Breakfast

Madagascar

Every morning a breakfast was laid out, freshly fried doughnuts with wild honey and tropical fruit. After that the camp was disembled and everything carried back to the boat and we continued on our journey.

Paradise

Madagascar

We visited the most beautiful beautiful beaches, some more than 30 km long……just white sand, turquoise water and lush greenery. This is the closest to the image of tropical paradise I have ever come.

I was very moved by the grace and dignity of the local tribes living in small villages along the coast. The children were so beautiful and above all so happy. They were totally trusting and came up to us and took us by the hand, a very moving and sweet experience. These people have no material wealth and yet I couldn’t help envying them their richness of life.

All I can say is that I only saw a far corner of this enormous island and I want to discover more. It left me with a longing for more adventure. I want to go back and see the amazing rock formations in the south, the giant baobab trees in the west, the huge wild territories of the north.

Patti Smith

I was at the award ceremony for the 2011 Polar Music Prize which was given to Patti Smith and the Kronus Quartet, two great musical forces.

There were touching performances by swedish artists, several young women, who interpreted Patti’s songs, most notably the young female duo ’’First Aid Kit’’ who cast a sort of magical spell over the whole concert hall. It’s amazing how a couple of voices and one simple acoustic guitar can express such emotion.

I was extremely moved by Patti Smith’s thank-you speech, she talked from the heart, exposing a  rawness and an honesty that is so rare and when one is in the presence of such a person who really believes in the good of humanity and the power of love and can express that in a poetic, natural way, it really grips my heart. Many of her songs are both rough and sensitive at the same time, which corresponds with her whole personality and her tomboy look, that was so iconised in the seventies. She is in many ways New York cool in its most authentic form. I left the ceremony feeling energised and inspired, thank-you Patti!

I’m curious to buy her book ’Just Kids’ about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe, it won the  National Book Award last year. Patti Smith was once a bookstore clerk herself and in an interview with the NY Times she said: “I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

Aaah if only there were more time to read………

The Source

There is a film that was presented in Cannes this May that I am really eager to see. The director Radu Milhaileanu is a Jewish Romanian living in Paris, he has made two films earlier that have been great and this one is set in Morocco and tells the tale of a group of women in a remote mountain village and their struggle for social equality.

I have travelled several times to Morocco and like many others I am a great admirer of it’s culture, it’s landscape, it’s style and it’s people.

Lady Jane Digby

On the subject of strong women, I read a book a couple of years ago about the english aristocrat Lady Jane Digby and she’s often been in my thoughts since then. She was a beautiful, passionate woman who was born in England at the beginning of the 19th century.

I find her so inspiring, she was driven by love and passion and in those days she obviuosly caused an enormous scandal – the book’s title is ’’A Scandalous Life’’. Yet she believed in her inner truth and the events of her life took her through Europe, where she was married to two kings, and finally to Syria, where she lived the rest of her life in Damscus with her Sheikh husband.

What inspires me so much is her courage, her faith in love, her faith in herself and the fact that she never compromised with her own life. She was very feminine, not a warrior type woman, but what she did over 200 years ago and the choices she made in life are still very relevant for the modern woman of today. Many times, just thinking about her has given me the courage to recognize my own path in life.