Oedipus Lex

I was stand­ing in an army bar­racks in Lan­cashire, soak­ing with sweat, dressed in com­bats, boots and a regi­mental sweat­shirt; we’d just come back from a pla­toon run. I was about to get undressed and someone came run­ning into my room say­ing that a plane had crashed into some build­ing in New York.

Like the half-starved, exhausted rem­nants of Charles Edward’s army at Cul­loden, an Itin­er­ant team, lack­ing the dash­ing verve of their bats­men, gathered at a ground famil­iar only to a few vet­er­ans. Among their hast­ily assembled ranks there numbered the hung-over, the unprac­tised and the per­en­ni­ally untal­en­ted. Yet a dogged determ­in­a­tion pre­vailed: these men would stand …

…I love it. There, said it.

As I sit in my grey office on a grey day in a grey suit there is a light. It comes in the shape, or rather sound, of TMS (Test Match Spe­cial for the phil­istines) play­ing via the BBC on my PC. Cricket obvi­ously has its detract­ors, I am con­stantly mocked …

While the com­par­ison is fre­quently ban­died around in the press Afgh­anistan is look­ing more and more like Vietnam.

For bet­ter or worse Bri­tain is stuck for the fore­see­able in a part of the world where few out­siders have had mil­it­ary suc­cess. Amer­ica had more heli­copters than you can shake a oily mon­key wrench at dur­ing …

I think it is pretty much agreed by every­one, with the pos­sible excep­tion of Gor­don Brown, that Labour are going to be trounced at the next elec­tion. I have an image in my head of a sort of last-days-of-the-Reich scen­ario with Brown sit­ting in his bunker while min­is­ters run in with reports of Tory tanks …

Yes they really are. They may be twats but should they be banned twats? I’ve been hav­ing a dis­cus­sion on Twit­ter, it’s not a new dis­cus­sion, one I have heard many times before and seems to pop up just before every elec­tion: Should the BNP be banned?

I, for my sins, cher­ish free­dom of speech above …