28 March 2025 An earthquake measuring 7.7 hits Myanmar and Thailand, killing over 1,000 people and injuring thousands of others. As I write the true extent of the damage is unknown and perhaps never will be as much of Myanmar is in a state of civil war. The struggle against military dictatorship has been ongoing for decades, ever since General Ne Win grabbed power in 1962. A crucial turning point came on 23 July 1988 when Ne Win resigned and, for a brief moment, hopes grew for a democratic government.

July 1988 Travel to Burma was limited to a one week visa and the only visitors were backpackers. I flew into Rangoon with my ex-wife, Judith. Our two main objectives were to see Lake Inlé and the ancient city of Pagan (now Bagan), a site often damaged by seismic disturbances (although it seems to have escaped relatively unscathed this time).

The train north from Rangoon was a clanking, super-slow, service. All the backpackers, mostly Aussies, were herded into one carriage. I fell asleep sitting on a wooden bench, then woke crouched in the aisle shouting, "I'm trapped in the rhythm of the train!" I cannot recall what the nightmare was, but I do remember all the faces staring at me. With a muttered apology for waking everyone, I reseated myself.

After staying on Lake Inlé, we went north to the town of Taunggyi, spending one night there. In the restaurant we sat down at a table with a neat white tablecloth only to notice that a column of ants was marching across the centre. Closer inspection revealed that they were coming up one table leg and down another. During the entire meal, the waiter took pains to avoid squashing any of them, placing the food with great care. I admired his concern for nature.

Next morning in the market I found more cash by the simple expedient of changing a US$100 banknote into ten $10 notes. That might seem an unprofitable manoeuvre except that $100 notes were in demand and dealers were prepared to add a significant pile of Burmese kyat in order to get the coveted larger bills.

Money was a hot political topic. The government had recently declared that the 25, 35 and 75 kyat notes were no longer legal tender and instead introduced the 45 and 90 kyat notes. These numbers were said to be the favourites of the military ruler General Ne Win. In that draconian act they put about three quarters of the country's money out of circulation and destroyed the savings of millions of its citizens. Walking through the market we fell into conversation with a neatly dressed old lady who invited us back to her house for tea.

The house was a tidy wooden bungalow of simple furniture dressed with antimacassars, white lace cloths hung over chair backs and arms to protect them from the hair oil that everyone used. In one corner was an upright piano. Our old lady was a music teacher and over tea and biscuits she poured out her sorrows. Her son was a student activist in Rangoon. "It is terrible what is happening," she said, "The students are hungry, but when they went out to protest, the soldiers grabbed my son's friend and smashed his head against the paving stones. He died."

We sat there stunned. In that tranquil, civilised house, her words seemed all the more chilling. We had stayed in Rangoon a few days earlier, drinking gin without tonic - 'Sorry Sir, unavailable' - at the famous Strand Hotel. Neglected and rundown, the historic bar was alive with cockroaches which no one would kill. If there had been any sign of unrest in the streets, we had missed it. Now all we could offer was condolences and the hope that her son would be alright.

Later, the old lady walked us back to the market and located our transport for the onward journey to Pagan.

In a corner of the marketplace was the taxi, but this was no ordinary vehicle. The battered Willys jeep had been left behind by the Americans at the end of WWII, then converted into a bus with an extra structure on the back equipped with bench seats. Between these, down the middle, was a row of wooden stools. Fortunately we were first and, congratulating ourselves, took the front passenger seat. We could share.

The back filled up with people and their purchases. Our delight at having the front seat soon ended: two more passengers squeezed in. I was now pushed almost on top of the driver. How was he going to operate the jeep? The dashboard contained an empty space for a missing speedometer. Rusted wires protruded where once had been switches for non-essential equipment like headlights. Next to my thigh, the innards of the gearbox gaped up at me through an oily black hole.

Eventually, with 26 people aboard, the taxi was declared full. The driver got in, beaming with happy smiles and carrying a curiously shaped stick. With a deep cough and a noxious belch the engine was started. Our driver took his stick and with a great theatrical flourish, shoved one end into the hole next to my thigh. There was a sickening crunch then the jeep gave an exhausted spasm and lurched forward. Teams of onlookers sprang into action, shoving us onward. The engine retched horribly but kept going.

Soon we were rolling along rough country lanes, occasionally bashing through overhanging stands of bamboo and vegetation. Every now and again the driver would take a hopeful stab at the gears while keeping one hand busy on the steering wheel, twisting it this way and that, without any apparent effect on the direction of travel. At every lurch I had to brace myself against the other travellers and keep well clear of that menacing black hole. I had the firm conviction that if any part of my anatomy fell into that diabolical gearbox, I would get pulled in, probably to be spewed out the exhaust pipe as hamburger meat.

And then it began to rain.

Of the next few hours I have only painful memories. The times when we sank into mud and had to get out and push should have been a relief, but the tropical downpour was so heavy it seemed impossible that so much water could fall out the sky. The driver, however, never once stopped grinning and waving his magic gear wand.

Seventeen hours later, at dawn, we pulled into Pagan and all the pain and fatigue was suddenly gone. Steam was rising from the jungle and above it, touched by the first rays of sunlight, was a forest of temples and pagodas. We wandered around in an exhausted daze, astounded by the decorative panels and reliefs: the Buddha in blissful full lotus hovering above a stupendous assortment of flowers and vines; goggle-eyed gargoyles snarling from cornices; dancing nymphs brandishing peacock feather fans. It was overwhelming. I was shattered. At the first available guesthouse, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. It felt a bit oily and I remembered, with regret, that civilised old piano teacher with her crisp clean antimacassars.

*

A few days later, having landed back in Bangkok, the news came that full-scale riots had broken out in Burma. The 8888 rebellion, named after the date it began, did not go well for the protestors. Demonstrations were brutally crushed by the military dictators with thousands of deaths. The following month Aung San Suu Kyi founded the National League for Democracy, but she was soon placed under house arrest. Burma had not been a happy country since General Ne Win took over in 1962. His policy of self-sufficiency and high tariffs had led to isolation and stagnation, but now it began to slide into the terrible violence and chaos from which it has yet to emerge.

© Vyacheslav Argenberg

Hello to all new subscribers and thanks for joining. I only write when something prompts me, although I can’t think why trust issues have come up this week…

2023 I visit Bolivia and Peru for the first time (some names have been changed)

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In the church the pews are positioned with large gaps. Pablo nudges me. "It's to let the women in." And in they come, chaperoned by their men who wear shiny three-piece suits, looking like assassins on their day off, which possibly some of them are since the town is reputedly awash with drug money. But it's the women who catch the eye, as is the intention, I suppose. On the head is a tall bowler hat, usually black, but sometimes a softer fawn or a bright scarlet, the sort a Pope might wear, were he an Andean indigenous peasant.

"On its own the hat can cost thousands of dollars," Pablo whispers, "From Italy. Look at the shawls...pure viçuna wool, another few thousand." He shakes his head. "And look at those skirts, so many of them."

It is indeed the skirts, or the hips, that demand attention. The women layer up with several petticoats, then add pleats and padding until their hips are as broad as a Castillian queen. "My wife doesn't do the chola, thank God," says Pablo, "I'd be penniless."

Chola is the Bolivian traditional women's attire. Reputedly the hat came from British railway workers in the 19th century, the skirts from Spanish colonial insistence on decorum. It's like they took all the nagging menfolk's advice and said, ‘OK, happy now?’ As a fashion statement it says, ‘Stand clear. Matriarch coming through.’

A woman navigates the aisle, then manoeuvres herself on to the pew in front of me. Her sicario husband flutters around her muttering, like one of those annoying automated lorry voices. 'This vehicle is reversing.' A dog slopes in unnoticed and tucks itself under the seat.

The priest goes through his sermon. A guitar plays. We stand. We sit. We stand. And then they get Francis of Assisi out his box and carry him down the aisle. The men shadow their women into the square. Everyone squints in the light. The sky is a devastating blue. The church is a cracking white. Firecrackers explode and the chola women chuck confetti at the saint, rather than over him. St Francis's performance is a little wooden. He lumbers along at shoulder height on his palanquin, stopping at each corner of the square to bless the onlookers. An oompah band oompahs.

This is the holiest shrine in South America: the basilica of Our Lady in Copacabana on the shores of Lake Titicaca. In 1578 an image of the Virgin Mary was brought here and started performing miracles. People were healed. Some pilgrims whose ship was sinking prayed to her and were washed up in Brazil on a particular beach which they named after her. In 2013 thieves robbed her of all the gold and silver adornments. They used a ladder from a mobile phone mast near the basilica.

I'm entranced by everything, but it's time to go. Pablo drops me off at the border post for Peru. I'm meeting a driver who will take me to Puno at the north end of the lake.

The immigration post is closed. It's a Sunday. A young man strolls over to me, "Kevin? I'm Felipe, the taxi man."

We wait until opening time and I get my stamp, stroll a hundred metres, another stamp. Then we set off. Felipe is quiet, apparently not wanting to talk.

After a few miles, I spot something down by the lake, "STOP!!"

Flamingos. A great flock of them, stepping ornately through the shallow blue water, their feathers a vivid pink and white. Felipe follows my finger, frowning slightly. "Yes, there are many here."

"Are we in a rush?"

He frowns a bit more. "Not really."

I get out the car. "I'm going to look closer."

Grabbing my camera, I run down a bank and start across a stubbled field. The flamingos are about three hundred metres away. A tiny sinister thought occurs to me: Felipe has everything of mine now. He could just drive off. I don't look back, in case he sees me and thinks I don't trust him. Maybe I don't, but if he thinks I do, maybe he will rise to the occasion. I look back. The car isn't there.

There are two pigs rootling around up ahead so I need to detour around them. I definitely don't trust pigs, having been attacked once by a Vietnamese pot belly at a children's petting zoo. I take another look back. Felipe must have parked up the road.

I'm crouching now, using a bit of scrubby bush as cover. The ground is getting mushy and wet. I have to skirt a few large puddles. Is this a good idea? I push on. Still not close enough. Some of the outlying flamingos seem to be stepping a tad quicker. If there was an ornithological equivalent of a chola, it would be a flamingo. Lots of layers. Lots of colours. Massive bill.

The scrub bush falls away. There's the blue sky and the blue lake separated by a line of darkness. Then the flamingos decide that I am, after all, untrustworthy. A few take off, but mostly they simply stride away.

"Is it good?"

It's Felipe. He has followed me and stands smiling, a few steps behind me. "You like the birds? Me too."

I take a few distant shots of the birds and give up. We walk back to the car and when we get in, I discover that the ice is broken and Felipe can't stop talking.

He is a student in Puno and works for the taxi company at weekends. He doesn't drink coffee, he doesn't drink tea, but he tried champagne when he was in Paraguay and he loves it. Paraguay? His favourite place in the whole world. He'd live there again if he could. It's a paradise.

What about our destination, Puno?

Puno is a crazy place. The airport at Juliaca was attacked by a mob last week and Puno was cut off from the rest of the country for three days.

The problem is politics. Felipe shrugs. "Our president was Castillo, but then he was arrested and locked up. Here in Puno he is very popular so people rebelled. Twenty-two were killed."

We are passing houses that have been painted with political slogans for various candidates and parties. Castillo dominates. "The owners let the activists do it because they get a free coat of paint."

Peruvian politics is an entertaining game of thrones, a constant shuffle between palace and prison for a handful of crowd-pleasers. Pedro Castillo is currently doing the prison shift. Born to an impoverished peasant family, he became a primary school teacher before a political career beckoned. As president he was a left-winger with right-wing social views. He whipped through four governments in six months which, even by Peruvian standards, is a bit pacy. His progress was checked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which pushed up fertilizer prices, mucking up his plans. An attempt to dissolve Congress and rule by decree was thwarted. Pedro was arrested and put in prison. Peru has several ex-presidents in prison. It feels like they've tried every available type: Alberto Fujimoro, Japanese-Peruvian technocrat (in prison at the time of my visit), Alejandro Toledo, USA-pleasing liberaliser with indigenous roots (in prison), Alain Garcia, handsome middle-class populist (shot himself before he could be taken to prison); Ollanta Humala, sturdy military man (in and out of prison in a long-running corruption case); Pedro Kuczynski, economist whose family fled the Holocaust (in prison); and so on and on. With Castillo imprisoned the country has finally, after two centuries, been driven to gamble on the only remaining type of human being available that has not previously been tried, a woman. So far Dina Boluarte has not impressed the people of Puno. Her 2004 book on human rights was found to be largely plagiarised. Several Latin American governments have refused to recognise her presidency, but she is still in place.

Felipe points to the burned-out toll booths along the road. "They were attacked in the riots. It's still not safe though. Ten people have been murdered in the last week." He turns to me, suddenly impassioned, eyes blazing. "The police cannot be trusted!"

We fall silent for a minute.

"Did something happen to make you not trust the police?"

He doesn't answer for a while, but I can see he's tussling with something: shaking his head, sighing, his fingers gripping tight to the steering wheel, then relaxing. Finally he says, "My grandfather was a policeman."

The story comes out. His father died when Felipe was a baby and he was taken to live with his grandparents. His grandfather was a heroic figure for him: strong, reliable, and righteous. But then one day the Maoist rebels, the Sendero Luminoso, bombed his police station, killing several of his colleagues and leaving him deaf. In the aftermath Felipe's hero slowly disintegrated, taking up heavy drinking which in turn drove his wife, Felipe's grandmother, to seek solace elsewhere. She found it at the local Mormon Church. Felipe was taken along. He became a Mormon.

He glances across at me a little self-conscious. I'm astonished. "Are Mormons common in Peru?"

He nods. "More and more. There are about 200,000."

"But you don't seem like a Mormon."

He grins. "As I grew up, all my family were Mormons. I never questioned anything. It was all accepted. Joseph Smith. The Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City. I was a 110 per cent believer."

When he was nineteen, the church gave him a business suit and a name tag, then sent him to Paraguay to convert the heathens. But what Felipe saw did not seem right. The American missionaries from Utah were pushing American culture, something he didn't like. Slowly he began to question things. He read history books. "For the first time I learned that Peruvian police committed atrocities during the Sendero time. I hoped my grandfather was not one of them, but I had to think he might have been."

Somehow, his loss of faith in his childhood hero was matched by a loss of faith in Mormonism and a Supreme Being. His mission to Paraguay ended with only one conversion, his own. He became an agnostic.

Eventually he flew back to Peru where he had to face the music. His uncles were furious. The family abandoned him, but he did not back down. "I had to do it, to be myself."

It has been a lonely path. "I can say that no one understands. Almost everyone here believes in God."

He lives quietly, alone. One day he plans to go back to Paraguay. "Honestly, Kevin," he says earnestly, "It's like paradise. People say hello in the street, and they smile at you."

All too soon it's time to get out his taxi and say goodbye. We shake hands. I tell him he's a courageous man, a true hero. He grins, but then looks a little anxious and drives away, taking his heartbreakingly simple vision of paradise with him.

January 2025

A rise in the popularity of right wing parties throughout Europe is associated with demonisation and hatred for immigrants. The leader of Germany's far right AfD party, Alice Weidel, is 'interviewed' by Elon Musk. Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa and remigrated to Canada at the age of 17 before moving on again to the USA. Weidel is the granddaughter of Hans Weidel, a Nazi judge appointed by Adolf Hitler. He joined the SS in 1939. Alice is a migrant too. She lives in Switzerland with her lesbian Sri Lankan partner. The AfD are opposed to same-sex marriage, the display of rainbow symbols on government buildings and immigration.

In 1996 I travelled through Ethiopia, Djibouti and Yemen. By November I had landed in Aden on the southern tip of Arabia, arriving by ship from Djibouti. From there I wanted to go north into the remote mountains of Yafa and start walking. But finding information about Yafa proved tricky. I was spending my time chewing qat (sometimes written khat), the leaves of a small tree native to Ethiopia, collecting experiences that would become my first book, Eating the Flowers of Paradise. The journey to Yafa is covered by that book in detail, but looking back through my notebooks I find events and fragments of conversations that I left out. Now they seem more poignant than three decades ago.

Aden

In one qat session I ask the men about Yafa.

"It's high mountains to the north," says one, "And very cold."

I don't attach much significance to this opinion. The average Adeni suffers frost bite when you put an ice cube in their Seven Up.

"I have a Yafa'i friend," says another man, delicately picking a few tiny qat leaves from a short stem and nibbling at them. "In the war he stole a Russian tank from the al-Anad military base and drove it back to Yafa. Eventually he reached a military checkpoint between Lower Yafa and Upper Yafa. The guards stepped forward and asked him, 'Any weapons?' He said, 'No.' And they waved him through."

The room rocks with laughter. Yemenis love stories about ignorant tribesmen almost as much as they like tales of truculent rascals who steal weapons and escape to the mountains. One favourite is that a couple of friends with a Toyota pickup truck stole a Mig-27 fighter jet and towed it into the mountains where it became playground equipment for the village kids. Of all the truculent mountain rascals in Yemen, the Yafa people have the greatest reputation. No one I speak to can agree on where Yafa actually might be located, but all are unanimous on the fact that Yafa fought hard against the British and the communists, except when they didn't. There is no doubt either, that they are famously hospitable, although sometimes hostile and unfriendly. And there can be absolutely no question that they are trustworthy, as long as you never turn your back on them. After all my investigations into Yafa and its people, I feel as ignorant as when I started.

The best solution, I reckon, is to go and see for myself, but I've just come by boat from Africa and I am physically knackered. I have a split lip, a sore foot and an infected eye. It takes a fortnight of soporific qat sessions and lazing on sweaty mattresses before I can summon up the energy, and courage, to set off for Yafa.

I first get a bus to Sheikh Othman, a town at the end of the causeway that leads to Aden. There I ask and am directed to a battered old Landcruiser, gathering dust in the corner of the bus station. This, apparently, is the transport to Yafa. After all the talk of mystery and remoteness, this seems a bit too easy. I am the last passenger required by the shared taxi, so as soon as I settle into the back seat, we set off.

It is only after some time that I realise the man sitting next to me is not Yemeni. He's wearing Yemeni clothes and sports a fine beard, but Sergei is Russian. "What are you doing, going to Yafa?" he asks in halting English, "In one year I never saw a another foreigner in Yafa." He's a surgeon working at the hospital in Labus, our destination.

We are soon bouncing up stony tracks. The landscape is a dessicated corpse, its ribs sticking out. Sergei tells me how he had been sent by the Soviet authorities to tend the sick in their political and military allies, first Tunisia, then Niger, and finally, The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the official name for communist South Yemen. But when he arrived, totally unprepared, the Yemenis decided they didn't want a Russian anywhere near a major population centre and sent him to Yafa where he was the only foreigner. It was the Yemeni equivalent of Siberian exile. Only no one told Sergei. For two weeks he thought he was working in the major Yemeni city of Lahej, and only later discovered that he was in a forgotten backwater called Yafa. The journey up to this mountain fastness had been a baffling series of car changes so he really had no idea where he was.

His salary was supposed to be $1,000 a month, but it had never been paid in full, sometimes not at all. During his years of foreign service the Soviet Union had disappeared, South Yemen had disappeared and communism had disappeared, but Sergei remains. He got a letter telling him that his wife back in Moscow had left him. He never hears from his daughter. He would like to visit Russia, but there is a problem. He shows me his passport. No stamps. Officially, he is not even here.

We stop at a restaurant, eat lunch and buy qat. Now the entire car settles down to enjoy the afternoon, the landscape unfolding before us. One man, loves that I am British because he gets to tell all his anti-British stories. "When we were fighting the British in Aden there was one regiment we called The Bastards. They wore a cap with a string hanging down behind."

I think he means the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders whose notoriously violent behaviour did a lot to foster anti-British sentiment during the independence struggle of the 1960s.

"One morning they lined us all up along the Causeway with our hands on our heads. One man was chewing paan (betel nut) and when he reached into his pocket for more, they shot him dead."

We pass a Landcruiser pickup, lurching its way up to the pass, its cab covered in a vast load of straw, the back packed with sheep and goats stoically waiting for their ordeal to end. The mountainsides get so steep that the terraces are only a couple feet wide. The soil has taken generations to gather and in it stand qat and coffee trees.

The driver, Omar, has a fine Arab face with green eyes. He points out a side track to his village and a particular rock standing over a bend in the road. "When I was a boy, we were at war with the tribe on this side. Cross the boundary and you could be shot."

The track really starts to climb and Omar slips the car into four-wheel drive, a rare event in Yemen despite many roads being outrageously rough and steep. Eventually we lurch out on to a high plateau where there's a shabby roadside settlement called 'Chance'. Then we arrive in Labus, our destination.

I ask about a hotel and they all laugh. There is no hotel. "You will stay with me," says Sergei.

He has a three-room apartment attached to the hospital. The sink is full of dirty pots. There is a sofa, an armchair and television. I chew my qat while Sergei polishes off a few cans of Heineken that he's smuggled up from Aden. He does not chew qat. He likes vodka and cognac but rarely gets it.

"This is a country within a country," he says, "They have Kalashnikovs but no work."

He fetches a stack of blankets. "Later it will get cold." I'm already shivering.

At eight Sergei is up, making date sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs with strong coffee. By nine we are on his ward round at the hospital, pushing through a crowd of people at the gate all demanding his attention.

There is a man whose knee has been shot off. He's making excellent progress. There are so many gunshot and shrapnel injuries that it seems like a warzone. Once, Sergei tells me, a stock of explosives went off in a shop and he had to do ten amputations. One man lost both legs but a week later he left hospital alive. "When a bomb goes off, there are so many rocks that a lot of my work is to remove rock shrapnel."

We are interrupted by a youth brandishing two X-rays. Sergei examines them, muttering in Russian, holding the plates up to the light. "Terrible. Double fracture. Bring her quickly or I will have to amputate."

He has two operations to do this afternoon: shrapnel removal and a hernia. There are two women accompanying the old man with the hernia. Both women are completely veiled in black. One waves a gloved hand at me, "Are you British?" Her accent is filled with the soft soupy glumness of the West Midlands.

I am astonished. "You're a Brummie!"

"No way. Wolverhampton me."

Yafa exports people, and they remit money. They rarely come back. She had been sent for marriage. Not all the women are so drab in their dress. One stooping old woman shuffles in, escorted by her son. She's dressed in a bright yellow and green dress tied at the waist with a red chiffon scarf whose ends touch the ground. She wears gloves trimmed with fake fur and a head-scarf topped with a tiara of Christmas tinsel. Her face is a vivid yellow, painted with a traditional concoction to protect it from the sun. When she looks up at me, it's like seeing a full moon rise. An old man arrives wearing a black and yellow striped blazer, white shirt, purple checked futa (sarong) fringed with yellow pom-poms, orange long johns and white trainers. He points a finger at me and makes machine gun noises, grinning widely. Later I'm told he is dumb, but he is trying to tell me how his village was bombed by a British warplane during the independence war.

"Does he hate the British?"

"Oh no, he loves the British."

At lunch Sergei and I head down to the market where we eat chips with tomato ketchup and drink milky tea out of cups and saucers. The cafe owner had worked in a steel factory in Sheffield. Outside men are selling guns and ammunition from the backs of trucks. I can hear steady gunfire plus a few loud explosions, but no one else seems to notice. Sergei shrugs it off. "That's normal here. They say the day begins when the Kalashnikov starts crying." At every possible excuse people fire their weapons. At weddings, he tells me, it's common to settle a few scores. "One wedding gave me four operations."

Sergei has to go and get ready for surgery now and I'm invited to chew qat with the hospital's director of nursing. The hospital guard joins us, leaving his AK47 in the corner. "I went to your country many years ago," he tells me. "It was very nice. I stayed with our sheikh who lives in a place called Birming Jam. The streets were clean and when you asked for directions people helped you."

What most impressed him, however, was the communications. "The sheikh's front door had a small door in it. Every day they would bring letters to his house and push them through that small door. Then the sheikh would open the envelopes and read the letters." He shakes his head in disbelief. "Such organisation!"

Next day I'm invited to chew qat in a village 15 km away. The car has an alarming tendency to leap to the left. The tyres are completely bald of tread, the canvas showing through in places. Our party grows. One man points out a house. "That was a Jewish house until 1948 We were all mixed up. There was no segregation. What fools they were to go to Israel when Yemen was their home."

After a long delay for a puncture - there is no spare tyre - we reach a village and enter the house of a local historian. "Aha!" he greets me enthusiastically, "Captain Haines! You have come. God be praised!"

Haines was the British officer who annexed Aden for the East India Company in 1839. The historian's father, a sprightly 70 year-old, arrives. "The last big event in Yemen was the bursting of the Mar'ib Dam 1500 years ago," he says, "That's when people came here to Yafa."

I tell him that I've visited the impressive ruins of the dam, out on the fringes of the Empty Quarter, perhaps 200 miles to the North-East of Yafa. Construction has been dated back to 1700 BC and its final collapse, brought on by failure to do repairs, is usually put at around 575 AD.

"The people came here and founded a Himyaritic kingdom," said the old man. "There are statues and relics that we know about, but we say nothing in case the extremists destroy them. We were Jews for a while, but then became Muslims."

I'm chuckling at this, the breezy demolition of the idea that Jews and Arabs are fundamentally separate peoples. He's shocked when I point it out.

"Oh no. We were all Jews once. I'm writing a history of our land and have over 200 pages finished."

The son is astonished. "What?! You never said a word to me!"

The other men are discussing the future of the country. One says. "There is a poet, al-Baradouni who is blind and his face scarred by smallpox. When people ask him about the future of Yemen, he says, 'It's written in my face.'"

When I get back to the hospital and Sergei's apartment, I find him drinking Cinzano on his own, watching an Egyptian soap on TV with the sound off. It is his daughter's birthday, but all he knows is that she is in Odessa. He pours me a drink. He's in maudlin mood. "Look at me. I'm old and my Russian diploma is worthless in Europe. In Russia now, only criminals are successful."

He pours more Cinzano. "My first teacher in surgery said a good surgeon can work after one litre of cognac."

He grew up on the Arctic Ocean island of Novoya Zemlya. "In summer it was beautiful. Birds would arrive from the south. Wonderful. But in winter, not so good."

His hope now is to save a bit of money and open a private clinic in Yafa. Maybe one day he can marry again. What does he think, I ask, of Yafa?

He considers the question for some time before answering. "They are good people." He pauses. "And sometimes not good. Like people everywhere. And I like them."

I ask how old he is and he answers: "I am very old," he says, "I'm forty-one."

At this we both start laughing.

Summer 1985

I loved Khartoum in the early morning. There was a cool freshness in the golden air and I'd walk down to the Blue Nile and watch the birds. They were all new to me in those days: the herons and hammerkops, the sunbirds and storks.

Eventually I would drag myself away and poke my head in at the Ministry of Education. It was always the same ground floor office, and every morning I would see the desk, untouched and empty. Sometimes a secretary would appear. "He hasn't come in yet." The man was the official who could assign the British expatriate teachers to their posts. I wanted to go to the south, but for that I needed special permission. I was on a programme that accepted British graduates as teachers in Sudanese secondary schools and I had done one stint in the far west, in Darfur, now I wanted something different.

I would go to drink tea and get some breakfast, taking my time, always the same: a plate of beans and a flat white bread, washed down with a glass of sweet red tea. Sometimes the presidential brass band would be practising in the lane beside the palace. They certainly needed that practise, but I would enjoy watching them. At the General Post Office I would enquire about Poste Restante and they would hand over a massive pile of letters in pale blue envelopes. It was a very casual system: people wrote to you 'Care of Poste Restante, GPO Khartoum'. The woman behind the dusty grille simply handed over everything that had arrived and trusted that you would only take what was yours.

Most of the letters were years old, messages to travellers who had long since passed through and would never come back. I'd look at the postmarks, the stamps and the names, wondering who these people were and what news they had missed. For all anyone knew they might be dead. It seemed very easy to disappear in those days.

There was a phone network, but I only tried once. You wrote the number on a slip of paper, then waited while an operator wrestled with a mess of electrical cables, jabbing plugs into sockets and listening in hope for some kind of reaction. Occasionally they succeeded and you were summoned to a booth that contained a receiver. A three-minute call would cost more than I was spending on food in a week.

A familiar voice saying repeatedly, "Kevin, is that you? Kevin?"

I would ask if everyone was alright. They would ask if Khartoum was hot, and what time of day it was. After that there would be a pause during which the vast, fathomless gap between your experience and theirs, would open up. Where to begin? Maybe tell them about the wrestling matches on Friday evenings out in Omdurman? The Nuba tribe would come en masse, carrying their heroes on their shoulders, fighters who had taken on the names of the most modern, most technologically advanced, objects that they could name. Hence 'Electricity Pylon' might tussle with 'Power Turbine'. Then the late sun would cut through the dust and the holy dervishes would begin to chant and everything was magic for a few moments. Or should I start with the moment when a Libyan fighter jet came whooshing overhead and, for no apparent reason, dropped a couple of bombs on the banks of the White Nile? Or the market where you could buy crocodile head ashtrays and elephant's foot umbrella stands? Instead I simply said that I was aiming to go to The South, to a town called Yambio on the Zaire border, but I had no idea if I would make it.

One time I had to go to the passport office, fighting my way to the front where there was an Italian nun shouting in a most ungodly way at the officials. Leaning over the counter I noticed something under a table leg, put there to stop the table wobblng. It was the nun’s passport. She got her stamp.

By late morning any cool freshness in the air was long gone, replaced by heat and dust. At the Ministry of Education, the office was still empty and the secretary would shrug. "He's not coming in today," or "You just missed him."

And then one day he was there. A tall dignified official in robes, rather than the corrupt and dissipated fraud that I had imagined. "You want to be assigned to the South?" he said, gazing at me in amused astonishment. "Why?"

"They need teachers too."

He shuffled papers, sorting some into a smart leather briefcase. Having turned up for work, he was clearly now about to leave.

"I cannot help you."

"But I was told you could."

"The Ministry has decided not to send any teachers to the South this year."

He pressed the brass catches shut with firm clicks. I was only interested in myself, failing to understand that he had given me a clue to a significant geopolitical moment. The South was written off. Khartoum had abandoned it.

Back at the hostel where the teachers were living, the rooms were emptying as individuals went off to their assigned towns. I spent hours reading and sleeping. Why didn't I want to go to places like Wad Medani or El Obeid? Why not go back to El Fasher? I could not explain. There was a desire inside of me to get as far away from everything as possible. Quite what 'everything' was, I could not say. Civilisation? My world? People like me? I wanted to step off the map. I wanted to go where there were no telephones, not even bad ones, and certainly no poste restante. I was 24 years old and I wanted to disappear into an adventure.

And then someone made a suggestion. "Just go. I bet the Southerners do want teachers. Once you're in Juba, they'll welcome you with open arms."

I stopped going to the Ministry of Education and started walking up to the airport. I discovered that I could stroll through the security gate at the back and head for the control tower. I struck up a friendship with one of the controllers. "There are no scheduled flights at all to the south," he told me, "But sometimes a cargo plane goes."

Then one day, he told me there was a flight that night.

I did the long walk in the soft darkness up to the airport, carrying my bag. The weight was mostly books that I would never read.

I asked about the plane and was pointed to a darkened jet standing on the far side of the runway. There were others hoping to get aboard: southerners desperate to get home.

We ran across the runway and made it to the plane. A jeep pulled up with two Russian crew. They ignored the crowd, pushing their way through and climbing a ladder into the plane. We waited, watching them in the cockpit, flicking switches, donning headsets, their faces concentrating in the light of the dials.

Finally the pilot reappeared at the door, looking out over the crowd which must have numbered almost a hundred by then. "I will take six passengers," he said. "There are no seats. You must sit on the cargo." He started pointing to people which set off a crazed hysteria in the crowd. "... and you."

I was selected, by virtue, no doubt, of my white face.

I shoved my way to the ladder and climbed up. Inside the hold was a series of wooden crates held down by nets. "Sit on top and hold on."

I remember the noise, and the cold, nothing else. No conversation was possible.

In Juba's Ministry of Education building they looked at me in astonishment. "We thought that Khartoum would not send any teachers this year."

"Can you use me?"

"Of course. Where do you want to go?"

I asked for Yambio, a three-day journey from Juba. Soon after I arrived the area was cut off by rebel activity. There were no phones and no postal services at all. But even there, far from the outside world and its communications, I could not completely escape.

I had been teaching at the school for about six months when a beige-coloured Landcruiser arrived in town. The occupant was a worker for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation. Somehow he had managed to drive up from Uganda. Even more astonishing was that he had a parcel for me, a large brown envelope marked “Kevin Rushby, Teacher, Yambio School, South Sudan”. It contained a clear plastic bag. Inside were various pieces of dried fruit. Attached to the fruit were fragments of a dark brown sticky substance. There was no message, no letter, no explanation. But I knew what it was. My mother had sent a Christmas pudding. A few marks and handwritten notes on the envelope suggested that it had been forwarded from Khartoum to the British Council in Nairobi who had passed it to the United Nations.

Assuming my mother had posted it in November, it had taken at least four months on the road, and during the journey had disassembled itself. I scraped all the pieces into one hand and squeezed them together. It was March, but Christmas had arrived.

26 January 2011 In the Syrian city of Al Hasakah, a Kurdish man douses himself in petrol and sets himself on fire. A crackdown on dissent by the government then leads to civil unrest in Daraa. Protests are initially peaceful, but the brutal response of the Assad regime starts a downward spiral into extreme violence.

1 December 2009 I arrive in Damascus

In the Great Mosque kids are chasing each other around the pillars, screaming with delight and excitement. The columns catch my eye: they are Roman and were repurposed seventeen centuries ago into a Byzantine cathedral, then 500 years later into a mosque. Outside in the bazaar there's a shopping arcade that was once a street built by Alexander the Great's army. Now it's lined with stalls selling sexy ladies underwear, spices, and sacks of dried figs and pistachios. I sit in a cafe, drawing on a nargileh pipe and sipping coffee. It all seems so idyllic, but there's troubling news. My guide tells me that a bomb has gone off that morning killing four people. Officially they are saying it was a tyre exploded. "That was not a tyre," he says shaking his head, "What kind of tyre targets Shi'ites?"

I can't decide about this guide. Is he sent to show me around, or is he a spy? Are his veiled criticisms of the government an attempt to elicit conspiratorial confessions from me. 'Yes, I am from MI6. Where does Assad keep his chemical weapons?' On the other hand, maybe he wants to come clean: 'This is a police state. I'm in great danger. Help!' Everyone knows that the outwardly peaceful face of Syria, one that has endured for several years, is a mask. The country is run on fear, although everyone is too frightened to admit it. But then it has probably been running on fear since forever: since when the Great Mosque was a temple to the rain god, Haddad.

We head north for Aleppo, taking several days to get there. At Hama we stop next to the famous waterwheel in the town square. I leave him sipping coffee from a bicycle cafe and go off exploring.

In a side street I hear the clacking sound of a hand loom and peering through a low window see a room packed with weavers. I go around the building and find a shop selling towels with a short stocky young man at the counter. Abdulmuizz is full of smiles and rather unexpected English.

"Get yourself in here, kiddo. Chuffed to bits. Magic. Like to see some towels? Fair-do's. No problemo."

On his own admission, Abdulmuizz learned English by watching the television show, Top Gear. He is a fourth generation weaver, one of eight brothers who are all weavers.

"We Arabs invented baths, soap and towels here. In the thirteenth century there were 500 looms working flat out. And what did you have in Britain? Precisely sod-all, my friend."

There is a shopping experience here that has all but vanished in Europe. The shopkeeper's patter, luring you in, the glass of tea that appears, swept in on a tray on the shoulder of a youth who has been summoned by some invisible, inaudible communication network. You sit. You talk. The goods are fetched down off the high shelves. More upon more. Layer upon layer. No time to consider. The outside world fades away and all that is left is this convivial cave filled with lovely things. Not a word about money. Do you like this colour? We have 800 colours. What could be more civilized than a discusssion with an old friend about the colour of towels?

And then, suddenly, he's gone all Shakespearean and is quoting Midsummers Night Dream...

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows"

He sits down, serious now. 'I cannot understand it. An ox is a cow, isn't it?'

His copy of the play is a battered schoolboy edition. It's not easy to understand the bard when your only teacher is Jeremy Clarkson, but his eyes shine with enthusiasm. "I love reading this stuff. It's the dog's bollocks."

I buy two towels and Abdulmuizz throws in a scrubbing mitt.

Reunited with my guide we drive on through the afternoon to Aleppo, stopping in a ruined city populated by sheep and shepherds. In one ancient site a temple has been made into a shelter for the animals and on the walls are inscriptions in Greek.

In Aleppo souk I wander aimlessly, admiring all the textiles on show. "You want to buy a scarf? This is antelope wool."

The merchant shows how soft it is by pulling the scarf through a ring that he takes from his finger. "We have silk too. You buy antelope for the woman you want and silk for your mistress."

"And my wife?"

"Polyester - it comes with divorce papers."

Next door they are selling soap, cutting bars from huge cheeses of the stuff. As it ages the soap's colours withdraw deeper into the heart and become more vibrant, and more expensive.

The following day is Sunday and I decide to visit as many places of worship as I can. We start at the Church of the Forty Martyrs, listening to lovely choral singing in Armenian as the priests swing their censers. Nearby we stop at the Church of the Holy Cross where there are only a few old ladies in black listening to a service in Syriac, a language related to the Aramaic that Jesus reputedly spoke. The Latin Church is busier with about 100 worshippers and a sermon in Arabic: 'You must dream not for yourself but the whole world, and know that those dreams may come true.'

The Maronite Church has the youngest congregation with lots of young lads and the women all in black.

We take breakfast at an upstairs cafe. Little cheese pastries, fata'ir, and grilled lamb with yoghurt and mint followed by sahleb, a milk pudding sprinkled with pistachios and coconut. Outside men are selling from sacks: flowers, parsely seeds, walnuts, thyme seed mixed with sesame, and hibiscus.

We jump in a yellow taxi that weaves through the throng of carts and donkeys to the shrine of Husayn, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, who was killed in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD. This was where the Islamic martyr reputedly laid his head on a stone, leaving a mark. The place is busy with Iranian pilgrims who have brought a small baked tablet of clay from Karbala which they place on the floor then pray, tapping it firmly with their foreheads so it leaves a mark.

The guide and I have become friends now. He seems less guarded and more open. I'm carried away by the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city: all the languages, faiths and professions living peacefully side by side in a wonderful cornucopia of diversity and colour. So when he asks what I do, I reply truthfully. "I'm a journalist. I work for a newspaper in London."

His face betrays no reaction, but it's a mistake. A short time later, he makes a telephone call and then informs me that a family crisis has come up. His wife is sick. He must leave me and go to Damascus. Within twenty minutes, he's gone, leaving me wondering what really happened. It's like a chilly wind on a late summer night, the portent of a change in season that is about to come.

Fifteen years after my visit it is painful to go through my photographs and see all the old men and women who must have died seeing their world fall apart, and all the children who, if they are alive, have never known peace since that time.

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Lunchtime. Tuesday 14 April, 1970. When the school bell rang at midday, I hurried through the corridors, out to the gates, then ran for it. Down Waddington Drive and up Halberton, making sure I never stood on a crack because that was bad luck and there had been so much bad luck already that day. I knew, with the deadly certainty of a nine-year-old, that if I kept off those cracks, the astronauts would live.

At 12.24 I had finished my slice of cheese-and-tomato on toast and was contemplating which cake to eat - there was always a choice in our house -  flapjack or fruit cake. (If you are wondering how I know what I had for lunch on a particular day over 50 years ago, it’s because I ate the same lunch every day). I had no idea, no more than the rest of the universe, that we were only one hour away from an entire new world order, one of those vastly significant moments in human history that people would only recognise with hindsight. A turning point was about to be reached.

The wireless was always on in our house. First you pressed a large cream-coloured button. There was a solid click then a deep hum. A tiny red light appeared. After a few seconds a satisfying warmth began to rise from the whole machine, and if you peered through the perforated wooden board at the back, you could see mysterious red gleams, like the embers of a fire. After a short 'warming up' period, the Rushby family wireless was ready.

For much of the 1960s it was our only gadget and I loved it in the way you might love a lifeline. Along its tuning display were written the names of various foreign stations: Moscow, Hilversum, New York, Tirana, and London. I had never been to any of those places and neither had my parents. Our radio was tuned to the BBC Home Service and there it remained. And although almost everything about the world has changed since those times, BBC Radio 4 (what the Home service is now) is still recognisably the same station to this day. Desert Island Discs and Just a Minute may have different hosts but they still run, as they did in 1970 when they aired at 1225. I would listen at lunchtime. On this day, I was hoping I'd be allowed to sit through to the end and hear the news headlines at 1 o'clock.

Because of that wireless I can, very dimly, recall the assassination of John F Kennedy (November 1963). I can clearly recall the murders of Martin Luther King (4 April 1968) then Kennedy's brother, Robert (6 June 1968).  But none of these moments can compare, in my memory at least, with the drama of Apollo 13. On the morning of April 14, I had left to school after breakfast with the disturbing news that an explosion had occurred on the spacecraft whose codename was, appropriately, Odyssey. Like every schoolboy at the time, I followed all the space shots as closely as the FA Cup. In lessons that morning we could talk of nothing else. Would the three astronauts get back to earth alive? The lunchtime bulletin was that astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were about to pass behind the Moon in their stricken craft. Would they ever reappear?

The previous year all we had could talk about was the moon landing. It happened on 20 July 1969 just before we broke up for summer holidays. The future was rosy, it seemed to us. There would be colonies on the Moon and expeditions to Mars. And all the voices on the wireless would be American. Astronauts were always American. Only Americans landed on the moon. The future was American. I had no particular expectation of being a part of it. We were British, our future was already in the past.

There were only nine months between the triumphant moment of Neil Armstrong's, 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', and the anxious cry of Jack Swigert on Apollo 13,  'Houston, we have a problem'. Nine months from that climax of American power and superiority to the image of a broken spaceship, water dripping down the walls, oxygen running out, limping home around the moon.

At 24 minutes past one, when I must have been back at my school desk again, the Odyssey reached 248,655 miles from earth, the farthest that any human has ever reached in space. The astronauts retreated to the lunar landing craft. From that moment on, for America, it was all downhill.

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Technological leaps should always come with a warning. Danger. This product may cause social upheaval and radical change.

'The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord,' wrote Karl Marx, 'The steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.'

By the early years of the 1970s the Rushby household had a gramophone player (capable of playing 78, 45 or 33 rpm discs), a telephone and a television. The latter was only in black and white, but I managed to watch snooker and know all the colours of the balls by their tiny variations in greyness. By 1974 the huge heavy wireless was redundant: I had my own tranny, a transistor radio with earpiece. By the 1978 World Cup the television did colour, and things were speeding up. Digital calculators, watches and electric typewriters arrived. Within a decade I bought a Sharp laptop with a flatscreen. Touch screens, smartphones and AI came galloping through.

Which generation of humanity, I wonder, could fairly claim to have witnessed the greatest and most significant forward leaps of technology? Could it be mine?

In a park outside Vilnius, Lithuania, last summer I stood waiting. The hot air balloons were being inflated. Our 'pilot' was a bumptious, talkative extrovert determined that everyone should get their requisite amount of selfies. Except I didn't care. I was alone and that made me feel conspicuous as the other passengers were all couples, and I noticed, couples who were extraordinarily attentive to each other and no one else.

When the pilot asked us to wait, I assumed we would exchange a few pleasantries and I'd drop into conversation with someone. But no. All the couples peeled off, found a place to themselves and entered into intense conversations with each other. One pair held hands in silence, as if praying. Were they anxious flyers?  

My sole interest in this touristy trip was to see what a balloon ride was like. After all, ballooning must have seemed mind-blowing to its first practitioners. In August 1783 an unmanned hydrogen balloon was attacked with pitchforks by peasants near Paris. They feared it was a supernatural monster. By September a sheep called Montaciel had been lifted off the ground and a month later three men rose in a tethered balloon. On 21 November the first real flight took place when scientist Jean-Françoise de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes managed to fly five miles, reaching an altitude of 3,000 feet. It was the first time humans had left the surface of the earth and flown. It triggered mass public euphoria, mixed with hysteria.

On December 1st the first manned flight took off in central Paris in front of an estimated crowd of 400,000 people, half the population. One of the balloonists caught the mood of the moment, "I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles and persecutions for ever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical rapture." [see Richard Holmes wonderful book, Falling Upwards).

Our own balloon takes thirty minutes to fill with hot air. Then the pilot gets us all aboard, rather awkwardly in some cases as we have to climb over the lip of the basket. With an extended blast on the burners, I feel the basket drag a little, like the earth is struggling to hold us. Then we lift off and rise fast.

'Look at that dog!' shouts one male passenger in a German accent.

'My neighbour has one like that,' cries his partner, excitedly in an Italian accent.

A little question mark pings up inside my brain. Aren't they a couple? If they were, wouldn't she say 'our neighbour'?

And now the pretty young woman with blonde hair is pointing out landmarks to her partner who seems a little old for her. 'That's the castle and there's the radio tower.' She has an American voice and a funky outfit. I gather that she is East European but living in New York. I call her Melania. But how can this man, who I have called Helmut, be her partner? This German who seems ill-at-ease, wearing cheap office clothes and with improbably perfect hair. He is very attentive to her, leaning forwards to whisper, then touching his fringe nervously.

And suddenly I understand. I have been squeezed aboard as an extra. All the other passengers are on some kind of dating experience.

I lean over the basket and look downwards, chuckling to myself. One of the astonishing thing about balloon travel is that you are free to jump out at any time. The wind blows, you go with it.  And your hands grip a wickerwork basket, the type of basket that has to be woven from willow. You stand on wickerwork. It doesn't seem right that such a material can fly. It should be down there holding your picnic, or a cat. Wicker baskets and flying machines are not a match, like space travel and valve radios.

Eventually we are scraping across tree tops. The sun is setting. We are coming down in an idyllic rural location. The peasants will be sharpening their pitchforks. Our pilot, however, wants to tell us about the history of ballooning.

"When the first flight ended, the balloon caught fire and all that de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes had to extinguish the flames was the champagne they had brought to celebrate. For that reason every balloon flight ends with a short ceremony."

We bump down without spilling anyone. Climb out.

He has us form a circle. "I will show you what we will do."

He takes some scissors from an assistant who has pulled up in a bus. She opens a bottle of Prosecco. He snips a few hairs from her and burns them with a lighter, then douses any fire with a few drops of fizz. Then bounds across to me. I submit. My reward is a glass of fizz. He bounds across to Melania who squeals with delight. I think Melania likes theatrics.

And then the pilot makes a lunge at Helmut who screams, grabs his hair with both hands and runs for it, pilot in pursuit. The group watch and laugh. The pilot is encouraged. He thinks Helmut is playing. Someone should sing, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Helmut is not playing. Helmut is a bit hysterical.

I glance at Melania and see her face has fallen. I think she has understood something about Helmut's hair, something that we all twig at the same time. It's fake.

I suddenly feel sorry for Helmut. He took a risk. He wanted a new future. It backfired. In the bus back to town, he is quiet and Melania does all the talking.

In 1783 the men who invented the future were given aristocratic titles and their feats became bolder. In 1785 balloonists Theodore Sivel and Joseph Croce-Spiveli attempted to fly higher than anyone, reaching 28,000 feet. When their balloon touched down, however, both men were found dead from oxygen-deprivation and cold. The turning point had been reached. The aristocrats who were enthusiastically elevating themselves in balloons were also about to witness the fall of the society that had elevated them socially. In 1789 a mob stormed the Bastille and the old world came crashing down to earth too. Aristocrats were sent to the guillotine. Despite all their innovations and inventions, the future, it turned out, was not theirs after all.

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November 2024          Comedian, Conan O'Brien, is announced as the host for the 97th Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. It is reported to be "the night when the world's greatest performances are recognised and rewarded".

I lean back in my chair and scan the rows of old notebooks. A memory has been triggered. Then I spot it. Indonesia 1992.

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On the boat out to Krakatoa I meet Neil from the Shetland Isles. Before leaving on his marathon world tour, Neil had never left Shetland, so he tells me. Now he is gorging himself on experiences with a disarming wide-eyed naïvete that is backed up by some impressive freckled Scottish brawn. In every country that he has visited so far, he tells me, he has fallen in love and been beaten up.

"By the same person?" I ask.

Neil roars with laughter. He is a modern-day Candide, a wide-eyed ingenue, endearingly innocent, reckless and impetuous in equal measures. In Thailand he was bitten on the bum by a street dog, so dropped his trousers and checked the damage in a shop window. "I could've catched rabies, man!"

In China he got food poisoning and was taken to hospital where they tried to inject him with a blue fluid. He grabbed the syringe, threw it out the window and ran away, pursued by security guards. In New Zealand he was badly beaten by a Maori gang.

"All this is blowing ma' mind," he shouts, gesturing at the rolling swell of the Sunda Straits. "How can I ever go back to Shetland?"

We hold tight to the boat, a little fishing vessel that is making hard going of this crossing. Looking ahead I catch sight of the menacing blackened fragments of Krakatoa's ripped up crater wall. They rear up above the horizon, then plunge back into the grey water. This voyage is far wilder and rougher than anything I expected. I need to keep an eye on the horizon for the sake of my stomach.

When the 2,800-foot mountain of Krakatoa exploded on August 27, 1883,  it did so with the power of 13,000 Hiroshima atom bombs, sending a tsunami across the world and killing around 36,000 people. The noise was heard almost 3,000 miles away on Rodrigues Island near Mauritius. An estimated 25 km³ of rock was suddenly flung into the air and Krakatoa, once an inhabited and forested island, vanished, except for a few craggy fragments, broken shards of the volcanic rim.

We chug up to a gap between two of these fragments and enter calmer waters. This large lagoon, however, contains a new island, Anak Krakatoa, 'Baby Krakatoa'. This steep-sided cone of dark grey ash suddenly appeared in 1928 and has subsequently grown to about 600 feet in height.

Our boatman will not risk his keel on the hard pumice beach so we jump out and wade ashore. The black beach is hot, from the sun we all assume. In fact, unknown to everyone, Anak Krakatoa is about to erupt. Climbing to a ridge we find a crater below us, then circle to the left to the highest point. Oblivious to the dangers, I go down and cross the crater floor, surrounded by sulphurous gases and heat. There is no path or footprints and I start imagining that the crust will suddenly give way.

When we get back to the black beach, we have to swim out to the boat. The sailor is frowning. Behind us a small puff of grey ash has appeared above the cone. We are not to know, but we have narrowly missed disaster. A few days later Anak Krakatoa blows, killing an American traveller and severely injuring the rest of her group.

Neil settles down on the rear deck with a book in his hand. "D'ye read these things, Kevin?"

"You mean books?" I crane my neck to see that he's got a battered paperback copy of Papillon, Henri Charières 1969 account of his time on another wild island, Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana.

Neil shakes his head in amazement. "I never finished a single book in my life, but I cannae put this thing down. It's taken me three months and I’m nearly there. Travelling is amazing - the stuff you do. Fucking incredible."

A week later I climb the volcano Merapi near Yogjakarta, then travel to Surakarta. I'm now with my family and one night, walking in the streets with my daughter Caitlin (aged 3), we chance upon a wayang kulit performance, the shadow puppet theatre.

We are both immediately entranced. One character crouches and Caitlin declares, very loudly, "Look Dad! That pumpet is skiing!" She's jumping up and down, unable to sit still. Then when the singer embarks on a banshee-like screech, Caitlin joins in, causing great hilarity in the audience. One woman makes a grab at her long red hair, but Caitlin has previous experience of such attacks and bats the hand away. "Get off me, Lady!" The woman retreats.

At the hotel they listen to Caitlin telling them about the 'pumpets' and inform me that there will be a big performance tonight. Wayang kulit, they tell me, is undergoing a renaissance with new puppeteers who tackle modern themes and make crude jokes. "Sometimes they even mention pubic hair!" says the guesthouse boy, and tries to translate the joke but fails, dissolving into laughter. They all agree that these new puppet-masters are superstars all across Java.

Shortly before sunset, Caitlin and I find the location inside the kraton, the old royal palace. The first sign is all the carts selling snacks and cigarettes, each with a little oil lamp. The rickshaw riders are standing on their saddles for a better view. Caitlin and I weave our way through an audience of about two thousand, all sitting cross-legged on the floor. Caitlin's red hair parts the crowd like Moses's rod. At the front are two white cloth screens, one of which is brightly lit and the shadows of the puppets are already leaping around, strange insect-like images, twitching, pouncing, scuttling. Sitting close to them, concentrating hard on the action, are rows of kids with flasks of water and sarongs, ready for a long night. Caitlin and I sneak in among them. This will continue for hours. Between the screens are the singers, seven women all kneeling, each dressed in a tight sarong with bosom-hoisting corset and hair coiled in a neat black bun. Their lips are painted into a perfect pout.

The crowd can sit either side of the screens. Out front, you get total immersion into the story. Behind, and you are with the gamelan orchestra and puppeteers who are frenetically operating the leather figures. Sitting cross-legged, in a white jacket, the dalang, or puppet-master, can operate several figures at once. A vital accessory is the trunk of a banana tree laid horizontally by his knees. Into it he can quickly discard a puppet, burying the supporting stick in the soft, firm flesh.

On screen at the moment are two comic characters: Cangik, the lantern-jawed beanpole, and his sidekick, Bagong, a lumbering buffoon who likes to dance to rock music (the gamelan orchestra, armed only with gongs, cymbals and drums do a good impersonation of Led Zeppelin). The crowd are howling with laughter - must've been the pubic hair joke.

Now the scene changes and the seven ladies sing. Their voices are like honey and lemon, both bitter and sweet, and the melodies insinuate themselves into the action like smoke. But the orchestra is building up power and the onscreen mood is shifting, becoming dangerous. The orchestra has no written music, a man behind me explains in a whisper in my ear, they respond only to the action onscreen and each other. He chuckles. "It's jazz."

A fight breaks out. I'm watching the puppet-masters, the dalang, who are moving so fast it becomes blur: kung fu moves, stabs, a haymaker, a blistering fast interchange of punches and kicks. Then they grab an assortment of weapons. Someone hides behind a leaf, leaps out and joins the fray, delivering a thundering uppercut to a puppet that is thrown high in the air, spinning around and around. The lights snap out. Total darkness for only an instant, then crunch. Lights on. Different screen. And the puppet comes spinning out the darkness into the hand of a different puppet-master. Fight continues. Orchestra, sweating, reaching a wild crescendo. The crowd going wild. Utter mayhem.

At the guesthouse next day, I rhapsodise about the performance. The houseboy is thrilled. The owner is moved to say: "You like to meet famous dalang?"

It turns out that one of the great new breed of puppet-masters, Anom Suroto, lives in Solo. In Java he is like a multi-Oscar-winning Hollywood star. The guesthouse owner pops around the corner and asks. We are invited.

The house is down an ordinary street and looks unprepossessing from the outside. Inside it is all marble and carved wood panels with a vast reception room furnished in Louis XV style: gilded rococo chairs with red velvet upholstery, a vast glittering chandelier and a beautifully painted ceiling. Anom is short and burly with a rich husky voice. He asks if I saw his younger brother, Warseno, performing at the kraton last night.

"The dalang is the keeper of Javanese culture," he tells me, "And wayang kulit is like bread or water to us - we must have it."

We go through to a music room and some of his children appear and start playing the gamelan. "We have several types of stories," Anom tells me. "Some have Arab origins, others come from old Javanese, there's the Mahabharata, and the epic poetry of Ranggawarsita."

He starts playing the drums. "Each story builds through three phases to a climax at midnight, but no two nights are ever the same - there is a lot that is spontaneous."

His son, who is eight, grabs a handful of puppets from where they wait in a section of banana trunk. An impromptu performance begins. "My father taught me and I am teaching him," Anom says proudly.

Caitlin and I join in, banging the gamelan gongs. It's all great fun, but eventually there is an interruption. Someone is here to remind Anom that he is scheduled to meet an important government minister.

We make out excuses and head for the door. We are talking about the possibility that wayang kulit might catch on and be popular elsewhere in the world. I'm optimistic: the sheer spectacle with all its colour and movement, the wild music and dexterity of the puppet-master - who could not like it?

But Anom is less hopeful. "I did a concert in London once," he says as we leave, "It did not go well."

I experience a moment of anxiety. Has my native country failed yet again? A racist incident, perhaps, or simply a complete lack of interest, an empty theatre?

But no, it was nothing like that. It was much worse. Anom shakes his head sadly. "I am afraid they were unable to provide a banana tree."

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There's an election coming soon and it could be significant, not only for the voters themselves of course, but the world. We are in volatile and chaotic times, the climate catastrophe is self-evident to anyone whose house has blown down or been flooded, but unfortunately to hardly anyone else; there are sinister billionaires and autocrats creeping up behind us, and trade wars are looming that could bust us back to the 1950s, a time you will probably not remember, and neither don't I, but I've seen enough documentaries to know I don't want to go there.

In such uncertain times one would hope that the electorate in significant countries might choose their leader wisely and that is why one particular election is gripping my attention. Iceland. Put the date in your diary: November 30.

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I always think that the character of a nation can be divined by the people's reaction to common occurrences like a road accident. Over the years I've had a few, but no one ever got seriously hurt, fortunately. The nearest I came to real disaster was on a bus in India which was hit by a speeding truck going in the opposite direction. I was asleep, halfway down the vehicle, and by good luck I'd moved into the aisle seat. Suddenly the entire side of the bus was ripped clean off. I found myself on the floor covered in glass with an agonising pain in my right elbow. I think I had smacked it very hard on a metal stanchion, but there was no long-term damage. In fact, we were all lucky: a few nasty cuts and bruises, but no fatalities. The reaction of the passengers, however, was interesting. No one showed any interest in contracting the emergency services, finding medical attention, or even handling the immediate and massive traffic snarl-up. What they wanted was revenge. The lorry driver, however, had already made a run for it, so they turned on the bus driver. Had he fallen asleep? I felt sorry for him: he looked as baffled and shaken up as the rest of us. If not for another bus pulling up and offering to take everyone on, I don't know what might have happened.

In Yemen, a car accident, can get a very different response. In Sana'a one night, driving too fast, I failed to hold a bend and hit a parked taxi, causing a problem with the  driver's door which was slightly open. I caught it with the cow bar on my 4x4, knocking the thing clean off and sending it somersaulting down the street with a deafening barrage of screeches and clanks.

Having stopped, I returned the detached door to the taximan with my sincere regrets. He just waved away my apologies, and started trying to fix it back on. "No problem," he said, "This is Yemen."

Either it wasn't his car, or it was the door's fault - it had been knocked off before. Well, maybe the more realistic answer was that he was driving without any insurance, licence or previous experience of handling a vehicle, and was afraid that a policeman might appear.

That incident had certainly been my fault, but on another occasion I was tootling along a street in my beloved Landcruiser (one of the classic J 40 series featuring a titanic 4.23 litre petrol engine, bench front seat, eyelashes painted on the headlamps, richly-tasselled green velvet dashboard dust protector, and a spare wheel cover adorned with a pair leatherette Kalashnikovs across the Yemeni flag). Suddenly a car came shooting out of a side road and I smacked into the front end, causing serious damage to the other vehicle. There was no need to call the police. The car contained the Chief of Police. I narrowly escaped deportation, after paying for his repairs.

All of these incidents, I think, say something about the societies in which they happened, but it is in Iceland where the drama of a car accident really reveals the true national character.

On the first occasion I drove from the airport in a snowstorm, eventually arriving in a place called Grundarfjördur where the weather deteriorated until the town was cut off. At breakfast on the third morning, the hotel receptionist told me that killer whales had been sighted in the next fjord. All I had to do was get over one mountain pass and I would see them.

"I'm fairly sure the road will have been snow-ploughed, but you'll soon find out..."

I set off in a hurry. The weather had calmed down and a snowplough had indeed been past. Things looked good. When I reached the mountain pass, I got a panoramic view of the next fjord which the road, after a long descent, crossed on a pontoon bridge. Even at that distance I could see the pod of orcas feeding under the bridge. They were snacking on a vast shoal of herring that had got itself hemmed in at the narrowest part of the fjord, precisely where the bridge had been built.

My first thought was: by the time I get down there, it could all be over. My second thought was: get a picture from here. And, as luck would have it, right there next to the snow-covered road was a lay-by: a flat section of pure white snow. No one had pulled in there for a while, there were no tracks, but I did not hesitate. I pulled over.

It was not a lay-by. It was a snowdrift flattened by the winds that had been scouring the pass. The car simply nose-dived off the cliff and sank into deep soft snow.

It was a massive struggle to actually get out the vehicle, then climb a few metres back up to the road. The effort warmed me up, but within seconds of making it on to firm ground, I realised I was underdressed for this situation. No gloves, no hat. This was a major disaster. I was going to die.

I found my phone and rang the hotel, blabbering with panic. "I've crashed the car. I'm freezing. It's so cold. Car's gone down the mountain." That was something of an exaggeration.

"Oh yes. Quite a chilly start today."

This was not the emergency response I wanted. I expected sirens, helicopters and a name check on the midday news.

"I'm at the pass. Please send help."

"At the pass, is it? Any sign of those orcas? Incredible animals. Do you know they live in matrilineal groups? Like us here in Iceland - we have more women in parliament that any other country."

I fought back a raging desire to scream, instead whimpering. "Can you get someone here?"

"Oh yes, we'll fix that. Once I get breakfast finished, I'll give Frederick a ring. He farms up there. Hopefully he's not too busy."

I restrained myself from pointing out that Frederick might be taking a look at my frozen corpse if he didn't hurry up.

Anyway, an hour later, a huge tractor appeared. Frederick climbed down. "Oh you parked it down there?" Chuckle, chuckle. He pulled a huge hawser and hook from the front of the tractor, climbed down into the snow tunnel left by my vehicle, attached it, then reversed the tractor. My car popped out the snow like a champagne cork. Frederick jumped down and tried the ignition. Nothing. He popped the bonnet, attached jump leads, fired me up. "Did you notice, there's orcas down there?"

I did get to the bridge in time to witness the orcas cruising under, gobbling up herring.

I have never known such matter-of-fact, commonsensical approach to a problem. Icelanders just don't 'do' drama. If Shakespeare had been an Icelander, Romeo would not have killed himself on finding Juliet's apparently lifeless body. he'd have borrowed some jump leads.

The next time I crashed in Iceland, I got confirmation of the whole Icelandic attitude to life.

It was in summer and I was driving a 'state-of-the-art' Hyundai 4x4 along a straight section of gravel road. It was in a boggy area so the track was a strip of deep gravel at least a couple of metres high with quite a sharp drop on the edges. The Hyundai had every gadget and gizmo imaginable, including a facility that tweaked the steering when it considered you were veering off-centre. I was trying to switch this off, using a scientific method that I have developed for dealing with complex technology. I jab randomly at all the buttons and screens while shouting rude words. It always works.

The car left the road and grounded on that sharp gravel edge, coming to a halt with the most ear-shattering screech.

I continued jabbing and shouting, but the car had gone into a sulk.

I got out. I rang the hire man. "Don't worry. I'll come."

Every car that passed, stopped. "Can we help?" "Want a lift."  There were thirteen cars before Henrik arrived.

"Haha. You did get it stuck! And this car is a little tricky to pull out. Let me take you to your hotel. They've got a very good natural hot pool. Have a beer and a soak. I'll bring this thing over later."

And that is what happened. When I asked about damage, he waved the question away. "Nothing to worry about."

And so, I have a proposal. Let's put Iceland in charge. No more bouffant-haired buffoons, no more weird laughs, no more dead-eyed driller-killer billionaires. Just Frederick and Henrik and a few mates. They'll sort everything.

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1988    The remnants of Colonel Gaddafi's failed pan-Arab Alliance take refuge in northern Darfur after defeat by combined French and Chadian forces. Their weaponry reportedly falls into the hands of the local Rizeigat clan. These people are part of a larger tribal federation called the Baggara, semi-nomadic camel and cattle-herders who regard themselves as 'Arabs'. They begin to use the weapons in disputes over grazing rights, disputes that are escalating as desertification intensifies. Their enemy, all too often, are people and tribes that they identify as 'African'.

2003  Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, 'Hemetti' emerges as a leader of the Janjaweed, a paramilitary force that commits atrocities against ‘non-Arab’ populations in Darfur. He is the son of a Rizeigat tribal leader and, in some accounts, part of a group that were driven by drought from their lands in northern Chad.

2014 Unable to control the Janjaweed, the Sudanese government absorbs and renames it as the Rapid Support Force (RSF). Hemetti, now a general, oversees 'Operation Decisive Summer' in which his men are supposedly fighting rebel factions, but in fact use the opportunity to burn, loot, rape and murder their way through defenceless villages in South Darfur. Several eye-witnesses report Hemetti's presence during the worst atrocities against unarmed civilians.

March 2023 Sheikh Mansour, owner of Manchester City football club and vice-president of UAE, is photographed alongside UAE president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, smiling as he meets Hemetti, the Sudanese warlord who has now embarked on a round of international visits apparently designed to establish him as a statesman.

September 2024  In the Sudan civil war the RSF appear to be gaining ground as a result of new deliveries of weapons. A Human Rights Watch report reveals that the RSF have been using 120 mm thermobaric shells, a particularly nasty piece of military hardware that deliver powerful shock waves, rupturing the lungs, eardrums and eyes of anyone nearby. Those at the centre of the explosion are obliterated, those nearby can suffer fatal burns and internal injuries. Photographs found on social media reveal that the RSF arms were manufactured in Serbia in 2020, then sold to the UAE Army. Despite this damning evidence, the UAE denies supplying the RSF. Other sophisticated weaponry has also been seen: Israeli multiple rocket launchers, Chinese drones and Russian anti-tank missiles.

I search the attic first, crawling with headtorch around the boxes filled with books and paperwork from long-forgotten projects. There are all sorts of distractions: my fossil collection spills out and has to be tidied up, there is a ticket stub from a 1976 rugby match between England and Wales, a match that I then find on YouTube, and there is the periscope from a burned-out Russian tank that I came across in Afghanistan. But these are not things I set out to find: I've been thinking about the time I saw the shadow puppet theatres of Indonesia and somewhere, I'm certain, I've got one of those puppets.

I know this is all avoidance behaviour. I know there are more vital issues. Palestine and Lebanon are what is in the news. But somehow I can't begin. The current situation is too terrible. As for Sudan, it is not in the news, but what is happening is also horrible.

What I want to find is a puppet: one of those spidery simulacrums of humans made from leather and wire coat hangers. In the hands of a puppet master, they come alive. I want to remember that human beings do create good things.

The puppets, however, remain elusive. Instead there's a shoebox filled with cassette tapes - my rummaging hand picks one out at random. "Anjouan. 13/9/99..." That starts a long digression to find an actual cassette tape player that still works, then listening to some drumming and singing from the Comoros Islands. Hours have passed. Then I go into a space above the stairs where, for many years, we have shoved unwanted posters, bags and framed pictures. The dust is intense. At the back I discover two knobkerries, those heavy-ended fighting sticks. One is black and more like a walking stick. I’m not sure where that came from. The other is much shorter and beautifully polished. I weigh it in my hand. I remember the Masai warrior who sold it to me, warning of its power.

"If a man does rob you, and he is running away, then you must throw this after him. It will chase and catch him!" He made it sound like the stick was alive and wanted revenge for a crime yet to come. He wheezed with sinister laughter. "It can break both legs. For certain, that man will not be robbing you again!"

For such a dangerous weapon, it appears remarkably unthreatening. There are no metal parts nor anything sharp. It is the sort of weapon that can be carried without raising suspicions. It is, after all, just a stick.

When I was in Sudan in the 1980s, I collected weapons. I only had to see a man with a traditional spear, or a fancy scabbard and knife, to move in and ask for a closer look. If you had asked me where that fascination came from, I would not have known, but I might have summoned up some waffle about them being 'historical artefacts', or perhaps that they were 'beautifully made'. If you had persisted, I would have explained that, as a boy of firmly pacifist parents, I had never been allowed any toy resembling a weapon. Even a dead stick, cunningly adapted to fire a barrage of imaginary bullets, could be confiscated. Those childhood restrictions had triggered an enduring interest, although to be fair, I think they also established an enduring dislike of violence too.

In El Fasher during the early 1980s I bought knives with crocodile skin sheaths from the Zaghawa tribe; in Kadugli I swapped a Swiss Army knife for a Nuer spear collection, and from others came home-made machetes and ceremonial 'money' spears, hunting bows, sheaths of arrows with deadly barbs, and a wickedly hooked knife that, I was told, was designed to cut human throats. What I did not see was firearms. Soldiers were not much in evidence either. Guns were a rarity.

My trips across the country often resulted in memorable encounters. In 1984 I was on a market truck travelling out from Nyala in South Darfur towards South Kordofan province. This was a peaceful area, sparsely populated. Occasionally you might glimpse a clutch of mud and thatch huts, often positioned next to a tall outcrop of smooth reddish rocks, a place where water might gather. Sometimes there would be a tin shack next to the road and we would stop to unload a few items, usually a sack of red onions and a battered cardboard box of soap. There would be a clutch of people waiting to get on - there always seemed to be more getting on than off. There was, of course, no indication of the racist horrors that were to be unleashed in this area by the RSF three decades later.

These trucks travelled between isolated markets and were always overloaded. Breakdowns were frequent, and sometimes serious. This time, as we wallowed through a dry river bed at night, the axle snapped.

We slept by the broken truck and the following morning I decided to take a chance and walk to the next village. Perhaps there would be another truck. When I arrived, however, the village was only able to provide shade under some ragged pieces of sackcloth and a glass of sweet red tea. No truck.

I spent a night there, sleeping on a wooden bench. In the morning I walked around, admiring a herd of white cattle in a thorn brush enclosure. These people were from the Baggara tribe who I had come across on a previous trip and always found to be very friendly. They invited me to eat, a thick porridge and sauce eaten from a communal bowl, and told me there was another camp nearby, a different tribe who they assured me, 'had come from Nigeria'.

Next day, intrigued and disbelieving, I set off to find this mysterious group.

I walked for a mile or two through the flat dusty savannah. Every now and again a hornbill would swoop away from the top of an acacia tree, otherwise nothing moved. Then I saw the cattle, and their herders. These people were different: tall graceful youths, their arms draped over a long stick across their shoulders. In the drab subdued world, their dark robes were emblazoned with colourful designs of stars and zigzag patterns. They were smiling too, pleased to have some diversion from the boredom of herding. In those toothy smiles were quite a few home-made gold teeth.

Our conversation was limited. These people spoke a language I did not understand at all. I examined their faces: sharp featured and intelligent with some facial tattoos and kohl-rimmed eyes, very different to the broader Baggara visages from earlier that day. One of the youths, I noticed, had a tiny mirror no bigger than a mosaic tile, that he was using to check his appearance. It was woven into a long side lock of hair. They were very concerned with looks, not least their own, but it was their sticks that I admired. They were black and weighted at one end. Without much discussion, I bought one.

The camp when I reached it was a simple collection of temporary shelters, no more than cloths thrown over a low wooden frame. Under these the women were squatting, chattering loudly. My appearance caused a stir: lots of arm waving with a clatter of metal bangles. It wasn't clear if this commotion was friendly or not. An older man came over who spoke a little English.

"We are coming a long way," he told me. "With our cattles. We are Fulani."

One of the young men began singing in a strange high-pitched voice. I asked what the song was about, a question that brought on much head-shaking and apologies for poor English.

"It is something."

"Okay." The song was quite long. "Anything else?"

"It is about beautiful hair."

He made a comment to the singer and they all started laughing. The youth checked his hair in the tiny mirror. I didn't get any more information.

Forty years later, in the loft, I am still searching for those shadow puppets, rummaging in the corner where the dust is thickest. Then my hand touches a rolled-up newspaper. I pull it out. It is a copy of The Guardian from Wednesday 14 November 1984, the year George Orwell chose as his setting for a dystopian nightmare. My immediate thought is that it might hold that Fulani stick, that fighting stick that had crossed Africa from West to East and, no doubt, smacked many a cow on the way. Or perhaps it will be one of those shadow puppets.

In the light of the headtorch I unroll it and am presented with three spear heads. The first is a Samburu tribal weapon that I remember buying near Lake Turkana in 1983; the second is a Dinka fishing spear that came from Lake Keilak in Sudan, but the third is the most impressive. It is a large blade, almost 40 cm long and 10 at its greatest width. Down its centre runs a strengthening rib and even after forty years in storage the point and curved sides are sharp.

Forget the Serbian thermobaric artillery shells, the multiple rocket launchers, drones and even the anti-tank missiles; for generations of Baggara tribesmen before Hemetti, for his grandfather and father, this was the ultimate and only weapon available. This is a traditional Baggara tribal spear and forty years ago it was the only weapon that men like Hemetti had available.

I weigh the item in my hand. This weapon had come from a previous journey across Kordofan Province when I'd met a local teacher and been invited to his family's summer camp. They were Baggara people and had been extremely hospitable. They invited me to ride a white bull and hold that spear. The bull, I remember, was completely docile although he did appear to have a serious frown. It was a bucolic scene of harmless fun: the people proud of their culture, appreciative of the foreigner's interest and - I admit it - convulsed with laughter at how comical he looked. The foreigner, me, full of admiration for their hospitality, their traditions and the craftsmanship that had gone into making that spear.

I replace the weapon in the newspaper and roll it up with the others. As for those shadow puppets and that Fulani stick, they remain unfound for the moment, but I hope that somewhere, far from danger and Hemetti's vile RSF thugs, those youths are still checking their looks in the little mirrors and singing songs about beautiful hair.

29 March 2024. Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, states that Europe is in ‘a pre-war era’.

2018    The classic documentary The Long Road to War is released. It covers the years before WWI, deploying an eclectic array of academics to uncover the secret machinations, childish greed and catastrophic hubris of a small group of middle-aged men with preposterous facial hair and chests full of unearned medals who deliberately plunge Europe into the most devastating conflict the world has yet seen to the benefit of no one, not even themselves. Most of all it reveals how humiliation, or more precisely, perceived humiliation, can drive humanity over the cliff edge. The programme is directed by Miloš Škundrić, who brings a particular Serbian slant to the story. The first cannon shots in the war were aimed at Serbia, a country that had defied the Ottoman Empire, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both of whom wanted to gobble up vast swathes of the Balkans and were outraged by any opposition. Neither of these two empires would survive the war, with consequences that still reverberate.

June 2008 I travel through Europe by train with my son Conor, then aged 16.

The night train from Budapest to Belgrade is not busy. It clanks along quite slowly, a Soviet-era relic with toilets that drop directly on to the track below. I stand in the corridor with Conor and watch darkness fall over the yellow mountains. It's hot, but the windows are open to let in the breeze. There is a young Chinese couple who are very excited to be on an adventure, without a guide. They have taken the momentous decision to avoid the usual Chinese tour group holiday, the ones that do 21 countries in 14 days, and go it alone. "Greece," she says. "I want Greece."

The conductress arrives to check tickets. "Serbia is very beautiful," she says, "Don't believe what they say in the press."

"Greece," says the Chinese girl, laughing, "I want Greece."

The conductress is, of course, Serbian, but what interests me is her unelicited defensive comment. Who says Serbia is not beautiful? Do they really say that? And perhaps more to the point, do Serbians believe 'they' really say it?

At the Hungarian border, the guards kick open the door to our compartment. Conor sleeps on. Half an hour later a Serbian guard knocks politely, and when he hands back the passports, he smiles: "Welcome to Serbia."

In the next compartment, however, I can hear raised voices. "Where is your visa for Serbia?"

"I want Greece," says the girl, no longer laughing. "I not want Serbia. I want Greece."

But the Chinese couple have made a dreadful error and are unceremoniously kicked off the train at some godforsaken unlit backcountry station. I wave to them from the window, standing there with their two pink wheelie bags. They have yet to realise that their adventure has just started. They look hurt and dejected, like they've been kicked in the Balkans.

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In the morning we cross the Danube, then the Sava River. From somewhere to our right the first shots of the First World war were fired from an Austrian gunboat on the 29th July, 1914, one month after the teenage Gavrilo Princip had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Back in Vienna, the Emperor Franz Josef had known what the consequences of bombarding Belgrade would be because the Germans had told him. Russia would support Serbia; France would support Russia; Germany would attack France, via Belgium; the British who would support France. Franz Josef would die before it ended, from a cold, not wounds.

Our train terminates at Belgrade. The city is scruffy. There is graffiti everywhere: 'Your God is dead' and a date, '1389'. I have to look this up. In 1389 the entire Serbian aristocracy was wiped out at the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks. This catastrophic defeat is the lynchpin of Serbian history, a bit like the Battle of Hastings for British people. The moment when everything changes. I have to admit, however, that I've never seen 1066 used in graffiti.

We catch a tram to the market, hoping to get some communist memorabilia. We find banknotes with Lenin's profile and red star cap badges. Conor is happy. He is less impressed when we sit down in a restaurant for lunch. The menu includes several local delicacies, their names translated into English with brutal directness:

"Bowels"

"I don't want that, Dad."

"How about, Glands?"

"No thanks."

"Young bull's sex  glands?"

Conor has spaghetti with tomato sauce. I toy with the idea of stealing a copy of the menu, but decide against it. The waitress is too scary.

After lunch we go to the military museum which contains a sobering array of killing equipment, starting with the ancient Greeks and finishing with NATO. The latter organisation bombed Belgrade in 1999 which perhaps explains why we see few other tourists. The history is stark. Serbia has been pummelled by large, aggressive neighbours for centuries. Everyone has had a go. Humiliation piled on humiliation.

At the end of the day, we have to catch the train to Skopje in what is officially termed, the Former Yugoslav Republic of North Macedonia. In Belgrade station the train waits. It is another old communist era relic. We are not allowed to board, so we stand waiting. A wheeltapper comes along, rapping the wheels with a long-handled hammer and making notes in a school exercise book. A station master in uniform is guarding the carriage door, preventing entry.

The minutes drag by. Conor starts squirming.

"Why are you squirming."

"Dad."

"Stop squirming."

"I need the loo."

I glance up and down the station. There are no toilets to be seen. The stationmaster has been distracted by a question from another passenger.

"Just get on to the train... Quietly, okay? Then use the loo inside."

Conor strolls nonchalantly away, then with admirable schoolboy stealth, steps closer to the carriage and sneaks back behind the distracted official. He climbs the steps and disappears through the open door. I breathe a sigh of relief - until I realise that the train bathroom is directly behind the official. A deathly hush falls over Belgrade. I think of picking up our bags and moving away, but I am rooted to the spot. All the elements of a diabolical catastrophe are now in place: stiff uniformed officialdom, an outdated bureaucracy with a simplistic toilet system, anarchical youth, and several thousand years of cultural misunderstanding.

There is a gush of water through the hole in the bathroom floor . The British ultimatum has been delivered.

But the station master appears not to notice. He frowns, his moustache twitches. The clock hits the hour. He raises a whistle to his lips and blows, then walks away. I snatch up our luggage and climb aboard.

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August 2024 The BBC report that fishermen from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Ghana may have been the victims of modern slavery, having arrived in the UK to work on Scottish fishing vessels.

The winter of 2008 was a hard one. That December, sometime after Christmas, we drove through the Scottish highlands. At four in the afternoon, the car temperature gauge showed minus ten. All around us the waterfalls and streams were frozen, and at each one I have the irresistible urge to stop and take photographs. Then I go down on my knees watching the silver threads of water leaking through the fabulously contorted realms of ice below the surface. Occasionally my foot goes through and I get an icy dunk.

Back in the warm car, on the long lonely stretch by Loch Glascarnoch, we passed a man on a bicycle. Up here on the West Coast, long before electric bikes or scooters, if you got banned from driving, there was only the bicycle. He didn’t’t look like he was enjoying the experience.

The last years before technological revolutions always seem, with hindsight, to belong to a much older, creakier age. My 1960s childhood, in a home without telephone, television and car, seems decidedly Dickensian. As the decade ended, we began to accrue the trappings of modernity. A black-and-white television for the football World Cup was followed by Uncle Geoff's cast-off record player. Every new arrival was inevitably followed by a period in which no one was allowed to touch the fabulous machine. Vinyl records had to be handled as though they were fragile Ming dynasty treasures. All the music we had was borrowed: Mozart's Einer Kleiner Nacht Music, Sardinian Folk Songs (that didn't get handled very often), and a Joan Baez EP (remember them? 45rpm but with three or four songs).

Back in the early 1970s I can remember my parents getting dressed up to go to the neighbours to watch a slideshow of their holidays. Paddy and Alan had bought a projector and everyone was invited to see their holidays. "Here's another one of Lulworth Cove - that's the back of Paddy's head just blocking the view a bit." People really sat through those shows, and enjoyed them. What I remember vividly, however, is the mechanical clunking sound of the projector fumbling with the next transparency. That is seared into my memory. Sounds can be startlingly evocative, especially when your attention is drawn to them by having nothing to look at except the back of Paddy's head.

By the early 2000s the slideshow phenomena seemed to be consigned to history, but there was a brief late flurry of activity. Few people then had the computer power to watch moving images online. A movie on your phone was still in the realms of science fiction. Mobile phones had tiny keyboards and it was widely expected that humans would evolve extremely narrow pointed thumbs. To watch a film, you went to a rental shop and got a video. Any online clips looked like they had been filmed in a particularly noxious Victorian pea soup fog.

Since film did not work, The Guardian newspaper was eager to have galleries of travel photos and I discovered a simple editing programme that would string them together with a sound track.

Of course I always hoped to get stunning images, but I soon learned that it was the juxtaposition with sounds that created interest. The combination of still photo and powerful sound clip could work magic. For that reason I'd find myself down on my knees on a frozen lake recording the burbles of water  and creaks of ice, shortly before it split. I'd also seek out musicians, ask people to read text, and record wildlife.

On that trip to Scotland we stayed in a bungalow that itself was frozen in time, 1973 again: G-plan furniture, bold swirly carpets, avocado-coloured bathroom set. The idea for my slideshow was to use New Year's Eve, Hogmanay, as a surrogate for Burns Night. I could record music, singing, laughter; take pictures of haggis, candles, dancing, then put together a show that would be uploaded on January 25th, Burns Night.

I had bought a haggis from Scotland's finest purveyor of haggis - Coopers of Bellshill near Glasgow - and added neeps and tatties then got Maddy (then aged five) to carry it on a tray. We went into Ullapool and attended the local ceilidh. I chatted to our landlady, a young farmer, about where to go on the big night itself. "There's a big party," she said, "You'll be welcome - everyone is welcome." She gave some vague directions that concluded with: "After a few miles you'll see a green gate."

By ten o'clock on New Years Eve, the temperature was minus 18 degrees Celcius (zero fahrenheit) and Sophie refused to leave the warm bungalow. Maddy and I set off, the car slithering around on an icy lane. It wasn't snowing, but there were tiny ice cystals in the air and the windscreen kept gathering an opaque sheet of frozen globulets. In the end I was driving with my head out the side window while Maddy sat in the back scanning the desolate empty landscape for a green gate. "This isn't right," I kept saying. I was still saying it when the lane started going downhill steeply. I slammed on the brakes and we just carried on going, slowly turning sideways, then hit a frozen hedge, span back, picking up speed as the slope steepened. "Get your head inside!" I shouted at Maddy, but miraculously the tyres hit a little strip of frozen grit. There was a moment of grip. We came to a halt.

Ahead of us in the headlights I could see that the road ended in a tiny jetty and then black water. We had been seconds from plunging into the loch. I found I was holding my breath. "Maddy. Can you get out the car? Very, very carefully. Then walk up the lane a bit."

It felt like a wrong move would send us slithering down.

Once we were both at the top of the lane, I realised that we were far from our bungalow on a night of brutal cold, having not seen a light for at least ten miles, and our only source of heat was teetering on the brink of full immersion in seawater.

I wish I could say that I immediately rigged up a shelter, lit a fire and speared a couple of salmon, but I didn't. I just stood there thinking, we're going to die: there's no way Maddy can carry me that far.

But then, a light and a noise. A tractor was coming across a field. Next thing a young man jumped out the cab and asked if we needed any help. A long chain was attached to the back of our Skoda. I got in, released the handbrake, and was hauled backwards out of danger.

The young man refused any money. "Not necessary."

We asked about a green gate, and a Hogmanay party. He shook his head. "Sorry. I'm out wi' hay fer the animals. No parties fer me. Cannae help."

We got in the car and put the heater on full blast. "We're going home," I said to Maddy. "Sorry."

We drove back along the lanes for several miles before Maddy shouted. "Dad! There's a green gate."

I stopped and got out. Sure enough there was a green wicket gate in a dry stone wall. But there was no house. I climbed up on the wall. Across the fields, in a dip, I could see a light. "Must be there."

We set off. As we approached, we could hear singing and laughter. Perfect.

The windows of the cottage were all steamed up and banging on the door did no good, so we simply opened it and went inside. Screams of delight. "You're here!" "Hooray!"

A drink was pushed into my hand. Maddy was swept off into an ongoing board game. I sat down at the kitchen table. A youth was playing guitar and singing Fisherman's Blues by the Waterboys. I realised I had left both camera and sound recorder in the car. Everyone joined in.

I wish I was a fisherman tumblin' on the seas

Far away from dry land and its bitter memories

"It's for him," said the singer, when it was over, pointing at a smiling man in the corner. "That's Roy. We rescued him."

Roy was a Filipino fisherman who had signed up to work on Scottish trawlers. "But it's so cold!"

He shrugs. "It not so bad."

He had been all around the world for twenty years, sending money home. In Scotland he was legally not allowed to leave the boat, but the party-goers had come across him alone aboard a frozen vessel tied up in Ullapool harbour. "They just went off and left him. Isn't that disgusting? All the pipes were frozen and there was no food."

The phrase ‘modern slavery’ had not yet been invented and slavery was something from the eighteenth century.

"Taiwan boat much harder," grinned Roy. He was made of stern stuff and had earned the respect of everyone at the party by his incredible ability to splice ropes in the most complicated of ways, while consuming vast quantities of whisky.

There was more singing. Eventually I dragged Maddy away and we went back to our bungalow.

Next day was New Years Day. The landlady came around. "You didn't come to the party!"

So it had just been a random house in the wilderness.

I asked if she would contribute to my slideshow by reciting the Robert Burns poem 'Address to the Haggis'. It's a traditional part of any Burns Night supper.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,

Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!

Aboon them a' ye tak your place,

Painch, tripe, or thairm :

Weel are ye wordy o'a grace

As lang's my arm.

She refused.

I went into Ullapool and scoured the pubs. Most people were too drunk to read. One partially sober man declared that without an Ayrshire accent like the great Rabbie, it would be morally wrong, blasphemous. He was from Dundee.

In the end I gave up. When I made the slideshow, I went online and found a recording of John Gordon Sinclair reading the poem. However, there was no option to download in those days. Instead I rehearsed several times and managed to fake an accent. No one complained or perhaps no one listened. They probably didn't have the bandwidth to hear it clearly.

When data transmission improved, and dial-up connections ended, so died the slideshow. Its brief Indian Summer was over. I still think something was lost with it, an alchemy of sound and still image. The Guardian website no longer supports the software. The fifty or so shows that I made have gone to the virtual graveyard. There's nothing left at all, not even for a future car boot sale. Hopefully slavery will go the same way.

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Last Saturday I came downstairs ready to do some final checks on my substack post and get it out by the usual time of 11.30 am. Instead I found our dog, Wilf, in distress. He had vomited and was standing by the back door. I let him out and started cleaning up, then I noticed the sheep - there were four of them standing in the drive staring at Wilf. As an old dog with a belly ache he took no interest.

I rang the local farmer and closed some gates to make sure the sheep did not stray on to the road. When the farmer arrived, we herded the lost animals up to his farm and penned them. They were not his, but we knew who owned them. By the time I got back home, Wilf had disappeared. I’d left all the doors open and expected to find him asleep in his bed. After ten minutes of running around calling, I had to phone the farmer again and ask for help. He came with his niece and nephew, but it still took an hour to find the dog. Somehow he had stumbled down a bank and got into a shallow stream where he stood, almost invisible in the shady thicket, his tail down, eyes glazed. Had he known, I wondered later, that his time was over?

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A dog's death rarely makes the news. No obituaries get written. Flags are not lowered. There is no public mourning or notices in the press. And yet Wilf had been a part of our family for over fifteen years. He was there in every memory, present on every occasion. In the days that followed we were reminded of all the useful jobs he had performed: all the crumbs hoovered up, the butter wrappers licked clean - he had learned to place one paw on the corner rather than chase it around the kitchen. His dedication to tidiness was endless. Once he tidied up an entire barbecue of sausages and bacon. A pub floor, covered in crisps and peanuts, could be cleaned in seconds. Many landlords became firm friends.

If anyone needed reminding, he could direct them to the warmest spot in the house throughout winter, and the coolest in summer. The presence of mice and rats was infallibly detected, and sometimes dealt with. Flies were chased and captured with an audible snap of the jaws. The presence of a fox within a mile was never missed. He could remember where a tennis ball had been abandoned months earlier, although never mastered any of the commands we attempted to teach him. He was able to recall every human he ever met, even after years apart, but somehow always forgot that the sofa was out of bounds. After three hours of sleeping on a car journey, he could wake up milliseconds before we arrived home.  In his youth he could attack larger dogs long before anyone had realised they were dangerous and even got arrested once for dealing severely with a shifty Shih Tzu. At such times his wolf ancestry was close to the surface, but he never forgot that his pack was human and to them he remained utterly loyal. If the pack went roaming, he wanted to go. He loved travel. Many times he cocked his leg in York Railway station, once on the footbridge that crosses the platforms below which made some unfortunate passengers look up, their second mistake.

He could never understand why humans, in contravention of all known hygiene standards, defecate inside their own homes. On this point he was scrupulous, preferring to poo in gateways or on steps.

Snow and ice were his delight. I remember his first exposure to snow on a hike in the Lake District when he bolted in crazed excitement, and leaped off a cliff. We ran to the edge to find him on a ledge below, still giddy with the thrill of it all. He liked water and almost drowned on several occasions: once chasing a stick into a torrent, another time while trying to subdue a pit bull terrier. When his pack went sledging on snowy slopes, his wolf element came bursting out and he would sprint alongside, biting at the sledge as though it was a runaway bison.

The day after he died, we dug a deep hole in the garden and lowered him into it. His ears were still pricked, as though he was listening. That night I thought I heard a nightjar calling, a bird I'd never heard in our area before.

We are learning to put the old butter wrappers in the rubbish bin and sweep up crumbs. There's no longer any need to brush the sofa clean of discarded brown fur.

Back in 2010 I went to Yellowstone National Park in winter. Wolves had been released into the park after an absence of seventy years and were already making their presence felt. Elk and deer populations were falling, but the cottonwood trees were growing and a cascade of other life forms appearing. Some of the wolves had radio collars and one in particular had disappeared. Over the week I was there I kept bumping into a researcher, Rick Macintyre, who was trying to locate that missing animal. It did not have a name. It is not considered appropriate to give wild animals names. The missing wolf was 691.

Rick knew that 691's last known whereabouts were in the Lamar Valley, not far from the log cabins where I was staying. It was bitterly cold, but I'd often see Rick standing on the icy road, holding a radio antennae, turning this way and that, trying to pick up a signal. On my last day at the camp, he found 691. She was lying dead underneath the cabin next to mine. In those last moments of her life, she had inexplicably moved towards the humans.

I often think about that wolf.

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You ought to read last week's story first in order to understand this one, but here's a summary...

In 2002 I travelled around many islands in the Indian Ocean, supposedly making a television documentary about 17th century piracy. One thing obsessed me: the idea of re-enacting a historical pirate attack at sea. In the rundown port of Mahajanga, on the west coast of Madagascar, I thought I'd found the right place. The locals were still building, and sailing, wooden galleons based on the kind of Portuguese caravels that had first arrived there in 1500. Unfortunately my arrival coincided with rumours of a potential coup d'état backed by Russian money and mercenaries. As tensions heightened, I made contact with the mysterious local, Max, and that contact began to attract suspicion. Was he a gunrunner and drug smuggler, or simply an unconventional jack-of-all-trades? There were also tensions with the film's director, Yulia, although not with amenable cameraman, Ken. Yulia seemed blissfully unaware of the political intrigue, the importance of filming permission, or the suspicions that her links with Russia might bring down on us. Then one morning a grim-faced soldier banged on my hotel door and I was arrested.

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Down in hotel reception are a group of soldiers and a commander wearing a kepi. "You come with me. Which room for the woman?"

I knock on Yulia's door. "You'd better come down - we have a problem."

When she gets to reception and sees the unsmiling soldiers, she starts waving her hands. "No, no. I'm not going with them."

"Yes," the officer insists sternly, "For checking paperwork and interrogation."

One of the soldiers cocks his rifle and she starts crying. I appeal to the officer. "Come on, this is not good. There's no need for this. We'll come and answer anything. We've nothing to hide."

Yulia calms down. They seem to have forgotten about our cameraman, Ken. At that moment the two Russian hotel guests, the ones I'd been thinking were mercenaries, come in from the street. One of them strolls straight over to me and grabbing my hand, shakes it, saying, "Dobroye utro." The soldiers watch stony-faced. I am non-plussed. Why has he done that? We haven't ever exchanged words and now he makes a great display of friendliness? The last thing I need is any visible Russian connections.

We are marched down the street to the gendarmerie which is only a hundred yards away. Then we are led through to an office. There's a table with a cup and some school exercise books. On the walls is a framed certificate, announcing the officer's qualification as a paratroop commander. Pinned next to it is Madagascar's 'most wanted' list: mugshots and brief descriptions. Our names are not on it - not yet.

In front of us are the officer and another man, in plain clothes, unsmiling and silent. "So you speak Russian?" the officer asks me.

"No."

"But you have Russian friends at the hotel?"

"I don't know them."

He turns to Yulia, flicking through her passport. "You visit Russia many times?"

"Yes, I've spent time there. It's lovely. I'll take you one day."

She has gone from tears to tease in the time of that hundred-yard walk. What will she say next?

"And you know the woman, Svetlana, who works in the hotel casino?"

Yulia tosses her head. "Oh, she's just some prostitute from Moscow."

We work through all their concerns. We are not spies or mercenaries. We are not planning to invade Madagascar. We are documentary filmmakers with an interest in historical pirates.

"Like Max?"

"He's just helping organise our film shoot."

Eventually a statement is typed out and we sign, then we are marched back to the hotel.

"You will stay here and not leave. There will be soldiers guarding you. Do not attempt to escape."

They are contacting the goverment in Tana before they decide what to do. Political tension is at screaming point. Everyone is waiting for the ex-president to invade - with the assistance of Russian mercenaries.

By the pool I telephone my sister who lives in South Africa. Can she help? Didn't I once meet the Madagascan consul at her place? She tells me that he is a friend, but only an ex-consul. She will ring him. Perhaps he knows someone useful.

That night in my room, there is a light tapping at my door. It's Max. He pushes inside, and with a quick glance to check he hasn't been seen, closes the door.

"I climbed the wall," he says, "There are soldiers everywhere. Today they shot someone in the street - killed him. It's mad."

I explain our predicament.

"I know all about it," he says, "The whole town knows. Look, get your stuff. We can climb over the wall and get down to my boat. The water tanks are full, there's plenty of food. We'll slip out the harbour and sail for Zanzibar."

For a second I imagine that scenario. The thrill of a midnight escape does have its attractions. "But I can't abandon Ken and Yulia."

He grins wolfishly. "Ken can come too, but not the woman."

“We can’t abandon her.”

He frowns and rubs his stubbled head. "You're crazy. This situation, I mean, we need to get out." He pulls up his tee-shirt and removes a pistol from his waistband. "At least take this - it's loaded and you're going to need it."

"No!" We start a silent, slow motion, comedy struggle: he attempting to push the gun into my waistband, me to fend him off. The gun falls to the floor with an enormous crash, chipping a tile. We both stare at it, thanking the gods that it didn't go off. Max picks it up. "I'm telling you, they're gonna lock you up and throw the key. Don't you understand? They want money - a lot of it. You're gonna be here until someone pays. That's how it works. I came here two years ago and bought a bit of land, then they all started gossiping about where that money came from. Next thing I'm a gun runner and drug smuggler. Better we just get out."

He flops down on the bed with a sigh. I am conscious that in the same minute that he has denied being a gun runner, he has conjured up a revolver.

"It'd suit me to go too. Ten days, maybe a bit more, into Zanzibar. Or we hide out in the smaller islands to the south, do some fishing."

Eventually Max leaves, still bemused by my unwillingness to run the gauntlet of armed soldiers, sneak into the port, and set sail.

Next morning my sister rings. "The ex-consul doesn’t think he can help much, but he's phoning some old contacts."

We all sit by the pool, waiting. Charles, the hotel owner is pacing up and down, a cigarette smouldering in his hand. It's important to him that we are innocent, otherwise he's tarnished by association. They will say he's been harbouring criminals. News arrives that the mayor of Mahajanga, who had been in Tana, has arrived and taken control of the situation. There's a suggestion that we go to him, but Charles is adamant that this is a bad idea. "Why? Only to vex 'im? Don't you understand? It must be the president himself who has ordered your detention. No one else would dare touch foreigners. Now you must sit still and count your money because that is where this will end. I myself have spent ten million in bribes to keep my business going and when I get it back I am off... zoom... gone.. finish... back to Paris! I tell you zis place... Pah!"

Then at midday, we notice the guards on the gate who had been slouching in the shade, suddenly stand to attention. The mayor himself has arrived. He is a huge fat man, his neck shiny with gold chains, his wrist ticking with Rolex. Yulia appears in a very short and revealing leopard print chiffon dress, a strange choice considering her earlier comment about Svetlana. From that moment onwards, the mayor's eyes never leave her. Charles ushers everyone to a table and drinks are brought out. The mayor does not know whether to look down Yulia's dress, or up it, so settles on both.

"What we have is a very serious situation," he says sombrely, "I have a document from our Minister of the Interior." He pauses, then leans towards Yulia, taking a long unabashed look down her cleavage. "He has given permission to make your film."

Ken and I let out gasps of delight.

"Tomorrow I will send three guards: one from the police, one from the army, and one from customs - for your safety."

After some more ogling at Yulia, he leaves.

That night I meet Max and we go to the two wooden ships in the harbour, rowing out in darkness. There's a gleam of coals in the fire by the foremast, the murmur of low voices, the creak of rigging as the mast tips gently swing across a star-lit sky. We sit on deck and explain to the captains, Djadjari and Rearison: one ship will be an Indian merchant vessel, the other a European pirate. They will sail towards each other and we will set off a lot of smoke bombs. When they are beside each other, the 'pirates' will board the Indian vessel and there will be a mock fight.

They love the idea but have one significant question. "My friend, your plan is a good one except we are all dark-skinned people. How can we pretend to be European pirates?"

Later, as we walk back through the quiet town, I realise they are right: we need European-looking pirates. We stop at the tailor who I'm commissioning to run up some costumes. I try to explain what a Jolly Roger is. He starts sewing.

Next morning at dawn, I am back on the quayside. The two boats are ready. Yulia has refused to pay for food, but I've commissioned Max's friend anyway. He turns up with plates of samosas and sandwiches and everyone eats while Yulia grumbles, "I'm not paying for this." The tailor appears with a cardboard box filled with colourful costumes.

Charles appears and announces that his friend, Jacques, will donate a speedboat so that our camera can circle the sea battle. Can we buy the fuel? I don't even ask Yulia, just hand over my last few dollars. Our Indian crew are delighted with their colourful clothes and the sandwiches, but there is no sign of Max.

One of the captains takes me aside. "I think they have arrested him."

The sun becomes hot. Yulia is getting angry.

And then a battered Renault Five comes screeching along the quayside. Max emerges, in full pirate costume, followed by Svetlana and the two Russian 'mercenaries', also in costume. they are carrying a motley assortment of knives, swords and hatchets. Max opens the car boot and takes out a box: he's made a treasure chest. "Pirates must have treasure!"

Our two crews prepare. The Malagasy sailors are given some colourful silks to wrap around themselves. Thanks to Max, we have a European pirate crew, and even better, most of them are probably actual pirates.

The ships themselves are the real stars. Without engines, they are towed by rowing boats then raise their sails. Out in the bay, the two captains expertly manoeuvre so that the ships plunge towards each other through the swell. I sit behind Ken on the speedboat and watch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Max and the Russians seem to know how pirates should behave. They swing on ropes with ease, chucking themselves across the gap onto the other ship then overpowering the 'Indians' with great battle cries (slightly Slavic-sounding but who cares?), then seizing the 'treasure chest'. The improvised smoke bombs work perfectly, hiding all the imperfections. Ken jumps aboard for all his B Roll: the cutaways and close-ups.

That night we celebrate, although Yulia is no longer speaking to me. I paid each sailor a few dollars for his efforts and she had not agreed to that.

In the morning, I'm sitting out by the pool having breakfast, feeling quite smug, when Max rushes in. The mayor has been attacked by a mob and made to grovel for forgiveness in front of the town hall. Suddenly all the anxiety is back. Will we be able to leave? With our film? Yulia appears in a very mini denim dress. "It doesn't matter. I'm ruined. All the money is gone. There's nothing left. We have no film."

By afternoon, more news arrives. The mayor is restored, the miscreants under arrest. We must visit him. At the gate, the army officer appears, "Kevin - is there a souvenir for me?"

I hold out my hands. "We have nothing."

The Town Hall is a large 1960s building with sweeping staircases and large folk art murals. The mayor is behind a huge desk laden with sporting trophies and banners although the man himself does not strike me as a sportsman. He greets Yulia enthusiastically and me coldly. He is wearing loafers without socks, a short-sleeved shirt and shorts along with all his gold jewellery. His skin, teeth and clothes are also all gold. He is Goldfinger. Is it possible he was only recently roughed up?

Yulia is effusive in thanks and he ogles her voraciously. I mutter to her, "Be careful. He's after you."

I think, until that moment, it had not occurred to her that his motives might not be innocent. Like lightning she crosses her legs, clasping her knees with white knuckles. Her answers become shorter and unfriendly. The mayor slowly gets the message.

Eventually we leave Mahajanga and part ways. Yulia is unfriendly with me too. I never hear what happens. I fly to South Africa and meet up with my sister, and tell her the full story. "Thank God your friend helped out."

But she is bemused. "I'm not sure he did."

But didn't he ring his friend the Minister of Interior and smooth it all out?

"He didn't mention it."

And so the entire episode remains pretty much a mystery to me. The Russian invasion of Madagascar never happened, and I was never a part of it. The Russians in Mahajanga, whoever they were, went on with their business no doubt, buying up fake emeralds. Svetlana, prostitute or not, hopefully made enough money to look after her mother. Max disappeared, possibly to Zanzibar. Yulia dispensed with my assistance and we never spoke again. A few years later when I got another chance to make a film, I was a lot wiser. Yulia, to be fair, had taught me a few things: not to overspend, not to mess about with guns, not to involve reprobates - which was how I ended up in Yemen during a war with a pocket full of American dollar notes and 26 soldiers on my pay roll. But that is another story.

I have yet to find any photographs of this episode, although the search continues. Instead, all the pictures this week come from two lovely maps that I inherited from Russell Butler who died in 2022, a true lover of Africa and a wonderful man with the best kind of piratical tendencies. Obituary here.

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3 May 2024 Reuters report that Russian forces have occupied a former American military base in Niamey, Niger.

December 2023 The Kremlin-backed Wagner mercenary group are now reported to be active in Sudan, Libya, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Mali and Madagascar.

In 2002 I got roped into working on a television documentary based on my book Hunting Pirate Heaven. In September of that year I found myself in the rundown port of Mahajanga on Madagascar’s west coast. I’d been having a great time, dashing around the Indian Ocean at someone else’s expense, seeking out historic and beautiful locations. Little did I know that fear and paranoia about Russian invasions could reach this neglected corner of the Indian Ocean.

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That night, on the way back from the town's only decent pizza restaurant, three gun-toting soldiers accost us: foreign mercenaries have been seen trying to get into the town, so who are we?

There is myself, Ken the cameraman, and Max. I am pretty certain that Ken is not a mercenary, but I've only just met Max. He is over six feet tall, muscular with short-cropped hair and looks like he could single-handedly mount a reasonably efficient coup d'état in a small country. I show my passport and so does Ken. Max identifies the lead soldier, turns him convivially away from the group, then slips a 25,000 franc note into his tunic pocket. When we get back to the hotel, Max tries to get me to go and meet 'a friend', but I plead tiredness and he leaves. When he's gone, Ken and I step into the hotel's small casino. We need to talk.

It's busier than I've seen it before. The two Russians I'd seen around the hotel pool are playing roulette. They definitely look like mercenaries. The smooth tuxedoed manager, Charles, breezes over, Gaulloise in hand. It could be Rick's Cafe in the film, Casablanca, but he doesn't resemble Humphrey Bogart, more of a Peter Lorre character. "Mister Kevin, let me give you a word of advice. Don't associate with Max. He's a crook."

I raise a querying eyebrow.

He adds, "They say he is a gun-runner and drug smuggler."

I find a quiet table.

Ken and I had been sent out into the Indian Ocean with a bundle of television cash and orders to scout locations and 'shoot B-roll' before our director, Yulia, arrived. I hadn't liked to reveal my naivety by asking what B-Roll might be, but I was learning. It was ambience, close-ups, cutaways - extra stuff. The subject was European piracy in the 17th century. Our problem was that we were struggling to find traces of those ancient pirates while wading through a swamp filled with the modern variety. The big hope that Ken and I were working on was to set up a re-enactment of a great pirate attack: big galleons in full sail, blasting at each other with broadsides while men with cutlasses in their gobs leaped out the rigging. It was more B-movie than B-Roll, but in my head it was amazing.

One night in a bar in the Comoros Islands, an ex-French Foreign Legion man had given us a lead. "Try Mahajanga in Madagascar. They build huge wooden boats along the lines of sixteenth-century Portuguese caravels. I mean they haven't changed anything. No engine. All sail. Incredible. They run the coastal trade over there. Buy them some rum, they'll do it for you. Here's a number for my old mate, Max who’s out there..."

And so we arrive in Mahajanga. After a couple of days, Yulia flies in from London, immediately furious with me for frittering away her budget, and with Ken for shooting 26 hours of random, beautiful B-Roll. "It's an edit-suite nightmare!"

I was totally new to film and, looking back, she had a point. I had no idea what I was doing, no idea that most of a film budget goes into post-production, not the hiring of galleons. Yulia was more experienced, she had even had a couple of documentaries aired on American cable channels.

In the casino, Ken stares gloomily into his beer. "This could be a disaster. I need to get paid. Have you been paid?"

I shake my head.

He sighs. "My kids are in private school. What about this guy Max? Should we avoid him?"

"He seems okay to me, just doesn’t belong to the local Rotary Club. Think about it. He showed us those incredible sailing boats today and he knows the captains. We can hire a couple of them and dress the crews up in costumes." I had it all planned. There was a tailor in the market who had offered to run up 40 pirate costumes at short notice. Max had a mate who had cooked lunch for the King of Swaziland and 800 guests - he'd do the catering.

Ken snorts derisively. "You heard Charles: Max is in the gun-running business."

"That’s just gossip. He got excited about our plan - that means a lot. He'll be really useful."

"Not if we get locked up - or shot. Besides, Yulia doesn't like him and we have no filming permit."

That was Yulia's decision. I didn’t care for bureaucracy either, but it was a mistake. A writer with a notebook can go unnoticed; three people with a large camera on a tripod might just escape attention; two galleons and forty thieves fighting a pitched battle outside a militarily significant port would probably not.

We are interrupted by Vadim, a Russian expatriate who claims to be in the gemstone business. Tonight he's depressed. His Madagascan contacts have been cutting open quartz, painting the inside green, gluing it back together and selling the results as emeralds. "It sounds amateurish," he grumbles, "But it's hard to spot."

I ask Vadim about the other two Russians. Vadim lights a cigarette and eyes them suspiciously. They are losing heavily at roulette, distracted by the croupier's cleavage. Vadim turns back to me. "Definitely military."

"So what are they doing here?"

He lights a cigarette as a waiter arrives with a cocktail glass. "You know I was a T-72 tank commander - in another life - until the T-90 replaced it. That's a good piece of equipment. A real Ferrari - 50 kilometres per hour into Red Square then take aim at the fucking parliament."

"It's strange that you Russians all end up here: Mahajanga. I mean it's not an obvious destination."

He shrugs. "Collapse of empire. Now we take the scraps we can get. "

"So what scraps are there here - for them?"

"I don't know. Ratsiraka?"

Ken drains his beer and stands up. "If you guys are going to talk politics, I'm going to bed."

When he has gone, Vadim and I discuss the current situation. As luck would have it, our team had arrived in the middle of a political crisis, one centred around the name Ratsiraka.

The ex-president, Didier Ratsiraka, had been ousted a few weeks earlier, fleeing into exile in the Seychelles (good choice), but the country was rife with rumours of him returning, backed by Russian mercenaries.

"I could do without all my fellow-countrymen here," complains Vadim. "They make life more difficult."

Ratsiraka had trained as a naval officer and risen fast after Madagascan independence from France in 1960, climbing the political ladder with socialist views that earned him the nickname "The Red Admiral". Once in power in 1975 he sought assistance from the USSR and flirted with agrarian ideals of rural self-sufficiency, fuelled by a suspicion of bourgeois intellectuals and the Frenchified cultural elite. The neighbouring Comoros Islands had gone the same way, establishing a Maoist state after a coup d'état led by a bourgeois Frenchified intellectual called Ali Soilih (coincidentally a native of Mahajanga). Soilih's own socialist paradise came to an abrupt end one night in 1978 when the French mercenary, Bob Denard, arrived with 43 ex-Foreign Legionnaires. Denard later claimed that he kicked open the presidential bedroom door to find Ali Soilih in bed with three teenage schoolgirls smoking a joint. Soilih later died, 'while trying to escape'. The fear of that midnight takeover by foreign forces had gripped the region's rulers ever since, a paranoia that Denard had done his best to foster, leading a motley private army of anti-communists through insurrections in Congo, Gabon, Benin, Yemen, Mozambique and Angola. The Comoros, however, were his pièce de resistance. He led coup attempts four times, twice successfully in 1978 and 1995, the latter with just 33 comrades all aged over 60.

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Vadim orders us both a cocktail. "You see our president, Mister Putin, he is going to surprise many people. He wants the Romanov empire back. Chechnya is only the start. Maybe he would like to get his hands on an Indian Ocean port. They can be useful."

I laugh. The idea is preposterous. The USSR is finished. I'd been to some of its former communist outstations: Aden, Addis Ababa and Maputo, sleepy towns still recovering after their bouts of post-colonial socialist fever. When I first visited the Malagasy capital Antananarivo ('Tana') in 1998, it had that same atmosphere. Most back streets were built of wood: simple structures done by carpenters who knew how to save timber with narrow staircases and tiny doors. In some parts it seemed almost medieval. The city snoozed under the tropical sun, waiting to see who might come to the rescue, praying it wasn't the IMF.

In early 2002 that rescuer arrived. Local businessman Marc Ravalomanana took over and Ratsiraka fled into exile. In the streets of the capital Tana, huge crowds of people were moving. There were no demonstrations, just a feeling of feverish excitement, bordering on madness. A month before I'd gone to Mahajanga, I'd arrived in Tana enroute to meet Ken in the Comores. I stayed a couple of nights in a quiet little wooden guesthouse down a back street. One evening I heard a disturbance and went outside to find a wild mob milling around. From the hotel doorway I watched gangs of men jostle each other, street urchins running, women rushing home with the last bits of food they had managed to find in the shops. It felt nightmarish, everyone unhinged. Back in the hotel I asked about dinner and the owner shrugged expressively. There was nothing, the kitchen had run out. Opening my room door, a woman shoved past me then ran around the room shouting. A few seconds later she ran out again, fell down the narrow wooden staircase with a huge clatter, then sprang up and launched herself out an open window into the street. That was the ambience of our B-Roll: chaos.

Back in the casino, Charles comes over. "Messieurs Vadim and Kevin, Svetlana wants to give you a free spin on the roulette wheel."

Svetlana was the croupier, another Russian.

Vadim grunts. "I'm out."

I walk over with Charles who takes my arm. "Your friend Yulia…"

"Is she bothering you? She's just anxious about the film."

He snorts. "Is she Russian?"

I felt my stomach turn over. "No. She's British. She has Polish ancestors." But it was me blustering now: what did I know? Had she actually told me that, or had I made it up?

Charles chuckles. "She speaks Russian.”

"A lot of East Europeans of her generation know Russian," I countered weakly, "It's nothing."

I sit down and Svetlana lets me win a little, then says, "Good. You can buy me a beer now - it's my break."

I understand that she has invited me over only to escape the attentions of her compatriots. Over the drink she complains about them. "They are rude. I am not a prostitute."

I ask if she's heard the rumours of a coup d'etat. "Oh, it wouldn't surprise me, they have those all the time."

After abandoning Moscow in 1994, she had drifted through the former Soviet satellite states - Ethiopia, Tanzania and Mozambique - before ending up here. Her plan was to make some money and go home to Moscow where she could make a splash with her old friends and look after her elderly mother.

When I decide that I need to sleep, she says good night, adding, "Be careful. They suspect you too. They suspect everybody."

"I'm just here to make a film!"

She smiles sweetly at me. "Nobody believes that."

I walk out past reception and into the walled garden that surrounds the small pool. Huge fruit bats hang in the trees. The hotel is in the town, but feels separate and safe. My room is up some steps, along a deck-access balcony. I lock the door and lie down, browsing the television channels. They are showing the 1997 fight between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, the one in which Tyson bites Holyfield's ear off. The commentary is in Malagasy. I turn the sound off. I want to hear any noises coming from outside. I'm thinking of what Tyson said before that fight: 'Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.'

In the morning, at first light, someone is hammering on my door. I answer to find a grim-faced soldier, his rifle pointing at my stomach. "You. Come wiz me. Bring you passport."

I am, it appears, under arrest.

[to be continued]

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Friday 5 July A new government is elected in the UK, one that promises honesty and integrity - things that the British electorate have not experienced in politicians for some time. Keir Starmer’s first speech promised that ‘the work of change begins immediately’. Doing that work well, of course, will be difficult - and there’s more than one way to do a job. While there is plenty to be done inside Britain, I hope the fresh approach extends to foreign policy where honesty and integrity have also been sadly lacking.

In 1988 I moved house in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, taking up residence in Beit Qadi, the ‘house of the judge’, in the Bab Shu’ub area of the Old City.

Moving into a tower house in the old city of Sana'a was not quite the same as any other place. First of all the exterior, all eight floors of it, had to have its decorative white bits rejuvenated. Each arched window had its adornment, every floor had a zig-zag relief across it, and all the parapets needed painting with a thick coat of weatherproof white plaster.

There was a hammering on the front door and when I peered down through a hole in the base of a casement window saw three workmen. It's not necessary in a Yemeni tower house to go down and physically pull back the hefty wooden beam that locks the front door. There is a rope that burrows down through various pipes and slots from the upper floors and is tied to that beam. A good haul on this rope pulls the beam back, opening the door without any need to descend.

New arrivals would then climb several short flights of narrow stone steps. On the first floor they would have to negotiate Ummi Sufia, an ancient old lady resident, somehow related to the landlord, who came with the building. She spent her days sucking on a hookah pipe and waiting to interrogate visitors. First she screeched, 'Man?' (Who's that?) down the stairs, then, depending on the person, she might invite you to a 'puff of smoke'. From that level there were many more steps, passing two barely used floors. If the house were one occupied by locals, the visitor would have to make a lot of warning noise, constantly muttering, "There's no god but God', lest you outrage the modesty of a woman, by seeing her unveiled nose and mouth.  (Ummi Sufia managed to smoke a pipe without ever letting anyone see either by dextrous use of head coverings.)

In the unlikely event that you did meet a woman on the stairs, she might scuttle past, veiled face averted, as if you were a dangerous plague-carrying danger, or she might engage in conversation: there was no telling. Once, a veiled woman did stop and talk to me and appeared so friendly that I asked her name. At that she screamed and bolted. I never again made the same mistake.

The workmen huffed and puffed and made their polite shouts of warning, then on the top roof they tied some very old hemp ropes to whatever fixed points they could find and lowered a horizontal wooden board where they could sit. Once in position (I cannot recall them climbing down to the board but they must have done), they began. The entire process might be termed slapdash. Vast quantities of paint plastered all over the men, their clothes, the ground below - with quite a small amount actually connecting with the intended target. There was a tiny shop eight floors down under the house, a hole in the wall really, and though Muhammad, the owner, got splashed, he did not appear to care, or even notice.

Despite such apparent casual unconcern, the net effect was beautiful: the neat geometry of pattern cut with a measure of devil-may-care irregularity. I liked that. When I grew up, my dad was working as a building site carpenter. In his youth, however, he had completed seven years as an apprentice furniture-maker. I remember he said that the entire first year was taken up with learning to sharpen tools. The second, I reckon, was occupied by sharpening clichés: "A bad workman blames his tools", "Measure twice, cut once", "More haste, less speed", and most frequently, "If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well". He built us a house and made the furniture. I can remember watching him knock six-inch nails into roof joists: a tap to set the nail up, then two perfectly timed swings of the hammer to drive the nail down. Perfection was always the objective, a type of perfection based on precision. He could saw in straight lines. I struggled.

The Yemenis, however, seemed to offer as different notion of what perfection might be, these workmen suggested that true perfection had a dash of chaos thrown in.

After a couple of days in the house it became apparent that there was a water leak in the bathroom. That was a double problem. Water is precious in Sana'a, but also I'd started using the bathroom as a photo darkroom to develop black-and-white pics. The constant drip was annoying. I went to the market and found a plumber. There was a place where all types of tradesmen would wait to be engaged, each sitting behind an emblematic set of tools. I chose one and we walked back, him puffing on a cigarette.

In the bathroom I showed him the problem. He lit another fag and puffed contentedly while it remained glued to his lower lip. Then he hit the dripping connection hard with a hefty  adjustable spanner. The pipe split and a jet of cold water burst out, hitting him in the chest. Laughing he reached out and pressed a finger on the hole, sending crazy spurts of water in several directions, drenching me and all the bathroom to his immense amusement. With this water constantly blasting all over the place, he cut the two pipe ends, inserted a new fitting and tightened the nuts. The water eased back, then stopped. There was only the sound of drips falling from the roof beams and all surfaces. The pipes were a jumble, nothing exactly horizontal or vertical. Everything skew-whiff, my Dad would have said. The plumber took a drag on his cigarette. I stared in disbelief. It was still alight. Magic.

How did you do that? I asked. He grinned and with a flick of his tongue, the cigarette disappeared inside his mouth, then a second later reappeared. I decided that he had taken plumbing to a new level, a type of performance art. "No job's worth doing," he might have said, "Without panache". When he had gone, I brought back my darkroom kit and started printing pictures again.

22 May 2024 British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announces a general election

21 May 2024 The UK’s Environment Agency announces that raw sewage ‘spills’ had almost doubled in one year, reaching 3.6 million hours of spillage

May 2023 It’s reported that only 14% of English rivers have ‘good’ ecological condition

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Is it an unavoidable fact that humans always muck everything up? And is it also true that a lot of humans actually don't mind. Or if they do, feel incapable of doing anything about it?

In Britain, Mrs Thatcher's idea of selling off public assets, then using the money to pay unemployment benefits to three million people, have now really reached the fruition point. The railways are hopeless, the roads full of potholes, and electricity and gas cost a fortune, and there is no money to fix anything. But the real triumph of her ill-conceived ideological assault is water.

I remember Margaret Thatcher vividly. The first general election I voted in, 1979, was her shock victory. By the fateful day of triumph, we were growing accustomed to the sound of her voice: soon to take on a crowing note that would remain with her. It was the year I left school and seemed appropriate that, having left behind the nerve-jangling screech of chalk on blackboard, I should have something to replace it with - something even more irritating. I've never understood the respect the Iron Lady has garnered from abroad, but of course her stand against communism and authoritarianism gave things a different slant when seen from afar. At home, for those of us who had to live with her, she was like a monstrous schoolmistress whose lessons you dreaded.

The central thrust of Thatcherism was that small government was good and that the market, the remorseless competitive battle of profit-driven capitalism, would somehow drive down prices while raising quality. It came on the back of widely-perceived incompetence and inefficiency in state-owned utilities, but also benefited from the poor image of opposition leader, Michael Foot, a rather bumbling and eccentric figure usually dressed in a duffel coat. During that ‘79 election campaign, I went to hear him speak at Nottingham City Hall. He mounted the stage uncertainly, wavering hand clutching for the rail. At the lectern he paused, beaming smiles at everyone, the sort that old people do when they know there’s a joke, but they didn’t hear it. Then he straightened, and without referring to any notes, delivered a blistering speech, remorseless and powerful in its logic, persuasive and passionate. He lost the election.

Thatcher privatised everything she could. When public assets came up for sale, ordinary people responded to cheesy television adverts and bought shares. As a result share prices soared and those mini-investors sold out. In time the shares became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, mostly pension and hedge funds. They wanted profits for their investors; they certainly did not want to spend millions fixing leaks and updating Victorian infrastructure. As time went on it has become clear that privatisation has neither driven down prices or raised quality.

A few people began to object. Surfers Against Sewage were one voice and they have campaigned for years. For a long time nobody in government took the slightest notice. Raw sewage spills became a regular occurrence.

Over on the River Wye, one of Britain's riverine crown jewels, people began to notice algal growths and declines in once-thriving populations of native species. The Wye flows through largely rural areas, starting in the Welsh mountains. The lack of towns on its banks meant that it had escaped all the horrors of the industrial age and there was very little sewage, at least not of the human kind.

When I was nine, I camped on its banks and asked my Dad if I could swim across. He said yes, but didn't offer to come with me. I remember the soft touch of waving fronds of water crowsfoot as I went. That's a plant that is a dead giveaway: the water is clean. Above it danced the deep blue wings of banded demoiselles, a type of dragonfly whose flight is like watching tiny chips of dark starry night fall through sunshine. Below me were shifting shadows, maybe salmon or trout, they were common. I swam across and I swam back. When it was over, I felt like I'd started something.

In the year 2000 I swam across the Ganges at Varanasi. Despite it being a holy river, the Indian population are happy to chuck all their crap into it. Fortunately in those days plastic was not as common as now. I saw some bodies, but also a river dolphin, the susu. It rolled up in front of me and gave me such a fright that I almost gulped some of the water - that would have been a mistake, but probably not a fatal one.

By 2017 when I travelled downriver to Calcutta I can safely say that I never considered getting in the river. Huge rafts of mixed plastic and hyacinths, cemented together with oils and fat, were drifting along. At Calcutta people do wash in it, but there is no alternative for them. Water quality does not appear to be high on the list of Indian governmental objectives. It’s curious that although all the major world religions profess to revere clean water, they have done even less than Mrs Thatcher’s privatised companies to do anything about it.

In 2023, above Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, I swam across that giant, ignoring the nagging fears of caimans, sting rays, orifice fish, electric eels and piranhas. There was no visible pollution, but a few miles downstream in the Iquitos shanty suburb of Belem, I saw vast amounts of plastic and human waste discarded under the stilt houses. When the rains came (as they eventually did) all these tons of rubbish would be flushed downstream. The irony is that they would then pass through the most isolated and undamaged portion of the entire Amazon ecosystem, the 1,000 kilometres of jungle between Iquitos and Leticia in Colombia.

Clean water was taken for granted by humanity for most of our existence. Imagine: once upon a time, any hominid could confidently stroll up to any river or lake and take a swig. I suppose you might have to watch out for a dead animal in the shallows, and the parasites, but otherwise it was fine. A lot of people around the world still rely on doing that.

Back on the River Wye, clean water activists have pointed out that the only possible source of the recent pollution was agricultural run-off. This set off howls of indignation from the farming unions, but the last few years have seen an unprecedented increase in the intensity of dairy and poultry farming in Britain, a trend that had already been underway for some time in the United States. Cows are kept indoors and milked robotically. All their food is trucked in. Chicken mega-farms have been built in their hundreds. Each can house at least 82,000 birds at any one time (that's the starting point to be classed as a mega-farm). Once again, all the feed is brought in.

Aside from animal welfare issues, the mega-problem is waste. Ammonia emissions in Wales jumped by 40% between 2017 and 2022 and it's been estimated that the River Wye catchment now contains about 32 million chickens.

I stopped eating chicken years ago. The sight of terrified scrawny white birds having their heads shoved down a mincer in the street did it for me: that was in Yemen, but I've seen the same treatment in many other countries. With eggs, I'm fortunate that I live in a rural area where people sell them outside their small-holdings. No mega-farmer ever does that.

And clean water? I hope it's a big issue in the upcoming British election. People talk about net-zero, but I'd like to propose a more ambitious target: that rivers should be clean enough that you could stroll up and take a swig, without giving out a shriek, like you just heard the sound of chalk scraping down a blackboard

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Travelling again now for a couple of weeks so no posts… hoping to swim in some clear clean water. By the way, for those of you who do not live in the UK, there are some fantastic, very clean places to swim, without having to worry if you swallow the occasional gulp of water.

It’s been a while since I posted a story, and there will be gaps sometimes, but the news from Sudan set me remembering events from long ago. In 1983 I went out to Darfur, the start of a long relationship with that diverse, creative and endlessly hospitable country that has now sunk into the abyss.

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Friday 17 May: Al Jazeera news report that the city of El Fasher in Northern Darfur is under siege by the Rapid Support Forces who have been responsible for widespread atrocities and extreme racial violence. Inside the beleagured city, 1.8 million people, residents and displaced refugees from other areas, are now threatened.

At first sight El Fasher was everything I wanted. Each evening, through clouds of golden dust, hundreds of camels came to markets that were busy with a dazzling variety of tribal people. I'd wander around in a state of bliss, drinking it all in: everyone wrapped in robes, men with deep facial scarification carrying hippo hide whips, all the produce tied up with hemp and palm, camels roaring and grunting as bricks of rock salt were forced down their throats to make them drink, while under hessian shanties people took shots of thick sweet coffee from exquisitely-made clay pots. It was mad and wonderful and I was a greenhorn, a 22-year-old driven by childhood dreams of remote places and adventure, rather than my official reason for being there: to teach English. I had never, in fact, stood in front of a class - except to be punished.

I had done my first journey through Africa, from Cairo to Nairobi, the year before, clutching my bible - not the desert scrolls concoction - I mean the gospel according to Geoff Crowley, the Lonely Planet guide, Africa on a Shoestring. Now, with Geoff's rousing panegyric to the wonders of the lost world of Darfur, I had made it to the far west of Sudan where, I naively imagined, nothing had changed for a very long time.

On my second day in town I went to visit the museum. It had been set up by the colonial British who regarded such institutions as essential markers of progress. When everything quaint, backward and tribal had been consigned to a museum, a country could begin to move forward. The El Fasher institution did not have a large collection. There was one unfortunate stuffed bird, labelled "bastard". I think they meant bustard, but I never knew the animal personally so cannot be sure.

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The exhibit which most impressed me was the chain mail. The information claimed that it had been captured from European crusaders in the Holy Land in the 12th century, then traded across the desert. Warriors of various Darfur kingdoms had used it in battle right up to the arrival of the British in 1916. I loved all that. And I loved the soft sunsets in the wadi where the camels were couched. I loved the open-air cinema where they almost always got the reels in the wrong order and a dodgy Libyan emigree served grilled sausages during the intervals. I loved the fresh cool air of dawn and the walk to school through sandy lanes, passing the doe-eyed cows tied up outside the butchery. I'd stop and shake hands with their owners: cattle-herders whose lands lay to the south. I liked the school too. The boys were friendly, lively, and interested in learning nothing, which was handy because that was the one thing I could teach them. We got on well, mostly because I never sent them out for a whipping, unlike the local teachers who did this frequently.

In some regards the British colonial approach had advantages in backwaters like Darfur. They really did not want to have to supress rebellions, or bring in military forces. The aim was always a quiet life with a modicum of tax collection. To achieve this they usually backed the traditional rulers, bolstering the dominant class or ethnic group with a few well-chosen officers and a machine gun. Alongside this was a cultural aspect, an attempt to lift ‘the natives’. In Fasher this had taken the form of a library which I discovered one day. Inside were a few shelves of dusty Dickens and the collected works of George Bernard Shaw. Astonishingly the caretaker was still paid a small salary. “Will the British come back?” he asked me forlornly. No one had taken a book out for some years.

If the British imperial project had had its own guidebook, it would have been called Empire on a Shoestring. In Darfur the reverberations of that short-lived and light imperial touch were still being felt. Old men would assail me in the market. "Where are the British? They were here once, you know."

Laughing with them, I told them Britain was now a washed-up nonentity, that the British they remembered were not even typical, but members of a privileged clique who had hijacked our country then used its resources to subjugate one quarter of the globe only to squander the loot on ugly country houses and oil paintings of themselves. They were fortunate to be rid of the British. If they understood any of this youthful invective, the old men ignored it, instead becoming misty-eyed. "Yes, but things worked."

It was hard to know quite what there was to 'work'. El Fasher was a market. Desert tribes came in to sell their animals and their handicrafts; farmers sold grains and vegetables; traders handled everything else, mostly soap and sugar. One merchant showed a little more imagination, selling custard powder. It tasted divine. I'd mix it with the little woody bananas that needed a knife to peel. The custard made them edible. It became my luxury, the thing that helped me survive. It was the taste of the outside world.

I lived with two other teachers inside a small compound with a central courtyard and bare rooms around. There was a huge spider living in the outhouse and a rat down the toilet. We slept on angarebs, wooden-frame beds strung with hemp rope. On my wall I had the three Michelin maps that covered all of Africa and I would plan my future expeditions. One of these was to travel by camel to the Tibesti Mountains in Chad, and for that reason I started going to the camel market.

The traders were semi-nomadic people who wore loose tunics, pantaloons and turbans, all in white. Up their left sleeve would be a knife. That was how I got to know Muhammad. I asked to see his knife and he slipped the plaited leather sash down his wiry arm. The knife had a crocodile and python skin sheath.

Muhammad had learned a little English. I was picking up some words of Arabic. We managed.

"Crocodile is in Chad," he told me. "Long time ago it was here too."

Muhammad had been to Tibesti and told me he'd seen ‘tiger’ tracks. I assumed he meant leopard. He allowed me to test drive his camels, rocking and rolling around the market, brandishing a hippo hide whip, to the whoops of other traders.

Talking about Muhammad's life was difficult with so little language, but it was not hard to understand that things were tough. Which tribe did he belong to? Zaghawa. Was he married? Yes. Where was his wife? He waved a hand vaguely northwards. When would he see her? In a few weeks or months. How many children? Two alive and two dead. How many camels did he have? Not enough. Prices were low. And every day he stayed in Fasher meant finding forage which was an expense.

I bought the crocodile knife from him and a basket. It was only years later that I realised these tribesmen, sitting around their fires at night, were on the brink of disaster. The desert was slithering southwards, smothering the meagre patches of grazing and drying up wells. The northern nomadic peoples were being pressured and so were the others: the cattle-herding Baggara tribes of the savannah and the farmers of the hills. To the outsider, newly arrived, distinguishing these people from each other was not easy. The cattle and camel herders referred to themselves as Arabs and the farmers, dismissively, as African. The physical differences might be obvious: a sharp Arab nose on one, fuller African lips on another. But both might claim to be Arab, or neither. It seemed insignificant, like which football team you supported.

Slowly and steadily in those years of the early 1980s, El Fasher was sliding towards disaster. It was in fact a climate crisis, long before anyone called it that. The label in those days was desertification. The consequences were not unknown, but they were easily trotted out and forgotten. People would be poorer and would have to move - that was obvious. That this would trigger a catastrophic chain reaction of violence and chaos was never envisaged. That some malevolent individuals would foment, dominate and benefit from this horrible future was not predicted. That weapons would flood in, even as everything else dried up, was unforeseen. That those small facial differences might mean life or death seemed impossible. That the outside world would do nothing to stop it was unthinkable.

One evening I went down to the market and Muhammad and his camp were gone. With him had gone my dream of getting to Tibesti. I was certainly not courageous enough to attempt it alone.

There were other old men lounging around, inviting me to take a glass of sweet red tea.

"Britisher?" they grinned. "Very good. They were here once, you know."

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Friday 8 March            Tourists are banned from the back streets of Gion, Tokyo's geisha district, after residents complained about incessant and aggressive photographing of locals.

27 August 2021           The Afghan School of Music falls silent

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There were four people in the car plus the driver: myself, Damian the photographer, and two representatives of Medecins Sans Frontieres. We were heading through the Kinshasa traffic to see an AIDS project they were running in a poor district of the city. Damian had his camera in his lap. "Would it be okay to shoot some street scenes from the car?" he asked, lifting the camera up a bit. At that moment we slowed down in the traffic and, as luck would have it, a policeman standing on the kerb glanced in the car and spotted the camera. Immediately he gestured angrily and shouted something in Lingala. The driver's reaction was instantaneous. He yanked the wheel of the 4X4 hard right, squeezed through a gap between two VW Kombi vans (there were thousands of them on the streets of the Congolese capital in those days) and accelerated hard. A minute later, a Kombi van appeared alongside with the policeman clinging to the side with one hand, shaking the other at us, hand clenched into a fist.

"Get back to HQ," yelled the MSF guy. "Ring the Minister."

After a few minutes of engine-roaring near-misses and desperate 'through-the-gap' moments, we shot through the MSF gates and they shut behind us, just in time to keep the policeman out. We were, it seemed, at the beginning of a diplomatic incident.

What had happened? The policeman did not like having his photo taken, or to be more accurate, he did not like having an image-taking device anywhere near his person. He may also, it's true, have seen an opportunity for a small donation to his pension fund. He may also have seen a bubble of wealthy white men and recognised a chance to make small amends for egregious historical wrongs, including the lining up of 'interesting' tribal people and their 'capture' in a camera.

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The question of image rights and consent was present from the very beginning of photography. It was 1838 and Parisian inventor, Louis Daguerre pointed a strange apparatus out the window above his Boulevard de Temple studio and released the shutter. The exposure was about four minutes and so the only human to cast a solid image was a gentleman having his shoes shined. If he had known where this was going, he might have rushed upstairs and hammered on Daguerre's door, demanding a copy of the photograph, or blood. He did not, he was probably too busy enjoying the broad tree-lined street without cars (Daguerre's colleague Nicéphore Niépce had already started dealing with that, inventing the first internal combustion engine). The shiny shoe man's name is unknown, but he became the first human in history to lose control over his image rights.

Even before Daguerre's invention, humanity had a tricky relationship with its own image. Islam and Judaism have always had strong elements of what is termed aniconism, while Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity have flirted with it. Go to any ancient church in Britain and you can find evidence for the destruction of images. At Blythburgh in Suffolk, legend has it that Cromwell's soldiers smashed every image they could get their hands on, but failing to reach the ceiling bosses that were carved into faces, they shot musket balls at them. They are still there, embedded. In Wells cathedral, they smashed some of the medieval stained glass: it was reconstructed into new, abstract patterns that I reckon is probably an improvement on the original.

Living in Yemen in the early 1990s I saw the power of aniconism in action. The renowned British painter Martin Yeoman was visiting and had bravely decided to set up his easel outside Bab al-Yemen, the main medieval gate to the Old City of Sana'a. I went to have a look and found Martin with a crowd of jostling, yelling art advisors, most of them under the age of consent, but also one old man who delivered a forearm smash to the painter. This severe critic objected to the very idea of making an image. On another occasion Martin was in a village on the stupendously beautiful mountain of Jabal Rayma where he was sketching a youth playing draughts. When the drawing was finished the youth came over to look. After expressing some pleasure in an image that truly caught his likeness, he leaned over, and with his hand, rubbed it out.

Back in Congo DRC, we eventually dared to leave the compound and made it to the AIDS project without incident. There, for the first time, I saw the distressing end-game for sufferers: physical and mental collapse. Many of the women had been abandoned by family and had young children, some with the virus lurking in their systems. I was covering this part of our trip for BBC World Service radio and started recording interviews. No one objected. Damian was struggling to get consent, expending vast amounts of diplomacy and persuasion to get each click of the shutter. The contrast with the voice was striking. Nobody minded at all. (Not that sound, especially music, has escaped the attention of puritanical minds. In Kabul in 2003, looking round the Ministry of Culture building that had been wrecked by the Taliban, I noticed they had singled out the grand piano for particularly harsh treatment: riddling it with bullets, then throwing it down the stairs.)

After leaving the Kinshasa AIDS project, Damian and I were walking down a road towards a market when he took a photo, a cityscape. Almost immediately a youth leapt from the long grass by some shacks, protesting loudly. In seconds we were surrounded by stick-brandishing young men, all shouting and furious, threatening to wrench Damian's camera from his hands and smash it. We kept smiling and walking. Their objections were territorial rather than religious. We were on their turf. Taking anything without asking was not allowed, not even images. When we turned into the market, we must have left their patch because they all gave up.

The market sold fruit and vegetables, but also wild meat. There were tiny crocodiles, still alive, their jaws strapped up with strips of tree bark; there were hunks of hippo and steaks of snake. And there were dried and smoked chimpanzees, their faces contorted into macabre final silent screams. No one here seemed to mind photography in the slightest. In fact, people started asking to have their picture taken, proudly holding up the grisly meat produce.

A week later I was at Kinshasa Airport, and found myself sitting next to the first and only tourist I had met in the entire trip. He was a Belgian student who, he admitted, had had a traumatic holiday. On the first day, somewhere outside the capital, he had been arrested for taking pictures and thrown in jail. It had taken the Belgian consul two weeks to get him out, by which time his holiday was over.

I have not visited Congo DRC since the rise of the smart phone so have no idea how it is coping with that innovation. The country, however, is behind the rise of that gadget. Thousands of poor miners, many children, dig out the cobalt needed for the batteries.

Years later scientists investigating the HIV-1 virus decided that it probably came from human-chimpanzee contact in the Kinshasa area, most likely an animal market.

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I’m travelling next week. Back soon with another story. Check out Martin Yeoman’s work on his website https://www.martinyeomanartist.com/

1966    Canadian psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff notes that he is seeing large numbers of adolescent offspring from Holocaust survivors. “It is almost as if their parents, in an attempt to justify their survival, demanded qualities of their children which were the accumulation of their expectations of all the dead who were murdered."

I have visited Jerusalem three times, first in 2003, last in 2010. The events here come from 2006. I am wandering around Jerusalem, talking to anyone who will engage, as well as interviewing some contacts. The experience reminds me of travelling in parts of Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down. There's an urge to testify, to share, and to mark one's own place in the whirlwind.

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In the Garden of Gethsemane the caretaker is struggling with a group of visitors from Goa. They are picking the olives. Some of the trees are extremely ancient, possibly even old enough to have been there when Jesus visited. The Indian Christians are unabashed. They want their holy relics.

I head off uphill on to the Mount of Olives where thousands are buried, including I notice, Robert Maxwell, the disgraced businessman who fell off his yacht and drowned in 1991. I had forgotten that Maxwell was Jewish, born in poverty in what is now Ukraine, his parents later dying in Auschwitz. He went on to be a war hero, single-handedly storming a German machine gun post, then a phenomenally successful publisher in England.

At his glorious peak, however, came a significant setback. His attempt to buy the Sunday tabloid newspaper, News of the World, failed. The owners refused to sell to a mere immigrant. There were hints of anti-semitism and a front page op-ed that described the paper as "British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding."  It was then sold to an Australian, Rupert Murdoch. Maxwell, you might say, had flown too close to the sun. And eventually, down he came, leaving behind all kinds of tangles, and a daughter, Ghislaine.

In a cafe near the Garden of Gethsemane, I meet Khaled who tells me he held a senior position in the management of the Dome of the Rock during the 1980s. "It is God's will," he tells me, "That the Jews are here." And he doesn't mind. "I don't like these Palestinian politicians - I'd rather be ruled by my enemy."

His family came to Jerusalem 1,400 years ago, and 30 generations have their names inscribed in the Dome of the Rock. "The Hebronites and Jews started coming here at the start of the 20th century. Two invasions! They were all poor people. Actually, I should say it was migration, not an invasion. But now they are all-powerful. We are losing everything to the settlers: land, power, money," he shrugs, "And that is God's will."

I'm intrigued to know who the Hebronites are. The answer is simple. People from Hebron. Palestinians. As so often happens in Jerusalem, a new complexity is added to what is already intricate.

Khaled is an old Jerusalemite and laments the passing of the grand aristocracy of ancient families: Arab, Christian, Jewish - he doesn't mind their religious affiliations, what counts is the number of generations spent inside the intricate woven network that is Jerusalem society.

We drink tea. He starts a diatribe. "Who invented chemical weapons and nuclear bombs? Anglo-Saxons. Who is destroying nature? America. But humans will not destroy the world," he says, "God will do that. One day for God is a thousand years for man." His conversation charges off, like a muslim Don Quixote, tilting at various windmills.

I'm getting used to a particular kind of conversation. I'm scribbling while people talk, but sometimes it is just too incoherent and fast to keep up. Then I make a mark in my notebook, TB, 'talks bollocks', even occasionally preferring the more extreme TUB, 'talks utter bollocks'. But I don't contradict, or challenge anyone. I just let them run and see what comes out. I write down what I can. Khaled's rant ends when a friend walks into the cafe and they shout at each other, "Hey, asshole!" They laugh uproariously and greet affectionately.

Jerusalem is a constant reminder that no one is all good, or all bad, and that we are all flawed, some more than others, perhaps.

Back in the town after sunset, the shops are closing and people hurrying home. Palestinian vegetable-sellers hoist their empty crates on their heads and set off. I meet a priest, Father Massimo, who came here from Bologna 22years ago. "Just being near the holy places gives me the strength to live here - it's not so easy."

We walk to his home, the Monastery of the Flagellation, where he studies Biblical languages and the texts. Upstairs there is a lounge where a single old friar is sitting. He is wearing a baseball cap. Father Massimo specialises in Aramaic and Syriac. We talk about paradise, the word itself.

"In late Assyrian you have pardisu meaning fruit trees or costly plants and we find that sense in the Song of Solomon chapter 4, Nehemiah 2 and Ecclesiates 2. There are three mentions of paradise in the Old Testament, all meaning a beautiful garden. By the time of the New Testament, however, it seems to be changed in meaning, to perfection. Do you want to try any of these biscuits? They're very good."

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Next day I head out to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial.

In front of one photograph, a woman asks me in Hebrew to borrow a pen. Dalia has come here to try and find the names of relatives who died in the death camps. They were Ukrainian Jews. "My grandparents who survived never ever spoke about it. Nothing."

Now she has found a name on a list and tears are rolling down her cheeks as she writes. The museum is a harrowing experience for anyone, but for Dalia it is truly traumatic. She cannot stop crying, pulling me to see the details of photos and artefacts. "Look at this." It's a notebook that was found among a pile of things at a death camp: a notebook in which the owner had been practising Arabic and Hebrew writing. "See? They were learning for the Middle East."

At the terrible model of the Birkenau gas chambers, she stares for a long time. "Did you know that Jewish scientists worked on developing poison gas during World War One?"

She has come with a group, but she shows no sign of wanting to be with them. She is different, I realise, a bit wild and prophet-like. At a display about a death camp, the glass front is being cleaned, she nudges me. "All the cleaners are Arabs. They serve in the cafeteria. Do you know that Gaza is a ghetto?"

At the pile of shoes, genuine shoes from victims who undressed to enter the gas chambers, she weeps again, gasping, "I can't take this. I need something good."

In the car park afterwards, she is distraught, almost crazed. "I don't know which coach is mine and I don't care. Isn't Sharon aware that he is doing to the Arabs what was done to us Jews?"

She is walking up and down, delivering unconnected and random utterances. "Is anyone a better person for more than three minutes after visiting that museum?"

"I must not be relativistic. I have to remember that."

"Which colour, which company?"

"If they sounded a fire alarm, how would we behave?"

Then she stops. "But I did get something beautiful. Did you see it? There was a man who painted in Terezin death camp, painted lovely scenes for his son, pictures of innocence and hope - in that place where 7,000 children died. I have his name - thanks to your pen. I could have stolen the Visitors Book pen, but you had one."

Then she looks up. Someone is shouting her name. A coach that was leaving has stopped and someone is waving from the open door. She shakes my hand, then runs for it, crying again.

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November 1979:         The film Monty Python's Life of Brian is released in the UK. I go to see it at the ABC Haymarket cinema in Newcastle. Built in 1933 to hold 1,280 people, the theatre's decor was intended to be an orientalist fantasy with camel and palm tree friezes which happened to be the perfect venue for a movie purportedly set in the Holy Land. The sell-out audience is almost entirely made up of students like myself. Each scene skewers human self-deception, irrationality and ignorance with relentless glee. At the time it seems that we are laughing at the past, the ridiculous world of our parents and grandparents. Unfortunately it later turns out that we are laughing at our own future.

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2006. I travel to Israel and Palestine. Jerusalem feels like a city where a storm is about to break.

My visit starts badly. Landing at Tel Aviv airport, I realise that I have brought the wrong passport, the one with visa stamps for Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, rather than the one with lots of blank pages. I am removed from the passport control area and taken to a back room for interrogation. Mostly this consists of repeated ten-minute grillings as to why I have visited these dangerous places, then an hour alone, followed by a new officer asking the same questions. And again, and again. They are waiting for me to alter my story or slip up. I am being evasive, of course. I don't want them to know that I am on a journalistic assignment. I tell them I am an academic and have a meeting lined up with a professor at Tel Aviv University. This has the advantage of being true.

After five hours they release me. I assume the academic has vouched for me (he has not) and catch the bus into Tel Aviv. Next day I meet Professor Israel Finkelstein, co-author of The Bible Unearthed. He is an engaging and likeable archaeologist, who contends that his subject should be rigorously scientific. His book is an attempt to separate Biblical legend from archaeological evidence.

I take the bus to Jerusalem and stay in the classic American Colony Hotel, home to generations of journalists. Walking the alleyways of the old city, I bump into all kinds of strange people. An old Hasidic Jew leans towards me conspiratorially, "British?"

I nod.

"Your Queen Elizabeth - very beautiful girl."

There's a group of men dragging heavy wooden crosses along the route that Jesus is supposed to have followed, the via dolorosa. Sweating and heaving, they are being photographed by their wives. I feel that I have landed in a Life of Brian remake. I can't help but remember Michael Palin as the obsequious prisoner, Ben, who is trying to curry favour with his gaolers. "Nail him up, I say. Nail some sense into him!"

In one shop window I see an interesting wooden model of a building and go inside to find an obese young man from Birmingham. He is here to gather funds for a project to rebuild the Jewish temple. This will involve demolishing one of the holiest shrines in Islam, the Dome of the Rock, a prospect he waves aside like an annoying fly. "They've had it for 2,000 years, now it's our turn." His West Midlands accent is strong. He has been in Israel two months. His grandparents’ generation had suffered in the Holocaust and now he harbours all the grievances and simmering hatred that they, inexplicably, had not had. “They were just happy to survive.” This too seems to make him angry.

Outside a black American Christian dressed in rags is crawling up the alleyway, eyes ablaze with spiritual fervour, knees bleeding.

"We call that Jerusalem Syndrome," says the Brummie builder confidently, like an old hand. "I can't tell you how many prophets I've had in here."

I stare into his face, searching for the trace of a smile, but there isn't one. "This is all ours," he says. "This city is ours. All of it. The Bible says so."

Outside  groups of people are chanting, shouting, and demonstrating. I am thinking, 'This is a madhouse', when a tall, long-haired youth in robes steps inside the shop and announces, "I am Jesus."

The Brummie chases him out, grumbling. After only two months, he’s already fed up with messiahs.

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Near the Western Wall there is the place where, in 1625, a tunnel entrance was discovered, later explored by the American Biblical scholar Edward Robinson in 1838. Now that spot is scene of a massive archaeological project. Israeli soldiers and police are everywhere, heavily armed. Groups of Israeli teenagers singing the national anthem are being sent down what they call Hezekiah's tunnel. I follow them. The tunnel is shoulder-wide, knee-deep in water and barely five feet high. Gun barrels scrape the walls. Behind me is another American Christian. "I came to see where our saviour walked." When we emerge, it is next to an Arab shop but I'm the only person who goes in. The owner, Ibrahim, is not doing good business. "Since all this started, nobody comes. The Israelis won't and the Arabs daren't."

The tunnel is clearly ancient, but claims that it was built by the 13th king of Judah, Hezekiah, in the 8th century BC, are unproven.

At the Imperial Hotel near the Hebron Gate I interview Archbishop Attalah Hanna. He is wearing the black robes and hat of a Greek Orthodox priest. Born in a Palestinian village to Eastern Orthodox parents, he is a forceful and fluent speaker who represents all that is complex and fascinating about this place. "Justice and rights are stronger than bombs," he tells me, "Military solutions always fail."

He is seething with fury because earlier in the day he had gone to Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital, for a conference about Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. At the checkpoint Israeli soldiers turned him back. Behind all this is a crisis. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem has sold church property in Arab East Jerusalem to Israelis, an act that led to his overthrow and the installation of a new patriarch, one the Israelis refuse to recognise unless he sells them more property.

In East Jerusalem a shopkeeper takes me up on a roof and shows me how Israeli settlers are building fortified gantries, effectively erecting a separate community within the city. As we watch the sun set, some young settlers wired up with walkie-talkies appear. I’m struck by their confident demeanor and their military boots, striding around like experienced roadies at a rock concert, ignoring the audience, meticulously preparing for the main event yet to come.

Through a contact I meet Reuben outside Blockbuster Video in West Jerusalem. A serious young man, he drives me past the Knesset and various politicians' houses, including the new leader of the Opposition, a man called Benjamin Netanyahu. There are no lights on.

We enter a parallel world, one that exists inside the Holy Land, but is entirely separate from the crowded, noisy world of Palestinians, Greek orthodox priests, and Jesus-lookalikes dragging crosses. Here the roads are well-maintained and gardens beautifully planted. It could be an upmarket part of California or the Mediterranean, a gated community that is also a nation state.

I sit in a bar, drinking beer with Reuben and his friends. The buildings around the square look ancient. "It was an Arab village," says Reuben, "But they all ran away in '48." The young people are lively, getting drunk.

"So the former inhabitants?" I ask, "Where are they? What happened to them?"

He shrugs, uninterested. "Israel is everything to us. It's our shelter - the place Jews can run to."

Reuben's grandfather survived Auschwitz and went home to Romania. The rest of his family had died in the camp and he never spoke about it, or being Jewish. "He lived like a Christian, even kept pigs."

Then in 1955 he heard that his brother had in fact survived and was living in Israel. He packed up and left for Tel Aviv.

Reuben drives me out to his home town, Maale Adumin. It's a settler community, outside of the 1967 borders. We eat cheeseburgers. I want to say, Blessed are the Cheeseburgers, but Reuben doesn't seem like the kind of guy who laughs a lot, or would enjoy the kind of film references that amuse me.

"The Holocaust was not the first time," Reuben says in the car heading back to Jerusalem. "And maybe not the last."

He drops me where we started, outside Blockbuster Video. I walk back to the American Colony Hotel, feeling like I am waking from a weird dream.

Near the Western Wall there is one Palestinian house left in what has become a Jewish quarter. It belongs to Ismail al-Eid. He's living in a paint-peeling room with an arched ceiling. The television is inside a wooden case and on top, china knick-knacks, family photos and artificial flowers. His son brings grapes, cigarettes and crisps, then coffee.

"My grandfather and father were born in this house," Ismael tells me. "And me too. But now I'm being forced out. I'll be a refugee in my own city." He looks tired. On the table is the book he's consulting, 'A Dictionary of Diplomacy and International Relations.' "They came here and told me I was living in a stolen house," he says miserably. "They had forged documents to prove it."

Could he simply sell up and move?

"There are people who will kill me if I do." He thinks a bit. "And there are people who will kill me if I don't."

He shows me out to the rear of the house where there is a lovely courtyard with lemon and pomegranate trees hung with several birds in cages: finches and budgerigars.

Ismail's earliest memory is of violence. "It was 1951 and I was five years old. My father managed the vegetable market in David Street. All the peasants were coming to sell their apples and grapes during the summertime when suddenly we heard gunfire. Bullets were cracking overhead. A peasant lady grabbed me and pulled me behind some doors. I can still remember peeping out through a crack into the street. Everyone was running. Soldiers were beating people and shooting. Someone had assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan in the al-Aqsa Mosque."

The murder was a key moment in the unfolding catastrophe that would roll forward, apparently without end, driven by the forces of self-deception, irrationality and ignorance.

Ismail looks at the birds. "This yellow one sings beautifully in the morning. My son likes to keep them, but I prefer to release them." And with that he opens the cage door for two of the finches.

But the birds seem confused and do not move. Ismail shrugs and closes the door, adding, "'amal khair wa 'irmia fil-bahr."

Which literally translates as 'Do good, then throw it in the sea,' meaning, I suppose: 'Do good and expect nothing in return.'

"There are nice people here," he says, "It's the boys who throw things and shout abuse that I don't like."

At the door, as we say goodbye, he puts a hand on my arm. "When the people here live together in peace like brothers, it will be wonderful." The door closes and I hear him lock it.

The ABC Haymarket cinema in Newcastle was demolished in 1985. It is now a car park. Monty Python’s Life of Brian is best seen in the company of over a thousand giggling students, but failing that, it’s on Netflix.

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