My Mum has an old friend called Louis who lives in Kenya. He is a priest and is now quite elderly and almost completely blind. He is fiercely loyal and has rung my Mum, my sister and me on our birthdays for as long as I can remember. Every year we get the mysterious, long distance call from someone we know very little about but who wants to know everything, everything about us. When he called for my Mum's birthday in February, I was in bed. But he called back later in the afternoon especially to speak to me, his friend's daughter who he hasn't seen since she was about 6 months old. He knows I study journalism and he is aware of my travels and language studies. When he asked me what was going on in my life, I told him about the snow. The snow had dominated our existence for at least a week by then and it was the first thing that came to my mind as I frantically searched for interesting tit bits of information to satisfy his curiousity and compassion.
"Oh I know all about that," he said. "That has been all over the news over here in Kenya. We, on the other hand, have to kill each other to make the news."
This made me sad. But he was't trying to make me feel bad. It's a good thing of course that beautiful snowy images were ambassadors for Britain all over the world. But it does make you question the concept of news value.
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