Across the pond

After the pre-Spring sunshine of the Easter Bank holiday the weather has turned seriously nasty down here in Lyme Bay. The wind howled around our bungalow all night, even waking me, who slept through raids by Hitler’s Luttwaffe. (Factual note: I was not under hostile fire. By the time the planes reached Wolverhampton they had unloaded nearly all their bombs. The noise came from the drone of the plane engines and the shots fired by the pom pom guns based at the air field behind our house.)

By the time we sallied down to the beach around 10 AM in drizzling rain the wind had dropped. But the waves were still battering the beach. Sweeping in, withdrawing, then coming in again to land powerful blows on the crumbling cliffs. An impressive show of strength. But although it was near high tide, the waves did not reach the line of driftwood and assorted debris on the beach, which marks the advance of the real storm just under two weeks ago, when the wind reached Gale Force 12. That night the sea flooded the car park and the hurled the debris inland as far as the footbridge over the River Char.

There was one brave surfer struggling to mount the waves. What he lacked in skill he made up for in tenacity. Time and time again he pulled himself upright and rode the crest of a big wave, only to plunge frum sight when the next wave smacked him down.

By the time we had walked back to the cafe, the sun was had broken through and it was warm enough to sit outside for coffee.

This is the life, I thought. And remembering that this blog is part of the manic depressive diary, which is intended to reveal what it is like being an MD, it occurred to me that I have not been seriously depressed since I moved here nearly eight months ago.

Forget shrinks. Forget pills.

They are puny compared with the healing powers of the sea and the shore.

So the newspapers and the weather forecasters were not entirley wrong about the bank holiday. Snow fell in Colchester yesterday, according to my youngest daughter. We ventured out at lunchtime despite a stiff wind on the hills and a threatening dark black sky and even met a brief hailstorm on the road to Lyme Regis. But down the hill in the bay it was sheltered and sea was stroking the beach, not dashing over the Cobb. The only blight on the Easter Bonnet Parade, now in its fortieth year, was the few drops of rain which fell just as the Red Hatted Laides were lining up to receive their prize.

Your intrepid reporter could not find a single goose pimple on the near 200 bare legs of the Drum Majorettes. They came from all age groups, if you include the minders keeping them in line. The youngest, a girl aged about 5, who brought up the rear, was an authentic lookalike of the baby of the von Trapp family in the Sound of Music. She had the personality to go with it. So I stopped my ears, shutting out the awful music coming from the sound system on the loudspeaker van, and listened in my head to Eidelweiss, hearing instead the voices of Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and those up and coming stars playing the rest of the family.

And the sun came out. So the grandchildren spent a couple of hours playing on the beach. But as honest reporter I have to say it was not quite warm enough to tempt any swimmers into the sea.

But Arctic it wasn’t.

Today was even better. On the top of Golden Cap there was only a slight breeze. The sun was hot as summer in South West England. And the visibility was so good that I could almost count the grains of sand on Chesil Beech.

And the path up the hill was quite crowded. We were not alone in ignoring the forecasts of the chilliest Easter of the century.

HELP. As you can see I am having trouble getting my pictures from Photoshop into the blog, both with sizing and the wrap around and even with moving them once I get them there. If any user of the WordPress program who says this could give me some crisp advice I would be grateful. My email is bob@thedailynovel.com.

The pic by the way is the view from Golden Cap looking towards Chesil Beach in the distance. Taken today by my eldest daughter, Holly. There as another to come of those majorettes if I can only manage to move it in without distorting the picture.

This evening I went to the dinner table full of brotherly love for my brother-in-law. I had just discovered that his team, Watford, had drawn 1 all against Plymouth Argyle, and that, my team, Wolverhampton Wanderers had drawn 3 all against Queens Park Rangers. Both teams have been drawing a lot lately. And although they are rivals for promotion to the Premier League, the way they are playing at present makes it likely that both teams will remain in what is ludicrously called the Championship but is actually the Second Division. In the harsh world of 2008 nothing but the Premier League rates. Even the BBC, which still aspires to be a Public Service broadcaster, on a Saturday night goes straight on from what has happened in the Premier League to the scores in Scottish football.

When I was a teenage football fan, the BBC on a Saturday night gave all the scores in the three English divisions, before they got on to the Scottish results. These days to find out how the Wolves have done, I have to go to my computer, or wait for the Sunday newspapers.

Tonight I thought we can share our sorrows. But at the dinner table football soon lost out to talk about food. Because my eldest daughter, Holly, had produced a fish soup, comprising locally caught mussels and pollock. Which was much lauded by all who ate it.

Janet found the pollock better than cod. Holly said that we should not eat any cod because cod had been over-fished. This led to a discussion of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who has been fighting a campaign to get Dorset folk to demand free range chicken at the Axminster Tesco. And also to eat at his River Cottage restaurant, which according to my wife, requires you to fork out £60 a head.

At the mention of the name, Roger exploded.

 ’Can’t stand the man. Whenever he comes on the television I turn it off. So arrogant. But he knows nothing about farming.’

Roger, who reads The Times every day, told us that a lot of the so-called organic produce was a con. Which The Times has apparently demonstrated in several cases. When challenged by my daughter, Holly, he moved to talking from his own personal experience.

For most of his working life Roger looked after pigs. Daily. Until the time he had to hand them over to the man whose job it was to kill them, so we could eat our Sunday roast pork. He did not like it, and when the new technology moved to raising pigs in much the same way as battery chickens, he liked it even less. But Roger continued to work, to care for his pigs, and do his best to make their brief lives comfortable.

Roger fell foul of the ‘new farming’. The farmer complained that Roger was spending too much time making the pigs’ lives comfortable. His job was to get them to the slaughterhouse as quickly as possible.

The ferocity of Roger’s explosion surprised me. Because HFW, whom I call Fingerstall for short, does, I think, care for the animals, as well as for the environment. But, Roger, however much he regretted the move to condemning pigs to a similar life to battery chickens, was also aware, that most human beings could not, and cannot, afford free range and organic produce. Because, as an agricultural labourer he was earning about the same as a teenage shop assistant at Tesco.

And I can well understand that when Fingerstall comes on the box, whatever he says will jar with anyone who has not had an Etonian education, or been to one of the other top drawer British private schools, like Harrow or Winchester. The accent makes them think, this bloke as arrogant.

It is not the content, it is the music. They were educated to rule the world. And, my God, it shows in the way they speak. Since I have met Fingerstall, I don’t think he is really like that. I think he cares for the animals. And that he cares for the human beings, whose well-being would be improved if they ate organic.

But the reality  of the Dorset, where mention of Fingerstall, brings most dinner tables to the verge of fisticuffs, is that only a minority of the population can afford the luxury of not shopping at Tesco. Many of the mostly well-to-do middle class incomers, who have come here because of the awe-inspiring scenery and the healthy sea air, are all for him.

The battles at the dinner tables are probably quite as fierce at the dinner tables of the long-time residents, when those residents who have gone away to university and come back to tell their parents they should change their ways.

Fingerstall is aware of the problem. His much publicised recent BBC series of television programmes, was an effort to get the Axminster Tesco supermarket to provide free range at a price the less well off can afford. And he has made some sort of difference, so that Tesco store at Axminster, now apologgises to customers if they do not have free range chicken available today.

But Fingerstall is not perfect. According to my daughter, who was stoutly defending him tonight, against the on-slaught from my brother-in-law. Too many of his inner team managing his various enterprises down here in deepest Dorset, are people he has brought from London

Never let your life be governed by what you read in the newspapers, particularly if it is about the weather. We were warned in print and on the television news that we were in for an Arctic bank holiday. Today, for the sceond day running, the sun has been shining in Lyme Bay. True, there was a brief snow flurry on the coast road from Bridport. And we ate lunch to a wind symphony at high volume, and watched the ferns waving vigorously in the garden.

But this afternoon, anoraked, scarved and ear muffed, we sallied forth the beach, The cafe was doing a roaring trade from the custom of those like us, who had not stayed in to watch the telly. There was plenty of debris around produced by Monday’s storm, which flooded the car park. But this afternoon most of the beach was sheltered from the wind. The waves were lapping gently over the pebbles, not dashing against the rocks. And it was warm enough to sit and stare for ten minutes or so.

As I write this just before 6 PM, the sun is still shining. Portland Bill is clearly visible and the clouds in the sky are white and fluffy and lit by the evening sun.

Last night it was cold. But the family was so moved by the full moon, which made the ocean look like a pool of very light grey lead from our vantage point up the hill, that they went down to the beach after dinner. I missed out, partly because I was a bit tired, and partly because someone has to do the baby sitting.

There are still two days to go. So there is still time for the forecasters to be half right. But don’t let them put you off if you are planning a day out. And even if it does turn seriously colder, I doubt that you or me are in danger of getting frostbite.

(I was going to write, ‘Thank God for the New York Times’. But I paused, shouldn’t it be, ‘Thank Jehovad’, because been raised to its outstanding reputation for detailed and impartial reports of matters vital to the world as well as the US, by a devoted and talented Jewish family. But really we should ‘Thank America’, because the NYT, which was my daily newspaper when I lived in New York, is most definitely a product of the American dream, the American constitution and the American reality.

Its detailed coverage enables democracy to have a chance of working. Voters cannot make an informed decision unless they know what is going on, including most importantly Governments, big business and other powerful interest groups, don’t want them to know. It is the kind of newspaper that makes you entirely happy to be a journalist. Shabby raincoat, but not shabby values.

Its standards slipped badly two or three years ago, but the mistakes were recognised and publicly acknowledged. But when the NYT published the results of its long investigation into McCain’s friendship with the blonde lobbyist, it once again became the Aunt Sally for most of the rest of the media. Most attacked it because they thought the story was not worth printing unless the NYT had been able to prove that McCain had slipped between the sheets with his beloved friend. So they did not ponder about what the NYT had demonstrated very clearly. That McCain had intervened to help the causes which his beloved friend espoused.

That is far more important in terms of the government of the country than what McCain does in bed. And my testimony from many conversations with American men of McCain’s age while they were peeing in the next cubicle to me, is that if McCain was having a fling with the blonde lobbyist, that did not make his wife special. Because most American men of his generation, and in his relatively powerful positions, were doing exactly the same thing.

But some of the media attacked the NYT for taking so long to run the story, dithering like an old woman. But when I read the full details, in the New York Times, and in the other media, which for a brief time wrote thousands of words about it, my reaction was different from the majority.

I think it is entirelyi creditable that there was a prolonged discussion within the newspaper as to whether to run the story. Responsible journalists know that what they write can wreck the lives of individuals, and that what they write can sometimes affect who wins an election and who wins a war. Disagreement and argument within a newspaper office is healthy. The young sleuths following the scent on the trail may be unaware of some of the things the editors know from their experience.

So it is entirely to the credit of the NYT that they did not rush to print. And it is entirely to their credit, that they confessed when they printed it, that they simply did not know whether McCain had slept with his blonde lobbyist friend. But of course their story did not need that. Because McCain had favoured his friend, who happened to be blonde, female and young. But every day people in positions of power favour their friends, whether they be lovers, business associates or just ‘buddies’.

In a democracy what is important is that these relationships, lover, buddy, old school friend or business associate, are known about. The lover or business associate sometimes is the best person to get the contract.

That is not entirely reprehensible. Because if you know someone well, you know a lot about their strengths and weaknesses. It is only a problem when the powerful person is so emersed with people who think like him, or her, that he, or she, is blinkered about their weaknesses.

So I thank America for the New York Times. Because the New York Times is trying to do what the founding fathers of the American constitution were trying to do, escablish a better world, where they could live their own lives, rather than have their religion dictated by the King, who in those days was George 111, who today is thougt by most of  the academic psychologists to have been clinically mad.

But the liberated American men I peed next to in the lavatories were just like the Rugby club at my own metropolitan university, Birmingham. Like them they were eager to tell me, in our brief  60 second ‘interviews’, that, altthough they were happily married men with kids, they still made it in the sack with the young and gorgeous.

Today, the story in the US is the Presidential election and probable threat of the most serious recession since the 1930s. In the Brittish tabloids and the heavies, thousands of words are devoted to the McCanns, who have been suffering the most appalling human tragedy.

Their daughter has disappeared. No-one knows where she has gone. Maybe the McCain’s were wrong, to think that she was safe, in the holiday they had booked liked many others with a company, which was caring of people’s children. Maybe they were wrong to have gone off to dinner with their friends, even though they were checking on their daughter.

Yesterday, they won £550,000 in the courts because the Express newspapers, had implied that they may even have murdered their own daughter. The Express group has coughed up the money. They have printed their apology. And all the rival newspapers have given masses of coverage to this story.

But of course all the other newspapers also printed the stories that the McCanns MAY be telling lies to cover up the fact they had murdereded their daughter, or killed her accidentally. There is no shred of evidence that this happened. But this possibility was present in all the newspaper coverage, including the ‘heavies’. Because the heavies reported all the wildest accusations of the tabloids. And the other tabloids, were a lot more skilful than the Express in peddling copy which might lose it millions in libel actions.

So the current position is that one newspaper group in the UK, the Express group, has paid up and admitted its guilt in this disgraceful saga sub-standard journalism. But all the rest of them have fuelled the flames, not just the Express, which is owned by Richard Desmond, the man many of the heavies love to describe as ‘ the pornographer’ True. He has made his fortune from perfectly legal, but not very uplifting, porn magazines. But is he therefore better than Rupert Murdoch, who made a huge amount of money by turning what was originally the only serious popular left wing newspaper in Britain, the Daily Herald, into the tabloid Sun, which made millions by publishing every day on Page Three, a picture of a young woman with naked breasts.

(That is not meant to imply that Murdoch is ‘only’ a merchandiser like Desmond of soft porn. He is also a serious newspaperman who endeavours to cover the real news as well. And, a born again Christian, who does not want a world is which young men are lusting after the unattainable favoured dimensions, portrayed on Page Three.’)

But reading the New York Times, after a day spent reading the British press, the message is quite clear. The New York Times is a newspaper of serious journalism. And the British press, the heavies as much as the tabloids, and the television and radio progcrammes as well, are skewed by the agenda set by the tabloids. Porn, rape, crime, etc. Coverage of all the human beings caught up in this daily saga.

But in order to make up its mind as to who governs the country, the readers want to know about what potential governments are going to do about this. And other ratther more complicated matters, like the behaviour of the banks, which has pushed us into what is probably the worst global recession since the 1930s.

The people who will really suffer from this, are the readers of The Sun and the Express papers, who have been seduced into borrowing more than they can afford.

Thank America for the New York Times, which gives detailed coverage to the real issues.

Thank America for the New York Times, which yesterday wrote an editoral on Obama’ s speech on race. I did not read this until after I had written my own blog about the speech. But many of the conclusions they come to are similar to mine.

But they headlined on something that I had not mentioned. Profile in Courage. As soon as I saw it, I realised that it was right. Obama, though he is sometimes portrayed as being ‘inexperienced’ knows that race is an explosive issue. He knows the risks he is taking by talking straightforwardly about being a black in today’s America. And being a ‘loser’ in today’s America, which is the thing that hits the white working class, who cannot afford plasma TV or Bill Gates rather expensive software. Or even tickets for the baseball game.

After eight years of Geogre W Bush, who has tried to impose the vision of a minority of Americans on the majority, and has attempted to impose that minority vision on other countries as well, I would be delighted if Obama wins.

But I would not be unduly worried if Hillary Clinton wins. Because she has a real concern for the poor of America, who don’t vote, although, unlike the original British feminists, do have the right to vote. They don’t chain seven card studapostar dinero paginas internettrucos ganar ruletajuegos apuestas paginas internetsistemas ruletasapuesta dinero portales internetcasino du libanjugar apostar portalruleta sistemas juegolos mejores casinos onlineweb baccaratruleta europea portal internetcasino virtual gratiscasinos netjugar baccarat en lineadescargar juegos de casino gratisayuntamiento madrid casinojuegos flash casinojuego interactivo internetapuesta dinero onlinejugar cartastrucos para casino empirecasino villajoyosajack black en linea gratisjuego tragaperrascasino portales internetruleta internetcasino on net downloadruleta pagina webjugar interactivo portalcasino virtual portal websistemas ganar ruletaganar dinero real portalescomo ganar en la ruletaruleta portal webjugar gratisganar dinero real portales webcasino internacional paginas internetcasino virtual paginas webcasinos internacionales paginas internetmaquinas tragaperras portalvideo poker paginas webapuesta portales internetjuego gratis la ruletaplay free baccaratjuego instantaneo portal internetcasino juegosroulette paginas webjuegos seguros paginas internetjugar cartas linea themselves to the railings because they feel whatever they do is not going to make much difference.

Obama’s courage is evidenced by the fact that he not only did not repudiate his friend and mentor, Jerimiah Wright, he defended him, when the media was after his head. In my terms he showed himself as a person of integrity. But he took the stand in full awareress that Wright is an eary target for the Clinton supporters and an even easier target for the Republicans.

At this stage of the match, my preference is for Obama as the next President, but I would be quite happy with Hillary Clinton, who has spent years trying to get better health care for poor Americans. On top of all her other relevant experience.

And I would not be unhappy with John McCain. As the New York Times has demonstrated he is not quite as whiter than white as his supporters would have us believe. But he is quite clearly a man of integrity. George W, I have always thought, was led in to the Iraq war, by his more experienced and assertive associates, including the vice President, Dick Cheney, who has has just surfaced, after a bout of ill health, to try and show that the Iraq war, was a triumph not a disasster.

McCain will not be as gung ho as Cheney, because he knows, as Cheney does not, the reality of war. He will not lightly order that the US use its huge stockile of missiles to kill those who oppose them, and a bunch of ordinary civilians who are standing next to the people the US wants to kill.

Because McCain, like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, believe in the American dream.

That is possible to establish a world which is not as bad as that dictated by the now ‘proven’ mad English King, George 111.

These are the kind of things the New York Times tells its readers about. Meanwhile the British press follows the tabloid agenda.

Who is Prince William going to marry? Who are the girl friends of his younger brother, Harry? As if it matters. Because the British Prime Minister listens to the Queen, because of British courtesy. But in deciding policy the imperatives for current British Prime Ministers, are Presidents of the US and the bosses of multi-national companies.

The reality is that we no longer rule the world. And although the Queen is still the religious boss, the adherents of her church are a tiny minority. Outnumbered by all those Roman Catholics, the old Irish, but many incomers from all parts of Europe. And the Muslims, refugees from Uganda, and more recent typrannies. And the slowly growing multitude who think that God was invented by man, and that maybe he was not as all powerful as his supporters would like to think.

When I arrived back in London today there was a bill waiting for me from BT for £73.50 although they still have not connected the telephone here which they should have done on 1 August, the day we moved house. Apparently this is for six months rental charges of £11 per month, plus five payments of £1.50, described as ‘payment charges’.

These charges are billed to my old London number round the corner from my present Gospel Oak flat, which I had asked to be transferred here last July. They cover a period of six months dating from the day the telephone actually rang here for a few days.

There was one not small problem. It rang if you dialled a 482 number. This number had been owned for several years by a local small businessman, who was not un-naturally rather annoyed to find his phone had gone dead. He harrassed BT and got his number back. My phone then went dead.

After hours of frustration I wrote a blog addressed to Sir Michael Rake, the new chairman.

Will have to finish this later, because have to go the National Film Theatre. But here is a reminder of some of the essentials, a copy of my 4 October blog.

Number of days it takes BT to connect a telephone: 220 plus

Number of Days BT has failed to reply to my complaints and give me any explanation for this delay: 183

Money spent on mobile phone trying to contact a BT human being: £50 plus

Time spent on the telephone and internet complaints: Hours and hours.

Apologies from BT: Nil

The Chairman of BT is now Sir Michael Rake, an accountant with a record quite as distinguished in that field as Sir Christopher Bland was in his. Can he be happy with the way the company he now chairs is behaving? Does he even know how they are behaving?

Maybe not, so if you meet him, tell him. This is what he looks like.

Sir Michael Rake was appointed to the Board as Chairman on 26 September 2007.

He was Chairman of KPMG International from 2002 until September 2007. Prior to his appointment as Chairman of KPMG International he was Chairman of KPMG in Europe and Senior Partner of KPMG in the UK.

The wind was shaking ouc bungalow on Lyme Bay last night. I buried my head under the bed clothes to shut out the noise and left the inspection til just now. The gale made a mess of the excellent job our gardener had done on the fence yesterday, dislodging one of the new panels he had nailed into place. A chair had blown off the terrace but the table held its position, anchored by the rather large Bohemian glass ashtray. The dustbin lid has been carried away to we don’t know where.

I did a quick trawl of the web, but apparently no more containers have been blown off railway trains and the storm was expected to peak in the rush hour, which is now past.

But my brother, who has made a study of such matters, thinks it is bound to happen again unless the regulations are tightened up, of which they is no immediate prospect, to judge by the reply he has received from the chair of the House of Commons committee.

 Here it is in full.

MRS GWYNETH DUNWOODY MP.

HOUSE OF COMMONS

LONDON SW1A OAA

Tel: 020 7219 3490 Fax: 020 7219 6046

Peter Jones, Esq

4th March 2008

Dear Mr Jones

Thank you for your email of 3rd March 2008. I am grateful to you for keeping me up to date, but as I was caught up in the problems over the weekend, I am only too aware of the situation.

I understand your worries about the evidence that was presented and we do, of course, try to get as broad a cross section as possible to give us accurate information.

At the moment, we are not looking at the caravan/trailer points that you raise and I am afraid that we do not have sufficient trained staff which would enable us to undertake the sort of inquiries that would be of interest to you.

I have, however, noted your views and will make sure that we keep them on file for the next time we meet the Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary to discuss them.

Yours sincere!

She is keeping his comments on file. Presumably it will not come to the top of the file until a container fals on top of a child watching the trains go by.

Writing this reminds me that today is my brother’s birthday and I forgot to post the card. Happy Birthday, Pete. Here’s wishing that Ms Dunwoody will have got off her backside before your next birthday.

For the full story the hazards of trailers on the railways and the roads visit my brother’s blog called Caravan Accidents.

Went to bed early after walking the coastal path in blazing Spring sunshine. Was certainly not going to stay up half the night waiting for the result of the US election primaries. It was pretty clear, I thought, that even if Obama did not win both Ohio and Texas, he would not lose by much, so that his already established lead would ensure he was the clear winner for the Democratic nomination. March 4th was clearly going to go down in history as the day of Hillary Clinton’s last stand, even though she might admit it for another week or two.

Woke up at 3.15 AM with troublesome dreams. Not nightmares. Not spectacular and dramatic revelations but mundane trivia from the day. In the dream I am sitting at my computer, searching web pages to find the result of the primaries. I cannot find any details of the actual results, but whatever I key in the answer to the question is Clinton.

I decide that it is my unconscious mind playing tricks. I am far too sceptical to think that I have extraordinary powers of dream divination, that like Joseph I can dream the seven years of lean in the future, or like Carl Justav Jung, I can dream the start of the First World War. So instead of rushing downstairs and turning on News24, I turned over and went back to sleep.

Woke again at 7.05 AM. The same troubling dream was still in my mind. Downstairs and turned on Radio 4′s Today programme while I was making my first cup of tea. Someone was interviewing Britain’s Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, probing whether he was doing some sort of U-turn on the referendum on Europe issue. It was not until the news summary at 7.30 AM that the American results were reported. Then I knew for certain. Though no figures were given it was clear to me from the interviews that the race was wide open again. Hillary had done another New Hampshire, the comeback girl. And the battle for the Democratic nomination may not be settled for a few weeks yet.

This blog is not an analysis of the results; that, I will do later, when I have managed to discover the figures behind yesterday’s results.

This Presidential election is about the kind of dreams people have during the day. Obama has been outstandingly successful in appealing to the dreams of the nation’s youth. It is not only the media commentators who have been making comparisons with the 1960s, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, captured the votes of the younger generation by his eloquent projection of the kind of country America could be, contrasting with boring reality of America as it then was under the presidency of the ageing Dwight Eisenhower.

And Obama projects himself as continuing the legacy of that other giant of the 1960s, Martin Luther King, whose speech, ‘I have a dream’      , delivered on 28 August 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, still has the power to move hearts and minds. Let me quote a paragraph.

‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able tot sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Missippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.’

Ninety per cent of King’s speech was about the plight of America’s blacks, but, as he made clear in the third paragraph, he was invoking a much wider vision; which has been frequently described by historians, as The American Dream, which has inspired Americans of every colour since the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. King said:

‘When the architects of  our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’

Those Brits and Europeans who have attacked Obama for encouraging a cult-like frenzy amongst his supporters, fail to understand, that what Obama is evoking is not the spirit of a lunatic fringe, but the very essence of the history of America. The spirit of incredible optimism, that seeks to establish a nation that never was, in contrast to the tyrannies of

Obama, although he is black, has repeatedly stressed he is not the candidate of the blacks. His appeal to unity is much wider. He is standing for election at a time, when a majority of Americans have begun to distrust the dream, when America is probably less popular in the world than it has ever been in my lifetime. The Bush regime’s attempt to police the world have brought that about. Despite Bush’s tour, the Middle East has erupted again, with Bush’s ally,

Whether Obama will win the American election is yet to be seen. But he is already making an impression on the world, although he has not yet embarked on any international tours. The London Times reported yesterday that a poll of its online readers showed a vote of 75 per cent for Obama and 25 per cent for Clinton. Just one, not very representative poll, but a huge margin.

In my view, it is now very clear, that Obama is not going to be stopped by allegations that he is swaying the emotions like a cult leader, or that he is a slave to the views of his own particular church, whose pastor apparently has some extreme fundamentalist views. His eloquence comes from the heart but he is ruled by his head. His appeal to the emotions is not in the least bit irrational. In our culture dreams are to be distrusted.

Change the language slightly. Obama is driven by a vision of the world that goes beyond the nitty gritty of policy issues.

As I write this, I realise, that as I wrote in a blog a few days ago, the more I read of this particular election, the more convinced I have become, that Obama is the best person to lead America. So if I make a psychological interpretation of my dream last night, it warns me that my unconscious is telling me that I should not be blinded by my own conscious thoughts.

Clinton still has the appeal to win votes. And her appeal, in the broad analysis of this blog, is clearly to American pragmatism. The distrust of big ideas. The wish to know, not only what candidates believe, but to base decisions on what they have actually done. How can you prove you can do what you say you are going to do? What’s your experience? How can you argue, Barack Obama, that you are going to fill the White House with excellent men and women of all political views, when one of your own my trusted advisers and fund raisers, Tony Rezo, is standing trial in Chicago on corruption charges?

So in my next blog, I will look at the pragmatics. What do the voting figures tell us about the likely result?

We now know that my wife’s purse was lifted from her handbag just outside the Haymarket Theatre three weeks ago. The thief must have been exceptionally light-fingered because she felt nothing but a strange sensation that her handbag suddenly felt later. But the purse has just been returned in a large brown envelope by none other than the Nat West Bank.

All the cards were there but the thief had taken the £70 in cash and her Freedom Pass. Presumably he, or she, must have thrown the rest on to the pavement in Lower Regent Street and made a quick getaway on the nearest bus. So watch out if you are travelling on London buses or trains. Our pickpocket can travel anywhere on the system for free until the end of March and exercise his skills without even getting his feet wet.

We think it was probably a Pole, because along with my wife’s cards in the purse which was returned to us was a religious Polish card. In the envelope returned by the police there was a piece of plain paper with a telephone number written on it. My wife had called it, but had great difficulty in understanding the limited English of the lady on the end of the line, until she put a  friend on the line.

Then it was  established that she had found the cards scattered on the pavement with the purse in Lower Regent Street. No she was not responsible for adding the Polish card. And she turned in the booty because she herself had had her purse stolen only the previous week.

So The Daily Novel will not be adopting Daily Mail attitudes towards immigration. But perhaps it is worth adding another question to questionairre for would-be British citizens.

 ’Who do you most admire, Fagin or the Good Samaritan? Answers on a 0 to 10 scale.’

The news today that Prozac works no better than a placedo (a pill coated with sugar) is no surprise to me. As one of those who have suffered from depression all my life, I have been tempted by the propaganda of the drug companies. Many times.

But mental illness is in the mind. So it is not at all surprising that depressives improve when they think that the sugar coated pill, they are ingesting, will make them better. Even though they are being conned.

Whatever you are suffering from Prozac makes you feel better. Just like alcohol, pot, cocaine, opium, etc etc.

The difference is that Prozac is pedalled be the doctors as the way depressives can help themselves. 

As if getting depressed were irrational. But there is plenty to be depresed about not only about people’s individual lives, but in what is happening in the world.

Drugs like Prozac make people feel better temporarily. As does cocaine. But if you take cocaine to make you feel better, you are breaking the law, whereas if you take Prozac, you are doing what ‘the doctor ordered’.  And not only that you can get if for free.

 But if you take cocaine you have to bargain with the drug sellers in Camden Markec. And it costs you even more than a packet of fags.