JOHN SIMPSON

Turkey, that superb, difficult, fascinating country is unfolding itself below, its lakes glinting in the sunshine, its mountains casting long shadows over the plains. The flight from Amman to London is smooth and restful after the usual fuss at the airport about our flak jackets and electronic gear. Behind me lies a two-week stint in Baghdad, with its attendant excitements.

There was a bomb at the end of the street in central Baghdad where our office is situated, a foray into Sadr City, where we had to trust our lives and liberty to the good faith of a particularly fierce and unpredictable militia group and the usual butterflies in the stomach every time we headed out to film in the streets, our armed guards watchful for any sign of an attack on us.

And now, ahead of me, lies a short period of pure pleasure before I have to head off again. It will begin in a few hours' time, when our Victorian front door opens and my wife stands there with our baby son in her arms. At 14 months he now knows who I am, and the strange functions I perform: ineptly changing his nappy; whirling him around my head dangerously; singing him strange, forgotten songs from decades long past.

My wife and I travel a lot, so in his 14 months he has been four times to France, three times to South Africa, once to Morocco and once to Egypt. And, as a result, he has turned into an excellent, interested, quiet companion. And I have learned to admire his calmness and self-sufficiency.

And so he attracts favourable attention. In Fez, as we wandered round the souk, the shopkeepers ran over to us just to look at him. Fortunately, he always grinned back at them. Old people kissed the tips of their fingers and touched his forehead; young men would ask to hold him, and he would laugh as they swung him round. While we ate at one of the superb open-air food stalls in the main square in Marrakech, our waiter plucked him out of his pushchair and ran off into the crowd to show him to someone.

Even I was worried by that. But Dee was more relaxed and sensible, and within a couple of minutes the waiter ran back, with Rafe laughing in his arms. When he's older, the interest will fade, and so will the special treatment we get as a family. Things change all the time anyway: he's far too heavy now for me to carry him in a pouch on my chest any more.

In Paris a few months ago, when I went out one evening to get basic necessities - some Pont l'Évêque cheese and a bottle of Bordeaux - I took him in the pouch. And because it was raining, I buttoned my ample coat around him, leaving just his head sticking out. It didn't occur to me that there might be anything unusual about this, until I noticed that people were looking strangely at us, and edging away. It can't have helped that I was singing to him.

Then I glanced in a shop window, and understood. We looked like a two-headed monster exhibit that you used to find at fairgrounds when I was young: Rafe's little head was sticking out of the coat a few inches underneath mine, and that was all you could see of him. I smiled at everyone after that, but it only seemed to make things worse.

Rafe was born at the beginning of 2006, but he's already changed my life. In Baghdad, I have become even angrier at the dreadful sights you see there. The bodies, the injured - they could all be him, and once upon a time, even the old ones among them were as young and happy and welcomed with love and joy as he is now. I hope I never was insensitive to these things in the past, but I'm certainly more sensitive to them now. And I have developed a loathing for high explosive and guns, one much more intense than anything I have felt before.

Now, I imagine, we are flying over some part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, with its strip-farming and its neat little towns and villages, and the mountains in the distance. In three hours I'll be home.

If the skies are clear, I'll even be able to see my house, or at least the terrace it's in, as we make our way down to Heathrow.

And for a while I will be able to forget about Baghdad, and that horrible sound as another bomb goes off, and the way the windows bulge inwards with the blast, and the reek of high explosive, and the churning of the stomach.

And after a day or so I'll stop looking at Rafe as though he's an unimaginable miracle, even though, like any other baby, any other human being, he really is.

Pretty soon I'll be telling him not even to think of dropping the remote for the television in the bath, or to stop fishing in the drawers for interesting electronic goodies, and that I really mean it this time. And, for a while, life will be natural and peaceful and calm again. Not long to wait now.

Twenty Tales from the War Zone: The Best of John Simpson (Macmillan, £1.99) is out now. John Simpson is the BBC world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected flights.