When I was at school, the ten day celebration of the revolution was always very exciting. The best thing about it was that this was one of the very few occasions when people could be happy openly and not feel like they were acting un-Islamic (on account of Islam being a religion all about seriousness as we were told). On these ten days a lot of great...

This is dedicated to my cousin Shadi, whom I used to share a bed with during our school summer holidays by the Caspian and whom I used to have massive fights with over leaving the light on until the early hours of the morning (as she read Daeejan Napelone and the Chain of Love for the hundredth time) which attracted all the mosquitoes of that area to...

Years ago when I was a wee girl back in Tehran, I was totally smitten by pirates and maps and finding treasures and all that. When I was at my friend, Roshanak's place, along with her two little brothers, we would spend hours burying Star Wars men and plastic soldiers in the ground and then make maps of their whereabouts so we could go and dig them up later. In my Grandparents' garden in...

I must say when we came to have a look at our flat for the first time, the biggest selling point for me was definitely this. I had always wanted to have the kitchen sink in front of a window and this was just ideal as I had a perfect view of the whole estate from it too. Even so, had at that time somebody told me that there is a three and something year old who uses every opportunity he gets to get completely naked and climb up to the window exactly opposite...

Yesterday Kamyar and I went to the Isis pub by the river, just the two of us, something we hadn't done for a long time. We got our two pints of Guinness and went to sit outside. There was the faintest hint of autumn chill in the air that always almost simultaneously makes me sad (as I remember the feeling such weather used to give me when I was little) and extremely happy (as I remember that I am now thirty and do not go to school anymore). We sat under an apple tree...

When the first Iraqi bombs were dropped on Tehran, it was so unexpected that I thought I was hearing the sound of thunder and lightning. It wasn't until Mum came rushing into my room that I realised there was something wrong. But by then the planes had left and all that we could hear was the crack of anti-aircraft fire. The sound of the bombs had been faint and far away, somewhere downtown perhaps. Dad says there is no need for taking shelter...

Waking up at half past four in the morning and spending our only day off school rolling down a mountain until we had snow coming out of our every orifice was definitely my cousin Shadi’s idea. She was thirteen and I eleven and somehow she had got it into her head that the only way we could get out of spending our every weekend with our grandparents was to start skiing! So we did. The first year was terrible. I could not ski to save my life and to make matters worse, I looked like...

I think I was about nine or ten. It was one of those times that Iraqis had started bombing Tehran again and so our schools had closed down. During the bombings my grandparents’ tiny one bedroom house by the Caspian always became Shelter Central and the doors were open for any friends or relatives who wanted to escape Tehran. There were two double beds and two sofas in the living room and everyone else just slept on the floor....

One of the things I love about Iran is that you can never get so chicken-nuggetly away from your dinner to forget where it comes from. Here in England if you don’t like the idea of cute little lambs being slaughtered, you can very easily walk into a supermarket and pick up a pack of lamb shops, neatly arranged in a cellophane tray and pretend that like chickpeas that actually have nothing to do with chicks, lamb chops have nothing to do with lambs either and essentially grow on trees. ...