As a sufferer of vertigo (I even get a rush of fear, nausea and exhileration if I drop something down the stairs!) these pictures caused me much discomfort and some amazement.  I recommend a look.

From The Guardian

Through these bruising encounters I realised that many people who post comments on news stories already have their mind made up – and are unlikely to engage in any rational debate. So it is with sadness but no surprise that I heard about the BBC discussion forum which asked users of its African news website whether homosexuals should be executed. In context, and sadly, while inflammatory, it  is not such a stupid question to ask – as it refers to a programme on the World Service highlighting the shocking news that the Ugandan Parliament is considering a bill which would see gay activity punishable by the death sentence in Uganda.

I don’t really know where to start with this story.  Lets just say, though that we leave aside the shocking implications of this bill, and the continued and frustrating refusal of countries across Africa to recognise sexual orientation as a basic human right; and the wrongheadedness of the BBC in using what must be seen as a deliberately provocative title to their forum (it has now been changed to the more considered “Should Uganda debate gay execution?”).  What I’d like to look at is the inevitable commentary that this story provoked.

The comments which The Guardian pointed out in their report on the story have now been removed, so that Chris, from Guildford, who said at 8.59am yesterday “”Totally agree. Ought to be imposed in the UK too, asap. Bring back some respectable family values. Why do we have to suffer ‘gay pride’ festivals? Would I be allowed to organise a ’straight pride’ festival? No, thought as much!! If homosexuality is natural, as we are forced to believe, how can they sustain the species? I suggest all gays are put on a remote island somewhere and left for a generation – after which, theoretically there should be none left!”

This one, from Caiyai in London, is still there however: “I can see why the leaders of Africa has impose this bill. Take a look at the world and what people are doing. The traditional laws and ways of life seems to be irrelevent and eroding away to those who have accepted certain ways with society now. We have forgotten the value and purpose of life.  Not because the western countries has laws that protect them and their sexual preference/ needs. That does not mean that another country should adhere to these rules”.

The beeb has obviously now censored the debate and while some very dubious comments remain, it is now a broadly speaking civilised exchange of views (albeit many of them ones I personally find deeply unsettling). But what really makes me lose my faith in humanity in all its variety of views and standpoints is that it takes this sort of editing to ensure that this is the case.

The expenses weren’t honoured – it was more the audacity of the attempt to claim which The Telegraph (and where do I start with the irresponsibility of their reporting of the whole expenses swizz?) pounced on.

Now the charming Mr Ingall says the publicity has harmed his business, and sales of the islands have plummeted from 15 in 2007, to two in 2009.

As widely reported today on the BBC, Mr Ingall said “The trouble is that my duck island has really become the icon of the bad guys… People are not ordering the garden follies that I produce quite like they were.”

As examples of his work include Scottish Castle hen house (left, price on application)  a Venetian Villa bird table (centre, £763.75) and the budget Queen Anne Dog Kennel (right, £2,232.50), is it not possible that people have better things to spend their money on during a recession?  Or even that there’s been a collective realisation of the utter tastelessness of these items?

Meanwhile, on other pages of their website:

I’ve just finished reading Glover’s Mistake, and the main character is a blogger. Like so many who live out their lives online he’s an incomplete person – whose insecurities manifest themselves in behaviour which is entirely self-serving, and who is haunted by the fact that life is being lived by other people and not by himself – and his blog is the only thing which affords him any self-respect. What he writes is self-conscious and sneering, of course, and no great advert for writing a blog, but it made me realise I miss the discipline of writing which this affords me, and so decided to resurrect it.

So I googled “broken word press blog”, found a guy (or woman?) called Zulf, from bloginstallationservice.com, and he got the whole thing up and running again. Even my theme – now completely incompatible with the modern WP – was rescued, and so here I am now, ready to go.  Just as soon as I’ve cleared out the 73,468 comments.

Now what to write about…

So I put on my thinking cap and here are the terms I used, and what they found (total 31479)

viagra 1066 cialis 946 loans 2599 lesbian 891 tranny 253 juicy 40 girl 1719 teen 855 shoe 98 bisexual 33 smoking 81 diet 1750 phentermine 1786 britney 59 dvd 140 poker 2030 bondage 197 gucci 25 price 181 baseball 34 video 594 magazine 93 discount 172 wholesale 63 auto 1560 health 1359 medical 114 catalog 618 professional 35 pharmacy 1135 xanax 308 nude 1409 tit 1400 escort 97 photo 297 gay 510 free 2640 pics 126 anal 330 hentai 292 full 150 interracial 20 ballantine 2 rotary 14 aaa 97 outlet 35 casino 1799 hotel 201 election 4 news 3555 mp3 33 exercise 8 sex 3131 adult 67 homeowners 394 mortgage 851 music 82 pussy 599 ipod 33 america 330 home 1992 insurance 2770 rental 121 cheap 154 voucher 1 samples 2 designer 17 oral 60 mature 96 roulette 262 dog 77 puppy 12 cat 692 asian 108 hair 171 porn 258 amateur 96 visa 148 japan 53 black 437 actual 664 travel 59 bbw 42 buy 183 prozac 18 prescription 25 links 907 information 3486 reviews 601 bang 13 learn 12 texas 167 soma 43 movie 71 spam 289 shaved 15 cunt 67 naked 20 ass 378 fuck 20 indian 71 women 4 suck 14 pretty 3 cute 5 young 7 bible 16 site 1004 research 267 foto 10 pic 154 tattoo 19 ka-ka-sh-ka 3589 game 63 value 189 poem 4 car 1932 friend 192 beer 3 bar 37 store 26 bag 33 book 350 move 53 job 15 intro 225 myspace 11 source 80 tv 10 hot 327 http 2672

The last one was because I couldn’t think of any more actual terms to pull out of the gobbledegook with which I was left at this point, so I tried to capture all. As there happened to be under the maximum amount in the list at this point, it displayed all results, I unchecked legitimate comments, and thankfully deleted the rest.

Now to find wordpresses’ spam plug in…

The new series has been less well received in our household. For a start, the presenter, Victoria Coren, had begun edging her way onto the shortlist for the list of “personalities” of whom my tolerance is very low. Also on this list (reasons in parentheses) are June Sarpong (that voice), Keira Knightly (the whole smug package), and Aishleyne from last year’s Big Brother (she looks like her breath smells of onions – the list of her other offences would not fit in the space of one blog). (And excuse the excessive use of brackets, but yes, I am aware that all of my pet-hates are women, but I don’t think, as Babyfather seems to, that this necessarily means anything.)

Victoria (Vicky as she likes to call herself) presented such a simpering, self-satisfied persona to the cameras that it began to seriously erode the pleasure the programme gave me. The mock-flirtatious smiles, coupled with an accent which I imagine Victoria herself (I will not use a diminutive for her) believes to be cut-glass, became too much for me and I began hoping that she would be cut down to size by the guardians of the OED to whom she submitted her weekly findings. Stern and academic, they presented a nice foil to her capricious flippancy, and a couple of cutting words from them would surely have stemmed the stream of her twittering.

In addition to this, our Friday night schedule was already full, and with Ugly Betty, Peep Show (now finished – and thank goodness, with the “watching through the gaps between my fingers” horror that some of the episodes accomplished), Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Eastenders, and more recently the double whammy of Big Brother plus eviction show, our sky plus was already creaking through over use. So something had to go and it was B&P.

That notwithstanding, it is to the idea behind the programme that I owe this blog entry. For I have coined a new word of which I am proud, and I want it recorded here for posterity.

Last week Babyfather and I were having one of the wondering conversations which we have of an evening, and the word forelock was mentioned by one of us. We discussed its origin and I wondered if fetlock was so named because it’s a piece of hair above a foot. (It is, I’ve just checked.) So forelock is hair on a forehead, fetlock is hair on a foot. So far so simple. But I began pondering other possible variants, and came up with the coinage knoblocks. It may not look like much at first, but say it aloud a couple of times. Allow the second syllable to roll off your tongue and enjoy its comedy potential.

I’ve written a possible dictionary entry:

Knoblocks pronounciation ‘näb-”läk NOUN. The locks of hair which grow on the pubic bone above the genitalia. Originally coined for use with reference to a man’s anatomy, it became used for both male and female pudenda when the person who coined the word consigned mingelocks to the dustbin of etymological history.

I’ve timestamped this entry. We first discussed it last Thursday 31 May. And maybe when it’s in the OED or the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, or wherever it will first be honoured, this little blog entry will help ensure that Victoria Coren doesn’t get her knoblock nets in a twist.

But, most upsettingly for me, Busy and Blonde’s uncle, Mike Davies, chairperson of the Combined Harare Residents’ Association, was arrested with them. Mike is also a close friend of my parents, and I phoned my mum but they had no more news than what we already knew: lawyers were being denied access, and Professor Arthur Mutambara (the leader of the side of the opposition party which split from Morgan Tsvangirai’s last year) was missing. Missing is not a good thing to be in a Zimbabwean prison.

We have trickles of news coming through today, but more annoyingly, floods of rumours too. Many of these masquerade as news, and if you type in Zimbabwe on the Google news site as I write, you will likely still see a story which says that Mike and two others he was arrested with had been transferred to the Goromonzi torture centre. This is a relic of colonial days which, along with the intelligence body the CIO which used it then and now, Mugabe retained in his government, in what would be an amusing Orwellian parody if it wasn’t so bloody awful. High profile detainees there have included Philip Chiyangwa (cousin to Mugabe, and supposed ring-leader of an espionage ring passing Zimbabwe’s secrets to the South African government), and Ray Choto and Mark Chavunduka, journalists at the Zimbabwe Standard arrested in 1999 and tortured by the army. It’s not a good place to be, but we soon hear that Mike isn’t there, but in the relative safety of Highlands police station – in the leafy Northern Suburbs most popular among the remaining middle class white Zimbabwean. Which cells in which police station matter in these circumstances – some are definitely worse than others. As my younger brother – who, in his time as a young idealist political activist in Zimbabwe, spent time in most of them, good and bad, around Harare – will tell you, some of them are notorious for bed bugs, some for lice, some for cockroaches. Catching TB is a huge risk, and the standards of cleanliness vary from one to another, although none of them are clean. And those are just the comfort issues. If they want to torture you, you’re more likely to go to certain stations or camps.

Not knowing for sure is a really hard thing to cope with, and for that more than anything I sympathise with all of Mike’s family, at home and over here. We’ve had emails through from his family back home to say they now know he is definitely at Highlands, and one from my mum to say it looks like a bail hearing is set for tonight. So at least they should get to see him. If that is, in fact, true. I’ve lost count of the times in the past I’ve had phone calls to say my mum, stepdad, or brother have been arrested back home for various supposed transgressions against the regime, but I thought we’d stopped having to worry about this sort of thing. Until contact is made, it doesn’t matter that the sensible 99% of you knows that all will be well, that the police know the world’s eyes are on them and will be too scared to perpetrate severe acts of violence, that the people arrested are savvy and resourceful, you can’t help thinking that they are suffering with the 1% of your brain too worried to be sensible.

In the meantime, Mugabe announced today his intention to stand in the next elections, meaning if he wins (and how can we believe different given recent elections) he will be 90 when the next term of office runs out, and his dictatorship will have lasted 34 years. In the meantime, the man shot dead leaves behind a widow and three children of school age. In the meantime, Morgan Tsvangirai, president of one side of the split MDC has been seen with severe swellings, and with injuries limiting his vision and preventing speech. He has apparently passed out several times. Having ascertained that Mike is at Highlands Police Station, we are left wondering where are those who were supposed to be with him at Goromonzi: Nelson Chamisa, the Member of Parliament for Kuwadzana, and Elton Mangoma the MDC deputy treasurer. Mutambara’s whereabouts are still unknown, and Lovemore Madhuku, National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) Chairman was rushed to hospital with a broken arm and other serious injuries early in the morning. A human rights lawyer trying to see his clients, at one of the police stations to which they were believed to have been taken, was assaulted, and denied access to them.

And last night, in the streets of Highfields, the high density suburb where the rally was due to take place, police continued to clash with ordinary citizens, assaulting members of the public who, in the absence of anything better, armed themselves with stones to fight off an attack by water cannons, tear gas and guns.

So we found ourselves scrabbling for seats in the cafe, ignoring a bizarre altercation in which racist insults were being hurled, all, it would seem, because of the refusal of one person to give another a match with which to light his cigarette. Babyfather was feeding Doodle (nee Bubble), the parents were talking to some friends who happened to be there, and looking round I saw the front page of what passes locally for the Sunday Papers, depicting a lifeless Saddam Hussein suspended by the neck.

I have ambiguous and vacillating views on the execution of Saddam Hussein. On the one hand, I oppose the death penalty entirely. I think that no person, or group of people, can claim the right to decide to end a person’s life. On the other, isn’t that exactly what he did, several hundreds of thousands of times over in the course of the last few decades? On the one hand, the people whose family were amongst those hundreds of thousands deserved closure. On the other, the conviction leading to his execution was only for a hundred and fifty odd of those, and many, including the Kurds, feel he should have been held accountable for all of his atrocities. On the one hand, his hanging serves as a rallying call to those who still supported his regime. On the other, his continuing to live was considered by many who had opposed his regime to be proof that he could return.

All of these points have been endlessly debated in the many media which always serve as the platform for such cogitation. But there is something beyond the easily circumscribed ‘issues’ which has bothered me about the news. When I had heard, the day before, that he had been executed, we had been on a jaunt out of newspaper range in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and I hadn’t been aware it was due to happen. It left me cold and I am still struggling to work out why. Perhaps because a part of me felt that it was just and fitting, and I was disconcerted to feel this reaction to the news of someone’s execution. Present with us on our jaunt was an old family friend, Lawyer, who said ‘well, you either believe in the death penalty or you don’t.’ Younger Brother, whose opposition to the Mugabe regime resulted in him suffering personally, and losing friends to politically motivated murder, said that he supported the Saddam decision, and I recalled agreeing with him when he said that the most just punishment for Mugabe wouldn’t be to execute him, but to let him loose, unarmed and unguarded, onto the streets of a high density suburb where the poverty and repression he had inflicted on the masses are such that in their anger, YB believed that they would turn on him. I am not so sure now that I would support this – for it, too, would satisfy a blood lust which seems to me to be at odds with the idea of justice. And even if justice is being meted out to someone who has caused incomprehensible suffering, do we not have cause to worry if we get a frisson of satisfaction out of seeing even the most execrable man die?

Skip forward, and back in Harare airport Parents, Babyfather and myself were discussing it, and I was asserting my belief that the English papers wouldn’t show those pictures because of good taste holding sway. Babyfather wasn’t so sure.

Skip forward again – to a semi-deserted Sainsbury’s on New Year’s morning, populated by walking wounded of the night before, a few elderly people wondering aimlessly and a nose-ringed couple staring quizzically at the Belazu products on the ‘posh product’ shelf. We’d arrived back at the flat the night before, three hours late at around 10 after an eventual journey time of around 18 hours. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa before midnight, and having woken up to an empty fridge, gone out to supply us with the makings of breakfast. I was looking forward to coffee and croissants, a little light levity in the papers as they discussed the New Years honours. But inevitably, the image which greeted me on the front page of The Guardian was again of the hanged man. And I was angry at the paper for not allowing me to decide myself if I want to join the hordes worldwide gorging on images on the event on YouTube. Queen of Cakes, who works for The Guardian, says that it is just a representation of an historical event. And the thrust of that particular article was, indeed, about the fact that the images were around the world almost immediately – and that a grainy camera phone video clip made the execution available to anyone who wishes to see it. Later in the paper a very well-written obituary level-headedly charted Saddam’s life. I hadn’t known much about it. About his murder as a teenager of three people to prove his machismo to male relatives. Of the whimsy with which he would order people executed. Or the lack of any kind of belief system to underpin his political aspiration.

The comments on YouTube have been predictably puerile. Almost Beavis and Butthead-ian in the ‘cools’ and drooling ‘wows’. The last minutes before he hanged, it has been revealed today, were filled with taunts and insults from bystanders. And yes, he deserved nothing less. And yes, it’s one life in exchange for the many that this butcher took. And yes, maybe justice has been served. But it still bothers me that we all have to participate in a global feeding frenzy at his corpse.

I can no longer ignore the comments on here from my three regular readers, and I have to profess, nay proclaim proudly, a similar obsession with this year’s The Apprentice. Wednesday night has, for the past nine weeks, seen me comfortably settled at 9 o’clock, mobile phone to hand so that The Queen of Cakes and I can exchange textual insights about the jaw dropping events which inevitably unfold in each episode.

I have thrown cushions at the television in frustration, most notably when Syed wouldn’t let ‘the A Team’ idea go, when the girls did the kitten calendar for the kiddies charity, when Sir Alan fired Karen, the only girl who at that point was not dependent on cheap feminine trickery in trying to get ahead. I had to physically restrain myself from hurling heavier things at the screen when Nargis embarked on her disastrous pitch, when both teams created ads reminiscent of cheap 70s soft-porn videos for Sir Alan’s exclusive flight service, when Syed eyed up the semi-naked girl in the Topshop changing room, when the boys’ idea of design for a calendar they had to pitch to top buyers at such shops as Harrods looked like your aunt’s local hospice’s annual tea-time fundraising flyer.

I have managed to conquer my initial instincts to support the nicer people, and recognise that the bullish Badger, for all her eye-narrowing, nose-wrinkling and lip-distorting when her competitors try to big themselves up, is probably the best person for the job. So I understood when the sweet but completely useless Alexa got fired. Likewise the first episode when it was the turn of Ben, whose entire pitch seemed to depend on a sympathy vote because he’s beaten cancer. I still hope that Ansell, who is also a good salesman, but somehow more personable than Ruth, wins. I also harbour a secret hope that he and the Badger will mate and produce little offspring. As the Q of C responded when I posited this to her in a text message last night ‘they’d be so cute… and chubby… and golden brown…’

Yesterday, however, I was completely torn. Tuan was an idiot. Board member and Sir Alan’s former PR Nick pointed out halfway through the task that Tuan should have taken note from the comments Sir Alan directed at him in last week’s boardroom – he needed to show he can sell, and can’t just stay in the background. But by taking on team leader role, he obviously thought he could look like he was doing something. Instead he was the only one of 6 people left who failed to let a single flat, and Syed saved himself by going out and frogmarching some innocent passers-by to a flat and then almost begging them on bended knees to lease it. Despite this, however, and despite knowing that it was the only thing Sir Alan could have done, I would have been happier if Syed had been fired. He is deceitful, rude, bullying, manipulative, malicious and stupid. He is so filled with arrogance that he can’t see when he’s cocked up – even trying to blame Tuan for the fact that he took the wrong keys on two occasions to viewings in last night’s show.

The two best bits of entertainment yesterday, as on most shows, came courtesy of Syed. The first was when he was standing next to a railway bridge which makes some of the local Hackney arches look palatial, talking on his mobile to a client who was lost on Wandsworth bridge, and confidently stating that he was standing next to Wandsworth bridge. This, for non-London-savvy viewers, crosses the Thames and is rather grander than the fallen down construction under which Syed was standing forlornly, wearing his hard hat, and bleating to passers by ‘Nicholas? Nicholas?’ Syed is one of the Londoners in the competition. The second was when, trying to talk down Tuan’s sales style, he said that he confuses things by using “big, financial terms like ‘consultant’, and ‘variable’.”

Sir Alan must know that he can’t work with someone like Syed. But as with all of his businesses, he knows how the show is marketed, and getting rid of Syed now would leave a gaping hole in the programme. So the watery-eyed Eastend blagger lives to face another boardroom.