Ed Milliband he aint

I just had lunch with the leader of the opposition, Nawshirwan Mistefa. I'm a bit too overwhelmed to say anything else.

He is a bit scary. I thought he just didn't know enough English to understand my questions, but it turns out staring at people who have just spoken, and so allowing an uncomfortable silence to develop, is his specialty.

But it was incredibly kind of him to give his time to a random foreign researcher, and he answered my questions thoughtfully (albeit up to a point). He also gave us beautiful Iraqi-style fish - that is, grilled over a flame which is a metre away, with rice and tomatoes and onions; lovely.

With tea, I interviewed his son, Nma, who grew up in South London and has the accent to prove it but was wearing traditional Kurdish dress and says this is definitely his home. What does he miss? The services: the internet doesn't cut out regularly, and nor does the electricity...we're good at something in the UK. And that reminds me - people compare the Brits favourably to the US colonisers: apparently we left them with roads, schools, a justice system and hospitals, but what have the Americans left? Broken roads and fast food. I don't mention that, along with the infrastructure, we left them an artificial and unstable country which led to the present mess...

Suli

I'm in a lovely hotel with wifi and proper aircon, and today's been awesome so all is good. First thing this morning, a day and even possibly a night at the Makhmur camp in Erbil (Thursday/Friday) was set up by a "negotiator" (how Jack Bauer is that? I wasn't even allowed to know his name). After a 4 hour journey to get here (Sulaymania, Kurdistan's second city), I met and interviewed two members of the incredible Hardi family: sons of the strongly nationalistic poet Ahmad Hardi, Asos is the founder and general director of Awena newspaper (winning the Jibran Freedom of Press award in Beirut in 2009), and Rebin is a political activist who was recently kidnapped after his prominent role in the Arab Spring-inspired demonstrations in Suli. He's pretty famous (the Elvis Presley of Suli, according to Hoshang), as I can tell by the amount of people approaching him in cafes. (He's quit smoking, which means that everyone who recognises him and plenty who don't get asked for a cigarette.) They are both very jolly despite their hard-bitten realism about the present situation in Kurdistan, of which more later.

Tomorrow I'm meeting another member of the Hardi family - the director of a women's rights NGO; the leader of the opposition (I'm quite scared by that one), two female students and two male so Suli in general is half way to fixing my interview stats and Friday will make the whole thing a success - if the negotiator does his thing. And right now the room is cold enough to snuggle into a duvet which feels like the ultimate luxury.