In , I returned from a posting to India. I called my friend Bianca, who I studied with at Oxford back in the day, and who is now a GP, having graduated with an English degree and worked as an acupuncturist and yoga teacher. I love my job, but are you sure you want to start again at 40? I had once loved my work in the Foreign Office β an organisation I still feel somewhat attached to, a prodigal daughter who will not return.
The reality was, of course, different. The nightly mortar attacks would send me tumbling out of bed, onto the floor, wriggling into body armour until a fresh-faced young soldier from 2 Para came to escort me out of the fragile portacabin I slept in to a safer building with a concrete roof.
I saw Saddam Hussein, shackled and broken, led to his trial. In October of that year, Margaret Hassan, a British-Irish humanitarian worker, was kidnapped by armed men on her way to work. Within hours, a specialist hostage negotiation team from the Metropolitan police flew to Iraq. It was an appalling burden for him to bear. Tahseen talked about his life with Margaret and how much he wanted her to come home; I listened to him every day.
I supported him through the crisis, through the terrible day when we were sent a video that showed Margaret being murdered. In May , I was posted to the US.
I must have had post-traumatic stress disorder, as I remember being terrified of fireworks and at one point believing there were masked men in black who were about to mount an assault on my Dupont street apartment in Washington D. At a course on negotiation skills, I began to understand what was missing from my experience of foreign policy.
