New Year

Out with the old, out with the old whispers through the hours, as they drizzle away to end a year already full of new starts, new starts seemingly no less fascinating or illusory each time.

At a restaurant in Jeita full of tackily black-clad Lebanese drinking vodka, taking photos of each other and not having conversations, I survey my last evening in 2009 much as I imagine an enthusiastic Lebanese student might do if, on travelling to England after reading Brideshead Revisited, they ended up at a party in a Wetherspoons in Leatherhead or Milton Keynes. Such emptiness is universal, if no less disturbing for being encountered abroad. But there is nothing to do for now but sport my shiny hat, and blow paper trumpets, and let fly party poppers and dance to Lebanese pop tunes, cheap whisky in hand. It is a timely enough reminder of how much there is left to do, and how badly wrong it can go.

***

On New Year’s Day, Callum calls me from Hiroshima. I am reading Palestinian Walks and watching the sun glow pink on the towers outside my window, wondering what it was all like before all the concrete, and whether the Palestinians in Lebanon find any hint in these hills of their lost lands, wondering what it is all worth in a world where these things can happen. Callum is tired of the school year and of the scene in downtown Hiroshima. There is an American teacher at his school who barely speaks Japanese, and whose local wife is not much better at English. We cannot understand the choices that some people make. France, he says. Geneva, Syria, Tokyo, Melbourne. Istanbul, I say. Iran, Yemen, Jordan, Israel, France. We understand each other.

Outside, the sunset deepens to an auspiciously extravagant evening display of cloudily-feathered technicolour, and the bats dip fatly up and down in the wind, as if they too overdid it the night before.

Out with the old, out with the old – we aren’t done yet, we aren’t tired, and we understand each other well enough, for now. Tomorrow, we begin again.