Finally then, after several days of spotlight-stealing teases, McCain has named his vice presidential nominee.

Ladies and gentlemen meet Sarah Palin.

The press seem to be picking up the fact that she was once runner up for Miss Alaska, but there’s a lot more to her than that.

She’s 44, just over a year into her first term as Governor of Alaska and she’s everything a Republican could want in a woman – she’s fiercly pro-life, a lifetime member of the NRA, and even includes hunting and eating moose-burgers in her hobbies.

In her short time in politics she’s already got a reputation as a fierce reformer. She blew the whistle of Republican corruption, sold the Governorship’s private jet on her first day in office and has passed agressive ethics reform legislation.

In fact, she’s pretty similar to Obama in terms of experience and the legislation she’s passed.

There’s one school of thought that says that Palin’s inexperience is going to mean McCain can no longer attack Obama as inexperienced.

Indeed, that’s the main reason she was relatively overlooked by the press – Romney, Pawlenty, Ridge and Crist was the most widely advertised shortlist.

It’s not actually an argument I fully buy. Yes, Vice President is one a heartbeat away from the Presidency itself (and in McCain’s case that’s a particularly legitimate concern given that today is his 72nd birthday), but there’s still a big difference between who is at the top of the ticket and who is at the bottom. Obama started running for President 18 months after becoming a Senator, Palin is just a running mate. In the same way that Biden shores up Obama’s foreign policy credentials, McCain shores up Palin’s relative inexperience.

More importantly, in picking Sarah Palin, McCain appears to be changing the whole campaign narrative; he’s redefining the whole reason to put a cross next to his name on the ballot come November 4. McCain is casting himself as the maverick, a reformer who is going to bring four more years of Bush policies. It’s a narrative that’s going to require a redrawing of Obama’s attempts to pain McCain as “McSame.”

Picking Palin is not only a bold attempt to appeal to disaffected Clinton voters, and women generally (though judging from the initial reaction on the web that’s not going to work so well – she’s no Hillary Clinton, not least because she is opposed to abortion; it’s also a bold attempt to redraw the race.

She’s everything Obama’s Biden pick isn’t. She’s unconventional, unexpected, a genuine Washington outsider, a reformer. And whilst that brings flipsides too – she has zero foreign policy experience and we’ve no idea how she’s going to perform against Biden in the veep debate – overall I think it’s an exciting and very brave pick.

Last night Obama brought out some tough talk to challenge McCain’s solid Republican policies. From tonight, he’s going to have to fight to keep hold of the ‘change’ brand.

4.00am – Ok, just over 45 minutes later and it’s done. Some initial thoughts:

In short, a very grounded, policy-focused speech, as we’d been led to expect. For the first time Obama really took McCain on this evening, addressing issues that have previously been left to Republicans – foreign policy in particularly, but also abortion and gun control. Tonight Obama showed he could talk tough.

Obama addressed pretty much everything that’s been levelled against him by the GOP so far. In countering the ‘celebrity’ charge we got something a bit different to his standard biography. Obama grounded his story this time much more in the story of his family, his World War II grandfather was prominent for example. He also addressed his perceived lack of experience, his foreign policy judgement. At the same time there was a hearty dose of offence. McCain gaffes and slip ups from throughout the campaign were borught up, including the comment by McCain’s senior economic adviser that the economic slowdown was a mental recession and that America is “a nation of whiners,” something which hasn’t been part of the media narrative for a long time.

Near the end there was an attempt to reclaim patriotism as a concept that knows no party lines, and Obama then launched into a pitch for Independents and Republicans. He talked through the big cultural issues that have been drawn on tightly partisan lines in the past – gun control, abortion, same-sex marriage – and reiterated his 2004 promise, that (to paraphrase) “there is no red America and no blue America, there is a United States of America.” It’s going to be harder for McCain to go negative after this evening with Obama suggesting that the candidate who can only tell voters to run away from the other candidate, is a candidate that brings nothing new.

In spite of Obama’s promise to avoid character attacks (‘we can disagree on policy without attacking character’) McCain’s long stay in Washington got a mention as did his famously short temper. Most of all, we got a hint of the inspirational power that has taken Obama all the way to becoming the first African-American to receive the nomination of a major American political party alongside a sense that he is ready to take the fight to McCain. Tonight he laid out his vision for the country in detail and made it clear that he’s tired of McCain’s attempt to define the campaign as a referendum on Obama and that he’s ready to debate the issues. Obama redefined himself in terms of his policies rather than just his biography.

3.12am – And here, to an adoring chorus of 84,000 flag-waving supporters, is the man himself. It’s game time.

2.55am – Senator Dick Durbin’s up. He’s the man who also introduced Barack for the 2004 DNC keynote speech, back when it all began.

2.40am – For those who can’t wait Obama’s prepared remarks are out. I’m going to wait to hear it from the man himself so no comments on it for the time being.

2.25am – And we’re going off schedule for a suprise visit by Joe Biden to explain why the Democrats have moved the convention to Invesco Field – int: it’s to make it ‘more open.’ Oh, and Wolf Blitzer assures me that Elvis is in the building.

In other news, the McCain campaign has kindly told reporters he won’t be leaking the name of his VP pick tonight. Of course, the suggestion that he was going to leak it in the first place came from the McCain campaign and it’s been a pretty sucessful way of getting into the media coverage on what should have been a day of back-to-back Barack discussion.

2.10am – Susan Eisenhower’s just finishing off her speech. Not long to go now. Only Senator Dick Durbin is scheduled to speak between Eisenhower and Obama. Look out too for a video by the director of An Inconvenient Truth who has been following Obama around the country.

1.15am – Well, here we are. After a long absence for a bit of r & r I’m back to liveblog Senator Obama’s historic acceptance speech. So far at the Democratic National Convention we’ve had Michelle’s biography lesson, Hillary’s attempt to instruct her 18 million voters to back Obama, Bill Clinton’s much more convincing attempt (he gave, you know, actual reasons to back Barack) and Joe Biden’s veep acceptance speech in which he basically ignored his prepared remarks.

Tonight the weight of expectation really is on Obama. We’ve seen great speeches from him in the past, but tonight has to be much more than that. Today is the 45th anniversary to the day of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech and the 15,000 Democrat delegates along with nearly 65,000 local ticket holders have all moved from the Pepsi Centre to the Denver Broncos’ Invesco Field for the nomination speech, just to really push home the historic nature of the speech. Perversely, for all the praise his speeches have received in the past, tonight’s can’t be too lofty. The Republicans have been reasonably successful in branding Obama as a celebrity who can give great speeches, but doesn’t understand the real concerns of voters. This evening we can therefore expect less lofty rhetoric, and a greater attempt to address the economic woes of everyday Americans.

Obama’s due up at 3am but in the meantime expect Al Gore, Bill Richardson (who got bumped yesterday for the Obama ‘suprise’ visit) and a host of video tributes to Martin Luther King. That’s not to mention Will.i.am doing his ‘Yes, we can’ song live, and – even as I write – Shania Twain is playing.

You can follow the convention live on CNN if you have cable, or on the internet democrats.org has a great high quality feed.

In the meantime, if you go here you can watch McCain’s latest ad, an attempt to enter today’s media narrative by speaking straight to camera and congratulating Obama on tonight’s speech.

If you go to fivethirtyeight.com, you can take a look at a great polling site which currently gives Obama a 57.5% chance of winning. More importantly, it also analyses the latest Gallup daily tracker which shows the start of the ‘convention bump.’ Obama has opened up a six-point lead and this is based on data collected over Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That means that 1/3 of the data came before the convention started and this data doesn’t include reactions to Bill Clinton or Joe Biden yesterday so expect a bigger bump in the next few days. Nate Silver, from fivethirtyeight.com, previously predicted from historical data that there wouldn’t be a bounce until the third day and that the average bounce is six-points. As the polls were tied up nationally going into the convention it appears that Obama has achieved that already – although obviously there is a margin of error.

And lastly, if you keep refreshing drudgereport.com you can see if McCain really will be leaking his veep nominee tonight (but don’t hold your breath on that one – I’m 99% sure he’ll be announcing tomorrow at 11am ET as planned).

An open-back military truck pulls up. At first the Figaro and the Sunday Times think the people onboard are refugees. A short brown man in a T-shirt jumps off. “Who are you, what you want?” He’s shouting. “You’re journalists? Get on the truck and I’ll show you the destroyed villages and take you to Ossetia.” I don’t have a moment to wonder what the fuck is going on. Five minutes later I’m in the open-back of a truck filled with professional journalists hitting 60 km/h on the dust track to the mountains.

The New York Times guy has the eyes of a drug-addict. We are chatting about Putin when he notices the boss is shouting to speed-up. “This you first war…?” I nod politely. I travelled around Iraqi Kurdistan, but it wasn’t like this. “You smell that?” A deep rot fills my nostrils as we enter a village. Somebody whistles in the truck. All the journalist have smelt it. Cameramen rush to the side of the truck trying to get shots. The Russian Colonel standing in the back with us starts shouting something incomprehensible. We swerve round another corner and grind to a halt.

The boss shouts at us to jump out of the truck and we clamber out. “This is a damaged Georgian village. We want to explain that the damage was caused gas-leaks, accidents, criminals, and some cases of arson.” The Guardian reporter looks at him. “Sacha are you telling me that thinking I’ll believe it.” He snaps something in Russian to the Colonel. “Sacha I speak Russian. You can’t throw me off the truck and leave me here.” He screws up his face. “You have twenty minutes. Watch out for bombs. You know what your doing.”

I follow six cameramen as they rush into a burnt out building. Devastation is in the details. It’s the shards of glass, the burnt documents, the smashed plates, the torched items of daily life. We hear wailing from the top floor. The camera men rush up the stairs – “Watch out for cluster bombs” one shouts. I follow in his footsteps. An elderly women in simple peasant clothes is shrieking. It’s clear there wasn’t a gas-leak here. As the camera-men snap she screams louder in terror and begins to panic. The Italian shouts, “she’s useless, too much screaming.” They rush off – there is a destraught grandmother outside. I stand there watching these men swarming like bees round honey. I step back slowly and run down the stairs.

Outside I follow another journo into a shelled house. Imagine you put a building through a blender – all your possessions shredded and crushed up under a pile of rubble. I stand there picking up pieces of a plate in what used to be a kitchen. The Figaro finds something. “Oh, look a bullet casing.” He chucks it away nonchalantly.

Sacha the boss is screaming. “Your time is up. Your time is up.” In front of the trucks an old women is being pursued by eight flash-photographers and trying to get away. On the truck the guys show off pictures of her terrorised face. “Make a great front page…this one.” The truck bobs along the valley, spraying a trail of dust behind us onto the mini-van behind. A reporter for Le Monde is smoking a cigarette and puts on his Raybans. “Beautiful day…look that’s a rocket launch.” A trail of smoke lights a distant corner of the valley. He flicks the Marlboro out onto an abandoned field. The tools are still left where the people dropped them as they ran away.

Rising peaks of the Caucasus mountains are up in front. I start to feel like a tourist. I feel the grin of the Le Monde guy pulling across my face. There are some sand-bags ahead and another group of tanks. The excitement in the truck is palpable. The photographers jump, jostle and swear at each other as they try and snap more pictures.

The truck pulls into a village-town. Tskhinvali – the ‘capital.’ It’s wretched. Sacha is shouting. “Out, out.” My feet land on a street that simply isn’t there anymore. Buildings have been punched open, walls have collapsed. The Le Monde guy gestures to me; “Let’s not listen to Sasha’s bullshit. Follow me.” We wander down a side-street. The roofs of the hovels of the Ossetian’s have been ripped off. A man with a massive gash across his skull wanders up to us. He doesn’t even speak Russian. He points to his head and then to a wreck. We follow him. I have seen countless pictures of charred teddy-bears. He picks one off the ruin of his house and thrusts it into my hands. The he points at the fruit he was saving for the summer in jars. Rotten. “Enough of him” decides Le Monde.

We enter into a shack. A short Ossetian women shows us her home. Her Russian breaks down after the words – “they did it…” Her husband sleeps on a filthy bed in the corner, she doesn’t wake him up. A little child wanders in. His arm is bandaged. I am feeling a little bored. Another one. I catch myself, shake my head a little.

“Your time is up. Get out. We need to leave.” Sacha is pacing around frantically shouting at a General through his Nokia. “Just do it…We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He clears his throat and spits into the shards of glass beneath his feet.

We swerve out of Tskhinvali onto the road further up the mountains. A few burnt out tanks are permanently parked under some plain trees. It stinks. I swallow but it stays in my mouth. The Colonel shouts – “This Khetagurovo.”

I am still bad at climbing off the truck. Maybe I’m too short but when I land on the floor I slip on some bullet casing and whack my head into the dust-track. There are barely any houses but they are all pock-marked and some windows are blackened. There’s been a fire. Sacha is explaining how ‘Russia’ sees what happens. The New York Times journalist bends over. “Ak-74s…interesting. Let’s go check out the post-office.” We push open the door of the shattered bureau. The safe was blown open and the floor is covered in piles and piles of Soviet era postcards. Happy Revolution Day. Pictures of Red Flags. Old Soviet pension books are ripped up and strewn in every corner. There is a sheet of glass that people who work in offices in any country place pictures under. I push off bits of burnt wood to look at the photos. The faces are staring at me. A faded colour picture of a goggle-eyed baby girl. A black and white passport photo of a young man. A school photo from the ‘50s. I don’t know why, but I pushed off the side covering and shoved them into my computer bag. I haven’t looked at them since.

On my way out an old man is lying in the dirt sucking a plastic Kvass bottle.

“Are you OK?”

He raises what appears to be his only arm and shouts. “To the great Russian people. You saved us. Saved us.” He spills the brown fluid over-himself. The Le Figaro guy looks him up and down.

“He’z di-zgust-ing.”

I follow the New York Times journo now. A brown-skinned man has latched onto him. He’s speaking slowly.

“What are their names? Where are they buried.”

I suppose this is what Poland must have looked like in the late summer of ’45.

“Can you show us? Great. Is it far?”

We trudge across a field and come to an earth pile. I didn’t see anything. It just stunk.

There are four of us in the car. The road ahead is empty and the cameraman is trying to hide his equipment as we draw up at the first checkpoint. “You…tell them you’re my brother, that we are a family going to see our aunt in Gori. Just say it in Russian…quickly. If they ask… say you’re ID is back home…on their side of the Checkpoint.” I nod. This isn’t the moment for disagreements. She gestures to the driver. “Go slower you idiot…you’ll frighten the Russians.”

He isn’t listening to Irina. He is chewing a piece of paper he tore off the corner of the daily news and is listening intently to the radio. He clutches the steering wheel tightly. Irina sighs and stuffs her press card into the little box under the dashboard. She’s in her late twenties and is wearing simple clothes to pass unnoticed by the Russians. I think she’s probably nervous too. For the past few days virtually no Georgian journalist has been allowed into Gori. To my left a French photographer is drinking a can of Sprite.

“It’s really nothing. I mean…The Russians are so polite. These Georgians don’t know what they’re talking about. They aren’t shooting the wheels off cars like the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Seriously…boring war….this…You want some Sprite….You thirsty?”

I don’t answer. He crunches the can and screws down the window to lob it out into some trees. The air bats my face. Brown plains and barren hills are passing by at 120 km/h. A few cows are wandering around in gloomy serenity – but I am trying to calm myself down. I thought until five minutes ago we were just going to the check-point. My stomach feels a little unsettled. Pictures of TV News flash through my head. Then I realise there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I smoke a Kent as we draw up to Russian lines. I suppose I’m trying to look ‘hard’ by pulling some kind of frown. I repeat to myself. “This is what you wanted…what you wanted.”

The Russian standard is flying 21 km from Tbilisi by a stream. Some soldiers are taking a nap. Others are re-enforcing earth dug-outs. It’s looks like their kit and attitude hasn’t changed since Life photographers snapped scenes like this is in the ‘40s. I feel like I’m inside one of those pictures. I open the car door into what I had only known from photographs. This should be in black and white. This should be 2D. The Tank is hanging over the side of the tarmac, three hastily thrown-together pieces of concrete mark the control spot. In the drizzle the Officer lumbers up and stares us up and down. A uniformed guy taps Irina’s shoulder and lifts up his early 2000’s Oakley sunglasses. There are large scars along his left-cheek. He smiles with unwashed teeth.

“Good morning….Pretty.”

So these are the ‘peace-keepers.’ You can see the Tartar in those long eyes. He holds an AK-74, spits out some phlegm and takes down the code on the number-plate. There’s no saluting, I can’t see a seniority system between these twenty-somethings. But he’s definitely in charge. Three of his men open the boot, push some stuff about and signal we can go on. They are quite polite and laugh a little idiotically when they find a bottle of cheap vodka in there. The French photographer keeps muttering under his breath. After a few minutes they let us through.

“Ridiculous. This is nothing. Not like when I was in Afghanistan -“

Irina pulls round and snaps at him. “How the hell would you feel if there were Russians soldiers – no matter how polite…21km from Paris?” He rolls his eyes and takes out some biscuits. “Want one?” He chews the chocolate all the way into Gori. He’s still being rude but has switched to French. “You see those APCs there…she’s afraid of them. I’m not. I’m a reporter…I see it almost like a toy. I want to snap it… Can’t be afraid of it….”

Tanks are loitering around the edge of the town like metal-animals. Young men are sitting on them looking rather bored. “You see…” The Frenchman mutters. “War is about waiting. That’s what you’ll learn.”

All is empty. There’s nobody home. The deserted streets eerily remind me of Christmas Day in England – just all the window panes are smashed in and a few apartment blocks are blackened. They’ve been bombed. The car bumps along the road. Irina shouts, “they used cluster bombs so be careful. You all know what they’re like.” I smile. I have no idea what a cluster bomb looks like. And rather stupidly I don’t ask. We park in the main square under the statue of Joseph Stalin. He was born in Gori – but musing about his historical legacy seems ridiculous when I can actually breathe it. Russian soldiers are on patrol so we push quickly into the Town Hall.

Soviet Baroque columns hold up a space crammed with the frightened and the confused. The wounded are sitting around dejectedly in the ante-chambers. Cuts, bandages and slings for broken arms fill the four corners of the room. As we walk up the stairs an old women is in tears. I don’t stop to ask why. The Georgian Governor is waiting for Irina.

He’s a young guy and has a nice pink shirt and a thick black desk in a room with a large conference table. Head in hands he smokes another Parliament Kingsize and coughs. Really badly. Behind him are his shelves. There are sixteen icons, a collection of knives and a framed photo of someone aiming a pistol. I Imagine he took it when war seemed like something fun. The Governor is sullen and spends most of the time scribbling down tank positions onto a map of his district and keeping an eye on the TV. Movements, pull-backs and new strikes are running along the announcement ticker.

“My country is occupied. We are resisting.”

I hear a grating laugh. Some journalists find that funny. Outside I run into the correspondents of the Figaro and the Sunday Times. These grinning men suggest I wander down to see the prisoner exchange. We arrive too late. General Borisov, the supreme Commander of Russian Forces in Gori is already leaving in his 4×4. He’s visibly drunk, is sweating profusely and speaks a foul-mouthed car-mechanics Russians. “Look guys…I’m getting my fighting boys outta here….just leaving some peacekeepers OK…? Just outside, right?” I ask him if the tanks there are going to be needed for that. He burps. Everybody pretends they didn’t notice. “Peacekeeping’s tough man. My guys are getting the fuck outta here tomorrow…. Don’t hassle me…I’m bu-sy!” The door is slammed and he hits the road. A piece of paper fell out of the door as he brutally shut it. Later that evening, the Le Monde Correspondent explains what the circles mean. It’s the new map of Georgia.

“They are occupying everything north of Gori and everything West of Senaki. For good. Or so it appears.”

Mirian wears ‘90s Reebok trainers, black badly-cut jeans and a lumberjack shirt of the worst imaginable quality. He is holding a rubbish sack filled with a few books, a family-photo album, more ugly clothes and a lock of his girlfriend’s hair wrapped in a green elastic band. He tries to speak English very quickly, over-pronounces the ‘o’ and fumbles around his meagre belongings looking for a blue lighter he claims somebody has ‘stolen’ from him.

His mother died last Tuesday, from bowel-cancer. Over the weekend a group of Ossetian ‘irregulars’ broke down the door of his father’s apartment and informed them that due to the strategic view-point their balcony offered over the town of Gori, their presence was now a ‘liability.’ One of them kicked in the glass door-pane of the old display cabinet to get his message across. He broke a china dog and a photoframe with a picture of his younger sister winning a local ballet contest. Sometime later that afternoon, probably when he passed out of his home town towards Tibilisi through a check-point manned by inebriated Russians, Mirian realised he had become a refugee.

Three olive-green trucks unload their human cargo under plane trees on the outskirts of the city. He lets his rubbish-sack of belongings drop to the ground, so he can use his hands to further articulate what he’s saying. I try to write down everything he talks about in my note-book, but I can’t record the shouting or draw his face. He stubs out his Yigor Light, looks for another one – but realises there are none left. Then his eyes stay still on mine. I stop note-taking.

“My cousin…was in the base…when they broke in and trashed it…he hid…in the boiler-room…and he heard them shouting…‘They’ve got everything…they’ve got all the equipment they could have dreamed of….and we’ve got nothing…’

“Then the Russians fell into a rage… they started to smash things up…their commander…couldn’t calm them down…and… and…they wouldn’t stop shouting… ‘we’ve got less than refugees…but we’ve won…we’ve won…we’ve won’

Then quite unexpectedly, he finds his blue lighter and begins to laugh.

In Istanbul the bus station is a multi-layered curved-concrete spiral – stuffed with little ticket-offices. Something that somebody might have found cool when concrete was young – or when they realised just how cheap it was to build. Outside each bureau a moustachioed man shouts out a destination.

“Adana” “Ankara” “Izmir” “Antakya” “Diyarbakir” “Kars” “Batumi”

Coaches are pulling in, people are pilling out. They’re migrating, trading cans for crates, lugging suitcases or picking up plastic bags of their belongings. Some are swearing as others rush to buy bits of food or bottled water. And then there are the goodbyes. Some tearful ones, some that seem more indifferent.

“Batumi”

So there are still buses to the Caucasus. An overweight, never-shaven guy in a stained orange shirt pulls me to the bureau. There is only one bus to Georgia. It’s his – and it leaves in twenty minutes. I don’t give myself enough time to properly make up my mind. Pretty soon I’m sitting next to Sofia, who begins to tell me her story in broken Russian.

She is looking for her son. His name is Soso. He’s seven and she hasn’t heard from him since the Russians pulled into Senaki last week. Sofia has dyed black-hair, more wrinkles than women of thirty tend to and a mobile phone. Soso is her background. Every ten minutes she pulls her Nokia out to look at him.

“I thought it would a good idea…for him to stay with his grandparents…I…I”

She never finishes the sentence. I sat next to her the whole twenty hours to Batumi and she could never say any more than that. At four in the morning the coach stopped somewhere on the motorway. Orange lights from the streetlamps flooded the tarmac. As whole families boarded, I watched colourfully veiled women holding their babies and fathers telling jokes to little girls. Sofia jumped off the bus. I think she must have been sick because when she got back on she was pale. Her eyes are Georgian, they almost have something Cherokee in them. She tries to explain;

“This happened to my parents…when there was a war…this happened…happens..”

The Turkish peasants are too excited by the bus to fall asleep. Children rush up and down the gangway. Men are strolling along talking to their new friends and seat-neighbours. None of them is going to Georgia. Sofia falls into a kind of sleep, but still every half-hour she pulls out her phone to look at Soso.

At the border the Georgian Cross of St. George is still flying – but little else is in the right place. Half the police have rushed off to the front-line, half the staff have gone to find their families. Papers are piled up, left unfiled, and nothing has been cleaned for days. An exhausted women stamps my passport without bothering to scan it. I can’t make out where her mascara ends and where the black rings below her eyes begin.

Dense-forests cover the mountain foothills nearby and along the road life-size rusted metal crosses occasionally appear at the cross-roads. We pull into Batumi. I saw Sofia pulling a wheelie-suitcase through rows of taxis and mini-buses shouting out the name of her village. Then she vanished.

All these buildings are cheap blocks of flats, painted ‘cheerful’ colours. The pinks and pale greens are greeting me. There is nothing in Batumi. Everything seems to be under sixty years old. Perhaps there was nothing here before. Maybe they all lived in huts. Maybe there was a big war that destroyed what was here. Maybe I’m right. I need an Internet Café. I need to get to Tibilisi.

The taxi-drivers won’t take me. Tattooed men wave their hands in the air.

“We can’t. The road is closed…there is War in on the highway…and I don’t know the mountain passes.”

I asked several times and every answer was the same. Groups of people are arriving in the main square clutching bags, suitcases and stacks of pots and pans. A handful of refugees has just arrived. So this is what the edge of a war is like. Confusion. A mess in which nobody know what’s going on. People are shouting each headline to those around them.

“The trains aren’t working.” “Are they moving to Capital?” “They’re withdrawing did you see the news.” “They’ve dug in.” “What did Bush say?”

The only way out is the airport. The driver smokes Chesterfields, wears a neatly pressed yellow shirts and grips the steering wheel with thick hands used to labour. He has four rings, only one of them from his wedding.

“The Russians are coming…and they’ve brought Chechens. Aren’t you ashamed – you British…that they can just crush this place you made so many promises to? You see those ruined churches on the hills up there… there have been many wars here.”

He points at the airport. The sleek new building shows that until a few weeks ago Georgia was a bold experiment in free-market capitalism and westernisation. The EU flags hopelessly hangs down its pole.

The main hall echoes to screams for a ticket. Somebody’s mother, brother, whatever, is in Tibilisi. Old women are knocking on the closed booths of the airlines. Children are crying because they don’t know what’s going on. I try and imagine Heathrow falling to pieces. Somehow there’s a seat for me.

Three policemen are sitting around smoking Parliaments are muttering intp microphones. They offer me a lighter, then a seat. Levan is in his early thirties. His eyes never stop moving. His face still has bits of shock stuck to it.

“I was in the Zone…two days ago. We were both there.” He points across the table to his friend. “And there was another guy from the brigade. He stayed there.” He pulls out his mobile phone. His Russian is thickened by an accent I’m unused to. It’s hard to understand. He clicks play on his Motorola videos.

On the tiny screen a column of camouflaged men are moving through the mist. He taps this moving image. “That’s us. They sent the police in when they ran out of soldiers.” A guy is smiling. Another is smoking. Somebody tells a joke. “You see there was mist.” Then there is a whistling sound. Tiny-sounding gunfire. The camera rolls along the floor and starts to focus on somebody who’s not getting up.

“He used to be the guy at the baggage counter.”

I once saw a happy-slap on a mobile phone and it disgusted me. A Turkish coach-driver once insisted I see the porn collection on his Samsung. But seeing death on a Motorola leaves me numb. As I wait for the delayed plane the policemen smoke two packets of Parliaments and then move onto mine. They are speaking to each other quickly in Georgian now. I can only make out a few words.

“Bush” “Shakashvili” “Sarkozy” “Putin”

Beirut – Around ‘Lunchtime.’ I need an Internet Connection, a number I have to call is waiting in my inbox. The Armenian Taxi driver coughs violently. I’m indifferent, he’s driven me way out of where I wanted to go, right into a dilapidated and run-down district that slides steeply down a hill. Flags of the Lebanese Forces ‘ex’-militia dangle from balconies, children are running around in little packs through the street, old men are sitting on plastic chairs outside their apartment blocs in silence watching the day go by. Small shrines to the Virgin Mary mark out which sect’s territory this is. “There’s your Net-Café Habibi.” A small grey and dimly-lit hole crammed full of kids and six computers from the early nineties. “Thanks.”

Achrafiye and those nice bars in East Beirut may not look like misery, but you only have to turn round the corner to find it right there waiting for you. The photographer I’m travelling with lights up, as a car blaring out the speeches of the Christian war-lord Bashir Gemayel swerves round the corner. The recordings echo through the roads that cut through the concrete towers, but there’s only grey sky above. The kids start to mob my friend, asking him repeatedly, “You Lebaneeeese – Lebaneeeese?” He nods, explains he works from London and that he’s keen to move back to Beirut. Then one of the bigger boys comes up to him, at most he’s 14, and says very seriously to him. “Take your family to London. There is war here.” Inside, the dial-up connection hisses and when my email finally opens, the number is there.

“Nayla Tueni. Will meet you in the Downtown in three hours. Call 08-90-90-78. Martyrs’ Square.”

Martyrs’ Square is the heart of Beirut and is the old dividing line between the mostly Muslim western districts and Christian East Beirut. Today it has taken on a different significance. In 2005 street protestors amassed in the square, eventually coming to such a crunch-point that on March 14th the decades long Syrian occupation was forced out of Lebanon. March 14th was just one day, but it has come to mean a Western-orientated political coalition of parties committed to keeping Syrian influence in Lebanon to a minimum.

The square is empty in the late afternoon, but it is filled with symbolism. On the side of the Headquarters of the Christian Ketaeb, also known as the Phalangists, there is a large mural of the assassinated leader Pierre Gemayel. Further up rises the large, modern Rafik Hariri mosque. This is where Lebanon’s assassinated March 14th Prime Minister is laid to rest. I stand underneath the An Nahar building, a modern glass-construction, with a large hanging bearing the face of the murdered journalist and MP Gibran Tueni. All were leaders in the coalition and paid with their lives for anything they achieved.

Gibran Teuni’s daughter – Nayla Tueni, is now the deputy managing editor of the An Nahar newspaper where her father worked. She’s in her early-twenties, I’m caught off guard – not just by how beautiful she is, but by how seriously she speaks.

I expected Nayla to talk rapturously about her father’s movement that freed the country from an occupation. But there is a tone of great dissatisfaction in her voice when she talks about politics. Nayla is often tipped for a bright future in this field, but she has no desire to be a politician for the moment. She explains, “We need a new kind of politics in the country, one that is no longer made up of blind followers, corrupt self-serving leaders and is actually interested in getting to grips with the social and infra-structural problems that make up real change.” It’s then I begin to understand, that politics in Lebanon is more mafia than party-political.

Nayla is young. And you can tell from experience that something terrible happened to her. I try and imagine what it must be like to lose a father in such a public, international-media-CNN sort of way. I can’t really comprehend what it would be like to Google my own name and see pictures of me weeping at my Dad’s funeral.

“I am worried about Lebanon,” she continues. “We do not have good neighbours. Syria, Israel, Iran. They all see us a political play thing. Not as a place. And this means people die.”