Diary – 17 May 2008

Dennis Sewell on the state of Lebanon and the charm of Guto Harri

My earliest childhood memory is of machine-gun rounds coming through the bedroom wall. There were no loud bangs — the cacophony is almost all at the shooter’s end. Incoming, each successive bullet breathed only the softest hiss, of a kind an exotic insect might make, and left in its trail an enchanting shaft of silvery moonlight. Too young to recognise the danger, I rather enjoyed it. The gunmen back then (this was the late 1950s) were Syrian-sponsored insurgents, who targeted our family’s villa in the Bekaa Valley because we were Brits associated with a pro-Western government in Beirut. Such gunmen are the perennial curse of Lebanon. Between 1975 and 1990 they turned a near-Eden into a charnel house. With the gunmen back on the rampage last week in the uniform of Hezbollah, I spend a long and depressing day online to my keyboard-pals in Beirut.