Going, Coming and everything inbetween.

In the previous few weeks I have discovered several things. Firstly, it is always going to be harder to return to Damascus than it is to leave it. Secondly it is going to be much harder to continue learning Arabic in the West than it is to study it here. And finally, the Syrian national grid was not equipped for Christmas.

After the most wonderful weekend in Paris celebrating my nearest and dearest's birthday with her family, I rallied my steam powered will and dragged myself out of her warm, comfortable apartment and onto the bus to the airport, the requisite two and a half hours before my flight was due to depart. I was confused therefore when my arrival at the airport, half an hour later, coincided with the closing of the gate and the departure of my flight without me. Befuddled as I may have been, the blinking red screen announcing my fate was certainly angrier than I. The lady manning the 'Service Air' desk told me it was impossible to make the flight and I didn't complain. Apparently it was my fault for not reconfirming my ticket, I didn't apologise and worst of all I would have to stay until Thursday at the earliest when the next Syrian Air flight was due, and that, I was told, was likely to be full. With that aeroplane went all thoughts of my cold floor, the difficult little midfah stove in my room and my triple thickness pyjamas. I was stranded with nothing but my girlfriend, a street of delicatessans and centrally heated and equally located apartment in Paris to console me. As they say in Arabic, 'Ya haraam.'

Having finally rearranged my ticket for the Thursday flight and recovered from the disappointing prospect of another two days in France I did as much work as I had expected to, which was none. I was pleased then that on my eventual arrival in Damascus I found that most of conversational arabic remained, I sent a couple of people off to the right instead of the left and conjugated a few girls as boys but was back on the straight and narrow quite quickly. The four hour one on one that I had with Manal this morning rearranged my perspective slightly. I recognised all the words but couldn't remember their meanings. It felt like being back in Durham. The long, delicious lunches and suppers and easy days of wandering and not quite christmas shopping sat around my understanding like cake around a rugby players' waste for the first hour or so, but slowly the fog began to clear. That was a week. Now there is a month around Christmas and a decent marker of success will be the speed with which the pea soup of January will diffuse. Between May and September is four months and then Durham and it is becoming abundantly clear that there could be a blackout, if only for a while.

Whilst I dealt with the fog of Western delights that had overtaken my desire to remember the eighth form of sumara, Damascus is struggling with a darker problem. Christmas. Cold weather, no central heating, and inadequate insulation in the Old Town (alot of which is Christian) has meant a huge increase in the use of electric heaters, and since then there have been a few more blackouts than previously. This weekend much of the Christian district has put up its trees, fired up its lights and turned up the carols. Since then the Old Town has been darker than London in the Blitz. Watching a film on a laptop last night the lights flickered on and off constantly through the evening, at times alternating with the speakers, and at others colluding to plunge us not only into blackness but silence as well. It seems that today the surge has been dealt with, although my hair clippers charging in my room have been on and off all morning. The internet cafe has been working all day and hopefully will remain so. Damascus is exciting in the winter, I saw my breath condense as it escaped the safety of my duvet yesterday morning, with power cuts and carol singing and warm sunshine in the open, it strikes a lovely balance between a hot christmas and a traditional English one. I wouldn't want to be seventy. Hunting electricity through the streets of Bab Sharqi has kept me warm for the last evening or so and there is a great air of celebration building, like a weatherfront at sea. I think that by January I shall be looking forward to coming back, back into my degree, back into my life for the year, but at the moment I am, as I was when I left for France, praying that my flight out takes off on Thursday, and hoping it might not do so when it is time to return.