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The Caliph of Damascus celebrated the overthrow of the French king yesterday. Bashar al-Assad looked quite at home, standing in his pale blue suit, wearing those inevitable Baathist sunglasses, occasionally clapping the precision drill of the French regiments in front of him, some of whom spent decades repressing Arab nations.

Walid Moallem leans forward in the armchair of the Paris Intercontinental Opera. "It's all on the record," he snaps. It usually is. The Syrians can be up- front when you least expect it. Syria's Foreign Minister is one of their top negotiators, a man who knows Israel's diplomats almost as well as they know themselves, who understands all the traps of the Middle East.

A poutaine is a chip, cheese and gravy mash much loved by the Québecois. And Samuel de Champlain was the founder of a township at a place called Kebec – aboriginal for "where the river narrows" – an outpost on the Saint Lawrence River which the French called Quebec. When the natives urged explorer Jacques Cartier to visit their village – the Huron-Iroquois word for village is "kanata" – he thought they were describing the whole region. So – well, of course – he called it Canada.

Once a week, my mail package arrives from The Independent foreign desk in London. It contains anything up to 250 letters and parcels, and wherever I am – in the hot smog of Cairo, amid the Atlantis towers of Dubai or on my own flower-smothered balcony in Beirut – I never cease to be amazed. Some letters are just plain asinine. Others are packed with the kind of psychobabble that makes me writhe with fury. Most are eloquent to the point of literature, analysing human folly, family history and war with a grace and philosophical wisdom that leave me breathless. Why oh why, I find myself asking when I read them, can't we journalists write like this?

How are the mighty fallen, we used to say. Now we turn it round. How did the fallen become mighty again? Remember the "mad dog of the Middle East" – Reagan's stupid cliché – the "terrorist" sponsor who even sent a shipload of guns to the IRA? A certain Moammar Ghazzafi – there are 17 different ways of spelling his name in Latin script – was the crazed leader of Libya who wrote a mind-numbingly boring volume of pseudo philosophy called The Green Book and who wanted to mock the White House by calling his own palace the Green House until someone tipped him off that this would mean he would look even more of a cabbage than he already was.

Three bodies lie beside a Baghdad street on a blindingly hot day. The one on the right is dressed in a white shirt and bright green trousers, his hands tied behind his back. Two others on the left lie shoeless, both dressed in check shirts, dumped – how easily we use that word of Baghdad's corpses – on a yard of dirt and bags of garbage. They, too, of course, are now garbage. The wall behind them, a grim barrier of dun-coloured brick, seals off this horror from two two-storey villas and a clutch of palm trees, the normal life of Baghdad just a wall away from the other "normal" life of Baghdad's sectarian killings. No one knows whose bodies they are and the picture – taken from a car window – was snapped in fear by an unknown Iraqi.