FEAST OR FAMINE

Days ago decorations were installed in the foyer of the hotel in Paris. Today the outside receives a make-over for the festive season: lights, baubles, foliage and tree branches!

Festive decorations were being installed as I arrived in a Paris hotel. Pink and silver baubles, tinsel, and tree limbs appeared in the lobby. Eiffel Tower trinkets hung from invisible threads. Ferns and foliage covered the reception desk and restaurant tables. A team of creative florists worked for hours to carefully construct the artworks, including decorative chairs and centerpieces. www.ateliersverchere.com

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

Part-autobiography, part-memoir, and part travelogue, Michael Ondaatje’s second novel, Running in the Family (1982) is also part-comic, part-tragic. Written after Coming through Slaughter (1976) set in New Orleans at the turn of the 20 th century, and before his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient (1987) set in Italy during the Second World War, this novel is set in his birth country, Sri Lanka, from 1978 to 1980 during which time Ondaatje returned home twice, for a few months, after 25 years. In his childhood, Sri Lanka was Ceylon, a colonial paradise, and life amongst the privileged class was easy. Recollections include the Governor’s Cup horse race, the tennis, Dutch forts, costume parties, church and the devout, houses once lived in, tropical gardens, the Ceylon Light Infantry, the Ceylon Railways, and tea estates. He begins in Jaffna, in north Sri Lanka, where he visits his Aunt Phyllis, and his subsequent few months of travels through Kandy, Kegalle, Kel...

Comet ISON, the brightest comet this year, could be seen in the east of Colombo, Sri Lanka, at sunrise on November 19, 2013. The country’s Technology, Research and Atomic Energy Ministry issued a press release stating that Sri Lankans will be able to view Comet ISON, with the tail stretching away from the direction of the Sun, in the early mornings from November 19 until January 2014. Amateur Russian astronomers, Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok, discovered the comet in September 2012. They named the comet after the array of telescopes they used to locate it – the International Scientific Optical Network – ISON. It is travelling close to the Sun. According to the MOTRAE release, ISON would come within about 1.16 million kilometres (724,000 miles) from the Sun on November 28. The heat is expected to be about 2,760 degrees Celsius – hot enough to melt rock and metal – vapourizing the comet and creating a bright tail that would glow in the night’s sky. The pre...