Bear in mind that what follows is written by someone who had difficulty making his choice of pizza understood or explaining to a taxi driver that he wanted to go to the biggest and most famous museum in Damascus. There are no claims to great insight or specialist knowledge.

Some personality cults are more ludicrous than others. Mussolini’s had a rich comic vein but at least he led a fascist counter revolution and had a distinguished war record. He also had an inkling that his subjects weren’t that enthralled with a lot of what he got up to. He kept a dossier in his office labelled “immaturity and blameworthiness of the Italian people”. We can only guess what Syrian president Bashar al-Assad makes of the omnipresence of his image all through the country. Let’s take the photo on the right. At some stage in the planning of the Damascus Yellow Pages someone must have said “we need to remember to put the photograph of the president in the front.” Someone else then piped up and said “great idea – but let’s make sure that the preceding page is made of that transparent greaseproof paper than you get in wedding albums and Mao’s Little Red Book.” You are never more than thirty seconds away from the man’s image in any populated part of Syria. Christian shops have the president and Jesus stuck up. Muslim businesses have verses from the Koran and the president on display. There are even framed photos of him in the entrance to public toilets. I didn’t check what was on the cubicle doors. Credit where it’s due he keeps the costume changes to a minimum eschewing Saddam Hussein’s variety of regional costumes, military uniforms and English squire outfits. Al-Assad sticks to his suit, occasionally with Mafia-style shades but is sometimes pictured in an officer’s uniform. As former president of the Syrian Computer Society he probably has a lot of experience of strategy games.

Drivers are able to buy stick on silhouettes of the president for their car and many do. Since The Simpsons isn’t broadcast on Syrian TV no one has picked up their resemblance to Ned Flanders.

How much this universal presence indicates the universal love of his people I thought it better not to explore. To the outsider it looks like the sort of thing a fragile state feels it has to do to give a sense of national identity. Having a father of the people constantly looking down on you may make the more compliant less minded to object to any meaningful form of democratic control over the state but the revenge that people took against every manifestation of Saddam Hussein’s rule suggests that sticking up a man’s poster because you feel you have to doesn’t make you develop any real loyalty.

It looks like al-Assad is pretty much a cipher for the Arab Socialist Ba’th Party. The regime has delivered fairly high literacy rates and the position of women in public life is better than in most neighbouring states. The economy is heavily reliant on a public sector which employs up to fifty per cent of the country’s workforce. Quite what some of them do is a bit mysterious. Traffic policemen are mainly trained in comparing each other’s mobile phones waving orange batons to encourage moving traffic to carry on moving. Things like making sure cars stop to allow pedestrians to use crossings safely fall outside their field of responsibility. As you move further out from the centre of Damascus the housing becomes shabbier and shabbier and on the outskirts there are dwellings that would disgrace a shanty town. Whether these are inhabited by Iraqi refugees or Syrians is a question I can’t answer.

 Notwithstanding the public vainglory the state feels fragile and lacks even the legitimacy of the Iranian government. The regime would be unlikely to survive a war with Israel and it did well not to respond to the Israeli provocation. In the absence of any other form of open expression religion is the only avenue people have for forming alternative ideas. The mosques too provide the only public buildings of any aesthetic work. From any high building dozens of them are visible. They are better maintained and much more pleasing on the eye than the ugly sprawl of seventies and eighties architecture which tries to drown them. From them could emerge the sort of mayhem that the sister city of Baghdad endured.

The photo on the left was taken after Friday prayers outside the Ummayad mosque. It’s a van containing medical supplies being driven from Scotland to Gaza.