Exactly one year ago on this very day, a thirty year old Iranian woman woke up in her flat in Oxford. It was a July Friday morning like any other.
She looked at the clock as a dog yapped in the building opposite and a few crows greeted each other in crow language. She twiddled with her hair as she listened to a drunk father and his young son have their morning chat and the single mum downstairs shout at her little girl, ‘GET IN THE CAR.’ And suddenly she was seized with an uncontrollable urge to start a blog and thus Shirin in Engelestan was born.
Now one year on, the drunk father has finally listened to his son and f***ed off, the little girl downstairs has listened to her mum and got in the car and they’ve gone away too but the dog, the crows and Shirin in Engelestan are still going strong; yapping and croaking and click clicking away on the keyboard; letting the world know that they need the bathroom, that they have just been to the bathroom on someone’s head or that their bathroom taps were designed by Doctor Evil.
But enough about me, the dog and the crows, let’s talk about you. Do you come here often? ;-) Why that’s a lovely monitor you have there, it frames your head so beautifully! :-)
Thank you for visiting Shirin in Engelestan in the past year. I hope it has made you smile sometimes.

One day a week we can go and visit Babazee in prison. Babazee (my mum’s father) is a small man with a big nose who is a doctor of economics but made his fortunes from Agriculture.
Babazee used to be very rich and owned a whole village near Karaj, just outside Tehran. I don’t remember much about our family’s wealthy days because by the time I was three and a half, everything they owned had been confiscated by the revolutionary government and given to Bonyad-eh Mostazafan (the Organization for the Oppressed).
All I remember from my Grandparents’ huge house in the village, is the big Bullmastiff called Filo, who lived on the roof and looked down at us as we walked into the house on Fridays.
Interestingly enough some believe that it was this same dog that caused Babazee’s downfall at the end. Allegedly some of the villagers who did not like my granddad much, after the revolution had ceased their chance and had gone to the revolutionary guards telling them that Babazee was a vicious landlord who kept a lion on his roof that he threw villagers in front of.
One day when Azizam (my grandmother) came back home from visiting her sister, she found that there was a big padlock on the door of her home and all the other doors and windows had been bordered up.
All that Azizam had been left with were the clothes she had on, her Rolex watch, a little gold broach in shape of a woman’s head, a necklace, two rings on her fingers and her handbag which in it had a little money, her house keys (which were no longer in use), a little pill box and some other bits and pieces.
Babazee had been taken to prison but he kept saying, ‘Don’t worry. This is just a misunderstanding. I’ll be out in no time.’

I hate going to prison so I don’t go every week. I go often though because I’m the only one out of all my cousins on my mum’s side that has not started school yet and so for most of the year, I’m the only one on be-a-good-girl-and-go-cheer-granddad-up-with-a-big-kiss duty.
Although sometimes it backfires and my presence seems to annoy him rather than cheer him up. Like when he sits on one side of the fence and we on the other and I’m allowed to go through the side door and sit with him.
First he looks as though he is very happy to see me and hugs me kisses me but then as soon as he thinks the guards aren’t looking, he starts going through my pockets. ‘Where are they?’ he whispers to my mum. ‘Where is who?’ my mum asks whispering while bringing her face nearer to the fence and narrowing her eyes.
I start to get excited thinking, ‘Wow, are we about to break Babazee out?’ and imagine us all running out of the prison in slow-motion with shots being fired after us and my mum and I jumping off the high prison wall, using her chador as a parachute; James Bond style, ‘ding dililing leeng…ling ling ling, ding dililing leeng…ling ling ling…’ ‘The pills’ Babzee interrupts my James Bond theme tune, ‘The sleeping pills that I have been asking you for, for god knows how long.’
‘Baba,’ my mum says impatiently, ‘I’m not going to give her pills to bring to you.’
‘Why not?’ he whispers, ‘They don’t search her.’ And then he turns to me and asks, ‘Did they search you?’
I panic and start nodding without thinking but then I remember that the guard just took my hand and brought me straight in and in fact the first time I was ever searched, was when Babazee put me on his lap and started going through my pockets. So I suddenly stop nodding and fling my head backward, raising my eyebrows. This is not a polite thing to do but at the moment my mum seems to have more important things on her mind than worrying about my bad prison etiquette.
‘See?’ Says Babazee, ‘What did I tell you; they don’t search the kids.’ And then, ‘you don’t know what it’s like in here. I need those pills.’

The prison is very far and I always get carsick on our way there. I’m bored stiff because all grownups want to talk about are things that I’m not interested in like, their numerous trips to Bonyad-eh Mostazafan, Komiteh, Rations, Petrol queues and he or she who was (they only move their lips to this without letting any sound out so I won’t get upset) executed (as if I’m blind and don’t see pictures of the newly-executed with ropes around their necks or holes in their heads, plastered all over the front pages of newspapers everyday).
There’s mud everywhere in the car because it’s been raining and all the dust on the road has turned into orangy-brown sticky mud and Maman, Azizam and I have brought a lot of it in with us when we stopped a little while ago for me to be sick by the side of the road.
‘Maman’ I say pulling her sleeve and looking up at her. She is sitting next to me on the backseat of the car, ‘I need a tissue.’ She picks up her handbag asking, ‘What for?’
‘My nose is running.’ I say stretching my upper lip over my upper teeth to try and buy myself some more time before the fast-moving snot reaches my mouth. ‘Oh’ she says and starts looking inside her bag, ‘I had one in here but I think I gave it to you to wipe your mouth earlier.’ And when she doesn’t find one she shrugs and says, ‘No I don’t have any. Does anyone else have any tissues?’
Uncle Bahy takes one hand off the steering wheel and with it searches his coat pockets and then lifts himself off the seat a little to pat down his trousers’ pockets, saying, ‘Even if they have decided that Baba is guilty of some sort of crime and deserves to have all his belongings confiscated, it doesn’t make any sense to take all our belongings away too. I’m sure we’ll be able to take our own homes back very soon and then we can start on getting Maman and Baba’s home and lands back.’ And then he looks in the rear view mirror and says, ‘Sorry darling, I don’t have any tissues.’
Aunty Leili who is sitting on the front passenger seat, has a look through her handbag too and then turns around and says, ‘I don’t have any either sweetie.’ I tilt my head back and try to redirect the snot back inside my nose.
‘Blow your nose in here.’ Says Azizam. I don’t move my head. I just give her my hand to put the tissue in. ‘No I don’t have a tissue darling but you can blow your nose in here.’ She says holding one of the two end bits of her headscarf in her hand while she is still wearing it.
‘I can’t do that.’ I say, not liking the idea at all. But she says, ‘It’s ok. I’ll just wash it when I get home.’ and at the same time shoves my head towards the piece of headscarf that she is holding between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Blow’ she says encouragingly. I do but I do it reluctantly because the headscarf is made out of a very slippery fabric that does a lot more smearing than wiping.
‘Better?’ asks Azizam, smiling down at me while tying a knot around the snotty part of her headscarf. ‘Yes thanks’ I say, giving my nose a couple more wipes with the back of my hand.

This time Babazee is sitting on one side of a glass wall and we’re on the other and the only way to talk to him is through the telephone. As soon as he sees us, he points to uncle Bahy which means he wants to talk to him first. So uncle Bahy sits down on the one chair on our side and we all stand behind him.
‘Salam Baba,’ uncle Bahy says smiling, ‘looking well.’ And then, ‘I went and talked to that Hajji I was telling you about last time.’ On the other side Babazee is getting very excited and talking fast but we can’t hear what he’s saying. I get bored and hang from the little metal shelf with the telephone on it and try to swing myself back and forth but after only a couple of swings uncle Bahy puts his hand on my head which means don’t do that and continues his conversation with Babazee.
‘I’m going to see him again tomorrow. You see this beard?’ he says stroking his beard and smiling, ‘this is my Bonyad beard.’ Uncle Bahy has had a beard for as long as I remember but these days when he wants to go to Bonyad-eh Mostazafan, he lets the sides grow, thinking that it makes him look more Islamic.
I slowly lower myself down, still holding onto the shelf and then let go of it, to sit on the stone floor of the visiting room. From the floor I look up at my mum, Azizam and aunty Leili; three of them standing solemnly in a row behind uncle Bahy, holding their chadors very tightly under their chin. ‘Hee hee, black crows.’ I think to myself, which is what I’ve heard some people call women in black chadors.

They didn’t always wear this outfit when they came to prison. At first they used to come in wearing their own clothes. But then this one time, they were not allowed in because a bad-tempered, black-chadored woman outside the prison told them that they could not come in unless they were wearing a headscarf. And no matter how much Azizam and my mum had cried and begged the bad-tempered woman to let them in just this once, she had flung her head backward, clicking her tongue and had said, ‘Next. What have you got in that bag? Empty it on the table.’
So the times after that, they had taken headscarves in with them and had worn long, baggy shirts and had got in. But then some time after that, they had been stopped by the door and told that they could not go in, unless they were wearing a chador. And that was what they had worn from then on.

‘Listen, we’re getting you out very soon’ says uncle Bahy, ‘and then we’re going to get everything back and there is no doubt about that; all the lands, the house and the villa. It’s all under control. Don’t you worry about a thing.’ Azizam throws her head back as she produces a very short burst of laughter, ‘Huh’ and loses her grip on her chador which means the little sack of snot gets a chance to poke its head out and dangle freely for a few seconds in prison air before she composes herself and tightens her grip again.

I make music by covering and uncovering my ears with my hands to let in and block out waves of the loud buzzing sound made by all the visitors talking, frustrated babies crying, the quick, occasional bursts of nerves-sounding laughter and the sound of Koran being read on a loudspeaker somewhere in the prison by a man who can no doubt have himself a very successful carrier as a pearl diver, even if the Koran reciting business does not work out for him.
Realising time is about to run out and she is not going to get a chance to talk, Azizam taps uncle Bahy on his shoulder and says, ‘Tell him I’ve brought him a new shirt, a dressing gown, some fruits and some biscuits.’

Here are a few things I learned from my trip to France and the wedding that I thought I share with you. I hope you find them useful.

1- Travelling is so much more peaceful when one’s travelling companion has a British passport rather than an Iranian one.

2- Having your eardrums pierced on Eurostar for three hours by excited little three-year-olds going to Disneyland, shouting at the top of their lungs, ‘Is Eeyore gonna be there? Is Winnie the Pooh gonna be there? Is Stripes gonna be there?’ can put you off having children for life.

3- The French are not able to form an orderly queue even if their lives depend on it.

4- It’s hard work trying to walk around on shingles wearing open toe, high heel shoes but fear not; things will get surprisingly easier after a few drinks.

5- It’s impossible to eat pistachio nuts while standing up and at the same time trying to hold a drink, a handbag and a shawl.

6- Not everyone will think, ‘Is you looking exactly like Peter Sellers, accidental or intentional?’ is a compliment.

7- Praying to the god of hairs apparently works.

8- It’s ‘la chignon’ and not ‘le chignon’

9- Twenty one year old boys (or is it men?) might look cute in their little suits but avoid talking to the little devils at all cost as it can be very depressing.
‘How long have you been living in England for?’
‘About twelve years now.’
‘Wow, you must have been a kid when you went there then.’
‘No; I’m just old.’ :-(

10- If you have trouble working out exactly when is a good time to stop drinking, hearing yourself speak these words, while hanging from someone’s jacket (preferably after having just finished a particularly theatrical solo dance to some eighties tune) might be a good cue, ‘Isn’t it weird; I’ve had three…or was it four? Anyway, vodka and tonics and two shots and two glasses of wine and I don’t feel drunk at all.’

I’ve never understood this fascination we women supposedly have with shoes. Yes high heel shoes are nice. To look at. Not to wear! Not to bloody wear! It’s like putting your feet in clamps. Sliding ones. And then be expected to walk and dance and laugh and chat to people as well instead of doing what you really want to do which is to take the shoes off and hit them repeatedly with a mallet-like instrument while screaming ‘you stupid stupid things.’
It just kills me when people balancing themselves on stilettos say things like ‘These shoes are so comfy.’ It makes me wonder what they normally wear you know; shoes with razorblades on their insides? Because in that case those scrappy stilettos that are making their feet look all mangled already from the pressure, could very well be super comfy for them.

I’ve started to think about all this because we’re going to a wedding on Friday and I’m dreading having to walk around in high heels all night. Everything else is great. I have a few dresses (that are all comfortable) and a few bags to choose from and I’m going to pray to the God of Hairs not to give me a bad hair day (my hair is at that teenage stage between short and long and lately it has been very unruly). There’s no point in praying to the God of Spots I guess since it has blessed me with two lovely spots already; one on my chin and one (of all places) on my chest. This is so God of Spots; always coming up with new and exciting places to put his creations on just before a big do. Bless, he never lets me down.
So the only thing I have to complain about is my shoes; the instruments of torture. My feet are starting to blister just from being in the same room as them.

I guess it could be worse though; I could be a man. Poor Kamyar has to wear a polyester suit. In this heat! He picked up a cotton one first, one those ones that crease even from being looked at. By the time he came out of the changing room he looked like he was wearing a large dishcloth.
‘I don’t think that’s suitable for a wedding really.’ I said. ‘Why not?’ asked Kamyar disappointedly (he hasn’t been to many weddings) ‘Because people tend to wear the kind of suits to weddings that do not crease so easily.’ I said. What I had really meant to say was ‘Because people tend to wear the kind of suits to weddings that do not make them look like drunken homeless guys.’ But I thought I should go easy on him because he had really liked the suit and was feeling very poorly from hay fever (which had actually contributed very generously to his drunk-homeless look; eyes half shut, mouth half open at all times to breathe in from due to severe nose blockage)
‘Doesn’t anyone wear these kind of suits to a wedding then?’ he said looking at himself in the mirror.
‘I don’t know’ I said, ‘Bob Geldof might.’
‘Oh!’

I must say he looked very dishy in his polyester suit and shirt and tie and all that at the end, Rrrrrrrrr. Any of you ladies try to flirt with him on Friday and my heel just might accidentally land on some of your mangled toes, ouch.

So far the only thing the World Cup has given me, is a small belly that I have accumulated from all the beers I’ve been drinking. Is that you clapping and cheering Khaleh Maryam? ;-) You know that day you said you wanted to put me on a fatty diet of cheese and cakes and lard or whatever, you should have just waited for the World Cup.

It’s funny isn’t it how the World Cup, which for some is all bout fitness, accuracy, balance and concentration, for the rest is basically all about drunkenness, hiccups, tripping over one’s own feet while slurring, ‘’ave I ever told you? You’re sound man. You’re sound you are.’ And then squaring up to that same wall or tree or dog or whatever creature one happens to be talking to ‘You f***ing whah? You f***ing whah? Come on then. Come on.’ Right before passing out.
It was estimated that during the first month of the World Cup, 410 million cans and bottles of beer, lager or cider were going to be drunk in the UK.
Obviously Kamyar and I have been doing our bit too and so far have drunk a large quantity of lager and Guinness…while sitting in our underwear… shouting at the television, ‘Are you kidding! That was never offside.’ Hmm, add that to the fact that the only property we could afford to buy was on a council estate and that we are both extremely white at the moment on account of not having been on a holiday in the sun for the past three years, and I think you will find that we are well on our way to become the first ever Iranian white trash couple. Know wha’ I mean? Hmm, no. Maybe my language still needs a bit more work.

It was so sad England leaving the World Cup yesterday. I shed a few tears I did. England hadn’t been all that great in all their other games but I thought yesterday they played brilliantly. After that idiot, Rooney was sent off and Beckham had to come off the pitch (because…I don’t know…someone had messed his hair up or something. I don’t know what happened to him really) the rest of them played so well. They really deserved to win that game I thought. First Iran and now England; all the best teams are out.
So I sulked a bit and then went and dressed myself in tacky eighties stuff; blue and white stripy top, red and white polka dot hairclips and a pearly-looking necklace, singing,

Everyone seems to know the score
They've seen it all before
They just know
They're so sure
That England's Gonna throw it away
Gonna blow it away
They don’t know how to play

Kamyar was busy with another four hour shift of staring at the computer monitor with an open mouth. This was what he had been doing since, for no apparent reason, one day his whole website vanished off the face of the internet and when it returned some days later, it had lost a whole month of photos and insisted that it was still the 31st of May. ‘No Website dear,’ we kept saying to it, ‘it’s not the 31st of May anymore, it’s nearly the end of June now.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes we’re very sure.’
‘Well in that case I’m terribly sorry but I don’t seem to recall anything that went on after the 31st of May. Do you think I may be suffering from Amnesia?’

But I remember...
Three Lions on a shirt
Jules Rimet still gleaming
Thirty years of hurt (well forty years now)
Never stopped me dreaming

It's coming home
It's coming home
It's coming
Football's coming home

It is as well. Well the footballers are. With a long face :-(

But on a happier note; welcome back mister Kamster of Kamshots. Yay, all the staring paid off at the end :-)

You might want to go and get yourself a cup of tea for this one because this is looooong even by my standards. Have a look. Yes scroll down.

See? It just goes on and on and on. Don’t worry though there is an intermission.
Yes I know; I’m not exactly helping by adding to the top of it as well. Agh, I can’t help it can I? Ok, I’m gonna shut up. Zipping it up. That’s it now I’m not gonna say another word. The mouth is now closed. Me no talky.

One last thing before I go though. Does anyone know a cure for verbal diarrhoea?


I think I was about nine or ten. It was one of those times that Iraqis had started bombing Tehran again and so our schools had closed down. During the bombings my grandparents’ tiny one bedroom house by the Caspian always became Shelter Central and the doors were open for any friends or relatives who wanted to escape Tehran. There were two double beds and two sofas in the living room and everyone else just slept on the floor.
Usually you would get a good mixture of people coming; kids, their parents and some older people too so everyone would have a good time and get to hang out with people their own age.
This particular time however, apart from me and my mum and dad, for some reason only the very old had turned up. And when I say old I mean proper old like most of them were older than my own grandparents even.
At first I didn’t really mind it. My mum and dad and I stayed in the little annex and every night after the others had gone to bed, we would have a great laugh in there chatting and listening to my dad read to us from some of the stuff he was writing at the time.
I also enjoyed being Babajoon’s (my granddad) self-appointed assistant and following him around the garden along with the two local black dogs, Kaapo and Haalo and when I got bored of that, I went off on my own and did what I had always done (and still do) best which is to stare into space and escape into a fantasy world in my head.
But after a few days I started to miss hanging out with people my own age. Plus my birthday was close and, not that I had anything against this lot, but I much preferred spending it with people who when started a sentence with ‘During the war…’ actually meant the Iran Iraq war and not Word War 2 or Jangeh Kaazeroon or Mamasani!
After dinner as everyone would gather around the radio trying to tune it into BBC World Service, I would kneel on the sofa with my nose pressed against the window and my hands cupped around my face, quietly singing to myself a spell my mum had taught me for when you want someone to come to you.
Alessoon-o valessoon
Abracadabra
Shadi-ro zood beressoon
Bring Shadi to me fast
Ageh neshsteh paash kon
If she’s sitting, make her stand up
Ageh vaysadeh raash kon
If she’s standing, make her walk

And then Alesson-o valesson
Nader-o zood beressoon
Ageh…

When we’d left Tehran, my aunt and uncle had said that they would come and join us in the north in a few days along with my two cousins, Shadi and Nader. Now a few days had passed and they had not arrived and we didn’t have a phone there to contact them.
Every morning I would walk to the top of the massive garden and I would poke my head out through the bars on the yellow metal gate and watch the cars going past while trying to get my cousins to come to me with the power of my mind.
This was something my cousins and I had done together many times when we were in the north and wanted someone else to come over. The three of us would get onto the gate and while swinging it back and forth would try to make contact with that person through the power of our minds! There was great fun to be had there even if the person did not show up at the end. Unfortunately doing it on my own just wasn’t the same. I couldn’t even get the gate swinging.

The night before my birthday I prayed like I’d never prayed before. I knew that was my last chance for them being there for my birthday because my aunt and uncle always left Tehran in the evening which meant they got to the north in the middle of the night so I knew if I woke up the next day and they were not there, they weren’t going to be there for my birthday.

The next day as soon as I opened my eyes, I jumped out of bed and flew to the window. I couldn’t see their car in front of the house so sliding my feet into my trainers with their backs pressed down, I ran out into the garden and did a lap of the outside of the house just to make sure they had not parked somewhere round the back so they could surprise me.
But their car was nowhere to be seen and to add insult to injury, all my running around the house had made the oldies (who were up at the crack of dawn) come to the window and now instead of going back to my bed and feeling sorry for myself and giving god an earful for not answering my prayers, I had to stand there and watch a bunch of wrinkly old smiling heads, poking out of the top of flowery frocks and shirts; buttoned up to the top, sing me happy birthday from behind the window, as I stood on the lawn in my pyjamas.
Oh I would give anything to see that now but at the time it was torture. I would have left but that would have been very rude, so I stood their just long enough for them to finish their song and ran off just as they started clapping at the end of it and pretended not to have heard their cries of, ‘Birthday girl, come and have breakfast with us.’

My mum was getting dressed and my dad was still in bed, hands behind head. ‘Happy birthday’ they said as I walked into the annex. ‘They didn’t come.’ I said sulkily, ‘I’m going to be all alone on my birthday.’ and sat on the edge of the bed, cheeks in hands. ‘Don’t lose all hope.’ Said my mum, ‘They might still make it.’ Letting out a big sigh I said, ‘No they won’t.’ and looked down at my feet. ‘Well they might break tradition just this once and leave in the morning so they can be here this afternoon.’ she said and while putting her hair in a ponytail she continued enthusiastically, ‘And even if they don’t come, we can still have a good time together, can’t we?’ All I wanted to do was to mope around all day and feel sorry for myself but you could tell she wasn’t going to allow to me do that. ‘Come on chop-chop,’ She said, ‘we have loads to do today.’ My dad smiled and winked at me.

This might be a good time to go and get yourself another cup of tea or a glass of water or something because as you can see this story is never-ending and I don’t want you to be all dehydrated and shrivelled by the time you finish reading it.

As a special birthday treat, I was going to be taken to town. On a normal day I would have jumped at the chance and would have dived headfirst in the car barefoot even, in case while I spent time looking for my shoes, they drove off without me, but that day, since I was determined to have a bad time, when I was told , ‘Guess what! We’re going to Noshahr.’ I just shrugged and continued to stare at the gate.

Most of the oldies stayed behind. Only me, my dad, my mum, Mamanjoon and one of Mamanjoon’s friends went to Noshahr. They all tried very hard all the way there to get me excited about my birthday but that just annoyed me because all I wanted was for them to be quiet so I could concentrate on sending brainwaves to Shadi and Nader and my aunt and uncle.
In Noshahr my dad went off to do the food shopping, Mamanjoon and her friend went somewhere else and Mum and I went to the Bazaar.

‘Cheer up’ Said Mum smiling, ‘come on, let’s go and get some ice cream.’ We bought runny ice cream that tasted like rosewater with bits of red, tasteless jelly swimming around it.
‘Now that…’ said my mum after her first spoonful. I finished her sentence for her, ‘…is disgusting.’
‘Yes that too,’ she said, ‘but I was gonna say, ‘…something worth getting upset about.’ We laughed and drank our ice creams, spitting the bits of jelly back into the cups.
On the opposite side from the ice cream place, there was a shop that sold cheapo, plastic stuff; colanders, Aaftabehs, ugly plastic dolls, salad bowls, laundry baskets and a load of other colourful plastic products. I spotted these little pink flasks with blue lids and blue straps hanging in the corner and imagined Nader and I, in our expedition gear, ready to embark on another adventure in the garden along with Kaapo and Haalo, armed with our sticks and sporting one of those flasks each. What an image! If Indiana Jones were to see what I was seeing at that moment, he would hang his head in shame.

‘Maman’ I said eagerly, pulling at her arm, ‘can we get some of those.’
‘Where? What?’ she asked looking around excitedly. She had been pointing at this and that all day to try and get me something for my birthday but I had turned my nose up at every single thing.
The flasks were cheap and nasty and stank of plastic. We bought three.
I knew Shadi wasn’t going to use hers much on account of her being two years older than I and preferring to spend her spare time reading romantic novels and Daee jon Napelone or scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen floors with bleach (instead of going on exploration missions around the garden, or fighting pirates and Iraqis) and there always being plenty of water in the living room where she read her books and in the hallway where she stood guard so she could tell people off if they tried to walk into the kitchen or the bathroom with dirty feet. But we got one for her too anyway.

Coming back, I was in a much better mood and kept thinking maybe they’d arrived. But they hadn’t. I spent the rest of the day hanging from the gate and watching the traffic.
When the sun went down, having lost all hope of my cousins ever coming and feeling a bit hungry, I went back to the house.
I was dreading going inside knowing that they were all going to make a huge fuss over me and keep calling me Birthday Girl and all the old ladies will be like ‘Oh my darling, how old are you today?’ and then ‘Oh what a lovely age. Cherish these childhood years my dear because in a blink of an eye, you will be old and broken like us. Now come and give me a big kiss.’ and then like a little bumble bee going from flower to flower, I’ll have to go from old lady to old lady. Only instead of drinking nectar, I’ll be breathing in head-spinning perfumes and instead of gathering pollen, I’ll be collecting different colour lipsticks on my face which no doubt someone will try to violently remove with a handkerchief a bit later.
The old men will be a lot better. Although they will no doubt ask me (for the umpteenth time) what year I’m in and then when I tell them, they will turn to the person next to them and ask, ‘What would that be in the old system?’ and when the person next to them says that they don’t know because the new system is too complicated for them, they both go on to tell me how much simpler things were back when they were my age and how the only toys they had were sticks that they pretended to be horses, ‘not like your generation with your Barbi and Kents and Donkey King games and Mickey Moze.’

‘Sorry your birthday was so bad’ said my mum as we sat on my bed. It was late and everyone else had gone to bed but I didn’t want to go to sleep just yet because I still wasn’t done feeling sorry for myself. ‘It’s ok’ I said, trying very hard not to cry, ‘It wasn’t that bad.’
‘I keep thinking of something to do for you to cheer you up but I can’t think of anything apart from ‘Hava Jeer Jeer' but I guess you’re a bit too old for that now.’ The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember what it was. ‘Do you not remember it?’ she said, ‘I used to that with you when you were little.’ I shrugged. ‘Well I get on my back. You lie on the sole of my feet with your chest and give me your hands. Then I throw you up and down by bending my knees and straightening them and sing, ‘Hava jeer jeer…’’ The song was longer than this but I can’t remember the rest. ‘I think I’ll pass.’ I said. ‘Is there anything else that you would like me to do?’ I shook my head. ‘Then I suppose we better go to bed, it’s getting late.’ As soon as she said that, I felt even more depressed; for some reason I didn’t want this day to end.
‘Maybe’ I said, ‘we could could give Hava Jeer Jeer a try.’
‘Really?’ said my mum excitedly, ‘Great!’

Hava Jeer Jeer was uncomfortable to say the least. Every time she pushed me up, my ribs dug into my insides and made me cough. I wanted to stop as soon as we started but that meant going to bed and I didn’t want to do that. Also seeing my mum’s happy face as she threw me up and down while laughing and singing the song (a little out of breath) I suddenly realised what a hard day she must have had seeing how unhappy I was and not being able to do anything about it. So for her sake at least, I decided to enjoy those last few minutes of my birthday and started to laugh and sing the song with her.
As we sang and coughed and laughed and wheezed and tried to catch a breath, a light shone through from under the curtains. ‘They’re here’ I screamed.

When Shadi and Nader saw me running towards them, they started running and waving too. We collided underneath the magnolia tree where I threw myself in their arms while crying out, ‘I’ve just had the shitiest birthday.’ And then, ‘I got us flasks.’

Yesterday we found out that a good friend of ours, Hooman Mahsa has died. Both Kamyar and I liked Hooman a lot and had known him for many years. I usually don’t cry easily when I hear that someone has died but yesterday as soon as I heard what had happened, I felt my eyes well up.
This news should not have come as a surprise really since Hooman had been battling with cancer for many years but with him being such a fighter, I had always thought he would be the victorious one. Unfortunately I was wrong.

I wasn’t in Iran when Hooman first realised he had cancer. When I went back home that year during Christmas holidays, one day Kamyar, Afshin and I went to pick Hooman up from one of his radiotherapy sessions to take him back to ours. Kamyar and Afshin had both been around all through the time Hooman was nearly dying in the hospital. Kamyar had been on medicine duty apparently and from what I gathered had spent most of his time going back and forth between the hospital and Nasser Khosro (a street where you can find black market medicine in Tehran). I was quite worried about seeing Hooman for the first time after all his troubles and was getting a bit nervous about what to say to him.
As soon as I saw Hooman, the first thing I noticed was that his face was very dark, like he’d been sunbathing, a lot.
After we’d all said our hellos, suddenly everyone went quite. That’s when I realised that I wasn’t the only one that was nervous about what to say to Hooman. It’s hard isn’t it? Exactly what one is supposed to say to a friend who has just come out of a radiotherapy session? ‘Good day at the office?’ ‘Nice day for it, isn’t it?’ ‘I’m having a wisdom tooth removed this week.’
Hooman was looking totally adorable sitting at the back with one of those great big smiles of his. I was desperately trying to think of something to say to break the uncomfortable silence. Then suddenly I remembered his tan and in a moment of total craziness, (due to extreme nervousness) thought to myself, ‘Of course! He’s been skiing’ (yes of course! Why not? In between his radiotherapy sessions! It’s the thing to do apparently!) and ‘maybe I could ask him about that.’
So I turned around to him and said, ‘That’s a very nice tan you’ve got there, mister Hooman.’
With a smile that had gotten even bigger now, he said, ‘Yes, isn’t it? Thanks for noticing Shirin.’ I was feeling so chuffed, I had both broken the silence and said something thoughtful. However this feeling was very short-lived.
Desperately trying to stop himself from bursting out laughing, Hooman continued, ‘That’s one of the things I love about radiotherapy; it gives me such a lovely tan.’ This was where he could control himself no longer and exploded with laughter.
Obviously I felt like a right chump but to look on the bright side, I had succeeded in my mission of breaking the uncomfortable silence ;-) We laughed for the rest of the journey.

When I think of him now, I always see him at our wedding. He looked very happy that night and as usual was full of energy. I never forget the first thing my mum said to Kamyar and I when we arrived at the party that night (fashionably late ;-) ‘Hooman has been the best guest. He was the first person to turn up, he brought lovely flowers and he has been dancing since the moment he got here.’ And he continued to do so for the rest of the night.

I’ve made myself a Farsi blog as well now if anyone is interested to know what I sound like in Farsi :-)

وبلاگ فارسی من افتتاح شد

O poo :-(
Can’t even be bothered to take the piss.

I don’t know how much of this is true but according to Mehdi-joon, after the match the Iranian government sent a telegram to the captain of the Iranian team saying, ‘Now can you at least try and get our rug back from the Portuguese?’

Iran Portugal match tomorrow. I’m going to London to watch the game with a bunch of Iranians which should be cool.
To show my support for Iran, I had this great idea for an outfit: three vest-tops, one on top of each other; red, white and green, worn in that order. I was going to leave the red one as it was then cut off one third from the bottom of the white one and two thirds from the green one which would leave me with an Iranian flag.
I liked this design especially because it would allow me to have three layers on my upper torso, something that I was hopeful would help with giving a feel of three dimensions to my chestal area.
I had the red and the white vests but unfortunately no green ones so I went out yesterday and looked everywhere (everywhere in Primark that is. Yes I’m a bit of a cheapskate) but the only green vest I could find was one that said, on the chestal area as well so there really was no way of getting around it, using a generous amount of glitter, ‘Show us yer tackle!’ which I did not think was appropriate for an Iranian flag.
Now I have to think of something lese to wear.

Even though I’m sure we’re going to get totally crushed again, I’m still hopeful and would do anything for us to win this next match. I would even offer my soul to the devil in exchange for a win but apparently he is neither buying nor selling at the moment on account of the sharp nosedive that the market of leading shares has experienced this week and fears that interest rates will have to rise further to curb inflation. Damn you FTSE-100!
So there’s nothing left for we to do now other than begging you, the Iranian team. Please please play well tomorrow. I really don’t care what you’re going to do before the game.
You want to sing ‘Maashineh mashti mamdali na boogh dareh na sandali’ instead of the national anthem, fine, sing it.
You want to give crazy gifts to the opposite team like ‘carved golden buttocks on a silver platter’ suggested by ‘Justagirl’ or maybe something a little more Iranian like a giant cake with a little khahareh zeinab [policewoman] (with bog standard facial hair) inside who will leap out of the cake, shout at the other team for wearing shorts and having long hair and jump back inside again after hitting them with a baton? Fine, do it. Personally I would prefer something a little more discreet like for example, circumcision gift vouchers for the entire Portuguese team which can be put in little envelopes and handed out, but as long as you win, I seriously can’t care less about anything else you do.

The Creed of the Iranian Football Team

This is my foot.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My foot is my best friend.
It is my life.
I must master it as I must master my life.
My foot, without me, is useless.
Without my foot, I am useless.
I must hit my foot against the ball true.
I must shoot straighter than the opposition,
who is trying to take the ball from me.
I must open his goal before he opens ours.
I will.
My foot and myself know that what counts in football,
is not the strange gifts we give to the opposite team,
the crazy noises we make as our national anthem is played,
nor the confusion amongst our supporters over our flag.
We know it is the goals that count.
We will score (goals that is and not afterwards in German clubs with babes wearing t-shirts that say, ‘Show us yer tackle!’).
My foot is human, even as I, because it is my life.
Thus, I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weaknesses,
its strengths,
its parts,
its accessories.
I will ever guard it against
the ravages of weather and damage.
I will keep my foot clean and ready,
even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other.
We will.
Before God I swear this creed.
My foot and myself are the saviours of my country.
We are the masters of this match.
So be it, until the World Cup is ours; the Iranians.

I don’t want to keep writing about football so I promise this is the last time. Actually I better not promise anything because you never know.
So we’re playing again on Saturday. This time against Portugal. And I’ve already started to feel a little uneasy. But to tell you the truth, it’s not the game that I’m feeling uneasy about because really what’s the worst that can happen? If I’m honest what I’m really dreading is the part before the game. You know, the bit when they all come out onto the pitch and exchange little presents. Yes, LITTLE. Did you hear that Iranian team? LITTLE PRESENTS. Like what the Mexicans brought: a little green flag type thing with a little tassel at the end of it.
And what did the Iranians bring? A huge chunky, golden frame with some sort of strange carpet type thing inside it! It was huge, wasn’t it? And no doubt quite heavy as well. No wonder poor Daaee was so tired by the time it came to playing.
Now that’s nothing. I mean if you remember the last World Cup Iran qualified for, you’ve probably noticed that they’ve mellowed down a lot with their present giving since then. Back then every time Iran had a match, they would walk out onto the pitch with a huge bunch of flowers, a big silver tray and a selection of Iranian handicrafts!
By the time the present exchanging part was over, the captain of the opposite team, standing there with his bunch of flowers and his tray and his tea set or whatever else he had been given, had an air of a young innocent girl about him for whom a suitor had been found and was about to be married off to him against her wishes!
Why do we do this? Why can’t we just keep things simple and give out little flags with little tassels at the end and get it over and done with?
So ok I guess this time was a lot better than the last World Cup; at least we didn’t look like we were trying to marry the opposite team. We gave a big, chunky, manly, frame with no flowers or tea sets. But then just as I thought, ok the embarrassing part is over now and it wasn’t really as embarrassing as I thought it would be, the Iranian National anthem started playing :-(
I just want to ask you one little question here my fellow Iranians. Am I the only person in the world who has bothered to memorize our national anthem? Seriously. Hands up, who knows the Iranian national anthem. Come on, don’t be shy. Don’t go putting your hands up just for the hell of it either. Do you actually know all the words? From ‘Sarzad az ofogh…’ right through to ‘Jomhoorieh eslamiyeh Iran’? Umm, yes I thought so. You don’t know it.
Don’t worry about it though; you’re definitely not in the minority. Even our football team didn’t know it! Nor did their supporters who had gone to watch the match in Germany. I have a feeling that even the people who sang the original version that gets played everywhere had not memorized it properly either. You know that part, a little before the end, where they go up really high, ‘Pyamat ey Emam, esteghlal, azadi, naghsheh janeh maaaaast’ it really sounds like they all think that is where the song ends but then the music keeps going and so they’re like, ‘What? What happened? Wasn’t that the end? Oh yeah there’s another bit. Shit.’ and then they come in again really quietly as if they’re not exactly sure whether they’re singing the right part or not, ‘shahidaaaaaan, pichideh dar goosheh…’ they’re still a not sure, ‘…zaman faryaaaadetan…’ then suddenly they’re like, ‘oh yeah, now I remember, Paayandeh maani o jaavedan, jomhoorieh eslamiyeh eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeran.’
But it’s not really that hard you know. It’s quite short as well (in fact it is very very short compared to the one before it that just went on and on and never seemed to end really) but I can understand why a lot of people have not learned it yet; they think ‘What’s the point? It’s only gonna change again in a few years time and we’ll have to memorize a new one.’
It’s true; we Iranians have changed our national anthem more times in the past thirty years than most people change hairstyles in a lifetime. First there was ‘Shahanshaheh ma zendeh bada’ (Long live our king) then there was ‘Ey Iran ey marzeh por gohar’ (Iran, my prosperous land) then there was ‘Shod jomhoorieh eslami beh pa’ (The Islamic republic came about) and now we have ‘Sarzad az ofogh mehreh khavaran’ (From the horizon, shone the kindness of east ‘,:-\ or something like that. If you think you can do a better job of translating these lines, please be my guest.)
So I can understand why most of you are reluctant to learn this and of course I can’t promise you that it won’t change again next year but please, if you won’t do it for your country, do it for me! I’m serious. I think I might end up having a nervous breakdown if I have to sit through another one of those horrific national anthem experiences with some of the guys from the Iran team going, ‘Oh yeah I know this part, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey doshman ar to sangeh khare-i man aahanam…’ with the guy next to them elbowing them in their side going, ‘Shut up. That’s not it.’
‘What is it then?’
‘I have no idea. Don’t sing, just move your lips and pray to god that some of our supporters at least know the words.’ and with some of the supporters singing ‘Shod jomhoorieh eslami beh pa’, some singing, ‘I will survive!’ and the rest just standing there, scratching their heads and picking their noses going, ‘Is this still the Mexican’s national anthem?’
[Blogger sighs] I mean it’s bad enough that we don’t seem to know what our flag looks like with some of us waving a flag with an Allah in the middle, some carrying one with the lion and the sword in the middle and the rest (the agnostics) carrying plain red, white and green flags (apparently they do not deny the existence of some sort of symbol in the white part of the Iranian flag but rather hold that one cannot know for certain if the symbol exists or not)
[Blogger sighs again] Well I know I’m just wasting my time putting this here and you lazy lot are never gonna learn it but here it is anyway in case anyone is interested.

Sar zad az ofogh mehreh khaavaran
Foroogheh dideyeh hagh bavaran
Bahman farreh imaaneh maast
Payaamat ey emaam, esteghlaal, azaadi, naghsheh jaaneh maast
Shahidaan, pichideh dar goosheh zaman faryaadetan
Paayandeh mani o jaavedan, jomhoorieh eslaamieh Iran

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

‘It’s not the winning it’s the taking part that counts.’ Yeah right!
Iran 1, Mexico 3, Shirin and Kamyar £10 poorer.
Ok the first half was good. It was really good in fact. They were playing so well, weren’t they? They were fast on their feet and passed the ball around really nicely and altogether it really looked like they were playing a much better game than the Mexicans. But then the second half came and [blogger blows raspberry]. Well we all know what happened then, don’t we?
It looked as though during the halftime our team had indulged themselves in a three course meal of Mast-o khiar and then Chelokabab with doogheh mabsoot followed by a big bowl of Sholeh zard and a ghalyoon while the other team had been injected with large quantities of Red Bull and Lucozade, while someone shoved bags of coke up their nostrils!
What happened to our boys? Well I say boys but you know…most of them are knocking on a bit aren’t they? They just couldn’t be bothered or simply couldn’t play anymore. They were all just hanging around by their own goal probably thinking, ‘Oh don’t pass that to me. What am I gonna do with it…Shit, the Mexican got it again. Oh well never mind.’
At times it was even painful to watch. When that poor goalie was trying to get them to go back a bit so he could pass the ball to them on the other side of the pitch, you could see they were taking a few steps back going, ‘Is this ok?’ then he would be like, ‘No back, back.’ and motioning them to go back with his hand and you could tell they were all like, ‘Uhhhh, do I have to? But then I’ll just have to run all the way back again, don’t I? What’s the point?’
Well it’s not the players’ fault I guess. Some of them are well past their sell-by date and should really be left alone to sit in their cardigans and comfy slippers and watch the game from the comfort of their homes, rather than play in it.
Let them go for crying out loud before one of them ends up having a heart attack on the pitch!

But seriously what is this fascination we have with old footballers? I guarantee you, Ali Parvin would still be playing too if only his belly was a little bit smaller. And I have my suspicions the only reason that poor guy had to go and make such a huge belly for himself is because there really was no other way for him to get out of playing football until he was well into his nineties.
Isn’t it about time we stopped treating our footballers like pickled garlic? Baba, be peer, be peyghambar, be ee sooyeh cheraagh, [swearing to this and that] up until his mid twenties, like pickled garlic, a footballer might get better with age but from then on it’s all downhill for the footballer whereas pickled garlic not only tastes better, but I have a feeling it might play a better football as well.

Well there’s no point crying over spilt milk but what can I do, I’m truly disappointed.

Balls. We lost :-(

Last night our cooker blew up. If you’ve never had the pleasure of having an electric cooker blow up in your face, take it from me; it’s quite frightening and really annoying as well especially if just moments before you have been saying, ‘I’m so happy. Hey isn’t summer great?’ while dancing around the kitchen, chopping up vegetables for you pasta sauce.
Kamyar said, ‘Yeah it’s great, isn’t it?’ and we pulled some very extreme happy faces for each other; arms up in the air, eyes bulging, mouth wide open; screaming style only soundless with jazz hands to finish.
Ok we were a bit merry from our one can of Becks each after having been out in the sun all day.
‘Look; I’ve got a tan just from walking to town and back today.’ I said. Kamyar agreed with my statement on further inspection, ‘You have as well. Nice.’ and then said, ‘I’ll just go and check something on my blog. Be back in a sec.’
And that’s when I noticed it. A most dazzling light was shining out from underneath the frying pan.
Naturally I thought what I presume any normal tipsy person would think when put in a similar situation on the night before their thirty first birthday; this was God, trying to make contact with me.
I felt quite chuffed of course but then I thought, ‘I really hope he’s just come to say happy birthday and be off on his way.’ because Kamyar and I were having such a nice evening together and we were both tired and fancied just lying on our sofa and watching Walk the Line and if god was to suddenly turn up, we would probably have to sit up straight and make polite conversations with him about the Koran and the Old Testament.
‘Maybe I’m going to be a prophet’ I thought. If that’s the case I hope I’m a fun prophet with a nice easy religion that says things like, ‘If you want to go to heaven, eat strawberries.’ and ‘But if you’re allergic to strawberries or just don’t like them, eat cherries or bananas.’ and that sort of thing. I didn’t really fancy having to go to wars and preach and all that.
‘I wonder if he’ll be willing to give me this week’s winning Lottery numbers as a birthday gift’ I thought, ‘or pull some strings and make Iran win the World Cup or at the very least, cure my eczema.’
And then it happened, as I bent down to see how much longer god was planning to illuminate the kitchen from underneath my frying pan before saying happy birthday, Booooooooom; the hob blew with a loud bang, sparks went flying and for the first time in it’s very long life, our old electric cooker had a nice little fire on it (which by the way god failed to come out from).
Happy birthday to me :-)

Ro-more trouble than it’s worth-mance

Part Three

In the last two parts of Ro-more trouble than it’s worth-mance, I have talked about two romantic disasters. In this third and last part in this series however, I want to talk about when romance (in its conventional sense) goes O so totally, perfectly, Hollywoodily right and exactly what that leads to in Shirin’s world.

Picture this if you may: a lovely summer’s day in a beautiful meadow/forest (well like a meadow with a mini forest just behind it) birds tweeting, blue skies with a few little white fluffy clouds, sun; shining warm, a breeze blowing; just about strong enough to make the daisies and the buttercups of the meadow dance to the rhythm of the forest and the birds. O how glorious it was. And there we were; my friend and I walking through meadow on our way to the forest.
I was babbling on about this and that. My friend was not saying much and looked as though he had something on his mind. I kept thinking he was getting flustered because it was too hot and he had this big coat on but he kept saying he was ok.

This is many years ago by the way and this boy was a good friend of mine that I got on with really well. I can’t remember if I’d had a crush on him right from the start or if I had developed the crush after we had been friends for a while but what I’m certain of is that I was a bit angry with myself at the time because I had done it again; I had gone and got too pally with this guy and again I was finding myself in that really awkward situation where I fancied my “friend” and was at a constant struggle with myself about whether to tell him or not. ‘What if he doesn’t feel that way about me? The thing is I don’t want to lose this friendship and if I say anything to him about that then we can’t really stay friends like this anymore. Maybe I’ll say something and if he looks too shocked I’ll pretend I was joking. No that’s silly. But I have to do something…or maybe not. No but I think I have to say something. Ok, if that flying pigeon lands on the ground before I finish counting to ten, then I’ll tell him. 1, 2, 3, 4… o-ok, I guess I’ll have to tell him then. Right then, here we go. Hang on a minute; is that a pigeon or a woodpigeon?’
You get the picture I’m sure. It was just so difficult and I didn’t know what to do.

Back to that day now. As the meadow ended and we entered the forest, my friend suddenly pulled his hands out of his big coat’s pockets and produced a bottle of wine and two glasses.
You would think any normal person that fancied her friend and was constantly thinking to herself if he liked her as well or not, would take one look at her friend who had kept his big coat on under the sun and had walked for about an hour with his hands in his pockets to stop the glasses from clinking, only to be able to surprise her with a bottle of wine in such an amazingly romantic setting, would quickly put two and two together and work out exactly what was going on. Sadly however, Lady Dumb-dumb here was no normal person. So she took one look at the situation and thought, ‘Wine? But it’s not even noon yet! And it’s so hot as well; I bet I’ll get a migraine. Well at least that explains the big coat but why didn’t he just put it in a carrier bag? I just hope he hasn’t forgotten the bottle opener.’
Of course he hadn’t forgotten the bottle opener but even if he had I’m sure we would have found one in front of us right there on the path. I mean everything else about that day was so absolutely perfect and looked as though someone had arranged every single thing about it from the temperature right down to those tiny purple flowers that had popped up all over the place that I’m sure a bottle opener would somehow have found its way to us too.

Two hours, some wandering around the forest talking about this and that and one bottle of wine later, a bit tipsy and very happy, we made our way back through the gorgeous meadow with me half dancing, half skipping in the front thinking ‘should I tell him should I not’ and my friend walking behind.
Suddenly my arm was grabbed and I was pulled back; gently but firmly. I don’t know if we kissed first and then fell to the ground or if we fell first and then kissed but the next thing I remember is looking up at that perfect blue sky with one little fluffy cloud going across it which I swear momentarily turned into a heart-shape before escaping my viewpoint.
I wish I could tell you exactly what was going on in my head at those moments after the kiss as I stared up at the blue sky but unfortunately there’s nothing to tell as for reasons unbeknown to me, my brain had suddenly stopped working.
I really wanted to say something but due to a very inconvenient brain shutdown, could not think of a single thing to say. Talk about awkward, the poor guy had gone through all that trouble; done all the work so to speak and now I couldn’t even say one little word to him. God only knows what was going on in his head at the time.
It was terrible. It felt like I was doing a movie scene and had forgotten my lines but unfortunately there was no one to shout out ‘Cut’ and then ‘Ro-more trouble than it’s worth-mance, Part 3, Scene 4, Take 2’

I’ve been racking my brain about this for the past ten or eleven years but unfortunately still have not been able to find a logical explanation for what happened to me that day. Was it romance overdose? Some kind of rare brain virus? A mild stroke? Or maybe it was destiny, galloping onto the scene, shouting, ‘What’s going on? Stop everything at once. You can’t do that. She’s not supposed to fall in love with him.’
‘Why the hell not man? It’s all going so perfectly well. Look at this super romantic set we’ve created here; forest, meadow, flowers; yellow, purple and white, blue skies, sun shining warm, heart-shaped clouds, (do you know how long it took me to persuade Cupid to do that for us?) we’ve even brought in the award wining Amazon Birds Orchestra. They’ve been practicing all morning with that cow that does an impression of Barry White, for the grand finale…’
‘I know, I know; I can see you’ve done a lot of work here but I’m sorry; this is not supposed to happen. Look I’ve got her chart over here. She can’t go and fall in love now, it’ll ruin everything.’
‘Let’s have a look’
‘Here’
‘What’ this; August 1996, Makes wrong choice after smartly dressed date slips in…what’s this?’
‘Sorry my handwriting can be a bit hard to read sometimes. Its says ‘…after smartly dressed date slips in cow manure and falls head first into the river.’’
‘Nasty! July 1997, Date ends when she runs off after being attacked by a swan who had taken a liking to her purple trainers! This girl really needs to stay away from rivers.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘July 1998, on a camping holiday in France an Argentinean man named Eduardo DOES WHAT?’
‘Hey, give me that. These are personal. Ok let’s see, some boyfriends, break-ups, la la la…now here we go; September 1999, falls in love with the man with one eyebrow who goes by the name of Kamyar…’
‘Hey doesn’t he look like that guy that played the crazy roommate of Chandler’s in friends and was also in Saving Private Ryan and A Beautiful mind? What’s his face, you know…’
‘Adam Goldberg’
‘Yeah that’s it. Man he really looks like him.’
‘Have you quite finished?’
‘Yes sorry about that. Please do go on. Do they live happily ever after?’
‘Let’s try and sort out this mess you’ve created here first, shall we?’
‘But how?’
‘The only thing I can think of is to restart her brain and hope that she will just get up and walk off without saying a word.’
‘As much as I’d hate to see all this go to waste, I quite like the idea of her and the Adam Goldberg guy so I’m having my fingers crossed that’ll work. Hey maybe I could get the Barry White impressionist cow to sing at their wedding.’
‘You could try but they probably won’t even notice it since they’ll be far too drunk. Plus they will have their wedding at the ninth floor of an apartment building in Tehran; I think you might have a hard time trying to get your cow up there.’
‘Yeah you’re right…hey maybe I could persuade the cow to get into a cage and then sing for them suspended outside the ninth floor window. What do you think?’
‘Sounds like a cunning plan my friend. Good luck with that.’

Ro-more trouble than it's worth-mance

Part two

As I’ve said before, I’ve never been much of a romantic but growing up I had always had this fantasy that one day someone I did not know, would come up to me and say, ‘It’s you’ (or something similar) and so basically just by looking at me he would realise that I was the girl of his dreams.

I was working as a cashier at Sainsbury’s at the time and one afternoon a little Spanish chap who bought a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and a can of Apple Tango, also declared his love to me.
Watching the Spanish Romeo being escorted out of the supermarket by one of the security guards, it suddenly occurred to me that there was a major flaw in my fantasy; normal people did not go around telling people that they did not know from Adam that they were in love with them, only creeps and weirdoes did this sort of thing.

As the supermarket closed that night and I made my way across the car park to the bus stop, I saw the little Spanish guy in the distance, standing by the exit. I guess it was sweet that he had waited out there for me for about five hours but it was also scary because it was dark and while I had been faffing around inside; looking for some change to buy a can of coke, everyone else had left the supermarket and now there was only us two left. The way I saw it there were three possibilities with this guy:

1- He was a loser with no life who could spare five hours of his Saturday night to stand around supermarket car parks
2- He was a sweetheart and a hopeless romantic who had seen past my spotty face and my greasy hair jammed in a ponytail and my very unflattering, nylon cashiers’ uniform and had fallen madly in love with me
3- He was a psychopath, about to kidnap me and hack me to pieces

I desperately felt around in my bag for anything that could be used against him in case he turned out to be the psychopath. He had already started walking towards me and so I grabbed the only thing that vaguely resembled a weapon, a biro which I held very tightly with the tip coming out of one side of my fist and imagined how I would stab him with it repeatedly (if he tried to attack me) Norman Bates style, eee eee.
As he got closer, I realised that there was also a fourth possibility with this guy,

4- He was a vampire slayer!

Or should I say I was hoping that was what he was because otherwise it meant that for no particular reason, while waiting outside for the love of his life to finish her shift, Prince Charming (feeling a little peckish) had decided that the best thing to snack on at this precise moment in time was what from the smell I would say, a bucketful of raw garlic.
‘Khello’ he said.
I think he was smiling but I can’t be sure as by then my eyes had started watering from the garlic fumes, making it hard for me to see.
‘Hello’ I said and started walking towards the bus stop, fast.
‘You no khave a car?’ He sounded like he was horrified even by the thought of me not having a car but I think it might have just been his accent that was making him sound that way.
‘No’
‘You go wis bus?’
‘Yes’

By the time we got to the bus stop, I was pretty much sure that this garlic muncher was quite harmless but it was still nice to see that there were other people at the bus stop as well.
Now at the time I used to smoke and one of my greatest pleasures was to get a can of coke from the machine and have that with a cigarette as I waited for my bus after I’d finished work.
I had taken out my cigarette and was looking for my lighter. ‘Not good for your mouth’ said the man who could wipe out an entire tribe of vampires with one breath, disapprovingly. I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that but in an effort to try and reduce the garlic fumes coming my way, I had already decided not to engage him in any more conversation than was necessary, so I didn’t ask. I put my cigarette back though and decided against lighting it because my bus was approaching and also because even though I was almost certain that garlic was not flammable, the air felt so thick with it at the time that I couldn’t help thinking, what if.

Long story short, it did not work out between me and the Vampire Slayer. Call me shallow but I have my standards and even though I appreciate a good party trick as much as the next person, I still can’t bring myself to date a man who can turn a French stick into garlic bread; simply by breathing on it.

End of part two

Ro-more trouble than it's worth-mance

Part one

Last night, munching our way through our big plates of bangers and mash with onion gravy, in our jimjams, I got thinking about romance.
I’ve never been the most romantic person in the world but even so if in my teenage years someone had told me that after six years of marriage the idea of romance for my husband and I would be to say to each other, ‘I wouldn’t come in here if I were you darling, I’ve just dropped one of those chemical ones.’ I would not have believed them.
But to tell you the truth now I’m more than happy with this arrangement. My romantic life for the most part, has only ever been a series of mishaps which I have always thought I could very easily have done without.
Take this for example. This guy I knew a bit from here and there, once invited me to go for a walk with him in a field.
When he arrived, I noticed that he was dressed very smartly and had a picnic basket with him that had a bottle of wine and two glasses inside. I was shocked because I didn’t fancy him in any shape or form and had no idea that this was some sort of date, but then again since there was a definite lack of romance in my life at the time, I thought a little bit of field, river, sunset and wine might do me some good.
As we entered the field, we realised that we weren’t the only ones who had thought of lazing away a summer afternoon by a river in a field; at least twenty cows had come up with the same idea. What’s more, they had arrived sometime before us and had picked the best spots for themselves. There weren’t that many of them really but as if by magic, they had managed to cover the whole field in cowpats, making it hard for us to walk around without putting our foot in one, let alone find a big enough manure-free area to put down our picnic blanket.
You could tell the poor guy was getting quite agitated; this clearly was not the romantic setting that he had hoped for. Trying to make him feel better I said, ‘It’s not very nice around here anyway, come on let’s go sit closer to the river’ and led the way. Next thing I heard a loud shriek from behind me, as my elegantly dressed companion slipped on a cowpat and a splash, as he fell into the river.
Now here’s the part that I’m truly ashamed about; without giving it a second thought, I started running by the side of the river as fast as I could, keeping one eye on the picnic basket and thinking up ways to rescue it. It wasn’t until I had to do an emergency stop about fifty meters down (as two cows had blocked my way) that I realised my instincts had got the better of me and had resulted in me showing my true colours by putting all my energy into chasing after what was most important to me i.e. the bottle of wine, when what I should have done was to give my injured date a hand and help him out of the river.
We have not spoken ever since.

End of part one

Tune in again in a few days for the part two of Ro- more trouble than it's worth–mance.
Here’s a teaser:

My worst ever romantic experience however was definitely this one, mainly because it came disguised as my ultimate romantic fantasy which was to have someone I’ve never seen before, come up to me and say, ‘It’s you’ meaning it’s you that I’ve been looking for all my life and now that I’ve found you I will never let you go and la la la (by which I mean all the rest of the things he meant by saying ‘its you’ and not that he would suddenly burst into song or anything like that. Saying that I must admit sometimes when I was feeling particularly cheesy or had just seen a musical, he would be singing and doing a little dance and all)…

Kalleh Pacheh (head and trotters)

One of the things I love about Iran is that you can never get so chicken-nuggetly away from your dinner to forget where it comes from. Here in England if you don’t like the idea of cute little lambs being slaughtered, you can very easily walk into a supermarket and pick up a pack of lamb shops, neatly arranged in a cellophane tray and pretend that like chickpeas that actually have nothing to do with chicks, lamb chops have nothing to do with lambs either and essentially grow on trees.
In Iran however things are very different. There are some supermarkets around now but since there are not that many of them, most people still prefer to shop in their local stores. Being squeamish and shopping for meat in Iran, do not go together. If you are one of those people that like to pretend that lamb chops grow on trees, then you are probably better off becoming a vegetarian since the first time you walk into a butcher’s shop and see every body part of sheep from fillets to shoulders to livers to kidneys to brains being proudly displayed on trays in giant refrigerators along with their trotters and their skinned, smiling heads (with their big eyes staring back at you) decorated with some plastic parsley, any illusions you might have had about what meat comes from where, will be totally shattered.
Even though confronting my dinner’s head has always made me feel a little uneasy, I absolutely love the idea of every part of a slaughtered animal being used and nothing going to waste.

One of the most memorable meals I had on my last trip to Iran was the Kalleh Pacheh (head and trotters) we had in Tajrish on our way back from the mountains one Thursday. I’d had Kalleh Pacheh many times before but I had always had it at home and never in an actual kalleh pacheh restaurant.
It had been my idea to have kalleh pacheh for lunch but as we walked in and the steam from the three sheep heads boiling away in the special pan hit me and I saw those six melting eyes and those three toothy grins, I was ready to run out screaming.
Meanwhile my dad who had already decided that the bread the kalleh-paz (head boiler) was going to give us was not going to be eatable and had already unsuccessfully tried to buy some bread on our way there by hurling himself out of the taxi and into a bread shop at the traffic lights, had popped into the kebab shop next-door in search of some fresh bread and having for some reason come back empty-handed again, was confronted by one of the kalleh-paz guys who had become extremely offended by my dad’s lack of trust in his bread. As my dad did his usual hovering around the place, poking his head here and there, (as though he was trying to secure an escape route when in reality he was only putting off sitting down since for some reason he can’t stay still for too long) he was chased around by the kalleh-paz guy who incessantly spoke of the freshness of his bread and got more and more wound up as my husband also entered the discussion by offering to go to the bread shop at the other side of the roundabout.
As the bread wars continued, I finally managed to pull myself together and so my mum and I went and sat down.
The man’s bread did actually turn out to be quite good and after we had each confirmed his bread’s freshness, he went over to the boiling heads and trotters pot to bring our lunch of face-meat, trotters, two tongues and one brain.
While my dad’s bread brawl opponent arranged the pieces of face-meat on plates and using a ladle, very theatrically let the juices run over each piece of meat, his colleague very coolly broke the jaws of two sheep heads (by putting his hands on either sides of the jaws and pulling forcefully in opposite directions) to extract the tongue and the brain.
I had been the one who had ordered the brain but now that it was about to be put in front of me, going over my last memory of sheep brain, I was beginning to get worried.

As a child I had always liked brain but since I’d left Iran, I had not had it and so one time when I’d gone back, I’d said to my mum that I quite fancied having some brain. Which in English might sound like a bit of a crazy thing to say to your mother but in Farsi is quite normal and can get replies such as ‘Yeah alright then, we’ll pick up a couple on our way back home today.’ Which we did. We picked up two fresh brains from the butcher’s which were dropped into a clear plastic bag and handed to me. It wasn’ta pretty sight and to complete the horror, some blood had got into the bag with them as well. I was feeling very nauseous but I still managed to carry them all the way home with a little help from Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
And a few others of my favourite things.
When we got home, naively thinking that the grim part was over, I pleaded with my mind to somehow forget the image of the two brains bobbing in the shallow pool of blood in that plastic bag or if that was not possible, maybe just not make the connection between that horrid image and the tasty, mushy, cream-cheesy type stuff I was going to have later that night.
Little did I know that a few minutes later, as I walked into the kitchen, I would witness a scene that would not only as we say in Farsi, put the other brain image in its pocket (meaning that was nothing compared to this) but also become one of my top five all time craziest things I have ever seen in my life.
As I walked into the kitchen, I was faced with what I can only describe as Hannibal Lector’s dream punch. The two brains were now swimming around in a big bowl full of water (made pink from the blood) with some ice!
This was certainly a far cry from all those times I had been called out as a child to have some of the nice, white, gooey stuff which I would smear on pieces of bread with a few drops of lemon juice without giving much thought to its original form or where it had come from.
As I struggled to stop myself from fainting, my mum who had taken all my staring at the brains without saying a word as a sign of interest in the art of brain boiling, came and picked up one of the brains and in her usual smiley manner said, ‘I really like this part. If you put the brains in some icy cold water, you can then come and pick out one end of the veins and peel them all away in one.’ Or something along these lines. I can’t be sure about anything that happened in those few minutes as I was too busy concentrating on standing up. But I think she also said something like, ‘It looks like a little net at the end.’ And it did as well. And I have not been able to look at a hairnet the same way ever since.
Needless to say, that night I did not have any brain on account of all the weird images in my head. Now many years later, I was about to make my peace with brain.
And it was really nice actually. The only slightly dodgy thing about it was that my brain was brought to me covered in cinnamon which is really the last thing I would think to put on a brain and it really should be the last thing too since it didn’t really go with it. Saying that, the cinnamon did cover all the veins which was probably a good thing and might hopefully help with my hairnet phobia as well.

Shirin’s report on the streets of Tehran

On Driving

Some people agreed and some disagreed with me on this while I was in Iran but I really thought people’s driving had improved a lot in Tehran. I’m not saying all the cars were stopping on zebra crossings to let pedestrians go past or anything like that but studying the faces of a lot of drivers, I did come to the conclusion that they no longer took any pleasure in running their fellow citizens over either and unlike previous years, they no longer looked as though they were actively searching for distracted pedestrians to knock down.

Another sign of very good driving for me came in the form of a man who before changing lanes in the motorway, indicated! Ok so maybe he didn’t actually change lanes at the end and decided it was best to just drive on with the line in-between his wheels rather than with his wheels between the lines but the important thing is that he indicated even if his indicating had been a little premature and before he had made his mind up about which lane he actually wanted to be in. So the man in the white Pride on Hemmat Motorway on the 26th of April this year at approximately five thirty in the afternoon, I salute you.

On road safety

I really felt like a lot had changed in the streets of Tehran since last year. For one, drivers and front passengers wore seatbelts! This also means that taxis are now only allowed to take four passengers instead of five since it’s practically impossible for two people to sit on the front passenger seat and wear a seatbelt. Saying that I must admit I’m surprised that taxi drivers have not yet found a way to get around this little problem by for example asking the smaller front passenger to sit on the bigger front passenger’s lap and hold the seatbelt over both of them.

Another safety measure taken by the government is that motorcyclists are now all made to wear crash helmets.
How you ask? And you ask a very good question too. How on earth a government manages to make a people who use motorcycles to move their whole family (consisting of one wife, two children, one grandmother) and one ladder, from A to B, to suddenly become safety conscious and wear helmets?
I have decided to give the answer to this question in the form of a riddle: How many Pasdars (morality police) does it take to teach a motorcyclist that getting on a motorcycle without a helmet is dangerous?
The answer is, Three.

You take one long stretch of good old Tehran road and put three Pasdars on it at about fifty meter intervals. You arm the first Pasdar with a regular sized sign that in big, red letters says ‘STOP’. You arm the second Pasdar with the exact same sign, only bigger. The third and last Pasdar who should really be the most athletic one as well, gets no stop signs at all, instead you must provide him with a great big baton.
Before we go any further let me just confess that unfortunately I never got a chance to witness this amazing helmet awareness process myself since by the time I had arrived, all motorcyclists had already been made aware of the dangers of riding with their heads exposed and had all gone and bought shiny new helmets for themselves. Here I’m only repeating what Kamyar’s friend, Afshin told us about this very effective course of action.
As the first Pasdar on the road sees a carefree, helmet-free motorcyclist coming towards him, he pulls out his stop sign and waves it in front of the rider in order to make him stop.
If the rider stops, he gets fined heavily for having broken the law so he decides to ignore the Pasdar with the median sized stop sign and speeds past him.
A few meters away however, the second Pasdar is waiting with his even bigger sign. Again the motorcyclist ignores the stop sign and zooms past the Pasdar saying to himself, ‘Even Saddam Hussein and his army could not make us wear helmets. We went off to the war wearing nothing but a headband that said ‘Ya Mahdi’. Now who are you to make us wear helmets in our own country at the time of peace?’
Meanwhile the third and last Pasdar gets ready with his baton and when the motorcyclist reaches him, he is presented with a physical stop sign that sends him flying in the air by whacking him off his motorcycle as he rides past.
Before landing in the middle of the road, the man makes a promise to Allah that if he gets out alive, from that moment on he will wear his crash helmet at all times even when in bed or in the shower.

If this story is true as Afshin swore it was, then I’m very proud of our government that has not only made our streets safer, but has also managed to take the notion of tough love to a whole new level.

If you are wondering about the guy in the above picture and why he is not wearing a helmet, I must say in his defence that he is of course exempt from this law as the super-safety-conscious guy that he is, he only ever rides on the pavement.

Home sweet home. Computer sweet computer. Broadband sweet broadband. But most of all bed sweet bed. O how I’d missed our bed. Somewhere between annoying Zeinab Sisters in Imam Khomeini airport mistaking my lavashak (dried fruit pure) for hash, drinking lukewarm coffees, being trapped in a plane with a woman who had emptied a whole bottle perfume on herself (this was so bad that for the fist time in my life I was actually thankful when another one of my fellow passengers let one go), falling sleep curled up and freezing on metal chairs in Baku airport and the two hour bus journey from Gatwick to Oxford, I had totally lost the will to live but crawling into our soft, warm bed last night, made all of that go away. It was one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life. Twelve hours of asleep and several pieces of toast with cups of tea and coffee later, I’m starting to feel normal again.

It’s both nice and sad to be back. I cried this morning and I’ve had a lump in my throat that changes size depending on what I’m doing or thinking of. Pulling out a bag of dried dill left over from my mum’s dill and broad beans meatballs; the lump gets Big. Watching an episode of Creature Comforts; it gets small. Seeing a piece of unpublished writing by my dad that he gave to me to keep; Big. Reading it; very small. Getting into my prison style pyjamas and lying on our sofa with Kamyar in his favourite shirt with the elbow areas missing; small. Seeing my dead plants; Big.
It’s ok to be sad though and I don’t mind it really because I know it’ll go away in a couple of days and I’ll be right as rain.
Stay tuned for my report on Iran that I will post in a few days time.