Her long dark hair splayed upwards and outwards. Just the hair, and it could be an advert. Her face turning away, scrunched up in pain. Not hairspray but pepper spray, aimed at the woman in a red dress protesting against the closure of a public park in the centre of Istanbul. The man with the king size aerosol, a Turkish police officer dressed head to toe in protective gear, shoots his stuff right at her. He has never been more intent; he will never look less intelligent.

In China a crowd with arms raised to acclaim the spectacular high tide on the Qinglang River (an annual event). Superstitious? In each and every instance their hands are joined above their heads, the better to hold camera phones. The all-important ritual of I-Was-There and This-Is-Me: characteristic customs of our age.

O little man, sitting cross-legged in the road with a line of spidery spittle hanging down from your mouth. Breathing deeply, gasping for more. Recovering from the combined effects of tear gas and water cannon used by Thai police against opposition demonstrators in Bangkok.

Will you go home and ne’er come back again, little man, now you know you could die out here?
‘He’s alive, he’s alive.’ The excited voice of the man up top, issuing directions to the diver whose headcam footage we’re watching. Making his way through syrupy water looking for dead bodies in a sunken tugboat, until – that zombie moment – a hand presses down on his glove.
Headcam holds on pale palm against black glove; pans round to the head and torso of a thickset man who’s survived the sinking and managed to stay alive in an air pocket for 60 hours. Wide-eyed with fear, joy and disbelief – right now he couldn’t tell them apart. As his rescuer fixes him up with breathing apparatus for their ascent, we see the folds of skin around his hips. Yes, a big man with baby fat.

Here in the midst of life and death, what’s in the frame is only homely – as if someone’s running a webcam in the bath.

Compared to these intimate moments, footage of demonstrations on the streets of Bangkok or Kiev seems lifeless, run-of-play, routine. Rolled out for rolling news.

Is it because these events really are less than decisive; or is it that this author also – behaving the same away as everyone else, for once – is losing his appetite for public life?

Sandals were slowing down his escape so now he races barefoot through the white streets of Tunis, wreathed in teargas. In Cairo they’ve got good at throwing the canisters back at police – especially the man dressed as a Mid-Westerner in checked shirt and bluejeans. Beats baseball. Spuming water, fired from a police cannon, rains down into the centre of Sanaa’s main street, but the Yemeni crowd has already parted to the sides. In Tripoli, Lebanon (even the BBC tripped up here), the Colonel’s beard is badly singed; beneath this icon, his KFC outlet burnt to a crisp. Whole cream milk shaken into the burning eyes of a rioter who’s been tear-gassed. Head turned half-way round to check how fast the police line is moving, lithe lady in a gas mask, running. Youths standing on burnt out cars, gesturing to police, posing for cameras like victorious athletes. From Benghazi to Chennai, and further east to Kuala Lumpur, the streets are action-packed with anti-Americans. Meanwhile, in the rural provinces of India, protestors have taken to the water, neck-deep. There they stand for days on end, heads sticking out against government policy of raising water levels behind India’s dams (60 years since Nehru dubbed dams ‘the temples of modern India’), displacing many villagers. Without shoes, their feet turn to bad meat, pockmarked with parasites. Police cited health grounds when recently removing a group of protestors from the water around Hada, Madhya Pradesh. In that other twilight, before dawn, the only bright spots were the fluorescent lifejackets of police officers wading through grey water, bringing protestors to shore: slowly, slowly; one by one.