Never a dull moment in Baghdad

Today I've: listened to a lecturer at Baghdad University play me an impromptu Beegee concert on his guitar in a bare classroom; sipped gin and tonic in a posh private "hunting" club overlooking the building site of the world's largest mosque; sat on ornate chairs in one of Saddam's palaces talking with the second most powerful man in Iraq (Jeremy Greenstock) and discussed the problems of forming Iraqi trade unions over dinner with an African-American longshoreman veteran of the West Coast dockers strike which George Bush decreed a threat to US national security. Of course there was plenty of waiting in traffic jams, visiting offices only to be told "come back tomorrow" and sitting around drinking tea. Who knows what tomorrow will hold.