Iran has been totally brilliant even if a little surreal at times. What has attracted my attention the most on this trip is how gifted some of the people here are at replying to a question you have asked without actually giving you an answer.
For the first few days I thought either I was going a little crazy or I had forgotten my Farsi and was asking questions that didn’t make sense.
For example I would ask my uncle if he wanted my mum to give him a call when she came out of the shower, he would give me a long lecture about how he doesn’t have any hot water in house! Or I would ask my grandmother how long she usually left chicken drumsticks to cook before they were tender, she would give me a complete chicken recipe with orange juice and onions, entirely missing out the part about how long it takes for it to cook. Apparently ‘The trick is to put a lot of onions and a tiny bit of water. The onions make it very tasty.’
The answers usually went on for so long that by the end I couldn’t even be sure what my question had been in the first place. So I came up with a cunning plan. Every time I asked a question and people started going off on one, I would keep interrupting with the same question until I got my answer.
This tactic worked for a few days and I was very proud of myself for having solved this problem.

I wanted to go to the Friday Market and buy something but since I had absolutely no idea how much this thing was, I decided to do some research about the price first before going all the way downtown and finding out that it was too expensive.
Anyway we went to someone’s house and I noticed that she had a few of these things so I thought great; this person will probably know about prices and all that. So I asked her, ‘Can you tell me how much these things usually cost please?’ She replied, ‘Why? Are you thinking of buying some?’
‘Yes but I wanted to know how much they are before going all the way to the Friday Market.’
‘Yes that’s where I bought mine from, the Friday Market. You know…’ Here I sensed she was getting a bit sidetracked and could do with a little interruption. ‘Yes but how much did you buy them for?’
‘You know you can buy them in all different colours now.’
‘Yes but how much for?’
‘You know when I went to buy these a friend of mine came with me and bought some as well. Would you like me to ask her if she wants to sell hers?’ She wasn’t giving up.
But neither was I. ‘That’s a good idea.’ I said, ‘So how much do you think your friend might want to sell hers for?’ Clever I thought; I had well and truly cornered her.
She paused for a moment and then replied, ‘I could call her and ask her about that but I don’t understand why you want to buy hers instead of just going to the Friday Market and getting some for yourself. Don’t be so lazy, it’s very easy to get there.’
I had met my match.

Next time I write in here, it will be from my parents' home in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I can’t write much now because I’m too busy panicking about our trip. I’m becoming such a worrier in my old age!
Must go and make another list of all the things we need to do before leaving (I’ve made three of these since this morning and have managed to lose all three somehow) and have another go at Kamyar (it sounds like he might be relaxing a bit too much now just sitting there watching telly).
Laters

Apparently after witnessing what a Forward Button could do, imagining the devastation it could cause if it fell into the wrong hands, one of its creators quoted a remembered fragment from the Bhagavad Gita. ‘I am become Death,’ he said, ‘the destroyer of worlds.’ Another one was reported to have said, ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’
(Or was that the people that made the atomic bomb? No I’m pretty sure it was the Forward Button.)

Oh the Forward Button, the bane of my life. Of course not all forwarded emails are bad. It’s nice for example when people send you things that they think you might enjoy like some of the things that a friend of my mother-in-law's sends me sometimes (pictures of tiny cute babies for example, made out of marzipan or an article about herbal remedies) or something I received from another friend just last week which I enjoyed very much; a clip with Shohreh Aghdashloo in Will and Grace.
However I find that most people these days abuse the power that has been put in their hands by arming them with a Forward Button. I’m talking about those people that forward any old rubbish that is emailed to them to everyone in their address book.
The interesting thing is that some of these people count forwarding all this junk around as emailing and even get a bit funny when you don’t reply to them and sulkily say things like, ‘Well you never write.’
In my opinion I’m actually doing our relationship a world of good by keeping my mouth shut and refraining from replying with my true feelings about every kitten picture, any dodgy article that has the tiniest reference to Iran in it or all those chain letters that they send me, but in their opinion they have sent me five emails a day for the past god-knows-how-long and deserve many replies, an award for the best emailer of the year and possibly a standing ovation.

Is it not time do you think that before giving any old emailing so and so a forward button, they were first made to pass a little test? Maybe a little something like this:

Question number 1- You receive an email that contains twenty close-up photos of different flowers, do you
a. Without thinking, forward it to everyone in your address book
b. Think about who in your address book would really love to see twenty close-up photos of different flowers and only send it to them
c. Destroy the email on the spot

Question number 2- You receive an email which contains a boring ten minute slide show with pictures of sunrises and sunsets with a cheesy peacy lovy message stuck on each slide with the last one being something like, ‘Send this to ten people and you will have good luck for ten days, fail to send this to ten people and something nasty will happen to you in the next ten days’ do you
a. Think you could do with some good luck and straightaway forward it to everyone in your address book, hoping that the more people you send it to, the more good luck will come your way
b. Hate getting these kinds of emails and never know what to do with them. You think you are an intelligent person and don’t believe in this sort of thing but you still hesitate before deleting the email because if you’re really honest with yourself, you are kind of scared. Meanwhile your phone rings, you get up to answer it; you trip on the carpet and nearly break your neck. Thinking the bad luck must have started, you run back to your computer and forward the email to ten people in your address book but in the subject box you write ‘So sorry about this but I can really do with some good luck at the moment’ followed by a winking smiley ;-) or a few of these ‘!’
c. Destroy the email on the spot

Question number 3- A travelling friend emails you some pictures from his or her travels, do you
a. Straightaway forward it to everyone in your address book that knows this person
b. Forward it to everyone in your address book that knows this person but before doing that you will take a look at the list of recipients so at least you won’t send the pictures to the people who have already received them once
c. You take a look at the pictures but won’t forward them to anyone else thinking that maybe your friend wanted only you and the other people that he or she sent that email to, to see those pictures

Question number 4- You receive a forwarded email the first line of which is ‘This may sound like a scam but it definitely isn’t! Do not delete or you will be sorry that you did!’ Do you
a. Read the rest of the email which is something along these lines, ‘This is not a scam! My friend did this and a week later she woke up to find that she had become Katherine Zeta Jones. She divorced Michael Douglas, married Brad Pitt and lived happily ever after. Another friend deleted this email. He woke up one morning from unsettling dreams and found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He was lying on his back as hard as armour plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling. His many legs pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes. ‘What's happened to me?’ he thought. IT WAS NO DREAM.
The more people you send this email to, the higher your chances of something great happening to you will be. Good luck!’ and forward it to as many people as you can
b. Read the email. Realise it’s another stupid chain letter. Think about deleting it but you just can’t get the thought of becoming a vermin out of your head so you send it to a few people with a little note that says ‘Sorry about this but as you know I have enough on my plate at the moment without having to worry about becoming a vermin ;-)’
c. Delete the email after reading the first line ‘This may sound like a scam but it definitely isn’t!’

Yes, I know a lot of weirdoes.

This is an old story but for some reason yesterday it came to me again so I thought I would share it with you.

About ten years ago now when I was at my first year of university, in our halls of residence, we had this cleaner called Pat. Now this Pat was a character and a half, psychologists' Holy Grail and Mike Leigh’s perfect muse.
If I had to describe Pat in just one word, I would have to say, Shrivelled. She was only in her late fifties but to look at her you would think she was well into her nineties. As my friend Tracy very artfully put it, it looked as though she had been left in the tumble dryer for a tad longer than she should have.
Pat’s favourite pastimes were, drinking cups of tea or coffee with eight sugars, cornering poor, unsuspecting students and telling them all about her sex life with her various husbands and walking into people’s rooms without knocking and when finding their door locked, shouting out, ‘Why is this door locked? ‘as [has] she go’ [got] a bloke in there?’
Pat’s biggest characteristic however was that no matter what you’d done, she had done something even bigger and better. For example if you were upset because your aunt had been gobbled up by a crocodile on a trip to Africa, she would say, ‘That’s nothing. My sister and her entire family were eaten by a group of seagulls in Hastings.’ and so on and so forth.
One day a group of us were sitting in our kitchen eating lunch and watching Jerry Springer which that day was all about women who had been beaten by their husbands. Pat was busy dirtying the kitchen surfaces (with this grubby rag that she was very fond of and used for cleaning everything from the toilets, to our bedroom mirrors) and giving a commentary on the programme.
Then one of the ladies got really upset and with tears rolling down her face, she gave Jerry this very long and touching speech about how hard it was for her to live with a man who beats her and how the effects of this were not just physical but mental as well. It was quite sad really and even though everyone knows Jerry Springer is really a pantomime, we were all listening intently and feeling a bit sorry for this poor woman. Even Pat had cut out her commentary and was listening (or maybe she was just thinking up something to top that). But then suddenly she decided that this woman had hugged the spotlight for far longer than she deserved and said something which in my opinion was pure brilliance and the mother of all anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-betters.
‘Bullshit’ she cried out, ‘My‘usband [my husband] used to knock me about a bit; it never did me any ‘arm [harm].’

So here in England last Sunday was Mother’s Day. However some of the shops in town still have all their Mother’s Day stock on the shelves in the hope that some idiot will walk in there and seeing all the stuff suddenly think, ‘Oh no, is it Mother’s day again? I best go and buy another stripy pink bear holding a red heart saying ‘I wuv you mummy’ for my mother or she’ll get really mad.’
It was raining and I had half an hour to kill so I thought I’ll go and see exactly what it is that mums these days are supposed want from their children.
According to WHSmith, what your mother would have really loved to receive this Mother’s Day was one of the following items: a very stunned-looking giraffe with the softest muzzle you have ever stroked on any animal, a not-so-pretty bulldog, a stripy pink bear…(‘yeah yeah we know the rest’ I hear you cry out and don’t worry; I won’t describe that monstrosity again), a CD titled, ‘Number 1 Mum’ (which is basically Celine Dion’s Greatest Hits with a few R. Kelly tunes thrown in as well), a book called, ‘Mothers and Daughters’, another one called simply, ‘Mothers’ (I don’t know if it’s just me or what but I detected a note of sarcasm in this one; ‘Mothers, ey? Can’t live with them and when you suggest they should just move into a nursing home and let you live in their house in peace, they get all funny about it.’) or one called ‘Why can’t every day be Mother’s Day?’ (or ‘Puke’, if they had just let me name it).
As I ran my fingers along the stunned giraffe’s soft muzzle and thought about braving the rain, suddenly something about the last corny book attracted my attention. It was a big round red sticker proudly presenting the message: ‘Buy one get one ½ price’
‘‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello’ I said to the giraffe, ‘What’s going on ‘ere then? A special deal for kids who have been adopted by lesbian couples or for people whose fathers have had a sex-change?’ The giraffe continued to look shocked which I put down to a strict religious upbringing. ‘Yes these are truly modern times we’re living in my friend.’
The giraffe was not much of a conversationist. But then again with a muzzle that soft he didn’t really need to be.

Waking up at half past four in the morning and spending our only day off school rolling down a mountain until we had snow coming out of our every orifice was definitely my cousin Shadi’s idea. She was thirteen and I eleven and somehow she had got it into her head that the only way we could get out of spending our every weekend with our grandparents was to start skiing! So we did.
The first year was terrible. I could not ski to save my life and to make matters worse, I looked like this:

Nice!

This season I was mostly wearing: outfits that were three sizes too big for me, very old skis with most of the colour chipped off them and a lovely pair of goggles (shudders)

The father of my good friend Roshanak, Amoo Farid once told me this anecdote. He said one day he was passing the beginners' ski slope and he saw an instructor trying to teach an English lady to ski. Now for going slower, the beginners are taught to point the tips of their skis towards each other and open the ends. In Farsi this is called a Hasht; the number eight, which looks like this: ^ But this poor lady did not speak Farsi and so had no idea what the man shouting at her: ‘Hasht kon’ ‘Do the hasht’ wanted her to do. As she got dangerously close to a group of kids and was about to run them over, the instructor suddenly had a bright idea. ‘Madam’ He shouted, ‘Madam do 8’ which incidentally (as illustrated above) is what I looked like I was trying to do for the whole of my first year.

The good thing about looking like that however is that there is only room for improvement and as I’m sure you will agree, here in the second year I’m looking a lot cooler.

This season I was mostly wearing: a big pair of jeans with two tracksuit bottoms underneath, a pink and white hand-me-down jacket from my cousin in Canada, pink sweater with matching earmuffs and a pair of fake Ray Bans from Tajrish bazaar, made with real glass so if you were not the patient type to just wait until the nonexistent UV protection did its thing and made you go blind gradually, you had the option of getting it all over and done with very quickly by either falling flat on your face or simply asking someone to give you a nice punch in the eyes area.

This season I was mostly wearing: my dad’s clothes with a pair of fluorescent pink gloves to add a touch of much needed femininity.

And finally the piesta resistance!
Ok those trousers were far too small for me but they were definitely an improvement from all those really huge ones I had been wearing up until then.

I know what you’re thinking, ‘How can this human embodiment of cool, end up becoming a geeky blogger?!’ Well my friend I’m afraid I can’t help you there as I myself am just as baffled about this as you are ‘,:-\

The Persian New Year is my favourite time of the year. The night before the New Year I can never get any sleep on account of all the butterflies in my stomach and all the times I get out of bed to make sure my new clothes are still straightened out on the chair where I’ve left them.
I love all our little rituals too; Mum and I doing the spring cleaning, finding suitable dishes for all the sweets and biscuits and setting the table. I look forward to polishing the little wooden statues of Don Quixote and Sancho, painting the hardboiled eggs and shining the two little silver bowls and the teacup holders.
Buying the little goldfish is the best; I always want the smallest and the cutest one. My granddad, Babajoon looks at our table and says, 'So are you not getting a fish this year?'
'We already have Babajoon, it’s on the table.'
'Well I don’t see any fish in that bowl. Maybe it jumped out.'
'Oh no where has it gone?' I look in the bowl and the little red fish is swimming happily.
'Babajoon, why would you want to go and scare me like that; the fish is still in there.'
'Is it? Where?' He bends over the table and squints behind his glasses. 'Huh' he says at last (clearly unimpressed).

Babajoon does not believe in small fish. He buys big fat juicy goldfish for the New Year and looks very pleased with himself standing there feeding the fish with some of his breakfast bread. Mamanjoon says, 'Stop feeding those, they will make their water dirty.' But Babajoon decides not to hear her. He looks like he is really enjoying himself throwing the little pieces of bread in the water and watching his big fat fish snap them up like dolphins (Well maybe not quite like that). Mamanjoon shouts, 'Mr. Saramad' Babajoon turns around with his hand behind his ear looking at Mamanjoon and squinting a little (His way of saying, 'Pardon me? Did you say something?') when we all know he heard her perfectly well the first time. Mamanjoon calls that selective hearing and laughs about it (although sometimes she gets really angry.)
I love Babjoon. It’s great watching him as he so enthusiastically does all his New Year stuff. He is the one who makes sure that we all have the best seven Ss in the whole of Iran. He buys the nicest tasting Samanoo (malt mixed with flour) and fresh Senjed (a kind of fruit) from the Tajrish Bazaar. He goes in search of the reddest and the best looking Seeb (apple) and sits there shining it until it looks like it’s made out of glass. He goes in search of Sonbol (Hyacinth) and won’t give up until he finds some. Serkeh (vinegar), Seer (Garlic) or Sekkeh (Coins) are always easy to find and no trouble at all but his famous Sabzeh (green part of the growing wheat or Lentils) takes a lot of care and planning.
He starts on that a while ahead by soaking the wheat (he only ever grows wheat and never lentils for some reason) and changing its water all the time until they grow little roots. After that he takes a tray and pours his soaked wheat into it around two tall glasses in the middle where he will later place his daffodils and amaze everyone because when the wheat have grown into tall Sabzeh, you can’t see the glasses anymore and it looks like the flowers have grown from the middle of the greens. I see the look of approbation on people’s faces (as he explains this to them on the first day of the New Year) and realise that it was all worth it.

I know that (like me) he is looking forward to the New Year. I know that he is looking forward to dressing up and having whitefish and herbed rice with all his close family the night before the New Year, watching Nader and I trying to get Kelatch the dog to climb the King-berry tree by offering him biscuits, listening to Shadi begging him to make her some florescent pink fingerless gloves like Michael Jackson’s, watching his two sons chatting and eating pistachio nuts and dried chickpeas, trying on his new pyjamas designed by Ammeh Maryam under Mamanjoon’s admiring eyes and having my mum around to give him kisses and cuddles and be generally affectionate to him (because she loves him so much and he knows it too).
I know that he is looking forward to the next day too when he wakes up bright and early waiting for relatives to come and visit. You are supposed to start by visiting the oldest people in the family and go down the line from there. Babajoon is one of the oldest people in our family (He really doesn’t look it though) so he gets a lot of early morning visitors. People come in with cakes, flowers and open arms because everybody loves my granddad. He sits there clean shaven and bathed, in his suit, tie and waistcoat (looking a bit like Marlon Brando in the godfather) and smelling like old spice and a heavy blend of women’s perfumes (from being hugged so many times by so many different women).
I know that he is looking forward to all the laughter he is going to get from all the distant relatives when he tells them his selection of funniest things that happened to him in the past year and them gasping for air as he tells Italian jokes, translating them into Persian line by line.
One of the ladies starts laughing as soon as Babajoon opens his mouth, claiming that she is sure whatever comes out will be hilarious. When someone peels cucumbers and pouring salt over the pieces offers them around and one of the ladies says, 'Not for me thank you, my doctor has forbidden me from having salt', Babajoon turns to uncle Firuz and says, 'Quick, get on the phone, we need to find her a new doctor.'
Then someone asks him something about the family and you can really see the twinkle in his eyes as he clears a piece of the table in front of him. 'This is my mother, ‘Bibikhanoom’' says Babajoon, picking up the sugar bawl and placing it in front of him on the table. Then he picks up the salt shaker and putting it down on the table says, 'and this is my father, ‘Mirza Mohammad Ali khan Saham Nezam’' and goes onto making a complete three dimensional family tree with household items.

Sometimes Mamanjoon asks some of the visitors to stay for lunch but after lunch they too go home for their siesta and everyone can relax for a couple of hours.
The first two days of the New Year are the most hectic ones. That’s when my grandparents might get up to thirty something visitor in their house at once. There will be people showing off their new babies and pictures of their older children who have made it to the US, people talking about the old days and laughing or remembering a sad incident and giving each other deep and meaningful looks.
The visitors are usually very good, they only stay for a little while; just enough to have a cup of tea and a little chat and then they have to be off again to the next place visiting the next older relative down the line. Some younger relatives might bump into each other three or four times in one day as they visit people on their list remembering the older people they visited last year and aren’t with us this year.
The ones, who get on well, arrange to go to the next places together so they can talk to each other if their host is too old and boring. Sometimes Mum and I hitch a ride with some of these relatives and get to do some of our visiting like that because we don’t have a car. My Dad is not so big on the whole visiting thing.
By chatting to each other, people find out where the big New Year parties are. They ask their cousins where the other ones have been and then say, 'Oh no I totally forgot about Aunty Zari.' So the well-mannered people rush to visit aunty Zari and people like us (who can’t be bothered and are a tad on the lazy side) say, 'I’ll just call her and apologize.'
New Year parties are the best. Grownups sing and dance and we kids count all the money we’ve collected all through the day. That’s what you get for the New Year. Older people give money to people who are younger than them. The older ones always give you a tiny amount saying that it’s just for good luck and get seriously angry with the next generation who take out wads of crisp, new one-thousand-tooman-notes and hand them out to the kids who snap them up in the air like hungry lions.
Sometimes our parents come and borrow some money from us because they see a new kid in the party and they’ve run out of money.
'So far I owe you 12000, ok?'
'It’s thirteen thousand five hundred, dad.'
'Seriously?!' and they go away shaking their heads muttering, 'What is the world coming too.'
Most people go away for the new-year. The parents are usually happy to do so remembering how much money they are saving by not seeing the kids in the family and the kids are upset because they know how much money they are losing.

The New Year holidays start on the first of Farvardin, (twenty first of March, the official start of the spring) and go on for thirteen days.
On the thirteenth day, you have to go out of your house to somewhere nice and green and have a family picnic or you might get struck down by the bad luck that can come out of the first thirteenth of the year.
Picnic-day is fun and depressing at the same time because the holidays are over. The schools open on the 14th and all us kids end up walking around with a lump in our throat until the grownups announce that we are not leaving for Tehran that day because of all the traffic. When they say that, we start playing and being happy and grateful for yet another day off school.
The worst thing in the world is if it comes to the thirteenth and you still haven’t done your holiday homework.
Everyone knows what their first composition title is going to be when they get back to school,

How did you spend the New Year?

We spent the whole of this New Year in the north, (by the Caspian) because of all the bombings.
Dad sat on the front passenger seat and pushed his seat back as far as it went because he had broken his little toe and his leg was in plaster up to his knee.
Mr. Farivar had offered to drop us off at my grandparents' place in the north on his way to his own place. He is a big man with a big belly who needs to push his seat back a bit in order to drive properly. He apologized to my mum and she said that she was absolutely fine sharing the back seat with my two cousins and me.
We truly left Tehran in style with bombs dropping all around us. At one point a bomb landed about fifty meters away from our car on a sand dune and although we drove past it quickly, we still got loads of bits of stones and rocks banging on the car. Mr Farivar said we were lucky the bomb landed there and was suffocated by the sand or we would have surely gone up in smoke, driving so close to it an’ all.
After the Candovan tunnel we stopped and had BBQ-ed liver with bread. Mr. Farivar didn’t have any bread with his liver because he doesn’t have his teeth anymore. By the time we reached our destination, Mum was ready to have a nervous breakdown saying it wasn’t easy to share the back seat of a Peikan (Hillman Hunter) for four hours with three kids who can’t sit still for two minutes.
My Aunt had designed new-year outfits for my two cousins and me. I didn’t really like mine much but I was glad that our clothes weren’t matching like when grandma makes or buys them.
Dad said there was no need for a goldfish this year since we were by the Caspian and there is plenty of fish in the sea but at the end granddad went and bought one. So we set the table with seven things beginning with S, plus the goldfish, a mirror and Hafez book of poems.
This year the New Year was at 12:35 and 24 seconds. Therefore we all had time to shower and get ready in our new clothes before the new year started. At 12:32 we all stood around the table (apart from my cousin Shadi who insisted on starting the new year rocking on the rocking chair).
I told one of my grandmother’s friends about the story behind the orange in the bowl of water and she looked at me in amazement.
'So right now our planet is balancing on the horn of a bull!' she said looking interested, 'and at the new-year the bull gets tired from carrying the world and flings it from one horn to the other?'
'And if you look at the orange in the water very closely you might be able to see it move.'
'Fascinating' She said with a smile, 'I love these little stories.'
The soundtrack to our New Year was definitely ‘Weeeee waaaa woooo waaoo’ which is the noise the radio was making at the time as another friend of my grandparents’ tried to get BBC Persian with no luck.
There were a lot of people staying at my grandparents’ place in the north this year on account of all the bombings that were going on in Tehran and people not exactly being in the mood for being blown up since it was the New Year and all that.

For lunch we had white fish and herbed rice, chicken with rice and noodles and green omelette. We ate all that with plenty of pickled garlic and we all ate them so we wouldn’t smell it on each other.

The End

In the memory of all those great childhood New Years. Especially those ones during the eighties. Happy Eideh No-rooz.

I’ve updated my website if anyone fancies a butcher’s (look).
I would really appreciate it if you could tall me about any mistakes that you might find in there or anything that is not working properly. Thanks.

Ok this is what I’m talking about; up there by ‘tall me’ I actually meant ‘tell me’.
On second thought, if anyone finds a way to tall me, I will appreciate that too.

I was just in Tesco and saw this group of American girls standing in the chocolate section. They were all lined up in front of this one girl (their chocolate expert I presume) who (like a teacher standing in front of a backboard) was very patiently (and you could tell she was really enjoying this) pointing at each group of chocolates on display and saying a variation of the sentence, ‘This is nice.’ (This is nice. This is really nice. Oh this is very nice. This one also is very nice.) After a while the rest of the group could no longer control themselves and so they too started getting involved in all the pointing and touching.
Oh they looked so happy. ‘Like kids in a sweetshop’ they were, literally. And rightly too. Anyone who has ever tasted American chocolate knows what I’m talking about. Or maybe not, I don’t know; that’s actually what I was going to talk about.
Unfortunately I’m not really an expert on this subject and so unlike for example the padded-bra case (which I had actually done a lot of research on) or the bum wiping issue for Iranians abroad (which I myself had extensive firsthand experience on) in this case I can’t exactly say, yes this is the problem and here’s the solution. Because to be honest I haven’t tasted that many different American chocolates to feel like I can give an opinion on them.
I guess now you could ask, why not go and do your research first and then come and blog about it instead of wasting our time and your own with writing about something you don’t know much about? And I must say your point would be very valid too. However there is a small problem here; this is one subject that I am not actually willing to do any more research on than I already have because 1- I’m not exactly a big chocolate fan and 2- From what I’ve tasted, American chocolate, to put it mildly, (I already said to my taste, right?) tastes kind of pooie. And it’s not like oh yeah I’ve become a bit la-di-dah since I’ve moved to Europe sweetie darling and I only ever eat Lindt or Thorntons chocolates now, no, I remember even as a child growing up in Iran during the revolution and eight years of war where often the only sweet thing you could buy from a shop was a mixture of sugar and rosewater which you had the choice of purchasing either in boiled sweet or ice-lolly form, I was still disappointed when people brought me back chocolates from America or Canada! Oh henry for example! What on earth?
The thing is Americans have become an easy target now and I don’t really want to be another person that picks fault with them or makes fun of them but to be honest I’m just intrigued by this. Because really you can say anything you like about Americans but you really can’t pick fault with the way their food tastes. It might not always be nutritious but it ALWAYS tastes great. Their burgers are lovely. Those half a cow steaks they have are great. Those extremely tall deli sandwiches they have with five hundred slices of pastrami, turkey, ham and any other animal you can think of, shoved in the middle of two slices of bread, are fantastic. Their sweets are great too; their ice creams, their donuts, their cheesecakes, their milkshakes. To make a long story short, every kind of food they have is good apart from their chocolate which is…well disappointing really.
I guess you could say well this indeed is not something to get one’s knickers in a twist about, perhaps with this terrible obesity problem in the US, the fact that their chocolate isn’t exactly morish, is actually a good thing.
But when you think about it chocolates are a lot more important than that. They are kind of like the food ambassadors of a country aren’t they? Think about it this way; when a nation goes to war or tries to “free” another nation, usually during the fighting or freeing process, two things fall down from the sky: 1-Bombs 2-Food parcels. While the first one does a lot of damage and annoys a lot of people, the second one I guess is designed to make people happy and build up trust. And here’s where everything goes a bit pear-shaped for the poor Americans because they’re not dropping down In-N-Out burgers or New York Cheesecakes or pastrami sandwiches on people, they’re dropping bloody Hershey bars on them that even an Afghani goat would turn its back on! No wonder the people of every country that Americans go to free, rise against them. They think if this is how your chocolate tastes which is a luxury and should taste heavenly, then I don’t really want to know what anything else is like in your country ‘Get out’.
Think about it, does anyone ever want to fight the Belgians or the Swiss for example? The answer is, ‘No’. We love the Swiss so much in fact that we’ve said, ‘Our darlings, you don’t need to do anything at all; you just sit here and make your chocolates and just so you won’t feel left out, we’re going to give you all our money to hold as well!’
As I said before though, due to a delicate stomach, I haven’t done enough research on this so it’s possible that I’m completely wrong about all this and for example, I haven’t understood American chocolate properly and the people of the nations freed by
Americans are actually pissed off about something other than the chocolate bars that are dropped on them from the sky. So I would really appreciate it if some of you more experienced chocolate fans could help me out a little on this one.

I’m sure a year was a lot longer than this when I was little. Now one minute it’s Persian New Year, then straightaway it’s Persian New year again! Sometimes I feel like the Mad Hatter who had got on the wrong side of Time. Only my watch is always stuck on Persian New Year instead of tea-time. Maybe I should try smearing butter inside it and dipping it in tea!

I’m not complaining though, I mean thank god my time is stuck on Persian New Year as appose to say, 24 January (the most depressing day of the year allegedly).

So yesterday I suddenly panicked and did a bit of cleaning and then soaked some lentils for my sabzeh (greens). Now I hope it grows well. My Sabzeh usually looks good because I love growing things but this year there was not much love involved in my speedy pouring of lentils in a bowl and shoving them under water and then realising some time later that there was not much to eat around the place, picking a handful of them and throwing them in a bowl of salad! I know; shame on me; this is totally unacceptable behaviour towards the lovely sabzeh.
I can tell the lentils are in a bad mood now. Maybe later this evening I will try getting on their good side by singing a little something for them,
‘Twinkle twinkle little bat!
How I wonder where you’re at!’
You know the song perhaps? ;-)

I feel terrible as I have really been neglecting this poor blog for the past couple of weeks. First my cousin came to stay, then Kamyar and I had to sort out some things in our Website Empire (as my cousin calls our collection of websites and blogs and all that), then I started working very hard on this new project for a picture book, then my dad’s book arrived and all I wanted to do was to read that, then suddenly the picture book project came to a halt and on that same day I got another assignment which kept me super busy for a further three days and left me with absolutely no time to clean around me or groom myself even, let alone write in my blog. It was all worth it though as yesterday evening when I clicked on that send button and for the first time in days had enough time to spend in front of the mirror to actually look at my face instead of running past it while hitting myself on the head in an attempt to flatten my hair, I realised that by working so hard to make my deadline, I had succeeded in producing not one, but two things to be proud of; my art and also a beautiful moustache that was now decorating my upper lip and would without a doubt put even my dad’s moustache to shame.
As I admired my new Clark Gable look in the mirror, I remembered my last conversation with Kamyar that evening before he had left home for his nightshift.
Me: ‘I’m so sorry, I must look very bad.’
He: ‘No not at all.’ Kiss ‘That’s nice; I’d forgotten how soft you were.’
And now I knew he hadn’t just said that to be nice; my new moustache was indeed very soft.

PS Click here to see a bigger version of the party picture.

It’s that time of the year again when I fish my headscarf out from the bottom of the laundry basket to wash it ready for our yearly trip to Iran. It is also the time when we start looking to buy our plane tickets. This process usually has four stages: Stage one; ‘Enthusiasm’ as we search for a ticket cheaper than Iran Air, Stage two; 'Excitement' as we find numerous bargain tickets, Stage Three; 'Doubt' as we find each bargain ticket has something wrong with it (such as having a ten hour stopover in Venezuela), Stage Four; 'Surrender' = buying our tickets from Iran air.
At this moment in time we are still in Stage two; Excitement. We have found a few cheap tickets, the cheapest one of which is with Azal (Azerbaijan Airline) who claims it can fly a person from London to Iran and back for only 220 pounds. It really is a great bargain compared to the 405 pounds that Iran Air charges.
Some people are still a bit wary of travelling with Azal. It’s understandable as well. I mean if dog years are seven years to one human year, then country years are more like about one to sixty human years which makes Azarbaijan a very young baby or maybe even a foetus. Now I’m just as uncomfortable with having my plane flown by a baby as the next person, however I find that when it comes to saving nearly 400 pounds (for the both of us) suddenly my reasoning starts going something like this, ‘And exactly who says babies aren’t good at flying passenger planes?’
But seriously I think anyone who has ever flown with Iran Air and lived to tell the tale should really be able to fly with any other airline after that and think nothing of it.
I’m not saying their pilots are bad. No they’re really great actually. Service is good too and so is food (especially when they give baghali-polo). People are also very friendly. Especially if you’re a single girl with a British passport (in which case there is always someone with a son or nephew that wants to get married) or if you have made the mistake of travelling light (in which case some old biddy will make friends with you and then emotionally blackmail you into carrying all her five sacks full of fried aubergine and ghormeh herbs or Primark goodies, depending on whether she is flying in or out of Iran) the inflight entertainments are quite good too (it helps if you’re into watching weepy Iranian movies in different shades of green with dodgy headphones that keeping up with the green theme will replace the voices of all the actors in the film with Kermit the Frog’s).
In fact I only have one problem with Iran Air; I absolutely have no idea how those planes are still able to fly! The only logical explanation is that there is some sort of divine intervention at work there which explains all that collective mandatory praying you have to do as soon as you get on.
Even so, I would still willingly fly with them if only their tickets weren’t so bloody expensive. Because the way I see it, in the current state of affairs (with earthquakes, hurricanes, landslides and bird flu and with buses and tubes and planes and trains being blown up left and right) on board an Iran air plane on its way to Iran, is probably the safest place a person can be.
So once you get over the fact that the plane you are flying in, probably needed to be scrapped over ten years ago, then unlike all other airlines, you can just sit back and relax and never worry about the other passengers and if someone’s hat is going to start ticking or if someone is going to try to light their shoe or hijack the plane and fly it straight into the financial heart of Iran (the Tehran Bazaar I presume). You can just fasten your seatbelt and enjoy five hours of absolute bliss and total peace of mind.
Iran Air, because you’re worth it.

Click here to read an extract from Ilkhanan-eh Iran

PS I have updated the page for Ilkhanan-eh Iran (by Farokh Saramad) so if you are interested, you can now read a few pages from this hilarious book which I received this morning and have not been able to put down since! Baba, you’re a star :-)

Click here to purchase this book

Something very exciting has happened in the Saramad household. After a long wait, a new book of my dad’s has finally been published.
It is astounding how much love, care, research, humour and pure intelligence has gone into creating this work of art; this amazing piece of history which without a doubt will become one of the great classics of our time. And that’s just the cover. Apparently the material inside the book is pretty good too ;-)

But on a more serious note I just wanted to say how proud of my dad I am for the amazing dedication that he has to his work which has inspired me all my life. Baba, of course you possess many truly fantastic qualities but there are a few in particular that I have always greatly admired; your wonderful writing skills, your ability to grow such a perfect moustache and the way you ensure my mum’s safety by keeping those alley cats away from the balcony (and let me just say this once more as I think you still suspect something, ‘No I did not plant catnip in the garden last spring.’)
I am extremely proud of my mum too for all the time and effort that she put into trying to publish this book and also for the courage she showed on the way at some of the more difficult times (such as the time she was attacked by a budgie in the Tehran underground; ghastly experience).
I am really excited about this book, a copy of which I will hopefully get my hands on in the next few days. If you are also interested in getting your hands on a copy of this great masterpiece but are misfortunate enough to live outside of Iran and therefore unable to pop into a bookstore and buy one for yourself, then there really is no need to cry; just whip out your credit card, click here and a brand-new copy of the first edition of Ilkhanan-eh Iran by Farokh Saramad will be sent to you.
Just be patient please though as it will probably take a couple of weeks since your package will be coming from Iran and you must take into account that on arrival to your country, it will probably be strip-searched, put in an orange jumpsuit, quarantined and listened to for any signs of ticking for some days before it is delivered to you.
On the plus side though, my mum is in charge of post and packing which means if you’re lucky, with your book you might also receive a nice bit of feta cheese or a couple of pomegranates.

I’ve lost a few people that I’ve loved in my life but my granddad, Babajoon is definitely the one that I think of the most. The interesting thing about it is that while thinking of people that have died should make us feel sad, thinking of Babajoon always makes me laugh.
Lately doing yoga with a DVD I’ve taken out of the library, I keep remembering one of Babajoon's famous stories and laughing to myself hysterically while trying to bend myself into various poses that the yoga instructor is trying to get me to do.
This story had many versions depending on what mood Babajoon was in and so keeping the tradition alive, I have now done my own version of it here which has a hint of yoga.

This is how it usually went:
He would say, ‘Did I ever tell you about that time when I was listening to the radio and two stations, one broadcasting an exercise programme and one a cooking programme had got mixed up?’ Then he would stand up and repeat what he claimed to have heard on the radio while miming what he actually had to do if he were to listen to the instructions he had been given.
‘Before we start our exercise you will need to get a few things from around the house: a hand towel, khhhh a sharp knife, a chopping board, two onions, some ground pepper and turmeric khhhhh Stand with your legs shoulder length apart and then bend down putting one hand khhhhh on the chopping board. Remove the skin and then cover with salt and leave on the side khhhhh now bring your forehead down khhhhh and place it in a large bowl khhhh spread out your legs khhhh chop up your onions into small pieces and then add them to the bowl khhhhh if this position is too hard on your legs, try bending your knees a little khhhhh and using your sharp knife, remove all the skin and bones and place the meat khhhhh on your head. We will stay in this position khhhhh until the meat is khhhhh ready for meditation khhhhh This might take a couple of hours which you can use to khhhhhh place your hands on your hips and ask someone to khhhhhh set the table khhhhh Don’t forget to breath. Inhale, reach high, exhale, khhhhh add two teaspoons of turmeric and one teaspoon of pepper to your bowl and mix well using your khhhh foot. Try lifting your leg higher khhhh and place it in a pan full of boiling water khhhh this position is wonderful for toning thigh muscles however if you suffer from high blood presser it might be better for you to khhhhhh turn down the heat and let it simmer gently for half an hour. Khhhh Stand firmly on the ground and make sure your thighs are khhhh tender by sticking a fork in them khhhh this exercise is also great for relieving any tension khhhhh at the dinner table. Khhhh Well that’s all for today. Khhhhh don’t worry if you can smell a little smoke; it’s just the fat burning off khhhhh Join us next week for another workout and meanwhile remember: your body is a temple khhhh decorate it with chopped parsley and serve on a bed of saffron rice with some pickled aubergine.’

When I was at school, the ten day celebration of the revolution was always very exciting. The best thing about it was that this was one of the very few occasions when people could be happy openly and not feel like they were acting un-Islamic (on account of Islam being a religion all about seriousness as we were told).
On these ten days a lot of great and fun things happened and you could get into different groups that did plays or sang revolutionary songs in front of the whole school or made wall mounted newspapers that would be used to decorate the school corridors. But my favourite thing to do was making maquettes. You would choose a scene from the revolution and you would make it into a three-dimensional model. It was great fun and every year I would get together with a few friends and we would make one of these.

The customary thing to do at our school was to draw the people on paper and then cut them out and stand them up on the base. But that year my mum had a great idea ‘Why not use chick peas for women’s heads?’ she said and took a chick pea and put two tiny dots on either sides of the beaklike part. Then we made a piece of wrapping paper into a cone shape and mounted the little chickpea head on the top and it looked like a chadored woman. It was a great idea but I was a bit worried about using them at first because I thought our religious studies teacher (that was also in charge of revolutionary activities) would get all funny about the fact that instead of wearing black chadors, the women in our demonstration were accessorizing with all sorts of different colour wrapping papers. At the end I gave in though because they just looked too good.
My friends and I spent a few days working very hard on our maquette and it was starting to look really great. When they left for their homes on the last day before it needed to be handed in, there was still a lot of work to be done and I stayed up half the night working on it.
On the morning we brought it in to school, all the kids gathered around us and we were told over and over again that our maquette was without a doubt the best one in school.
The best thing was that our religious studies teacher was absolutely delighted by the chickpea women. In fact she loved our maquette so much that she hugged us all and told us how proud of us she was.

In one of the breaks on that same day, our teacher came running up to us with a massive grin on her face. She said there was a national school art on revolution (or something like that) competition and she was going to enter our maquette in it. She said she had not said anything about it before because she had not thought that we being so young could come up with anything that could be entered in that competition but after she had seen our work, she had loved it so much that had called the organisers and had arranged to go there that day with our maquette.
I’m sure you can imagine how excited we got about this. And the best thing was that she said in a few days she would go to that place again and would take us with her so we could see our work exhibited in the gallery along with the other entries.
A few days past and we kept pestering our teacher about when she was going to take us to the exhibition place. But for some reason she was having problems organising the trip. At the end on the last day (on this day actually 21 Bahman 10th February), the day before the national holiday for the victory of revolution, our teacher finally managed to get the permission from school and hire a minibus to take us to the exhibition.
We knew we hadn’t won anything (because right from the start our teacher had made it clear that we had no chance since the older girls and boys from art schools, had made some really great things) but I still couldn’t help imagining that when we got there, there would be people nudging each other and saying, ‘Look it’s those girls that made that amazing maquette.’
‘Which one?’
‘You know, the chickpeas.’
‘Really? That’s fantastic! Why they are so young as well. I can’t believe it.’
‘Yes they are very talented.’

The exhibition place was nothing like I had imagined. It was a huge old house in the middle of a big garden and it was very spooky because apart from us four and our teacher there was no one else around.
Inside the house, there was artwork everywhere. There were paintings, sculptures and maquettes all over the place. Some of the maquettes were placed on tables and platforms but there were so many of them that some had just been left on the floor.
You could tell we were all very disappointed and quite shocked by the state we had found this place in but we all made out as if nothing was wrong and set out on the task of finding our beloved maquette that we had so lovingly made.
At first we went around together but the place was so big that we thought we would cover more ground if we were to split up so we each went our separate way. I was quite wary of doing that because a lot of the artwork there depicted scenes with people dying and a lot of blood and that sort of thing made me very uncomfortable.
In the second room I went to, behind all the maquettes I saw a bed like thing with a pair of boots sticking out of the end. I thought great, this is probably the person that is supposed to be manning the exhibition and he’s fallen asleep. So I went closer to see what the story was and if maybe there was a sort of order to this place that he knew about. I could not see the man because his whole body had been covered with a white sheet that had been drenched in something red where it was touching his face. It was either that this was a life size model of a dead body with its face blown off or this creepy house actually belonged to an Iranian version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family, what’s for sure is that this was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life. Inside I was screaming but no sound was coming out. Finally when I pulled myself together I ran out of the room as fast as I could and then glued myself to the first girl I could find.
We looked and looked but we couldn’t find our maquette. At the end our teacher said we had to leave it and go back because it was getting late.
On our way out as we were going down the last flight of stairs, suddenly one of the girls said, ‘Oh my god, look.’ So we all looked down and there it was. Our beloved maquette had been tossed on the floor by the side of the stairs.

I had to try very hard to keep back my tears. It had been completely destroyed as if people had been walking on it and dogs had been using it as a chew toy. The boy that carried a picture of Khomeini had fallen on top of the woman in the white chador with red flowers (giving our revolutionary sisters brightly coloured chadors instead of black ones had indeed turned them into right tarts) who was now just a cone as her head was nowhere to be seen. The crow had fallen out of its nest and was now having some sort of struggle with the man in green shirt. The wall on the side had broken off and most of the chickpeas had left their posts as heads and where now rolling freely around the street. Altogether our peaceful demonstration had turned into carnage.

A Cautionary tale

Life Insurance........Life Insurance
Once I’d gone to pick up a friend at Heathrow airport and while I waited I went to buy a coffee from this guy. I thought he looked Iranian and then he asked the man in front of me ‘Vot vood you like?’ and I knew he was. So I said salam and chatted to him a bit while he made me a coffee. I went away from his stand thinking he was sweet (because he had not charged me for the coffee) but maybe a bit on the simple side (because he had not said much and had spent the whole time staring at me with a wide open mouth). Life Insurance
It was some time later when I paid a visit to the ladies’ that I realised it’s all very well to in your haste to get to the airport in time, grab and put on the first items of clothing you lay your hands on, but unfortunately the top you grab may turn out to be completely see-through. Life Insurance.....Life Insurance......Life Insurance ...... Life Insurance

I think we have already established that I have a bit of a sick sense of humour so it should come as no surprise how I was tickled by this news on channel 4, the night before last, about Bush and Blair’s meeting about Iraq in January 2003. Basically by then they had decided to go to war anyway regardless of what the United Nations decided and in that meeting they were trying to come up with ways to do this.
What seriously annoys me is that, even though both Bush and Blair are such great liabilities, I still can’t bring myself to dislike them. I want to dislike them as well and so as soon as say, George does something really silly, I think ok that’s it now; I don’t like him anymore. But it never lasts very long because straight away he goes and says another great thing like: ‘The Indians and the Paki's should learn to live in peace.’ Or ‘I’m honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.’ (Umm, I dread to think what he was actually doing when he said that.) or ‘For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it.’ or ‘I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.’
I think you will agree that it’s impossible to dislike a man that brings us so much laughter.
It’s different with Tony. He’s not funny. And unlike George Bush he doesn’t give you that sense of the-lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home so you can’t even feel sorry for him because you think he is a bit dim.
However the thing with Tony is that in his speeches he gives me this feeling that he really believes in what he is saying. Even with the Iraq war I think he actually believed that it was the right thing to do. Now it was either a case of him really wanting to do this and then lying to himself over and over again until he finally fully convinced himself that Saddam had weapons, or he had simply listened George Bush when he had said, ‘The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself.’ and had decided that it all made sense. Whatever it was (maybe I’m being a bit naïve here but to me) in his speeches about the war, he came across quite sincere. To the point that even I, the Iranian, that make it my business to always be cynical about politicians, started to think that maybe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and could actually destroy the whole of Britain in forty five minutes notice. I know lying isn’t good and all that but let’s give the man credit when credit is due because he really did a good job in his speeches.
But I think the main reason I can’t dislike Tony Blair is that out of all the people that want to become the prime minister of Britain, he is the least weird! Yes it’s more a case of, in the kingdom of blind, the one eyed man is king or in this case, in the kingdom of crazy, the less crazy is the prime minister. I’m not saying that people of Britain are crazy or anything like that, oh no, far from it, it’s just that unfortunately nobody in their right mind ever wants to go into politics. So Tony Blair may be annoying and a liar and the possessor of the strangest superpower of all; the ability to instantly turn anything he shows interest in from cool to seriously uncool (this is true; he very nearly put Calvin Klein out of business and at one point even the music industry was threatened) but at least he is the annoying liar superhero that we know. Also he is actually quite intelligent and says things like, ‘Ask me my three priorities for Government, and I tell you: education, education and education.’ As appose to his American counterpart, ‘Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?’
In short, these two are like Pinky and the Brain; they might be trying to take over the world, but it’s still impossible to dislike them.

‘I hope you leave here and walk out and say, ‘What did he say?’’ (George W. Bush, Beaverton, Oregon, August 13, 2004)

There is a possibility that at some point in our lives, any one of us could be labelled a ‘Sad fat git’ or a ‘Mad old hag’. There is however a way to shun this unfortunate labelling. For the first one you must avoid a flight that starts in Safford airport in the US, stops in Fresno Terminal and ends in Geita airport in Tanzania and for the second one you must avoid a flight from Madrid Barajas airport in Spain to The Hague in Netherlands via Old Town United States.
However not all unfortunate labellings are so easy to shake off. Just imagine this for a moment. After passing a ‘spot the difference’ test that separates the seriously stupid from the rest, after somehow managing to get through an interview with a woman with funny eyes that you were unlucky enough to piss off before the interview even started (by completely ignoring her when she was talking to you because you were certain that her eyes were looking at the person sitting behind you) and who asked you questions like, are you into bondage? (to which you replied ‘No’ and she said, ‘I am…well sort of… just for a laugh.’) and ‘Are you punctual?’ to which you replied, ‘What is that?’ (because even though you knew what it meant, for a second you panicked thinking ‘What if it’s not what I think at all and it actually has something to do with bondage?’) after hearing endless stories about the old Rover days of the factory (people forgetting half eaten pork pies in the bodyworks of cars that were sold off to little old ladies who kept complaining about their car smelling like a dead animal) and after doing the same job on the line for months on end, not knowing if you are ever going to get that contract or not, finally one day it happens; you are given three sets of slick new black uniforms and you are told by your manager, ‘Congratulations, you are now an employee of BMW New Mini Plant Oxford.’ In other words, you are now officially a ‘Cow ass.’ Quite horrified, you examine your new uniforms, it’s true; they are all labelled: Cow Ass (some number) and then your name!
‘But why?’ you whine. Shrugging his shoulders and readjusting his cap, Cow Ass A110 replies, ‘It’s Cowley Assembly, init?’

The other day when Kamyar and I were walking to town, our conversation went from bricks, to me delivering a long monolog about these little mud huts that my cousins and I used to make in our Grandparents’ place in the north of Iran. We each used four bricks, two to go on either side of each hut and then put sticks on the top and covered the whole thing with mud. Mesothelioma

They were originally built as homes for the little Fisher Price men that we had at the time, but later all the plastic people were evacuated out of their homes as the three mud huts were turned into emergency hospitals for the poor, half dead, rat-poison-eaten mice that we were finding around the house. First the poorly mice were placed inside the mud huts to shelter them from the hot sun and then the treatment would start. Mesothelioma
We brought out cheese and tried putting tiny pieces of it into their half open mouths. Soon we discovered that a rat-poison-eaten mouse is not exactly in the mood for cheese, or any other solid foods for that matter (we had also tried feeding them Maadar biscuits, the boxes of which their beds were made of). Mesothelioma treatment
We borrowed two empty little Otrivine nose drops bottles from our granddad (Babajoon), one for milk and one for water and took turns dropping liquids into our patients’ mouths, in a race against time to rehydrate their little bodies. Mesothelioma treatment
Sometimes Babajoon would stand behind us in his chequered shorts, white vest, socks and sandals that were tied tightly around his feet and ankles with different colour pieces of string, and would pretend to examine the diseased little orange trees in front of the mud huts when in reality he quietly watched us in our manic race to save the lives of a bunch of mice that were without a doubt beyond saving.
A bit later he would be on his way to the beach, where with his nifty choice of footwear, he would very coolly walk straight into the sea and be seen as the biggest genius of our times in the eyes of every misinformed tourist in that area who was destined to do an involuntary dance (made even more fun to watch by the crazy facial movements they made, in an attempt to hide their pain) as their poor helpless bare feet were first subjected to the blistering hot sands of the beach and then to the sharp rocks and the remains of old villas (destroyed by the waves of the Caspian) popping up here and there on the seabed.
Mesothelioma

Aligholi Saramad aka Babajoon aka Professor Baltazar
Civil engineer, Poet, Inventor, Lover of dogs
Was born in a year, way back, when hunting dogs rode on horses (well at least one dog did according to him),
and was gone in the winter of 1997 when dogs had long since stopped riding horses and the Labour government was trying to put them completely out of business by banning them from hunting altogether.

Mesothelioma

At times the sheer volume of casualties meant that we even had to put some patients on rooftops, where they laid motionless on big magnolia leaves with their limp tails hanging from the side of the roof and its end dangling about half way down the building’s side, waiting for another wasp to come and nudge it (on its way to his home right above our head, under the roof of the house) and make it swing one more time. Mesothelioma
Oh how I prayed for those mice to get better and how happy I got every time one of them looked as though it had swallowed a drop of milk or water. But sadly none ever survived and so every day we had to have more funerals and wrap the stiff body of yet another small mouse in toilet paper and bury it in the little cemetery behind the house.
Mesothelioma

Here lies Chubby the Mouse
Muncher of cheese and Mamanjoon’s straw hats
Also had a soft spot for rat poison
Died in the hot summer of 1984

Mesothelioma treatment
‘This was the height of human confusion when you think about it’ I said to Kamyar, ‘We certainly didn’t want these mice to be running around the house, chewing our clothes and eating our food and carrying on with their slalom races between the tea cups, and we would never object to Babajoon putting out rat poison, yet when we saw them lying about the place, on their last breaths, we so desperately tried to revive them, not thinking for one second that we were the ones who had caused their suffering in the first place.’
‘It’s a bit like the Iraq war, isn’t it?’ replied Kamyar. ‘Yeah it is a bit’ I said, thinking about the similarities. ‘Maybe you could write something about it.’ he said and I said ‘yeah maybe I will.’
But then I thought, well that’s not really saying much because if you really wanted to, you could probably draw parallels between the Iraq war and any idiotic kind of behaviour.
Mesothelioma

It’s not that I really want to have a baby right now or anything like that; it’s more like I have this feeling that I must. Yes you guessed it; I’m ovulating again and those weird hormones are trying to trick my brain into thinking that what my body really needs right now is to have another person growing inside it. drug addiction treatment
But my brain being way more logical than my ovaries, refuses to accept this and points out that this is in fact the ovaries worst idea to date, followed very closely by their monthly attempts to convince the brain that we must wipe out the human race since they all seem to have been put on this earth for the sole reason to get on our nerves. The ovaries insist that this statement is in fact true and that they will stand by it. They don’t say it in so many words though as the ovaries don’t have a very large vocabulary. However they seem to have no trouble at all getting their point across. I still haven’t worked out if it’s because the ovaries are too dumb or too clever but usually what they do is to take something like ‘People bad, Baby good’ and repeat it over and over again. This can really get to poor Brain as you can imagine. addiction treatment
‘But why do we need that?’ asks Brain, ‘Are we not happy just the way we are; coming and going as we please, having a computer room instead of a baby room, being able to sleep at nights without something screaming in our ears every ten minutes?’
‘Must have baby’ shout out Ovaries. drug addiction treatment
‘No shouting please.’ says Brain trying to sound authoritative, ‘Lets discuss this like civilized beings. At the moment I don’t think your argument is convincing enough dear ovaries, so do you think you could give us any other reasons as to why you so strongly believe that we must have a baby?'
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‘Enough already’ Brain says impatiently
‘We make eggs, must have baby now’
‘Ok yes’ says Brain trying its best to sound sympathetic, ‘I understand. It must be very hard for you to make those eggs every month and see them go to waste like that. But haven’t you thought about how having another person in here will affect the rest of us? Take the poor breasts for example, they will have to go from the A cup, no bra wearing, free spirits that they are, to these huge growths that resemble a cow's udders and have to be strapped to the poor Back at all times because they can no longer support themselves…’
Back: ‘I aint havin’ that, no. That’s not on, no that’s just not on.’
Brain: ‘Yes thank you my friend. Don’t worry; everything’s under control. What about you breasts? Do you have anything to say about this?’
‘Well you know’ says Right Breast, ‘I’d always wondered how I’d look if I’d been a bit bigger. Maybe not that…’
‘What are doing?’ asks a mortified Brain, ‘You’re not helping. Can you just be quite and let me deal with this please?’
Right Breast replies, sounding a bit offended, ‘Well I was only saying because you asked me…’drug addiction
‘Don’t worry about that one Brain’ yells out Left Breast, ‘She gets a bit tetchy about her size because I’ve always been the bigger one.’
‘Hey this has nothing to do with that; I was just wondering…’
‘Has too.’
‘Has not.’
‘Has too, has too.’
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‘I’ve said it before and I say it again: I aint havin’ that. So if yous think you can just get as big as you like and dump all that weight on me, you have another thing comin’. You best think of something like hangin’ yoursefs from the sealin’ or somethin’ cause I aint dealin’ with that.’
‘Has not, has not, has not’
‘Has too, has too, has too.’
‘Must have baby’
‘Please everybody just Calm The Hell Down.’ Cries out Brain.
They all go quite for a few moments.
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‘I’m hungry. Wonder if there’s any cheese cake left.’
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