Waxing nostalgic for the stuff you have to leave behind when you flee. Icy weather. Train line.

 Here is an extract from Ziad’s Gaza Diary:

“There is an Egyptian proverb that says: “Like those who danced on the stairs: neither seen by those above nor those below.” I wonder, are we Gazans the ones dancing on the stairs“? No one saw or heard us dancing and building happy memories and lives, no one saw us planting flowers and achieving dreams, no one heard us singing and ululating during weddings and other happy occasions. And, right now, no one is seeing us, dying every moment, crying for help?”

In his latest entry (I think it’s the latest), the one before the “humanitarian pause” came to an end, he wrote about how difficult it was to decide what to take with you when told you must flee your home and how the trivia of life - your photos, the collections of stuff like perfume bottles in his case or little notebooks filled with pressed wild flowers in mine, different things for different people - the stuff that doesn’t seem important enough to pack on your emergency suitcase, which must be portable, how that unimportant stuff is what you miss the most when you look back. 

And it seems that they are back to square one, with bomb and rocket attacks going on and aid not getting through.

Meanwhile, what we have to worry about here is the big freeze. The temperature was somewhere around -3° when I went out running this morning. We are fortunate that it hasn’t been particularly damp, and so the pavements are not too slippery. In York, Granddaughter Number Two tells us, they have had thick fog. One consequence of that is wet pavements which then freeze - not good. Even she is complaining about the cold and she is the one who normally revels in the cold. Mind you, she tells us she managed to go flying when she took her dustbin out. 

I read this article about revisiting “Metroland” 50 years after John Betjeman’s classic TV documentary. It’s odd to read about places that for me are familiar stations along the Metropolitan Line underground track (mostly not underground but overground) which we take from London Euston to Chesham when we visit our son and family. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!