“My mind is always stealing away my joy.”

The above line caught my attention in an interview by Georgina Roberts in the Times Magazine about the photojournalist Sir Don McCullin who has spent his long life documenting conflicts across the world. Having grown up in what he described as a very violent part of north London, he then set about capturing on film other people’s terrible situations. At the age of ninety he professed to have been “chasing a life without joy” and anticipated going to his maker “slightly unhappy”.

I could understand and even identify with some of what he said: the heartbreak of children running towards him, believing aid was on its way when what was being brought to them was, in his case, a Nikon; in my case a few paisa, some sweets or a pen. Such images come back to haunt in dark and sleepless hours. And yet, as he must surely know, the power of those captured images is immeasurable. I think of Sally Trench, one of the subjects of my recently published book, who in 1992 was appalled by images of war-torn Bosnia. Confronted by the haunted and hunger-ravaged faces of children fleeing burnt-out villages, she resolved to act. Between 1992 and 1996 she led convoys into Bosnia, taking food, medicine and other supplies to those worst affected by genocide and ethnic cleansing – the power of images.

Joy can be both illusive and apparently irrational. Mother Teresa exuded joy even whilst carrying living skeletons in her arms. For Etty Hillesum, the Jewish author, her belief that “a luminous current of invisible Goodness irrigates the world no matter how virulent evil may be”, was a source of uneasy joy even as she climbed aboard a train to Auschwitz.

Personally, I must find consolation in the potency of the pen – the occasional confirmation that some word or shared thought has brought comfort, even joy, to the reader, or spurred them to some act of goodness that I could never undertake.

And I wish Sir Don McCullin that joy which can mysteriously transcend the workings of the mind.