A friend in Central Asia writes: I often bike to the office during the morning. I so enjoy using my little low-slung bike with its fat tyres on the rough roads of our suburb – but it is incongruous that I find myself pedalling along and using my mobile phone! One morning a week I bike to language school. Last week I arrived to find my teacher really tired. In class he told the following story in the local language and I was chuffed to be able to understand it. He and his widowed mother and siblings live in an alley containing about thirty houses. (They have the good fortune to own their own home.) The previous morning an 18-year-old girl living in the alley went off to school and didn't return. Day passed and night came and she still didn't return. Her family called in the police, and everyone in the alley stayed up all night with the grieving parents.

At dawn she returned, saying she had lost her way in the dark and had stayed under a tree all night. No one believed her. They believed she had been with a boy since leaving for school. My language teacher said he had told her brother that he should poison her. He said her family had lost all its honour. No one would want to marry into the family, and the parents could not raise their heads again. Indeed it was a total shame for the whole alley – they too were part of it. Honour killings are common here.

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