The oddest things that bring thoughts of home

I feel as if I am sitting in a Banjo Patterson ballad as the phrase ‘I am sitting in my grimy little office in the city’ keeps running through my thoughts – most Australians will recognise this as the first line of ‘Clancy of the Overflow’.

Having just returned from lunch, it is an unusually warm afternoon so I have turned off my heater and opened the large sliding glass door that opens my office onto the rooftop terrace. The sounds of an Islamabad afternoon waft in on the breeze and distract me from work and the deadlines I have to meet.

Being Friday, the mosques are calling the faithful to prayer. I am reminded of the times I have worked in Darfur, Somalia, North Sudan, Indonesia Turkey and Syria. Even in Kenya when the wind was blowing in the right direction we could hear the call to prayer from the mosque out on Kitengela. I smile at the thought of all the friends I have made and am still in contact with, in these amazing places.

There are the birds, big grey crows, ‘cawing’ as they do all day. Probably excited about someone’s lunch leftovers they have discovered; the distant hum of traffic, one of the staff singing as he walks down the stairs, and the rhythmic ‘plop’ ‘plop’ of the badminton game taking place on our small lawn. The staff plays every lunch time. They are extremely competitive. They are quite a sight with the tails of their shalwar kameez flapping and the girls’ scarves fluttering as they leap for the shuttlecock. The men wear grey, brown or navy, the girls are like butterflies in every colour of the rainbow.

However the sound that catches my ear and really sets my mind wandering is the consistent slamming of the screen door. It takes me back to my childhood to the farmhouse built by my grandfather when he arrived in Australia from Wales. The house where my mother and then my four cousins grew up and my brothers and I spent holidays each year. He named the farm Cambrian Grove after the country he had left behind. With seven children – my brothers, myself and our 4 cousins -  running in and out all day the screen door saw a lot of action. Just as well it led onto a small verandah and the actual door into the kitchen and the main house was always open. At my parents house we also had the screen door into the kitchen. It was a simple timber frame with fly wire unlike the very fancy metal security door that my mother now has installed. Nothing at all secure about it – the screen easily torn and the main door unlocked, by children arriving home from school before their mother was home from shopping!

The door banging again and again brings me back to the reality of where I am (in a minute I am going to turn into my mother and scream down the stairs ‘will you stop banging that door and close it properly!).

A military helicopter circling over head reminds me sadly that it is 16^th January, exactly one month since the Peshawar school was attack, and how this country has change so much in such a short time. The mosque starts its call again. Unusual for this time of the day even for a Friday but maybe the clerics feel the same as many of us, that with everything going on in the world at the moment, it needs all the help it can get and a few extra prayers never go astray.