Authors Electric

As many of you know, I've been to Nepal. It was evident, within a few hours of my arrival, that many tourists have deserted Nepal. Talking with friends there, it seems that cancellations began the day after the earthquake. One big quake, it seems, is enough for most people to believe the country is shaken to the core - and will carry on shaking. While a few backpackers are making their way back, the big tour groups are still staying away. Without tourists - and their foreign money - Nepal cannot earn the income she needs to rebuild. 'It's the journalists' fault,' Ajay told me. 'They were here for two days, took plenty of pictures of the earthquake damage, and then left us to it. No one has come back, seen how things are now.' He's right - anyone who saw those images might think that the whole of Kathmandu was flattened. I took this picture from his balcony, looking over the rooftops of the city: Does this look flattened? Disasters make goo...

An earthquake sounds like a jumbo jet landing on the roof. An immense, relentless assault of noise - rattling, rumbling, shivering, cracking, quivering. In the walls, the ceiling, the windows and the ground. It goes on for ever and when it stops the stillness is thick as rock. It was 9 in the morning. We were a group of friends from seismically solid England spending a week in a Palladian villa in Vicenza. Our expectations for the day were nothing more challenging than agreeing which old towns to explore or where to have lunch. But now we were dashing out of our bedrooms and bathrooms, all calling out the same - obvious - question. Was that what I thought it was? Is everyone all right? We had no internet access, no way of pinging the outside world to check. As if it wasn’t clear anyway, for above our heads the heavy iron chandeliers were swinging. All of them, in every room, beat in slow, wide arcs. It took twenty minutes for them to stop. Gradually we got on with our day. In...