Black cloaks are turning beige and grey, scarves are often coloured. Western culture, despite the old Khomeini restrictions on music, has not died out.In Ferdosi Square last week, posters of the shell-smashed palm trees of Khorramshahr, freed from Iraqi occupation exactly 13 years ago, were outnumbered by large ads for the Tehran Symphony Orchestra’s latest concert offerings of Brahms, Debussy and Grieg.Of course, there is another side to the story. Hem-lines, once at pavement level, have crept above the ankle Scarves are slipping back behind the hair line. Some of them were leaving the city every night, fleeing their homes to hide in the country to avoid the explosions.

So not all Iranians showed the deep sense of solidarity about which we like to talk.”No one tried to shout her down. Even the pasdaran (revolutionary guards) war veterans in the class listened respectfully. Nor was the woman making much of an admission; everyone here knows that Tehranis in their thousands spent the hot nights sleeping under the motorway bridges of the Karaj highway during the “war of the cities”. But the woman’s remark showed an extraordinary desire to confront the realities of a war which is once more being commemorated with much passionate intensity by the authorities These little signs are everywhere. Women who would once have walked cowled in their hijab are showing more courage in the face of the slowly decaying bureaucracy of puritanism. When the Iraqi missiles were falling on Tehran, not all the people here were so brave.

But in the class, students argued about the meaning of the Iran- Iraq conflict and one young woman in a black chador insisted on speaking her mind about her people’s behaviour in time of war.
“Iranians were very brave – they fought for their country and were martyred for Islam in great numbers And we say, rightly, that it made us united But I have to tell you something. Five years ago, someone in the seminar would have turned on a tape-recorder and tried to trap a foreign visitor into saying something that could be used as propaganda in the pages of the Tehran Times. At a politics seminar at Tehran University last week, graduate students were remarkably outspoken about their country and its recent history. Why on earth would an Islamist supposedly dedicated to the destruction of the West’s iniquities – a man quite happy to shout “Death to America” – wish to listen to the voice of the Little Satan? But Tehran today is full of such gentle ironies, not least because there is, behind the natural xenophobia, a faint new spirit of freedom.

And then, as we were walking back across the auditorium, he turned to me and said: “Can you do me a favour? I’d like a copy of the schedule for BBC World Service programmes. Could you find one for me? I love listening to the BBC.”

It was tempting to smell a little hypocrisy in his request. A man with a neat beard, an Iranian bank manager fiercely loyal to the memory of Ayatollah Khomeini’s teachings, led me down among the worshippers in front of President Rafsanjani, so that I could take close-up photographs of the revolutionary guards and mullahs at Tehran University. A FUNNY thing happened at Friday prayers last week. The choices are appallingly difficult and, whatever is decided, there is no guarantee that it will lead to peace..