So engrossed in work was I yesterday that I completely missed the big news of the day – the verdict against Musharraf and his sentencing. Can’t approve of the death sentence, of course, but this is basically the least likely one to be carried out, ever. But otherwise it is to be celebrated. There must […]
Meagre pickings
After working for much of the night on Sunday, I finally finished my work at 6 in the morning. Felt fine the next day, as I normally do after a night without sleep – it’s the second night that gets me zonked – just a bit slower than usual and unwilling to make much of […]
Dancing horse
Well, a slight exaggeration. In the morning my host and I drove down to Chakwal to the ancestral (my great-great grandmother’s) village where there is a family farm. It came into the family about 20 years ago as part of a settlement of a decades old property dispute and since then we have been trying […]
Filth
What a bloody miserable result. Worse than I could have imagined it. It’s really truly devastating. Brexit now a certainty. Austerity, Tory cruelty to the poorest and weakest. Rising nationalism. Destroying institutions. Institutionalising lying. It’s unbearable to see this tide sweep across the world. What we had was imperfect, but it was not the brutishness […]
Naming
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’.
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 […]