The arrival of the Virgin Mary

I find myself alone in our apartment for the first time, and everything that's happened over the last week is drizzling into the air pockets in my head. Is it a coincidence that the Scottish word for child, bairn, is made of the same letters as brain? A poor woman from Clan Macdonald back in the day perhaps had the realisation that once the r had moved two letters forward, her head would be a different place. Not better, not worse. Just different.

My brain is at ease and ticking happily having just watched the bairns from two floors up, skipping along the road towards the Bird Garden with a ball of wholesome Jordanian goodness in the form of our very new part time nanny who has filled our lives with fun, energy and crucial local knowledge.

When we were planning our lives here, everyone told us we'd never find a Jordanian willing to help with children - it was only Egyptians, Philippinas or Sri Lankans who did that job. But it appears we've found the only one who does. And amazingly she also feels the stars were aligned in her favour.

Her last job was with an Arab royal family, where she was used to being shuttled around with the children in a helicopter. She drives a Mercedes (also beige) and a 4 x 4 and LV is her Topshop. I'd been concerned she'd be more Glammy than Nanny. But as an unmarried Jordanian with a tattoo, a clandestine boyfriend, and a job that she doesn't tell anyone she does - she errs enough on the wild side to hang out with our two dwarves and she won their hearts in a matter of hours. She also says everything in English and then in Arabic, so our days are all about 'yala yala' (let's go) and 'shwai shwai' (gently gently/slowly slowly). Inshallah, Alhamd'u l'illah and Mashallah. No day is complete without heavy use of all these.

L keeps forgetting her name and asks me, 'Where's that little lady gone?' as she's about half my height and when holding Rashimi his toes reach her mid thigh. But she can shift, as I discovered when L was hurtling towards a busy road, and she disappeared as lightning to scoop him up, her sleek plait, as black as a squaw's, flying straight out behind her. She is just what we needed, not least becuase she laughed when I explained about all the imported food and told me that supermarket was where you go if you want foreign stuff. Now we have a fridge full of Jordanian veg. No surprise her name means Virgin Mary in Arabic. I hadn't realised The V.M. featured in the Koran. But she is proving herself to be that, and more.

We had to buy a first pair of shoes (Chinese) for Rashimi as he's out and about a lot, and he's walking like a small John Wayne wading through mud. In the playground yesterday he was found face down in the downward dog position eating sand most of the morning, which is either a mineral deficiency or a demonstration of his humility for a new land. To everyone's amusement, I was also accosted by gangs of Egyptian and Jordanian ladies wanting to take my photograph. Perhaps this is payback time for all those pictures I've taken of other people in my life.

I just met our landlord's mother who came to show me how to work our oven. They are a Palestinian family and I had the chance to talk to her about when they left Palestine and came to Jordan. Her side of the family arrived here in the mid 30's, and her husband's came in 1948, during the Nakba, which means disaster, when Palestinians were forced out from their homes, their towns, their country, in so many cases, never to return. She said they used to return to Jerusalem every weekend before 1967, but after that date, they couldn't really go back at all. These dates are etched in the history here, as 1066 and 1789 in Europe. I'm looking forward to understanding more about it. It's particularly appropriate that we should understand it being British, since Britain played such a big role in the turmoil. The Middle East was divided up by Europeans, particularly the British and the French, and we've been living the manifestations of it ever since. It's something we don't get to look into nearly deep enough in our history classes at school.

Noticing the cracks

The air up here is dry and crackly and we all woke up looking like pompoms with static hair. Our hands are dry and our lips crack when we smile. The Lozenge says 'I want to go home' every hour or so, so we went to a place up the road called the Prince Hashem Gardens, otherwise known as the Bird Park because of all the caged birds there - from peacocks and pheasants to red hens and ducks. There's even a monkey and a baboon. It was full of Jordanian families as it's a Friday and it seemed to take the Lozenge's mind off going home.

It took us about an hour and a half to walk to the park, to the supermarket and back and all he could say was, 'Look at the crackth, Mummy! Look at the crackth!' The road is covered in cracks, like our lips and hands, and he was fixated.

It's true. And you notice the cracks everywhere. Despite there being all the obvious signs of modernity each way we look out of our second floor windows - satellite dishes, cranes, mirrored glass buildings and Mercedes Sports, you can't ignore the basis of arid poverty. There's a chronic water shortage and the country is almost entirely dependent on aid. The cityscape is bland, and as beige as the interior of our flat. On top of this flaking canvas, the modern stuff seems stuck on top like a band aid - and fails to cover up what's below.

We finally made it to the Supermarket  and tried hard to buy Jordanian food but the only garlic on offer was from China and about 70 per cent of the stuff on the shelves was imported, with a little red sticker saying just that. 60 per cent of the population here is also imported, since this country didn't even exist until the 1920s when Churchill drew a few straight lines on the map and created Trans-Jordan after the Arab revolt. This place only begins to make sense when you start reading all about this relative recent history - and it really brings it all to life.

What big curbs you have

The supermarket doesn't, however - as anywhere else in the world. And after trawling around for 40 minutes we emerged, the boys with pink cheeks from having been pinched and stroked by many hands in the aisles, with a motley mixture of stuff. I only realised when we got home that we didn't get any salt so everything tastes like baby food.

The Lozenge has been taking off all his clothes most of the day long and getting into bed with his teddies, the laudry basket, my belt and the sandbag to hold the door open. Saeed found it most amusing to see a naked Lozenge cavorting around when he popped in to look at the electrics.

I know about first days in strange places. It's when your eyes and soul are at their most keen and most judgemental and yet you're also at your most vulnerable and exhausted. This day is no different but I know I'll look back after months and think what a funny little day that was. You can't cut corners - you just have to go straight through it and wade on.

I once read an interview with the actress Salma Hayek who when asked if she was going to feel like a fish out of water in her new life in Paris, she said, 'I'll make my own water'. This, I guess is what we're aiming for.

Hobbled camels

There's perhaps a reason why Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark didn't have children, or at least didn't travel with any.

An adventure is something you make. You have to look for one, and make it one. It doesn't just happen to you. But when travelling with children, the normality or domesticity you might try to escape when adventuring, follows you around. Had either lady done it, they might have felt it was like riding a hobbled camel into the unknown - forced to go slower and to stop in places they hadn't chosen. In a strange way, this can either make you feel trapped, or grounded. You can feel hindered by it, yet sometimes even grateful for it. But you never travel in the same way again. Until they grow up and leave.

I managed to salvage a few minutes gazing out the window as the Mediterranean ended and we flew over Israel/Palestine and I saw the mountainous desert begin as we swooped down towards Jordan. The sky was a clear icy blue which merged with pale orange as it met the desert and the border with Syria was visible. The border that hundreds of Syrian refugees are flooding over every hour, like so many other nationalities before them - Palestinians then Iraqis, now Syrians. Who next?

We were spat out from the Orange Purgatory into a humid arrivals section where we hung around for about an hour in a queue. Rashimi had spent most of the flight being squeezed and taken off our hands for cuddles in ample Jordanian bosoms, and continued to be plumped and kneaded by a gang of Bangladeshi girls who looked about 16. The mini van from the embassy was nowhere to be seen when we came through arrivals so we spent a sweaty half hour with about 25 taxi drivers in leather jackets and our pile of as many bags, and jumped in 2 cabs to the centre of Amman - Lozenge and J in one, a ravenous Rashimi and I in the other with a pack of Pringles. One pop, he ate the lot and unlike many other international junk, they really do taste the same everywhere in the world, unlike a KitKat or a Twix.

We all arrived at our flat at the same time, which was astonishing really, considering neither driver knew where we were going, and street names in Amman were added only five years ago. Our landlord greeted us, a slim man in his forties with a gym habit. LA meets Amman. J informed me he spends most of his time in the Power House around the corner. He was with Saeed, a charming Egyptian man in a shell suit with eyes as shiny, who's the caretaker. He gave us a whistlestop tour of every lightswitch with accompaniment of a bored-fatigued Lozenge cutting in every 30 seconds with 'CanIwatchCharlieandLolaontheIpadMummy' until our landlord, who seemed like he'd done one too many diet cokes that afternoon, finally whisked out again and left us in Apartment 2, No 3 Allal al Fasi Street, Amman which is our new home. It majors on beige, gold and marble with a twist of Louis XV, and is so much bigger than our London house we keep losing each other.

Then we found ourselves having dinner in Mirabelle, a 4 storey ice cream parlour and cafe which is so sweet and sickly you feel like you've landed in Disney. It's not somewhere J and I would have chosen to stop, but our travelling dwarves were delighted and I guess until we settle in here, their moods will be the barometer for all four of us.

Shrivelled lemons

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I know this is a good philosophy. But there are times when the lemon tree's leaves look dry and crispy and the lemons dark yellow and shrivelled. And today was one of those days. 

After a New Year's Eve full of friendship and merriment, and two weeks spent rafting on a wine river of farewells, the crash was bound to happen. It has been a weekend and half  week of weeping. With a dry throat, sore back and a nausea - all a throwback from the boarding school tri-monthly pack-a-thon, our soundscape has been the noise of unhappy suitcase zips and a wailing Lozenge and Rashimi, and dare I say, myself. It was Nayara the Brazilian cleaner who set me off. All she did was stand at the ironing board and say, 'I'm going to miss my boys' and out spouted the tears which have barely stopped. There have been rare moments of mirth such as Rashimi lifting up the Tshirt of the waitress with a greasy mozarella hand when we went for pizza in the pub, saying 'tickle tickle' on her tummy, and the Lozenge saying, 'are we finally going to Jordan today?' But other than that. Mostly weeping.

Every two hours J has had to run out and buy another suitcase from the shop down the road, and when he gets back, log onto the Orange Purgatory to book another 30 kilos on our luggage allowance to avoid an angry moment with an Orange Ogress. (This should really be a plug for cheap flights to come and see us. Yes, EasyJet flies to Amman).

An ever emptying house has been unsettling for the little people in our life. Similar to the dog hopping in the back of the car when you're filling it with luggage, the Lozenge's sticky hand been attached to mine for 12 hours a day, trotting by my side like a shaggy Shetland show pony in the ring, even up and down stairs or to the shop.  His games have been all about packing. So when I mumbled to J that I was sure the 20 adaptor plugs I'd ordered on Amazon had been in that pile there, and J took zero responsibility for its disappearance, I realised the packing dwarf had been at work, and discovered all 20 plugs, neatly zipped up in the monkey backpack. Leave something lying about. It'll get packed. 

The problem is, we're not leaving London because we don't like it. And after three years of growing some baby snowdrop roots here, it already feels very painful to rip them up. Our neighbours for one, have been some of those types you don't get the opportunity to live next to often. As you can see from this little photo film. It's only 6 minutes. And these two men really are two pieces of treasure one door down. 

https://vimeo.com/57914767

So it's been because of all this, that I've wondered to myself why exactly we're going to all this trouble to uproot a happy, already interesting life, to learn one of the world's hardest languages, and live in one of the world's most unsettled regions. Honestly, we must be crazy. What on earth are we doing? Why, oh why, did we decide to do this?

Yesterday we sat at home in the dying afternoon light of a winter afternoon eating lamb and rice with our Arabic teachers. Two of the ladies are from Syria and and I have always marvelled at how they stood at the white board, explaining five different plural formations to me, never giving away the pain they must be feeling about their homeland being ripped to shreds by internal hatreds. Never talking unless prompted about family members they wish they could rescue from it. And there they were in our sitting room eating and chatting away, bright and cheerful as ever, teaching the Lozenge some numbers and Arabic greetings, one of them expecting a first child, herself. 

Watching and laughing with them, it reminded me why we are doing all this. But the irony of heading to Amman, so close to all the turmoil in Damascus and beyond, as London is to Birmingham. So close and yet, still, so far. Who knows what the fate of Jordan will be as it sits in the doughnut hollow of relative tranquility, south of Palestine, West of Syria, North of Saudi Arabia. Who knows. Yet we at least have a home to come back to should it turn. We, for the moment, seem to be the lucky ones.

My doubts about what will happen when we get there also emerge at moments like these. (Having realised I was invincible and could survive on 4 hours sleep and red wine for ever - it was J that suggested gently that although I did have more juice in my batteries than most people he'd ever met, 'just don't forget to top them up every so often'). But the doubts emerge at times, for example when I realised that flying on the Orange Purgatory, you could have only one piece of handluggage each. Which meant I could either have my entire camera kit, or my bag full of nappies, beakers and wetwipes. So I can be a fully functioning me, or just a Mum. But not both. And my lenses can't go in the hold.

So we finished packing up, and got ready to leave, trying not to think too hard about those walls which had witnessed so much of our funny little fledgling family life. All the people coming in and out, and the eating and the drinking, and the sleeping and the not sleeping, the laughing the sobbing, the happy and the cross. Let's hope it all stays in there, I thought as I swung my huge pack on my back, and an equally rotund Rashimi under one arm and staggered to the taxi where J and Lozenge waited, shutting the door behind and hoping the next people would feel it all in these walls still.

Last week a Palestinian architect I interviewed told me he used to convince his clients he would take their house and make it a home, and it's the people in a house that make the home. This is what I'm hoping as we head off to re-plant our snowdrop roots in a strange place. And without the Lozenge or Rashimi noticing that I'm a little afraid.