The sheep were making some kind of effort at grazing on mounds of sand and heaps of discarded plastic while people crouched weeding out carrier bags in plots of green. A woman in black with a stick in one hand and a donkey on a string in the other hurried slowly into Baquba town centre, in Diyala province, north of Baghdad. The letters on the board labelling the Iraqi Grain Board premises were peeled so as to look like Chinese style decorative writing, in front of a building devoid of windows.

And mud and mud and mud: three wedding dresses sparkled out front of a roadside shop, hovering above the bog like the spangles were holding them up. The writers who were taking us there asked the way to the children’s hospital, calling it by its new name, which I forget. “You mean the Saddam hospital,” was the firm reply, before directions were given. Resembling a building site more than a hospital, the hospital is bare.

The two ladies’ toilet cubicles were without water. One, a sit-down arrangement, had a tin can wedged in the bowl. The other, a hole-in-the-ground affair, was overflowing. We occupied the police office as a dressing room, the desk too low, really, for getting onto the stilts, doing our make up in the mirror on the back of a pink hairbrush borrowed from a policeman, besieged by women asking to borrow Peat’s juggling ball case for carrying presents for the kids, a man in an army uniform requesting the loan of some make-up (he was part of the show) and assorted security officers bringing large automatic rifles in and out of the room.

The new shaving foam pie routine went down well. We used it first in Hilla, a policeman being the apparent target of the pie-in-the-face that time, though in fact it goes in Peat’s face in the end. Today it was the reporter from Diyalla TV. Lots of sick kids had a good time, which is what matters, and it was good for an over-tired and somewhat burnt out clown to be cuddled and kissed by a crowd of smiling children at the end.

Mohammed’s nine-year-old daughter Farah adopted me as her friend which was great because it meant when we were taken for lunch afterwards I could run off to the playground instead of smiling nicely and trying to make polite conversation. A small donkey by the playground fence made her nearly fall off the slide by shouting loudly right behind her and I practised some trapeze tricks, upside down on the climbing frame, between pushing them all on the swings.

Baquba is generally seen as another of the hot spots to the north of Baghdad, not as wild as Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit and the small towns around them but nonetheless a bit spicy. Uzma and I went out to talk to people and found that no one wanted to talk. No, there was no resistance here. Yes, everything’s fine here in Baquba. It’s all outside of Baquba city. Objectively this is not true and the same people who were telling us Baquba was calm and peaceful were also telling us the centre was too dangerous and we should go back.

There was a fear in people’s eyes I used to see when anyone asked them about Saddam in the old days. It’s the look when they know there’s an official line and that’s what they have to tell you. The eyes glaze over and they repeat exactly what the person before told you, the tone flat. Things are fine. No, no resistance here. Deny the visibly obvious. You point out the inconsistency in what they’ve said and they lead you round in the same circle.

Finally Khalid and Mohammed begged us to give up: “They think you are American soldiers.” Well, that explained why no one wanted to talk to us.

“There are many house raids and they destroy everything and take everything and then they come and say it was a mistake,” Khalid said afterwards. He’s the leader of the Diyala Young Pens Association, an arts and cultural group set up in 1998 to encourage upcoming writers and artists and to make contacts with those in other provinces and countries. Since the war they’ve helped establish the Iraqi Woman Rising organisation, based in Baghdad, which I haven’t encountered yet, as well as the new popular poets’ and writers’ unions in Diyala.

“Everyone in Baquba is opposed to the occupation, both Shia and Sunni,” Khalid told us. Consultation brought forth a guess of about 60% Sunni, 40% Shia in the local population. “The resistance so far is Sunni. The Shia are opposed to the invasion as well, but they were so badly brutalised by the past regime that it has taken them time to recover. People feel shame because it was not the Iraqi men but foreign invaders who deposed Saddam. They are against both Saddam and the occupation.”

And with that we were shovelled back into the van and driven home. I think we have to go back without an entourage of writers and worried people to find out more about what’s going on in Baquba.

This is dedicated to the family of Odai, who was killed last night working for the foreign media.

Also to Kathy Kelly, Jerry Zawada, Scott Diehl and Faith Fippinger, all jailed for 3-6 months in the US for demonstrating against the School of the Americas, or whatever Newspeak name they’ve tried to rebrand themselves with.