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.