It’s early, before 5.00am, a quiet time in Sana’a, and I’m riding towards the airport in a deconsecrated black and white NYPD cruiser driven by Sa’id – from the Arabic for happy.

I’m stupefied by lack of sleep and as we turn off, car-chase-style, into the sunken street of Sailah my mind wanders…

Wasn’t Happy one of the Seven Dwarfs? At about 6’ 6”, wearing a dangerous looking curved jambiya (dagger) and possessing a countenance at odds with his name, it’s obvious my guy is no relation.

As it happened Sa’id was a good man, handsome, dignified and in another time perhaps a noble desert warrior, not a freelance coddler of tourists. His demeanour reflected the chronic state of tourism in Yemen and the fact that with my departure he’d have no work and therefore no income.

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I’d arrived in Yemen with the usual baggage of preconceptions but after a few days in Sana’a I wished I could stay for longer. The capital’s Old City possesses some of the Middle East’s most striking architecture. Multi-storey dwellings of decorated bricks, centuries old, creating a unique Yemeni Manhattan on the Arabian Peninsula.

In the city’s Souk Al-Milh there’s no tourist sideshow, no pursuing touts or hustlers. Here’s an ancient market not even in the same A to Z as the global high street. Among the stalls a heady fragrance of incense from Hadramat ranged on currents of warm air, mingling with intense spices and blacksmiths’ glowing charcoals, finally combining not unpleasantly with essence of camel and donkey dung.

At Sana’a’s Sheba Art Gallery, on the second floor of a marginally updated caravanserai, the proprietor had greeted me in English, ‘Welcome to Yemen. I can tell you’re not American.’ He picked up a hefty Oxford English/Arabic dictionary, an example of Yemen living up to its epithet of ‘dictionary land’, and weighed it in his hand. ‘It’s so very good to hear an Englishman speak. The American, when he talks it’s different. We say it’s like a dog barking.’

In the late afternoon, reassured in my diction, I sipped sweet cardamom tea close by the gate of Bab Al-Yemen. By six o’clock groups of men had gathered to sit on the ground in convivial circles, talking in animated fashion. A kind of Yemeni passeggiata it seemed, though without either walking or women.

The reality soon became clear. Alcohol may be haram for Muslims, yet the concept of khamr, prohibition of intoxication, in this instance through chewing narcotic qat leaves, obviously didn’t make the second proofs of the Koran’s Yemeni edition. I’d never seen so much al fresco mastication, this far from unspeakable practice driving the rising level of chatter. Before judging the qat chewers collective substance abuse, I contrasted Sana’a’s peacefully doped gatherings with the alcoholic afflictions of beer-rage, vomit and piss that regularly overcome our own nighttime city centres. I knew what I’d choose.

Yemen has always been a country of talkers, with or without the social lubricant of qat, and its reputation for Arabic language teaching continues to this day. Back at my hotel I chatted with Colin, the only other Englishman to cross my path in Sana’a. He was taking a three-week course of intensive Arabic tuition and when we met he was still in awe at the previous night’s April shower – the first rain he’d seen since the previous July.

‘I’m living in Riyadh teaching English. Arabic teachers are much cheaper here and the style of Arabic is very pure. I could have gone to Dubai but in Sana’a very few people speak English, so you have to use Arabic, it’s better.’ I had to agree and it was indeed an intriguing proposition but probably a difficult one to sell to my wife and family…

After one particularly lengthy excursion exploring local mountain villages I returned to Sana’a tired and hungry. Before dumping my bags I saw that staff at a nearby restaurant were bloodily employed reducing a sheep animal to its component parts. In my mind this meant one thing, fresh offal. I took a seat, ordered kibda (liver), foul fava beans and a nice glass of cool salty ayran – Hannibal Lecter would have approved. Sitting outside nursing a glass of tea, by 10.15pm there were no sounds, save those of living.