Ukraine is not Iraq

A journalist often meets unhappy people in dire circumstances. Accidents, murders, wars, natural disasters, protests and recessions are not the kind of events that produce much joy, so you tend to remember those rare times when you were a witness to happiness.

- STEPHEN DAVIS

Three stories stand out in my 50 years of reporting for the sheer jubilation of the people I saw and interviewed.

The first was on a crowded dockside in Southampton when the passenger liner QE2 returned from the Falklands War. It was impossible not to be moved as the bands played and the badly wounded but smiling Captain David Hart Dyke of the ill-fated HMS Coventry, which was sunk by Argentinian bombs, was reunited with family.

The second was in a Black church in the US state of Georgia, as a gospel choir sang and everyone looked so exultant, impressing even a non-believer like me. But by far the most memorable was Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

With a TV3 current affairs team, I travelled around the city unhindered, through both Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods. Groups singing on street corners, strangers hugging each other, our driver in tears as he stood on a bridge overlooking one of Saddam's palaces, an action that would have got him arrested just weeks before. So much joy before the years of horror.