Vignette 1

Afternoon people,

So, it is half past two and I am hungry. I really should go and have my lunch. Instead, I am sat at my desk with my headphones on in an office full of women. One, Saudi but utterly anglicised; she went to university in Dundee of all places and studied English literature and Philosophy, is my boss kinda and she is in a bad mood. We take it in turns to deal with Angela; a Briton who is thoroughly Arab in her approach (she’s lazy and inefficient and just doesn’t understand, anything). The last is Bahraini and the total Muslim. She sits mute in her hijab until her mobile phone rings - one of her mobile phones, she has three - and then she warbles into it like some kind of bird.

I’m in a grump I guess. Not really a grump, just a little tearful, but not really. Missing home a bit, but again, not really. Me and the ho were talking about this the other night. We miss our friends and family of course, but what gets you the hardest is the familiarity of home. Stupid things, like TV and busses. It is not that you miss anything in particular, more the ménage of every day things that one comes to understand as your life. And I suppose that it is that that I am finding, if not upsetting, then difficult to reconcile with my new life. There are just so many things that I want to leave behind; need to leave behind. And I have. But I am not sure that I have found the things I need to replace them yet. And into that gap flows an emptiness. It is not a sadness, not really, more a lacking. A lack of something definite. Yes, that’s it: I lack the definite article.

I am being cleansed, but worn away also.

And that’s why I miss the busses and TV, why I miss the over crowded and dirty streets of London. Not because I do, but because I have not yet found their equivalent.

To that end I have decided to create a series of Vignettes:

French, "little vine" A short composition, designed with little or no plot or larger narrative structure. Often vignettes are descriptive or evocative in their nature” web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_V.html

I like to think of them as postcards, but the front and not the back. I want to catch a series of images and make the permanent by describing and sharing them. Maybe then I will initiate my actual departure from London and begin to embrace Juffair, Bahrain as my new home.

I lit my second cigarette right off the back of the first. Two cigarettes and two twelve inch mixes: the Stone Roses and the Charlatans. That’s me this morning. Waking up. I thought of about Alex and then deleted the thought just as surely as I had I deleted his number from my phone. I got up. The cats were awake now too and have started making their noises in anticipation of getting fed. I had my phone with me so the music followed me throughout the otherwise silent flat. She had gone. Left for work early again. I wouldn’t be seeing her now until I got home from work late. I sat down on the sofa and thought about our new life here. Of the things that are different; the things that are still the same. Later, on the drive here, I saw that Indian woman again, still carrying her English leather handbag, still carrying the black umbrella with the brass point at the top as she crossed the busy roads on her way to work.

So that is Vignette number one look out for more as they occur to me.

Take care folks.

Rave Safe.

XxX