ON BLOGGING DRY SPELLS

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that I haven't posted here lately. I thought I should perhaps make it known that, as far as I am aware, I am actually still blogging. In fact, in my head, I blog all the time. Everything is a blog post to me. It drives me mad.

Someone should invent a blogging machine that extracts brilliant posts from a person's brain and puts it straight onto their blog, fully formed and spell-checked.

Until such a time as that happens though, I am reliant upon manually creating posts with the use of a "computer". Unfortunately, I have no free time at work and at home I share my trusty laptop with a husband who spends hours on the thing despite not having a blog to write. I don't quite know what people do for hours on a computer if they don't tend a blog, but it keeps him quiet anyhow.

In addition to not much computer time, I have also had things to do. I have noticed about life that there are always things to do. No matter that you do them, and so in theory this should mean that you no longer have things to do, there will always remain things to do never-the-less.

In truth, I would have time to do a cheeky little posts every now and again to keep my blog ticking over. However, when things are going on such as Greece being in flames and children being shot, I worry to write about how the woman outside my office drives me mental by asking me if I'm OK all the time. I fear this would be presenting myself as self-absorbed and superficial*.

This is the trouble with having a blog with no distinct subject matter. You want to write about everything and so end up writing nothing.

I will have a think about what I am going to do about this state of affairs, but in the meantime, here's a story of elephants in love.

(* I am self-absorbed and superficial, but no one is to know that)

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

In December 1995, a 15 year old boy called Learco Chindamo sneered as he slapped, punched and then fatally stabbed his headteacher, Philip Lawrence. Chindamo was a member of a gang that modelled itself on the Chinese Triads and was linked to other serious crimes, including rape and attempted murder.

Chindamo, now 26, who came to Britain from Italy with his family at the age of six, is serving a life sentence for the stabbing. His 12-year minimum prison term is due to end next year.

The widow of Philip Lawrence states that she is devastated and demoralised by the decision of the Immigration and Appeals Tribunal not to deport her husband's killer back to Italy when his jail sentence ends. The Government, ever feuding with the judiciary over such matters, is saying it will appeal very vigorously.

In a more local issue, former West Bromwich Albion football player, Lee Hughes is coming out of jail too. Hughes was beloved of the Albion. An Albion fan himself, coming from a humble background, he was a roofer until the club gave him a chance. One year he was the league's top goal scorer and saved us from relegation. Then he went to Coventry, a local team in the same league. As he did this for money, fans fell out with Hughes. In 2003 he killed a man and crippled another when he smashed his Mercedes into their car whilst drunk.

Albert Frisby, the man Hughes crippled, has said that he feels "sick to the stomach" that Hughes is out and able to resume playing professional football.

In both cases, Mrs Lawrence and Mr Frisby feel aggrieved that an individual who has accused incalculable grief and damage can walk out of jail and resume their lives. They have understandable feelings of vindictiveness and anger. They have no compassion for these two young men, and no one has the right to ask that of them. It would be easy to agree with them that the perpetrators of such crimes should not be able to leave jail and be allowed to continue their lives as before.

But what about the victims of such crimes who do not feel vindictive? The ones who want to forgive? Would we have been agreeing with Mrs Lawrence if her Catholic faith had lead her to be forgiving of the boy and not even want his incarceration?

I doubt it.

Which is why I think we have the judges and the courts. We need the fair and equal hand of the laws in such matters, not verdicts based on how desperate for revenge the victim does or does not feel.

And if you're going to tell me that the law isn't always fair and equal, then I agree, no, it's not. But we challenge that with the laws own checks and balances, and with advocacy, and with a desire for justice. Otherwise we might as well just throw up our hands and let mob rule commence.

HEADLINES YOU DON'T SEE EVERY DAY

British Dwarf's penis gets stuck to hoover.

GLOBAL WARMING CAMPAIGNERS ADD TO GLOBAL WARMING. AGAIN.

Here we go again. Sorry to be boring, but I have to say this.

These protesters at Heathrow? They are expecting a couple of thousand to turn up for a week long campaign about people going on holiday adding to climate change.

And just how are these couple of thousand people getting there? Are they arriving on donkey carts? Or once again will we see the extra gobbling up of the world's resources as these self-righteous sandal-wearing extremists trundle down to the herd watering-hole to use up precious police time and money?

And just what do they think it will achieve? An active network of religious fanatics who wish to use aeroplanes as weapons of mass destruction haven't put us off going to Portugal for our annual leave, so why would a band of unwashed, dread-locked, tie-dye fanatics stop us?

You're wasting your time.

We'll consider our own backgardens for our holidays, when you stop having mass protests and wash your hair.

SCRIBBLES RECOMMENDS... CARDIFF

This weekend Mr Scribbles and I went to Cardiff for fun and frolics. Well, why not. I love Wales and you don't have to go through baggage check-in.

Scribbles recommends the following:

The Mercure Holland Hotel

A friendly and confident 4 Star Hotel. I didn't get to try the spa treatments, but the cotton soft bed and pillows, stylish decor, and sumptuous breakfasts were enough to satisfy the Scribbles desire for luxury.

Cardiff Bay to experience...

The Doctor Who Exhibition

But only for fans of the series. The exhibition makes the mistake that all exhibitions aimed at kids make - namely to throw as much noise, light and images into as small an area as possible and hope for the best. Presumably this is because exhibitors think that all people under the age of 13 have an attention span of one nano-second and to keep their attention they must bombard their senses with reckless abandon. It is, of course, nonsense. Kids' senses process such sensory bombardments even worse than adults' senses do.

However, where else do you get to be up close and personal with costumes from the series, including the outfits of the last two Doctors and their assistants, the Tardis (ever wondered why Doctor Who's time machine is stuck as a 1930s call box? It's because the "chameleon" adapter has broken), Cybermen, and the highlight for me - Mr Dalek, himself. He pointed his sucker at me and said "exterminate". I nearly wet my pants.

The Welsh Assembly

Originally mistaken by me for an unfinished, slightly dilapidated building, once inside the Y Senned gives a fabulous views across Cardiff Bay. The Welsh members sure picked themselves a nice spot to do business. Inside, the place looks a little like a 1970's Swedish sauna, and I think that giving the members computers in the debating chamber is silly, but there is nothing like being able to wander about and fart in the annals of power to make one feel good about oneself.

Just don't forget to take the nail scissors out of your handbag when passing through security. Plan elsewhere to cut your toenails, they don't want you to do it there.

The Wales Millennium Centre

The famous frontage is even more impressive in real life than it looks in the photos, but inside it's like any other arts building. The gift shop was good though, and sold an "action Mozart" figure - expertly moulded in the finest plastic with fully movable limbs.

The Norwegian Church Arts Centre

Relax outside on the lush grass and get lulled into sleep by ropes gently clanging against the flag-poles whilst the midday sun blazes down and roasts your bare skin red.

In Cardiff central, a couple of miles inland, you will not have lived unless you visit Cardiff Castle. The Romans were there first, with their army barracks. Then, in Norman times, it was a proper castle, with thick stone walls slashed with slit windows for arrows to be fired through. Some Roman remains and the Norman Keep exist still.

Later in the 1400s a poncy aristocrat gentrified the place and built on the castle grounds an elegant hall of residence. In the 1800s, with all the sensitivity of a blind madman with a fairytale obsession, another aristocrat added all the turrets and towers a graceful medieval building could never want.

We did not get the time to see inside, but witnessing the battering the Victorian owners gave to the exterior of the main apartments - not even bothering to make the additions in the same colour sandstone as the original medieval building - I dare say I could not have stood how they puked all over the interior.

*

The overall impression Cardiff gives is of a place emerging with blinking eyes from a heavy past. Half of its shopping centre is under reconstruction and Cardiff Bay feels unfinished, which it is, but the promise of the place is exciting.

My only quibble would be with the British town planners obsession with zoning everything. There's a large shopping zone in Cardiff, distinct from any residential or entertainment buildings, which after the shops close is uninviting and even a little scary, dotted as it was with groups of drinking youths. The Cardiff Bay area is separated from Cardiff central by a uninspiring land of housing association flats and weed-infested space, which must be traversed via bendy bus or train. The Bay itself feels a little dislocated, both from anywhere else and between its own components parts.

To end on a positive, when in Cardiff, eat Italian - Scribbles recommends Positano. Choice menu, classic dishes simply cooked, served by intense Italian waiters. Never did a glass of red go down so well.

AWAY FOR THE WEEKEND!

I shall tell you all about it when I get back....

IN CELEBRATION OF THE VERY LOVELY KYLIE MINOGUE

As Kylie Minogue celebrates 20 years in show business, Scribbles wishes to put her admiration for this exceptional creature into the public domain.

I always feel that people who try and criticise The Minogue because she cannot sing, cannot act, is not especially good at dancing, and has only produced a handful of bearable pop songs in two decades, utterly miss the point.

The point about Kylie, is Kylie. It's her perfect package of feminine loveliness combined with a touch of the dirty bitch, that makes her so worthwhile. She's just so squidgy looking and so feminine and despite having slightly alienesque facial features, somehow so beautiful.

The pop songs are not important in themselves, only existing to showcase her loveliness - to give her the chance for her to exhibit and for us to enjoy her abundance of lovely. And she does. She revels in loveliness like there is nothing else in the world but loveliness.

It doesn't bother me that she has nothing to trade on but her loveliness, because loveliness to my mind is a very valuable commodity. It's rare, much needed thing. There's enough seriousness, nastiness and mundaness in this world. We need a counter to all that.

Running like a pole of steel through her career though is her strong work ethic. Not for Kylie falling drunk out of nightclubs, going into rehab through exhaustion, and getting dog poo over herself in photoshoots. She works hard at her career at being lovely; she respects it; she nurtures it like a child. She doesn't snort it up her nose or puke it down toilets.

This could have made her boring but for her series of affairs with sexy men with serious attitude problems. To handle men like Michael Hutchence and Olivier Martinez, it takes a woman who can do sex. There's not a man in this world that Kylie couldn't look square in the eye and take on in bed. That her series of affairs is always reported in the media as her being 'unlucky in love' is laughable. If the pitiful hacks who report that nonsense had half the love and sex Kylie has had, they wouldn't be calling it 'unlucky.'

It must have felt a real assault on her sense of self to undergo the butchery and endure the poisoning that was necessary to beat the cancer that grew inside her. But she has packaged the horror away, and come back out into the light her loveliness glowing fiercer than ever. And she looks like she revels in her loveliness now more than ever, as if to stand victorious over the monster that tried to take it away.

Female loveliness is a powerful, yet strangely vulnerable force. Throughout the ages men have tried to cover up women's loveliness or strip it bare, expose it, and turn into pornography.

But whilst there is a Kylie in this world, loveliness burns bright.

THE CALL CENTRE WORKERS REVENGE

"[Facebook] The social networking website, which has mushroomed to 30 million users worldwide, is being asked to close down the Survivors of 118 118 page because of its high level of abuse.

The action by The Number UK, which runs the 118 118 phone directory, follows two months of monitoring the page, which was set up by two former staff members earlier this year.

...

The site lists alleged shortcomings of the directory, but The Number UK said that repeated abuse of customers was the main reason for wanting it shut down.

One of the page's founders, Simon Stranks, says in an online entry that he left 118 118's Cardiff centre in January and wanted to let the world know how difficult callers could be. He claims to have got his own back by "writing their numbers on the walls of public toilets and pasting them on many an Internet site"


Having worked in a Call Centre once, how delighted was I to read about the 118 118 Survivors page in yesterday's Guardian? Revenge on company and customer alike. Fabulous!

Never did I receive so much abuse as when I once worked the operator 100 service. It was like, because I was some anonymous speck of unimportant humanity at the safe end of a phone line, people felt they could blast me with all the aggression they bottled up from everywhere else.

I always considered it quite risky behaviour however. Because whilst I was anonymous, they weren't. I was always in full possession of their name and contact details, including address. Luckily for them, I am not given to criminal acts, or otherwise I might have sought my revenge in all sorts of sick and twisted ways.

Ultimately, I learnt to get over abusive calls as best I could, consoling myself with the relief that whilst I had had to endure a few minutes of their stinking personalities, they were stuck with themselves for life.

It might be worth bearing in mind though when you do speak to people in Call Centres that firstly, they are human beings with feelings, and secondly that there is always the possibility that they might be slightly unhinged. A word out of place might see dog poo coming through your letterbox. Or worse.

You have been warned.

AIRING ANOTHER SIDE OF THE 'DEBATE': IT'S NOT FOREIGN POLICY

I've just watched tonight's "Dispatches, Britain under attack" on Channel4. I wasn't going to, because once you've seen one programme that asks why extremists are attacking us British, you've seen them all. The ideology behind the bloodshed is muttered with embarrassment amidst a long, usually nasal whine about foreign policy.

However, I caught this article today in mediaguardian, "Tea and al-Qaida sympathy".In it, Abu Muhammed, a man who is confusing described in the article as "which is not is also linked to al-Qaida", justifies the July 7 bombings.

Here's a quote from him:

"if someone commits an aggression against you, you are allowed [in Islam] to commit an aggression against him. Millions of Iraqi children were killed as a result of the [western] embargo and no-fly zone and we have to treat those responsible in kind"

"hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001"

I had to know, given the great big flapping lapse of logic in these sentences, if the Dispatches programme was going to challenge him.

I'm guessing, but the embargo and no-fly zone that Abu refers to are about Iraq, and the measures taken after Saddam Hussein (a Muslim) invaded Kuwait (a Muslim country) in 1990. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the no-fly zones were there to protect the Kurds (Muslims) in the north and the shiite population (Muslims) in the south from further attempts of slaughter by Saddam.

The sanctions - a well intentioned and oft used method of bringing to heel despots over-reaching even themselves - were absolutely a failure. They failed to bring Saddam to heel and succeeded in making the lives of ordinary Iraqis a misery, it being estimated that thousands of children died through want.

This happened however, let's not forget, in great part because of the inability of the UN to put its humanitarian work before lining it's own pockets. This is the mighty UN from whom apparently we need permission from before stopping genocide (It's quite hard to persuade on that point). It must not go unsaid either that Saddam's palaces remained remarkably intact in a country whose infrastructure was falling apart.

But there were only two ways to bring an end to the suffering caused by the sanctions - lift them or force a regime change. To lift the sanctions was to allow Saddam to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons (we know he retained the capability to do this). Chemical weapons that would not have been used against British civilians, but against the Iraqi people (Muslims). Just like in Halabja, the worst instance of use of biological and chemical attack in modern times, when Saddam sent his aircraft to bombard the town all night with agents such as mustard gas and nerve agents.

But as we know, what we did instead was force a regime change. That is, remove from power a monster who murdered, raped and tortured his people at will.

And now to Afghanistan. The country that was in the grip of one of the nastiest cults of fanatics the world has seen. The Taliban, that insane, bloodthirsty group of thugs who executed people on football pitches for having the wrong haircut and make women live in perpetual darkness, were good at slaughtering their own people too. Such as the attack on the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, in 1998.

"the Taliban drove their pickup trucks "up and down the narrow streets of Mazar-i-Sharif shooting to the left and right and killing everything that moved -- shop owners, cart pullers, women and children shoppers and even goats and donkeys."[49] More than 8000 noncombatants were reported killed in Mazar-i-Sharif and later in Bamiyan. [50] Contrary to the injunctions of Islam, which demands immediate burial, the Taliban forbade anyone to bury the corpses for the first six days while they rotted in the summer heat and were eaten by dogs."

And as for the continuing slaughter of the Iraqis since 2001.

"A 2005 Human Rights Watch report analysed the insurgency in Iraq and highlighted, "The groups that are most responsible for the abuse, namely al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna and the Islamic Army in Iraq, have all targeted civilians for abductions and executions. The first two groups have repeatedly boasted about massive car bombs and suicide bombs in mosques, markets, bus stations and other civilian areas. Such acts are war crimes and in some cases may constitute crimes against humanity, which are defined as serious crimes committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population."[2]

So, in this Dispatches programme, when Abu Muhammed talked about "aggression" against Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have liked him to be confronted with the fact that the people responsible for the slaughter in these countries have been, and continue to be, Muslims. The Baathists, the Taliban, al-Qaida. Not agents of the West, but people whose faith is Islam, killing Islamic people, in the name of Islam.

Much the same as in Darfur, where now, thank fuck, the UN has finally condescended to send in a force to try and protect what's left of the Sudanese populations (Muslims) from the Janjaweed (Muslims) - once again, The West risks the lives of its men and women to save Muslims from the "aggression" of other Muslims.

I make this blunt point because if you are going to use western aggression against Muslims as reason to kill civilians on the streets of Britain, then the very least that is required of you is that you make a good case at highlighting this western aggression against Muslims. Clearly, however, referencing conflicts where Muslims were suffering death, torture and oppression under Muslim rule, until a western coalition came along to try and execute rescue, spectacularly fails to make that case.

And the least a Channel4 programme that allows such people as Abu Muhammed to spout this kind of deeply offending nonsense can do is confront them with their illogic. And it must be confronted because this idea that the suffering of Muslims around the world is due exclusively to nasty Britain and America is widely believed, despite the fact that it is so obviously not the truth. And it is this widespread belief that allows people who blow up civilians in peacetime Britain to say it's about foreign policy.

Put simply, we are allowing the killing of people on our streets to be legitimised by a faux argument.

Abu Muhammed is not the first wanker to go on record to say this kind of stuff. Interview any student, Muslim or not, and you'll get much the same sort of rubbish. Or any liberal of whatever age for that matter. I don't know why in the guardianmedia article the director thinks he has to explain why they needed to 'air' this particular side of the 'debate', because this particular 'debate' is the oxygen around here.

Do me a favour. Next time someone talks to you about us attacking Iraq, ask them how they feel about us going into attack Darfur. Hopefully their poorly wired brains will cause a spark that will make their heads explode.

I'M BACK!

Many apologies for the disappearance, and much thanks to Mr Scribbles for his many hours on the phone to some BT call centre in India. Also thanks to Poppa Scribbles who spent a day around our house waiting for a BT engineer to show up.

And thank you, dear reader, for not abandoning me.