There are some of us who want to go to the kind of place a travel agent can't really help with. A few weeks ago, in the centre of Kabul, someone called out my name; it happens, now that the BBC is watched by hundreds of millions around the world. (Just think of all those viewers saying 'Isn't he putting on weight?' and 'How much longer do you think he can keep going?' whenever I come on the screen.)
Anyway, these people were British, and they wanted to thank me. Apparently they had heard me declare somewhere that Afghanistan, approached sensibly, could be one of the most exciting, beautiful and rewarding places for a holiday. I hadn't really expected anyone to take up the suggestion, but they said it was entirely true.
Still even I couldn't recommend this place, Baghdad, as a holiday destination. There are wonderful things to see in Iraq — Nineveh, Nimrud, Samarra, Ctesiphon, Karbala, Najaf, the Marshes — but it's years since I've been able to check them out for myself. Going to some of them would have been an elaborate form of suicide.
Much of the country is spectacularly unspectacular: it is appallingly hot and flat, and the overmastering colour is that of dust and mud — not surprisingly, since Iraq was created over millennia by the spread of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The mountains of the predominantly Kurdish north are, however, superb, and cities like Erbil and Sulaymaniyah are pleasant, increasingly prosperous, and moderately safe.
Baghdad was attractive once upon a time, but that ended after Iraq became a republic. Too big, too hot, too dusty, too full of cars and rubbish and overhead wires, too messed around with by Saddam Hussein after the big oil money started to flow: Baghdad's inheritance since the 1958 revolution has been shabby. The years of UN sanctions — don't get me started on that — have made these things far, far worse.
And yet there has always been one part of the city where it's possible to glimpse what it once was, and what it might just possibly be again. The Mustansiriyah University, a grand building in golden brick, has stood overlooking the Tigris since it was opened in 1234 — shortly after the great European universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, and only 24 years before the Mongols destroyed the rest of Baghdad.
It still stands there, imposing and no doubt much rebuilt. Sadly, the famous clock beside the main entrance has vanished. On each side of an alcove decorated with an accurate map of the stars, two golden birds were perched on this water-powered clock, each with a golden nut in its beak. Five times a day, at the hour of prayer, the birds would drop the nuts into a bowl. The weight of the nuts would start a mechanism, which opened a door, activated a trumpet, and summoned the faithful. It may have been the world's earliest alarm clock.
When I was based in Baghdad covering the first Gulf War, I spent a lot of time round here, wandering along the riverfront and visiting the antique shops in the bazaar. And when I returned to Baghdad in 2003, three days after its fall, I was determined to see what had happened to the people I had once known.
It was a mistake. A gun battle was raging across the river, there were fires everywhere, and occasional shots rang out in the alleyways nearby. To prove to myself that I'd made it here, I bought an antique copper pot from the only shop that was still open. Even at a time like that the merchant was inclined to haggle.
And now, in the summer heat, I'm back again. For seven years it has been far too dangerous for a Westerner to come here. Even six months ago it wasn't safe enough, but now it is. Yet going back can be a mug's game: memories you have prized are often belittled or trashed.
For the most part, I found that the antiques dealers had been driven out by market forces. Shops which once contained silk carpets from Isfahan, jewellery from Central Asia, the memorabilia of centuries, and dishes of coins from the Abbasid period, when the circular city of Baghdad was the greatest centre of civilisation on earth, now sell cheap junk: T-shirts, backpacks, plastic toys. But there are a few of the old shops left, and I bought a string of coral prayer beads for old times' sake. Outside one of the shops in a covered alleyway sat an ancient man who recognised me before I remembered him. 'I bought a gramophone with a brass horn from you,' I said. His shop, long since closed down, now sells dreadful cheap clothes for women.
The details started flooding back. The gramophone was on the topmost shelf, and even then, 20 years ago, he was too old to climb up and get it for me. I grabbed it from the top of a rickety ladder, and took some old 78 rpm records, thick with dust, as I teetered down again. I paid up and left.
Outside, the bazaar was almost empty: war was coming, and most shopkeepers were leaving the city. In the darkness of the evening, a friend of mine put the gramophone together on an ancient stone seat, now vanished, and wound the handle. Wordlessly, I handed him the first record that came to hand: Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra playing Runnin' Wild. The tinny, crackling sound, unheard for decades, echoed off into the dark cavern of the bazaar around us: 'I'm runnin' wild, lost control/Runnin' wild, mighty bold...'
Now the antiques market has faded almost as completely as that sound. But at least I can come down here again, after all these years.
John Simpson is the BBC's world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
