A long time ago, I was saying to a friend from Mainland China that there’s so much hatred in Europe. She laughed bitterly. “Wait till they’ve been brewing that hatred and feeling of superiority for 5,000 years!” she said. I hadn’t thought about it before, but of course Asia was divided in the same way as Europe, just for much longer.

On the topic of your ex-girlfriend, it’s awful when you hear of a whole group of people being almost wiped out. I read a very sad article a few years back about all these Australian indigenous languages which are dying out because there’s only one or two speakers left, and sometimes only one or two people left in a tribe.

I guess that’s always happened through history. I was watching a documentary about the Carthaginians, the Mediterranean power before the Romans came along, but the Romans wiped them and their culture out, so now no one knows what the Punic language was or what their traditions were. All we have left is Roman propaganda, which says they burned their children as offerings, and they worshipped a cruel horned god…

When I studied early Celtic history at university, we did an interesting exercise where one of the students had set out a whole bunch of quotes and we had to guess who had written them. The quotes all shared a theme. More “civilised” people were commenting on the barbarity and unpleasantness of an indigenous group. As it turned out, one was a Roman commenting on Celts, some were relatively modern day English commenting on the Irish, some were Australian settlers commenting on Aborigines, one was an American settler commenting on Native American people, one was a Roman commenting on Germanic tribes…the same Germanic tribes who would later think they were superior to anyone else! A group of “barbarians” can become the “civilised” people of a later age, looking down on others.

My point with Germany is the hackles on my neck raise when I hear about this stuff in relation to them. We have family that was forced to flee Germany in the 40’s. Not because they were Jewish, they were pure German, Mauser, (the gun manufacturer) they opposed Hitler and had their lives threatened.

I went to my favourite sushi shop yesterday, and couldn’t remember the word for “arm” when in conversation with the proprietors. I could remember everything else (leg, nose, eyes, hair, hand) but not arm. Don’t ask me why! The brain is a mysterious thing.

I’m sure that if I visited again, it would all come back. Maybe it would even be better for having percolated in my brain for 10 years? Then again, maybe not.

But then, I can’t think of any country which does have a great historical reputation. Perhaps, unfortunately, nowhere is free of xenophobia.

I remember when I was in Japan, I heard some right-wing goon come past on a truck shouting slogans like “Resist Western decadence! Foreigners out of Japan!” Some poor guy on the street realised from my expression that I understood what the goon was saying, and came to apologise profusely. I said I wasn’t offended: there’s rednecks and racists in every country - but it’s people like him who make it better. We all just have to resist, wherever we live.

Racial discrimination exists everywhere. Didn’t France ban students from wearing hijabs not that long ago? Hasn’t an Australian school just doctored a hijab out of a school photo?

I read your comment as wishing bad luck on the guy himself, rather than wishing for his wife to be harmed. The fact that you could envisage him harming his wife tends to suggest he wasn’t a nice person.

That’s the hard thing with blogging and e-mail - there’s no tone, but we write quickly as if we were speaking - sometimes the message come across differently to what we intend (it has happened to me before a couple of times).

LE