Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.