I’m back after a spell of illness that put me briefly in the hospital, but feeling better now. The Great Baboon has been especially busy while I’ve been away. The extent of his hubris and stupidity, and frankly, evil, has now reached biblical proportions, of which more below. When I was a kid in Johannesburg… Continue reading

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

Last night the Trump psychodrama limo lurched off what was already a bad road into unknown terrain. This is why I am writing this on my new daily work machine, a 2015 MacBook Air that was no longer supported by fucking Apple, so is now running Linux Ubuntu. I still have – I could hardly… Continue reading

Today there is an article in the Guardian by the estimable Simon Tisdall. It’s about Donald Trump and what an oxygen thief he is. No arguments from me. The headline to M Tisdall’s piece is: “The global rule of law is not collapsing – Trump is the lone problem and he can be defeated.”  The sub-head… Continue reading

There is a need in the British middle-class psyche to be told what to do. Ideally, the person doing the telling should be a woman – a nanny. It probably helps if it is a posh one. Often, the telling is an exhortation to stiffen the sinews and is couched in terms that hark back… Continue reading

In Donald and me (1) I admitted to an obsession with Trump that probably bordered on the unhealthy. I think I went down swinging by suggesting that we all ought to be a little obsessed with the old crazy, or we might be blindsided by his craziness. In Donald and me (2) I rationalised my… Continue reading