My elevation to some sort of elder continues apace as I was asked to help out with a friend’s troubled marriage. A difficult business, as I could see quite clearly where the backgrounds and assumptions of both parties interacted and caused blindness and resentment. I don’t think I was much help, but it still took […]
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 […]
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 […]
Winding down
We are winding down at work now, or rather I am, as everyone else who is actually employed here remains at full tilt. This is undoubtedly the nicest thing about consultancy work, any feeling of being trapped lasts only until the end of the project and then I can safely return to fearing I’ll never […]
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 […]
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 […]
Explosion
This working day I worked, except for three breaks of note. The first was when I accompanied one of my hosts to the markaz for a few errands and a quick lunch. We found a table in the open space served by the surrounding restaurants and cafes, ordered our paratha rolls and a cup of […]
What I make of Christmas
I will freely admit that I dislike and resent Christmas. I resent how it – and, specifically, one version of it – bulldozes over every other celebration, in almost every part of the world. I hate the consumption that surrounds it. If in the UK, where it is genuinely celebrated, the anxiety and expense around […]
Sepia to technicolor
Much of Saturday was spent firefighting at work, including chasing down people who had already left for their Christmas vacations but the machine never stops, so most of them had replied by Monday. Saturday morning I made it out to an early breakfast with a couple of friends, both with an interest in heritagey stuff, […]