It must be the holidays. Or the heat. We're all sitting around at home waiting to be told what to do, and or to not be told what not to do, like an orchestra without a score. Maybe we're just bored. Whatever the reason, we've gone all nostalgic: “Let me tell you a story from my childhood 30 years ago, when I lived in an old house in the old district of Manfouha in Riyadh, of an old Hijazi man who lived next door,” Khalid Al-Ghanami began, tuning up his cello in Al-Watan. “In the past our neighbor's house was like our own, we'd come and go, and whenever anybody needed anything they'd go to their neighbor, for tomatoes, or salt, saying, ‘Mum says have you got any tomatoes?'” his colleague Turki Al-Dakheel counterpointed on a violin. “When will we see those days return?” he adagioed, ma non troppo. Quotes Senior, the former conductor of our family orchestra, would have said that those days will return when we all run out of tomatoes and salt again, and he would have opened our bulging refrigerator by way of a little “life lesson” to the Quotelettes. That's why Quotes isn't prone to nostalgia for a past long gone. He's been taught by the scruff of the neck to appreciate what he's been given. It could also be something to do with the fact that Quote's neighbor in days of yore was a broom-wielding battle-axe who if she had any tomatoes at all would use them to pelt him in the back of the head with unnerving accuracy as he pegged it down the stairs she'd just cleaned on his way to school. He's not saying she was Hijazi, but it just so happened she was. Nope, Quotes is made of sterner stuff. He doesn't long for the past on a mournful viola, but instead plucks a dreamy harp to look back without anger at the passing of a past future, of a time when he was blessed with both greater promise and the promise of greater things. In short, Quotes views a missing present with nostalgia, which may explain his occasional lapses into a slumberlike state frequently misunderstood by his pay-docking editor-in-chief as “napping at the desk… again!” It must be the holidays, or maybe the heat, but at this time of year Quotes has a tendency to drift away and gaze at the achievements of his venerable forefathers and wonder what became of himself. Grandpater Quotes by 23 had already compiled his indispensable “A Century of Weekly Quotes”, and his unforgettable “Encyclopedia of Lost Quotes” (Volumes A to E). Quotes Senior, in turn, had by 28 produced his now standard texts “One Month Course in Weekly Quoting”, “Quoting Weekly for Beginners”, and, it barely needs mentioning, his irreverent and hilarious “Three Men in a Quote”. All of which Quotes, in his better past future, would have rendered obsolete with his own, “Everything You Need to Know about Quotes, Quoters and Quoting”, to be translated into 31 languages from his original Latin text. But he still hasn't got past the title. And hasn't learnt Latin. “Snap out of it!” Mrs. Quotes says when he gets like that, and she actually does that snappy thing with her fingers. “Sometimes you're so… elusive!” “Look!” she said, plonking the paper down in front of me, tap-tapping her orchestra to attention. “A snake that has haunted the corridors of a girls' school in Makkah for three years has finally forced pupils and teachers to relocate after all efforts to rid the building of its presence have failed.” “So?” “Some pupils at the school in Makkah believe the elusive creature to be a jinni given its uncanny ability to disappear when officials are summoned to a sighting. ‘As soon as they've gone it comes back,' they said.” “What's your point?” Quotes asked. “What are they doing at school this week? It's the holidays! Get out of the house, do something useful! There're festivals, fairs, exhibitions all over the place! Go have some fun!” Quotes turned a hefty page to see what was on. “The idea of having this during the summer vacation period is to show that the vacations are not just for entertainment,” said Jeddah governor Prince Mish'al on Sunday at the opening of the Saudi Publisher Fair. “I'm surprised at the poor turnout, but it must have something to do with the failure to provide entertainment for a variety of tastes,” said a honey aficionado noting the dismay on the faces of beekeepers in Baljurashi at their annual Honey Festival. “The low number of visitors is down to the festival's bad timing,” one apiarist sulked. “It was much better last year when it was in the month of Shaban.” Quotes could hear his spellbinding harp trying to pull him away again. But what's this? “We didn't have a meal without him and we lived according to his instructions,” said a Saudi gent whose family was kept under a spell for two years by a master of the black arts. “What's YOUR point?!” Mrs. Quotes countered, her indignation betraying her recognition of the very point. “I'm just saying there's a parallel, is all…” And who would disagree? Not Khalaf Al-Harbi in Okaz. Given the proliferation of such acts of magic, Al-Harbi tongue-in-cheeked, “it's about time the Minister of Labor created permits for practitioners of magic from West Africa and East Asia”. Al-Harbi was on to something. “The ministry should then also think urgently about Saudizing this essential sector, and provide training courses to professionalize it.” The very next day, Al-Harbi got the response he was looking for when the Social Awareness Society's Women's Department announced its “License to Drive a Family” training course addressing the “cornerstones of marriage and marital relationships”, and the “differences between spouses, marital life skills, and spouse dialogue”, and, we mustn't forget, “other matters related to marital problems”. Tappity-tap, Mrs. Quotes interrupted, bringing back in Khalid Al-Ghanami who had by now deserted his cello and was picking up brass: “The family in the house of that Hijazi man seemed to us like Martians. Everything about them seemed strange. What were we afraid of?” Al-Ghanami put his lips to the trumpet, and fanfared: “The new generation, however, is very different to us, and has overcome these things, hence my great optimism.” Quotes of the Week, finally inspired, cast his harp aside and left the auditorium.
