Seattle was a crazy place last week. This laid-back port city on the Pacific, noted for its Starbucks coffee shops, Boeing planes and Microsoft millionaires, turned into a madhouse of rioting, street demonstrations, police firing off tear gas.
And then there were the curfews.
I was interviewing our Minister for Trade, Tom Kitt, in his Sheraton Hotel suite on the 28th floor when the hotel intercom boomed out a warning that everyone had to be off the streets from 7 p.m. until sunrise. Hotel guests would be "locked down" during curfew.
Our interview took place against a background of explosions in the streets while the TV set, with sound turned down, showed amazing pictures of riot squads in black Darth Vader body armour lumbering around with huge batons and firing flash grenades and tear gas.
As I left, I told the Minister he would be my excuse if I failed to beat the curfew and had to account for myself. He smiled faintly.
It was partly his fault, of course, that Seattle had been turned into a sleepless, crazy city. By turning up with representatives from 134 other countries for the WTO summit, our Minister had helped attract protesters from around the world as well as the US who want to save whales, help the Third World, ban "Frankenstein food", rescue endangered turtles, preserve forests and of course put a stop to the WTO's gallop.
The WTO is the World Trade Organisation, which our own Peter Sutherland helped to set up, but he wisely did not show up in Seattle to confront the men and women decked out as turtles or butterflies. For them, the WTO is the villain based in Geneva which makes rules that favour "corporate greed" over saving Mother Earth.
The WTO summit had become a magnet for every kind of protester. Many of them had come early to "train" how to disrupt the dark-suited WTO delegates with their briefcases and get themselves arrested.
For some reason Seattle's Mayor Paul Schell and Police Chief Norm Stamper were confident they could handle whatever the environmentalists could throw at them, as well as control the march by 50,000 trade unionists.
As I headed for my hotel like Cinderella trying to get home before the clock struck midnight, through streets where there was still the whiff of tear gas and exhausted police sat on pavements holding their fourfoot staves, it brought back memories of the Bogside in August 1969 and Paris in May 1968 when I also trusted to a press pass to get though police lines as the rebellious students took a break from heaving cobblestones and manning the barricades.
But the French riot police had been cracking skulls and blood was running in the streets. The Seattle police were remarkably restrained and used their batons mainly to shove protesters on their way as they tried to block off the site of the summit.
By the second day of street demonstrations, the police had changed tactics after widespread criticism of how they had let a small group of masked anarchists rampage through the business district smashing windows and spraying graffiti about how property is evil.
This time over 400 anti-WTO protesters sitting peacefully in the roadways in the "no protest" zone were swiftly handcuffed with plastic strips and dragged off to buses which transported them to a former naval prison. The "anarchists", meanwhile, gave an interview to the New York Times from their abandoned warehouse headquarters.
Journalists who had come to report on the tedious minutiae of trade negotiations found themselves running around the streets of Seattle and the WTO delegates tried to dodge the protesters to get to their meetings.
By the time curfew hour came the famous Seattle restaurants were dark and their staffs headed for their homes.
The Seattle press had sneered at the visiting media getting their "boxes of freebies" from the WTO organisers. The box had smoked salmon, biscuits, fruit and nuts, a bar of chocolate, mini-bottles of cider and white wine, an umbrella and a guide book to Seattle.
"Some journalists either refused the gift box - it is graft, after all," sniffed Helen Jung of the Seattle Times, "or donated the contents to homeless people or others. But many more were taking it with them."
Well, that box of goodies kept this and other journalists going through the long nights of curfew in a hotel with no restaurant or bar.
While munching chocolate and drinking cider, non-alcoholic of course, we could read in our guide books about "the abundance of good restaurants" and the "vast selection of ethnic dining". Outside the sirens wailed and helicopters clattered in the night sky. The letter with my box of goodies from the Seattle Host Organisation, chaired by Bill Gates of Microsoft, enthuses that "our city is also a great place to conduct international business and the perfect place to begin the World Trade Organisation's `SEATTLE ROUND' ".
Pity about the curfew, Bill.