« 4 Aug 04. Democracy and poetry | Main | 11 Aug 04. Chavs »

10 August

My blogging rate is really dropping. There are many and varied excuses: working in London, the hideous heat, the fact that I've recently started work on a proposal for my next non-fiction book (watch this space) and I'm very excited about it.

Today's excuse is that I'm still recovering from Sunday, when I spent nine hours in a kayak with a fishing rod, trying to catch my dinner. I was canoeing arround the Thames and its various hidden tributaries with my friends George Monbiot and Mark Lynas - a literary lunch set if ever there was one, except that in this case we had to catch the lunch. I ended up with a pretty substantial pike and George caught a perch. Surprising how good they taste fried. Don't bother to write to me about animal rights, by the way. I stopped being a vegetarian a few years ago in West Papua, when my adopted tribe insisted that I shot and ate a pig in honour of my visit. There's really no going back to tofu after that.

Anyway, this has crippled my weak and feeble legs and back, and they're only just recovering. It's worth it though, just to be on the Thames and its tiny, hidden tributaries, in high summer. It's such a wonderful river, and often overlooked, precisely because it is so well-known. I saw kingfishers, sparrowhawks, herons and any number of weird and wonderful plants and insects that you'd never see from the banks. The history, mythology and potential of the Thames fascinates me, and always has. So much so that it's the basis of my new novel, The Wind Smith, which will be in all good bookshops just as soon as my agent comes back from sunning himself on some Pacific beach and finds me a publisher.

The upshot of all this is that I've had no time for blogging. Life's too short. To make up for this, here are a few titbits I've spotted over the last few days:

First, some depressing news from Indonesia, where the generals responsible for the 1999 slaughter in East Timor have recently been pardoned. Impunity is alive and well in this militaristic nation, where the army is still very much in control of the political process. Watch out for next month's presidential elections, in which two of the three leading candidates are former generals with blood on their hands.

Second, the equally depressing news that Ralph Nader has been accepting money from Republican supporters to promote his election campaign in the US. I heard about this some weeks ago but didn't want to believe it. It seems true though. Bush's boys are funding Ralph in the hope that he'll split the anti-Bush vote and let them back in. Nader is a heroic figure in many ways, but he's really going to fuck this one up big time if he doesn't stop. Now.

Lastly, to make up for these two miserable pieces of news, a cheerier item. God is on the side of bankers, stockbrokers, fund managers and business people in general. He wants them to succeed. He wants sound economic management. It is written. Here.

More tomorrow. In theory.

Posted by paul at August 10, 2004 12:44 PM

Comments

Post a comment