No, I didn’t know either. But Bhaktipur is the Birmingham of Nepal. I visited in May 2015 shortly after the earthquakes that caused huge devastation in parts of the country, to report on The Salvation Army’s emergency disaster response.

We visited a large tent city, managed by The Salvation Army in conjunction with other aid agencies and then headed into the centre to see why people had had to leave their homes. The air was still full of chokingly thick dust, even a week or so after the main quake. The damage was immense, with buildings at disturbingly odd angles and nothing quite joining up in the way townscapes usually do. (The main dual carriageway into the city had developed a peculiar split level effect, which vertically separated the east- and westbound traffic by more than a metre.)

But it was as we returned to our vehicle that the danger became very real. We had just walked along an innocuous-looking pathway and paused to breathe. Suddenly, there was an enormous clatter. We turned round to see a large section of roofing had fallen off the building we had just sauntered past and was now completely blocking the pathway. Twenty seconds difference, and we could have been in big trouble.

Such peril has, thankfully, not been the norm in my work. But it very much is for the International Emergency Services team, to whom I doff my (hard) hat this morning. And, hopefully, having experienced something of the horror myself, albeit in a limited sense – I still had a home to return to – it has improved my empathy for people affected by crises of all kinds, as well as improving my ability to write coherently about challenging situations.

Thank you Damaris and team.