Martin Fletcher's Blog: To You, the Reader

As a writer I’m on a journey. I don’t know the destination, only that each book I write is another way-station. It is an inward journey, seeking myself by telling stories of imaginary people who overcome bitter challenges and learn from them. I invite readers to accompany me at the rate of a book each year or two. If they are interested in my direction, they will come along for the ride. If not, they can jump off. I could change direction to accommodate the passengers, but then I wouldn’t reach my destination but their’s. And so here I am again: with the hint of an idea and a blank page, eager to discover where we are headed.

It was grim when our nest emptied so we left too. Hagar and I traveled around the United States and Europe for a year, and then renovated a beautiful leafy house which we swore would be our final home. After sixteen homes in nine countries it was time.

We moved in nine months ago. Our house has a lush tropical garden, a small pool, friendly neighbors, and is a minute from the beach and fifteen minutes from town. A desk at a bay window overlooking purple jacaranda became my writing space and Hagar turned the basement into her studio. She's an artist.

We hung our pictures, stacked our books, planted a herb garden, and yesterday, as I write, rented the house to a German couple with three children for two years.

We're going to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to learn Spanish for a month, and then plan to wander slowly through Latin America, writing and painting.

Why? I don't have a clue. Hagar says it's because we're wandering Jews.

After all, we met on the road.

I was a 26-year-old news cameraman and Hagar was a 19-year-old Israeli army sergeant. Driving to Jerusalem I passed this smiling Yemenite thumbing a lift and hit the brakes so hard I almost banged my head on the steering wheel. That was thirty-nine years ago and we've been together ever since.

The road is in our family's blood. Guy left home age fifteen for the Royal Ballet School in London and has hardly been back since.
Jonathan left school age fifteen to go surfing around the world.
Daniel is studying in New York.

At the door, with their bags in their hands, I spread my fingers across the boys' bowed heads and blessed them with the words I learned from my father:

May God bless you and protect you.
May God's face shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May God lift God's face up to you and grant you peace.

I wished them well and they were gone.

But when I fell sick I at last woke to find all three at my bedside, hugging Hagar. We smiled and kissed. And when I recovered, they left again.

That's the way of our little world. Everyone is seeking their story.
I write mine, Hagar paints hers, and the boys are living theirs. For home, it is true, is where the heart is.

—Martin Fletcher
Jacob's Oath

What do you think of when you think solar energy? Or wave energy? Or wind power? Put them together and I get sailing on a sunny day. Pleasant pursuits. But how about nuclear energy? Most people’s first associations would be mushroom clouds, cancer and danger.

That’s the trouble with nuclear energy; the associations are so unpleasant that it’s hard to imagine a world fueled by the same substance that can cause so much harm.

Yet in France, living with nuclear power is such an everyday thing that nine-year-old Elsa, the daughter of a nuclear plant worker in Flamanville, on the coast of Normandy, had never had a school emergency drill that dealt with the dangers of radiation. Fire drills, plenty of them. Even bomb scares. But drill for a security threat from the two nuclear plants in town, or the nuclear waste storage plant across the bay? Never.

When I asked her mother to show me the pills each family is given in case of radiation emergency, the pills that could protect Elsa’s thyroid glands from deadly radiation, which can cause the breakdown of the internal organs and death, she couldn’t find them. In fact, Valerie Cihelca laughed gaily and so did her husband. “I have no idea where they are,” she said, “we never think about it.” Ten minutes determined search later, she returned with the pills. Each family within a ten kilometer radius of a nuclear energy plant has the emergency ration, but they’ve never been used.

Fifty eight nuclear plants provide eighty per cent of all of France’s electricity, by far the highest proportion in the world. In 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, France decided to become energy independent, and is almost there. But my question to everyone was, if the rest of the world is so concerned about the dangers of nuclear energy, even though it is clearly cheap, clean and allegedly safe, how come the French are so blasé and accepting?

(I can hear the cries of protest from anti-nuclear activists when I say nuclear power is allegedly safe. Yet consider this: three thousand people died in the radiation disaster in Chernobyl, while DOUBLE that number die EVERY YEAR in Chinese coal mines. Yet nobody says China shouldn’t mine coal).

I got three answers from French people why they are so accepting of nuclear energy. First, they admire big engineering projects eg the TGV, the fast speed train, Eurostar, the channel tunnel, Concorde, and nuclear reactors are huge projects, each one costing two billion dollars or more. Second, they admire scientists and engineers, while many other nationalities tend to be suspicious of grandiose engineering claims. And third, their rational thought leads them to accept that, given the evidence, nuclear energy is safe.

After a few days research and a few more visiting French nuclear installations, I’m hardly in a position to judge. But I was struck by the knee-jerk objections so many people have to what other people accept so naturally. Is nuclear energy the clean, safe solution to the world’s electricity needs, which are set to double within twenty-five years? Not by itself – everyone agrees that future power needs will be met by a combination of alternative energies as well as fossil fuels.

But I did come away from this assignment impressed by the words of Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace in 1972, who said that he had fought against nuclear weapons and all things nuclear, but now he had changed his mind. Why shouldn’t we benefit from the positive aspects of nuclear power, he asked?

His words reminded me of the phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater;” another unfortunate association, but one worth considering.