How much does a pint of milk actually cost? You may think the answer is about seventy pence but actually this isn't true. Dairy farming is subsidised like most other forms of farming. And it's subsidised by Europe under the Common Agricultural Policy. Since the moment the CAP was put into place people have been saying that it needs reform and yet there it is still unreformed.

The point of the CAP is to make European farmer's products cheap enough to compete with foreign products. Generally these products are cheaper to produce abroad because of weather, efficiencies and cheaper labour.

It's generally been seen a cheaper to subsidise farmers than it is to put tarrifs on things that you are importing. This is largely based on the idea that people will generally get in touch with you to claim free money but might not mention the fact that they need to pay you some tax.

But perhaps now is the time to consider a switch to tariffs? One of the reasons that milk produced in Australia and New Zealand is cheaper than milk produced in the UK is that shipping goods across the world doesn't cost very much. In fact the main problem is that it doesn't cost enough. If you are running a tariff based system normally there is a large transaction cost. You have to go through a massive mixed shipment and say, "right how many bananas have you got"? And so on.

But imagine we had discovered that there was suddenly a non selfish reason to support our local farmers. Imagine it wasn't just the old arguments about protecting local jobs and protecting food supplies during times of war. What if we suddenly discovered a reason that belching out gallons and gallons of oil transporting fruit and veg across the world was bad. What if suddenly the transportation was the issue? I am of course talking about global warming.
If all you had to do when a ship arrived was ask it for its port of origin, which already happens, and then apply a levy based on the number of miles traveled and the weight of the ship it would make things very simple.
Making this change would be a massive shift in the economy because instead of just protecting farmers it would also protect manufacturing and all manner of other jobs that have been moved to where the wages are cheaper.
The one problem is that goods would become more expensive. But on the other hand because we wouldn't be funding CAP any more we would pay less money in tax.

The biggest problem does come back to the issue of the pint of milk. If the price goes up then for people who pay tax there will be relief based on the lack of tax they have to pay. But what about people who pay no tax?
There are clearly some issues to work out but I think that the farmers will prefer working in a situation where there is actual money to be made farming. And that their goods aren't just going into a milk lake.
You never know. It could work.

Labels: Articles

Big Issue Sir?

Labels: Jokes

It had been a way of hiding for so long. A way of fading into the background. And then, and then, something happened. What was it? 9/11? No it had already started before then. Suddenly the beard had started to make him stand out. He had tried to ignore it for a while. In fact he had been so good at ignoring it this was the first time he'd thought about it since the summer of 2000. He used to always think about it in the summer but his level of denial had become so strong that he hadn't even considered it for the last few years.

But now. Now he knew. He had known Jen had hurt him by leaving. He had known that. He had known that it would hurt. But now... Now he was having to consider this. Now he was considering shaving his beard.

He tried his old stalwart in moments of crisis, "This beard is part of who you are, if people wont accept that then you shouldn't accept them".

He listened to the words reverberating around his head. But he knew that while he liked the beard he liked hiding more. And now that the beard was so obvious to people it was time for a change. That, and he fancied a shag.

Labels: Fiction, Short

On the train the other night I heard two people chatting and I couldn't help but earwig. The conversation was tumbling along until one of them said, "yeah but he's a friend of dromedaries" except he didn't obviously, he obviously said, "he's a friend of Dorothy's". He was calling someone gay and using a particularly antiquated way of doing it. It's a phrase that's fallen out of favour somewhat mainly because it sounds quite gay to say it I imagine. At any rate now we can bring it bang up to date with my new misheard version. Now I'm not homophobic, I can't understand why anyone's afraid of their own house, so I will pose for the requisite picture.



But what would the lesbian version be? Clearly it would have to be, "loving the llama".

As well as accusations of baldness and drug taking there have been repeated rumours that of late Britney has been loving the llama.

Labels: Illustrated

What ever happened to vests eh? They used to be all the rage in the olden days. I remember as a child being checked by my aunt to see if I was wearing a vest. And if I wasn't she'd say I was going to "catch a death of chill".

Obviously this was crazy talk. But I think she was simply harking back to the golden era when men were really cold and women stayed indoors because they were sensible.

Now some people will say that it is the rise of central heating that's caused this but I say no. It can't be, because there is no central heating outside. I think it is the clearest sign of global warming.

Now some people don't think that clothes can be affected by your environment. Some people seem to think that there wouldn't be a corolation between temperature and clothing. But to those people I say, "Remember the lessons of the Global Colour shirt".

The global colour shirt was one of the foremost advances in technology the world has ever seen. A shirt that changes colour with your temperature. But like concord another advance of mankind consigned to the scrapheap the Global Colour shirt has withered on the altar of progress. And why was that? Could it be that the name is no coincidence? That the global in global colour is related to global warming. I think it might be.

So what can we do about global warming? Well I think it's time to install air conditioning. Clearly now it's the only way forward. Turn your air con up to full, put a vest on, and set fire to all of those global colour shirts. It's the way forward. And it's what concord would have wanted.

Labels: Articles

[This is part two of the Citron Investigation: The Influenza Adventure. Be sure to check out
Part One]

I followed Geoffrey as he lead me back inside the restricted area. There were a couple of looks, as if people were saying that they half recognised me, that they half despised me, that they half wished that they too were able to not wear the ridiculous clothing and finally that they half realised that there had been too many halves by half.

A young man in spectacles walked up to Geoffrey and looked him up and down as though he was more important than him. I was later, and by later I meant literally two minutes later, to learn that this young pipsqueak was Geoffrey's boss and in a way had every right to look down upon poor Geoffrey. I mean I looked down on Geoffrey, but then I looked down upon him as a friend, because I thought he would learn something from it. I looked down upon him because I thought it would make him a better detective. Whereas this looking down was done purely because it was a chance to be demeaning. I mean I demeaned Geoffrey but at least when I did it there was a point to it. This man had none of the same manors. It is possible that my being there did not help matters.

"What is he doing here?" said the pipsqueak to Geoffrey.
"Ah, Mr Cadeau, he is aiding us with our case."
"Why?"
"Why is he aiding us? That is quite a complicated question."
I decided to step in, "Ever since I was a child I was fascinated by the criminal mind."
"No", Cadeau said, "Why have you brought him in."
"You're on your own," I said, "I don't know yet."
Geoffrey stammered through a few apologies, and then I decided to put him out of his misery by offering to leave.
"No!" Said Geoffrey and Cadeau at once. Cadeau continued, "I don't wish to inconvenience you Citron that is all. But, please, I trust Geoffrey. I do. I know that if he has brought you here it must be for good reason. I apologise for any inconvenience caused."
"Okay," I meekly added, and then for reasons of sheer boredom I added, "sounds good".

Cadeau literally clicked his heels together and pranced off. I turned to Geoffrey but before I could say anything he was saying, "Right, before you get a chance to say anything about my boss I need you to interview the key witness. She's had five people interview her already so she's not fresh, and she is tired."

I looked back at him, I was trying to radiate signs that said, "if only your people would call me before the first interview, let alone the second" when I realised that I was thankful that they only called me when their plan wasn't working. The problem would be much worse if they called me for every parking ticket. Instead they only called me when they couldn't figure things out. Was it my fault that things seemed obvious to me? I needed to control the urge to criticise. The fact that I was in work was because I was one of the few people that could see the way that the criminal's mind worked plainly. Was it safe to criticise the people who couldn't? Almost especially not. And almost especially if you considered that it was their incompetence that paid the bills.

Interviewing the witness was going to be interesting, she was hostile from the moment I walked in there. She did not want to be interviewed. But if their was information to be gained then I would be the man to gain it.

Tune in next week for Part 3.

Labels: Citron, Fiction, Influenza, Long

Labels: Jokes

So all of my articles on truth have been leading up to some kind of conclusion, which was written around the same time as the Tony Blair articles about two or three weeks ago. The only problem is that there was a program on Sunday on BBC 2 which said the exact same thing as my conclusion and now you'll think I've copied it. There's a conspiracy to destroy my reputation and good name. The program? The Conspiracy Files. I haven't actually seen it yet I have it recorded. But in conversation with my good friend Kris he mentioned the alarming similarity. But I may as well carry on regardless eh?

Have you ever wondered where conspiracies come from? There seem to be a lot of them about. And I think that they are very important way to see how people construct the stories that support their outlook on life.

The most compelling argument for how these conspiracy theories emerge is that they come because of the disproportionate nature of the truth the act itself. The true story doesn't feel right. Like in the case of JFK people feel that the true story that a single individual murdered their president isn't good enough. Almost as though they are critical of the narrative itself. As if they were saying, "if individuals could just go around killing presidents where would we be"?

It's as if the killing of this great man wasn't supposed to be the end of his story. He'd built up such a dramatic head of steam that he needs a really good ending. And the problem is that lone random confused whack job isn't really a suitable ending. If that's the ending then what was the reason that he was killed?

It also starts because at the begining of the situation we are as a society invited to join in the investigation. For the begining part of the investigation not even the experts knew what was going on. And because of that people are almost given a free hand to speculate.

Then add that lots of people are talking about the story and are eager to hear the latest news out of the investigation. And if there isn't any new news then they may as well talk about the latest theory. And it's during conversations like this that the theories cross that line from crackpot into conventional wisdom.

These things together create the ideal situation for the conspiricy theory to spread. Then if you add time you find that these theories with no real consensus on what actually happened become the truth. There are compelling stats about the numbers of people who think that JFK, 9/11 were conspiracys and the moon landings were all faked. Why? Because it makes a better story. An easier more comforting story. People going to space is scary and exciting. That they faked it to spook the Russians is more reassuring.

Let me let you in on a little secret though, which I don't think they'll have probably mentioned on the program. 9/11 actually was a conspiracy. Here's why... There was more than one plane. There was more than one suicide bomber. So yeah it already is a conspiracy. The "conspiracy" in "conspiracy theory" comes from the JFK case where one side was saying "lone gunman" and the other was saying "no there were lots of people in on it".

Anyway now I've got that off my chest the final point here is about the largest example of something of this order. Religion. Religion perfectly fits the three point model I created earlier. People don't know what's going on as the expert scientists haven't worked it all out yet, people are looking for the latest news on why their crops have failed, baby died, the sun rose and finally the god version of creation is much more dramatic. I mean which one sounds more exciting to watch, a man in a beard magicking an elephant out of thin air or the slow march of progress over billions of years. "You mean I've got to wait here for a million years just to see if this rock turns into a zebra? Oh man I'm going to need a chair."

When people saw the moon landings happening in real life with telescopes and we still can't convince people that they actually happened good luck convincing them about something that happened before television.

Labels: Articles, Truth

I keep dreaming about these horrible sexual acts - sadism, bestiality, necrophilia.

Doctor: 'Forget it, you're just flogging a dead horse'

Labels: Jokes

My fingers tighten around some tiny something. A rock? A ledge? Whatever it is it's stopped me from falling. My legs are dangling I look down at them, trying desperately not to look any further down and I do my legs sway slightly away from the rocks. I try and see some spot they can reach. Some spot I can step on to to lift me up. But there isn't anything. Or at least I can't see anything. The rock seems to curve away from me right under my pelvis.

I try to curl around it. To wrap myself closer to the rock. But no. Nothing. My feet still don't touch anything.

My fingers are feeling... Tired. No not tired they be starting to feel harder like they are set into to rock. But something about this change also seems to have made them feel very brittle.

I try to swing my legs closer to the rock one last time. And suddenly around my ankles I feel something holding on to them. Something is holding on to them both. And just then I feel a yank. Whatever it is is trying to pull me off the mountain by my ankles. My brittle fingers almost can't take it anymore. Yank.

I spin through the air pivoting on my ankles which are being held tight. And suddenly I'm approaching the rock face again this time upside down, and this time at a fairly alarming speed. It was around this point that I fell unconcious.

Labels: Fiction, Short

I have been blog tagged by Adrian. This has proved tricky for somebody who has been blogging so much as I have but I've managed to dredge up a few things:


1 I was a muse for some of the most popular bands of all time. Although I was never mentioned in the sleeve notes, I have appeared in several pieces of album art:



Sergeant Peppers



Joshua Tree



And Nevermind



2 I'm a trained assassin. But because of my oath of professionalism I'm not allowed to talk about my successes only my failures.

Assassination of Hitler



Assassination of Judas



Assassination of Bono



There's still time Bono.


3 as you can tell from the list of marks (see it must be true I have all of the lingo down) I am incredibly old. Here's what I'd look like if I didn't shave at least once a century.



4 Because I've been alive so long and I've accumulated so much knowledge I have to use multiple brains. Here's a picture of my collection



5 see how one of the brains has a distinctive veil drawn over it? Well that's the brain we don't like to talk about. It was damaged in a bizarre gardening accident. And so we usually draw a distinct veil over it (although to be honest it often wears a Burka and forces us to refer to it as Jennifer).

Anyway here is a photo story of how the brain got damaged, "Damn you Bono!"



Sometimes I have recurring nightmares about that. Yeah I feel I'm stuck in a moment I can't get out of.

You may, if you're lucky, get some real 5 things at some point soon.

Labels: Illustrated

I overheard this on the bus the other day:

"Honestly girl I wanna go out with ya. But I gotta go back and see this other girl first. Listen I'm on the bus now it'll only take an hour. I'll get down there and bang 'er. It'll only be fifteen minutes. Literally in and out and then I'll be on my way to you. Alright girl I'll make sure I'm quick."

Labels: Articles

I turned the corner and stopped. A bird on the floor. Why hadn't they found this one? Those fools they'd been bodging this one from the start. Tapped the pigeon with the side of my boot. I could lift it of the ground easily enough. I stopped short of tipping it over, I could smell maggots. That had been all I wanted to know. It had been lying there for a while.

I walked closer and suddenly I saw what I had been expecting since I turned the corner. They looked like they had just been on a space ship with all of the suits that they were wearing or that some kind of nuclear spill. It all seemed slightly incongruous for Croydon.

One of them started bounding toward me. Actually he was moving quite quickly. But he looked like he should have been moving in slow motion. That was one of the weird things about these suits not only was it silly looking and separated you from your colleagues in a time when a close and frank exchange of ideas might be the most crucial thing you could have on your team. But amongst all of that was the disconcerting realisation that people were moving around in these suits much too quickly. Because the thing with the suits was that they put you so in mind of space that you expected people to plod forward like they had a kilo of marshmallows attached to each foot.

As he arrived near me I realised two things almost simultaneously. First that it was my good friend Geoffrey inside the suit and second that he had a second suit over his right arm.

"Hullo Citron, how's things?"

"Things have so far been fine. Although if you do try to make me wear that suit I will kill you."

I could see Geoffrey was looking me up and down and wondering which was the better thing in his life to be afraid of; me or his bosses. He already knew what his decision was but on some kind of whimsical off chance he thought he should ask me just in case he could avoid trouble.

"Wouldn't it be safer to wear it?"

"Perhaps it would, but that would have required me to have not stumbled over a dead bird at the end of the street and outside of the exclusion zone. This would has already gone wrong."

Geoffrey looked at me mournfully. He knew he would probably get in trouble for this. I saw there, loitering on his face, the understanding that he'd made the right decision. Knowing that he'd done it I couldn't help but give him the excuse he needed.

"If it is bird 'flu I wouldn't need to be here. It wouldn't be a police matter until the contamination had been dealt with."

And with his reaction I had got my first information confirmed. I could have been called because the bird 'flu had been purposely infected by someone and they didn't know by who and that would in fact have happened before the contamination was completed.

But in fact something else was happening. The disease control people were starting to believe that it wasn't actually a disease. And that's why the bird had been left on the street. They were getting careless.

"How did you know that Citron?"
"You know I don't play parlour games Geoffrey. Come now tell me what you know."

Tune back next Friday for part two of the Influenza Adventure.

Labels: Citron, Fiction, Influenza, Long

I came for my Paw.

Labels: Jokes

Here at gamboling we've been monkeying around with the idea of truth for the last few weeks. And in the end we all have to ask ourselves what really is truth?

I was addressing an envelope to a firm based in Milton Keynes. And I asked Katherine how to spell it and she said "Keynes like the economist, blimey I never thought of that. The city is named after two economists."

Of course you may have known this already but until that moment of striking thought Katherine had been clueless about the whole situation.

Milton Keynes is a planned city, the largest in Europe, and when they were building the city the planners still hadn't come up with a name for it. The call went out to the civil service and an economist in Whitehall came up with using the names of Milton Freeman and John Maynard Keynes because he thought somebody might see the irony of using the names of people who were against planned economies as the namesakes of a planned city. By the time the irony was realised it was too late and the name had been made public.

Okay so none of that last paragraph was true. The true answer is that there was a small village in the town called Milton Keynes. Which means that Katherine's story is very dangerous.

Her story which she created, which was just the short part in quotes is incredibly potent because it sounds right. And tied to which the actual true story is quite week in terms of story. These are the ideal situations for the release of a meme.

A "meme" Alex are you sure you mean one of those things where everyone answers the same question?

I am sure. A meme is an idea or snippit of thought. It was an idea created by Richard Dawkins to talk about how ideas spread and solidify in society in a rather similar way to evolution. The set of questions that spread themselves are just a subset.

One of the most powerful proofs of natural selection are those humming birds with the really long beaks. You know the ones that have to get nectar from plants with really long stalks. And we can see that each one is growing to keep up with the other. In each generation the problem gets more pronounced. This shows a lack of intelligent design because a designer would have said "right you're both five centimetres long". And this is the same with stories. Stories aren't retained because of their rightness they are instead valued on their ability to propel themselves. Their quality of their story DNA if you will.

The fact seems to me that if you heard this story then you'd be quite likely to believe it. And if you weren't sure then what would you do? Check Wikipedia probably but how do we know that what's there is true?

An American comic called Steven Colbert has been pushing his idea of Truthiness. Truthiness is the idea that you don't have to believe what you read in books you should believe what you feel in your heart. Things that you thing sound true. And while that idea sounds crazy now it must have been how things were decided before there was writing.

Much of what is passed down to us has been checked and doubled checked and so we feel capable of believing it. But we are so used to believing it that we no longer actually bother to check.

Just think about the number of things that you use in a day that you don't understand. I mean I know how a phone works in principal but could I actually make one? Right now I'm writing this post on a mobile phone and I'm going to send it in a while as an e-mail which I'll then post onto the internet. There's a lot of technologies right there. Not even considering the way they generated the electricity, mined the metal, shaped the plastic, extracted the oil for the plastic. And so on and on.

The day that one person couldn't know everything was the day we needed a new solution. And writing was it. But the danger has been from the start: what if what you're reading isn't true?

Labels: Articles, Truth

They can dish it out but they can't take it.

Labels: Jokes

She sat down by the river and started to comb her hair. Her hair was starting to get really long now. But she knew Bri liked it long. She was never exactly sure what it was that he liked about it but he said it from time to time.

Bri was so very organised that one time she had, after he'd complimented her on her hair getting longer, begun to wonder if he had put a reminder in his calendar to compliment her. That maybe he had been worried when they had first gone out to find a girlfriend who didn't get her hair cut and decided to do something to compensate for the fact that he wouldn't be able to compliment her after she had a hair cut. But then she remembered that men don't do that. It was much more likely to be the way her hair was straight all of the way down but then at the bottom curled around her breasts when they were having sex. That sounded much more likely.

She wondered what would happen if her mother could have seen her. Her mother had always made her keep her hair short as a girl which was almost certainly why she didn't now. Even though it was quite warm she felt a sudden slight imaginary draft as she thought about her mother and as she looked over the river everything looked suddenly like she was looking at it through sun glasses.

But she shook her head and gave a very slight breathy laugh. Her mother would have been very cross to think of her sitting there mourning on such a wonderful day. She would have been even more cross about that than the hair.

As she thought about it she realised it was her mother's death that had made her stop needing to cut her hair the last time she had had her hair cut was for the funeral. Having your hair cut for a funeral seems such a strange thing but she had known at the time that that was what her mother would have wanted.

But since then it wasn't just her hair that had grown. And now she knew that her mother was just rotting in a box not some angel in heaven. And the one thing that she had taught her above all else was to enjoy herself and not to sit around mopeing. And also she'd taught her to cut her hair.

And with that she got up and walked into town to get a hair cut. And you never know, she thought, maybe she'd finally find out what Bri really thought about her hair.

Labels: Fiction, Short

Labels: Illustrated

I am going to make a few changes around here. Have a bit of a sweep and tidy up.
In my job which I amazingly manage to do and keep four blogs on the go part of my role is managing change. Trying to change the way that my firm goes about it's business. And one of the most important lessons I've learnt working on projects like this is the concept of fail fast.

People get incredibly invested in the projects they are working on. They feel that if they just tinker a little bit more then it will suddenly come right. But it isn't often true. You have to learn to be brutal even with the projects you love.

Now here at Gamboling we've added the weekend section since the beginning of the year. And I've personally liked the Sunday Illustrated section very much but the Saturday deafinitions have been wearing me down. They aren't funny enough, they take ages to write and I don't want to steal them from anywhere else.

If I were going to I would have already posted my personal favorite from Stephen Fry, for I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue's Uxbridge round who did "Countryside - the act of killing Piers Morgan" at lunchtime on a Sunday on Radio 4 and nobody complained. Presumably because they thought it was true.

So if I'm not enjoying it I think I better retire from that particular feature. So what, you may be asking will you be getting instead?

Well I have been, as you might have noticed experimenting with some longer fiction of late. And frankly I would like to do some more. So I think what I'm going to do is add another day of Fiction into the mix. One of the fiction days will be for short little stand alone things and the other will be for longer pieces which will appear in four parts each. So a four part story will take four weeks still. And there will be some other fiction each week to keep you going.

The other fiction will likely include some recurring characters. For example in the up and coming months we can expect to see our friends from the frozen school of the future again and I will also be bringing you some short stories from Citron, my detective. Citron has been in the pipeline for a while now, he's one of the novels that I mention in my profile. His novel has the virtue of being the only one I've been actively writing in 2006 and I am continuing on that tack in 2007. But some ideas simply can't fit into the novel so they will appear here.

The only problem is that Friday and Saturday are right next to each other in the week so it might get to be a bit too much. So to solve this I'm going to have a quick re-jig of the days. So we will have:

Monday - Short Fiction to start up the week
Tuesday - A Joke
Wednesday - An Article
Thursday - A Joke
Friday - Longer Fiction
Saturday - An Article
Sunday - An Illustration or an illustrated article

Anyway that's the plan. Obviously feel free to let me know if you don't like it, or drop me a line for any reason.

Thanks for reading,

Alex.

Labels: Admin, Deafinitions

I pulled up my socks and fastened my shoes. Well I didn't really fasten them I was just checking them again. I always did this now before every race. Just superstition really. They'd never once come undone.

I put my feet back into the blocks and crouched back down into the starting position and put my hands on the asphalt. It was almost impossible to touch. The sun had been on it for hours now. It felt sticky and I had, as I always did, a moment of panic about what would happen if some of the searing hot red goo got stuck on my hands. I looked down at them just to check and the reflected heat baked into my face. I couldn't keep looking so I looked further back to check my feet position. The glittering of the metal was almost dazzling. The colours always seemed so much brighter at the track.

I could feel the people around me were looking up and forward and I just as though I had decided it for myself I did the same.

Bang

Labels: Fiction

...do you smell fish?

Labels: Jokes

[This is the third (and final) half of the increasingly inaccurately titled two part series recounting my encounters with Tony Blair. Part One: Two phone or not two phone. Part Two: Don't call U.S., they'll call you. Hopefully reading these will help you.]

Tony looked over at me as if I'd slapped him.

"People forget that you started with Clinton," I made eye contact with him.
He looked away, but I went on, "yes people forget that. You were Clinton's leading ally. And now you're George W.'s. How did you manage that Tony? How did you survive? You sold your soul to the devil didn't you."
"You are out of line, Alex."
"Forgive me Prime Minister. I got carried away. But I do know how it actually happened. I remember the situation weeks after George got in. Suddenly new Tory donors were coming out of the woodwork. There was agitation within your own party for the first time. And you, you could read what was happening faster than almost anybody else. You knew Bush was pushing to oust you. You knew he wanted an ally who was ready to go to war. And he thought he could never get it from you. And so you gave him what he wanted didn't you? You promised to change. To become his kind of Prime Minister."
"I had to. He would have gone to the Tories instead. His aides had already held meetings with Hauge. It was only international political protocol which meant he had to see me first."
"And so you decided to save yourself."
"It wasn't myself I was saving. I was sacrificing myself. I did it for Britain, and the world. I couldn't have somebody toadeying up to him. Saying yes to his every whim. A prime minister yes man. I needed to tame the beast. Even if my own party, my own country would hate me for it."
"But that is what people think of you Tony. They do think that you are a yes man to the president. They don't see anything different. And to be honest Tony. Among friends here. What have you actually been able to do?"
"I'll be honest, not as much as I'd hoped. But the G8 was good."
"But so much of that was because of the popularity of the movement. Most of it was Bob not you."
"He couldn't have got the meetings without me."
"You know it was the second resolution on Iraq that destroyed you."
"I know. I know. I still think about that moment every day. It haunts me. I can't escape it. It defines me. If we had got the second resolution people would have seen me bringing George to the UN and not this mess. We, all of us in Britain, would be in this together."
"But why didn't you back down when you didn't get the resolution? Why didn't you stop there? By carrying on when you knew you were no longer being listened to was what made you look weak."

He took a deeper breath, paused, and said, "I couldn't stop."

This admission hung in the air while I shifted in my seat.

Then I spoke, "so Tony, they've interviewed you again have they?"
"Yes."
"And you've brought me here because you want advice. And..."
I paused, to give the appearance that I was thinking about what I was about to say rather than I was inviting a question.
"And... You want to confide in me something that you were asked not to share with your staff."
"Yes. Well no. Nothing more than I've said really. Except..."
"They're going to arrest Levy"
"Yes. How do you know. I was told no one knew."
"Well I have the benefit of being no one quite often."
"Yes. I suppose you do"
"what are you going to do about it Tony?"
"I don't know. I can't know."
"You want them to stop don't you."
"Yes of course I do."
"And people have been telling you to stop haven't they. Saying that if you stop the police will all go away."
"Yes."
"But we both know it doesn't work like that."
"Yes."
"If you quit you won't be the prime minister any more. And you won't be protected."
"But that's not it. They still won't arrest me I didn't do anything."
"Are you saying Levy did?"
"No, no. Of course not."
"So it is entirely selfless?"
"Yes. Yes it is."
"You're doing it for Gordon?"
"I'm doing it for Labour."

I was relieved. I knew he had been so stressed recently. I really had been worried that he had been loosing his political nose. The Tories were right on the money asking him to quit now. But any Labour party member asking for the same must be mad.

The first one hundred days of being in control are the most important for any politician. They make or break you really. Look at Cameron. He got off to a flying start right when everyone wanted to talk to him. And then kept them listening by keeping in the news. It's easier to be in the news if you were in the news yesterday. Miss a day and nobody comes sniffing.

Imagine how badly Gordon would fair if the first hundred days were taken up with "The trial of Tony Blair". And Tony could still read the party politics. I looked up at him and a small smile spread across my face.

"What's that for?" Tony asked.
"Well I was just thinking, 'thank God he hasn't totally lost the plot'".
"I just wish I could convince my party."
"I'm sure you do."
"So, Alex, what do I do?"
"I'm sorry Tony. I can't help you. I can't advise you any more. What would it achieve?"
"Well it would help me. You know for old times sake."
"I can't you know. I can't advise you like I used to, not in the run up to the next one. It wouldn't be fair. I can only tell you what I'd like you to do personally."
"Well at least that would be something."

"Well Tony I would like a complete Mea Culpa. A full and frank admission of guilt on your part. Admit you misled the public about Iraq and admit you did offer honours for loans. The people already think you did it, and you know the truth of what happened. But you should say exactly why you did it. And how it all happened. Explain the situation honestly. And then move on. Say that it would be wrong to remove the soldiers from Iraq now and that if we do there will be an even bigger humanitarian disaster than there is now and we'll just have to send even more troops back in. Say all of that because Tony you seen like you are just constantly repeating your version of the truth in the hope that it will become true. Just because you say something out loud just because you write something down. Even if you say it and write it many many times you will find that it still isn't the truth. Just because you or I say something has happened doesn't make it true. We're not that powerful."

And with that I vanished.

Labels: Articles, Truth

The philosopher turns to his colleague and says, "I assume you've read Marx"?
"Yes," replies the sociologist. "I think it's these wicker chairs".

Labels: Jokes

We have finally finished moving house, after 10ish months in the making. It seems to have sapped every strength that we have had at times and has been an incredible journey. But this weekend we finally felt like a real weekend at home, with no real house things to be done. Nick came round on Saturday and we made a movie. Which was really nice and felt like a normal weekend again with somebody dropping by and having some food, and generally relaxing.

On Sunday I was messing around on the computer, and Katherine was baking a cake while listening to the Archers and it felt like pure bliss. In the afternoon you could find me sitting in my living room, still on the computer, drinking a beer and eating the cake:



What a wonderful feeling.

I'd like to thank, Mum, Dad, John, Ellen and Pete for working so hard on the house. And Michael, Barbara, Joe, Kris, Nick, Adrian and Dei for putting up with me droning on about my house for the ten months without hitting me. And especially Katherine for putting up with me throughout the whole process:



I love Katherine so much, it's great to be able to share our new house together.

See she must love me, she even let me have this much electricity!

Labels: Articles

I actually already have a blog post called this here on gamboling: So I may have started another blog which I posted when I was starting SofaF1.

Nick and I have decided to start making films under the soubriquet "Troy Road". And so there is a blog associated of course: Troy Road Blog.

Well I shall be writing even more this year than even I thought! Hope you've been enjoying the new features: Deafinitions every Saturday and Illustrated every Sunday.

Thanks for reading,

Alex.

Labels: Admin

Labels: Illustrated

A vacuum cleaner that you've borrowed

Labels: Deafinitions

Running for the train,
think I'm gonna miss it,
pounding down the lane,
in a rush to get pissed yet,
something in my mind says,
don't be so silly,
she's just some fillie,
not like Billie,
and there's a dude on the line,
in Forest Hilly.

Peace out to my gangster* massive** homeboy***

* He wears a suit to work at Currys

** He is actually massive. I've seen him eat a whole family bucket at them KFC****

*** He's actually a mummy's boy but his mum lives at his home too - innit?

**** K to the F to the mother clucking C homeboy***

Labels: Fiction

Doctor: I'm sorry to say sir, that that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Labels: Jokes