Libya...Gaddafi... and.. "The Lavender Scented Swimming Pool."

This was the name of the diplomatic posting in Malta, as described by the then British Ambassador.

We had got together to rehearse a concert in the beautiful gem of an opera house, The Teatro Manoel, the earliest in Europe, built in 1731, and preceeding the San Carlo in Napoli. The island of Gozo just across the water, has two opera houses, one on each side of the street.

Brian Hitch our Ambassador, was a very good pianist indeed and we worked hard to prepare a Poppy Day programme for the veterans, in commemoration of the island's rescue during the war by one of our last warships.

So for the second half I asked for a bar stool and a microphone and we cruised through Begin the Beguine, Coward's Nina from Argentina along with Cole Porter and Gershwin, and of course.... Summertime.

I had to leave and returned in October for the concert, but I noticed that some things had changed meanwhile at the Embassy.

Brian and Margot had looked after me in Munich and I was always aware of the understated care while in the vicinity of our Embassies. However, having arrived with a huge salmon and my usual hats only to find that none would fit into the armoured Jaguar, small enough to negociate the narrow streets of Valletta, I was struck by the watchmen patrolling all night with torches in the garden and more significantly, the iron shutters which rolled down over all the windows, and the alarms now directly through to the police.

This all seemed a bit excessive for "the lavender-scented swimming pool" scenario which Brian had described, and he was learning Maltese and Arabic to keep in trim.

We played two concerts in the Manoel and later when he had moved on to Oxford University, I asked him what "all that extra security was about?"

"Oh!" he said. "Between your first and second visits, the Scottish police descended on us to investigate the Lockerbie bombing and my office was overun with them."

It seems that the bomb had been put on a plane in Malta, in a suitcase containing clothes from Marks and Spencer, and that the origin was Libya.

The Embassy was on red alert for 6 months and I hadn't known it.