Oliver! Oliver! Never before has a boy meant more!

Right at the beginning: And things just get better!

My buddy Ron and I having a serious conversation. He let me in on a secret that had to do with ...well..I aint tellin!

Russ Abbot, who plays Fagin now may be nasty on stage but he's an actual sweetheart! Very nice, very chatty!

Kate and her glamorous sausages and mash! Yes! in a Martini glass!

Mark Lester (The cute boy called Oliver all those years ago) et moi

Ron Moody addressing the cast and the Audience at the end of the show and celebrating 50 years of Oliver!
Can you tell I'm not excited at all?!

Me toootallyyy blending in at the after party heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Okay, this is one of those things that just happens and is PERFECT! Had I worked months on trying to arrange this it couldn't have happened like that! Carolyn Bodley you have no idea ho happy you made this girl right here!

It just so happened that a colleague had tickets to Oliver! And it just so happened they were on offer and it just so happened that I got in at the right time and claimed them and it just so happened that they weren't any tickets but OLIVER! 50th ANNIVERSARY tickets (with drinks after and all)! and it just so happened that the lovely Kate was available that evening.

So it just so happened I was at one of my favourite musicals on earth with the best company! So yes special , special and more special! The seats were great! I could almost touch those miserable workhouse kids as they came out from everywhere possible singing 'food glorious food'

I wont review the play. You can find this in many many other places. But I will tell you how it made me feel. To call it a feast for the senses is, well for lack of anything else that comes to mind, is the only way I could describe it at the moment.

At points in the play I was so overwhelmed by all the performances on stage I hardly knew where to look and what to look at. The 'Consider yourself at home' and 'Who will buy' segments come to mind quite strongly. But equally Fagin and boys' performances when Oliver first arrives!

Russ Abbot's Fagin is brilliant. Very true to Fagin but with a Russ Abbot take that I thoroughly enjoyed. Kerry Ellis was a wonderful Nancy and Steven Hartley a very convincing evil Bill Sikes. Both Gwion Wyn Jones as Oliver and Ben Wilson as The Artful Dodger owned the stage and were equally adorable!

All of this aside and more than how spectacular everything about Oliver! is, it's the way it made me feel! How it took me back to the first time I laid my hands on the book a good 19 years ago in school and read and studied Oliver for the first time. It was a grim story painted quite morbidly by our teacher who was trying to be true to the times.

So it was quite a surprise when right about the same time I saw the film and was greeted by one of the best musicals I've seen. With every song , every scene of the play I went back to our room in our old house in Alex where I saw Oliver for the first time.

And being the desperate reminiscing fool that I am of course I shed a tear or two (or a lot!). But nothing could've prepared me or anyone in the audience for Ron Moody aka THE FAGIN appearing on stage at the end of the play to celebrate 50 years of Oliver!

And nothing could've prepared me for meeting him, the original Oliver (Mark Lester) and the current Fagin after the show and having a lovely chat about how much this all meant to me! Not a bad night out I say!

St Ives-Cornwall: My summer 2010 memories

Ma boi and i

There's so much I can say about this amazing little fishermen village. I can be all tourist guide'y and talk about the silky-sand clear -water beaches in the middle of green mountains that even on a grey day like today were absolutely magnificent!

On the footpath to St Ives

Seriously...cheesy as it sounds Carbis Bay and St Ives are a feast for the eye and I haven't even seen that whole of Cornwall yet!!

This is the kind of place you need when you don't want to do anything but have lovely walks, chill on the beach and tread cobble stone roads and browse little cute shops... Well at least this is what I and my better half did and it was one of the best days we had!

Not a sexy look but I can't walk with a pebble in my shoe!

There are so many things I'll remember about that trip: The picturesque footpath we took from Carbis Bay to St Ives ( we wanted to buy every single house we saw!) , the divine views, the self-drive boat ride we took at Porthminster beach, the beautiful hotel we're staying at,my lovely dragon (ehem temporary) tattoo...

If I'm honest though all of the above was made extra special being chronicled with my boy's extra extra special camera app...Really cool.

In a cool little antique'y shop where there's so much stuff you don't know where to look!

The streets look like they came out of a 19th century novel! So beautiful!

Ma boi checkin out some antiques

The Hana Effect

This girl has it all figured out. Not just her sense of style oh no!! that is a crust to a richer more delightful core that is Hana Tajima-Simpson.

We met to talk about her label , her style and when and why she decided this is what she wanted to do. We ended up talking about that and so much more:Family, religion her outlook on life and work.

I tell ya she's got it figured out! And to think of how much younger than me she is!!! (Nope not gonna tell you my age or hers!) All I could say is that at her age I was no where near being in the right place with myself and the world as she is (probably still not!)

Anyway we digress! OK Hana,her designs,her style and her label ...I stumbled across her blog Style Covered when I was researching for a piece about Islamic fashion. I took one look and I was hooked.

The one thing I noticed about her style is how simple and expressive it is. It's quite understated but there is no mistaking that the looks that Hana puts together are very deliberate and thought through and more importantly very true to who she is.
(Check out her Abaya inspired wrap dress)

"My style is very eclectic." she tells me."I like different things." And it's true the looks she puts together vary from the super feminine with soft fabrics and clean lines to the layered funky boyish look.Like this one that I LOVE!

It all started with the blog ...
"I started by reviewing catwalk shows and different looks and got good responses. But I found that I got most responses when I started styling myself and putting photos up on the blog. I had many positive comments about the looks an decided this is the way I wanted the blog to go"

And you can tell how well the relatively young blog is doing from the avid following. "It was just this instant thing where Muslim women can see a look and try it for themselves right away because it was on a real person.There wasn't anything like that for Muslim women before."

From Style Covered to Maysaa
The success of the blog revealed a marked that was hungry for more."I've always made clothes for myself, especially when I became Muslim there was nothing out there that was stylish and was covered up at the same time and I felt I lost a big part of my personality in the beginning of my Hijab days. It took time from when I started wearing Hijab to my look today."

Another Hana look I adore (Maysaa headscarf and skirt)

But how did it go from making her clothes for herself to starting a label, launching it and turning it into a business? "Well, first of all I didn't want this to be a job. I wanted to remain passionate about it and not to be jaded. Especially that I had studied fashion before and left it because I saw what the industry was like from the inside and decided I didn't want that."

"After I'd settled into my religion(She became Muslim 5 years ago)and got married I though about what I wanted to do with my life.I asked myself what is it that I wanted to do that didn't feel like a job and it was designing.My husband suggested that we work on it together and so here we are. He handles the business side of it and I handle the creative part."

They've just launched her label Maysaa last month and have already met all their sales targets.Hana is now thinking about her next collection which she says will feature more colour and prints than the first one.

"I wanted the first collection to be a foundation for any wardrobe pieces that you can play around with and dress up and down.Timeless pieces that could work for you where ever. The next one [collection] I've added more colour and prints."

We finish our coffees and roam the streets and look at clothes.I show her the shoes I'm currently drooling over at Zara and she gives me her stamp of approval!
During shopping I ask her about trends and whether she thinks about that when she designs her clothes. "Of course you follow what's going on in fashion but my clothes are very personal,timeless and that's the most important thing."

Watch this space for more Timeless pieces to come! Hana will be guest blogging and I'll be dropping in on one of Mayasaa's photo shoots soon.

Happy the Man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour

John Dryden

Goodbye Osama Anwar Okasha

I was asked after Osama Anwar Okasha's death if my blog was named after him. It's not. Okasha is my mom's family name but I always told mommy how I wished he'd be one of her relatives.



This is late, it's very late actually but I'm not going to let that be an excuse not to do it like many things in my life!It's been almost a month now since the death of one of Egypt's and the Arab world's most important and influential television writers. But that's not why I'm writing this.

I'm writing this tribute to Osama Anwar Okasha because he's helped shape my life with his work and not in the cheesy sense of 'the big message and inspiring a generation'(even though he did do that and it's not cheesy at all) .. What's very special about my relationship with the late Mr.Okasha was that his influence on me started long before I became inspired by him and began to understand his influence as a writer and historian and how important his work is.

Oh and this is in no way an attempt on my part to analyse his work and technique it's not my place and I'm not equipped to do it. This is about a writer whose characters came to life right in front of me for so many years. I loved some, hated many,fell in love with a handful and remained loyal to the man behind them.

Ramadan and the sound of my childhood


El Shahd Wel Demoo' Intro

Osama Anwar Oksaha had become synonymous with many things for me over the years but first and foremost he was synonymous with Ramadan. Among the many sounds of my childhood the intros to his TV series which mainly aired in the holy month remain engraved in my memory and associated with family gatherings and after-Ifatr teas and sweets. His series brought families together around TV sets to watch his characters live their lives.

El Shahd Wel Domoo', Layaly El Helmeya, Ana Wenta We baba Fel Mish Mish, El Raya EL Bedaa, Dameer Abla Hekmat, Arabisque, Zizinya and many others were the staples of Ramadan and companions of my youth. Even though I caught up late on some of them after we came back from the US they remain part of me.

By no means do I intend to narrow him down to this list and the effect they had on me, but this is how he came into my life and many other millions of lives; in our homes, through our televosion sets. He came into our lives with the struggles of Zeinab in El Shahd Wel Domoo,through the eternal animosity between Seleem El Badry and Suleiman Ghanem in Layaly EL Helmeya that for the years of it's existence remained amicable and amusing. He came into out lives with Ali and Zuhra's epic love story in the same series and through the fallen hero that is Hassan Arabisque.

He dared to challenge TV tradition by presenting 2 seaons (parts) of El Shahd Wel Domoo' when it was unheard of and 5 whole seasons of Layali El Helmya. He confused and baffled audiences and critics alike with his quirky and innovative Ana Wenta We Baba Fel Mish Mish, changing the shape of Arabic TV drama and discussing everything from corruption to the freedom of press.


Ana Wenta We Baba Fel Mish Mish Intro


He stole our hearts and minds completely when he took us to school with Dameer Abla Hekmat with the legendary Faten Hamama hitting it right in the head with a question about why education in Egypt is in the dire state it is.Is it the lack of educational facilities or the lack of human resources or both? (Twenty years later the question remains unanswered and Egyptian education goes from bad to worse..That is another blog post!)

He managed to transform Sanaa Gameel into the notorious Fada El Me'addawy in El Raya El Beda where in the end of the last episode I was so ready to go out and join the sit-in in front of Dr.Abulghar's villa in Alexandria to save it!


El Raya El Beda clip

This is why, in my view, Osama Anwar Okasha will remain alive; because his characters are. They're real and alive because they were real and alive in Okasha's mind when he wrote them. Everyone had a story that was intricately related to the stroy of another that was all linked in the end to the story of a country ..told by those who loved and lived her.

Mommy and Layaly El Helmeya


Layaly EL Helmeya Intro

I once asked my mom why she,an avid TV hater and despiser, was a keen follower to Layaly El Helmeya and she said "because Osama Anwar Okasha writes life, when you watch you feel you're watching people's lives, you feel they are real." Only he could manage to get my mom away from her books and lecture preparations. He'd also managed to get conversations between me and mommy started on so many things starting with my questions as a youngster on why the King was bad and why the July 23rd revolution was good and why everyone loved Gamal Abdel Nasser so much and why Zuhra was so cruel to her mom when she grew up and what she'd suffered and why I should be grateful for mine and why Tawfiq El Badry was mommy's favourite character and what was so noble about him.

The other reason why Layaly El Helmeya in particular is so special to me is that I, quite literally, grew up with it. The series started in the mid eighties when I was a child and ended in the mid nineties when I was a teenager. Through the years the characters changed and grew and so did I ...How can you not connect with that? How can that not be part of who you are!

Alexandria


Zizinya Outro

The other major reason why Mr.Okasha holds a special spot in my heart is his love for my home town Alexandria. I fall in love with it over and over and over again when I see it through his eyes and I live in it with his characters. I get tears in my eyes everytime I hear the outro to Zizinya and remember Ramadan nights watching the series and listening to that song in the end; how it felt, where I was and man oh man how things have changed sisnce then!

There's so much I still haven't grasped in Mr.Okasha's work, a- because I don't see it often enough and b-because when I do see it I watch it with a sentimental nostalgic eye. I think one of my missions should be finding his work on DVD and watching it closely.

Okasha was an immaculate historical dramatist and a writer of the highest calibre some call him the Naguib Mahfouz of televesion and it's true; both the men's charachets are so alive you can smell them. Their dialogues ring so true you could swear someone you know had said that before! Okasha has managed to create a niche in Arabic television drama I have yet to see someone else fill.

He always had an eye on our past and was keen for us to understand and learn from it. He was constantly critical of the present and ever so worried about the future. Okasha was desperately in love with Egypt and I think it's safe to say that over the years Egypt grew desperately in love with him.