Boadicea's Chariot

Dylan – Blowing in the wind

“Life is a performance, I thought. Perhaps the word “illusion” would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me “performance” seemed closed to the truth. Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realisation swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendour of light, if only for an instant. Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves”.

— 吉本ばなな

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
~ Milton Friedman

Warning! This is a cricketing blog so please ignore it if that is not your ‘scene’.

We all know, of course, that the DT is  not as good as it was. I first started reading it in the days when Slightly Grumpy’s dad, TE Utley, was a leader writer. The ‘Peter Simple’ column was unmissable every day and Andrew Alexander’s Parliamentary sketches were brilliant. Every day or so, you were privileged to read the obituary of some ordinary individual who had performed extraordinary feats of valour in their lifetime. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’ as the boy Wordsworth opined. Continue reading “In Praise of the ‘Daily Telegraph’”

“The only thing that really saddens me over my demise is that I shall not be here to read the nonsense that will be written about me and my works and my motives. There will be books proving conclusively that I was homosexual and books proving equally conclusively that I was not. There will be detailed and inaccurate analyses of my motives for writing this or that and of my character. There will be lists of apocryphal jokes I never made and gleeful misquotations of words I never said. What a pity I shan’t be here to enjoy them!”

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.

I see that the head of the National Audit Office has refused to sign off the House of Commons accounts because there is insufficient evidence to support exependiture of around £14m. Will they never learn?

These are some pictures of  an accident on St Johns Bridge on Thursday.

Continue reading “White Paint”

Assange is not a whistleblower and I wish people would stop dignifying what he has done with that sobriquet. A whistleblower is someone who works for, or with an organisation, discovers some wrongdoing, or apparent wrongdoing, and makes it known in a way appropriate to the alleged wrongdoing, and the consequences of its exposure. Most developed countries now have specific laws to protect such people and all reputable companies and organisations have Legal/HR/Security policies which both encourage and protect whistleblowers in the interests of good corporate governance – and the avoidance of severe legal penalties. So?