Ta' barra mod ieħor ieħor...

The Gargarish Road stretches four miles from the compound where I live down to the Medina. It slumbers for a while after the rush hour and then after the sunset last call to prayers it returns, with its traffic like water in a sea of glass and metal. Every space is filled as quickly as it was created, sometimes overflowing onto the pavement, threatening somtimes to engulf the hapless pedestrian, already contending with the rubbish plies and the sticky sifting sands. It a road of a thousand chancers a minute and a hundred near misses a second. The horn is wielded mercilessly as a psyhcological tool, designed to break the other driver's nerve, to bend his will. When the moment of impact inevitably comes the drivers emerge, often surprisingly calm, to negotiate and survey the damage. To try and stare it away before settling, shrugging and taking solace in the fact that they had a dent on that side anyway. In effect it is a dent to a bump. Or else it creates a certain pleasing symmetry...

To start off with, I should point out that I may have to change a few names in order to protect the innocent from the guilty. I don't want to put too fine a point on it but I must tread lightly. Hopefully there is not a room somewhere with a gang of proverbial monkeys typing combinations of website addresses looking for subversive blogs. Not that I aim to be subversive. I just want to describe my life here, though I guess there will have to be some degree of self-censorship. I have not included my name anywhere on the blog. I feel bad choosing this as the subject for my first blog but I suppose it would be hard to ignore the events in London of last week. I lived in London for four years before coming out here, so it has been on my mind a lot. As I am sure most educated, informed people are aware, the majority of Muslims abhor terrorism in all its forms and Libyans are no different, despite the rather sinister image the country is still trying to shake off. Without exception all th...