Jeremiah's Strange Times

Deep in Tehran my party and I hit an intersection.   Across from us the street gave way to cobbles, along which and off to the right a square was cut into the linear streetscape. Here were set two platforms at right angles. Crowds milled and pushed about them. We nuzzled in to get a closer look.  The platforms were lined with moustachioed men with perfect hair. They gesticulated wildly.  One, a large man, who seemed to be in charge, looked at me and shouted a word I didn't catch or understand, I stared blankly and waved.  We saw now that it was an auction The crowd bid for gold coins which sat in cases like picture frames at the men's feet. Gold Coin Auctioneers We broke away and found, just beyond and beneath an old arch pointed like a leaf, a short stairway leading down to a street arched over - seething and stretching away to an interior horizon: a morass of colour filtered on a bed of chador black. Shoppers shuffling beneath rich banners in luminous g...

I was in Tehran, physically beaten,  spiritually ecstatic.  The sky hung above the courtyard, grey and tawdry, wind shook the tree in the corner, occasional drops of ashen rain fell to stain the page. I had set to writing, fueled with tea from a battered samovar, perched on a little table with insectile legs buckling; wrapped up in cling film beside it were flat bread piles and fig jam.  By default I was first to this breakfast buffet, others arrived gradually as the hour grew saner and before long I was scattily engaged in chat with a French student and an accountant from Amsterdam. Idle pleasant chat watching bedraggled folk emerge from dormitories upstairs, they stumbled in turn over a large pool of shoes that spread from the door almost to the samovar at which they clutched, sleep feverish. All then sat, chewed and sipped - joined the growing chat.  It was the simple ease of the hostel. All looked well traveled in well worn loose fitting woollens, fa...

Late last year I ended up in Iran.   I was working in scooter caffe in Waterloo, serving drinks and cocktails and cakes. One evening a very attractive young lady approached the counter. Somehow conversation blossomed; she had been studying in the Middle East, in Jordan, and I mentioned my own trip, many years before - Syria, Jordan, all that. Oh how quick we are to boast to beautiful women.  The impression was formed that I was something of a traveller so naturally she asked where I was going to go next and, having nowhere in mind, I said Iran.  Then her inevitable boyfriend came along, he said "I hear you're going to Iran" and I could only agree, it seemed that I was going to Iran.  But all that is so much facetiousness. Nauseous facetiousness.  Why did I choose Iran? It felt like it could change, it was different, it was unknown to me, travel was currently possible but that could change. It had already been bubbling in a vaguer part of my mind....