Forget the day off and the good news. We were back in Kabul and it may as well have been Baghdad.
 A suicide bomber had completely hollowed out a bus that was carrying police trainers into a compound. Officials said more than 35 people died.
 I was being jostled by a crowd in front of the Jamuriat hospital in the centre of the Afghan capital, pressed up against an iron fence. Eighteen bodies and ten wounded patients had arrived here. Doctors had run out of room inside and were handling the wounded and the dead at a makeshift triage station in the courtyard. Ambulances were pushing through the crowd.
 Through the bars, I saw a corpse under a sheet, next to a pair of bloody shoes. All I could see of the body was his feet, with cuffs of a police uniform. A male relative was wailing into a mobile phone, being restrained and consoled by friends.
 Sundays bomb was the deadliest such strike in the Afghan capital since the Taliban fell in 2001. The attack played out the greatest fear of Afghans, that the tactics that have caused such mayhem in Iraq would be imported here.
 The Taliban claimed responsibility for a very, very successful suicide attack and announced plans for more. In four smaller suicide attacks over the past two days, they killed at least 14 other people. At the scene of one of those strikes, American troops opened fire and shot one civilian dead.
 I had finished my embed and returned to Kabul on Saturday in a Hercules military cargo plane, a solemn flight accompanied by three coffins draped with Afghan flags containing the bodies of Afghan soldiers killed in the south.
 I had missed my flight back to London, but was initially secretly glad. It would mean two extra days in Kabul. Local resident Masood had offered to host me in the Panjsher valley for a barbecue, and I was looking forward to a relaxing day in that beautiful mountain valley, breathing fresh air and eating roast goat by the river.
 I also wanted to get there to write a “good news” story. Whatever else has happened over the past five years, the Panjsher and neighbouring Salang valleys are areas that have dramatically improved since the fall of the Taliban. The valleys had been cut-off from the capital by an impenetrable frontline during the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, and when I first visited them they were packed with desperately poor refugees, many hungry. Today, Masood explained to me, life in those valleys is much easier, with a newly paved road allowing people to bring goods to market in Kabul and move there for work. I hoped to write a simple, good story, while enjoying my own relaxing day out.
 Sunday morning I was drinking coffee in the Reuters office when I heard of the bombing. Instead of heading out into the countryside, I hit the streets of the capital to report.
 Speeding through the town, rushing to the hospital with our Kabul TV camera crew, I could see the contradictions of contemporary Kabul. We raced through a wealthy street where endless rows of enormous, brightly coloured marble-clad palaces are being built. At a nearby corner, a tiny beggar girl wiped our window with a dirty cloth.
 For now, much of Afghanistan is still at peace, or the closest thing to peace the country has seen since the 1970s. But the war in the south has escalated sharply over the past year. And the Taliban are now bringing the sort of carnage to the city streets that caused the meltdown of Iraq. At the end of our trip, I remain hopeful, just, that improvements will still come faster than the violence worsens. But Ill have to wait until my next trip for that chance to relax in Afghanistans quiet valleys.