Smugness count

Two points to raise about this site.

1. The preamble, to give it its due, concedes that these numbers include those civilian deaths caused by "insurgent or terrorist action". It appears to shy away, however, from presenting that number separately from the Allied troops-related number. I'm willing to speculate which is the higher. At no point, of course, is there mention of that fact that a great many of those terrorists have no greater right, under whichever nebulous international "law" by which the invasion of Iraq was originally adjudged illegal, to be in Iraq than have the Allied troops. Technically, therefore, Iraq has been invaded by two armies (although only one of them dismantled the oppressive, bloodthirsty regime found therein previously; the other apparently wishes to see it restored).

2. I'm willing to speculate, too, that the civilian death toll in Iraq since April 2003 would by no means be insignificant had the Allies not invaded. The assumption seems to be that it's a zero-sum game, that Saddam wasn't in the habit of killing, or more accurately having killed, thousands of his citizens every year. And, of course, let's not overlook the fact that the vast majority of these civilian deaths since April 2003, whether caused by a terrorist suicide bomb or by a bullet discharged from an M-16, were ultimately caused by the so-called insurgency.

Speaking of which, can we stop romanticising that, please? An insurgency is when people rise up to defend their own country from state oppression, not when people rise up to resist the liberation from state oppression of another country. Enough mealy-mouthing. It's terrorism.

Swap the Blairs!

Kate Moss is coming back to Britain to chat to the police about snorting some coke five months ago, after some weeks of negotiations.

Is this a joke? Do the police really have so little to do that they have the time to hassle someone in the fucking United States to come back to answer a piddling possession charge? No, wait, they're mumbling about supply too. I don't think supplying minute traces to mirrors and banknotes counts.

I'm lost for words. (OK, not entirely.) Are we to infer from the stupendous manpower being devoted to a single instance of a crime committed by millions every day, the only remarkable aspect of this one being the offender's tolerable level of fame, that the police are satisfied that they've caught all the dealers, all the movers, all the middlemen, all the suppliers and all the barons? Somehow, one suspects not. I'm all for broken windows, but if there's an issue where it won't work, it's this one; with a fresh market opening up every day, it doesn't matter how many people like Kate Moss you ostentatiously pursue. This is purely for show. Whereas the Labour government, with all its statist conceit, operates its bludgeoning top-down do-as-we-say policies, when in fact it should be instigating reform and inculcating its values from the bottom up, the Met appears to believe that the best way to fight a "war on drugs" is to go after the end users rather than the suppliers. Perhaps if we put the Met into government, the Labour party could run the police: certainly it possess the requisite authoritarian streak.

That Chris Huhne/disabled person interface is on the cards any day now...

So it turns out Ming didn't need to set Hughes up with an aide. He did it all on his own. The twist, of course, is that Hughes isn't out of the race. In fact, it's tempting to conclude that the statement was timed to coincide with Hughes' appearance on Question Time on Thursday. Certainly it gave him every opportunity to make a statement direct to the nation rather than having to filter it through the agenda of national newspapers. Lib Dems being the sort they are, of course, it's a point of principle that something like this won't affect they way they vote (nor should it): it wouldn't surprise me if it increased his share of the vote, so determined will your average LD be to prove his tolerance.

What I'm really curious about is whether they'll have the sense to spot where the space is. With David Cameron's understandable but infuriating co-option of any policy that he thinks people will like, the biggest gap in the political market at the moment is a true libertarian angle. (In fact, that's been the case since the Lib-Lab alliance betrayed Liberals in 1903, but it is marked at present.) Of course, Mark Oaten was the man most likely to take the party in that direction, but Ming might make a reasonable fist of it: it's only ever been his social liberalism that kept him out of the Conservative party. But with Cameron and Blair fighting for the fence, there's a whole garden for the taking.

Parity, parity, parity.

The Blair thing was education reforms. Of all the items on a long and distinguished list of matters on which I and various unreconstructed members of the Labour Party (which is to say the vast majority of the Labour Party, its dissimulating foremost members aside) are in violent disagreement, education is perhaps the highest. The Labour shibboleth concerning academic selection, memorably encapsualted by the villainous Anthony Crosland as a desire to "smash every fucking grammar school in the country", has wrought more damage to the prospects of this nation's youth than any amount of drugs on the streets or violence in popular culture. There can be no justification for bright kids being hamstrung by an ideological imperative that confuses equality of opportunity with parity of outcome. Worries about a "hierarchy in education" seem to overlook the undeniable hierarchy in kids' aptitude (which is no different from "ability", by the way, and any attempt to suggest otherwise is simply sleight of hand). We can't change the latter, so why avoid the former? Gifted kids have too long been held hostage to dubious and ill-conceived ideals. They need pushing, not constraining.

So Blair saying that he was a parent first and a politician second was, at least on the face of things, welcome. That fact that it was a consummately political thing to say appears to have escaped many people, and the fact that his education reforms, while being just about sensible enough to infuriate the nationalised egalitarian cranks on his backbenches, are in fact worth neither the tremendous cost to him personally in what little political capital remains to him nor the vast swath of Parliamentary time that will be wasted introducing the recalcitrant Labour Left to the notion of real life wherein selection by ability is a constant factor, is also unfortunate: if it were going to cost this much, they might as well be genuinely radical. Nonetheless, anything that goes even an inch to undo the catastrophic orthodoxy that poisons our education system at the moment is to be applauded. Maybe one day our kids will be sufficiently stretched that our exams could even become tough again.

AAARRRGGGHHH!!! It's "Rule, Britannia"!!!! RUN AWAY!!!!

RIP Chris Penn.

Having some pretty comical problems with this shitbox computer at the moment. There's plenty I want to bitch about - and, rather less plausibly, there was also something I wanted to remark on as being something Tony Blair was suggesting that I heartily endorsed, but I can't remember it. But I'm mostly trying to fix my computer.

Also, of course, there was Gordon Brown weighing in on the pathetic decision to scrap the UK Theme that takes up three minutes of Radio 4 airtime at fucking 5.30am and replace it with ... the same thing we get for the next three and a half hours: a news summary. Clearly the idiot controller of Radio 4, whose name is something ridiculous but appropriate like Mark Dazzling-Stupidity, is terrified of broadcasting anything that remotely smacks of dangerous, seditious stuff like a folk-memory. Naturally, as the instigator of the present fatuous debate on Britishness (subtitled "Which Includes Gordon, Don't Forget!"), Brown has come out in support of the UK Theme, which makes this a somewhat momentous day: their slippery, questionable motives aside, I stand today in support of something said by not only Tony Blair (which I still can't remember) but also, horrifyingly, Gordon Brown. Still, cheer up. He's fucked the economy seven ways from Sunday. We can get back to hating him tomorrow. In the meantime, go here and sign the petition. It's OK to be proud of the past.

Just don't say, "I'm getting a Brazilian."

Speaking of Presidents, my favourite Bush joke. Originally printed in the Grandiose, or Graunchier, or whatever it's called, but tickled me nonetheless:

Rumsfeld comes into the Oval and gives Bush news of the day: "Today three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq." Bush is horrified. Head in his hands he sits for a least a minute behind the Kennedy desk, muttering, "that's too terrible," "those poor boys," etc.. Finally he raises his head.

"So exactly how many are there in a brazillion?"

Deus ex machina

The dead horse is to be flogged no more.

I should be upset about this, and if it had happened three years ago I would have been bouncing off the walls. There was a time when there was nothing to touch this programme. Simplistic on occasion, frequently preachy and more-or-less suffused with moments apparently designed purely to encourage vomiting among all non-Americans (and probably some Americans too), it was nonetheless so fearsomely well-written and for the most part so flawlessly interpreted, so impeccably directed, so beautifully shot and so sympathetically scored that you just had to let slide the clunky moments of patriotic fervour or those times when the actors might as well have turned to face the camera for all that the pretence that they were addressing each other and not the audience was successfully maintained.

So what happened? It's a rare fan that doesn't know, so if you don't know now would be a good time to become a fan. The West Wing was created by Aaron Sorkin in 1999 subsequent to the commercial, if not critical, success of his film The American President. Anyone who's seen Sports Night will know that Sorkin's not a chap with nothing to say, and if on occasion he proved susceptible to schmaltz, he also managed to corral a dizzying array of facts into the average West Wing episode. While he received much assistance on the wonk side of things from White House staffers such as President Clinton's 1st press secretary Dee Dee Myers, the actual writing is very much him, very much of the time. An astonishing achievement, considering most TV shows of The West Wing's size generally have between seven and ten writers. It couldn't last, of course - particularly not with a drug habit like Sorkin's and a hypocrisy like the average US TV network's.

After four years of consistent board-sweepage at the Emmys (keeping out The Sopranos and Six Feet Under inter alia, no mean feat) and two Peabody Awards (for the first two seasons, fittingly), Sorkin was fired from his own show, apparently for consistently missing script deadlines. Now, I don't know about NBC, but I'd probably be prepared to wait the extra day or two for scripts of the quality of those Sorkin produced for The West Wing, if the alternative were the stultifying lumps the cast had to contend with from Season 5 onwards. I don't think there can be much doubt that it wasn't his late scripts they fired him for.

Creative control was handed over to John Wells, who had been on board as Executive Producer from the start. His show ER served as a pretty good template for Wells-era West Wing: hackneyed melodrama vying for screentime with tedious foreign-policy (ie medical jargon) exposition, and well-crafted, funny dialogue that still managed to get the point across nowhere in sight (I started dubbing The West Wing "Executive Room"). Sorkin had (perhaps spitefully) written Wells into the mother of all corners at the end of Season 4, and Wells' self-extrication was slightly inelegant, but better than it might have been. Early S5 episodes showed promise; it was all-too disheartening to learn that they were from Sorkin's treatments. The West Wing soon went into freefall. Seemingly determined to carve his own West Wing niche, Wells set about changing anything he could think of. Immediately the White House became a different building: not geographically but in terms of its ambience, specifically its cinematography. Where Sorkin's was all reds and oranges (to be honest Thomas Del Ruth created the most whorishly lit Oval Office you'll ever see), Wells went for colder blues and greys. CJ started dressing like a whole different woman, and I'm not convinced she wasn't made up to look older, presumably to lend the slightest air of credence to the absurd and utterly unrealistic promotions that were made in a futile attempt to give the show a freshness that Sorkin's writing had brought it effortlessly. Suddenly the NSA was staffed by glossy thirtysomethings with a decidedly Goth line in eye makeup. Revisionism was leaned on heavily that characters might be pulled out of positions they held and more-or-less discarded by the wayside, occasionally to wander into someone's office in search of termites or to deal with the plumbing. Without succumbing to the general hysteria surrouding these issues, this was mainly imposed on the one black regular. Most egregiously, probably in an effort to hasten Martin Sheen's departure from the show (either following pressure from the network to lose the lefty, or due to Wells' desire to get his own president), a year was lopped off the timeline, which had until then been very stricly observed, with no explanation whatsoever. Now, I'm not so curmudgeonly that I demand the satisfaction of a full eight-year term for Bartlet. But there are plenty of ways to get him off the show that are dramatically satisfying. The guy had MS, after all. He could die; or be assassinated or impeached. He could simply resign if necessary. That stuff can be written at the drop of a hat. What Wells chose to do instead was creepily Orwellian: he just had all his characters start getting into election mode a year early. Not only that, he gave interviews to anyone who'd print one saying, "We were 18 months into the administration when the show started," when in fact they were six or seven: the US TV season runs from September to May and Bartlet had been elected (as it were) in November 1998, inaugurated in January 1999 and Season 1 picks up in Spetember 1999. That's why he's re-elected in the November of Season 4, in 2002, and inaugurated again in the January of Season 4, in 2003. But rather than deal with it, Wells chose to insult his audience by assuming they wouldn't notice, or not caring if they did.

Changes made at the behest of the network in the final two years did little to help. Toby and Josh had the most unlikely of fistfights in what was otherwise the best episode of a bad lot in Season 6. There was an interesting "live" debate episode for this one-year-early election that two people you don't care much about are contesting, here in Season 7. John Spencer's tragic death spared him this particular humiliation, for no-one gave as much to The West Wing as the incomparable Spencer. Just buy the first four seasons, and if you must watch the rest, be grateful they put it down now before Wells could drag it down any further with his cheap hackery.

...And it just says, "Drink Coke."

An impressively coincidental phonecall yesterday from my friend D, on her way back from her boyfriend's, he having thrown her out, as it were, when he had to leave in haste for work. She was in Trafalgar Square as I was on Regent Street. Being the most disorganised girl on the planet, she had failed to prepare herself adequately for staying the night there; being a conscientiously hygenic sort of girl, she refused to wear the same underwear two days running. Did I want to go and buy underwear with her?

"Hang on," I said. "Didn't I used to dare you to do that, and you never did?"

"I'm wearing jeans," she explained. Damn. I should also explain that there was a time in the history of our association when my daring her to do that wouldn't have been inappropriate. Fortunately, the responsibility of dealing with the fortissimo craziness she feels it's her responsibility as a girlfriend to exhibit has now fallen to him. Nonetheless, buying knickers with a beautiful girl who wasn't wearing any was better than what I had planned for the day, even if her figure has gone from hypnotically voluptuous to merely breathtaking in the intervening few years.

Having selected her underwear (and taken, of course, the best part of an hour in and out of the changing rooms) she was so impressed with how she looked in it that she made a promise to send me a picture later. What's more, she kept it. Shame I only got the top half, but I must admit she knows her shit when it comes to bras. Now if I could just figure out how to get it off my phone and on to the internet where it belongs....

You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

It's all happening today. I've been perfecting a tirade about the nauseating primness this country (by which I mean our gutter press) displays when faced with political sex-"scandals" (a definition it has stretched, over the years, to include any evidence whatsoever that our MPs do anything other than screw their spouses once a month, missionary) since I was 14, when the Daily Mirror decided that his fondness for Chelsea football strips and the company of actresses was fatally compromising David Mellor's ability to do his vital work as Minister for Fun and I fired off the first of many stiff letters to the editor. I'm not going to reproduce it here, at least today. There are more important quesitons that need answering, viz, who among the remaining candidates for the Lib Dem leadership is the House of Cards fan, and what humiliating experience is in store for the other candidates? I think it's Ming the Merciless, and now that he's made Oaten his Earle, how's he going to persuade, say, Simon Hughes to have sex with an aide?

FUCK SHIT UP!

Anyone, tell me how this was faked. I can't imagine any venue that doesn't like getting sued would let this happen. But look at the hands on the frame, the wheel and the back of the seat ... the leg that some guy's holding (weird boots, or what?) ... the disbelieving looks on the band members' faces. I find it hard to believe that there isn't someone getting crushed under there, and as a frequent visitor to the front of metal gigs I can attest to the fact that you don't need an occupied wheelchair being passed around above your head to sustain some pretty impressive injuries. The odd trailing boot is usually more than adequate.

Fear in a handful of dust

RIP, Thames whale.

The Whale and the Wiki

So, the whale came past my house about twenty minutes ago. What's truly surprising is that on finding that link, I read that the whale's eyes and blowhole were protected with KY Jelly - at which point Wikipedia provides a link to KY Jelly, because you never know who's going to want to look up KY Jelly on Wikipedia. Well, I clicked on it, so I guess I can't snark.

Even now, less than five hours after the whale was first hoist onto the barge, the Wikipedia KY Jelly page already contains a section headed "Other Uses" (other than as a sexual lubricant, that is - and did you know that while ingestion is not recommended, it has a mildly sweet flavour, apparently, for the express purpose of making oral sex possible when KY's involved?). The only thing they've got in Other Uses is the whale thing. So in the midst of all this brouhaha about the whale, someone noticed that KY was used to protect the eyes and blowhole and thought to himself, "Hmmm. I should probably update the KY Jelly page on Wikipedia right now." I love the internet.

He's almost certainly the only one

I could write all day about George Galloway, about his magnificent self-regard, his contumely, his shoddy demagoguery, how joyous it was to watch him utterly dismantled by Christopher Hitchens (there's a beautiful moment in that debate where Galloway, in full self-righteous spluttering flow (and shouting a lot, because Hitchens knows what he's talking about), refers to "the 9th of September" and takes the wind right out of his own sails just for a moment, presumably aware of how hollow his anger must seem if he can't even remember the date (seared onto the 21st century's consciousness) that started it all, before gathering himself and his boundless hubris and blustering on), how alarming it is to hear evidence that anyone can possibly think that simply by virtue of being rude, shifty, unco-operative and vituperative he can possibly be considered to have, variously, "bested", "shown up" or "taught a lesson to" the US Senate sub-committee, or the insulting way he appears to believe that this empty theatricality should work on all but the most desperate, vulnerable and impressionable people, but what I'm really thinking about right now is this: at the moment Galloway is in the Big Brother House (and while everyone else is up in arms over how it's cost taxpayers almost £3,000 so far to pay him his MP's salary while he's been in there, I'm of the opinion that keeping this canting prat in the BB house indefinitely is the best use of £1,000 per week yet devised) with, inter alia, Rula Lenska. Now, can I really be alone in finding the notion of Galloway imitating a cat (the most self-regarding and self-interested of creatures) getting the cream, as it were, by licking it out of the hands of the woman who once played Morgwyn of Ravenscar, the Devil's harlot, in Robin of Sherwood a deliciously apt one? If this isn't clear, picture the cream as Oil For Food money and the Devil's harlot as George's best pal Saddam (Galloway can stay on his knees in your mind's eye, of course), speaking of whom: did the two of them by any chance ever get together and hash out a courtroom style? Some of Saddam's bluster and evasions in Baghdad have been pure Galloway in their transparent evasiveness. Perhaps Saddam salutes George's courage, strength and indefatigability too.

Oh boy...

I saw her again today. I wasn't stalking her, honest ;). I have time to kill and Waterstone's is a pleasant place to do it! Her hair was tied back - I think it looks better down, it frames her face better - and she was dressed more for a Piccadilly bookshop and less for a Soho knocking-shop this time, but still. She really is something else.

By his idiocy shall ye know him

Gordon Brown, who one suspects is but an election victory away from changing his name by law to Dear Leader, suggests we have a Britishness Day to celebrate ... well, being British; he exhorts us to fly the Union Flag in our gardens, and possibly to jump around shouting, "Yay for being British!" Let us gloss over all of the following, viz: that Brown, who will presumably be leading the Labour Party into the next election, seems perfectly happy to benefit from the lack of any clear answer to the West Lothian Question (already Labour has used Scottish MPs' votes, Brown's included, to pass legislation that applies only to England that would have been roundly rejected had the vote been for English MPs only), thus engendering resentment and division within Britain; that Brown, whose constituency borders have changed three times since 1983, is likely to claim that power only through the ludicrously gerrymandered constituency boundaries that would give a Labour Party with 36% of the vote some 50 more seats than a Conservative Party with 36% of the vote, most of them in Scotland; that Brown, who probably knows all six verses of The Red Flag, has likely never managed to look upon the Union Flag without grinding his teeth at the thought of all that foul Imperial history it represents (hence Labour's galumphing over the better part of 1500 years' worth of institutions); that Brown, who lives in London with his family, is not so exercised about Britishness that he doesn't spirit his wife back to Scotland when she's about to drop his hellspawn that they may be born Scots: all this is mere carping. The important point here is that Brown, who is apparently British in that he is a Scot, has so little idea of the British character that he thinks waving flags and prancing away like magnificent poufs are the kind of things that come naturally to us. They don't: we need the silly music. In short, there is surely little less British than a Britishness Day.

Come down / Get off your fuckin' cross

The sound of knees jerking everywhere.

I can understand that on the face of it at least some of the images appear racist - although it's pretty funny that the Creation Of Adam one is deemed offensive to blacks, since it shows a black man - a black looter, no less - as Adam, which you'd think would annoy the white supremacist Neanderthals before it annoys the Blacks. Clearly she's not familiar with the painting ("the White man ... is clearly being shown as a God" - some deduction there!) and even though Adam (ie Lootie) is black, at the end she infers from the altered painting the suggestion that a White God created white people in his image, which betrays a certain amount of confusion! I also love the fact that she starts off saying "at least [it] shows a White man on high keeping a Black man down..." (my emphasis) as though to say that while it's a solecism to offer a negative portrayal of a black man, a negative depiction of a white man is almost a positive thing. Funnily enough I think most offensive thing to black people on that page is her commentary for picture 8, where she lazily manages to imply that Western culture is white culture (I trust she enjoyed her trip back to the 17th century): I don't see what's so offensive about the black family being "just like the people around them" when all that that entails is going to a fucking fairground with the family. Is eating candyfloss and shooting wooden ducks an offensively white thing to do now? Did I miss a meeting? Throw in the fabulously patronising, smarter-than-thou tone ("it’s hard for the Majority group to see racism or subordination") and I'm about ready to find her just as offensive as the one or two genuinely racist pictures.

Tautology's finest hour

Seen on the cover of Heat, or OK!, or Hello!, or Fuck Off!, or whichever insult to snotrags it was, this afternoon: "At Home in Essex with Jodie Marsh". Hee.

Yes, I am blind / No, I can't see the good things / Just the bad things....

The bland response from the Conservatives, via David Davis, to the condoning of, not to say incitement to, violence by Steven Morrissey in an interview (see Q13, and have a look at Q12 for some delicious irony), backing terrorism as committed by animal rights "activists" against scientists and organisations involved in medical research using animals makes for depressing reading. "Any incitement to violence is obviously wrong in a civilised society and should be investigated by the police," said Mr. Davis.

I have heard stronger condemnations of terrorist sympathisers from Sir Iqbal Sacranie....

I think there's an interesting psychology at work behind animal rights "activism" - in fact behind all terrorism, but let's stick to these particular crazies for now. In their determination to see no harm come to animals no matter what the benefits for mankind (including, of course, themselves, some day), they inflict any kind of pain or torment of which they can conceive on those they consider responsible, from the harassment of repeated phone calls and unsolicited goods ordered on the credit cards of those they consider cupable, via your straightforward acts of intimidation, assault, violence, arson and sabotage, all the way to the theft of human remains (presumably as some kind of punishment to the bereaved). This is justified by the laughably hubristic notion that "violence is the only language these people understand", which really means, of course, that having failed to get exactly what they want with words, the "activists" will go to any lengths they feel like to intimidate and brutalise people into accepting their point of view. Seems to me that violence is rather the only language the "activists" are capable of speaking. Morrissey went on to compare the "struggle" to warfare - drunk, no doubt, on the intoxicating self-image that that sort of analogy conjures: Morrissey et al heroic, unbowed freedom fighters united in the struggle against ... a few guys in white coats or wax jackets.

Clearly, then, self-importance is not in short supply among these people. Entertainingly, Morrissey characterises the ARM (the Animal Rights Militia, so named, presumably, just in case they were running low on self-aggrandising warlike sentiment) as, "usually very intelligent people who are forced to act because the law is shameful or amoral." Leaving aside the minor enjoyment value of knowing that he meant immoral, this is fun because he implicitly includes himself in that description, given his stated support for them.

This is what interests me: the blazing, blinding self-righteousness that characterises this as all forms of terrorism. The great irony is of course the explicit rejection of the old platitude, two wrongs don't make a right. By their own value system, they are legitimate targets, for if testing products on animals leaves scientists or directors open to having their wives' cars blown up, to what does blowing up blameless women's cars leave the animals rights "activists" open? The very fact that they have not been treated as their actions would suggest they be treated, if everyone were as dubiously and arrogantly certain of ourselves as they, proves that most people are civilised where they are barbarous. Fundamentalism of any stripe is essentially barbarism. The refusal to engage in civilised debate, however strongly they feel and however egregiously they feel ignored, is symptomatic only of ignorance and inarticulacy, of an inability (or, not unlikely, an unwillingness) to make their point in a sufficiently compelling fashion through non-violent means, or of a childish, petulant refusal to accept that having the debate doesn't necessarily mean you'll win the debate. Some debate it would be, after all, if the opening position were, "Well, we're prepared to engage here, but just so you know, if there's anything we don't like, we're just going to blow shit up anyway." Oh, wait. That is how debates with these dickheads go.

And the Tories' non-condemnation? Can it be that Steven Morrissey, as the former singer of The Smiths, is to a certain extent one of David Cameron's passports to legitimacy in the eyes of the all-important youth vote? The Smiths were a favourite band of Cameron's in his youth, and a strong condemnation of Morrissey now could undo all that hard work, all those slightly bashful, royalist-caveat-laden admissions that The Queen Is Dead is his favourite album. I'm certain that David Davis' true feelings on the matter are a trifle stronger than "should be invetigated by the police", which strikes me as almost a dismissal of the question, a kind of "don't ask me, I'm just the Shadow Home Secretary" evasion. (But hey: at least they're showing signs of being united, even if only united in weakness!)

I couldn't find my keys ... or remember where I lived

So I was in Waterstone's the other day, just killing time, embarrassingly enough leafing through the Doctor Who shooting scripts book, when I had a revelation. A girl walked past me - an employee. The head of the goth in me is easily turned by dark hair and pale skin, and a good rack never goes amiss: this girl had all of these. She was also appallingly beautiful, one of the very few people I've seen in the flesh to make me fully appreciate Aristotle's adage: beauty is terror. What really intrigued me, however (aside from how she didn't notice me staring, and who'll end up with the Doctor Who script book with the bonus puddle of drool), is how she got away with dressing like she had and still kept her job. I swear, she was wearing a tight black jumper that was probably not quite long enough to be worn as a dress, which was exactly how she was wearing it (and certainly not long enough to cover the tops of the stockings she appeared to be wearing, particularly when she climbed stairs), and those floppy, fold-down FMBs that are everywhere at the moment. Seriously, it took me about ten minutes to remember who I was.

Steak and potatoes! Lobster! Yul Brynner's noggin'!

Actually, I can't stand lobster. And I've very little idea what Yul Brynner's noggin' tasted like, even when he was alive. But those are Bill's comparisons, not mine.

He was talking about smoking, of course, yet another activity that's due shortly to be banned in this country, as usual for no readily apparent reason other than the fact that a lot of the people that voted for this Labour Govt. have a sufficiently limited understanding of the role and the powers of the state that they think this is the sort of thing that governments are for, and if the Govt. doesn't do what they want they'll vote for someone else next time (like the Conservative Party, rapidly becoming a simulacrum thereof), and since when not exhibiting a detestable self-righteousness Labour's top brass generally spends its nights waking in cold sweats at the thought of having ever to return to the misery of the Opposition benches, they'll pretty much do anything to keep the voters sweet. The idea of actual, you know, leadership, or conviction, very much takes a back seat. "Look," you can hear Blair saying, "there go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them."

Anyway, my point was, why need there be a law? Can restauranteurs or publicans not decide for themselves if their establishments are to be non-smoking? Can the staff in those establishments not decide for themselves if they're prepared to work in a smoking pub or restaurant? Is it not possible that in some areas the majority of patrons will be non-smokers, in which case it would make sense for a publican or restauranteur to operate a non-smoking policy, whereas in another area the majority of patrons may be smokers, in which case, etc.? Why must one law apply everywhere? Weren't the catastrophic failures of various incarnations of corporatism, welfarism and socialism over the last 60 years enough to convince our alleged leaders of the inadvisability of the one-size-fits-all dogma? Apparently not (qv education).

I'm Belle de Jour and so's my wife!

Here's a thing. I realise I'm late to the party, both in the blogging sense and in the sense of being terribly curious about the true identity of Belle de Jour, but I read her entire blog over the last few days, as well as a few related articles, book reviews and pieces of self-serving tripe masquerading as journalism, and in among all the fatuous notions (she's Toby Young, she's Lisa Hilton), there was passing mention of Martin Amis. He's mentioned in the blog, you see, when one of her clients makes a particularly lascivious suggestion and she identifies it as a line from London Fields, after which they have a terribly self-conscious conversation about Amis. Now, I love that book - I've ruined two copies - and I couldn't place the line. But what I noticed was that the conversation was alarmingly reminiscent of those that Amis wrote between John Self (the narrator) and Martin Amis (a writer) in Money. (In Money, for those unfortunate enough to have never read it, Amis employs the slightly heavy-handed device of introducing a character called Martin Amis, and gives him all the reader's fears, as if the moral disgust that permeates every word weren't enough to convince the reader that this is satire.) Amis likes nothing more than to offer critiques of his own work through the voice of others (John Self has a go in Money; London Fields' narrator Samson Young and anti-heroine Nicola Six both have things to say about works by "Mark Asprey"). Belle's discussion of Time's Arrow seemed to be very much in that style.

Am I suggesting she is actually Martin Amis? No. Amis is far too busy writing increasingly mediocre books to have the time for something like BdJ. But then you notice the other little idiosyncrasies. Belle likes to italicise "Oh no". There's an oddly prurient relish to her descriptions of time with clients (as noted, Amis disgusts himself when he writes, yet is morbidly fascinated by how much more disgusting he can get).

There are more. I'll read it again. But if this girl's for real, she's an even bigger Amis geek than I am, because I still can't place that line in London Fields.

If you're wondering, it was, "I want to write my name in come all over you." If you happen to know the book better than I do (in which case you are Martin Amis) then do leave a comment and help me out.

Still to come: every other post I'll ever make!