Rebecca, Hugo and Tyler celebrate Chinese Moon Festival

This is my friend Rebecca (Ho Chi Wai) and her two beautiful sons Hugo and Tyler as they set off to celebrate the mid-Autumn festival or Moon festival. This is the traditional Chinese harvest festival and it is linked to the autumn equinox - the time when the moon is at it's fullest and roundest.

"We took paper lanterns to Norwood Park and floated them up into the night - but it was too windy and they blew into the only tree around. I was quite scared watching them burn there and the boys got scared too, so we came home."

"I love my boys in these clothes - they look so sweet, but I'm not such a traditional person. I've been raised more in a Western tradition and I married an English man."

"Personally, I feel that the price we have paid for Chinese culture is too high. In China, we have a saying - 'We're proud of our past, ashamed of our present and unsure about our future.'

Rebecca gave me a red silk purse to sew onto my map of patterns. It was given to her son, Tyler when he was born by his grandmother, Pak See. Inside was a tiny silver ankle bracelet with delicate silver bells on it.

The keffiyeh, Intifada and picking grapes in Piedmonte

This weekend, I met Sabrina and Michela. We were working together to harvest grapes, but spent more time eating, drinking and sharing stories. I got chatting to them because they were both wearing the keffiyeh, the traditional headress usually worn by Arab or Kurdish men. The distinctive woven checked pattern of the keffiyeh is very ancient and originally came from Mesopotamia, where it represented either fishing nets or grains of wheat.

Sabrina is wearing the classic black and white check kefffiyeh that became such a symbol of Palestinian resistance and national identity in the late 1980s, during the Intifada or 'shaking off'.

She told me: "Non sono revolutionaria ma simpatizzo," which probably sums up how a lot of people feel about wearing such a powerfully symbolic piece of clothing. Michela wears her scarf not for its 'radical chic' but for its colour, softness, warmth and the fact that it stops her from getting earache. She bought it two or three years ago from H&M children's clothing range.

Today, this symbol of Palestian identity is largely imported from China. The last producer of Palestian-made keffiyehs went out of business in 2006.

On my map, I've sewn a piece of keffiyeh (this one picked up in a New York street market) onto a piece of the Middle East. I'm still struggling with how to reconcile the immense power and significance of this cloth with the fact that it is so ubiquitous and almost meaningless in other ways. But maybe this is the fate of all great symbols.