After the gate fell five minutesgone, the mob got in the garage,sitting in the old cars, the man’spride and joy. Now they arein the house, necking vintagesfrom the years of hubris. Theydrag with them the bloodiedmercenaries, their bought defiance gone in defeat. The question inevery mouth: where is he?For the reckoning time is come.In the… Continue reading

In my twenties I read a few books about the Vietnam war. It was the war of my generation, the audio-visual backdrop to my adolescence, the wellspring of much of its music and an early view, as a boy growing up in Apartheid South Africa, of what a generation’s courageous resistance to an old order… Continue reading

I have read that the boy in the video for the REM song “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)” is searching through the wreckage of his house after it was destroyed by a tornado. Over the last two days I have followed live, as they came out, two podcasts… Continue reading

Clint Eastwood made a film called ‘In the Line of Fire’ about an aging secret service agent called Horrigan who is racked with guilt because he failed to prevent the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Now near the end of his career, Horrigan foils an assassination attempt by an embittered former CIA agent… Continue reading

Dear, oh Lord. Poor Peter. In the shit again, over Jeffrey Epstein. The dear man just cannot catch a break. However, he has at least nobly resigned from his beloved Labour Party to prevent it any “further embarrassment” over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and again apologised to his victims, who should have apparently got… Continue reading