Kabul Notebook

The grandson of the King told my wife and me at dinner that we were ‘the only two tourists in Kabul’! In fact, we nearly did not arrive because on the eve of our flight, the aid-worker Gayle Williams was shot dead by the Taleban in broad daylight. The incident made world headlines and the Afghan capital suddenly more dangerous. I was at a shoot and all my fellow guns thought I would be mad to go. But I also knew that I would go mad if I did not. For assurance, I telephoned the inimitable Rory Stewart on the ground. He was too polite to insist on our visit, but sounded calm — not exactly unexpected from someone who had walked across the entire breadth of Afghanistan and was a deputy governor of an Iraqi province. So my wife and I packed — she with a large scarf and I with my oldest clothes (that fitted).