Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The view from a street corner in Beirut

A pale sun had emerged from wintry clouds and the hillsides were topped snowy white. But all around me was the workaday bustle of Beirut streets still wet from overnight winter rain. This was the Armenian quarter, near the docks, at morning coffee time.

I was standing on the Rue Qobaiyat, opposite a downtown petrol station and outside a corner barber’s shop, Salon Anto. My partner and his mother wanted to go to a museum and I’m not a great one for museums, and needed a haircut. ‘There’s a barber just around the corner,’ said the helpful owner of the little Baffa House lodge where we were staying. ‘A bit … old-fashioned. Nothing “cool”, you know.’

‘Just my place,’ I said; and soon found it. The lights were on, a TV was on, and someone was bustling around inside the tiny salon — opening up, I supposed. I needed money first, so walked on to find a cash machine.

Returning, I lingered at the window of a dingy little toolshop and was all but dragged in by the elderly Armenian proprietor. ‘-Twenty per cent off everything,’ he said — then, as if to explain: ‘I have to go to Virginia on Monday.’ So I bought a Mole wrench and a set of 24 screwdriver heads for 24 obscurely shaped spindles — such as can unlock hotel windows or blanked sockets at airports. Always useful. And carried on to Salon Anto.

Now it was locked, though the lights and TV were on. A car drew up, parked anyhow (half across the pavement, as they do in Beirut), and its driver, an elderly man with glossy dyed black hair — another would-be customer — started yabbering at me in Arabic, then French. Surely the barber’s arrival was imminent.

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