The Burning of Emily Brontë's Second Novel

Today's use of the dash (-) in preference to parentheses, is a tribute to Bill Bryson.

We had a spectacular thunderstorm here yesterday along with enough rain to turn the back garden into a lake. It is thundering here now and the whole building shakes. So the question for us in the North is Heatwave! What Heatwave? So you broke the temperature record yesterday. The papers with their old-fashioned desire to decry anything new-fangled like the Centigrade scale (developed in 1742 many hundreds of years after Fahrenheit - oh well - about 20 years after) revel in the fact of the 100F mark being reached in the UK - like celebrating an arbitrary birthday. I fail to see how the headline 100F can mark an newspaper out as being a serious news-deliverer, especially bearing in mind everything else which goes on in the world. Life is made by experience not by measurement. That was the best thunderstorm I ever saw but of course it may not have been the loudest.

The soundtrack for today - and it is called Soundtracks - is Tour-De-France by Kraftwerk. This is their first proper album since Electric Café in 1986 and I am sure no real fan is disappointed. Kraftwerk were never about big use of technology. I know that sounds opposite to the perception of the boys but they know when not to add something to mix and leave it laid back. Were you expecting the Aphex Twin?

I was going to write something about the Brontës but it has just struck me how strange it is to be thinking of the aforementioned sisters while listening to Kraftwerk. I know that some historical dramas have been set to techno soundtracks and that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't - does nineteen-eighty-four count? - but you wouldn't expect many to work. Maybe I will leave my thoughts until some more appropriate music is available. My wife is reading Jane Eyre again. I am still struggling through Wuthering Heights trying to work out if Heathcliff is hero or villain. As I said, more later.

What should be written about while listening to Kraftwerk? The thunderstorm has finished and the news is simply the start of the Hutton enquiry. Well that reminds me of the article in the Guardian last week after Tom Kelly had to apologise for calling David Kelly a Walter Mitty character, which pointed out the irony of how David Kelly was - far from being a fantasist - exactly the sort of person Walter Mitty dreamed of becoming and that Tom Kelly was probably the Walter Mitty of this tragedy. Well at least we have some morals at work here and the people involved have realised how badly behaved they have been. Or is all that just a front to try and redeem themselves in order to try and retain the support of the public. Surely no politician would resort to crocodile tears. Very disillusioned at the moment. What alternatives do we have? We are back to the old no one who wants political office is fit to be in office. I assume that a person wanting to go into politics with a view to being top dog must have a certain amount of morality override in order not to go crazy worrying about all the people you have to do the dirty on in order to get there. As the electorate is more sophisticated these days, it is not enough to have simple and stark messages. Maybe we need a return to the simple rhetoric of past campaigns. Who is your choice?