We did a straw poll at work today, and 4 out of 4 of us were ashamed that we are not French! They know how to give a proper response to attacks by the wealthy (23 millionaires in the cabinet) on the rest of us.
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The cognitive dissonance of the Big Society
I’m finding Government policy very confusing – the Big Society – it could be drivel, or it could be an idea we all really get behind. Who but the most confirmed misanthrope doesn’t want to be part of something bigger where we all pull together and help eachother? The part where cognitive dissonance comes in is that [...]
Lemon Tree – neither sweet nor sour!
I finally got around to watching Lemon Tree this evening- about 2 years after it’s release. Amazon have been selling it for around six quid, so it was worth a punt. Although I like a lot of Middle Eastern Films, I have been avoiding Lemon Tree, since some reviews made it sound too sherbert-lemon for [...]
April Foolishness
Reading The Guardian yesterday, I was pretty certain I had spotted 3 fake stories planted for April Fools Day. I find today that only one of them was actually fake. I wonder if it’s a sign of my being out of touch or that some of the news stories we now hear leave many of [...]
International women’s day
It’s International Women’s Day today, and i’d like to draw attention to the plight of an interned man. Jafar Panahi is an Iranian film director who has continued to make cinema shot in Iran that relates directly to the lives of her citizens, without being preachy, and just about staying on the right side of [...]
End of year rant…
The noughties have been almost entirely about a sense of not belonging, of dislocations and moral panics that things beyond our control are going to get us. The main candidates seem to have distilled down to 2 threads: mad bombers and nature. The environment, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, foot and mouth, e-coli, global [...]
A unified policy for everything…
Today I bumped into my old friend Stefano outside the papershop. |We haven’t seen eachother for about 6 months, so we celebrated by having a mutually satisfying state-of-the-nation rant. Amongst the pleasing vitriol, was Stefano’s considered opinion that the whole Government policy on preventative Tamiflu injections (for children) is misdirected and inconsistent: Our entire economic [...]
