'Nother Solent

The Stealth Blogger strikes!

Sorry for the dearth of posts over the last few days. And I'm afraid the famine is set to continue until next Tuesday, the 11th. We have a few more family events to pack in before going off to Belgium to indulge in an activity illegal in this country.

Wash your minds out! I refer to the sport of target pistol shooting.

I'm going away for a day out now

- with the great issue still undecided. At least the roads will be empty.

Sweden has equalized.

Not that I'm interested.

Random Jottings continues to track me telepathically. John Weidner writes that he put in a swipe against the Palestinians as a whole people when feeling grumpy, which he has now removed. He even apologises. A little while ago I too condemned the Palestinians as a whole.

"Palestinians don't bomb places where families congregate as an unfortunate side-effect of hitting an armaments plant; they aim for them so they can kill families."

I was conscious what I was doing while doing it. That, thought I, is the first collective condemnation I have written in decades. Hitherto I had said some pretty damning things about them, but phrases such as "a people sunk in barbarism" yet imply that it is possible to rise up again. "Palestinians do X" implies an eternal character. Fine, I thought. About time someone said it. The killing of an eighteen month old girl and her grandmother at an ice cream parlour and the usual peverted boasting that followed it had put me in a black fury.

OK. I was wrong to put it quite like that. I don't actually feel particularly like apologizing, but one thing I will say: anyone and any group is capable of redemption.

There appears to be some sort of sporting tournament taking place.

I thought you might like to know that. We turned up at church at the usual time but the service was over and everyone was just scarfing the biccies and leaving in a most unsociable hurry. So home we go, and the kids are watching TV - some wholesome educational programme, no doubt, and my daughter informs me that "England scored." I hope she is not referring to the purchase of illegal pharmaceuticals.

And has the Guardian/ Observer shut up shop or something? Where are the customary denunciations? Iain? Peter?

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by....

sloth. Uncommon Sense explains why the US State Department seems to prefer one-party states. Mind you even sloth is preferable to the sort of imaginative intiative shown by some public servants teaching Police Studies at Chandler school. (Scroll to the post below.)

The "Post and Publish" button worked just then

, for the first time in twenty-two hours. I have not actually been sitting here for twenty-two hours trying it, but that's what it feels like.

Blogging will be low to non-existent over the coming half-term week. For some of it we will be away, for the rest we will have a guest staying in the room where the computer lives. And while the demands of hospitality might allow me a well-defined blogging period I can't get away with popping in at one in the morning with a cheerful cry of "I've just got to see if Blogger is working."