Personality disorder programme No longer a diagnosis of exclusion

Inside IMH, antique tables with modern PCs , and an elegant sweeping wooden staircase with a huge satellite dish on the roof gave a hectic workaday feel in a setting of well-faded grandeur.

The basement bunker was my first appointment, with the recently-arrived head of country security plus our own house’s security guard. I was expecting a simple Powerpoint presentation, a few dos and don’ts, and good night. But after a few warm-up slides with lists of facts and figures about the country, it was down to the hard stuff.

The polite chit-chat was over, and it was like the moment that you decide it’s probably better not to make a joke when they ask at the airport if you packed all your own bags. First ‘this might happen to you’ followed by several things you never even think about as even being possible to somebody like you, then ‘this is where it’s happening at the moment’ with extraordinary detailed maps with arrows showing which directions they’re moving in, and coloured in to represent the threat level (we’re currently just shy of the one where nobody is allowed to move anywhere, which is one below the ‘lock yourselves in the windowless room on the left of the front door with the steel plate door firmly bolted’).

Following that, we had ‘this is when it last happened and to whom’ (a couple of days ago, to several people) and cheerfully supplemented with ‘there’s less than a quarter of all this that you every get to hear on the news’, and finally ‘this is what you can do to minimise the risk’.

That involves keeping the car windows up, doors locked, seatbelt on and never getting out of it until you’re at you destination with the gates shut behind you – including the 100 yard trip from the house to the hospital. Also, we have codewords for each of us and each building, and they phone round everybody twice a day to check that we are safe, and that we are where we are meant to be – but only using the codewords. From the news, it’s probably not surprising that Kandahar is considered the worst at the moment – and an absolute no-no for the likes of us – but as I’ll only be doing the 100 yards to and back from the hospital, I won’t need to worry about that one.

Now I’m not usually much of one to worry – and indeed I felt sensible about this, but a few minutes ago as I sat at my desk to write this I noticed that the thick net over the window was tucked back, so I could see into the street below. Normally, I would have thought ‘what an interesting view’ (which it is), but I unthinkingly pulled the net right across and then consciously thought ‘ with my head visible from the road, eyes glued to the laptop, and this obviously being an ex-pat house, I’d be a sitting duck for a bullet if anybody nasty and armed walks past. And there’s a lot of nasty and armed people in this town’.

Because one of the others in the house was leaving and because I had just arrived, the four of us decided to go out to a restaurant to celebrate. It had to be one on the ‘safe’ list, and we had to be back by the 7pm curfew – which was a problem as by the time we assembled to go out it was 6.30pm, and we had to do all the faffing about with the cars and gates business.

But the duty security officer was surprisingly helpful: he checked with the security chief, and allowed us to extend the curfew to 7.30, as it was in an area which was thought to be very secure (just by the bus stop where Yousuf used to wait for his school bus 40 years ago, in fact). Now the security men at Grendon wouldn’t have been like that, I thought. Thank goodness that people are allowed to exercise a bit of discretion!