At the Zakho border I’m confined to a tiny room with fifty chain-smokers. Well, no, actually, oil tankers stretch back for miles, and every last one of them is pumping fumes, coating my face and lungs in a layer of grime. This is passive smoking on a murderous scale, I say to Jessie, who nods in agreement. Tea shacks and hawkers make the wait bearable. A driver, eager to practise his broken English with the real thing, tells us, somewhat furtively, that we’re in a region known as Kurdistan, which spreads over from Turkey. We know little about the current politics of this part of the world. In this we are compatible, at least. We do know that the Iran–Iraq War ended over a year ago, which was also just about when I last read a newspaper. This from a man who used to read the paper religiously every day, and, if not, he’d get withdrawal symptoms. I recall there have been kidnappings in this area. If I ask, I might get confirmation, so I don’t. Innocents abroad, or is it idiots?

It takes six insufferable hours to reach customs and immigration, and they give no more than a cursory glance at the eagle sticker in our passports, the carnet de passage, green card and other vehicle documents. Once we hit the motorway, the tankers divert off to oil fields.

We are on our own again, riding down the bumpy vertebra of this long, narrow country. There’s no time to visit the villages in the barely discernible distance. The landscape isn’t the beautiful undulating sands of my golden imagining but a disappointing earthy-sandy substitute. Jessie can’t drive fast enough to leave. I tell her it’s not wise to put poor old Matilda through a heavy hammering. She ignores my advice. Nothing new there.

‘All the road signs are in Arabic,’ I exclaim.

‘What did you expect? This is hardly Costa del Iraq. Baghdad is not exactly Benidorm and we’ll not stumble across an Irish pub called O’Malley’s in the desert.’

I remember what I like about her.

We park by a garage outside Baghdad for the night. Jessie’s key in the ignition wakes me long before daylight. I wash with a cup of water and half a lemon. Survival training.

In the morning we drive around the outskirts of Baghdad and I’m just itching to visit the site of the famed Babylon of ancient Mesopotamia. Hey, I might bump into Nebuchadnezzar wandering around the Hanging Gardens, pruning roses and sipping mint tea. Wisely, I say not a word. At a set of traffic lights young men crowd the car, shouting for Jessie’s hand in marriage. Are they really as sincere as they sound? So desperate?

‘Marry my UK passport, more like,’ she laughs. I laugh too. I cannot remember when last I did. We catch each other’s eyes and smile. Hers contain hope yet.