Ta' barra mod ieħor ieħor...

Mustafa had a preoccupation which was torturing him night and day. A teenage problem really, but in the Arab world, puberty seems to arrive ten years later. Or maybe not. Mustafa said that he was the only one from all his friends who was still a virgin. He said that it wasn't so much that he wanted to have sex but that he didn't want to be the only one left out. He said that all of his friends had had sex but I just didn't believe him. I would not normally be so dismissive a young person's account of what his own generation is up to, but when it comes to sex, you have to be wary. Lies are the nasty cold that sex caught and just can't shake off. People lie about sex, people lie to get sex and then lie and then say that they haven't had sex. Some even lie during sex. But more commonly people lie and say that they have had sex when they haven't. This is the most favoured lie amongst young men and it is a lie that is virtually one of the necessary pains of growi...

When I first arrived in Libya, the company put me up at the Baab Al-Bahar (Door to the Sea) Hotel in Tripoli. The Baab Al-Bahar is a five star hotel which one must assume beat up a smaller hotel in a fight and took a few stars off it, as not all of its five stars seem to have been acquired through any legitimate means. But despite its modest service, its passable buffet and the unpredictably of its souvenir shop's opening times, it has a location on the Tripoli coastline unenvied even by Tripoli's genuine five star Corinthia Bab Al-Africa (Door to Africa this time). The Corinthia, by far Libya's plushest hotel, is a near-skyscraper of a building with a shadow whose radius reaches and almost hits the Bab Al Bahar and then turns to rest and fade on the Medina as the sun sets. While some of the Corinthia's residents' windows face the sea, others directly face the ancient limestone walls of the Medina, fronted by the fronds of massive palm trees. What the international ...