I’m not a war correspondent. But it’s 3am and, like every night this week, I’ve been woken by the sound of sirens outside, alarms on my phone and a calm voice-broadcast in the corridor of my hotel telling me to go to the basement. I scramble into some clothes and fumble my way down to the hotel laundry/bomb shelter. The smell of detergent is overpowering but also somehow reassuring. I take in the sleep-deprived faces of my fellow basement dwellers: a group of Spanish nuns; a couple of mysterious American “technology workers” with their local girlfriends; and the real-deal journalists and war correspondents who remain entirely calm and tell us: “This is nothing. You should have been in Afghanistan last year.”
Why am I here?
