NewsLab

This is my first time on the blog for 2 long weeks. I was nervous about looking at it, reading it, catching up on it, re-encountering the group, remembering its breadth, our different approaches to the blog. It’s an odd position we’re in, being all of us part of something that was ‘there’ and ‘then’ in Alexandria, is now here (where exactly?) and all of us far away. I tend to feel my geographical position more than I expected. Or maybe I’m confusing the territory with the cultural identity that goes with it. But I can definitely feel the space, the North South East West that maps everyone’s experiences. Standing brushing my teeth in my bathroom where there’s a huge world map, I’ve caught myself staring blankly, foamy-mouthed and surprised each and every time at how small Tunisia is, or that the capital of Morocco isn’t Fez. But coming back to this blog forms a further frame of reference, beyond just maps, beyond just news reports that I sometimes miss or only half-hear. The blog is a new way in to places I’ve never been and places I’ve been countless times.

But in the past 2 weeks my experiences have been peculiarly inward-looking and domestic, and I have a sense coming back to the blog of being slightly afraid to engage with the bigness of the world again, the bigness of the things going on in other places. Here, in London, I move house, I draw up contracts and strategically manoeuvre my way through meetings at work, I write essays on books and academic theories that aren’t quite current. My world in the past 3 weeks has consisted mainly of the following:

• Objects, and the packing of things into boxes.
• The moving of things around, the finding of places to store them; or put them in places where they look nice, such as on shelves.
• A wedding
• Kinship patterns in South India
• Excel spreadsheets and wildly fantastical budgets
• Nanny Hyde’s fruitcake
• No internet connection
• Adopting major new lifestyle habits such as using the overland train instead of the tube
• An ongoing debate about saying ‘I love you’
• Obsessive-compulsive concern about a blocked drain and the buying of extremely expensive and corrosive cleaning products.
• A slightly sore throat

So you’ll forgive me if this is all I can post for the moment on the blog, that little list of boring everyday things, my insular and closed experience of the world – and those things seemed so important, at the time. If anyone would like to post their list of things that take up time and grow to disproportionate levels of significance in their lives (excluding here of course the wedding and the thankfully unrelated issue of saying ‘I love you’, because those aren’t small things), I for one would be delighted to see if this problem is universal, or if it is just something produced on this little island, or a chemical imbalance in my brain.

Whatever the cause of such a problem, this blog - as nervous as it makes me with its encapsulation of so much difference and similarity - is the outside from the inside, and it forces me beyond the distractions of just living, and to think more about life. In recognition of that, and regarding my point of departure for this post, my list is worthless as an offer of exchange, but all the same I’d dedicate it to LM, and her view from Beirut.