Sunday

Another Sunday and still no word from the Master, so presumably nothing worth reading in the Sunday Times - apart, of course, from Prezza's memoirs hem hem. And Cherie's at it too, her volume hastily brought forward in case Gordie's gone by the autumn. Of course it isn't possible to feel sorry for Gordon Brown, but this is getting pretty tedious and no longer funny.
Otherwise the main item in the news has been the unfolding horror in Burma (at least most media - even the BBC! - have rejected to the Myanmar option). This is clearly going to be one of those horrific situations that 'the world' can do very little about because of the paranoid obstruction of self-serving rulers - and yet we see and know enough to get an idea of how bad and how hopeless it is. In a truly closed regime - China under Mao, for example - this kind of thing could happen and the world would know nothing, there would be no news, no TV reports, just the regime's lies if anyone got wind of what was going on. Now the world is so open - thanks, not least, to satellite imagery - that even in North Korea it would be hard, probably impossible, to cover up a natural disaster on this scale. Anyway we are still powerless, and reduced to a kind of benign voyeur status.
To escape all this, I took myself off to the Surrey downs yesterday, which was thoroughly restorative. The birds were singing like crazy - chiffchaffs and other warblers among them - but I'm sorry to say that, even on such a warm sunny day, the butterfly count was very low. I blame John Prescott.