It's been no work all week for me. It's always nice to be earning, but in the hottest July week for a century or more, maybe it's a blessing in disguise. Gives me the opportunity to see one of my grandmothers in a nursing home and tackle the other grandmother's overgrown garden that has really sprouted since the last time, a few weeks back, I tended it. On the way to see the former, on a double decker bus, I saw the rather incongruous site of two limousines squidged together in a forecourt barely bigger than the space the limos occupied. This limited limo pool was adjacent to a residential house which gave it the incongrous look - imagine going to do your shopping in one of those (for those who drive, I always walk). And there was a choice as well - black or white. Has suburban affluence really extended this far or is it more a case of when Homer Simpson took up a job as a limo driver for a firm?
The agency I'm contracted to actually said that they intentionally sent more than the required persons needed to that job last Tuesday, in case people let them down. On this occasion, no-one let them down.
Down Lebanon way, the casbah continues to rock, to the shake, rattle and roll of explosions. Deported (from Britain) cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed cheekily tried to take refuge on one of the British warships helping to evacuate our nationals, but was turned away for not having a British passport. The policy of government is clear - we won't send you to a country that may torture you when you get there, we'll just send you to one that gets the shit bombed out of it by a rogue military. The plight of the Israeli captive soldiers reminds me of the little poem 'All for the sake of a nail, the horseshoe was lost' that leads right up to the fall of the kingdom. This time all for two Israeli soldiers (or a sense of proportion), the Israeli cause was lost. Hundreds of Lebanese civilian deaths, thousands more casualties, dozens of Israeli civilian deaths and several Israeli soldier deaths, all allegedly for two Israeli soldiers and this propaganda is harped on by the ever-dwindling defenders of this vendetta against Hizbullah. Remember, Haifa wasn't being targetted before the Israeli assault; Israeli people weren't dying from crude Hizbullah rockets, but they are now that Hizbullah is bringing out the big guns it kept in reserve. In 2004, Hizbullah seized some Israeli soldiers but that was negotiated out through a joint prisoner exchange - the real problem is that the current Israeli Prime Minister and Defence Minister have never been involved in direct conflict, have never had bullets whistling around them and consequently are afriad to say boo to the Self-Defence Force and have limited understanding of the destruction being caused in Lebanon and Palestine, lest we forget the latter. Really, Kofi Annan calling for a cease-fire isn't going to do much; being the arch-diplomat he sounds at his most testy like someone forgotten about cakes in the oven, which got burnt. I say, send Gordon Ramsay out there, he'll knock heads together, literally (and don't even talk about leaving cakes too long in the oven). And please can the CIA perform an extraordinary rendition on Tony Blair to the USA; you've got his brain, you might as well take the rest of him.
On a closing note, this week, strolling down the pedestrianised High Street precinct, I saw spread out over a section a class of infant children , watched over by a teacher or two, who were drawing or writing on paper and lay on the ground as they did this. What is British education coming to, if the government can't afford tables or chairs for young pupils?