My camera bag’s falling apart, and I was walking about Gemmayze, East of the centre, kind of the bar district since Downtown’s off limits to that kind of thing, when I saw a little shop with a wrinkled old man inside and a sign on the glass shopfront saying simply ‘shirt’ then presumably the same in Arabic above it. I asked the man, in French and English, then with signs, if he could fix my bag.

He said no, but I then enquired as best I could about the price of a shirt. He pointed me to the cloth samples on the bench, had me sit down, and, signing wait, which here is fingers togetheer back of the hand facing down, like Italian ‘what?’ I think. I was intent on finding a cloth when he came back with a woman from a shop nearby who would translate. His Arabic was not extensive as he was Armenian, but spoke no English or French, she explained after cordially introducing herself. 60,000 which is $40 or about 20 GBP, no pound sign here my dears. That seemed ok, so I found a dark blue one, was struggling to tell the truth, but we agreed, and he measured me. There was a bit of discussion between her and the the shirtmaker, over the length of the shirt-to-be. We all agreed the one I had on was too short- hey, they don’t do bespoke in the Shakespeare Hospice shop Henley-in-Arden- but she thought the new length he wanted to make it would be too long, and she tried, and eventually succeed, to stop him from hustling a couple of extra centimeters onto the tape measure before he wrote down the result. She witnessed the receipt, took half as deposit, running across the road to change the 50,000 note at a garage, and then he started to speak his half toothed Arabic to her with some emphasis. He wanted to take me to where his friend would fix my bag, and would charge me nothing for it. She said goodbye Dan, he rooted in a drawer of his sewing machine bureau for a key, and then led me, almost up the middle of the road against the tide of beeping taxis, and a soldier with an AK47 driving a pick-up with an old merc hitched to the back, beeping of course, and asking the old guy for directions, perhaps, at the same time.

The place was closed. We stood there for a moment, thanking in a variety of languages and gestures, and he flapped his arms in the lowering sun, friendly, apologetic, bemused, and we parted. The shirt I pick up tomorrow.