From today’s Guardian, Dan’s account of being ejected from Iran. (See previous entry.)

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“Caitriona Palmer, who has been reporting from Iran for The Irish Times on a part-time basis, is being forced to leave the country. She and her husband, Dan De Luce, who writes for The Guardian of London, went to Bam without official permission, to report on the effects of the recent earthquake. Subsequently, the authorities revoked Mr De Luce’s residence visa and press accreditation. Despite appeals, including from The Irish Times, he has to leave for at least three months, and Ms Palmer with him. Ms Palmer, a Dubliner, has also reported for RT�.”— The Irish Times

I’m sitting in Brooklyn with a beaded beer, reading newspaper articles about my best friends. Caitriona sent me a rushed email when the call came through from the ministry last week. They’d been given two days to leave Tehran, but couldn’t get a flight to London until Thursday—five days out. That delay made me frantic. They were the first foreign journalists to be expelled from Iran since 1989, and last year, Zahra Khazemi, a Canadian-Iranian journalist, was beaten to death in custody in Tehran. Caitriona is tough bird—in early pregnancy she spent fourteen hours a day hauling rubble at the site of the Bam earthquake—but I couldn’t settle until I knew they were out.

They arrived safely in London on Thursday. To my great delight, they’re now planning a move to DC. I am trying to negotiate Brooklyn visitation rights, so that I can fully interfere in the gestation of their sprog, who is due to show up in December. Cait and I haven’t shared a continent in nearly a decade, and though I wish it hadn’t happened quite this way, I’m tempted to send a thank-you strippergram to the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture.

There were a bare dozen foreign journalists living in Iran. Now there are ten. It’s an unusual process to eject reporters, and doesn’t generally reflect well on a country. Very few states demand that visiting (not resident) reporters have special visas. Cuba, Syria, Iran, and North Korea are among them. The United States, you may be surprised to learn, is another. The latest antics of the INS, or whatever they call themselves in newspeak, make a good counterpoint to outrage at Dan and Caitriona’s experience. Mr. Ashcroft’s underlings have recently taken to handcuffing, jailing, and deporting European journalists who visit to explain this country to readers at home. The parallels between the following two excerpts make me want to choke on my freedom fries:

Elena Lappin, a freelance journalist from the United Kingdom (who has written for Slate), was stopped at Los Angeles International Airport, subjected to a body search, handcuffed, frog-marched through the airport, and then held in a cell at a detention center overnight-all because she dared travel to the United States without a special journalist visa…Since when is the U.S. government in the business of accrediting journalists-foreign or domestic? What possible journalistic standards must be met in order to prove to the INS that one is enough of a journalist to merit a press visa? The list of enumerated requirements would make it impossible for a reporter from an allied country to cover a breaking story in a timely way. Reporters must now provide a letter from their employer detailing their assignment and place their hope in the broad discretion afforded immigration authorities. Of course, freelancers just looking for a story without a contract in their pocket are presumably out of luck, too. Unless, of course, they elect to lie and call themselves tourists with super-big cameras. The state cannot be in the business of acting as arbiter of who’s allowed to come and write about America.

—Taken from “Why is the US terrorizing British reporters?”, by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate

And Caitriona on Tehran:

By forcing foreign journalists to apply for permission to conduct interviews or travel around the country, the authorities try to restrict the flow of information coming out of Iran. By keeping the rules vague and unwritten, the authorities can at any time choose to penalise a particular journalist in an arbitrary manner….[T]he generosity and friendliness of the Iranian people is so far removed from the repressive nature of the Iranian regime. …[O]rdinary Iranians are good, honest, hardworking people who are embarrassed by their government and the negative image it receives around the world.

By expelling and restricting foreign correspondents, the clerical establishment in Iran is playing a counter-productive game. Their paranoia is preventing the world from appreciating the true nature of Iranian society. It is not a nation of terrorists or militants. Perhaps if more foreign journalists were allowed to work in Iran, the country’s image might improve.

FULL TEXT OF CAITRIONA’S ARTICLE

IRAN: Caitriona Palmer, who has been reporting from Tehran for The Irish Times, describes how she and her journalist husband were forced this week to leave Iran. Last week in Tehran, the telephone in our small apartment rang. On the line was a secretary from the ministry of Islamic guidance and culture, our ‘minders’ in Iran. The secretary seemed nervous and overly apologetic for calling. The news wasn’t good, she said.

“You have a week to leave the country,” she told my husband, Dan De Luce, correspondent in Iran for the Guardian. “Your visa has been denied for three months. There is nothing further I can do. I’m very, very sorry.”

So were we. Iran had been our home for the past year and a half. We had a cosy apartment overlooking the Alborz mountains, a large group of friends and a great enthusiasm to tell the outside world about the real Islamic Republic.

As two of just a dozen resident foreign correspondents living in Iran we were aware that we occupied privileged positions in a country that was deeply suspicious of the foreign press.

Despite our complaints about Tehran’s pollution and its choking traffic congestion, Iran still felt like home. And now the Iranian government was telling us that we weren’t welcome anymore.

A recent article by Dan about the reconstruction efforts in the city of Bam, devastated by an earthquake on the December 26th last year, seemed to be the cause of our problems.

In late March, Dan and I had travelled to Bam to volunteer for an Iranian charity that was providing rehabilitative care to earthquake victims. It was the Iranian new-year period and we had a week off. We’d travelled to Bam six weeks earlier to cover Prince Charles’s visit and had been moved by the enormity of the human suffering there. We were eager to return to help out and curious to see how the reconstruction efforts were progressing.

As is customary, we applied to the authorities for permission to travel to Bam as journalists and volunteers. Word came back that we could volunteer but not report. This seemed strange. In a city that had been the focus of so much recent international attention and foreign aid, it was odd that the foreign press were not welcome.

But once in Bam, it became clear why the Iranian government was so keen to keep foreign journalists away. More than three months after the earthquake, the city remained a mass of devastation and confusion. Over 70,000 homeless were still living in appalling conditions in synthetic tents by the road. Stinking fly infested roadside latrines and showers were the only means of available sanitation.

Relief workers and earthquake survivors told us that the reconstruction efforts were plagued by mismanagement and alleged corruption. Survivors complained that they were not seeing the fruits of the massive influx of foreign aid and that there was too much bureaucracy and red tape standing in the way.

“We know that other countries have helped,” said one 45-year old woman who lost her husband and young daughter in the quake. “But there is no money coming to us.”

And it wasn’t just the Bam residents who were complaining about mismanagement. Government agencies were trading accusations. A week before we visited Bam, the Iranian Red Crescent Society alleged that some $10 million of foreign aid had yet to be fully accounted for.

Wherever we went in Bam, angry residents approached us demanding that we report about the slow pace of reconstruction, the lack of temporary housing, and the deafening silence from the Iranian government. Frustration at the slow pace of reconstruction was palpable on every street.

Just a few weeks before our visit, people took to the streets, burning cars and banks and beating up the governor general. An international relief worker told us that several Bam residents were shot in the ensuing riots. But barely a word leaked out in the foreign or domestic press.

Back in Tehran, perturbed and depressed by what we’d seen, we felt we had to write stories about the situation in Bam, even without official permission. And so the fateful Guardian piece was published on April 2nd while I filed reports for RT�.

By expelling Dan for reporting about Bam, the Iranian authorities have simply reinforced suspicions about mismanagement of the aid effort and the regime’s commitment to freedom of expression.

By forcing foreign journalists to apply for permission to conduct interviews or travel around the country, the authorities try to restrict the flow of information coming out of Iran. By keeping the rules vague and unwritten, the authorities can at any time choose to penalise a particular journalist in an arbitrary manner.

By allowing the intelligence services routinely to interrogate and intimidate the interpreters who work for foreign correspondents, the regime seeks to discourage journalistic inquiry. By forcing foreign correspondents to renew their visas every three months, the regime retains the right to expel any correspondent that it believes is pushing the envelope.

But foreign correspondents are lucky. We just get expelled. Last July, Zahra Khazemi, an Iranian photographer who held a Canadian passport, was beaten to death while in custody in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. According to Reporters San Frontiers, there are more journalists in jail in Iran than in any other Middle Eastern country. On the day that we left Iran, another two Iranian journalists were arrested and yet another newspaper shut down.

In our rush to leave Iran, we barely got a chance to say goodbye to our Iranian friends. And that is our deepest regret. Those who heard the news were deeply embarrassed and ashamed to hear of Dan’s expulsion. One Iranian friend broke down in tears as she explained her powerlessness in challenging the clerical establishment.

The Iran Air steward on our flight to London was so worried that our view of Iran would be ruined forever that he fed us a constant stream of snacks and drinks throughout the journey. “I didn’t want your last Iranian experience to be a negative one,” he explained at the end of the flight.

And his plan worked. For his kindness, and that of ordinary Iranians, remains our most enduring memory of Iran. That the generosity and friendliness of the Iranian people is so far removed from the repressive nature of the Iranian regime. That ordinary Iranians are good, honest, hardworking people who are embarrassed by their government and the negative image it receives around the world.

So by expelling and restricting foreign correspondents, the clerical establishment in Iran is playing a counter-productive game. Their paranoia is preventing the world from appreciating the true nature of Iranian society. It is not a nation of terrorists or militants. Perhaps if more foreign journalists were allowed to work in Iran, the country’s image might improve.

Copyright The Irish Times 2004

I am flying west to New York, stretching five bonus hours out of this bonus Leap day. This flight marks the end of my sabbatical from responsibility, and I am glad to have the privacy to absorb it. Tonight I see my Canadian sweetheart and my Brooklyn pals again. Tomorrow I start work.

Some friends are disappointed that I seem to be sliding back into the slot I left. They feel stifled in their own lives, maybe, and enjoyed my freedom vicariously. What’s the point of time out, they ask me, if you don’t make radical changes afterwards?

I understand their sense of betrayal. My new job is broadly similar to the one I left, and I’ll be living close to my old neighbourhood, seeing my old friends. But the changes are inside. This expanse of time and experiences has shaped me more than a token career or city shift could reflect. I had a privilege that is rarer than a college education, and, to my thinking, more valuable.

(It is very hard to write about this without sounding painfully earnest and possibly sick-making.)

I had the time to grieve a husband who is still dear to me, and to count the million billion mistakes I made.
I learned how to be by myself, and see for myself.
I learned how to sit still. I am bad at it.
I made friends from different lives. There are so many fine people out there.
I discovered how little I need to live happily. Fancy dinners and toys are no longer on the list. Nor is running water, if the lake is clean.
I learned how to pretend to be brave, which is nearly as good as courage.
I saw different ways of bringing up children, and I hope to make bolder mothering mistakes than indoor, anxious cossetting.
I visited old and new friends on two continents, and atoned for years of putting office work before them.
I fell in love.
I made up with Ireland. Now I have a place to miss, and go back to.
I had the time to read hard books.
I started to pay attention to politics and freedom.
I lost my puppyish infatuation with America. (But I still heart New York.)
I learned to be an ounce less than completely selfish. (Occasionally. When it suits me.)
I got to know my parents as an adult. I finally grasped that their lives as teachers are more valuable than any CEO’s.
I made memories of Lake Superior that that will feed me when I’m old.
I felt, first-hand, compassion, grief, love, outrage, anger, and gratitude.
I got the chance to write.
I faced some fears.
I found I had an untold number of assumptions and prejudices. Many more lurk, still invisible to me.
I learned how to trust people to be kind. They mostly are.
I learned that atoms trump bits. Nothing beats face-to-face contact, which is why babies don’t IM.
I accepted that I’ll never be wealthy. It still scares me, especially in America.
I earned some crows’ feet, and the conviction not to Botox them.
Somewhere along the way I woke up as a grown woman.
I want to find a way be a net contributor.

And oh, I will miss my freedom dreadfully. I will miss the space to read and write and think and talk. But we’re over Newfoundland, and a new life waits.

Consider pleasures, not as they arrive, but as they depart.
—Aristotle.The End of the Holidays

We drop you at O’Hare with your young husband,
two slim figures under paradoxical signs:
United and Departures. The season’s perfect oxymoron.
Dawn is a rumor, the wind bites, but there are things
fathers still can do for daughters.
Off you go looking tired and New Wave
under the airport’s aquarium lights,
with your Coleman cooler and new, long coat,
something to wear to the office and to parties
where down jackets are not de rigeur.
Last week winter bared its teeth.
I think of summer and how the veins in a leaf
come together and divide
come together and divide.
That’s how it is with us now
as you fly west toward your thirties
I set my new cap at a nautical angle, shift
baggage I know I’ll carry with me always
to a nether hatch where it can do only small harm,
haul up fresh sail and point my craft
toward the punctual sunrise.

—Mark Perlberg

My sister Claire flew west yesterday. Glen was waiting in forty-below Ottawa with his two kids, whom she has missed and talked about throughout her trip home. She lived at home in Limerick until last spring, but now that there are two small, immobile Canadians in her life we know her future visits are temporary. We know this, but we don’t say it in the Aer Lingus check-in queue for the New York flight, nor do we say it as we sit for a last coffee while she fills out her green IAP-66 arrival record. Instead we chat about how lucky we are to be able to fly directly from our small town to London, Chicago, or DC, and to be allowed to stroll through US Immigration at Shannon’s lovely, quiet airport rather than at JFK. Then her flight is called. My parents smile as they hug her goodbye, and they promise to post the keys she has just remembered are still on the kitchen table.

Twenty minutes later we are driving back past Bunratty Castle, past the neon-green hills of Cratloe, when Claire rings from the departure lounge, a last goodbye. Mum passes the phone back to me and breaks into sobs. She cries and cries from missing Claire, who will soon be three thousand miles away and whose sweetness can’t be replaced. Claire is our family glue, who tells me about Caroline’s adventures, and keeps the family posted during my disappearances. She phones every day and remembers the special treats we each like. I reach forward and put my hand on Mum’s shoulder. She holds it, but it doesn’t bring Claire back. Still she cries, muffled, hiccupy sobs, but she says nothing all the way home.

A few hours later she gets up from her nap. She still looks sad. I put my arms around her and she says, “I hate emigration.” Then she says, “People complain to me that their children are off in Cork or Dublin. And mine are so far away.”

I look at her in grief and guilt. I have just taken a job in New York, and I’ll be on that same flight in two weeks.

Emigration’s unwelcome gift is a permanent state of loss. Wherever you are you miss someone and somewhere, and if you are lucky you are missed in your turn. Sorrow is the price we pay for love.

The birthday girl’s mother stood up. “Tiny Pony wants to make a little speech,” she said. And so she did.
We were at the White Horse in Putney, also known as the Sloaney Pony (pronounced Slaney Painy.) I was Simon’s date in the college friends’ corral, where they explained that though it was Cambridge, Churchill college took mostly state school kids, and was not at all posh, really. Unlike the rest of the guests. This distinction seemed important to them, and I believed them. Simon isn’t posh. He speaks with the new Tony Blair Establishment accent, full of democratic glottal stops. Our corral bonded as the yahs and brays increased down-table; we swapped compensating stories of council estate beatings and jam sandwiches.

I get infected with interest in this stuff as soon as I get to a British Airways check-in queue. I start listening and classifying, and watching others do it faster than me. Words and and accent peg you here, and they’ll always piss someone off. If you’re uncomfortable being having your origins and aspirations dissected, try an Irish accent. Thug? Posh totty? Only Dublin knows for sure.

I keep asking my friends about this obsession, sure that I’m exaggerating as usual. But maybe not. Elly tells me about her friend whose boyfriend wouldn’t take her to the May Ball, in case she might embarrass herself because she doesn’t speak properly. “She might say ‘toilet’ instead of ‘loo’ or something.” The friend reported this to Elly as proof of his consideration for her.

That class boorishness is dying. Nobody would coach Margaret Thatcher on a fake upper-class accent these days; the plummy Tories are a joke. Piers Morgan looks and sounds like a flabby young Roger Moore, but he edits Rottweiler tabloid The Sun. Little England tabloid The Daily Mail. The Daily Mirror*. The old BBC accent , which I’ve always liked, is being phased out, replaced by regional voices and the estuary English that’s becoming the new standard. No single class, identified by accent or schooling, seems to have a lock on a given industry or profession any more. Maybe classification is mostly a leisure activity now, social Tetris.

“In America, though,” they tell me when I ask about class in Britain, “they treat you like shit when you don’t have money or a flash job.”

*I’ve been annoying my English friends with my sloppy reporting. Last time I lived here, Piers Morgan was editor of The Sun. Now he edits the Daily Mirror, apparently, a fact that won’t stick in my brain even though somebody posted this in my comments a week ago. Simon writes: “Under his editorship it’s become a left-wing tabloid and a much “better” competitor to The Sun, unfortunately he has remained an odious toad.”

So there you go. I stand gratefully corrected.

I’m writing from Linhope Street, where Simon and his two flatmates have been good enough to put me up and put up with me on my trip to London. I met Simon briefly in London before I left on my backpacking trip eighteen months ago. He joined me in Peru for two weeks in June, and we walked the Inca Trail. Now he’s inducting me into a far more exotic culture: the London Lad Flat.

Nick Hornby is the tutelary spirit of Linhope. The DVDs and CDs are stacked high. There’s an X-box, big speakers, and a bigger telly. I can’t tell which of the five remote controls I’m to use to change the channel. Since they are all consultants, there are three irons and stacks of clean but rumpled shirts all over the living room, and the fridge is full of Marks & Spencer’s meals of impressively recent vintage. It took me a while to find a dusty tethered phone behind the sofa—in London, the mobile rules. PG Tips tea fuels dressing-gown arguments about classic comedies. “Squeeze the teabag,” instructs Barry as I stir some suspiciously weak-looking stuff for him. His given name is Ian, but when your last name is Whyte, England can’t let the nicknaming opportunity pass.

Simon is a lovely host, good enough to haul himself out to Heathrow to surprise me. Jetlag is a headache-free hangover, and after a quick turn around Regent’s Park and down swanky Marylebone High Street, he allowed me to spend the whole evening lying on the sofa, eating Hob-Nobs and watching two full seasons of the British version of Coupling. It’s funny in a loveless way, a farcical Sex and the City predicated on embarrassment, which is still an abundant natural resource here. One episode is based on a woman flipping out when she finds a porn movie in her boyfriend’s video player: chuck her, mate. I’m tired of sit-com shrews.

Like an Oliver Sacks character, my face works for a while before I produce the right words for everyday things. Registration number, not license plate. Cash point, not ATM. A-meen-ity, not a-mehn-ity. On The Simpsons, Homer refers to a baseball made out of Secretariat and I have to explain to Linhope what a Secretariat is. As usual, I’m shocked and charmed by the amount and variety of chocolate bars pushed at every turn—stacked high over the cash registers, sold in vending machines on every Tube platform. No wonder the television presenters have fascinatingly wide hips. Simon may yet ban me from muttering, “God, she’d never be hired in the States”, even about Anna Ford, who becomes more extraordinarily beautiful as she ages without the Saran-wrap facelifts that are mandatory on the other side.

On Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman, who masters the art of looking bored and outraged at the same time, shreds a Labour Party spokesman over proposed “top-up fees”—discretionary tuition fees of up to three thousand pounds to be levied by individual universities, which are otherwise completely free to students. These pinko debates are a joy after two weeks in Mr. Bush’s America.

The weather is lovely—cold and bright—though wasted on me since I can’t drag myself out of bed before afternoon.

Happy Thanksgiving, New York. Wish you were here.

Swinging out to London this evening. My Ambien is packed. I’m wearing a fuzzy jumper and practising bleary scowls for Heathrow (sorry, HeathROW). The British Airways trolley dollies are among my favourites, for masochistic reasons, and I can’t wait to be woken up at five for chilled, stale baked goods, as I will no longer be able to call them. (Why don’t Americans extend this usage to “boiled goods” and “fried goods”?)

During the American War, the Viet Cong spent years in warrens like the Cu Chi caves. These tunnel networks were dug in the rich soil of the Mekong Delta when Agent Orange and other defoliants dropped by the Americans made jungle cover impossible.

Last year I crawled through these tunnels, cradling a broken hand for authenticity. The mud walls pressed tight, and the smell of the stale air and damp, packed earth was heavy. We had the luxury of occasional lightbulbs; the original tenants crawled in blackness.

Long bamboo pipes funnelled smoke from the underground kitchens away to outlets under distant bushes. The underground hospital was stocked with sticks to bite away screams. There was a small factory for turning out hideous booby-traps. Silent villagers sharpened stakes, brushed on poison, made pipe bombs. Their designs were modelled now by large Caucasian dummies, and our stomachs flipped at the sight. There were bouncing betties; forget-me-nots—foot traps you could take home with you; concealed drums that spun above a stake-lined pit; staked boards that would swing down from the trees and impale a soldier at chest level.

Americans threw grenades down the tunnels when they found them, so the Viet Cong developed a system of blind alleys and sharp turns where explosives were marooned. Cave-ins were a constant danger. Sometimes Americans invaded the tunnels, but so many were killed on these missions that they began to refuse to go down. They sent dogs instead. The Vietnamese began to wash with American soap and eat C-rations to confuse the dogs’ senses. Sometimes the tunnels were so extraordinarily well-concealed that they were simply never found. The day I visited, the bigger westerners had trouble wedging their protein-fed bodies through the hidden trapdoors, but the Viet Cong had managed to stay so inconspicuous here that the Americans had once built a camp right on top of a network of caves. They couldn’t figure out why they kept getting shelled.

Mr. Hai, my tunnel guide, was a handsome, charismatic man in his mid-fifties.
   “The question I want you to answer me when we leave,” he announced just before we crawled into the tunnels, “is where did they shit? Think carefully! Where did the people who lived in these tunnels take the shit?”

Mr. Hai had been an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. He worked as a translator for the Americans. Tank Division. Years later he still got a kick out of the memory of those American boys. “Hai,” they would say, “Is hot. Is damn hot!” He laughed, delighted at his command of idiom. The short words sounded good from Mr. Hai.

The boys Mr. Hai fought with went home suddenly in 1975. Mr. Hai was sent to a reeducation camp for three years. His uncle, who was far more senior, was cruelly “reeducated” outside Hanoi for seven years. When he got out, he refused to go back to his job as a surgeon. He would not work for the communists; he would sweep the streets instead. Eventually he got out on a boat and became a heart specialist in Ohio.

Mr. Hai did not hide his own dislike of the communists. “We give them name Viet Cong. They never call themselves Viet Cong. You know why? Because it mean “Dumb Vietnamese”, or “Stupid”. They do not like this. And when they won they took revenge on the South Vietnamese. Especially anyone who had helped the Americans. I did not speak English for twenty-five years. Pretend I never learn English. Only in last five years I can speak English again and work with tourists.”

He had never heard from any of the Americans he served with, though in the last few years he has met a few other servicemen. He could find them on the Internet, I told him. He smiled vaguely.

Tim O’Brien wrote an extraordinary short story about serving in Vietnam. It’s called “The Things They Carried“, the title story in his first collection. In it he lists with great care every item he and his fellow U.S. soldiers carried as they slogged through the jungles outside Saigon.

Pages and pages of stuff, he lists. The personal choices reveal the human beings in O’Brien’s soldiers, and the pounds of standard issue show them as grunts. The people they fought wore black pyjamas and carried a pouch of rice, perhaps a rifle and a few magazines.

We sat in the tiny kitchen, deep underground, and ate boiled taro root dipped in salt.
   “And now,” said Mr. Hai, “you will tell me, where did the Viet Cong living in these tunnels take the shit? Because remember, if the dogs smell, they are dead.”

They buried it in dead-end chambers, we guess. The women who sneaked in rice smuggled it out again in bags. They…burned it in the kitchen fires. They piped it out, like the smoke. Mr. Hai kept shaking his head.

Tim O’Brien had the answer.

They were defeated, these American boys, by the things they carried and by the things they dropped. They were bogged down in the swamps and the jungle on size twelve boots. They dropped C-rations and soap, and all kinds of materials that shored up tunnels. They dropped ammunition and knives that were turned into booby traps against them.

Meanwhile, under night cover, boys in black pyjamas combed the rice fields for metal ammo containers dropped from the choppers. Shockproof. Waterproof. Stinkproof.
   “You don’t know,” says Mr. Hai, laughing again. He waves an ammo case at us. “They take the shit in the ammo box, and carry it out at night. That is how they stay down here for all the years.”

So here’s the plan for the next few months. I’m like a shark: if I don’t keep moving, Immigration will get me and you’ll stop reading.

• October 25: Trona. Because I have a wedding invitation.

• November 13-25: New York. Because I have to go the dentist for the first time in fifteen months (eww).
• November 26-December 8: London. Because I want to play with Simon, Elly and Edward.
• December 9: Dublin. Because I have three babies to visit.
• December 15: Limerick. Because it’s home.
• March 17: New York. Because BA won’t sell cheap tickets one-way.