Author Archives: Arthur House

On the 343

14th October 2016

In 2012, the number 343 bus caught fire outside my bedroom window in southeast London. Caught fire might be misleading. Rather, it exploded, rattling my windows, waking me up, and drawing most of the neighbours – or at least those who did not have to go off to work at 8 AM – out into the street to look. I knew the 343 bus well – it was my route to the supermarket, to my girlfriend’s house, to the cinema, the pub, the park. I, along with my fellow neighbours, rode it almost every day. It was, I thought, ‘my’ bus. So it was strange to walk outside in my pyjamas and slippers that early March morning and join the gaping sodality as the big red bus burned before our eyes. No one was injured – that much we could tell. The ambulance was off to the side, the paramedics idle. Nor were the fire brigade in any big hurry to do much about it. ‘Best to let it burn itself out,’ one of them told me as his colleagues languidly sprayed the flames. Slowly, the big red vehicle disintegrated in front of my eyes. I’m not sure what was more bizarre: the burning bus itself of the pictures of the burning bus – my burning bus – on news sites, in the paper, on TV. The police were not treating the incident as suspicious, which struck me as odd. Not that I suspected terrorism – not at all. But still, a burning bus, or rather an exploding bus, struck me as incredibly suspicious. A robbery of sorts. That was our local bus, I felt like shouting. And now it’s gone, without so much as a police investigation. I’ve since moved out of that house, but I still live in the same area, and I still ride the 343 every now and then. Recently, after visiting a friend near London Bridge I decided to ride it home – something that I hadn’t done in some time. It was a rainy afternoon. Blustery. The bus was nearly full. The windows had fogged up. It would be a long journey, but I didn’t mind. The 343 is one of those circuitous buses. It traverses few main thoroughfares, choosing to snake down the suburban roads, the backstreets, all the way from City Hall to New Cross Gate. This can be explained by the fact that the 343 wasn’t always the 343. Before the route was sold to Abellio – a Dutch transport company, one of the handful of private corporations in charge of London’s various bus routes – it was known as the P3, one of those single-deckers meant to shuttle pensioners and schoolchildren from door, to shop, to door. When Abellio bought the line, they expanded the service. Now it’s one of the least efficient bus routes in all of London,among the ten worst performing in the whole city. The bus halted in traffic at Elephant and Castle. I rubbed the fog off the front window to see the large construction site just beyond the old shopping center. This used to be home to the Heygate Estate, which was demolished last year. A few cranes swayed in the wind. A man sipped a cappuccino outside one of the refurbished shipping containers at the new Boxpark. I had no right to get romantic about the Heygate – it was a hellish, rusk-hulk of a ruin. But this too felt bleak. Just beside the Boxpark was a large digital picture of the world to come: the new development was to be called Elephant Park, and flats were officially for sale. Old London burnt up, purified by fire, making way for the boxy corporate design of condos and flats, soon to be home to white-collar workers, low-level execs, those trying to get a rung on the property ladder. A bastion of healthy living: a gym, rooftop gardens, a children’s play area – residents’ access only. Eventually the Walworth Road unjammed, and the bus turned on to one of the small roads heading south. Ads for Elephant Park continued for another half-mile or so: large, digital illustrations of the bright, white redevelopment scheme. But the advertisements disappeared as soon as we reached the Aylesbury Estate, where a good portion of passengers alighted. I was always fascinated by the Aylesbury when I passed it on this bus: I knew it as one of the most ‘notorious’ estates, not to mention the largest social housing project in Europe, a great grey city unto itself, where Tony Blair made his first speech as Prime Minister, promising to bring prosperity to Britain’s ‘forgotten people’. But I recognized it from somewhere else, too. Television. That old Channel 4 ident, in which a camera pans slowly out onto one of the balconies, surveying the bleak ruin as a large number 4 arranges itself in the center of the screen. The estate doesn’t really look like this, of course. The Channel 4 film crew brought along a few props when they filmed this little clip: plastic bags, wet washing lines and empty lager cans were placed in the shot for effect. The satellite dishes dotting the windows were added later, in post-production. The bus carried on past Burgess Park, through the strange residential area between the Walworth Road and the Old Kent Road. We passed rows of old Victorian terraces, a few smaller estates and a handful of new Elephant Park-style condominiums. But as we rode, I noticed something strange. Something was missing from my journey. The announcements – that was it: the bland, computerized female voice that announced each stop had ceased. The journey felt somehow empty without her. But why? I’d always found it a bit strange, that voice. A bit OK Computerish. Fitter. Happier. More productive. Strange, too, to know that its provenance is a real person, and not a digital automaton – a computer program with RP pronunciation – as I once thought it was. Her name is Emma Hignett. Born in Durham, Emma gave up her dream of being a dancer when she was in her 20s and decided to pursue a job in radio, instead. People had always complimented her on her voice, and she found success as a traffic reporter somewhere up north. Eventually, she moved on to a co-hosting slot on Capitol Gold’s breakfast show in London. But her big breakthrough, of course, was the London Buses. The iBus electronic system came into effect in 2006, mapping and tracking the thousands of buses that drive up, down, across and around London every day. TFL wanted a female voice to announce each stop, and after a brief search, they came across Ms Hignett’s perfectly unthreatening mechanical-staccato voice. Today, she occupies a space in the collective consciousness of most bus-travelling Londoners. Think about the way you hear her voice whenever you walk past a familiar bus stop. Aldwych, alight here for Royal Courts of Justice. Is it tragic that the woman who dreamt of making art with her body – being a dancer – ended up as a disembodied voice? And not just that, but the voice of a new, technologically advanced London – a floating geist of corporate hegemony. Something about her tone, those dulcet recitations – perfect for the type of corporate advertising that would come to be her bread and butter – paired surprisingly well with Elephant Park, those digitized images of corporate architecture. As the bus pulled over to my stop, I imagined the future residents of Elephant Park (as well as the future residents of the new development on the road just around the corner from my house, where the 343 burned to bits that day four years ago) all speaking in her voice. Walking in their parks. Swimming in their indoor pools. Enjoying glasses of white wine on their balconies. And I wondered where my former neighbors would end up. The old men and women who came outside to look at the burning bus that day. Perhaps they’re set to go the way of the buses. ‘Best to let it burn itself out,’ the fireman said to me that day. ‘No point in fighting it.’

Cat People

29th February 2016

June, 2010. South Africa vibrates with football fever.‘Feel it, it is here’ goes the slogan. South African flags adorn cars across the city, flying from antennae and covering wing mirrors. If you are stuck in traffic you can play a game – spot the unpatriotic driver with a naked vehicle. There’s no excuse, as most of the hawkers who linger at traffic lights sell World Cup paraphernalia. The national soundscape is dominated by the B-flat drone of the vuvuzela and K’naan’s ‘Wavin’ Flag’. Luis Suárez’s handball against Ghana, the last African team left in the competition, causes communal outrage and generates thousands of newly minted, temporary Netherlands fans for the next round’s match against Uruguay.

And I am sitting in my lounge, wrapped in a dressing gown, hair dishevelled, and crying as I watch How to Train Your Dragon.

This is the closest I have come to understanding what it must be like to look after a newborn baby (to which an actual parent might reply, not close at all). My world is now taken up with the wellbeing of a small creature that needs my help. Unlike a baby, this creature sometimes glares at me, narrows his gaze in affection, purrs, or growls in discomfort: my cat, Blackie, who has had the misfortune of losing a limb. The drunken melancholy of sleep deprivation is a powerful thing. Emotional senses heightened and seeing the world through a cat-shaped filter, I watch this children’s movie and question how thousands of children have not been scathed by it. I wonder at the callousness of the Vikings, with their macho violence and fascination with dragon-hunting competitions. Don’t they see that the dragons are just as scared as they are? As we all are? And on a more technical note, I ponder whether the animators modelled Toothless, the wounded dragon, on a cat.

There are situations that we cat-owners think we are used to. We know that a scratch on the forehead will quickly form an abscess if it isn’t treated. We can interpret tail movements and flattened ears. It is harder, though, to know what to do when your cat is dragging his lifeless leg behind him. Blackie got in a fight with a neighbourhood tabby and was limping on his front leg. The vet who treated the wound in Blackie’s front leg had injected the muscle of his back leg with cortisone to speed up the recovery. It was unnecessary, merely meant to be helpful. But the routine injection must have hit a nerve and it left his leg lame.

For a month my family and I watched him in hope, fuelled by the vet’s guess that the nerves could repair themselves. His foot was bandaged to prevent damage from dragging. The bandage got muddied and was replaced. Hope turned to resignation as we saw how Blackie tried to hop onto a chair and was hindered by this alien deadweight. His head would whip around, eyes all-pupils, as he tried to figure out what was holding him back. After a month and a half, we realised that nothing was going to change. The only option was to have Blackie’s leg amputated.

How absurd, that a little injection would lead to the removal of a limb. But there we were, facing a very difficult decision. We also feared that the experience would undo all the progress that Blackie had made from being near-feral when he first starting hanging out in our garden – not that it would make him wilder, but that it would diminish him psychologically. I scoured the internet for more information; the internet knows a lot about cats, it turns out. I took comfort in the scores of blogs in which people shared what it is like to care for a feline amputee. (Surely by now there is an academic paper floating around, with a title like ‘The internet is a cat person: Cat(egorie)s of communities and the rise of digital culture’.) The internet also confirms what I already knew: my family has distinctly unoriginal, retro feline naming practices: ‘In the 1950s and ’60s dogs and cats were given ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ names…Cats had names like “Blackie” and “Spotty”, names that illustrated their physical appearance.’ So says sociologist Adrian Franklin, apparently.

When my mom and I fetched Blackie after his operation, he came hopping into the waiting room, slowly but confidently, wearing a cone around his neck to prevent him from pulling at the stitches lining his hip. The receptionist cooed at his bravery and the vet told us how good he had been. Letting him walk out to us without help was a compassionately calculated move on their part. We embraced the symbolism. He was going to be okay. Blackie slept a lot for the first couple of days and we gave him painkillers periodically, especially when a slight shiver told us that he was in pain.

When we first got him, Blackie had clearly never lived with people. Perhaps saying that my family ‘got him’ implies too much volition on our part, or too little on his. We noticed a skittish cat who would eat the pellets of food left out for our other cats and we began feeding him. His fur was matted and he was skinny. Household items were objects of distrust: he’d crouch down and slowly stalk a shoe lying on the floor so that he could tentatively tap it with his paw. In the beginning, it was too much to expect him to sit on our laps or allow us to hold him over our shoulders, but he did learn some domesticated behaviour from our other cats. How else to explain his early tendency of arching his back about an inch away from our legs, not touching them, as if he’d seen this done before and thought he’d give it a shot?

While the differences between cat and dog lovers are highly exaggerated – why should we have to choose, anyway? – there is something to be said for the sympathetic resonance between cats and the people who love them. The narrator in Takashi Hiraide’s quietly arresting 2014 bestseller, The Guest Cat, reflects on his unexpected friendship with a cat:‘When I think about it now, rather than my not being a cat lover, it may simply have been that I felt a disconnect with people who were cat lovers’. Yet it is through the guest cat, Chibi, that the narrator and his wife start to reconnect with each other. The many little acts involved in caring for and observing Chibi bring them the small joys that had been dulled by everyday monotony. Chibi, however, is her own cat, and the story allows her to keep a little mystery. It’s the mystery of anything we hold dear: the idea that we can never grasp the whole knowledge of those we love.

Blackie has his secrets, too. We don’t know what caused the kink at the end of his tail. If you pick him up near a body of water, he stiffens, his claws extend and he fights to get away. The sound of running water, though, makes him miaow with a curious, upward inflection, as if he wants an explanation crestor price. There is a little flap of lost skin on his right ear that we presumed he earned during a fight, until we found out that ‘eartipping’ is a standard practice when feral cat colonies have been spayed or neutered.

In another way, he had no secrets during that month of recovery, the month of the World Cup. The experience was gruelling in the way that caring for someone you love – even if that someone is a cat – is gruelling. It ceases to be good or bad. You think in terms of necessity and hold onto the rewards or the difficulties of the moment: my mother and I, sitting on a blanket outside, Blackie spread out between us and the maroon mound of his stump bared to the winter sunshine; the gradual change from shaven pink skin to downy fur that is soft to stroke in one direction and a little prickly in the other. Blackie made no secret of his desire to tug at his stitches. His first cone was too small and he found a way to lodge it into his hip and push his head towards the stitches. A bigger cone proved no more effective, and short of fitting a contraption more akin to a snowplough than a recovery device, the only way to prevent Blackie from injuring himself was to monitor him all day long. If a cat’s ‘default setting’ is to think that they are the centre of the universe (David Foster Wallace’s observation is just as applicable to felines as it is to humans), then Blackie gathered very little evidence to contradict this belief. I took the late-night shift, staying with him until about two or three am, when my mom would take over and see him through until the morning. Repeat this process for about 30 days, and that is how you end up shattered by How to Train Your Dragon.

When I began my graduate studies in the UK a couple of months later, a lot of people asked me about the World Cup. What was it like? Did I go to any matches? Wasn’t it just amazing? To which I’d give a condensed reply: yes it was, but I actually didn’t experience a lot of it, I was more involved with looking after my cat. I could have also told them that he is absolutely fine now, more than fine, and that he seemed to take all that attention as an affirmation of his place in the world. I could have said that he uses his tail to balance when he’s sitting, and that he sometimes tries to scratch his ear with his phantom leg, but if you scratch it for him the stump stops wiggling and he starts purring. But you shouldn’t try the patience of strangers too much when you first meet them, so I’d leave it at that.

Dragons’ Veins

‘Your old house was haunted,’ my girlfriend said to me. She had sensed it whenever she had passed the place, before she knew I had ever lived there. It was a curious hybrid, a rustic townhouse that occupied a crossroads in a residential neighbourhood of downtown Iowa City. What she pictured when she passed had been an elderly woman, glowering from the windows of the bedrooms, wringing her hands. I had lived in that house for two years and towards the end of my time there had been afflicted by bouts of insomnia and depressive homesickness. The house was beautiful, antique, and comfortable. I couldn’t ascribe my unease to it but neither could I deny that the place had a Gothic kind of atmosphere. Trees dipped to scratch the window panes and small birds would muck about in the guttering above. One morning, I sat at my desk, reading, and had paused to marvel at a squirrel delightedly collecting a nut from the branch that ran alongside my bedroom window. Without any fanfare, a hawk swooped upon the helpless, unsuspecting creature to deliver a mortal savaging. A rational explanation for my feeling would be that I had not prepared myself for living in such a large house. The basement alone seemed to expand each time I visited it and every round of laundry assumed what felt like the dimensions of a cartographic expedition. The metal vines of the plumbing either crept towards or from another world. I haven’t always been known for my credulity. I suppose I have always projected a kind of rationalism. A friend once very conspicuously didn't invite me to an exorcism in her apartment. She did this by telling me about the exorcism after it had happened. ‘You’d have laughed,’ she said, ‘and that would’ve made things much worse’. By the time I moved into my second house in Iowa City, I was becoming more humourless about spirits. The second house was reputed to be the oldest residential home in the historic quarter of downtown, where the streets are bricked, the trees form a magisterial canopy, especially during the green months, and deer blithely canter about the sidewalks at night, never having apparently seen Bambi. The ghost of a cat, or a dog, was thought to inhabit the attic, and Kurt Cobain was rumoured to have spent a night up there before he was famous. By the time I had moved in, the door that led up had been padlocked. After that year, my third in Iowa, I returned to England and coming back has since proved the real uprooting. There’s an instructive contrast in the ways that Britons and Americans move house. If you move into rented accommodation here, you can expect it to be furnished. America is, among other things, the land of the U-Haul. So many of my friends moved with couches or beds that had been with them for years, kitchen supplies, record players, pets, books, artwork and floor lamps. I became an adept at scouring second-hand shops, of which there are many in Iowa City, each of them curated with the kind of sensitivity to atmosphere that one might expect from a Berlin gallerist. Agonising over the right wooden spoon, which had to look just worn enough, became a languid pleasure rather than a chore. When it came to finally packing a box for the Good Will, it struck me how much of a cocoon I had inhabited. Having quickly hurdled the novelty of my presence as an Englishman in this small Midwestern college town, I came to assume the intimate familiarity of a local with the people who served me coffee or sold me books. I had allowed myself to think and to behave in ways more becoming of a denizen. I had arrived in Iowa to write fiction. Instead, I came to live it. Javier Marias described Oxford as ‘one of the cities in the world where least work gets done, where simply being is much more important than doing or even acting’. The reverse is true of Iowa City: everyone is preoccupied with simply being but with the following caveat that this doesn’t preclude hard work. On the contrary, people hypothesise and experiment, and generally seem to be preparing themselves, their personalities, for a sustained creative effort. In my case, that required an evacuation of my interior world. Having dropped the context that England provided me, I gulled myself into thinking that I could wriggle free from the patterns I had formed there, while allowing myself access to a new kind of clarity on everything I had previously experienced and thought I knew about myself. I am describing a feature of migration and one it seems we are inclined to forget. Of course, I have had it easy in comparison to members of my family, who haven’t always volunteered to leave the places they came from. Still, I now see that I was clearing room in my head for a good haunting. Certainly, I experienced some of the expected strains of living abroad. I missed my family, none of whom seemed to be in spotless health. I wondered generally if I was absconding. When it mattered, one freezing Thanksgiving week, it all got too much. I was mostly alone in the first of my haunted houses. Deep frills of snow fluted around the fruit trees in the yard and lay over the lawn in a cold, clean veil. In the pit of night, after no sleep, or only a couple of hours, I would pad downstairs and then outside and allow the air to nip at me for as long as I could stand it before returning inside to the kitchen where I would sit and wait for an appropriate hour in which to make breakfast. On those nights, I felt powerfully compelled to clear out of my bedroom though it never occurred to me that I might have been visited by anybody who might have once lived there. Confiding this now to the companionable internet doesn’t make my sense of having once been haunted go away. After all, the ghosts come to hang out here too. I type this without irony. I am beginning to believe in them. The following week, Joy Williams came to read at the Writers’ Workshop and my housemates and I hosted an after-party for her. I was new to her work but had already been smitten by ‘Congress’, a story of hers in which a woman named Miriam, partner to a renowned forensic pathologist, embarks on a kind of vision quest with a lamp fashioned out of four cured deer feet after her partner sustains a brain injury while hunting. It’s a story in which her marvellous spiritual investment in the world that we habitually describe to ourselves as insensate, the world of animals and objects, becomes clear. Nothing is allowed simply to be in her world, nothing could ever function as mere furniture. I loved the story for being a picaresque, loved it for making me confront death in a way that seemed honest, wholly alien and yet horrifyingly familiar. She writes well about displacement too. Considering her partner’s gifts for identifying the dead and providing closure for their loved ones, Miriam notes her own ‘fondness for people who vanished’ and how ‘if she had a loved one who vanished, she would prefer to believe that they had fallen in love with a great distance’. The night she visited our house, I’d say Joy Williams knew what was up. She wore pink-tinted glasses, seemed shy, but courteous, even happy to be there. She’d wisely asked my roommate’s girlfriend to take her on a tour of the place, an arrangement that retrospectively seems suspiciously like a medium casing the joint, and then disappeared back to her hotel. I think every writer has wanted to vanish. I tell myself that the labour of writing, of mining a strip of feeling or pursuing thoughts about an aesthetic experience, resembles becoming a ghost among the living. It’s that great love of distance that Williams has Miriam identify in those who are presumed dead, which acts as the originary spur for writers, the need to run but not always to hide. I had come to Iowa to be haunted and then to write about it. The deep mistake I had made was to assume that the place itself would merely host those efforts, not shape them. Without my recognising it, a new shelf of significance had formed. But I have since come to think of these connections as dragons’ veins. The phrase was introduced to me during my first week back in England. I was staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Heacham on the north Norfolk coast, where my parents took their annual holiday, and had done since my brother and I were children. Out of adult associations with neighbouring Suffolk, I now view this most familiar of landscapes with writers who walk the flat, harsh coastline of the peninsula and meditate on the collapse of European civilisation, or musicians who do much the same while also memorialising a golden age of English socialism. I wouldn’t be doing any of the above, having injured my ankle and Achilles tendon while moving furniture on my last day in Iowa City. So I hobbled between Heacham and Hunstanton, in search of espresso, in search of Mr Whippy, and wondered how or where I would write on this raw, small island. One morning at the bed-and-breakfast, I had lamented my injury to a woman whose accent suggested she was from London but who seemed conversant with East Anglia on a lane-by-lane basis. I asked her if she knew of a restored Saxon church, St Mary, in the hamlet of Houghton-on-the-Hill, just outside of Swaffham, that I had wanted to visit but couldn’t. I told her who I missed and how much. I ordered kippers for my breakfast. I explained how both my ankles had always been weak and prone to injury despite my not being an especially active person. I wanted her to help me. She knew of St Mary. Not only had a warden from the parish rescued it from abuse by local Satanists; it occupied a convergence of ley lines. I didn’t know what ley lines were but she introduced me to the concept and told me more: about a valley further along the coast and just a little inland where the air bristled with what the locals called dragons' veins and what I have since parsed as an unusual concentration of psychic energy. Writing this down, I can sense my new susceptibility like another skin. I too am in love with a great distance. Perhaps I can be invited to the exorcisms now. I won’t tell anyone where this valley is though. I promised no-one but myself to return there, this place I have never seen before.

Bee

  March After all of our readying and careful preparation, the hive sits outside with a What Now? feeling about it, an unnaturally bright near-tangerine beside all of the stripped-down greys and hard-fought greens that have made it through the winter. It is one thing to make a hive ready for the bees but quite a different thing to have them fill it, and before beekeepers learned to split and breed colonies artificially one means of populating a hive was simply to leave it out like this, in the hope that a passing swarm might settle inside it. (There’s a guy I know who always keeps a hive empty in his garden, just in case.) But even then, when feral colonies were not so unusual, this strategy must have met with only very limited success. Since what were the chances, really. That a swarm of bees would happen upon this place, here, out of all other possible hollows and hidden darknesses. There are records of rituals and traditions employed to hurry the process, or at least add a little action to it. The practice of tanging – taking pots and pans out from inside the house, and beating them around the hive – was said to attract swarms, and persisted well into the 19th century. Across the Ancient Mediterranean there was widespread belief in bugonia, the spontaneous generation of a swarm from the carcass of an ox or a bull. An account survives from Ancient Rome in which Florentinus lays out detailed instructions for this task. The beekeeper should find a building ten cubits high and the same in breadth, he writes, with equal dimensions on all sides. There should be one doorway and four windows, one in each wall: Bring into this building a bullock, two and a half old, fleshy, and very fat. Set to work a number of young men and let them powerfully beat it, and by beating it let them kill it with their bludgeons, pervading the bones along with the flesh. Every aperture of the animal should then be stopped with cloth, including the eyes, before the door and every window of the building are closed and sealed with clay, that there may be no entrance or vent to the air nor to the wind. After three weeks all entrances should be opened, and light allowed to pass through until the air and every thing inside the room becomes animated; then the door and all four windows should be closed, and sealed again with clay. After 11 days the room should be opened to the air once more, whereupon it will be full of bees crowded in clusters on each other, and the horns and the bones and the hair and nothing else of the bullock left. Imagine that room, all shocked with light. Bees don’t, of course, appear spontaneously from the bodies of dead animals, and it is possible that the bees in Florentinus’ account were only swarms of flies feeding on the flesh of the dead carcass. But still. I begin to wonder if there aren’t rites of passage to becoming a beekeeper; things that have to happen, for a hive (or indeed a beekeeper) to become a place that the bees, that animating force, might dwell. But try stepping aside from the hive for a moment, and the whole colony, which is difficult to look at in one go. I want to focus instead on a single bee. If you took out a knife and opened her body up you probably wouldn’t recognise very much. Honeybees have an open circulatory system; blood and breath are combined in that yellowish liquid you see oozing when you poke. But now look at her heart. A honeybee heart has five openings and a one-way valve; not something Florentinus nor anyone else in Ancient Rome could ever have known, at the time, without the aid of microscopes. But considered like this, beside the bee with her chest opened, his account of the room with the four windows and door appears suddenly as though it were describing a process of bodying the bees forth. Imagine that door, those windows, opening and closing.

*

‘I was just thinking about you,’ he says when he picks up the phone. ‘No joke.’ I’m lying on my bed with the phone balanced over my left cheek. ‘This is a good time,’ he says. ‘I’ve just ordered fish and chips; I have to wait while they cook.’ He is my friend in the Derbyshire dales and I say how are you and he lets out a long sigh so that I think for a moment that there’s no-one there, and then he speaks. A lot’s happened since I last saw him. ‘This isn’t the life I expected,’ he says. ‘It’s not the life I thought I’d lead.’ I imagine him sitting on one of those moulded plastic chairs, the chip shop door swinging and jangling. ‘Anyway,’ he sighs, and there’s silence again. ‘How are you?’ I try to think of something that’s happening after everything he’s just said to me. ‘I dunno,’ I say, collecting myself. ‘Not much. I had a date last week.’ ‘A date?’ He says, and I hear him grinning at the fish and chip counter about me. ‘And – how was it?’ ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘OK.’ ‘Huh,’ he says, ‘That doesn’t sound good.’ And he starts asking questions about it. I try filling in gaps, but it’s all sounding hollow and I’m tailing off somewhere in the middle when he interjects and says, ‘But – isn’t it just about having a feeling? Something that comes, just from being around someone?’ Yes, I want to say. Yes, yes. But how often does that happen? I scratch my head, adjust the mouthpiece. I’m thinking of the windows in that room again, those things getting animated. ‘And how are the bees?’ He asks. ‘Oh, we’re still waiting to collect them. Spring is so late this year, it’s not warm enough yet.’ Even now, with our systems of production, payment and collection, we’re still held in sway to the weather. And then I practice my bee anatomy on him. Honeybee brains are not just in their heads but spread in collections of ganglion cells throughout their body, so that maybe even their kneecaps think. There are thousands of tiny crystals inside their abdomens (salmon have them too, and monarch butterflies) that have been shown to hold a steady magnetic orientation when in the presence of an external field. ‘What, like the earth’s field?’ ‘Yeah, like the earth’s.' Or like some people, or particular places, or things; the way we’re drawn towards them. But then I’m not thinking about the bees anymore, and I’m supposed to be thinking about bees. ‘Earth magnets,’ he says. ‘Nice.’ I ask if the fish and chips are ready and he says yes, they were ready ages ago; he is not inside the fish and chip shop anymore, he is at the top of a hill, and all of the fish and chips are in his stomach.   April To get a colony of bees these days you don’t have to play around with windows and light or metal pans, you just have to order and collect it, and I order mine from a couple named Lucy and Viktor who live on a farm near Banbury. When spring finally arrives my friend Luke comes down and we drive out to collect them together. Luke is a beekeeper himself, with hives across London. We were introduced by a friend a few years ago, and during the time that I lived there I became a kind of apprentice to him. ‘I’ve been dreaming about hornets all week,’ I tell him now, as we fiddle with the Satnav. ‘And bees. I keep dreaming they’re in the house, or in a box, and I’m looking around for my bee-suit, but I can never find it.’ We can make the Satnav work but we can’t find its voice, so I look down at the route and up out of the window as we drive, which keeps me from feeling sick and us on the right road, until the GPS fails, then we’re on our own in the middle of an ocean of oilseed rape. Luke pulls up at a lay-by as I reach into the back for the hand-drawn maps and scribbled instructions we brought with us as backup. ‘We’re supposed to follow the signs; Lucy said follow the signs.’ We follow the road until we’ve definitely gone too far, and then we follow it back again. Everywhere is a primary-colour haze of field and sky, and at one point we think we see a hive ahead, but it’s only a fencepost. The honey farm is a small island of concrete and corrugated iron in the undulating yellow, and we reach it only after Viktor has driven out to come and find us. There are deeply grained chestnut trees beside the gate with their tips just beginning to find their leaves, and we spot a row of weather-warped beehives at their base. ‘We didn’t see any signs,’ I say to Viktor as we clamber out of the car. ‘Lucy said follow the signs.’ He shrugs. ‘There are only signs on a Saturday.’ The yard is scattered with pieces of farm equipment in various states of disarray. There’s a barn and a row of crumbling outbuildings with their windows dusted over so that I can’t see if they’re in use. ‘Where I keep my honey,’ Viktor says, seeing me eyeing a large shipping container. He points to a large padlock on the front: ‘For the thiefs.’ He has a Polish accent so thick that I wonder if he’s putting it on. He’s wearing a full-body bee suit with the gauze hood flipped back over his reddened face, and the front unzipped to waist height. It’s deeply spattered with wax and pollen, which gives the impression of some kind of slaughter having taken place, or of an oversized playsuit. ‘So, who’s the beekeeper?’ He asks, looking us up and down. I point to Luke, and Luke points to me. ‘She is.’ Viktor turns and disappears into a shed. ‘You want tea?’ The inside of the shed is piled high with pieces of hive, and it stinks of wax and wood. There’s a desk at one end where a man in glasses and a boiler suit raises his hand to us, and a set of shelves with a kettle and a microwave at the other. ‘Honey?’ Viktor pours tea into brown-rimmed mugs and drops a large spoonful in each. ‘How long have you been keeping bees?’ I ask, looking up at a poster of a shiny motorbike leaping over a mountain ridge and wondering where Lucy is. ‘Since I was birthed.’ ‘His parents were bees, weren’t they Viktor?’ shouts the guy in the corner. ‘Shh.’ Viktor says, and smiles to himself. ‘Don’t tell my secrets.’ And then he gestures to me, ‘Come – we get your bees.’

*

Behind the shipping container the ground is dusty and there’s something in the air that catches my throat like there might be particles of pollen drifting over from the rapeseed sea. There’s a box between us, closed. ‘You’re not wearing gloves. Won’t you get stung?’ His hands are red and swollen like his face was when I could see it. ‘Me and bees; we same blood.’ We’re both cocooned in bee-suits now, with the hoods up and the masks down so that I can’t tell if he’s smiling anymore. More boxes are arranged in neat rows around us, stained rough reds and greens and looking a bit like improvised towers in a miniature and makeshift city. These are nucs. A nucleus is a small colony created from a larger one; each box contains a queen and a body of workers along with a series of wooden frames packed with eggs and larvae and honey stores – not that we can see any of this yet. When Viktor takes a tool and prises the lid open there’s a sound like a thousand nerves tightening and stirring. He moves fast, without stopping. Takes a few frames out and empties them by jerking, so that the bees change from clinging solid to thick dark liquid pouring back down into the box. We’re disturbing them. Dark points of agitation fly up, away from the hive or straight for us, and my gauze mask thuds as one hits and holds, buzzing. They are blurring. There are more of them. I can’t see them separately anymore; can only feel the size of the disturbance spreading until it surrounds us, and then we are inside it, and the air is alive with them.

*

When the one-way five-entranced heart of a honeybee dilates, blood enters and is forced up into the head, creating a pressure that flushes it back down into the body. Without a backbone or in fact any internal skeleton at all, the bee’s insides are composed of a series of organs and gaps, which the blood-breath fluid surrounds and fills. As we drive home with a box of bees in the boot I try to find words for the feeling. ‘It was like – a warmth. Like there was a warmth coming from them. Have you felt that before?’ Luke isn’t into mysticism but he gives room to experience, and he likes to wonder about things. ‘Well, it would’ve been warm in the hive – the bees have to keep it at around 35 degrees for the brood to develop, and it’s cool today; perhaps you felt heat escaping?’ Which makes sense, but doesn’t fit with the feeling. It wasn’t coming from the hive itself, it was coming from the space around me. Perhaps warmth isn’t right; I can’t match my words to it. The limits of our world are set by our own bodily experience, writes the philosopher Martin Buber, who in I and Thou sets out to describe a particular quality of experience. When I encounter Thou there might be a person or a place or a creature before me; what matters is not the thing itself but the quality of the dynamic between us, which acts with a directness such that categories of inside and outside, self and world collapse; I have entered a world of pure relation. Buber draws on the Ancient Polynesian concept of Mana to help elucidate his meaning. Mana has been characterised as a supersensory force that moves into people and things and imbues them with an effective force. This force cannot be touched or seen, less even described; it can only be bodied forth. In a culture where objects could possess spirits and households find themselves visited by the dead, there was nothing supernatural about Mana; it fitted neatly within a worldview which considered that bodies could be acted upon by things they couldn’t touch or see. The limits of our world are set by our own bodily experiences; and also our categories for them. When we stop at a service station I open the boot and crawl inside to put my nose up to the metal grille where a hundred upside-down bee feet are clicking and tapping. They are beautiful, I want to say. I am amazed by them. I say it to Luke when we’re driving again, but my eyes are too wide, it sounds overblown, and silly. This multitude of tiny legs, each one no more than a hair’s breadth. Back at home we take the box and open it again, and the bees lift up as we slip the wooden frames out and place them inside the waiting hive. The opened cavity seems impossibly vast after the tight-packed box, and the frames don’t fit; they’re too square and wide to hang widthways down the tapered sides, so we rest them like a stack of playing cards along its base and I catch sight of the queen, then, before replacing the lid.

*

That week it turns unseasonably cold. It is so cold that people stop in corridors and on buses to mention it. ‘So strange,’ they say. ‘What’s happened to the spring?’ I walk around with a lightness in my stomach, stopping at windows to peer out at the clouds roiling until it rains, a lot, so the bees can’t go out to gather food; and what about that steady inside temperature they have to keep? I start checking online weather reports every few hours, and they start warning of freezing temperatures. So then there I am running out at night under a bitten moon, heaving blankets and string just like the old beekeepers who brought things out from inside their houses and held them up to hope with. I’m standing in Wellington boots and I’m wrapping and tying around the barrel of the hive and I don’t open it up to look inside because I don’t want to take any more heat from them. Like this the hive sits and it looks just like before, except now with the blankets around it and those frames inside like an organ grafted. And I watch it, for a week; not believing they’ll make it through, not knowing how they could; wondering at the shock and the cold and the violent displacement of arriving here, coming to this place. ‘Bee’ is an extract from a book-length work in progress

St Francis Bay

In the afternoon our house settles into a decadent air. My sisters’ children are asleep, there is the lingering smell of coffee, the corridors are in shade with leaves moving silently outside the windows. In my room light still pours in from the electric blue sky of the Eastern Cape. There is a view of the town, St Francis Bay, clustered picturesquely in the orthodox Dutch style, thatched roofs and gleaming whitewashed walls hugging the turquoise of the Indian Ocean. This town, as I hear people say, is not really like South Africa. Most of its occupants are down over Christmas from the northern Highveld cities. During these three weeks the town’s population quadruples, the shopping centres, bars and beaches filling with more or less wealthy holidaymakers. They are white South Africans – English and Afrikaans-speaking – a few African millionaires, and recently, a number of integrated middle-class Africans too. The younger generations are Americanised, dressing like it was Orange County. There are fun runs and triathlons on an almost daily basis, and dance music drifts across the town every night. But each year it requires a stronger act of imagination, or repression, to ignore the realities of the continent to which this place is attached. Already, the first world ends at the roadside, where families of pigs and goats tear open trash bags containing health foods and House and Leisure. Holidaymakers stock up on mineral water at the vast Spar supermarket, no longer trusting their taps. At night, the darkness of power cuts is met with the reliable whirring of generators. And from where I sit at my desk I can make out, along the worn-out roads, impoverished African men loping in twos or threes towards the margins of town after their day of construction work, or of simply waiting at the street corner to be picked up for odd jobs. Most of them are headed to Sea Vista, or KwaNomzamo, third-world townships like those that gather around all of South Africa’s towns and cities, like the faded edges of a photograph. When I visited South Africa as a child, this ragged frontier seemed normal, even romantic. Then, as I grew used to gazing at the world from London, my African insights became a source of tension. The situation felt rotten, unaccountable. But if responsibility comes from proximity, how can the judgment that demands it come from somewhere far removed? And who is being judged, anyway? In a place where the only truly shared experience is instability, judicial words like ‘inequality’ must become injudicious ones like ‘headfuck’. That is what South Africa is to an outsider: an uncanny dream where you feel implicated yet detached, unable to ignore or to understand.

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Ethics is an inherently privileged pursuit, requiring objectivity, critical distance from a predicament. If, as Thomas Nagel says, objective judgment is ‘a set of concentric spheres, progressively revealed as we detach from the contingencies of the self,’ then ethics assume the right to reside in some detached outer sphere, a non-person looking down at the human nuclei trapped in their lesser orbits. In his memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg, Mark Gevisser uses another aerial view, a 1970s street guide, to recollect the divisions of apartheid South Africa. Areas designated for different races are placed on separate pages, or the offending reality of a black settlement is simply left blank. These omissions represented the outer limits of ethical awareness, as sanctioned by the state. Gevisser, raised as a liberal, English-speaking South African, had at least some of the detachment implied by his map. Apartheid was the creation of the Afrikaner people, whose insular philosophy became bureaucratic reality in 1948, by virtue of their being just over half of South Africa’s white voters. My parents grew up within its inner circle, a world with no television and no loose talk at parties, tightly embraced by the National Party and by God himself through his Dutch Reformed church. It was a prison of memory – the Afrikaners had never escaped their roots as the hopeless dregs of Western Europe that had coalesced on the tip of Africa in the 17th century. Later, the British colonists would call them ‘rock spiders’. They always respected a leader who snubbed the outside world, like Paul Kruger, who in the late 19th century called someone a liar for claiming to have sailed around the earth, which of course was flat. Their formation of choice was the laager, a circular fort of settlers’ wagons, with guns trained at the outside. By the time my father bought the house in St Francis in 1987, the world’s opinions had long been flooding in. Apartheid’s collapse was under way, brought about, ironically, by dependence on African labour and international trade. My family lived in Pretoria, where they kept a revolver in the glove compartment. We left seven years later, when I was three, part of the first wave of a great diaspora of white South Africans to the English-speaking world.

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From my half-detached perspective, the rhythms of South African history appear deep and unbending. The crude patchwork of apartheid dissolved only to reform as a new set of boundaries, distinct spheres of experience sliding past each other. Even as places like St Francis boomed, the deprived rural population suddenly found itself part of a global economy, and flooded into peripheral townships and squatter camps. During the year, when there is no work in St Francis, these are the ghosts who break into empty mansions to steal taps, kettles, and whatever shred of copper they can find. This is how Patricia and her family moved to KwaNomzamo, near the poor town of Humansdorp, about 20 minutes’ drive from St Francis. Patricia is our cleaner, a young woman with bright eyes. She is Coloured, an ethnicity unique to South Africa, which draws its genes from African and Malay slaves, the indigenous San and Khoikhoi people of the Cape, and the Afrikaners, whose language they share. This is the deferential language of the past – ‘ja Mevrou,’ Patricia says in her lilting accent. I have two images of Patricia. The first is a mental one of her home in KwaNomzamo, one of the tin boxes they call ‘disaster housing’, planted neatly in rows beside the sprawl of the apartheid-era ‘location’. This image is dominated by Patricia’s disabled mother, who spends her days here, mute and motionless like a character from an absurdist drama. Beside this is the actual photograph Patricia asked us to take at her boyfriend’s house, where they assumed a Madonna-like pose with their three-month-old child. These memories drive apart the different perspectives in me like nothing else. The relationships between middle-class South Africans and their domestic staff today are a genuine strand of solidarity in an otherwise confusing picture. But from my European viewpoint, always aware of history and privilege, even empathy is just another measure of injustice, of difference. This mindset is calibrated from a distance: someone who brings it to actual relationships is not an attractive prospect, nor an ethical one. Self-aware is never far from self-absorbed.

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The danger usually emphasised by ethics is becoming trapped in a subjective viewpoint, seeing the world from too narrow an angle. But another problem is the philosophical shrinking act sometimes known as false objectivity. If you already have a detached perspective, the most difficult part of forming a judgment is understanding the personal motives of those involved. ‘Reasons for action,’ as Nagel says, ‘have to be reasons for individuals’. The paradox is that a truly objective judgment has to be acceptable from any viewpoint, otherwise it is just another subjective judgment. In Britain, hardship seems to exist for our own judicial satisfaction. Ethics are a spectator sport mediated by screens, a televised catharsis implying moral certainty. War, natural disasters, the boats crossing the Mediterranean – there’s not much we can offer these images apart from such Manichean responses as blind sympathy or outrage, and these we offer largely to our consciences. Looking out becomes another way of looking in. The journalist R.W. Johnson noted that after liberation, foreign papers lost interest in commissioning stories about South Africa. Just as well, since it soon became a morass of competing anxieties, the idealism of the ‘rainbow nation’ corroded by grotesque feats of violence and corruption: I am not unusual in having relatives who have been murdered. Against this background, the pigs and potholes among the mansions of St Francis are like blood coughed into a silk handkerchief, signs of a hidden atrophy already far progressed. Alison and Tim are the sort of young South Africans – and there remain many – whose optimism has always been the antidote to all this. They are Johannesburgers proud of their cosmopolitan city. One evening last Christmas, I sat with Tim in a St Francis bar that served craft beer and staged an indie band in the corner. This is not really like South Africa, he said, pointing to the entirely white crowd. Then he told me he, too, is thinking of leaving. South Africa’s currency, the Rand, crashed in December after President Jacob Zuma fired his Finance Minister on a whim. You could not go anywhere without hearing about this. Everyone is looking for something to export, Tim said, a way to earn foreign currency before it becomes impossible to leave. He has a family to think of – and yes, he admitted several drinks later, it bothers him that you could wake any night with a gun to your head. ‘More often in the first world / one wakes from not to the nightmare’, writes the American poet Kathy Fagan. There is such as thing as a shared dream, but even nightmares that grow from the same source tend to grow apart. They are personal, invisible from outside.

Syria in Exile

Over Eid al-Adha in September 2015 the Turkish-Syrian border opened to allow around 50,000 Syrians to cross to spend the holiday with their families. It had been closed for nine months. Some travelled from Aleppo, Idlib and even Hama; others from Turkey’s Hatay, Kilis and Gaziantep provinces. They passed en masse through the crossing points of Bab al-Salama and Bab al-Hawa and dispersed to the towns and villages of northern Syria and the relative safety of south-eastern Turkey. For those 50,000, it was a rare hiatus in the otherwise unremitting civil war. Ten days later they returned and the border closed, slicing a people in two once again. War is complex and fraught, opening rifts in families and communities and leading to people being left behind. Sometimes the causes are practical or circumstantial: grandparents too old to move remain in Damascus as their children and grandchildren depart; siblings become separated in flight and finish up in different countries or even continents. But all too often politics makes its way insidiously into relationships that might otherwise be defined by more binding, familial values. ‘Whatever is going on in Aleppo, crossing the border is worse,’ says Mahmoud, a Syrian journalist and activist now living in Turkey. The civil war has not only provoked physical separation but has hardened borders where before they may have been soft and navigable. These go deeper than marks on a map, the many lines of control of regime vs opposition vs Daesh. They are religious and cultural in nature too, mirroring Syria’s longstanding Islamic and Christian traditions. These invisible divisions, the consequences of five years of bitter and unresolved enmity, are in themselves a form of hidden violence and mental suffering. Moreover, they stand in contradiction to the ideals of freedom, justice and dignity for which the Syrian revolution began. My work as an employee of Adam Smith International is part of a cross-border effort to bolster the structures of government in opposition Syria and thereby make the case that moderate, fair civilian government can succeed. In this undertaking I work alongside dozens of highly impressive young Syrian men and women. Backed by the UK, US and other European governments, we channel advice and funding to councils, the police, health services and education providers. The intention in the short term is to maintain a modicum of structure and stability for people living in terrible circumstances. But in a wider sense, we are offering an alternative to the dictatorship against which the revolution erupted and the extremism into which it has declined. Turkey serves as temporary home to over two and a half million Syrians out of an astonishing 11 million who have left their homes. The daily sequence of barrel bombs, Russian air strikes, shifting front lines and assassinations has put constant pressure on this number. In January and February alone a further 130,000 people have fled the combined Russian, Iranian and regime onslaught. Most Syrians are concentrated in Turkey’s south-east, in the rapidly modernising towns of Gaziantep, Adana, Antakya and Sanliurfa. Close to 400,000, a similar number to that which Europe absorbed in 2015, have made their way to Istanbul. Gaziantep, where I work, a conservative, provincial town known for its kebab and pistachio baklava, is home to 300,000. It seems an unlikely place of exile. A cluster of mainly Seljuk and Ottoman-era mosques and souks around a far older citadel are surrounded by a sprawl of identikit apartment blocks springing out of brown Anatolian hills. The better that I get to know my Syrian colleagues and friends, the more I find myself in awe of the extraordinary experiences, losses and reconciliations that lie behind their everyday demeanour. I’ve observed my strengthening affinity with the revolution as the moderate causes it champions resonate ever more insistently. Alongside this awakening the contradictions between ideals and reality appear in starker relief. It is through a handful of these characters that I’ve begun to grasp the individual toll the civil war has taken. Imad was a young paramedic with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent when the revolution began. Despite being professionally neutral at the time, observing the regime shooting protestors first hand, as he did, drove him to activism. ‘For more than eight months, we were visiting Homs every Saturday taking with us some medicine, clothes and cash to distribute. After a few months, the protests started in Damascus but were very risky and very short: about 50 people for less than three minutes was considered an achievement.’ As we talk, Imad’s normally cheerful persona fades and is superseded by an agitated air. The police came looking more often, but by then Imad had gone into hiding. Unable to track him down, they took his little brother out of frustration and revenge, who spent the next 11 months in jail. This finally prompted Imad to flee across the border into Lebanon in 2013. He saw neither his brother nor his mother and father again until they met clandestinely in Beirut for a week late last year. ‘It was so nice to see them after two years, but at the same time it was so hard,’ he says. In Syria, Imad is officially ‘missing’. His parents report him as such every time the regime comes knocking. Alaa is from Aleppo. A diminutive figure with thick, wiry hair, watery eyes and a nervous air, he’s part of a group I meet in the garden of Topkapi Sarayi, a restaurant with strong Syrian connections on a non-descript Antep street. His extended family has been split down the middle by prior allegiances. Uncles, aunts and cousins, tied by politics and business to the regime’s survival, have remained loyal and chose to persist in the regime-held, western half of the city. He and his parents, appalled by Assad’s brutality in the early chapters of the war, rebelled and fled into exile. They are now scattered across the Middle East. In the summer of 2015 Mahmoud took me to Olabi Café in Gaziantep, a gathering place for young Syrians known not only for its nargileh and punchy, cardamom-infused espresso but for its genesis in Aleppo. The city hosted some of the earliest protests against the regime in 2011 before fighting intensified in 2012. When the owners of the original business left, they simply took it with them, setting up shop again across the border. ‘Antep is like a little Aleppo,’ says Mahmoud, lighting up a cigarette. ‘Many of us have ended up here. People from Idlib go to Hatay and Istanbul is full of Damascenes.’ Olabi Café is one of a number of Gaziantep joints that act as common ground for the Syrian community in exile, a locus for conversation and shared reference. I had met Mahmoud in Istanbul via The Times’s Turkey correspondent. Tall, languid and with an infectious smile, he featured in a forthcoming documentary about Syrians in Turkey called In Between Nowhere. At the time he had recently spirited away his wife from the regime side of Aleppo into Turkey. ‘It was fated that the girl who I love was still living in the area under regime control. We could not meet.’ Mahmoud’s a wanted man in Aleppo so they held a discreet ceremony with both their families before returning to Turkey. Unable to cross legally, they were forced into making a terrifying dash in the night through no man’s land and under the fence, at risk from trigger-happy border guards or landmines. He’s now based in Gaziantep and sends money back to his parents and seven siblings in rural Aleppo. Like so many families, they have opted for the safety of the countryside after their house in the city’s Salahaddine district was destroyed by a regime barrel bomb. ‘I caused a lot of anxiety and trouble to my family since I made my decision to participate in demonstrations.’ He’s been arrested twice by the Assad regime and kidnapped three times by armed groups. The scale of the dislocation visited upon individuals is emblematic of the corrosive and difficult fault lines that increasingly scar Syria’s society. I haven’t met a Syrian yet who isn’t proud of Syria’s plural society, admiring of its history and committed to its territorial integrity. Over an apple nargileh Mahmoud recalls the excitable patriotism of two friends of his, former adolescent fighters for the Free Syrian Army now studying politics in Gaziantep: ‘We must go back! We must rebuild!’ Many elements of Syrian society took part in the initial peaceful uprising against the regime: Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Druze, Yezidis, Alawites and others. ‘We did not have any slogans or sectarian goals,’ says Mahmoud. Christian and Druze friends of Imad also participated in protests beside him. Some members of Orthodox or Catholic denominations went on to join military brigades and fight alongside the Free Syrian Army. ‘Unfortunately, after the war [began] we started to hear the word “minorities”,’ says Imad. Many of the dozen or more communities that have inhabited Syria for centuries, living alongside each other and the majority Sunni Arab population, have faced impossible choices. The Druze community in the country’s south struggles to maintain its neutrality. The Kurds in the north have, at one time or another, opposed almost all the warring parties, taking whichever side they must to enhance their autonomy, and currently acting in concert with the regime. They still provide some protection for Yazidi and Christian groups in territory that they control, and Assyrian Christian militia have often fought alongside them against Daesh. Many have nonetheless, even if reluctantly, chosen regime stability over the upheaval of revolution. Today Assad’s Syria may offer something approaching a safe haven. The Alawites, of which Assad is one, almost rely on the regime for their existence. They face an armed opposition that voices support for the revolutionary ideal of Syria but which, year on year, adopts more and more of a Salafi slant in its doctrine and ideology. Powerful Islamist and extremist fronts, some backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have joined the ranks of the secular brigades that dominated the fighting in 2011 and 2012. The middle ground of the armed opposition in 2016 has a distinctly Islamist flavour. The longer the war persists, the less faith Syria’s minorities seem to have in a country that can really embrace them. In Imad’s words, ‘some [friends] chose to support the government as they thought the regime will protect them from the terrorists'. The overriding and most lasting effect may be one of homogenisation, the culmination of a trend observable throughout the 20th century as the Levant has gradually been depleted of its non-Muslim minorities. Before the war, Aleppo housed the largest Christian population in Syria, belonging to an intricate array of Greek, Syriac and Armenian Apostolic Orthodox and Melkite, Maronite, Armenian, Syrian and Chaldean Catholic churches. In September last year, the city’s Chaldean Bishop Antonio Audo estimated the number had fallen by over two thirds to not much more than 50,000. In the same month the Melkite Greek Patriarch Gregorios III Laham lamented publicly that chaos and fundamentalism were driving his congregation away and urged people to stay. The last Jews of Aleppo, an old lady and her two daughters, are reported to have left for Israel. There are just 18 Jews left in Damascus of a people resident in the Levant for 2,500 years. In January I see Mahmoud again, this time in Topkapi Sarayi. ‘The minorities made the right decision to be neutral. They do not support Assad but they do not want the Islamists either. They have a place in the future of Syria. They must remain. Syrians are secular, not Islamist. They have seen the armed groups and Daesh. They do not want that. Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam do not represent the resolutions and aspirations of the Syrian people. There will be no Islamism in the Syrian government.’ It’s quite a speech and I want to believe it. But I can’t help thinking that it’s not only the minorities that have reason to be concerned. Many secular Sunni Syrians opposed to Assad are justifiably suspicious of a rising Islamist voice. Beyond statements of ideology, no single party to the conflict has yet been able to prove with any confidence that their vision of the new Syria will really be for all Syrians. ‘When we go back to Syria, after the war, we will see all these places again with our own eyes, places that now only exist by name on a map.’ Mahmoud says he will go back ‘strongly’ to Aleppo, to begin the process of rebuilding his broken land. So too will Imad, to Damascus, as will many millions of Syrians in exile, streaming across borders to reunite with families and past lives. That chance to return may seem remote, with a state in pieces and trust between all sides near non-existent. The tragic divisions running through the country will persist for some time yet. Nevertheless, the recent cessation of hostilities and opening of humanitarian access allow for a modicum of hope. Encouraging signals are emerging from world capitals and momentum may be building for a wider ceasefire, paving the way in turn for negotiations in Geneva to resume. Syria’s transition and reconstruction will undoubtedly need all the education, experience and passion that returnees can muster. More complex will be adapting to a new society and healing the fractures of the past. It is in this space, perhaps, that the values embodied in the early spirit of the revolution will be most sought after.

Carstairs’ Homer

‘You might try something about the sea?’ said Carstairs, although I wasn’t really listening. ‘What's that about the sea?’ ‘You know, how it... looks in this light,’ he clenched his fists slowly towards himself as he said this, so I wouldn’t miss how profound he was implying the sea looked. ‘How you can just imagine Odysseus, or any of those other ones, hove into view across it, fresh from great deeds and terrible adventures, beneath the magnificent canopy of the sky. And something about the sun, as well. Something about the sun, and the quality of the light.’ I shrugged. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ I muttered I supposed so, and resumed panicking. We didn’t have much to do from our small office in Adiáforas. Most Greeks assumed we were spies, sent here to counter Communist influence. Perhaps that was true of our offices in Athens or Thessaloniki. It certainly wasn’t the case in Adiáforas. Our role here was simply to promote friendly understanding with the Greeks. We’d hear rumours of Communists sheltering in nearby villages, but Carstairs and I were really just expected to organise lectures by visiting British artists and academics, which in practice usually meant feeding off any scraps the Athenian office threw us. Adiáforas wasn’t even an out-of-the-way town so much as an out-of-the-way hamlet with a harbour, as well as some of the nastiest shepherds you had ever met. Nikos, in particular. I rented an apartment on the harbour, and even though Nikos lived in the Old Town (some crumbling cottages and a church hidden in the hills amongst a spray of trees: cypress, carob, and pine) I saw him every morning as I left the house, waiting on our doorstep, once with a fully-grown ram tied to a length of rope, the sight of which made me jump. ‘Morning Nikos,’ I would say brightly, only for him to scowl back. I suspected Nikos of having an affair with my landlady, and wondered whether the ram was a lover’s offering. I asked her once why Nikos didn't seem to like me. ‘He is Communist,’ and she gave me a look that suggested she might be too. Athens had sent us three speakers in the year since I had been posted to Adiáforas, including an expert in 19th-century porcelain, who, when he arrived, was so hungover that he vomited twice: once on Carstairs’ shoes when the two of us went to meet him from his car, and the second time half-way through his talk, which, luckily for Anglo-Hellenic relations, was only attended by Carstairs, myself, and a couple of girls from Carstairs’ language school. The porcelain expert had wept over dinner that night, remembering some of things he’d seen on the beaches of Sicily. We knew that the council’s Official Representative in Greece was irritated we hadn’t managed to organise anybody to come here ourselves and it had been a great relief when an old schoolmate of mine, now quite a famous poet, had agreed to fly over and give a reading from his latest collection. The recital was supposed to be tonight. I’d made Carstairs tell all the girls at his language school to bring their families. I’d even invited the Official Representative. It had been a terrible shock to receive a letter from said schoolmate that morning, with a three-week-old postmark, his apologies, and the news that a delicate situation had prevented him from making the trip after all. He didn’t like to say how he’d spent the money we'd advanced. I’d lost the rest of the day trying to work out how to salvage the situation. Carstairs was standing at the window, looking out over the harbour, whistling, very loudly, a tune I didn’t recognise. Eventually he broke off, with a deliberate sigh. In addition to our work with visiting speakers, Carstairs also ran a small language school, under the Council’s auspices. It was attended by three girls and one older woman. Carstairs insisted that they were besotted with him. Having spent a year working in close proximity to Carstairs, I took this to mean he was in love with all four. The sigh bespoke some recent romantic disappointment, about which he was eager for me to ask. ‘You know,’ he said, after about a minute’s silence. ‘I might have something you can use. If you’re desperate?’ ‘I’m not going to give a talk about the fucking sea.’ ‘No, I mean… well, that wasn’t such a bad suggestion, old man. But, I mean I have something written. That I’ve been working on for a while. Look, we aren’t going to get much done here. Let’s have a drink, and I’ll tell you about it?’ I considered the fruit of my afternoon’s labours – a picture of me disembowelling my schoolmate, the treacherous poet, that I had carved into my desk with a penknife – and agreed. Carstairs tried unsuccessfully to turn his fan off. We could still hear it, flacking and stuttering, from the street. It was another very hot day. We took a table outside at Elefthérios’s, a taverna on the harbour. Carstairs insisted on unbuttoning his shirt. He motioned to Elefthérios’s wife to bring us some beers, borrowed a cigarette from me, and began explaining his latest entanglement. It took two rounds. I grew drowsy with worry and beer and heat. It was one of the girls from his class, of course. Louiza. Her father was a terror, according to Carstairs. His disapproval placed a considerable strain on their ‘romance’. When I said I wasn’t interested, Carstairs looked crestfallen. He claimed that I knew nothing of love. I thought of Nikos and his ram, and wondered if Carstairs might be right. Nikos had offered me a chicken the previous day, albeit by proxy. ‘You want chicken?’ my landlady said when I came home for lunch. Lunch was lamb, so I wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘I asked Nikos about what you say. He said he has chicken – if you want?’ Carstairs always told me not to mind Nikos. Carstairs had been in this part of the world during the War. Fought very bravely, they said. He had begun shouting now, in Greek, at another of the taverna’s patrons. I leant over. ‘What’s all this?’ ‘Bastard owes me money.’ I’d settled enough of Carstairs’ debts to know that this definitely wasn’t true. ‘Leave it out. You said you had something I could use?’ He spat out of the side of his mouth that I didn’t understand the way of life round here, and began to explain the translation of The Odyssey, with original songs he’d been working on, although he interrupted this explanation a couple of times to ask if the man he’d been talking to was looking at us. I said that he wasn’t. Carstairs said a good thing, too, because he was minded to sock the cheap bastard in his no-doubt glass jaw. He’d made Homer’s epic somewhat fresher, he claimed, ordering us another beer. The songs really brought the piece to life. ‘I don’t sing.’ ‘I didn’t think you did, old man. I’d do the songs. Not sure yet, how I envisage it being performed eventually. Whether I’d want to stage it – with a chorus and dialogue and so on – or just keep it more of a chamber piece. But tonight I’ll bring my guitar, and just chip in when we get to a song.’ ‘The talk starts at seven. I can’t learn The Odyssey in that time.’ ‘No fear. I was thinking more of a staged reading. To be honest, chum, you’d be doing me a favour. Great to get some exposure for it.’ The air hummed and wobbled, thick with its absence of breeze. Wasps kept hopping about our hands, eager to drown themselves in our beers. I had no idea what I was doing, not just tonight, but in Greece. Beneath the magnificent canopy of Carstairs’ sky I felt convinced by my own absolute pointlessness. My weightlessness. The sea seemed too still; and too blue. I couldn’t even imagine drowning in it. It wasn’t that I wanted to throw myself in, but that I thought even if I did, I would merely float to the top, and Carstairs would ask if it was nice in there. ‘Fine, then.’ ‘Good man.’ Carstairs smiled, and told me to pay for our drinks, and try to distract the fellow he’d been shouting at earlier. He’d pick up the script and meet me later at the mayor’s house. The mayor’s house was towards the Old Town, almost falling from the hillside into the road, a tumble of stones and olive branches. Carstairs was practising the opening song when we met. It wasn’t dark, though the evening was already caught in the squeaking of cicadas. A tiny lizard slid quickly between lattices up the whitewashed wall behind Carstairs then disappeared, like a nasty feeling in the small hours. The mayor’s wife sold fruit and vegetables from their small porch, and Carstairs had his foot on a crate of tomatoes, singing an invocation to the muse – A man needs his home, like a dog needs a bone, And he’ll just keep on goin’ Till he gets there. So tell me o’ Muse, of that poor feller’ whose, mind and crew he did lose, On his wanderin’s. ‘There you are, old man!’ He fished me a sheaf of papers from his knapsack. The front-sheet read ‘Carstairs’ Homer’. He gave me a wink: ‘Like Pope.’ There were about 300 typewritten pages, with numerous additions or corrections in red ink. As I flicked through, he kept apologising for freshening the original up so much. The mayor let us use the small terrace at the back of his house for our talks. He never attended himself, spending most evenings drinking at Elefthérios’s. His wife was here tonight, though, together with the Official Council Representative – the only person present wearing a suit – and the women from Carstairs’ language school. They hadn’t brought their parents. Nikos was last to arrive. Carstairs pointed out Louiza, a pasty, round-faced girl I had already identified from her refusal to engage with Carstairs’ repeated attempts to make eye-contact. Most of them seemed to enjoy the show well enough. Even the Official Representative. They especially liked Carstairs’ songs: ‘That Ain’t No Pig!’ about the adventure on Circe’s island, ‘Feelin’ Under Sheep’ from the episode with the Cyclops, and Odysseus’ climactic battle with Penelope’s suitors, ‘How’s That Suit You Now?’. Carstairs had abridged the piece quite ruthlessly, so that the majority of the most dramatic moments were rendered in song. I couldn’t help feeling a little put out. I’m no actor, but my Odysseus voice was quite good, at least. I tried to make it twinkle in places, bear the weight of all he had suffered in others, with a gravelly bass-note throughout. I found myself directing much of my performance to Nikos. Doughy, with curly white hair, and the right side of his face falling away from the rest as if he had suffered a stroke, an uncomfortably ageing cherub. It seemed he might be smiling along with the poem. But he might equally be laughing at some infelicity of phrasing, or the inadequacy of my husky Calypso voice. I thought how you could solve a war with a wooden horse full of soldiers, even if it did take you ten years to come up with it, but civilian life was more resistant to the swift solution. When Odysseus returned to Ithaca, were all the shepherds there Communists, now, too? I began to think the wandering was deliberate; that Odysseus had put off coming home for as long as he could. No surprise Tennyson has him setting back out again. ‘Though we are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.’ Carstairs continued making at eyes at Louiza while I spoke. It grew dark. The mayor’s wife lit some candles. There was a small, enthusiastic applause when I finished, which, in my overexcited state, sounded a great deal louder. The Official Representative came over to shake my hand, while the girls from Carstairs’ language school gathered around him. ‘Most interesting,’ said the Official Representative. ‘You didn’t find it a little fresh?’ ‘Yes, perhaps a little fresh.’ I felt a hand at my elbow. Nikos. ‘Good,’ he said, pointing at me. ‘Thank-you?’ ‘I have something.’ He pointed at me again. ‘For me?’ He nodded, and motioned for me to follow him to the front of the house. I was suspicious, of course, but didn’t think I could let the Official Representative see me refusing a bit of friendly understanding with the Greeks. The front porch was extremely dark. Nikos rifled through the boxes with only a dim light from indoors to guide him. At one point he bashed his head against a box of what looked like lemons, and I think if I hadn’t been there, he would have cursed. Eventually, he found what he was looking for. He struggled to open something. Then turned round brandishing a live chicken. The creature seemed relaxed, undulating its neck, and pecking at the air every now and again, inhabiting that peculiar rhythm chickens do. He handed it to me. I must have been a little stung by Carstairs’ comment earlier that I didn’t understand the way of life round here, or else flushed with the success of my performance, because I accepted the bird more readily than I might have done. An anxious ripple ran through its feathers, ugly, yellowing white, but it quickly settled down. ‘Delicious. Very good.’ Nikos pointed at the bird. ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Yes. Now you –’ he pointed at the bird again, and made a gesture at first inscrutable, as though he were trying to wrench then ease something out of the ground, until I realised that he was miming for me to throttle it. ‘Now?’ Nikos nodded. I had done worse. But it didn’t feel like that. Maybe I wasn’t as ready for a life I thought I missed, or maybe it wasn’t that I missed it, and something else entirely was happening, that I couldn’t hope to understand. I looked pleadingly at Nikos. He just kept nodding, and pointing at the chicken, and doing the throttling gesture. I started to flex my fingers in preparation. Almost purposefully. Still looking for Nikos to reprieve us: me and the chicken. ‘To promote friendly understanding with the Greeks,’ I said to myself, eventually, and made a clumsy grab for the bird’s throat. It screeched and jumped out of my hands, a frightened and threatening cascade of beaten wings that sounded as though a flock of its fellows were amassing to revenge themselves upon me. Nikos swiped the bird from the air and pinned it to the ground with one smooth gesture of his left hand, and decapitated it using a knife drawn from a jacket pocket in an equally seamless move of his right. Blood sprayed over his clothes. A warm splash of it landed on my face. The beating stopped abruptly. Nikos put the knife, together with the chicken’s head, back in his pocket, and handed me the rest of the corpse. There was another smile, somewhere in his fallen face. They were all drinking wine when I went back to the terrace. Nobody seemed to notice the headless chicken I was carrying. Carstairs was imposing a whispered conversation on one of the women from his language school. Not Louiza. Remembering to wipe the blood from my cheek, I took him aside. Was it local tradition to present a performer or a guest with a chicken, and invite them to slaughter it in front of you? I asked. You know, as a show of gratitude? ‘Absolutely not. Whatever made you think that, old man?’ And he went back to the girl from his language school, who I don’t think was giggling at his jokes as much as he thought she was, either.

Two Poems

Riding to Ronda What can be remembered, what made up— The unsure eye slips this to that in landscape past the bus-glass. Trees stream into olive ceiling / sky flipped into ground. A pond dissolves to leafless / greenish clouds the stuff of cotton-floss flung up.             When Noah had enough of one dull colour he dispatched the dove. She brought him back an olive branch; next sortie she vanished—                       out of form > disorder or these clouds forever morphing—swan to dog to donkey, Don Miguel and Dulcinea; Sancho Panza’s staff (for he had once commanded sheep), to high white turbines. And Rilke wrote in Elegy Six of urge to action, rivering air; of Samson, how his destiny was buried in his breast. When he smashed those pillars, he burst out of the force of flesh, into a narrower world where he went on choosing... I recall deciding                       at the stony lip of a bridge— singularly beautiful and Romanesque, like Ronda’s.                       Or was this only in a poem... or had I already leapt? And was it into water after air, or into arms?             And didn’t you not let on, for the sake of subtlety,                   my heaviness—

Theory of Dreaming The garden my solace, especially in winter: plants detach and snow obliges stone. I sit at the window alone, insular as January. Still. The trees have a static quality too, like stars, though slowly, very slowly becoming Suns. Their thin limbs radiating outward. Lifetimes pour before me. Here I sit awaiting a car, there awaiting the war. A shepherd, then a girl with a hump, like mother. But more like sister: we’re twins. She the lighter; I the dark and heavier; she the fey ~ The air outside is thick with beings— vertical in falling snow. Close as claustrophobia, though not confined to the garden. Maybe they’re angels. If so, what is their message— Is it that if I live on, I become a figment of one? And is it actually January, or am I already gone? Perhaps we all are angels.           And have given up our flesh, and are no longer free.

Three poems

28th February 2016

From What I Remember

I snag out each fingernail, deflate my hand to a surgical glove, roll my arms to the elbows like there’s work to be done.

I am, it turns out, a reluctant ghost. I am leaving my body like I leave the house, arriving into every radiant room

asking after the remaindered names of my day’s things. But there are parts of my body I never learned to name:

the spit and sound of my typing wrist, this wintered shin’s roche moutonnée shine, my drawstring laugh,

these flashy spokes at my throat, that one dry eye in the house. Gathering my legs to my chest, legs gathering

at my ankles, my body rolls a sticky question mark in our bed. I am not sure what I will need. Phone wallet keys yes but

the skin sweats off my back like a breathless August cagoule that only helped to keep the body’s weather so close so

you’d have pockets for these things you can name and as the hood peels from my head I am handstanding

in the doorway of myself looking at what I will forget. I am turned out, reluctant ghost, like a skinned rabbit

still and still joined to its own mouth by the fur of its mouth before the blade nicks and for two small seconds my lips

are parting as if to speak or―and I worry there is no word for this―my lips are parting from my lips as if to end a kiss.

   

Charm Against Wednesdays

To be mixed with sweet tea, ash and egg and held under the tongue before lunch: some rumour, ripe; must; the desiccated zest of still early days; a fist of dust; stick of lightning struck by a nettle; leftovers; betony for bad dreams; poultice of dfgh qwert on the sleeping cheek; soil carried over from the previous week; for fatigue, fennel seeds, salt, an antennae of thyme; for the soft wound of hours, this voucher: swallow, say ah and repeat three times ‘Wednesdays were named after a poet.’

   

Deep Field

Of course, by coincidence – no one would suggest otherwise – in the same ten days she wins the goldfish she calls Engine who swims the window sill like an astronaut’s dream, three hundred and forty two photographs are taken of the bright black sky.

To think of him now, little body of gelatinous stink just a forearm down and her lips ushering a word so small and folded it barely held air.

Slowly lowering the spoon, she turns the earth.

On the other side of the soil, NASA’s x-ray observatories listen for rumours telling themselves into gas lobes, red and burning with a forty-million-degree self-conscious agony:

someone’s talking about you, you know.

And true enough, it’s us talking over the credits, getting up to look, bending wounded over that one dead pixel in the centre of the screen which overlaid every scene of the lovers kissing in the dark with a distant family portrait of the entire observable universe.

When he stopped moving, his name was returned to her and she skimmed both of them off the surface to examine the difference. The beautiful bowl was rinsed awake. His body landed in the soil slightly bent, like a golden parenthesis, opening.

La source du Nil

25th April 2014

 

‘On est déjà en retard, Monsieur Nicolas.’

I was hung over. I was tired. I was being told off by a retired colonel. This wasn't a good start to the day.

‘Je suis désolé, Monsieur Antoine,’ I replied dutifully, getting into the Toyota Landcruiser beside him.

We left Bujumbura’s Hôtel de l’Amitié and set out into a muggy and overcast morning. The grey-blue expanse of Lake Tanganyika was visible to our west, flanked on the opposite shore by the buttresses and ridges of the Mitumba mountains in the Congo. To our east, the land rose precipitously into the first line of Burundi’s milles collines. Around us, plain white buildings hand-painted with brightly-coloured advertisements were interspersed with 1930s art deco.

It was my umpteenth visit to Burundi in recent months on behalf of donors or aid agencies. Notwithstanding the slow pace of progress, I had come to appreciate the tranquillity of this little nook in the heart of Africa. But rather than visiting the usual catalogue of ministries and development officials, my intention this time was to travel to the southernmost source of the Nile, in the south-easterly reaches of the country.

My hope to see the source of this great watercourse emerged from romantic notions of the significance of such a beginning. My companion, Colonel Ngurazizi was a well-educated product of the army that had, until the last decade, held sway over the twists and turns of Burundi’s 20th century history. He was a gentle, fatherly man in late middle age, and as we drove through the country’s interlocking hills and valleys he told me about his childhood village in the south, and about his children, spread all over the globe in Kenya, China and the USA. ‘There’s not much for them in Burundi, but at least they have married Burundians.’

He’d been to the source a couple of times when his children were young but was evasive – a pronounced national trait – about what significance it held for the country. ‘We appreciate the custom it brings,’ was all he would say.

For centuries, locating the source of the Nile had been an obsession for explorers and scholars. Herodotus chronicled his passage up the river to modern-day Aswan, considered by the ancient Egyptians to be the Nile’s place of origin. Ptolemy posited that it rose in the Mountains of the Moon, which straddle the Ugandan and Congolese border, while the Ottomans traced the river as far as Juba in South Sudan. When John Hanning Speke and, later Henry Morton Stanley, ‘discovered’ Lake Victoria in the early 1870s, they were convinced that they had also discovered the Nile's source. But they too were wrong, after all their efforts. I was off to the real source on a day trip in a 4x4, and I felt like a bit of a fraud.

We were leaving the hills and emerging into a flatter landscape. A verdant plain dotted with hillocks and copses stretched to the horizon. The colonel pulled up the vehicle. On this plain, he pointed out, were the houses of three of the country’s recent presidents. ‘Armed with telescopes they could have waved at each other from their verandas!’ It could have been something in a Wes Anderson film.

He explained that Presidents Micombero, Bagaza and Buyoya were all members of an influential sub-group of the Tutsi, and that they had shaped Burundi’s turbulent path with their coups, efforts at development and divisive policies. On their watch, the country had gradually descended into ethnic turmoil and civil war, culminating in two decades known as la crise, which ended in 2006. ‘Burundi’s heyday was in the ’60s and ’70s but la crise put a stop to it all. For obvious reasons tourists stopped coming and people started leaving.’

A light drizzle began to fall and I allowed the colonel’s reminiscences of lakeside weekends and happier times in the officers’ mess to fade into the background. The radio was churning out a mixture of Congolese rhumba and bad European dance music. Every few miles, a startling collage of colour leapt out of the green and grey; the dresses of women at market. Eventually a battered and rusty sign appeared around a bend: Bienvenue à la source du Nil.

We parked, paid the fee to the attendant warden and were pointed up a hill. At the top was a stone pyramid the height of a man, and a plaque in Latin commemorating the southernmost source’s discovery – Dr. Burkhardt Waldecker, 1938 – as well as all the men that had come before and the many names the Nile adopts on its way to the sea.

A drop of water falling on the surrounding hills might have a long journey ahead of it. After some time in brooks and streams, it would find itself in the Ruvubu in Rwanda, over which German and Belgian occupying forces marched at the turn of the 20th century – movements echoed more recently by the exodus of refugees fleeing the Rwandan genocide. Proceeding through the lush landscape of Uganda’s great lakes, drifting and racing through the Victoria and Albert Nile, it would then flow into the world’s newest state: troubled South Sudan. From there to Juba, through the papyrus swamp of the Sudd and, passing a climax of British-French imperial rivalry at Fashoda, into the evocatively named Lake No.

There it would finally become part of the majestic White Nile, soon to meet its mountain-reared, Ethiopian twin in Khartoum. It would pass the tombs and temples of kings and the pyramids of pharaonic Egypt. It would cascade through the Aswan Dam and give sustenance to the world’s oldest agricultural land. Finally, it would meet its salty end at Alexandria, dispersing into the Mediterranean.

‘In Burundi we believe this is the real source of the Nile. Uganda, Ethiopia – their sources are really just tributaries,’ said the colonel.

Then it was down to the spring itself, in a grove below. We walked down a wet and woody path through the trees, turned a corner, and there it was: a block of concrete set into the side of the hill, with a small, grey plastic tube protruding. Out of this came a slow trickle of water. The entire assembly was surrounded by brown stone rubble and the flow disappeared into a dank bed of moss almost as soon as it dribbled forth.

From small beginnings come great things or, if you will, the Nile comes out of a pipe.