There is a child from Somalia, with an old man's face, sitting in the corner of the lounge room. He must have come out of the television set at some time this evening. It's New Year's Eve, and all the stations have been playing condensed highlights of the year -- so many images of poverty and diseases and war from around the globe. Trying to cram so much human misery into a few short hours, it's no wonder, really, that something overflowed. He sits there, huddled in a ball, like a tiny wizened dwarf, behind the corner lounge chair. I don't know when he came out. It could have been any time. The television has been on for a long time. His face is blank. An old man on a child's stick body. I pretend he's not there, of course, and go into the kitchen to make a snack. I am about to bring it back into the lounge room, until I think better of it, and eat it in the kitchen. When I get back, he's still there. It's just as well that I had planned for a quiet New Year's and hadn't invited anybody over, because he smells a bit too. You don't get that when they're on the TV, but it's a smell of old dried cow dung and other things I've never smelled before. The television is still on, and it's still showing news highlights. There are scenes from some civil war in the former Soviet Union. Just to be on the safe side, I turn the channel to an American sit-com. There are some gorgeous looking ladies sitting around a dinner table making risque jokes. Not much chance of having one of them appear in my lounge room, I ponder. Not in real life. They're only actresses. I steal a glance at the Somalian -- but he doesn't seem interested in the show. I stay there watching until the show ends, then the news comes on. It's another highlights of the year program. Naturally. A well-groomed news commentator says, rather pompously, “Hemingway sat in the Hotel Florida in Spain and wrote passionately about the blood being spilled in the streets below, trying to...
