{"id":15305,"date":"2023-05-26T08:48:44","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T07:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/pastuso-in-rwanda\/"},"modified":"2023-05-26T08:48:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T07:48:44","slug":"pastuso-in-rwanda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/pastuso-in-rwanda\/","title":{"rendered":"Pastuso in Rwanda"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-15303\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/67c060ba9d344cfb14a762a07b4400d4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"900\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/67c060ba9d344cfb14a762a07b4400d4.jpg 600w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/67c060ba9d344cfb14a762a07b4400d4-200x300.jpg 200w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/67c060ba9d344cfb14a762a07b4400d4-294x441.jpg 294w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/67c060ba9d344cfb14a762a07b4400d4-1x1.jpg 1w, http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/67c060ba9d344cfb14a762a07b4400d4-7x10.jpg 7w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>Pastuso in Rwanda<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>by Jim Aitken<\/em><\/p>\n<p>First they came for my dear friend, Mr Samuel Gruber,<br \/>who came originally from Hungary, I think.<br \/>Then they came for me early one Friday morning.<br \/>They burst into my attic bedroom as I slept<br \/>and shouted, \u2018Get your filthy foreign fur out of this bed.\u2019<br \/>I was terribly shocked and embarrassed for my hosts.<br \/>The children, Judy and Jonathan, were screaming and Mr<br \/>and Mrs Brown protested rather profusely, as I recall.<\/p>\n<p>No longer welcome, I was whisked out of 32 Windsor Gardens<br \/>without even being able to say all my goodbyes<br \/>and without, more importantly, any marmalade sandwiches<br \/>for the long journey to Kigali airport. There was to be no<br \/>legal appeal on my behalf owing to the fact that my<br \/>anthropomorphised identity was not considered to be legal.<br \/>I simply could not understand the complexities of it all and<br \/>found it rather sad for the country I once considered my home.<\/p>\n<p>My biographer, that nice Mr Michael Bond, had once witnessed <br \/>the Kindertransport refugees on their arrival in London<br \/>with labels round their necks, and so he simply transferred<br \/>this to me. It was my lovely Aunt Lucy who had enabled me<br \/>to stowaway and she placed a message around my neck<br \/>which read, \u2018Please look after this bear. Thank you.\u2019<br \/>I did have a wonderful time in Notting Hill, looking back,<br \/>and I do miss the Brown family and think of them with fondness.<\/p>\n<p>Cleverly, the authorities here in Kigali have requested that<br \/>my statue in Paddington Station, along with the other one<br \/>in Leicester Square, be sent over here. It certainly seems that<br \/>I am marketable everywhere I go. They have built me a nice hut<br \/>in the Volcanoes National Park and my new neighbours,<br \/>the gorillas, are extremely pleasant and I understand their <br \/>language perfectly well. It is similar to the language I spoke<br \/>in darkest Peru. In these beautiful mountains I am called Pastuso.<\/p>\n<p>This was my actual name at birth. The Bonds and the Browns,<br \/>terribly nice people as they were, preferred the name Paddington<br \/>since foreign sounding names were just too difficult, it seemed.<br \/>And it also seems, looking back, how it was their so called Brexit<br \/>that tapped into the fear of the foreign and created the madness<br \/>engulfing the place. With their economy now belly-flopping, it seems<br \/>they need a constant stream of diversionary scapegoats. It is all such<br \/>a terrible shame but it\u2019s now time for a jar of marvellous marmalade.<\/p>\n<p><em>This poem is taken from the <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Welcome-Britain-Anthology-Poems-Fiction\/dp\/1916459382\">Welcome to Britain<\/a><em> anthology published by Civic Leicester and edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pastuso in Rwanda by Jim Aitken First they came for my dear friend, Mr Samuel Gruber,who came originally from Hungary, I think.Then they came for me early&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":15303,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}