We All Wear Levi's

 There's a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government at the moment, with the acronym CHOGM. Catchy, eh? They're deciding who'll replace the Queen as head of the Commonwealth. As a Republican I could care less, but there's another issue too, which is that 70% of Commonwealth countries apparently still ban homosexuality.

 Now to my mind, who sleeps with who isn't my business. If two men are in love, or two women, that's fine. Love is very rarely wrong. But still, do we really have the right to lecture other countries, other cultures, on what to believe?

 That's cultural imperialism. There's still a good bit of it about, unfortunately, sixty or seventy years after the end of the European Empires. People get upset because Saudi Arabia, among other countries, punishes thieves by cutting off their hands. They get angry because homosexuality is illegal in Zambia, or women have few rights in Pakistan. Those things seem strange to me too, even a bit backward. But I know that's because of my perspective as a man raised in the increasingly liberal West. I'm not sure I have the right to lecture other peoples on issues like these. Their cultural histories are different from mine, so their outlooks are too.

 The world wasn't like this, once. Marco Polo could travel to China and be amazed by the differences. Ibn Battuta covered the world from Morocco to China and wrote of the wonders he saw. Now we can travel from Britain to Cuzco or Samarkand, and most likely find a McDonald's on a street corner and a little shop that sells Pepsi. Everything has to be made the same. I think that's a pity. I'd rather live in a world of myriad cultures with different rules and traditions, than one in which every pub is a Wetherspoons and we all wear Levi's.

 I'd like to see homosexuality accepted everywhere, and women's rights too. I'm liberal to my bones. But if the price of that is losing the things that make us different, losing much of the world's cultural identities... well, then I don't know, because I love those differences too. It's the sort of conundrum which liberals have failed to deal with in the past. We all defend a woman's right to have as many children as she wants, but we also know that overpopulation is killing the ecosystem, so which belief do we abandon? Which holy cow do we shoot?

 Instead of trying to sort through this, at CHOGM they've spent days deciding that the next Commonwealth head will be the heir of a hereditary monarch. Imperialism, still kicking after all this time.

Magic And Derring-Do

 The new novel, How The Stars Shine, seems to have stronger love themes in it than I'd planned, or than I've done before. It's not a romance, by any means. I can't say much without risking spoilers, but I'll note that love takes many forms, and more than one appears in the story.

 It wasn't planned. Stories take their own shape sometimes, just as characters do - or should, if they're any good. I'll reach a certain point and a character will want to do something I hadn't considered before. That's good, it shows the tale has life thrumming through it, and unexpected things may happen. If I don't know for sure what's coming down the line, the reader isn't likely to. But this time, it's got me thinking. Stars is the first from-scratch novel I've begun since I met my wife. Everything else was at least blocked out before then, and largely written. Its broad form was set. Stars was not, and it's changing in my hands.

 Could this be, do you think, because I have love in my own life at last?

 I remember I said to Caz, before we were married, that I wasn't sure I felt love in the way that other people do. There have been signs of it. Me not crying while my whole family wept at the funeral of my grandfather, things like that. I'm known as a distant man, unapproachable as one of my friends called me - and if that's what my friends think, how must I seem to people who have only just met me?

 Caz broke through these walls of mine without trying. I noticed one day that she was already inside my castle, having a good rummage about and putting pictures on my walls. And I didn't mind. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. Again, not love as most people know it, eh? Then came the babies, Bella and Evie. Bells will be two next week. And with them, no doubt at all, I have learned to love the way everyone else does. Overwhelmingly, swept-along-in-a-flood helplessly loving them. I know now that all my doubts about love were rubbish. I can feel it fine. I just hadn't found the right place and time before.

 So love is a part of me now, and I guess it's finding its way into my work. That's OK. I'm not going to end up being Barbara Cartland. My stories will still be Fantasies, there'll be magic and derring-do and hopefully some strange cultures that the reader hasn't seen before. But maybe there will be a softer tone, just now and then, and you know, that's OK too.