Euromoney Middle East Awards for Excellence, 2014
1 July, 2014Cerulli: CIC moves to endowment model
1 July, 2014Discovery Channel Magazine
When John McCarthy was released from five of a half years of captivity as a hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, most of it spent chained to a wall, there was a problem: he no longer had any depth perception.
It started as he was handed over by his kidnappers to Syrian military intelligence and was driven to Damascus through Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in August 1991. To him, the cliffs on either side of the car seemed to be going thousands of feet straight up in the air. “Then two or three weeks later, I was with some friends in Wales,” he tells Discovery Channel Magazine in a café in Teddington, just outside London. “And I was looking across this valley and thinking: how weird that some of those cows are big, but some are really small. I wonder what special breed of cows they’ve got to make them really small?
“And then something in my brain went: no no no, they’re just further away! They’re not all on this cliff in front of you. Some are 300 yards away and some are half a mile away.”
This is what happens to your mind when you never see anything that is more than six feet away for half a decade. And as he understood this, he came to another realisation. “Christ! I’ve been driving a fucking car!”
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