The Secret Policeman's Poem

On the last day of 2006, with the girls in a shop stocking up for the evening celebrations, I stood in a quiet Amman street recording a poem I'd written about the Eid scenes the day before.

After I'd read it, a small, dapper man approached me and asked me what I was doing. It became clear he was a plain-clothes policeman. I kept calm and tried to explain, and of course, kept recording. After a couple of minutes the girls came out and told him that I wasn't press - he relaxed, smiled, and even shook my hand before departing.

Turned out this quiet street contained two embassies and the Jordanian National Oil corporations, so I guess he was detailed to hang about looking after those places.

But, what would his reaction have been if they had told him I was press? It made me realise that, pleasant though Jordan is, it does not enjoy the same freedoms which I take for granted in the UK.

Slaughtertown, Slaughtertown

On the way to Jerash, I filmed in the car as we passed through Baka'a, a very poor district on the outskirts of Amman. Originally it was a Palestinian refugee camp, which dates from 1948 when most of these people were forced out of their homes and off their land in what became Israel.

The girls chat happily about work, life, and then Diala casually mentions "Slaughtertown" and indicates the annual sacrificing of sheep by the roadside. I was told that the authorities in Amman have cracked down on the practise over the last couple of years - this used to go on all over town, but now is confined to the poorer areas. The grey sheep are kept penned in small groups by the road, dulled and huddled, with the smell of their dead in the air, and blood running in red rivers down the roads. It struck me so strongly, that later I wrote a poem about it.

After visiting the Roman ruins, we went for a meal and ate grilled lamb. Looking out of the window across the valley, we saw a gutted cow swinging on a thick metal chain in a barn, men and boys gathered cheerfully around it, chatting, anticipating the evening feast.

It may seem uncivilised to westerners, so used to buying meat from a supermarket in pre-packaged plastic containers, with all the sticky unpleasantness of death kept always at a safe distance from our plates. But in Jordan, it seemed perfectly normal, if somewhat dedicatedly carnivorous.