From Syria, with sadness: souvenirs that cause heartbreak

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/18/syria-souvenirs-holiday-mementos-aleppo

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Holiday souvenirs are reminders of happy times, but when tragedy comes to the places we’ve visited they can become double-edged. In my front room is a large rug that I once haggled for over a cup of mint tea. What turns this particular carpet into a poignant memory is that I bought it, with other mementos, in the street market in Aleppo over a decade ago.

The city was full of incredible sights. How many will survive this war is an open question. But it’s the people I remember. Passersby would regularly stop me on the street and ask me where I came from. When I told them, they would nod and say: “You are welcome in Syria.” That seemed to be a phrase everyone knew the English for. When a shopkeeper noticed I was hopelessly lost, he told his young son to lead me back to my hotel through a warren of backstreets. This little boy looked as if it was me doing him a service, rather than the other way around.

With the heartbreaking footage on the news of broken children being pulled from rubble, you wonder what has happened to those people.

Syria might be the worst example, but there are others. As a member of the African diaspora, visiting the ancient Christian churches of Ethiopia was about as near to a spiritual experience as a secular person such as myself is likely to have. But I suspect the beautiful wall paintings of black saints and apostles, with their Afros and cornrows, would affect anyone whatever their ethnicity, and I made sure to bring reproductions back to hang on my walls. But it’s unlikely I’ll be able to return anytime soon as Ethiopia is now under a state of emergency, with many areas off limits to tourists. Rugs and paintings that once made for happy memories are now tinged with sadness. But they’re reasons to be grateful too. I’m sure most Syrians and Ethiopians would be only too glad to swap my sadness for theirs.

Night of the furrowed brows

Here in the UK we don’t have to worry about war, so we can get down to more serious matters like laughing at contestants on TV quiz shows. The Davenports, from Manchester, guests on the BBC’s National Lottery’s 5-Star Reunion, are being mocked for their lack of general knowledge. They thought Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Tories, and that rectangles have six sides. But I won’t be joining in the sneering. And I suspect anyone else who’s ever attended a quiz night won’t be either.

My uncle was a governor at a school and I used to be a member of his team for their fundraising quiz nights. As I soon discovered, behind the smiles, crisps and bottles of pop, these are ruthlessly competitive affairs where nice guys come last. I also discovered that when your table doesn’t have an answer to a question, the pressure to come up with something, or indeed anything, can be nigh on irresistible. A tentative suggestion gets written down, and when it turns out to be wrong the guilty person finds their eyes avoided. So, as one who has been there, I’m with the Davenports.

Quote with your conscience

I had an interesting new experience last week when I discovered from a colleague that a third party had been misquoting me about my views post Brexit (I was a Brexiter). The misquotation was bad enough to qualify as egregious. Politicians and celebs get this sort of thing all the time, of course, and appear to take it in their stride.

Indeed Warren Beatty once said he never bothered to deny falsehoods that appeared about him as that just encouraged people to think they might be true. I’m of a humbler stripe. Still, I’ve decided to follow his example: misquote and be damned.