A noisy nativity and perception, or is it qerceqtion?

I was busying in the kitchen making bolognese sauce in a surprise half hour that came my way. It was an emergency bolognese because the mince had been looking at me from a shelf in the fridge for about a week. I put on some carols from King's College. Not very Bolognese but it got me in the mood and helped me enjoy my scattergun chopping and sprinkling and stirring. We'd just got back from the 'noisy nativity' theatre performance at the school in which the dwarfs had featured as donkey and shepherd and the Pea made noisier with her new parakeet shriek. The Lozenge was outside the kitchen in his favourite crafty place which always looks like a tinker's cabin. You have to step over cardboard boxes with wonky holes snipped into them, collect a small pompom or a sticky pipe cleaner on the sole of your shoe as you tackle the obstacle course. That familiar crack as you crunch down on some hidden bubble wrap, and the core control required not to drop the baby as you negotiate. So the Lozenge was crafting away making a vending machine to sell his 'raisin pies', and he  wandered in singing along to Once in Royal David's City with the celotape in his hand, effortlessly hitting that top note: 'Maaaaaary was that mother mild...' smack on, and then asking me to find the end of the tape as he'd lost it again for the fourth time since he started. And then slipped out again in his socks to get on with his job. No idea of the bliss. No idea that this is where it all began. No idea of that feeling which this normal life gives at times, and which I never knew existed until it all began for us.

Back in he came, feeling like a chat about squid. I put down the wooden spoon and sat to listen while the bolognese bubbled.

' Sometimeth, Mummy there is an underwater battle between a sperm whale and a colossal suqid. And the squid...and the squid...Mummy, are you listening...and the squid puts its clawth into the sperm whale. And did you know that there is 2 types of squid. A giant squid, and a colossal squid. And the colossal one is bigger. The colossal squid has hooks and a giant squid just has suckers.'

Trying to get the dwarfs to clear up is a permanent state of play, but we're not allowed to tidy according to the Lozenge, because: 'This, Mummy, is imagination land.' I replied: 'Before you go back to imagination land, maybe we could just tidy this up just a tiny, tiny bit so that we can walk from the big room into the kitchen without coming out the other side looking like the Skip Creature.  'But that won't work Mummeeee!' sang the Lozenge: 'Because imagination land is here all the time. And you know what? Imagination land is a bit of a messy pla-ace!'

It's all about perceptions, according to the Lozenge's lady he goes to see about how he sees things, compared to how they actually are. To the Lozenge a q is sometimes a p and a b sometimes a d. But not always, just sometimes.

And as the learning support lady, who's a really nice Jewish Australian, was talking all about perception and how she can work a little bit on how the Lozenge sees things, I realised that perception is the root of everything because we all perceive things in our own way. People and places are different to all of us. And someone else's truth is sometimes not enough of a reason to change the way you see something. Is that dad or is it bab? A bog or a dog?

I have a necklace I wear which J gave me with the first letters of all my boys' names, and a bead for the Pea. On one disc it says: 'Walk on the Wild Side' which when my dad, or should I say my bab, saw it, he said: 'Oh no, lovie. Not any more. Surely?' But it reminds me that even in a domestic ditch there is a way of finding a little bit of wildness. Not hard with dwarfs and a pea in tow, but also to let the three go occasionally and have a foray on your own.

Hardly wild, some would say. Though for Israeli's it's illegal to go to area A of the 'Wild West Bank'. But for me, Nablus, a northern West Bank town wasn't so wild, but just a small adventure in itself. Enough after a few winks of sleep and two dwarfs and a pea wriggling in the bed and creating static in the dry air so we all looked like the aforementioned pom poms. And a nice small job to do for a friend, who lost his wife earlier this year, and has set up a wonderful foundation in her name, allowing Palestinian refugee girls to go onto further education, which they wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford. Here's what I made for him to inspire more money for the cause:

https://vimeo.com/147870109

She's a lovely girl, Ghaida'a. When I arrived in her front room I was a bit concerned. Her room was beige, her sofas were beige, her long manteau coat covering her lovely 17 year old figure, was beige. Her headscarf was beige, her face was a bit beige, and so was her Mum. I got that sweaty palmed feeling I get when I'm just trying to figure out how to get a spark and a story out of my perception of reality. But when we started to talk, the spark was in her, that was for sure. And her bedroom was pink. And she had a balcony, and a turquoise headscarf in her cupboard.

Not only is she not beige - she's also a role model and one that Palestinian society, even girls, need so much of at the moment. The stabbing attacks have continued. 2 little girls armed with scissors ran at 2 Israeli soldiers trying to attack them. One was shot dead, and the other shot but not killed. It's the new form of suicide because they almost always die these tweeny stabbers. Ghaida'a could have been one of those. What is the difference, and how do we perceive our roles in the world? What makes us become a 5 star student or a tweeny stabber? It transcends class and economic status and it's not going away. The Isreali reaction has been criticised by some:

'"Our rules of engagement are more permissive than restrictive, but when you have a trembling girl with scissors in her hands, you don't need to riddle her with ten bullets. You could kick her or shoot her in the leg," a Senior IDF commander says, "We learned a lesson from both intifadas – Palestinian deaths cause outbursts of violence.”

As Israeli novelist and playwright, A.B. Yehoshua wrote recently:
"(Netanyahu) has condemned, expressed anger, threatened to take retaliation steps and promised that Israel's security forces are capable of overcoming the attack. But there is one thing he has failed to do: He has failed to turn to the young Palestinians in a human, direct manner, offering them hope, in a bid to stop the acts of murder and outline a possibility for a better future for them and for us."

Palestinian young people need some form of hope for their future to be worth something.

We're going to have to watch out, as Europeans, not to emulate the Israeli State's security example over securitisation and Islamophobia. It's a worry, as Europe swings back around to the right.

"Even if we really try, the settlements and the occupation in the Territories will not become legitimate thanks to radical Islamic terrorists who strike in the heart of Paris…Neither will the world agree to support the continuation of the occupation, the settlements and our control of the Palestinian people under the disguise of a global war on terror."
--Peace Now Secretary General, Yariv Oppenheimer, writes in a local paper that the attempt by the right-wing to gain a political profit at the expense of the dead and wounded in Paris is “nothing less than cheap demagogy.”

I went to Nablus with a great Palestinian guy from East Jerusalem who helped translate for me. When we got back we picked up his two little children from their nursery school. They chatted to me in Arabic and then looked at me suddenly with big brown eyes - wide with fear. 'Fi yehud fi al aqsa'. 'There are Jews at Al Aqsa (mosque)'. Bad media can easily twist young minds and encourage a perception that isn't entire.

Then I went out and about near Qalqilya in the West Bank to make some short films and take photographs for a land mine clearing organisation. The cool blue sky was tinged with a wintry pink and we set out to interview a farmer who can now return to his patch of land and care for his olive trees, with his grandchildren, without worrying about stepping on a mine.  'I love the olive tree like my son' said the grandfather, 'there is no monetary value to it as I love it with my heart.'

'The land is the privilege of the human being' said his 11 year old grandson, Karam.

Such depth of feeling towards their tiny sliver of precious land - constantly in threat of being taken from them as has happened to so many little plots around the occupied Palestinian territories, and  Israeli settlements built.

So their perception of their land is heartfelt, as its future is always in question. And the meaning grows as deep as the roots of their lovely trees.

And finally on to interview an 88 year old man with the clearest voice, and the sharpest memories, about how he laid these mines with the Jordanian army in the 1950s. He sat there, his wife beside him, explaining how he couldn't have known back then that these land mines intended for their enemy, Israel, would be littered around their own lands nearly 70 years on.

Here he is with his lady who he married when he was 18.