O Little Town of Bethlehem

I've never really been anywhere exotic. I've been to some odd places - I've been to Arkansas, which in some ways takes "odd" to a whole new level, and I once spent 3 days in Salzburg talking about lesbianism - but I've never been anywhere that's felt truly "foreign". So it was with a certain amount of excitement that I awoke at 5am to find that I'd been stirred from sleep not by students urinating against my window, which is normally the case, but by the sound of several minarets seemingly competing with each other for the faithful. I'd woken up in Bethlehem, and it doesn't get any more spine-tingling than that.

Bethlehem was so alien to me in many ways as to make Arkansas look vaguely normal. A city of massive contradictions, it isn't the Little Town still-lying under starry skies that you imagine from the hymns and charity cards. This image is even less appropriate these days, when the city is encircled by a huge, ugly concrete wall which the powers that be laughingly call, with a grasp of PR that would impress even Peter Mandelson, the "Peace Wall". This peace wall means that those residents who've even managed to get permits to allow them to leave need to queue for several hours daily at the checkpoints just to be allowed to go to work, so they can earn money to pay taxes, most of which the city never sees. Under the guise of peace, the army is stopping Palestinians from even accessing and thus being able to harvest the olive groves - one of Bethlehem's main sources of income given the products (oil, wood etc) that come from them. Much like the Berlin wall, the wall is gradually being daubed by all sorts of grafitti, from an original Banksy to the undecorated yet dryly witty "Can we have our ball back, please?"

At the same time, though, the wall afforded me one of my more poignant moments of the trip (the somewhat less than poignant I'll come to later.) We had kept silent - a whole bus of us - as we approached the checkpoint out of the city and into Jerusalem, a sort of act of prayerful solidarity with the Palestinians, for whom the queuing is the easy bit. Absorbed in a sort of easy "goody versus baddy" analysis of the whole situation I gazed out of the window, not looking at anything particular. A young soldier with a huge gun hung across his chest, who looked younger than most of my students, gazed back at me. He smiled. I smiled back. As we pulled away and through the gates, he waved. I waved back. A tiny gesture to relieve the monotony of his day, but a little human glimmer of hope in a deeply depressing situation. Of course, they have conscription here, and the kid must have been 18 or 19, and this whole state of affairs is not his fault.

Downtown Bethlehem isn't exactly kicking. A trip venturing out one evening found us heckled twice by shopkeepers who leapt from their front rooms-cum-storefronts as we moseyed past at nine in the evening. The first, who seemed to run some sort of corner shop from an easy chair, shouted after us "You English? You want beer?" We declined and walked a little further up the street, only to be heckled by another store owner who stood in the door of his souvenir shop brandishing an olive wood nativity scene and calling excitedly "You Irish? You want Virgin Mary?"

Our trip into the centre of town encountered little excitement, except an ominous chain cafe that on closer inspection turned out to be called "Stars and Bucks" (the West Bank is happily free from Americanisation, though possibly for the wrong reasons) and a huge Christmas shop that seemed to be open all night and sold the sort of articles you'd buy with a sense of irony even in the mid-70s. Disturbing and garish singing plastic Santas adorned the shop front, strobe lighting attacked the road in front, and a Disneyfied voice loudly rang out with the Twelve Days of Christmas. It was therefore with a certain amount of relief that we stumbled upon Afteem, just off Manger Square, a gloriuos family-run restaurant with no menu, where they bring you what happens to be going down that day. In our case this was real hummus, falafel, salad and lamb kofte to die for, washed down with genuine Palestinian beer (which against all expectation I'd highly recommend, despite the fact it's advertised by a bloke who looks like Borat) Afteem restored my faith in what had appeared during the day to be a sad, down-on-its-luck tourist trap which my inner-Marxist had been brooding on throughout the trip. It was friendly, cheerful, the food was awesome. Oh, and they have their own Facebook group. It seemed like one of many glimmers of optimism in a surprisingly optimistic city, one of the others being the Bethlehem Arab Society of Rehabiltation - an astounding organisation relying largely on outside aid but serving the local community, specialising in rehabilitation and training for disabled members of a society that often shuns them. The centre carries out operations, provides treatment, consultations, support, rehabilitation, training and work opportunities, day centres, nurseries, outreach and crisis internvention. In short, it's a shining miracle in what we shouldn't forget is this most holy of cities.

And so, onwards, through the checkpoint. We're leaving Bethlehem behind - counting our blessings that we're able to leave at all.

Those were the days, my friend/We thought they'd never end

As I haven't been serious in... well, I'm never serious on this blog, it defeats the mere object of my existence, but anyway, there's a time and a place, and this, as the Michael Jackson song somewhat ostentatiously puts it, is it.

Yesterday, someone I knew a long time ago, at school, died. Last year, days after I'd got engaged, and while I was wrapped up in my own little bubble of self-satisfaction, someone else I knew from school, from the same group of friends, also died. I felt on both occasions somewhat unworthy of feeling any sort of grief - guilty for not having kept in touch other than through the odd Facebook message and occasional running into each other at a mutual friend's party; a fear of being swept into a drama of something in which I had no part to play except perhaps a fleeting cameo. Then I found a photograph from ten years ago, and I cried my eyes out.

So here's the cameo. What this has made me realise is how the ripples of someone's life can have such a huge impact on so many people. Yesterday loads upon loads of people who knew Will posted comments on his Facebook page, ranging from heartbreaking to the frankly ridiculous. All of those people knew him; a normal, nice bloke, he'd made an impact on every single one.

I realised when I looked at that picture - which I'll come to in a minute - that in an odd and not wholly melodramatic way I owe my existence to those two guys. This isn't for some deeply symbolic reason; I never dated either (though I may have wanted to, but that's another story), and neither of them talked me down off a bridge or pushed me out of the way of an oncoming car. Nothing like that. It's just that they were there.

I fell into my sixth form days battered and bruised and brimming with teenage angst that would make Morrissey blush. I'd left a small island, much of my family, my lack of real friends (bar one or two) and a miserable few years at an all-girls secondary school I hated, and arrived on this huge, shining campus with its own golf course populated by malevolent, designer-clad youths who screamed with laughter at any hint of a Northern accent, or if you hadn't heard of Armani, who innocuously asked you the price of your ball dress knowing full well it came off the peg in Marks while theirs was - ahem - Prada. It was a mix of those who were very, very good at things - the Sports and Arts scholars, the Chinese academics, the National Youth Orchestra Violinists - those who had been told they were very, very good at things, and those who didn't need to be good at anything, because Daddy was paying and would pay until he died and passed on the inheritance. And in the midst of this 3 lovely normal guys and one loveable intellectual, all a full year above me, scooped me up andindulged me for a whole year. This was the best year of my life.

I realise now how much I owe to all of them, not least because one of them is now one of my closest friends. These beautiful blokes' blokes danced with me at the school ball; they came to my concerts. Guys who hung out together on epic treks (they did the Ten Tors challenge and talked of joining the army - and did) listened to me babble on about saving the world, socialism, and my "band" (Lapsang - 'nuff said), and gently took the piss out of my vegetarianism, misguided attempts at Marxism, and the undercover relationship everyone was convinced I was having with the budding author in our group. While the School's elite and the resident tormenters bore down on you from the Rep Step and skulked around the quad, we occupied our very own table... in the library. We talked about The Now Show, and we plotted against the new headmaster, a chap who made us laugh so much it hurt when he condemned his students for "unseemly displays of affection" and told us he didn't like to think of our new outfits as a uniform, rather "a dress code with compulsory elements". We were the Resistance, our own brand of revolutionaries. Only we really knew what was going on. I have it on record. Dom, in my leaver's book, wrote "I hope you survive another year of Mr P and all the other cronies plotting against the school. Good luck in your crusades about whatever the next peaceful demonstration is about. Anyway, have fun."

And I did have fun. I had so much fun. This was truly the best year of my life. For the first time I can remember, I felt challenged, wanted, cajoled, supported - I felt happy. When they left I was able to stand a little taller, feel a bit more confident. I got on with stuff, though stuff was never that good again.

And I found the picture. On their last day of school before A level study leave, with me, their token girl and protegee looking on in giggles, a giant pink bedsheet appeared hung from a window high up in the theatre, and on it massive letters for all to see, some reference, I presume, to our Head/Dictator, as we saw it: "Cheer up, the worst is yet to come. From the class of '99".

Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.

There were five of us. Now, disparate and floundering, there are three. Will and Dom - I now realise how much I owe to you both. I love you and I miss you. Thank you.