I've been wanting to go to Dungeness for a long time. I finally made it yesterday.

 It is the bleakest headland I've ever been on; and in some ways the most sinister, with a quietly throbbing nuclear power plant brooding like some petrified giant of the forest dominating the background and which is never quite out of eyeshot. Wherever you are so is it. 

But it has beauty; this long, deep pebble beach has a spare, haunting quality, which for me, was utterly intoxicating; the sky was pure aquamarine, startlingly blue; everywhere there's spiky yellow gorse, tied down with long anchoring roots to stop it being torn out like twisters do trees in Kansas from the harrying sea winds that probe into every nook and cranny of this massive shingle beach. The vegetation is low, thick, matted, like a tough, hard wearing carpet.

At times it felt as if, and looked as if, we were by the cote d'azur; the sun was high and the pools that fill the old workings were deep and clear, like ice green emeralds. And at the same time, it also felt like the last of England: where the survivors of some apocalyptic event (the Anglo version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps) had fled to, with the power station being the only reminder of a now extinct civilisation.

It's certainly the place where people must be living off the grid. Like the driftwood that reaches the long pebble beach, so it is for those souls who wish to disconnect and lead another existence. They land there.

The perpetual flush of the sea, pushing the pebbles along the shore to it's own symphony of sound must be manna for those who want nothing but to hear the roar, crash and hubbub of nature. And you hear that in the birds that adore Dungeness: gulls roost on the lip edges of building in the power complex and cut dramatic outsize shadows against the building walls as they wheel and turn in the afternoon sun. Spring's first sand martins and the odd pioneer swallow cut arabesques through the sky. Full bodied ravens strut like country squires. Warblers yell like market stall holders or explode like car alarms from every bush.

A little way off the beach is the warm water outfall from the power plant; just like a dishwasher churning or the mythical maelstrom, it's frothing kettle of spume and water, which the gulls and dive bombing terns love, feasting on the fish attracted in their turn by the warm water.

The notion came to me as we wandered over the headland, first by the long pebble ridge, then across each of the nature reserves on this magical land that Dungeness is really the world's largest Japanese rock garden. It has the harmony and the serenity of a zen garden. Untouched. Natural. Forever. Yet, and this is the ever present irony of nature, what the waves bring, they can take away. The crumbling coasts of eastern England testifies to that. And, of course, there is the squat, humming presence of Dungeness A and Dungeness B as man's tacit contribution to instability.

Yet, I could live there. That frontier like quality so appeals to me. Few places have invited me to contemplation in the UK; this is one of that tiny group. I can fully understand why Derek Jarman headed south and set up a homestead. His "Prospect Cottage" is a tiny gem in black shingle. Fronted by a garden which reflects the austerity of the area - driftwood, flotsam, hardy plants, pebble cairns, minature standing stones - again, in a dreamy, zen fashion which fits so aptly the sensibility of this modern day Prospero's island. And the piece de resistance: the first verse of John Donne's "The Sunne Rising" marked out in raised lettering on the cottage's black tarred western wall.

I've thought for some years now that to leave garden behind is a gesture of the greatest generosity. A present for the generations yet to be born. Designed and created by people who may well, and I think particularly of Prospect Cottage and Chiswick House gardens here, never see it in it's realised state of exultant beauty. What existed on paper for them exists in front of our eyes. What a great legacy.

"I want all my friends to come up like weeds, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends one has to cultivate"
Roger Deakin. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

I've said this many times. Whether I've written it down is moot. I'm never homesick. My sickness is to come home. To a job I don't particularly enjoy; to worries about neighbours; frets about what I should do to my flat (sell and leave the stresses of living here to someone else) or more likely what I won't do (sell).

I know I'm psychically running away from all the decisions that have to be made, which will  and I can see this, probably make my emotional life easier to bear in some ways, but, and ain't there always a big one of this: travelling, even the thought of it, is just so damn exhilarating.

Sarajevo. Are the two of us in love? Hard to say on such a brief encounter - three nights, four days - but there's definitely chemistry between us. Something to build on.

What I had n't realised, and, really, how can you from the media and photographs, is exactly how much of a cauldron Sarajevo is in; long, narrow, and somewhat spatulate as it fans out towards the airport, and completely overlooked by hills and then a backdrop of snow topped mountains. Nor had I realised how close the frontline actually was, in places it must have been the other side of the street. It  can only have been an unimaginable three year hell encircled, besieged and shelled relentlessly.

Yet, the city has recovered incredibly. New buildings, many, many more restored, with only a handful or so in the city centre still bearing the scars of war, or in case still a hollowed out shell. Again, my hat and my respect goes out to these brave, resilient Sarajevans.

The city is a little gem: studded with minarets, clanging with hardy looking trams, and home to the tallest building in the whole of the Balkans - the Avaz tower. I spent a good part of one morning revelling in the view from the tower's open observation deck, baking in the heat.

Walking longitudinally across Sarajevo is a journey through spiritual as much as secular architecture: from the UN lookalike of the Bosnian parliament building, the quaintly Yugoslav communist functional buildings - all right angles and wide steps - on to imperialist statement buildings thrown up by the Austro-Hungarians - very formal, Viennese fussy - and then the bee hive that is Bascarsija - the old town.

Bascarsija is where generations of people have lived, traded, prayed, wept, bought, fought, laughed, ingested endless thimblefuls of coffee. Designed for meandering, created for chance meetings and conjecture. I felt ghosts every step of the way. Every flagstone throws up a story. The walls breath, the mosques exhale stories. So where are they? Who's the chronicler?

Only I can see this through: let this be the year I sell my flat. I need space. I need quiet. I need greenery. I need respite from the unease this area generates.

There are many things I hope for and this is one: why won't the BBC man up and take on the Daily Mail. If there was just some organisation, some entity which would square up to the Mail's bullying. I dream of this. A direct challenge string enough to turn this basilisk into stones or at least clip it's wings.

The near compulsory public tribute offered to the former prime minister who died three days ago - hyper ventilating press (Usual suspects. No surprises) and the forced recall of parliament for what must have been a buttock numbing seven or so hours for the non believers wearily listening to the cult members effusions - has put the UK shoulder to shoulder with the other country dominating the media sphere. North Korea. Brothers in arms when it comes to hot torrents of strident rhetoric

We have in the space of a few days become the unwilling participants in a cheesy, grisly personality cult. Thank God, I'm out of the country when this tawdry spectacle reaches it's apogee.

If the Tories start busing public servants in and coercing them to publicly weep a la Kim Jung Il then we are a truly pantomime country. They've already tried, but excused it away as a genuine mistake to get Whitehall staff to wear mourning clothes.

It seems that Cameron has no depth to which he won't plumb. Everything up to celebrate the passage of a former PM who left only division and despair in their wake. A scorched earth, put all prisoners to the sword raison d'être that many of us living through those times frantically hoped was an aberration never to be repeated. In the same passionate way probably as medieval monks must have prayed for deliverance from the Norsemen.

 Just that even though that rotten baton slipped out of one Tory hand it has been inelegantly, but enthusiastically, plucked out of the long grass by the current incumbent and the wand of despair benights us once more. 

Again, and I simply have to say it: I am ecstatic I'll be abroad next Wednesday.

So today was the day Margaret Thatcher died. I acknowledge her passing as I do her significance for some of my fellow citizens. That's all. The urge to pen vitriol has been contained. Just.

How paradoxical it is that fiction can open up the true drama and reveal the full spectrum of human behaviour of any actual situation that's occurred than hard observed fact. I've been thinking about this after reading a lightly fictionalised memoir of a Polish Jewish young boy and his aunt on the run, never more than a step ahead of the Germans, savage Ukrainian militias, and mostly indifferent, sometimes callous Polish Catholics during the darkest days of the second world war.

It's the tiniest details that the history books either ignore or are oblivious to that this novel - Wartime Lies by Louis Begley - depicts that drives home the humming terror anyone in this the most awful of all predicament must have felt: this little boy could never urinate in public because (as I am too) he was circumcised. To do so risked discovery and a hitherto secret life instantly jeopardised. On such a thing hung a life. I can't get over that; it's almost laughable except it could be the tipping point between life or descent into hell.

Another book, a collection of short stories by an Urdu writer called Saadat Hasan Manto, is a chilling recount of the effects of another great British colonial fiasco: the partition of India and the communal demons that set free - massacre, pogrom, rape, arson.

Tell me that fiction means nothing if you dare. These two books alone would explode that canard should anyone dare to raise it.

I don't know whether we should all be laughing or holding our head in our hands in global collective horror at the lava flow of threats streaming out of Pyongyang. Either they are masters of tension to an intensity that a horror movie director would envy, or the much more frightening aspect is that it's so hermetically walled in by psychosis and persecution complexes that they will lash out against some imagined slight that only they recognise. 

There's something eerily reminiscent of the last few months before the outbreak of WW 2; every day, the ratchet cranks up another cog. What is it they hope to gain?