If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring. ↗
A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring. ↗
But the key thing is that Iraq, while it's got very large oil reserves, has marginalized itself as an oil exporter and these days its exports are only about one tenth that of neighboring Saudi Arabia. ↗
Sometimes, when I have a lot of ideas and I want to do a lot of things, or when I'm traveling, I lose energy and I can't do as many things as I want. So I have to plan days when I'm not doing anything. I find that a bit boring, but it's necessary. ↗