Goodbye yellow brick road.

Good old Elton. I think this probably is my last post on this blog, unless something extraordinary and thoroughly worth sharing happens in the next five days as I am heading home on Saturday.

I just wanted to clear a few things up (well one actually). I only spotted the spelling mistake in the title a month or so after I started writing, but by that time pride dictated that it remained as is, as it has and will (apparently you spell Orientiering - 'Orienteering', but hey).

There are few more self-congratulatory ways to communicate with the outside world than the public weblog (blog) which is why I have enjoyed writing it, and seeing that at least a gentle trickle of people have been reading it most gratifying, and kind on their part. People would look at you strangely if you were to write open letters to your family in the newspaper but somehow in the perverse world of the internet this has become commonplace and it has become acceptable to 'self-publish' material that should have been consigned to the waste paper basket years ago. What it has done is made me feel a little closer to home, and people thereabouts who can know what I have been up to whenever they want to.

Fortunately for the world's forests my rambling communique's have not been printed by many (if any), although I intend to leave it standing online as a scrawl in the electric nothingness of the 21st century lest my relationships with memory, and indeed with Arabic, deteriorate even further. For now and to steal the words of Whinnie the Pooh, "Good-bye-and-thank-you-for-a-nice-time."

The Guns

So is the incessant banging of Lebanese politics, the numbing repetition of a poem-noir that has rocked and crumbled the country since the eighties, the sixties, or even (for the pedants amongst you) the forties. It peaked briefly last night with the murder of Walid Eido and his eldest son along with eight other members of the public on the seafront, around a mile from the site of the bomb that killed Rafik Hariri in March 2005 and sparked the last two years of unrest.

What is most noticeable to a western born and educated person at a time like this is the marked experience gap between the Lebanese and the people of most western countries. Where my childhood was lego and army men, that of Lebanese my age (at least those who stayed through the war) was more cinder blocks and armies. It is not to sensationalise the Lebanese experience to say that more of my generation in Lebanon could pick out the sound of a gunshot or a bomb explosion than their contemporaries in London.

But Beirut, as one journalist said to me recently, is not Mogadishu, whatever you see on the news or read on the foreign office website. It is fundamentally a safe place. There is, however, a risk of bombings as we have seen nine times in the last 24 days. But bombs go off in England, and America, even if it is not with the same frequency as in Lebanon. Westerners are not targeted, there is no violence in the streets, and student populations - often a sparking point for civil unrest in Lebanon - are busy with their finals. The vast majority here do not want violence.

However, the late Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani describes the insensitivity of the Arab people to their plight as follows:

جلودنا ميتة الأحساس

آرواحنا تشكو من الافلاس

أيامنا …تدور بين الزار , و الشطرنج , و النعاس

هل ( نحن خير أمة قد أخرجت للناس ) ؟

من القصيدة: هوامش على دفتر النكسة



Which can be poorly translated:


Our skin is dead flesh to feeling

Our souls complain of money

Our days... revolve around visits, chess and lethargy

Are we a great nation, when our people have fled?

- From the poem: In the margins of the notebook on Neksa (the '67 war)

He describes the futility and the anguish and displacement caused by fighting earlier in the poem:

كلفنا أرتجالنا

خمسين ألف خيمة جديده

The cost of our failure

but another fifty thousand tents.

Someone I interviewed for The Daily Star today said to me, "What is it when a bomb is just another one? When you are not impressed that it killed only ten?" It is what Qabbani means when he uses the word ميتة to describe "dead flesh" its meaning is literally 'a lump of lifeless meat,' or 'meat which has been killed by irreligious practice' (ie not halal and thus not fit for human consumption). It is a powerful and damning indictment on the state of a people.

Qabbani wrote his poem in the '60s. We are but six months from 2008 and still Baldrick's is a coarse but accurate definition of politics in the region and todays climate. Qabbani's is a delicate and thoughtful call to sense from a man who understood his people better than themselves. Bombs bang away in the background of the political and social stage, suffocating and clawing at the progress that surrounds them but always failing to realise their longterm goals.

Gaza is now in civil war, as is Iraq. Lebanon is at a gentle simmer and I found out while I was at home that the Cutty Sark caught fire. Where does childhood go from here?