"To begin at the beginning...starless and bible black"(Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomos)

As usual I write hunched in bed in the darkness that only a shared room can provide. It is a Sunday morning - but an extremely early one - my body clock is still locked into this week's time table of 6.30 get ups and can't quite get out of it despite going to bed yesterday at 1.30am. But this darkness and quietness is beautiful as it makes me feel as though I am the only one awake in all this city, and so it seems to belong to me. Existing only for my pleasure. It makes me smile to think that even with all our technology we still follow this cycle of darkness and light to shape our day. We are still creatures of nature. This particuarly struck me yesterday when I met someone who seems to have faced his own place within the great cycle of nature.

Yesterday afternoon Akane (a Japanese girl from work) and I spent an hour with Christopher Morris, a top photo journalist for Time Magazine who has covered over 10 conflicts in his life, from Afghanisatn to Chechnya. It was the first of a series of interviews we hope to do while we're here, on dream jobs and how to get them. It actually is just an excuse for us to meet people whose jobs we want - but that's the great thing about working here - I feel as though the whole thing is just a journeying of fulfilling my own curiosity about the world. Chris Morris looks like he's been through a lot, and I say that in the nicest possible way. Through his skinny frame, his black slightly scruffy attire and gaunt, pale skin there really is a calm and peacefulnes about him. As a war correspondent, every day you face death, every day you come to terms with your own fragile humanity, and I think this has made him at peace in a way I have seldom seen. I got the impression that nothing I said could have shocked him. If the Rouge Hotel Lounge we were sitting in had caved in, because a set of 10 raging rhinoceri had appeared from nowhere he would simply have placed his two hands together in the precise, controlled, unconscious manner of long established custom, leant back into the red leather studded couch and excused himself in his honeyed ciggerette tones to walk quickly through the rubble in search of his camera. He spoke about an incident in his last trip to Iraq, when a group of embedded journalists were told they were to be part of an envoy of 15 vehicles, designed to lead a short sharp attack into Baghdad. They were told only 10 of the 15 vehicles were expected to return. Two of the reporters decided to stay back, it was a risk they were unwilling to take. When the envoy returned, complete with all the vehicles and journalists they found rubble. The two reporters had been bombed out. The moral of the tail - a warzone is never safe. We could be killed tomorrow. We must accept our frailty and our place in nature.
I'll send a link to the interview in a few days. His work is published in Photo8 this month- a British photo magazine - if anyone's interested.

Well - outside a sunset is emerging slowly to take this day creeping into coffee and bright, freezing skies and I seem to be going against that cycle of nature I was talking about earlier, as suddenly I am feeling extremely tierd and ready for a nap.
Maybe I'm not ready to be a photo war journalist quite yet.