It was the time of the visa woes. Once again I trudged from my hotel to the Riverside for lunch, the sun baking and oppressive, the heat thick enough to slice. Past stinking sewers rustling with rats, wheelie bins with their contents strewn on the floor by scavenging street dwellers and baying moto drivers with their almost Pavlovian response everytime a Barang walked by,

'Moto bike sir?'

On one particular street there lies a one man rubbish tip, his skin black beneath his filthy loin cloth always asleep. Besides him lies the remains of other peoples rubbish that he's scavenged for some unfathomable purpose. Empty bottles of spirits, the trademark of winos everywhere, litter the ground besides him, the only shelter a thin leafed bush that only partly blocks out the strong fingers of sun. And yet...and yet, there besides him is his own personal altar to the Buddha, even in his decrepitude he made offerings and prayers to the Buddha, to make merit - I wondered how he viewed his past lives, if this is what he'd aspired to in this one?

Past the museum that houses those beautiful relics of Angkor Wat, removed from there because of theft by art dealers, past the park where street dwellers sleep at night and wash under the sprinklers in the morning. Running the gauntlet of the booksellers and boot-boys, the moto and tuk-tuk drivers yelling and whistling at you as though you were a dog.

At the Riverside I bumped into Gordon, we'd become quite friendly over the two or three months I had stayed in Phnom Penh. He was a charming Scotsman, with an incredibly sexy wife Nuri, and the two were always arguing; she was impossibly jealous and Gordon an irrepressible flirt. I had a feeling that Nuri didn't quite like me for the simple reason that whenever Gordon and I got together we ended up getting completely plastered. Today was to be no exception.

The ritual was usually the same, we'd sit together and take the papers beneath a cooling fan while dining, occasionally breaking the silence to remark on some story or other that caught our eye. As the afternoon wore on, Gordon would field phone call after phone call until finally he switched it off. He was an odd character to say the least, with fingers in many pies. He was in oil, mining, security and any number of other shady practices. Occasionally he'd introduce me to other colourful characters, such as Jim, who ran drugs from places like India or the Phillipines to Thailand for huge profits per pill - all technically 'legal'. Major Lim, chief of the tourist police would also make an occasional appearance and we'd get steadily drunk. After the sun had set and the elephant had wandered past on the way home from Wat Bo, we'd usually repair to the Temple bar, for no real reason other than the great collection of blues and jazz music that the owner, John, supplied the bar with. It was usually pretty empty, May is the quietest month in the Phnom Penh calendar for some reason - probably because nobody could get a bloody visa!

Gordon was heavily involved in Iraq, he ran a company that recruited and trained mercenaries to be posted there. Because of the complete anarachy there, and the unwillingness of the US and British forces to leave their heavily fortified bunkers, all the movers and shakers, the politicians and businessmen used mercenaries such as Gordon provided to protect them from insurgents, organised crime and acts of random violence. They work with impunity, shooting anyone that gets in the way, Bremer in his infinite wisdom having granted all mercenaries complete immunity from prosecution before he fled Iraq last June. There are tens of thousands of these mercenaries roaming Iraq, bullying, intimidating, raping and shooting ordinary citizens epsecially when they get drunk, which is often.

We were well into our cups, a fact that you could tell because when he was soused Gordon had a habit of crying out loud,

'You can take our lives but you can never take our freedom!'

from the film Braveheart, which Gordon had taken, well, pretty much to heart. It was in the middle of one such full throated Scottish cry that all hell broke loose. I was sitting with my back towards the window, thank God, when the whole thing imploded. Glass sprayed everywhere, little iced daggers ripping through the air, then there was a second explosion of glass. It's odd how things happen so quickly and yet so slowy at the time, instinct kicking in instantly. In the split second of hearing the window explode behid me, a matter of a couple of feet away, I was diving to the floor with my arms behind my head protecting it from whatever was happening. Everone else had done the same, I realised, and as quickly as it had begun it was over. There was the briefest of silences and then a new pandemonium. The bar girls had caught the worst of it, they had been facing the windows. One was covered in blood and screaming while clutching her bloody face, Major Lim was barking into his phone, people from outside were yabbering excitedly, another guest was moaning - I was shaking with fear and wonder, what the hell had happened?

'Are you okay?' It was Gordon, I nodded. Jim grunted something unintelligible.

It was only later that we pieced together what had happened. Someone with a grudge had driven by on a moto and fired a couple of shots into the bar shattering the glass. The target could have been anyone, Jim, Major Lim and Gordon all could lay claim to having not a few enemies. But the truth was that it was probably the disgruntled ex-boyfriend of one of the bar girls.

Cambodia is an incredibly violent society, there are Kalashnikovs for sale in the Russian market, guns and grenades are everywhere, shootings and stabbings are an everyday occurrence. Thankfully it's usually Khmer against Khmer, but recently more affluent Khmer men had taken to hanging out in the restaurants and bars that the Barang, or Westerners frequented. But the affluent Khmer men usually had a bodyguard or two in tow, and with the fanatical devotion to 'face saving' all too often the bodyguards would pull guns on a Barang that had accidentally bumped into or had looked to long at their employer. Which means that the local Barang also now tote guns usually in plain view. Things were getting pretty nasty in Phnom Penh, but it still seemed a far cry from the days when the same disgruntled boyfriend, several years back, would lob a grenade into a bar rather than a couple of bullets.

Neither Major Lim, Gordon Jim or myself had anything but superficial nicks from the flying glass, John bundled the bar girls into his car outside and took them to be stitched up by some local bone doctor. We gingerly dusted off the glass shards from the bar stools and sat down, helping ourselves to beers while Major Lin quizzed the ineffective security guard about what he'd seen of the shooting.

This was, after all, Phnom Penh.

yechydda,