Yesterday was Monday I’m told, but I feel quite out of time, as though the week has been going on for a very long time. It turns out taking my weekend on Friday didn’t actually feel much like the weekeend, or maybe it did and in that case it should be Friday tomorrow, but it […]
See you on the other side
Metaphorically speaking, of course. The weekend lockdown starts tonight so the GF and I decided to take Friday as our weekend (well, I did anyway; the GF just moved his working day to the evening). It was a lovely sunny afternoon and we went to get supplies for the next couple of days, having decided […]
Silver fish man
Another piece of my childhood fell away today, with Diego Maradona’s death. Other pieces had fallen before: Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze; some are still around: Madonna, Imran Khan (for all he is), Miandad, Viv Richards. What a legend that man was, I knew no other footballer’s name, but I knew him and his face and […]
Some progress
For the last little while the GF and I have been banging our heads against various forms of bureaucracy, most recently the bank – our ATM cards are blocked, can only be unblocked by telephone, to use the telephone service we need a telephone pin, the pin is sent to our registered phone number, we’ve […]
Impressive
I listened to an interview with Arafat Mazhar, a very impressive young man indeed. His new film, Swipe, is genuinely very good, as was his first one (Shehr-e-Tabassum) and it was such a pleasure to listen to a Pakistani who was intelligent, well-spoken, well-read, and trying to draw on indigenous ways of understanding the world.
Assassins we have known
A curious dinner party last night, replete with tales of assassins we have known told by one of the other guests, advice on where to buy ‘illegal meat’ (i.e. not slaughtered in an abattoir), and the best duck in Turkey which, it appears, is available at Ikea. All this over a rather spectacular dinner of […]
Happy world toilet day
Happy world toilet day. Here’s looking forward to the next wave of excrement.
A beginning
Today – or, correctly, tomorrow – a magazine that I’d been working on with some others goes live. Admittedly, with only one story as the plan is to publish a story every few weeks and for 4 or 5 to comprise an issue. I think it’s a really interesting idea if we can keep it […]
Things that are keeping me up at night
Will there be an earthquake and the flat fall down? Will something go terribly wrong with the renovation? Will it go over budget? Will there be a problem with our visa application? Will someone in my family get COVID and I won’t be able to travel to them? Will there be a hard lockdown here […]
Two more mosques
Today was a funny, dissatisfied sort of day, though a pleasant one. Soon after the GF woke we went back to the Syrian place for a chickpea-based meal, again very delicious and this time there was no wait. Sadly they were out of the fatteh or rather, out of nuts to put on the fatteh […]