Why I hate Antiques Roadshow: A tale of loss and envy

I really hate Antiques Road Show (UK). Every time I watch it triggers something, an anger I never thought I had that comes screaming and rocketing out of me from a deep dark place in my soul. “Why do these English have all this great stuff they inherited from great great grandfathers? We don’t have anything like that!” Envy, poisonous envy wells up as I covet each and every bauble and trinket that arrived to British shores from China or South America or India of Polynesia. Why do I care so much? Why does it affect me so? 

 

It’s because all our heirlooms, our trinkets and baubles, our family hoard of meaningless objects, a family’s history of acquisition, was all lost. Not once, not twice, but over and over and over again, from Germans occupying our family home in Nazareth to turn it into an HQ in 1915, to the Nakba of 1948 when so much was left behind in my father’s family’s Haifa apartment lost forever, to the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war when what little was brought over from Palestine and left in our Beirut apartment was either taken or callously destroyed. Pages of books torn and strewn on kitchen floor: Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, what offense did these early edition tomes give to the vandal I wonder?!

 

No, my anger is deeper, my envy is greater, I envy their centuries of stability and economic growth and the fact many British family attics were left unplundered by invader or occupier and not blasted by Israeli or Syrian cannon. I envy the time they had, the luxury of time and the prosperity to accumulate things! That prosperity was no lucky accident, it came about by and large due to the fact that their government (UK) was busy plundering the attics of families in other countries, mostly south of the equator, mostly the countries of dark skinned peoples, preferably those who didn’t have access to rifles and artillery!

 

Yes, I hate Antiques Road show. But I hate the deep cavernous hole in my soul, and the inherited sense of shame I feel at losing my country, a country I never knew or lived in, a country I could only look at from across the Jordan River from Jordanian shores. I was so close. I wanted to jump into the water and swim through a hail of machinegun fire. I wanted to take back all I had lost, a loss I never gave much thought to as a younger man or child. The younger me was too busy drunk on the wispy intoxicating haze of youthful exuberance, floating on an ether cloud into the welcoming bowels of oblivion. I wasn’t much of a romantic. But now, at this point in my useless life all I can think of is all that never was, the life that could have been mine. I know it’s nonsense, but what in life isn’t nonsense to someone somewhere. The little insignificant things we attach so much value to are important to us and are so very significant.

 

But what does my loss compare to the loss suffered by so many refugees fleeing our region, especially after 2011 and the war in Syria. An endless stream of war weary families joined in an unwelcoming European continent by refugees from Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, so much loss, so much left behind. Probably little inexpensive things that meant a great deal to their owners who never had much of anything to begin with. 

 

Reading Rabih Alameddine’s book “The Wrong End of the Telescope”, you can’t help but weep, it’s what westerners would call a cathartic book, its about Lesbos and refugees, written before COVID and the war in Ukraine probably. It's a sort of book that allows them to feel deep emotion about third world people, and by “feeling” cleanse their souls somehow of hundreds of years of imperialist wars waged by their countries, wars that sowed the seeds of modern day conflicts and refugee crises. But for me, the themes of loss and the memory of place in that book resonated deeply. The smell of cardamom in the morning, morning coffee on the veranda, the aromas of places you lost. Your dreams that seem to fixate on one apartment you lived in long ago that no longer exists. Thankfully, I never lost a close family member in a war, but distance in time and space, an economic or political exile for 20 or 30 years, growing apart from people you love, that is as much a loss as any kind of loss.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed Alameddine’s book and highly recommend it by the way.

 

So, Antiques Roadshow, you unapologetic show off, you pretentious, pompous, snobbish piddling little show, I hate you and you make me want to be a Viking and raid your British shores. I want what you have! I will find a way to take it all! And you know what, maybe mine are just words spoken in anger, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who have lost so much more than I who are salivating at your gates and the gates of Europe. Be afraid, be very afraid… it’s a new age of possibilities.