Benefit Street, Brighton.

  ....in the beginning.                                               I came to England directly from China where I'd been Lecturing for 7 years.  A chap who contacted me while I was there & said he was doing so because he was a friend of a friend of mine at the British Council,, suggested we work together: he had the premises for a school in Eton and I would bring over a couple of teachers & contacts from China to help teach at the school. It was all lined up & I saw this as a kind of Wonder-Job: I couldn't wait to get started. (And the plate glass windowed flat high up at tree level was all blonde wood & brushed-steel kitchen appliances.) The fourth day of being in England my putative "partner" declared bankruptcy. And I also discovered t...

   Yes, I do mean Alice as in Alice in Wonderland. She  who, 150 years later, was to inspire plot-lines for Soaps and B-Grades with the (now) evergreen It Was All a Dream- ending for years to come. And the reason I am referring to Alice is because, until those hot days we had recently, I never had completely understood how, on a hot summer's day, anyone could really fall asleep under a tree? Not that I ever breathed this puzzlement to a soul: nothing I had ever read, seen or heard over an increasingly longer period of time, seemed to indicate there was a flaw in this reasoning. Everyone else obviously understood.  As this has undoubtedly been the status quo for around three quarters of a rather peripatetic life, one sometimes one has to get a grip on asking too many questions. The line people draw between eagerly intelligent fact gathering, and total imbecility, is shorter than you may realise. But now, finally, like a bucket of iced-water over the head, I discove...

I once turned down an invitation to have tea on The Britannia with the Queen and Monty and all;  in order to go on a first date excursion, picnicking up in the mountains. In to-day’s Britain this factoid would bring down one of two reactions. The first would be hearty claps on the backs and “I should think so too!”. The other is “OMG! Are you insane? What were you thinking?”. (Mind you, in my current incarnation, the average reaction would be “Havin’ a larf, are we?” At the time I was 18 and I could legally please myself! As I was only a scant few weeks out of boarding school  this freedom was heady and still rib-ticklingly and foot tinglingly novel.  I couldn’t be cajoled into compliance, nor ordered to obey.  No-one could ever expel me again. Or forbid certain ways of doing my hair! And no-one would, ever again, make me wear the same clothes, day after day after interminable day. Nor make me leave a nice warm bed at 4.30 in the morning to...

                                                      My middle name is Arabic. In modern Britain I’m one of many millions. However in a series of convent school in Australia in my dewy days of youth,  my very name was considered an act of wilful sedition. Until Yrs. 11 & 12 I had never come across a nun who didn’t consider it rather uncouth not to have a “dacent” name like Mary, Ann, Elizabeth or, if one wanted to go foreign, then  the Italian “Maria” should satisfy all yearning for the exotic.  Opting for Arabic however, was very definitely OTT. Despite any question of the fairness of the thing, the logic involved in nuns taking against me for my parents transgression escaped me for many years. When I came across the “sins of the father’s” meme it finally became clear. The nuns, it must be said, took against m...