Failure Bearing Fruit.

Most unusually for these troubled times, a new ditty began forming in my head this morning. It began I met a girl from Samarkand… And then other random rhymes kept rolling around like tumbleweed in the wasteland that is my brain these days, like do and shoe and shark and bark, and so on. But all the linking lines declined to take form, so I stopped bothering. Seems I don’t have the faculty of ditty mind any more, but the exercise did provoke a question:

‘Where the devil is Samarkand?’ I thought. It’s a familiar name and sounds exotic, but its location was entirely unknown to me.

So I looked it up. (It’s what I do.) It’s in south-eastern Uzbekistan, and that set me off on another train of thought.

When I was a boy at school, geography was given quite a high profile in the matter of important subjects, but all the places we studied were places with which we had current or historical connections – other European countries, the USA, ex-colonies which were still part of the British Commonwealth, and so on. We even looked at South America because it’s a big land mass, and East Asia because of its involvement in WWII. We didn’t bother with Russia or Eastern Europe because they were on the other side of the great divide (see? involuntary rhymes again). All we knew about Russia, for example, was that Russian women were huge, hairy, and could throw canon balls further than anybody else’s women at the Olympic Games. (Admittedly, the music master did occasionally mention Russia because they produced the odd decent composer or two. I remember him sniggering over some chap called Rip-Your-Corsets-Off who wrote Scheherazade. And then there was another chap who wrote a tune about a vulgar boatman who, according to the music master, was called Stinky Razin.) But anyway…

The one part of the world which was pitch black on the world map, and therefore presumably empty, was the bit called Central Asia – you know, those countries north of Afghanistan which all have names ending in –stan. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Uncle Stan, Ollyandstan, and so on. This is probably because for the first few decades of my life these places were part of the USSR – which, in itself, made them a bit persona non grata – and they weren’t even in Europe. Consequently, the public imagination was naturally inclined to think of them as a bit wild, a bit primitive, and probably mostly desolate.

But when I read the Wiki article it came with pictures, and such pictures they were. The architecture of old Samarkand is as sophisticated and beautiful as anything in Western Europe. In the Middle Ages the city was a main crossing point on the silk road, and was coveted by many a would-be conqueror. Ghengis Khan conquered it, and Tamerlane is buried there. And I never knew. I had an image of goat herders, home made musical instruments which played out of tune, and very little else.

So that’s what happens when you find your ditty faculty failing. You get to learn something.