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.'

And 5 short photo films

I made these for UNICEF about 5 Syrian children living in Jordan. Each child shows extraordinary resilience and clarity of thought.

"Since the start of the conflict in Syria, children have felt its impact in different ways. In this series of photo films, five Syrian children, now living as refugees in Jordan, speak of their experiences and how the war has transformed their lives, and their futures."

https://vimeo.com/98416648 Mohammad

https://vimeo.com/98415104 Eyad

https://vimeo.com/98413069 Alia

https://vimeo.com/98412080 Ahmad

https://vimeo.com/98410808 Adnan

Documentary: The Darat al Funun

https://vimeo.com/99365257

My film about one of Jordan's jewels - finished, polished and ready to view!

It's probably best if you download it, then watch, as it's HD.

Watch it on full screen if you can. It will take 40 minutes of your time, so completely understood if that's too long. But this place is a beautiful and inspiring gem; an oasis and escape from a dusty city, and we hope far enough from the tentacles of the caliphate in the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham.

There is still much going on in this region to be celebrated.

The eyes are the window

There's a saying that the eyes are the window to a person's soul. But through the course of a day spent with Jerusalem's St John Eye Hospital outreach team, I realised they are also a window to much more besides.

The body, nutrition, environmnent. And in this part of the world, this also means politics.

I was invited to go along with the outreach team, as the hospital might need me to make a short film about their work to help them fundraise. We set out in a small minibus: 4 male and female nurses and an opthalmic doctor, a dedicated driver, and me.

We were headed to a village near the city of Hebron, or Al Khalil, as it's known in Arabic. The landscape grew drier and rockier as we headed south - but much of the land was also cultivated with vines. Farah, the one female nurse who I chatted to most of the way, is from Hebron originally, and she explained to me that people from there are renowned for their strength; their love of food and women and their grapes. 'Women from Al Khalil are always beautifully turned out,' she said.

Just as the luscious vines lining the road.

We arrived in a diminutive village full of inhabitants who once were Bedouin, but have begun to creep into small urbanised pockets as many other nomadic peoples are forced to do in our times. We might have been going back 100 years from the outfits, footwear and rugged facial features of the patients who lined up silently outside the small makeshift surgery where the hospital staff were setting up. The building had a sign outside: 'The Non-Violent Resistance Museum of Al Twaani.' The patients were mostly old men and women, but many brought grandchildren with them, with eye complaints to be checked.

The staff arranged themselves in 2 rooms - one registration and one inspection. Their modern metal opthalmic equipment from Switzerland stood in stark contrast to the dusty little building steadily filling up with villagers. The staff, all Palestinian, exuded patience, sympathy and professionalism.

The Eye Hospital is a charitable organisation which provides vital opthalmic care for residents of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. In 2013 they treated 114,000 patients, 33% of whom were children; and performed 4,300 sight saving operations. Huge numbers of Palestinians suffer from diabetic retinopathy. The diabetes is often diagnosed for the first time through the eye hospital teams. Endemic genetic diseases, the diet, the stress of living in this open prison and the tense political environment cause a great number of physical complaints, many of them spotted for the first time by these dedicated eye doctors and nurses. Without this outreach, there would be nothing. That morning, one of the villagers told us, the Israeli settlers up the road had been slamming their cars into the villagers' donkeys and sheep.

Their eyes reveal everything.

The air in the makeshift surgery was calm with the feeling of relief from villagers - some of whom would not be able to afford to reach a surgery even in nearby Hebron, and many of whom will never be allowed into Jerusalem as they don't have the right permit. One elderly lady, dressed in a long black 'thobe' covered in traditional embroidery, asked me: 'Keif Al Quds? Keif Al Aqsa?' 'How is Jerusalem? What is the Al Aqsa mosque like?' with a dreamy look in her eyes. I'm always struck by how intense this lifetime of longing must be for Palestinians without a permit to enter Jerusalem. They are such a tiny distance away. Separated only by a few dry hillocks covered in olive trees, and the residue of nearly 70 years of politics and its physical and metaphorical barbed wire.

But there is great pride in their birthplace nonetheless. One of the local people helping the outreach staff was called: 'Falasteen' (Arabic for Palestine). It's like me being called, 'Scotland' I said to her, wondering to myself how many babies by that name might be born this year of all years.

'I LOVE my name!' she exclaimed. 'For me, it says everything.'

On the way back to Jerusalem I chatted some more to the lovely female nurse. Farah is one of those people who seems too big for her environment. At 40 years old, she is very attractive with twinkling eyes and a dedicated and caring approach to life and her work, which I imagine must make her a very effective mother of two teenagers, whose photos she proudly showed me. She is so exasperated by the injustice and limitations of her confines, and isn't shy to explain the differences between our two lives. I have got a little better at being less apologetic, and just listening to tales, instead. She explained to me: 'My husband has a green I.D. (West Bank) and I have a blue one (East Jerusalem) so we only just manage to live together in Jerusalem. It's not easy, as he's not really meant to be here. But if we left, I would lose my Jerusalem I.D. And we want to offer our children a blue one too, so they have a right to stay in this city. But now I'm worried, because as they reach the marrying age, they are going to have trouble. Life is now dictated by green and by blue here. We are making strategic choices for our lives based on these colours, not on what our hearts say.'

She's worried for her 16 year old boy now more than ever. 'In our village near Jerusalem it's like there's a war. The Israeli police are everywhere questioning people about the kidnappings and ransacking Palestinian houses up and down the country.'

Farah told me she has done everything to bring up her boy understanding that violent resistance is not the way forward. And she admits his friends are good and sensible. But how much does it take for a teenage Arab boy to see red in the end?

We agreed the timing of the World Cup couldn't be better - providing other things to be involved with at midnight than kicking tyres and starting fires.

I told her about listening to Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian author and lawyer, on Desert Island Discs - and what he had managed to achieve without succumbing to violence. On his desert island he said he would take some seeds to plant. I assured her that there was a big world out there that did care about the cause, even if the politicians let us all down time and time again. As one of her colleagues added, having listened to our conversation: 'Nothing ever stays the same, so we live in hope.'

I got home to find Rashimi building a cave from sofa cushions and the Lozenge outside fashioning a car wash from a mop, some chairs and a watering can, with a Postman Pat van underneath preparing for a drenching. I listened to their patter. They were unaware that I was there: 'Washimi, it is Daddy's birthday next week, so you will have to put on a pwetty dreth.'

St Grace is going away for a little trip to Jordan this weekend for a Sri Lankan concert with her husband. Sometimes I don't know how to show her how much I appreaciate her soulful presence about the place, which keeps our little caravan on the straightest path, as I weave around it doing little bits of work here and there. So I told her how much I appreciated her and gave her some extra money for her border crossing. 'You're wonderful with our boys', I said, 'and they are so happy which I feel so grateful for when we're surrounded by so many children that don't have this start in life.'

'Well,' she said, 'When I am with them I just think to myself. That they are mine.' And a little tear pricked into the corner of her eye.