'Remember to be cheerful in case you die,' warns the yellow post-it note stuck to the handset of the satellite phone. Normally, the hastily penned reminder would seem morbid, melodramatic - but normal went out the window a long time ago. Normal took a long look at Baghdad's dusty, dangerous streets, Humvees full of sweating, frightened young men and grubby markets where buying a few over-ripe tomatoes could be a life or death experience, then headed west, hightailing it over the Tigris and across 400 miles of scrubby yellow-grey desert to the border with Jordan.

Normal crossed through the razor wire no-man's-land and kept going half way around the world before finally taking refuge in a lounge room in suburban Sydney, where it sat down on the couch with cold beer in hand and switched on the seven o'clock news. Here, about as far away as it could get from Baghdad, it began to feel once more like its old self. From here it felt relaxed enough to watch the latest news on yet another suicide bombing in Baghdad, watch the red-haired woman report on the growing casualties, and still feel safe. And sound. And normal.

 It tried to forget the post-it note; to forget that in Baghdad it could almost be considered normal to remind yourself to be cheerful in case you die. I don't consider the note abnormal. For me it's realistic, prudent even. It's normal to find myself standing on a rooftop overlooking the Iraqi capital, about to 'go live'. With temperatures well over 120 degrees, it's normal to worry if the camera will show perspiration beading on my forehead or pooling in the hollow at the base of my neck. It's normal to worry if some critic back home will complain I look too sweaty or, more likely, one of the desk-bound presenters will email terse instructions to apply more hair spray. Never mind the blistering heat, the howling desert wind, the brain-frying sun. 

Just a year ago I was a housewife in Baghdad, desperate to fill empty hours in an echoing home. Now it's normal to worry about stray bullets and whether I should have worn my flak jacket, as I tell folks back home about the latest wave of death and mayhem.

 Last night I scrawled the bizarre reminder, red ink on a yellow square, in case the unthinkable, but altogether possible, happens. It was a couple of hours after a phone call from my husband, Geoff. He was more than 600 miles away in a darkened hotel room in the Jordanian capital, Amman, with fear wrapping its icy arms tight around him. The tinny satellite connection had a second-long delay and Geoff seemed so distant, like a voice from the past, as he begged me to leave Baghdad.

I had to sign off in a hurry. There was precious little time for words of love, at midnight, with a never-ending stream of casualties to report back to Australia, disappearing into the ravenous craw of news bulletins on the hour every hour.

Later I fixed the post-it note to the sat-phone, knowing soon I would be back under Baghdad's merciless sun, clutching the barrel of a microphone, trying to make sense of the chaos and the mounting body count. I tried to forget the miserable phone call, to ignore the gunfire outside my window. I tried to remember when death and terror weren't a normal part of life, when I knew who was friend and who was foe, before I became my own worst enemy.