There’s nothing like getting your boots on the ground. If you’re a writer or journalist chasing a difficult story, there’s no substitute for dropping what you’re doing, telling your wife or husband that you love her or him and will return with all sorts of exotic, possibly sparkling, presents, flying out there and getting on with it.

Hats off, then, to the 27-year-old Jay Bahadur, who quit his job in market research in 2008, just as the Somali pirates story was commanding the world’s attention, and made his slightly tortuous way into Somalia to research the story for himself. Although six weeks in Garowe, the