Saturday before last I became ashamed of being Iranian for the first time in my life. I just couldn’t believe that the people I call my fellow countrymen, had re elected Amadinejad. It was truly shocking. But then it all changed. What has been happening in Iran ever since that day, is so grand, so beautiful and so truly magnificent that you can’t help but be proud of having the same blood as those people running through your veins, even if you are thousands of miles away, only glued to your television and computer.
I wish I could be there. I have never wanted to be in a place as much as I want to be in Iran right now.

I think I might have made my peace with banana at last. I’m glad of that. Banana and I go way back and I did not really like the idea of my unborn child coming between us.
As I’m sure anyone who grew up in Iran remembers, for many years after the revolution bananas disappeared from Iran. You just couldn’t find them anywhere. Years later they reappeared in the form of small, black, unappetising things that were sold by aggressive, suicidal men who would jump in front of your car and try to shove the overpriced fruit through your window.
Some time later a better brand of bananas called, Dole was imported to Iran. This meant that from then on, the suicidal men who would throw themselves in front of your car, would also order you to, ‘Eat Dole!’ This was not without its hilarious consequences since the word Dole is very similar to the Persian word for a little boy’s tinkle!
But before all this, there were no bananas in Iran at all. When I was little I had bananas twice a year. Once when my Auntie Leili came from Canada and once when my Auntie Maryam came from England.
They would each bring me a bunch of bananas, hugging them like a baby all the way on the plane and in transit so they wouldn’t get bruised. I was a very lucky girl. Most of my contemporaries had never even seen a banana in their lives or if they had, they had been so young then that they couldn’t remember it.
One day at school something very interesting happened. I think I was in third or forth year. At first it was like any other day. The bell rang and we all ran out into the school ground for our first break.
The sportys played volleyball. The older girls sat on the stairs of the pray-house, whispering in each other’s rears and giggling. Younger kids held hands and pointlessly walked round and round in circles. In one corner a girl tried to swap a tangerine for an orange flavoured wafer. In another, a girl split a cheese and cucumber roll with her friend. Next to them a girl desperately tried to finish her homework.
I sat with a few friends under the shade of a tree. We were talking about this and that. Suddenly I noticed that I could no longer hear the usual loud murmur of the school yard. It was as if someone had pressed the mute button on all the girls.
In addition to going mute, all the girls had also stopped dead in their tracks and were staring at something in the middle of the yard. Naturally my friends and I stood up and started looking around for whatever it was that had so mesmerized everyone. And that’s when I saw it: that slender body with its natural curves (well curve really!), that radiant colour, those tiny, brown beauty spots. I knew what it was straightaway. ‘It’s a banana,’ I said as if thinking out-loud. The people standing around me all turned to look at me.
‘What did you say that was?’ one of the girls asked.
‘A banana,’ I said confidently.
Maybe none of them had ever seen a banana before but they should still have been able to identify it from pictures and stuff. I mean most of them had never seen an elephant before either but I’m pretty sure if an elephant had walked into our school, they would have been able say exactly what it was. Also we had banana flavoured chewing gums. Ok so they had the texture of cardboard and tasted more like the idea of banana from the point of view of someone who had never had a banana before in his life but it was still some point of reference.
‘Are you sure?’ another girl asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m sure that’s a banana.’
From that moment on, the girls that were around me, hung onto my every word as if it was the most important thing they had ever heard in their life. If someone asked an inappropriate question, the others would snap at her saying things like, ‘she said it’s chewy,’ in a pay-attention-girl sort of tone.
Meanwhile the banana went up and down the school yard as it was watched by four hundred pairs of eyes.
The thing was at our school we all wore dark coloured uniforms. We even had to wear dark shoes. The only things at school that had any colour in them were our bags and at break times when we didn’t have our bags with us, the whole place was just a sea of black, grey, navy and brown. So to suddenly have this bright yellow, almost luminous thing in the middle of all that, was really amazing.
The banana belonged to a girl called Maryam who had it clutched to her chest tightly as she walked round and round, seemingly aimless. You could really see the terror in poor Maryam’s eyes. She gave the impression of a sheep trying to make her way through a pack of hungry wolves with her injured little lamb by her side.
Oh but she also had a sheepdog. Not exactly a sheepdog actually, it was just another wolf really but it looked like it might have turned friendly.
This sheepdog/wolf/self-appointed-bodyguard was called Fatemeh. Mrayam and Fatemeh were both in our class. We were all friends in a way because we were all in a one class but these two girls weren’t really special friends or anything like that. I had never seen them hang out at break times together before. But this day was different. This day Fatemeh had her arm around Maryam like they were best friends. As they walked past us I noticed that Fatemeh was holding onto her new best friend so tightly that you could tell her fingers were digging into her shoulders. ‘We’re best friends,’ I heard Fatemeh say, ‘and best friends always share everything.’
Maryam did not answer. She just stared ahead, holding onto her banana. It didn’t look like Maryam had had any say in this newfound friendship.
I guess what Fatemeh was doing wasn’t very nice really but I think in a weird way, Maryam actually appreciated it. I mean her own friends had deserted her and now she was under the watchful eyes of the whole school. I don’t think people were going to attack her or anything like that but it still must have been very scary for her. Fatemeh might have wanted half of her banana but she was also protecting her. Whenever someone tried to get close to Maryam, Fatemeh would push them away.
Suddenly there was an announcement on the loudspeaker. Maryam and her banana were to report to the office immediately. Straightaway Fatemeh let go of Maryam and vanished into the crowed. Maryam and banana made their way to the office. Some minutes later Maryam came back out alone. The banana that had brought the whole school to a standstill had been confiscated.

I’d always known as human beings we are very adaptable and can get used to almost anything but I would never have guessed that one could even get used to feeling sick. Now it’s only been a week and bizarrely I think I’m starting to get used to having a carsick feeling twenty four seven. Can’t say I like it or anything but it’s there and what’s weird is that I’m beginning to have trouble imagining a time when it wasn’t there. For example even looking at a banana makes me want to throw up now and I can’t for the life of me imagine a time when bananas didn’t have that effect on me and I used to like and even eat them!
It’s like that feeling when it’s in the middle of a very cold winter and you look at pictures of yourself on a beach in a bikini and you are so cold at that moment that you think no matter how hot it might have been on that beach, if you were to be transported to there right now, you would still probably wear a cardigan at least.
The funniest thing is that if something makes me feel sick at the moment, then it’s not just smelling it or seeing it that makes me feel sick, it’s even hearing the word or reading it somewhere.
At the moment garlic is one of the things that I cannot stand. So of course I get an email from my mum this morning titled, Garlic! Every time I read the dreaded word it made my stomach churn! I think I might be turning into a vampire.
However the weirdest thing about pregnancy so far is that it feels like someone has come in the middle of the night, emptied my head of my brain, and replaced it with some cotton wool. I can’t think at all. Which means after finishing the sentence before last and before writing, ‘I can’t think at all’ I spent about ten minutes staring at the monitor while my brain took a break and thought about a green meadow with white, fluffy bunnies jumping about in it. Can’t say it was unpleasant but it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea either.

Big news people! I’ve gone and got myself knocked up.
So for the next few months you can look forward to such posts as, ‘Constant Puker’, ‘Me, myself and my leaky nipples’ and ‘Midwife Cowboy’

Thought you might be interested in knowing some of my likes and dislikes at the moment so here they are:
First, Likes: Boiled vegetables, Tomatoes, Celery, Aaloo (prunes), rice, eggs, Marmite, Blueberries
Dislikes: Chocolate (Smell of chocolate actually makes me gag! Now isn’t that something?!), Baked beans, most sweet things, hummus

Must go and throw up now.

At our high school there used to be a small but fearsome lady called, let’s say, Mrs R. This Mrs R had a rather curious phrase that for some reason she was very fond of and would repeat over and over again. No matter what you did from arriving late to breaking a window to chewing gum in class to ripping another girl’s veil, Mrs R would say to you, ‘May you break you neck.’
I know in Iran people say some pretty bizarre things like if you really like someone you may say to them, ‘I want to eat your liver.’ And they will think that you are being very sweet but this was different. This was not a phrase that we all knew and had hidden meanings and stuff. No, this one basically did exactly what it said on the tin, it wished for you to break your neck and die…at your earliest convenience!
She had overused this phrase so much that we no longer called her Mrs R. Instead we referred to her as Mrs My-you-break-your-neck. Not to her face obviously.
One of the funniest things about Mrs My-you-break-your-neck was that the amount of vigour she put into saying, ‘May you break your neck!’ and the tone of her voice, changed depending on how bad what you had done had been. For example if she caught you giggling at postcards of muscly men that your friend had sent to you from Germany, she would go mental and while waving her finger at you would yell, ‘May you brrrrrreak your neck!’
But if for example you had written, ‘I am a donkey’ on a piece of paper and stuck it on the back of another girl’s uniform, she would give you a look of disgust that (you and I probably only reserve for when we’re scraping pieces of dog shit from the bottom of our shoe) and while shaking her head, would mumble, ‘May you break your neck.’ and then turn around and go as if to say, ‘well you’re just an idiot and not even worthy of me wishing for you to break your neck.’
This last one is a bit long but it’s a very good example I think so I’ll tell it anyway.
One day at school these two girls had started a water fight and were running around the school yard with empty glass bottles of coke that they had filled with water.
Now by doing this these two were breaking all sorts of school rules. For one they were running, for two they were having a water fight, for three they were playing with their coke bottles instead of giving them back as soon as they had drunk the content. In short, they were in big trouble.
Suddenly as the two were running around and laughing, they collided with each other and one of the bottles broke, cutting one of the girls’ hands. Blood started gushing out and they both started to scream and cry. Some people ran into the office and brought out the nurse and I think called for an ambulance as well. The nurse ran out with bandages and started to bandage the girl’s hand right there in the garden with a massive crowed gathered around them.
Meanwhile I had a genius idea. I ran into our classroom and got a piece of white chalk and ran out again. Now I’m not sure if had I thought about this a bit more I would still have done it but some blood had spilt on the ground and for some reason I thought it would be absolutely hilarious if I drew a chalk, body outline around it like in detective movies. As if someone had died there. And that’s what I did. I did it really quickly without drawing any attention to myself (which was easy because everyone else was gathered around the injured girl) and then went and stood with the others. It wasn’t because I didn’t want them to know it had been me, it was just that I thought it would be funnier if they suddenly turned around and saw the outline there without seeing me draw it.
Anyway at the end one person saw it and started to laugh and then everyone else saw it too and they all started to laugh, even the nurse. The only person that had not found it funny at all was the injured girl’s water-fight partner. She went absolutely mental at me and kept yelling things like, ‘You are so insensitive Saramad [my maiden name]. My friend is going to die and you’re making fun of her. I’m going to tell Mrs R what you’ve done.’
This was when I started to feel a bit bad. Her friend had just cut her hand and wasn’t going to die or anything and I wasn’t making fun of her anyway but I thought maybe she was right and I had been a bit insensitive. Then I suddenly saw Mrs R, aka, Mrs May-you-break-your-neck running towards us.
The girl that was yelling at me, ran to her crying and saying, ‘Mrs R, come and see what Saramad has done. She is so horrible.’ and things like that.
Basically she knew she had broken all sorts of rules and was very much in trouble so now she was trying to draw some attention to me hoping that they would just forget about her.
On the other hand I was at the early stages of pooing my pants as you could tell by Mrs May-you-break-your-neck’s way of running that she was pretty angry.
A little out of breath, Mrs May-you-break-your-neck stood at the foot of my chalk outline with the other girl next to her who was screaming and crying and pointing to the ground.
Mrs May-you-break-your-neck looked down for a few seconds without saying a word. Then I noticed that she had started to bite her lips the way we do to stop ourselves from laughing. Then she turned to me and while the beginnings of a smile were trying to break out from the corners of her mouth, somewhat playfully, borderline affectionately, said, ‘Saramad, may you break your neck!’ before turning around and walking back to her office.
So basically her tone varied but the saying always stayed the same, ‘May you break your neck!’
One day we noticed that Mrs May-you-break-your-neck had not come in. She was absent for a week I think and then one day turned up wearing, yes you guessed it, a huge, white neck brace over her veil.
I just remember looking up to the heavens as soon as I saw her on her first day back and thinking to myself, ‘There is a god. And he sure appreciates irony.’

Ages ago Leyli invited me to a game called Shabeh Yalda where you reveal five things about yourself that you haven’t already and invite five other people to do the same. Now I haven’t been around for a while so, sorry about the delay but here it is anyway.

راستی این فارسی هم داره اگر ترجیح میدین.ل

1- I hate it when people say, ‘Guess how old I am!’
In my opinion this is the most pointless exercise known to mankind and nine out of ten times, it ends in tears. Well it does if I’m the person you’re asking!
There was this one time at a friend’s house when I was talking to this guy who I thought was still at school. Then he said something about his military service and it surprised me because I thought he was about sixteen or seventeen. Turned out he was twenty or twenty one, the baby face type.
Anyway there was a woman there who I was meeting for the first time that night and who overheard our conversation. For some reason this woman found this little mistake of mine absolutely hilarious and then no matter what, would not drop the subject. She kept laughing and going on and on about how funny it was that I had thought this boy was about sixteen or seventeen when he was twenty or twenty one.
‘Oh you don’t have a clue how old people are do you?’ she kept saying while giggling. I think she was a bit tipsy but I was getting a bit annoyed with her anyway because I wasn’t!
After about ten minutes of laughing she finally asked the question, ‘So how old do you think I am then?’ and as quick as anything, I blurted out, ‘Forty two’
Turned out she was forty two. And from the look on her face, she was not too happy about it either! Well she asked for it, didn’t she?
She was right about one thing though, I really didn’t have a clue how old people were; I had thought she was about forty eight and basically I had tried to be nice to her by saying forty two instead!

2- For some reason a lot of people seem to think I’m a lot smaller than I really am. My dress size is ten or twelve, very rarely eight (depending on the shop I’m in) but I’m normal size really. However some people I know seem to always be trying to push my dress size to see how low they can go before I actually burst out of the outfit they have given me!
On occasions I have even been given children’s clothes. I’m thirty one. With breasts and everything! I mean they’re not big but they’re there.
So I get given these tiny T-shirts made for ten year olds and as if that’s not enough humiliation for one day, then I am often made to put them on there and then as well to see how it looks.
So I come out taking care not to take deep breaths because I’m afraid the T-shirt might rip if I do. My belly is hanging out and I’m being choked by the neck line and they go, ‘Oh great! It fits!’

When I worked at this restaurant for a short while, on my first day my manager looked me up and down and then handed me a uniform. I went into the changing room and put it on. Then I looked at myself and thought, ‘Odd! Is this T-shirt really meant to flatten my chest like that?’ I thought maybe they had some sort of no-chest policy or something.
I took off the T-shirt and looked at the label. It wasn’t small or extra small or petit or anything like that. Oh no. The label said: Age: 5-6 years. 5-6 years! I’m not joking. The bastard had not even given me a normal staff uniform, he had given me one of the kiddy T-shirts that we sold in the restaurant. Needless to say I looked like a retard.
Talking of retard, I always wondered how I still got tips even though I was a very bad waitress, now I’m thinking it’s possible that people just felt sorry for me.

3- I can’t stand it when people say, ‘I never give a hundred percent in what I do, I give a hundred and fifty percent.’
What on earth? I don’t know which idiot started this whole stupid over hundred percent business but whoever it was, should be ashamed of themselves.
Suddenly giving hundred percent to something is not enough anymore. If you go for a job interview and say, ‘I give a hundred percent in everything I do,’ they will probably think you’re a bit lazy! You have to say I give a hundred and ten percent at least or two hundred percent if you really want to impress them.
In sports, everyone has to give hundred and ten percent now or it’s not good enough. If you watch interviews with football managers they always say, ‘My boys are going to go out there today and give a hundred and ten percent.’ Which basically means, they will do the best they can and then give a little bit more.
So why do your best and then do a little bit more then? Why not do your best and then do a lot more more? Hmm, let’s see what percentage that would be. Hundred and fifty percent? Two hundred percent?
So where does it end then? Nine hundred and ninety nine percent? One million percent? Absolute nonsense.

4- I really envy those people who can come out in the middle of winter wearing just a vest or a T-shirt and not even shiver. I don’t know how they manage it but I wish I could do it too as it seems like a very useful skill.

5- This blog was very nearly called, ‘Communication, no!’ But then I thought it was probably best to go with a title that did not need explaining.
The story behind ‘Communication, no!’ is that there was this guy that my cousin and I once met in a party in France. He was very sweet and kept trying to talk to us. The problem was, he didn’t know much English and we didn’t know French. So he would start to say something (by the way he was completely coked out of his head) in English and then suddenly he would get excited and say the rest very fast in French. And then we, not having understood a thing, would say, ‘Sorry, no French.’ And every time, he would slap himself on the forehead and stamp his foot and totally helplessly shout out, ‘Communication, no!’ Then after a few moments he would try again.
Unfortunately we never found out what was going on in that poor guy’s coked up mind that he was trying to tell us about but I doubt I will ever forget his desperate cries of ‘Communication, no!’

And now I’m passing this onto these guys if any of them are interested in doing it:

Homeyar
Foulla
Amanda
Amir Sharifi
Chakameh Azimpour

Our serial killer has finally been caught. Actually I shouldn’t say that. He is after all presumed innocent until proven guilty. I’m talking about the case of the five murdered women in Ipswich by the way. The women were all prostitutes and worked in the same area.
I’m dying to know why the police arrested this guy and why they ended up charging him but they’re not saying anything at the moment for legal reasons. I would love to be a fly on the wall in that court or better yet, a juror. This is weird because when I got called up for jury service once, I was absolutely horrified by the idea of having to sit through a very gruesome case or something nasty like child abuse.
What I ended up being a juror on was in fact neither of the above. A man had brought his wife to court accusing her of pouring paraffin over him and trying to set him on fire. She had failed in her mission however and all that he had to show from his traumatic experience was a rash he had got on his left butt-cheek from the paraffin.
I don’t even know how this case had ever made its way to court. The whole thing was basically like a comedy sketch. In a way it felt a bit like god was making fun of me.
‘What dear? You don’t fancy being a juror on a grisly murder case? How about a bit of mild domestic argument then? Do you think you could handle looking at pictures of a man’s butt with a little rash on it or would that be too much for you too? Please tell me because if you don’t like this, I could maybe fix it for you to go to the furry animals court instead and be a juror on the case of mister Squirrel taking Fluffy Bunny in front of the magistrate and accusing him of stealing his nuts.’

For added comedy value, the woman was tiny while her husband was very tall and lanky. She only came up to about his waist and she was wearing high heels! I’m not saying she was not capable of doing anything nasty because she was small but looking at them you would think that no matter how scary things got between those two, as long as he was not tied down, that guy could always simply step over her. Or like in cartoons, put one hand on her forehead and keep her at an arm’s length and stand there watching her as she throws kicks and punches his way without being able to reach him.

We were not told what the original argument between this couple had been, we were just told that they were arguing about something. In the middle of it all, the wife takes a break to go into the kitchen and pour herself a nice bowl of paraffin. As you do! Not to drink by the way, the paraffin was to treat her head lice, which incidentally is very common in Britain. I’m saying this because I know by reading this, a lot of people in Iran at least are now thinking, ‘How ghastly! Hope you convicted that dirty tramp and threw away the key.’ But as I said anyone can get head lice over here and from what I saw, that paraffin thrower/husband burner, was in fact a very lovely and respectable young lady!
Anyway as I said, the lady takes a break and pours herself a bowl of paraffin but her husband who is obviously not aware of international laws regarding ceasefires, follows her into the kitchen and continues with their argument. Long story short, after a while she gets very angry and chucks the paraffin on him. However being so small, she only manages to get it on his waist.
The paraffin that had sunk into the man’s clothes, had resulted in a mild rash on his left buttock that he had had a friend take pictures of at the time. These were passed around the court for everyone to look at. And here is where all my sympathy for this guy went right out of the window. Tell me if you don’t think this is nasty. In the pictures, the man was wearing blue Y-fronts. Blue Y-fronts for crying out loud! Why?
In case you’ve missed it, blue Y-fronts are a serious pet hate of mine. I don’t like Y-fronts full stop but I find the blue ones in particular extremely horrifying.
Good job I didn’t become a judge right?!
‘The man is wearing blue Y-fronts, off with his head!’
‘But he is the complainant Your Honour.’
‘Oh! Are you sure? He looks pretty dodgy to me. Could I at least maybe slap him a couple of times?’

So that’s basically the gist of my comical jury service experience. Obviously it was nothing to give me nightmares or anything like that. Afterwards my fellow jurors and I did kind of wish that we had been given a case a tad more serious than a butt rash. However I must admit this experience was a bit of a turning point for me.
It’s weird having two nationalities, especially if like in my case, your two nationalities are so different from each other. I guess it’s a bit like having two children that are very different. Say one is a bit of a retarded drug addict and the other is a model-looking genius. From what I’ve seen, if a mother has two kids like this, she will always pay more attention to the first one. She will take care of him more and maybe even love him more than the second one who she may end up ignoring or maybe even loathing. Well she figures the second one doesn’t need her really because he is great and everyone knows he’s great too so he will be fine. The first one however will probably only ever be loved by her.
This I think is similar in a way to the two nationalities that I have, Iranian and British. Guess which is which child!
Anyway just like that mother, I have always sort of taken the side of my not-doing-so-well nationality and picked faults with my other one. Well the first one is an easy target basically and the way I see it it needs my love and protection more. However there was something about my jury experience that made me see things a bit differently.
As I sat in that beautiful court room with the judge and the lawyers all in their wigs and costumes, very seriously presenting pictures of a man’s butt-rash, all I kept thinking (apart from, ‘that butt-rash man has no sense of style whatsoever’) was, ‘how fantastically civilised’. I hope I’m explaining this well because it’s quite a delicate subject but it just felt so amazing to be a part of that whole thing. I mean this is a country that values it’s people enough to give an arty someone (whatever I am) a chance to have a say in what becomes of a paraffin throwing, lice-infested little lady and her lanky blue Y-front wearing husband! I just think that is so wonderful. I’m being serious now.
I guess you could say that in an extremely unusual turn of events, a man’s butt rash ended up making me feel proud to be British! And I still get the same feeling when I think back to that time. So it was a good experience after all.
Course I will continue to take the side of my easy target, flag burning, holocaust denying, generally as politically incorrect as they come country and pooh-pooh my other nationality (which I’m not saying is without its faults) but the difference is that now we both know that deep down I respect it immensely and love it really.

Wonder if the Ipswich killer wears blue Y-fronts. I’m telling you, those kinds of people are not to be trusted ;-)