One night in June I started to feel pain in my stomach.  This is common around here, what with the tap water containing more bacteria than a microbiologist’s petri dish, so I thought little of it.  When the pain got worse, and then even worse, I started to wonder if I should do something about it.  And when it became unbearably painful I asked a friend to drive me to a hospital in the mountains, some three hours away.  That journey, over bumpy mountain roads in the middle of the night with me vomiting into a bucket every fifteen minutes, is a story in its own right.

                 To cut a long story short it ended up being a very serious problem indeed which required some particularly invasive and unpleasant surgery on my intestines.  This required a two-month period of convalescence in the UK, as it was 45 degrees in our home city in Pakistan, a temperature not exactly conducive to recovery from a major illness.  We flew home and spent two months resting, eating good food, visiting family and friends, and trying to persuade people that we couldn’t wait to return to Pakistan again.

And now we’re back.  It’s great to be home.  Normal service, whatever that means, will shortly resume on this blog…