ABSTRACT
I was born in Baghdad and spent the ‚rst sixteen years of my life in Iraq, but left the country for good with my family in the late seventies when the political climate changed. Every two or three years we would spend our summer holidays visiting my grandparents in England, but the summers spent in Iraq held their own magic. The last of the clouds would have dissolved away by late April, destined not to blemish the blue skies again till October, and school holidays would stretch out for three and a half glorious hot months (we did have a six-day school week though). During July and August, temperatures would reach a maximum in the mid-forties (degrees Celsius) and would hardly ever drop below an uncomfortably sticky thirty degrees at night.
