I bought a book at Hatchards on Piccadilly the other day. I’m very fond of it – I’ve been going there since I was a kid – but it really is the prime bookshop of the Buffer Zone (that area of wine merchants, hatters, art dealers etc., around St. James’s Palace). If you don’t believe me, take a look at their picks of the season, packed with double-barrelled names and books on gardening. And no Da Vinci Code in sight.
Author: Anthony
Worrying noises from the Kremlin
Apparently, the breakup of the USSR was the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century – something of a surprise on Anzac Day, 60 years after the liberation of the concentration camps. In an entirely related point, he’s also said that Russia “will decide for itself the pace, terms and conditions of moving towards democracy”, which has strong echoes of Pervez Musharraf (and every other political strongman in history).
Exeter’s season over
Exeter performed well to win 0-2 at Carlisle, but results elsewhere didn’t go their way, and they ended up a point outside the play-off places.
This is what desperation looks like
From pub bore politics to twitchy paranoia.
A good New Yorker cartoon
Kids and perspective
I was in London and St. Albans today, looking around at couples with and without children. I thought about the time my wife and I had together before the kids came along, and about the career thinking I’ve done before and since.
You hear a lot of people say that when you have kids, they become the most important thing in your life, and I think that’s mostly true. But as well as shortening your perspective – down from career and social life towards kids and family life – they also extend your perspective immensely. So I’ve found myself much more drawn towards projects to make a difference to the world than before kids came along – partly perhaps because I’m getting older and more thoughtful, but also because I want to make a better world for my two, and everyone else’s.
How not to design a web site
Every time I try to buy a train ticket from the Trainline in the UK, I get angry. It just has too many brainless avoidable problems, such as:
- The site is unbearably slow and clunky, particularly compared to something like Expedia
- It only seems to work well on Windows PCs running IE
- The error messages are of the classic Microsoft “Something went wrong, and it could be one of these twenty things, or something else”; and
- It lets you try and buy cheap tickets before telling you that only the expensive ones are available.
All this is annoying in itself, but when you consider that the railways are competing against airlines for business, you would think that someone would try and sort the situation out. Apparently not. Even the market hasn’t worked (a common complaint in the rail industry) – when a better, speedier competitor (QJump) opened a couple of years back, the Trainline bought it.
I’m beginning to think it might be run by Microsoft.
Britain’s shame spreads further
I had thought that the Daily Mail was a private grief, but apparently not. So, not content with poisoning our national debate, they now trash our record in the eyes of the foreign press.
Digby tells it like it is
A welcome intervention from the CBI. Sir Digby Jones – a natural Tory if ever there was one – has attacked the Conservative Party’s immigration policy.
ITV’s finest hour
Remember Rodney Hylton-Potts, the racist nutter who won ITV’s woeful “Vote for Me” a while back? Despite the overblown PR puff that preceded the programme, it was a ghastly, ghastly failure, shoved into a graveyard slot, and ‘starring’ seven would-be politicians who made my district councillor look like Gladstone. On a tiny vote (140,000), the most extreme voice won, which gave great pleasure to the fascists.
Despite the obvious flaws in the programme, Kelvin McKenzie said that any of the candidates would make better MPs than those (at that time) in the Commons. Well, perhaps, Kelvin.
Mr Hylton-Potts is standing for Parliament in Folkestone and Hythe for a party called Get Britain Back. In a recent delighted press release, Mr Hylton-Potts announced that the BNP candidate in Folkestone was withdrawing, and that all the people who voted for him on Vote for Me should vote BNP. Another triumph for the popular will!
Somehow, I don’t see Vote for Me II being on our screens any time soon.