A sad end to the freak show

There's nothing like a celebrity death to bring out the worst in journalists.
And there are few celebrities bigger than Michael Jackson.
So when news of Jackson's death started to filter through, the usual newsroom antics weren't far behind.
Bets were discussed on whether Patrick Swayze would also die on Thursday making it a trio of Farrah Fawcett, Jacko and Swayze in one day.
There was consternation that Jacko's white gloved supporters would be out moonwalking en masse on the streets, or that there would be a tsunami of wailing in Japan.
The usual puns on Jackson's songs were soon up on Facebook - Beat it, Killer, 20 percent off the Jackson Five etc, while one writer was taking odds on Madonna also shuffling off her mortal coil.
It didn't take long for the first Jacko jokes to follow.
There was so much tweeting on Twitter it apparently ground to a halt.
Nobody seemed to be sad about Jacko's death, except perhaps greedy plastic surgeons and a man famous for bending spoons.
I'd like to say I didn't join in and was above it all but, you know how it goes.
But now that it's all over Jacko's death has left a queazy feeling in the pit of my stomach because it casts an unpleasant hue on our sickly celebrity-obsessed society.
Long before his untimely death Jackson had ceased to become the kind of celebrity anyone aspired to be.
He wasn't like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean who were still uber cool when they died. He was a grotesque corruption of one of the most talented artists of the 20th century. He didn't seem to be black or white; male or female, man or boy. In his later years he appeared to have dropped in from Mars.
Nobody who shed a tear to the melodies of Ben at a school disco could ever equate the prodigious talent that was the teenage Jackson with the porcelain freak show who slept in an oxygen cylinder and dangled a baby from a hotel window.
But surely it's an indictment on us all that instead of caring about putting together the tortured pieces, we bought the popcorn and sat down hungrily waiting for the the final chapter of the macabre show to unfold like the crowds who came to see the hangings at Tyburn.
Martin Bashir's famous interviews brought home to us how disturbed and out of touch with reality Jackson really was.
But they also shed light on something else; the sinister nature of Jackson's relationship with his father Joe who thought little of beating, intimidating and bullying his kids towards perfection, sacrificing Michael's childhood for fame and fortune.
By the time Michael Jackson brought out the album Thriller in the 1980s, the perfection blueprint seemed to have worked. Jackson could sing, dance and perform like no other artist in the short history of pop.
Pity it was exactly what dad ordered; an act.
And when the cracks began to show they weren't just in the face Jackson tried to create to look less like his father.
They were to split a brittle human being into a million pieces, all of them hurtling groundwards toward a gaudy Neverland where child abusers stalked the Carousels.
Not that anyone cared. The intervention strategies we see every day on reality TV don't seem to apply to the famous. We watched appalled as Jacko's kids were paraded round with their faces covered. And nobody did a thing about it.
The Jackson tragedy should be a lesson to all of us who push and punish our kids into being the superstars we never were.
It should bring it home to us that being ordinary is nothing to be ashamed of and everything to aspire to.

trapped in the past

It occured to me the other day that I am sinking into yesterday.
I only need to say "yesterday" and I think of the sad chords of the Beatles song. And when I think of sinking, I imagine the fabled bogs on Dartmoor and the tales my parents used to tell me when I was on holiday there about Old Uncle Tom Cobley who loaded his friends on the back of a gray mare cum makeshift taxi service on the way to Widecombe Fair.
Widecombe Fair was one of those jolly japes that ends in tears. All the people on the mare mysteriously disappeared - my parents speculated they were sucked up in a bog - but on a ghostly night out on the moor you can still hear the "old mare in her rattling bones."
Dartmoor can be a bleak and windswept place but I miss it to bits.
I have fond thoughts of the weak sunlight on the day I followed a flint strewn path by a clear stream up the escarpment into trees that radiated the reds, oranges and yellows of fall. And the pictures I took of the gnarled trees that had bowed to the wind on the edge of the bare moor.
We stood there smugly in our fake Barbours admiring a distant church tower and heard the peal of bells carried by a hestitant wind on one of those timeless afternoons.
The girl I was with then drifted away later like one of the grey tinged clouds that race across the rocky tors and are a distant memory 20 minutes later.
I don't think about her much now and when I do my thoughts are most pervese.
I find myself wondering what happened to the Italian-bound leather wedding album that cost about $3,000. I mean what good are such fragmented memories to anyone?
Is there a day of the year when someone somewhere brings it out and lights candles for all the failed marriages since Adam and Eve started bickering over fruit?
And how could all those weeks of agonizing about cake colors and who to invite have ended more than seven years later with a phone call that went something like: "How's the cat?"
"He's dead."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't."
And the line went deader than a feline for ever. Just like that. And now I can never think of the conversation without conjuring up an image of Paul Daniels in his faux magician weaseldom.
"You'll like it. Not a lot but you'll like it."
- I'll like it about as much as a dead cat but what is dead can't be made undead nor said unsaid. I think that's my problem.
Dartmoor on the other hand is less easy to erase. It has a lowering presence and majesty.
Back in the day when I was consumed with enthusiam about journalism and its infinite possibilities I went up to Princetown to take pictures of the hulking great Victorian prison whose granite walls cast a shadow that even a sunny day can't dispell.
The jail, like the prison project I labored on at journalism college, speaks to my past but says little of the future.
Back in the 19th century desperate prisoners would attempt to flee the prison's damp and cavernous spaces in ankle chains only to be cut down by the wind on the moor, flurries of snow and those lurking bogs.
I fear the past is becoming my ankle chain too.
I have worked at places where young reporters have looked at me blankly if I've mentioned Duran Duran. When the Reflex was number one in the charts, the only reflex they were aware of was a twitch in the birth canal.
And to the Ipod generation, the charts are a meaningless concept as alien as a granite prison anchored to a moor.
It used to matter to be Number One; but then I suppose it used to matter if your suit of armor was properly oiled.
Mention Top of the Pops and Pan's People - the dance group my father used to be overly attentive to in the five minutes before he was slapped by my mother - today and you might as well say: "I went to school with Emily Bronte - nice girl, a bit gloomy, though."
I'd like to say I'll get over my obsession with the past but it seems to be getting worse.
Today in 7-Eleven I found myself muttering the words of a Doors song and I can't get enough of the Stones every time they are played on the radio; I end up thrashing my arms around in my car, gathering more strange looks as I veer across the Interstate.
The Stones aren't even my generation but I think I need to buy their cassette.
And every time someone talks about Jon and Kate, Kirstie's weight or Cher's daughter's sex change, I alternately want to disappear into my shell or scream.
Then my mind goes into overdrive. I want to find a way I can turn the conversation to Napoleon's ill fated retreat from Moscow but start talking about 1812 at a party and everyone looks at you like you're a freak.
It's worth persevering to my mind. The next time you are wedged in a kitchen sipping watery Millers between two crushing bores in baseball caps who are jumping up and down about the Steelers' latest win, try loudly interjecting with an observation about how Hannibal made a key strategic error in the Second Punic War. It's worth it for the reaction.
Because let's face it - the past beats the present hands down. There were great movements, ideas and thinkers all cast in the foundry of constant fear and the spectre of suffering.
Today's generation has it all at the push of a button. But by being visually richer we are spiritually poorer. Somebody else has given us the imagination thing and we have burned our own imagination out on the X-box.
Meanwhile the answer lies unopened on the library shelf.

Cruel Summer

It's been a June of bouts of unremitting heat and leaden skies split apart by thunder here in Virginia.

During such months you have to wonder about those madcap adventurers who made the trip across the Atlantic more than 400 years ago to simmer in a mosquito-infested swamp at Jamestown and to freeze and starve in between unedifying episodes of cannibalism.

To me the New World remains a bewildering and unforgiving place at times. Away from the cities the trees seem taller and more savage than in Europe, the brackish waterways darker, more mirky and muddled. I feel if I look over my shoulder I will glimpse heavily tattooed people flitting through the half light of the forest and spirit demons exorcised with their drums.

Where man has left his mark the cities of Virginia can also be unforgiving on the eye, sliced up by hulking, concrete freeways that divide rich from poor and strip malls that are vast Saharas of cracked concrete and testaments to prosperity lost.

Faced with the slabs of downtown Newport News and the sickly, sulphorous residue of the coal dumps at the shipyard that linger in the nostrils for half a mile up the Interstate, it can be easy to lose hope like the souls in the ghetto to the east, who live and die prematurely on the wrong side of the tracks.

Sorrow lingers down here in the streets with numbers but no names. My landmarks are the half remembered scenes in the half light where the only color is the yellow of incident scene tape and the blue lights piercing the gloom. I measure the distance of the blocks by the footfalls of the marchers who come to remember the prematurely dead.

The candles and makeshift photographs taped to cardboard are a world away from the solid war memorials that occupy pride of place in every English town but they share a common heritage that seeped into the bloody ground.

Many a time on a homicidal intersection I have yearned for a peaceful stream and an English meadow. Grantchester with its sleepy homes and bunched willows draped over the flowers of the water meadow, seldom seemed so alluring. The Old Vicarage where Rupert Brooke wrote of the lilacs in bloom, never so unattainable.

Brooke, the flowering of English youth, died on a Greek Island, in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England, on the way to one of the bloodiest theaters of World War I.

The longer I am away the more easily I slip into the Arcadian/American view of England as a place of antique steam trains, Shakespearean theaters, old maids riding through the mist and sleepy afternoons caressed by the sound of leather on willow.

It becomes more convenient by the day to airbrush from my mind the ugly asphalt of the A12 and the tower blocks of Barking, of walking the gum strewn gauntlet to Blockbuster past the crack addicts and hustlers and the schools of the East End with their grubby walls and high steel fences.

But for an island so densely populated England is yet to give up its gentle charm and the countryside is seldom further than an hour away.

On the days when the storms muscle their way up the James River, sucking the oxygen from the sky, I am increasingly far away recalling the gentle contours of Wenlock Edge and the clouds that rise like pleasure balloons over the escarpments on a Sunday afternoon.

It's becoming increasingly hard to forget about those blue remembered hills.

My work station

I've always found "work station" to be a strange expression.
It makes me think of trains whirring in and out, a bustle of commuters and routes that go places.
Whereas my work station doesn't involve anything much going anywhere.
Instead of direction there's accumulation and inertia. There's a mountain of papers that threatens my keyboard like a mini Aberfan. Sometimes they slide into my arms when I am on the phone and people wonder why I sound like I'm wrestling with a baby seal mid conversation.
Sometimes it's hard to find the old gray phone under the detritus of my desk and when I find it I have second thoughts.
The receiver is probably clogged up with the germs of reporters long since past; I try not to hold it too close to my ear.
If Aggie MacKenzie of How Clean is your House? fame were to see it she'd probably squeal in that high pitched Scottish voice of hers, take a swab and present me with a petri dish that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Although I tell colleagues, tongue firmly in cheek, my desk represents a new generation of one stop filing, that I can put my hand blindly into the abyss and pull out a gem of information, the truth is more random. Rather than the stat I'm looking for on arsons in York County in 1973, it's more likely to be the remains of last October's chicken sandwich.
At least I didn't request mayonnaise.
I console myself with the thought there are women with more disordered handbags. Like a former colleague called Christine who used hers to house a collection of chicken bones dating back to the mid 1700s.
I'm told such behavior is not the norm for women.
Some days I pledge to have a purge, motivated - if nothing else - by a desire to find out if my desk is a lurid shade of bubbegum pink under those papers, or just gray like everyone else's.
Desk clutter isn't a new problem for me. Crowded desks have followed me my whole career, like an old friend, or an alarming stalker. I never know how they get there.
When I was working as a features editor in England, one of my colleagues invited to my work station, on a one way ticket from hell or Hellesdon, a neat Nazi who ran an operation called Clutter's Last Stand.
The spurious context was it might make a decent feature.
Mrs. Clutter - I can't remember her real name but am haunted by her bob - ritually humiliated me for the best part of a day and made me get on my hands and knees under the desk while she assaulted my hind quarters with a vacuum cleaner. I was getting alarmed by Mrs. C by the end of the day.
Two months later she called me up and asked if I was interested in a follow up visit. As papers cascaded onto my lap I told her there was no need to because the desk was still immaculate.
Maybe my desk needs another Mrs. C in its life. It's tired and lackluster and needs someone to whip it into shape with some Vim and a vacuum cleaner attachment.
But there is surely something noble about its decline. When I look upon my desk from afar my eyes mist over as if I have stumbled on a relic from an antique age.
In an oblique way it makes me think of Shelley's poem Ozymandias.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Uncle Ho saved me from being a teenager

Uncle Ho isn't a particularly popular figure in the United States compared to, say Uncle Sam or Colonel Sanders.
This is probably just as well because if some bright spark decided to open a chain of Ho Houses, people could get the wrong idea, although it's hard to see how they could be more seedy than Waffle Houses.
Being British I am a firm champion of impossible causes, such as the England football team. it almost goes without saying that I had something of a soft spot for Ho Chi Minh, the mythical Vietnamese Communist revolutionary, Prime Minister and President, notwithstanding the often brutal and misguided nature of his regime.
Uncle Ho may have deprived a whole generation of Vietnamese people from making an easy buck not to mention those McDonald's fries that taste like cardboard, but he saved me from being a teenager for at least four hours of my life, an achievement that should not be belittled.
I'm always suspicious of people who say their teenage years were the best of their lives, a fad that seems to have been growing recently with those wretch inducing prom photos that periodically appear on Facebook. I'm convinced these people now have selective memory loss or were on drugs.
For many good reasons I have made every effort to erase the memory of those years, as effectively as Stalin airbrushed Trotsky out of Soviet history.
I didn't even have to destroy my class photos as a teenager. As soon as my parents opened the envelope, removed the health warning from the photographer and and pulled out images that were more like join-the-dots puzzles than liknesses of a human being, there wasn't the remotest prospect of them parting with their hard earned cash for images that would scare away the few house visitors they had.
Of course acne isn't the only curse of the teenage years.
There's this strange parallel universe you enter in which you come to come to believe tight stripey jeans, lemon colored wife beater shirts and pointed shoes with buckles on the side are the epitome of coolness.
If I had attended an respectable school I may have survived, by cosseting my teenage angst and rampant hormones into a blazer.
Unfortunately I attended the School of Hard Chavs, a place where burgundy staypress trousers, fledgling moustaches and streaky hair were the order of the day, the classrooms and the disordered places in between.
Even the brightest of students tried to dumb down. One photo that does survive from those days is The Grim Trinity, otherwise known as the official image of the three brightest kids in school.
I can't remember how I made the list. I believe I had to spell my name and get all the letters in the correct order.
Demonstrating my impeccable judgement, I chose to wear a jacket that the most evasive of backstreet car salesmen would be proud of, drainpipe trousers and appear to have injected a generous amount of "Sun-In" into my hair. I would have owned a Ford Capri but fortunately I wasn't old enough to fail my driving test.
I was in good company. Even Keithy, formerly so square that we avoided him for fear of being injured by his right angles, had reached for the Sun-In and was spouting the beginnings of a moustache every bit as pathetic and light deprived as my own.
Being away from school provided little respite from being a teenager; in fact it only made it worse. On Saturday nights I would join forces with Dan whose natural teenage awkwardness was excacerbated by an unkept shock of hair the color of the top of a Duracell battery and an unfortunate limp.
Hyped up on cheap lager we'd stagger from disco to disco with the sole purpose of being insulted by girls. Or so it seemed. A for effort, E for achievement, D for desperation.
Most nights we ended up sat on a wall, chain spitting on the pavement while I tried to think of ways to trade in Dan for a cooler friend I never found until one day I stumbled on Uncle Ho.
For a bizarre reason I never understood our school had been selected to take part in a United Nations youth conference in London and I was one of of the members of the three strong delegation.
Our hands, stained with nicotine from unsuccessful teenage smoking escapades, were all over the envelope. It finally came apart and a small label beating the mystical name "Vietnam" floated to the floor like a slogan from a fortune cookie.
The envelope marked a strange phase when we departed from our school's moto, which I recall was "bugger it," (it sounds better in Latin) to do some real research.
One of the big ticket debates at Westminster Hall was slated to be Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia and I was the delegate in the hot seat. I assiduously visited the library and studied Vietnam's pragmatic and often disastrous form of communism and the country's late spiritual leader Ho Chi Minh.
My life was transformed. By the time I attended the plenary sessions I genuinely believed in Vietnam's right to occupy Cambodia, an argument strengthened by the fact that the UN still recognized the muderous regime of Pol Pot as Vietnam's legal representatives, notwithstanding the not inconsequential matter of two million deaths in the killing fields.
I was winning the argument and winning over the girls from a Catholic school in Bedford, until I made a sartorial gaffe by wearing a rat grey leather jacket on the second day and narrowly lost the diplomatic high ground.
But some of the gravitas of being Vietnam carried over to the parties at the University of London, the type where you end up in a clinch in the elevator with some unknown girl from Stevenage and spend breakfast the next day clearing your throat and avoiding her glassy stare.
Soon the crescendo was upon me. On the last day the conference convened in Westminster Hall and voted on the resolutions. Knots formed in my stomach and my hands shook as my alloted time drew near. When I stood up to speak about Pol Pot's atrocities there was a dull murmur in the hall.
The arguments that had been so persuasive with the girls from Bedford were having little effect. But then I had a mental image of the mystical figure of Uncle Ho, his long whispy beard hanging in the jungle breeze.
Abandoning my script I launched into a diatribe against American imperialism. The conference erupted into whoops of delight, clapping and cheering. It was a low trick, perhaps, but Uncle Ho had saved me.
We narrowly lost the vote but I didn't care.
For at least four hours the sartorial horrors and gawky angst of being a teenager had been vanquished. Uncle Ho had rescued me from being a teenager.

The American Dream

I wondered how well the American Dream was doing last week. I was in one of the cavernous parking lots that comprise downtown Hampton when I heard shouts turning the air blue.
It was an unusual sound to hear in this part of Hampton. I'm not saying it's the kind of place where you overhear snippets of conversation about last night's performance of Madame Butterfly, just that it's close to the cop station.
I turned and saw a grizzled man in a motorized wheelchair making stuttering progress down the middle of the highway as if his power button was cutting in and out.
Two large American flags were flying behind his wheelchair and his head was jerking around as eratically as his contraption.
The object of his anger, a middle aged woman was strolling nonchantly down the sidewalk.
"#@**&&^^^," shouted the man, or words to that effect, casting aspirtions on his lady friend's fidelity.
A couple of cars swerved to avoid him, but otherwise this rather disturbing tableau diminished down the road, leaving Hampton to the peculiarly soulless silence of parking lots in the early afternoon.
Whiskery men in wheelchairs draped in America flags tend to conjure up one powerful motif; that of the aftermath of the Vietnam war, although for all I knew this character could have fallen out of a window.
In Oliver Stone's film Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic, played by Tom Cruise, joins the Marines as a clean cut personification of the American Dream and ends up a mental and physical cripple.
In one of the most powerful scenes in the film, Kovic - now a grizzled and angry veteran - has a wheelchair fight in Mexico with another veteran played by Willem Dafoe, in a performance that goes some way to expurging memories of Dafoe's excrutiating candle wax sex scenes with Madonna in Body of Evidence.
I'm not sure if any universities offer courses on the American Dream but if they do Vietnam is surely taught as the gloomy low point, discussed with relish by a Trotskyite lecturer in sandals whose one ambition in life is to spit on the Staute of Liberty.
If America went into World War II like the calvary coming to rescue Europe and Asia from the scourge of tyranny (the atomic bomb aside), it got pulled into Vietnam like a dazed rotweiler at a boistrous kids' party and left with the exteminator's gun to its head.
But although Vietnam threatened to tear America apart, the intangible dream has lived on. America remains the richest country in the world and the place more people aspire to live in than any other country.
The phrase "American Dream" was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America in 1931.
He said the American Dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."
"It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."
So, in other words it's a dream of a meritocracy as distinct from those class ridden Europeans.
This is interesting because I always thought the American Dream was about refrigerators, and large ones at that. When I was a child my parents almost bought a house from a mysterious character known as "the man in America."
The "man in America" had been sent there by his company and reports about the land of opportunity would occasionally filter back. The immesurable wealth, the cars as big as sideboards and inevitably the refrigerators large enough to hold a party in with all your friends, were greeted with wonder back in Blighty.
America in the late 1970s seemed like consumerism gone mad. It was the ultimate in luxury goods.
In the end the "man in America," who as kids seemed as exotic and distant as the man in the moon, returned to Britain and proved himself to be a total pain in the backside. My parents, in their wisdom, instead bought the house next door so as we could endure years of confiscated footballs from the former man in America.
The experience left me no closer to understanding the American dream, although there's a wealth of literature that points to its hollowness.
What, for instance, could be more marvelous than the Long Island of the 1920s as depicted in F Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby? There were big houses on the shore and jazz parties that went on until the early hours. And the self made Gatsby with his bright suits and his joviality, was the personifiation of the dream.
Except for the fact he was morbidly obsessed with someone else's wife, the fickle Daisy, who he tried to impress with his shirts.
"It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before," Daisy told him in a clear indicator that her case shallow waters didn't run very deep.
In the end The Great Gatsby merely exposed the dream as a sham as did the tragic descent of the handsome, wonderful and talented Fitzgerald himself.
Today nobody talks about the dream much. The news channels are more interested in the people being laid off, those working on minimum wage and working two jobs.
Yet many of us still drive cars the size of small tanks and own I-pods and other devices that would be unheard of in Chinese villages.
The dream's been shrunk a good deal but its's still here. Somewhere.

Escape motivated

Adults, my course tutor told the class last week, are escape motivated.
I remember the comment and its exact time because I was staring at the clock to see how long we had left until I could escape from the lesson.
I've made a mental note to myself to spend a few dollars on a watch battery; it's worth it to alleviate the neck ache from all that clock staring.
I have to agree with my tutor whose name I can't spell or pronounce other than remembering it's a name straight out of the Godfather. I'm thinking Luca Brasi but that's clearly not his name, although it sets me off down numerous confused and overgrown thought paths such as why my wife would have named her former cat after someone who is slow witted and brutish. Hang on, that's according to Wikipedia. Which means he probably had the mental acumen of Albert Einstein and was great company at baby showers.
Whatever the merits of Brasi - apparently he was loyal - I total concur with the escape motivated comment.
No sooner have I arrived in work than I am itching to escape. Unfortunately this means a mindless round of visits to courtrooms and jails. After five minutes in the jail corridor I find myself itching to escape back to work.
I'm the sort of guy who paces around impatiently on station platforms waiting for the train to arrive and then after two hours in baggage class facing the wrong way and nursing a flat hamburger that's taken 80 minutes to cool below the temperature of your average red dwarf, I can't wait to disembark.
Unless it's Doncaster, which is like the British equivalent of Newark. You ask directions and are told 'turn right after the two dead dogs on High Street and left again by the three dead dogs outside Smiths.'
I've made some notable escapes in the past, although none of them have involved Steve McQueen-style motorbike antics or years of chipping through a prison wall like in the Shawshank Redemption.
It's funny how that always happen in movies. Spend eight years chipping through the wall of any prison I've been to and you'll be nowhere near freedom - you'll end up in the cell of a large homicidal brute who wants to kill you or do other unmentionable things to you for messing up his nice clean wall.
But there are certainly times when escape is the only option. I'm thinking of a beautiful sunny day beside the Sea of Galilee on a press trip when the organizer insisted we had to spend more than an hour in a museum devoted to the woeful remains of an old boat dredged up from the sea bed.
Cue a bathroom break and a sprint to the great outdoors where I bumped into Lorna who had had the same idea and was whining that the guide was treating us like a bunch of school kids.
On reflection, the urge to escape probably goes back to our childhood when we willed the school bell to ring - and that was five minutes into the lesson.
Of course there are times when escape can be construed as bad form. One is usually compelled to sit (or stand) through one's own wedding even though there's a multi layered cake out there somwhere and you want to get to it before some filthy guest, who you didn't want to invite in the first place, gets their dirty, freeloading paws on it.
Ducking out of funerals is also seen as bad form. So too is drinking so much whisky that the room starts spinning round.
But although there isn't much to be said for funerals, the one silver lining is that as a teenager adults don't pay you a lot of attention at funerals. You are abandoned in a room and the bottle of whisky is standing there too, looking as lonely as you. It's surely only natural to want to make friends.

Sock it to me

I have no sympathy for some of the figures in history who claim to have had dilemmas.
Did Julius Caesar agonize about crossing the Rubicon? Did Napoleon think should I, shouldn't I invade Russia and have to eat his horses? What about Robert the Bruce in his cold, abject cave when he saw a spider struggling to build a web and resolved to try, try again?
Tis all insignificant compared to the dilemma I have every morning when I attempt to find matching socks.
There are days when I've woken up earlier than the rooster for an early assignment or my red eye course on a Saturday. I've had enough time to slowly read War and Peace backwards, underlining all the names with "ski" in them.
Still, one way or another, I have come unstuck in the socks pile, lost my temper, hurled disparate apparel at the cat and ended up running out late wearing one red sock and one blue one.
My course colleagues didn't buy my excuse I was making a patriotic gesture.
My wife can't believe I own so many brown colored socks by the same manufacturer of such crazily different designs and periodically asks me if I was on LSD when I chose them at Wal-Mart.
Well, of course you have to be on LSD in Wal-Mart just to survive the experience.
To be fair I've never taken LSD: I was concerned by those drug talks at school when they warned you about 'flashbacks.' Admittedly if you got a flashback and you were again in Wal-Mart I'd call that a bonus.
In retrospect buying a job lot of the same socks would have made a lot more sense but mornings just wouldn't be mornings if everything matched.

Missing

I'm a serial misser. The longer I live, the more I miss. It's a problem I'll have to start managing before I start missing the missing half of my breakfast cereal before I've finished it.
Here's what I miss in no particular order.

1 - Britain; almost everything about it, my family, the way rain clouds can grow suddenly out of a pale blue sky and the reassuring medieval church spire that rises from the hazy fields behind my parents' home. It's like nothing bad can happen with that view even though it was probably the last thing peasants saw as the black death claimed them back in the Middle Ages.

2 - The gentle contours of the Norfolk Broads from How Hill with its antique wind pumps and the sail of a wherry drifting down an unseen waterway.

3 - The fields of bluebells that carpet hidden glades on the Cotswold escarpments in March.

4 - Edinburgh from Carlton Hill, its spires, monuments and gothic spikes scraping the sullen Scottish skies.

5 - Driving into Pately Bridge on a spring day after rain with the daffodils choking the verges below the drystone walls and the village pond.

6 - Eating a searing curry in Brick Lane looking onto a street scene more Calcutta than London.

7 - The Corner House and its characters, the councillor who celebrated his flatulence, the red eyed man who called you his "buddy". The second pint and the realization work was about to get a lot more interesting.

8 - The ever increasing cast of characters consigned to the past like a play half remembered, a pair of piercing blue eyes and a curious nose, the Hugh Grant caricature, a man with a face like a Groucho Marx mask, a ginger haired man, even.

9 - The myriad coffees with my friends when I never wanted the cup to empty.

10 - The House of Commons terrace bar on the nights when the street lights blurred and sunk into the Thames.

11 - The days in Paris when we were too enamoured to leave the hotel room and got to the Sacre Couer at 1 a.m. when they were turning off the lights.

12 - The villa in Positano and the way the dome of the cathedral caught the gold of the early morning from the table in the lemon grove.

13 - The day I picked up a shining new Buick in Vegas and knew the long, open highway was mine.

14 - The stars that overlapped in the whorl of the Milky Way that night on the beach in Brittany.

15- Fires on a cold night in the forest and the faces of long lost friends that rose and fell in the flames.

16 - The days when I could run like the wind on the beach and not care about a thing.

17 - The ruined monastery, swallowed up in moss beside the shallows of an Irish river.

18 - the sound of the choir rising and falling with the breeze in the cathedral close.

19 - the yellow and pink rose bushes we planted in our garden before the tenant let them die.

20 - the chaos of the parties, the intrigues, the embraces, the giddy unpredictability of being carelessly young.

21 - The hours spent at Watersmeet poised above the rushing waters with my camera.

The shadows don't fall so long in the new world. I walk through vistas and pass out the other side without my feet leaving an impression. The angles are sharper, less forgiving and the sky is a solid blue drawn in by an artist with a paint gun.
If I return to the old world will I miss the new one? Most certainly.

Guernica

America is a nation of background babble, of TV screens in every room that blare away into a semi attentive netherworld.
Last night my senses were assaulted by a noise akin to a chainsaw coming up against an obstinate tree branch. It turned out to be the voice of Nancy Grace in vitriolic cross examination mode.
The subject, it goes without saying, was the Caylee Anthony case, the dead 2-year-old girl from Florida whose mother Casey is accused of her murder.
It seems strange that Grace has been talking about the case every show for at least six months when kids killed in the ghettos are apparently not worth the airtime and kids who die in Darfur don't even make it onto the radar.
If you start to talk about genocide in African countries people tend to shun and avoid you unless you happen to be an actor, an aid worker or Christiane Amanpour.
It's a sad but probably inevitable consequence of capitalism that there is little air time for much beyond tabloid TV that caters for short attention spans. Even in the midst of a recession we learn more about obscure household gadgets from the adverts than we do about the Janjaweed or atrocities on our doorstep in Mexico.
The stars of this throwaway TV culture are people like Flo, the hyper enthusiastic sales rep from Progressive who - let's face it - would be fired in the real world for being too weird.
Then there's Billy Mays, who is like the token annoying guy that turns up at every BBQ, with his loud voice, his OxiClean, his Mighty Putty and Mighty Mend It. If you believed Mays the Navy could use this stuff to stick wings on their F-18s.
"A broken heart, no problem. Try Mighty Mend It," Mays would probably say.
It's enough to make anyone resort to drugs or subscribe to "turn on, tune in and drop out" to coin the catchword of Timothy's Leary's '60s counterculture.
Travel has been my drug and means of escape for many years, although I am currently suffering from the absence of travel.
The real world is the best antidote to the background babble. I still miss the streets of Madrid where we walked one day five years ago after a wedding in the mountains.
Nursing a mild hangover from the night before when we had met up with some of our friends in the maze of streets that never sleep off the Puerta del Sol, we took the Metro to the 18th century Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
As the morning sun rose higher in the sky and the air became warmer we wandered around a small market in a plaza under the high shaded facade of the museum, perusing jewelry and bags from North Africa and local crafts. We had a coffee under the trees before the museum opened.
For me time stands still in art galleries with their soaring ceilings and works of frenzied inspiration now at rest in heavy frames.
But one work in the museum gives no time for the human soul to rest. Picazzo's Guernica is a huge, abstract mural depicting the terror of the Nazi attack on the village of the same name on April 26, 1937, when the Germans used Guernica as a testing ground for their bombers during the Spanish Civil War.
Animals and buildings are torn apart in the painting, a bull gores a horse and there are stigmata on the hands of a dead soldier.
It's sobering to realize Picasso was commissioned to paint Guernica not in a placid post war peace time but for the Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World's Fair, just two years before the atrocities that befell the village would be repeated all over Europe.
More than 15 years earlier TS Eliot had given a voice to the modern age with his poem The Waste Land, representing the disillusion of an increasingly metropolitan population in the post war climate.
Artists like Picasso put the feelings on canvass in a bold new way, while Adolf Hitler put aside his paints and turned that disillusion in on itself to bring a second instalment of horror on a shell shocked world.
Back in Madrid that April it didn't feel like the cruelest month, although it had been cruel to Guernica.
A couple of days later we headed to Atocha Station to take a train through open fields to the walled city of Toledo.
When the evening sun fell on the water gardens outside the hotel and the high tower of the cathedral it was hard to imagine anything bad ever happening again in Spain.
But it did. A year later Al Quaeda bombs ripped through trains in Atocha Station killing perhaps more people than the Nazi attack on Guernica.
Sometimes it's easier not to think too hard, to get lost in what Leonard Cohen called that hopeless little screen than to take in Picasso's big picture.

Whatever happened to ... Sarah Palin

A strange thought hit me as I was driving to work recently. I realized I missed Sarah Palin.
The enormity of this epiphany proved dangerous to other users of the Interstate because my car veered across the road as I tried to slap the errant thought out of my fevered brain
I slapped to no avail. I still miss Sarah Palin.
Six months ago there surely wasn't anyone with a pulse in America who'd have believed they'd find themselves missing Palin. The country was in the grip of mania for the Governor of Alaska and even if you missed her in person there were plenty of willing stand-ins such as Tina Fay.
Sadly Sarah Palin impersonators have now had their day. Their outlook is as rosy as John Cleese's parrot or Circuit City employees.
And in place of Sarah we have to make do with the trinity of Barack, Barack and Barack.
If Obama doesn't own all the TV networks he surely will soon. Every time I look up to the screen he's there; like a benevolent Big Brother (more like an uncle really) trying to save the world.
As for Sarah, she tried to salvage her reputation after the election with a few interviews about the evils of interviews and slowly disappeared into obscurity.
But for a few weeks last fall Sarah Palin landed in our living rooms with all the subtlety of HG Wells' aliens in the War of the Worlds and showed no sign of budging.
She took the Republican conference by storm, causing people to forget she wasn't actually the one running for the White House. I'm told it was a man with white hair.
Middle aged men froze at Palin's glassy right-wing stare and amazing up and down hair, and rushed off to divorce their wives.
Although Palin didn't quite possess the face that launched a thousands ships, she could claim (with some degree of inaccuracy) to have the face that sunk a thousand bridges to nowhere.
And boy could she shop.
But a series of "soft" interviews given by Palin have cemented her reputation as a superstar of the electoral circuit.
When Katie Couric asked Palin why Alaska's proximity to Russia enhanced the vice presidential nominee's foreign policy credentials you could almost hear a vital cog fall out somewhere and sharply hit an unsuspecting toe.
"Well it certainly does," replied Palin, in the sort of timbre that people use when they want to say "hell if I know," and the rest is incoherent history.
If Vladimir Putin ever reared his head and shoved it into Palin's airspace - something unkind commentators said was located between her ears - he's not likely to bother with her anymore.
But now that Palin is no longer in our air space, I have to admit she has left a void.