April 30th - May 6th 2007
Sunday Anemone
Saturday Fired up
Friday Orchid
Thursday Unsporting
Wednesday Tulip
Tuesday Fame games
Monday Daffodils
Sunday 6th May
Anemone, Spring 2007
Saturday 5th May
Independent columnist Philip Hensher on last week's raid on Fire:
I find the prospect of a dealer operating to a determined clientele in the dark corner of a nightclub at 5am much easier to live with than the crack dealers hanging around busy south London streets on a Saturday afternoon.
The police operation on Friday night, though by all accounts conducted with good humour, seems unlikely to improve community relations or to have done anything very much to cut down the extent of drug use. At most, a few arrests will create business opportunities for some opportunistic footsoldiers in the drug dealing profession. Vauxhall might be a little quieter for, at a guess, four weeks.
What I find deeply worrying, however, is quite a new tactic in the way the operation was carried out. Reportedly, everybody in the club was led out and searched - fair enough - but subsequently, whether the police found anything or not in their possession, they were photographed for a purpose which was not explained.
Friday 4th May
Orchid, Spring 2007
Thursday 3rd May
Stop the chancellor using Lottery money to plug the funding gap in the 2012 Olympics.
If this goes ahead at least £900m will go from Big lottery, Sport England, Arts Council and Heritage Lottery much of this money would fund projects within the local voluntary and community sector. Services to disadvantaged people will be directly affected by the loss of this funding, people who will have no opportunity to benefit from the olympics directly but rely on local services provided by the voluntary sector.
Sign the e-petition here
Wednesday 2nd May
Tulip, Spring 2007
Tuesday 1st May
Ain't it the way: you wait several months for some bloggable news and then four fat stories come along at once.
Peter Andre not dead shock horror
Boy George arrested in Shoreditch after gay kidnap claim, and best yet:
Lie over gay partner ends BP chief's career
The feud between Lord Browne and his ex, Jeff Chevalier, will run and run, you can be sure.
(I particularly liked imagining the faces round the dinner table where "Lord Browne and his lover entertained Peter Mandelson, the European Trade Commissioner, and his Brazilian partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva [and] 'European Union policy and Chinese textile quotas' were discussed")
Be prepared for an endless op-ed cycle, starting with 'Nothing wrong with being gay, but..' through to 'Hell hath no fury like a rent-boy spurned'.
Keep a careful eye open for those oh-so-elegant euphemisms for bent-as-a-nine-bob-note. (Jeff Randall's piece in The Telegraph gets a good head-start: "immaculately turned out..elegant appearance..stylish, but never flashy..a lifelong bachelor, devoted to his mother..")
And, whilst doing so, amuse yourself by noting who's digging what dirt.
All papers report the central lie that brought about Browne's downfall as being about how he first encountered his former lover, whom he said he had met while "exercising in Battersea Park" - and most papers leave it, frustratingly, at that.
Which, of course, begs the question: where exactly did they meet? (Somewhere spectacularly sordid, you might think, given that Browne has forfeited up to £15m after trying to keep it quiet.)
In fact, as the Sun and The Guardian report, 'close associates' of Lord Browne admit the pair met through suitedandbooted.com - an escort-dominated website (currently offline 'due to technical reasons').
You will search the The Daily Mail, who originally broke the story, for any reference to 'suitedandbooted' entirely in vain, just as you will not now (or, I suspect, ever) see there any use of the words 'escort' or, God forbid, 'rent-boy'; they describe Lord Browne's "gay lover" as "a computer operator from Toronto".
How very discreet of them, you might think. Or then again, not.
Monday 30th April
Daffodils, Spring 2007
......previous week
