Emails from the Edge Read Online Free Page B

sacked, and serving out notice in such circumstances is always devastating. But, on those other occasions, there was time to pick up the threads and, frankly, money enough to go travelling and seek balm for the battered soul. Here and now, with so much turmoil around me, this quietly delivered order to remove myself had the effect of a bomb going off close to my troubled mind.
It provoked a terrible reaction in me which, nearly a decade and a half on, I can analyse with a wisdom denied me at the time. The tension between staying and going, which the invasion of Kuwait had generated, was suddenly heightened, as I had to serve out my time in a place where I was not wanted, where the choice of staying or going had been wrested from my hands and replaced with an ultimatum: stay, then go. Whether through my decision or others’, it felt—just as my sense of physical cowardice had been tested and I was discovering a moral courage superior to it—that leaving just then was cowardly, nothing less than abandoning my colleagues in time of peril. They weren’t there for me; but an old religion that I had formally abandoned but which still provided my ethical bearings told me I should not just wash my hands of their fate.
Now I look back on that combination of stressful events and say that, under the tension I then felt, it was probably a matter of time before I would have skedaddled anyway. But the decision only pulled one more tile of certainty from beneath my feet. I was discovering the weakness of a philosophy by which I had steered my life in the six years since leaving Australia, rooted in the conviction that by making a plan and following it you can always achieve what you set out to achieve, through sheer willpower.
Adherence to a plan will indeed bring success 99 times out of 100. But the world is not entirely predictable and there comes a time when a plan, rather than being a life raft, is ballast that will drag you down to the depths unless you throw it overboard. As ever, I was learning the hard way.
Extreme anxiety triggered by the August invasion and its aftermath now combined with shame that I had been branded a professional failure, to produce a lethal psychological cocktail.
There was nothing for me to do but hang on grimly and see what would happen. By day, this meant going to the bank at al-Adliya and waiting an hour while other distressed expatriates jostled and shoved their way to the front before opening suitcases on the counter and angrily demanding their funds in cash. Tellers, frightened by their scowls, retreated into the manager’s office under a barrage of threatening fists. The central bank, to prevent the loss of all its reserves, had ordered a freeze on foreign-currency transactions, and overnight the wealth of expatriates who had come to the Gulf to make their living was annihilated, worthless. They, too, were trapped.
I tried to humour myself, Well, at least now I know what the Great Depression must have been like. I’ve seen what a ‘run on the economy’ really means . Telling myself that this was some sort of privilege—that all experience must confer an advantage of some kind—was my way of reacting to the suffering of others, and nothing to be proud of, I can see now. But besides that I see from the perspective of distance that my struggle was to remain an observer, not a participant. If I thought all this loss were happening to me rather than about me, by God, what would I have left to cling to?
By night, unable to sleep more than a few hours while the mounting confusion of fears, dread and appalling news swirled through the tumble-dryer of my mind, a snatch of warning came back to me. In what I jocularly refer to as my Cambridge days, in late 1986, on the occasional Wednesday night after work I would relax with a colleague at a pool hall, a club where my colleague’s father was a member. It must have been just before I went to Oman, my first sub-editing job