At the bus stop last night a Guardian reader whom I didn't know felt moved to share her deepest fear. Her daughter works for a government aid team, currently in Afghanistan.
So on a warm summer's evening in tranquil west London one widow's thoughts were focused on random bombs in distant Kabul. What can one do in that situation?
Just listen and sympathise, I think. The Daily Mail has today plastered the anger of one dead soldier's mother – "the politicians haven't got a clue" – all over page one, which does no one much good. The pain is real enough – the Guardian printed her complaints too on an inside page – but the mother's reaction is not typical of service families.
But as the death and injury rate among British forces in Afghanistan since 2001 touches the 1,000 mark – 204 dead, 245 of the 800 injured "seriously" or "very seriously" so – neither she nor the woman at the bus stop are alone. The newspapers and news bulletins are full of anguish, both personal and strategic, again this morning as Afghans prepare to vote on Thursday.
Yet normal life here goes on. The football season starts, Jessica Ennis wins the Heptathlon gold medal at the Berlin Games, we complain about the weather and the traffic. Prince Charles causes trouble over buildings he doesn't like.
Since the last proper battle was fought in England at Sedgemoor in Somerset as long ago as 1685 (in Scotland's case in 1746 at Culloden) the contrast between tranquillity and insecurity is reinforced by a lack of shared experience.
Except in Northern Ireland and among those old enough to remember the Blitz (the first V2 rocket landed barely a mile from my west London bus stop in 1944) few British civilians can remember the fear of bombs and battle. It all seems far away. So did the Flanders trenches in 1914-18, though when the wind was right people in Kent could hear the sound of the big guns.
So what do we do? My sense of it is that, if we support the strategy that underpins the British and allied presence there then we must bear the consequences – death and injury included – provided always that the troops are provided with all necessary kit by the taxpayer, properly looked after too if they come home minus a limb or two. It costs money.
If we don't support the strategy – 57% didn't in a Sky News poll this week – we should also be prepared to accept whatever the consequences of withdrawal turn out to be. That means more terrorism, more drugs, a greater threat to the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan, according to the governments in London and Washington.
Even if you believe it – I'm willing to take the argument seriously – it's not at all clear that propping up the corrupt and inefficient Karzai government via active military intervention is likely to achieve the best result, in one year or even the 40 years suggested this week.
The return from exile in Turkey of the brutal Uzbek military warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum to campaign for Karzai in his home province is hardly reassuring. Nor are newly enacted laws that further restrict the rights of women, a key test of modernity in any society. The Taliban are not the only reactionaries in Afghanistan.
Yet realism requires outsiders to accept that lasting change usually comes only slowly. The BBC's balanced coverage today includes an interview with a brave female teacher, back home in (I think) Sangin – held at great cost by British forces – and glad to be there, teaching girls again.
My hunch remains that we stick it out for a while and see what happens, despite the glaring fact – widely repeated these past few days – that the Afghans have been seeing off invaders since Alexander the Great passed that way 23 centuries ago. In the current "Afghan special" issue of the New Statesman, Victor Sebestyen mournfully describes Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to extract the Soviet Union from its own "bleeding wound" there – and do so with dignity. He failed: the USSR fell too. It makes grim reading.
The west is not at that crossroads yet; neither are the Afghans. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's gripping reports from behind the Taliban masked-and-bearded lines in this week's Guardian illustrate what it's about – more eloquently than his Taliban interviewees intended.
And a note of perspective as more coffins are flown home. Every death of a bright young man or woman on active military service matters, to society as well as their families. But they are all volunteers, mostly proud to be there sharing the risks with their mates. They only hope the politicians are right when they tell us all it's worth it.
But 204 deaths remains a modest toll. How many British servicemen died on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916? Twenty thousand, plus 40,000 wounded. How many people will die on Britain's roads this year? Around 2,700. How many of cancer? More than 100,000.
How many of these deaths were avoidable? You tell me. It's little consolation to the unlucky ones, but it is a proper context.
