JOHN SIMPSON

In my business, there are some places where you only pause because you are heading on somewhere else; usually somewhere more difficult, more extreme and far less hospitable.

For me and many of my colleagues, Amman has always been a bit like this. For the past 16 years, it’s been the best and nicest place to stay before making the short trip to Baghdad, and to go for rest and recuperation afterwards. Amman has good hotels and restaurants. It is relaxed and comfortable and civilised. You can have alcohol if you want it. And you can abandon yourself to the delight of a decent bath or shower, before or after your weeks of discomfort. In other words, Amman offers everything to the modern journalist that a well-stocked caravanserai on the edge of a desert once offered the merchants on a camel train.

But until recently, I never really thought of Jordan as a place to travel to for its own sake. I don’t think I’d say that now, though. True, there is something mildly suburban about Amman; as if a quiet town in the Home Counties has been suddenly turned into limestone and dropped down in the desert. There is none of the seething, denatured, impersonal mall-culture you find in the big cities of Saudi Arabia or the Gulf, and Amman certainly isn’t anything remotely like Damascus, which is beautifully frozen in time.

It’s well-run and comfortable, but there isn’t a huge amount to do: a wander round the intimate Roman amphitheatre; a look at the shops where they sell woven carpets; a cup or three of sharp, sour coffee while reading a newspaper; a long lunch or dinner in some charming, vine-shaded restaurant with a bottle of Lebanese red.

All the same, Amman has an understated charm which is all its own. Partly, I suppose, it’s the stunning white stone, used for virtually every building, old and new, for two millennia. But it’s also the mix of people. In its quiet way, Amman has always been a melting-pot, blending Bedouin and Palestinians and Circassians with refugees from the region’s troubled societies.

In recent years, it has become a home for people who find it difficult to live in their own countries, but can’t or don’t want to leave the region. There are now entire cafés adopted by groups of Iraqi doctors, lawyers, or civil servants. Sitting there, it feels exactly like being in Sadoun Street in Baghdad, only without the danger.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that Jordan has stayed peaceful by chance. It has been fortunate in its political leaders, whose faces you see on posters in the street, on the backs of cars, in people’s windows. Of course, you see that in a lot of the Middle East, but in Jordan, King Hussein and his son, now King Abdullah II, seem genuinely popular.

Amman hasn’t always been quiet and stable. During the first Gulf War, I went to a dinner party with King Hussein, and listened while he talked gloomily of the possibility that he would be chased out of Jordan and would have to go and live on his stud farm near London. It never happened, of course – maybe it was just part of his political skill to say such a thing, knowing that it would be quoted back in London.

He was always calm and self-possessed. During the violent upheavals in September 1970, when Palestinian groups in Jordan fought King Hussein’s loyalists and his reign seemed likely to be cut short, I interviewed a British ham radio operator who corresponded with him every Sunday. On this particular Sunday, he tuned in, but knew the King would have no time to speak to him during a revolution.

Then the call-sign came, and he heard the calm, slightly accented voice at the other end, precisely on time. The King spoke without excitement, even though a shell hit the palace during their conversation. He eventually signed off, saying he’d better get back to oversee the fighting.

King Hussein never lost his unassuming jokiness. In the last year of his life, undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, he watched a lot of videos, including the Austin Powers films. During this time, he and his son, now King Abdullah II, were invited to the White House. King Hussein must have been in a lot of discomfort, and the chemo had taken away what little had remained of his hair. But as the two of them drove through the gates of the White House in their limousine, he put his little finger to the corner of his mouth, Dr Evil-style, and hissed “I’m going to ask the President for one million dollars.”

Something of the King’s character remains in Amman. Its success, its stability, its openness. It’s a nice, relaxed, unassuming city with a lot of hidden charm. I think that’s why I like it so much.

John Simpson is the BBC’s 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 BA flights.