PART 2
FEBRUARY 2012

By the end of the year, I had rather lost sight of the history of Uncle John, as I prioritized my research once again at the start of the new academic term. In the autumn, my increasing teaching duties also meant that any free time I had had to be given over to boring tasks such as lesson planning and marking, and in addition to that the period running up to Christmas proved to be full, as ever, of social events, so that, as the holidays approached, I found myself drinking more often and more heavily than usual, as well as gorging myself on winter treats, so that I started developing a beer belly. Just before Christmas, though, with the increasing hours of watching television that that entailed, my attention turned more and more to the media and the continual news reports on the conflict in Syria, which was quickly becoming the focus of the bloodiest fighting of the Arab Spring. A number of experts were already predicting that the conflict would develop into a civil war, although there was no definite front that could be delineated on a map since the fighting flared up first here and then there, making it difficult to foresee where exactly the conflict would be fiercest next. It was becoming increasingly apparent though that the city of Homs and the surrounding area had suffered very badly, and increasingly stories reached us about the wretched state of the buildings, the transport system, and the severe shortage of food and water in the city. This war was by now having an extremely negative effect on civilians in the city and the country as a whole.

Lurking beside, or perhaps beneath, the feelings of horror and sympathy I felt about what was going on in Syria, were those old feelings with their mixture of guilt and envy. And yet these feelings did not lead to any noticeable outward changes in my behaviour, and my fits of taking an interest in the fate of Syria and feeling sorry for its people would come and go, particularly when work needed to be done and my own attention was far too easily distracted by various news websites. So, with this conflict as a constant if distant backdrop, I threw myself into my work once more in the new year, and it was only when I heard about the death of a journalist, Marie Colvin, theSunday Times correspondent, as she was recording a broadcast about the siege of the city of Homs from a building that had been deliberately targeted, as was established later on, by the Syrian government forces because they knew that foreign journalists were working inside, that my attention was really forced to turn again toward Syria. Because of this death, the country’s predicament, and especially the images of extreme suffering that the people of Homs were experiencing, suddenly appeared in all the news headlines, and heart-rending pictures by the French photographer, Rémi Ochlik, who was killed in the same attack, showing appalling scenes of widespread destruction, were plastered all over the front page of every newspaper and every news website.

It’s strange to think, today, that it took the deaths of two western journalists, in this way, to make me realize, and to make many others like me, I’m sure, realize and understand how wretched the situation was in Syria by this