Minneapolis. I don't know about you, but when I think of Minneapolis (and granted, it's not often) I imagine somewhere quite westerly within the whole US of A scheme of things. Today I am finding out quite how wrong I am. It's not in the west. It's not even in the middle. Look at a map. It's in the east.
While a lot of people seemed shocked to hear the news last week that Chris Moyles was stepping down from his breakfast show on BBC Radio 1 to join the arena tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, I had anticipated that this would be the case from the moment he was announced in the cast.
At a women's shelter I saw some of the consequences of Afghanistan's ingrained patriarchy. I talked to a teenage girl married off to a 70-year-old man who then suffered sustained beatings at the hands of the man's family. I also heard from a young widow who explained how she'd escaped her father-in-law who wanted to force her into marriage after her first husband had died.