Kwang Sabat Na

As of today, "my five year old" is "my six year old". Six, as any mathematically inclined readers will realise, is one third of eighteen which means that my little fella is thirty three point three three recurring per cent of the way to the age of majority in the UK.

On Thursdays I take him to swimming lessons and Muay Thai classes, which sometimes makes me wonder if I'm not a little paranoid about teaching him to keep himself safe, and that maybe I could have pulled that off just by naming him Sue and lighting out, leaving him an "old guitar and an empty bottle of booze" as keepsakes.

We watch a lot of movies together, bonding - to my delight - over Peter Sellers' Clouseau, "you can walk Chief Inspector, you can walk!"

In a strange way, he reassured me about the educational value of his martial arts lessons the other evening when we were watching "Batman Begins" - the Dark Knight having been redeemed by the casting of a Welshman. Early on in the film Bruce Wayne gets in a big fight in an oriental prison. After being knocked down by the imposing villain he drives back up head first at his assailant's midriff and, while his face is bent down just past his his foe's chest, twists his body and strikes - essentially backwards - with his elbow into the big guy's face.

"That's Muay Thai", my boy remarked casually of this one second detail of the melee and - guess what - he's right. I was mighty impressed.

Happy birthday mate.

I am boring

"Eat your way around the world in London" faced something of a dilemma on Wednesday in that we had to finish eating in time the catch Chelsea in the European Championship on TV with a 7:45 kick off. We all have our crosses to bear I suppose.

As a nod to Liverpool's simultaneous match with Galatasaray we settled on the Turkish fayre at the nearby Limon Shish & Mezze Restaurant.

We perused the menu over a Villa Doluca white - it was news to me that there was such a thing as Turkish wine - then shared mixed mezze; humus, borek, cacik, falafel, biber, kalamar, biyaldi, and pilaki with pide bread.

For the main course, I had a lamb shish and Paul had a mixed sea food shish with an ezme salad. Rather appropriately we talked about Xerxes bridging the Hellespont as we chewed.

I offer a trivial thought; isn't the antipathy of the Greeks and Turks particularly sad when you think that their grub is to all intents and purposes the same?

(Chelsea were playing Levski Sofia in Bulgaria while Liverpool entertained Turkish opponents. Until I updated the maps of our real and imaginary destinations I didn't even realise that Bulgaria had a border with Turkey.)

Press Lord Click Lord

The miracle of RSS has both informed me that Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time is back on the radio, and downloaded the first episode for my later delectation. The new series begins with the career of the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, "a remarkable man with a remarkable legacy"apparently.

I'm pretty sure that "In Our Time" was the first mainstream BBC radio programme to embrace podcasting and now Melvyn's doing the same thing on ITV where according to this page "the South Bank Show is now available in podcast format for free!"

Hooray for Baron Bragg, FRSL, FRTS.

Consider my forelock tugged m'lud.

Cap Carpe Diem

I took my five year old to the park for twenty minutes or so after school yesterday to let him run off some steam.

Part of said steam runnage consisted of grabbing a cap off a schoolmate's head and running off waving it at him. His victim set off in hot pursuit laughing, so far as I could tell, with the fun of it as well. I could also tell however - from some sixth sense - that his Dad, who was a little way off, was not best pleased.

I let the chase on for a short while and then wandered over to bring it, discretely I hoped, to a close. At pretty much the same time the other Dad called over to his son that they were going. (I wonder why that was?)

I passed this news on to my boy who threw the cap back to his friend who promptly picked it up.

His Dad told him to put it down again. "Oh God, here we go", thought I so I essentially hustled my little one into picking the redowned hat up and passing it back politely.

"Don't ever grab the cap from X again!" hissed the other father furiously. I let it pass.

Two observations:

1. I think that both the boys were completely unaware of the tension and I bet neither could remember it now.
2. I sympathise with the other guy. I'd rather no caps were snatched off heads, but if it is inevitable I'd rather have a snatcher than a snatchee. Is that shameful?

Film Round Up

I was supposed to go and see The Madras House in Richmond on Saturday but - after lingering too long over a beer - had to can it when I missed the train at Wimbledon so Clerks 2 at the Odeon had to serve as an emergency stand in.

This was no ordeal as I've had room in my life for Jay and Silent Bob since the original Clerks all those years ago. Clerks 2 is worth the price of admission for Randal's delineation of the Lord of the Rings movies alone:

Those fxxkin' hobbit movies were boring as hell. All it was, was a bunch of people walking, three movies of people walking to a fxxking volcano. Even the fxxking trees walked.

His mime summary of the trilogy has to be seen to be believed.

Actually for all its surface crudity, Clerks 2 is really rather a sweet and sentimental movie about Dante's slowburn romance with Rosario Dawson's character.

I've long thought that sort of thing is a peculiarly American product. Didn't Kurt Vonnegut talk about putting bitter coatings on sugar pills or something similar? Philip Marlowe, the shop soiled Sir Galahad, was an early example. He was really a pussycat under the hardboiled exterior.

In a separate development, I worried a little on Sunday when I noticed in Sainsbury that the new Wesley Snipes movie seemed to have gone straight to video in the UK. This was because I had been getting breathless reports from my brother earlier in the year of the Snipester filming action scenes outside his office, so I was obviously keen to see my home town blown to smithereens on the big screen.

It turns out that it is The Detonator that has failed to get a cinema release, the film I'm waiting for is The Shooter. What a relief!

As I was googling my way to the truth, I was also delighted to come across details of Wesley Snipes Six Day Sexcapade in Cardiff. Its a pretty dull story to be honest, but saved by this money quote:

"He also talked in strange rhymes and told me he was a Buddhist monk. His meditating annoyed me. Without warning, he'd shake me and say he was 'releasing my energy'."

Genius.

Neighbours

We have had something of a turn round in tenants in our office building over the last few month and as of today, my immediate neighbours are:

1. To my right - Time & Leisure lifestyle magazines, who I notice have launched PlentyFish.net, "London's dating playground" since last time I visited their site.
2. To my left - http://www.radiosa.co.uk/, an internet radio station for ex-pat South Africans that is expanding to broadcast in FM as well.

Strange the companions life throws up, n'est-ce pas?

Bran ap Brychan

Robin Hood was Welsh and never went to Nottingham, claims book

Robin Hood was really a Welsh freedom fighter who never even set foot in Nottingham let alone Sherwood Forest, a historian has claimed.
The medieval outlaw - said to have robbed from the rich to give to the poor - never once met Maid Marian nor the Sheriff of Nottingham, according to Stephen Lawhead.
The American blows apart the widely accepted version of the legend in his new book, Hood, arguing that Robin Hood was really a hardened Guerrilla based in the Valleys.

Lies and Liars

I almost died of having to pretend for the past year that we were actually governing. Instead we lied day, night and evening. I don’t want to do this anymore. Either we go ahead and then you have a leader or you have to pick somebody else.

The riots are getting bigger but I find that I find that I am curiously attracted to the candour of the Hungarian Prime Minister on his notorious tape.

When The Times ran some of it they noted:

The extracts are in chronological order and have been translated by Reuters from a transcript on Mr Gyurcsany's personal weblog.

Isn't that astounding? I can't make head nor tail of Hungarian but it seems as if it is still being updated through the crisis. The last post on the home page is dated Friday.

I suppose that it seems like a breath of fresh air rather than a scandal when viewed from Blighty because of the sheer fatigue that has built up over the last decade as we have been so cynically manipulated by our own government.

How about this for our domestic cynicism?

A tearful Gordon Brown has spoken at length for the first time about the death of his baby daughter four years ago.
The notoriously private Chancellor described how his first child Jennifer Jane died at ten days old from a brain haemorrhage.
The interview with Sky News shows Mr Brown has accepted that to be voted as prime minister he must open up more to the British public.

Read the last paragraph, then the second, then the first. I think that rereading reveals the motivation. I'm not so stupid as to imply that the tragedy wouldn't have been devastating for the man, but the use of it - with his connivance - in a public relations ploy to make the Chancellor seem more human leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I go where the smart mobs go

Newsgator picked up this post from Ian's weblog yesterday afternoon, so last night I let Armani, Leonardo, Beyonce, and Bono down and went out to dinner with Howard Rheingold instead.

There's a certain justice in Ian wielding RSS and SMS to gather an impromptu group to meet the author of Smart Mobs.

I've got two of Rheingold's books on the shelf over my desk here at home. Pulling down my copy of his "Virtual Reality" I find that it was published fifteen years ago and the edge of the paper is beginning to yellow. Even the new is getting old.

Kalashnikov MP3

Chris wants an AK47. May I suggest an accessory?

The 'AK-MP3 Jukebox' comes with 20GB storage capable to hold up to 9000 songs or 3000 hours of mp3 audio books.
AK-MP3 player built into the body of the ammunition magazine of Kalashnikov automatic rifle.
Player could be used on its own or it could be attached to the Kalashnikov machinegun instead of the ordinary magazine.
Stainless steel body makes this new player uniquely suitable for outdoors.

Boney M said it best. "Oh, those Russians."

What I remember the writers telling me when I was young

It is always good to find a poem you don't know from a poet you don't know:

Look hard at the world, they said --
generously, if you can
manage that, but hard. To see
the extraordinary data, you
have to distance yourself a
little, utterly. Learn the
right words for the umpteen kinds
of trouble that you'll see,
avoiding elevated
generics like misery,
wretchedness. And find yourself
a like spectrum of exact
terms for joy, some of them
archaic, but all useful.
Sometimes when they spoke to me I
could feel their own purposes
gathering. Language, the dark-
haired woman said once, is like
water-color, it blots easily,
you've got to know what you're
after, and get it on quickly.
Everything gets watered
sooner or later with tears,
she said, your own or other
people's. The contrasts want to
run together and must not be
allowed to. They're what you
see with. Keep your word-hoard dry.

We are Siamese if you please

The odd juxtaposition of the coup in Thailand and my five years old's Muay Thai lessons (oh and the 50% off the a la carte menu offer that was ending on 30 September) combined to send "eat your way and the world in London" to the outstanding Mango Tree Restaurant in Belgravia last night.

I've been there several times before and I'm not going to review the food, all you need to know is that it is out of the top draw and the menu is here.

It was a favourite when we had an office round the corner in Portland House and it was good to get back to our old stamping grounds as it also enabled us to reacquaint ourselves with the Grouse and Claret, our boozer of choice back in the day. This was as well, because when I rang the restaueant to book there wasn't a table available until half past nine at night. There was time to kill.

I also quite liked the idea of going round to the nearby Westminster Cathedral to see if there were any bigots demonstrating outside with whom I could practice my freestyle theological debating technique. Paul unsurprisingly bailed on this portion of the evening's entertainment when we got out of the tube station at Victoria, but when I got to the Cathedral there were neither demonstrators nor an overt police presence.

I went in and sat down. There was a service in progress , it was towards the end of a sung mass and I listened to the Benedictus. That dovetailed so neatly with Benedictus PP. XVI that I couldn't help but feel a little as if I was in a overly contrived novel or play.

Then I went down the pub.

Strange he never married

.......... he toddled off-stage energetically waving a Welsh flag. Some things are simply beyond rational explanation.

From a Evening Standard review of Johnny Matthis at Wembley. Very odd.

Any Expertise?

We're advertising a lot of antiques on www.virtualbumblebee.co.uk at the moment, as the police are trying to find the rightful owners of property that may have been accumulated outside the law.

I was amazed that I was able to improve the description of this item as I recognised it as a Japanese Daruma (maybe a netsuke).

It makes you wonder how much a civic minded community of real experts could contribute to the system.

Mills a Boon

I'm too busy to write today, so here's a photo I took at Abbey Mills on Sunday after watching the music on the bandstand. Not a bad place to work all in all.

Talk Like A Pirate Day

I have decided to celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day, by elevating the infamous buccaneer Henry Morgan (Llanrumney 1635) officially to the status of A Welsh Born Icon.

I went to school in Llanrumney and observed many a pocket money privateer in the playground there myself.

"Every quid over you."

Cheers

WASHINGTON (AFP) - People who consume alcohol earn significantly more at their jobs than non-drinkers, according to a US study that highlighted "social capital" gained from drinking.

The study published in the Journal of Labor Research Thursday concluded that drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than teetotalers, and that men who drink socially bring home an additional seven percent in pay.

"Social drinking builds social capital," said Edward Stringham, an economics professor at San Jose State University and co-author of the study with fellow researcher Bethany Peters.

"Social drinkers are out networking, building relationships, and adding contacts to their BlackBerries that result in bigger paychecks."

The authors acknowledged their study, funded by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, contradicted research released in 2000 by the Harvard School of Public Health.

"We created our hypothesis through casual observation and examination of scholarly accounts," the authors said.

"Drinkers typically tend to be more social than abstainers."

The researchers said their empirical survey backed up the theory, and said the most likely explanation is that drinkers have a wider range of social contacts that help provide better job and business opportunities.

"Drinkers may be able to socialize more with clients and co-workers, giving drinkers an advantage in important relationships," the researchers said.

"Drinking may also provide individuals with opportunities to learn people, business, and social skills."

They also said these conclusions provide arguments against policies aimed at curbing alcohol use on university campuses and public venues.

"Not only do anti-alcohol policies reduce drinkers' fun, but they may also decrease earnings," the study said.

The best line in that is "we created our hypothesis through casual observation" which sounds like a euphemism for hanging round in bars.

In a related development, "Two Week Bender Just Flies By", reports Doyle Redland at Onion Radio News.

Manuel II Palaiologos

I was reflecting morosely over the weekend that the unseemly fracas about the Pope's address at the University of Regensberg was probably created, never mind exacerbated, by the default agit-prop setting of the goonish mainstream media.

The putative hive mind of the internet hasn't put much meat on the bones either. I checked out the Wikipedia page for Manuel II Palaiologos - the Christian Emperor whose quoted words sparked the "crisis". Admittedly it has been updated 53 times over the last few days, but as you can see from this comparison not a lot of valuable information has been forthcoming.

The discussion page is a little more useful. For me, it is evocative of both place and historical context to learn that:

Manuel was begging Henry IV of England for a new crusade to save Constanople from the besieging Turks, when a message arrived with the news that Tamerlane's (Timor's) Mongol army had badly defeated the Turks, thus saving Constantinople.

Henry IV held his Privy Council at Merton Priory in 1407, probably in the very Chapter House (a stone's throw from where I'm sitting) that Paul is bringing to the infosphere.

Small world.

Joey Goodbye

Apropros of nothing, the lyrics of an old Thump the Clouds song. Written as far as I can tell when Pete Doherty was about five. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I knew Joey for a while
I guess I always liked his style
He'd break your hear with a smile
But you'd be laughing all the while
I met him at the usual bar
He tried to sell me his guitar

And that's the last time I saw Joey
Joey Goodbye

I heard Joe was in a fix
Needed more, and got less kicks
Mixin' things you shouldn't mix
Cuttin' corners, turnin' tricks
His man says you're my good friend
And you can try the special blend

And that's the last time he saw Joey
Joey Goodbye

Kids found Joey on waste ground
Straight and stiff and flat face down
All the people gathered round
And said nobody heard a sound
Watched the wagon pull away
But no one there had much to say

And that's the last time they saw Joey
Joey Goodbye

Heroes and Villains

I picked up a deeply discounted DVD of Cinderella Man not too long ago. I thought it was a great old fashioned movie, so it came back with us the last time I took my five year old to Cardiff, and I watched it with my Dad one night after the little one was asleep.

He enjoyed it as well as I did but said in passing of the reigning champion set up by the film as a murderous cartoon thug and nemesis of the saintly Jim Braddock, "I don't think Max Baer was actually like that."

I've done a little bit of research. (OK I've actually just looked in up in Wikipedia.)

In the film, Baer is presented as almost relishing the fact that he killed a man in the ring. Here is what his son said about it:

My father cried about what happened to Frankie Campbell. He had nightmares. In reality, my father was one of the kindest, gentlest men you would ever hope to meet. He treated boxing the way today's professional wrestlers do wrestling: part sport, mostly showmanship. If I were to make a comparison, he was more like Muhammad Ali than the Sonny Liston of his day. He never deliberately hurt anyone." He helped put Frankie's children through college.

In 1933, he decided he was a Jew and wore the Star of David on his trunks for the first time. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, his opponent was Max Schmeling, a reluctant Nazi poster boy. "That one's for Hitler," Baer snarled between blows as he defeated the stumbling Schmeling.

Despite the star on his trunks Baer was never a practicing Jew; his father was probably half Jewish.

(Let's cut him some slack though, as Dannie Abse - St Illtyd's alumnus, and now anointed Welsh Born Icon - said later, "Auschwitz made me more of a Jew than Moses did." And, while we are in a Welsh digression, I'm put out that Baer also beat Welsh Born Icon Tommy Farr.)

Baer is the villain of the Braddock story. What about Schmeling, villain of Baer's?

Joe Louis' defeat of Schmeling in their June 1938 rematch (Schmeling had knocked Louis out two years before) was probably the most politically and racially charged boxing match in history as America and Germany headed inexorably to war, though both the protagonists seem to have been reluctant figureheads.

In November 1938, less than six months after his defeat, however Ubermensch Schmeling came to the aid of Jewish friends in the wake of Kristallnacht, hiding, at great personal risk, two Jewish brothers in his Berlin apartment and later helping them to escape from the country.

An episode of which, as far as I can tell, he never told anyone. It only came to light in 1989, when one of the brothers invited Schmeling to Las Vegas to thank him for saving his life.

Heroes and villains.

Neung, song, saam

My five year old brought a school friend along to the kids' Muay Thai class at Jackapong last night.

"Did you enjoy it?", I asked our guest when they trooped out at the end.

"Yes, it was great," he said.

"Would you like to do it again?", I prompted.

"No," he replied to my disappointment.

"Why not?"

"I'm too tired, I'd rather just go home, sit down and watch the football."

The light began to dawn.

"I don't mean straight away. Would you like to do it again next week?"

"Oh, yes."

Wanted: 500 pigs to save ponies from toxic acorns

A Beachcomberish headline and a Beachcomberesque byline "Simon de Bruxelles", but a genuine article from the Thunderer.

The Madras House

Back in April, I was really impressed with the National Theatre's production of 'The Voysey Inheritance', and now I've noticed from a review in the Telegraph that another Harley Granville Barker play 'The Madras House' has been revived in the Orange Tree Theatre.

I must get along to see that. For all the time that I lived around Richmond I never actually went to a production in the purpose built Orange Tree Theatre after it moved from the pub across the road.

The action concerns the sale of a rag-trade family business, comprising a drapery emporium in Peckham and the Madras House itself, an haute-couture establishment in W1.
Philip Madras, the son of one of the founders, is running the operation, as his father Constantine has converted to Islam and now lives near Baghdad.

A modern sounding synopsis is it not? The notion that we have a more sophisticated view of the world than the Edwardians seems more ridiculous to me by the day, yet that golden generation was smashed and pulled down from its pedestal in the quagmire of the Great War for all that they were cleverer, more worldly and more cultured than us. It's a sobering thought when you look at the world today.

five point palm exploding heart technique

Once upon a time in China, some believe, around the year one double-ought three. Head priest of the White Lotus Clan, Pai Mei was walking down the road, contemplating whatever it is that a man of Pai Mei's infinite power contemplates - which is another way of saying 'who knows' - when a Shaolin monk appeared, traveling in the opposite direction. As the monk and the priest crossed paths, Pai Mei, in a practically unfathomable display of generosity, gave the monk the slightest of nods. The nod was not returned. Now was it the intention of the Shaolin monk to insult Pai Mei or did he just fail to see the generous social gesture? The motives of the monk remain unknown. What is known, are the consequences. The next morning Pai Mei appeared at the Shaolin Temple and demanded of the Temple's head abbot that he offer Pai Mei his neck to repay the insult. The Abbot at first tried to console Pai Mei, only to find Pai Mei was inconsolable. So began the massacre of the Shaolin Temple and all 60 of the monks inside at the fists of the White Lotus. And so began the legend of Pai Mei's five point palm exploding heart technique.

So that's settled then.

The Flashing Blade

As long as we have done our best
Then no one can do more
And life and love and happiness
Are well worth fighting for

Perhaps because this year's school summer holidays have just finished I have been reminiscing about the TV shows that I remember being shown during the long break when I was a kid.

The series that I particularly cherish were - for some reason - all foreign productions that were dubbed into English when we saw them.

I've looked them up on IMDB. Here we go.

The Flashing Blade (theme tune lyrics above) was apparently Le Chevalier Tempête in its original form.

Thats when I softly sigh
On white horses
Snow white horses
Let me ride away
Away
Away

White Horses (another fine theme song) started off as Ferien in Lipizza.

Belle and Sebastian was originally, and unsurprisingly, Belle et Sébastien. A great vocal theme tune as I recall but no lyrics, "Angelina, Angelina don't let them take my Belle!"

Robinson Crusoe, and last but not least The Singing Ringing Tree.

The Singing Ringing Tree was an East German fable - and possibly Communist allegory - called Das Singende, klingende Bäumchen and I am still, deep in my heart, afraid of the soddin' evil dwarf in it.

It is of course entirely possible that these shows were shown at another time and didn't comprise the background to our long, languid summer breaks, but that's how I remember it.

It's Only Rock 'n Roll

If I could stick my pen in my heart
And spill it all over the stage
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
Would you think the boy is strange? Ain't he strange?

If I could win ya, if I could sing ya
A love song so divine
Would it be enough for your cheating heart
If I broke down and cried? If I cried?

I said I know it's only rock 'n roll but I like it
I know it's only rock 'n roll but I like it, like it, yes, I do
Oh, well, I like it, I like it, I like it
I said can't you see that this old boy has been a lonely?

"Illegal" Drug Prices At All-Time Low

The War on Drugs has completely failed. Cannabis, Ecstasy and Cocaine prices have dropped dramatically since the 1990s. An Ecstasy pill is now a mere £3, compared to £9 in 2000. This year's bumper poppy crop in Afghanistan means that heroin is also due for a major price drop.

I found this story - an odd update almost to my joke post http://nickbrowne.coraider.com/2006/05/fitness-for-purpose.html on digg.

This post is really just a test, though, of the digg feature that let's me wire it to my blog rather as I have with flickr.

read more digg story

The Evil of Two Lessers

As I write, we are somewhere in the middle of round 92 of the most wearisome heavyweight contest in the history of British politics. The fading champion, Tony Blair, is out on his feet, but the challenger, Gordon Brown, seems almost as punch-drunk. They cling to each other in the middle of the ring, alternately propping one another up and landing the occasional feeble punch. If the challenger were any good, it would all have been over long ago. Worse, the ringside is crowded with would-be contenders, eager to turn the fight into a free-for-all.

Meet the bloggers

Noodling around on the web over the weekend I came across the web site for a Radio 4 series of five fifteen minute programmes called "Meet the bloggers".

I listened to the first two episodes from the site and heard the third - which features the great James Lileks - live this morning.

Chapter five will be on at 9:30 am UK time next Tuesday and the sixth at the same time the Tuesday after that.

Check them out.

Out of the mouths of babes

Yesterday being an "inset day" at his school, my five year old came to work with me and asked me, in the course of the day, two questions.

The first was rhetorical:

We aren't a real family because we live in two different houses are we?

The second was not:

Are you lonely when I am not with you?

In real life I prevaricated but here are the answers:

No we're not.
Yes I am.

I don't think that our children ask a lot of us. All they want is to feel secure and know that we love them. In that I have failed in this I am deeply and irredeemably ashamed.

British victims of September 11

1. Sarah Ali, 35, from Balham, south west London, was at a conference on the 106th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre.

2. Andrew Joseph Bailey, 29, married with an eight-year-old daughter, was originally from Birmingham. He worked as a security supervisor for insurance brokers Marsh and McLellan on the 93rd floor of the north tower and lived and worked in New York.

3. Michele Beale, 37, a director with London-based Risk Waters, was attending a conference at the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11.

4. Jane Beatty.

5. Oliver Bennett, 32, was a journalist with Risk Waters publishers.

6. Graham Berkeley, 37, an IT consultant, whose parents live in Shrewsbury, was on board the United Airlines flight which plunged into the World Trade Centre's south tower.

7. Paul Gary Bristow, 27, a publisher for Risk Waters group, was at a seminar in the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor.

8. Geoffrey Thomas Campbell, 31, a Reuters employee from Great Billing, Northamptonshire, who had been due to take part in a conference hosted by English publishing company Risk Waters Group, in the World Trade Centre.

9. Jeremy Mark Carrington, 34, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the WTC's north tower. Brought up in Essex, he moved to New York 12 years ago, where he met his wife, Pattie. Jeremy had survived the 1993 WTC bombing. His mother, Catherine Ross, lives in Gillingham, Dorset.

10. Suria Clarke, 30, was working in the towers. Her brother Tom is from London.

11. Neil James Cudmore, 38, worked in the advertising department of a financial journal. He was believed to have been planning to marry colleague and fellow victim Dinah Webster.

12. Michael Joseph Cunningham, 39, originally from Ilford, Essex, was a broker for Eurobrokers in the South Tower. He lived in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Teresa, 35. His son Liam was 13 days old when the jets hit the World Trade Centre.

13. Gavin Anthony Cushny, 48, of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He was working as computer consultant for Cantor Fitzgerald on 104th floor of the north tower.

14. Caleb Arron Dack.

15. Anthony Richard Dawson, of Southampton, had been attending a convention in one of the towers when the second plane struck.

16. Calvin Dawson.

17. Kevin Dennis, 43, a stockbroker, who lived in St John's Wood, north London, before he moved to New York to work for Cantor Fitzgerald. He had been on the 101st floor of the north tower of World Trade Centre.

18. Melanie Louise Devere. The 30-year-old publishing assistant with Risk Waters grew up in Hayling Island, Hants, before moving to London.

19. Richard Anthony Dunstan.

20. Michael Egan, 51, the Hull-born vice president of multinational insurance company AON, is believed to have died as he helped colleagues escape from the south tower.

21. Christine Egan, 55, a nurse working in Canada, was visiting her brother's office while on a week-long holiday in New York.

22. Robert Eaton, 37, a Cantor Fitzgerald broker, believed to have been working on the 105th floor of the north tower.

23. Godwin Forde, 38, a security guard for Morgan Stanley, was at work on the 42nd floor of the south tower.

24. Christopher Forsythe.

25. Boyd Gatton.

26. Andrew Clive Gilbert, in his thirties, originally from Ipswich, worked at the World Trade Centre.

27. Timothy Paul Gilbert, like his brother Andrew, was also in his thirties and working at the World Trade Centre. The brothers had been living and working in New York for some time.

28. Paul Gilbey, from Southend-on-Sea, a money trader with Euro Bank, worked on the 84th floor of the south tower. He and his wife had moved to the US eight years before the terrorist strike.

29. Ronald Lawrence Gilligan, 43, from Merseyside, is thought to have been behind his 103rd-floor desk at Cantor Fitzgerald when disaster struck.

30. Robert Halligan, originally from Kent.

31. Nicholas John, a 33-year-old banker from Swansea, had been due to attend a meeting at the World Trade Centre.

32. Christopher Jones.

33. Robin Blair Larkey, 48, from Surrey, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. He left a wife and three young sons.

34. Steven Lawn, 29, from Broadstairs, Kent, moved to New York three years ago to work as a money dealer. He was on the 91st floor of the south tower. Parents John and Angela had just retired after running the family newsagents for 35 years.

35. Leon Lebor.

36. Michael William Lomax, 37, from Heaton Moor, Stockport, was working on the 93rd floor of the south tower when it was hit by one of the planes.

37. Mark Ludvigsen, was an employee of Cantor Fitzgerald.

38. Gavin MacMahon, 35, from County Durham, was working as an insurance executive on the 99th floor of one of the World Trade Centre towers.

39. Simon Percy Maddison, 40, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. Lived with wife Maureen and three children in New Jersey. Originally from Harlow, Essex.

40. Keithroy Maynard.

41. Colin McArthur, 52, from Scotland, was vice-president of insurance company Aon Inc.

42. Christina Sheila McNulty.

43. John Moran.

44. Stephen Philip Morris, 31, whose parents live in Nantglyn, near Denbigh in Clwyd. He worked for a finance company in the World Trade Centre.

45. Alex Napier.

46. Marcus Neblett.

47. Christopher Newton-Carter, 52, from London, was an associate director for banker Sandley O'Neill. He was six floors from the top when the second plane plunged into his building.

48. Avnish Raman Patel, worked on the 93rd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre as a financial analyst with Fred Alger Management. Mr Patel, a single 28-year-old whose parents live in Clapham, south London, had lived in the US since he was 13.

49. Hashmukh Parmar.

50. David Alan James Rathkey, 47, from Maidenhead, Berks, was working on the 83rd floor of the North Tower. The father-of-three was a systems consultant who was married to an American and had lived in the country for 20 years.

51. Sarah Anne Redheffer, 35, from Enfield, north London, was working for Risk Waters on the 106th floor of the north tower when the first jet struck.

52. Rick Rescorla, 62, born in Hayle, Cornwall, was vice president for security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. He was helping his colleagues flee the World Trade Centre's south tower.

53. Karlie Rogers, 25, a Sussex University graduate from London, worked for Risk Waters publishers.

54. Howard Selwyn, 47, from Leeds, was told to evacuate the south tower while on the phone to a colleague at his desk on the 84th floor.

55. Jane Simpkin.

56. Michael Stewart, 42, a banker, from Belfast.

57. Derek Sword, 29, from Dundee, was working for American finance firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods when the second jet went into the south tower.

58. Rhondell Tankard.

59. Ian Clive Thompson, 43, was born in Hampshire.

60. Nigel Bruce Thompson, 30, from Sheffield, was working on the 105th floor of the twin towers for brokers Cantor Fitzgerald.

61. Simon James Turner, 39, was among seven other British employees working at the technology conference in the quarter mile-high building.

62. Benjamin James Walker, 41, was on the 91st floor of the north tower, working for Marsh McClennan insurance brokers. He had moved to New York five years ago from Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire. He left an American wife, Laura, and three children.

63. Dinah Webster, 50, was attending a conference on the 109th floor of the south tower. She and fellow victim Neil Cudmore worked in the advertising department of a financial journal.

64. Vincent Wells, 22, from Ilford, Essex, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.

65. Kathryn Wolf.

66. Martin Wortley, 29, from Woolpit, Suffolk, was working as a dealer with Cantor Fitzgerald.

67. Neil Robin Wright, 30, an options broker from Tilbury, Essex, was also in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald when the building was struck.

TED

Tenders Electronic Daily - the EU Public Procurement Invitation to Tender system is now publishing RSS Feeds, and I have subscribed to see if we can't pick up some IT work.

It takes me back though, TED is the first thing that I ever worked on in anger with The Profit Burglar (Paul Robert Fright being to The Profit Burglar what Nicholas Browne is to A Welsh Born Icon.)

Back in the day, we were accessing TED over Frame Relay using a Gandalf Packet Assembler/Disassembler. Old School hacking indeed.

Beerfest

When I blogged the plot of Beerfest late last year, I honestly half-thought that someone was pulling my leg, so I was amazed to find it turn up at the Odeon at the end of last week.

I went to see it yesterday, and it really is as low brow, vulgar, daft and enjoyable as I imagined. Definitely a movie whose acquaintance I shall make again over a few Stellas when it comes out on DVD.

If you're going to check it out I suggest you hurry. Given the sparse audience at the showing I attended, I don't think that it will be hanging round the multiplexes long.

Music

I've just bought a 'Netgear Wireless Digital Music Player MP101' from our own police property auction system. (£46, did I get a good deal or what?)

I wonder, once I've picked it up and integrated it into my set up at home if I will ever play a CD again.

Hugh was telling me the other day that now he has finished ripping all the music that he's bought through the decades, to his PC he has started deleting all the filler he has got encumbered with over the years; the disdained album tracks and mistakes. That's a good idea but I'm not sure I have the time or fortitude to do it myself.

I love letting the Media Player itself decide what I might like to listen to - Isaac Hayes' "By the Time I get to Phoenix" from Hot Buttered Soul is on at the moment.

It also came up with the 'Was (Not Was)' album "What Up Dog" this morning. That may be my favourite release of the 80's though I can't abide the track "Robot Girl". Not being as steely as Hugh, I've just given it a low rating rather than deleting it. The story of my life in microcosm eh?

Anyway, all together now with the immortal "Anything Can Happen":

She took me in the bedroom
To show me her computer
She asked me if I liked it
I told her she was cuter
She wasn't that great
But it was getting kind of late
She talked about her father
Said he never really liked her
Said that she'd been married
To a schizophrenic biker
I thought I'd say goodbye
But then I saw her start to cry .........

Ginge

My brother Harjinder
Was sick out the winda
All over my brand new sombrero

I was delighted earlier this week to be contacted out of the blue - via the Swansea University BuddyBoard (a system to which I had forgotten subscribing), by Harjinder Singh who studied Chemical Engineering with me in Wales before we joined Fluor together.

He left Fluor before me to join Schlumberger asnd still works for them in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where he is married with three kids.

I thought I would record it on the blog in case any fellow students or ex-colleagues happen to find their way here. I know from the comments that one or two have stumbled upon it.

'Nuff Said

Firemen shouldn't be asked to man stalls at BNP summer camps, Jihadist demonstrations demanding the beheading of cartoonists, Conservative Party conferences, Evangelical Christian rallies or anywhere else where a partisan, contentious point of view is being expressed. So they shouldn't be asked to do so at 'Pride Scotia' or anything like it.

As ever The Onion was ahead of the curve. See "Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years" from April 2001.

Stubborn Wales

Due to domestic obligations, I couldn't get to White Hart Lane to see Wales take on Brazil last night but I was free early enough to go and watch it down the pub. (I don't have BBC3 at home as I'm not enough of a TV watcher to make it worthwhile subscribing to Sky or cable. Maybe now I'll get a Freeview box.)

I was pleased to find that the game was on in CJs, but a little disappointed that no Brazilian supporters from the favelas of Colliers Wood seemed to have turned up.

Even though we lost 2-0, Wales held the Pentacampeao for the first hour which is a very respectable.

(Although, to be fair, they only beat us 1-0 in the quarter finals of the 1958 World Cup. That is the only occasion that Wales have been beaten in a match at a World Cup, but then again 1958 is the only time we ever qualified.)

New Species on ebay

You can buy anything on eBay these days – even a new species of marine life. When zoological experts were asked to identify sea urchin shells and spines which collectors had been buying and selling on eBay, they were surprised to find that they were looking at an entirely new species.

Gimme Shelter

I didn't need another reason to be proud of Wales, but I find myself warming to Janice Lee (almost certainly because I live 150 miles away):

A council that took a woman to court for belting out power ballads said today it had successfully applied for an anti-social behaviour order against her.
Janice Lee, from Cardiff, also had her four CD players and speakers confiscated to ensure her neighbours could get a good night’s sleep.
Cardiff Council resorted to court action after neighbours in the Gabalfa area continually complained about the 37-year-old mother-of-four blasting out 80s hits, such as Europe’s The Final Countdown, and singing along until the early hours.

Dr. Smart-Allick

Dr. Smart-Allick was playing bridge with three of the masters the other day. It became obvious that something was wrong when a simple sum in addition revealed the fact that, in the first rubber, no fewer than thirty-one aces had made their appearance. The Doctor said, 'Since I only had seven myself you men must have been rather over-doing things'.

Ramin Jahanbegloo Released

Four months after Ramin Jahanbegloo was locked up in Iran, we learn from the Guardian (via normblog) that he has been released.

As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.

Radio Grumunkin

CDH's eclectic Pandora station "Radio Grumunkin" was my work soundtrack Thursday and Friday last week.

So massive props to Chris for helping me to discover the half Welsh - half Ghanain chanteuse Rhian Benson (not Welsh born unfortunately so ineligible for the icon award), and Margaret Whiting, the 40s and 50s singer whose late-life marriage to younger gay porn star Jack Wrangler raised many eyebrows. (When they first began dating, he protested, "But I'm gay!" to which she replied, "Only around the edges, dear.")

New Left Review

The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on "The Limits of Multitude" in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?

Oh to be young and talk bollocks again.

non-denial of the non-self

In the 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement "all ravens are black", you could derive the equivalent "all non-black objects are non-ravens". Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage. However, a number of computer scientists, led by Fernando Esponda of Yale University, are taking Hempel's notion as the germ of an eminently practical scheme. They are applying such negative representations to the problem of protecting sensitive data. The idea is to create a negative database. Instead of containing the information of interest, such a database would contain everything except that information. .......read on ...............

Do I detect the hand of Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht? It's Beachcomber's world, we just live in it.

'menace to society'

Tomorrow's potential troublemakers can be identified even before they are born, Tony Blair has suggested.
Mr Blair said it was possible to spot the families whose circumstances made it likely their children would grow up to be a 'menace to society'.
He said teenage mums and problem families could be forced to take help to head off difficulties.
He said the government had to intervene much earlier to prevent problems developing when children were older.
There could be sanctions for parents who refused to take advice, he said.

Word fail me. Who the bleedin' hell does this man think he is?

Granted, the last decade has seen an eyebrow raising lack of intellectual firepower from Anthony Blair, but I'm not entirely convinced that that is necessarily a failing in a primus inter pares premier.

It's true that Tony Blair - a proven lawyer - has demonstrated extraordinary contempt for, and ignorance of -the idea, principle and tradition of common law; perhaps these islands' greatest legacy to the world.

His key, defining flaw though is moral vanity. He seems to me genuinely to believe that things are true and right because he thinks that they are, and that he - and he alone - can put the world to rights.

Handily - haven written a blog for a while - I can quote myself with examples from history.

What a deadly danger eugenics was in the 1920s! H G Wells thought the weak should be killed by the strong, having 'no pity and less benevolence'. 'The diseased, deformed and insane, together with those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people will have to go'. He envisioned a time when all crime would be punished by death because 'People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it.'

Not a huge step from our present leader's musings that, but - let's be both honest and frank - Blair is simultaneously demonising and sneering at a caricature the type of difficult background that energised my orphaned father.

In so far as the labels mean anything any more, I am on the right rather than the left but I will oppose this sort of popularist authoritarianism to my last breath.

Cachacaria

"Eat your way around the world in London" is on the road again after the summer recess.

Last night we went to Las Iguanas near the Festival Hall to sample the food and booze of Brasil. It was recommended to me by Hugh on the weekend, and the family in Wales can try the experience as well because there is already a branch in Cardiff.

Cachaça - is the third most consumed spirit in the world by volume after vodka and whiskey - is the national spirit of Brasil and the basis of the nations cocktails so we started off with a classic Caipirinha each at the bar.

Then when we managed to get a table - the place was ramped in the parlance of the waitress; Bolinhos (Brasilian cod, potato & parsley fritters served with aji; hot chilli salsa) followed by chicken Moquea (a light coconut curry of peppers, tomatoes, garlic & palm oil,with white rice, sweet plantain, coconut farofa & aji: hot chilli) for me, and gambas followed by Xinxim (Pele’s favourite; Brasilian lime chicken in creamy crayfish & peanut salsa) for Paul.

It's good to be back.

Where in the world?

I've only ever put one posted one photo to flickr, but I revisited it last night in light of all the buzz in the blogosphere about the system adding extensive geo-tagging and maps support. As it happens I the example picture that I posted was taken in Kerala in India which made it an ideal candidate for an experiment.

They've certainly made tagging very easy, so I've annotated the picture with a notional idea of where I took it (memory fades) and followed the instructions for wiring my flickr account to this blog. Unfortunately all that comes through is the picture below, but if you click on it you can follow another link to the map. (It is on the lower right of the picture on flickr's page under "Additional Information".

This is interesting in itself, but also potentially significant for business. Bizarrely I just sent an update to a police client of an intranet client for their dispatch system that also throws up a link to the incident location.

IMG_0792, originally uploaded by NickBrowne.

Against them there shuts a door

Years on:

Amnesty International today warned that the build-up of Sudanese troops in Darfur could lead to a human rights catastrophe in the very near future, and urged the UN Security Council to take immediate action to protect the people of the region.

"Eyewitnesses in al-Fasher in North Darfur are telling us that Sudanese government military flights are flying in troops and arms on a daily basis," said Kate Gilmore, Amnesty International's Executive Deputy Secretary General. "Displaced people in Darfur are absolutely terrified that the same soldiers that expelled them from their homes and villages may now be sent supposedly to protect them."

A year on, I wonder how Robert McCartney's family are getting on and I'm afraid to find out. Wikipedia tells me:

The McCartney family had lived in the Short Strand area of Belfast for five generations. However local people in the Short Strand area, which is a largely Nationalist area, did not welcome their dispute with the IRA and allegedly drove them to leave by threats of violence. The last McCartney sister to leave the area (Paula) departed Short Strand on 26 October 2005.

What a world.

Blog Limerick

I can't resist Norm's request for a limerick for the word 'blog'.

Here's mine, why not send him yours?

If you have a dead horse to flog,
Turn blogger, start blogging a blog.
And share your opinions
With millions and millions,
You laughably puffed-up bullfrog.

Carnival

Well, the Notting Hill Carnival weekend has rolled around again. I'm not going this year, but I have very clear memories of the festival in 1998. It must have been one of the first times that Raybs came with us when we went out. I remember that I had to lift him onto my shoulders so that he could see the floats over the heads of the crowd. He was so small back then that I could put my hands under his armpits and swing him up on one easy movement. I thought of it often in the years since then as he grew to tower over me, and the idea that I could ever have hurled him around like that seemed more remote and ridiculous.

I took him to school every day for a long time and now I don't even get a reply when I call and leave a message asking how he did in his GCSEs. Can that be right?

I'm surprised how much I expose writing here, I'd probably never reveal the sentiments above in a conversation in a million years.

As a betrayer of my own soul however, I am still a beginner compared to Robert Hughes, I couldn't believe it when I read this lacerating piece last week. Graham Greene spoke of a "sliver of ice" that a writer needed in his heart and Alfred North Whitehead said that "art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern". When you consider the bombshell that Hughes drops about his son in the penultimate paragraph and the fact that this must have been a clear eyed structural decisison intended to maximise the impact of the writing, you have to wonder if the game is worth the candle.

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

One for the Pot

We had a drink at the Royal Oak which is opposite the Sappho Meze in Clapham) last night while we were waiting for Hugh to turn up. I was intrigued by a menu offering of mussels with white wine and chorizo that was chalked up but coudn't investigate further because we had promised our stomachs to Greece for the evening.

I have found a recipe for it today though as "moules a la portugaise" on page 79 of Anthony Bourdain's "Les Halles Cookbook" which I was tidying away after John - my brother - had been leafing through it after breakfast.

Small world.

George Herbert

For the first time - as a recall - since April last year, a poem for Sunday.

Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days'-world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

George Herbert (Montgomery 1593), a Welsh Born Icon. Here is TS Eliot on Herbert (and Donne).

Ithaca

John and Jo are staying with me having come up to London for Abbeyfest's Blues last night and I am basking in the self righteous glow of having gone to the gym and come back before they woke up.

Today's itinerary is due to revolve around Discover Tooting, Hampton Court Palace's Country Affair, dinner at the Sappho Mezze bar and then more blues but it may vary.

So to acknowledge that the company and the journey is really more important than the destination, this:

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon have just launched a limited Beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud", and I think that the ground may be shifting in our business.

Details are a bit sketchy at the moment but it seems that we are essentially being offered the ability to host and serve our own web applications on Amazon's infrastructure. Scaleable, pay as you go, access to effectively limitless capacity would really have got us out of a hole in January.

All our public facing systems are built on Windows Server and this offering seems to be Linux based, but maybe the Ray Ozzie era Microsoft will be spurred by this to offer something similar as part of the Windows Live initiative.

Interesting times, watch this space.

Old School

Exactly six months after floating the idea, I finally got my five year old along to Jackapong last night.

He was thrilled with the idea all day and punctuated our walk to his first Muay Thai lesson with blood curdling cries, leaps and kicks, but - perhaps inevitably - got a little sheepish once we arrived.

Kudos to Gordon, who suggested that I took my shoes and socks off and went into the dojo (or whatever the Thai equivalent is) with my little boy, and Kru Johnny Boon who didn't fuss when Ben was lurking on the periphery of his class. In the end the lotus blossomed , Benny joined in and had a fine old time, and the Jackapong Gym on the ground floor of the Brown and Root building is where you will find us for the foreseeable future from 6pm until 7pm on Thursday nights.

Books

One year on, it is time to renew my membership of the Folio Society by choosing this year's four books.

Having snapped up Herodotus in the off season, this year I will be getting;
- W. B. Yeats: Collected Poems
- Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book and Just So Stories
- St Augustine: Confessions
- Raymond Chandler: Trouble is My Business and other stories.

Further, the next meeting of Chris's book club - to be held at my gaff early in October is looming. I've nominated jPod, and I have to read and inwardly digest "The Time Travellers Wife", "The Keepers of Truth", and "Berlin: The Downfall, 1945" to accommodate the other three members by then.

I had a blast at the first meeting I attended earlier this year in Bradford On Avon.

Statement of Purpose

I was delighted today to receive - for incorporation into a client's website - a stern corporate Statement of Purpose that used the used the Three Letter Acronym (TLA) - SOP as a title.

A sop being, as any fule kno, "a concession given to mollify or placate", the mot juste indeed.

Reservists

I started wondering about the Territorial Army in light of both yesterday's post and President Bush authorising the US Marine Corps to recall thousands of inactive reservists to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the Times report back in July of Des Browne's announcement of reinforcements for the British troops in Afghanistan:

The extra troops numbers will involve a call-up of reservists. There are currently150 serving in Helmand, mostly from the Territorial Army, and 450 more will receive notices to deploy.

Which, given that the total new assignment was 900 troops, implies that half the fresh soldiers will be part timers.

Here's a human interest piece about the imminent deployment of lads from the TA in Gloucestershire to Helmand.

It all seems rather ominous a drum beat to me.

Operations in Afghanistan

From the Telegraph this morning (the bold emphasis is mine):

The leader of a paratroop section who took on Taliban fighters single-handedly has become the seventh British soldier to die in Afghanistan this month.
Cpl Bryan Budd, 29, was shot dead during an attempt to lead the storming of a building filled with Taliban fighters after an ambush in the town of Sangin, northern Helmand province. He had led his unit "superbly" from the front for the past three months, his colleagues said yesterday.
All but one member of the eight-man section of paratroopers have now become casualties of the increasingly ferocious clashes with the Taliban.

I'm getting increasingly worried about what is happening in Afghanistan where we have inflicted causalties on the same scale as the clash between Israel and Lebanon, and are enduring - though on a much smaller scale - a relentless drip feed of our own.

The MOD's page about the conflict is here, and there is an associated RSS feed here. I'm subscribed and it is depressing.

It was more than ironic to catch Rambo III and its dedication to "the gallant people of Afghanistan", on late night TV last week. Here's a sample of the dialogue:

Mousa: This is Afghanistan... Alexander the Great try to conquer this country... then Genghis Khan, then the British. Now Russia. But Afghan people fight hard, they never be defeated. Ancient enemy make prayer about these people... you wish to hear?
Rambo: Um-hum.
Mousa: Very good. It says, 'May God deliver us from the venom of the Cobra, teeth of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan.' Understand what this means?
Rambo: That you guys don't take any shit?
Mousa: Yes... something like this.

New Orleans School of Cooking

I was delighted when visiting my brother last week to find that he had stumbled on the recipes that we had been given on our New Orleans cookery course all those years ago, so it can now be revealed that the venue that I had feared lost to memory and posterity was the New Orleans School of Cooking & Louisiana General Store. We rusted up a jambalaya (replacing the unavailable andouille* with chorizo) to celebrate.

The website says, "our Creole/Cajun experts teach New Orleans specialities such as Gumbo, Jambalaya and Pralines, and season them with history, trivia and tall tales", and that is just what I remember so fondly.

John found the handout in his copy of "River Road Recipes", the textbook of Louisiana recipes prepared by the Junior League of Baton Rouge.

I remember our instructor recommending that sort of work over the more conventional cookery book as he reasoned that, for example, Mrs Augustine Renaud Foster III would not contribute her recipe for squirel stew to a collection that was also going to feature the down home favourites of her peers unless she had confidence in it. And that instructions assembled by a food technologist to be published under the imprimatuer of a celebrity chef couldn't compare.

* Louisiana-style andouille is not to be confused with the French version.

Unspeakable, Uneatable

After a week in Wales, my five year old and I are back in London. (I do by the way intend to backfill blog entries for the days that I missed.)

In yet another example of the kind of eccentric incident that seems to define my life, as we approached the front door of No. 11, a girl from a neighbouring house stuck a toweled head out of the front door and told us that a passerby had told her that he had seen a fox looking out of a window in my house earlier in the day.

We entered gingerly and neither found or smelled anything untoward, but when I checked the upstairs, the master bedroom had been turned upside down, a carpet corner was torn up, and the window frame had been clawed and chewed.

We checked Benny's room and then the bathroom, and as we came out of that a fox wandered insouciantly out of the main bedroom. I shut my little guy in the bathroom, ran downstairs and opened the front door and then chased the intruder out.

I don't think that the creature laid its "scent" anywhere and I think that it must have come through the catflap we inherited, but I have been stuck on the sofa with a traumatised five year old boy for the last couple of hours. I'll have to unpack tomorrow.

Welcome back to my life. I wonder what my insurance will cover?

The Be Cool Army

"When you do this, you have to say bling."

Off the Grid

I am still alive. Just in Swansea in a house with no telephone, never mind broadband, but it seems to be - shades of the Filthistan Trio - business as usual in the wider world.

A Philippines judge who said he consulted imaginary mystic dwarves has failed to convince the Supreme Court to allow him to keep his job.

says the BBC.

Gone Fishin'

Horse Riding

Thanks very much to "Mark the Butcher", plus his wife and son and Max and Jack their horses for taking us riding for free.

I really got the bug, but I'm not sure that I can justify the salty prices of Horse Riding London at Wimbledon Village Stables to continue my studies.

Techniquest

We met up yesterday with a nursery and school friend of my five year old's whose family has moved down to Penarth and all went to Techniquest in Cardiff. Thence to Rabaiotti’s - apparently unchanged for thirty years - on the Penarth esplanada for ice cream.

Merton Priory

I am back in Wales visiting the family with my five year old this week so blogging will be light.

My colleague Paul is burning the midnight oil for Colliers Wood producing a 3D model of the ancient and lost Merton Priory.

He's blogging the development at http://mertonPriory.coraider.com/ to help us collaborate with local experts.

Mas Que Nada

There was a latin band called called Samara playing at AbbeyFest on Friday night. As I bowled up, after going home after work to shower and get changed, they were playing Mas Que Nada and when they finished Rachel Calladine, the guest vocalist said how intimidating it was performing that song to Brazillians.

Quite so, because - for all that it seems to house more Poles than Poland and more Sri Lankans that Ceylon - Colliers Wood also seems to be some sort of hive of activity for capoeira the Brazillian martial art with music.

I've seen posters saying that it is on in the community centre, noticed it being practiced in the Muay Thai gym and even seen people walking round at night carrying and occasionally strumming berimbaus.

It is all rather confusing although I am 100% in favour of it. I wonder what the story behind it is?

The Glorious Twelfth

Just as it does every year, a card from my Mum has dropped through the letter up reminding me that another year has gone by since I quit my job to run my start-up Coraider Services full time. Today is the tenth anniversary of that world historic day and, by a weird coincidence, also the twenty fifth anniversary of IBM's announcement of their first PC; an event that to all intents and purposes created Coraider's market.

Here's the spec of the original IBM 5150:

Processor: 4.7MHz Intel 8088
Co-Processor: Optional 8087 math coprocessor
RAM: 16K - 640K
ROM: 64KB
OS: MS-DOS 1.0, CP/M-86
Standard storage device: Cassette tape
Floppy drive: Optional
I/O ports: Five internal 8-bit ISA slots, monitor, Centronics, cassette
Peripherals: 5, 10, and 20MB hard disks
Display: 12"
Base price: Around $1,565 (around $3,500 in 2006 figures)

I know it is a commonplace observation but the increase in power and capacity of the machines since then is truly amazing and developments like this year's dual core processors seem to indicate that it is still not slowing down.

I've also found out that August 12th is the start of the open season for grouse shooting in the United Kingdom. Perhaps Paul and I should try and bag a brace on this day next year.

Can you digg it?

Diggnation is pretty much the only video podcast that I watch regularly. It is essentially two guys sitting on a couch, shooting the breeze, and drinking beer, which may not be to everyone's taste but is right up my street. I've looked once or twice at digg - the "user driven social content website" that it is apparently about but I've never really got it unlike the show.

I was astounded to read BusinessWeek's breathless estimate that co-presenter and Digg founder Kevin Rose stands to make $60 million out of it. That is worth a drink or two.

Dragon Castle

Fired up by a rave review in the Times - "Look, this place is terrific. Absolutely terrific. Best Cantonese I've seen in ages." - Paul and I decided to interrupt our break from "eat your way around the world in London" to add the Dragon Castle - a huge plush Chinese in the unlikely setting of Elephant and Castle to our haul.

As a "Chinese restaurant" in the UK will usually serve mostly Cantonese food, we went for a set menu (menu E to be precise). Great familiar food in comfortable surroundings made for a fine evening.

Now that we have broken our duck with Chinese food we can try and move through the "Eight Great Traditions" of Chinese cuisine.

These comprise - in addition to Cantonese - Anhui, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Szechuan and Zhejiang. I wonder how many we will be able to find in town?

Follow the links for our real and imaginary destinations as we eat our way around the world in London.

Kettners Champagne Rooms

I went to Ronnie Scott's last week with Andy M, who I've known since we worked together on the BP Grangemouth project all those years ago. (Thump the Clouds trivia hounds should know that "Shieldhill" is on the braes overlooking Falkirk and Grangemouth.)

Andy being something of an oenophile, we gave the wine list a thorough going over at Ronnie's and then retired to Kettners Champagne Rooms for debriefing. I'd never heard of Kettners but I enjoyed it a lot. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I had to email Andy to ask him to remind me of the name.

I had a bit of a shock when I got back to Leicester Square to get the tube as they seem to close all of the entrances except Cranbourn Street late at night.

Andy arrived at Paddington in time to just miss the 0:34, had to wait for the 1:34, and got to bed at 2:40.

Next day, after being woken at 7 am, he took his daughter to Thorpe Park as planned and thus came to endure with a hangover:

• X-no way out, a backwards roller coaster in the dark
• detonator, 150 ft vertical drop
• Nemesis Inferno, hanging roller coaster with loop-the-loop and corkscrews
• Stealth a 30 second ride, 0 to 80 mph in 2.3 seconds (straight line), vertical rise to 205 feet arching over to a vertical drop of the same.

You're a better man than I am Gunga Din.

By The Way

We are radical,' admits Jaroslaw, an eccentric, cat-loving bachelor who is said to be distinguishable from his brother only on the occasions that he forgets to brush the cat hairs off his trousers. 'Poland needs a certain amount of radicalism to change and cleanse.'

Sometimes I feel that Beachcomber is still writing for the Telegraph.

The invisible hand

I was in Cheshire from early to late yesterday, and I'm a busy boy today but I don't want to break my tradition of writing here every day.

Please entertain yourself with The Economist's attempt to answer the vexed question "Why do econmists spend valuable time blogging? " in the meantime. With any luck it should also encourage me to return to normal service tomorrow.

Once More Into the Breach

It doesn't get any easier taking my five year old back to his mother after the weekend now that he is trying to engineer a reconciliation.

Last night as we were driving, I heard him twist in the back seat. "That is the noodle place," he said "we can all go there tonight."

"I can't come today," I lied, "I have to go to the office and print some papers for a meeting."

"I didn't meant tonight, " he lied, "I meant another night."

"We'll have to ask Mummy," I said.

"Why?" he asked. "I'm inviting you." And, as my eyes began to fill, "I want you to be Mummy's company."

Another blub up for me on the way home. It has been a year now and I couldn't give a damn about her to be perfectly frank, but - though I have to keep my mouth shut for his sake - I will never forgive her for making him worry so, that he schemes like this.

Alky

So the Edinburgh Festival has kicked off for another year today. According to the BBC:

Blogs are taking centre stage at this year's Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, with three different productions tapping into the world of online writers.

One of the Bloggers: Real Internet Diaries is composed entirely of extracts from UK Blogs. I wish I'd thought of that.

I remember Edinburgh as great fun. I was lucky enough to be there for the whole of the festival in 1985, 21 years ago, as I was working at the oil refinery in Grangemouth.

Lucky as I was to be in Edinburgh I was less lucky to be in Grangemouth. At the heart of the HF Alkylation Unit was Hydrofluoric Acid - the glass dissolving, world's scariest compound.

Symptoms of skin exposure to dilute HF are not felt immediately, but exposure of less than 10% of the body to it can be fatal, even with immediate medical treatment. Highly concentrated solutions may lead to acute hypocalcemia, followed by heart attack and death, and will usually be fatal in as little as 2% body exposure (about the size of the sole of the foot). This substance is extremely toxic and has the capacity to kill upon exposure rather than simply damage skin and eyes. It should be handled with extreme care, beyond that given to hydrochloric, sulphuric, or other mineral acids.
Due to low dissociation constant, HF can penetrate tissues quickly like a small non-polar particle. Hydrofluoric acid which comes into direct contact with the fingers can severely damage or destroy the tissue underneath the nail without causing any damage to the nail itself. It is this ability to cause little harm to outer tissues but considerable harm to inner tissues which can produce dangerous delays in treatment of hydrofluoric acid exposure. Once the pain starts, it is out of proportion to the burns produced. Patients often describe the feeling as if they have struck their fingers with a hammer. HF that penetrates under the skin causes later development of painful ulcers, which heal slowly.

Nice.

You could get hypocalcaemia because the acid pulls calcium out of your body so aggressively. We had to carry tubes of calcium glucamate around that we were supposed to rub into our body if we started to itch. Not a place for a hyperchondriac.

It was on the HF Alkylation Unit that I decided that I wanted an office job. I was at the top of a distillation column that was being waved about in the driving rain by a howling gale, clad from head to toe in rubber to stop the acid killing me and trying to find a rogue pressure transmitter when I began to whimper for my Mum and realised that there must be easier ways of making a living.

Time Out

I've read Time Out pretty much every week since I moved to London. (As an aside, I am so daft that I didn't realise for the first decade that the sections were in alphabetical order.)

The listings magazine has moved on since it was founded in London however. Here, Time Out New YorkÂ’s editor-in-chief, Brian Farnham, talks with his counterparts at Time Out Beirut and Time Out Tel Aviv.

Just before the hostilities in Lebanon and Israel broke out, Time Out Beirut's editor-in-chief, Ramsay Short, contributed a brief item that ran in last week's Time Out New York, proudly bragging about the generous drink pours you can get in his 'truly 24-hour party city'. That party abruptly ended when bombs began falling on his friends, family and readers. Amir Ben-David, the editor-in-chief of Time Out Tel Aviv, and his city are contending with the threat of Katyusha rockets. The pages of an arts and entertainment magazine are not the place to get into the complex issues at hand, but because there's a family connection, we thought it would be interesting to give readers access to these Time Out perspectives interviews with both editors about their experiences during the conflict can be accessed below. We look forward to the day when our colleagues, and their readers, can replace worries about survival with the dilemma of deciding what to do in their great cities.

Amen.

Between Gigs

I saw Wynton Marsalis at Ronnie Scott's last night. Great music and great threads. I wonder if the pocket handkerchief is making a come back?

I'm abandoning Mentaca at AbbeyFest tonight in favour of Scritti Politti at the Tate Britain. (Both free gigs by the way.)

I learned about the Scritti event from Rhodri Marsden's blog. He's the keyboard player in the touring band and seems to live pretty near to me from what I can gather from his posts.

My Guilty Pleasure

Q, the music magazine, has taken it upon itself to list the top 50 songs we don't publicly admit to loving. Here are the top 10.

1 Livin' Thing ELO
2 More Than A Feeling Boston
3 Don't Stop Movin' S Club 7
4 I'm Not in Love 10CC
5 Rock 'n' Roll Part 2 Gary Glitter
6 Cold As Ice Foreigner
7 Rebel Yell Billy Idol
8 Whatever You Want Status Quo
9 Baker Street Gerry Rafferty
10 I Will Survive Gloria Gaynor

For myself I own up to "Love Will Keep Us Together" as performed by Captain & Tennille or indeed by its composer Neil Sedaka on inumerable "variety" specials on BBC TV in the 70s.

I was always desitned to be unhip; something I realised early on in primary school when I did a project on the electric motor while Anthony Elliott studied the Rolling Stones.

In the same vein, I also fondly remember being denied access to the Wag club in Wardour street in its 1980s heyday when I wasn't even trying to get in. "You're not getting in here mate," yelled the doorman as I strolled past on my way somewhere else.

Holden Caulfield; Proto Geek

I got a deeply odd email from Amazon yesterday:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We've noticed that customers who have purchased "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger also purchased books by Selim Aissi. For this reason, you might like to know that Selim Aissi's "Security in Wireless Networks And Mobile Platforms" will be released soon. You can pre-order your copy by following the link below.

This initially seemed bonkers to me, but on reflection I can imagine Holden Caulfield, if he'd been born nearly half a century later, hanging with Coupland's geeks (and slackers).

One for the grupo when JPod comes up perhaps?

Maronites

It's probably a displacement activity, but as the bombs continue to fall I have been thinking about the Maronites; the most numerous denomination of the Christians who make up about a third of the Lebanese population.

Not many people in the West seem to know about the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. These are ancient Christian Churches of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and India that, while being part of the Catholic Church in full communion with Rome, are distinct from the Latin Rite or Western Church. Ignorance of these churches is probably related to the fact that they make up only 2% of the membership of the Catholic Church.

Most Eastern Catholic Churches arose when a group within an ancient Christian Church that was in disagreement with the see of Rome chose to rejoin into full communion with that see. The Maronite Church, however, boasts of never having been separated from Rome.

I learned about these churches myself from a Keralan colleague working in Bangalore who belonged to the similarly constituted Syro-Malabar church. Both the Maronite and Syro-Malabar churches consider that they were cut off from Rome by accidents of war, politics, and history and then - in a sense - rediscovered.

There is quite a good Wikipedia article on the Maronite Church.

A couple of nuggets:

• Clerical celibacy is not, on the level of principle, obligatory for Eastern Catholic priests but, among the Maronites for example, monks must remain celibate, as must bishops who are normally selected from the monasteries.
• Bishops and priests of the Eastern Catholic Chuches celebrate the sacraments according to their own rites and Latin rite laity can recieve the sacraments in Eastern Catholic Rite form. Some priests may also have the permission to celebrate some or all of the liturgy of another rite. Thus some priests of one Eastern Rite may also occasionally say Mass according to another Eastern Rite or the Roman Rite, and some Roman Rite priests may occasionally say Mass according to one of the Eastern Rites. Biritual permission, when given, is usually limited to one specific rite in addition to the priest's native rite. The Pope, as head of all the Churches, can say Mass according to any rite.

I wish Benedict would do something more than just mouthing platitudes at Castel Gandolfo. He does "have a dog in that fight" to contradict the first Bush's Secretary of State's vulgar reaction to an earlier blood feud.