As you may have gathered I am a little tired of being in such a horrible place. If you have any ideas of how best to pull off a long term sickie, please let me know. Sure we have improved the hotel no end since our arrival, Rats no longer crawl down corridors, the air conditioning works occasionally, the floors are cleaner, the walls are whiter, the lights have bulbs, the doors have handles, fire doors litter every corridor, new fire alarms ring constantly in various places, the stairs even seem to have even been remarbled. The gym has machines that work, the showers have cold water, every office has its own sign, and as I have mentioned we even have one Portakabin full of porcelain loos. But it wasn’t my understanding that I was coming out to witness a hotel refit team at work.

The locals continue to be extraordinary, and now I am starting to come across even stranger aspects to this culture. They have no concept of comfort. We have purchased a new sofa for our TV room, being a “dead posh” outfit no expense was spared and the finest furniture shop in Basrah was asked to provide some of its wares. There is no way on God’s Earth that anyone except someone who lives here could have designed these things. They are awful, not just in colour, texture, and look but they have been fashioned in such a way to make it impossible to sit on and be comfortable. A large wooden pole runs across your back forcing you to sit as though something has been forced up your bottom, the seat is made of the thinnest piece of foam on top of the hardest wood in the Middle East, and the headrest bit is made of solid rock. It is the most remarkably uncomfortable creation on earth.