91Èȱ¬

Nulla dies sine linea is the title of our next project and I'll explain it in a moment.

First let's take some stock of what we've done together this year.

We have written a short story together called E kabo dara ju e kule lo, I am finalising our Nightly Express project - over the Christmas period I will be making a copy of the newspaper containing your dreams and it will be available online in January.

You've been with me when I launched a series of radio programmes "Read my country" and I'm still running a project Pendle Chronicles about ordinary people from the English Midlands, coping in different ways with the hardship of government spending cuts.

I had a wonderful trip to Africa, I have written about the great literary figures of Bush House and the tragic events in Kyrgyzstan.

I have also started series of talks in Bush House on topics such as Poetry in Putin's Russia and Global minds in one family with leading international writers.

These are just headlines of our common tenure: 91Èȱ¬ World Service Writer in residence.

New Project: No day without a line

Try to guess who I'm talking about...

A boy was born to a happy family.

His mum was fantastically beautiful, his dad was clever and noble (what else do you need from a father?)

But then mum and dad's relationship went sour and they divorced.

The boy was in his teens when his mum died.

His father married another woman.

The boy grew up with his sibling in his wonderful granny's family.

Then at university he met a girl, whom he decided to marry.

They've announced their engagement. The date of the wedding was chosen as the 29 April.

Until the last sentence I thought that I was writing about myself.

All of the above is true about me, including having had a fantastically beautiful mum and a wonderful granny.

But you are right, this story also applies to Prince William and his planned marriage to Kate Middleton on 29 April, 2011.

You can see why I feel a certain affinity to that young man.

Though many circumstances of our lives are similar, as Uzbeks say: "I have worn out a couple of shirts more".

As a person living happily with my wife for 31 years I wish the same to him.

I know a couple from Pendle, Lancashire, whom I'm going to be writing about in a forthcoming blog entry called Pendle's prince and princess.

So I call on you to send me a line of poetry every day between Christmas day - 24 December, 2010 - and 28 April, 2011.

I'll be choosing the best one and put it both on the Facebook and Twitter.

As Pliny the Elder said: "Nulla dies sine linea" Or "No day without a line".

Line by line our ode will be created and on 29 April we'll publish the poem here in its full glory.

My story begins far away. In the cotton-growing country where I come from.

Uzbekistan is one of the biggest producers and exporters of raw cotton.

However, for the last few years it has made headlines not for the amount or quality of cotton it exports, but for using child labour for picking the harvest.

Many Western and British companies such as Tesco banned products made from Uzbek cotton.

But despite an ongoing international campaign to stop using forced child labour, there were still reports of children working in cotton fields this autumn.

I myself picked up cotton from the age of 13 and throughout my school and student life.

It was a part of our curriculum - to spend two or three months every autumn in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.

Our daily quota was to pick at least 50 kilos of cotton. Every cotton boll weighs just two or three grams.

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Imagine how many times you have to lean forwards over the cotton bushes to achieve your 50 kilos.

The best among us would pick up to 100 kilos or even more a day.

It really was a slavish job!

I must say though that when you're a child, you don't pay too much attention to the hardship of it, you accept it as the price of freedom from lessons and parents - especially when you are camping for the summer with your schoolmates (girls and evening discos included).

It so different for rural kids, though, who are in the fields all year around.

With age you start to understand that it's deeply immoral to use children and keep them from their studies for all of their childhood. And to cover up the failures of the whole agricultural industry.

I digress.

A world away from Uzbekistan in Pendle, Lancashire, there are, nonetheless, shared similarities. Not for the use of child labour, but a shared history of cotton production.

Once upon a time Lancashire was one of the world's leading centres of cotton industry.

In nearly every town there were mills and factories. The buildings are still there, but now they are used to house other businesses - storage, retail, restaurants.

There are different theories about the industry's rapid disappearance in the 1960s and '70s, but all of them agree on one point - it was fierce international competition which caused so many mills to close.

Before going to Pendle I did an online search for mills and found that the only cotton-producing factory left in the area was one that made towels.

But when I arrived, I discovered that the factory closed down earlier this year.

From that point on I began a mission to find a working cotton mill

I asked people in the local area - but with no sucess.

I finally found a weaving association in Blackpool, but they told me that there's nothing left in the Pendle area.

Higherford Mill in Pendle has been turned into a museum.

With some doubt, the staff there directed me towards the town of Foulridge, saying there might still be a working textile mill there.

I drove to Foulridge and locals directed me to different mills but none of them made fabric any more: one had been turned into a tile storage depot, another one into trade outlet.

The next day I finally found a small textile company - County Brook - one of the last Mohican remnants of a glorious former cotton industry and you can see how they are dealing with the industry's demise in the following audioslide show.

County Brook audioslideshow.

And you can understand that after such a quest, I was really relieved to know from its owner Mr Andrew Mitchell, that no cotton gathered by forced child labour is used there.

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It was still snowing heavily when my producer, Elise Wicker, and I arrived in Pendle, Lancashire, by train. It was my second visit, you can read about my first here.

We found a minicab station and our driver said: "I'll get you as far as I can, but you'll have to walk the rest of the way".

He drove us almost to the gates of our bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town.

In the silence of the early darkness, in the fresh air, the serenity of the surrounding pastures covered by Siberian-like snow were awesome.

The following morning we quickly understood that beauty of this kind comes with a price-tag. The taxi we had booked was lost among impassable roads and a small car we hired slid back on the first hill.

Some of the businesses and offices we had come to investigate were closed because staff couldn't get in.

We had come to Pendle to see how the wide-scale spending cuts, introduced by Britain's coalition government, have affected businesses and the lives of ordinary people.

Talking to people in various businesses, I could draw a parallel between them and the snow: Each is refreshing and beautiful on the surface, but both carry many underlying problems.

It seems that nobody is blaming the new government yet, but many talked about the hardships that are creeping into their lives.

Alain from the car rental company says that now they are not working for profit - they keep going just to sustain business and pay salaries. Pub owner Andrew is concerned about the forthcoming raise in VAT (value added tax, that is put on some goods at the point of sale) he thinks it will dramatically reduce his clientele.

On the other hand, Mike, a proprietor of a café, argues that he hadn't noticed big changes when VAT was decreased and then increased once again last year. What he's worried about is the period after Christmas, when people have less money to spend.

However the mood of the town is to just get on with it. People are demonstrating their resilience. When Higherford Mill Trust - where an art gallery and artists workshops can be found - faced severe cuts, they all decided to work a four-day week rather than making some people redundant, The local hairdresser, Dale, has frozen his prices and decreased the profit margin to attract new customers.

Speaking metaphorically, everyone is finding their own way through these snowy fields and roads.

Listening to my crunchy steps on the snow on my way back to our bed and breakfast, I remembered what the owner of the shop "Witches Galore", Maureen, said: "One should be positive". She added with a mysterious sparkle in her eye: "Like a white wise witch".

She spoke in the fast-falling darkness and her words rang true through the white snow.

There are many ways of being clever (or indeed stupid).

One of them is to be as logical as "A students" - to use the term invented by an American satirist writer PJ O'Rourke (in a minute I'll tell why I'm mentioning him).

But logic is not respected anymore. To support this view some of my mildly radical friends cite the failed consensus on whether invade or not invade Iraq as the 'very end of Western rationalism'.

As for myself I would rather refer to James Joyce's notion that we - the modern species - can hardly be logical in the length of a couple of paragraphs.

Or I can come up with another example.

I've got a friend who has a wonderful character.

She is a musician and she thinks and converses in a musical way. Imagine dining with her: she asks you: 'Where do you get these awesome croissants from?'

You reply: "From our local bakery".

She then goes: "Have you heard that LOCALS are being forced out of their residential areas, I heard it on Radio 4."

You are a bit puzzled at the mental leap the conversation has taken and struggle on with the theme: "Our bakery is also struggling with big supermarkets built around here recently".

To which she replies: "We are also BUILDING a conservatory".

Initially this kind of conversation, which my wife calls "catching a flee" can be irritiating, until you accept the rules of the game and reply: "My wife graduated from Tashkent CONSERVATORY" to which she continues:

"Yes, I have to call my son's WIFE after I finish with this awesome croissant" at which the conversation ends up on a happy note in a full circle of mutual understanding and satisfaction.

I was thinking about all of that last week in the cubicle of the studio during the recording of the discussion programme The Forum with PJ O'Rourke, English science writer Philip Ball and American nano pioneer of Costa-Rican origin Sam Stupp.

I like The Forum because it's a free flowing conversation between different minds on different topics. It doesn't include any pre-emptive Truths.

There's a famous saying that the happiness is not a destination, but a journey and that is just the way I feel about the conversation and the composition of The Forum.
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In all cultures there are places where people gather just to have a good, entertaining conversation, where you can learn something, share knowledge or emotions.

English pubs and Uzbek chayhanas - tea houses - are places like that.

The Forum also reminds me of a global chayhana. The hosts - be it the programme's producer Emily Kasriel or the presenter Bridget Kendall are like real Chayhanachi - owners of the place, who try to be almost invisible, serving not just a few guests, but a much bigger global audience.

They are there like conductors who don't play music themselves, but bring out the best in the "music" of conversation.

The drama of The Forum lies in the tension between the speciality and the communality, as the A student would say. I would say it simpler - it's about surprise and discovery.

Three specialists are put together to talk about their achievements in their specific areas. So what are the latest breakthroughs in nano-technology, pioneered by Sam Stupp, while the political satire of PJ O'Rourke urges us not to vote for politicians.

Apparently in both cases they are sending signals: in the first case to regenerating organs, in the second - to society, that also wants to amend itself. Apart from that the nano-technology could also help the satirist with his right dysfunctional hip. Not bad at all!

I said that The Forum doesn't aim for any pragmatic goals, such as healing aches and pains, but it's not completely true.

There's a section of the programme in which one of the panellist is asked to come up with any idea which would drastically change the world. They have to explain the idea within a minute.

When PJ O'Rourke came up with the idea of forcefully ejecting earplugs from kids' ears Philip Ball was first to catch him out: "You argue for more freedom in your books and suggest a pretty authoritarian change!"

So the world is not just about logic, but even in the illogicity (another A student word) of it there's a certain logic?

On that happy note I would repeat a quote from Antoine Saint-Exupery, that there's "no hope of joy except in human relations." Which for me sums up The Forum exactly.