Storm Clouds over Soho

April 2, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I got the train up to London today with a view to getting my hands on a decent pair of shoes, since I’m told the Italians can be a little snobbish when it comes to standards of dress. With the Northern Line under repairs, it took a little longer to get up to Bloomsbury, so I took a leisurely ride on the Circle Line from Blackfriars and indulged in a favourite pastime: sketching commuters on the Underground. There’s an art to it (no pun intended) – you’ve got to be quick, since most of them only travel a few stops before getting off. And now that face masks are a minority affair, it’s a lot more enjoyable a practice than it was.

Predictably, I got waylaid in Gower Street’s Waterstones en route to the shoe shop. Ever on the hunt for new additions to my Spanish library, I thought I’d do some digging at one of London’s finest bookstores, since it’s been quite a long time since my last visit. I managed to exercise a considerable amount of restraint this time, leaving behind two case studies on the Inquisition from the antiques section in the basement and Minder’s The Struggle for Catalonia… though I’ll be back for that one eventually. Giles Tremlett has brought out a new book on Spain which looks like it will pump out a lot of material I can use with my A Level Spanish students, which is my way of justifying that purchase. The only book I didn’t question was an account of Walter Starkie’s Camino. Starkie wrote so vividly about his journeys as a minstrel across Spain in Spanish Raggle Taggle and peppers his writing with old verses all over the place, so I had to salvage that one.

I wandered down towards Oxford Street in search of a decent pair of shoes, but I couldn’t find anything that jumped off the shelves at me, so I decided to make do what I have (a fine piece of advice at the best of times, which I wantonly ignore whenever I should be near a bookshop) and cut across town back to the river through Soho.

I’ve either forgotten how luridly seedy Soho is, or I haven’t properly explored the place before. What looked like a shortcut led me down a dark alleyway with shady adult stores on either side. The noise of Oxford Street seemed to die in the distance, like the record player in the Waterstones’ basement, stifled into silence by a wall of books… only now by grimy bricks and a mere sliver of sunlight through a gap between the buildings above. I almost collided with a stocky man in a big puffer jacket with a cough came lumbering out of a film store, stuffing something under the sleeve of his coat. Two Arabs stopped talking and gave me a funny look as I passed, clutching my journal in one hand and one strap of my rucksack with the other, humming the tenor line from Ola Gjeilo’s Northern Lights to myself. I guess Soho isn’t on the tourist trail.

Leaving Soho behind, I wandered through the crowds in Chinatown and came out onto Trafalgar Square, where a large crowd had gathered on the steps. Unsurprisingly, it was a rally against the war in Ukraine. Blue-and-yellow flags fluttered high above the throng, joined here and there by Polish and Hungarian partisans adding their colours to the mast. One woman, the tryzub emblazoned on her cape, stood defiant at the front of the congregation, fist raised in a powerful salute for most of the half-hour I stuck around to watch.

Boycott Russia.
Arm Ukraine.
Stop Putin, stop the war.

Those were the chants, coming around and around before the crowd. The main speaker apologised for the necessity of being so blunt, before decrying the rape of Ukrainian women by Russian forces and the slaughter of its children. An Englishman spoke slightly hesitantly about the need to support Ukraine’s disabled and elderly refugees, and a Ukrainian began to sing a national lament as the sky darkened overhead and the sun faded from sight. I’ll admit I half expected there to be a police van lurked nearby, its officers on standby for any disruption, but I couldn’t find a visible copper for love nor money.

The last time I saw a demonstration like this was back in October in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, as I walked back to my hostel with one of my cousins. “They’re always here,” he told me, “and so are they,” indicating the loitering policia who hang back just shy of the crowd, silent, hands on their truncheons, watching the Republican flags flying in the night air. The crowd was surprisingly mixed: an old man in a flat cap stood shouting his passionate support in the centre of the throng, while two girls shared an equally passionate and equally political moment on one of the bollards. The policia watched on, silently.

On my way back to the station, I stopped at the traffic lights and looked back to Trafalgar Square. Lord Nelson and a mounted Charles I stared southwards over my head, silhouetted against the clouded sky: two men who got personally involved in European wars and paid a physical price for their efforts. Little wonder, then, that the European powers are so reluctant to send any troops into open battle to defend the Gateway of Europe.

Back at Blackfriars, the rally seemed a world away. I missed the early train by a whisker and had to wait twenty minutes for the next one. A Catalan girl sat on a bench nearby, a red-and-yellow skiing jacket from Cerdanya proudly displaying her winter colours. I instinctively reached for my face, but my usual rojigualda facemask was at home: I’d opted for a less nationalistic face covering today. Away to the east, the sun broke through the clouds over the Thames, lighting up Tower Bridge against the rainclouds rolling in from the south. London seems to go on forever, whatever happens to the rest of the world, and yet it’s Rome that holds the title of the Eternal City. I’m looking forward to seeing it with my own eyes and reading such stories as I can find in its people and its streets. BB x

Rewind, Reset, Refocus

March 14, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Diary Entry: 14th March, 2012. Ten years ago today.

Heavens above, the first night of Fiddler is less than a day away! This year has flown by… Today went by in a similar blur: four frees (essentially), Spanish and English raced past with a quick thrashing of Peter at chess over lunch and a Yearbook planning session. The dress rehearsal was superb – a lot to be ameliorated for the night itself (apparently) but otherwise very good. I must say, personally, I’m impressed with everyone. Our Tevye in particular: he’s come a long way since only just deciding to put his oar in… One of the big five is almost out of the way! The only question is… what next?

When I was seventeen, lists to me were everything. I think it was a long hangover from the teenage bird-watching days: garden lists, patch lists, year lists and lifers. That kind of thing. I wasn’t really the kind of kid who had it all figured out from the beginning, but I did appreciate a tick list to motivate me. I must have the original “bucket list” of fifty miscellaneous tasks I wanted to achieve before the age of fifty stored away on a memory stick, buried deep beneath a hundred other forgotten half-finished jobs, books and games. The irony isn’t lost on me.

I still remember the big five, though. They were the “ultimate goals”, the quests that I had to complete, come Hell or high water. It went something like this:

~~Play the part of Motel in~~ ~~Fiddler on the Roof~~
~~Get a place at Durham University~~
Travel from Cairo to Cape Town
Get married
Publish the book

You’ll notice that two of them are struck through. Completed. Dicho y hecho. You might well think it more than a little foolish that I managed to get two of my five “great quests” completed within six months of each other, and by the age of eighteen, to boot. You might also question the logic of making the First Quest so very specific, which relied upon a great many external factors, but as the descendant of a lost Jewish family driven into hiding, Fiddler on the Roof holds a very special place in my heart. I was also uncommonly blessed with a musical director for a mother, so I did, I admit, have a significant advantage in achieving one of them early on.

“*Is there a blessing for a sewing machine?*“

Durham? Durham wasn’t even up for debate. I simply had to get there. And though I do my very best to advise my own students against such stubborn folly, I was more than prepared to take a gap year and have a second shot when I didn’t get a place at the university of my dreams the first time around. Call it madness, but I wasn’t prepared to accept anywhere else. It was a gamble I ended up making good on, shored up by a much more favourable set of A Level grades. A combination of luck, hard work and stubborn pride secured me the Second Quest.

Of the remaining three, one was swapped out a few years back for a new quest:

3. ~~Find the family~~

As I got older and my desire for reckless travel steadily fell away – the pressures of holding down a job and being in a relationship will do that to you, I guess – the idea of making the great overland trek from Cairo to Cape Town by any means at hand drifted further and further into the nether realms of lost dreams. Living in Uganda very much whetted my appetite for all things African, but in the years since I’ve been made to question that interest so often, through the lens of anti-colonialism, BLM and the downfall of my Gospel Choir. Eventually, the risks outweighed the allure. I buried that dream a long time ago, and replaced it with a much more personal Third Quest: finding the lost family I had never met.

I found them. That was five years ago – you can read the story here, if you missed it. Of all my quests, the search for my family has been the most precious, and I live in its afterglow twice a week every week as I guide my youngest cousin towards his English B1 exam.

That leaves only two of the original five: arguably, the two chambers of my heart. The book, and the one. I’m not afraid to admit that my single greatest ambition since childhood has been one and the same, and combines those two into one; and that is to read my own stories to my own children one day. It’s an image I’ve had in my head for almost twenty years: sitting on the edge of the bed, my life’s work in my hands, putting on all these silly voices and painting the world I’ve spent decades creating for my children. Leading them there, chapter by chapter. Watching them grow up with my heroes, until they find stories of their own and take up the mantle my great-grandparents passed on to me.

Of course, there’s a small but fundamental stepping stone that must be crossed first: the Fourth Quest.

Getting married and publishing the book. The two quests go hand in hand. That, perhaps, is why coming out of a long-term relationship has been a bit more jarring than I thought it would be. The derailing of two quests at once. A future rerouted, rewritten, a page of thoughts and ideas and names scrubbed blank. It’s not disheartening – nothing can be when the birds are singing and the year is on the turn – but it does leave you knocked out of orbit.

Ten years ago tonight, I was psyching myself up for the first night of Fiddler on the Roof. Tonight, Russian forces continue to cut a burning path through Ukraine. Kiev shelled. Mariupol in flames. Hospitals in ruins. As Motel, I took my young family and fled west into Europe. The radio today was talking about how the British government is offering a tax-free allowance of £350 per month to those willing to put up Ukraine’s refugees. According to the Beeb, some 43,000 have already signed up to help, only five hours in.

The events described in Fiddler took place in 1905. More than a hundred years later, the parallels seem alarming. They put one’s troubles in context. Personal quests and family pride must be denied and set aside and mortified and all that. Perhaps it’s high time I set myself a new quest. In the meantime, there is work, and work is good for the soul, even if marking GCSE translations is a far cry from any soul food I’ve ever eaten. BB x

Tevye: Work hard, Motel. Come to us soon.
Motel: I will, Reb Tevye. I’ll work hard.
Fiddler on the Roof, Act II, Scene 8

Wailing World

February 26, 2022February 26, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

“Sir, what’s your opinion on Russia v Ukraine?”

In the vocabulary of a child, it sounds harmless, like a friendly football match. It tears away the shock and the hysteria. It tells a story of immediate information, of children monitoring the dawn of war on the screens of their smartphones. It seems almost absurd, watching a war unfold in real time.

I couldn’t answer the student because I don’t know enough about what’s going on in Ukraine to give anything like an informed opinion of my own. My meddling with Russian affairs amounted to nothing more than a short-lived attempt at after-school Russian classes in my sixth form days. The two other chaps in the class went on to study Russian at Oxbridge. I had no such intentions. I happened to be studying the Russian Civil War in A Level History, I was intrigued by the art style of the Soviet propaganda machine and felt like learning a new language. Not for the first time in my life, I felt like a foolish hobbyist amongst eager professionals. I don’t think I ever made it to the second class.

I chose to focus on Arabic instead, for equally casual reasons. I didn’t want to be a spy, or a civil servant, or an ambassador. I don’t have the cunning or the sense of national pride. All I wanted to do was to read my history books, and to draw back the curtain on al-Andalus. I had the chance to explore an entirely different world, and I took the other road. God only knows where my life might have taken me had I made it to that second Russian class.

As the fighting intensifies in Kiev, I remember flashes of my brief stop in the city almost seven years ago. Bearded, sweat-scarred and looking forward to coming home, however briefly, after two trying months in Amman. The decision to take advantage of a twelve-hour layover and make a flying trip out to Kiev from Boryspil Airport was a fool’s fancy on my part, as it so often is, but it did mean that I got to see with my own eyes a city that is now in headlines around the world.

That was back in 2016, only a couple of years after the Revolution of Dignity and the subsequent annexation of the Crimea. The city was quiet, but the stress lines were there to see, if you looked closely. Beneath the People’s Friendship Arch, a monument to Russian and Ukrainian unity, a messaged daubed in Cyrillic: “Slava Ukraini” – Glory to Ukraine. The nationalist call-sign, forbidden during the years of the Soviet Union.

The blue and yellow of the national flag was everywhere, almost as fiercely ubiquitous as the rojigualda in the months following the 2017 Catalan rebellion. Even the street artist dressed as a minion in the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) seemed intentionally patriotic.

The blue and yellow from the city streets of Kiev has since fanned out across the web. Profile pictures bear its bicoloured hue. Thoughts, prayers and shares tell the story of the conflict to millions. And while part of me feels this is the way things should be, there’s something that keeps cropping up that I feel the need to talk about.

As is becoming customary in the Instagram Era, there’s just as much anger on my social media feed about the underrepresentation of conflicts happening elsewhere in the world as there is about the fighting taking place in Ukraine. For every “thoughts and prayers” post there’s a story bemoaning how much less of a fuss was made over Israel’s actions in Palestine, or the Indian occupation of Kashmir, or the assault on Yemen, as though one ought to be losing one’s head every time a gun is fired anywhere around the world. All of them immensely valid causes, no more or less than the chaos unfurling in the land of the Rus right now. Still, the phrase “pick your battles” comes to mind, and perhaps I’ve never used it more accurately. You can’t fight every war.

War. It’s not a word I’m used to using in the present tense, jaded as we are in the West by decades of relative peace. Thousands of us – maybe even millions – have never known what war means beyond what we studied at school. There’s a strong argument against the virtue-signalling “thoughts and prayers” response trending across social media, but maybe that’s just the knee-jerk reaction of a generation so far-removed from war that the word has all but lost its meaning.

Thoughts and prayers for the people of Paris after the Notre-Dame fire. Thoughts and prayers for the people of Afghanistan. Thoughts and prayers, but never enough of them, and never going to all the right places at the right time.

“There’s so much human suffering that the whole world should be wailing.”
Joy Chambers, My Zulu, Myself

Taking the colonialist argument off the table, just for a moment, I don’t know whether we’re even capable of feeling a genuine sense of outrage at every injustice there is in the world – even my generation, which does a very good line in being outraged and incensed at everything. Every injustice, though? How can you fight for every cause and still remain true to your own beliefs? That much pain would be enough to tear the soul apart. It’s bad enough being a bleeding heart about the natural world – which, when the chips are down, is the first thing people forget to care about.

Fight, by all means. Resist. Shout about the things you care about. But pick your battles, and don’t attack those who didn’t come when you called, just because the fire in their hearts was not burning so bright.

What’s my opinion, then? Bewilderment. Jaded bewilderment, like so many of my generation. Bewilderment at the aggression. Bewilderment at the inaction. Bewilderment at the comparison to the Sudetenland saga I’ve heard so many times this week.

I studied the Soviet Union for years, but I’m no nearer an answer than any other armchair expert – probably because of my innate aversion to 20th century history, having studied it to the exclusion of every other century at school. Before I speak out, though, I will do what I do best. I will read. I will research. I will inform myself, as we were so often commanded to do during the BLM movement. I will speak to those who know more than I do, when the time is right.

While the world watched the city of Kiev, five islanders returned from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. It was their first independent trip home since they were forcibly removed by the British authorities during the 1970s as part of a deal to secure Mauritian independence. Mauritius wants its territory back. The Chagossians just want to go home.

Just one more injustice to add to the pile. Perhaps the whole world should be wailing – but for whom? Our world is full of people who think differently, and long may that be so. I will defy my generation and risk the use of a colonial poet to conclude, because I do believe Kipling had the right of it in this verse… BB x

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgement seat,
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor breed, nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the Earth!
Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West

Go West

December 2, 2015December 3, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

For once, it’d probably be better if, whilst reading this, you’re not hearing my voice saying it to you – because my voice right now is wrecked, and you wouldn’t recognise the guy on the other end of the line if you could hear him.

I put that down to three things: three hours of choir practice (most of which spent singing at the top of my range as there are no tenors or basses here), two hours of conversation with Upper Sixth-level students and one hour of wrangling with one of my two very-almost-out-of-control primary classes. First and foremost, I blame Ariana Grande, but that primary lot don’t help much. Still, I got my first hug from my two favourite kids in that class today, which was heart-warming, to say the least. Tasha’s been getting hugs since the get-go, and I guess it’s normal procedure for the female auxiliares, but not for me. It made my day, anyway. When they’re not launching a full-on assault against my sanity, my will to live and my voice-box, it’s nice to know they see me as a human being.

I catch myself saying to myself almost constantly: remember the Iraqi kids, remember the screaming, remember the chair-throwing incident… It can’t possibly get any worse than that. I think that’s probably the right way to go about it.

In truth I’ve not got all that much to report at the moment. In a couple of days’ time I’ll hit the road as it’s the December puente (when a national holiday falls close enough to the weekend to create an extended weekend; literally, ‘bridge’). This year it’s only (!) a five-day weekend as the national holidays on the 7th and 8th fall on a Monday and Tuesday respectively, but that’s enough for a mini-adventure at least. I’ve been juggling several ideas over the last few months as to how best to use the time – surprising my friends in Cantabria, Morocco or Granada was the main plan – but it wasn’t until last weekend that I hit upon a decision, and my decision is PORTUGAL.

Yeah. I don’t speak any Portuguese.

It’s only occurred to me recently to take an interest in this nation that just so happens to be lying RIGHT ON MY DOORSTEP. No, seriously, it’s less than half an hour’s drive in the car if you just keep heading west. I suppose the main thing that stopped me going in the first place was that, quite simply, I know nothing about Portugal. I can read Portuguese almost as well as I can read Spanish, but understanding it spoken is… well, it might as well be Russian. The odd word might sound familiar, perhaps, but otherwise it’s a different language in its own right. And rightly so. But, just as Andrew and I decided in Kiev, the mere fact that I don’t speak the language shouldn’t be a barrier in the slightest to an adventurer like me, so… there we go. I’ve booked a couple of nights at a hostel in Lisbon, and I’m leaving it until I get there to decide whether the plan is to head south and check out the Algarve whilst it’s still tourist-free (a tempting prospect) or the gob-smackingly-beautiful north, peppered with unforgettable villages like Monsanto, Marvão and Piódão. It’s a tough call. As always, I’d rather leave that decision until the day. I’d feel better, that way. Come the day, I’ll know which way to go.

As for the Portuguese, well, I’m not going in completely unarmed. In Kiev all I could say was a feeble ‘спасибо’ (thank you). I’ll brush up as many little phrases as I can before I go, as a little always goes a long way, however badly you pronounce it. I’m told the Portuguese are a fascinating people; proud, polite, gaudy and brilliant linguists. My bachillerato class also seem to think that the women have moustaches, but I’ll be the judge of that.

With any luck, I’ll return doubly keen to pick up another language and add it to my belt. I was planning on making my next big language attempt in Zulu, but it is a bit of a jump… Perhaps it would be better if I worked my way towards Zulu, say, via Portuguese…?

Oh Monty Python. How I miss you. BB x

The World’s Most Beautiful Women

September 5, 2015September 6, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Why am I doing this?

No, seriously. Why am I doing this? This isn’t Amman. This isn’t even vaguely Arabic. We’re halfway to Kiev on a bus that isn’t the Skybus that Google and Tripadvisor recommended. Come to think of it, I didn’t even ask the driver where we’re going. It might not even be Kiev. I’m going by the size of the city and the great big river we crossed earlier and assuming it is. Other than that, I really don’t know. I can’t read the alphabet. Any and all Russian I learned in those four after-school sessions has jumped clean out of my mind, except that the letter P becomes R and K, T and A stay the same. Ten points for effort for this worn-out linguist! I mean, there’s no escaping it this time: this is sheer lunacy, even by my standards.

‘We could be going anywhere right now,’ says Andrew. ‘We could literally be going anywhere.’

Well, this really isn’t Arabia anymore…

We really could. It all looks bleak and Soviet; pine forests, grey skies and grim skyscrapers with peeling walls. Even the hooded crows look seedy. But I do have £33 worth of Ukrainian hryvna in my wallet (or at least, I think I do) and I plan for us to be back at the airport for six o’clock at the latest. So there is some semblance of a plan beneath the anarchy. Blimey, but what I wouldn’t do to have fellow linguists and Russian speakers Shahnaz and Rosie here with me now, if just to have a vague idea of what’s going on.

Nope, I don’t understand any of this

If that whim decision to go for the twelve-hour layover bothered me slightly at four o’clock this morning, it was practically crucifying me by nine, when we’d touched down in Borispol Airport and navigated customs. Andrew managed a good couple of hours’ sleep on the journey from Amman; I did not, and it’s really beginning to kick in now, as I’m no longer constantly on the move. But fatigue is the smallest of barriers to the determined adventurer!

…once again I find myself picking up the mantle some two hours later. Two sentences later I woke up with the iPad slipping off my legs onto the floor of the bus. So I take that back. Apparently fatigue has other ideas.

I digress. After a minor financial confusion over the exchange rate of the Ukranian hryvna, Andrew and I made it to Kiev (it really was Kiev in the end) with six hours to kill. Cue at least half an hour of ‘wow’, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’ and ‘this is absolutely bonkers’ as Andrew patiently bears my childish enthusiasm. We took a wander into the old part in search of the Bessarabsky Market to grab a bite to eat. Every single stall inside, without exception, was manned by what can only be described as the stereotypical babuschka. And no, try as they might, Andrew and I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying. But an idea struck me at one of the aisles and I procured a tin of caviar from one of the stallholders who was anxious for us to try a spoonful of all of her wares, from sweet to tongue-zappingly salty, from lumpfish to Beluga sturgeon. And if you think I’m exaggerating, I point you towards the sequin-scaled monstrosity lying headless on a mound of ice near the market door, barbels removed. It hardly needs saying, but this is a world away from Amman. Period.

Concrete block for make unification of great Russian Power and Ukraine

The miracle of Kiev is that there is so much to see in so small an area. Like I said, a world away from Amman. In just under four hours we had covered almost everything there is to see. Beginning with St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, an elaborate Orthodox affair in gold leaf and black-robed majesty, we set off an a tour of the old city. There’s something really special about Orthodox churches. At first glance it all looks a bit showy: giant crosses, bold block colours, gold used just about wherever there’s breathing space, not to mention all the icons. But it’s a great deal more complicated than that. It was Andrew who pointed it out to me. The congregation, outnumbering the sightseers by about nine to one, were mostly women, in varying states of dress, but the one thing they all had in common was the wearing of a headscarf. A kind of step-down for us from Jordan, perhaps.

‘Surely it doesn’t work like that,’ says Andrew, as a scarfed young woman in high heels leaves the cathedral after making the sign of the cross twice across her chest and bowing out, a lurid pink thong showing above the cut of her miniskirt. Apparently, it does. You know what they say about book covers…

Overloading on the blue, much…

One of the subjects that came up in conversation with Fahed and Massoud yesterday was the subject of Ukrainian women, whom Fahed believed, as ‘proved by science’, to be the most beautiful women in the world. I set out to test that theory today, both to conduct some kind of fair test in light of such a sweeping statement (especially when any suggestions of Spain and Colombia had been overruled just minutes before), and more so to justify this ridiculous little side-quest into Kiev at the end of our labours.

Or you could just cut out the middle man…

I’m going to surprise myself, but Fahed’s got a point. Ukrainian women are pretty stunning. They must be, or we wouldn’t have run into not one, not two, but a total of seven weddings in the course of our wanderings. There’s also a heck of a lot of them; more than the men, anyway, at least from my observations. A bit like Elvet Riverside, come to think of it. But seriously, those weddings we walked in on (there was hardly any avoiding them, they were all over the place…) Flowing white dresses everywhere on a backdrop of marble steps, spiralling turrets and Orthodox spires. My heart was on a serious flutter. Perhaps it’s the healthy skin tones, the raven hair, or the eyes that shelter a mixture of light and dark? Or even the fabulous dress sense? No, surely it’s the curled smiles most of them are wearing… (I wish Nizzar Qabbani could help me out here, I’m teetering on the edge of the villainy of objectivity)

Somebody stop me before I make a rash move!

Before I go too far, I’ll throw you the anecdote that tipped me over the scale of utter disbelief of Fahed’s claim to conceding a little ground to the guy. In the grounds of the St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev’s jaw-droppingly beautiful UNESCO cathedral complex, Andrew and I stumbled upon an outdoor recital by a young Ukrainian student playing quite possibly the largest lute I have ever seen. I believe, if memory serves, that it is called a bandura? We still had a good three hours to kill so we stopped to listen, and am I glad we did! No sooner had she put her fingers to the strings than the girl began to sing, and in all my years as the son of two music teachers I have rarely heard a voice so magical. Like a siren, but sadder and more graceful. I was totally drawn in – so much so that it took me some time to realise that the bandurist and I had been staring at each other unflinchingly for almost a minute before I snapped awake, and she’d been singing all the way through.

‘You should have got her number or something,’ said Andrew, as we moved on to the Great Gates of Kiev twenty minutes later. ‘You haven’t got forever. Get them before they’re all gone, that’s what my godmother told me.’

I’m not running out of time yet – at least, I hope I’m not. Maybe I should have done or said something. As ever, I was lost in the music, I guess. Too lost to appreciate that we kept looking back at each other after her set was over. My obliviousness reigns supreme. At the very least I have a good three minutes of her set on video, so I can listen to that siren song again if ever the mood requires. And by that I mean, of course, sleep. Andrew fell asleep during her recital. If I hadn’t been so entranced, I guess I might have done so too.

It’s ok, as long as I have cats I’ll be just fine

Water under the bridge, hey? But what an adventure, and what a way to end my time in Jordan! It’s been a pleasure to live and work alongside you, Andrew, and I wish you all the best in France (knowing that you’ll be back in the comfort of your own home by the time you read this, and that Babette won’t have to check on how you’re getting on in this long-winded fashion anymore!) As for the rest of you, dear readers, I shall probably take a few days’ hiatus to catch up on sleep, as I’m dangerously behind, and to clear my head. Just a few minutes in one of Kiev’s parks was enough to recharge my batteries right the way up – green, green, GREEN, oh my God, the trees, the leaves, the grass and all of the GREEN – but I intend to set up stores for the winter, as it were. Villafranca’s not lacking in countryside, but I’ve learnt my lesson, and I’m not setting off into the open world without a well-supplied heart next time.

There’s still another hour to go until boarding begins for the flight back to London. Farewell, До свидания and I’ll catch you all later. Yours truly needs a well-deserved break from all this madness. Until the next time! BB x