Entries from July 2007 ↓

What a boost.

Heroes. Loving it.

Is it really 25 years ago this year that The Jam disbanded? This new book looks good but the comments from Bruce Foxton look even better. Forget the Spice Girls, if The Jam reformed, it really would make a stir.

Parliament is to have a bolstered security pass system. At present you swipe your card and the doors open. In future, you’ll have to swipe and type in a PIN code. It’s a sign of the times but will cause some of the more traditionally minded colleagues a degree of irritation.

A friend told me last night that the brother of famous Sheffield singer, Joe Cocker, was the boss of troubled water company Severn Trent. Is this true or was he winding me up? And whilst I’m at it, can you name the three Cockers to have had number one hits in the UK?

I attended the first meeting of the Northern Ireland Grand Committee yesterday. We were discussing policing. The level of debate was understandably well informed (apologies I can’t find a link) and at times, passionate. Peter Robinson made an extremely well crafted speech. He used a chilling statistic in his contribution. There are 3347 unsolved murders in Northern Irelands. Makes you think doesn’t it?

‘Look, chum, we need to do some rethinking’.

News reaches me that Mr Cameron has just addressed a very empty Rwandan parliament. Halfway through his speech, the lights went out. Quite literally.

It appears that the honeymoon is over even before it begins for some in the Cameron high command.

One of the great underrated films of the nineties is Luc Besson’s, Fifth Element. Gary Oldman hams up the evil Zorg with comic brilliance. Zorg procures information to help him in his dastardly plan in a number of underhand ways, one of which is to have a tiny camera attached to the back of a small remote-controlled cockroach. This allows him to find out the whereabouts of the precious stones and therefore threaten mankind’s very existance.

I couldn’t help thinking of Monsieur Besson when I read that Berkeley had invented a robotic fly. These Micromechanical Flying Insects must be a hoot to make but I find them slightly creepy.

Whilst away, I’m pleased to say that Mrs W. successfully harvested the broad beans and the King Edwards. The pak choi has flowered but you can’t have everything. The rain that with natural majesty held off in Ealing until Friday, has prohibited me from any outdoor chores for the weekend so I’ve managed to catch up on a month’s supply of Tribune and New Scientist.

Martin Rowson has a wonderfully caustic piece in Tribune on the Campbell diaries that opens with the line:

“The fact that I still can’t work out if Alastair Campbell is really clever or; instead, really really stupid rather suggests that he’s so clever he’s successfully conned us into thinking he’s an idiot”

It gets better but you’ll have read the whole piece yourself.

The best analysis I have read is this:

Lord Tebbit, the former party chairman, acidly summarised the result as “Labour won, the Liberal Democrats did well, and Mr [Tony] Lit, the Tory candidate, and former Labour party donor, who stood under the banner of David Cameron’s Conservatives, did extremely badly”.