Facebook continues to block my promotions and I’m beginning to think I must have been blacklisted. Ironically, Facebook kept me sane in Afghanistan, now it’s driving me nuts.

“Being a man of upper middle age, I hadn’t really got the point of Facebook before Afghanistan. Now it had become a lifeline to a world without Hesco. A world where people, in the normal course of events, were not routinely and painstakingly planning to kill each other.

Instead they were posting pictures of the places they’d visited at the weekend, of their kids winning prizes at school, or even of the maddening commute to work they’d endured on Monday morning.

Sitting down at one of the battered and bruised keyboards I enjoyed my allotted 30 minutes of internet time, living vicariously through the delicious morsels of normality that my friends and family served up from all over the globe. With a like, comment or share, I was able to join them in that moment, and in doing so let them know I was alive and well.

Facebook now made perfect sense but, ironically, it could not bring me news of my own family. Unfriended by Jane, I assume to avoid sharing with me any potentially embarrassing pictures of her new life with her new partner, she had also denied me further news of Harry and Alfie.”

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.