Norman Bates with a briefcase

Return to Liverpool.

We have just had a great week back in Malvern and while the weather was sometimes atrocious we did manage a walk up to the top of the Worcestershire Beacon, well a walk up half of it from the car park at the Wyche Cutting. My daughter started out complaining that her 'little legs' were tired but there was plenty of distraction and she made it up quite happily. We phoned her Grandmother from the top so that she could stand out in the Garden of the house in Malvern and we could wave to her. I think I saw her through the binoculars (I forgot the telescope) but it was too windy and cold to stand for any length of time. There used to be a cafe at the top but it burnt down in 1989. Talk about Pavlov's dogs but I was getting a real desire for an ice cream because that was what you always got at the top of the Beacon. My sister said the same thing when we told her about the walk later. There is nothing there now, not a sign of where the cafe used to be. A good point for any local business people maybe.

We wanted to go up The British Camp as well but on several days, the entire ridge of the hills was lost in the mist. We told my daughter that they had been loaned to the Americans though I am not sure she believed us; she now replies that a great deal of what we tell her is silly even when it is true. Maybe we should go into politics where everything sounds silly at the moment. The web is just one element in a great wool-pulling exercise. There is no definite truth anymore except for the most basic of facts; Colin Powell was in China but that is all the truth you can get. Reporting of events and conversations and spin just seems irrelevant these days. I was looking at a picture of Mountbatten discussing his plan for partition with the future leaders of India and Pakistan and it struck me that his entire plan for the future of a billion people was contained in a few sheets of double spaced foolscap. You couldn't see that these days; even the agenda for the steering group to decide on the timetable for discussions about setting up an investigating body would take up many volumes. And what in all those volumes would represent the truth? Probably just the watermark in the paper being used. Everything has to be spun so that no-one gets hurt emotionally. It is alright to deny all those men at Guantanamo Bay a full set of international rights as long as you leave them enough chain to turn to Mecca and provide them with Halal meals. Isn't that sick? especially when it seems that there very little proof that any of them were any more than the Taliban equivalent of Grunts. English men do not get steamed up about the Cricket any more; there are too many important things to get angry about.

I have just finished two more books, Tragically I was an only twin which is a collection of the Comedy of Peter Cook and One Hit Wonderland, the latest of Tony Hawks' books based on an obscure bet. Read the details to find out what the bet was but I have to say that 'What does a Pixies Do?' is brilliant. Having finished these I am now onto something a little more heavyweight - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I suppose I should read The Virgin Suicides as well. I have just noticed the 'Customer who bought this also bought ...' and Sylvia Plath is in there. I only know the plot of the Virgin Suicides from the review of the film and straight away I though of The Bell Jar. Anyway, Middlesex is already a cracking read so more later. Films to watch include Frida.

Back to the grind.