As a general rule, I have no nose for impending trouble. Some say they can tell when a bar is about to erupt in a blizzard of broken snooker cues and flying pint glasses, but I never sense the danger. Which is why when I visited Crimea in 2013, I very much enjoyed being somewhere that felt so peaceful and secure.

A little bit later, I was in Kyiv when I received a call from the editor of The Sunday Times. He’d heard, even though he was in London, that all kinds of trouble was brewing in the city’s Independence Square and asked me to have a butcher’s. So I hurried over there and after a couple of hours talking to all the shoppers, reported back that it was as quiet as Bourton-on-the-Water. I think it was about ten days later that there were many petrol bombs and jets falling from the sky and I saw none of that coming.

Syria? I was there in 2010 and remember saying, out loud, that Damascus was one of the nicest cities in the world, with great shopping opportunities and many pretty girls. I also loved Homs, Raqqa and Palmyra because out there in the desert, it was all so timelessly calm.

In Dakar I never saw the riots coming, and in Mozambique I posted many idyllic seascapes on Instagram, failing to spot that some of the charming fishing boats heading for the coast contained armed Somali pirates. Then of course there was Argentina. I was happy there too, right up to the point when burly men with pickaxe handles were coming down the corridor in my hotel, kicking down doors.

And now we get to Shan state in Myanmar. Apparently it’s all kicked off there again. There are reports of shells landing in neighbouring Thailand and of fighter jets whizzing about in the skies. And I definitely saw that one coming.

Shan state is about the size of Britain and it’s pretty much shut because for the past 60 years, it’s played host to what is the longest-running civil war of modern times. And it’s not just revolutionaries versus the government either. It’s way more complex than that.

Because competing against one another, for territory (and opium production), you have various ethnic armed organisations including — deep breath — the Arakan Army, the Kachin Independence Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Shan State Army–North, the Shan State Army–South, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, the United Wa State Army, the Danu People’s Liberation Army, the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force, the Kayan New Land Army, the Lahu Democratic Union, the National Democratic Alliance Army, the Pa-O National Army, the Pa-O National Liberation Army, and the Wa National Army.

When I was on Top Gear, we thought it would be a good idea to go there. Yes, we’d been told that no foreigners are allowed in, ever, but we had a swagger back then, so we asked and incredibly, the government said yes. But then all the factions said it wasn’t up to the government. They had to agree to our visit. It took a while but one by one they did.

And then they decided to throw a party to welcome us. On the way to the venue, I saw a man with rabies. He’d been thrown out of his village and was standing in the middle of the region’s only road, his arms and legs all broken by the violent convulsions that are part of this terrifying disease.

I also saw a man driving a tuk-tuk who had obviously injected 500 gallons of heroin into his face. He was as funny to behold as the rabies man was not. So I had in my mind that our welcoming party might be a bit extreme. And it did not disappoint.

You know that Colonel Kurtz scene at the end of Apocalypse Now? Well it was a hundred times smokier and more bonkers than that. Even I could sense the horror because all the factions arrived carrying guns. And they had all seemingly spent the day preparing for our visit by ingesting vast quantities of a drug called yaba, which makes the user extremely angry.

So in a little bamboo village, choking on smoke from the barbecues and with AKs propped against every tree, it all began. Dinner was roasted grasshopper, and the drink served in enormous quantities was a whisky called Hankey Bannister. According to the label it’s “Northern Burma’s third best whisky”.

After dinner, under a giant poster of Frank Lampard, there was musical entertainment which was provided by quite the weirdest instrument I’ve ever seen. It was a long, curved pole with a single string attached at either end. And it could produce only one note. This made all the songs quite similar.

After an hour of bong bong bong bong, we were invited to the stage and ordered by our increasingly inebriated hosts to produce some musical entertainment of our own. Which was tricky because we didn’t have any instruments with us and the only song that James, Richard and I knew by heart was Bobby Brown by Frank Zappa. So against all the advice proffered by our increasingly nervous film crew, we did that.

By 11pm, even I could sense that the factions were getting argumentative, so to distract them we decided to move from table to table, raising endless toasts with the Hankey Bannister and it sort of worked. In as much as I went to sleep in the back of my lorry that night without any gunshot wounds. There was a bit of sporadic gunfire as the party broke up but none of it went in me.

The next morning, as I drove away I do remember thinking that I’d spent the night in a tinderbox and that one day, it was all going to end in tears. Which is what’s been happening with increasing regularity all year. That’s me. The oracle. Just occasionally, I see the future. And what I see in 2026 is peacefulness and stability and growth. Enjoy it.