Hand out

I've been looking forward to seeing Amal in Oxford for a long time. Colleagues of mine have been involved in making sure that refugees are involved in the event. But, but... I was disappointed. 

It didn't help at all that the start of the event was in the Botanic Garden and the (free) tickets were limited. Yes, some were reserved for refugees but it just didn't feel right that those who were in the know got tickets and the rest of the public didn't. Who are the knowledge rich? Isn't that an important question?

All of it, all of it, should have been in open public spaces.

Then there was Alice. I'm not convinced that a puppet of Alice in Wonderland was the right being to welcome Amal to Oxford. Amal represents the invisible real, a refugee. Blond-haired Alice represents fantasy. (Even her namesake, Alice Liddell, had brown hair.) Reality and fantasy both have their place but I really don't think the conjunction worked.

Then on a much more personal level it didn't help that the beloved nephew I haven't seen for two years turned up today. He wasn't expecting to be dragged round Oxford in pursuit of a puppet; I wasn't expecting him to be trying to book ferry tickets to get back to a job in France by tomorrow. We were dislocated, the pair of us.

Predictably, I kept bumping into people I knew. The penultimate was a colleague who was trying to arrange somewhere for tired and bored Afghan refugee families to sit while they waited for the bus back to the hotel they are sequestered in at the moment. We - The Story Museum which coordinated the event, the Botanic Garden, the charity I work for - all wanted them to be involved. And their attendance was optional. But what story were they told about today? What would they really have wanted, if they'd known what it would be like?

I will be very interested to know, at some point in the future, assuming anyone asks the right questions, what this 8,000-kilometre walk has meant, and to whom.