i am writing columns for Kazin, a sloven magazine. this is the first one.

C.Anesi, 27th october, 2006

New cocktail: LondON.



A new smell

It has got a strange smell, London.
And it is all around. In every shop you walk. Hidden behind the corner of roads, ready to jump in your nose, in your mind and you loose your thoughts into it.
It is a smell of diversity. Of uniqueness. It is a smell of a freshly baked cake.
However, it is a bizarre one. A smell of many different flavours all at once.
And I, walking London, I only wish, every second I live, to taste it all.

London. It is very different from my
Home

All the violence I see
Smell every day
The only explosions I hear here are the beats of techno music Friday night in T bar.
And the only blood splashed around is the one in the pan when we cook some pasta.
London is pretty different from my home. But everyone will feel at home, in London. None is foreigner -- here. Tourists are foreigners, but everyone becomes citizen after two days of London. After living it a bit.
London is somehow like a woman to make yours. It depends all on you, how good are you in playing with her? She may wholly donate herself to you. Bit by bit every person who starts to live London will get in touch with her -- deeper and deeper.
Her soul is the most perfumed soul I ever been in touch to.
It does not matter what are you here, none ask where you do come from. My home? My home, in London, is finally the World. Whatever tonality, you are a London citizen; she has got the rare quality of being a home for anyone.

Since I left Gaza strip I found myself splashed across a completely new life, a totally different environment. The risk of being shot or killed from a bomb exploding randomly somewhere is just non - existent, here.
I still cannot rationally believe it.

Angels
Surround me

It is only two weeks I am in London and I already found a “family”. I belong to a program of scholarships that sees involved young people from both Palestine and Israel studying and living together at the same university. I am lucky to be here, I am lucky to give chance to dialogue, forgotten aspect in a time in which hope seems to have abandon our lands. After the Israeli Government action of this summer against Lebanon, get together and talks about an utopia known as peace sounds...vain.
But all this sounds more than constructive to me. When better than now young voices for dialogue are needed to get together and build a common testament of will?
When better than now the world need to see that is never to late to showing hope paths?
When better than now the conditions are fertile for stopping the absurdity of this conflict that is overlapping humanity?
It is very hard for me to wish to stop it, there are many injustice that has been played on Palestinians that I wish, inside, to avenge. Not on innocent, I don’t want other blood other violence other death embracing me. But how could revenge take place in those two countries rather than in a violent way? Violence generates violence, and us, silly men, keep the cycle on. I want to smash it into an end. I feel in London the parody of a peaceful Middle East can take substance.
When I walk the road with my new Israeli friends, when I drink a beer with my new Israeli friends, when I dance the whole night with my Israeli friends, how can I consider them enemies?
Sometimes I wonder. And Mumble. We are in London. That is the reason why we are safe: from ourselves from our stories from our societies from the evil conflict we are in. In London we are free, free to love each others. But then, back, we are not even free to meet each other. I wonder. And I answered myself. We have been uprooted from the context, uprooted from the tragedy we were living in.
It is like a play, all of it, now from my Londoner balcony I watch out the movement of humanity, of a vast mixed Humanity, a cocktail of cultures and beliefs and I feel it now inside like an explosion: the sensation of being a part of a whole.
World.
Of the same damned World. Still so beautiful, and poetic.
Loay comes. He switch on his cigarette. Smoke is playing with air. Or maybe is air playing with smoke. Pushing it up, down, laterally, away. Like our lives, in this conflict. We are watching people walking, cars running the road like crazy horses in a field, finally free after long rest. Every thing in London is moving, maybe London is: movement.
London is a dance.
Yeah, probably London is a dance, a freaky one.
And us, we, here, we are trapped in its perfume of continuing change.