This Hamas Israel business is really worrisome. Also, unusually, personally worrisome as we have many synagogues and a Muslim Brotherhood settlement within a few minutes of our front door. But I really don’t know what will happen, and it is terrifying politically and in terms of human suffering.
Strawberries in winter
A good article on changing seasons, or rather on unchanging seasons, and on the harms of 24/7 convenience stores. We eat our strawberries, not knowing where they came from or at what cost, but they do taste nice. And if they spoil, we throw them out and buy more. Indeed, the increasingly superficial celebration of […]
The ways of fruit
Is fruit a snack, a meal or a dessert? In my mind definitely a dessert and I rarely think of it as something to eat between meals and almost never for breakfast. Struck me this time when in the UK where the people I am staying with definitely think of it as the first two, […]
Grrrr
People who drink teabag tea – do they not realise actual tea does not taste like lightly caffeinated wet paper? Do they like this rubbish?
End of the age of aquarius
The weather here has been strange. The first week of June was unseasonably cool, in the low twenties, and in the teens in Multan, which the sun approaches closer than anywhere on earth because of the saint who invited it down to cook his fish. But now it’s as hot as June should be with […]
Poopmanteaux
Unreasonably enraged this morning by unwieldy portmanteaux, the object of my ire being ‘miltablishment’. Such nonsense.
New or old?
I enjoyed Marina Hyde’s columns in the Guardian, at least the political ones and sometimes the pop culture ones. They were a bit of relief during the horrible UK politics around 2019. But then she went away on a break and came back, and the columns definitely feel quite mean-spirited, especially the pop culture ones […]
Lungis
Went down a rabbit hole of sorts, thinking about lungis, the sarongs worn in Pakistan, now largely by ancient farmworkers, at least in the urban imagination. There must have once been a whole spectrum of them, as they were handwoven. Each region with its own patterns? In Jhang I hear the weave could you tell […]
Sinking back
Sinking back into Lahore today, a little underslept, and the usual quiet drowsiness. I feel less at home every time I come, and wonder if I will keep coming when those I wish to be with are no longer there.
Rabbit
Read a good SF short story, called Rabbit Test. It was exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to cry. It’s a very American story of course, as it’s about abortion and control of women’s fertility, but the story is such an old one for women, of constant control, of advances and setbacks, […]