You know what it's like when the rain in East Lancashire really sets in. There's nothing spectacular about the downpour - it just keeps on coming, relentlessly.

And it's combined with a sudden, clammy cold that makes you shiver, even though it's well above freezing point.

For Blackburn or Burnley, read Baghdad.

Last Saturday evening, and it's time to leave the British Ambassador's residence for Baghdad "International Airport" via the "Washington LZ" - the helicopter area in the Green Zone.

The Green Zone is a huge area of Baghdad, I guess about a mile square, which is as secure as anything can be in that part of Baghdad.

It's from where the Iraqi government is principally conducted, and where the main American base is. Our old embassy, first established when we liberated Iraq from the Turkish empire in 1917, is some way away, outside the Green Zone, so the whole of our now large embassy presence is in the Zone.

In some ways, inside the buildings, life in the Green Zone feels perfectly normal. It's outside that's different. In place of high hedges, there are high - four metres - concrete walls around every building, and "Heskey barriers" around every compound. These are huge wire sacks piled high, which are - I am told - very effective against rockets and mortars.

The weather means that my helicopter had been delayed a bit - so there I am, in the wet gloom, when I spot three figures in an odd concrete tent. It's the Green Zone's equivalent of a bus shelter - a blast shelter. I peer in. The three figures turn out to be American soldiers.

There's one strapping guy, who fits the usual stereotype; one short (5 ft 4ins) white woman, one black woman. I mention these gender and race differences because they tell an important story - not only about American society, but especially about the American forces.

The forces were as segregated and discriminatory as American society as a whole (except, of course, when it came to who was put in harm's way - then black troops would often be accorded the priority).

But, as my pal Colin Powell will testify, American forces have been in the lead on opening up opportunities for black (and other non-white groups), and more latterly women as well.

One is ever conscious in Iraq of the security situation. It puts our people at risk, but overwhelmingly these days the violence is Iraqi on Iraqi.

Despite this, extraordinary progress on the road to democracy has been made in the last 12 months. There have been three national polls, they have been pretty peaceful and at each poll there's been a higher turnout than the one previously.

My helicopter did arrive for the first leg of the long journey back. Despite the odd circumstances - body armour, helmet, open doors on the helicopter for those manning the machine guns, I've now done the journey often enough not to worry too much.

Instead, I take a pair of "cans" - earphone headsets - and listen as the pilot and co-pilot fly, in the dark and low, avoiding the pylons and banking abruptly in risky areas,

I do so again on the "Herc", the big military C130J transport plane, as I sit in the cockpit for the take-off.

The "Herc" takes me to Beirut for a change over to a civilian plane. It's raining there too, just like East Lancashire, and when I got back to London it was raining there. What a welcome home.