Ta' barra mod ieħor ieħor...

Howard is dead. He didn't look well, it must be said. I saw him slumped unconscious on a plastic white table at a party a year ago and his face was as red as beetroot. Howard's favourite vegetables were chips and tomato ketchup. His daily intake of water was actually over the recommended amount at a healthy two litres. However, when you consider that this water was taken solely to dilute on a 50/50 ratio with the amount of Flash he consumed, the figure is less impressive. At least health-wise. Flash is the most common, only slightly ironic, euphemism given to the alcoholic tipple of Western expats who reside in gated camps and compounds all over the ostensibly dry outposts of the Muslim world. Actually, it is less a tipple and more pure, distilled alcohol, diluted with water according to personal requirements in order to decrease its toxicity. I have heard that some of the expats develop such a taste for it that they even make and drink it back home. Which is behaviour which m...

Before I knew exactly who or what human beings were and before I had mastered the cognitive skills needed to differentiate between personalities and even genders, estimate ages and judge characters I remember the warm nicotine-scented breath and the bristles of a cheek brushing against my face of a man bending down to hug me as I lay on a bed or maybe even a cot. My since errant, absent father perhaps? Another relative? I don't know who it was. But I think that it was a man like Basim. A large, bearded grizzly bear of a man, Basim is nominally the cleaner at work, but in reality he is a sort of general gopher, no-fixed-job-description, maintenance man, odd-jobber and donkey/dirty worker. Basim is a contract worker, not a direct employee of the company and is therefore not issued with the standard company coveralls and safety boots which normal employees, including desk-bound ones, get. Someone once gave him a green company boiler suit and, though now oil-stained and tattered, it is...

Geological surveys in the 1970s confirmed that there was more than 120,000 cubic kilometres of pure fresh water lying under the sand of the Libyan Desert. In an extraordinary session of the General People's Congress in October 1983, the leader of the Revolution suggested transporting this water to Libya's coastal towns and thus started the Great Man Made River Project, the "8th wonder of the world", an engineering project on a scale never seen before in human history. The pipes, the largest ever made, dwarf the transporters they are carried on and the pre-stressed steel in their manufacture would circle the earth 280 times. The quantity of aggregates used in the construction of the project would build 20 pyramids the size of the Great Pyramid of Khofu and the pipe transporters will have travelled a distance equivalent to going to the sun and back when the final phase of the project has been completed. It is envisaged that the 13000 wells that have been drilled will pu...

Of course, not all Libyans are Arabs. In the south, there are the nomadic Tuareg and the Toubou, who trudge the Saharan plains, often roaming past resented borders into Niger, Algeria and Chad. But small in number, these tribes forge their own path outside the mainstream of Libyan society. Then there are the Berber. Popularly known as Berber, though they prefer the term Amazigh to Berber, which is after all a Latin derivation of barbari, they predate the Arab settlers and their modern day population is spread across Northern Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. Some estimate that the Berber make up as much as five per cent of the Libyan population. Precise figures are impossible. Some are not even sure themselves. Last weekend, Mohammed took me to Nalut for the festival. Mohammed's parents are Berber and I asked him if he was also a Berber. He said that he didn't speak the language and that he identified more with being an Arab, having been schooled in Arabic, though he quickly added th...

Though it only lasts for the few hours leading up to prayer time on Friday afternoon, the Friday Market makes up in scale what it lacks in opening hours. It is a market of such magnitude that it even has a part of Tripoli, aptly Friday Market ( Souk il-Gima ), named after it. It is a market which snakes its way through two kilometres of massed bodies poring through clothes, fake DVDs, alarms clocks, car accessories, fruit and vegetables, goats and camels. There is in fact very little that you can not buy at the Friday Market. It is good market, but not my favourite. Also open on Friday mornings is the teeming Fish Market, which is in the harbour by the light-house, just across the road from the Arch of Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps it is because of the crush that women do not attend most markets in Libya, though you see plenty of them actually inside the Medina. At the Fish Market, there is so little space between the stalls that at one point, shambling through it absent-mindedly, I found...