Chaos happened to me, though it was my fault, because I sought it out. I arrived at a ruined airport as the sun set over Africa. This was Mogadishu, capital of Somalia in the middle of a civil war and a famine.

The Russian cargo plane slowed, halted, and turned off its engines. A profound silence fell. 

Night was not far away. There was no immigration desk, there were no customs, just a bunch of 14-year-olds with AK-47s (I remember they had blue plastic stocks) who knew enough English to ask me and my companion, the brilliant photographer John Downing, ‘You want bodyguard?’ and to name a price in dollars. Dollars were almost the only useful thing we had brought with us, as it turned out.

An American fixer for one of the news agencies, waiting to pick up cargo from the same plane, was the only person we could ask. Should we hire these teenagers? ‘Oh yes’, he said mildly, ‘You’ll be dead and stripped naked by morning if you don’t have any armed protection. They’re probably good kids’. They were, or I wouldn’t be writing this.

Their car had no interior trim, a common feature of such places and I suspect they were high on khat, the local stimulant, but more by luck than by judgement they bore us into the centre of what had once been a city – by then a maze of shuttered ruins.

They took one serious wrong turn, driving straight into a wide boulevard full of crazy militias, all mounted on garish, rusted, Japanese pick-up trucks, each with its machine gun and crew of headbanded, dead-eyed killers. All wore bandoliers made of large-calibre bullets. They looked like heavily-armed rock stars.

Luckily they were preparing to leave, as a US Marine invasion was expected at any minute (I had gone there to observe this mad event, which would lead in the end to the wretched Western defeat depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down). And so they did not notice my panic-stricken white face peering at them goggle-eyed from the back of the flatulent little car.

‘So this is what death looks like’, I thought to myself rather unoriginally, gibbering slightly. We turned and fled, and by a series of happy accidents, I was allowed, if not exactly welcomed, into the small fortress occupied by a German TV crew who had come a bit better prepared than we were.

A young militiaman, part of a factional group fighting during the civil war of 1992, strikes an intimidating pose

Boys play football in the street, seen from the window or an armoured car last month in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia

A private security officer stands at a lookout point on the edge of a private beach south of Mogadishu last month

They were properly equipped for the end of civilisation. They had a generator, a water filtering plant, a satellite telephone that worked, and some grown-up armed guards. They looked pityingly at us but shared their camel stew and let us sleep on their concrete floor.

I fell asleep to the sound of gunfire, and of screams in the middle distance, emitted by people who had not been lucky like me.

I could not have had a more basic introduction to the essentials of civilisation. In a few short hours, since I stepped blinking off the plane and into the Bronze Age, I had been living in a place deprived of law, order, electricity, water, food and modern communications. It was like Doctor Who’s Time Travel, but without a Tardis to go back to, a sonic screwdriver or all the other wheezes the Doctor uses to keep peril and chaos away.

If any of those gangsters had taken it into his head to open fire on us, that would have been that. It might have taken weeks for news of my fate to get back to England, if ever. When I finally got through to my then newspaper’s London office on a satellite phone, a bemused person responded to my suggestion that we leave immediately, by asking vaguely: ‘Can’t you go to the British Embassy for help?’ 

At that time (December 1992) that embassy had been closed for nearly two years, something the Foreign Office rarely does but on this occasion thought wise. I performed a major feat of self-restraint, and explained gently that this was not an option. We did in fact get out, running out of cash to pay our bodyguards a few minutes before we escaped.

Soon after I got home, I saw some photographs of Mogadishu in the 1950s. They showed a sophisticated city, with pavement cafes, white-gloved policemen directing opulent motor cars down a broad boulevard, which looked worryingly like the muddy, rubble-strewn desolation where I had met the gangsters.

In the 1950s Mogadishu was a busy capital with smart buildings and modern services like the Roma Bank

There are concerns of a jihadist resurgence in Somalia amid growing attacks by the militant group Al-Shabaab, which has been fighting the government for nearly 20 years and controls swathes of the southern and central parts of the country

The lesson has never left me. It was reinforced when, some years later, I saw what happened to Baghdad after the US invasion. Electricity stopped. The pleasant suburban streets became places of fear as darkness fell. Citizens took up position in their porches and let off bursts of sub-machine-gun fire if they thought they detected thieves, kidnappers or other marauders. And they were not imagining things. Kidnap, especially, became a thriving industry in those times.

Civilisation is terribly precarious, a thin crust on top of a jealous, powerful chaos, as ready to break out as weeds are to infest and choke a well-tended garden as soon as its owner ceases to care for it. In Spain and Portugal this week, people were given an unpalatable foretaste of this, as supermarket shelves were stripped of essentials and long queues formed at cash machines in the darkness.

In any place I visit, I can now easily visualise how it would look after a decade of civil war, or after many years of repeated power failure or cyber-attacks.

Take a look at your own city and see how its delicate, expensive and vital infrastructure, which has often taken years to build, lies open and vulnerable to terrorists, hackers, saboteurs, hybrid-warfare experts, cheap drones and missiles. We have built a society that is astonishingly dependent on order, while doing very little to ensure that order thrives, at home or abroad. This is even more so since we became so utterly reliant on computers.

Some of you may have seen the terrifying 2011 film Contagion, in which a virus far more deadly than Covid spreads across then world. I suspect that it was too horrible to be a big success, especially the scenes showing a prosperous suburb descending with amazing speed into kill-or-be-killed savagery.

Of course there is no guaranteed way of protecting ourselves against these sorts of disorder. But the withdrawal of the police from the streets, the decay of an accepted morality and of manners, the decay of neighbourliness, all mean that if the blow falls, we shall fare worse. 

Our national enthusiasm for entangling ourselves in far off wars would dwindle fast if the jingoes involved had ever seen what such wars do to people like them, where they to happen. What if, eventually, all our meddling comes back to haunt us, and we are ourselves a war-zone, providing amusing fiery film clips for Chinese TV watchers and internet-surfers? One thing you may be sure of is that cash will come in very handy indeed.