Early in the war, footage of trench warfare between the Taliban troops and Northern Alliance rebels included the sobering sight of a large-calibre lump of metal shaving the camera man’s ear. It might be comforting to believe that you never see the bullet that gets you, but this footage revealed that it simply isn’t true. In another near-miss, one of the BBC’s Kabul correspondents was filmed as he filed a radio report – his broadcast interrupted by a rising shriek in the air and the sudden implosion of the windows as an American bomb hit the house next door. The odd thing was that his body knew what was coming before he did – a kind of pre-shock running through it before the explosion took place. As a journalistic account of civilian vulnerability it could hardly be bettered.Most significantly of all, the camcorder managed to capture even what was at pains to evade capture.

Osama Bin Laden was fighting a video war too – well aware that his invisibility needed to be balanced by presence. In the early days of the war Al-Jazeera television provided him with a conduit to the world but his broadcasts then – self-consciously responsive to history – were not the ones that will endure.His grainy, muffled confessional surely will. Discarded in the rush to escape, it was the kind of souvenir that must be committed to tape hundreds of times a day – a meeting between an admirer and the object of his admiration, the latter almost gracious in the way he shared the backstage gossip about his greatest performance yet. Those led to expect a demoniac Fu Manchu, boasting of his exploits, will have been disappointed. It was far more matter-of-fact than that – tinged here and there with a visionary derangement but pretty much devoid of incitement.

Bin Laden wasn’t really playing to the camera – because the camera was too humble an object to command his attention.A technology that used to be the preserve of professionals has spread – with a kind of viral speed – into every corner of the world, even those corners hostile to the very idea of technology in the first place
More from Thomas Sutcliffe. They look like a cross between a squash ball and a hedgehog and bear a name as unprepossessing as could be, but sea urchins are rapidly becoming one of Scotland’s most lucrative exports with a culinary appeal to rival even that of caviar. The international market for urchin products is now estimated to be worth more than £200m a year.Currently, the principal exporters of sea urchins are the United States, Chile, Korea, Iceland and Norway. The biggest markets are Japan, where the animals are considered a traditional delicacy – often exchanged as a gift during the New Year celebrations; France and Spain, where they are called erizos de mar, hedgehogs of the sea.Andrew Bing, sales director of Loch Duart Ltd in north-west Sutherland, which has been helping to pioneer the commercial cultivation of sea urchins in Scotland, said: “There is a huge market in Europe and our aim is to grow about 100,000 urchins a year by 2003 for customers in France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and the emerging UK market. They taste a bit like oysters and, as the UK seafood market becomes increasingly sophisticated with a growing wealth of ethnic restaurants specialising in Japanese and Mediterranean cuisine, there is greater demand.”It may be a rarity at the moment in the UK, not least because when you tell people they are eating the animal’s gonads they tend to take a step back, but we have had a huge amount of interest from our customers, which suggests that urchins could soon be a popular sight on many menus.”With a creamy taste, including a hint of iodine, urchins have been considered a delicacy since Roman times. Until about 100 years ago they were a common food source for coastal communities around Britain.Ever since the French exhausted their stocks in the 1970s, and native Irish stocks followed in the Eighties, the price of urchins has risen drastically and Scottish fish farmers have been looking for a way to cash in. Spiky green sea urchins (Psamm echinus miliaris) still grow in abundance in sheltered bays around Scotland but, until now, they have been considered too small to be commercially viable.However, after six years of research, scientists from the government-funded marine laboratory at Dunstaffnage, near Oban, have developed ways of breeding urchins in sufficient numbers to sell on to fish farms as a complement to their existing stocks of salmon.Research into the life and needs of the sea urchins has revealed that they thrive on the high-protein pellets fed to farmed salmon.Dr Maeve Kelly, the marine biologist leading the research at Dunstaffnage, said: “The joy of cultivating urchins alongside salmon is that they feed off the salmon food pellets which the fish might have missed.

They are an extra layer to scoop up any potential loss of salmon food and are an additional crop for the farmer.”We have two common species of sea urchins around Scotland. There is the very big one, which is the size of a grapefruit and is pink or red – Echinus esculentus. But the trouble with them is that they are far too big for what the market place wants and the flavour is not so popular in Europe.”The species we are focusing on is the smaller one, Psamm echinus miliaris, which is about the size of a squash ball and is usually green,” she added.The roe, which is similar to caviar, is much sweeter and is a more appealing colour, much closer to what the continental market wants. In the wild this species is more usually found in sheltered areas and quite dense populations can be found occurring naturally in the Scottish sea lochs.Dr Kelly said: “Environmentally and economically it makes good sense to cultivate them commercially This is the way ahead for fish farming. It’s a more balanced approach to managing Scotland’s aquaculture.”How to eat a sea urchinThe urchin is cut around the middle and the roe is scooped out of the shell with a spoon.