This I suppose will be the last one from Beirut. Tying up loose ends would be good punctuation, but as with all travel, it’s hard to be conclusive, especially when you start to leave before the cab leaves for the airport, the plane takes off, you wait in Larnaca transit, dreading- that’s a strong word perhaps- return to the cold grid of London; and there’s always a tension between losing a sense of where you’re going back to, and the knowledge that even if you’ve changed, maybe, nothing dramatic will be different in the world you’ve left behind, and really you’re making more loose ends than were there before. Apologies to Chelmsley Wood from before, I’ve never been there, so I have no right to compare the place with Staines, where i got dropped once hitching to London, staying one stop too far on the M40.

I woke up the other morning thinking this kind of writing was suited to the way one carries on conversations mentally, day to day, with no focus or outlet. Being somewhere different, I find myself trying to work things out, make connections, in short, to know it better link what you see to what it’s ‘like’, what it ‘is’. A friend lives in Forn el Chebeck, a bit to the South of Achrafiye. She was telling me about the sky at night, some times the Metropolitan Hotel lights would change colour, that there were spotlights from the ground between there and the montains, like the ones you used to see over the Centre Ville when she first came here. Were they from a disco? she asked a Lebanese friend. Yes, it’s a kind of disco, said her friend, referring sardonially to an Islamic party’s occupation of that part of town.

Sometimes the sky muddies up over the mountains, and the desert wind brings clouds of dust which coat the cars in dirty raindrop patterns. There was a man on a nearby roof who would at 8pm every night come out to fire rounds off into the sky, though you can no longer hear him do so. After the recent murders in a religious school in Jerusalem, tracer bullets lit up the sky with their congratulation, from the neighbouring area. The night time noises would change periodically, and she learned there were new exploding tracers to watch and listen to crossing the heavens. Sometimes too, a shooting star.

The stars I have seen, the rest is heresay, though entirely trustworthy. I was introduced to some people the other day, in a very nice flat with book-lined walls and a distinctly cultured air. The guy asked me if I could feel the tension, referring to the ongoing political crisis here. I tried to answer as best I could, and thought about it a bit, trying to see what he meant. I’ve read about it, people have spoken about it, there are politial posters everywhere, graffiti tags of confessional demarcation, everywhere there are police and security guards and soldiers and the centre of town is occupied by Hizbollah. Feel it as such though, not in the way he clearly did; I’ve also been quite busy having a very good time, and photographing silver polishers, shirtmakers, broken down funfairs and beach clubs, eating really good food, walking home late, exchanging pleasantaries with a succession of guards and cops and soldiers, trying to get cab drivers to help my stumble up the Arabic one to ten, looking for lighters that LED project Hariri and Nasrallah. There were a couple of soldiers guarding an unsociable hour on Friday, night, and as we strolled past them- Bon soir! Bonjour!, they were listening to Celine Dion sing ‘…and I know that your heart will go ooooon…’ huddled together over a mobile phone near a Cedar stencilled guard box, naturally attended by Kalshnikovs.

Feel the tension, over a Long Island ice tea in Torino Express at 2am on a Tuesday morning (though now Gemmayze closes early, a protest by bar premises owners wanting to put up rents, disguised as a protest by residents sick of the traffic and shitty house music all night all hours… so I heard)? Not as such. I tell him my first day’s confusion of the building site with the memorial of the murdered man- see the first post below, thinking about the distinctions between evidence and experience, and he says that guy was my friend, Samir Kassir, journalist and intellectual.

A young guy walked with me – the long, if not quite wrong way round – when I was going to Raouche to swim in the Long Beach Club, quite a place incidentally, pictures to follow, and in a mournful monotone in English told quite a few things about himself, and life here, and we parted on the Corniche after he’s said how sad it was for him to look at the sun going down over the sea. He felt at these moments as if the souls of his dead were floating in the air around him.

I’m going to the beach club places now, for a swim, meet a friend. Some food and the sun go down.