Well, I didn’t want the canopies and I sure
as hell didn’t want the ‘bibliothèque’….my two cups and saucers acquired as
gifts with a couple of packets of coffee would look very lonely on their own in
there. So our home was quite bare and we were reduced to sitting on chair-beds
on the floor with our voices ricocheting from every wall so nobody could hear
what anyone else was saying. I gave in
and agreed to have some canopies made, for our guests if nobody else, and
slowly but surely our furniture grew and our home began to look less like a
warehouse and more like a home. I wanted
a comfortable sofa and just couldn’t find one I liked. There were the old style made-in-Algeria wannabe
sofas – straight backed, covered in rich brocade with gold decoration which, if
you made the mistake of leaning your head on the back, you were at risk of
brain damage caused by the block of wood lurking across the back underneath the
glossy covering. There were also more
modern type sofas which you might find comfortable if you didn’t mind having no
support whatsoever from the middle of your back upwards. I used to watch television programmes, and it
didn’t matter which genre it was…news interview, chat show interview, documentary,
film, etc. I found myself looking at the sofas and thinking to myself ‘that
looks SO comfortable!’ The canopies are
fine for sitting on but you just can’t lounge on them – a concept that
seemed totally alien to Algerians, which is ironic for a nation whose number
one pastime for so many of their men folk is lounging against walls in every
street and on every corner. Their nickname
is ‘heytist’ as the Arabic for wall is ‘hait’.
I have often wondered if they all stopped lounging around would all the
walls suddenly fall down.
But I digress… not like me at all I
know. I finally got my sofa and was so
happy… for all of five minutes until I thought of the next thing I wanted…. and
couldn’t find. The thing about Algeria
is that it withholds what you want, until you’ve lost all hope and
then mysteriously produces it right under your nose and you’re so happy, as if
you‘ve found gold at the end of the rainbow.
If you had a problem with patience before you came to Algeira….. you
will learn it by force… or die of sheer frustration. The trick is… to go with the flow, and be
grateful for the small victories Alhamduliah.
Every year we tried to do some renovations
on the house as we could afford it, and so we changed the second kitchen (yes I
said the second one…. you can never have too many you know when you live in
Algeria) into my daughter’s bedroom, we pulled down one wall and made my pokey,
kitchen into a decent sized one, changed one of the arab-style toilets (a nice way
of saying a hole in the floor) into an English style one, removed some of the
70s-chic big pink flowery tiles, etc. etc.
In many ways it is still a work in progress because it’s taken us so
long to … grow into our home. It was a
lot bigger in some ways than what we wanted but I can honestly say now that we
use every single room every day without fail. I have often wished that we had
at least one room that’s kept clean and tidy all the time for unexpected
guests, but have resigned myself to the fact that, with my husband and offspring
that’s never going to happen. I’m never
going to have the ‘sitting room’ that my Mum had during my childhood in Ireland, the threshold of which we dare not
enter under pain of death, where we were
never allowed to actually sit and where the three piece suite lasted for over
40 years. It’s not a show house… it’s our home
Alhamdulilah.
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