Diary

I am in the midst of a tour promoting a book, The Political Animal. Like all journeys in this country, it is almost impossible to travel anywhere with any confidence that you will arrive within a day of your anticipated time. A trip to Norfolk, which ought to have taken three hours, lasted five. The return journey, involving jams on the M11, closure of the M25 and so on, took five and a half. Complaints about the ludicrous state of the British transport system have become so commonplace that we all just ignore them. 'It took me two hours to get through the Dartford Tunnel.' 'I travelled five miles on the M6 in an hour and a half,' they go on. The trouble (and reassurance) is that the British are a people with very low expectations in almost everything.

Editing a newspaper is not a dinner party, as Chairman Mao would have observed had he been running a tabloid, but you sure do get invited to dinners and lunches and breakfasts, most of which are politely turned down because there is a paper to publish and competitors to clobber mercilessly and ceaselessly. But, thanks to the influence of the peerless political-reporting team at the Times, some invitations arrive which can't be summarily rejected even if the reporters have to provide the verbal equivalent of subtitles by translating the lofty concepts or subtle intrigues being articulated by our hosts.

A glorious sunny day in Spain, and I have just been certified a genuine, card-carrying, paid-up cripple. Actually, being an old-age pensioner and a householding resident of Catalonia, I wasn't required to pay or say anything. My doctor did the talking, and had to, because I can't speak a word of Catalan. Anyway, it was all very pleasant except that I felt a complete fraud and thought dark thoughts about being had up for perjury. That didn't seem likely, because the waiting-room had six people in it and they all looked perfectly healthy to me. And I did have my crutch. The examining doctor looked as though he might have a heart attack at any moment. He was a very fat and Falstaffian fellow, who didn't bother to examine my foot.

Sunday: Ducked morning service in favour of gardening, but made it to a special evening service to celebrate the Jubilee year and the community of our parish. In the midst of a powerful sermon on how technology has changed village life, the rector clamped his mobile to his ear, yelling, 'I am in the pulpit. No, another 35 minutes.' What a communicator. What a cook, too: I was all but trodden under at the post-service reception in the rush for his famous trout-and-leek tart. Despite everything, a church can still be a centre of village life, with the right incumbent. Monday: Gardening again. Autumn marks that time when guilt over last spring's jobs undone is set aside to plan for early action next spring.

Kabul On the trail of genetic traces of Alexander's soldiers in Afghanistan, I arrived in Badakhshan, the country's most remote and beautiful province that abuts China. I went to see my old friends at the government guest house, which is set on an island in the middle of the Kokcha river. We sat on a terrace with the river roaring 20 feet below us. Night fell quickly, and I looked up at more stars than I have ever seen before in my life; it was as if my sight had been miraculously restored. Occasionally, an orange tracer shell arced silently upwards as government soldiers tested their guns. The only thing to do for fun here is to take naswar. I asked Shafid, a turbaned old man who seems to have some sort of decorative function, what it was, and he said, 'It is part of narcotic.

And so to Blackpool. But how? Train: disgracefully expensive, probably delayed, full of broadsheet journalists (apart from the Independent), possibility of being jumped in the buffet carriage by a beaming Richard Branson dispensing pork pies. Car: long, boring, held up by roadworks and impoverished Independent journalists in jalopies. Plane: ten minutes from Canary Wharf to City airport, no queues, prompt 40-minute flight. And, most crucially, via Manchester. Now, I won't labour the football in a rugger bugger's bible, but the last time I went to Manchester was in May to see Arsenal win the double in Sir Alex Ferguson's backyard. Better than sex?

In the electronic age, a social disease is a virus you get from your email correspondents. And often from one-night stands. Three such co-respondents sent me word that as an entry in their 'address book' my computer now had some awful disease. Complicated instructions to erase followed. When questioned, not one of the owners of these infected emails could describe the address or special characteristics of their virus. 'It's the worst and I don't understand it,' whined one. I don't have a card to give out and so I've luxuriated in the belief that my name and details remain my own.

I shall call him the Unknown Afghan Hero. The BBC footage of the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai showed a civilian greeting the Afghan president through the window of his limousine. Suddenly, several shots rung out and this civilian, reacting instantaneously, swung round and hurled himself upon the would-be assassin, as did another man, before all three were killed in a hail of American friendly fire. It was a dramatic moment recorded on videotape and beamed into our sitting-rooms, yet so much of the press got it wrong. Reuters reports mentioned that 'both Karzai's attacker and an Afghan bodyguard died in the shootout', though not the civilian hero.

I can't imagine why people claim to enjoy camping. Before the trip - a six-week overland slog through southern Africa - I joked with friends about how impractical and ill-suited to the Outward Bound lifestyle I am; how I'm never knowingly more than six feet from a make-up bag, and am incapable of assembling, with full instructions, the contents of a Kinder egg (more general jocularity). But I wasn't laughing as I wrestled, feeble-beamed torch wedged between jaw and shoulder, with unco-operative tent pegs in the pitch-black, improbably freezing African early mornings, with weak fingers and a weak will. Sleep deprivation made it worse.

The workers teem over the building site that suddenly appeared on the overgrown river-bed which my holiday cottage overlooks. They like to get an early start before the merciless Andalusian sun starts roasting their leathery hides. A couple of hours before breakfast a raucous but not unappealing cacophony of tuned power tools fills the air. The whine of the electric saw is particularly poignant at that time of the morning, reminding me of someone trying to perform the oeuvre of Poulenc using the contents of the Black & Decker catalogue.

Despite feeling ghoulish, my wife and I found ourselves drawn to the television set whenever an important development took place during the grim vigil at Soham. By the very nature of the event much of the footage and commentary was banal and, like the press, unavoidably intrusive. Sky was sharper, the BBC's much-mocked News 24 had better tone - a bit like the difference between tabloids and broadsheets, I suppose. Both deployed retired ex-detectives, including John Stalker, in ways I'd not noticed before, knowledgeable, discreet and wise. Yet, rare in the age of 24/7 TV news, there weren't any pictures of what this was really all about: unfathomable evil at large in a sleepy English village. We each had to use our imagination. Much worse.

In 1755 Lisbon was ruined by a massive earthquake, the shock waves from which were felt as far away as Switzerland. When the rumbling stopped, a great fire ensued, followed by a tsunami that washed away coastal villages. As I awoke on Tuesday morning, I had good reason to believe that Portugal’s capital was about to endure a second devastating tremor. On Lisbon’s Avenida de Joao II, the walls of my tiny hotel room seemed to be swaying and I could hear a terrible banging. My hands were sweating, my heart was pounding. Inside my head, the pressure was so intense that I feared that my eyes would pop out like corks from over-fizzed champagne bottles. Semi-conscious, I struggled to make sense of dreadful thoughts.