Since I treat Pakistan as more or less a domestic sector, this was my first trip abroad after almost a decade. I'd forgotten one has to exercise caution during visa interviews. The officer at the British High Commission looked at me with some suspicion and barely-concealed hostility, and asked if I was married or divorced. Excited at my new-found freedom, I blurted out that I belonged to the latter category and was immediately perceived as a spouse hunter. I tried convincing him that one had travelled the globe as a divorced woman before, that marriage was purely incidental in my life and I wasn't the kind of woman who sought marriage as a career. But to no avail. Eventually, it was some business faxes that did it. Quite obviously, my hard-earned notoriety hasn't reached English shores. So plans to spend an unexciting but soulful millennium eve at home holding my seven-year-old son's hand were disrupted and away to London it was. There, I found myself at a champagne-swilling penthouse bash watching the Thames turn into a river of fire as spectacular bursts of coloured stardust lit up the skies. Well, how do you make God laugh - tell him your plans! Hope he enjoyed the joke as much as I eventually did.