And so, and so.

And so it happens that, short on exercise and long on wedding fireworks and motorbike races outside the window, a girl finds herself awake at an unecessary hour. The rails around the balcony are haunted by dangerous creatures - they loiter, and they cackle. Not to mention the dark corridors, in this place without lamps. But then a light is fumbled on, and the apartment is a glowing yellow ship, sailing far above the spaghetti junction, and bravely away over the sea towards the stars. She stands at the huge window and steers by idle fancy.

And at this hour, a line from a Velvet Underground song that's been around for years might slip in edgeways, a stray ribbon of a thought, and come alive by suprise. What do you think I'd see, if I could walk away from me? What indeed. Would you look back at yourself, and see you, through a stranger's eyes? But whose eyes? Or would all the glories of the world look different - someone else's glories?

Sometimes, one should stop playing pop philosopher and go back to bed. But the bikes are very loud, and the sheets really offensively floral. The ship, the ship. The roar of the traffic is the wind howling in the rigging and the groan and creak of the hull. I shall make completely unnecessary changes to my desk arrangements, and light candles to smell the wax burn and watch it crawl into shapes.

I once fell in love with you
Just because the sky turned from grey
Into blue.

Libanpost

Nelly (Nelly!) calls me upstairs and laughs at me, because I have been up every other day this week. “Ellen!” she says. “The celebrity!” “I AM a celebrity,” I say. “I should have my own team of secretaries.” I carry the envelope impatiently back downstairs, past The Boss’s office, past the photocopiers, past the little kitchen and the Indescribably Vile Arabic Coffee Machine. “MORE letters?” say my colleagues. “Yes,” I say, smug.

I am already smiling at the handwriting that I have recognized on the envelope, now inkily patched over with Arabic post office stamps. Sometimes I didn’t even know I knew that person’s handwriting. How did that happen? I ferret it open and bask in the scrawls from Dalston, the good wishes from Ireland, the books from Shepherd’s Bush, the books from Borough wrapped in glorious pink paper that I will cut into shapes to adorn my fridge. I even raise an amused eyebrow at the Pinsentry Reader Package Without a Note. Pater will never understand that you cannot send anything, not even the most inconsequential thing, to another country without so much as a note. ESPECIALLY the most inconsequential thing. I mentioned this once, and he attached a post-it to the next one that read, “Here is note as requested.” I do not think he meant it to be funny.

English for Starters will lie untended on my desk for the rest of the morning. But it doesn’t matter, because Jihane on my right is browsing pictures of her wedding venue, which she is going to have done out in lime green and fuchsia (Lime Green!! and Fuchsia!!), and to my left Alex is playing virtual backgammon, occasionally stealing peanuts from my supply and passing them back inscribed with cordial insults.

Nelly calls, and I am uncharacteristically warm and fuzzy.

For now.

Carl Haag's portrait of Jane Elizabeth Digby el Mezrab, the only known image of her in Arab dress. She was well into middle age when it was painted, and some visitors to the Levant thought her sadly changed. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl to protect them from the sand-filled desert winds, and her hair was dyed black, as the Bedouin thought blonde shades so wonderful as to be dangerous, devilish, unlucky. She spoke Arabic fluently, along with eight other languages, and was friends with the Burtons.

Shortly after marrying Sheikh Medjuel, Jane visited her family in England. Victoria and Albert held sway, and she was not allowed to speak of her marriage to an Arab. People were tying lace frills around their piano legs.

She never visited again.

If you know, you know.

There was a pie. No ordinary pie, this – a pie of lentils and Armenian sausage that would make a Lebanese mother chase you from the kitchen with her broom. Concocted from the gleanings of unprepared cupboards and fridges, what it lacked in culinary stripes it made up for in diplomatic gaffes. For it was gloriously adorned with a pastry Lebanese flag, a pastry Union Jack, and a small pastry model of Rafiq Hariri whose time al forno left him sadly separated from constituent torso, moustache and monobrow.

They consumed it with wine and Billie Holiday. If you know, you know it good. All is well.

We are the generation who will not be immortalised as statues.

The streets of the Downtown area of Beyrouth are a sultry pseudo-Parisian dream of the Orient. In thick, muggy, dusty air that you could cut with a knife, absurdly polished Lebanese dripping with designer accoutrements lounge around the yellow-lit pavement tables of French-titled cafés drinking wine – Château Lafite or Ksara from the Bekaa – and smoking narghileh pipes made from hollowed-out fresh watermelons or pineapples. Around Place de l‘Étoile, women float along in full niqab flanked by cavorting children, the girls as yet uncloaked. They show an astonishing range of colouring – from classic dark Mediterranean to blonde curls or deep auburn and pale green eyes set in smooth brown faces, and rub shoulders unconcernedly with hordes of appallingly beautiful girls in the tightest, most lurid and extraordinarily cutaway outfits possible, leaning on the arms of their boyfriends. Saudi tourists abound, thobe, ghutra and embellished abaya a-twinkle and a-flow. In the quieter streets that radiate outwards from the clock tower’s square, uniformed men leaning on metal barriers swing AK47s with a nonchalance that suggests they wouldn’t suffer agonies of conscience if it came to having to use them. The buildings look on serenely – they could have been watching for centuries, as happy to observe the minutiae of people’s evening walks as to contain the swelling crowds of protests outside Parliament on the left of the square.

But look closer, and the graceful arches and elegant walls of pale stone are too smooth and clean, unmarked by years of tramping feet, by the caress of wind and rain, or by the sparks of children throwing handfuls of Chinese firecrackers. Or, let’s be frank, by bullet holes, which elsewhere in Beyrouth are so ubiquitous that at the end of a day of tramping about you can no longer tell the difference between rust damage to a garage door and the trail of sniper fire or RPG. The cobbles are unnaturally even and regular. Downtown, the dream rings hollow.

For this picture of the good life was not always so, and has been carefully if recklessly constructed, like the stories which shape the lives led around the walls. Before the civil war (or, rather, wars), this area was a mixture of Ottoman architecture, of unremarked Roman remains, of new and old – unkempt perhaps, but also a thriving, variegated residential borough, undeserving of the violent battering and gutting it received. The Green Line that ran North-East from Martyr’s Square between East and West Beyrouth – today Avenue Damas, the road to Damascus – was so named because of the extravagant weeds and eventually trees that sprouted up from the cracks in the road that no-one dared cross or tend to. Downtown (like much elsewhere) was left in ruins, and plenty has been written of the tragicomic swings and roundabouts of power, of the multiplicitous militias, of the bodies stacked in alleyways, of blood and rape and betrayal and despair.

La ghalib, la maghlub. No victor, no vanquished. This is how many Lebanese and their various leaders have chosen to characterise the fifteen years of the ‘wars of others’ and their exhausted, uncertain conclusion. A clean slate, amnesty for all (unless you got on the wrong side of Syria), no need to commemorate, to mourn, to seek answers or to ask for justice. Thousands of missing and abducted declared dead with a sweep of the presidential pen. What happened during the wars – the ‘events’ – and what came before barely feature in the national discourse, and the reconstruction of Downtown is a perfect expression of this attitude. Shi’ite construction entrepreneur turned fabulously rich and powerful politician Rafiq al-Hariri’s vision did not stretch to the preservation or restoration of history. You would never guess that there had been a war here, or that people once strung washing from the balconies now adorned with unnaturally uniform wooden shutters. He saw a business opportunity and, through his company Solidere, residents and owners of property throughout the area were forced to accept shares in lieu of payment for their homes, which were then bulldozed, regardless of their state of collapse or otherwise. The Roman remains – those that were left by the time the extravagant looting and illegal antiquities trade that sustained many during the war years had finished with them – suffered similar fates, ineffectual archaeologists and historians wringing their hands from the wrong side of the Solidere barriers.

And so Downtown was rebuilt in the Hariri image, the image of the new Lebanon. Clean lines and smooth edges where guns once roared and snapped, and where raw sewage once ran down the streets. Cafés and banks and a park, and a towering, expansive sky-blue and golden mosque dominating Martyr’s Square, dwarfing and obscuring the Orthodox cathedral next door. Hariri’s political alliance, the aptly named Future Movement, had no time for the humiliating and depressing war years. And so Lebanon, hedonistic Lebanon, plays out its role in the Disneyland light of Hariri’s dream. No questions asked.

On Valentine’s Day 2005, Hariri and several of his motorcade were blown to bloody, burnt scraps by a suicide bomber opposite the St Georges Hotel. Hariri had resigned as Prime Minister a few years earlier over Syrian attempts to expand their control by extending the Presidential mandate (a position they kept filled by one of their own), but was running again and posed a significant threat to Syrian hegemony. In the days and months that followed, popular outrage was such that millions marched the streets demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces, the destruction of their network of spies, and an international enquiry into the murder of al-Hariri. The freshest graffiti on the walls of Beyrouth was now a throbbing, impossible demand: ‘The truth’. This was a historic moment – the books call it the Cedar Revolution, a clanging mistake when this tree, as well as being a source of national pride, is the symbol of Christian militias from the mountains.

People had barely bothered to ask for answers about the civil war and its massacres. The Israeli Kahan investigation into Sabra and Chatila was derisory – according to Noam Chomsky, “not intended to be taken seriously by any sensible person”. Other camp massacres and checkpoint murders not directly attributable to Israel have not even been granted this attention. Their names go largely un-commemorated, except in the history books – Black Saturday, Karantina, Damour, Tel al-Zaatar. Their perpetrators are largely still in government or other positions of power – questions are too risky. The Palestinian camps grind on, still denied citizenship after more than fifty years, living out their nakba on the same ground as before the war. A nightclub called BO18 is on the site of one massacre, with chairs shaped like coffins.

And yet, in the lofty corridors of The Hague, there now exists something called the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Its legality, usefulness, remit and prospects are all disputed, yet still it exists, with the sole purpose of identifying and punishing the perpetrators of one political assassination among hundreds of others, of one death among hundreds of thousands. Downtown, the mosque, the voluminous tent covering the beflowered tomb at its flank – these also stand as memorials to Hariri, as does the historic withdrawal of Syria, only fifteen years after the UN and the Arab League initially ordered it to go.

One borough over, into Achrafiyeh in still mainly Christian East Beyrouth, bullet holes are thickly scattered across the walls and metal door of a nursing hospital which lies in ruins, opposite glossily reconstructed Parisian-style apartment blocks whose balconies groan with luscious plant life, and whose guarded lobbies are gilded and glass-smooth. Every building’s wall bears the neatly spray-painted Phalangist cross, at the height of a head or a heart. The message is unambiguous: stay away, get out, this is ours. Fifteen years of fighting, an enormous death toll in a tiny country, and the city still constantly marks out its territory – it has not learned to live with itself. No one explains, no one apologises. No one has ever said, “We are sorry”, from one people to another or from a country to its citizens. No one has managed to extract a single narrative of the wars from the hundreds that trail carelessly across books and lives and local legends.

Mai Ghoussoub wrote, ‘We are the generation who will not be immortalised as statues’. I’m not sure this was what she meant, but it seems clear to me – how can you build statues and memorials to help forget a war that no one wishes to remember?

Perhaps instead you build a shiny new Centre Ville and mourn a man who put the country into forty billion dollars of debt.

Does it matter? The forgetting – perhaps not in and of itself. Every family in Lebanon lost someone in the civil war. There is no need to remind people of what war cost them personally. Candlelit vigils or the laying of wreaths or a national day of mourning will not make the photographs carried by mothers, by wives and by children, come back to life. But they never have, and have never been supposed to. A nation mourns – well, for many reasons. But chief among them because it is able to, because a chapter has closed, because the tears can flow without setting another torrent of violence in motion. Years after, when the tears have long dried, a nation reminds itself of its past – yes, sometimes to justify new violence, but also sometimes to prevent it. Lebanon is many things, but it is not at peace with itself and its past, which is also its everyday present. The different peoples of its many different areas cannot gather together to forgive and forget.

These are the things I ponder as Lebanon roars on outside my window, and I rage against the bonds that keep me from its siren call. Secure in the heart of Maronite territory, in an office full of nice girls who talk of nothing but weddings and clothes and this week’s regime, the descriptions of deep fissures and the dire warnings that rise from the never-ending pages of my thesis reading seem almost to be about somewhere else. But then the Armenian girl who sits opposite me will refuse the packet of jelly sweets circling the office because they were made in Turkey. A Druze service taxi driver claiming to live opposite Walid Jumblatt is forced to make a detour by a confused Syrian passenger and launches unashamedly into a venomous tirade against these “fucking people”. In his interview for Librarie du Liban, James was told that “the company would prefer” it if he did not visit certain (Muslim) areas of the country. There is not a headscarf to be seen on the streets of Zouk Mosbeh, where the streets lead to Notre-Dame University, seat of Adonis and so many other Maronite Phoenicianist academics. When you get into a service taxi and find yourself sitting next to a man in full camouflage gear and army boots, you know he isn’t being ironic. And as they zoom up the hill from the autostrade towards the mountains, drivers hammer out a jaunty refrain on their car horns – that of the Lebanese Forces, whose headquarters lie between us and the supermarket.

Far from the headlines, these are the tiny echoes of tension that creep in to the day-to-day. Without yet setting foot in West Beyrouth or a Palestinian camp (though with every intention of doing so), the picture of an edgy, enclaved society is subtly, incrementally crystallising. The triggers are there, unremembered, unremarked, unresolved. Tread carefully.

Now, if only Jane Digby posts, lines carved out of time working on a Teachers’ Answer Key for Saudi Arabia, were my dissertation.

Nahr al-Kalb

And then James texted. Would you like to take a break, take a walk on the beach? The air con growled, the computer screen hummed and hazed. I blinked, and smelled salt in my mind. There would be no Conflict Studies today.

The day’s heat had dulled a fraction, exhausted by its own intractable humidity. The doorbell rang, and bare feet slipped across the polished floors. And then there were three – Alex (irrepressible), James (a gentleman and a scholar), and a tall, uncertain girl in a blue-flowered skirt, who should know better than to complain.

Because despite uncertainties, and office days and theses and the hopeless business of being oneself, there are ever fascinations at the bottom of the autostrade. Come and see.


Three uncertain souls, tripping through the dust. They cleave paths through the traffic and in the thick air, leaving swirls of horseplay in their wake. A hop, a skip, a road, a thousand toots on a hundred horns, another road, a bridge over a river, and there the cars disappear into a hole in the hill. It doesn’t look like much, this river. The water is sluggish and unkempt, the extravagant plant life on its banks reaching skywards and overshadowing it with prehistoric fronds and spears. But this is Nahr al-Kalb, the Dog River, once Lycus. The bridge across it takes you to the base of the valley into which it cuts. Look left, into the mountains. The stone arch you can see was built by the Mamluks, just one of innumerable different peoples that have passed this way. For this is the path to the coast of Lebanon from Syria, and from far beyond. Down this narrow valley, bristling with ambushes, army after army across centuries and dynasties has trudged in nervous single file, in pursuit of whatever it is that armies like to pursue. Look right. Make an enormous leap of the imagination and wipe the autostrade from existence (O happy dream!), and this is the sea they saw as they emerged into the light and the sky, buckling perhaps in the heat beneath their helmets and uniforms and weapons, their numbers diminished, their victories or defeats ever destined to be impermanent.

Such was their relief at the sight of the Mediterranean, Beyrouth mere miles down the coast, that they carved their marks into the rocky wall of the valley. We survived, they say. We came with spears or guns or crowns, with threats or offerings or salvation. We leave this moment here in stone, in thanks or as a warning.

And, people, this shit is crazy. There the French liberated the Levant with regiments from their colonies. There Caracalla, Marcus Aurelius Antonius, left word of his doings. There an Assyrian figure is just visible, a stony silhouette in the rock, there an Egyptian one was obliterated by a marble plaque bearing the name of Napoleon. Greeks and Brits, Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses II, every few paces the French. The freshest, cleanest plaques are of the Lebanese Forces; it has been much less than twenty years since the last militia stamped its claim. An unofficial hand has carved a clumsy cedar in a circle, for this is Phalangist territory. The wars are barely done.

Extraordinary, then, and extraordinarily sad. What to say about the tracks men leave along their warring ways? They are everywhere, whether plaques or graves or languages or boundaries on a map. Here, the glut of memorials is comically overwhelming. Look on these works, and may your mourning never end, that the killing never starts again.

Climb higher, cursing the swimming costume under your clothes, and you can look back on Zouk Mosbeh in all its grimy glory. A plinth stands empty here, where once the statue of a dog reared up, and was said to send his bark out over land and sea to warn of enemies, with such a booming power that it could be heard in Cyprus. The sun is doing its best to set dramatically; the air is heavy with the day and with possibility. We had not planned this.


And so three souls, hot and dusty now, hop and skip with a little less élan towards the shore of the sea. A kingfisher darts quick and blue under the bridge and guides the way. There is litter-strewn sand, there are fishermen, there are cats fighting noisily in the dunes. There is a ghetto blaster playing Arabic chants under striped umbrellas. The sea is as warm as blood, and its surface does not bear scrutinising. They dip in anyway; feel the stones and then the sand and the pull and the swash. They stretch out in the water for a moment, and everything looks different, even the smokestacks and the tankers anchored in the bays. At some evening hour without a name, the ripples become glossy with a particular light and everything blushes darker, washed through with pink, shyly beautiful through the mess and the strange smells and the sound of traffic.


Some things don’t get better. But others are always good. Seek them out and cherish them, for tomorrow there will be Harry Potter at City Mall, and on the same day in a year’s time there may be La Traviata sung under the sky at a Roman temple in Baalbek, melodies floating away on the same air that once danced with the breath of Fairouz, of Umm Khalthum, of Ella Fitzgerald. The blue-flowered skirt will have been worn to a rag, the uncertainty will never go away. But some things are always good.


And Michael, the very best of brothers. Happy Birthday – have the very best of years.

I know what I said, but …

Some things don’t get easier. But they should. You shouldn’t just get older and wiser, but older and better. Apparently, all that you get better at is accepting that you will always be hopeless at some things, and at managing the unnerving realisation that this is pretty much how it is always going to be. You are not going to wake up in a few years and have worked off the less pleasing aspects of your personality.

You can find new things to be hopeless at, to ring the changes. Or you can just be hopeless at the old things, in a new place. You do mind a bit less, but only because you’ve minded too much, too often before.

Is that really it?


Beg pardon. I am also good at some things, and getting better at others. Just not today.

Apply liberally as needed.

Fret not, chaps. My sources have been most forthcoming.

(k)halas - enough
zhaté min hon - get away from here
whahad matlak eir - you're a dick
munharif - pervert

And my particular favourite:

zenté baddik dayes - you need to be stepped upon

Finally, inevitably, and hopefully more often than the above:

ayre bilcheghei - fuck work

And so it goes.

It's time.

Time for a girding of loins and a taking of deep breaths. The photocopies are amassed. The cursor on the empty word document blinks with an extraordinarily sophisticated combination of expectancy, mockery and taunting hopelessness, given that it is, after all, merely a cursor.

For Lebanon must wait, in order that I sit inside and write about Lebanon. And not of flowers or food or fairground rides, but of war and politics and the foolishness of men.

Now. Let's see.

A Sunday in Beyrouth (NSFW)

“Take the bus to Dowra,” they said, “take the second road across the roundabout, and you can walk straight into Beyrouth in forty minutes.”

Sounds like a plan, non? An easy start for a girl trying out her first steps alone in Lebanon, wanting to test the water, to see what there is to see, to see how this works.

Well, this is how it works. Crossing the slick of green slime that is the Beyrouth river, where drinks cans fly instead of birds, along Avenue de l’Armenie, steps sound close in my right ear and a voice begins, a voice I have heard in countries across the world. “Hey, where you going? Speak English, Français?”

I have never been good at this. I have friends who will talk to everyone who comes up to them, be constantly open and friendly, but my immediate reaction is to turn away. I have accepted that I will never be anything but shy and socially awkward, in a way that translates into brusqueness rather than gratitude for contact. I make friends slowly. Today, I had never felt more justified.

Ten minutes later down the road, a moped pulls in to my right. Unremarkable, were it not for the face, the chequered shirt, those which came with the earlier voice, that drove it. Worse, the hand at work below the waist, the fixed stare and the mocking gasps and the “Oh my God, my God” that came with it.

Forget it, forget it. In twenty-six years of sauntering and be damned, I've been lucky not to have had much worse. I don’t flinch and I walk straight on. And then – and this has to be bad luck – the garage entrance to my left, right next to the street, is suddenly host to naked hairy legs and buttocks, their owner facing the wall and his hand – at work? Urinating? It didn’t matter, because he glanced back and the same refrain began, the same exaggerated movement and high-pitched commentary, like he couldn’t believe his luck. What the hell is this place?

But that had to be it, right? Until the earlier shirt, with the same hand to flies, the same voice starts up again on the street and I realise that I am being kerb-crawled. Belated self-preservation kicks in, and I choose a left-hand turn of steep steps leading up into what I guess is Achrafiyeh, a leafy climb where the houses have signs in Armenian script and an old lady and I exchange smiles and lifted eyebrows in commentary on the heat.


On the way home, my skin smelled of Beyrouth streets. This is not a nice smell, people. It’s a smell of sweat and of fumes, of putrid rubbish, of buildings so riddled with bullet holes as to look like perforated paper snowflakes standing next door to designer shops, of incessant car horns demanding your attention, of ex-pats drinking in expensive bars that would not be out of place in Leicester Square, of getting lost and frustrated, or knowing you would be frustrated if every feeling weren’t flattened to nothing by heat and sweat, and of being strangely disinclined now to ask for directions from the loitering male masses.

But it’s also a smell that remembers how a single jasmine flower fell to the pavement in front of me, where no jasmine bush grew or overhung. It remembers the sheer surreal impossible reality of standing on the green Astroturf in front of Rafiq Hariri’s tomb, while people around me cupped their hands and prayed. It remembers walking the Green Line that I've been reading about for months. It remembers how the cool stone of sculptures from Sidon and Tyre and Baalbek soothed me in minutes when I eventually found their home, and how they spoke of a Lebanon that is still waiting to be found, that could be a friend.

Just maybe when I have acquired a crucifix, an ostentatious wedding band, a mobile phone with the police on speed dial and the Arabic for “Leave me alone, you sick fuck.”

That first week in Zouk

Zouk Mosbeh is not an attractive borough. At best, from the enormous balcony running alongside the front room of the apartment, you can look left along the coast towards Beyrouth, away from the red-and-white striped industrial smokestacks to your right, and squint so as to avoid including the ever-active autostrade in your line of vision (yes, autostrade. Three languages are just not enough, apparently). Then, in the cooler hour of the glowing sunsets over the sea, one can take pleasure in the view as the chaotically stacked concrete apartment blocks become tinged with pink, and softer in the evening haze. From the boys’ balcony you can look up and right to Harissa, a mountain crowned with clouds and a cathedral modelled on the hull of a Phoenician boat, which is reached by a vertiginous cable car with a psychedelic sixties colour scheme. But down on the street it is a mess of rotting litter, ragged road edges and cars held together with bits of string executing insane manoeuvres amid an incessant blare of horns; what one journalist described as 'Athens on speed'. Walking anywhere is seen as a sign of (a) poverty (usually the refuge of Syrian migrant workers) or (b) insanity (the British), and you can see their point. There is barely a tree in sight and many of the buildings are either under construction or hopelessly decrepit, the outlook simultaneously emergent and collapsing or forgotten. The air is thick and tangy with pollution, heat and humidity.

Librarie du Liban is another concrete block, a white sign with letters in the Lebanese colours directing you off the steep road from behind sprays of depressed bougainvillea. Ahead is the residential entrance, right to the bookshop and offices.

In the endless acreage of the apartments, I am on the third floor, with the office’s two other Brits, Alex and James, on the fifth and final. The other floors are empty except for a family I haven’t met yet on the first. Brief power outages happen several times a day and switch off the air con, which often means waking up in the night in a pool of sweat and getting up to re-set it. In fact, I am currently sleeping in the sitting/dining room as I somehow blew the electricity supply to the bedroom air con with my hairdryer on the first morning. I jumped the first couple of times the outages happened during the day but since in offices, supermarkets and so on people carry on as normal you stop noticing very quickly. The apartments have been treated for cockroaches with industrial strength insecticide – unfortunately, this has the effect of knocking them down about two feet along their journey into the room, where they can lie on their backs dying for days on end unless one plucks up the courage to dispose of them and risk a valedictory death-throe scuttle. The vastness of the rooms and the hideousness of their furniture have given pause to my usual evangelistic domestic visions – but small pockets of space are starting to feel like home.

In the office, style sheets are impressively protean and are confined to the heads of project managers; standard copy- and proofreading marks are as hieroglyphs to the editors and designers and content briefs are subject to the dictates of zealous ministry officials. The most constructive feedback I have had so far is to make my changes in pencil rather than in pen, as it is preferable to erase the ones they don’t want to make (lacking time/money/motivation) than to go over them with tippex. The work may often be dull (proofreading Technical Vocabulary for Syrian Intermediate Learners, anyone?) but even – or especially – at this level, on some projects the ideological reach of a repressive Arab state client is painfully overt. All references in exercises to holidays to visit historic sites or the achievements of scientists must glorify, for example, Kuwait, rather than more obvious/relevant examples from other countries. Denmark is banned for such illustrations. For some countries, all women must be shown in full Niqab, which often involves crude photoshopping of stock images. A caliphatic vision, not facts, rules here. Until they learn to Twitter, the youth of Kuwait will come of age believing that their country contains a perfect example of every ecosystem, from mountains to rainforest, and that the city of Cambridge, England, features eight mosques and not a single church. Male consultants who do teacher-training courses in Saudi Arabia must school female teachers from a different room via one-way video link, or via mobile phone through a female intermediary.

After work, there are (paying) beaches within walking distance of the apartment, though you’d hesitate to swim in the water, and their sand is charmingly multicoloured due to the amount of plastics that are dumped and then shaped and scattered by the action of the sea. You can make the hairy, suffocating bus journey into Beyrouth, or stay at home and sweat over beginner’s Arabic or your dissertation.

So far, so everyday . . . it’s a lot like life, just somewhere else. Allowing for the introductory wisdom of one week, I sense that the difficulty here, in sharp contrast to the Tanzanian bush, is to find ways to grasp the challenges and opportunities, rather than slipping into a life where, but for the more obvious environmental differences, you don’t make the effort to get out of the comfort zone and end up leading a life not terribly dissimilar to the one you left behind (except that you can’t project manage, because that caused problems during the 2006 war when the British editor was shipped out, and you never know when another one might flare up). The girl who was here before me married a Marxist Shiite after four months – not something I’m aiming for, parents, Jane Digby notwithstanding – but I do feel that with age and confidence taking the edges off the relocation, I owe it to myself to make this as important to me in practice as I envisioned in theory before I left.

Watch this space.