So I woke up in the morning to find myself face to face with an eyeball and it didn’t belong to Hanan. Don’t get ahead of yourselves, this is not a confession of anything dodgy. This slimy, bloodshot eyeball was not attached to a person, it was just stuck to the side of my bed staring at me like a producer willing me to finish a script…yes, the boys never fail to go to bed without thinking of beautiful things to leave for the mothers who have endured countless sleepless nights for them. I’ll stop now, before the violins kick in.
The day got better when Hanan announced that she wanted my script and shot list.
‘Script for what?’
‘Our new Middle Eastern cooking show. We’re shooting it in two weeks.’
When I finished crying, I asked her more details. She’s been planning this for a good while, to be fair, but since I was appealing to you all for help finding a presenter just a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t take it seriously. When will I learn? Nothing stops La Kattan, and sure enough, about ten seconds after I landed from Mumbai, she had set up a meeting with a very old friend who looks incredibly young, who loves food and cooks it, and who is half Lebanese, half Syrian and married to a Palestinian. If that woman can’t figure out what to do with a dead lamb and some rice, no-one can. As ever, my pared down bumbling idea that a couple of us might just show up with a DVCam and give it a shot were blasted out of the window and I found myself in a full scale production meeting about prime lenses, 3rd Assistant Directors and Production Designers. Ahh, it felt like prepping for The World Unseen. It even felt like prepping for I Can’t Think Straight (but without the harassment and weeping). So now I am behind a script, a shot list and a concept, but in the name of research I am retiring to bed (relatively) early and watching ‘Caramel’, a beautiful film set in Beirut. If you haven’t seen it, please do.
In other news, Hanan has been busy embarking on preparation for the TEDx conference that she decided to host with the lovely Israeli woman we met in India. The idea is to bring together Palestinians and Israelis, with a focus on women, who are doing interesting and remarkable things in a world where it is hard to focus on anything but survival. Hanan is from Jordan, but before that she is from Jerusalem and Bethlehem which feels very meaningful to someone born in Surrey. The event is almost a year away and it’s already been quite an effort in diplomacy which, I suspect, is the one subject Hanan must have flunked in school. So we’ve had protests that only Palestine should have a TEDx conference, we’ve had hassles about the name. Hanan's wonderful cousin Muna from Bethlehem even sent us Palestinian football kit for the boys. It had to be a place, and we didn’t want an Israeli name or a Palestinian one, but something inclusive. Some incredibly brilliant genius (I can’t say who, but she was struggling with shot lists for kebabs at the same time) came up with ‘Tedx HolyLand’. What do I think? Funny you should ask, because I was just about to tell you. I think that anything that humanizes two opposing camps to each other can’t be a bad thing. I think dialogue might expose pain, it might get nowhere, but it might, just might, get someone somewhere to think differently. And I think, like any good Brit sitting down over a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, even in the Holy Land, is definitely the way to go. 29th October 2010, East Jerusalem. Be there or be square...