and back.

And so, I'm back in the muck again. Just two days ago, life was all about having crepes for lunch and choosing what kind of earrings to buy and here choices revolve around having to withdraw aid completely from the northeast in the light of recent increased violence, thus setting back our implementation agenda by at least four months. Or endangering staff and project assets instead. And those decisions lie with someone phenomenally inexperienced and incapable of having to make those decisions.

So predictably, I went home and shared a bottle of wine with a colleague in town and we talked about aid, about our NGO, about the developing world, about education, about film and it was the kind of conversation that I had missed in Sri Lanka all this while. While I was on the plane coming over, all I could think about was how much I missed my friends and family despite the relatively short-haul in front of me. But a day of being back in the office and it feels right, and the sun is shining and it feels as though i had never left.

Someone mailed me some music composed and I was thinking that it was an incredibly personal thing to do for when I hear that music, I think of him which surely isn't right?

Also reading the Israel Lobby (from the London review of books, read if you have a chance) an academic paper from the Kennedy School of Government detailing the extraordinary and inexplicable power of the Israel lobby in American politics.