The past is another country, they say, and it is hard to find your way back. What they don't tell you is that if you carry a diplomatic passport you can pretty well forget ever crossing that particular frontier again.
Making sense of life is hard enough. But making sense of a diplomatic life led in a dozen different places can be impossible. It doesn't matter if you are an ambassador in Washington or a third secretary in Ouagadougou - such are the repeated curtailments and displacements of normal existence that it becomes hard to link postings, those disassociated segments of diplomatic life, into a single, coherent whole. Nor are postings taken one by one any easier to deal with. You may tell yourself that you are living in Beijing or Bratislava or Tehran but in a sense it does not really matter where you are - on the diplomatic circuit everywhere is a temporary place peopled by similarly uprooted wanderers with a vision of the past and future as truncated as your own.
