A distant dream

Ceasefire 
by Michael Longley

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and 
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.

Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
to stare at each other's beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

'I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son.'

A country, bleeding

It's the Eid holiday: Eid ul Fitr, the Muslim feast day to celebrate the end of the month hard slog of ramadan. In Afghanistan 7 years ago, Gemma, my wonderful colleague turned friend and I had some days off over this festival and called it 'Read' rather than Eid - using the time to catch up on neglected background reading for work.

In Jerusalem this year, Eid feels more like 'Bleed'. The streets have been empty and quiet for days, and you feel like no Palestinian in the whole country, or even the world, has the appetite for a feast day this year of all years.

Well over 1,000 people have died in Gaza now, and over 6,000 have been wounded. With 53 Israeli soldiers killed in the process. It's hard not to feel that the place - or the Palestinian part of it at least - is being bled to death. Is it really possible to kill a country?

We've been hopping between East and West over the past week. We ventured West, to Mehane Yehuda market at night time for a dinner of freshly caught Mediterranean fish, some delicious white wine, and sat chatting with friends to the accompaniment of ska and reggae from a funky young band a couple of stalls away. Young people milled about - piercings, trendy clothes, female legs on show, smiles and laughter. Very far from anything you might describe as wartime. And an entire world away from the scenes we're seeing from Gaza.

Then we came home, back East. We were met by the bossy honk of Israeli police cars and sirens, and the inescapable stench of 'skunk water' the vile liquid the riot police spray on the crowds, making us wretch as we walked into our house and forcing us to close all the windows. A Palestinian man was leaning against our outer wall vomiting, panting and trying to talk on the phone to a friend. Sweaty young men in black t-shirts, fresh from a demonstration, staggered along the road covering their faces against the fetid air.

2 Palestinian men were killed in West Bank demonstrations that night.

Bleeding and suffocating. The tactics of killing a nation seem still as basic as ever.

Meanwhile we're still managing to play happy families. We spent the weekend in northern Israel with some friends who came to visit us from Jordan. They innocently asked a garage attendant if he spoke Arabic. 'We are a country at war. I am Israeli. Please don't insult me,' he responded.

We forgot about war for a while at the safari park near Tel Aviv - the animals, particularly a curious ostrich, a welcome break from humans.

And now we're preparing to go on holiday to the UK, which J and I agreed feels like a betrayal, and a guilt-inducing escape. While they're not letting anyone into Gaza, we still feel that just by staying put and showing solidarity we might be contributing. Though it's impossible to know how to help.

Sometimes you pluck a book from the shelf and you read in wonder as you get the feeling each word is written especially for you at that precise moment. I'm finally reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I can't recommend enough for existential dilemmas, whether inside or outside of a war zone. And I've found a certain consolation in many of Robert Pirsig's paragraphs, including this one:

'I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature...; or with programs full of things for other people to do...Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.'

And as Desmond Tutu writes in his Book of Forgiveness : 'The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another.'

On that consolatory note, I'm going to pack our bags for a three week foray in a green and familiar land, with our two little forces of stickiness, and pause for a while.

We just hope and pray that this still beautiful country won't be bleeding as badly when we return.

St Grace's contribution to the dwarves' spiritual development

Though a point of return at the moment, seems a faraway dream.

More sights in Mehane Yehuda market

Proud to be here

Daily bread

My Grandma used to tell us stories about cycling around London during the Blitz. For those of us who live far from war zones, it's hard to understand that life still goes on.

Yesterday I took a wander with the dwarves around our district. The streets were filled with Muslim ladies doing their Eid shopping. 'Al batikha ow al bayda, Fatima?' (The watermelon or the white one, Fatima?) shrieked a lady to her friend, brandishing two patent handbags - made in China like everything else in these kind of markets around the world.

We visited our friend Johnny in Holy Land Insurance, who cuddled the dwarves warmly and showered them with sweeties from the bowl on his desk, his brown eyes crinkling into laughter as he watched the dwarves' sticky hands dive into the bowl for a fifth time. Although he is Christian, he too is putting any chance of peace into the hands of God: 'He is the only one who can stop this now,' he said.

From Johnny, we meandered slowly down the hot street, my arms stretched as I encouraged the dwarf duo to the shady side. At the bread shop, round the back with all the metal machines from the 1960s, there were four men fashioning pearl coloured dough into twists, and covering them with sesame seeds. These are special ramadan loaves which Muslims eat at Iftar when they break their fast.

'Why are there thethame theedth?' asked Rashimi.

The baker gave the dwarves one warm loaf each in a plastic bag, and didn't charge me for them.

At the pastry shop a couple of doors down, the patissier beckoned us in and handed the dwarves a chocoloate croissant each. 'Mashallah' ('God willed it' - the common greeting that is given in relation to children), he said, and apologised he didn't have any water to offer us as it was ramadan.

We tottered home with our wares. No need for lunch after all that.

At my computer later, I watched a short video from Gaza. The Lozenge was watching over my shoulder as we saw one IDF shell hit the city. 'What is that?' he said. I explained in simple terms.

'It is exthiting, Mummy. Then we can build it all up again.'

I wondered where our Middle East 'Peace Envoy' is amongst all of this. Why isn't he at the centre of things? If not in the thick of it in a flack jacket like all those courageous reporters, at least getting people to sit around a table and talk? But then, waging peace is hardly his forte.

Rashimi went to bed and the Lozenge retreated with the ipad. I boarded the tram to the market. The tram cuts through the centre of Jerusalem, and many Arab friends have told me they are afraid to travel on it at the moment because of the number of attacks on Arabs after the kidnapping of 3 Israeli boys, which was the touch paper to the tragedy we're witnessing now. There were fewer passengers than normal but I sat next to two young Arab girls in skinny jeans and shades, admiring each other's newly varnished nails - extended talons with painted white tips.

The market felt the same as ever, with elderly men and women milling about with shoppers on wheels; shopkeepers announcing their wares and trading a joke; army cadets enjoying a falafel sandwich.

As I walked and took photographs, it certainly didn't feel like a country at war. Though one shopkeeper, encouraging me to try a vine leaf parcel, was in a wheel chair after fighting in a previous IDF mission. He didn't look bitter about it:

Back home, a friend of ours dropped by. His name is Jacob.

'Er....Jesus,' the Lozenge said to him, 'are you staying for lunch?'

'I think you just got a promotion,' I said to Jacob.

Then in the late afternoon, the dwarves and I got ready to go swimming in a nearby pool.

'Are you going to put on your booby suit, Mummy?' asked Rashimi.

It's not you...

I took this in the wonderful Mehane Yehuda market today. It got me thinking how we could use a bit more of this attitude in politics around here.

Pink panic and displaced anxiety

I'm not sure if it's normal to find yourself welling up to Dire Straits', 'Walk of Life'. I find Chris Evans on R2 in the mornings is just what I need - but hadn't bargained on this. It might be time for a holiday.

My anxiety about the war was interrupted by something closer to home this week. We're supposedly looking after our neighbours' cat while they're on holiday in the Balkans and I went with the dwarves to their apartment to do our routine feed, water and clean up last week. The dwarves love it there as the family have older boys with exciting toys.

We went in the door and there was an ominous silence. Normally Rainbow, a fluffy and exotic looking feline, is padding about miaowing as we enter. I paced about, calling her name. Filled up the water, shook some food into the bowl, cleaned the litter tray.

No sign.

My mind started to race as I combed the apartment. I wasn't sure cats really come when they're called - but I carried on, looking more frantically under cushions to reveal nothing but the occasional regurgitated fur ball.

The dwarves were unalarmed, happily playing with some transformers. But my imagination had already jumped to phone conversations to Bosnia explaining I'd lost the beloved family feline; to images of finding a cat corpse under a bed or curled, cold, in a corner.

After half an hour I had looked in every nook and it was time for my Arabic class. I dropped the dwarves back home and walked down the road, my mind a mire of misery; my face pink with panic.

After an hour and a half of watching my pretty Arabic teacher Suhair's mouth, open and close, explaining present continuous and future tenses in Arabic, I had to admit my problem. I confessed that nothing had sunk into my head during the class apart from the fact that Arabs sometimes call the wife: 'Al wazirah lildakhaliyya' (the minister of the interior) which I'd found funny enough to remember, even in my panic.

'Aaah' she said, when I explained. 'It sounds like one of those Persian ones! I really love those, but they cost about 2,000 shekels so I can't afford one at the moment.'

Gulp.

She suggested: 'I think you should go around with a bowl of milk, and make some little kissing noises, and say: 'here Bissa, bissa, bissa'. It's how we say 'cat' in Arabic'.

The class came to a close and having received a calm text from the owners in answer to my panicked: 'Help! Missing Rainbow!' that 'she does sometimes like to hide', I decided to pop back into the flat without the dwarves, to have another look.

As I climbed the stairs, I heard a little 'miiiiaaaaaow' from the other side of the door, and opened it to see a fat and healthy looking Rainbow creeping about the hall looking rather pleased with herself.

I think she must have been hiding in a cupboard and laughing at me as ransacked the apartment.

Never work with children or animals. Is that what they say? I will think twice before I agree to look after anyone else's.

But Rainbow at least ensured that my mind was taken off the misery of this war, the same way that when I was about 8, Mum managed to take my mind off the doctor piercing a needle into a fingernail I had jammed in a drawer, by squeezing the other finger so hard, it actually hurt more.

The Three Terrors

"I’ve already raised the white flag. I’ve stopped searching the dictionary for the word to describe half of a boy’s missing head while his father screams “Wake up, wake up, I bought you a toy!” "
.....

I’m fed up with the failed efforts at competing with the abundance of orchestrated commentaries on Hamas’ goals and actions, from people who write as if they’ve sat down with Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, and not just some IDF or Shin Bet security service source. Those who rejected Fatah and Yasser Arafat’s peace proposal for two states have now been given Haniyeh, Hamas and BDS. Those who turned Gaza into an internment and punishment camp for 1.8 million human beings should not be surprised that they tunnel underneath the earth. Those who sow strangling, siege and isolation reap rocket fire. Those who have, for 47 years, indiscriminately crossed the Green Line, expropriating land and constantly harming civilians in raids, shootings and settlements – what right do they have to roll their eyes and speak of Palestinian terror against civilians?

Hamas is cruelly and frighteningly destroying the traditional double standards mentality that Israel is a master at. All of those brilliant intelligence and Shin Bet brains really don’t understand that we ourselves have created the perfect recipe for our very own version of Somalia? You want to prevent escalation? Now is the time: Open up the Gaza Strip, let the people return to the world, the West Bank, and to their families and families in Israel. Let them breathe, and they will find out that life is more beautiful than death."

Amira Hass writes a soul searching article in Ha'aretz. Her piece is followed by streams of comments which might in other worlds be described as hate mail.

Well over 500 Gazans dead, and IDF taking casualties every day. For what?

An ill wind has been blowing from the sea these past few days - the kind that whips your hair in your face and blows papers from your hand. It stirs things up, and froths up the anxious feeling I already have in my stomach every minute of the day. The war may be raging away from here, but it is also being waged in the souls of the people in this city.

The night before last we were awake most of the night hearing triumphant fireworks which we mistook for further graduations, but discovered the next morning were in celebration of a kidnapped Israeli soldier. The war is certainly here, too.

A wonderful young Israeli academic we had dinner with last night described seeing a dusty, exhausted Israeli soldier walking down her road that morning in West Jerusalem, coming home to his wife, who was in her car outside their apartment, tooting and tooting on her horn so he would see her, in floods of tears at the vision before her.

In our little double reality, I sat with the dwarves last night, our bare legs interlaced on the sofa, and watched Rashimi's choice - 'Peppa Pig: International Day' where Madame Gazelle gets all the children to dress up as a different nationality and sing together: 'Peace and harmoneeeee! In all the world! Peace and harmoneeeee, in all the World!'

And I had a sudden ludicrous image of getting the world's war mongerers to board an enormous cruise ship and sing it out together until they had nothing left to fight about. I could see it in lights: 'The Three Terrors!' replacing Pavarotti, Placido and Carreras with Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, Netanyahu and Putin. Ayatollah Khomeini as understudy (for once in his life), and make Tony Blair conduct.

Man overboard for misbehaviour.

The Lozenge asked his usual question for when my face is in repose and obviously not lit up enough for his liking: 'Are you happy Mummy?'

'Yes, my sweetheart. I'm really happy.'

One day I can tell him about my dream.

Four little lights

The air is cooler today and Israeli troops entered Gaza in the early hours. This morning we awoke to unusually grey skies, a tribute at least, to these times.

There's a Scots expression which describes better than any I know, the Palestinian mood at the moment: 'hudden doon'. You feel it in each conversation and see it in every face on the street.

A photograph in yesterday's New York Times, showed a man holding the face of one of the four, slight bodies wrapped in yellow shrouds - the victims of Wednesday's horrific strike on Gaza beach.

Holding the face of a child between one's two hands is such a visceral action. Just looking at the image, I can feel our boys' warm cheeks between my palms, bright eyes looking back, warm breath on the inside of my wrist.

In a matter of seconds, out went four little lights on that beach. Their junior trajectories stopped in their tracks. Nothing to remain but the pain in the hearts of the mothers and fathers who know so well what it is to have a running, jumping, dancing, fighting, laughing ball of boy energy in their house. The feeling of that form of sculpted sinew and muscle wrapped in silken skin - so familiar to their hands from all the washing and dressing and tending and kissing. Never again will they grasp an arm in angry chastisment, stroke a head in illness, or grip with two arms around a breathless chest in response to a boyish hug. The basis of the pain must be the ghost of tangibility, the whisper of a memory of all those routine motions required from every parent. Every parent's darkest fear.

Family Bakr and all the other families in Gaza and the West Bank who have lost children since this horror was rekindled - 'nahass fikom' we are feeling it with you.

Dream Treaties

This poem was commissioned especially for the Ha'aretz Peace Supplement that came with last weekend's paper. I found it moving, particularly as so many of our Palestinian friends here lament the shrinking interlace between Palestinian and Israeli children. As one friend, now in his 50's said: 'I had so many Israeli friends when we were growing up, and they are still my friends now. But my children - not so much.'


Dream Treaties by Ronny Someck,
translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden

There were half-green lawns,
miserly sprinklers
and one scary moment when my daughter
vanished from view.
She was three at the time and after a search of several minutes
she grinned from ear to ear,
standing in a wagon usually used for distributing towels
and Samih al Qasim's and Mohammed Hamza Ghanayem's
children
had trundled her from one end to the other of the hall
where more than a field of thorns could have been planted
in the furrows ploughed by the adults' brows.
Afterwards the children traded roles
and the cart continued to sail like a pleasure ship
in the puddles of words choked
in two languages.
I so wanted to be a captain or a deck boy
or even just a lifebuoy
on that voyage,
and I was madly envious of the children, who had they paper and
pencil,
would in the space of 10 minutes
have signed dream treaties.



How we need these dream treaties now. 

Entertaining ourselves at home…

A mother's fear

A supplement full of inspiring and thought provoking writing was included in this weekend's Haaretz newspaper. 'Give Peace a Chance' love Yoko 2014. www.imaginepeace.com

This extract from South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1949) was quoted in one of the articles:

'You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught from year to year,
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.'

And this mother's piece in the main section of the newspaper explains what many Arab women my age living here in Jerusalem, and elsewhere in the country, are going through. Because they have children much younger here on the whole, there are mothers of teenagers who are fearing for their adolescent girls and boys as hatred grips many a heart and people no longer feel safe on the streets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/opinion/a-palestinian-mothers-fear-in-east-jerusalem.html?_r=0

Gaza takes it again

Like a tiny slip of a donkey, thin and mangy from maltreatment and continuous beatings, Gaza is being flogged again. While its population of 1.5 million people, famed for their stregth of spirit and warmth, must be searching for the deepest of inner reserves to survive this next onslaught, the rest of us can only look on with grave concern.

Well over a hundred people, including many children, have died and this morning's news showed the wreckage of a centre for disabled people, two of whom were killed. J and I have our iphones clamped in our hands most of the time - searching for news, and receiving automatic updates. Heroic stories trickle through, such as a group of foreign activists who yesterday formed a human chain around a hospital in an attempt to stop an Israeli strike on it. We marvelled at their courage.

I don't enjoy being on the sidelines - it's like watching people work. I'd much rather be in amongst it. But as Mum sagely suggested last night on the telephone, 'Being with your boys and keeping them safe is the right place for you at the moment, darling.'

St Grace has been in Jordan visiting her husband so the dwarves and I have had four days together. We visited our local pizza restaurant as a treat. It's a Palestinian establishment who received a grant from the EU to learn how to make a real pizza and build their own ovens. The other draw is the albino rabbit who the Lozenge and Rashimi have named 'Nibbles'. So we set off down the road in the scorching sun armed with a couple of cucumbers from the fridge so it could live up to its name.

After a Marguerita (pizza not cocktail, I promise) between them, the boys were busy tucking into an ice cream doused with chocolate sauce. The world cup highlights were blaring in the background, with Brazillian beats mixed with Arabic dialogue, then all of a sudden a loud: 'Doooommmf' then four more of the same. The dwarves were so busy covering their chins with extra choccy topping, they didn't notice, but I looked up and caught the eye of a Palestinian man sitting with his family. He nodded. They were definitely rockets and then the air raid siren sounded. Everyone sat still, and the waiters walked by, chatting in Arabic to the other Arab families there. I've interviewed enough Syrians now to know the word for shelling and rockets, and I heard the waiter say he thought the noise was from the Israeli 'iron dome' intercepting them. I looked at the structure of the building and saw we were sitting as far from the glass windows as we could have been - plus no one else was moving and I reckoned they'd been through this before, so we sat tight and then walked home as quickly as I could make the tight-bellied dwarves scamper down the uneven pavements.

As often in life, the thing you fear is not the thing that ends up hurting you. I should have looked no further than the bowl of ice cream, which caused the Lozenge a more violent bout of food poisoning than any I've witnessed. From 1am onwards he was sick every half an hour and we ended up spooning in his single bed with Rashimi jabbering away in the background: 'Ith it morning Mummeeeee! Is it morning? Is it, is it?' We limped through the beginning of the day. By 10 am we'd watched James and the Giant Peach, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Shrek.

Being a fairly robust kinda guy, L seemed to be on the mend that afternoon and was not going to miss a friend's birthday swimming party for the sake of a bout of food poisoning. I was changing my clothes to something more modest to leave the house in, and put on a tshirt with spots on it. The Lozenge said: 'You look beautiful Mummy. Jutht like a dotty printhess.' Evidently he was recovered enough to head out.

The swimming was a huge hit - for them. You might have thought that Israel were playing in the World Cup that day for all the blue and white flags, but no, in Israel, this is just a normal day. The place was seething with children in the baby pool which had rather suspect lumps of unrecognisable solid matter floating in it. There was so much chlorine it was like getting the water from the Dead Sea in your eyes. Then the dwarves discovered the water slide, for over 10s only. But the guy waved us on and we hurtled down, over and over again. After the dwarves welfare, my main concern was to keep my bikini on before we were spat out at the bottom into a deep pool.

We made it home, and I raced about trying to make dinner for the dwarves, get changed to go out, and welcome a Sri Lankan babysitter who St Grace had arranged to come over in her absence. She sat shyly on a bench in the hall, and didn't seem to undertand much English. Just as I was trying to plunge the dwarves into a bubble bath, the air raid siren sounded and L did a huge projectile vomit all over the carpet. As I watched the sweet but rather hopeless Sri Lankan lady dabbing at it with a bit of tissue paper, also suggesting we vacuum it up, I realised this wasn't the person to leave our children with during a potential rocket attack.

We canned the evening out, which is one of a number of evenings which have not happened recently and had a night in together which  is often as exciting as a night out these days. The night was punctuated with the air raid siren, sounds of rockets being intercepted, and then hilariously the 'Iftar' cannon which sounds every night at 8pm to signal the hour when all Muslims can break their fast. It also sounds at 4am - and it still catches me out, along with randomly timed fireworks displays. You'd think that at troubled times like these they could have a bell in the mosque to ring instead of having to fire an enormous cannon and cause us to leap for cover.

There are an awful lot of people on the planet whose hearts are with Gaza - but how can this be happening again? Normally there would be an external mediator involved by now - but Egypt, who often fulfilled this role, are not interested now that they've kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood (the main basis of Hamas), so they're no longer interested. Other Arab countries are busy with their own mess, and Internationals are hopping about the sidelines, or not even that, these days.

We internationals, and most Israelis could leave the country if it gets really bad. But the Gazans are stuck there with no escape and no one to turn to but each other and their inner souls.

Though people are wary of suggesting a third intifada as yet, you wonder how much more this tortured nation can take before they retaliate with something other than rockets. There have been 80 so far, and almost all have been intercepted, which must only accentuate the feeling of powerlessness. I have a vision of those martial arts displays where a big guy deftly blocks a punch from a smaller guy, not feeling a thing from the furious fist and infuriating the weaker one until he has to resort to dirtier tricks. 

The backdrop doesn't match

With the background of 'noiseth in the the distanth' and sirens to remind us that our little paradise is perhaps not entirely real, I scratch my head most days and wonder. If someone were to paint our family portrait, the foreground would seem completely incongruous to the backdrop.

Every morning we awake to blue skies, a gentle breeze and a cacophony of birds. We open the doors and shutters and  go straight into our scurfy little yard/garden dotted with lime and lemon trees; a pomegranate and an apricot. It's the first house we've lived in with a garden and it has entirely changed the way we live and interact with one another.

We've invested in a large inflatable paddling pool which has turned the boys from dwarves into nano-nymphs. They are in it most of the time. Which I'm glad about, because St Grace and the dwarves had to take 4 taxi rides worth £15 each way, to get the pool, and then back again when they got home to realise we also needed a pump. Having been encouraged, by the Israeli shop assistant, that if she spent a further £30 she'd get £20 off the pool, shop she did - and came back laden with many other exciting items such as a loo brush and cleaning products. The entire project has cost me near on £100. And my Scottish streak is keener than it used to be (you'll be happy to hear, Dad).

After witnessing St Grace's first shopping foray, I try to do the supermarket trips myself - generally with the dwarves in tow. The round trip takes about 2 hours as the fruit and veg is sold in a separate shop. We struggle through tiny roads of gridlocked traffic with the Lozenge in the front seat and Rashimi swinging off the coat handles in the back like a chimp. The Lozenge insists on his own trolley in the green grocer so he can buy things to make 'thoup'. Rashimi's sticky hand plucks at grapes and piles of dates. The shopkeepers turn a blind eye and help us practise our Arabic.Then we struggle down the street trying not to get squashed by the revving 'Shabaab'(lads) who drive more furiously in Ramadan, encumbered always, by a watermelon, bunches of bananas from Jericho and all the rest.

The locals use a one way street, in the opposite direction, as a short cut. And three men made me (the one who was using the street the correct way) reverse all the way back down the steep slope to allow them to pass, which produced extreme expletives from me. For once the dwarves were silenced as I swore and shouted at the men. Still now when we pass that street, Rashimi reminds me: 'Thothe naughty men was going the WONG way, and made Mummy upTHET!' They are allies at times, these dwarves.

The supermarket is a euphemism for ice cream which is why the dwarves always come shopping, and this week we had to wait half an hour by the suppurating bins in 40 degrees, while Rashimi painstakingly licked his lolly, not allowing anyone, least of all the Lozenge, to come near, and all I could do was watch as the little green and pink rivulets meandered towards his elbow.

I left J and the dwarves for a weekend to go back to London for a school reunion. The dwarves spent the morning I left, stark naked as ever, playing with the plastic picnic set and pretending their noses were a carrot and a corn on the cob and sneezing them off; then Rashimi, who has a fixation with witches at the moment, rode around the house on the plunger that unblocks the sink, still naked, shrieking 'WOOOO HAAAA HAAAA HAAAA!' like a witch. Then they both dived into the paddling pool. When I left for the aiport with Bassem they hopped out to give me a slimy hug. I said: 'Look after Grace and look after Daddy.' And Rashimi said: 'Look after Batthem!' As I say, life on our patch couldn't seem further from Gaza.

But the rumblings in the news were ominous and the British Consulate has cranked into 'crisis mode'. There was a five hour delay to our flight because the Israeli airport staff were on strike, and as I sat on the runway in an orange tube with the air conditioning turning the passengers to ice, I wondered if I was making a terrible mistake leaving the dwarves and J just for a school reunion. I had the nursery rhyme in my head: 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone.' And I remembered that the Lozenge had been drawing pictures of ladybirds at breakfast and maybe that was an omen. After a panic call to J he assured me I was doing the right thing, and to try and enjoy it.

No problem there. The noise levels eminating from the room full of wonderful women, must have been audible at Arsenal (we were in Fulham). Many, many great people I'm still in touch with, but some equally brilliant girls I hadn't seen since 20 years ago, we all raced out of the traps into the wider world brandishing hopes and dreams, and it seems most of us are now living them.

Sometimes when I'm at a party I find my head doing the maths - calculating how many minutes you could have with each person - and I wonder if it's worth it, if all you can do is a conversational skate over the surface of all those lives. Maybe it was the rosé, but very soon, I forgot about that and marvelled at what a start we'd all had in life - not just being at that school, but growing up together, and still having so much to talk about 20 years on. Luckily no one has forgotten how to giggle, or drink. Or was it just me? Miraculously, we're all still alive, and everyone looks GREAT. We are so lucky.

I returned to find happy dwarves, an empty fridge (as thankfully St Grace hadn't been to the shops), and an even more mischievous Rashimi who keeps widdling all over the place now he's worked out how to do a 'man wee wee'.

So the dwarves and I did the sweaty hike to buy some food. I caught Rashimi about to whip down his pants in the fruit store and raced with him round the back of the shop to a revolting loo. As I was bending down to help him, my sunglasses fell off my head and into the loo bowl. Yuk, yuk and yuk. I don't know how I get myself into these tangles in 40 degrees.

The Lozenge spotted something by the checkout. 'Look Mummy! Lipthickth! I want to buy one for Batool (the Glammy our amazing Jordanian nanny we had in Jordan, who we're visiting next week). I pointed out that they were nail varnishes, but he was welcome to choose one for the Glammy. He chose a bright red one, and has wrapped it up in pale blue tissue paper and huge swathes of masking tape.

Rashimi left his fifth little puddle in the house, near the doorway, as though he too is marking his territory like many other people in this land, and I joked: 'If you were a dog, Rashimi, I'd rub your nose in it.'

Later that evening as I was trying to insert the toothbrush between clenched white fangs, he wrapped his sticky arms around my neck and said: 'Mummy, I don't want you to wub my nothe.' You forget that a 2.5 year old world view - is still a literal one.

Last night, J and I mulled over the situation - the tragedies on our doorstep; the Consulate in crisis mode calling us to make sure we're stockpiling food (you try...); messages going around to avoid certain areas. We both agreed we'd spent the day doing our normal thing - J had a meeting in Ramallah, I sat cross legged in my den putting my new film camera together and working out how to use it. A Palestinian friend called to invite us around on Friday night.

We are finding it hard to reconcile the normality of our daily life with the chaos so near at hand.

Noises in the distance

As the Lozenge put it the other night to J: 'It'th noisy in the distanth, Daddy.' From our little oasis in East Jerusalem, only about 60km away from Gaza, we can hear the rockets. Last night a warning siren sounded in our area.

I wonder what the Gazan children are saying to their Dads this week.

As I flew back into Israel from London on Monday the guy at passport control laughed as he saw my passport and said: 'You're coming from a civilization. Why the hell would you want to come here? This is such a horrible place,' shaking his head.

I'd been a bit concerned about leaving J and the dwarves for a weekend, as the country, and the greater region hurtles towards fever pitch. Ramadan and soaring temperatures don't help. And within the space of a fortnight, the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers were found, provoking a vicious cycle of retribution attacks. As their families mourned, people ran through the streets of Jerusalem shouting: 'Death to Arabs.' Then a 16 year old Arab boy was taken by a gang of Israeli settlers, who filled his mouth with petrol and ignited it, dumping his charred body in a forest. Palestinians have been pulled from trams and attacked; there have been 2 failed kidnap attempts on Arab children of only 7 years old. Riots, burning tyres, rocks and stones. And now rockets. In a David and Goliath style inbalance, only the other way around -  the Israelis are fending off the furious Hamas attacks with their Iron Dome which is as good a shield as any could muster but the poor Gazans are taking it so hard.

How do you ever forgive the person responsible for filling your 16 year old son's mouth with petrol and setting light to it? Or for kidnapping your boy while hitchiking - a common way to travel here - killing him and dumping his body somewhere?

As an outsider you have to keep silent. We just don't know what it is to be from here. But it doesn't stop you thinking about it.

The seasoned journalist Aidan Hartley wrote a piece recently, based on a recent visit to Rwanda, from where he had also witnessed and reported on the genocide in 1994. His point was that there is not really a political solution that can stop people from tearing each other apart if that's what they're intent on doing. It is only our spirituality (and I don't think he means religion) as individual human beings that can save us.

Sometimes on a Sunday morning, dwarf decibels willing, I manage to catch a bit of Clare Balding presenting her morning show on Radio 2. I love Clare Balding. Not only did she go to my school but she sparks in me an enthusiasm in televised sport, which often I find hard to muster. A couple of weeks ago she interviewed Mpho Tutu, Desmond's daughter, about her recently published book she wrote with her Dad:  'The Book of Forgiving.' I ordered it, then forgot about it.

It landed in our mail box at the Consulate the same day the bodies of the 3 Israeli teenagers were discovered.

The news from here is all about vicious cycles. Living here, you get to feel history wheeling its huge form around and around, like an ancient mammoth-turned-elephant spinning through time, gathering terrifying momentum at each cumbersome 360 whirl, until no one standing within its wake, can work out what to do.

How can we know it won't go on spinning into infinity?

Is the only key, as Aidan Hartley suggests, within ourselves as individuals? Is this spirituality also the same as forgiveness? And most importantly how long does it take? It seems like the slow path when you're in the thick of it right here - with the Caliphate and the remains of poor, broken Syria, on the other threshold.

Bassem, a Palestinian friend who has just been made redundant, gave me a lift to the airport last week. I asked him about the concept of forgiveness, since he is Palestinian, and over 20 years ago, his brother was shot dead in the Al Aqsa mosque, while praying with many other men, by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

'There are two problems,' he said. 'One is that we still don't know who did it, because there were loads of soldiers it could have been. The other problem is that the bullet used was called a 'dum dum' one that explodes after contact - and the bullet went into his body through his cheek. So you can imagine the image I have in my mind, of my brother now.'

'So does this mean you can't forgive?' I asked.

'Time is good. It eases the pain and it helps you to forget. But forgive? No, I'm not sure I could ever do that.'

I haven't read the book of forgiving yet. I'm too busy reading the news:  'The tragedy of the Arabs:' A poisoned history; 'A vicious circle speeds up again';  'The War for Iraq, every sort of battle'; 'After God'; 'The Jihadi Spy'; 'Sunni vs Shia'. You can't escape it. Which is why I'm also reading Clare Balding's autobiography: 'My Animals and Other Family' which is such a glorious escape from it all. Though it makes me worry we don't have pets for the dwarves to kindle those kinds of early relationships she describes in her book.

Haaretz, the left-leaning paper here (perhaps the equivalent of the Guardian) gives voice to reasonable and reasoned views. But sometimes they seem so quiet. And drowned out by all that background noise, and hatred on the streets.

Bradley Burston, writes an apology to the Palestinians 'for the unforgivable, for the unfathomable, and for all those on my side who never will.'

And Israeli author David Grossman, examines why Israel has not been able to make peace: 'And maybe, just maybe, the despair that has ruled us in recent years is also partly the despair of the doomed, who understand by now that there is no way to avoid punishment for their deeds, or for what they allowed to happen throught their support, or their silecne, or their apathy, so therefore - Why not eat, drink, and make merry while one still can?'

The guy in customs was right. This is a crazy place. But at this point in time, wherever we are in the world, we have to start thinking about it. Not only does it affect us all, but it's not going away.

Breaking barriers

Another bonus of having tots under 5 years old is you can embark on many a social terrain without them noticing.

Last week we struggled through the soupy air into the hot car with burning acrylic car seat on Rashimi's rubbery thighs, en route to the West side, where one of the Lozenge's classmates lives with his new mother. The verdant and carefully trimmed landscape dotted with Israeli flags in their quarter of Jerusalem was a far cry from our scruffy little Arab section with sticky rubbish-strewn pavements, though from their penthouse balcony we had a stunning view of the Dome of the Rock.

The Lozenge's classmate, let's call him Peter, is not actually from here. He's from Siberia, and was adopted with his little brother by his new mother and her husband who were too old to have children themselves. The couple are Messianic Jews (a blend of Evangelical Christianity and Jewish practise and terminology which came into being in the 1960's/70's).

It was interesting seeing our two family realities - four boys from backgrounds which couldn't have been more different - splashing in the paddling pool together. I gazed at Peter and his brother, who started life in a Siberian orphanage, enjoying themselves on their balcony in West Jerusalem - this their first experience of family life which began only last September.  They are lean and athletic and can throw and catch balls like circus performers. But they don't talk much yet. Our boys filled the silence, and gazed at their playmates' gymnastic skills. You could tell they were thinking: 'Wow. Check that out.' Their new mother, in her 50s, admitted honestly that you should be careful what you wish for and that she is only just keeping afloat with her new charges, in the new life they have brought her. But with an energetic quartet of testosteroned tots, there was not much time for navel gazing, and little time for politics - though I did tentatively ask her opinion about the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers, and Netanyahu. It was not a road we'd have been wise to continue on. But we left on good terms after a scorching, shambolic but happy morning.

Back home, the dwarves attacked some cool slices of water melon.

J and I sparked up the barbecue that night, and invited a few people round.

I got off to a shaky start by deciding to do our food shopping for dinner the day before ramadan. (Note to self: never shop the day before ramadan begins, particularly in 45 degrees.) The roads were choked with cars and headscarved women attempting three point turns in front of streams of angry males with sweaty palms on horns. The man at the butcher's section at the supermarket, who has not produced one smile for me in the five months I've been shopping there, looked at me as if I'd asked for 3 kilos of goldfish kebabs, when I asked for lamb cutlets. The shelves were gapingly empty. Then there was a powercut, so I had to wait for the mince, watching the partially dead corpses of flies buzzing resignedly against the fading blue electrifier. I returned, puce, with a paltry selection of products.

That evening there was an enormous explosion, followed by another. I looked at J, thinking I hadn't heard a noise like that since the Taliban bombed the Indian embassy when we lived in Kabul; and wondered if Hamas had finally hit the Knesset. I looked at the boys, and wondered which room we should crouch in when the next bang inevitably came. There was none. And surprisingly no news feeds. A few hours later it transpired it was merely the 'ramadan cannon' doing a few practise shots (without balls). Every morning at 4am and every evening at 8pm the cannon goes off - signifying the moment to stop and begin eating, respectively. How we laughed. But it still makes me jump a little, even now I know what it is.

Inviting a few people around in a new place is never as simple as it sounds. And the cocktails, in both senses, could have gone either way. I felt a little nervous as one man with a very English voice, extolled the virtues of 'stalking in the Highlands' next to a sparky Glaswegian, (confirmed nationalist in his heart yet for this year's referendum he's letting his head rule). I felt relief as I saw the Glaswegian's face light up: 'I just love that sport! Just the feeling you get when you pull the trigger and you know you've killed the stag'; then dismay as I looked at the expression on the face of the staunch vegetarian lady on his left. Luckily the Palestinian contingent, one wonderful man who was more Napoli than Nablus with a box of cuban cigars, and tortoiseshell glasses, soon had us hooting about his experience with our nearby dry cleaners. 'You wrecked my beaauuutiful Italian suit, you moron!' J spent much of the evening squirting the results of the frenzied feline frolics from three months back - litters of kittens, with the dwarves' pump action water pistol. And despite one lady fainting from the heat, the evening went more smoothly than it might have done with the ecclectic mix around the table. Often these days, our best moment is when everyone has gone and J and I get to tidy up and then slump on the sofa, finishing the wine and mulling over the evening. There was plenty to mull in this instance.

The following morning, I witnessed some inevitable bonding between feline and human small creatures and watched as the Lozenge tiptoed out to the garden with a bowl of milk for the kittens. 'Now I'm going to draw a picture of birds for the kittenth,' he said when he came in, which he did, then laid it out beside the bowl of milk. We watched from the window as the kitten sank its little face into the cool liquid and drank it all up. I really hate the feral parents of these creatures, but their offspring remind me so much of our own - feet slightly too big for their frames, and pluckily confident as they try and pad into the house without us noticing. This is probably why, when I saw one little face peeping out from behind the sage bush, I felt a little pang of sympathy. Oh dear. A slippery slope. I can hear J loading the water pistol in retaliation to this motion.

Later, I found J and the dwarves in their bedroom reading Ant and Bee in the dark with the 'air condithionning' on full blast. It's a job keeping cool. So we went off to a swimming pool and picnic area about 20km from Jerusalem. It's on the Israeli side of the 'green line' so I was not expecting the scene we arrived to find.

Large swathes of olive toned (though not so honed) flesh was on display, as lots of little families sat around in deck chairs, happily picnicking.  I couldn't understand why everyone was chomping, it being midday in ramadan, but one look at the huge crucifix tattoos and other Christian emblems confirmed that these were all Arab Christians evidently escaping the heat and restrictions of ramadan. They were all incredibly friendly and chatty. One lady, Angela, laughed: 'If you come here on a Sunday you will find ALL of the Old City's Arab Christian population on a break from the intensity of it all. Please come again - we would love to see you.'

Many of the men were vast, and one of my favourite tattoos was a head of Jesus branded onto a bulging upper stomach, which when the owner sat down, was almost entirely engulfed, revealing only a little mouth, seemingly gasping for air from under the man-boobies.

The dwarves for once excelled themselves, happily splatting about with wet feet and arms at an armbanded angle, even managing to share out their bag of Haribo and muttering the odd Arabic greeting. The cool water and friendly environment with complete strangers, did us all a world of good.

They have found the bodies of the Israeli teenagers. And the atmosphere is getting extremely tense. So it's good to have an escape from all this within a stone's throw, so to speak, from Jerusalem.

Pork, pimms and aliens

We awoke to a cool breeze, slightly deflated balloons dangling, and other sticky remnants of the birthday tea. Then J and I stepped into the car and drove to Jordan for a couple of days work, for once - together. The men at Jordanian customs looked at J and said: 'Oh! She's your wife?!' We drove up the winding road to Amman past jingling trucks loaded with tomatoes, and dusty lorries roaring in low gears uphill, sagging under the weight of sand coloured rocks. We listened to The Eagles trying not to spill our paper cups of scalding, muddy 'Qahueh Arabiye'.

We did our respective bits of work, then went to collect some books written by a friend, which have just been translated into Arabic. It's extremely difficult for an Arab to deliver anything from Jordan to Palestine and vice versa, so we were happy to be able to help. And it was a good excuse to see our friend Mohammad, an elderly, charming Palestinian who is Emeritus professor of English literature at Jordan University. His English is almost Edwardian, it's so classic. He's unmarried with no children, so I always try to keep domestic details at bay. Though kindly, he always asks after the dwarves.

He was telling us some interesting vignettes, so I whipped out my notebook to jot them down, only to realise my notebook had been hijacked by the little people, and there was barely a free page. I had to scribble in between sketches of dragons, dinosaurs and aliens.

Mohammad didn't seem to notice.

Then we clanked back to Jerusalem, the car loaded with pork and Pimms.

A working trip to Jordan reminded me how much you can fit into a day when the domestic creeper is not interlacing your every minute. To get the dwarves to do anything at the moment, there has to be a game involved. To get Rashimi out of his cot it's a case of: Me" 'Little piiiig, little piiiig, let me come iiiiiin.' Rashimi: 'No, no, no, by the hairth on my tiiiinny tinnn tinnn!' After about 20 minutes we have managed to insert a toothbrush through clenched teeth; another 20 and we've put on a pair of pants. ('No, I don't want my Fwiday pantth, I want my Monday oneth!') We've had to resort back to disco dressing where we dance to music and put on an item of clothing when the music stops. And it's nearing 45 degrees most days.

Though Rashimi is holding out for some rain.

A thmall thurprithe

Mrs Coyne, our elderly next door neighbour where we grew up, always used to say that there were three parts to an event: the looking forward, the event itself and the eternal memory of it. Now I realise she was a philosopher in her own right, though that observation would have passed me by the age I was then.

Unfortunately for J, he missed out on the first of the three parts for his birthday weekend. But I got a large dose of all three - including his share of the first, by arranging a bit of a 'thurprithe' as it is known in our household...

We'd had a good time at the Queen's Birthday Party in the garden at the British Consulate in Jerusalem. The pimms was the colour of stewed tea, and I drank three, and the beer kegs eternally flowing. At 8.30pm I saw J chatting away with someone, leaning against a wall, cigar in hand, and wondered how I would tear him away. I made up an excuse that St Grace had found a free ride to the Jordanian border, and we tootled our way back home rather tipsily in the darkness.

When we arrived, there were four figures sitting in the darkness out the back of our house. Two were wearing Haredim hats with sidelocks; another two were in Palestinian thobe dresses and Jordanian keffiyehs. They were muttering to each other with drinks in their hands. J was evidently confused and a little worried. Who were these strangers sitting in our house? I was filming the whole thing on my iPhone, and as I saw his face become more and more concerned, I encouraged them to reveal:

And there they all were: Rosie and Harry, Bertie and Lucy - ready to spend a weekend of adventures with us in Jerusalem. J had no idea, and was suitably amazed and happy.

Little did he know that Rosie and Harry were hiding in St Grace's room when he came back to change before the Queen's birthday bash, and St Grace had had to whisk the dwarves off for a hot and sweaty walk in the street so they didn't let the cat out of the bag.

We don't have a huge number of bosom buddies here after only 5 months in the city - but to share our little oasis of a house with people we know so well and love so much, and to get to explore together, was just what J and I needed. And our visitors did more than enter into the spirit. Each minute was full of hilarity, conversation and the occasional sip of wine. (hiccup) A tonic indeed. And plenty of gin to go with it.

They stayed for four days, and after they'd left I was reminded of Mrs Coyne's philosophy as I sat having lunch with the dwarves. Rather than letting myself feel sad they'd all gone - I reminded myself of the riches to be found in memories.

The muezzin struck up as we began our lunch: 'Hath Daddy gone to the mothque?' squawked Rashimi.

'No Washimi, that is Daddy actually singing from the mothque!' answered the Lozenge.

On J's actual birthday, the dwarves and I arranged a small tea party with an emphasis on chocolate and balloons, since it is mostly the small people who were in charge of party planning and arrangements in our house. But I was allowed a tiny say over the flowers and the cake recipe.

It's amazing how little you need to have fun when armed with two children under 5.

At 8pm the Lozenge sat slumped on a hat box which belonged to J's grandfather. 'Oh Mummy, I just want the party to start all over again. It wath so much fun.'