E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

BAA, which runs Heathrow, has admitted it turned down an offer by the British Army to help shovel away the snow and ice on its runways.  Instead, it went it alone, and has cancelled thousands of holiday flights, spoiling Christmas for tens of thousands of people.  It also only invested half a million pounds this year in cold weather removal gear, but boasted of profits of over 350 million.  Heathrow should be ashamed.  The truth is, British companies offload the suffering onto the British people, when bad weather strikes, shrugging their shoulders and blaming an act of God or aberrant weather, when in fact the fault is in their own balance sheets - the weather is perfectly ordinary at Christmas (we had snow last year too) and such snowstorms, in American, Canadian, or Russian, cities, would be shrugged off, as minor, easily de-iced and cleared away.  This is incompetence with a human cost.

I am just back from a very fine week in the Sultanate of Oman, trekking in the mountains, desert, and spending time by the sea reading. Oman is an exceptionally interesting country, a small nation on the Arabian peninsula connected by its historical, cultural, religious, and sea-faring ties, as much to Africa, Asia, as to the Middle East. A predominantly (moderate) Islamic country, it is not as oil rich as its neighbours, so it has had to diversify its economy. For the past 40 years it has been ruled, benevolently and intelligently, by Sultan Qaboos , who has won international awards for his far-seeing commitment to environmentalism. Oman is also a leader, in the region, in education, health, and eco-tourism. Oman is mainly a gravel desert, and mountainous, country, very hot and humid most of the year (it is bisected by the Tropic of Cancer), with some monsoons in the summer in the south, and a cooler breeze along its long coast (the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman). Politically,...