Postscript
Well, I got bugger-all done today, so I thought I may as well blog a couple of random thoughts. To be fair, it was quite a good day: I dropped into Harvington Hall, and if you ever find yourself on the Bromsgrove-Kidderminster road (is there anyone reading this to whom that might apply?), you should do the same. It was built in the sixteenth century and has the country's most impressive collection of intact priest-hides. 'Priest-hides' is not ideal, evoking as it does the image of tanned clerical epidermis, but it might be marginally preferable to 'priest-holes,' certainly as I don't want to say that I climbed into a priest-hole for the first time today.
The architectural genius required for these hides would be impressive today. To enter the hide I visited, which was only slightly smaller than my second-year undergraduate accommodation, you lean on what appears to be a structural beam and the whole thing pivots. It's brilliant, but my favourite is the hide that appears when you remove a couple of perfectly solid-seeming steps.
On a different but not entirely unrelated subject, this is particularly special from Mark Steyn, talking about Guantanamo:
'it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality.'
And finally, a YouGov poll found 54% of those questioned thought it was "hard to know what the Conservative Party stands for at the moment."
Is that all? What were the other 46% thinking? Just cut-and-pasting examples from the BBC website makes a marshmallow look vertebrate:
'The party must claim the political centre ground and become the champions of a "new spirit of social responsibility," said Mr Cameron.
It must also trust ordinary people to make decisions about their own lives, said Mr Cameron.
Speaking against a backdrop of green foliage and bright sunlight, he told delegates: "Our party's history tells us the ground on which political success is built."
"It is the centre ground. Not the bog of political compromise. Not the ideological wilderness, out of the fringes of debate. But the solid ground where people are."'
I don't think his party's history actually tells him anything of the sort, but he had already got lost in a metaphorical thicket. Quick, somebody call the copse.
'Speaking against a backdrop of green foliage and bright sunlight', he urged delegates to 'let sunshine win the day.'
What the hell...? Was the foliage and sunlight accompanied by rainforest noises and soothing pan pipes, or did they all join hands with a rousing (but inclusive) chorus of I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing? It seems more that David Cameron is proclaiming the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Not only is he 40 years out of date (summers of love are so passe, darling), but it raises the horrible prospect of the Shadow Cabinet dancing naked.
I confidently expect the Conservative rallying cry at the next election would seem to be, 'let the people go ever so slightly free, if that's what they want!' And if by some miracle they win, Prime Minister Cameron's first action will be to appoint a Hugging Tsar and oversee a national tissue bank in case anyone gets ever-so-slightly upset.
What was John McCain doing there? And did nobody tell him that the axiom "government that governs best, governs least" was abandoned in the UK some decades ago?
A friend of mine used to work for Cameron and published a defence in a recent edition of the Salisbury Review, a defence that seemed willing rather than convinced, like a barrister going through the motions. I wonder what - we'll call him John - thinks now?
The architectural genius required for these hides would be impressive today. To enter the hide I visited, which was only slightly smaller than my second-year undergraduate accommodation, you lean on what appears to be a structural beam and the whole thing pivots. It's brilliant, but my favourite is the hide that appears when you remove a couple of perfectly solid-seeming steps.
On a different but not entirely unrelated subject, this is particularly special from Mark Steyn, talking about Guantanamo:
'it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality.'
And finally, a YouGov poll found 54% of those questioned thought it was "hard to know what the Conservative Party stands for at the moment."
Is that all? What were the other 46% thinking? Just cut-and-pasting examples from the BBC website makes a marshmallow look vertebrate:
'The party must claim the political centre ground and become the champions of a "new spirit of social responsibility," said Mr Cameron.
It must also trust ordinary people to make decisions about their own lives, said Mr Cameron.
Speaking against a backdrop of green foliage and bright sunlight, he told delegates: "Our party's history tells us the ground on which political success is built."
"It is the centre ground. Not the bog of political compromise. Not the ideological wilderness, out of the fringes of debate. But the solid ground where people are."'
I don't think his party's history actually tells him anything of the sort, but he had already got lost in a metaphorical thicket. Quick, somebody call the copse.
'Speaking against a backdrop of green foliage and bright sunlight', he urged delegates to 'let sunshine win the day.'
What the hell...? Was the foliage and sunlight accompanied by rainforest noises and soothing pan pipes, or did they all join hands with a rousing (but inclusive) chorus of I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing? It seems more that David Cameron is proclaiming the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Not only is he 40 years out of date (summers of love are so passe, darling), but it raises the horrible prospect of the Shadow Cabinet dancing naked.
I confidently expect the Conservative rallying cry at the next election would seem to be, 'let the people go ever so slightly free, if that's what they want!' And if by some miracle they win, Prime Minister Cameron's first action will be to appoint a Hugging Tsar and oversee a national tissue bank in case anyone gets ever-so-slightly upset.
What was John McCain doing there? And did nobody tell him that the axiom "government that governs best, governs least" was abandoned in the UK some decades ago?
A friend of mine used to work for Cameron and published a defence in a recent edition of the Salisbury Review, a defence that seemed willing rather than convinced, like a barrister going through the motions. I wonder what - we'll call him John - thinks now?
posted by BoB at 3:42 PM
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