Parries → A Walk to the Station 

A sense of place, that’s what I need to provide you with. Where am I coming from here? If you look at this rather abstract map, we are on Kensington Street, so bereft that it doesn’t appear on this map but is located more or less at the base of the “R” in the word “Kensington Gardens”. There’s not a piece of green to be had, but it’s heavily photographed by passersby due to the rich grafitti on the wall outside our place. It’s mostly ground-floor offices here: Komedia, the comedy club a block away; Clearleft, the renowned web company. Stepping out our little house, if you look right, or south, at the corner of the street is a Starbucks and the large Wagamama restaurant. If you look left, the streets continues up quite far to some vaguely defined hill.

That’s the direction we’re going, because we’re off this afternoon to ride a train, the first I’ve ridden since arriving here from Gatwick over three months ago. Yipee! So off we go, crossing Gloucester Road and then continuing up Sidney St, taking a glance in the bonsai shop window, then a covetous look at Indonesian furniture at the Villa & Hut shop on the corner—pretty darn cheap compared to the high street furniture shops. At the end we turn left up Trafalger St, taking a glance over at the camping gear shop before going under the brick arch tunnel, then the steep walk up to turn around and enter Brighton Station—elegant, traditional, bright and airy with its great iron Victorian roof (1882-3). There’s something about British railway stations in particular I find exciting. Maybe because they are my first and archetypal stations? As a teen in Ra’anana, Israel my big trips were back to the UK, punctuated with rail travel as I mooched from relatives in London to Birhmingham and Glasgow.

It’s 4pm. The next train to Lewes is at 4:10pm. The cheap day return ticket, £3.60, rolls out of the machine as we pay for it by credit card. Then tea at a kiosk, though we can’t bring ourselves to say that—“a tea”—and ask for a cup of it instead, otherwise we’re contributing to general social decline, and we do enough of that already. 80p. Not bad. The young guy looks both Indian and bored.

The train is not only clean but shiny and new both in and out. It leaves on time and we have a cup of acceptable tea to drink too. What a pretty ride it is out of town, the rows of brown houses and chimneys stretching off, endless green fields behind them. All is well.

Tune in next time as I come home again.

Meanwhile, what’s up with Armageddon? I usually find the op-ed pieces in Haaretz obnoxious and shoddily written, let alone wrong, but these two paragraphs by Prof. Ephraim Yaar and Prof. Tamar Hermann are remarkable in their casual brevity and razor-sharp on-the-ballness:

Despite the intense recent criticism of the functioning of the government, the Jewish public appears to support its overall policy on foreign- and security-related issues. Similar to Israel’s official position, a majority of the Jewish public thinks the establishment of the Palestinian unity government reduces the chances of reaching a political settlement, and does not believe an agreement based on a two-state solution can be reached with this government. A large majority also supports the official policy of not negotiating with the Palestinian unity government until it recognizes Israel and fulfills the Quartet’s other conditions, particularly fighting terror. At the same time, though, the prevailing opinion is that Israel cannot allow the present situation to continue and must make greater efforts than in the past to reach a political settlement with the Palestinians.

On the Syrian issue, as in the past, the dominant position is against a peace agreement in return for a full withdrawal from the Golan, and a majority also supports not responding to the Syrian initiative to renew negotiations as long as it supports Hezbollah and other terror organizations. The Syrian approach is seen as resulting from weakness and not from a genuine desire for peace. At the same time, the widespread assessment is that Israel’s policy stems mainly from the United States’ opposition to negotiating with Damascus because of its position on the Iraqi issue, though Israelis believe it was right to accede to the American demand even if the Israeli leadership sees things differently.

What a great summary of the status quo, eh? I haven’t read the rest of ‘So who’s going to destroy Iran’s nuclear reactor?’ but I’m convinced at this point that it’ll be worthwhile.

Ah, I’m a little let down. The rest of the article is an amplification of this summary, a breakdown of polling data, rather than a direct addressing of the title. Interesting I suppose, but not enlightening.

Now, having reached the end, my suspicion is that there’s an error with the content management system, the title is so unrelated to the text. I still don’t know who’s going to destroy Iran’s nuclear reactor. The Saudis?