Sunday, May 11, 2008

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.

2 comments:

  1. Hope the master is well, and that his luxuriant snowy-white beard is holding up in the heat of the desert. All that very dry air can't be good for it.

    Went for a spin on the bike through "Lost lanes of Queen Anne's Lace / And that high-builded cloud / Moving at summer's pace." What a day! It takes a day like this to remind one that all these politicos - Prescott, Cherie, Broon, the lot - have "something of the night" about them. And as for the Burmese generals, they are the night. A very dark and unpleasant one. I was about to say "theirs is almost another world" but then braked sharply. It isn't, alas.

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  2. I don't like this silence from the Master. I'm afraid something may have gone horribly wrong. The last we heard from him he was experimenting with some very potent magic, more potent than I fear he knows how to handle.

    For God's sakes, why won't he call?

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