Rushdie ain't pleased with the motorcade

A great cloud of dust, a whoosh of excitable policemen, and a motorcade comes to a gravel-scattering halt outside my hotel here in Cartagena, in Colombia. The most awaited guest is arrived. Salman Rushdie ain’t pleased. The one condition on which he had come here was: no security, no motorcades.

He was fuming as he made his way to hotel reception. Trouble is, no one loves an armed motorcade like the Colombians like an armed motorcade. The drug cartels, the mafia, the FARC and Uncle Tom Cobley have seen to that. No-one of consequence moves without one.

I chaired a discussion last night with Martin Amis on Updike. Amis has an impressive capacity to retrieve actual quotes from Updike’s work and himself to deliver cascades of flawless prose as he talks about him. It was a great event.

My own lecture, on Living with the Gringos, from San Salvador to Baghdad, completely surprised me. I had feared that my ramble through US foreign policy that I had intersected with over the past 30 years would positively alienate my mainly Lain American audience.

It is a dangerous enterprise to attempt to talk conceptually with a culture with whom you have never intersected. Amazingly, they were absorbed and engaged, and asked better questions than an equivalent audience at the Hay on Wye festival of which this event is a cousin.

For the rest, this is an amazingly safe and beautiful walled city, sumptuously restored. I have walked the whole place. Tomorrow I’m going to projects out in the barrios where Colombia’s majority, the poorer citizens, live.

Benjamin Zephaniah has been rapping their socks off – save that they start bare footed anyway. They can’t understand the words, but his cadences and his mannerisms communicate enough. Many of his audience are the descendants of slaves from Africa. The beach he’s close to is on the Caribbean – a world away from Brixton, Liverpool or Birmingham – and the weather is hot and steamy.

This afternoon I’m on a round table with Matt Frei of the BBC, a guy from El Pais, and a vast audience. The media and the meltdown – that conceptual engagement again. Back to the snowy wastes tomorrow. Blog services will resume Monday.