There is another thing I have learnt from David Baboulene. It is a learning I immediately grasped. And have been unable to ignore ever since. Nowadays – post Bab, as I like to term it – I can hardly watch a film without seeking it out. Much less remain connected to a book without it.

I had been getting it badly wrong. It was an omission rather than a full-blown mistake, but it was an error in my writing nonetheless. All those hours of writing, hunched over a laptop in a tent or a café, or a “compartmentalised housing unit”. Army speak for a cramped portacabin.

“I didn’t connect with your writing”, said the agent loftily. I was happy to receive a response, frankly, though I wasn’t sure if it was one of those standardised responses – one step up from “if we don’t like it we won’t contact you”. Agents respond so rarely to a query these days, in the post-pandemic tidal wave of scripts, that something in me treasured the recognition that I lived. And wrote. But now I know what it meant.

Hundreds of thousands of words wasted on the anvil of a desperate attempts at refinement. Without really understanding what I was refining. Adding material, tweaking this, turning that down. And all along there was a key factor missing. Something a literary agent of course, practised in the art of identifying an author capable of retaining an audience, was onto within seconds of turning a page.

The building was there when I arrived. It stood alone in a wide expanse of kicked and scuffed desert sand. Soldiers used the space as a football field from time to time, somehow weaving the building into their game.

It was a lonely sight, wildly out of place amid the low metal prefab buildings and the endless traffic of an airbase. By rights its pale walls should have shouldered with like properties on either side. A dusty tarmac road should have flanked it, dotted with parked saloons and SUVs. Now and again children should have danced and played in the emerald grass of lawns carefully husbanded by wealthy Arab owners, sprinkler systems keeping the treasured grass in perfect condition.

The building was regularly visited. But only by soldiers in light battle order, equipped with radios and body armour, assault rifles to the shoulder, eyes pressed to battle sights, moving in a fast half crouch. It was a dance, a choreographed series of movements practised over and again. Night and day, day after day. An occasional hand to the shoulder or a nod the soldiers’ only communication.

One afternoon the tempo stepped up. A pair of helicopters hovered at altitude. A stream of jumpers snaked earthwards in a perfect double column. Landing they quickly detached themselves from their parachutes and resumed the practised dance. For weeks this went on.

One day, activity ceased. A day later the house was dismantled. Its plywood walls and doors no longer moved uneasily in the wind, its loosely hinged doors ceased their angry creaking and slamming.

And then, on the screens in the canteen over lunch and dinner, news emerged that a terrorist leader had been killed in a strike somewhere not all that far away. The bulletins showed aerial photographs of the house in which the leader had detonated the bomb that had killed himself and other members of his family. The house was still on fire, smoke poured from crumbling walls that gaped with holes where once were windows and doors.

Beneath the smoke the house looked strangely familiar. On either side similar properties jostled with what remained of the smouldering wreck. Around it was a dusty tarmac road, dotted with parked cars. Carefully tended lawns glowed emerald against pale concrete walls…

The knowledge gap was one of the many problems in my writing. Or at least, in my case, its absence. The ‘storification’ forced on the read of Hemingway’s powerful micro story: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn” produced a seminal learning for me. It has informed my writing ever since.