At other times the sense of being in a state on the edge of civil war, the impact of being shown one memorial after another to assassinations and martyrdoms and the physical scars of bullets and bombs, evaporated as other, happier or more pleasantly eccentric aspects of Lebaneseness asserted themselves.

One of the first things I noticed in Beirut, other than the sad dearth of traditional Ottoman or even French mandate architecture, was the almost total absence of working traffic lights and the disrespect of Lebanese drivers for any and all traffic laws. One of my American colleagues, delighted by this and by the much-exercised freedom to smoke when and where you like, observed that Lebanon is a kind of libertarian paradise. It seems to be a place where people cannot or will not knuckle down to anybody's rules. Even Hizbollah understands this: as you can see if you visit Beirut's southern suburbs or the south of the country, it has more or less given up its efforts to make Shia women cover up (at one point it even offered cash to women who covered their heads). When you do see a Muslim girl wearing a headscarf, this modesty is often in dramatic contrast to the effect of spray-on jeans, boots and a skin-tight sweater, as if the scarf were a grudging concession to an alarmed father.

Sunni Muslim Lebanese women at the February 14th rally in Martyr's Square, Beirut

Most bizarre, and unexpected, was the extraordinary presence of lingerie shops everywhere we visited. At the smart ABC mall in Beirut's Ashrafieh neighborhood, I counted six of them next door to each other. But their garish wares were also on display in small towns on the road to Mount Lebanon and in predominantly Shia Tyre, on the edge of Hizbollah's mini-state in the south. Lingerie, even if worn underneath black robes, is apparently almost as big a Lebanese obsession as fast, expensive cars and guns, though much safer than either.