War

Saturday

Our Shabbat away, near one of my favourite stretches of beach where Eli and Mor live, was postponed because their baby had a temperature, so we stayed in Jerusalem. Shabbat is the only day to catch up on zeds, or zees as Americans no doubt say, so sleep and eat is what we slouchily did to make up for the tiring rush of the week. Shabbat went out, we lit seven Channuka candles, and once the computer was switched on, we realised Israel had bombed Hamas's infrastructure in Gaza. It surprised us as much as it must have surprised the Palestinians - the day before Israel had issued 'it's strongest warning yet' to Hamas to stop firing rockets into the south , but still we didn't expect a war to start as we were snoozing, reading and having a long walk to the park with the frisky hound. I suppose reactions to this type of situation vary - there will be people who say, 'Good. Serves them right. Yal-la,' the ones who say, 'Oh, man! What did they do that for?' and the ones who silently gulp, like me, which may well be the majority grouping.

Times of war and intifada mean every Israeli home with a TV (and that's not everyone as religious Jews don't have TVs) has it on all the time, with the same recurring images and interviews repeating in an endless circle of drama and mayhem until some other gruesome event comes to oust the previous images. TV and media, being what they are, fuel the human elements of the situation, which means they try to pull on the heartstrings or disgust you by showing injured kids, and the bias is shocking. In Israel they show women hysterically crying, screaming and praying as the sirens go off and the rockets start raining around them (I saw that standing in the doorway of someone's house as I went to pick up daughter number two from her friend). And in England they never go to Israeli homes and interview people, rarely show the damage or the fear instilled on this side, but show instead the damage Israel has done, and that reeks of propoganda.





Sunday

The kids are still on Channuka holidays and we have plans to go to the Western Wall, or Cottel, with the Korn family from England who made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel) from sunny Pinner in the summer. I need to pick up my older son from a sleepover at his cousins' house as the Korn's son was in his class in London and it would be rude if my boy didn't join us, but I have to threaten him as he doesn't want to have anything to do with us once he's at his cousins' house, but this is expected and my threats are good. But I can't get to him as the road to his cousins' house is blocked by police and soldiers, and we all know what this means without having to ask the police girl smoking a fag and waving cars away. Next to where the cousins live is an Arab village, the village the tractor killer came from, and they've been rioting. Later on, coming back, we pass the entrance to the village, still blocked by police and soldiers but just the village and not the whole road this time, and we see a huge skip-like bin on fire, hundreds of rocks on the road that were thrown at the police and soldiers and some dark smoke further in where something is smoldering.









The Arab village below my house, Beit Zafafa, is closed as well. Police and soldiers block all the entrances and exits to the village. Later, on my way back from a wonderful class on Jewish philosophy, where we refuted the Big Bang, pretty much wiped science off the table and considered the timelessness and instancy of the act of creation, the whole road near Beit Zafafa was blocked and I had to go the long way around, to the Bethlehem road, hoping that wasn't closed as well, so I could recapture my child from the Russians. Nice Russians, but it sounds cold-war-ish and exciting, so I'm leaving it in.




(Rocket being fired from Gaza into southern Israel)

Monday

I'm not the kind of person who wakes up and reads the news on the internet, but this is war and it's on my doorstep. Israel has bombed more Hamas compounds overnight and the death toll is rising. It's the last day of the holidays, it's rainy and there are six kids in the house chasing the dog and playing on the Wii. I manage to blag a press pass to cover Project Interchange, a group of US campus editors with an anti-Israel stance, who are coming (with perfect timing) to assess what the situation is really like, go to security fences, have lunch with IDF soldiers, meet Palestinian media and have talks from eminent professors about strategic environments and problems with investment in the Middle East. I put myself forward as a blogger (blagger, more like) for The Independent (which is in the pipeline but I've had no official go ahead yet) and a freelance journalist, so I get a place on the bus, lunches and to interview and cover the events. Thing is, I can't go with them to the north as I have to work, cook and be a mother, or to the Dead Sea and Massada as they're doing that on Shabbat. So I'm squeezing myself in where I can. It's fun, being a war correspondent. Not that I have any idea what a war correspondent does and I haven't yet left my rainy house or written anything about the war. But the idea is exciting.





Tuesday

It's raining heavily in Jerusalem; we wake up and the breathtakingly beautiful panoramic view we have of the city is a breathtaking panoramic view of thick white cloud and fog. I can't see the houses in Beit Zafafa below my garden. I'm locking doors, telling the kids to ask who it is before they open it, and in school yesterday the teachers talked to each class about what was going on in the country they'll one day have to fight for in the army. It's a bizarre reality to grow up in. I remember during the intifada, when suicide bombings of teenagers waiting to go into clubs, bus bombings, Arab drivers driving their buses into whole crowds of soldiers and civilians standing at bus stops were incidents happening every day, a little girl of five came to play with my little girl, who was also then five. It was the day after an incident when a mother of three was lying on her bed with her children, sleeping, and gunmen burst into her house and she could only grab two of them and pull them under the bed with her, and I was raw with emotion, knowing that the other one, who was shot dead, was the one she couldn't get to and how she must have felt about that. I heard the girls playing in the sitting room, and then it clicked what they were saying. 'There's been an incident,' (piguah) said the visiting child, 'and Daddy's been killed. The ambulance is coming soon and we have to run away.' 'Woah, woah,' I said running to them, 'What happened to playing with your dollies?'



(Israeli man surveys the damage to his home after it was hit by a kassam rocket.)

Mum calls.
'It's kicking off there.'
'Yep.'
'Make sure all your passports are ready.'
'Ok.'
'I hate this.'
'I know, Ma.'

Her only two daughters and her six grandchildren - her entire family apart from her siblings - are here. I know she's panicking. I don't tell her a bomb fell in Be'er Sheva yesterday, 40kms away from Gaza, which is very close to our friends with the horses and donkeys. I must call them and see how they are. The 43 year old Dad, who is rather beefy these days but is most cool - he lived in Jamaica for two years when he was seventeen and dances like a black man, which is with winding hips and tiny smooth movements - got called up as a reserve to fight in Lebanon during the last war. Hope he doesn't get called up again. They have three kids, one isn't a year old yet.

War isn't fun. People are tense and stress levels are high. Fear of reprisals and renewed suicide attacks are hanging over us like the shadow of the grim reaper, and Australia suddenly seems a very good option as an emigration destination. But here we are, getting on with our day, justifying Israel's actions and our existence to the rest of the world and our friends and famiy, who get shown a one-sided viewpoint on TV, hoping they'd see it another way if they had to live like this, wondering if these 'defenseless' people, as they were called yesterday, will stop trying to wipe the country out. Meanwhile, we wipe theirs out.

Sigh.

Fud

I'm so excited. It's the academic equivalent of reading Wanderlust from the comfort of your Tube seat and losing yourself down a vast dusty track in the outback, laden with rucksack and telescope, alone and intent on searching for the darkest skies on Earth from which to view supernovae. Or stomping through teeming undergrowth, swatting mozzies off your sweaty countenance as you trek in search of some endangered beast or long lost tribe. When you look up and you're on an old rickety train somewhere between Charing Cross and Embankment instead, the hit is no less energising. More so, in fact.

I've spent the last few weeks helping students with their applications for Harvard, Yale, Georgia Tech, Oxford etc by rewriting and editing personal statements and fixing CVs. Oooh, I thought. Harrrrvard. Mmmm. Oxxxxford. Yes, I said to the aeronautical engineer who wants to do Phd research on aeroplane engines that run on some kind of dangerous sounding explosion - go do it. The deadline might be a week's time and you only decided to apply last week, but don't give up: apply again next year if you fail the GRE and don't blame it on my teaching seeing as you only gave me a month to teach you the whole course and you're Russian.

Then other thoughts occurred. If these not particularly genius folk (the others, I mean - the Russian is pretty sharp) are applying to these wonderous places, and some of them are downright dim, what it means is, these places are filled with ordinary people and some of them are not even scarily clever...

So I spent last night in ac-lust. Academic lust. Searching for the perfect Phd, or fud, as I like to call it. I sent an email to a nice prof in Stanford's department of literary philosophy to tell him I was interested in the course he's thinking of running if he has enough interest. I found out that a comparative literature Phd at Harvard requires four languages, minimum, so I'm definitely not taking that, but other courses look delectable. I contemplated the 'The Centre for the Study of Rationality' at the Hebrew University, even though "Every student in the program must have a background in mathematics at least at the level required for admission to the University's Department of Statistics: this includes differential and integral calculus, and linear algebra. The student must also have an introductory course in statistics and probability and a course in game theory", the very idea of which made me come out in a nasty rash, but I have a good friend who's a maths teacher, so it's not impossible. But studying decision making is rather bloody ironic, considering, and not sure if it interests me fully anyway as the maths makes it all a bit, well, mathematical.




I think I found my doctorate course, anyway. I think I found funding and I think, seeing as they are 'actively seeking researchers in these fields' and I deemed those fields exactly right for my purposes of getting in, I'd definitely be in the running. The only problems are - one, the application deadline is in 2 weeks and I'd have to outline a whole research project including relevant reading done thus far and intended sources, which is expecting alot from the 'miracles happen during Chanuka' belief, and two, it's not in Israel and I am.

I won't apply now, obviously, even though one part of me is going 'Phduckit. Why not? Just to see if I could get in...' Maybe I'll spend the coming year reading and figuring out my line of research and apply for next year. I do feel guilty that my children's education is what I should be investing time in now and not my own, so even if I do it in like ten years time, it would be ok, I guess. A long wait, but then at least my children won't be illiterate ignoramuses. It made me so excited to even consider it and now nothing seems impossible. I did rule out most of the Ivy League and US universities, merely because I can't easily schlepp the tribe somewhere else after recently upheaving them (maybe that's not the right word - it sounds like I puked them out). But maybe. One day. Five years of the Phd is paid for in the US, as long as you teach a bit. Oooh.





So rather than read about trips to Antarctica and Chile, I'm getting my kicks from reading graduate programs and checking out the courses available in the world's top universities, and my hairs are on end. This is fun, man! I'm even considering studying astronomy, or anthropology, just for a little something in the meantime, until the kids get bigger, until the day comes when I can go off and become the leading professor in the philosophy of stellar-linked rationality in the emotional ethics of Irish Jewish Thai literature based on the absence/presence of the author and the literary techniques of ancient Jewish texts. (Maybe I'd be the only professor in that particular field, in fact, thinking about it.)

The world is my oyster. (Is that why they call a London travel pass an Oyster card?)

The other significant thing going on this week is a likkle day called Harismas on 25th, which is nothing at all here in the Holy City but a regular Thursday (or whatever). It never ceases to amaze me that a day so built up all over the world, with such an drawn-out, panicky, excitable countdown; a day that people travel all over the world to arrive before; that they take time out to buy things for, spend so much money on and over-eat and over-booze to such a remarkable extent doesn't even get a mention. It simply doesn't exist, full stop. Unless you go to Bethlehem or Nazarus, and as a Jew, that's illegal. But I know it does exist, which makes it feel kinda furtively exciting. I look around the streets at the very normal goings-on, and know what's happening in all the homes of my family and friends and it's like a weird movie where all the action is building up in certain scenes but keeps getting cut with scenes from a boring, ordinary day where things are moving really slowly. The things I miss most on that day are tastes - rich, alcoholic, over-indulgent. But I don't miss smoking, so that's mucho excellente.




Anyway.

What I'm trying to say is Seasons Greetings to all of you, whatever your leanings. Happy HeyZus-mas day, and Chag Sameach. May miracles abound.

Addictions

Monday morning I went on a school trip with Maayan's class to Park Canada, which isn't the small crappy park across the road from our house, as I'd previously thought, but a large and beautiful spot near Latrun where the Maccabees fought the Greeks in a big battle. This trip pertains to Hannuka (which I prefer spelled without a 'c', even though I've started adding that same 'c' to the English spelling of my surname as people were calling me Emma Seven) as steep inclines lead to 360 degree views and ruins of the guards' watchtower, which is living history and thus pretty cool. This was all wonderful stuff etc etc but the whole 5 hr shebang would have been significantly more enjoyable if there had been coffee in my bloodstream.

It was the first morning for as long as I could remember where coffee didn't play a part, and man, was I fucked up. Arrrggh, massive yawn, Arrggghhh massive yawn, arrggghhh massive yawn - whoop swallowed a rock, a child of eight, a teacher's scarf, my own face. Who, Maayan, is that constantly yawning, grey-skinned lump of near-life crouching with desperation near a rock? Oh, that's my Mummy. She's just dying of caffeine withdrawal. She'll be fine and if not we'll cart her body home in the bus. Leave her to die and let's war again.

I was flabberghasted to realise just how addicted I am to caffeine. Yesterday morning I had to have five cups of it to replenish the cellular deficit. This morning, pre-coffee, the yawns started again, the body was sluggish, half-alive, eyes streaming. Post-coffee and I could run across the Antarctic in my pj's and feel neither cold nor tired, merely wonder why there's no zenith to climb and how long I could stay in the icy waters before my heart gave way, and plop, here goes - start the stopwatch!

Dad used to tell us how sugar was 'the biggest poison known to man' and refuse to buy sweeties, cookies, chocolate and sweet cereal and I plotted that when I was older I'd have a whole row in my kitchen of all the cereals I wanted and no one would be able to stop me. Now, of course, I don't want them, I want Weetabix, which costs like eight quid a box of 24 so there's no way on earth. Anyway, we'd say, 'yeah, yeah Dad, give it a rest and pass the Smarties.' So I wonder if it was the sugar as much as anything that I put in my coffee, but whatever. I don't drink as much alcohol as I once did, I don't ram consciousness expanding drugs down my gullet (anymore), I let people cross at zebra crossings, unlike Israelis, and I work hard for almost no pay, so I figure I deserve a little poison.

Hannuka is about to begin, which means doughnuts and holidays and cold dark weather -except the weather hasn't got very cold and on the trip, we saw the flower rakefet, don't know what it's called in Anglit, which is an end of winter sort of flower, and the teacher reckons she saw blossoming almond trees, which is a sign that you need to start cleaning your house like a nut for Passover. It's all messed up. I like Hannuka. I like anything if I've drunk coffee that morning.

So Him Indoors said last night I was addicted to the computer - 'the world's greatest addiction' he called it. Yes, I've spent almost every minute on the effing thing since I got back and here I am again, but I WORK on it, was my reasoning. I feed from it, I connect with the world, I write and create. This is my medium. This is my sustenance and livelihood, my entertainment and my 'only connect' faculty. If it made me coffee I'd marry it.

So I guess I'm not as pure as pure can be. Not that purity was ever a goal, as such, but one wonders if I might be something worth thinking about. I'm too punk to be pure, but one day I might be rid of that and get zen on a cloud of purity.

No cigarettes, said the brain upon waking.

No cigarettes it's saying now.

Don't get up and go to the back door.

Don't do it.

Don't!

Londinium

People have been living in the London area for over 5,000 years, although, like Israel, it was once boggy marshland. I don't know what this means, this 5,000 years business: does it mean no one lived there beforehand because it was a swamp, or that that's when residential records started, or at that point the native folk got massacred by nice white people who stuck their flag in the earth?

The Romans established the town of Londinium in 43 BCE, about 7 years after their invasion of Britain. Around AD 60, it was sacked (what does that mean ?) by the Iceni and their fiesty queen Boudica, but then it grew until, get this, in the 2nd century, it replaced Colchester as the capital of Roman Britain (Britannia).

I repeat. Colchester. Imagine that being the capital of our mighty frozen land. Shudder.

Talking about shuddering, these pictures were taken at lunchtime, the warmest part of the day, on our convoluted way past Henley's fields and icy graveyards as we looked for the effing pub. It was around minus 5 that night. All of us went out for a smoke but no one was shivering quite as violently as I was.












Roman London had 60,000 residents, as opposed to the squashy 12 million today. They enjoyed the largest basilica (Roman public building) north of the Alps, a governor's palace, temples, bath houses, amphitheatre and a large fort for the city garrison, all which, sadly, are no longer down Streatham High Road. Political instability and recession- yes, credit crunchers, a 3rd century recession - led to a slow decline.

At some time between 190 and 225 AD the Romans built a huge, thick defensive wall around it, although I don't know where that is either. Also like Jerusalem, the city has survived fires, plagues, terrorist attacks, war, bombardment and invasion. Both have witnessed mass immigration and growth, until tiny hamlets a day's ride from London, like Pinner, got enclosed in its great zone 5 underground map, and it spread almost to, well, Colchester. Ironically.



Fuelled by this newfound interest in the place I was desperate to leave for most of my itchy youth, I got in touch with schools for the kids for next year to, as they say in Amerikee, cover my ass. If I was to decide to come back then the kids having places in schools would be a serious consideration, but if I left it, that would be it. No chance. No option. Stuck with a capital uck and a different first letter.

So I called the secondary school that has a thousand kids vying each year for 'only' 300 Year 7 places and discovered the deadline passed in October; that my kids aren't in the country which complicates the application by a millionfold or renders it impossible (depending on which local authority you speak to). The school committee would have to consider Tamar's Year 9 application with great weight and deliberation if she ever rose up the extensive waiting list, and we'd have to get clearance from the Beit Din. Barnet were the least pedantic and beaurocratic council - well, they were the only ones who didn't scream with laughter at my request, or slam the phone down with disgust, or shriek outright, 'No way on EARTH, you mad, deluded witch.' So in my application, as long as I use Valerie's address, move to Hendon or Golders Green if I do go back, which is fine by me, lie, cheat, steal and kill all those who are on the waiting list before us, we'll be in with a slim chance. Hey, I wasn't daunted. Massive headfucks are run of the mill - I'm getting used to them - and where there's a will there's a way and all that proverby stuff. Plus it will leave my options nice and open one way or another.

Feeling not so trapped or stuck or weighed down, Israel felt a better place to be. Boring, uncooth and uncivilized, yes. Decent people have to scrum through flying mud for the remainder of the pickings and feel grateful they have work at all, yes. But that may be just my inbred intellectual snobbery and my blue blood surfacing. I could blame alot on those regal genes - I should remember to. I'm a PRINCESS, for crying out loud. I'll have to get that printed on a t-shirt.

Once landed, I spent the last 2 days arched over a computer with stiff shoulders writing summaries for Newser, which means making sure headlines are direct and contain verbs, putting numerals before certain things eg 40 years but forty candidates, italicizing books and some sources but not others, and turning 'encyclopedia sounding sentences' like 'Other threats to coral reefs include pollution and natural disasters, like earthquakes, the Guardian reports' to snappy lines like 'The report also zeroed in on additional threats like pollution...'

The New York chick training me seems to think I'll get there in the end and the snappy line thing will just click, but right now I hate the news with a passion. Three of my summaries went on air yesterday, with editing, of course. Do I get paid for these two whole days? No. And the three days beforehand? No. And the two days next week? And the week after, ad impecunium? Don't ask.

I see it as skill building. Or slave labour, depending which day you get me on. A Penniless Royal (Oooh, Penny Royal was some kind of ancient contraceptive stuff. Good name for a book.)

Kate said, 'some things just don't belong. Like a cactus in the rainforest'.

Hmm. Well, the cactus is back in the rainforest after a much needed restorative break, wishing the friends she could rely one, the ones who are there for her and made her laugh, were just down the road. But something is better, and the thought of being here seems less enervating somehow.

And, AND, I woke up this morning and said, ' No cigarettes today. That's it.' And I didn't either. Just wish I hadn't bought a stick of 200 in duty free.

Dirty Old Town

ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth, Sept 3rd 1802



Tuesday 2 Dec
For more than a year, Luton Airport has been surrounded by roadworks, preventing people from getting home from the airport even after midnight, which is just what you need after a five hour flight. The taxi drivers huddle in each other's taxis for warmth, speaking Hindi or Urdu. You have to pay a quid to use a trolley for your bags, which is offensive. It's minus one. It feels like the most normal thing in the world to be home.

Wednesday
I wake up in a bed enveloped in Egyptian cotton sheets, lying on the softest pillows, looking at a pale, cool room. Mum's love of decent things even when there's not much food in the fridge means it's comfortable in bed and frost covers the roofs outside like snow so I don't rush to get up. I've been awake for hours, anyway. Thinking. The house is cosy: log fires and hot radiators; tweeting birds and proper tea. I really really hate Staines, but we take Maor to town to arrange an eye test, buy him new trainers and mooch about, looking at the toys. Maor doesn't want to come to Leonie's house so I go with a backpack and a book on the train; Leonie picks me up with Ella, Megan and Tullia in the back, grinning sweetly and wondering why Maor didn't come. The house smells of baking salmon and steaming dogs. Cats hang out on the kitchen counter and lick plates in the sink. Sean and Catia are there already, munching on hard crisps and looking smarter than I look. The house has evolved into a beautiful place - Leonie's canvases line the walls and one captures Grandma's expression perfectly, so I look at it for a long time. Being here is like walking into a warm corner of your heart. Dinner is eggplant soup with mint leaves and pine kernals dotted on top; salmon en croute with Thai paste and spinach on the side, and muesli crumble and custard for pud. I take Florence her dinner - she's babysitting next door. She got fifty quid for it. I'm in the wrong career.

Thursday
Flo(15) has tuba today and can't carry it to school so Leonie drives her in. Ella (13) has her saxophone grading so I listen to her practice after breakfast. She makes me (piss weak) tea - I add another tea bag- toast ('Shall I butter it for you? Yes, please Ella. Do you want some marmalade? Shall I cut it in half for you?) and makes the sweetest little 'oh' noise when she makes a mistake that if I was the teacher, I'd pass her just for that. We take her there - she's so nervous - I wish her luck and get on the train. I walk over the bridge and London hits me like an intravenous mainline shot of adrenaline.





Waiting for Kate on Embankment, I go into the National Theatre, a place I've never been to before. There are lots of these places - London is a city I'd like to get to know better. Upstairs is the 'Landscape Photography of the Year' exhibition so I float silently in front of large canvases of rough British seas, tangled, knotted woods and icy moors, enjoying (just as much as the exhibition) the dark oak floors, the heavy doors of the restrooms and their solid handles, the porcelain seat of the toilet and the thick tissue paper, wondering if that means I'm a snob. In the coffee shop beside the photographs people are quietly eating, sitting upright, drinking politely to the classical music in the placid cafe. In his eight chapters preceding Perkei Avot, Rambam, the King of Spain's physician, writes that just as a diseased body needs a certain cure, so the troubled soul needs to restore itself, and this is done by wandering around beautiful buildings and gardens. He's right, you know. Kate is restorative as well. She also grabs hold of the manuscript I'm about to lob into the Thames and, in a moment of focus and light, tells me exactly what's wrong and what's right. We have noodle soup in Wagamammas and take our cold ear shells off to meet the others in the pub, which was chilly. A crushing headache for hours and hours leaves me reeling. Good to see my writing comrades again.






Friday and Saturday
Maor and I get the train to Pinner and go to Moriah. In the playground, the thin minded, gossipy mothers I never liked anyway give sidelong looks and almost hellos; the ones I loved give hugs and kisses. Inside, the over-controlling teachers leave me with a sour taste in my mouth. Shabbat comes in early - 'I run and I run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking' to get to Chiswick on time. Dinner, champagne cocktails and wine with Mazzer, a spa and steam room in the morning and a wander by the river, watching the kayaking men in woolly hats, and a walk along Chiswick High Road where Jamaicans in a steel drum band play Jingle Bells to white shoppers with expensive beach strollers. A microcosm of society, this place - everyone here is a made-it professional, all the smart homes look the same inside the large, bare windows -it's lovely but it's not quite real. Not for me, anyway. Not yet. If ever. When Shabbat goes out we go to Justine and Pete's; Milly (5) had a temperature but said, ' You made me feel much better, Emma. Will you come back and live here, please?' I make soup for Jess, who's sick as a dog and in bed for a week already, and Justine does her usual trick of saying, 'Oooh, can you double up?', so I make soup for her as well. We deliver the soup and sit with Jess a while. As days go, this one's close to perfect.





Do I miss it here? Of course I do.
Do I want to come back? I do, actually. Kind of.
Will I? Hmm.
Good question.