Today someone brought their child to the office and introduced it to all of us so I smiled down and said, ‘Hello, Myson’ — only much later realising the parent has said ‘This is my son’.
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On the edge
It’s a day of celebration, but also one on a knife edge. There were slight flickers of hope in the last couple of days (I refer to the election in the UK), but it feels really precarious. Inevitable that they’ll be crushed, this is not a time of many happy endings. Please may there be, […]
Bags under my eyes
My eyes are dramatically shadowed these days, work has been consuming all waking hours and most sleeping hours as well. I did manage to make it back early once – by early I mean left at the end of working hours – and went to the markaz to buy some milk for tea. My exciting […]
Coloniser, colonised
My deadline on Wednesday has unterrified me, as it turns out it is actually my deadline on next Monday. Phew. While it’s still going to be tough, not least because I have to extract information from dozens of reluctant individuals, at least there are enough hours between now and then that it is theoretically possible […]
Terror strikes
Back in Islamabad. In the morning we went to visit an uncle who lives very far away, in the new bits of Defence, and then back, a quick lunch and off to the Daewoo. It was an uneventful journey, enlivened only by a chicken patty of the classic sort you get in all Pakistani bakeries. […]
Battlefield Lahore
The air is terrible. 400+. I can taste it at the back of my throat, acrid burning. I’ve felt nauseous all morning. How can this go on? My nephews are forced to live inside closed rooms, with air purifiers. The older one, four, had to be let out eventually and he came over and we […]
Up and away
I left work early, by which I mean at the time when we are supposed to leave on Fridays, as I was planning to catch the Daewoo to Lahore. This I did, though it felt a very long journey. It is lovely to be back with my father. Slowly it has started feeling a little […]
Old school nose job
I decided to switch to handkerchiefs, and if I am sacrificing the convenience of paper tissues, then I decided I would get genuinely nice handkerchiefs. I found an elderly German woman online who collects and sells old embroidery, and have purchased a stack of silk and fine lawn handkerchiefs from her. Of course they will […]
Good bad medium
Last night I finished up The Good Place, a rather surprisingly good show with a remarkable number of surprising twists. Set in an afterlife that seems straight from the Middle American dream, with some glorious subversions and excellent characters. It was an interesting case study in how one is, as a viewer, ready to accept […]
Days out
Yesterday I went to a conference where perhaps the highlight was one that almost no one actually knew about: that one of the virtual attendees forgot to turn off their camera and turned up wearing only a towel, and that too on their head. Fortunately for this person, only a limited number of people actually […]