Yet, I remained, through the indignities, the outrages, and the general descent into lousiness.
Most of these outrages weren't even reported in the national media, let alone the occasion for a supportive visit from a government minister.
Here's a question they don't often ask in polls: what has the Human Rights Act ever done to you? Victims of the Human Rights Act are pretty hard to come by, while myths about outrages perpetrated in its name are so widespread as to be collectible.
"Is there punishment beyond the grave for the outrages against decency you committed in life?" I asked.
How clever to question our own responses to the outrages and horrors that are "secondary" to our lives only through accidents of birth or geography or fortune.
And how convenient to conclude that unearned emotion is an indulgence, because that's the only conclusion that would allow us to look away from Malala's story, or any front-page outrages: the doctor who considers drugs the only hope for children in failing schools; the Syrian refugee crisis.
Launching the round in Qatar's capital city in November 2001, as the world reeled from terrorist outrages and the dotcom bust, trade ministers declared their determination to liberalise trade so that "the system plays its full part in promoting recovery, growth and development".
In the 21st century his list of executive outrages grew long again, this time provoked by the war on terror: surveillance of Americans by government agencies, the growth of biometric databases, expanded powers of detention, pervasive secrecy.
If it continues on its present ominous course, however, they will have to.Mr Putin used the most heinous of Mr Basayev's outrages, the attack on a school in Beslan in North Ossetia in September 2004, as a pretext for scrapping the election of governors.
And there is a ring of instability on Islam's southern frontier, which runs roughly along the 10th parallel from West Africa to the Philippines.Terrorist outrages are once again presumed to have religious connections, as they would have done in Cromwell's time.
Apocalypse, soonIn tit-for-tat revenge in the Middle East, the Israelis tried to kill Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, a militant Islamist faction, and Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 Israelis, some of them soldiers, in terrorist outrages in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
