It gives me all I can do to cope with the date and I’ve long since given up the unequal struggle to distinguish one day of the week from another; when Friday is Sunday and Thursday is Saturday and Saturday is Monday it seems hardly worth the effort. But presumably I’ll register the significance of 25 December when the time comes. Kabul, though so much of it has been recently rebuilt, is an attractive little city. Many of the new buildings and public monuments are hideously avant-garde but their incongruity is so extreme in this country that the total effect is comic rather than offensive. The city streets were paved (by the Russians) only a few years ago and today I saw a traffic policeman abandoning his post to kneel on the footpath and say his prayers at the appointed hour. This frank devotion is for me one of the most impressive features of Islamic culture. If we accept that it is more than a superstition then there is something very wonderful indeed about mixing one’s daily deeds and one’s daily prayers in such an unselfconscious fashion, instead of keeping each in an airtight compartment.
