Light Blogging

I am working like the crazy man I am, and have not been to bed before two for the past four days, up at six. So I apologise to my one demented reader for my lack of blogging. As I understand it, the world has stopped, and my readership has been reduced to rocking backward and forward in front of the special rubber screen in the big house with the Terry Wogan show on an electronic loop.

Never fear, I'll be back. I'm trying to set in place a series of contracts so that I don't have to worry about money next year and just pay down the last of the debt before the interest rates that will follow on stagflation start to bite. It does involve a huge amount of work for small sums, but small sums pay bills on time, whereas the big fees used to come sporadically. If I want something more than a series of feasts and famine with the odd moment staring at the last can of beans in the cupboard, I have to put my shoulder to the wheel. Well, that's what I told myself in October, and grinding though it is there is a certain reward in it.

It's my own fault, I should have bought gold ten years ago. At the time, one of my Chinese students did apparently refer to me as 'goldfinger', which was no doubt an unfair translation of the celestial. Here's a video about modern banking practices.

Subliminable Belor


I find this photograph really quite funny. It's attached to a Daily Telegraph Article. Sarah Barracuda's political instincts are, really, second-to-none, regardless of all the other stuff. She's sensed that most people 'get' the ridiculousness of the global warming lobby, and their isolation. She's tied it to the frequent flying president and first lady, and set the scene for an attack on their Kennedy-style-but-not-quite-as-elite parties at the White House and whatever rubbish emerges out of the Copenhagen conference, which is talking about global warming whilst she is standing outside, in the snow.

She also claims not to be running for anything.

Which is why she is wearing a military-style cap, cross (not crucifix, watch the Protestants) earrings, and a necklace on a bare chest to appeal to the older Irish and orthodox crowd in places like Maryland and Michigan, and the veterans and older republican males. And she's done that instinctively.

That white stuff you see on the photograph is the ash of liberal heads exploding. Or possibly the nuclear winter that a few of the neocons would have welcomed when they were young as a way of speeding up the end of communism, and may again. It'd definitively stop global warming, anyway.

Those eyes look like they could gut a docker. What next, a Reagan mask?

Here's a 2012 political broadcast, involving Mrs Palin, the late Adlai Stevenson, and some gentlemen from the Waziristan area, near Purley...

The First Duty and Lily Lilley

Everyday absurdities and cruelties are commonplace in this state, and probably always have been; they run alongside acts of kindness and compassion. For hundreds of years, however, English elites and their fellow travellers have thought of the ordinary people of the country as a mob.

Sometimes they have reason; often they do not. One of the tragedies of England has been that those who believe themselves democrats and out to reform have usually and reliably ended up serving class interest, and those who might have worked with them have retreated into populist and violent reactions to get themselves and their moral economy noticed. Another is that every time the best education is opened to people, in a way that removes middle class advantage (I was reading of the Jacobean distaste for grammar schools because they promoted so many low-born people today), it is pulled back, often by its own working-class products.

That's a debate for another time. I am tired and ill. I have been shocked by a story I read today, though not surprised. It relates to Exile's Aunt Lily, may she rest in peace. I don't always agree with Exile's politics, nor he with mine. No one asks that we should be in agreement. But when his Aunt is murdered--and not in a clean way--and wheeled in a bin to a canal, and her killer gets pregnant, by another inmate who is treated as a 'customer of the prison service' at a 'user forum', and who has an ongoing, hotel-based relationship with that man whilst still nominally in prison, what is he supposed to be other than angry?

Surely the first duty of a state is to ensure justice and protect the people from harm? We now live in a country where around eight out of every ten voters did not vote for the government; where popular policies and views are routinely discounted; and where savers, and the law-abiding, and those with common sense in enough store to see through the green nonsense are routinely ignored. This is a country that has become scared of its police and where large numbers of areas are just not safe for citizens to be.

A class of almost uncontrolled, poorly educated, overworked, and cynical 'social workers' have been raised to power that is often unchecked. Because of what they see of their fellow human beings, and their preconceptions, and their inability to stand outside of their history, they think most of us racist, violent, vengeful, and stupid.

These are harsh words and harsh words very often lead nowhere. Despair is a sin for a reason. But what else fits? Even Christ cursed a barren fig tree once.

Lily Lilley's isn't an isolated case. I know, and not from any special knowledge but because I listen to ordinary people whom I know, where various killers are. The dogs in their street know. I also know that no one has attempted to kill them in some of the toughest towns I have been in. Working people have been restrained.

Yet we let bad people out of prison as a society, before their time, and spend money on new identities for them, just as we celebrate our humanity by making euthanasia, and abortion, and debt slavery, and the destruction of families easier and easier. We do it because lower-middle class social workers think the worst of working people, but still spend their taxes. How is this right?

This country has been in worse trouble. It has seen bad days before, and it will see worse ones. I think that it can be recovered from itself. But there are times when you want to weep at what is happening to England, even if you are not English. Put the wrong sort of recycling in your wheelie bin and you'll feel the full force of the law; torture and murder an old lady and drop her in one, and you'll be out with a new identity fairly quickly.

This country is failing in its first duty to its people. The mood is sour and worsening by the day, outside of the bubble. What happens when the real credit and jobs crunch hit next year?

I'm something of a Hobbesian; I think people can be bad, and that the bad will drive out good if allowed. I think that we suffer the state to maintain ourselves, and we hold back from vigilantism because law and justice can be matched with order only by a just state. What, however, happens, when a radical philosophy so grips the strongest parts of the state that justice slips away? What happens when eight out of ten people did not vote for the government that stands at the apex of that state?

I tell you where it leads. It leads to hokum like that in the video below that gives badness an apparent mandate and undermines hope and decency more surely than any amount of drugs or sex, for a generation. It encourages racism, and the exclusion of the ill educated and the one-time violent and the stupid, and drives on the hangers, and the brutal; it makes compassion impossible. It leads to people giving up on law and justice and redemption and playing with the psychotic notion that no person can ever be redeemed because some badnesses were indulged and improperly punished.

It leads to delusion and gesture politics on both sides.

We need tough, small government. We need lower taxes and social insurance, and an encouragement to work, and local decisions and more democracy. We need people to have a real investment in a society via the chance of real property for themselves, and not mortgage-driven delusions of Minsky assets. We need jobs that stem not from the state but from a balanced, decent society that recognises that selfishness and the market can't do everything, but that humanism, self-restraint, and limits can lead to the best things, and that they need to be taught by schools and families and churches that are away from state control.

We need just punishment, more prisons, and tough compassion. We need an end to a state that breaks up some families, prevents others from starting, and uses a third set to undermine all rules of just punishment. There is an intimate relationship between the destruction of the family, the glorification of personal autonomy without a proper education, and every aspect of the Lilley tragedy.

Adoption works. It's infinitely preferable to abortion, and to the state-murder of murderers. Children should not be a get out of jail card; rehabilitation and redemption should be.

The best cliches are true. They encapsulate really very old lessons. One is to let justice be done though the heavens fall. Another is to subdue the proud and spare the humble from harm. But one of my favourites is written into the stone of the Old Bailey--Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrongdoer.

Lily Lilley was one of this country's children too.

Waterboarding 1901

The picture is from the British seventies comic 2000AD, and depicts Tomas de Torquemada, future leader of the human race. 2000AD was a highly innovative British comic much affected by punk, which you can read about here.

I'm tired and a bit ill at the minute, so took to a hot bath after a long day with Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, all about the first President Roosevelt. It's odd the things that jump out. Here's testimony described as a 'confession', but noted as publicity on page 101, from 'The Anti Imperialist League'. It seems to have been given during the Congressional investigation of America's occupation of the Philippines. The book was written in 2001.

"Witness after witness testified to widespread use by American soldiers of this traditional torture, developed by Spanish priests as a means of instilling reverence for the Holy Ghost; (the Spanish Inquisition seems to have thought that they were rebaptising heretics).

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin...is simply thrust in his jaws...and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose...until the man shows some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious...His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown.

Other reports spoke of natives being...strung up by their thumbs, and tattooed facially for identification."

President Roosevelt subsequently issued a public statement of revulsion and ordered a court martial. These things happen, especially in Empires, which emerge right from the darkness inside us. Was anyone ever happy whilst one strode and chimped and murdered its way across the local world?

There was me thinking that water boarding was a French Indochina/Algeria thing that made its way through some manual or encrusted soul via Northern Ireland to the Americans--and the past blames a sort of Spanish bastardised Erastian excess all along. It's almost ironic.

I met one of America's special Nicaraguan forces once, and at a party in a religious house in Washington met a Cuban exile of a certain genus. Both terrified me, and I suppose both were dementedly terrified of their end, because these people are often religious. It's what allows them to cling to the idea that what they were doing was right, and for their country. People want to do right by that historical construction--for all the talk about the sixties, for instance, one of its best selling songs was The Ballad of The Green Berets. It's singer, I seem to recall, became obsessed with the soldier who speared Christ on the cross, and moved to central America to write books about him in between stints as a mercernary. He met his end when someone shot him in the head in a taxi in Guatemala.

God forgive us as a species. Just to cheer you up even more (and for my friends in Maryland who served), here is Billy Joel's Goodnight Saigon.

Chin up, it's Tuesday.

Light Blogging

Many apologies for the lack of demented rants recently--though I suspect that if I left things a little longer my hits would actually start going up. I have been working like a mad person, and am down in the country for my little Sister's wedding today. Normal service will soon be resumed.

I hope that everyone is having a good December so far, though I've been paying attention to the unemployment figures and met a soon-brother-in-law last night who has been burying friends from the Iraq conflict regularly. These are not light times,but today is going to be very happy for me.

One question has occurred to me which I would have blogged about if I had time. This present crisis is in large part a banking crisis. Big countries have been put on life support whilst small ones have gone down. That's why Ireland and Iceland are in the state they are in.

Does the pattern of collapses and weakness in the UK suggest that 'the North' and Scotland are functionally separate places? It's hard not to see that the British Banks and Building Societies that have gone down, bar Northern Rock (part of which is still based in Ireland)were Scottish. What does that say about the UK, and what does London's rescue of them mean for the idea of Britain?

Utterly Pedestrian Observations

I thought that, tired as I am from what I suppose I should call a major 9-hours a day fundraising effort if I wanted to 'big it up', I would just be honest about this post. I have been supplementing my usual doings with law and economics tutoring across the capital, and frankly I'm a little exhausted. Still, I'm not so exhausted that, in between the mental hail marys and the quiet voice behind my eyes that tells me no thing of beauty is as lovely as the women I have known, or the fierce love in my girlfriend, I can't help but reflect about art.

I like art. Specifically, I like the feeling that I have when I look at it, decode it, contextualise it, and then reflect that I am a person who likes art. It is an utterly solipsistic and somewhat philistine narcissism, aided and abetted by my low-to middlebrow tastes and somewhat neurasthenic palate, which drives me. It has, however, led to a good bit of reading of serious art tomes, and the occasional insight, as well as a few bizarre blog spats, as when that silly randroid turned up after my first day at the Baroque exhibition ended with a spider-man compendium in the bath.

I like the Baroque and the Byzantine, but am fascinated by modernism and vorticism and surrealism and futurism in a sort of arms-length way. They're all reactions to the bursting twentieth century, and mostly Edwardian or pre-Depression in sensibility. Is fascism Edwardianism without hope?

I get the point, I think that vorticism was about the brutality of the present and the lack of a redeeming future, rather than some science-fiction attempt to focus forward, and that it overlapped with the modern, as did futurism. Indeed, one immediate observation that springs to mind is that my earlier suggestion that the Labour Party had been a modernist project lacked an understanding that a sort of brutalism and romantic indulgence which corresponded to futurism was wrapped up with it.

But, well--doesn't Jacob Epstein's road-drill not half look like a clone trooper from Star Wars? Or a Cylon, if you want to keep your American-left sci-fi chic. I came across the sculpture in a little gem of a Brian Sewell review the other day, and discovered it on the web (the picture at the top of the post, that is) here.

Yes, I know. George Lucas, and utterly derivative schtick? I am shocked--schlocked in fact--that I could even propose such a thing. Yet his films have been politically important in shaping the quiet consciousness of generations who let his words and images slip in beneath their thinking as surely as any Byzantine was formed by a glance at the art in a wall. Or by a wall, in fact.

People overlook the backward-looking streak in Star Wars. They can't understand why it and Superman The Movie reflected the Reagan revolution much more than, say, THX-1138 or Barbarella reflected the sixties, or Zardoz and Alien the despairing nonsense of the seventies.

But once you get the point that star wars is a sort of combination of The Wizard of Oz, American Graffitti, Shane, and a chocolate-dip version of futurist and modernist art, you're halfway to understanding why it is so deeply Reaganite. It isn't conservative, at least not in an original, Edmund Burke sort of a way; it functions more in a sort of facilitating-total capitalism-through-neoliberalism way. That it manages to unite mystical elitism with a colossal narcissism looked forward to the eighties alliance of an anticommunist and polish vatican with the washed out but ultimately successful activist Liberals of the CIA.

There's a certain chic to that. It only failed to connect with the nineties in the prequels because of the rubbish dialogue (it's better in French, or German). Imagine if the people who wrote the dialogue for The Empire Strikes Back had written the rest; or, for that matter, J Michael Straczynski, or the Sex and The City crowd. What films they would have been then!

And just think what I could have done if I followed the most curious thing about the rock-drill, which is not the hard maleness of the outside but the child it carries within, conceived in the intellectual air that a living Freud breathed, and written about it. But I'm not really capable of that at this time of night. Or proper short sentences. Well, just a bit. See.

This is the bit where I acknowledge that three blind beetles would get the point. Plenty of other, much better, writers on culture have--you can find one here, for instance, and another here. I'm not telling you anything new. I thought that, at the end of an anniversary year for Marvel Comics, I would indulge myself a little.

So much of what characterises us as people enters with the stories and cheap art of our childhood that I don't mind reflecting on mine on the blog. After all, if it had not been for the liturgy, the Church, and good public libraries, I would be a total Philistine except that I would retain some ability to communicate with whatever it is that beauty and the symbolic represent through science fiction and comics and films. And, of course, the mental world of Law and History. Which I understand best through comics. What's the Thames Magistrates, where I have occasionally hung out as an observer, but the Savage Land of Ka-Zar and Kraven?

And why, while I am at it, did Stan Lee keep putting gay-style people in the jungle? Was it some Rousseaian thing? You know, like, Rousseau and that, civilisation as repression. Then again, all his 'straight' male characters spent their time in masks, swinging about cities dressed in tights looking for women defined by exaggerated female characteristics. Real men stood attendant in suits in the background and got on with things, except for the hulk, who spent his time behaving like a hopped up gym teacher. As in life, one suspects that they went home and quietly resented things, or such.

In any event, I wouldn't be me without the brightly drawn figures jumping somewhere around the scaffolding of my head.

I remember the first time that I saw a really good, deep film; it was Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, and I was already quite mature. I was living in a Balliol graduate house up the Banbury Road. There was a very devout Russian who'd been tortured by the KGB next door; a French photographer and national security man with a passion for poetry on the other side of me; a very beautiful, and funny Italian woman whom I came to experience a very deep friendship with below, a couple of drug dealers one of whom was on the run from the army, and a stint in Broadmoor (as a guard, he said), down the hall, and a blond German aristocrat in search of some philosophical panzer in the kitchen. An American girl and her boyfriend, nice, well-rested people, lived in her bedroom, and occasionally surfaced half-naked for some sustenance. They were so comfortable in each other, and I supposed so intensely disinterested in how they looked, that they made us so. I like it when men and women are natural together.

One night--I remember the snow going orange in the light outside, and the face of the house lady downstairs, who battled cancer and to whom I brought porridge when she was undergoing treatment and whom I once scared by checking for burglars from the wrong door and turning a corner with the light behind me and my bulk in front of her, and a woman I liked stretched out on the floor like the arms of St Peter's basilica or some beautiful undulating mountain range made of langorous curves and blondeness and brains, enjoying some cake or pie or bread and butter pudding that I'd cooked--I lost myself.

Totally and completely. In Takovsky's odd, strange tale. I think that I spent the next free hours watching Les Enfants du Paradis, and I'm sure some Kurosawa was involved too. My God, I may even have tried Last Year At Marienbad in an initial taste of what would become many encounters.

But you always remember your first. Things blend together in the memory. It probably took me ages to watch them, just as it took moments for some smirking thieves to steal an old nineteen fifties missal from which I learned my latin prayers and creed, and my only pictures of my grandparents, and some of my father, that were contained in a long kesh wallet made by the prisoners we'd picked up on some holiday in the long ago.

You know, I used to be the sort of person who didn't belt out cliches and then write volkisch things like 'you know' as though that made it acceptable. However, I have long sets of notes and guide papers and so on to write tonight, and a full day from nine to nine tomorrow, so I am allowing myself the indulgence.

Anyway, you've been warned. I have to read a paper on Trusts now, followed by one on sex crimes, and then one on Jersey criminals. All good fun at midnight. But it's nearly Christmas, and you know what that means. I'll be hanging about the galleries soon, and if you don't like the consequences, don't look at this blog. Just say no, and go and watch something much worse instead.

'Night, my friend. Good luck to you in finding that....

Happy Eid

Eid Mubarak to all my demented Muslim readers, of whom there are a few. I wanted to say thank you again to the kind Bengali gentleman who shared generously the samosas his wife had made, and his companionship and conversation with me today. I will reciprocate with Mince Pies....

One more time....

Here is the order of battle in the current depression. Please refer back to every other post here since 2007

1) Derivative markets will fall, which will panic governments
2) Money will move into stocks and shares after banks are 'stabilised'
3) Stocks and shares will slide as global imbalances and bank weakness are revealed
4) Treasury bonds and government securities will rise irrationally
5) Defaults by governments will panic remaining investors into gold and commodities
6) Analysts and politicians will use transport costs, energy costs, or perceived exchange imbalances--or 'climate change'- and the threat of social breakdown to tout protectionism
7) I wish you all Good-Bye and head for Donegal with a bag of platinum and a year's supply of meat.

Peak oil, peak globalisation, and food problems will complicate matters and make them more volatile, as will the exact length of time it takes for lagged unemployment to hit, and for monetary base inflation to wreak its damage. These waves are coming.

We seemed to slip into stage four today. The flexible retreat is quickening, but of course it is controlled and will merely be the precursor to the use of a wunderwaffe against Stalingrad....

Momentous Are Those Things That No One is Listening To

We'll listen to bankers saying that the ten-billion costs of refunding unfair charges would have meant that they would charge for all accounts and ATMs, even though they now say that the cost would have been much lower. We'll listen to members of the political media class lying about global warming, and we won't haul them up over peak oil or when their lies are exposed. We'll listen to the Governor of the Bank of England saying that two banks he saved were on the edge of collapse--and not mentioning others.

We'll listen to social workers saying the grotesque child abuse and largely unremarked destruction of working families they perpetrate regularly is unimportant compared to the good that their schemes do. We'll pretend civil unions are really only gay unions and that the idea of a pact of solidarity and equal treatment was never implied into the sale to the electorate of them--even though the House of Commons Library thinks that it originally was. We'll ignore millions of abortions, and pretend that protocol and respect are trivial and that they don't matter. Noise after noise after noise--all this we will put up with.

But--what's this? NASA announcing that there probably was once life on Mars? The Vatican holding conferences on extraterrestrial life, and coming to terms with it? Some Bulgarians in charge of their space agency claiming Aliens have been here a long time and that all they want in us is love?

I would hastily add that a nasty dispute between the President and Finance Minister has developed in Bulgaria over the Academy of Sciences, which may be off, out on the range, as the Texans used to say, when it comes to believability at the moment. The President thinks that the Finance Minister has nicked all his money, basically; it is at once more human and less serious than the dispute in Japan between the Finance Ministry and the Central Bank, which threatens us all.

I wish aliens were here and that they were running LloydsTSB. The strange celestial reasons and behaviour of the visitors would at least explain my bank's delusional psychosis, and those of other financial institutions with which I am connected. One of the reasons I am working seven days a week, teaching and lecturing and paying down my debts, is how unreliable they have become--I'd far rather be blogging, though I do love teaching undergraduates and A-level people. How odd life is. Still, I used the great boom to have a good time and to make myself a Doctor and a Barrister. I really cannot complain.

Mad, I know, but how mad? How much more mad than the determined belief in, say, stock markets, which of course are markets in nominal certificates for stock since no one has ever actually seen or claimed to have seen a share? More mad than the love in the eyes of women I know, or more mad than a bottle of wine?

Oh, who knows. They're here. Go and raise a glass to them, and ask them about Katie Price, or travel via black holes, or whether Jesus really visited Glastonbury before Bruce Springsteen did. These are things that our media think important.

The following song is for an old friend, and the wife of a good friend, whom I have known in death and life and who is in hospital again tonight, waiting for her son and fighting with all the strength of Jewish and Irish and Polish and Scottish blood. I love all of you.

People

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

The picture is by Blake, and depicts Pity and the child of Los, the blacksmith of the heart and fallen prophet who gets her 'up the duff'.

People are such an odd blend of culture and learned behaviours. I'm growing increasingly suspicious of any opinions in themselves, by which I mean--and you'd expect someone who was trained as an historian more than a barrister to write this--that none of us ever really leave the matrix of experiences and context that exists behind our eyes. Me and my multiple identities....

I write that after turning over two things on a long walk back from a small seminar job in Marylebone the other night. Past the Dorchester, past the homeless tents near the toilets in the tunnels beneath Marble Arch. Past the shops shifting volume and not value as they hurtle towards rent day and deflation or stagflation.

Many are blaming the present banking crisis, which I think has a long way to run, on President Clinton's initiative to include the poor in sub-prime mortgages, for instance. It is a way of identifying an absurd recipient of largesse, and seems to be a litmus test for particular sorts of conservative. However--and people should always bear this in mind--the crisis we find ourselves in, and which indirectly has just fired a woman who has been running her store for twenty six years with her husband who I have just been talking to whilst buying a bottle of wine--is a banking crisis.

Banks misused derivatives. Bankers turned offices into shops for mortgages and loans, which they used as raw material for derivative operations that allowed them to leverage and evade rules about capital. They then hid how much they had abused the concept of mixed collateralised obligations, which were meant to blend risky, safe, and so called 'mezzanine debt', or spread it regionally. If banks had been telling the truth about their debts and not hiding in shadow investment vehicles out of greed, the hundred billion or so of sub-prime debts would easily have been contained by the apparent half a trillion of bank capital that they said they had, but which we now know doesn't exist.

So why do people still blame the American poor for taking loans? The loans were mad--ponzi-scheme mad. But the way the derivatives market was apparently working, they made sense, and there was a certain sort of wisdom in the crowds who responded by apparently buying their homes for a short time. People want that sort of thing. It's a tic of humanity--to want the legal appearance of ownership even if a bank actually has it. I suppose some thought that that was better than spending their precious, short lives renting. I really wish a system would develop, however, in which people would see that a mortgage mostly means that a bank owns your house unless you have sufficient equity to fend them off when they 'over-exuberate'.

The second thing I thought was telling this week, and my friend Martin Kelly has published on it with a more instant humanity than I, was the condition of those caught in the Cumbrian floods. As Martin points out, BBC types will launch an appeal for foreign countries, some of whom are now nominally richer than us, who are inundated by floods at the drop of a hat. They'll wave the canard of sea level rises in Fiji to justify taxing the little people with aplomb.

But why do the media take one trip to Cumbria, hastily survey those who have lost everything, then head home and blame people for wanting houses that were built near flood plains or feel satisfied in some way that what they at their dinner parties falsely term climate change is hurting someone other than them?

Is it because many of the houses and flats in London now purchased come surrounded on surveys by drawings of waves to symbolise flood warnings that make plans look like pirate treasure maps? Is it because they escaped and the working people didn't?

There is a local Cumbrian Appeal, by the way--it isn't getting much coverage, but you can obtain details of how to do something for it here, if you wish.

Oh, I know. Facts are facts, and floods happen, and our housing policies have been flawed for years. I still feel for those who have lost everything, though. I have friends in Carlisle, whom I telephoned last week, so as to check that they were safe, and they tell me that the people are determined up there but still shocked.

I wonder. We're told people are so heartless in an atomised, broken Britain. I sometimes near, but I hope don't slip into, that valley myself. Yet I read today in the Evening Standard about people of all ages, sexes, and conditions in Peckham who woke up to find their flats burning and who, instead of simply running, made sure that their neighbours woke up and escaped too. The kindness and fellow feeling seemed instinctive, but made me glad of the invented community I feel with them as a Londoner. I'd prefer there were not disasters, but they sometimes seem to bring out the best in the people of these islands.

The story in the Standard was accompanied on the same page by a tale of a massive fine to a major fashion chain which had locked its basement and marginalised its staff so that, when a fire broke out, insured stock might be sacrificed and people might die, but at least theft would be minimised. It made me think of the London Monster and Calico cloth, and since the Standard is the house magazine of feudal banksterism, I'm sure that the irony was unintentional.

People. The strangest human beings I know are all so...well, human. We can follow logic and understand reasons and see opinions, but anyone who spends any time just listening to people will know that the idea of people uncovering the true Reason and philosophy of the universe is an idea best buried beneath a large pile of commonsense and experience. It takes some years to learn that.