to ordinary women on both sides of the divide, writing up the results (“And it was the first-ever writing on women in Cyprus,” she adds proudly, at least in relation to the conflict). Gender matters, indeed a recent UN resolution has declared that wars and conflicts are “gendered phenomena”, meaning they’re experienced differently by men and women – and Maria is a founding member of the Gender Advisory Team (GAT) working to “integrate the gender perspective” at the current talks, notably by including women among the negotiators.

That’s her main battle at the moment, in terms of activism (unsurprisingly for a left-wing academic, LGBT rights are another passion), and the endless meetings seem to be paying off: the UN Secretary-General had a whole paragraph on GAT in his recent six-monthly report to the two leaders, urging them to take its suggestions seriously. Some may view the whole effort as quixotic, given how little the negotiators (of whatever sex) seem to be accomplishing – yet there’s always been an element of hopeful idealism in Maria’s work, especially in her emphasis on conflict resolution through dialogue. “We need dialogue. Dialogue is a tool for me, but it’s also a value. Because it’s only through dialogue, and acknowledgment of the Other’s identity, that we can open spaces for understanding, and at the same time building new relationships”. Even the most intractable conflict can be eased through dialogue – even ISIS, she says when I cite the Islamist nutters as a case where dialogue is impossible: “Have we really sat down and questioned, what are their concerns? What do they really want? And what has been our responsibility in constructing this kind of ISIS culture?”.

It reminds me of something she said earlier, about her dad’s parting words when he reluctantly agreed to allow teenage Maria to study in the UK (despite being a girl). Fine, said her father, go and study – but “remember that not all people are as good as you think”. She was naïve at 18, admits Maria – and she’s not so naïve at 69, yet some of that faith in human goodness still persists. “I always look at the positive side, I look at the beauty of each person. I’m not suspicious”. As she used to tell her children (she also has a daughter, Christina), the three best things in life are “patience, love, and every day a new discovery,” she declares with the air of a personal motto. “Every day, to tell you Theo, I wake up and I feel so happy – because I have in front of me 24 hours of new things to do, to experience, to feel, to read. These 24 hours are crucial for me.”

It sounds a bit Pollyanna-ish – yet I think I see the kind of person she must be, a big-hearted extrovert bored with materialism from an early age, drawn to the excitements of literature and poetry and travel and theatre, then politics and marches and mentors and the thrill of changing the world. She’s the first Greek Cypriot academic to teach (every summer) at Bogazici University in Istanbul, she enthuses, and her tone might be that of an explorer saying she’s the first Greek Cypriot explorer to plant her flag at the North Pole – and some may not like it, she adds (Istanbul, not the North Pole), but she doesn’t care anymore.

“I’ll tell you something: I have to be me,” says Maria Hadjipavlou. “At this stage of my life, I’ve decided I will be me. No self-censorship anymore! I went through a lot, but I always knew that I wanted to stay true to what I believe. Which is dialogue, and to look at the Other’s rights as well, not just my own”. Self-censorship? Perish the thought.

One Nicosia woman has just returned from Antarctica. Previous adventures have seen her climb Mount Kilimanjaro. THEO PANAYIDES meets someone on the search for what is truly awesome

Liana Toumazou is 51. Nothing unusual about that – but she’s only been 51 for a few weeks and, more unusually, she celebrated her 51st birthday in Chile, on her way back from Antarctica. She spent 11 days travelling in the world’s southernmost continent, sailing in an ice-strengthened boat, kayaking around blue-veined icebergs, observing in mute delight as penguins came up to her or just ignored her, and plunging into waters so icy that she suffered a cramp after just two seconds (it was only by being a good swimmer that she managed to clamber out at all). Now that’s unusual.

The world, you might say, is divided into two kinds of people: those who’ll read the above and ask ‘Why would someone do such a thing?’, and those who’ll reply ‘Why not?’. Most seem to be in the first camp, as implied when I ask Liana why she went on the trip by herself (she was part of a 50-strong group of visitors and naturalists, but only met her fellow travellers when they boarded the good ship Paula Pioneer). “The question I was asked when I said [to friends in Cyprus] ‘Guys, I’m going on holiday to the Antarctic’ was ‘Whyyyy?’,” she replies pointedly, stretching out the word and collapsing into peals of laughter.

That’s the way she talks, lively verging on hyperactive. She starts to answer questions, then her voice speeds up as she gets more excited and finally she bursts into laughter – like a plane taxiing, then taking off – but keeps on talking through delighted paroxysms. Her energy is singular and potentially “overwhelming”, one of her favourite words. Antarctica wasn’t her first expedition; a few years ago she climbed to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, incidentally raising €5,000 for the Sophia Foundation (though she didn’t do it ‘for charity’, she was going to go anyway, she adds pointedly, lest she be accused of hypocrisy). When not climbing mountains or diving into ice, she works from home – one room in her third-floor apartment is the office from which she emails clients and talks to stakeholders as the Cyprus and Greece representative of RICS, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors – and lives alone, as she’s done for years. Has she never lived with someone? “Yeah, on and off,” she replies vaguely, the energy dipping for a moment like a flickering candle; but “if we did, it was for a very short time”.

She has no children, which seems a shame – not because there’s anything wrong with being childless, but because kids would surely respond to her brand of fast-talking fizz. “Yes, kids would,” she agrees – though “it’s sometimes overwhelming to grown-ups!”. She does have nephews and nieces, and “they love me, most of the time, because I’m the one who’s doing all the naughty things, I encourage them to get out of their comfort zone… This is the job of an aunt. Parents are there to discipline, I’m there to push them.”

How does she think her friends see her?

“Weird!” she replies, and bursts into laughter again. “They think I’m weird, but they love me. I haven’t followed the normal – you know, I’m not married, I don’t have a family the way people understand it. So I also don’t have the same concerns. They’re worried about the kids, they’re worried about their education. I’m not interested in these subjects.”

Surely it’s not about being single or married, though. After all, lots of single people are supremely boring.

“Well, I don’t know who decides who’s boring,” she demurs. “In some ways I’m really boring, because I’m not interested in some things that…” she shrugs as if to say ‘that everyone’s into these days’. “For example, younger people may find me boring because I’m not interested in the fashions, and the ITs and the Facebooks.”

Instead, she has more exalted interests. “Now, at this moment, I’m fascinated by awe,” she explains – and she even compiled an “awe journal” while in Antarctica, asking others what provoked awe in them and jotting down her own thoughts. In addition to RICS and her various adventures, Liana works in executive coaching (helping businesspeople set professional goals and “get excited about life”) and she believes that experiencing awe may be useful in this regard, using that emotion as a tool to help people change their behaviour. The catch, of course, is that what provokes awe is different for everyone. Many would define it as a sense of feeling small, faced with something greater than oneself – but Liana, for instance, sees it differently. “For me, it was being part of Nature, actually part of it,” she recalls of Antarctica. “I mean paddling [in the kayak], and struggling, and going around ice, and coping with the cold. I felt I was one with Nature”. She shrugs eloquently: “But I’m a very physical person. I do sports, I do dance…”

That’s a massive part of her personality: that she didn’t feel awe just by observing but by actively doing, that she needs to feel it in her bones so to speak – and of course that she’s physical, just as her energy is physical, causing her voice to accelerate and her body to convulse in peals of laughter. “I was so overwhelmed by ice,” she says of her recent trip – ice is her big discovery: “It’s beauuuutiful, it’s wonderful! It’s a beautiful thing to see, it changes non-stop!” – and of course ‘overwhelmed’ is a word that suggests total surrender, a word one feels viscerally as well as intellectually. She’s been doing dance “ever since I can remember, I’ve done everything”, jazz and ballet and modern dance, belly dancing and flamenco and a bit of tango recently (since she was passing through Buenos Aires en route to Antarctica) – yet she doesn’t come out with a list of favourite bands (or anything at all, really) when I ask what kind of music she likes. I suspect music isn’t really as important to her as the actual sensation of dancing: not the music per se, but the music as it courses through her body.

Bodies fade, of course. Even when you run and sail and dance and rock-climb like Liana does, bodies fade – and eventually fail. Some people (those who ask ‘Why?’ when they read about an adventure holiday in Antarctica) might discern a subconscious agenda in all this activity. Doesn’t a physical person feel the aches and pains of getting older even more acutely than the rest of us? Isn’t her energy maybe a kind of denial?

Liana shakes her head firmly. She’s not doing it to be ‘young’, she insists, and “I’m not an adrenaline addict. Maybe I used to be, maybe when I was younger – there you go – and you do things for the sake of doing it. I don’t do this for the sake of doing it. Not anymore. I’m doing it for the sake of getting insights and taking it further – and does that stop? Why should only young people do these things?”. If you stand at the South Pole, she notes (though she didn’t travel quite that far), you can move one day ahead just by taking a step to one side of the International Date Line, and one day back by taking a step to the other side. “So what’s old and what’s young?” Time is a construct.

What does she think about death?

“I don’t think. I’m not interested to go into it. It’s the same with religion, it doesn’t really interest me. You know? I’m concerned with being a good person. I don’t want to hurt people, or damage others.”

There’s another aspect to all this, a certain undercurrent in our conversation. “Look, I’ve been through many crises in my life,” says Liana candidly. “I lost both my parents when I was very young, we lost our properties and livelihood… I went through times when I didn’t have a lot of money, money was an issue. My mother died of cancer, I lived that. Her final year wasn’t very nice”. (She’s also had her own unspecified health scare recently, but prefers not to go into detail.) Her mother died when she was 22, her father when she was 11, just after the invasion – a heart attack brought on partly by having to start from scratch after losing the family business in occupied Nicosia. “I was definitely not prepared for that, it was a huge trauma… And of course I was in love with my dad, he was my hero. But I think because we had this very close-knit family – I mean the extended family – we always talked about Dad, he was always part of our life. So I managed to find a way to overcome it.”

Is her streak of independence as an adult partly a result of having lived through such a rupture as a child? But she prefers not to analyse. “Could be,” she says vaguely, then shrugs: “This is who I am”. The point isn’t why, the point is how – the energy she used (and consciously cultivated) in order to get through it. “I’m very lucky,” she observes, “that I’m a positive person”.

I look around. Liana’s kitchen is studded with reminders of her recent trip: a 10,000-peso note from the Banco Central de Chile, a box of Mamuschka chocolates – chocolate-covered almonds, to be precise – from San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina. But the trip’s real residue goes beyond the mementos and her many dozen photographs of ice (“Ah! Beautiful! I discovered the many shades of white!”). The real outcome lies in the insights it gave her, her coaching model based on the power of awe – and something else as well, the way it revealed (or confirmed) the importance of living in the moment.

What was the hardest part? “Actually making the decision to go,” she replies at once. When she was still in Cyprus, thinking about such an undertaking – what would it even feel like, leaping into one-degree-Celsius water? – she worried a little; when she was there, in the moment, immersed in the action, she couldn’t get enough of it. “And I think this is where people could be – different,” she offers. “It’s making the decision to do something, you know? That sounds difficult. This is what I keep telling my nephew, your fear is bigger than the actual thing.” She shrugs, as if admitting it’s easier said than done. “I’m a little bit more fearless than other people, a little more risk-taker. For obvious reasons. Because I don’t have to worry about other people – and I appreciate that.”

Liana Toumazou has always been a bit “loud”, she admits cheerfully, even as a child – always very positive, always full of energy. She briefly tried the mopey-teenage thing as an adolescent, trying to get into The Smiths and so on, “but I think I very quickly moved on! I was always, I think, overwhelmed by passions and new ideas and change and moving on, and trying new things and having new experiences”. Then again, it’s a little more complicated. She’s not just sunny, there’s a streak of detachment there too – not coldness, just a stubborn independence and a tendency to withdraw sometimes. People assume she’s an extrovert, “but I know there’s a streak inside me that I’m really an introvert – because I need to reflect on things, and I need time to do that… I wouldn’t say I’m unsociable, I’m not. All I’m saying is I need to close down sometimes, and I need my space”. She’s what’s known as “an ideator”, a person who’s forever coming up with ideas – but she also gets bored easily, and doesn’t always put them into practice. She thrives on excitement, a desire for stimulation that she feels like a physical hunger. Then it subsides, and she’s a woman alone again.

“Have you read about flow? Being ‘in the flow’?” she asks me, and cites Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. People are happiest (it seems) when they’re immersed in their passion – when they’re in the moment, in the flow, totally caught up in what they’re doing, though they don’t even know it at the time.

“You don’t know that you’re in the moment when you’re in the moment,” points out Liana. “It’s the now. Now, it’s happening.” Her own flow is simple enough. “I’m happy when I’m doing things. When I’m in touch with Nature, when I’m sharing things. I’m happy, yeah.” Recently she’s heard about a new adventure – an annual expedition off the coast of Norway where you snorkel with the orcas, a.k.a. killer whales. “Isn’t that an experience?” she marvels, and laughs excitably.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a local folk singer who has prowled the country to find traditional old songs

Look for the olive trees, says Michalis Terlikkas on the phone. Look for the place where the olive trees meet the side of the road, and turn right immediately after. I’m already somewhat off the grid at this point – near the village of Sia, off the Nicosia-Limassol highway – and I’d have preferred more orthodox directions, like a road-sign or something. Fortunately I find the olive grove, then drive up a dirt track to a house set a long way back from the road, fronted by a garden of carob trees and a few citrus. Standing outside to greet me is Michalis, one of the best-known – and most distinctive – folk singers in Cyprus.

He’s not tall but he’s imposing, a barrel-like man with a thick moustache, a great thatch of white curly hair and unblinking, bulging eyes that give him a permanently startled air as he sits at the dining-room table, talking in the slow deliberate manner of a valued regular in a village coffeeshop. His booming voice bounces off the walls, the same voice you can hear on YouTube singing traditional songs like ‘To Yiasemi’ (The Jasmine Bush) or ‘I Gaouritsa’ (The Little Donkey Mare). A fridge in a corner of the room – from which his wife Maria will later extract a bottle of zivania – bears a sticker invoking Kapouti, the occupied village near Morphou where he was born 60 years ago and started singing soon afterwards: he could sing entire songs before he’d even started primary school, he assures me.

“Musically speaking, I have no education,” shrugs Michalis. He’s never been a full-time singer, then again a full-time singer is precisely what he was – a man who sang all the time, it’s just that he also did other things while singing. He was nearly 30 by the time he started singing semi-pro, but before that “I’d been singing, singing, singing constantly. Back then I sang because I wanted to sing, I had a great need to sing, it was like eating bread or drinking water. I finished primary school – I sang. I finished high school – I sang. Then I went to study in Athens”. He studied Electronics – but meanwhile also sang, in the evenings with friends in tavernas, at home by himself, on his motorbike while running errands. Later he worked on construction sites, and sang while working. Later still, in 1983, he got a job at CyTA as a technician – a job he kept for 27 years, before retiring five years ago – and sang between classes during the two-month training course. “I told you, I was singing. Constantly, constantly, constantly… What I remember in my life [is that] until I was 30 I’d sing, and I’d sing, and I’d sing. It was inexhaustible.”

We’re drinking herbal tea as we talk, as a kind of prelude to the main event. “What will you have?” asked Michalis before we sat down: tea, coffee, zivania? I hem and haw (the thought of zivania sounds good) but finally plump for the tea, and he leads me outside to the back garden. The kitchen walls are adorned with religious icons plus, incongruously, a framed photo of an Alsatian (his name was Max, I discover; he died last year). In the garden, he pulls at what looks like a scraggly weed, then brings it up to my nose; it smells tart and citrus-y. This is lemon verbena, which he mixes with cinnamon and a bit of savoury. “There’s more in the pot,” booms Michalis, pouring out two cups. “And we’ll have our zivania later.”

His manner is firm, brooking no contradiction. He appears to be quite the paterfamilias; Maria sits behind me in the living room while her husband holds court and his son Constantinos, a graphic designer, also sits in a corner, tapping at his laptop (he has another son, Stavros, who works as a sound recordist). Neither says a word, but nor do they get up and leave. I suspect it’s a question of solidarity, or respect for the family patriarch – the old-fashioned village mentality.

Even in his youth, there was something unreconstructed about him. He tells me of his big break, during that CyTA training course in 1983 when another trainee turned out to be a dancer with the Shakallis folk-music troupe, and informed Michalis that they needed a singer. He auditioned for the job – and later learned that when they first laid eyes on him, “with my big moustache, and only this tall [he indicates his diminutive stature], they said: ‘Who the hell is this shepherd that you’ve brought to sing for us?’”. Michalis laughs, as well he might – because the musicians stood slack-jawed when that big booming voice finally emerged and he stayed with the troupe for a number of years, appearing onstage and on TV and finally creating his own troupe, Mousa, a few years later.

Those were the years when the music took off, the late 80s and early 90s (he also got married, in 1984). Those were the years when he worked with the famous fiddler and scholar Giorgos Averof – “I don’t know if you know him,” he says, eyeing me doubtfully, “but those who read this will know him” – and began his own peregrinations in search of Cypriot folk songs, criss-crossing the island to find obscure singers and forgotten melodies. The singers were often old men, croaking out their songs in bits and pieces; it was like musical archaeology, says Michalis, like unearthing a jar in shattered fragments and putting the fragments together. Of the 90 or so Cypriot songs in his personal repertoire, around a quarter belong in this category: songs he discovered on his travels, which no-one had known before and no-one would ever have known, had he not intervened to record them.

This was valuable work – though, it must be said, not especially lucrative (there’s a reason why he held on to that CyTA job). Michalis has been singing all his life, but only intermittently managed to make a living out of it. Even now, his country-squire appearance is deceptive: the rural retreat is purely because Maria comes from Sia, and they took out a mortgage for the house which took years to pay off (in the same spirit, the only reason he grows carob trees is because they don’t need much water). Being a folk singer must be even tougher these days, I suggest, thinking how much society’s changed in the past few years – but he shakes his head.

“For me, the worst time – ” he begins, then suddenly shifts in his chair. The tea’s almost finished. “Missus!” he calls out. “OK, bring us please – my mouth’s gone dry –” he explains, half to himself, “bring us a couple of olives, some anari, two shot glasses – and some zivania, because enough is enough! Oh, and cut some lountza”.

Maria scuttles off to get things ready, and Michalis goes back to talking – telling me of the worst time, the 20 years from independence to the early 80s: those were “the Dark Ages” for folk music in Cyprus, because Cypriots developed “a mania” for all things foreign. It’s a subject on which he has much to say, and does so in between issuing more instructions (“Have you warmed up any bread, missus? Put some in the toaster for a bit, but only half-toast it”).

“Our country has a very serious problem,” he asserts in that booming voice, “and has done for many years, maybe 200. Basically, others have created in us an inferiority complex. A low-self-esteem syndrome. And what this says is the following: ‘Nothing of yours is important’.” What’s important is what comes from outside, implicitly from above. “You [Cypriots] are a nothing. You’re peasants, you’re coarse”. Our dialect is deprecated, being allegedly inferior to ‘proper’ Greek. “Anything foreign that we’re offered must be good, because they’ve given us a complex. This is still the case today.”

The zivania arrives. We clink glasses, and I take a sip. It’s moonshine, of course – from the village of Vasa, up in the mountains – and very strong; it burns my stomach, and I like zivania. “The only way to cure yourself of this disease – and I believe I am cured, in fact I’m sure of it – is to devote yourself to your homeland,” says Michalis, warming to his theme (‘homeland’ is the untranslatable Greek ‘topos’, meaning literally ‘place’). “To local culture, to the homeland – even to the last dry rock in this country. Visit every corner of Cyprus, meet the people, love your homeland AS IT IS,” he urges, laying emphasis on the last three words. “I wrote a poem about that: ‘The rocks, the dry thorns, the grasshoppers / Our legends, our songs, that’s the true meaning of nation’ [the lines rhyme in Greek, obviously]. The rest is hogwash – the flags, the speeches… I’ve seen all of Cyprus, so as to write my songs and use our dialect and write in dialect, and I love my homeland, and now no-one can make me feel inferior to anyone else in the world. But, at the same time, I’ve learned to have total respect for the culture of others,” he adds pointedly, making clear that love of nation isn’t the same as nationalism.

That snatch of poetry isn’t a one-off, by the way. Michalis writes prolifically, not just songs but also stage plays and especially poetry (he’s thinking of publishing a book this year). Partly it’s a function of retirement, having time on his hands and not much to do – “Just before you came I took a little stroll with the neighbour, and picked a few mushrooms” – but he also has a gift for vivid turns of phrase, on the page as in conversation. He even writes haikus, like this one for instance (the 5-7-5 metre works in Greek):

“I turn off the lights

The better to see

My own blindness.”

“Let’s have another,” he offers hospitably, and pours out another shot of zivania – though his glass is still full some time later, when I ask if he has any regrets in life. “Look,” he replies, “I’m not one of those people who say ‘If I came back, I’d do it all the same way’”. He’s made mistakes, he admits – and one big regret is not having taken better care of his health and his God-given gift, i.e. his voice. In what way? “Generally. I’ve over-indulged.” ‘Over-indulged how?’ I ask – and he indicates the bottle in front of us.

Michalis Terlikkas may have a dark side. All artists do, after all – and he must have his demons, which music only partly alleviates. He tells me a story of sitting in the CyBC canteen with a friend many years ago, and the friend asking why he drank so much: “Well, do you see anything around you that could make you feel happy, unless you were drunk?” Michalis replied half-jokingly – and one shouldn’t read too much into a joke, but one can still read something (admittedly, sitting in the CyBC canteen would make anyone a bit depressed). He has a temper, he says – though it flares up only briefly, and he doesn’t bear grudges – and he’s also the kind of man who, “unfortunately, according to most people, always calls things like I see them”. He’s direct, perhaps to a fault.

Brutal honesty isn’t really a Cypriot thing – yet he is very Cypriot, in the old-school way that’s become less pronounced in our globalised age. Cypriot folk singers sing differently to those of Asia Minor or the islands of the Aegean, says Michalis: we’re more plain, less flamboyant. “Our people are essentially introverted,” he explains. “And their introversion comes through in the way they sing”. And there’s something else, as well: Cypriot folk songs are almost entirely about love – seldom patriotic, and almost never political. Cypriots don’t really protest; we don’t have many revolutions in our history. Michalis quotes his friend, the late actor Thanos Pettemerides: “The Cypriot sees danger coming and holds on tight to his pine tree, saying ‘I’m staying here, with my pine tree’. So that’s his resistance. He compromises. He resists by making compromises… And maybe that’s why he’s managed to hold on to his language, and his customs”.

Michalis himself doesn’t seem the type to compromise – yet there’s something of the pine tree to his cosy house, his straightforward pleasures, his love of music and Nature and a nip or two of zivania. “I don’t envy the fame and acceptance that others have had,” says the man with the lifelong need to sing. “I don’t envy them at all. I’m content with what I have. I’m happy just to have a clear conscience, and be at peace with myself that I’ve acted right”. Then we shake hands and I take my leave, driving past the olive trees and back towards the highway.

More than 2000 burglaries are reported annually across the island, and the majority are never solved.

Even worse than the actual value of what gets stolen is the sentimental value – but worst of all are the feelings of fear and insecurity that linger on, long after the trashed rooms have been put back to rights.

We spoke to a selection of people in Nicosia whose homes have been broken into in the past few months.

On Nicosia’s Makarios Avenue one shop owner has seen it through the high times and the tough times. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman who has rarely had a day off from the same post since she was a teenager

Profile interviews come in all shapes and sizes, but they tend to have one thing in common: almost all are conducted sitting down – yet I talk to Athina Tsoumbrou as she stands behind the counter at Be-Be, the venerable toyshop on Makarios Avenue in Nicosia, leaning across the counter to ask my questions. Behind her are mementos: a selection of tiny trolls (now back in fashion, apparently) with their multi-coloured fountains of hair, a dusty old witch-doll made for children who are now middle-aged, and a quick crayon sketch of Donald and Daisy Duck sharing a milkshake while Pluto looks on. That was sketched by a passerby – a refugee looking for money – back in 1974, just after Athina and her husband Loucas took over the shop. He tossed it off in a couple of minutes.

There’s another Be-Be, in Pallouriotissa, plus a warehouse for the couple’s wholesale business – but this is the original, probably the oldest shop on Makarios Ave (it celebrated its 50th anniversary last year) and the one that means most to Athina, for the simple reason that she’s spent her entire adult life here. Fresh out of school, at 17, she got a job working at Be-Be, then a few years later got engaged to Loucas and left to join him in Morphou – but soon returned with her fiancé, displaced by the invasion before they’d even had a chance to get married. The then-owners of Be-Be wanted to emigrate to England; Athina knew the place inside out, from her years working there; Loucas knew nothing of toys, but had (and has) a sharp mind for business. The couple bought the shop, and have been here ever since; with the exception of a few years while her daughters were growing up (both are now married; the older daughter works in the business), Athina has stood behind that counter almost every week since the mid-1960s.

The room is a basement, bright with the glare of neon lights (the entrance is a much smaller shop at street level). It might seem depressing to be stuck here all day – though of course you’re surrounded by toys, stacked along four aisles with board games at the back and early-learning toys near the counter. There are shelves of model boats and model planes, plastic bags full of plastic animals, chess sets, xylophones, boxes emblazoned with Disney titles – Planes and Cars, and of course Star Wars. ‘Monkey Dentist’ reads one box, mysteriously. Another shows a little girl giggling with her best friend: the toy in question is a casket with a lock, where a girl can keep her private affairs – and “only you and your best friend know the combination”. Barbies appear on the shelves, then again so do ‘Nines’, little black dolls that seem a touch politically incorrect. “From the place where I was born!” jokes Athina.

Nines from Spain

‘Nines’ are made in Spain – but in fact she means the Congo, where she was born in 1949 and lived for a few years before being dispatched to boarding school in Limassol. Her dad was a merchant, and expat life in Africa was wildly luxurious – though her parents had to flee for their lives when the country exploded in 1960, leaving everything behind and making their way back to Europe as refugees (Cyprus seemed “like a village” to her Greek-born mum after the high life of Leopoldville). They were also reunited with their daughter, whom they’d barely spoken to (except by letter) for six years – and the rupture may have troubled Athina but in fact she adored boarding school, which she calls “the best years of my life”. She liked the “order”, and responded well to discipline. She also played, as all children should. “The yard was huge,” she recalls. “It was endless. I climbed every tree in the place. Football. Tag. Hide and seek. My knees were always bruised from playing marbles – like those ones there,” she adds, pointing to a box on a nearby shelf. “We played all the time, we really felt our childhood. Today, it’s all changed – but I can’t blame them. It’s a river, it always flows forwards. You can’t go backwards”.

Thereby hangs a tale, of course – because, with the exception of Christmas when the toy market goes briefly insane (her husband routinely works 16-hour days in November and December, filling out orders), kids no longer have the same relationship with toys in this age of iPods and iPads. What kind of toys did the shop stock when she started out in the 1960s? Oh you know, she shrugs: clockwork toys, toys with batteries – “simple toys, nothing like today. Kids were simpler too. Kids used to play. They’d play. They’d see a toy and get excited.” Athina’s just back from the Nuremberg International Toy Fair, where she and Loucas have gone every year since 1975 (their long-standing friendships with global toy factories are surely a major reason why Be-Be is still in business) – but nowadays, she says, “when I go to the Fair I try to only order toys for the under-5s. After five years old…” She shakes her head: “When older children come [to the shop], eight or nine years old, often they don’t find anything, they walk out looking apathetic. The little ones yes, they go nuts, but the older ones – ‘Nothing here,’ they say, and they leave… I saw a little kiddie earlier, one and a half years old and holding a mobile phone. I give up!”

Apathetic kids mean less business. It’s fair to say that the place isn’t heaving with people. I stay for an hour, early afternoon on a Friday (not a busy time, admittedly), and only see a smattering of customers: a middle-aged woman who may be a tourist makes a quick purchase, two Arab gentlemen ask about wooden trains. This is why we’re both standing up, of course, and why Athina is behind the counter – because there are no other staff, just her. There’s a girl upstairs, to greet customers and direct them down to the basement (they also hire temporary help over Christmas), but a toyshop can’t afford too many employees these days – especially a toyshop on Makarios Ave, or at least the Makarios Ave of today.

Be-Be is a survivor on a street full of casualties. Even those who don’t live in Nicosia will have heard of the decline and fall of Makarios Ave, a once-teeming shopping mecca – the city’s main thoroughfare for decades – that’s been comatose for years now. “Tourists come here, they come down from the Hilton,” she relates, “and I’m always afraid that they’re going to ask the same question: ‘Where is the city centre?’. And I’m too ashamed to answer. Once, when I did answer, they said: ‘You’re not serious!’ When they look at this graveyard”. Athina sighs: “I don’t blame people, they go where it’s most convenient. I understand. But, in a European country, it’s unacceptable not to have a city centre”.

Who to blame for this sad state of affairs? She points the finger at the closure of Eleftheria Square (another well-known scandal) that effectively split the centre in half – but other factors played a role as well, from the opening of the Mall to excessively high rents (now coming down, but too late), to the post-haircut crisis that killed what remained.

Is she bitter at all?

“I’ll tell you what I do feel bitter about,” she replies. “We have beautiful weather in Cyprus. If you ignore the height of summer, when it’s really hot – I wouldn’t go shopping when it’s 40 degrees either – the other months are beautiful. So come on down! Why this obsession with parking in front of a shop, or downstairs at the Mall and going up?” She was just in Germany and the streets of central Nuremberg were full of people, even in winter. “With us, if it rains a little bit, everyone disappears! ‘Oh, it’s cold, mustn’t get wet’. To the Mall…” she repeats, and shakes her head. “Let them go, it’s okay. If they want their city to be like this – to be dead, like this – let them go where they like”.

Athina herself loves to walk, and will often walk from Be-Be to her home in Pallouriotissa (a good half-hour trek). She strikes me as an active, straightforward woman, a down-to-earth doer who doesn’t over-think things. “The simple pleasures are the best in life. Taking a walk, going to a little taverna…” Any hobbies? “I go to the gym,” she replies – twice a week, at 7.30am. Her day starts early, in general; if she’s not outside the gym at 7.30 she’ll be outside the supermarket, doing the day’s shopping so she can cook, clean and be at the shop by 9.30. She opens earlier in December and stays later, usually till 10-11 at night; Christmas Day is a holiday (what were the top sellers this Christmas? Star Wars toys and the Frozen doll, which also did well last year) – but Boxing Day is a working day, coming in by herself to “set up the shop again”. She likes work, and believes in discipline; she doesn’t like the stories that come out of schools these days – so different to her old boarding school – of parents protesting when teachers yell at kids, there was none of that in her day.

Does she ever regret having spent so much of her life in one job, one place, one windowless basement? Not really. She did once harbour dreams of being a gymnast (she was quite the ballerina in her youth), or a choreographer like her younger daughter is today – but the work gives her everything she needs, and besides it’s the family business. It may be significant that she can’t recall what kinds of toys she and Loucas sold when they took over the shop in ’74, yet remembers very well going to Limassol to haggle with wholesalers for some extra stock. What’s important is business, not the specifics of this particular business. She may keep old toys behind the counter as mementos – but it makes sense as well, for that old-fashioned toyshop ambience (besides, the relics are valuable; she’s forever fielding offers from collectors). Athina isn’t sentimental. What if she were selling pots and pans, instead of toys? Would she have the same love for the shop? She frowns, taken aback. If she’d started like that, back in the 60s, “I’d love it just the same,” she affirms.

When politicians speak of the challenges facing small businesses, this is what they have in mind. What could be more challenging than a shop staffed by the owner (unsurprisingly, Athina is vehemently opposed to the introduction of Sunday shopping hours), on a street that’s been left to die, facing competition from big rivals in oversized warehouses, in a sector that’s declining anyway? Be-Be might be forgiven for deciding that enough is enough, after 50 years, leaving the apathetic kids to their smartphones and their lazy parents to their air-conditioned malls and parking spaces – yet Athina Tsoumbrou remains optimistic.

“I’m not afraid of any rival,” she assures me. “Because I have confidence. I know what I have in my shop – I have the best toys. I don’t bring the Chinese stuff. I mean look, there’s a tendency – some people think in a certain way, wanting to buy a big present so it costs €10 and looks like it cost €50… We don’t have that kind of toy here, and I think that’s why we’ve survived. We have another standard of toy here.”

Someday it’ll end, of course. Even if Makarios Ave gets back on its feet – which is not impossible, with Eleftheria Square re-opening soon and the rents now slightly more realistic – even if kids miraculously get tired of apps and go back to pre-digital toys, a woman in her mid-to-late 60s can’t keep living this life, standing behind the counter all day in the shop she’s known since her teens. Look, admits Athina, “we’re not going to be here forever, and I’m not exactly a baby. The day will come when I’ll have to close down – or maybe someone else in the family can take over, we’ll see. I mean, I go to Germany now, for the Fair, and the night before I leave I feel bad that I’m leaving. Imagine when I have to leave for good.

“It’s a lifetime,” she sighs, “it’s full of memories. This is where my kids grew up, they’d come to the shop and run around and play. A whole lifetime here – it’s not easy. A whole lifetime. From very young. I grew older, I got married, I became a grandmother – and I’m still here.” If you’ll pardon the pun, she’s still standing.

Working at Britain’s National Trust and cataloguing paintings has given one man a very niche role, but it is one that he has relished learns THEO PANAYIDES

The setting helps: a fifth-floor office adjoining the AG Leventis Gallery in Nicosia. It’s only a conference room but, in keeping with the ethos of the place, it’s been decorated with an eye to high culture, with monographs on famous painters alphabetically laid out on the bookshelves and ornate, solid chairs around the conference table. “There’s a superb library in Munich called the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte,” says Alastair Laing in his clipped, mellifluous tones – and something about that sentence, maybe the way the German words trip off his tongue, or perhaps the mere fact that we’re discussing the best places to conduct art-historical research in Central Europe, is obscurely thrilling. His conversation seems a world away from the dusty view of Nicosia outside the window, backed by the Turkish flag branded on the Pentadaktylos mountains.

Alastair will be giving a lecture in a few hours – its title is ‘Petits-Maîtres: Schall, Huet, Leclerc and others’ – but seems entirely relaxed about the prospect. Partly it’s because he’s done it before, countless times and in much bigger venues – but it’s also because (as he gleefully reports) this particular lecture is the last commitment standing in his way before he finally embarks on “what I’ve always planned to do, which is to do this catalogue résumé of Boucher’s drawings”. ‘Boucher’ is Francois Boucher, an 18th-century French painter in the Rococo style on whose work Alastair is among the world’s foremost experts; Boucher was prolific, producing an estimated 10,000 drawings of which about a fifth survive, scattered all over the world – and creating the first-ever comprehensive catalogue of these drawings is the mammoth project (he calculates it’ll take about five years) which he’s set himself in his retirement. He’s been retired for three years. Before that, he spent nearly 27 years as Curator of Pictures and Sculpture at the National Trust.

The Trust (actually the ‘National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’) is one of those institutions the British seem to do so well, created in 1895 to preserve all the things that were in danger of disappearing due to development – initially natural landscapes and “small vernacular houses”, but later also the expensive country homes which were being demolished at the rate of one a week by the mid-20th century. That’s where the Curator of Pictures comes in, because many of these country piles house impressive art collections; indeed, in a couple of cases – most notably Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, the last remaining house anywhere in the world to have been built and furnished by a Rothschild – the collection is a good deal more important than the house itself.

“I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my life,” Alastair tells me – and the greatest stroke of good luck in his professional life was perhaps that the job of Curator fell vacant just as he himself was in the public eye, having just written the catalogue for a major Boucher exhibition. Most exhibitions introduce us to an artist, raved Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but this one has introduced us to an art historian – “and it was true,” affirms Alastair, “I was launched by that exhibition”. He was already in his 40s, and hadn’t really done much else of note – though he’d spent seven happy years at a commercial art gallery in the West End and before that had been a PhD student into his 30s, studying and reading and looking at Art while working odd jobs to pay the rent. Indeed, it may be something of a family joke – because his son, he says later, is “unfortunately taking after his father: he’s 29, about to be 30, and he is still studying!”.

He does seem quite studious, with the slightly hunched bearing of someone who’s spent many hours poring over catalogues. He’s a big man, broad-shouldered, with thinning grey hair; he reminds me – of all people – of John Wayne, in the pictures I’ve seen of Wayne when he was Alastair’s age (which is 71). His body language is slightly reserved: he answers every question very graciously – but sits across from me, his big hands clasped together, and seldom makes eye contact as he speaks, looking down at the table. Is he something of an introvert? He hesitates: “I always used to think I was an introvert. Actually, I’m not so sure any longer that I am”.

There appear to be two contradictory impulses tugging gently at his personality. On the one hand, he has no false modesty (as implied by his quoting de Montebello’s lavish praise). “I got a scholarship to Oxford when I was very young,” he notes, so young in fact that the college wouldn’t accept him straight away, and asked him to take a year off. Why was he so much younger than his classmates? “Well, I was cleverer!” he replies, and laughs delightedly. “Or ‘precocious’.” He doesn’t strike me as a shrinking violet – yet at the same time he’s diffident, even a little self-deprecating, like someone who’s stuck his head above the parapet once too often and is now content to lay low. “I know,” he admits at one point, “that what I do is slightly odd.”

On the one hand, he’s sociable; his job at the National Trust involved frequent attendance at gallery openings and cocktail parties. He and his wife, who’s a neuropsychologist (“and she’s Czech!” he adds, as if delivering a punchline), must’ve been a regular fixture on the London art scene. Yet he also recalls that his work involved trips to the countryside two or three times a week, going out and “looking at things” – and “one of the real pleasures of the job was, if I went to a house, to go and study the paintings or sculpture there. And I would do so during the day – and then, at the end of the day, [when] all the visitors had departed, I had the house and gardens to myself and I would, you know, just wander in them. And then I also had enormous pleasure in English churches, so I’d try and find one or two churches that I could get into and visit.”

Would he say the greatest pleasures in life are essentially private ones?

“I think that’s probably true, yes.”

Is that more true of him than of most people?

“Um… It may be more true for me than most people. I think I’m perhaps more single-minded – or more narrowly focused, whichever way you choose to put it – than a lot of other people.”

‘Narrowly focused’ sounds about right. He doesn’t seem to have many passions beyond his work. What does he do for fun? His profession is his fun, he replies with a chuckle: “I go and look at things”, though admittedly those things include theatre, films and TV (he raves about the new BBC War & Peace) as well as paintings. ‘Looking at things’ is how I encounter him, when I arrive a few minutes early for our interview and track him down to the second floor of the Gallery, perusing its Greek collection. An art historian’s eye sees differently to the untrained one. “I know people who will spend – and once or twice in my life I’ve done it, but very rarely – you know, half an hour in front of a single painting, just looking and looking.”

It’s not something he was born with. He has no artistic talent himself, he admits quite frankly, and couldn’t even ‘see’ until late adolescence. A History master at Bradfield College, where he went to boarding school “in the usual way” for a boy of his time and background, tried to interest him in Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, but “I just didn’t get it at all”. Something changed in India, where he spent his year off in Udaipur (while waiting to come of age for Oxford) and became very taken with Indian miniatures – then, in his first vacation from college, he went to Florence and that really was an awakening, discovering early Italian Renaissance art plus the whole “experience of Italy”. Yet he remains a historian more than a pure aesthete, excited as much by what a work of art means – how it fits into its period, or its author’s oeuvre – as by its formal qualities of line and colour: “I need something that I can grasp intellectually”.

It’s a funny business, the appreciation of visual beauty – or non-appreciation, if you look at most people. The most literal-minded dullard can be gripped by moving images (i.e. films or videogames), the art of storytelling and narrative, but stick them in front of a static image – however pleasing to the eye – and attention starts to wander. Alastair feels it even more keenly from his years at the National Trust; after all, in a perfect world, the Trust shouldn’t have to exist, because beautiful things wouldn’t be allowed to disappear. “One of the things that always disturbs me,” he muses, “is how visually incurious and blind people are. How things get demolished and destroyed, you know, without thought”.

Is it a question of education? He looks doubtful: “I’ve always been very sceptical about art education. Nowadays I don’t think there’s a schoolchild who hasn’t been taken off to museums and galleries and all that”. No, he sighs ruefully – explaining perhaps his almost apologetic, low-profile mien when he talks of his “slightly odd” work – there may be a fundamental deadness to painting and sculpture. “It’s a very artificial activity to look at something created, and to involve yourself with that – a dead thing, a dead object if you like. So it’s not surprising perhaps that, for most people, it doesn’t signify anything”.

It sounds a little chilly, and perhaps it is. Alastair Laing wasn’t born into an artistic family (his father was a management consultant), nor does he have any interest in modern artists. It may be that his passion for Art is partly an abstract exercise, a historian’s fascination with how it all fits together. When was the last time he was deeply moved by a painting? He cites an occasion when a new Boucher was unearthed – a small Nativity which didn’t look like a Boucher in the emailed image, but then he held it in his hands and “all doubts disappeared” – which is poignant but not quite the same as being moved by visual beauty in itself. “So much of what one sees when one looks at a work of art,” he explains, “is seen through the knowledge that you already have of the context in which that work of art was created”.

There’s a slight elitism here – not necessarily class-based but a gap between the trained and untrained, the expert and the common man, maybe even between the more “civilised”, hierarchical Britain he grew up in and the more slapdash, uninhibited Britain of today. He’s methodical, for better and worse. Does he have any regrets, looking back over his life? “Yes, one or two,” he replies, a bit surprisingly. “So much of my life has been spent cataloguing things – which means really object by object… I feel myself described in the way that a very brilliant man who was Warden of All Souls College in Oxford, John Sparrow, was once described by one of his colleagues: ‘He’s a mental dentist!’”. He laughs, miming the action of a dentist going tooth by tooth by tooth. “So I would like to have done something on a bigger, broader scale, and I never really have”.

One last thing: Alastair once co-wrote a book with the infamous Anthony Blunt, the art historian who was later exposed as a Soviet spy, one of the so-called ‘Cambridge Five’. Alastair speaks warmly of his old friend, calling him “a wonderful man”, quite the opposite of the aloof, haughty figure he’s been depicted as – the spying he ascribes initially to the naïve excitement many Britons felt for Communism in the 1930s, then later to Blunt being “mesmerised” by Guy Burgess, the most charismatic of the Five – but it still raises a question in my mind. He himself has spent a lifetime in the company of Art, studying it, exploring it, appreciating it, much more so than most of us. Is there some virtuous effect? Does Art, in a word, make you a better person?

He looks down, surprised and amused. “Uh, no,” he says at last, “I don’t think so. One does have to remember similar examples like Goering and Hitler, who appear to have appreciated works of art – it certainly didn’t do them any good!” Alastair laughs uproariously, the handsome volumes on the bookshelves above us seeming to share in his mirth. “No, I think one has to admit that it is an amoral activity, I’m afraid.” Such a pleasant one, though.

ALASTAIR LAING’S FIVE FAVOURITE WORKS OF ART
Frescoes by Piero della Francesca
Verrocchio’s Madonnas
Drawings by Boucher – particularly of mythological subjects
Still-lifes by Chardin
Velazquez – above all ‘Las Meninas’