A year ago I found myself outside a Jett bus office in Amman, Jordan. My destination was Jerusalem and I had been told it would take a good three hours to cross the border.

They say that scent elicits the strongest memories, can transport you back into times long relegated to a distant past, bring forth fragments of emotions thought buried under the merciless march of time.

Whenever I walk towards Brick Lane Mosque in the east end of London I always look at it as a continuation of a Dickens novel.

On the day the US embassy opened in Jerusalem, in May 2019, 58 Gazan protestors died from Israeli fire. This, Donald Macintyre writes in a special dispatch for The Independent, was easily the bloodiest day since the Gaza war of 2014.

A few years ago, while visiting Sudan, I travelled the short distance from my hotel in Khartoum, overlooking the Nile, to Omdurman.