A distant dream

Ceasefire 
by Michael Longley

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

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

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

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

A country, bleeding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

St Grace's contribution to the dwarves' spiritual development

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

More sights in Mehane Yehuda market

Proud to be here

Daily bread

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

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

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

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

'Why are there thethame theedth?' asked Rashimi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not you...

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

Pink panic and displaced anxiety

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

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

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

No sign.

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

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

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

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

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

Gulp.

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

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

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

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

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

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