Nine Years Under British Skies

Some dates sit quietly in a calendar until you realise they are load-bearing. For me it is the 29th of July. On that day in 2017 I landed in Britain for the first time. I was 28, and I arrived, as I wrote in my notebook this week, با دستی خالی، پر از شوق و امید و آرزو: with empty hands, full of eagerness, hope and dreams.

This week my notebook did the maths for me. Nine years. I am 37 now. Blink once and I will be 45; blink again, 47. I wrote that line at ten to five in the morning, because that is when these thoughts arrive, before the city wakes, when the page does not argue back. The question underneath it was simple. When the next blink lands, will I be standing somewhere I am proud of?

Nine years is long enough to hold several lives, and mine has held a few. Years of learning a craft in a language that was not yet mine. Chapters of building, and chapters of losing what I had built. The last two and a half years were the hardest of them all, and some of those stories deserve their own pages here, told properly, another day.

Here is what this anniversary finds me doing, and why I wanted to start writing again. This month, after nine years, I hold the keys to my own studio in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. Three weeks in, I am there before work, after work, sometimes deep into the night, and I have never felt more productive or more energetic anywhere.

And I am not building alone, exactly. The most fascinating change of this past year is what artificial intelligence has done for a maker like me. My mind has always produced more ideas and questions than my hands could keep up with. Now I ask them, try them, watch a prototype appear, and sometimes watch it grow into something real. My weak points are covered. My strengths feel multiplied. It is a strange and wonderful time to make things.

At a quarter to six that same morning I wrote two sentences I want to keep where I can see them. I want to do work that makes me feel good from within. I want to leave something valuable behind in this world. When I drew my life as circles, only two mattered: designing and making, and learning and sharing.

So this blog begins again, under the same British skies that met me nine years ago. I will write here every week or so: about the bench and the studio, about carrying Iran with me through an English life, about what I am making and what it is making of me. If you are reading this years from now, whoever you turn out to be to me, I hope you find something here worth keeping.

The kettle is on. The next nine years start now.