Less time spent writing, more time to jump out of planes, right?

Bernd Debusmann has just logged his 2,000th parachute jump. Here he is leaping from a helicopter.

Fifty years after he began a journalistic career with Reuters that would take him to more than 100 countries, Debusmann is still writing the occasional column as a freelance writer. A piece from Washington, where he lives, appeared only yesterday in The Daily Star, an English newspaper published in Beirut - the city that means so much to him. It was in the Lebanese capital that he was shot twice in separate incidents in 1976 and 1980 while reporting for Reuters. A 7.65 mm round from a silenced gun fired from a passing car remains lodged in his back.

“Censorship by 7.65 mm bullet,” he called it. “It remains encased near my spine, a permanent souvenir.”

Debusmann’s latest piece was headlined Gaza War: Polls spotlight long-running American-Israeli love affair.

He joined Reuters in Bonn, capital of West Germany, as it then was, in 1964. He signed off in Washington in 2012.

Most of his parachuting is done over Florida. Now in his 70s, how much longer will he go on jumping? His Mexican wife Concepcion, a correspondent and columnist in Washington, said he was working towards jump number 3,000. ■