FEAST OR FAMINE

On 29 April Le Parisen newspaper documented the distribution of masks, gel, and gloves at a vending machine in a small village.  When a vending machine landed in Saint-Andre Farivillers, an Oisien village with a population of 500, during the Coronavirus crisis, a 42-year-old teacher rushed to buy a mask. The first person to die of Covid-19 in the region was a teacher. But almost the whole village is buying the masks. The machine is so busy, it needs to be replenished regularly.  On the way to l’Oise there were already many automated vending machines dispensing vegetables, eggs, bread, and pizzas. ‘Distribprotec’ installed the new mask vending machine near the school. Normally, the customers for vending machines are restaurants and bakeries, rather than the mayor’s office. Here, the mask vending machines takes 3 euro for one hydro-alcochemical gel tube and 11.40 euros for a pack containing 100 ml of gel and a washable mask (that can be washed up to 10 time...

MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author   of:  The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), 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 Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), 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 Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), 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).

My next book, The Paris Residences of James Joyce, will be released on 1 May 2020.  The Paris Residences of James Joyce is about the apartments and hotels where Irish author James Joyce lived during his nineteen years in Paris, from 1920 to 1939. James Joyce (1882–1941), author of Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses(1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939) never owned his own apartment, but moved in and out of residences in the heart of Paris.  The Paris Residences of James Joyce, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, includes photographs of each of his homes, with an historical account of his life and the heady times of Paris, where intellectuals from around the world gathered in a cultural collection of cameraderie and competition.  Further information is available at : My website:  http://martinanicolls.net/the-paris-residences-of-james-joyce/ Cambridge Scholars Publishing author page:  htt...

Berg (1964, edition 2001) is set in the seaside town of Brighton, England, in the 1960s. Hair restorer Alistair Berg decides to kill the man who left him and his mother to move in with another woman. The man, of course, is his father.  He calls himself Alistair Greb when he comes to Brighton to find his father, so as not to reveal his true identity. ‘Why should it come to this, an isolated day when thought is nearly as heavy as feeling...?’ This is a novel about Alistair’s plot to kill his father. Alistair is 33 years old, and his father is about sixty. The problem is that he and his father share the same love—the same woman—Judith. Alistair must kill his rival.  Mentally, Alistair is in his head, torn between rationality and an insane hatred and jealousy. His internal monologue and his mother’s letters drive him crazy. Is he really crazy? His father screwed up his childhood, and now … well, now, this just has to stop. Permanently.  The first...

MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author   of:  The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), 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).