…and so with the harbinger of Martin's painting we come to apocalypse, or my experience of it. If at the end of this somewhat lengthy post you come to the conclusion that I was merely a tourist in Bosnia Herzegovina I will not argue. I was not called up to service. I was not paid to go there. But I went anyway - and if I was quietly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of human suffering I encountered, well, you can say I got what I deserved.
At the same time, this is not really my story. It is actually many stories. U2, Paul McCartney and Luciano Pavarotti are part of this story - though before you ask, no, I didnt go to school with any of them! There is at least one hero in this story - and no, that isnt me either, but a man I met called Nigel Osborne. If anything, I discovered that on some instinctual level I am a coward. But that doesn’t matter either. As with nearly all my stories, the real subjects here are the children, wherever they live, and what we oblige them to suffer.