"In a few hours from now, Jordan's exactly where I'll be."
OK, that was the theory. But I wasn't - I ended up stressing out over going there at all, with full-on nightmares on a regular basis etc etc, most of which stemmed from seeing my friends in Mike's Place making world headlines a couple of years back. After some 5 months in Israel, where everyone says exactly what they think regardless of the consequences, I could see myself starting an international incident within minutes of crossing the border. Besides which, I started renovating my area of zend.com at the beginning of this month, and this exercise has left me with no time to mess around running from country to country every time I get a short visa. All things considered, I went illegal for the final Israeli fortnight and headed back to the UK, fuming quietly to myself over Israeli visa regulations.
I said goodbye to most of my Jerusalem friends on the 15th, and spent the 16th packing and cleaning. This took longer than anticipated, and I didn't make it to Ramat Gan in time to say goodbye to the guys and gals in the Zend office. It was around 9pm when I waved back sadly at Denise, my erstwhile landlady, flatmate and provider of cooked potatoes, and set off for Tel Aviv with what seemed to me a huge amount of luggage. I had to buy a suitcase from the markets off Agripas earlier in the day to accommodate the books, jumpers and jeans I bought in Israel - still everything didn't quite make it in, so I had a lot of tonnage to haul. And it really was a haul - there's no road near my pad in Jerusalem, it's strictly steps (Ha Madragot), and it took over half an hour to find myself a taxi because I took the steps downhill rather than attempt to go up. Still, I was (eventually) glad I'd done as I did - Ariel Sharon drove by as we queued at the Bezalel traffic lights, which seemed a fitting farewell from Jerusalem to me.
Erm - make that 'seven cars, one of which contained a girl with a megaphone, all of which contained security men with guns, three of which had darkened windows, one of which may have contained Ariel Sharon'. The rest of us mere mortals in the queue had to pull over onto the pavement as the big man passed by.
Tel Aviv... ah, that was so sad and so sweet. 'Why are you going home?' 'Israel doesn't want me any more.' 'But they never asked us!' (Alan).
So I hugged Gal, and Sarah, and Alan, and the guy who plays the keyboard so beautifully, and Josh, whose birthday it was, and Jasmin, who is not having a Good Time, and Emma, and Yattir, and the guy who sells incense (who handed me a bunch especially for Nigel, 'The King'), and Canadian Dave, and Sammy, and Barry, and Assaf - and the ever-lovely Yariv, who came an extra 5 miles just to say goodbye. All too soon I had to leave, and sober up in the 3am taxi to the airport.
The Zend letter probably saved me a strip-search, and Gal a 5am phone call, but I still got the full two-hour interrogation. 'You don't have much luggage.' (I don't?) 'What did you bring when you came here?' 'My rucksack, my laptop, and a carrier bag.' 'Where is the carrier bag now?' 'Huh?' I found a carrier bag to show. 'This is a carrier bag.' 'Ah...' the security guy got the giggles, thankfully, and the interrogation was much easier from then on.
So - home, via Cyprus, and a guy named Richard who chain-smoked alongside me in Larnaca Airport for 3 hours happened to be driving to Huntingdon from Heathrow Airport. Basically he was passing my area, so I asked for (and was given) a lift to Stevenage, where I could catch a bus home - or at least, to Hitchin Station, which is the next best thing, as I actually live some 5 miles up the road from there. By the time the bus came I'd reconsidered, and asked for a ticket to the town centre instead. 'Hitchin Town Centre? But you live in Baldock, don't you?' asked the driver.
Yep, that's home alright...
I went into the Red Hart, phoned Nigel and asked him to pick me up when he could, touched my very-ex-partner Floyd's plaque in a 'hi I'm back' kinda way, realised I was out of tune, and settled down amongst my luggage to get re-conditioned into Englishness. By the time Nigel arrived to pick up his incense sticks, duty-free cigarettes and me, there was a band going through a sound-check, so we shouted greetings to one another over the strains of 'I don't need no fuckin' leadAH!' (I guess they don't know any Beatles covers.) We planned our evening - it being St Paddy's night and all that - and drove over to Baldock in his new sports car, the one with a trunk the size of a lady's handbag.
Nigel having spent Christmas week in Tel Aviv with me, he was very aware of the strangenesses of rural England, and did his best to mitigate the culture clash. We did a minor pub crawl around Baldock until we found some Irish people, drank a Guinness with them, then went for a traditional English dinner - Chicken Dansak, Aloo Gobi, Mushroom Pilau and Peshwari Naan - before rounding off the (for me) 40-hour day with a glass of red wine and grateful unconsciousness.
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