BAGK IN HOLLAND …

In February I left for Holland on my first home leave. After six years’ service without official holidays I was entitled to a six months’ holiday, too long by any standard. It would also turn out to be financially disastrous. Our normal salary was suspended for the length of the leave and replaced by a monthly stipend, which, the wags claimed, was barely enough to keep your mother in flowers and your father in cigars. The point was that your parents had to put you up and feed you, as you could not possibly afford a hotel or even a pension on that meagre handout.

My journey took me first to Hong Kong, then on to Bangkok for an overnight stop, as the planes did not fly in darkness. On the invitation of one of our important Syrian customers I made a three-day stopover in Damascus, where they had reserved a room for me at the sumptuous New Omayyad Hotel and was assigned a private guide for the length of my stay. He took me to the Great Mosque, to a café where I smoked a water pipe and drank arak, and then to the colourful souk with its fabulous choice of carpets and copper and silver jewellery and exotic handmade artefacts and garments made of silk. I stocked up on presents for Holland.

Later my host took me along to a dinner party at a senior politician's home. To my astonished eyes the scene there was purely Biblical’: nearly everyone was wearing gorgeous traditional dress, many men had great beards, some wore turbans and both the floor and the walls were covered with carpets. The food, served in huge shallow brass platters with scalloped rims, was superb. The contrast of all this opulence with Japan's sober tastes and my own rather frugal bachelor's existence was striking. What I found even more astonishing was the virtual absence of any Western touch. What I witnessed was a highly developed but utterly different lifestyle, apparently solid and self-assured, and though hospitable to Western visitors, not in need of their approval or assistance.

Two further stops — Athens and Zurich — and I finally arrived over Dutch airspace.