‘You hadn’t read that? I read that before I was…… I thought everyone had read that!’ is what I am expecting on the airing of this article. ‘How can anyone not have known about that!’ Well, I didn’t and thanks a lot friend for sharing it with me!

Antoine de Saint-Éxupery wrote ‘The Little Prince’ which I understand to be a classic and also have not read, but my eyes have never smarted, my breath has never shortened, and my heart has never missed so many beats on reading anything as on reading the first seventy pages of this other small book of his.
It was previously entitled ‘Terre des homes’ (Land of men), which the author was subsequently persuaded to change to the heading above, and it is important that you obtain the Penguin published William Rees translation, which follows his original text. Saint-Exupery’s writing is, quoting The Spectator, ‘Some of the finest prose written in this (to us, the last) century, lyrical, at times visionary, polished and still fresh.’ This translation is full of these qualities.

At its most basic, Saint-Exupery’s story is a ‘first hand’ pilot’s account of some of those who flew for the pioneer French commercial airline Latécoère, later to evolve into Air France. These men opened the world for us at a loss of life probably proportionate to that incurred over the skies of Europe in the Second World War. But we soon discover that his saga is interwoven with a host of other obtusely related and equally moving stories, all pointing as inexorably as his aircraft compass, not simply to the exploration of an unknown world, but to that of man himself.

Saint-Exupery’s approach is philosophical rather than religious, and he sees the onrushing modern world from the vantage point of his 1930’s aeroplane. He sees the impact of modern machines and what defines them. He sees their inevitability, their fascination and their danger. His writing style and ideas are not modernist, but with statements like: “It seems that perfection is obtained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of its evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.” you would be forgiven for assuming him to be not only modernist, but the first minimalist and a religious man at that.

The book divides itself into three parts. The first seventy odd pages, briefly described above is followed by an account of Saint-Exupery and his engineer’s miraculous survival from a crash in the middle of the waterless Libyan Desert, and finally there is a fourteen page reflection on the sense, the meaning, the ‘truth’, which in the very act of being we all seek. By this time he is a reporter caught up in The Spanish Civil War, and sees our world ‘cracking apart’. He is prophetic as he is profound and the dilemma he describes is as real today as it ever was. The beast has many heads but one sword will cut them all off. He has such a blade and a mighty weapon it is!

He cuts deep. He shows us our diseases and how that to truly be alive we cannot be caught up in the machine, but must be out of its control and larger than life itself.

Since the end of The Second World War, a new European identity has begun to emerge. This has been partially manufactured by ‘The Authorities’, (a conveniently anonymous phrase) but there are certain people in certain places who we can all say, are ‘European’. As someone who under protest holds a European Passport, I have to ask, who are these people, and can you please define Europe, geographically? Suddenly there is not ‘An Authority’ in sight.

The problem concerns what kind of Europe you are taking about; the Lisbon Treaty Europe, the Sporting Europe, the Eurovision Europe, the Euro Europe or the ‘Weights and Measures’ Europe.

The Lisbon Treaty is a new accord which most European governments are proceeding to ratify, when it is clear that the majority of people, at least from the main founding nations do not want it, and have had no direct say in its acceptance. What was originally envisaged was a Common Market which has morphed into an all-powerful, political institution, to be given yet more authority by this new treaty. Like being in hospital, and not allowed to go home, the only recourse is to walk out in your smock, which the Irish (who have the euro as their currency) have just done by voting ‘no’ to it. They are the lucky ones, having been given the opportunity to vote at all. The reason that the UK, France, Germany and the Benelux countries have not been afforded this inalienable right, is that opinion polls show quite clearly, that they would also vote ‘no’. The Lisbon Treaty is therefore an undemocratic travesty of the highest order, unequalled since the days of Napoleon and Hitler, but considerably more insidious than anything either of those so-called gentlemen ever cooked up.

We are on much happier (but not always solid) ground with both Sporting and Eurovision Europe. Crucially, both Turkey and Russia are included in this version. As with all International Sports, the time and distance measurements are universal, so there is nothing for anyone to adjust to. Moscow recently hosted the final of the European Championship for European ‘A’ League soccer teams and Austria and Switzerland hosted The European Soccer Cup of Nations. In a sporting sense, the larger version of Europe is shown to be a very workable construct, although England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all field their own soccer teams, rather than compete as team UK. Therefore they get knocked out prior to the main contest. Good thinking, guys!

Eurovision is another thing. There are TV Euro News channels, which must have an audience, but who knows where, and there is famously the Eurovision Song Contest. Here we have a true indicator of the less than solid ground which culturally Europe stands on. The UK’s popular music stems from America, and it punches well above its weight with it’s own top class productions, but whilst Europeans listen and buy this music in great quantity, they are not natural producers of it. The exception to prove the rule are the minority, ethnic populations of some European countries who have made Hip–Hop their own. The natural beats of Europe range from the Northern Oom-Pa-Pa to the Southern Latin rhythms. It is no surprise that the UK regularly registers a last place in The Eurovision Song Contest, while its musical product easily outsells the grand total of all the others. Jazz is Europe’s only universal music, and does not feature in the Eurovision Song Contest, the last winner of which was a Russian vocalist, accompanied by a solo violinist and an ice skater.

When it comes to currency, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and the UK all have their own money, and not the Euro. The fact is that the UK’s economic pulse, as with music, is tied to America. This is clear historically and particularly at present where the Euro is surging ahead of both UK sterling and the American dollar. It is an inconvenient truth as far as ‘The Authorities’ are concerned, who are particularly determined to create a ‘critical mass’ by adding both the UK and these other very prosperous nations to the Euro currency world.

In terms of weights and measures, the European land mass has a single standard throughout, but again, the UK is a half-way house. It has now adopted kilos and litres, although many are still not sure of exactly what they are, and yes it has Centigrade not Fahrenheit, but it also has inches, feet and miles, not centimetres, metres, and kilometres, although metric measurements (at least in terms of property) have to be given by law. The UK therefore has two sets of measurements, metric and imperial, on all property details.

I have written all this to show how desperately Europe is trying to be something that it is not, while not being something that it is. And yes, of course Russia and Turkey should be part of the equation; the trading equation. As in sport, greater Europe should share the same terms of measurement, but let us leave it at that. Individual liberty and basic democracy is being sacrificed in the name of European ‘unification’, when there is nothing there to unify. The European nations are as different as chalk and cheese. They can either be united in the glorification of that fact, or under the cloak of those who know how to make jobs for the boys and ram square pegs into round holes. And you know what they will say when things inevitably come apart at the seams? After decades of secret deals, of avoiding referendums, and of carefully seeded misinformation, they will all claim that it was nothing to do with them, but just an unfortunate accident.

Relationships are incidental, work is incidental, being is not. Most of our day-to-day involvements are split between relationships and work, and up until very recently, this was necessary for all but the most rigorously spiritual of beings.

What is surprising is how the wealthy seem to have stuck to this relationship/work regimen, when their money has freed them from the necessity of following that path. Those that break away for this stereotype seem in fact to come from all backgrounds, and have many different philosophies. They are proportionally few in number, and often they reject their family and friends or a ‘steady job’, but not always both.

The merit that society attaches to a person being ‘hard working’ and ‘popular’ obviously maintains the status quo, but is overworked to the extreme, and in it’s present form is nothing short of insidious. A moment’s thought must be given to why we are here and what we are for. This can only be given perspective by looking at where we have come from, what we are doing, and why?

It is often said that ‘the best things in life are free’, but it seems that the best things are not as important to us as the things that cost, be they children, houses, cars, white goods, etc. I hear you say, ‘But children are the best thing.’ Well maybe they are, but you can’t possibly say that they are free. They are free to make, although people often spend as ton of money setting up for the event, but they certainly are not free to have around. Children are part and parcel of life, but they are incidental to your being; yes, as is the rest of your family, your friends and your work.

I am not advocating some kind of a spiritual solution, but I do see that our social environment is beginning to threaten the personal freedom that we have fought so long and hard for. Whereas communism was something to be battled against, Chinese totalitarianism, for example seems to be something to be almost admired and it is easy to see left wing political thought in the west looking over it’s shoulder somewhat enviously at a structure which allows those in charge to get on with things without the inefficiency and bother of the democratic process. I would also accuse the most capitalist, the most democratic of the world’s nations of turning both rich and poor into hamsters on a wheel. Technology is what makes all this control possible and it recognises no political boundaries.

No, it is not enough to be hardworking and popular. It is not enough for anyone’s life to be reduced to an education, a job a family and so many weeks of vacation a year. If you think that is why you are here and what you are for, then I am truly sad, not just for you but for all those who you probably think you are doing so well by.

It is also not about adventure, and the wind in your hair. It is more about who you are, as ‘The Who’ asked. If you don’t know, it is time you found out. Be yourself, know yourself, have time for yourself, positively indulge yourself, be someone special or be no one at all.

We witness evolution on a regular basis. Whether it is Scottish mountain sheep forced off grazing land onto an island shore, where within a few generations they become dependant on seaweed, or welsh hedgehogs who in fifty years no longer freeze in the face of a car’s headlights, but run as fast as their little legs can carry them, or lizards placed on an island with few insects but much vegetation, where in thirty years they develop a new digestive system capable of more efficiently processing their new diet. In the case of the lizards, they say that thirty years for them is equivalent to a few hundred years for us. Evolution is dependant on generational turnover and ours is a lot slower than the comparatively short lived lizards.

The examples that I have listed above depend on the animals being placed in new circumstances which require their adaptation. Over the last few hundred years, our physical circumstances have become easier, so on a physical level, we have nothing much to adapt to. I don’t doubt that this is the root cause of the increase in allergies, cancers, and the like. While in earlier times, the subjects of these illnesses simply died, now they often survive and procreate, thereby perpetuating the illness which they suffer from.

However, on a mental level, we have every reason to adapt to our rapidly changing situation, and I wonder who we would meet twenty-four generations ahead of where we are today. As I say, I doubt whether we would be physically changed (unless we become the subject of genetic engineering) but would our mental make-up be the same?

We live in an increasingly specialist society and one ‘Brave New World’ scenario might be for specialist minds to evolve to the point that there would be little correspondence between the various groups. This makes a good story, but the inconsistent way our genes work, picking out facets from our grandparents and beyond make me doubt it. Added to this is the human fascination with physical beauty, causing unions between those who otherwise have little in common.

But there is a possibility that a more objective, sympathetic strand might develop within us. Our tribal background has been sufficiently strong for uncountable millions of us to have been ravaged by a never ending series of wars, but now it seems that more and more of us will simply not take sides. I remember in the sixties a friend saying that if there was a fight he would be the first to run (just like the hedgehogs). At the time, this was not a common point of view, and I don’t think it is now, but it is certainly more widespread. This does not directly equate with ‘pacifist’ or CND sentiment. It is less political and more personal and I can see how this might in time become part of our nature. We would of course fight if our backs were against a wall, but it would need more than aspersions concerning our birth, manhood, faith or nationality to trigger such an event.

Also, we might become more perceptive. I think that we are starting to realize that language can only take us so far along the road of personal understanding, and a more intuitive nature would be a great help, not only in relating to ourselves but to all other living things.

Some well known spiritual figures might well posses or have possessed these qualities, but my vision is not so visionary. A little less temper and a little more feeling would be quite enough to take us down the line.

This is the title of a newly published book by Mark Leonard. Mr Leonard discusses the thoughts and aims of Chinese intellectuals and the policy-making elite. Occasionally, he drifts towards the popular attitude to these various propositions, but these are infrequent diversions, perhaps because there is not much point in discussing the general public’s attitude to concepts over which they have no influence. This is not to suggest that the Chinese people do not consider these things. I suspect that they do and that political (one could almost say ‘philosophical’) thought is very much part of the Chinese make-up. Indeed political philosophy plays a major role in this book. We have parables of horses painted to look like zebras, until the people become used to the stripes at which point true zebras can replace the horses. But this is not a concoction of poetic anecdotes. I don’t doubt that it truly represents political thinking in China. Mr Leonard, with his think-tank background is the ideal person to tackle this picturesque intellectualism and his enthusiasm for it is contagious.

What is unexpected is the clarity that he brings to the subject, and there is the comforting knowledge that behind the all-encompassing Chinese one party system, there inevitably are two main factions. These are presently The New Left and The New Right. Alongside such intellectual dissertation comes fascinating real time experimentation exampled by ‘inner-party democracy’. It seems however, that China is only dabbling with democracy, and in fact has moved away from it’s wider application, having realized that it has little or no influence on economic development, (why they ever thought it might, I can’t imagine) and more pertinently that it could lead to the break-up of what is actually an Empire of many disparate parts, much the same as Russia was, pre-Gorbachev. Mark Leonard relates that in many of their eyes, Democracy = Chaos and my own reflection is that what they in China term ‘incremental democracy’ is in fact what we in the West are the result of, and are still evolving from.

The clarity of Leonard’s book points to a fundamental naiveté which might derive from the intelligentsia of a country that up until now has had little interaction with the rest of the world, but is that truly the case? Is this in fact the naiveté of all political intellectuals, and as a consequence of Mr Leonard himself?

He does observe however, that behind all this political speculation the Chinese leaders show adeptness at realpolitik. They are world-wise enough to see that in the international arena ‘swagger’ as he puts it, gains a country less than a more conciliatory stance. He goes on to say that China is using the United Nations as a powerful amplifier and is not only changing the balance of power in many parts of the world, but also ensuring the importance of national sovereignty.

On this latter point, I must take issue with Mr Leonard. To my mind, China’s adherence to what Mr Leonard calls ‘an older idea of sovereignty’, only goes as far as it suits them. The rules of not invading other countries, not trying to overthrow regimes, and above all not interfering in the internal affairs of other states, did not apply to Tibet and would not apply to Taiwan. It is a stick with which to goad those nations that see it as their duty to call a halt to genocide, nuclear proliferation, or possibly a regime that is imploding on itself. By purporting to have this ‘older idea’, China conveniently relieves itself of these duties, and actively criticises those who are prepared to get their hands dirty. It is nothing more than an excuse, and a poor one, at that.

Returning to the book; it is short and yet so full of information that I have only been able to skim the surface here. It has put me on the road to a basic understanding of contemporary Chinese thinking, which turns out to be unexpectedly refreshing, not to say charming in some ways, while obstinately stuck in a ‘Walled World’ in others. China has always been a paradox to westerners, but it is less so after reading this. Mark Leonard’s clear sighted energy exudes from every page and helps make this understanding a joy.

Our method of arriving at any given conclusion is to consider the alternatives. It is something that our success and our survival depend on. This has led to what are generally called ‘arguments’. It occurs to me that this adversarial process is now ceasing to serve us as well as it has and that we are now living in an age where to hold a specific point of view is both simplistic and dangerous.

Of course we must make decisions, but I have to question the structures that have evolved from this necessity. We are divided into camps, and whatever the question at hand, it always seems to be a matter of opting for one camp or another.

This seems to be the best that can be done in an imperfect world, but is it? Take the field of medicine. Would not a more open minded approach to ‘alternative’ and ‘oriental’ medicine have kept millions out of our hospitals, and have avoided millions of operations? I suspect so.

It is interesting that in times of war, political parties cooperate, but as soon as the conflict is over, it is back to the old ‘right and wrong’ scenario. Why do things suddenly become so black and white? Well, of course they do not. It is a construct which leads to the best manipulator of the supposed facts being the likely victor. The reality is that as soon as the structure has to work efficiently in the face of a powerful, opposing element, say in a team sport or on a ship, the concept of dispute disappears.

I recently spent a number of weeks commenting on the daily news articles posted by a left-wing, American blog. What impressed me was, to put it kindly, the ‘wishful thinking’ behind so many of the pieces. How can it be constructive to overstate the case? I have recently received two emails from people who I would normally consider to be clear thinkers. One concerned the supposed fact that the holocaust is not taught in UK schools the other concerned Ronald Reagan’s purported diary comment on George Bush’s son, ‘GW’. Both were spurious, but neither party would make a retraction or so much as apologise. They portrayed their broadcasts as ‘fun’ but they were simply lies, which is where all this ‘wishful thinking’ ends.

Satire is something else again. It is the antidote to this contentious system of ours, but that does not make the system safe and true. Satire simply makes fun out of the fact that it is not. Even if the administrators are safe and true (as I believe they usually are) the combative nature of the terrain is bound to reduce all but the most straight-backed to a compromised shadow of their former selves. There is an amusing movie where Jack Lemon and James Garner play two former US Presidents. Their own essential corruption gives the plot a much needed touch of reality, but why should this be so?

Looking at the world from another perspective, I have recently read and reviewed Mark Leonard’s book, ‘What Does China Think’. It struck me how in China much political thought is peculiarly cooperative and even experimental to western eyes. For all of China’s dictatorial pomposity, ideas can be considered objectively and rather than being espoused or rejected, there can even be a ‘test-run’.

‘It works for me,’ is all anyone can say about anything, anymore. There is no point in arguing, but every point in considering the options. We must learn how to do this without limiting our freedom.

I once knew a middle aged, family man who kept a massive collection of Playboy magazines in his cellar. He made no secret of it, even when he came to sell his house. Whether he was a collector of what might just as well have been Marvel Comics or whether this was an expression of his appreciation of female beauty or whether this was a means of stimulating his sex life, I have no idea.

Even in the heady days when it was something to see a pair of naked breasts in a magazine, Playboy had a cosy, well scrubbed look which denied its essential function; to stimulate lust. Playboy has always shied away from the description, ‘pornographic’ but lets face it, those girls pose in a way that is outside the scope of Venus de Milo. It is not art that they are selling (even though it might be) it is sex.

Hefner has always tried to convince us otherwise by means of hiring the great literary figures of the day to write a few pages which are wedged between pictures of the girls. What was wedged between the girls themselves was inferred, but otherwise left to the imagination. Lifestyle articles were also prevalent, but when you came right down to it, it was all about porn. The impression that the girls were glad to ‘put out’ at parties and such, added to the mix, but it brought the Bunnies perilously close to being labelled whores. Were they sex slaves in a gilded cage, at the mercy of the male libido? Hefner’s response was brilliant. He installed his daughter as the magazines editor. She became the Princess of porn and the girls her acolytes.

Today, in an equally well scrubbed way, a new Princess is born, and her name is Alison Angel. The magazine has morphed into a website featuring both still shots and video, and Alison is both its editor and its content. She is a drop-dead gorgeous blonde (at least most of the time) and goes further than the bunnies go, but probably not so far at parties. She plays with herself and with other girls as innocently as you please, but not with men. She is now nineteen although most of the content was shot when she was eighteen and says, “I will not shoot photo or video of…….general disrespect of Myself (and never will!).” Her website is as cosy as you could wish for, and the word ‘porn’ is never mentioned. It is a career choice. “I always wanted to be a nude model,” she unassumingly confides. And so she should be. The cool, certain way she stares out at you sets her apart from her peers. The natural pride and enjoyment she derives from running it and being it, turns the whole concept of shame and scandal on it’s err, head or tail; you choose. Go to http://www.alisonangel.com/contact.html and watch the three minute ‘Welcome’ video. The girl will go far. A Star Is Porn!

How do we restore the Olympics tarnished image? That is the question being asked after the demonstrations staged on the route of the Olympic flame-carriers.

A UK breakfast TV show asked their viewers how they felt about these demonstrations and were immediately flooded with emails saying how proud the senders were of the people carrying out those demonstrations and how proud they were to live in a country free enough for those demonstrations to have taken place.

And what exactly was the previous image of the Olympics, given the history of the Nazi inspired pre-war 1936 Berlin Event or the ‘Black September’ terrorists who killed nine Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972? Also, you may remember the 1996 bombing at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta which killed two and injured 111 others.

There is of course the possibility (which I do not back) of national boycotts. These we are told would further sully the Games harmonious reputation. Harmonious reputation? As if! We need to be reminded that The Soviet Union did not participate in the Olympics at all until the 1952 Helsinki Games, but organized alternative events for the Communist Block called ‘Spartakiads’.

The 1956 Melbourne Olympics was boycotted by the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, because of the repression of the Hungarian Uprising by the Soviet Union; additionally, Cambodia, Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon, boycotted these same games due to the Suez Crisis.

Again, in 1972 and 1976, a large number of African countries threatened the IOC with a boycott, to force them to ban South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand. The IOC conceded in the first 2 cases, but refused in 1976 because the boycott was prompted by a New Zealand rugby union tour to South Africa, and rugby was not an Olympic sport. The countries withdrew their teams after the games had started; some African athletes had already competed. A lot of sympathy was felt for the athletes forced by their governments to leave the Olympic Village. Twenty-two countries (Guyana was the only non-African nation) boycotted the Montreal Olympics because New Zealand was not banned.

Particularly relevant to the present situation is the fact that in 1976, due to pressure from the People's Republic of China (PRC), Canada told the team from the Republic of China (Taiwan) that it could not compete at the Montreal Summer Olympics under the name "Republic of China". Taiwan did not participate again until 1984, when it returned under the name "Chinese Taipei" using a special flag.

In 1980 and 1984, the Cold War opponents boycotted each other's games. Sixty-five nations refused to compete at the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but 16 nations from Western Europe did compete at the Moscow Olympics. The boycott reduced the number of nations participating to only 81, the lowest number of nations to compete since 1956. The Soviet Union and 14 of its Eastern Bloc partners (except Romania) countered by skipping the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, arguing the safety of their athletes could not be guaranteed there and "chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria are being whipped up in the United States". The 1984 boycotters staged their own Friendship Games in July-August.

Returning to the present, the government of Iran specifically orders its athletes not to compete in any Olympic heat, semi-final, or final that includes athletes from Israel. As a result, at the 2004 Olympics, an Iranian judoka who had otherwise earned his place did not compete in a heat against an Israeli judoka.

Further compromising the image of the Olympics is the issue of drugs. Looking back in time again, the winner of the marathon at the 1904 Games, Thomas J. Hicks, was given strychnine and brandy by his coach, even during the race. The first and so far only Olympic death caused by drugs occurred in 1960. At the cycling road race in Rome the Danish Knud Enemark Jensen fell from his bicycle and later died. A coroner's inquiry found that he was under the influence of amphetamines.

The first Olympic athlete to test positive for drug use was Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, a Swedish pent athlete at the 1968 Summer Olympics, who lost his bronze medal for alcohol use. Seventy-three athletes followed him over the next 38 years, several medal winners among them. The most publicized doping-related disqualification was that of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who won the 100m at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but tested positive for stanozolol.

Despite the testing, many athletes continued to use doping without getting caught. In 1990, documents were revealed that showed many East German female athletes had been unknowingly administered anabolic steroids and other drugs by their coaches and trainers as a government policy.

The recent 2000 Summer Olympics and 2002 Winter Olympics have shown that this battle is not nearly over, as several medalists in weightlifting and cross-country skiing were disqualified due to doping offences. One innocent victim of the anti-doping movement at the Olympics was the Romanian gymnast Andreea Răducan who was stripped of her gold medal-winning performance in the All-Around Competition of the 2000 Sydney games. Test results indicated the presence of the banned-stimulant pseudoephedrine which had been prescribed to her by an Olympic doctor. Raducan had been unaware of the presence of the illegal substance in the medicine that had been prescribed to her for a cold she had during the games.

During the 2006 Winter Olympics, only one athlete failed a drug test and had a medal revoked. The only other case involved 12 members with high levels of hemoglobin and their punishment was a five day suspension for health reasons.

In October 2007, American sprinter Marion Jones admitted to having taken steroids before the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics. As a result of these admissions, Jones accepted a two-year suspension and forfeiture of all medals, results, points and prizes earned after September 1, 2000. Marion Jones now faces a six-month stay in prison.

Drugs have become so sophisticated that there is every reason to believe that there will be athletes competing in Beijing this summer who have taken drugs, but remain undetected.

An interesting aside is the fact that 203 countries currently participate in the Olympics. This is a noticeably higher number than the number of countries belonging to the United Nations, which is only 193. Why, I ask myself would a country not belong to the United Nations? All the answers that I come up with do nothing to enhance the Olympics image.

My suggestion is that we ignore this bunk about the Olympics reputation and ignore the games themselves. It is unfair to ask the athletes not to compete. That is after all, what they do. It is just as unfair to expect us to watch them, hosted as they are by repressive, bullies who refuse to let their own people know what is happening in the world around them. We, not our countries must make the difference. If that comes to pass, then the Olympics will have gained something of a reputation, after all.

In the field of sporting competition, anything can happen. Sport is a form of disinterested truth, based not on right or wrong nor on who is best, but as the ancient Greeks would have it, who the Gods favour on the day. Who would foresee The New York Giants going to a sub-zero Green Bay and beating ‘The Pack’ and then going on to beat the unbeaten Patriots in The Super Bowl? Who would foresee the lowly Barnsley soccer team beating two of the top four teams in the UK in consecutive FA Cup matches? The unfathomable nature of sport is at its very heart, but of course, we are human and like to tweak things, so artifice and gamesmanship creep in.

The rule makers often are to blame. For instance in two thousand and three, they made a new rule for sprinters so that the second person who false-starts goes out of the race. It's OK to false-start the first time. So, why not do it if you think you have great control over your starts and that one of the top runners might easily false-start second time out, then you who false-started in the first place and set this situation up, will end up in their place at the end of the race? Besides, it is in the very deepest sense 'unsporting' to say to someone, "Oh, you were the second false-starter. Yes, you qualified, but unlike the guy who false-started first, you can't run."

Just run the race and decide what to do about false starters, after it is over, why don’t you? An empty lane, what is that? It is a symptom of the empty headed, empty hearted bureaucrats, who control the Olympics, World Athletics and World Soccer. They should be junked and replaced by committed sports people, likely swifter in the body and more open in the mind.

Drugs are another way of tipping the scales in a particular direction, and they say that with some of the new performance enhancing drugs, at the forthcoming Olympics they will be unable to spot the users. I will not be watching that doomed, smog-ridden event, but it does seem that other than smog, this is a cloud, that will darken sporting skies for some time to come.

There is another side to the Olympics which has been worrying me for some time and that is all this guff about ‘competing for your country’. It makes some sense in team sports, not a lot, but some, but when you have a black man from Cardiff in Wales who now lives in Australia and trains half the year in The States, it makes nonsense.

Our chests are meant to swell as we are told of the haul of medals that our Nations have collected. Some countries actually pay athletes to change nationality, while other athletes chose which Country they compete for by how likely they are to get a place on the plane. What a lot of drum-beating stupidity it all is!

But the reason I will not be watching the Olympics, has nothing to do with the drugs or the smog or the drum-beating. It is TIBET. Tibet has not been given a chance, sporting or otherwise, and this is an opportunity to make the point in the only way that seems to have any clout in the modern world. That is, by not buying into it. ’Buying’ is the operative word. NBC will lose a billion dollars if we don’t watch it, and China will lose its pants. The whole thing depends on mass audience participation, which means us. Hit them where it hurts most. Don’t just sign a petition and think that you have done your bit. Boycott this farce. Tell them to get lost.

Of course words have different inferences in different cultures and to the Chinese to give someone a ‘sporting chance’ has nothing to do with an even break. It oh, so well reflects what this Olympics is about. It means to take a gamble.

An orange must have been called an orange because of its colour, but then why wasn’t a lemon called a yellow? Orange is the only one of the seven main colours to have a fruit named after it. There are of course lesser examples such as aubergine, but orange has cut its swathe across our lives to become part of our history and part of almost every day.

We talk of red heads or possibly ginger, but not of orange heads even though orange is more accurate than red, and with today’s hair colouring often more so than anything else. Britain associates the hair colour with a trio of its most famed women leaders; Boudicca, Queen Elizabeth the First, and Margaret Thatcher. These were three ladies who you didn’t want to mess with, and today it is difficult to imagine a brunette or blonde ever obtaining that status. Somehow, the words themselves seem to rule that out. Brunettes and blondes just sound too soft and attractive. Possibly a little orange hair dye is all Hillary needs to join the immortal ranks of those mentioned above.

William of Orange came to Britain to save us from Catholicism, and he in turn not only spawned the Orange Men who march across Northern Ireland and down the Eastern seaboard of America, but he also caused the carrot to be orange. It was brown before, but just like Coca Cola turned Santa Clause from green to red, William kept cloning the more orange carrots until the browns became history. William came from Holland and to this day, orange is the colour of their soccer team and probably much more that I don’t know about.

And what is breakfast without orange juice? As much as common sense tells us that grapefruit juice, (what has ‘grapefruit’ to do with grapes?) or any one of a number of other juices would do equally well, the fact is that while some may stray, the vast majority of us confirm that the day must start with the juice of an orange.

First there was the ‘bitter’ orange, which came from Persia and grew all over Southern Europe, then in the fifteenth century the sweet orange arrived from India and quickly replaced it. When these fruit reached the hands and mouths of Northern Europeans, Orangery’s soon followed. In fact a nobleman of that era might just as easily have said, ‘come and see my oranges’ as ‘come and see my etchings’. But why Orangery’s and not Lemonary’s, or even Fruitary’s? The colour and taste of the orange must combine to provide the answer. The colour is as warm as the evening sun and its round shape further reminds us of it. The taste is sweet and yet citric, but that is only part of the story. There seems to be some kind of spice in there. It is exotic without being saccharine and quite unmistakable. It not only reminds us of the Sun, but is the Sun in a galaxy of citrus fruits around which they all revolve.

I had a small, convertible car in Los Angeles for maybe ten years. Its colour was orange. I now have a slightly larger yellow cabriolet. But the car is no lemon. It must have an orange soul.

I caught sight of a chimney sweep and took him for a slave. It was an easy mistake. His face was black and he looked distressed. I suddenly saw that he was as much a slave as the Africans before him. We have had many slaves since slavery was banned.

Slavery is older than prostitution, but few have made it a profession. Africans were enslaving Europeans long before Europeans were enslaving them. The Corsairs sailed from North African Ports and pillaged their way up the Atlantic Coast as far as Scandinavia. Their victims were corralled onto their ships and sailed back to the waiting African slave markets, from where (apart from the prettiest boys and girls, and the strongest young men) they were marched off to their fate, somewhere in the interior.

The British Navy finally blasted the Corsairs out of existence, but in the main, the North Africans were excused the slavery they had inflicted on others. They were just left slave less. For them, Central Africa, not Europe, had always been the major source of slaves, and under the new European regime, these slaves were simply diverted from their various North African destinations to the West Indies and America. In other words, the Europeans took over an existing operation, and enlarged it. I am afraid that there is no patent on man’s inhumanity to man. We are all capable of the most sickening sins against each other, no matter our colour or creed.

Slavery is as prevalent as it ever was; child workers in India, prostitutes from Eastern Europe, foreign domestics, children abused by those in authority, women used as chattel, the list is almost endless.

Slavery is deeply imbedded in our psyche. So much so, that we often equate it with love. It is an expression of power and control and has many hidden implications. It is hard to say where all this begins and ends. ‘Duty’ and ‘vocation’ are subtle forms of slavery, and the prospect of wealth can easily enslave. At the end of the day, we are slaves to ourselves. We are slaves to our ambitions.

But don’t try to smack me on the bum or strap a spiked collar around my neck. I don’t want to be your slave and have no intention of enslaving you. Slavery is like bird flu. It recognises no boundaries, is highly infectious, and can thrive under our very noses. The very birth of Democracy took place in a slave zone called Ancient Greece, and most if not all of the early civilizations were founded on bedrocks of slavery. You could say that civilization and slavery went hand in hand.

No animals that I know of have a similar arrangement, and yet we are the ones who are meant to be civilised. I can’t help feeling that an extraterrestrial would like animals a lot more than he, she or it would like us. In fact, it seems that slavery, wars, and the desecration of the planet have been our hallmark. As far as the earth is concerned, the sooner we either blow ourselves up, or bugger off into space, the better. Yes, we are slaves to ourselves and we are the pandemic.

My Aunt always used to say, ‘when in doubt smile’. I have relied upon that advice and although nothing can make you feel more like The Village Idiot than smiling at someone for no apparent reason, it does work.

It has been put to me that animals cannot smile. I am told that we just think that they are smiling. I am not sure if this is meant to mean that animals physically cannot smile, because they don’t have the requisite facial muscles, or because they don’t have the emotion that goes with smiling. If it is the second hypothesis, then it would be necessary to identify all the various emotions that can be expressed by smiling. A moment’s thought is enough to realize that you can smile about most things. Someone smiling through their tears, pulls at the heart strings as almost nothing else can, which playwrights and movie makers are well aware of.

Now, I personally think that dogs and elephants are particularly good at smiling, and I have no doubt that they are also smiling on the inside. Physically, their smiles are not quite like our smiles, but they all seem to involve a change in the shape and openness of the mouth and I am completely convinced that they are in fact smiling because they are generally pleased with what is going on, or because they find it funny. My guess is that elephants are particularly big on humour.

On the other hand, a chimpanzee who is closest to us genetically, often gives the biggest grin, but I don’t think that has anything to do with smiling at all. It is a grimace, not really a grin and certainly not a smile. A porpoise is something else again. It is always smiling. That is just the way its jaw is set, and this combined with its naturally inquisitive and playful nature makes us wonder what happy drug it’s on. And there is a grain of truth in it. Overall the porpoise is a friendly, happy-go-lucky creature, but I am told that there are times when it is downright vicious and no doubt it keeps smiling all the time.

The smile painted on a clown’s face is also fixed and can hide a myriad of emotions. One of Marvel Comics greatest creations, The Joker is constantly smiling, but what dark, twisted thoughts lie behind it! Then there is of course the famous crocodile smile, and the imagined smile of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Both mask dark intent, but they don’t mask it too well or children would not be scared of them

But in a world of smiling salesmen and women, promoting everything from alcohol to holy water, in the smiling world of stage and screen and news casting, the falsest of all smiles belongs elsewhere. You have probably guessed it; the mother of all smiles belongs to the politician. They smile when they come into office and they smile when they leave. They smile when they are at peace and they smile when they are at war. They are always smiling at you. They have steely smiles, and commanding smiles, they have needy smiles and demanding smiles. They have just about every damn kind of smile you can think of. If we are not careful, they will smile us right off the planet.

I will conclude my list with the most enigmatic of smiles; the Giaconda Smile. Why have I saved this till last? Well, because it is the one that hides its secret best and is likely the last smile to ever cross our lips.

Since the end of the First World War, the world has swung between left and right wing philosophies, until I suppose inevitably, the line between the two has blurred. This is perhaps hardest to accept in a country like the United States, which calls itself ‘free and democratic’ while running a two party system.

It is generally supposed that the Republicans are right wing and the Democrats are left wing, and seen in its best light the Republicans front the ‘laisez-fair’ approach, while the Democrats are more for social justice. Tellingly, they would not argue with the quality that I have attributed to their philosophy, but would say that they also encompass the quality I have attributed to the other party.

The fact of the matter is that we now have a situation where it makes no odds whether it is the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats in Germany, New Labour or the Conservatives in the UK, the Republicans or Democrats in America, or any of the main political parties in the other Western, democratic countries. Their political philosophies are inextricably intermeshed and they have one common goal; to control us. It is for your own good, don’t you know.

Europe has been designated as one control centre, North America (Canada, The US and Mexico) as another. Whoever you vote for won’t stop it happening. You will be subject to the directives of countless committees of bureaucrats who will know what is best for you, without knowing you at all.

This goes way beyond politics. Even these articles are monitored, not by an editor, which a writer has to accept, but by a search engine’s ranking system. Anything considered ‘adult material’ would be likely to lose this site a point or two. ‘General audience material’ is what makes this particular world go round, and that means it is governed by something very similar to the classification system placed on movies, only in this case if you get an ‘adult’ rating, you just don’t show. And this rating system comes from a search engine thru which you can easily access not only written, but the most graphic ‘adult’ material legally available.

No, we are being boxed and packaged like never before. We are being subjected to double standards and double talk and are ultimately being led down the road to conformity; not conformity to any one particular standard, but to conform to conformity itself. Never have things seemed as Orwellian as they do today.

The question must be, are we here to do what we are told and take what we can get, or to live a free life, and accept the consequences? Our lives are on the line, and no matter which way we vote and who gets into power, they are not going to be free ones.

Boy, did we have it good some forty years back! Maybe this is the price that has to be paid for it, but I doubt that. We just overcooked things a little, but were on the right track. We need to get back to the garden, as Joni said and learn how to play again.

In all the countries that I know anything about, the proportion of local news far outweighs news from elsewhere. When we are given ‘world news’ it is mainly stuff about dolphins being rescued, or a rare species being found and when it is of substance, such as the demonstrations in Burma some months ago, there is hardly ever the will to follow the story beyond it’s initial impact. Who knows what happened to those who were arrested, and whether the lady, Aung San Suu Kyi who represents the democratic opposition is still under house arrest? As I recall, the UN’s special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari was having meetings both with her and with the leaders of the military regime, and then, then nothing.

There is no doubt about the general feeling in the rest of the world concerning the plight of this country, but at the same time there is no coherent expression of it, outside of various diplomatic missions. This is the same in the Sudan, in Zimbabwe, in Kenya….I could go on and on.

Now it appears that the athletes who are selected to compete in the Beijing Olympics will have to sign a document which precludes them from making any expression of their feelings as regards the human rights situation in China. This has been reported on the UK news. I am assuming that it would be pointless to have UK athletes make such a pledge if other countries were not taking similar action. If I am right in this assumption, it is a huge story, but it is reported as if it were a local matter.

We hear a lot of things about globalisation, most of them negative, but surely, like it or not we are all citizens of an ever shrinking world and this segmentation of information deprives us of ever knowing what the full story is and therefore in having any say in it’s outcome.

This all hinges on the sovereignty of a Nation, even when that Nation has been hijacked and its people are being held to ransom. But what is a nation, anyway? It is no more than a concept that is constantly changing in size, shape, culture, influence, and political make-up. What was Russia yesterday is not Russia today, and what was Yugoslavia is not at all anymore. The majority party in Scotland wants independence from the United Kingdom. Iraq might well to end up as three separate nations. Nations are man made concepts, an attempt to separate what is local from what is not and whereas we must have the right to know and act on local issues, it is increasing apparent that we need some sort of a global voice.

In due course, this is bound to evolve through the internet and the telephone. A sort of global opinion pole which we all have access to. There are many problems, such as validating each person’s identity, but I don’t doubt that it will come about, and along with it far more focus on events in other parts of the world.

And politics of this type can be extremely entertaining. There is today possibly one issue that a substantial proportion of the world’s population could and would all like vote on. Not a vote that counted, just an opinion, based on a working knowledge of those involved. It is a subject that has captured the world’s imagination to a far greater extent than I think the local participants realize. Everyone has an opinion on it, even if they are on the other side of the planet and it has nothing directly to do with them. Can you guess what it is? Well, it’s the Hillary and Barack Show, of course. If only I had a vote!

Note. The author has spent fifteen years in America but is British by birth.

Homo sapiens is still very much a ‘work in progress’. Apparently they can look at the model of any species and ascertain whether it has reached its optimum form and functionality, and our species is nowhere near being the finished article. We have only been around for one hundred and fifty thousand years, so we can hardly expect to be the end product.

In spite of games such as chess, one of the major deficiencies in our make-up seems to be our inability to react to changing circumstances until after they have changed. How many times have our ancestors just sat there when the writing was on the wall? From the fall of Rome to the Second World War, the list is almost endless, and on a personal level I have been oblivious to the obvious so many times and so many times have I kicked myself for it.

It would be nice to think that as we drift downstream, that we are at least able to guide ourselves between the rocks in front of us, but particularly when things seem fairly settled we loose our eye and it seems our nerve.

Never mind, when a disaster occurs, we can always construct a conspiracy theory to take the blame from ourselves. But there is a very real conspiracy, and that is over our energy needs.

Behind the ‘inconvenient truth’ that oil and gas may have a hand in Global Warming lies the even more inconvenient truth that we are running out of them. This is actually why oil is now £100 a barrel. All the other stuff they tell you is an attempt to hide that essential fact.

‘What will gas cost this time next year?’ I asked the guy at the gas station.

‘I never thought of that,’ he said, laughing like a drain.

It is true that there is a lot of coal and oil shale lying around, but to make them a viable alternative energy source would take a good decade and would surely be a step backwards.

There are quite a number of other alternatives, but decisions relating to their pursuance should have been taken at least ten if not twenty years ago if they were to come on stream in time. It is simply too late now.

I was watching a re-run of ‘The Big Bulge’, a Second World War Movie and near the end Robert Shaw who plays the Nazi Panzer Commander, says to his adjutant ‘But chu don’t understant, Heinz. It ist not about vinning ze var. It ist about ze var goink on FOR EVER!

‘But vat about my sons?’ Says Heinz.

‘Zey vill be soldiers, und you vill be proud of zem.’ Comes the reply.

The conspiracy is to weaken society so that Big Brother can govern the subjugated population and in this present case it is simply achieved by letting the oil and gas run out without allowing enough time to gear up for the alternatives. The pressure is already on the public from every quarter, when it should be on the politicians. They should have been working on the alternatives for the last twenty years, and the reason they haven’t is that they don’t want us getting above ourselves as we did in the sixties. They want control, and if goods, housing and transport are cheap, they loose it.

This conspiracy is not orchestrated by any particular group or party, it is an across the board unspoken conspiracy, carried out by simply not taking any significant action. The Politicos all want us to wear nappies and have our arses wiped, and live our lives as if we were under wartime conditions, and under orders. ‘I’m gonna be taken care of until I die,’ says a prisoner with a life sentence, as if he had done something clever. And that is the way they want us all to think.

It would in turn, be nice to think that we, the public who have a certain amount of control over who governs us, would see this coming and elect someone to smash this plot against our liberty, but my bet is that rationing of essential commodities will be with us within the next ten years, and they won’t need a war to make it stick.

Yes, it is a conspiracy, based on the fact that although the facts are staring us in the face, we won’t do a thing about it.

We were about to sit down to dinner, when I realised that the fruit salad wasn’t on the table. I went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and, and….couldn’t remember why I was there. Back in the dining room, some moments later, all was made clear. Perhaps this is God’s way of making you feel like a turnip, or perhaps it’s a sign of genius.

They say, it gets worse with old age, but I am not so sure. More recently it’s been known as short term memory loss, but absentmindedness could be another word for it, and that’s something I have always suffered from. Absentmindedness is really one thought replacing another without your consent. The new thought is just so attractive that you give up on what was previously going on and make love to the new beauty in your brain.

Of course, this type of mental process can take place on a far larger stage. Only this morning, I wrote about how we in the Western World have spent the last 50 years learning to live together, somehow forgetting about Ireland and Yugoslavia and the many other examples of bloody intolerance which have marked this period. It doesn’t alter my perception of the road to greater toleration that we have been on. Our acceptance of the different and unfamiliar today, compared to the nineteen fifties is self evident, but in all honesty these European conflicts just did not come to mind. Could this have had something to do with the fact that they didn’t suit my argument? That is a distinct and extremely unpalatable possibility.

We are fickle creatures. If a more attractive thought comes along we ditch the old one. If there is something which would upset our beautiful surmise it is not brought to mind. We all like to think of ourselves as open-minded, but without considerable self-monitoring of our mental processes, there is absolutely no chance of this being so.

‘Genius’ must be an extreme form of this fickleness, and probably why it is so associated with absentmindedness, and why such people can discern one great truth while ignoring so many others. It is all about focus in the end. You focus in, and you miss the larger view, you focus out and you miss the detail. Even if you have a very large lens, which geniuses must have, for an overall perspective you must recall what you saw when it was on the other setting. This is quite a trick to pull and requires a kind of genius in itself.

I feel as if I am a clear sighted, reasonable individual, who has an excellent capacity for assimilation and judgement. Most of us must feel like that. Most of us are in fact more sporadic in our assimilation and more selective in our judgement than we would ever care to credit or admit. People sometimes talk to me and I just don’t take in a word of what they say. It would be nice to describe this as a symptom of genius, but I am afraid that this is simply a human symptom. It is an affliction which we all suffer from, notably including but not exclusive to genius.

We all know what Porridge is, don’t we? Porridge is the sticky stuff the Three Bears like so much, but which we hardly ever eat ourselves.

Porridge was UK 80’s slang for ‘Jail’. You were in ‘porridge’. You were eating your ‘porridge’. You were having some, doing some ‘porridge’.

Now there’s a man who at the age of ninety bet on himself reaching one hundred, and on collecting his winnings attributed his long life to his morning dish of ……..you guessed it, ‘porridge’.

It is said that if you are arthritic, for an instant cure you should immerse the affected area in a bowl of oatmeal ‘porridge’.

They also say that you can have sex to the point of excess, dosed by ‘porridge’.

On the eave of the New Year, I heard someone say ‘Oh if you do that, you never know what you might turn into.’ And I thought, ‘Well, you never do know, but you are always turning into something, like it or not.’

As I speak, I am the kind of person who believes in personal change, but tomorrow of course that might cease to be true. We inevitably change, and indeed there are occasions where this takes the form of an epiphany. More normally, we slowly change as we go through life.

I am reminded of the expression, ‘a leopard doesn’t change his spots’, and there does seem to be a core to our personality that always remains, but to talk about a person as a rock, solid entity seems to be a sure way of getting them wrong. Ironically, it is often those who are closest, who are guilty of this. They have a detailed picture of who it is that they know and love, and sometimes the image is there for life. Often the object of their affection ends up playing the part handed to them, although they are no longer anything like that.

Such are the misunderstandings that playwrights feast on. Their stories can end up with the revelation of a new world, but are just as likely to find a person unable to grasp what is now around them.

As we journey into 2008, perhaps the greatest thing we could wish for is to see ourselves as others see us and for them to see how in fact we are. It would take the gift of telepathy to make such a thing come true, and we would have to hope that if such a wish was granted, it would be selective as there are many things about us which are simply not fit for the consumption of others; well not as we presently are at any rate.

But ‘never say never’. I am sure that our tolerance of each other can grow if we can at least think of ourselves as people who over the course of time are inclined to change. The mobility of our character and beliefs is what has kept us moving forward on this great adventure. Without it, we have no chance.

This last spring, I watched a pair of swans nesting. Yesterday, the cygnet, now some nine months old landed on that same pond by itself. Even two months ago the parents wouldn’t let it out of their sight, now they are who knows where. Nature knows how to move on and we must to.

Here’s to ‘Them Changes’. Let’s make the most of them and not think that we know anyone so well that there is not more to be discovered.

First there was the family, then the tribe, then the nation and now there is the world. This century should become known as the time when it was realised that there is no percentage in thinking about ‘them and us’ anymore, unless you mean ET.

The chances are that you are not who you think you are, anyway. The Irish think of themselves as Celts but turn out to be Norsemen. I think of myself as an Anglo-Saxon, but I am a Jew in the sense that my great-grandmother was a Jew and I am directly descended from her maternal line. As Jonathan Miller once put it, I am a Jew, but not Jewish.

Now, the Chinese for all their various languages and their huge number are very strong on national identity, so strong that they argue that The Western World has been producing carbon emissions for a century and they therefore have the right to ‘catch up’. This is the kind of argument, which comes straight from the ‘them and us’ school, and ignores the world itself.

They have since put forward a far more interesting proposition. At the Kyoto conferences, each country is looked at on the basis of how much carbon it emits or how much carbon it is no longer absorbing – by cutting down rain forest and establishing grazing land, for example. A table is then made up which establishes the US as the prime offender, with China in second place. The UK emits far less carbon than China and is some way down the table. ‘No’, say China. ‘This is all wrong. The table should be structured by looking at a nations population and should work on a carbon emission per person basis.’ This changes everything and makes the UK for instance, a far greater offender than China.

On the one hand, the giant polluters must be curbed, but on the other is it not reasonable that there be a common emissions standard for every person on the planet? In spite of the obvious threat to my personal lifestyle inherent in this approach, I have to admit that in theory at any rate, it is reasonable. Not only is it reasonable, but if tackled reasonably, it could not only be a breakthrough for Kyoto, but a breakthrough for world politics. What I would hope for would be a ‘you keep your emissions where they are while we bring ours down to your level’ style of approach. This in turn would have to recognise the underlying problem we are up against, and that problem is of course the number of people on the planet and the number who are in no position to emit much of anything at all.

Yes, it leads us full circle to realise that nothing can be done about one thing without doing something about the other. There is no point in looking at these issues in isolation. Sometime or other we must grasp the nettle and get serious about making this a great place for everything and everyone to live. There are so many things that must be done even get to first base, and there is no chance of us ever getting there unless we all have the same goal in mind.

Seasons Greetings and a Very Happy (Chinese or otherwise) New Year!

If you went back to the Stone Age there would be a guy sitting around the campfire, saying that unless we all did what he said, there would be hell to pay, maybe in a literal sense and maybe not. On occasion, there would be two guys around the campfire with different ideas and then there certainly would be hell to pay. The one thing I always wonder is how these guys got to be so sure of themselves in the first place.

There are those who are sure that the world was created in a week, those who are sure that there is no God, those who are sure that terrorism is the only option, those who are sure about almost anything you can mention, and I am not even sure that I exist at all. I am taking it on trust, trust that my senses aren’t telling me major porkies. I know that they are telling me minor ones, pretty much all the time, so why shouldn’t the whole thing be a dream?

My view is that all you can really do is look for clues, remembering that what you see can look very different when viewed from another angle. The clues are mainly to be found in certain emotional events in your life, or in nature. The emotion can be love or hate or any other genuinely moving trigger. In my experience, once you have succumbed to that emotion, then strange things can happen. Praying could well prove to be something much along the same lines in that they say the more emotion that goes into the prayer, the more likely it is to have effect.

Dreams and emotions are essentially illogical, mental occurrences, things that are deep-seated and stem from our subconscious, and this perhaps gives us a clue as to the nature of reality. Outwardly, things seem to follow a logical progression but from time to time, we are confronted by events, which seem to overcome these parameters. These moments of heightened experience can be put down to many things but they undeniably lead to a super reality, which steps out of the familiar pattern of things. To acknowledge that this state of mind exists at all, calls all our sureties into question, but at the same time indicates perhaps that there is indeed something out there.

Nature is the other indicator that I mentioned. I cannot look at what is all around us and truly believe that evolution in the scientific sense is solely responsible for the enormous detail featured in say, a butterfly’s wing. We all know how grudging nature can be in giving us anything that it doesn’t need to. Butterfly’s need wings to fly; give them wings, they need a bright colour to distinguish one sex from another and perhaps by extension sex them up a bit; give them a bright colour, but give them the sublimely complex patterns that they have, why? You can’t seriously tell me that there is a need for it, and that in scientific, evolutionary terms is what nature is all about - need. But nature has gone far beyond need. It would be impossible for any one of us to dream up the wonderful designs to be found in every aspect of nature, but perhaps not impossible for all of us, and this brings me to a speculation.

What if there is a group mind of which we are all part. What if although we cannot read each other’s minds, they are in fact all part of a greater whole? It would be an explanation. Well, you might well say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

To clamp down on freedom is a natural inclination of authority, which always tends towards the notion that it knows what is best, because after all that is why it is there. Also, authority feels that if it gives us an inch, we’ll take a mile. Authority is not altogether wrong on either of those assumptions. It is not altogether right either.

My generation blew the chance of greater freedom by not being able to handle it. The sixties ended in Altmont, Manson, Kent State, and the deaths of Janice, Jimi and Jim, and instead of leading to a more enlightened, freer society, it led to the indulgence and nihilism of the seventies and eighties. This in turn has caused the regimentation of the Western World, where misinformation or selective information is used to present things in such a way that it will give more control to authority and less to us. We have simply shown ourselves ill equipped to deal with things as independent, contributive members of society. We have also shown ourselves hopeless at penetrating the smoke screens that those in authority and their ‘qualified experts’ place before us

The situation has been worsened by the outbreak of terrorist insurgency, but things were going that way, anyway. Let us ask ourselves some questions about some of the countries that are or have been infected by terrorism. For example, can our sympathy with the Palestinians be maintained in the face of their two main political parties indulging in gun battles with each other? Is this the sign of a country that is ready for self-government? Or, why is it fine for Ghadafi to exercise a benign dictatorship over Libya, but not for Musharraf in a nuclear armed and terrorist infested Pakistan?

Michael Butler in his comment on the Chalmers Johnson book ‘Nemesis’ - The Last Days of the American Republic wrote, ‘Still it is so important that you discover what is happening to the world under the aegis of American drive for world hegemony’. America is the only nation capable of making such a drive and I cannot help feel that there is a real necessity for it, but ironically when ‘Democracy’ is attached to the need for worldwide co-operation, it can simply open the door to those who seek less of it.

The time has long gone for us to expect anything other than a propagandist view, whether it is on speed cameras or global warming. If I said, as Heather Mills has, that eating less meat would do more to reduce your carbon footprint than taking less plane flights, I would be going in the face of what everyone wants to hear and therefore what represents the popular platform on that issue. If I were to say, ‘Speed cameras should work on a cars average speed over a distance of at least half a mile, not on its speed at a single point’, in spite of the obvious fact that the single point system is far more dangerous with cars slowing down for the camera and then inevitably speeding up again, the authorities would not be happy with an average speed system because they would not catch so many of us out, and that is what they truly love. It is not so much the money as to have us in their grasp.

In America, there is a great perception of this loss of liberty, but the mainstream sees it as a States Side phenomenon. But look for instance at the UK. It is being politically welded to Europe when it is patently obvious that the great majority of its citizens want only a trading relationship with that Continent. It doesn’t matter what they want. It is happening anyway. Wherever you look in the world the progression is towards less freedom, not more. We are conjuring up a world where kids have to be in school until eighteen and then have to work for forty plus years to ensure that they will have enough money to round off this glorious adventure. It is all a horrendous mistake.

Freedom is not just about our rights it is about our lives. All those years ago, I guess I was one of those who tuned in, turned on and dropped out. It wasn’t a smart thing to do, but it added great richness to my life, and without that experience I don’t see how I could possibly be writing this today. Freedom is not just about what they say you can or cannot do, it is about what you do.

At the end of the day, doing good works, being politically aware or being socially responsible is not enough. Freedom is something that you must indulge in. Being free is subjective, and it can only be had if you reach out and take it. Let’s all work at being as free as we can, whether they say it’s OK or not. The rest will follow.

It is time that I said something about these pages. At the start of each article, I feel like an airman, strapping on his helmet for another mission. With something as fast and furious as this, I could be in a dogfight, maybe ending with a kill, but more likely with a shot up fuselage.

Of course, it is all highly subjective, and I try not to get too close to the action. There are occasions when the result seems pretty good, others when there are doubts, and other rare moments when there is that thrilling feeling that there might be something a bit special, something that has not been before, from me at any rate.

I remember once being told that there was a time when it was thought that you could know everything there was to know, and there came a day when it was generally agreed that this was no longer possible. This has led me to believe that any discovery which is not learnt but arrived at, be it commonly known or not, is still as much a discovery as it was the first time it was ever thought of.

Given the title of this column I have the luxury of ignoring conventional considerations, and flying by the seat of my pants as ‘Loose Talk’ is all it is. I would certainly hope not to be ‘samey’ in anything but my writing style. I have in the past adopted many different styles for their dramatic effect, but that was fiction and I could not honestly have written those stories in another way. This current work is as journalistic as I am ever likely to get, and if it has brought to mind anyone, it has been Alistair Cook, not that I would remotely compare the end result to his unsurpassed reflections.

I am, if you like a ‘cheap-shot, merchant’, compared to Mr Cook. But that doesn’t mean that my aim is not true. A lot of the time you wouldn’t know whether Alistair (if I may be so bold as to call him that) was taking a shot at all. He was, if you like giving a very elegant flying display, whereas I am going up to do battle. But, I do admire his intellect and productive genius, and we do both ‘fly a kite’, as the saying goes. Towards the end of my first book, one of the characters said, ‘These words are my wings!’ And so they have turned out to be. I like my stuff and I hope you do too. It was recently put to me, that I am thirsting after recognition. I replied that I was in it strictly for the money. But that is also far wide of the mark. I love being up there, out on the wing. That’s the truth of it.

As I go on, I am less concerned about literary considerations than I am about the overall feel of the thing; a sort of literary impressionist, wanting to make hay with splashes of colour and great gobs of paint. This column has certainly given me the freedom to move in that direction, but it has also made me aware of the inherent limitations that exist if I don’t want to come down in flames.

This is the end of the tour, but not the end of the War and I will be back, hopefully with bigger guns and a steel plate under my bum, but whatever they give me I don’t care, just as long as I’m up there!

Some people feel that each hour they sleep is an hour of their life that they have lost. Well, I like my sleep. I look forward to putting my head on a pillow and am slow to get up in the morning. For me, it is a case of feeling good when I am up, and it is a minimum of eight hours (and I do mean minimum) that gets me feeling that way.

There are those times when you need to get up at a certain hour and you can only have a three or four hour nap. I can handle that on a one-off basis, and it doesn’t necessarily ruin my day, but I hate, just hate to regularly wake up to an alarm. Within a week or so, it brings a grim edge to my waking day, and when I finally get a break it takes a couple of ten-hour sessions in the sack to restore my humanity.

Either lack of sleep or a lot of it can put you in touch with the dialogue going on in your dream world, in touch with what I guess is your subconscious. Sometimes in my dreams, I walk into rooms with orchestras playing and sometimes I wake up and remember myself singing or listening to someone else sing a song, and for a magic minute or two I can actually remember the words and the tune. It is my subconscious that creates the orchestral suite, or writes the song, something that I am completely incapable of doing in my waking life. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Freddy Mercury woke up in the middle of the night with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ running around in his brain.

I had a surgical operation, just over a year ago, and found it difficult to sleep in the six to ten days after. Often I found myself lying there in a semi-conscious state, half aware of where I was but at the same time experiencing what I suppose you could call a mild hallucination. The drugs I was on at the beginning, could have accounted for it, but these visions persisted long after I had been taken off anything other than anti-infection medication. My explanation is that my mind craved sleep so much that it began dreaming in a semi-wakened state.

I don’t doubt that the most creative of us are nearer to our subconscious, which is also quite dangerous if you confuse the two. Various disciplines, such as yoga and meditation can also lead you in that direction, opening up your chakras, as they say. The thing is that you must always come down safely. A long time ago I was practising a yoga technique involving mild hyperventilation. I was sitting, cross-legged in the sun and after a while felt myself rise into the air. I continued to levitate for sometime, gradually rising higher and higher, until a large oval opening appeared above me. There were the silhouettes of some figures leaning over the edge, eagerly stretching out their arms, gesturing me to come within reach. It was only possible to see the outlines of their head and shoulders, but there was something a little too eager in their manner and I floated back down, without making contact. To this day, I feel that something very wrong might have happened if I had come within their reach. On returning to my body, I found myself bathed in sweat and had to lie down for an hour or so. I am sure that the heat of the Sun had much to do with it, but I am also sure that there was some real mental danger there.

From time to time, I have glimpsed how dreams can link from one night to the next. The last two nights, I have been driving around in an orange Karman Ghia that I had in the seventies, with some of my present friends, not those I had back then. I couldn’t tell you much about the story other than I am driving around a lot, but I do know that one night is not simply a repetition of the night before. It may be that the dreams overlap, or that that they are entirely different stories. I just don’t know.

Even when the dreams are not too pleasant, they provide a sort of release. They contain all the unbridled creativity that is locked inside us, and although they seem to vanish, I suspect that they leave a scent on our waking day.

'Due to Mr Benedict's geographical remoteness from the United States, the film has reached him a good two months after it's release and much of what he predicts has already happened. Nevertheless, it is worth publishing because he identifies what is truly significant about the film and is not sidetracked into a critique of it's content. The mere fact that it has now reached him also confirms his assumption that the film will span the globe in a way that a conventionally released film could not.'

There is only one thing on this site, and I suppose that it is best called a ‘movie’. It combines history and statistics by use of illustrations, quotes, old news and movie footage to present a global point of view, which is expounded in progressive stages. It may well turn out to be one of the most influential movies ever made, not just because of it’s controversial subject matter, but because it is there to be seen for free, not in a movie theatre, but on the Internet.

The same day it was sent to me, I emailed it on to my entire address book and sat down to write this piece. What I said to my friends was: ‘ This movie should be part of the education curriculum. It is two hours long but very well done and pulls a lot of things together. It is a viewpoint that EVERYONE should be aware of.’

As is the case with any ‘whodunit’, I would not be doing the movie a favour by outlining it’s content. I also have reservations about much of what they lead up to, but I still have no doubt of the significance of their achievement. It is thought provoking and completely convincing on one issue, and that is that we are constantly being fed a heap of horse pucky. As with the mass audience in the film ‘Network’ from which they use a clip, we should scream, ‘We are not going to take it anymore.’ Of course we’ll continue to take it and I don’t have to spell out where we’ll take it, but perhaps this is a steppingstone on the road to standing up straight again.

I have from time to time expressed my disappointment with the use to which we put the Internet. In a recent article I said, ‘In a sense, it is a matter of culture; a change of habit and of what we expect of ourselves, and I suppose that I may simply be expecting too much too soon. The point is that up until now the door has been open. All we have needed to do is walk through.’Well, someone just walked through that door and ‘Zeitgeist’ just became part of the common nomenculture.

Having made the case the film makes no real attempt to suggest a solution, perhaps wisely. Perhaps the way forward is one of both resistance and compromise, but such tactics are useless without a clear understanding of who we are in the first place. It is in this area that the film is run-away winner. This will be the most watched movie of the year, with the smallest gross. You must see it.

The Arts are a Community Service. Sweeping the streets, talking to underprivileged kids, giving meals to old age pensioners are Community Services too, but don’t let us ever forget that however self-aggrandising stardom and celebrity may seem, at the end of the day they are also simply a Community Service.

To suggest that ‘The Sex Pistols’ were offering anything other than a Community Service is not to see them clearly. If they were so bent on oblivion, why did they present their argument on stage, rather than go for bloody insurgency? Because, my friends it was an argument, not a pistol to the head.

The Arts are an argument. If it does not confront you, however softly and subtly, it is not art. Art is confrontation of the senses and the intellect.

What is ‘Art’? It is simply the result of people dedicated to providing a Community Service. Yes, all artists would love to be recognised and feted for what they do, but the very great majority go without those accolades in the knowledge that they have played their part in serving the cause of free expression, and perhaps in making you reassess your situation in the scheme of things.

There are of course, ‘grey areas’ in art. Graffiti is one of them. It is easy to say ‘good graffiti is art, bad graffiti is not’, but it is a lot more difficult to say what is good and what is bad. There was a face sprayed onto an electrical transformer casing, who’s sardonic expression I admired for a couple of years before it was painted over with regulation beige. Then there was a slogan, which read ‘Robert Goldring Lives!’ On it’s own, it was nothing, but as you went around town, it popped up time after time and in the end you had to say, ‘OK, Robert Goldring really does live!’ He had made his mark on what must have been thousands of people. It is as meaningful and as meaningless as so many other pieces of conceptual art. All you can say is that both these graffitists promoted a reaction beyond that of an unsympathetic listlessness, and therefore I would judge them as artists, though I appreciate many would not.

I recently came across www.fanfiction.net . This site is about a lot of young people writing stories, which are extensions of their favourite comic stories and then commenting on each other’s efforts. The ‘Dad’ who told me about this site said, ‘its not Shakespeare, but quite amusing, apart from some self-indulgent ramblings - and the reviews are quite interesting.’ But is it art? Well, I hope that what I am doing merits the same description – and I get a lot fewer reviews than those kids do. We must surely appreciate all that is out there and make as much of anything as there is to be made. Art is the service and we are The Community.

It also goes without saying that artists, more often than not, are the most self-centred, two-faced, community serving bastards that you will ever meet in your life. Which is just about all of us.

As David Beckham pockets many millions for playing for the LA Galaxy, the NFL loads up it’s coffers by staging on October 28th, the first American Football Game that actually counts for points in the NFL championship at the newly constructed Wembley Stadium, London, England. Both moves are aimed at promoting what are essentially competing sports, but the differences of approach are significant.

The LA Galaxy is a team of course, while the NFL is the American governing body, but can anyone imagine the National Football Association in England (never, ever familiarly known as the NFA) having the wit to hire The Giants Stadium in New York, and stage a points counting match between say Manchester United and Arsenal there? You cannot be serious! Those greasy palmed (palm greased?) clodhoppers couldn’t to use an American sporting expression, get to first base.

The NFL first punts a package of tickets plus flights and hotel accommodation to the States-side fans, who credit card willing are more than up for such a junket. These deals are snapped up in a flash. This of course means that the NFL is picking up change, not just for ticket sales, but for the whole excursion. It also means that there will be a real football atmosphere with real fans. They sell the remaining tickets in batches over the net at between $110.00-$180.00 a seat! These are also gobbled up.

I believe that Wembley Stadium has in excess of 80,000 seats and the great majority of these are in the $180.00 category. One can only guess at the gross receipts, but I think it safe to say that this is a very cost effective way of promoting American Football.

David Beckham’s move to LA, makes it hard for him to play for his country, and the guys running the English show are left out in the cold, not having turned a coin. Then, to put the icing on the cake, the NFL say, ‘Please note that any tickets from this sale that are found to be on eBay or similar ticket touting websites will have their sale cancelled, and made available to genuine fans in a final general admission sale that will take place in late September’. Ticket touting is rife in soccer and all The NFA can do is to click their tongues a little.

The NFL is a business and the NFA is jobs for the boys. I’m not saying that all is sweetness and light in the NFL, but despite the many problems that beset the States, Americans know how to run things, know how to show things. Good ole’ American know-how! I bet they are picking up another billfold from live TV coverage in the UK as well.

Before I go on a trip, I naturally try to tie up any loose ends. There are always things that you want to close out but have to leave, and the sobering thought is that is very much the nature of life itself.

I like to think that my life will end up as a fully rounded whole, which of course in one sense it may do, but just like any other trip, the departure can never be as neat as all that. There are bound to be outstanding issues of one kind or another.

There are always those things you forget, not that you can take things with you when you die, but things like locking the back door or leaving a note to stop the newspapers being delivered. Perhaps that is what ghosts are all about: people who should have done something, but didn’t. Whether they forgot or were pig headed, or simply lacked the courage could also be a factor. Indeed it could be even more complex than that. I can think of things that I should really do, but I don’t, not because I am not equal to the task, but because it might disturb another’s peace of mind. ‘Things best left unsaid,’ as the saying goes.

Of course, from our present standpoint we also have to deal with things that we think should have taken place with those who have now gone. We didn’t forget, or perhaps we did, but whatever the reason, we never got to it in time and now never will.

These untidy strands exist on both sides of the fence and infiltrate so much of our existence that it could be what keeps the whole cycle rolling on. It is rather like the discovery that what was first taken to be the emptiness of Space is full of stuff that actually drives the Universe. At first I was a little embarrassed at calling it ‘stuff’ like a kid in High School might do, but on second thoughts it is not such a sloppy word. After all, we talk about ‘the stuff of life’, and as far as ‘life’ is concerned, this could just be our Loose Ends.

Perhaps on the other hand, the truth behind the mystery is that the things that you wanted to say but didn’t were known already and the things that you wanted to do, but didn’t, would not have worked out in the way you thought.

Now, this notion seems to have some elemental truth to it. Our lives can be many things, but looking back, I am in the most part surprised, surprised that while we blindly bash our heads against this or that wall, or drag ourselves over seemingly insurmountable obstacles, like a great painting, while the detail can be ragged, there is an overall balance to the whole thing.

We are told that when we drink coffee, tea or alcohol we dehydrate our bodies. My dictionary tells me that ‘to dehydrate’ means, ‘to cause to lose water’.

Now, if you were lost in a desert or adrift on an ocean and had only a flask of filter coffee to drink should you drink it? I suspect that the answer is that you should. I suspect that if you had a can of lager, you would be better off drinking it, and that only spirit alcohol, along perhaps with espresso coffee are not worth drinking in such a situation.

In other words, a mug of coffee or a can of beer actually do not dehydrate you, they simply do not hydrate you as much as water, they have an ingredient which dehydrates but it is mixed with water, so dependant on the proportion of the ingredient to the proportion of water you may well be receiving a limited hydration benefit.

I have not referred to any scientific source to reach this conclusion. It simply follows from the course of action I would take if I were in those circumstances. I would welcome some informed opinion on the subject, but whereas the issue may be more complex than my simplistic assumption, if essentially I am right then we are at best being told a half-truth. More likely we are being fed a well-meaning falsehood, somewhat disingenuously at that, or to put it plainly, told a lie.

Those that use and promote this simple speak would either argue that it is for simple people, or that we know what they mean. Either way, it frees them up to dehydrate our brains if not our bodies.

As more and more information becomes available, there is more and more temptation to wrap things up in simple bite-sized packages. ‘Sound-bites’ are exactly that. I am a great believer in simplicity, but not in simple ness and there’s the rub, my friends, simple ness is what we are getting; gobs and gobs of what is simply good for you, for your friends and for the Planet as a whole.

Put another way, bicycling can be bloody dangerous, running the marathon can be horribly harmful to you in later years, and most of our sports heroes are permanently injuring themselves by doing what they do. We know this, but it’s not said. We have comfort talk just like we have comfort food. Well, I find it uncomfortable in the extreme. It makes me see red, and yellow at the same time. I am pissed off by all this double talk, but I am also scared of the consequences of living in a foolish world.

Goody Two Shoes can turn you into a prune as surely as The Merciless Ming. Welcome to the Dehydration Nation!

I am truly sorry to be like this. We’ll have a laugh next time.

My wife died more than a quarter of a century ago, but I have found her again in the DVD of this cult film from 1970, ‘Rainbow Bridge’. In addition to the photos, I now have this incredible movie, shot a few years before our relationship, but not before we had met. I knew quite a few of the other guys in the film and also met some of those who produced it. I also knew the star of the film, Jimi Hendrix from times both in the States and in the UK. Not that he ever knew me.

What is extraordinary, as it would be for anyone of my generation, is to see some professionally shot film with excellent sound, featuring someone you knew and loved back then. In this film she has been slightly prepared for the cameras but is not ‘made up’ and is as beautiful as memory serves. I call her my wife because we were married. We lived together on occasion, but ours was not a marriage in the accepted sense, and many would say not in any sense.

‘Rainbow Bridge’ takes a look at the culture that could nurture such an unconventional take on institutional values, more so perhaps than even ‘Woodstock’ or the musical ‘Hair’. Many of the rank and file in ‘Rainbow Bridge’ (including said wife) came from ‘The Source’, a health food restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. They lived in a drug-free commune, dressed in white robes, were spiritual in their outlook and had sex with other members of the group on a rotational basis.

I, and those I hung with were not as radical as that crowd, but understood and empathised with them and were radical in other ways. ‘Rainbow Bridge’ rejected western, industrialised society. We on the other hand sought to turn it to our liking. It all seems to have been pretty ineffectual, but things aren’t always what they seem and there is a legacy. How big or small is hard to say except when it comes to music, and music is this films great strength.

The extraordinary sight of those giant Marshall Amps mounted on a makeshift stage in the middle of a field without any of the commercial hoopla normally associated with such an event would provide any trio (the toughest of all rock disciplines) with a performance problem, but being brought down to this basic level only served to demonstrate Jimi’s towering musical genius. Of the many, many hours we have, which show this great man performing (I have watched most of what there is, and also saw him live) this most clearly shows the essence of his greatness. He seems as if he might be carried away on the wind at any moment, as would any other angel producing such magical sounds.

Yes, for all the cartloads of nonsense, there is magic in this film. In the intervening years these pioneers have been ridiculed, but there is much to suggest that their medicine was strong. It permeates our world today, and yet may save it.

Now and then, we all have to reflect on why human beings can’t even agree on something as simple as which side of the road to drive on. If there was a choice, other than left or right there would be plenty of subscribers, and I for one would say ‘vive la difference’ except, and this is a big ‘except’, except for those things where the difference makes no difference at all.

Take for instance the ‘website’ you are looking at. The French are too late on the scene to call it something completely different, but will they leave it at that? No, they won’t. They call it a ‘site web’, which in turn leads me to ask, why do we call it a website at all? Well, let’s begin at the beginning. What came first, the Internet or the website? Well, naturally, the Internet. In that case why wasn’t a ‘website’ called a ‘netsite’?

‘Internet’ is a glorious word, which fully expresses both the simplicity, and the infinitely complex nature of this extraordinary medium. It is the combination of two words we regularly use, ‘inter’, the Latin for between, and ‘net’, the thing that amongst others, fishermen use.

Now, spiders use a ‘web’ for the same purpose as a net and yes, I would go as far as to say that they are one and the same thing. It would seem to me more appropriate to talk about a ‘spiders net’ than a ‘spiders web’. You can even talk about ‘the web of a net’ although why would you? There is no law against it, but no reason for it that I can see.

Of course, there are ‘webbed feet’, which probably gives us the clue as to where the idea behind the word ‘web’, came from. ie: something that spans out, like the spokes of a wheel. Unfortunately, spiders work in squares as well as circles, just as there are nets, which span out as well as nets that are cubed.

At the end of the day why confuse a ducks foot, with a spiders net? Just to be different, ehh? Well, we are that alright.

There are times in life when you feel that you are on a roll. The feeling is something like being on a roller coaster ride, although the term itself comes from gambling, which is disappointing.

If I had my way, Vegas would be a one-horse town, lotteries wouldn’t exist, horse racing would not be big enough to be televised, and card games would be played on rainy nights for matches.

A friend of mine was driving back to town on one such rainy night, and stopped to pick up someone hitching. The poor guy was drenched and very grateful for the transport and shelter.

“How come you were out there?” My friend asked.

“Well,” the guy replied. “I was playing cards and put everything I had on what seemed like a sure thing. Only it wasn’t.”

My friend pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out.” He said.

“Why?” The guy was bemused.

“You were fool enough to go for broke. Your head should be under a tap.”