Ta' barra mod ieħor ieħor...

The riot policeman outside the 11 June stadium seems nervous. He has a baton, which he uses to routinely prod spectators as they file into the ground but there is no real violence in his action. Inside, an aura of gentle, good-natured anarchy is in the air. Green and red flares are propelled towards the pitch to the rhythm of a constant drum beat that reverberates around the ground with the periodic explosions of cherry-bombs, as we prepare for the Tripoli derby. I am surprised to see that the Ahli fans seem to outnumber the Ittihad supporters by about two to one. I choose to sit down in a sort of buffer zone away from the throbbing of supporters. I am surrounded by more Ahli than Ittihad fans though. There are about 30,000 in the green of Ahli to my left and maybe 15,000 Ittihad supporters in red to my right. I decided there and then that I would be an Ahli supporter. There was not that much to distinguish between them as far as I could surmise, but once the choice is made, there is n...

There are two staple jokes in my boss's comic repertoire, though neither are exactly jokes. The first of his comedic devices is to affect a funny nasal voice. The closest approximation that I can make is Kermit the Frog, though I don't think that Abdul Rahman has ever seen the Muppet Show so it is a funny voice entirely of his own creation. The second, and this works on two levels, is to say 'Good Afternoon' when it is half past seven in the morning and conversely to say 'Good Morning' at three in the afternoon. We finish work at three and do not socialize outside work, so he has not yet had the opportunity to employ the gag to its full, devastatingly funny effect at, say, 10 o'clock in the evening. Now a great deal of, if not all, humour relies on some form of inversion. A man dressing up as a woman is just one example which springs to mind. Whoever said that sarcasm was the lowest form of humour was wrong. A man in a dress is lower. So I cannot fault Abdul...

I once saw an orange man praying in the shade of a satellite dish. Andy reckons that it was an orange man who stole his two bags of cement. It must have been at least two orange men, as they were big bags. Sometimes orange men set up base in the gardens of disused flats. Sometimes not disused ones. They travel on tractors with trailers attached to the back. One driving, the others in the trailer. There is one orange man outside Peter's house who uses the outside part of his air-conditioner as a clothes rack. When you see the orange men in the shop they are always buying tins of tuna and about twenty bread rolls. I sometimes see orange men out late at night, sitting on a bank of grass under the sodium street lights, which hum like giant mosquitoes. They can look slightly sinister, sitting there with scarves wrapped around their faces like bedouins. I don't think there is anything dangerous about the orange men though, as they slink around the compound in a somnolent slumber. Pau...

"In Libya, you don't catch buses. The buses catch you!" as Abdul Hamid put it. And on one score, he was certainly right. You could be walking down the pavement, minding you own business, maybe whistling a tune from the new Mohammed Hasan MP3 (maybe you wanted to get the original one and send some money his way, but you just couldn't find it. 'What the hell?' you might think. 'He's got enough money'). And while you are whistling the tune, minding your own business, you may find yourself accosted by the sound of a blaring horn from a driver on the other side of the road, who is actually heading in the opposite direction to the one who are walking in. A quick shake of the head suffices and they take off in another burst of speed, just to slow down at the sight of the next pedestrian. On another account, though, Abdul Hamid was wrong. They are not exactly buses. There are no buses in Libya. Like many other things in a groaning infrastructure, there use...