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Almost every time I enter the foreign ministry building in Tehran, I am told to pull my headscarf further forward to cover my hair. My colleagues say it's because I look Iranian and the staff don't realise I am a foreigner. What surprised me at first when I arrived here for the BBC five months ago, however, is that I dress like a nun compared with half the women in north Tehran. They have mastered the art of balancing a headscarf on the back of the head, while teetering around on the highest of heels, sporting the tightest overcoat possible and looking quite glamorous. I have never seen women wear so much make-up. I have even been asked by Iranians at parties why I don't wear make-up--when I was wearing it. The natural look hasn't hit Tehran. But then there is the argument that with a headscarf on, you need to wear a lot of make-up if you are to stand out. Opposition to the restrictions on women seems to have manifested itself in overdressing. Women are indeed pushing the boundaries by what they wear, but it is a pity the cause of women's rights here has got so bogged down in appearances.

Apart from standing out as a professional woman, something else you become aware of very fast in Iran is being a foreigner. The first time I was recording angry crowds shouting "Death to England!" ("Marg bar Engilis!"), I felt self-conscious. (What if they looked at my tape recorder and saw the BBC sticker?) Now I have got used to it--and removed the sticker. Apart from "What on earth are you doing in Iran when you could live in England?", the question I am asked most frequently is: "What do you think of Iranians?" The right answer is to say how hospitable and friendly Iranians are. One day I would like to say what I really think. There is, in fact, a marked degree of xenophobia here--not because people are nasty but because they have been kept so isolated for so long and simply find foreigners an oddity, and interaction with them difficult without a common language. I have heard Iranians apologise for their lack of courtesy in not offering guests food promptly by saying, "Oh dear, I am behaving like a foreigner."

Iranians do follow foreign news avidly, though--in the past few years by watching Persian-language satellite television channels broadcast from California, which has the biggest concentration of the diaspora. Technically the dishes are illegal. Periodically, there are raids to confiscate them and people just hide the receivers because they are the most costly part of the equipment. In many apartment blocks, tenants replace the glass in one window with plastic sheeting and put their dish in front of it. Ours must be one of the few houses in Tehran with a legal dish (because we are journalists), but to fix the dish or tune the channels, we have to call one of the rather shady satellite men. They specialise in fixing pirated satellite cards and then frequently retuning the system to make it work. We once made the mistake of asking one of them for a receipt and he looked at us very strangely, as if we had asked for a receipt for buying something off the back of a lorry.

The satellite dish can be a curse. There are hundreds of channels but there is nothing much worth watching. Many Iranians have become addicted to the expatriate Persian channels that broadcast Iranian pop, films made before the revolution and tips on beauty and fashion dished out by buxom ladies. Recently, the talk of the town was an Iranian TV presenter in California who threatened to overturn the regime by bringing 50 planeloads of his friends to land in Tehran. He never arrived, but taxi drivers and housewives discussed his scheme for several days.

It's not just escapism--Iranians do also follow the latest threats from America, and the state media report them accurately. The result is that ordinary people will come up to you and say things like, "Is your country going to attack us? Tell Tony Blair not to attack Iran." Yet there is no sense that the country is really in any imminent danger. People have got used to living against the backdrop of no relations, or poor relations, with the US (though obviously they do not want another war, having been through a terrible one with Iraq for eight years). In the official ideology, Britain is the Little Satan--compared with the Great Satan of the United States. However, many ordinary Iranians believe there's a British hand behind everything and frequently joke about this. The mythology is that the British are cleverer and more cunning than the Americans, and it was because of their support for the mullahs that the revolution happened in the first place. Britain is also more visible these days--its embassy is periodically attacked by stone-throwing crowds opposed to British involvement in Iraq. The former American embassy is now called the Den of Spies, and surprisingly many young Iranians do not even know what it was before the revolution.

Iran has a very young population and it is clear there are frustrations. Unemployment is a major problem, as is drug addiction. And many say there is simply not enough to do that's fun. Art exhibitions are packed and quickly become major social events. As soon as snow falls in Tehran young people are out hiking, skiing or just playing snowballs with a passion I haven't seen elsewhere. It's a grey city--except when it's covered in snow, as it is now, during an unusually cold winter. Even the authorities have made efforts to try to give the place more colour. These days you see baby-pink buses and luminous orange-and-green plastic palm trees. But with the city's huge highways jammed with traffic six lanes deep, beautifying Tehran is not an easy task.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Even now, with snow on the roads, small decrepit cars zoom along highways at night like racing drivers in a video arcade game, swerving around the other vehicles in an extraordinary test of nerves. Nobody here hinks twice about reversing the wrong way at speed down a one-way street--it is culturally acceptable. Driving in Iran is so bad that Iranian TV has been broadcasting cartoons to educate people about road safety. But much of the time you can't even hope to speed in Tehran's traffic--you just crawl along, breathing in the polluted air. If the Americans try to invade Iran, goes a popular joke, their tanks will get stuck in a giant traffic jam and that will be the end of the invasion.

Frances Harrison is the BBC's Tehran correspondent

COPYRIGHT 2005 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group

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