I recently went into Beirut to buy Eric Clapton’s new album. Usually I’m the one who buys the one copy in the country that is not pirated. That’s it. The Lebanon buys one copy of each album. I sometimes wonder how a meeting of record company sales executives must go when they review the monthly sales figures. “OK, so Robbie Williams’ new album is breaking all the records. 8 million in the US; 2 million in the UK; even Germany – Germany!, where you’ve got to knock David Hasselhoff out of the charts to have any success – we managed to shift around a million CDs.” “Great going guys! What’s the bottom performer?“Lebanon.”“Again?”“Yep. It sold a grand total of, wait for it… one.”“Again, just one?”“Yep, just one. As always.”“We gotta find out who this one guy is – maybe he’ll buy two next time.” Well, if they came to the Lebanon they’d find that thousands more are sold, but they are all copies. One original is bought and copied, the cover is also copied and it’s all packaged up and sold for peanuts: maybe $2-3.The quality isn’t bad, it just isn’t great, and every time a new album comes out [...]

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  Life has been quiet, I have been spending a lot of time with my dentist – I am rebuilding my mouth, getting fillings and implants. I don’t mind dentists – he takes the pain in my mouth away, and I would rather see him than feel that pain. The only pain that is worse than bad toothaches is migraines, which I used to get a lot in earlier years. Man, those were bad. They were technically cluster headaches, which give the same type of pain as migraine, but worse – imagine the pain of a terrible toothache times 20. It’s that bad, and in some quarters they are called suicide headaches because people would rather die than suffer them. They used to start behind the eye and twist down through the body to your opposite toe, so that if it began in your left eye, it would end in your right toe, like an ‘s’ of excruciating pain through your body. Fortunately I haven’t had one of those for year, I’m a lot healthier now, except for my teeth. Getting your dental work done is a bit like making a record – it takes time. Outside my head, things are [...]

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So the Lebanon is on the brink of falling apart again. Saad Hariri’s coalition government has been dissolved after Hezbollah walked out because he wouldn’t tell them whether he would name the suspects in the assassination of his father, former president Rafik Hariri. The killers were probably from Hezbollah – that is what the United Nations tribunal in the Hague is expected to say, but even the UN tribunal is probably fixed, because to come out with the truth would probably cause even more trouble. This whole business is rotten right to the bottom – completely corrupt. But then if it wasn’t, it couldn’t be the Lebanon We had to cut short our trip to London when we heard the news. There’s too much at stake at home to be away at a time like this – only by being here can you have some control in how the situation develops. From the airport I needed someone to escort me out or else I would have been stopped for a giant search; and all because a Mr X put my name on the customs’ list. No problem, I have my ways and was out and on my way home in [...]

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