April 11th - April 17th 2005
Sunday Mmmarathon
Saturday Amsterdam 1997
Friday Too Polish
Thursday Looming tourists
Wednesday New news
Tuesday Anderson on Art
Monday Advice
Sunday 17th April 2005
Today I was woken early by the drone of helicopters covering the London Marathon as it ploughed along the Highway, 500 yards or so from my flat.
I contemplated wandering up there to spectate a little (and maybe catch a glimpse of The Dane in shorts) but turned on the tv instead - just in time to watch footage of the leading male runners passing the top of my road. Now that's what I call a result.
I did emulate the Marathon in other ways however - and not just by leaving HMD slightly earlier than planned due to a Radliffe-style potential emergency.Earlier this month I finished my re-reading of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and today I finished re-reading Cryptonomicon, the prequel/sequel. That's (927pp plus 887pp plus 815pp plus 918pp) 3547 pages in total; more than twice as long as War and Peace and, with all due respect to Tolstoy, a damn sight more readable.
Saturday 16th April 2005
Amsterdam, Spring 1997
Friday 15th April 2005
Overheard at the office
A: Who do we fancy for Pope then?
B: Anyone as long as it's not Pappenfuhrer Ratslinger
C: My money's on Anne Widdecombe
B: You don't think she looks too Polish?
Thursday 14th April 2005
Loth as I am to agree with Michael Howard, I do agree with him when he says that we badly need to have a public discussion about immigration.
It does need to be an intelligent discussion, however.
What I can say and he can not (perhaps because my motives are more pure: note the fifth plank of Tory immigration policy, "Health checks for immigrants") is that it's extraordinarily different for us to have a rational debate on this issue given the long history of mob violence and saloon-bar xenophobia that has so disgracefully marked the British people's relations with abroad.
The reaction to this - turning a politically-correct blind eye to the cultural trials that result from dealing with successive influxes of people who speak a different language and who have a different picture of the way society works - is no solution.
Nor, much as I admire her candour, is the answer given by posh model Lady Isabella Harvey who, answering twenty questions in the Independent lately, was asked what we should do about immigration: "I've got no idea," she said.
I have no answers either, but I can at least tell you what the first line of my speech on the subject would be: "We are - or have been - an island nation. And the adjective from island is insular...".
In the meantime, let's prepare ourselves for the great hating-foreigners game that even members of the metropolitan elite can play with a safe conscience: this year's tourist influx.
Who will it be this summer? No more Americans, that's for sure - the demise of the almighty dollar has seen to that. And the cliché of the Japanese coach-party got tired long since.
I think I spotted a preponderance of South-east Asians last season, milling about on tube platforms, standing just exactly on the spot where I need to do a swift heel-swivel and skip-jump to stride into work no more than fifteen minutes late.
This year, in which vernacular do we need to master "Out of my way! I live here"?
(My money's on South Africa.)
Wednesday 13th April 2005
News you may have missed
Dandruff causes global warming
Embarassed wrestlers drop their pants
Tuesday 12th April 2005
The category of art expands and doesn't mean anything any more. We've become so clever, so sensitive, that we don't need works of art to represent beauty, to remind us how to look and how to feel.
Some days, everything is tuned really well, and everything you see is sharp, and it's like living in a work of art.
- Laurie Anderson talking to Martin Longley, from an inexplicably off-line interview in last Friday's Independent
Monday 11th April 2005
Doctor Johnson's Anatomy of Melancholy
The great direction which Burton has left to men disordered like you, is this, Be not solitary; be not idle: which I would thus modify; - If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.
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