Peace is its own reward

Peace. The colours were brighter but the sea felt the same. (HD cameras and digital colourists are made for each other.) I was sitting with the artist on the naturally bright red sofa after a hectic weekend, watching a part of the world on TV that I knew fourteen years ago. (I have mentioned it as Badenoch before.) I must admit, seeing it again took me right back there. When I was there the creative impulse of so many of the people was often directed inwards, making it difficult to source any sympathy. (Manic exteriors, like too much icing on otherwise subtle cakes, sometimes conceal deep and tragic interiors.) Furthermore, there was a kind of necessary vanity to the people - a few bright fake cherries - which I could see still existing now, in peace-time, on TV, and with that vanity while I was there, of course, came a kind of beautifully self-important disbelief that this, the war, the brutality, the precision targeting, the armed arrogances, was actually happening to them. 'Of all people,' they would sort of add. (Nor do I mean to belittle their plight back then.) Tonight, the lapping of the water, in particular, reminded me of the warped timelessness of being there and travelling around, a timelessness which now seems impossible to believe. Thankfully, the artist beside me on the sofa was able to see the bigger picture - well, bigger than my own slightly provincialised-because-I-had-been-there interpretation. She saw clearly for example the fundamental importance of any cessation of hostilities. She even reminded me - in an age of justified gloom about global security - that there are at least some recent instances of rapid turnarounds in the slit-throat-special stakes. And this, oh yes, was one. Peace.