Diary

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.