I've just come from our local street with the three small people: the pavement sticky underfoot and the passers by pale and quiet in this last week of ramadan. The dwarfs had a haircut with the Armenian hairdresser. While the Lozenge swept up the hair - his favourite pursuit - I chatted to a Adjoco, a lady from Togo who will be doing St Grace's hair braids next week. St Grace feels like a new hair do so I say I'll pay for it. Her husband takes her money so I know she can't afford it. We: a Togolese, two Armenian Jerusalemites and a Sri Lankan, all talk together, looking at the braid colours and whittling down the price in a mix of Arabic, French and English on an East Jerusalem street in ramadan. The Pea escapes a hairdo this time. She has a good punk look at the moment - a messy fountain of fine fluffy hair.
What a week to buy a map of the world tablecloth. 'Look Mummy Baghdad is REALLY quite close to us,' says the Lozenge - a buttery finger pointed to where J is now at work in 40 degrees and alone, but doing fine. And above us, just a small stretch of water away, what I used to think was our peaceful and sensible continent, now ripped asunder by politicians gambling our destinies for their egos: throwing away half a century of peaceful intent, on the cenenary of the battle of the Somme - only a hundred years since we were killing each other's young men and drawing lines in the sand in this region where we now live, for greed and ownership of a land that was never ours in the first place. And all of this while we live happily in Jerusalem: a 13 year old Israeli girl stabbed to death in her bedroom near Hebron; another Israeli stabbed in central Hebron. The city is now closed off. Palestinians shot dead all over the place. And Turkey, poor Turkey.
The world looks so small on our kitchen table, its pattern repeating over and over, the continents and oceans until the fabric runs out. And sometimes over our breakfast of home made plum jam from my new Italian friend and neighbour who has become a firm ally in this extraordinary week, I wonder if the world will run out also.
And yet. This week's pixellated memories, over-exposed in the bright southern mediterranean sunlight on the first day of July: our car in the grip of East Jerusalem traffic deadlock on the way back from the beach. I travel with five children -- only two of which are my own. I am the only adult, and I'm at the wheel trying not to savage the side of our car again with a tour bus taking up more than its share of the road. A sea of people walks past us: all muslim, all smiling, all peaceful, all extremely hungry, on their way to the Haram e Sharif to worship on the final Friday of ramadan before Eid ul Fitr begins next week. A day on the beach behind us, a car full of sand at our feet, I have a red sunburnt patches in the shapes of various archipelagos on my back. 'But that one is like a red Green land!' the small people shriek as I show them the damage. They - the five - the reason for my burnt patch as I'm the only adult amongst them, and Rashimi's determined, soft, nut brown hand didn't do the coverage, quite. But we're happy and we've had a fun time. The children spent an hour diverting the shower water from people washing themselves a couple of metres above us, into rivulets down the beach. They move big stones, and scrape sand, make tiny dams, and if I'd let them, the rivers of water would've met the ocean. And they'd have been there til midnight, no water, no sunscreen - such is the contentment of small people when they have committed to something. They have a shower and I have to bribe them all with a slush puppy to come off the beach. They stand around the machine as it crunches the ice, waiting their turn.
A drone circles overhead from the Israeli military training ground near the beach. We drive back in silence: two in the 'very back' playing a game on one of my old phones which says: 'Temperature Alert! Let phone cool down before using', as it's been sitting in the car all day. The three in the 'normal back' watching Bob the Builder on an ipad. We roll back up the route 443 - past Modi'in, a white concrete city which looks like possibly the safest and possibly the most boring place to live in the world. A security balloon hovers above the west bank village opposite. I think to myself that I might rather live under the security balloon away from the white gated city, and near the colourful ramshakle Arab houses, even near the minaret.
And then we get stuck in the friendly ramadan bottle necks as we wait for the pedestrian worshipers to pass. But nobody cares - the Israeli soldiers let us through, the muslim pilgrims smile as I wind down the window to let in some real air. And all the while people are being shot and stabbed down the road in Hebron and up the road in Qalandiya.
This week the UK has voted to leave Europe and J has started work in Baghdad. These are tremendous upheavals near and far, home and away - though now away is home, and home is away. For us. Our referendum result feels scary and disappointing, and our European friends are annoyed with us and think we're crazy. 'But we don't want this,' we say, 'Don't forget our nearly 50 per cent of people who didn't.' But what can we really say - because our country has said what it needs. A frightening number of us are xenophobes, stoked by our irresonsible politicians to this rift.
Also this week I watched 'The Audience' with Helen Mirren broadcast at the Cinamatheque Jerusalem with my new Italian friend and my elderly Israeli friend Zuli. I go to collect Zuli and have a glass of white wine with her and her husband, Avi. She opens the door to me dressed in a white dress covered in large black spots. It's an old Vogue pattern' she says,' it's fabulous this material - it's stretch - bought in Lewisham. I made it myself!' We sit and discuss the situation. I'm in the company of Anglophiles - they lived in London for 43 years and they're as keen to discuss as I. Avi, a former GP, says, in the well-measured unemotional way of a scientist: 'we don't have enough information yet to know if this will be a good or a bad thing.' Zuli says she loves Theresa May as she has such good taste in shoes. We giggle. What else is there to do?
It's a serendipitous week to watch seven British prime ministers' converstaions with the Queen. Harold Wilson - 1974 - could have been today. The gloom. The beginning of it all. And now the end, or so it seems. J had his birthday this week - we had a cracking party which we needed on June 24. 'The Union was almost the same age as me,' sighed J.
I give Zuli a ride home and I say as we drive into West Jerusalem: 'I always wondered what it really felt like when people told me they wept for their country, but now I'm beginning to understand.' Zuli just chuckles so loudly: 'Well you are welcome in our club.' She doesn't like the kosher restaurants - the people - she's secular through and through. My new Gazan friend Jeje who I met in my latest trip also messages me saying: 'Dear Lucy I am so sorry for what is happening in your country.' The Palesstinian man in the supermarket shakes his head and says: 'Hedi moshkeleh kabiiireh, kabiireh. This is a big big problem. And us Palestinians know about big problems.' Oh dear I don't know whether it helps or doesn't help being here. But all I know is you look up and listen when a Gazan, an Israeli and an East Jerusalem Arab tell you they are sad for you about your country.
I drive J over to Amman to get his flight to Baghdad. The boys wave us off at the gate and J is visibly moved. He says: 'You know that 99 per cent of people wouldn't have agreed to take on what you have. Actually, there's no one. No one would have. Staying here in this place while I am there. This support you give - there's no one else who could give me this.' We have a bubble of our own while we talk about our world - greater and smaller. The sun is dipping below us, over the lunar-scape of the borderland and we drive into a fasting Jordan, almost reaching iftar the breaking or 'opening' of the fast at the end of the day. 'Ramadan Kareem' says the friendly border guard we know quite well now, and when J explains he's travelling to Baghdad he says he visited once in Saddam's day and he agrees with his fellow guards: 'Oh it was a wonderful place then. Much, much better place.' I look down at my British passport and have to write my nationality on the paper: what have we done here and now what have we done to ourselves? Maybe the two are linked. From Blair to Cameron and Boris and now the Chilcot report expected in 4 days. Who knows what further monsters will be unleashed with that. Will there be anything left of our dignity?
J and I have a moment at the aiport. I don't cry because I believe in him, and I believe in him doing what he's doing. And I also I believe in us 4 and what we're doing back in Jerusalem. 'Don't forget to enjoy it,' I say to him. 'Don't forget to pop your head up occasionally and go, wow, I'm in Baghdad, even if all you can see is grey cubed buildings and gurkhas with guns and those famous smiles.' And he says to me: 'I'm with you every step of the way,' and I know this and I can feel it as I begin my journey back to our three children in Jerusalem and our life, which we'll be in charge of while he's away.
The sun is now almost completely set as I head back West, the same border guard asks me to join him and his friends for their iftar meal to break their fast. I am humbled by their offer and wonder what UKBorder police would do as an equivalent to a passing foreigner. But no, I explain, I am headed back to my children, and they need no more explanation than that.
As I cross no man's land I stop to get this picture of Nature and of Man, and the lines: this time above the sand. A few metres safely above the ones that were drawn by our British representatives here, 100 years before us. And I feel like I am literally driving into the future and with it all the question marks about theirs, here, and this time also, our own.
What a week to buy a map of the world tablecloth. 'Look Mummy Baghdad is REALLY quite close to us,' says the Lozenge - a buttery finger pointed to where J is now at work in 40 degrees and alone, but doing fine. And above us, just a small stretch of water away, what I used to think was our peaceful and sensible continent, now ripped asunder by politicians gambling our destinies for their egos: throwing away half a century of peaceful intent, on the cenenary of the battle of the Somme - only a hundred years since we were killing each other's young men and drawing lines in the sand in this region where we now live, for greed and ownership of a land that was never ours in the first place. And all of this while we live happily in Jerusalem: a 13 year old Israeli girl stabbed to death in her bedroom near Hebron; another Israeli stabbed in central Hebron. The city is now closed off. Palestinians shot dead all over the place. And Turkey, poor Turkey.
The world looks so small on our kitchen table, its pattern repeating over and over, the continents and oceans until the fabric runs out. And sometimes over our breakfast of home made plum jam from my new Italian friend and neighbour who has become a firm ally in this extraordinary week, I wonder if the world will run out also.
And yet. This week's pixellated memories, over-exposed in the bright southern mediterranean sunlight on the first day of July: our car in the grip of East Jerusalem traffic deadlock on the way back from the beach. I travel with five children -- only two of which are my own. I am the only adult, and I'm at the wheel trying not to savage the side of our car again with a tour bus taking up more than its share of the road. A sea of people walks past us: all muslim, all smiling, all peaceful, all extremely hungry, on their way to the Haram e Sharif to worship on the final Friday of ramadan before Eid ul Fitr begins next week. A day on the beach behind us, a car full of sand at our feet, I have a red sunburnt patches in the shapes of various archipelagos on my back. 'But that one is like a red Green land!' the small people shriek as I show them the damage. They - the five - the reason for my burnt patch as I'm the only adult amongst them, and Rashimi's determined, soft, nut brown hand didn't do the coverage, quite. But we're happy and we've had a fun time. The children spent an hour diverting the shower water from people washing themselves a couple of metres above us, into rivulets down the beach. They move big stones, and scrape sand, make tiny dams, and if I'd let them, the rivers of water would've met the ocean. And they'd have been there til midnight, no water, no sunscreen - such is the contentment of small people when they have committed to something. They have a shower and I have to bribe them all with a slush puppy to come off the beach. They stand around the machine as it crunches the ice, waiting their turn.
A drone circles overhead from the Israeli military training ground near the beach. We drive back in silence: two in the 'very back' playing a game on one of my old phones which says: 'Temperature Alert! Let phone cool down before using', as it's been sitting in the car all day. The three in the 'normal back' watching Bob the Builder on an ipad. We roll back up the route 443 - past Modi'in, a white concrete city which looks like possibly the safest and possibly the most boring place to live in the world. A security balloon hovers above the west bank village opposite. I think to myself that I might rather live under the security balloon away from the white gated city, and near the colourful ramshakle Arab houses, even near the minaret.
And then we get stuck in the friendly ramadan bottle necks as we wait for the pedestrian worshipers to pass. But nobody cares - the Israeli soldiers let us through, the muslim pilgrims smile as I wind down the window to let in some real air. And all the while people are being shot and stabbed down the road in Hebron and up the road in Qalandiya.
This week the UK has voted to leave Europe and J has started work in Baghdad. These are tremendous upheavals near and far, home and away - though now away is home, and home is away. For us. Our referendum result feels scary and disappointing, and our European friends are annoyed with us and think we're crazy. 'But we don't want this,' we say, 'Don't forget our nearly 50 per cent of people who didn't.' But what can we really say - because our country has said what it needs. A frightening number of us are xenophobes, stoked by our irresonsible politicians to this rift.
Also this week I watched 'The Audience' with Helen Mirren broadcast at the Cinamatheque Jerusalem with my new Italian friend and my elderly Israeli friend Zuli. I go to collect Zuli and have a glass of white wine with her and her husband, Avi. She opens the door to me dressed in a white dress covered in large black spots. It's an old Vogue pattern' she says,' it's fabulous this material - it's stretch - bought in Lewisham. I made it myself!' We sit and discuss the situation. I'm in the company of Anglophiles - they lived in London for 43 years and they're as keen to discuss as I. Avi, a former GP, says, in the well-measured unemotional way of a scientist: 'we don't have enough information yet to know if this will be a good or a bad thing.' Zuli says she loves Theresa May as she has such good taste in shoes. We giggle. What else is there to do?
It's a serendipitous week to watch seven British prime ministers' converstaions with the Queen. Harold Wilson - 1974 - could have been today. The gloom. The beginning of it all. And now the end, or so it seems. J had his birthday this week - we had a cracking party which we needed on June 24. 'The Union was almost the same age as me,' sighed J.
I give Zuli a ride home and I say as we drive into West Jerusalem: 'I always wondered what it really felt like when people told me they wept for their country, but now I'm beginning to understand.' Zuli just chuckles so loudly: 'Well you are welcome in our club.' She doesn't like the kosher restaurants - the people - she's secular through and through. My new Gazan friend Jeje who I met in my latest trip also messages me saying: 'Dear Lucy I am so sorry for what is happening in your country.' The Palesstinian man in the supermarket shakes his head and says: 'Hedi moshkeleh kabiiireh, kabiireh. This is a big big problem. And us Palestinians know about big problems.' Oh dear I don't know whether it helps or doesn't help being here. But all I know is you look up and listen when a Gazan, an Israeli and an East Jerusalem Arab tell you they are sad for you about your country.
I drive J over to Amman to get his flight to Baghdad. The boys wave us off at the gate and J is visibly moved. He says: 'You know that 99 per cent of people wouldn't have agreed to take on what you have. Actually, there's no one. No one would have. Staying here in this place while I am there. This support you give - there's no one else who could give me this.' We have a bubble of our own while we talk about our world - greater and smaller. The sun is dipping below us, over the lunar-scape of the borderland and we drive into a fasting Jordan, almost reaching iftar the breaking or 'opening' of the fast at the end of the day. 'Ramadan Kareem' says the friendly border guard we know quite well now, and when J explains he's travelling to Baghdad he says he visited once in Saddam's day and he agrees with his fellow guards: 'Oh it was a wonderful place then. Much, much better place.' I look down at my British passport and have to write my nationality on the paper: what have we done here and now what have we done to ourselves? Maybe the two are linked. From Blair to Cameron and Boris and now the Chilcot report expected in 4 days. Who knows what further monsters will be unleashed with that. Will there be anything left of our dignity?
J and I have a moment at the aiport. I don't cry because I believe in him, and I believe in him doing what he's doing. And I also I believe in us 4 and what we're doing back in Jerusalem. 'Don't forget to enjoy it,' I say to him. 'Don't forget to pop your head up occasionally and go, wow, I'm in Baghdad, even if all you can see is grey cubed buildings and gurkhas with guns and those famous smiles.' And he says to me: 'I'm with you every step of the way,' and I know this and I can feel it as I begin my journey back to our three children in Jerusalem and our life, which we'll be in charge of while he's away.
The sun is now almost completely set as I head back West, the same border guard asks me to join him and his friends for their iftar meal to break their fast. I am humbled by their offer and wonder what UKBorder police would do as an equivalent to a passing foreigner. But no, I explain, I am headed back to my children, and they need no more explanation than that.
As I cross no man's land I stop to get this picture of Nature and of Man, and the lines: this time above the sand. A few metres safely above the ones that were drawn by our British representatives here, 100 years before us. And I feel like I am literally driving into the future and with it all the question marks about theirs, here, and this time also, our own.
