Slain journalist Marie Colvin’s first ever blog

Journalist Marie Colvin who died Wednesday while reporting in Syria for The Sunday Times, sent this amusing blog, her first, while on assignment in Baghdad in 2008 for the Sunday Times. Ha ha… WHAT RAT?  the foreign desk replied to my message from Baghdad. I had been joking about just how difficult it is to work in Iraq, and not just because of the constant threat from suicide bombers, snipers and kidnappers. You don’t see them every day. What wears you down is the basics of daily life in August with the thermometer at the British Embassy showing 54C, or 130F. Karadeh, the Baghdad neighbourhood I am staying in, has only one hour of electricity every six hours, 4 hours every day. Air conditioning is not a luxury in this heat. The neighbourhood compensates by buying electricity from a large generator run by a family down the street. It gives an odd insight into the neighbours. This family is lazy, the local gossip goes, so unless they are watching a film they take their time turning on the generator. We send runners, and even then sometimes they can’t be bothered. My ceiling fan helps a bit, but to get it going I have to jump full stretch and punch it a few times. Of course, the fan doesn’t help with the lights. Try telling the editor you will file tomorrow because you can’t read your notes. Sometimes the electricity is so weak that the lights go into a slow-motion disco affect; five minutes on, five minutes off. As if that discomfort was not enough, being female I have to walk around with a black hejab, or head scarf, and the full monte of Islamic dress, a full length black abaya. It’s like walking in a steam tent. I keep it on even when driving; al-Qaeda sends spies to check out cars in Baghdad’s endless traffic jams. Sometimes the dress is a help, however cumbersome. When I went to Diyala, an al-Qaeda stronghold, I sat in my black tent in the back seat of the car and was not once asked for my identy document even though security was supposed to be heightened because of a bomb attack. At every checkpoint, soldiers took the papers of the three Iraqi men in the car, examined them carefully, turned them over and examined the other side carefully, then questioned the men. No one asked me for anything I wanted to shout, ‘Hey, what about me!’” And then I thought about my American passport, and the British embassy warning that there was an al-Qaeda kidnap squad currently looking for foreigners, and I thought, ‘Nope I’ll just sit here and sweat’.” Anonymously. So I was joking to the foreign desk that I had traded the Saddam regime for the new Baghdad regime; the pounds are dropping off, what with the sweat and no booze. Oh, yes, just in case life wasn’t difficult enough, it is Ramadan, the Muslim holy month where everyone abstains from food and any drink during the day. All the already scarce liquor shops are all closed for the month, and everyone is grumpy. And then came the most disgusting moment in my life! I was brushing my teeth when I heard a disturbance in the toilet. I turned to see this oily, scaley THING whipping above the bowl! I thought it was a snake. No, it was the tail of a live RAT that had come up through the pipe into the toilet bowl. I shreiked, various guys in the house came running and said ‘Oh my God, it's huge (no kidding)’. I flushed, and spent the night with a 2.5kg weight on top of the (closed) seat. I poured some petrol down yesterday morning. But what if I had been SITTING DOWN? So that's the rat story. It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘rat-arsed’. And I wasn’t. In either sense.