13April1996

My dear folks,

In a few hours, I shall grab my bags & walk down to Bayswater Road to catch the bus to the airport & thence the plane to Portugal. I’m up early, driven from my bed by dreams that were getting well beyond Freud. In the last one, I was appointed correspondent in Buenos Aires & had arrived to finding lodgings in a fairly unappealing little house, only to wake the first morning & find that someone had stolen one wheel from either side of the Rocket. Various children, unlikely relations & hordes of visitors poured into the house in such a spate that I retreated, naked, to the more manageable conscious world and left them to get on by themselves.

I cycled home last night in the teeth of a biting wind & freezing rain that had dribbled and drizzled down the newsroom windows the whole day. Once again, I had reason to be grateful to my double knitted Canadian gloves that kept my hands warm & dry. There were light falls of snow inland, some of which could be seen surrounding John Major as he put the best light - in a TV interview - on his party’s latest by-election defeat at the polls. He is reduced to a majority of one. His opposite number, Tony Blair, has been swanning around the White House meeting the Clintons et al.

It’s been a tough week, with long, often frantic shifts to take in the latest world dramas. These have centred on the Middle East the last few days as I hardly need tell you. Every now and then I stand back & reflect on the rhetoric and craziness that surrounds such operations - as Israel & Hezbollah hurl hype & high explosive across the Lebanese border at each other. The Israelis, determined to “teach the terrorist Hezbollah” a lesson, have killed - to certain knowledge - one Syrian soldier and a dozen Lebanese civilians in the process of rocketing Beirut and pulverising dozens of Lebanese villages. Hezbollah have wounded 5 Israelis with their Katyusha rockets. I once heard a colleague define terrorists as the ones who don’t have an air force & the more I have thought about it, the more right I think he was. Maybe one should add, the ones who don’t have howitzers.

But I didn’t intend to make this a philosophical treatise. It’s basically just a hello & goodbye and I’ll talk to you in a week or thereabouts when I return from the Quinta. It’s a break I really need and am much looking forward to.

Blessings
T