A friend popped in for a cup of tea and brought over trifle, so I had a pleasant break from work. We tutted over the whole Prince Harry business, generally agreeing that it was all nonsensical on every side, and the press is particularly shameful, but it’s certainly good gossip fodder. Other shameful news from […]
Saturday
It’s Tuesday today, but I forgot to post a couple of days ago and since that was the end of the current chapter in a fairly uninteresting story, I suppose I should write about it. On Saturday it was decided that one of my siblings and I would pretend to be family elders and discuss […]
Downpours
There was thunder in the morning, passing overhead, and cold rain and wind. The rain and wind continued all day, it was like being in London, and will be very cold for the next few days, I think. I’ve been settling back in Lahore life in a more active way than was usual in recent […]
To the hospital
In the morning, after my useless meeting, I went off for my haircut. It’s a quite long drive to Shah Allah Ditta, an area on the outskirts of Islamabad, which used to be an old Buddhist site (it’s close to Taxila) so there are many caves filled with Buddha statues. The house itself is overlooking […]
Moving on
I’m back in the office but only for a couple of hours, and for a particularly useless meeting. Next I go for a haircut, then Lahore. I had bad dreams last night: there was a child who was a younger sibling (though not one of my actual siblings) with a pet rabbit which had to […]
It never really ends
All was supposed to be finished yesterday and I came home to make myself a cup of tea when an email popped up. I looked at it, it was from work. The materials we’d uploaded well in advance of the deadline had gone haywire: the aardvark text was under guppies and the the coyote material […]
Night terrors
I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced that everything had gone terribly wrong with work and that I would never recover. It took me a long time to get to sleep and I only managed after making a careful plan for the morning to double-check everything and after reading a couple of […]
The fat of the lamb
‘Lamb’ being inaccurate, as the animal used for Shinwari style barbeque is most certainly mutton. A couple of us went down to one of the better known places, Charsi, for a dinner of mutton, ordering half a kilo between us (leg and chops), along with a quarter kilo of rump fat, a couple of chapli […]
Auspicious beginning
I rang in the decade lying in bed, working — not even on my own work but something very similar for someone else. I tried desperately to finish up before midnight so I could maintain my tradition of being fast asleep for the new year, but didn’t succeed, and it wasn’t till about 20 minutes […]
Lost weekend
It was a weekend of work, also of freezing into an icicle, as winter has properly come to Islamabad. My shawl and occasional cardigan will no longer suffice so I have borrowed a coat from my host at least for the morning walk to work, when all the leaves and the ground are rimed with […]