When a new cosmonaut went up we ran through the old jokes about bad Russian hotels

When a new cosmonaut went up, we ran through the old jokes about bad Russian hotels. But now Mir is no more, her otherwise mostly humdrum existence having ended in a spectacular shower of stardust plunging into the southern Pacific ocean - and there is a strange gap in all our lives. The Russian people are apparently heartbroken at the loss of what they see as a last vestige of their vanished status as a superpower. But they should feel no shame, only pride at what their space station has achieved. Mir soldiered on for 15 years, three times longer than was originally intended. It was among the most effective vehicles for co-operation between Moscow and Washington. Above all, it taught human beings about living in space.Before Mir, space exploration consisted of long periods of tedium punctuated by oc-casional calamity.

Mir was a patchwork of the minor dramas of everyday life, from dodgy food to leaking pipes and malfunctioning lavatories In other words, it just muddled along Like the Russians - and like the rest of us.. Two years to the day since the Kosovo war started, with the first Nato bombs falling on ex-Yugoslavia, 60 or so lightly-armed Albanians, sitting on a hill top, have brought South East Europe back to the brink of war. They have caused the leaders of the world's most powerful military alliance to meet in worried conclave, to wonder about what on earth to do next. Two years to the day since the Kosovo war started, with the first Nato bombs falling on ex-Yugoslavia, 60 or so lightly-armed Albanians, sitting on a hill top, have brought South East Europe back to the brink of war. They have caused the leaders of the world's most powerful military alliance to meet in worried conclave, to wonder about what on earth to do next. As so often, the spark that lit this tinder was tiny and accidental. A Macedonian army patrol stumbled on a small arms cache in the house of an Albanian hill farmer. Shots were fired and within days the Schar Planina mountains, which divide Kosovo from Macedonia like a great jagged spine, were full of young Albanian men, with romantic dreams of liberation conflict - and mules, struggling up over high, snow-filled passes, carrying the implements of war.Bosnia and Kosovo could be contained, with conflicts about Serbia's limits and ambitions.

But Macedonia has the capacity to widen the conflict beyond ex-Yugoslavia to include Greece, Bulgaria and ultimately, some say, even Turkey.There is real anger at what Macedonia sees as Nato betrayal. They were promised the earth, when Nato needed them as a passage-way for its supplies, and a jumping off point for invasion, during the Kosovo war But few of these promises have been delivered. Macedonia joined Nato's Partnership for Peace, but now "terrorists" are coming from a Nato-controlled area and the Alliance appears neither able to stop the insurgents, nor adequately willing to protect their fragile new state from disintegration.Macedonians feel betrayed by their Albanian population, too. It is true that the Macedonian Government was very late to recognise the unacceptable denial of human rights of their minority Albanian population, and that there is a deep distrust, often amounting to visceral hate, of Albanians among the majority Slavs in the country.However, the current Government has done more to correct this in the last three years than in all the previous existence of the Macedonian state. The Macedonian president, Boris Trajkovski, has taken some great personal and political risks to involve the Albanians in his Government and there are now commissions sitting, including Albanians, considering changes to the constitution, and the involvement of Albanians in the armed forces and police.There is some way to go, however, before Macedonian Albanians have equal rights as citizens. The long years of burning resentment, fuelled by what they perceive as slow progress on reform, has meant that the rebels in the hills have not found it difficult to attract young Albanian men with a romantic notion of war to gather to their cause.But this is not Kosovo under the Serbs.