Tunes spilled out of the practice rooms at Baghdad College of Music and Dance. Students carrying clarinets and flutes, cellos and violins walked the corridors. A very small boy was almost hidden behind a French horn.
In one room a group was rehearsing Haydn's Toy Symphony, or (the composer’s name for it in German) the Symphony for Children. In another, 14-year-old Frand Nashat was slogging away at his trumpet scales and practicing a tango, La Cumparsita. His older sister Raniya was also at the school, learning the horn.
Frand was nine years old when the Iraq war began in 2003.
"When I woke up in the morning," he told me in confident English, "every morning I heard the sound of guns shooting and artillery coming down and planes throwing bombs."
Five years on from those days, how was his life?
"We stay in the house doing nothing. So all I do is just playing on the computer, or my trumpet, or watch TV, or do my homework. That's it."
What would he like to do?
"I want to play football, a lot of football 'cos since I've been a child when Iraq was invasioned I didn't play ball outside ever. Ever. And the second thing I want to do when I go out is ride a bicycle because I didn't ride a bicycle since nearly five years."
Frand's parents wouldn't let him go out because - as he put it - "Maybe there is a chance a car come with a heavy machine gun and shoot all the people for no reason."
I asked him if he'd seen anything like that.
His answer, delivered without emotion, was another example of how violence had been normalised.
"Yes, one time they killed my uncle. Yes. He was in the street with his friend and they come and they call his name and they took him down."
As if anticipating my next question, Frand said this:
"I don't want to leave Iraq because it's my country and I was raised here and I have all my friends in it but I want to go out of my country to see the people and their traditions and know what they're doing with their lives because our life, you know, is not normal."
The next time I met Frand, he was fifteen, he was taller, still learning trumpet, and he was getting out to play football. He told me he felt much safer, and was reassured by all the checkpoints.
We were chatting as his mother Bushra (her name means Good News) was preparing a sumptuous lunch for their BBC visitors - cameraman, interpreter, security adviser and me. We ate what Bushra described as 'meatloaf pizza' (lakhma bajeen, minced lamb on a dough base), vegetable biriyani, andIraqi flat bread, lamb kebab, and salad.
When our conversation turned to security in Iraq, she agreed with Frand that it was much better - but only better relative to six years of murders, explosions, kidnappings, sectarian violence and the merciless insurgency:
"It's much better because in the past it was zero. It has improved, but it is still not very good - and not good enough."
Electricity was certainly not good enough. There was none during most of our visit (Bushra was cooking with bottled gas), and she said she had to do most of the household washing by hand. The family also avoided opening the fridge unless the power was on - a miserable restriction in summer when the temperature was often 40 or 50 degrees Celsius (over 100°F.)
There were intense debates at this time (2009) about how long American forces should remain in Iraq. Bushra was in no doubt that they should stay:
"I don't feel comfortable about the Americans leaving - I think they make it safer here."
And when I asked her if she had confidence in her own government, she replied partly in French - with an waggle of one hand and a warm chuckle:
"Comme ci, comme ça, half and half." Then she added, "But I believe in God. If something happens, it happens. It is destiny."
Another World
Frand and his sister Raniya auditioned for the newly formed National Youth Orchestra of Iraq.
In August 2010 the orchestra manager announced that it would soon be giving its first public concert to paying customers - in the far north of the country, in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Irresistible story. But I'd have to pitch it, and I'd need finance - to fly from Baghdad to Erbil, with a cameraman, a producer and an interpreter, as well as meals and two nights in a hotel. I estimated the cost at $2,000 - modest compared with most TV budgets.
Despite my bargain proposal the BBC's Newsgathering ‘film unit’ weren't interested.
So I passed the hat around, by phone and by email. Rupert Allman, then editor of the BBC Radio Four Broadcasting House news magazine programme, stumped up $500. And the head of BBC Arabic Brenda Griffiths quickly saw the potential of the story and agreed to fund the $1,500 balance - but on one condition; that I would find a second story in Kurdistan, and submit both for TV and radio in English and in Arabic.
She got them all, on time and on budget.
The journey itself provided some of the material for the second story that I’d agreed to find.
In those days a greater challenge than many of the news events we had to cover was the twenty kilometre (12 mile) drive from the city centre to Baghdad International Airport. To ensure that no one ever got onto a plane with a bomb (or a gun or a knife), this short distance had become a stressful and time-consuming obstacle course of security checkpoints, concrete chicanes and watchtowers.
The day we set off for the airport to fly to Erbil it took us more than two hours to travel that short distance and reach the entrance to the terminal building.
First there was a corridor of concrete anti-blast walls; we had to stop at the entrance to it, hold a laminated security pass out of the window, wait while an American soldier in a watchtower about fifty metres ahead scrutinised it through hefty binoculars, wait for him to flash a green light, and only then move forward - slowly - past several signs in Arabic and in English that warned "Deadly Force Authorised."
There was then several more checks:
· Get out, open all the doors and windows and bonnet and boot, and stand back while a dog walks around the car - sniffing for explosives.
Drive on.
· Remove bags from vehicle and put them through an x-ray security scanner.
Drive on.
· Place bags on the ground between two concrete anti-blast walls. Stand back while another dog sniffs all the bags. Take bags to the entrance of the airport building.
· Put bags through a scanner and walk through a metal detector.
· Put bags through another scanner before getting to the check-in desks.
· Scan hand luggage between check-in and departure lounge.
· Scan hand-luggage again before going through departure gate to plane.
· Checked-in luggage is laid out on the tarmac before being loaded onto the plane. Identify bags (any bags not identified will be left behind and destroyed).
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Iraqi Airways we welcome you on board this Boeing 737 aircraft bound to Erbil."
After take-off, the summer heat-haze was too thick for views of anything more than the faint outlines of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers snaking down from the north.
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen we have just at landed at Erbil International airport. The outside temperature is 45°C."
In the departure lounge at Baghdad International, sparrows had been hopping about on torn carpets searching for dropped crumbs. At Erbil International there were clean, polished floors and an espresso coffee bar called Barista, with free internet. The arrivals board displayed flights from Vienna, Stockholm, Malmö, Frankfurt, Istanbul and Dubai.
And a new Erbil airport was under construction, with a smart modern terminal and a runway nearly five kilometres long (the main runway at Heathrow west of London is less than four kilometres long).
Compared to rundown, war-scarred, dusty, dirty, traffic-clogged, concrete-walled Baghdad, Erbil felt like a different country. There were clean, wide, well-maintained four-lane highways, functioning traffic lights, fast moving traffic, pedestrian bridges with electric escalators, and - joy of joys - no checkpoints.
This was the essence of the second story that I would submit in order to fulfill the $1,500 funding condition stipulated by BBC Arabic; the contrast between Baghdad and safe and confident Erbil.
And it was easy to find the 'visuals' for it - a four thousand year old citadel (known as the Qala) with thirty-metre-high walls rises above the city centre. The Qala is a UNESCO World Heritage site and contains the Mullah Afandi mosque with turquoise and yellow tile work on its ancient minaret. Parts of the mosque are believed to be more than a thousand years old.
Children played around fountains in the main square below the Citadel and families sat on benches enjoying the relative cool of the evening. A balloon seller wandered through the crowd. A man with an ornate brass urn strapped to his back deftly dispensed tamarind juice from a long narrow spout and into small cups. Five women wearing different coloured hijab head-scarves took a group selfie.
I chatted with Sarhan Azizi, taking a break from supervising his doner kebab take-away business. He told me that many of his customers were Baghdadis who had chosen Erbil as a place where they could come on holiday and feel safe. His English was good enough for an interview, and he happily repeated his responses in Arabic for my bilingual brief.
On another bench I struck up a conversation with a smartly dressed businessman from Turkey who was in Erbil seeking contracts for a construction company. I interviewed him in English - BBC Arabic could translate and subtitle it.
Sitting in a public place without the background anxiety which was always more or less present in Baghdad was a welcome relief. I could walk about without having to be accompanied by a security adviser. I waited in line for ice cream, and wandered through the old covered market - the Souk - with its corrugated iron roof and shafts of sunlight slanting through the dust.
This was autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, part of Iraq but at the same time ploughing its own fertile furrow. There were smart Western-style petrol stations with clean forecourts and convenience stores, and no queues for fuel. There was a vast modern shopping mall - the Majidi mall, with Burger King, Mango, Levi's and Adidas stores, a ten-pin bowling alley, and glass lifts gliding up and down. This was all clear evidence of significant investment, development, progress - and confidence.
Sitting outside Pepe's Pizza in the Majidi mall, I met Zaheda Assed - an English teacher from Baghdad on holiday with her children:
"Erbil is a very civilised city," she enthused, "no car bombs, no explosions, nothing like that. I like it! I like it too much!"
As we walked and drove around, one of my Iraqi colleagues became tearful and resentful at this startling contrast with his bombed and battered home town Baghdad.
An Iraqi Called Lance Conway
The National Youth Orchestra of Iraq was formed in 2009 at a two-week music camp in the Kurdish Iraqi town of Suleimaniyah. Professional tutors came from Germany, the UK and the USA, and a conductor from Scotland, Paul MacAlindin.
The orchestra was created by Zuhal Soltan, a Baghdad music student who was seventeen years old at the time. She told me the idea just came to her "from nowhere, just like that."
She had already been accepted into the National Iraqi Symphony Orchestra, and was inspired by the respect that its seventy players showed for each other, "So I felt that if people of Iraq could see this form of unity in the younger generation, it could provide a lot of hope."
Her simple idea was to use music as a catalyst for peace, and was inspired in part by Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in which Palestinians and Jews play together.
At the first music camp, Zuhal recalled, "new musicians came from Arab parts of Iraq and Kurdish parts of Iraq and for the first few days they all kept to themselves in cliques - not really mixing together at all. Four days later they were dancing together in the bus."
Horn player Raniya Nashat particularly appreciated that:
"The greatest thing is that we met Kurdish people and played music with them. I had never done that in my life before and it was wonderful finding out what great musicians - and how lovely - they are."
Raniya and Frand’s years of hard work at music school had paid off - they were both in the youth orchestra now, with Frand as one of the trumpet players. Zuhal Sultan had the original idea for the orchestra but it might not have happened without the committed determination of conductor Paul MacAlindin.
This turning point in his life came as he was eating fish-and-chips at his favourite Glasgow pub one day; an article in the Glasgow Herald caught his eye - with the headline: Search for UK Maestro to Help Create an Orchestra in Iraq. He contacted Zuhal and got the gig.
But Paul believes it had actually come together so successfully "because people wanted it so badly; many of the musicians were self taught, many of them had no access to top-quality teaching, many of them had never played in any form of musical group of any kind."
There were hundreds of applicants for auditions to join the orchestra. Iraq then was not safe enough to be able to travel hundreds of miles with a cello or double bass or a harp or a horn, and attend an audition in person. So Paul auditioned applicants online, watching and listening to their audition pieces on YouTube.
The orchestra's Erbil concert featured Beethoven's 1st Symphony, Mendelssohn's violin concerto, and Heartbeat of Baghdad by Iraqi composer Lance Conway.
The orchestra's leader, Armenian Iraqi and superb violinist Annie Melconian, described Heartbeat of Baghdad as "wistful and bittersweet at first, and later all the instruments get louder reflecting the torment and the troubles in Iraq over the past seven years."
But towards the end, she told me, "there's resolution, hope and peace."
The composer of Heartbeat of Baghdad, Lance Conway, explained that the work was in part about the history of the capital "when it was the big library for the world when people came to Baghdad to learn, and then [it's about] how the city's heartbeat survived all our wars and troubles."
But how did this Iraqi from Baghdad come to have the Anglo-Irish name Lance Conway?
His grandfather was an Irishman who fought for the British Empire against the Ottoman Empire in Mesopotamia during the first world war. There he met a girl from Baghdad. They married, and he stayed in the city and became an Iraqi citizen. The Celtic surname endured, and Lance is an abbreviation of his grandfather's first name Lancelot.
The Hurt Locker
"We're going on a mission! Everybody get back! Go! Go! Go!" is from Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker, which was set in Baghdad (but mostly filmed in Amman in Jordan). It was released in the summer of 2010. It stars Jeremy Renner as an explosives expert who dons a cumbersome bomb-resistant suit and helmet to defuse unexploded ordnance.
One of my BBC editors in London emailed me to ask if there was any chance I could find the real Hurt Locker team. I put a request in to the US military press office. They agreed immediately and set up a meeting with the bomb disposal crew at Forward Operating Base Prosperity in the Baghdad Green Zone.
This was the same team that had loaned the bomb suit for Renner to wear, and they'd all seen the film. Captain Jason Stewart told me it was good story and that it accurately conveyed the reality of their work.
The bomb-disposal robot in the film is also authentic. It's called 'Talon'. The first thing they do when there's a suspected unexploded bomb is send Talon in to inspect it with its cameras. But unlike the ferocious dog in Black Mirror, Talon can't run: it has tracks, not legs.
Lieutenant Sam Dimmick operated it for us, steering it with a joystick on a console and using a dummy mortar shell for the demonstration. There are four screens, one for each of Talon's cameras. It has bright spotlights for night-time work, and at the end of its articulated arm there’s a claw. When Talon reached the shell, it's arm bowed down towards it, grasped it gently with its claw, lifted it, and moved it away.
Sgt. Dimmick said it took him a while to get used to the jerky movements of the robotic limb, which is not able to move gracefully like a human arm.
At the time, these robots cost $170,000 each. Sixteen had already been delivered to the Iraqi police, and another thirty-four were on order. The Iraqi Talon operators were trained by Captain Stewart and his team; he said his student robot drivers were "disciplined, capable and very professional - very educated." He believed that having robots available in Iraq had already saved lives.
Sometimes the human operators can't use a robot and must instead climb into the huge green bomb suit - for instance when the wiring around an unexploded device is too complex for Talon's claws to unstitch and disconnect.
The suit is made of bullet-resistant and shrapnel-resistant Kevlar. With its unwieldy green helmet and blast-proof visor the wearer resembles a cross between an astronaut and a beekeeper.
This line from The Hurt Locker is melodramatic, but authentic:
"Every time you suit up, you realise it's life or death. You roll the dice and you deal with it."
The suit doesn't guarantee survival; it wouldn't protect a bomb disposal technician if the device exploded while they were trying to defuse it, but it is intended to provide maximum protection while walking towards or away from the target. The suit is also fire-resistant, and has a quick-release handle for swift removal.
The team at FOB Prosperity were so positive and enthusiastic in their attitude that I found myself asking, "You love this work don't you?"
"Yeah. Yeah!" Pause. "Once you've finished and you know you're alive."