FEAST OR FAMINE

A photograph of an Airbus A400M in action appears on the fence of the Luxembourg Garden in Paris in a photography exhibition called Industry View from the Sky.  The exhibition is on display from 14 March to 14 July 2020.  The signage underneath the photograph, called ‘An Airbus in Action’ provides the following information: A400M Airbus is dropping decoys. This European aircraft, designed by military Airbus, is intended for military transport. It entered service in 2013. The Airbus A400M ‘Atlas’ is a modern military defense aircraft. It can land in small, grassed, sand, and unprepared airstrips and can act as a frontline tanker for re-fuelling missions.  So, the photograph is not of fireworks coming from the aircraft, but decoy flares.  The flares are sometimes called Angel Flares. The decoy flares are used to counter infra-red homing heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles or air-to-air-missiles. In other words, when a missile is coming towa...

MARTINA NICOLLS Website Publications Facebook Paris Website Animal Website SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES  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).

An Abbreviated Life (2016) is the memoir of a Ariel Leve’s childhood in a dysfunctional family from the 1960s to the present time.  Leve begins her memoir at six years old when her nanny died next to her, on a plane travelling from Bangkok, where her father Harvey lived, to Manhattan, New York, where she lived with her mother Suzanne. Suzanne and Harvey are pseudonyms for her famous parents.  Her classmates adored Leve’s eccentric, artistic, poet mother. But at home, her mother oscillated between extreme affection and extreme rage. She was a controversial attention-seeker, and a distant, critical mother. For Ariel Leve ‘to cope, in childhood, was to be on guard at all times … the result was to live a life within brackets. An abbreviated life.’ Her mother was most at peace when she was talking about literature and poetry. ‘Each book was a friend who would never let her down … Poems were lovers who would never leave.’ Written when the author is nearing 5...

MARTINA NICOLLS Website Publications Facebook Paris Website Animal Website SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES  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).