Oliver Poole gets reverse culture shock

Oliver Poole, author of Into the Red Zone and Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent, talked to students in Oxford earlier this week. Snippets of his chat appear in Cherwell and he talks about that oddest of feelings of reverse culture shock felt by many war correspondents when they head back home,

“Once I began to live permanently in Iraq, there was nothing more astonishing for me than coming back to Britain and seeing everybody carrying on as normal” Poole explains. “I’d get on a plane in Amman and would be on the tube in about four and a half hours. For the first few days, I’d derive complete wonder and fascination at every day normalities of life back in England…It was kind of good to know that despite everything, things were carrying on as normal back home.”” link