There was trouble last night, after a weekend of trouble. A return to the Bad Old Days, people said. Typical that it should happen on only my second visit to the city. I felt undaunted though and more than a little curious so the prospect of a hotel dinner, didn’t even occur to me. I walked through the gangs of kids congregating on the street corners, dressed in their tribal colours and with hands full of stones to hurl at their mirror image a hundred metres away. The convoys of armoured Landrovers hurried back and forth but responding to or provoking turbulence it wasn’t clear.
I stepped over the looted building materials on my return.
This morning I was late arriving: the army bomb squad was disarming a pipe bomb just outside.