Dearly departed readers, brace your gins and gird your loins. The skies over Kuwait International have become a mobile exhibition of Iranian drone technology, courtesy of a surprise fly-by critique of Western foreign policy. Yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran, in a bold bid for the Best in Show at the 2025 Middle Eastern Air Displays, apparently took exception to the terminal's duty-free selection and decided to drop in unannounced.
Now, I've sampled many an airport gin, but the kind delivered by a precision strike from a Shahed-136 is not, I find, conducive to the pre-flight tipple. This latest escalation, described by my colleagues at the Ministry of Moaning as 'unprecedented,' is actually a masterstroke of geopolitical performance art. Think of it: a drone is just a flying saxophone if you close your eyes, and the US and Iran are essentially two tone-deaf tuba players having a honking contest in a library. The real victims are the librarians, the innocent civilians who just wanted a mediocre flat white before boarding a budget airline to Istanbul.
Prime Minister Sunak, bless his spade-like face, has emerged from a bunker possibly wearing an egg-cup on his head, declaring that 'We stand with our allies' which is political shorthand for 'We are deeply confused and also our GPS is on the blink.' Meanwhile, in Tehran, some chap with a beard that has its own postcode is presumably shouting slogans into a microphone while simultaneously checking the stock price of carpet glue. It's all so desperately, predictably, depressingly theatrical.
Let's be honest: the conflict in the Gulf has become a soap opera written by a committee of paranoid octopuses. Each new strike is a plot twist that no one believes and everyone pretends to care about. The drones don't discriminate. They have the artistic sensibilities of a brick through a window. But here's the thing nobody is saying: this is just the prequel. The sequel, already in pre-production, involves a cyber-attack that turns all the oil into chickpeas, rendering the entire region a giant hummus bowl.
I myself was at Kuwait airport three days ago, trying to explain to a customs officer why my inflatable globe was leaking. If I had known the real show was about to begin, I would have ordered a double gin and tonic, or perhaps a treble. The evacuation, I'm told, was handled with exemplary efficiency: lots of running, some screaming, and a man in a fez trying to flog a duty-free Toblerone at 200% markup. The airport will reopen in a week, once they've cleared the debris and renegotiated the concession contracts. Business as usual. The human soul, however, remains a hard-drive that is, frankly, corrupted.
So here we are, peering at the rubble of yet another normal Tuesday. The US and Iran are like two drunks in a pub car park, circling each other, each convinced they're the one who knows how to throw a punch. The rest of us are just the broken bottles they're going to fall over. Give me a world where the worst thing is a delayed Ryanair flight and a warm pint of Fosters. That was, I admit, a deeply unpleasant world. But at least it didn't involve my luggage becoming part of a kinetic art piece. As I type this, I'm listening to the BBC play the soothing sounds of geopolitical collapse, and I can only conclude: we need a better class of war, or a better class of gin. Preferably both.
