Shamim Sarif's blog

I’ve been in the snow, becoming quite unhinged since my last blog. Munich and the DLD Conference was a source of great satisfaction and not just from the sausages and beer.

I was awestruck by an astronomer from Harvard who gave a talk on how to identify life on other planets. I was somewhat shy to actually meet this genius man at that evening’s party, but Hanan marched up to him to shake hands.

‘You made that movie, didn’t you?’ the astronomer demanded, excited.

I looked around, bemused. Clearly, he had mistaken me for Steven Spielberg – not a common mistake, to be sure, even since I’ve gotten old enough for facial hair and glasses. For what movies would this man possibly be interested in, except for ‘ET’ ?

‘I Can’t Think Straight!’ he declared. ‘I loved that film.’

Reader, he wasn’t even a lesbian astronomer. My ecstasy was complete. We agreed to swap books and signatures when he next came to London.

In the meantime, I headed to Switzerland a day later with my son Ethan and his school ski team.  This little sojourn involved sharing a very small room with a 13 year old whose fingertips are magnetically compelled to download dodgy apps to my beloved Macbook Pro and iPad, and whose knowledge of English is somewhat limited by his lack of understanding of the word ‘No’. I decided that a zen-like, relaxed attitude was the best way to enjoy our quality time together.

As if sensing my slackening attitude, Hanan Skyped me at once.

‘Is Ethan eating vegetables?’ she asked.

I cast my mind back to the mountain of french fries I had noticed on his plate at dinner.

‘Er…yes,’ I said.

‘And are you doing mantras?’ she demanded.

If you counted Ethan saying ‘There’s no way I’m doing mantras’ ten times in a row, then yes, I guessed we were.

I headed down for a meeting with the other parents, where the leader of our group waved a video camera and asked if anyone had any experience whatsoever with making films.

I decided to keep quiet, but a couple of the parents who had attended our charity screening of The World Unseen at the school for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund looked at me narrowly.

‘I’ve made a few films,’ I offered weakly.

‘Great!’ the other mother cried. ‘Family videos?’

‘Full length features,’ I muttered.

Well that was that.  I was put on movie duty and reported back to Hanan on Skype. She called me immediately.

‘You have to get outside,’ she said.

‘It’s like, minus 10 degrees, and I’ve been on a mountainside taking shots of 157 distant dots skiing through fog and snow down a mountain and now I have to figure out which ones are our kids,’ I protested.

‘You need establishing shots of the hotel,’ my producer continued, ignoring my whining. ‘Pictures of them putting on boots, helmets and skis. Behind the scenes interviews. The struggle. The drama!’

Well I captured the struggle pretty well  as we all scrambled for seats on Easyjet. The drama I’d already gotten when my child was told off for toasting his fondue bread in the candle flame at dinner.

Back home, I sat down to my first full day in London in a while, ready to tackle my To Do list, when Hanan looked up from her laptop.

‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she said.

The last time she asked that, I ended up pregnant, but I was confident this would be something quick and easy.

‘Can you make me a hot chocolate?’

I looked at my watch. Having another child would possibly be quicker and definitely less hassle. For since we had the hot chocolate to end all others at Berthillon in Paris, a spoon of powder mixed in some milk is no longer acceptable at Chateau Sarif-Kattan.

I subtly tried to sidestep some of the extras.

‘You don’t want whipped cream on top, do you?’

‘Yes please. If it’s not too much trouble.’

I started whipping. With the other hand, I searched for chocolate. It had to be real chocolate and the right chocolate. I found two bars, brought from Paris, one milk, one dark. I offered them for inspection.

‘Perhaps a bit of both?’ Hanan asked politely.

Bien sur. I broke off a little of each and melted them gently in a pan, whisking in a little mik to loosen the pure, thick mixture.

Next, more milk heated to exactly the right temperature and then frothed and gently poured over the chocolate. Then the whipped cream spooned on top.

Exhausted, we sat back to enjoy the results, and pondered a good day. Our younger boy, Luca, had got accepted to Kings College (where Ethan is) and had made it past a three hour examination, a two hour activity morning and a full on interview. After that, I had half expected him to get an offer of a partnership at Goldman Sachs.

‘You know what this means?’ Hanan asked. ‘You can take both of them on the school ski trip next year.’

I swapped my hot chocolate for something stronger…

In Paris, Ethan, Shamim and Luca take lessons to perfect Hanan's hot chocolate requirements...

Well, after the New Year’s Eve fiasco involving lost keys and flat tyres, I had all good intentions of staying home for a while – till, for example, July.

But the very next week we had an invitation to our friend Sarah’s birthday party. Now Sarah is a highly respected neuroscientist, so I prepared with a happy heart and knew this ‘party’ would undoubtedly be a quiet evening of intellectual conversation.  But then we got an email asking guests to wear a mask.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Marina, another friend who was attending.’I've got lots of masks, I’ll bring them for all of us.’

So our band of 5 women arrived and met outside the venue. I don’t know about you, but a masked party suggests to me Venetian velvet eyewear. We waited in anticipation as Marina rummaged in her bag.

‘Who wants to be the Queen?’ she asked, gaily pulling out the face of our esteemed monarch, complete with white elastic and slitty eye holes.

‘Is that the only option?’ I asked grimly.

‘No, of course not,’ returned Marina and I breathed a sigh of relief.  ‘I have Prince Phillip, Charles, Camilla, William and Kate.’

Reader, it was a hard choice. I ended up as Prince Charles, and in we all went as the Royal family. If I tell you that entrance was the most subdued thing about the party, you’ll have a good idea that neuroscientists can have a flying time with the best of them.

So when our next invitation came, to Lisa Tchenguiz’s birthday party, I was more prepared.  If you’re a recent friend of this page, let me explain that Lisa is one of our Executive Producers on The World Unseen and I Can’t Think Straight. She is also no stranger to the joys of animal print home decor, large diamonds and dancing on tables in St Tropez.  She is to parties what I am to the music of Karen Carpenter.  A global ambassador.

‘Where’s the party?’ I asked Hanan.

‘Annabels,’ she replied. One of the most exclusive nightclubs in London.

‘What time?’ I ventured. We were leaving at 5am for Munich and the DLD Conference the following morning.

‘Starts at 10pm.’

‘Can I wear my Prince Charles mask?’

‘I really think it’s best not to.’

‘Then I’m not going.’

I could see Hanan’s eyebrows knitting above her Macbook screen.  ‘Lisa’s like family to us. We have to go.’

I really could not see the correlation between the first sentence and the second. Luckily, Lisa herself knows me better than my wife does, and understood that, unlike everyone else in her life, I would rather be in bed with a book at 11pm than sitting down for dinner, even with my dodgy mask on.

We took her out for lunch instead – and I write this having been to Munich and returned already, from the DLD Conference.

Run by the indomitable Steffi Czerny, we were able to spend time with our friend and chairwoman Maria Furtwangler, who interviewed me at DLDWomen last June, and also heard talks from a host of tech geniuses, as well as Arianna Huffington and Yoko Ono, and you’ll be glad to know that we attended even more parties. Clearly, that’s another blog. For now, I have to go and exchange my party face mask for a nice cup of cocoa…

We are not amused...the Royals rock the house before being analysed by 20 neuroscientists...

So, I had New Year’s Eve all planned out. Our first New Year’s in our new home. Hanan’s dodgy and recently dislocated knee would have a rest, my brain would be gently marinated in champagne, and the last two chickens that had survived Christmas at Waitrose supermarket would be roasted. I had (almost) figured out which wine to drink, and I had in mind an 8pm bedtime for the boys and 9pm for me. Yes, I know the only person that you all know who actually sleeps at 9pm is your grandmother, but I get 3 nights off a year OK? (New Year’s Eve, my birthday and Christmas – and, as a confirmed agnostic and previous Muslim, I had to fight for the latter).

Then our dear friend Katherine called. By the end of the call we had been convinced to abandon the raw chickens and drive to her place with our children for an early dinner. Well, I channelled my own inner socialite and realized that I had been perhaps too hermit-like for my wife and children. Thanks to me, they had all slept through the turn of the millennium, while everyone else had been witnessing a once in a thousand year event, or sitting in a bunker waiting for the world to end, so maybe it was time to re-evaluate. It’s fine to be a reclusive novelist when you’re around 75 and have won a Nobel prize or three, but I was clearly enjoying the fruits of the eccentric artist far too early.

So we jaunted off to Katherine’s, which is always a pleasure, and feasted on crab risotto, prawns, lovely wines and good company.

It all went brilliantly well until we left. Hanan drove home. She had tried out her previously-dislocated knee for five minutes in the car on the way there and had insisted it was fine and that I could have a glass of wine. Like the feckless wife I am, I took her at her word. And the knee held up well throughout the half hour drive home. As we pulled up outside our house, I felt in my pockets for the house keys. Nothing. Frantically, I searched my bag, the car, but I knew it was pointless. They’d been in my pocket.

‘I told you to leave the keys in the car!’ Hanan said, rubbing her knee.

She had.

‘Did you even take them out of the house?’ she asked.

‘Of course I did!’ but my protests were muffled as I scrabbled around the floor of the car feeling for keys but coming up only with lint-covered plasticine, a piece of lego and a toy car. I conveniently ignored the fact that I had forgotten the keys about ten times over the course of our relationship.

Then Ethan piped up from the back, now that he was bored of riling up an exhausted Luca.

‘The other children were playing with your coats,’ he threw in. ‘Because I hid my chocolates underneath it.’

Hanan swung the car around and we headed back to Katherine’s, a good 30 minute drive. The keys were indeed there. We collected them and grimly set off home again. By now it was close to midnight, and my dreams of an early night had evaporated under the fiery glare of my wife, nursing a now painful knee (having driven one and a half hours back and forth in search of our house keys), and two overtired children whinging in the back seat.

It was not quite the romantic, appreciative turn of the New Year I’d imagined. As we drove up the steep hill about 3 miles from home, the fireworks began over the London Eye and the bridges. There is a small area on that hill where you can see back and watch those very fireworks and as Hanan caught them in her rear view mirror, she smiled.

‘We’re here, we might as well watch them,’ she said. Deftly, she swung the car around, drove back down, and promptly hit a kerb stone. The tyre screamed, the car ground to a halt. I got out. The tyre was as flat as a pancake. We tried grinding up the hill but it was no good.

‘Happy New Year!’ I offered.

Before my wife could throw me out of the car, a young man wielding a beer can approached the car and tapped on the window.

‘I’m a mechanic,’ he said. ‘I can sort it out for you. Where’s the spare tyre?’

Naturally, my wife looked at me for clarification, since in our house I am not only tech support but in charge of all things mechanical.

I didn’t have a clue where the tyre could be stored but drifted towards the back of the car and popped open the boot, guided by a something I might have picked up from my dad 30 years ago, or else watched in a TV show only 20 years ago.

‘What is all this stuff?’ Hanan asked, appalled.

The boot was crammed with carrier bags full of books to be donated to the charity shop up the road (but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet) and stuff I had been planning to take to the office (but I hadn’t been there over the holidays). No sign of a tyre. I poked around, knowingly, but by now, Ethan had used the iPhone as a torch and the mechanic had figured out the spare was under the car. 45 minutes later, he was sweating in the zero degree temperature, trying to raise the tyre off the ground with the pitifully small jack.

‘Would a bigger jack help?’ Hanan asked.

‘Yeah, but…’ he shrugged and kept going.

‘Why don’t you find us a bigger jack?’ Hanan asked me. There were so many answers to that question from ‘It’s after midnight on New Year’s and everything’s shut’ to ‘We’re on a quiet road miles from any garage’ that I just shrugged. With the air of one tired of having to explain the obvious, Hanan pointed me in the direction of a magnificent house across the road, with lights blazing at every window. Feeling somewhat sheepish, I sloped off and walked towards it.

Smartly I knocked at the door and tried to look trustworthy and yet nonchalant. A tall blonde twenty-something woman answered my knock. That kind of thing usually happens to Hanan, not me, but I quickly blurted out the highlights of our sorry tale, and her French boyfriend appeared. We all trailed out to the car, where the mechanic was in the first stages of cardiac arrest but the car was still not off the ground.

The Frenchman went straight for the spare tyre and squeezed it.

‘Zees tyre ‘as ‘ad it!’ he said.

Hanan looked to me for translation which is odd, since she speaks fluent French.

‘The tyre’s had it,’ I said.

‘It’s flat also,’ he confirmed.

The mechanic stopped jacking up the car. The blonde went back for her car keys and insisted on driving us all the way home. We staggered into the house at one a.m.

‘I’m hungry!’ Luca said. Well, it had been several hours since his last meal. Hanan made toast, we wrestled them into bed and lay down ourselves around 2.

Hanan nursed her very sore knee and I tried not to count the few hours till I had planned to be up.

‘You know, it was lovely being out, but I think next year we should stay home,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘Yes. We could have a nice roast chicken. And an early night. What do you think?’

I think I wish I’d thought of that myself.

The Sarif-Kattan's toast the New Year shortly before standing in the cold for 2 hours and renouncing any further social interaction till 2046

I’m writing this in the waiting room of a medical centre, where Hanan has just left me to get an MRI on her dislocated kneecap.

I watched her go, leaning in pain on her stick, my eyes moist.

‘Are you sure I can’t come in with you?’ I whispered, all but hanging on to her good leg.

She replied with all the romanticism I have come to know and love.

‘Waste of time,’ she said. ‘Make sure you’ve finished a blog by the time I’m out.’

Right then. I retreated to the waiting room, chastened, only to find she had pulled open the door for a last word before she was separated from me to be sucked into a dark machine.

‘What did you want to tell me?’ I asked softly, encouragingly.

‘You have an hour,’ she said. ‘I asked the nurse.’

So here I am blogging. How did this mishap occur, I hear you ask.

My wife wasn’t skiing, mountain biking or even chasing after me with a new To Do list, she was sitting on the Eurostar to Paris, where we were taking our now annual Christmas day trip with the boys, invited by our friend Kelly and her daughter Chatham (the boys’ cooking cohort in Kitchen Chaos).

As Hanan twisted to get out of her seat to look at something on Kelly’s iPad, her knee sort of stayed behind, and popped out. We all looked on aghast as she clutched her leg, eyes rolling in excruciating pain.

‘Pop it back in, mama!’ was Ethan’s practical advice, and she did. It took an hour of recovery, for she turned quite grey and short of breath in the aftermath. But, like the true brave spirit she is, she recovered in time to hobble off the train and insisted on continuing the day in Paris and refusing the train staff’s offer of a wheelchair.

Of course, we found out later she should have been splinted up and immobile for 72 hours, but instead we all drew on our medical training (which sadly ends at applying band aids) and bought Hanan a walking stick and decided that the best treatment would be a meal. We headed for a brasserie in Isle St Louis and ate copious amounts of steak, chicken, frites and cheese. As we limped out, some of us staggering from dislocated knees, the rest of us just overfull, Hanan suggested that while we walked off the meal she would wait for us in Berthillon, perhaps the best ice cream shop in the world.

Well, we took exercise for all of 15 minutes before we joined her for ice cream and a hot chocolate that came in 3 serving dishes (containing melted chocolate, steamed frothy milk and creme chantilly respectively) on a silver tray. We tried to tear ourselves away, but we were slack from overindulgence and the children had fallen into food comas.

‘We should go. I organized a surprise that starts in 10 minutes,’ Kelly said.

I put down my spoon, relieved. A museum, or a walking tour would be just the thing to stop us inhaling any more food.

‘What is it?’ I asked, eager for deliverance from chocolate.

‘I booked a lesson for you and kids to learn to make macaroons…’

Though I wanted to sleep off the 100 pounds of food I had already consumed, I channelled my inner Henry VIII and went to the class. It was an excellent class, though our meringues turned out a dodgy shade of grey.

‘They look very contemporary,’ commented the head of the cookery school. ‘Sort of like pebbles in a Zen garden.’

I was just grateful not to be tempted to add a grey, Zen macaroon to list of food I’d already consumed. But while we had been cooking, and undeterred by shifting kneecaps, my wife had been taking a cab across Paris to buy cheese.

‘But there’s a cheese shop right next door,’ I pointed out. ‘You should be resting your knee!’

‘Cheese has to be from Androuet,’ she said, as if that explained everything. ‘The man said this Camembert will be ready in 2 days.’

‘Really?’ I was slightly sceptical. ‘What time?’

‘In time for lunch,’ Hanan shot back. ‘I got a selection for all of us to take home,’ she said. ‘And on the way to the Eurostar we need to pick up the ice cream from Berthillon.’

‘Didn’t we just have ice cream?’ I asked.

‘I ordered it to take back,’ returned my wife. ‘I’ve done it for 25 years, they know how to pack it.’

Of course they do. I dragged myself back onto the Eurostar home laden down with cheeses in one hand and enough ice cream for a party at Versailles in the other.

We’d barely settled into our seats, when Kelly whipped out two baguettes.

‘Those won’t last till tomorrow,’ I told her sagely. ‘Baguettes need to be eaten the same day.’

‘We’re eating them now,’ Kelly confirmed. ‘Unpack that Camembert, will you?’

‘But it’s not ready for another 47 hours,’ I began. I was overruled and we opened the vacuum-packed cheese, filling the train carriage with a scent that made Luca weep (and not in a good way) and had the other passengers wonder if they had ever left Paris.

I was too full to eat a bite. But I did.

I could have written it off as a day of indulgence, but we’d just been to see ‘Meet Me in St Louis’ only a couple of days earlier, also with Kelly, at the British Film Institute, an afternoon that had started with a blowout meal at Royal China, where Hanan ordered enough crispy duck to fortify an entire Chinese province.

That sojourn had continued at the Christmas market outside the BFI, where hot waffles and Spanish churros were on offer.

‘I think we should get just a few,’ Hanan suggested.

‘I can’t eat a thing!’ I protested.

‘Just to change the taste from the Chinese food.’

How could one argue with such practicality? We tucked into hot churros, dipping them into chocolate sauce, while Kelly and her sister sipped at mulled wine and pancakes.

By the time we went back into the foyer of the BFI there was a mere 20 minutes till the movie.

‘You know what would be perfect now?’ Hanan asked. I hesitated. A lie down? A colonic irrigation?

‘A hot chocolate,’ Hanan said. I went to get hot drinks for everyone, coming back in time to find that Kelly and Hanan had comandeered the very table where I had signed books after ‘I Can’t Think Straight’ had played at the BFI.

‘Why do you need such a big table?’ I asked.

Kelly regarded me as if I had lost my brain cells back at the fair. ‘For snacks,’ she said.

A big biscuit tin lined with foil and filled with homemade cakes and biscuits was hefted onto the table, followed by bags of crisps and nuts. Luca knocked over a cup and a trail of crumbs marked the spot where we lingered. A security guard cast us an askance look but we were mid munch so he hesitated to interrupt us. The feast carried on inside the cinema, where Judy Garland sang to the gentle crackle of tin foil and sweet packets. Well, Christmas comes but once a year. And my arteries and Hanan’s kneecaps are glad of that. Happy Holidays to one and all…we wish you a wonderful holiday season, a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year, filled with old movies, good food and just a little healthy exercise…

The Sarif-Kattan clan prowl around Paris looking for their next meal

Namaste, now that we are back from glorious India where we were winding down 2011 and getting ready for 2012.

This is Hanan here, writing my yearly blog for Shamim, as I promised her and I am good at keeping to calendar tasks!

Like India itself, I was conflicted as I left from Delhi with a heavy heart as my wife stayed behind for a few more days while I headed back to my boys in London and to make just it in time to Luca’s school Christmas carol service (he is in the school choir) and to then take Ethan at 4 am to his school for his ski trip as he made it to the school ski team. His school won last year’s UK school races (we are the proud mommies) and years ago I stopped trying to keep up with him on the slopes.

I left Shamim at 4.30 am at the hotel to get a car to Delhi airport only to find a big wedding was still in full swing and the lobby was crowded with wedding guests.  My car for the airport, which we booked the night before, was nowhere to be found and after making a big fuss for over 20 minutes and being assured  “2 more minutes Madam”, the driver finally shows up, relaxed and without a care in the world.

I thought it might be a good idea to close my eyes during the drive to the airport but within 10 minutes the car abruptly stopped in the middle of a very busy highway with traffic flying by, even at 5 am. When I asked the driver what had happened, he replied:

‘Fog, Madam.’

I looked outside the car. There was the usual pollution haze of Delhi but nothing special to cause a sudden stop in the middle of a busy highway.

The driver saw my confusion and pointed to the windscreen that was fogged up. He put the hazard lights on and sat back to wait in the middle of the road as cars zoomed past us. I took off my safety belt and lunged to the front of the car to press the steam button and explained that it would help clear the fog. He eyed me suspiciously but as the steam vanished he proceeded to the airport driving as if we were in a formula one race and ignoring any red lights along the way.

It reminded me of my car drive from Delhi to Jaipur a few days back when we arrived in India. I flew to Delhi, while Shamim went to Mumbai (possibly to take a 10 hour break from being nagged to work on the plane) and I met Liat at Delhi airport at 1.30 am. Instead of waiting for the 6 am flight to Jaipur, our dear friend Aseem kindly arranged for a car and a driver to drive us there.

Many years back, in my haircare days, Shamim and I had visited Dharamsala. I asked the hotel receptionist to reconfirm our flight. We had flown in on a tiny little plane that looked like a reject from the War, with the seats around us lurching forwards and backwards.

The hotel receptionist had then informed me:

‘Madam, we are not sure the plane from Delhi is coming this week’

I calmly informed him that we need to catch our flight back to London and the plane not coming was not an option.

‘Don’t worry madam, if there are passengers next week, the plane will be coming to Dharamsala’

So I immediately asked him to arrange a road trip with their professional hotel driver only to have two young kids show up in their uncle’s beat up air-condition-free car to drive two women across India to Delhi. It turned out they had never left Dharamsala before. I am not sure anyone truly recovers from a straight 11 hours journey on Indian roads and one day Shamim will have to write a blog about our adventures in India.

Earlier this week and as we were driving from Delhi, Liat thought we were on the set of Harry Potter, dematerialising just as a crash seemed imminent. At 2 am the streets were crowded with trucks and buses and our driver merrily continued to drive at full speed towards the gigantic trucks, somehow always managing at the last minute to squeeze between the trucks while zigzagging and beeping throughout the 6-hour car journey to Jaipur.

But what a wonderful way to end the year – in India to see dear friends, to meet new amazing people, to experience amazing talks at INK and to reflect on the year.

Having made the decision to sell our flat and move from central London to Wimbledon was a big decision for us after almost 15 years in Chelsea and away from our friends, our city life and our office. I thought of it as moving to the country even though Shamim assured me it was only 5 miles away from where we lived.

When Shamim and I moved in together as a couple and started our own family, we decided to do so in Chelsea as we both loved the village feel, the beautiful brick buildings and living near the river Thames and opposite Battersea park where we shot parts of I Can’t Think Straight and where we went each week with our boys to enjoy the park and where Shamim would go for her morning run in and come back with great ideas and stories for her books , films and music.

But now for our boys, it was time to move closer to Ethan’s school to remove his daily school commute and to put Luca in a new school close to our new family home.  So we sold the flat, bought a house and ended up spending the year living with Lebanese and Polish builders who are still in the house working away. We tried to explain to the Polish builder that he is not re-creating Versailles and we would like to have our home completed to spend our first Christmas without builders and boxes. Unfortunately he informed us that we will have this Christmas boxed in and that his Polish window supplier has let him down. I suppose we will just have to paint pictures of a garden onto the plywood.

2011 was another amazing year full of changes, challenges and wonderful things and amazing people. We completed The House of Tomorrow (inspired by TEDxHolyLand) after a follow up family trip to the HolyLand, we completed the music sound track, Shamim was invited as the closing panelist to the DLDWomen in Munich, she then condensed my marketing book from a thousand pages to two hundred pages, putting aside her fourth novel temporarily, we moved to Canada for the summer for Shamim to become Canadian and we took on the challenges of moving to a new house, a new part of London while learning to live with builders for almost a year.

And of course it took me a year to convince Shamim that we should publish her blogs from last year as a book, which we hope to have ready soon. We are working on many exciting projects for 2012 including the amazing and talented Leonie Casanova’s first album.

We are so grateful for the continued support and generosity from fans from all over the world. When we started on this journey of films, books and music, we had no idea that we will create an Enlightenment community that is growing each year. It is touching to know about the many friendships that have been formed directly between fans from all over the world and as a result of their passion for our films and books and music.

Here is to another amazing year for everyone and may 2012 continue to be a journey of discovery, new experiences and love.

Hanan and Shamim find a new companion for their next Indian road trip

I stood in the courtyard of a palace in Jaipur, wearing a fragranced rose garland around my neck, listening to the drum-laden charm of Indian folk songs and watching the most incredible lunar eclipse in the sky above the old stone towers around me. It was a moment to savour. Or perhaps, just to capture…

‘Come over here and stand with these dancers,’ Hanan commanded, breaking my reverie. She waved the camera at me and hauled me over to where a group of bemused women covered in bangles were waiting to take the stage. I stood amongst them and grinned.

‘OK now dance with them!’ The dancers and I looked at each other doubtfully. ‘Come on, don’t be shy!’ Hanan coaxed. I put a half-hearted hand in the air and shuffled my feet in a dance-like fashion. The dancers looked at me pityingly. One of them smirked.

Oblivious to my humiliation, Hanan was on a roll.

‘OK now, let’s take a picture with this man,’ Hanan said. I dutifully stood next to a bewildered waiter wearing traditional garb and carrying a plate of paneer masala.

‘OK, now go on stage and dance!’ Hanan suggested. But I drew the line. I’d had only the one  glass of Indian wine, and I wasn’t ready to sacrifice my fellow INK conferenceattendees to my flailing limbs and a sense of rhythm that can’t make it through an aerobics class.

I can’t blame my wife, though, because everywhere you look in India, there is colour, light, life and a world asking to be immortalised through a camera lens. I didn’t think that should have extended to our hotel room, however. As we’d been dressing for dinner, Hanan figured out that the wall between our bedroom and bathroom was actually a huge window with an electric blind. Once she figured out how to open it, it made the bathroom completely open to the bedroom, a box of light.

‘Why don’t you stand in the bathroom, so I can take a picture of you!’ Hanan said, delightedly grabbing the camera.

First of all, I couldn’t really understand the photo opportunity there, but secondly I was reminded of a previous trip to Mumbai when I met Lisa Ray for dinner and stayed the night with her in a chic hotel that had the same open bathroom arrangement. I hadn’t noticed that when I had decided to take a shower.

Only when I’d walked into the bathroom and started unbuttoning my shirt did I realise with some horror that I could see Lisa in the bedroom. Which meant she could see me in the bathroom. I’d pointed this out to Lisa at the time.

‘Oh, don’t worry about it, Shamimi, I don’t mind,’ was Lisa’s relaxed reply as she got on with emails.

I was happy that she didn’t mind, but I did. Call me shallow, but

there was no way on earth I was taking off all my clothes in front of a anyone except Hanan, who has over the years become used to the slow erosion of gravity about my person.

But enough of sagging and on to uplifting matters. The wonderful thing about INK is its TED-like format of talks, but also the strong humanistic streak that runs through the talks, the ideas and the leadership of Lakshmi Pratury. The theme was ‘the hero’s journey’ and anyone who has driven on any major street in India knows how heroic a simple journey can be.

Happily for us, Liat Aaronson had flown in from Israel. You may remember Liat as Hanan’s partner in TEDxHolyLand, but she is also family to us, so to have her join us was the icing on the cake, or indeed, the syrup on our gulab jamun. Liat and Hanan had met at TEDIndia two years ago and in that time, they had brought together Palestinian and Israeli women at their own conference and they had inspired me (or in Hanan’s case, left me no option) to make our new feature The House of Tomorrow.

So I felt in safe hands as the three of us left the conference on the first evening to travel up to the Amber fort to meet another member of our family of dear friends, Leena Yadav. It was magical. Softly lit courtyards and majestic buildings, the seductive scents of candles, flowers and spices, the gentle company of some amazing women.

On the way back, jet lagged and overcome with the wonder of it all, I closed my eyes in the car, only to be roused by Hanan, clutching the camera.

‘There’s a cow in the road!’ she said. Well, seeing a cow on the road in India is like seeing a car in the road in London. But then came a short parade of elephants and, finally, a wild boar, chomping away in a mountain of rubbish at the side of the road.

Hanan asked the driver to stop, and opened my door.

‘Go and stand next to it!’ she said, already composing the shot in the viewfinder.

I looked at the boar. The boar looked at me. Call me over-sensitive, but I wasn’t keen to approach a hungry hog half my size at midnight by picking my way through a pile of decomposing food waste. I’d already posed next to a brown bear in Canada, and one wild animal photo op per year was enough for me. I shut the door and strapped myself in.

‘You need a sense of adventure,’ Hanan admonished as Liat gave me a raised eyebrow.

‘But I married you,’ I pointed out. My wife eyed me. I may not have danced much Bollywood, or hung out with the boars, but if marriage is the great magical journey, I couldn’t have have found a better partner and for once, I think she knew I was right.

Hanan and Shamim learn to change a light bulb, Indian style...

So we whipped Hanan over to the doctor’s the other day. Since the last doctor we hung out with was tall, blonde and funny German actress Maria Furtwangler, I decided to accompany her, both for support but also for to ensure she wasn’t given a close exam by a model.

The consultant was lovely, and male. He poked and prodded warily, and ended the session giving her a short lecture on the benefits of relaxing more, taking care of herself and not juggling too much.

‘I wonder why he said that?’ Hanan asked me as we left and as she looked up from emailing on her iPhone. ‘I’m very relaxed.’

Perhaps in the same way the Pope is very atheist. I added a mini-lecture of my own and obtained a promise of a more enlightened way of living starting the next day.

Which was why I was perturbed to come our of a 6.30am shower to the sounds of a Macbook Air keyboard.

‘I thought you were going to start the day with 5 minutes of yoga breathing?’ I asked.

Hanan started sucking in air and typed faster. ‘I am!’

It got worse over breakfast, because my wife doesn’t leave time for such luxuries as eating. And so her new thing is having breakfast in the car. I know. We’ve all done it. Grabbed a cereal bar or a coffee and headed out. Except I noticed Hanan jangling ominously all the way to the front seat. She fell into the car and offloaded a glass of water with ice (and I mean a real glass), a cup of hot water with lemon (a porcelain cup, none of that safety cup stuff), a bowl of granola, yoghurt and honey, spoons, forks napkin and her laptop. I’d seen less silverware at Claridges.

‘Want me to drive?’ she asked, taking a bite and a sip at the same time. I almost said yes, just to see which part of her anatomy she would use to control the steering wheel, but I declined and pulled away like a great grandmother on Valium, because, bien sur, the cup and glass were full to the brim.

Nevertheless, my wife is feeling a little more Christmas spirit this year. I’ve persuaded her to join me and some friends to see Judy Garland in ‘Meet Me in St Louis’ on the big screen. I’ve negotiated 3 days off to cook and watch food channels over Christmas itself. And yesterday brought the car to a screeching halt that sent toast remains all over the floor when she passed the first fresh Christmas tree display.

‘Let’s get one for the office!’ she cried, sizing up an 8 footer.

We compromised on a 4 foot tree that is still a tad too large for EP HQ, unless we give up an intern, or assign one to hold the tree while wearing a green leotard. But Olalla, our Spanish intern, skipped down to meet us and started draping lights and baubles all over the place. She was joined by Aliki (Greek) and Tom (new, British and bewildered by EP Christmas protocol). It wasn’t long before Karen from Creative Associates, and the genius behind the I Can’t Think Straight Series website came in for a meeting, closely followed by Sue, our Head of Marketing, and at this time of year, Head Elf.

It was a fun day. Almost relaxing. And since doctor’s orders are to relax, relax we will. If it kills us.

Christmas comes early to EP HQ. From left, Aliki, Olalla, Karen, Head Elf (Sue), a super relaxed Hanan and a random stranger