We wandered the city today but writing the blog as I researched online sites written in challenging English affected my ability to write it all up. Mmmm so today I learnt a valuable lesson about leaving myself enough time to absorb what I research before trying to create something with it. Tomorrow's posts will be about diamonds and how a 15th century estate became the city graveyard.

Meanwhile I want to note down a little more of this prose by a poet whose writing I love so well ...'My head on the pillow in Abu Hazim's house. Another home for the traveler, another pillow for the head. My relationship with place is in truth a relationship with time. I move in patches of time, some I have lost and some I possess for a while and then I lose because I am always without a place. I try to regain a personal time that has passed. Nothing that is absent ever comes back complete. Nothing is recaptured as it was. 'Ein al-Deir is not a place, it is a time. Evidence of the last rain that we can see on our shoes even though our eyes tell us it has dried. The thorns of the brambles trained our hands and our sides to bleed early when we were children returning home at sunset to our mothers. Do I want to scramble through brambles now? No, what I want is the time of scrambling. 'Ein al-Deir is specifically the time of Mourid as a child.

Mourid Barghouti
I Saw Ramallah