While Cameron's leadership took a beating in the UK, and Obama decided to look to Congress for approval for a strike on Syria, things in our household were a little more carefree this weekend.
Temperatures can be startlingly high in our second floor apartment these days - particularly in the kitchen where there is no air conditioning and the added bonus of a large heated towel rail which has to stay on all the time for there to be hot water. So it's often the room where tempers can fray - particularly mine. Which is more of a worry considering it's also the room where the knives are kept.
So on Friday we escaped to Al Wadi, a water park complex overlooking the Dead Sea which is like a relic from the 1980's complete with slides, flumes, wave machines, and luminous coloured slush puppy on sale in the cafe. In 45 degrees, they were even offering a Jacuzzi which I thought might have just tipped us over the edge so we avoided that and stuck to zooming down slides, thef four of us, on an inflatable 'family boat', with J and I clutching Rashimi so he didn't fly out half way down. The 'Elf and Safety are nowhere to be seen in these parts which is refreshing and un-nerving in one terrified intake of breath.
The morning was fairly calm, but the place got fuller as the day went on, with Jordanians in everything from top to toe burkinis to San Tropez chic, and the music ratcheted up and up and up until by about 1.30pm it was so loud that we could barely even hear Rashimi shriek or the Lozenge wail. The music pumped from speakers embedded in walls everywhere, including the bathrooms, and the wave machine churned the crowds of writhing bodies, all punching the air in a drugs and alcohol free version of Ibiza or Magalluf. And all this nestled in the armpit of the Holy Land. After inhaling a flaccid family pizza we decided to leave the inferno and enter the next one: The vermillion Chevy. Which had been steadily heating up as we frolicked in the chlorinated surf so we could barely breathe inside. With all fans whirring and churning out dust, we cruised out of the car park and headed back to Amman. The car started bunny hopping at regular intervals when J put his foot on the accelerator, and an alarming, unrecocniseable light was flashing intermittently. After three un-enlightening visits to teenager-manned garages, we decdied to brave it and keep going. I couldn't help but giggle at the ludicrous situation, but J kept begging me not to laugh until we'd made it home. Which we eventually did having lost our body weights of water. The bonus being that the flat felt relatively cool on our return from the belly of below sea level. Everything is relative after all.
On Saturday 'Dook' as Rashimi now calls him, invited us to watch an Arab horse show and visit his farm, just out of Amman. Rashimi said 'orsee! 'orsee!' about once every 2 minutes for the whole day, and was fortunately enthralled by the sleek creatures hopping elegantly over jumps. (Though less inclined to go that near, or touch one). The riders all looked like they'd stepped off the pages of an Arab version of Jilly Cooper's Riders - in immaculate white jodphurs and designer details. After the show the Duke took us to his family farm house, which I got the feeling he feels sad about. The patch has been divided between family members with different priorities, shall we say. And a three lane motor way now cuts his farmhouse off from the farm land where he grows all his fruit and vegetables. His small corner of the house, complete with its own chapel and a stained glass window he and his wife were given on their wedding day, is a small, dusty gem of heritage integral to this country and how it once was. But we felt sad and weary for him as we left, seeing how much upkeep is required, and all within a society with increasing numbers of people who would rather build a new place with angular lines, electric gates and tinted windows.
J and I also had time to watch an extroardinary couple of films, including Gatekeepers, which has just been released, which is based around interviews with ex-members of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service. It reveals a lot about the relationship between politicians and their agencies, and an awful lot about humans and how we reflect on our actions after the events. We also watched one part of the four part, Shoah, an extraordinary filmic journey by Claude Lanzmann. It's packed with brutally revealing interviews of Polish people who were aware of the goings on during the Holocaust - and it makes you realise how anything that happens on earth cannot be bi-polarised. There are always a multitude of facets to any given horror show when you start asking the right questions. Like the two compound eyes of a fly - each side is divided into thousands of tiny and different ways of seeing things. They were both important films to see at this point in our lives - where these realities continue to be played out around us in thinly veiled guises.
The Lozenge has had his first day at school and the highlight of yesterday was 'making thnaketh'. The snakes never made it home, but he did, with an empty lunch box, and a big smile on his face. This morning the diminutive orange school bus rolled up outside our door smartly at 8am, and the Lozenge gave J, I and Rashimi (still in his pyjamas chewing on a toothbrush) a quick kiss, hopped in the bus, and waved happily as the bus cruised steadily off towards his school. A rite of passage if ever there was one. And I could see that Rashimi seemed fairly impressed at the adventure of it all.
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