Wild life | 8 October 2011

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life

Israel
Jerusalem was once a very sad place for me and I feared returning. I was mad with grief when I was last here in the 1990s. I remember my friend Julian tried to cheer me up by taking me to a gun shop where a South African who had made aliyah gave us M16s and boxes of ammo that we took down to a range to blast away at images of terrorists. It didn’t do any good. I came down with malaria, a parasite hung over from years of reporting African wars. ‘Africa?’ said the Israeli doctor. ‘We’ll run an HIV test. You might have Aids.’ ‘I’ve got malaria.’ He returned an hour later and said, ‘You’ve got malaria.’

In those days I had a girlfriend in Jerusalem. She became so sick of me she spent two weeks shouting as I lay in bed. I didn’t hear a thing.