‘Uh-huh.’

Chris drove in silence. It really was magnificent, inspiring and solitary. His recent sojourn in the southern Atlantic wilderness had changed him. After so many months being alone out there, he’d found the aggressive noise and haste of New York a little overpowering. He frequently had found himself back in his hotel room relishing the comparative peace and quiet, happy to have the echoing wail of police sirens and the harsh rattle of urban noise muted to nothing more than a subdued rumble seeping through the double-glazed window.

New York these days felt like a town under siege. Every subway train and bus station was manned with cops checking IDs. Having olive skin, or even just having a dark beard, seemed to invite suspicious inspection from every passer-by.

It wasn’t just New York. London was the same. Cities twinned by their paranoia, waiting for the next big bang.

Chris shook his head; it was becoming an ugly world, one waiting, spoiling for a fight. Those months away from it all, away from people, photographing terns and penguins, that had been a refreshing antidote. But on coming back from his months of solitude, the whole Muslim- Christian hate thing seemed to have gotten worse. The news seemed to be fuelled by this alone these days.

He felt old. He certainly couldn’t face doing another ‘hot’ assignment. A year ago he’d done some work in northern Iraq for News Fortnite, documenting the appalling and bloody tit-for-tat killings between the Kurds and the Sunnis that was still going on even now, years after the second Gulf war. A few years ago he might have been able to dispassionately shut out the worst of it on this kind of field job, but that last one had finally got to him.

From now on, he would be happy to stay away from the hazardous stop-and-drop assignments like that. It was going to have to be terns and penguins, or he was going to have to find a new way to earn a living. The world was becoming too ugly a thing to study through his viewfinder.