Routes and Routines

routine (n.) 
1670s, from French routine "usual course of action, beaten path" from route "way, path, course" (see route) + subst. suffix -ine. Theatrical sense is from 1926. The adjective is attested from 1817, from the noun.

In the orginial sense, and the theatrical one, we're finding it. Although I hate to admit I rely on a usual course of action, let alone a beaten path, it helps. And it goes a bit like this. 6.30 Wake up one by one - no one knows who first - it changes every day; 7am breakfast and throwing/dodging/wiping up various different varieties of cereal and other carbohydrates laced with jam around the kitchen; 7.45 Lozenge and J leave for nursery/language classes - Rashimi and I hang about dividing an hour and fifteen minutes into 10 minute chunks of what I'd like to do versus what he'd like to do; 9am Glammy arrives and whisks Rashimi off for adventures; 9am catch breath, do a few 360 degree turns while I work out what to do first… and so on until 7.30pm when J and I find ourselves alone again, sometimes, with a glass of Tio Pepe, other times, not, and always with a muezzin-ipod megamix. And so far, everything that happens in between, has been generally different every day.

This week I've been researching a feature for a Jordanian magazine about traveller communities in Amman. They make the travellers in the UK look sophisticated, clean and articulate. No one can quite work out who they are, and where they've come from, and as far as I can see they are Amman's untouchables. I realised listening to them speak, that the language sounded exactly the same as the Turkmen communities I filmed in Afghanistan. Although there's not so much opium being consumed here - as I guess we're further from the source. It's a brave call for a magazine that normally has double spreads of handbags and Amman elite. So I need to get it right.

I found a translator with J's help, and knowing that I was probably heading towards a rough-edged kind of scene, I initially worried she would turn up in heels with aforementioned handbag. But I was in luck. Along the road towards me she sloped, in jeans and a baggy sweater, no make up and highly articulate, intelligent, interested, funny…Another gold good'n from whoever knows where, or however I deserve it. We got Abu Mohammed to take us to the camp, having been told they were Bedouin. When I told him who I was looking for he said in Arabic via the gilded translator, "Umm Laurence, these people are not Bedouin, they're the lowest of the low, the scum of the city. I really don't want to take you there…Umm Laurence, please (his head in his hands)." After some persuasion, we drew up at an incongruously placed, steaming rubbish dump, nestled between a huge glossy Mercedes garage and an IT service centre. The cluster of tents houses about 30 families who are permanently on the move, from nowhere to nowhere it seems. The children are wild, feral, mostly barefoot and don't go to school. It's hard to tell which came first, the dump or the people. I think my emotions must have temporarily switched off as we tried to find a story that will be compelling enough to the readership, who probably, in fact definitely, do not want to know about these people. I kept looking searchingly at the translator thinking she was about to freak out and leave, but she dealt with climbing over piles of human **** with forbearance and grace.  Inevitably we were mobbed by the braying children who posed for photos and clawed us for money and attention. The 1,554,321 photographs I took were on the whole rubbish because of the mayhem, the tripping and slipping and jostling and shouting; and the interviews were stilted because their first language is Turkik, so the women who are less educated had to use their husbands to translate from Arabic for us. The women never tell the whole story in this instance, as understandably they need to protect what remains of their husband's honour by not beseeching us to get them out of this place, preferably with their children.

We left after a couple of hours, calling Abu Mohammed to come and fetch us again. He offered us the hand sanitiser as we stepped in, and revved off seconds after we'd stepped in the back, suggesting we use the whole bottle. The upshot is we're going to have to find more people to talk to us, which will involve more forays into Abu Mohammed's worst parts of town. But the translator is still on board for more dump jaunts, and one of the best I've ever worked with.

I spent the rest of the week getting to know the city, alone, in the red Chevy. There's something about being alone in a car, unrushed, music blaring that will always feel teenage and free. And I thought to get to know the city well, I just have to drive toward somewhere I need to go, and let myself get lost if necessary, without getting cross or in a panic. There are very few maps, road names are so new that Sat Nav often leads you to the same old dump rather than the mall, so there's no other option. And to throw myself, without a brace of bellowing boys, into the Amman traffic mayhem with Mercedes models that would fit an early Woody Allen film, and driving that makes the latinos look sedate, has been quite fun. A car can sometimes quite simply be, a room of one's own.

We've found strong bread flour in one supermarket here and have been putting the bread maker through its paces. Although I miss the kneading and slamming of dough on a marble surface, I figured life involves enough kneading in other ways right now, and there's a certain magic to setting the timer for a loaf to be warm and crusty by 6.45am, ready to be poked and stroked by little fingers and chewed slowly by tiny milk teeth.

The boys and I make regular trips to the local fruit and veg stall where the patient stall keeper, Yaser, explains the names in Arabic of each and every one, with their dual and plural form. A pomegranate is a 'roman' and fennel is a 'shoman'. But unfortunately, that's where the rhyme ends. He is very kind to the Lozenge and Rashimi who normally come away with a complimentary banana or apple clutched in a grubby paw. He took a photo with his phone of Rashimi and I the other week, and we have now become his screen saver. Perhaps everything here becomes more acceptable when you have children, as my new name, Umm Laurence, might suggest.