100 and 44.

Forty minutes before the dinner party guests are due to arrive, I opened the fridge for the first time since I left for London a month ago. Who knew cheese could metamorphise? This may as well have been the soundtrack. Jesus Christ.

100 and 43.

My favourite quote of all time comes from Great Expectations. At the end of Chapter 27, Joe turns to Pip, “Dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together”. Travelling, for however long, is characterised by these accidental adventures, where dinner parties, nights out, nights in and the strangers that populate them, become suddenly exciting, whether they are in essence surprising or everyday to those whose lives you have invaded.

Now writing from the St Andrews library, whose pull I never seem to escape even in the midst of post-academia, the memory of misadventurous drinking games, nightclubs that hang over the Beiruti coastline and gatecrashing the flats and house parties of the Lebanese student community leave a mark on my thoughts: is it possible to be nostalgic about so short a trip?

On my second morning in Lebanon, or possibly the third, for time seemed stilled by the permanent heat – cut into two: the dark and the light – I was given a reality check. I was in a car park I think, with a view of the city, looking out at scaffolding and half-broken buildings. I was with a friend I had met the night before at a leaving party, hungover and tired and deeply confused by the city machinery. I said that I found the place strange. The response was unexpected, “And who are you to say that? What do you know about Beirut when you’ve only been here for one day?”

He was right. The problem with going away is that it is impossible to describe what has happened. Events become mythologised in telling and retelling so that the memories that remain are transformed through hindsight. If I were to document Lebanon now, as I have promised in earlier posts, it would devalue and falsify each of the six days. These words would be blasphemous.