MARY AND JOSEPH travelled to Bethlehem because of a Roman census while I went there seeking relief from a sore ass. If I wanted to be Christmassy, I’d say it was a donkey that was the cause of it, but in fact it was a camel.
I had been riding this obstreperous, flatulent beast through the Jordanian desert along the Iraqi border when my patience frayed and I managed to convince my brother that we had enough of the sequence filmed and that we ought to head on west-wards towards Israel.
I hired a 6-cylinder, 6,000cc 1967 Plymouth so that we could recreate the last section of Joseph and Mary’s journey in style, but it blew up after 120km.
Coincidentally, this was precisely the distance the mother of God and her husband travelled by donkey from Nazareth. We ended up stranded in a remote village and would have had to spend the night there, maybe even in a manger, had not a kindly soldier commandeered a jeep and demanded that it took us onwards. The jeep was owned by an oil-driller from the Emirates who drove in silence for three hours before pulling in to a remote wadi and asking us how we planned to pay for the ride – with dollars or our lives. Tense negotiations ended with $50 notes being handed over before she drove us onwards to the River Jordan where we crossed the King Hussein Bridge into the West Bank.
It turned out not to be the best time to visit Israel – when is? Jesus’s parents travelled during a fractious period of uncertainty and turmoil when Quirinius was governor of Syria. His descendent Bashar al-Assad was in charge when we visited and the situation was no less fractious. A few days before our arrival Ariel Sharon had claimed that, “the Temple Mount is in our hands and will remain in our hands. It is the holiest site in Judaism and it is the right of every Jew to visit.” This was bound to be provocative to Muslims who regard the site as one of their holiest places. By the time we arrived, four people were dead and 120 injured and many more would follow, although going into further detail would steer us far from Christmas cheer. I could pretend that upon our arrival in Jerusalem, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph were racing through the Damascus Gate with tinselled antlers, but the truth was a series of tense check-point encounters with olive-skinned, Uzi-armed Israeli beauties. From there we went straight out to Bethlehem, which surely raises the sleigh-bell quotient a little? It wasn’t yet Advent, but scores of zealous pilgrims were wailing devout utterances while kissing the silver star that marks the point where the son of God was born, mar dhea.
A young Palestinian boy in a white djellaba took my hand and pulled me down a lane, past the military base built against Rachel’s Tomb, and into a windowless shack with hazy light seeping through a concrete air-vent. After adjusting my eyes, I was able to discern an old woman, staring up at me from an iron cot, toothless and with a gangrenous leg.
“She needs medicine,” the boy said, before pulling me through another door into a bright courtyard crammed with the world’s war reporters – familiar figures from BBC, Sky and the American networks – all dressed in office attire accessorised with flak jackets and helmets. It was as though they had been magically transported from a war-themed cocktail party. They were standing idly by, checking their Blackberries and catching up on their lives since their last postings.
“Why are you here?” I asked,
but sensing my inexperience they ignored me until a well-coiffed Norwegian woman said, “It’s the birth place of Christ.” Before she could say any more, a bomb exploded somewhere nearby and we braced ourselves before chasing off after it.