Pig Sty Avenue

I'm blogging here from one of the self-contained wee rooms for 1st year undergrads at Leeds. There's an abandoned cemetery outside and a big horse chestnut growing right up to the window. During the two weird weeks of visa limbo a thought that kept me going was Guinness and a read of The Guardian (a proper paper one you can hold in your hand). Which I've just had. Yesterday morning I was in Libya. Everything with the new job seems to be going as expected. Except that there's a shisha cafe within spitting distance of my room. Will I never be free? I haven't tried it yet, but that's only because creeping jet lag has overcome the burning need for a big old blast of mint flavoured tobacco.

This is great news . We ex cigarette smokers know that it's the coolest, dirtiest, most evil aspect of culture and health in the last hundred years. However. In the absence of family and friends, and without the lonely man's crutch of alcohol, I've gotten into shisha tobacco big time the last few months. I was worried about addiction. When in Libya, around 9pm, I really enjoy rinsing out the water bottle, filling out the bowl ( kursi in Libyan-Arabic, literally "seat"), lighting the self-igniting carbon . And waiting a few minutes for it to get going and then puffing away as I surf the internet, watch The Sopranos, or read a book. Sometimes, at weekends, I'll have another pipe in the late afternoon, prior to a siesta. And this week, bored and stressed, well... I've some days been having one in the late morning. It's getting out of hand. I've got two really good pipes. I'm taking at least one of them back with me, and the two of them sp...

There's been at least one hoopoe around The Bungalows since we got here. They are lovely looking birds. Molly will appreciate them when she gets here because they feature in a musical scene in In The Night Garden ; (or maybe not - she tired of that programme quite quickly: it's very repetitive and essentially vapid; students on cannabis no doubt love it, and I do wonder if that is the intended audience). I spotted one in the garden this afternoon, and watched it pull out a grub from beneath the ground with it's long beak, and then, to my delight, saw a young bird run up with beak open to receive it's dinner. I watched them for a while, both parent and child probing the ground with their long beaks. The juvenile wasn't having any luck but every time the adult found a fat grub, the bairn would get it. A late night last night, mostly acting the fool in DMU . And then a long, long lie in this morning, (the first time I've stayed up past two, and slept past 11...

My students are tickled by our improvised noun, ‘hubbly-bubbly’, to describe what’s called in Libya a shisha, and in other Arabic countries a narghila pipe. Users of a certain herb in Britain would call it a bong. I saw a cheap and nasty one on sale in Newcastle during my last break for £60. God only knows what they’d want for the sort they use here, which you can buy new for between 30 and 50 dinars (that’s about GBP 10 – 13). Here they smoke tobacco in them, flavoured with molasses. Additional flavours are optional: apple’s very popular, and there’s also strawberry and ‘cocktail’. In the summer, I was teaching and living at a place called Imsallata, up in the hills. I was sharing a big house with my mate Padraig. There was very little to do. Monday marks the middle of the week here and we’d celebrate that by walking into the town and going to the café for a pipe. It’s a funny thing, because I gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago and I’ve become somewhat anti-tobacco sin...