pensions - AAFI-AFICS, Geneva - UNOG

A laptop changed my life. I get food and medicines with strangely named ingredients. I don’t want toswallow just any old thing. So I can read what ‘parebens’ and ‘pthalates’ are and how to avoid them inmy everyday life. I can book a train, a plane trip or order a car without going outside. I can even thesedays order food brought to my door. A sedentary life? Not at all. Thanks to my computer I can arrangelunches and much more with other friends on line.I dismiss those who say they have no time, have no space or don’t ‘need’ a computer. Wait until aftertomorrow. You are going to regret not having one. And you will be so old it won’t be so easy to learnany more! You and I are already older since you started reading this and I set down to write it… All Ican say is Don’t Be Left Behind and Out Of Life. It’s going to become crucial.Better now than later. And later may be too late. They compute in Heaven…Joy PattinsonOF CABBAGES AND KINGSGIVE ME SPACE … LOTS OF SPACE …When I was young, I outdid Malthus.Who’s Malthus, you ask? Don’t you know old Thomas Robert? The man who invented the populationproblem?Yes, that’s right. I outdid him. When I was about twelve years old – I remember because I was lookingout of my bedroom window – I shared a room with my younger brother - and saw a huge crowd on thestreet outside and it struck me then.Yes, it struck me then, like a flash of lightning, that if the number of people on our planet keptincreasing, there would soon be Standing Room only, and after that not even that.When I was a bit older, we lived in a house on a little hill overlooking the Indian Ocean. There was agrassy slope going down to the rocky sea shore. The little hill had just a few houses each with a largegarden. Then came the developers oh so eager to provide houses for the burgeoning population; thehouses and gardens disappeared to be replaced by high rise buildings, noisy children, dusty cars,and barking dogs of the pariah variety and crows of the cawing variety.The years passed. We had a house with open fields and a copse - is that the word I want? - on oneside, going down to the airport. One day, along came a team of bulldozers and mechanised saws andreduced the copse to firewood and the field to a muddy mess.Strangely, the same scenario was re-played some years later, through vicariously. A friend of mineworked for a large and prosperous company; it outgrew its premises; it moved into a brand new office.This was built on land which had been open woodland with a copse; the trees were duly cut down andthe meadow duly churned.The meadow had been home to a covey of pheasants. You could see them occasionally, perky andcolourful. As their habitat dwindled, so did their numbers. With the passing of time there was one left,a female with no mate. Did she mourn her companions? Did it sense the end that awaited her ofdoom, the intimations of mortality, hanging over her?39