Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 27th of June and the end of really quite a tumultuous week.

As you will know, I've been reporting all week on various degrees of chaos in the Middle East. Not least, of course, Monday night.

That extraordinary attack by Iran on Doha, on Qatar more widely, which led to the closure

of airspace and the diversion of dozens of flights and disruption for tens of thousands of passengers.

And to get a view on what is happening geopolitically in the Middle East, I thought there is no one better than

Jane Kininmont. She is the chief executive of the UNAUK. That's the United Nations Association.

She's also a co-host of the podcast Disorder, which is well worth a listen and has a long

background in international affairs,

particularly in the Middle East. So welcome, Jane. We've seen so much disruption, so much

conflict, so much bloodshed and an awful lot of havoc in international aviation in the Middle

East. So, Jane, should we simply avoid the Middle East altogether and make different

travel plans? I have to say, whenever in my 20 years of covering the Middle East, friends have said to me,

is it safe to go to X, Y or Z? I've tended to be rather wary about giving them a definite answer,

because it really depends very much on your

own views of risk, why you want to go somewhere, etc. But at any given time, there are hundreds

of thousands of Brits in the Middle East, of course, lots of people going for tourism, but also

for business, family ties, and so on. Most of the time,

everything is fine. What we tend to see in the news does give us a sense of the bad things

that happen. It doesn't show the boring stuff of everyday life, so I think that's always

worth bearing in mind whether you're thinking about the aviation

things or whether you're thinking about the terrorism that has also weighed on people's minds

over many years. But going back a week, we suddenly saw British airways canceling over a dozen

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