Martin Meenagh blog

The Barry George case Barry George was the individual convicted of killing the television person Jill Dando. I have an interest, as my reader will know, in miscarriages of justice and mysteries, and I was not surprised to see that the case was re-opened, though I wouldn't pretend to know all the evidence. One thing that comes of hanging around the Old Bailey or the courts observing trials (which I enjoy doing) is that very little that really goes on is reported. The last time I was down at Southwark Crown Court, for instance, the journalists came in ten minutes before the end and started writing stuff down on disconnected bits of paper and credit card bills. When I went out they were doing pieces to camera about lawyers who had not been in the room and their speeches, plus riffing on the tone of the Judge in sentencing (and getting it wrong). However, courtesy of David Lindsay's website, I found this site written by a man who has studied the Barry George case and who thinks t...

Make London and England Independent There are obvious problems with the idea that, as very soon may be the case given the political winds in Scotland, England may have to be an independent country again. For a start, the question of what status the isle of man, Wales, Cornwall and the Six Counties in the north of Ireland will have is unclear, of course. But there is one entity that is bigger than all of them. It has its own economy. It would inevitably unbalance any independent England, sapping its young and dominating its politics and culture. It is a cosmopolitan, multi ethnic hub which threatens to parasitize England and which does not really understand the rest of the country and does not need to. An independent England would be a Byzantium or a Veneto; a hinterland characterised by attachment to a city. That would be a sad fate for the country of England. So, why not start planning now for the obvious? England should be an independent, democratic country in charge of its own tradi...

Women are the greatest invention of God, even better than wine. France is also beautiful. So--and I am well aware of how ridiculous I sound--I was deeply impressed that the famous small person, M.Sarkozy, was man enough to surround himself with the intelligent, confident and beautiful women above. They remind me of two of the most beautiful women I have ever known. One is his Human Rights Minister and the other one is the Justice Minister of France. What a country. We have Jack Straw and a glove puppet described as 'a pillock on a gap year' by the great Robert Marshall Andrews QC MP. Or some latte quaffing numpty from Liverpool or somewhere in the Home Office. I don't care. Ah, Paris....

State funding of political parties? Not with my taxes! I arrived home tonight to hear from somebody described as a former 'policy director' at number ten downing street (for whom nobody voted and whose title is frankly absurd) that the Labour Party funding scandals are all our own fault for not being mature enough as citizens to fund political parties with taxes. I do not like swearing on this blog so I will restrain myself. Why should, at the behest of some unelected functionary from the political classes, even more of my absurdly high taxes be spent keeping politicians who won't get up on a platform and actually debate and engage with ordinary people in media consultants? The Tory 'voter vault' computer system, and before it 'excalibur' for labour cost millions between them. Fine. The adverts both parties ran on billboards cost more. Fine. The army of underpaid hacks from student unions who produced campaigns that turned half the electorate off and got a g...

Spot The Difference Number Two--Happy Monday! One of the pictures above represents a world in which a group of confused creatures live obsessed with the inflation of their wheels whilst a malign force attempts constantly to stop them enjoying themselves. Their only consolation is chasing a happiness dragon and hoping for some stroke of individual luck to fall upon them or their idiot rulers. The other is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Can you tell which is which? I have placed a short instructional video below, on the usual terms.

There is an act of grotesque historical vandalism going on.... I am not always in agreement with the views of Melanie Phillips, who now blogs for the Spectator. However, on two occasions some time ago, when late at night I posted comments on her blog, she responded with courtesy and in a way that she did not have to, which I appreciate. I also enjoyed her book on the movement for womens' votes very much. So, her piece on the archaeological destruction of the remains of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Palestinian authority is quite disturbing. Even if you can't bring yourself to agree with her, the fact of this vandalism should be apparent, as should the very dark emotions behind it. Take a look.

I like a good tune... and for some bizarre reason the Australian national Anthem always moves me as much as the Irish one. Here's a lovely example from the Sydney Olympics. I heard it lying in a friend's spare room eight years ago one sunny morning and it made me weep. It's odd how there are some countries you care for--but I suppose one of the more usual moods of anyone with any sense in Britain is working out how to emigrate!

This is the way governments crumble... Just before I go to bed, there is a potentially very big story breaking about the way the Labour Party in Britain financed itself under Tony Blair. I can't help but feel sorry for Gordon Brown. Every problem he has had was inherited from his predecessor, Mr Blair, with the exception of the press speculation over an election that he stoked and then tried to suppress. But this one could end up with people in jail. Despite that, as this site shows, the Conservatives could win a big victory in the popular vote and yet still lose the election, leaving no party with a majority of the House of Commons. The Scottish National Party could even beat Labour in Scotland. The mind-numbing contest for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats has therefore become bizarrely important, because the most likely outcome of any election now will be a 'hung' parliament in which they hold the balance of power.

I'm really very bored this Saturday night... So let's look to tomorrow in history, if that's not wrong on many levels other than simply the grammatical. On this day in 1177, there was war in the Middle East, as Saladin was about to be defeated. There was an assault on Muslims at Granada in 1491. It's a bad date for storms. In 1703, environmental change led to a week-long storm that killed 9000 people in England; in 1839, cyclones killed 300000 in British India. In 1950, the 'storm of the century' hit the Northeastern United States. In 1987, the Philippines suffered a murderous typhoon. On 25 November 1864, Confederates employing terror tactics firebombed New York City. Vojvodina tried to secede and join Serbia in 1918. In sport, in 1953, England suffered their first home defeat at Wembley. So, war with Islamic countries, environmental disruption, terrorism in New York, trouble in Serbia and an England football defeat. Glad that's all in the past then, and th...

Banning Things It's almost comical how the vast majority of the English middle classes, and the former trotskyites masquerading as militant liberals and neoconservatives, want to ban everything. I ought to point out I am not, to my mind, some big fat right wing thuggish boor. To anyone who knows me, well, maybe.... Consider the following list; 1) A good dinner of meat and properly genetically-modified vegetables, a good bit of several wines (not taken on its own, as my own aged inbility to do that anymore has shown me to my cost lately) and a good cigar. Banned in part in most places and by tenancy agreements at home. Bans suggested by greens, 'health campaigners', 'anti-smokers' and animal sentimentalists and science-phobes. 2) An open, non pc conversation at a dinner table or in a pub. The natural reaction is to censor it. I've nearly started fights by just chatting to people who have opinions that are a little beyond groupthink, or saying what I think to vari...

An Indian view of the Giuliani campaign Here's a hat tip to a gentleman in India who seems to have seen through the Giuliani campaign. As I said before, I like Barack Obama, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee this time round though right now I can see Romney and Clinton getting their respective nominations....

For those of you interested in the amount of crime on the streets.... The British Crime Survey Statistics are available here . Careful with the figures, they are Home-Office structured and may underplay crime if there is a high element of non-reporting.

Ten Policies to fix Britain. If Britain is suffering a massive cultural crisis, and it is, can we get beyond immigration and think about what could fix things? How many of these policies would you agree with, if any? 1. British people don't own their country. Their votes do not matter, since the electoral system doesn't reflect the views of the electorate. So, first, make England, Scotland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, Wales and Cornwall self-governing fiscally accountable states. 2. Base each state on a form of election which will not allow unnatural majorities or party domination. Allow popular ballot initiatives. Build all this into a written constitution that clearly defines and limits the executive. Disestablish the Church of England but allow all faiths to run schools so long as they accept democracy, diversity and a minimal canonical education. Abolish the national curriculum over a period. Allow schools and universities to adopt their own teaching methods if ne...

The non-Roman Catholic Churches One of the interesting things about successful Empires and states that recurs time and again is how they reconcile lots of different groups to themselves. So, for instance, the Persian Empire in the past was, as to an extent one of its successor states Iran is, an area of many different groups under one form of rule. So is China, which contains a few dozen different languages and ethnicities and acknowledges them even under its present dispensation. Within the area of their borders, then, such states tolerated and even promoted local regimes (in the sense of local laws or laws that applied to particular communities). They were culturally federalist. If the modern inhabitants of Britain got this point they would see that their own state has long since ceased to be culturally federalist, but has adopted the shadow form of diversity and different forms of law in Scotland and England to cover up the emergence of a vulgar popular and a somewhat shallow elite ...

Pakistan and the Law There's a lovely blog by Indian legal scholars and lawyers on law in that country and in the subcontinent in general that those interested in the Pakistan shenanigans may wish to have a look at here. As you can see, the author puts Pakistan's periodic instability down to four main causes. First, partition created unstable borders that any state would have had trouble with. I suspect that such an argument is familiar to anyone with an interest in European twentieth century history. People frequently make the point that even Stressemann (I don't have the German symbols on my keyboard to write the Scharfes S) would have had trouble with the Polish border after 1919. This problem was compounded by the existence of East Pakistan, which was to become Bangladesh, and by the failure to resolve the Kashmir issue. Secondly--and I am sometimes building on the logic of his arguments rather than quoting--the author points out that the Muslim League was in no way as...

John Howard John Howard, described by the American conservative think-tank as 'Asia's Tony Blair' has been decisively rejected by the Australian electorate. Tony Blair, not described as 'the Atlantic Ocean's John Howard' has been removed from office. Jose Maria Aznar-Lopez, described by the President of Venezuela as 'a fascist' has long been removed from office. The Poles have rejected their government recently. Only the Danish Prime Minister remains from the 2003 Coalition of the willing that contributed troops to the invasion of Iraq. It's funny that all thats left after this debacle is Hamlet. Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a nice piece here on how Howard criticised John Kerry for commenting on Australian affairs--and then tried twice to severely undermine Barack Obama's campaign a few months ago. It says just about everything really, though the one thing I would note is how silly it is sometimes to draw serious lessons from the end of a po...

The uses of Criminal history and the Amazing Careers of Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard There is a poem that describes tube trains from the perspective of a deranged child (not that distinct from railway company management views, I know) as 'metal boxes where people go to read books and listen to music'. I have to say, I fully sympathise. Living where I do in London, the district line, which is mostly overground, is the only tube I ever really have to take. Two dark nights a week, I travel back from Temple station and, recently, I have been losing myself in the brilliant popular history of London crime by Hitchcock and Shoemaker, The Hanging Court . I've put the Time Out review at the link because Amazon have done something lazy and just gone on about how the 'Enlightenment' saved London from itself, which is nonsense. Shoemaker and Hitchcock draw from the Old Bailey's Online Proceedings , which are a romp for the likes of me and almost as much fun as rucking ...

The Price of Beer, Bread and Bacon For some time, 'ordinary' inflation has exceeded the disinflation of goods and services that pulled the numbers down for most of the past ten years. So it has been perfectly possible in Britain's wirtschaft non-wunder to be told over and over again that the economy is doing fantastically but actually to find that normal household bills for shopping or going out for a claret or a pint have gone up . Here is a price indicator which is a little behind the times but which provides comparisons of the prices of things that suggests what I mean. This is a serious issue. Truth and any trust in statistics or experts is in very short supply in Britain at the moment. So is legitimacy. Only 22% of the electorate actually voted for the government after all, and that figure was far less in England itself. So when people find their ordinary daily prices out of kilter too, is it any wonder they feel even more alienated from the political classes?

We're paying for the husk As I suspected the other night, and as is common practice, the Profitable mortgages and loans which the Northern Rock Bank touted as its own actually belong to another company they set up in Jersey, or at least according to the Guardian 70% of them do. So if the taxpayer is lending the company billions (and latest estimates range from 25 to 30 billions of pounds, which is something like twice the education budget and four times the aid budget), what are we doing? Why have we not been given shares in return? The case for nationalising Northern Rock as this excellent post from Neil Clark suggested, or on the Network Rail lines, grows stronger every day.

Here is an insane game involving brussels Sprouts (which I like) that my cousin has just sent me. You may wish to waste some time at work with it, since this is, in between my more pompous moments, a timewasting blog. Turn your volume down first.

In the post below, I discussed Banking failures which had government money thrown at them to no avail before being bought up and hushed up. I decided to start an absolutely new post so that no one could get the wrong impression at all. Here is a link to a Liberal Democrat campaign to make the British government declare how many billions of taxpayers money it has given to Northern Rock. Not Barclays or Paragon. Those Banks clearly are not in trouble. You may want to go and read it and sign it.

Banking Failures in the Anglosphere The Spectacular Six Thrilling. I was turned down for dinner by someone who wanted to do their accounts, which more or less sums things up at the minute, frankly. Beats washing her hair I guess, though she is an excellent cook. Anyway, undaunted (and perhaps this line of patter is a clue to my present isolated condition) this has not stopped me from spending the night with a book on banks and mortgages. I have always thought that those who enjoy land law are probably susceptible to Stockholm syndrome, the illness that makes the kidnapped sympathise with their captors. It is an incredible waste of a soul, though rather predictably the first recognisable English law book was based on who owned the land. It wasn't anyone who had any sort of a claim to it or who made their lives from it, as you might expect and this being England, which is basically a sort of Norman burglary bag tied up with industrialist enclosures. If you were hoping any imminent ba...

Not to wade into private grief, nor to start a fight.... Which blog got 612 votes in 2006 --just over half of what Neil Clark , the UK's best blogger--got in 2007 despite suggesting to its members they vote often and now, by some oversight (and I hope they have the grace to maintain it) have actually posted that suggestion on their blogspot ? Its such a mystery.... In fact, such a mystery that I have posted the material from their blogspot below in case they remove it. Perhaps it is some monumental set up? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm December 08, 2006 Vote Early, Vote Often! We are honoured to have been nominated, along with many other extremely good blogs, for the Best UK Blog category of the 2006 Weblog Awards. You can vote for us, or indeed any of the others you fancy, here. It appears that you can vote once every 24 hours. Remember, it is just a bit of fun, ect ect ect. (hat tip: Norm, who is also nominated). wardytron adds: It already looks like being a 2 horse race between us and somethi...

May God Help Bangladesh According to the Times today, almost ten thousand people may have lost their lives in Bangladesh from the floods. I have an awful feeling that this is just a draft of a bitter cup we are going to be drinking very deeply from, and I mean that in more than a Churchill-plagiarist way. The Bells have been ringing for some time. It has often been the lot of human beings to live amongst the rising waters, of course. In a sense, the waters have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age. But this catastrophic example of something that has been happening more and more recently must surely focus minds and allow us to reclaim the environmental issue from bourgeois fantasists and the self-indulgent ranks of professional Greens. If the ice caps melt, the weight holding down the tectonic plates of the earth shifts. Earthquakes and floods and tidal waves very quickly might result . In fact, some anti-greenhouse gas sites acknowledge this and see in a mad way a solution to...

How come is this? Is David Milliband actually Sweep? Who is Sooty? Hello viewer. One of the pictures above is of a glove-puppet with delusions of Grandeur who appears to be under the impression that he is required to respond to all crises with a) a stunning degree of incompetence and b) an obsessive return to a putative global requirement to interfere with people's rubbish bins. One of the people is Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth affairs. Can you suggest which one is which? I have placed a short instructional video that may help below.

Books about Terrorism that have been Suppressed by the Libel Laws I have just returned from Mass, which was a beautiful service in Wandsworth . I love the catholic church. Surrounded by people of all races and ethnic extractions, we heard a quiet, decent priest talk about how to live life. It is little wonder that most of the people I know who went to catholic comprehensives are now teachers, doctors, social workers or possessed of a social conscience and determined to give their lives in community. So it's depressing when I come back to have a snarfle round the blogosphere and find lazy silly depictions of the church in sites I otherwise agree with. If you can ignore those and just want to go for the more thoughtful parts of the web, have a look at this . It's from the Spiked website. Spiked is thought-provoking sometimes, and this article depicts five books that were effectively suppressed from British readers by actions in the libel courts. It isn't breaking the law, and...

The Buster Crabb mystery solved! The British Special forces diver, Buster Crabb(not of Flash Gordon fame, obviously) died mysteriously during a Soviet visit in the 1950s. His death has always been a mystery--now the Russians have confessed! You can read about time's latest revelation here . Now, there are just a few mysterious questions left. 1)Whose body was discovered and passed off for that of Crabb? 2) What was Crabb fixing to the soviet ship? 3) Who ordered him to do it if the MoD did not, and was it Earl Mountbatten? Time reveals all!

The Prophesy of the Popes, the end of Time, and my hangover One of the scarier things in the world is the existence of the prophecies of St Malachy . This document, which is probably a very old note amended by forgery half a millennium ago, purports to give cryptic notes on the identity of the Popes until the end of Rome. Successively, each pope is given a motto, but not a name. As their papacy goes on, the cryptic lines of Malachy are read by Vatican-watchers and referred back to and then, in what psychologists would no doubt call a causal attribution, the malachy lines are lauded for their accuracy. At times of papal election, these prophecies are dusted off and form a backdrop to what is after all the extraordinary business of electing a pope. At the 1958 election, for instance, reacting to the prophecy that the next pope in line would be a 'pastor and sailor', Cardinal Spellman of America hired a boat and sailed it up and down the Tiber until the Patriarch of Venice (the Q...

Neil Clark, David Lindsay and the Spanish Inquisition! I'm stupidly busy at the moment but wanted to direct readers to this excellent article on the Spanish Inquisition from David Lindsay , a quixotic conservative whose writing I like and whose thoughts make me think. And to wish Neil Clark , the official best UK blogger congratulations again on the success of his left wing blog! As the political class breaks down all the logical divisions of politics, I think that agenda-challenging and thought-provoking people like these two are going to be the ones all the frauds hate.

And just because I have just learned to do this.... Here is a song from a very beautiful Italian-American woman who told me it starts with wars in the third world, continues through european disruption, stops off at Iranian trouble and ends in an atom bomb. Lovely tune too. I promise proper word blogs in the future, but I hope you enjoy the Merry Minuet!

I like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, for sentimental reasons and because they seem honest and straightforward and not plastic. I may be fantastically wrong. This speech, however, is just a taster of why in a fair world the Democrat frontrunner in America should be Barack Obama. It's twenty minutes long and it takes a little time to get going, but god, reason and populism don't always mix like this beautiful speech on a hot Iowa night. Enjoy!

Bread and Circuses There seems to be some disbelief on the price of a loaf being over £1. Here's a link to a story from the start of the year, in which bread was 94p. Towards the middle of the year, the supermarkets started blaming the chinese rather than their oil-powered supply lines . Here's a loony link from a bread lobby saying that a kilo of bread here is at least cheaper than in colombia . Now, in November, no one seems to have any explanation, though I found this piece on why the poor are eating too much in the Daily Telegraph . Perhaps it's a secret plan to put us all on the Atkins diet, though come to think of it I haven't been to any circuses later, so maybe the state is losing its grip

The price of Bread Inflation statistics, whether measured by the Retail Price Index, underlying inflation or the Consumer Price Index, are notoriously difficult to track contemporaneously. Has anyone else noted a ludicrous inflation of supermarket prices recently? I can't get a sliced loaf for under a pound, or chicken for less than four. I wonder if it is just London, or my part of it? Are the supermarkets putting on their oil costs to ordinary consumers?

The exile (though there are far worse places to be exiled than Mexico, I guess) has just sent a note a propos of the Obama silliness when people criticised Obama for not grabbing his breast at the playing of the anthem . He said Mexico had adopted the Italian/'Roman' salute of the 1930s, and sure enough here is Vicente Fox looking a bit Flash Gordon doing it. The man above the post would qualify for the CNN presidential primaries.

Crippen innocent; Mad King Ludwig murdered? Time tends to reveal most things. The British press are incredibly bad at revealing things when they think they are doing so, but at least better than the American. I found two gems in recent weeks. The first, readable here , suggests that DNA evidence now puts the guilt of the infamous Dr Crippen of the crime for which he was hung in 1910 in doubt. It is one of the many recurring themes in English criminal law that DNA is used far more to show innocence rather than guilt. The first time that DNA evidence was used in English courts, for instance, was in the mid-1980s to disprove a confession. In the right hands, DNA can be as unhelpful to a prosecution case as Elizabeth Loftus has shown eyewitness testimony to be. Another great mystery was the way Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria died during Bismarck's second Reich, in the summer of 1886. Ludwig was gay, and a threat to the stability of the (unstable) federation under the Kaiser as a sort of h...

Our Mediterranean Civil War One of the interesting things about the generally uninteresting President Sarkozy (I liked his wife though) was his concept of a 'Mediterranean Community' stretching around the middle east and North Africa. he has back-pedalled a little on the idea of late, having run into significant opposition from those who believe that North Africa, Jordan, and Turkey have nothing to do with Europe. Really, though, what are we arguing about? In 1054, the Catholic West and Orthodox East split. Is the east part of Europe? Well, yes. No one in their right mind would deny that the Greeks or Serbians aren't Europeans, and that they shouldn't participate in our common European culture. The Greeks were the inheritors of Byzantium, as were the Russians later. Byzantium was a version of the Roman Empire. What, on that logic, excludes Byzantium itself after 1453? True, it was overwhelmed by Turks, Kurds and Arabs under the banner of Islam. Yet Islam shares a great ...

2008 candidates There is a particularly silly debate that is ongoing at the minute in American politics (quelle surprise). It concerns where one should stick one's hand when a national anthem is playing. Barak Obama is in trouble because he did not place his hand on his breast when the national anthem played . The Star Spangled Banner is a poem by Francis Scott Key. The poem was written in 1812. The words would therefore not have been recognised by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Governeur Morris, John Randolph, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, or John Adams when they invented America. The song tune may have been. It is an eighteenth century drinking song called 'To Anacreon in Heaven'. Here are the original words. It is a sweet tune. It did not become the American National Anthem until 1933. Previously, 'Hail Columbia' was played. The Pledge of Allegiance is something that tiny American children start doing at kindergarten. It requires th...

Enoch Powell was wrong, so why do so many mistaken people think he was right? Part three I come from a working-class ex-steeltown. I am very removed from it in many ways now; a night out I enjoy is down the Middle Temple or the Oxford Colleges I used to teach for, and I was never much cop in a pub or the Catholic club (known for some reason as the KK) at home. My old catholic comprehensive has been shut down by ofsted because it was underperforming and catholic (in many people's eyes) and some of the businesses and the steelworks I spent some summers in have changed radically. None of this is the fault of immigrants. We were all immigrants, from Ireland, serbia, scotland, poland or anywhere else white after all. And therein lies a clue. When the government began dispersing asylum-seekers in the early twenty-first century, Corby gained a Muslim community. They set up a mosque in an old housing estate from the seventies, and as is the custom in that community, left shoes outside as a...

Enoch Powell was wrong, so why do so many mistaken people think he was right? Part two Enoch Powell in 1968 made particular aversions about the numbers of immigrants. Though careful to note that he was talking about then-present trends, he said that there would be seven million immigrants and their descendants in the UK in 2000. The Office for National Statistics in the UK maintains population figures here . It may be more reliable as one goes into the past, and may be underestimating the figures.As the reader will note, Powell was, on the figures, more or less right in terms of the sheer number of immigrants. As a percentage of the British population, and immigrants (I am the child of such a family myself) are British, immigrants and their stock have risen from just over four per cent to nearly ten per cent of the population. The vast number of those immigrants are concentrated in cities that have always had very large immigrant elements and many of which profit by having immigrant en...

Enoch Powell was wrong. So why do so many mistaken people think he was right? part one It is an article of faith amongst those of a liberal bent in the United Kingdom that Enoch Powell was wrong. When people say this, they mean that his race-baiting speech of 20 April, 1968 to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre was wrong. Some conservatives and a huge number of white working and lower middle class people, and some journalists, disagree. They, along with Nigel Hastilow, the former Conservative Party candidate sacked for saying this, say that (in a mealy-mouthed euphemistic kind of a way) they think that many think that Powell was right. They almost never associate themselves with the former Conservative MP and Ulster Unionist directly. Enoch Powell was a brilliant man; a scholar proficient in several classical languages, a major at the age of 26, a throwback to an Imperialist age. Many were overawed by his wit and accomplishments. One of t...

The Crisis in Pakistan I want to post on the unfolding crisis in Pakistan in the nest few days; but I can't do anything better than direct you, if you are interested, to the Pakistan blog . It notes that of the fourteen points put forward by General Musharraf--God, what is it about messianic presidents and their fourteen points?--, eight express his frustration at the high judiciary (of which I approve) and another four relate to the menaces created by the Pakistani inter-service intelligence group (of which I disapprove), which tends to create trouble to keep itself in business. Watch that space; the fall of Pakistan and its 160 million citizens into crisis could be a milestone in our plunge into one of history's worst crises. The arc of instability stretching from Indonesia through to the Balkans via Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Arabia and Turkey into the Balkans is now smouldering. And the banks are teetering on the brink here too, and in Indonesia it's volcano day...

The Brilliance of Hitchcock's Topaz The fantastic meal I had the other night at L'Auberge (Ok, I know, but a blog, as my picture above demonstrates is a vanity publication as much as anything else) made me think of one of the great Alfred Hitchcock's movies. Hitchcock is vastly underrated in Britain, and always has been, even though he was knighted in 1980 four months before he died. The way he was pigeonholed here, and the lack of opportunities available him are I suppose two of the reasons why he left. His humour is that of a Londoner from the lower middle classes who can see some of the immutable qualities of class barriers in this country--and who knows that however he succeeds, he won't be 'in' and, to his credit, does not want to be. One of the many Hitchcock films I would watch over and over again is the finest of his Cold War films--Topaz, based on the book by Leon Uris. Topaz , made in 1969, looks back to a 'hidden history' of the Cuban Miss...

Vote, vote, and vote again for the blog awards Stupid silly Oscar-inspired empty ceremonies are hypocritical and silly. However, that logic doesn't apply to me because I am obviously above the rules and much better than that! So Vote here for my friend Neil Clark. His excellent, thought-provoking blogspot has been nominated for a blog awards and you should go and vote, 'specially since I just tipped you off about L'Auberge!