Here and There (16 page)

Through all of Europe, Gypsies are denied education, health care, employment benefits, housing benefits. They live outside official systems. They're prevented from getting insurance. They can't run businesses or get loans or credit. The Gypsies are forced to work outside the law; they are universally believed to be endemic recidivist criminals, and so often intolerance creates the conditions to prove itself right.

I'm thinking about all this because, here in France, the Gypsies are being deported en masse back to Romania. Once more, trains of unwanted untermensch are being trundled across Europe. These people, identified by their racial origin, are asked to account for themselves because of some eugenic code that says they were born to be criminals, to be a burden, to be a stain on a civilised country.

There's precious little fuss being made. Hardly any other Europeans stand up to be counted with these dispossessed. Any criticism is mostly from people who want to score points off Sarkozy. The Romanians are a disposable stick to beat the president with; precious few are shouting, ‘How can this be?'

How swiftly we forget. How can a nation that has had its own citizens shipped east so easily and glibly do it to others, to these fellow Europeans who have shared this continent with the rest of us for millennia? Here in the south of France, in the flat fields of bulls and white horses, the picturesque version of the Gypsies and Gypsy life is a tourist attraction, a cultural treasure – their guitar music, their songs, the bright patterns of their cloth. In Spain they dance; in Hungary it is their haunting violin.

Gypsies have a fugitive culture. If it came from anywhere else in the world Europeans would be holding charity dinners and forming committees to defend it. But now the nation that with such vaunting pride proclaims itself the birthplace of liberty, fraternity and equality is transporting the most needy and persecuted minority in the European continent. Although the Gypsies shared the same status as Jews during the Holocaust, no one ever called for a Roma homeland because nobody believed they would ever need one. Why would they? They belonged here with us in the most civilised continent in the world. From Donegal to Andalusia, Gypsies were one of us. Their problems were Europe's problems; their music, our song.

Obviously not. This is all beyond shame, beyond dishonour. But it isn't beyond the warning of memory. This is how it begins.

Sorry, this isn't what I was supposed to be writing about; it's probably not what they wanted.

Revel without a cause

The problem with extravagant
shindigs and elaborate children's
parties is that they're attempts
to manufacture happiness – and
happiness never sends
out invitations.

There is a cocktail-stick rule of entertaining that I think can be found in an appendix of Newton's
Principia
Mathematica
, or perhaps it's a footnote in the Book of Revelation, that parties are great in inverse proportion to the time, effort and money that are allocated to them. A party is a collection of random and extemporal moments that somehow collide to make a collage that turns out the next morning to have had a plot: a beginning, a middle and a happy ending. Planning a party is like setting a trap for mist: the more elaborate and diverse, the more impressive and ostentatious the decoration and the lighting, the more baroque the bait of entertainment, the lure of cocktails and wine fountains and spitted hogs, the more you notice the absence and the will-o'-the-wisp that is that magic that makes a party.

The most extravagant and elaborate bash I ever went to took a year to plan, a Third World debt to pay for, and the imagination of at least three Oscar winners. It was costumed and pyrotechnicked to within a couple of feet of God. Every possible wish, whim and spoilt demand was catered for, from midgets carrying silver trays of coke, to bunny girls offering Cohibas and champagne. There were chill rooms and dance floors, banquettes and bars, pools and fairgrounds, benches, armchairs, divans, waterbeds, li-los and a rack. As we the guests turned up, exhausted with expectation and the gorgeousness of our costumes, we just stood in awe, struck mute and shy by the grandeur and the brutal excess. We traipsed around the party whispering, like prospective buyers being shown around a house that we knew we couldn't afford. The largesse was so overwhelming that we'd all gone home by 11.30pm, defeated by our own failure to rise to this occasion.

Contrarily, the best party I've been to was decorated by a fire on a beach. It wasn't meant to be a party at all. There were no invitations, no dressing up, a couple of bottles, some lobsters, a cappella singing, and the vast Milky Way by way of fireworks. Come to think of it, all the best parties are decorated by fires, that circle of light, Promethean and elemental, the connection and the community made by fire, the ring of warmth in the chill. But because I live in the middle of a city, and serendipitous bonfires are frowned upon, I don't throw many parties. I find more than half a dozen of my friends in a room confusing and rather depressing.

But because latterly I've become a father again, I'm now flung back into that strange fun of children's parties. There is a list of all the things that I'd forgotten about kiddie get-togethers. And the first item right at the top, in caps, underlined, with exclamation marks, is: children's parties are not fun. They're not at all fun. They're not at all fun for anyone. I'm talking about parties for the under-fives, you understand. For little kids. Little kids' parties are high-stress events. The children made to wear weird stuff. They don't know what's expected of them. They have to share food with strangers. Their cosy, comfy safe houses are full of people they don't know. The furniture's moved around. Then either some other little moppet is getting all the attention, which is worrying – maybe this is a competition and mummy's going to take the new one home – or they're getting all the attention, which is terrifying. Other grown-ups are coming up and kissing you and they've set your dessert on fire and then they chant some sort of curse and it's the worst day of your life. So you have hysterics and regurgitate and your mother hates you for ruining whatever it was this was supposed to be. For most children, their first birthday party is their first social humiliation. This is where we all learn what to expect from our lives.

What bothers me more than the obvious misery and insecurity parties are going to inflict on my kids is the desperate misery and insecurity they're going to inflict on me by proxy. There is some weird, and frankly unfair, genetic amplifier that turns up the pain of life through your children. If I lose a race (this is hypothetical, the chances of me racing anything or anyone are nil), I go ‘Hohum, I've lost a race', I'm really not that bothered. But if my small child loses so much as a sack race, I know it'll be a sickening blow that'll feel like a high velocity bullet. The only thing worse than your own birthday party is your child's birthday party. An infant human's natural instinct is to burst into tears when confronted with a flaming cake and a clown.

We have to be taught to like parties like you have to learn against your better instincts to enjoy smoking and hard liquor. It's no coincidence that all these things come wrapped up in the party bag. I used to hire a children's entertainer called Naughty Nigel, or perhaps he was called Evil Edwin or Recidivist Richard. He was a paragon of his calling, a balding, sad, half-cut, thwarted, ill-tempered loner who incubated a Sahara of dandruff and had teeth that reminded you of a komodo dragon. Through long experience of kids he'd grown to loathe them, almost as much as he loathed parents for having kids. His act never varied. He was never surprising, or entertaining, or original. The children sat cross-legged watching him with a wary moribund concentration, because children will look at anything with a wary concentration: fish tanks, Spongebob Squarepants, their parents having sex. They always resisted Pedo Pat's encouragement to join in – again it's hardwired into our DNA that audience participation never led to any good. The birthday child had to be bullied and dragged, whimpering and shivering, into the spotlight for the clown to give him or her the prize. In Naughty Nigel's case, this was always the same: from an apparently empty box he would produce a terrified chinchilla, which was obviously as thrilled to see another child as the child was entranced to be presented with a surprise rat made out of fairy floss.

There was a moment when the children made it to eight or nine that they'd start abusing the clown, throwing things, telling him they could see the bunch of plastic flowers up his sleeve or threatening to call social services if he got any closer. And at this point you knew as a parent that their party training was over. They could go on with the rest of lifelong expectations and disappointment and mass entertainment.

The best of parties is the morning after. The hungover brunch. The restorative Bloody Mary. The post-mortem. The dissection of the goodtime corpse. Parties, like saints, are nice to remember but hell to live with. Parties are hubris. They're an attempt to manufacture happiness, and the lesson of life is that happiness is fleeting and random, and happens despite our best intentions, and never ever sends out invitations.

Danger becomes you

If life's getting too much, forget
pampering, take an unrest
holiday instead.

Adam and Eve were the first refugees. The first people ever were the first asylum seekers. Where do you go for help when you're the only people on earth? You can't even pray. You can imagine the sort of reception they'd have got today: ‘So you want to claim political asylum, and you're from Eden? We don't have any reports of unrest in Eden; the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has designated Eden as paradise. You say there was this angel with a fiery sword who came and threw you out. Could this have been a political police angel? No? Okay, it was a religious fundamentalist angel. What was your offence? Nicking an apple. Anything else? I don't care if it is embarrassing, love, it's gotta go on the form. Knowledge. What sort of knowledge? Carnal knowledge. It was the first time? Well, everyone has to have a first time. Oh? This was the first time ever for anyone? Right. And you got prosecuted and evicted for having sex in public? Okay, so there wasn't any “private”. Would you mind telling me why you're not wearing any clothes? Because you didn't know you'd be needing any until you got kicked out? I don't want to be disrespectful to your beliefs or anything, but it doesn't sound like much of a paradise to me.'

The Bible is a litany of refugees, flights and wanderings. The Old Testament is the first collection of travel writing, and it's all disastrous. Wilderness, 40 days of walking in circles, despair and distant horizons, thwarted dreams, ruing, locusts and honey. And the flood: the ark is the first cruise ship. The journey is the plot and instigation of a lot of religion. All those trips stand as a metaphor for our life journey. The ancient need to go on a pilgrimage seems almost universal, from Aboriginal walkabouts to Santiago de Compostela and the annual hajj to Mecca. Travelling to discover things about ourselves is the oldest exploration, as old as travelling to escape the truth of others.

I've been thinking about all this because I've just been back to the Garden of Eden to see what the old place is like. You know it's had some changes. The original Garden of Eden – in fact, the original concept of all gardens – is Babylon, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Today, there is nowhere like Eden left in Baghdad. If you wanted to draw a strictly biblical fable to show why we got chucked out in the first place, then the state of Iraq today would be a pretty good illustration.

Baghdad was frightening. Not in a car-crash sort of way, more in a sustained horror-movie way. It's the suspense, waiting and watching. You know that all the time you're moving in a space between explosions, and everyone's life here is caught in the parenthesis of someone else's death. But it is, at the same time, very exciting. And that excitement is like a guilty secret we carry around inside our body armour; we know we really shouldn't feel anything like pleasure at visiting here.

Perceived and real danger does appeal. It takes away the veil of your senses, the prophylactic of living in a country at a time when your safety is someone else's responsibility. Where you can rest easy, smug in the knowledge that there are armies of health and safety professionals who never cease to work at your wellbeing, making sure that your world has guardrails and safety caps, that if you fall over, someone will be there to pick you up and maybe even give you a little reward.

There is an elation in knowing that you're living on your own recognisance and that you are an uninsurable risk. Of course, I was surrounded by a lot of soldiers with guns, but we all shared a real and present danger. And one of the pleasures of danger is that it seems to add a precision to your eyesight and a clarity to your hearing. Driving through Baghdad, the panorama of gritty, packed streets and twisted, burnt cars becomes pin-sharp. Every face is examined with a forensic care. There is a heightened awareness to everything.

When I flew low over the city in an old Puma helicopter originally built by blokes with quiffs and brown overalls who were listening to Gerry & the Pacemakers on the wireless. I sat inside the door beside the machine-gunner and watched the ground slide away beneath us as we zipped over the poor streets, and I realised I was concentrating on the journey, looking at it so hard that I can now re-run it like a movie.

I've taken loads of hops in helicopters, looked at millions of streets, seen uncountable things, but they swim together into a soup of memory. Few things are photographically memorable, unless they come with an equally strong emotion. A thing being beautiful or big or small or bright or unusual isn't enough. It needs the label and the wrapping of a feeling to fix it. I remember the first time I saw the girl I live with as if the moment was set in crystal. I can recall every minute detail of the only man I've ever seen killed, and l wish l couldn't.