Moving when the world has stopped

MARCH 27th 2020

There is something cathartic about going through all our stuff and separating it into 3 categories: stuff for lockdown months, stuff for Oman, things to store. I sling the final load of washing between two old apple trees and feel thankful for the surprising happiness we found in this house. A house of firsts. First washing line, first veggie patch, first feline - an orange cat called Monkey, sent our way by our wonderful neighbour, Alison, when she heard St Grace was leaving us in May 2018. He has a handsome marmalade face with palest of green eyes. ‘Would this fill the space?’ I asked myself. I wasn't sure a cat could ever replace a nanny like St Grace. And the fact that St Grace believed in karma and hated cats, meant that essentially she was being replaced by a cat - which she found hilarious and did her famous belly-quivering laugh.  And then our first dog (also orange) a few months later; and our first proper school run through fields along winding roads. The silhouettes of enormous oaks on the skyline, and podcasts and conversations, and little schooly worries and gripes all aired in the metallic bubble that is the family car.

The country is in full lockdown as we plan to move ourselves. I find comfort in being surrounded by the orange pets and a 10, 8 and 4 year old and J in our confinement. 

I feel a shiver when I think of children and women who are now locked in with their aggressors. For the children whose only escape is school - and whose only healthy meal is from school. And I feel nervous about J going to London to work which he'll have to do when we get to Scotland. Why is it better when someone is in sight? Even if you’re not a nurse and you couldn’t help them if they fell ill anyway. 

In the languid zone just before sleep, where more delicate thoughts are aired, Rashimi asks me: ‘Mummy what happens when the world ends? It’s just, I’m okay if we all suddenly go dead. But what I don’t like is the idea of the suffering.’

I go to give blood. There is no one much on the road. People are jogging and walking dogs - all at appropriate distances. J was worried about me going, and Rashimi calls after me: ‘Don’t give all yer blood Mummeeeee!’ ‘Just 1 pint!’ I call back. Daddy’ll show you how much that is in the measuring jug if you ask him.'

The nurse was brusque. ‘We have plenty of blood. I don’t know why they were giving the call out for more. We have plenty.’ I thought that was rude, and felt like withdrawing my arm. Did she know what I’d left behind? Either way they got my blood and I expect someone will use it. I get home and have a moment with the Lozenge. I explain J is going to have to work away from us for a while, and then isolate afterwards. A total of 6 weeks. Just like one of those blocks of time he spent in Baghdad. 

‘Why does he have to go?’

‘Because he works for the government. It’s called a ‘service’ which means you serve other people. And you’re paid for it, but it’s not a private company. It’s a public thing.'
 
The Lozenge says:’Screw the government.' Then looks a bit embarrassed.

'So you gave your pint of blood, and Daddy is giving his 6 weeks to the government, so what are we giving?'

Everyday feelings are changing. The world’s situation is a contrast to the bright, crisp weather. After only one week of home schooling from three different computers: 'Mummy! Mummy!' from all different floors with separate technological or numerical situations, many of which I can't answer immediately and need to do more research to answer. My phone is a constant hum of questions to Google. Wherever I step, there's a small orange dog under my feet, and Monkey the cat is on a constant cycle of hot bedding, until there are no beds left in the house. You never know where you'll find him next - on a pile of fresh laundry or in an open suitcase.

The children close the lid on their time capsules: plastic boxes with treasures inside that they will not be taking to Oman, and will discover in however many years time as a testimony to these earlier days.

Against all odds, we move out of Dagnall Farm on Friday 27th March. Pickfords close the doors of their trucks. It's their last job, and they are all wondering what will come next. None of them have jobs to go onto as they're all freelance. One of them was talking about trying to do deliveries for pharmaceuticals companies. None of them look terribly excited about the prospect of being at home with their wives and children. 

We have so many bags and pieces of equipment to take with us to Scotland that we have to arrange a separate hire car from Avis. I try my luck online, and unexpectedly get a confirmation of my order. On Friday - the country 3 days into lock down, we all drive into Milton Keynes towards the Avis office, and we are expecting the place to be shut. But as we turn the corner I see some little puffs of smoke from outside their reception area. Two blonde ladies are having a fag outside. 'Oh, we've been expecting you all day. You're our only customer so you can have any vehicle you like.'
'We'll need the biggest you have,' I said as I explained the pets and suitcases and our strange situation of moving when the rest of the world had ground to a halt. 
'Oh bless, ya,' they puffed over a generous 2 metre fenced off zone. I feel so grateful for them being there. And for still being smokers. There's something comforting about their throwback Englishness. Neither of them look like they own a yoga mat, and you'd definitely want them there in a crisis (with their fags).
The journey begins. J does an origami-like pack of the cars where every bulging suitcase of clothes, computers, toys, cat cage, dog bed, camera equipment - is all fitted like a Jenga stack.

Then the children do the family tradition of house-kissing when we leave a place we have loved. Which so far is pretty much everywhere.

The boys and pets go ahead, with the Pea and I behind in the enormous white Avis hire car shaped like an iceberg adrift - which almost how we felt. The Pea in her child seat in the front  - legs sticking straight out in front of her, telling jokes. ‘Why did the cow cross the woad Mummy? Because he wanted to get to the moooovies.’ She chats non stop, we listen to music, she eats her picnic tea, and passes out, head lolling backwards by 7pm until we arrive at 11pm.
There is almost nothing on the long road to the deep North. Just lorries in a loose cubic metal chain, restocking supermarkets for panicking shoppers. We wind our way north, the countryside changing. Through the treeless hills of Cumbria. And all of Britain in their houses, with the lights on. Every face you exchange a glance with,  you know they know it too. You know they’re thinking it. Our exchanges have changed. There’s kindess there, there’s support. (‘You’re only allowed 2 bread items I’m afraid,’ Oh - of course.) 
We stop once for some fuel and that's it. Monkey the cat miaows his way for 7 hours - even after a couple of tranquillisers. 
We reach Scotland. It's a wild re-route, and it may not be Oman, but in some ways feels like one of the biggest adventures we've had. The route ahead is completely uncertain. Completely unplanned.

A foreign land

MARCH 24th, 2020

Everyone will have their lockdown story, just as they have their Princess Diana story, and their 9/11 story. We will all remember where we were when we heard, saw, or when it happened.
For J and I, it's 5am on Tuesday March 24th. Exactly 8 months ago. 'Pickfords are never going to come and pack up your house now we're in lockdown,' the little monkey voice in my head tells me. That nagging tone that wakes you up at weird hours, that you want to flick away. But a couple of hours later the phone rings, 'The van will be there in an hour.' It will probably be the first and last time we move to not-quite-sure where. 

''Ave you 'eard we's in lockdown,' says Keith the handy man who is coming to fill the holes in the walls after we take our pictures down. 'Well, I shouldn't be coming, but I will anyway. Got to get you on your way, 'aven't we.'

I've started to feel an itch to write this blog again because lockdown feels like we've arrived in a foreign land. And not being an illustrator or a journal-er, it's a way of trying to make sense of what is going on around us, like brush strokes on a canvas. And also because we are all cut off from each other - we are all living in our separate lands. There is a sense of connection to others when you write to them. 

Sitting around our kitchen table having one of our last breakfasts at Dagnall Farm, the Lozenge chooses ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles on Spotify. The sunlight winking through a wafting curtain, the news pauses on its cycle of what feels extraordinary. Yet now already becoming ordinary. Yesterday - I think. I have nostalgia for yesterday. Nostalgia for 1 week ago. Everything looks different. Whenever I’ve been in dicey places, I’ve wondered if I was kidnapped, what I would I most miss about life. I would miss the small things - my child’s warm breath on my face, walking down the stairs in the morning to make a cup of tea, the phone ringing and seeing it's J calling. And it’s the same now.  Meeting a friend for a quick cup of coffee, looking up a play or a film and booking tickets. 

We cancel a nerf gun farewell party with all the boys' friends, and I ask the lady in the Co-op if she'll allow me 6 packets of Jammy Dodgers for their replacement leaving party in their class rooms. '3 Jammy Dodgers and then you'll have to get something else like Custard Creams,' she says. 

The Pea wanders past us in the kitchen, with one of her dollies wrapped life-threateningly in a shawl. ‘She is hot, Mummy. Dolly has the Cowona Viruth.’ The Pea's school teacher was crying as we all left. ‘This could be it for the year - this year of little children that I’ve taught for the first time - I won’t see again now,’ she sniffed, wiping her eyes and looking out onto the playground. Red jumper-ed small creatures squeaking with excitement and swinging on bars and running up climbing frames. 

For us it's even stranger because we're meant to be moving house, moving country. But already, Oman seems like a distant dream. We still think we might get there on April 15th, but nothing is certain. The certainty that we have all been accustomed to in our planning, seems like an apparition. Something unreal. And as we start to organise our house, I think to myself that we’ve never packed up to nowhere before. We don't know where the enormous lorry load of stuff would be headed. Or how long in the UK we need to pack for.

J and I laugh because one lot will be headed back to Blair Atholl, as will we, while we wait to see when the passage to Oman is open. We were living in Blair Atholl for 3 months, 2 years ago after we got back from Jerusalem. And J and I met in Blair Atholl. Being the oldest in the family and the one with more of a tendency to spread my wings, I have often ironically ended up back here when trying to go on an adventure. And Blair Atholl was certainly the very last place I’d expected to meet my future husband. It's an anchor which keeps pulling me back. A place where everything muddled in my mind gains perspective again, surrounded by family and the habits and rhythms of my own childhood.

We start a tentative routine: every day, Petra’s devoted schoolteacher records herself reading a story for her pupils which the P and I watch before bed and remember the love with which dear Mrs Watson tended the youngest pupils in the school. 

The Pea comes back from her final day at school with drawings of J and I. ‘The happy couple’ 

The Lozenge and Rashimi are working through bulging back packs of schoolwork, and lessons begin online. ‘How are you finding home schooling and me being your teacher?’ I joke to Rashimi. ‘You’re a really bad teacher’ he says. Through my laughter I say, ‘Well it’s very lucky for the world that I’m not a teacher, then.’ He nods enthusiastically in agreement. The boys' computer has come down with a suspicious virus. ‘Maybe it's got Covid-19 too’ says Rashimi. I find talking to the IT man in Milton Keynes before dropping the computer on his doorstep near his closed front door, a comforting thing, the tones of our voices are different from how they would have been a couple of weeks ago - more caring perhaps, and less rushed. We ask after each other and how we're finding this new normal. Of supermarket orders 2 weeks in advance, and meeting friends through a screen.

In the sunshine we run out with a ball, or go for a jog with Debbie the dog, our feet rustling through the new lurid-green grass, making discoveries which are more exciting than before - a patch of bright pink rhubarb, clumps of mint already coming up from the earth, and the sage and thyme from last year already revitalised. 

For most of my life I’ve loathed ‘home economics’ - seeing them like a downhill slope towards housewifery in my school days - and for that reason I always struggled with too much time on a sewing machine or doing washing. I now look at our washing line flapping with sail-sized white sheets with a feeling of deep contentment. And I dust down the sewing machine and make two dog beds to go into the shipment for Debbie with some old duvets covered with two bits of cloth from Mali that I’ve been hanging onto for decades. The washing machine plays Shubert’s ‘The Trout’ when it finished a cycle, which it now plays about 5 times a day in its little tinny voice and I I think this will be a soundtrack of this time in the English countryside.

The children are around all day, all evening. When they aren't calling for IT help with online school, they have questions after questions. Mummy: ‘What happens if you lose your eyelids? Can you still sleep?’ So then we talk in depth about the purpose of eyelids and how your eyes would not survive for very long without them.

Gweno, our lovely French Manny au pair departs reluctantly back to France - his mother’s instructions sounding ever more urgent down the phone until he feels he has no choice and takes one of the last trains home. 'Votre premier minister est completement FOU. Imbecile!' These are the last words I hear his Mum shriek to me down the phone. The rapport Gweno and the Pea built - a 19 year old french guy and a 4 year old British girl, was a very sweet thing to witness. ‘Gweno - I will miss you. Merci' the Pea writes in her new cursive writing taught painstakingly by Mrs Watson. I remembered the moment when we had some friends over, and I peeped into P's room where Gweno was reading her 'Mr Bump' in a thick French accent, her head on his shoulder.  

Everywhere I go, putting cushions and duvets into Lakeland hoover vacuum bags, or whipping a frozen morsel from the empty freezer to cook, Debbie the dog is right there, between me and what I want to do - looking at me. 

Rashimi announced yesterday ‘I am a vegetarian’ and I hadn’t taken much notice. But as I was foraging for a frozen pheasant dad left in our freezer to cook for lunch, he told me again. ‘But Mummy, you know we’re having pheasant for lunch. Well, I’m a vegetarian.’ I laid the pheasant in a tray and said, ‘Look Rasheem, I know you have every right to become one, and I have no problem at all with that - in fact I think we should all be almost veggie if we can, it’s just that there isn’t an enormous choice in the supermarket right now, and sometimes we might need to eat meat at a meal, particularly as we're trying to eat our way through the freezer. Is there any way you could postpone your vegetarianism until after the Corona crisis?’ He nodded.

But in the midst of global chaos it's the small things that initially give solace. Watching J paint the Pea's nails painstakingly neatly. Going for a run and having a bath and trying to keep the educational show on the road. Blossom on the trees and washing on the line. It’s all how it might look if we knew that this was about to be it. We drink in the juice of it.

I have been filming Leslie, a wonderful 96 year old in the village who translated all the Tintin books into English, and was also a secretary at the Nuremberg Trials and I’m not going to be able to finish the filming with her for fear of spreading something. She said to me: ‘I expect to go to sleep one night, and wake up to find a cross painted on my door and all will have passed over.’ When I asked if she needed anything she said: ‘Well my weekly trip to Budgeons is normally a bit of  a non-event, but Budgeons will be looking even more Russian than ever. So I think I'm fine at home, dear.'

As I stretch a big white duvet cover along the line so it will dry un-crumpled and go into a Pickford's box, I feel two cold little hands and some breath on my leg…:’Are we coming back to this land, Mummy?’ the Pea asks. I love how she calls it a land. It sounds more dreamy and romantic than the word country. 

‘Well, we will always be from here, so it will always be our land, but we’re going to use it as a springboard for adventures until we don’t want to do that anymore.’ 

She seems to buy that and carries on busying with the small plastic wheelbarrow which she has rescued from the toy recycling pile. ‘My wheeeeelbaroooooow!!’ she squealed protectively, and whipped it out of the bag. It has busied with the Lozenge, then Rashimi and now the Pea - from Camden to Amman to Jerusalem, to Dagnall Farm...seems like it will also be scooping up sand in Oman, if we ever make it.  

The Big Picture

I've emerged, blinking into a clear day. There is for the first time in 8 months, some silence. I have a human urge to fill it with something. I can't remember where I found this poem, but it jumped out of a jumble on my desktop and I will fill today's silence with it. It seems to say that everything matters and nothing matters.

THE BIG PICTURE 
by Ellen Bass
I try to look at the big picture. 
The sun, ardent tongue
licking us like a mother besotted 
with her new cub, will wear itself out. 
Everything is transitory.
Think of the meteor 
that annihilated the dinosaurs.
And before that, the volcanoes
of the Permian period — all those burnt ferns 
and reptiles, sharks and bony fish —
that was extinction on a scale
that makes our losses look like a bad day at the slots. 
And perhaps we’re slated to ascend
to some kind of intelligence
that doesn’t need bodies, or clean water, or even air. 
But I can’t shake my longing
for the last six hundred
Iberian lynx with their tufted ears, 
Brazilian guitarfish, the 4
percent of them still cruising
the seafloor, eyes staring straight up. 
And all the newborn marsupials —
red kangaroos, joeys the size of honeybees — steelhead trout, river dolphins,
all we can save 
so many species of frogs 
breathing through their 
damp permeable membranes. 
Today on the bus, a woman
in a sweater the exact shade of cardinals,
and her cardinal-colored bra strap, exposed 
on her pale shoulder, makes me ache 
for those bright flashes in the snow. 
And polar bears, the cream and amber 
of their fur, the long, hollow
hairs through which sun slips,
swallowed into their dark skin. When I get home, 
my son has a headache and, though he’s 
almost grown, asks me to sing him a song. 
We lie together on the lumpy couch 
and I warble out the old show tunes, “Night and Day”… 
“They Can’t Take That Away from Me”… A cheap 
silver chain shimmers across his throat 
rising and falling with his pulse. There never was 
anything else. Only these excruciatingly 
insignificant creatures we love.
 

Anniversaries

This morning I'm loving the mundanity of a Monday.

It's raining and I'm sitting in a surround sound of perfect silence. Often on a Monday I wake up feeling like I've been stretched on a rack after spending the weekend with two small/big people and a boddler - the Pea currently in the mid-stage between baby and toddler. Saturday morning, I'd said Fuck three times before 10am, and lobbed a plastic stool in fury over general obnoxiousness. The air was cleared as I don't lose it very often at all. Rashimi came in with a tearful apology. Sunday morning I attempted to have a bath but found myself being pelted with plastic toys by the furious boddler who then tried to join me in there, fully clothed, slipping and falling in, soaking her new trainers. Sunday evening I unscrewed the top of a bottle of red wine and set about cleaning up dwarf detritus in every single room.

There is nothing restful about my days of rest. So I welcome Monday morning like a long-lost Puritan friend. A little stiff and plain, but a peaceful predictable presence. It's that moment where I get to sit down my own and mumble: 'Now where was I?' without being interrupted.

'I am Martin Luther King' was the book of choice last night, and over a bowl of porridge this morning, the Lozenge linked MLK's story to the tale of the Good Samaritan he'd heard at school. 'Because everyone said that the Samaritans were different but this man showed they could also be very kind. Like Martin Luther King was black, and everyone thought he was different.'

Then he pensively swallowed a mouthful of porridge. 'But hang on. Rashimi is brown.'

'But we have to treat him the same as you, the white one,' I added.

Rashimi looked relieved.

Before the weekend, St Grace skipped out the door in a brightly coloured sari, en route to the Sri Lankan embassy in Tel Aviv. '69 years since independence, Madam! So there will be lots of Sri Lankan food and it's always fun.'  'Independence...' I muse. 'From us.' St Grace roared with laughter.

2017 is the year of anniversaries. Nostalgia reigns. I listened to Vera Lynn, now 100 years old, talking on the radio, with a snippet of one of her famous songs: 'we'll meet again.' I've been thinking a lot about how things used to be and whether we're any better now, since editing interviews of my grandparents. I filmed all 4 of them before they died. Each one of them in their own way, said the most important lessons life taught them was the importance of kindness to other people, and not being judgemental.

It's four years since we left London and I think back to the first few weeks after we arrived in Amman. 2013. Rashimi was 1. The Lozenge 3. And we ragged about the city being thrown about in the back of taxis - no seatbelts, no car seats. Unprepared but minds open, looking forwards to whatever life in this region would bring.

It has brought so, so much. Happy times and friendships. Understanding, but perhaps just as many questions as when we arrived. Only, different ones. This year - 2017 -  is the 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration which was in Palestinian terms, the malignant seed which began the rot in which they're now living up to their necks. This year also marks 50 years since the occupation proper began: after the 6 day war in 1967 when Israel took control of East Jerusalem and swathes of Palestinian land. We are often reminded of Balfour when we say we're British around here. Local people are still so very aware of it and what it has meant for their lives. I went into the pharmacy this week and met a man dressed in tweed. He spoke English like a gent, and described the impact it had had on his life, referring to Trump as a 'nitwit.' I emerged 40 minutes later.

I met another Palestinian gent, a doctor in his mid 60's, this week to talk about a film I've been asked to make. Medicine is often considered to be one of the last remaining bridges between two communities: Israel and Palestine. But the doctor, who was minister of health for the Palestinians at one point, burst the bubble. Whereas there used to be possibilities for Palestinian medical students to find training in well-funded and well-equipped Israel hospitals,  the Palestinian Authority has recently forbidden any involvement with any Israeli institution.

'It's in response to the deteriorating political situation on the ground here' the doctor told me. 'This is a tinder box. We're sitting on a powder keg. We can't control our own destiny and the Israelis are suffocating us from every angle.'

'Take East Jerusalem, where 5,500 settlement units have been planned between here and the West Bank, for instance. I'm a permanent resident, but not a citizen. What use is that? 50 per cent of our population is under the age of 20. They have no hope. It's not Islam that is telling these people to kill themselves. It's the despair they feel. We don't have good advocates of our cause.'

I read that the settler population has grown by 100,000 people in the past 8 years - that's the timescale of Obama's presidency.  The well-publicised evacuation of Amona settlement 2 weeks ago, is commonly understood to be a smoke screen by the Israeli government to make them look like they're doing something. 'They're just moving the settlers to another chunk of Palestinian land nearby' a local told me this week.'

The entrance to Aida Camp, now a suburb of Bethlehem crammed in against the separation wall, which houses Palestinian refugees who've been without a homeland since 1948 and the creation of Israeli state, has a huge key straddling its entrance. The key symbolises the door keys that many Palestinian families still have, to the doors of their homes from which they were evicted almost 70 years ago. The 'right to return' is still talked about in these terms - that people should one day be able to return to their houses, farms and villages, some of them no distance from where the subsequent generations now live in the camps.

Aida camp - like most camps around the Palestinian territories - receives constant beatings. Young boys are taken in the night by Israeli soldiers and thrown in jail, young people are shot dead for protesting in the street, or for throwing stones. There is a general loss of hope. 'What am I supposed to do when I hear a 9 or a 10 year old boy telling me they have no hope for their life, and they'd rather be dead?' explained Abdelfattah, the founder of Al Rowwad cultural centre and the man who first came up with the term 'beautiful resistance'. The Israelis have just taken away the permit he uses to enter Jerusalem, where his home is, where his wife teaches and lives with their 5 children. He is swiftly becoming a version of Martin Luther King here on Palestinian soil.

With Trump's Presidency, people expect the situation to escalate further - with new settlements planned, and the establishment of a US embassy a possibility in Jerusalem. Though many Palestinians are sanguine about it, and say they've been through worse, there is much talk of this being the beginning of the end of any form of just solution. As I look at the Dakota pipeline footage, I ask myself if Palestinians will be those unrepresented indigenous faces in 50 years time: their social and political narrative a distant reality.

Here are some of the wonderful women of the camp, some of whom cooked up some Palestinian delicacies for my friend and I on our latest visit.

Manners maketh small men, and also Mummies

We're back on track. And it's cooler in winter so I can jog again which has transformed my state of mind. My little i-watch tells me I haven't run anywhere since April 16th, 2016, so it's about time. And this is a backdrop canvas like none other. Down the hill, the Garden of Gethsemane on the left with its ancient olive trees - squat, gnarled and girthy, bathed in winter sunlight. Up around the Old City Wall opposite the Jewish cemetery which has converted one side of the Mount of Olives into a chalky white cubic morass. Up around the back of Al Aqsa Mosque where Ultra Orthodox black-hatted Jews are clambering out of minibuses: unfolding baby buggies and flooding in the gate of the Old City nearest to the Western Wall. The swifts will soon be back I think as I search the streaky blue-pink sky for the now familiar black silhouette of little winged sprites.

St Grace is back home giving the brood their dinner while I run free for 40 minutes. Nothing in my hands. Nothing pulling on my arms. No weight on my back or my shoulders. And sights and scenes gliding by to a soundtrack of my choice.

The lights begin to ping on all around, and the dusk call to prayer begins to echo. As I pass the New Gate, the Christmas tree is almost entirely undressed - just a bare frame and a star now visible above the wall. And as I run down the slope the other side, gasping with relief to have finished all the uphill bits, young East Jerusalemites do somersaults in the air from a standstill on the grass outside Damascus gate. I clap. So do they. Sirens sound. I pass the police hut now a permanent fixture in this temporamental political climate. I count on two hands the number of people that have jumped, nervy, looking behind them as I approach. This is a city very much on edge.

Earlier in the day the dwarfs and I have been discussing manners. Rashimi has his grumpy little grumps at the moment, and I try and explain that it only makes the day more painful for all of us, particularly him, if he's rude. So the Lozenge suggests a manners chart and then expands: 'actually Mummy, it's not all the time that YOU are polite to US either. Like sometimes you don't alwayth say PLEATHE when you want us to get dressed or brush teeth, and you did shout two times this morning.'

Manners maketh small men. And also Mummies. So it turns out. 'And Mummy,' adds Rashimi. 'If you get five gold stars in a row on your manners chart, then I'll give you a bottle of wine. All to yerself. Which you can drink with a straw and you don't have to share it.'

The next morning, as I eat my toast behind the cereal packet so the Pea doesn't see, otherwise she eats all of my breakfast as well as her own, I see the manners charts are stuck up on the door.

And I think I'd really like to put one in the White House for its next (P)resident. But I don't think he'd be getting his personal bottle.

I read Maureen Lipman's piece 'If I ruled the World' (I think it was her) a while ago in a magazine. She said the thing she would concentrate on if she was in charge of everyone would be manners. Her point was that manners are the top of all essential human virtues, and linked to every other important one. Empathy. Tolerance. Kindness. Generosity. Patience. All the things we often feel are so lacking in a city, or the world stage, where push and shove are a shoddy replacement for please and thank you.

I was also reading in the New York Times about Obama's letters - how during his double term as President he had a huge team of people working 'underground' sorting through every letter that came in. They would separate them into appropriate bunches: hundreds and hundreds of them each day; until by the end of each working day they'd have ten left, which the President himself would reply to. Because his point that every letter was important, because each one was from a person; an individual. Now that's manners. How his legacy will be missed.

And like Meryl Streep said in her speech about Trump's rudeness towards the disabled journalist. 'Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence'.  It all goes back to manners.

I like how the shop floor is also keeping check on the duty officer in our household situation. We should be doing the same on a global level.

And I will be saying a big thank you to my small housemates when I get my bottle of wine with the straw.

Out with the News and in with the Olds

The Lozenge climbs into bed and I fumble for my phone. 5.55am. He gives me a strong armed hug, and an eskimo kiss. His nose is still quite rubbery and un-boned so it's a very mallowy experience having him in the bed. I think of J, who's in his Baghdad pod without the physical presence of all of us, and I feel grateful for a warm boy who wants to be near me this morning.

'So let's see what'th on the news Mummy. Can I turn it up a bit?' A slight lisp has returned since the 'loth of another thmall tooth'. This departure, and the arrival of the Pea's latest molar - four white prongs glinting through a pink gum - matches the state of our calendar and much else besides. Out with the old. And in with the new: New fangs; new year; and a new President of the USA.

The pips sound. It's 4am in the UK and 6am with us. 'This is the BBC Worldservice'. I wait for the torrent of questions I cannot or do not want to answer. 'What is a HARD Brexthit? Will it be hard, like difficult, or hard like a hard landing?' Donald Trump Donald Trump. Donald Trump. Why ith he always on the news? Why did someone drive into Israeli soldiers and kill them? Was it on purpose? Why would you drive into someone on purpose?'

The cusps of change-over I find are the most difficult. J has just left us after a cosy 2 week Christmas holiday. A fortnight is enough time to sink into the comfortable bulge of being together. And then it becomes stringy and stingy again and J goes back to Baghdad. He is alone, and we have to re-learn how to function just the 4 of us again. I'm sure it must be deep down good for us somewhere. But there's a crunching feeling as our little cable car meets the metal runners on the base frame. One out. Clunk. Clunk. Before soaring up into the sky free and independent again. And then up, up and away we go on one more cycle.

We listen to a strangely cheery voice reading un-cheery news items. I feel flat. And powerless. How do we ensure that the owners of these small warm bodies such as the one in my bed have a planet to be proud of? Any wild animals left to watch? Any destinations in which to backpack when they are 19? I think of the comment from a lovely Kosovar friend: 'We're bringing up these children to be thoughtful and generous and compassionate. And the world is full of hatred and violence. They're going to be eaten alive!' she said to me when we last met.

Where are the beacons of hope in this new year? I ask myself. Not within the News, perhaps. So maybe within the Olds, instead? Helped by our map of the world table cloth over breakfast, the dwarfs and I discuss Olds without even knowing it. 'Wow Mummy - but look at Baghdad. It's right next to Syria. And to Turkey. And there's a wobbly line, and there's a straight one.'

I also have some company over the cusp. Goldilocks, as in me, (a few grey hairs at the front) and the three au pairs: Woodren, Honor and Antonia - visitors here - in their early twenties, full of beans rather than porridge, and ready for adventures on our own, and with the small people. And for two days we immerse ourselves in more Olds.

Between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea you don't have to use much imagination to picture John the Baptist's sandalled feet trudging the rocky sand-scape. We start out at Nebi Musa - the Arabic for the Prophet Moses -  the mosque's white domes creating a textbook oriental atmosphere for the beginning of our hike. On our first cliff top, the view is breathtaking. We chew on dates and take it all in, feeling like microscopic dots in the landscape and within history - looking out over the landmass that reared the people who felt compelled to write a code for living or the word of God on papyrus. The Dead Sea scrolls. We look down towards the silvery snip of that sea at the very lowest point of the earth's surface.

Simon, our Palestinian guide, who has to walk each day or his legs feel itchy, strides on, leading us past ancient irrigation channels, still used by Bedouin, who are hanging onto as much of their ancient lifestyle as current politics allows. The Bedouin's temporary housing structures are vulnerable to Israel's hunger for yet more home-land and this way of life is at great risk of disappearing.

Into a rocky crevasse we walk, the river bed now dry. Huge boulders wedged into gaps punctuate the ravine like giant full stops. A Bedouin boy on the cliff top enjoys a rare audience and plays his pipe while his herd of sheep and goats negotiate the rough ground. Their bells tinkle and his brother sings and dances to us. Up another face we climb, this time studded with metal handles after a walker fell to his death a couple of years ago.

I was as glad of these handles as an older lady might feel glad of a handle on the inside of the bath. The area is dotted with signs of ancient monastic building from the 5th Century. The monks, such as St Saba, came from places like Cappadocia to get away from the material world and grow closer to God; and these caves and crannies and tumble-down rubble shacks, seem just as far from the material world today. We marvel at the idea of living in this way.

Equipped with 3 au pairs, it's a good weekend to go on a dwarf-friendly adventure. So the following day we set off to St Saba's foundation stone: the Greek Orthodox monastery Mar Saba - chiselled into and built onto the rock face of the Kidron Valley.  Despite the river gushing with sewage thanks to an Israeli and Palestinian dead-lock in decision making over this river polution, the landscape is magnificent. It happens to be the day of Orthodox Christmas itself and pilgrims dressed from top to toe in black - the women with flat topped veils on their heads - are gathering outside. The monastery is open only to men but we scramble down the slope below, the Pea lodged in a pack on my back and squeaking with excitement at the rocking, rolling motion of the descent. I am her own little ship of the desert. The camel mother. Then we clamber up the other side where we have a picnic on a flat bit of rocky ground facing the extraordinary sight of this higgledy piggledy monk-mansion. We are the noisy technicolour against the sandy surface which in contrast to us, is dotted with dark-clothed, silent worshippers. But no one seems bothered by our presence.

What really makes me wonder at it, is the reason St Saba came here at all. I read that after Constantine the Roman Emperor converts to Christianity in 312 AD, 300 years worth of Christian persecution comes to an end. So the faith becomes safe and comfortable and respected. 'Where is the sacrifice and martyrdom now then?' thinks St Saba. And so he decides to find a physical and spiritual challenge in this landscape of the Holy Land. Basically, life gets too easy, and he has to look for a more challenging way to live. Historians think that there were as many as 150 monasteries dotted around here from this time. Monks must have been flocking here in search of pain, and loneliness and horrible conditions. Who ever would go in search of that? And apart from a major blip when in 614, the Persians killed all the monks in the monastery (after which it was un-inhabited for only a few weeks); the place has been almost continuously lived and prayed in, for over 1500 years.

I feel comforted by John Steinbeck's reflection at the beginning of 1941. 'Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy.' And when you look back, 1941 didn't go so well, nor the years immediately after. There was a supreme evil at play in the world, and it's hard not to feel that we might be heading the same way again, not even a century later.

But his reflection on evil is also heartening: 'Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man.'

The au pairs are worth their weight in gold for Goldilocks, particularly with her three small people on a rock face climb. But after a joyful weekend, they leave back to January in the UK. And I embark on a richter scaled feng shui session. Avalanches and tsunamis of stuff: Out. And order and space: In. It's more zen in the house. And my state of mind is more peaceful as I've tuned out of News and into Olds.

As I sweep and scrub and tie up bags of stuff, I think that for anyone, even those who don't believe in God or Saints, it's still interesting to imagine what might St Saba be doing now? Where would be the rock face of pain to escape to today?

Maybe he would still be here in the Arab World. But instead of stretching himself with the silence and hermit-like withdrawal from it all; he'd be searching for his agony in the heart of the persecution and chaos.

A hermit with a helmet.

I must discuss all this with the Lozenge over the next early morning eskimo kissing session, when tuning into the News makes us go looking for the Olds.

Speak Life

It hadn't rained for so many months. The brown earth was gasping, it seemed.

There used to be an ancient Palestinian custom for an autumn drought: to lead a lady sitting backwards on a donkey through the village.

So there must have been a lady doing that somewhere because it's been raining so much them drains have been straining, and flood water has lapped around our ankles for a week. It's beautiful. The dwarfs love it and wear their wellies with nothing else on around the house. In homage to the puddles.

Christmas fever is truly upon us. 'I'm an angel in the nativity play,' Rashimi says to the Lozenge. 'There's only 2 angels you know. In the play. Only two.'  And the Lozenge says: 'Well, you can't have too many angels all going around saving people. Because then you'd forget to save yourself.'

Daddy is now officially a 'bot. The Pea spends much of her day kissing my iphone - because that's where her Daddy's face appears to her most often at the moment. Sometimes on a call, the dwarfs take the Daddy 'bot into the playroom so he can watch their Lego building. Then something happens and they run out - leaving Daddy in there. We need iphones that walk so that Daddy 'bots can follow us about the house rather than being stranded.

The potatoes have all got holes in them from Rashimi's rampant spud-gunning. 'After you die, Mummy', he asks idly refuelling his gun with spud, 'can you still think?'

We light the advent candles from Grandma every night except that the naughty advent candle warden one night let them burn down to number 23 when we're only at 16. She's related to the tooth fairy that one. A little bit scatty. The candles are now hidden so the dwarfs won't see until it's really 23.

Auntie Rosie and Tilly visited. We started out with 'Cook with Rosie' in Jerusalem for the first time. She helped 8 pairs of small hands to pat mince into Syrian meatballs, and afterwards they stuffed dates with apricot and walnuts, then rolled them in coconut. A couple of parties, some funny hung-over days wrangling small people, and finally a trip to the Marwani mosque - underneath the Dome of the Rock compound in the Old City - a 7th century mosque only used today when there's an overflow during Ramadan. The crusaders used it as their stables, and the stone pillars still have holes where they tied the ropes for the horses. Simple, stunning 7th century arches, with metres and metres of carpet and chinks of sunlight diving diagonally across.

And now, all the scaffolding has come down inside the Dome of the Rock revealing a newly painted ceiling.

 I met a friendly Israeli man who works in a local supermarket Super Deal also known to us instead, as Super Rip-Off. He's a 'Mizrahi' meaning a Jew from the Arab world. He was born in Mosul in 1949 before all Jews were evicted after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. We talked for a while about how my husband was in Baghdad, and I asked him if he had any photographs of that time. 'Oh no. Nothing like that. No memories either. Just that stamp of where I was born'. We spoke in Arabic - he wears a Jewish skull cap. This is the place to be to understand we're all entwined. No walls can separate us even if they try.

The father Christmas lists have been written. 'A globe of the world please, a football please, a boomerang please, please. Writes the Lozenge. 'Please Santa,' writes Rashimi, with some help from his brother, 'Flying. I want to fly'. And, 'The Force'. Please. Love Hamish. With a back to front 'h' at the end.

The Lozenge stands on stage in the nativity play in a beautiful crown crafted by St Grace. 'The best crown on the stage,' the Lozenge says proudly. It's tall and golden with plastic gems stuck all over it. And Sashimi is there at the front with an itchy tinsel Halo which he itches the whole way through the nativity play. It's a very sweet play as they always are.

The same day these dreadful snippets of news are coming from Aleppo. And then we go and visit the wonderful Alrowwad centre where the boy I made the short film about works. It's tucked in near to the graffiti-covered wall which locks these people in, through nothing they've done wrong, other than be born. There. We raised a speck of money for them lately, and the founder, Abdelfattah explains how he just wants young people to want to live, not to die. And to live, and love, and be happy. He says: 'To hear a young person of 9 or 10 say they just have no hope and they want to die. Well, I just can't explain it. So we keep going - doing this, whether we have money, or we don't have money.'

Rashimi has a sore tummy (which later we realise is the vomiting bug), so he's in a bit of strop when we go and visit, and won't shake anyone's hand, or say hello. But we watch a wonderful Dabke - Palestinian dance display. The Pea walks into the middle of the dance floor, and sits down and claps her hands.

And the boys watch and don't want to stop watching.  Even Rashimi with his sore tummy. The Lozenge is love-bombed by loads of Palestinian boys after their dance class. If only we were allowed to report more about love bombing than just bombing.

And we drive back from school today - the dwarfs' last day there before we fly off home to see our family, and the Lozenge and his little friend Vera from Sweden are singing along on the back seat of the car to the song they learned in assembly. 'Speak Life' it's called' they say, 'Do you know it Mummy?' I say I don't and I swizzle it up on the iphone, still hot from Daddy 'bot moments and we play it and they sing along. And it's almost as sweet as the nativity play. But none of this they know. And this little gospel-soul-or-something song says it all. Without them even knowing about people their age wanting to die. Or not wanting to die, and having to die anyway. So we drive. And they sing. And the Pea claps. And now I have to write it all down.

'Some days life feels perfect. Other days it just aint workin. The good the bad, the right the wrong.  And everything in between. It's crazy. Amazing. We can turn a heart with the words we say. Mountains crumble with every syllable. Hope can live or die. So speak life. Speak life. To the deadest darkest night. Speak life. Speak life. When the sun won't shine and you don't know why. Look into the eyes of the broken hearted. See them come alive as soon as you speak hope, you speak love, you speak life. You speak life.'

And that is the thought we leave you with, the dwarfs and I, as we prepare to hop in a cab in a few hours, and head to the homeland.We are looking forward to speaking life with you all. Happy Christmas.