The Politics of Dancing

The decision announced on Saturday that Vladimir Putin intends to run again for the Russian presidency, though hardly a surprise sends chills down the spine. It felt as if Russian Democracy for so long in intensive care had finally been pronounced dead. Whilst Putin may be the grave digger of Russian democracy he was handed the spade by Boris Yeltsin. It was the drunken buffoon Yeltsin, with the American ideologues pushing and shoving from the sidelines, who unleashed the disaster of unfettered free market capitalism upon the Russian people leaving them bitter and impoverished, its only ‘achievement’ being the creation of a small coterie of billionaire oligarchs, often, like Putin ex KGB holding Russia’s wealth in the shape of its natural resources, for ever after democracy was always tainted within the Russian imagination with this period of unfettered greed. Putin presented himself as the knight in shining armour come to clean up the mess and put the Oligarchs in their place, from no...

Now I don't mind that I can't sleep and I don't mind that I can't rest, although this means I've failed the test. The test at which each night I play to make the demons go away. The demons now sit on my bed, and they play havoc with my head. And so with heavy heart I sigh and chat with them to make time fly.

I remember it being an extremely pleasant autumn day, at two that afternoon I was due to meet an extremely attractive woman called Petronella to discuss some joint training we were due to undertake, which gave the day a certain frisson. After an extremely tedious meeting in the morning I took the tube to Earls Court and in my memory became cocooned from the world for about an hour and a half. The planning went extraordinarily smoothly, enhanced by the pleasure I was deriving from her company. I do remember that during a short break she was endlessly playing with her mobile phone. I thought she was playing some sort of game and said so, but no she was in fact text messaging, my first experience of the phenomenon. I am not sure what time I emerged out into the afternoon, sometime around three I think. It was a fine day and I was in no hurry to get back to the office and so took a bus along the Kings Road. In those days my Job title was Clinical Services Manager and I was working for a...

“What possible good can come of any day that commences with getting out of bed?” So once observed an Austrian wit and there are days when you know what he is talking about. As it happens I am a morning person, always an early riser I start to fade as the evening settles in, though this has not made me immune from the occasional bouts of fear and loathing on waking. The correct response to this state of affairs is a ‘good cup of tea.’ This should ideally be made in a pot, loose tea is better, however living in a top floor flat not very practicable respecting disposal,* so tea bags. For me the tea has to be strong so I opt for Assam. Pot must be warmed and water poured onto the tea bags the second it boils and then left for at least five minutes to brew. Mug, not cup, tea in first then add milk, for me no sugar, which I think destroys the drink, though I am aware of contrary arguments. ** The first mug should be ‘nursed’ that is drunk slowly and reflectively, this is a moment for con...

Having spent a week in the Shropshire countryside I returned to a very autumnal London, positively cold. The streets smelling of post carnival debris recently sprayed with power hoses, rather like a grubby kitchen sprinkled liberally with disinfectant. In Shropshire I watched the liberation of Tripoli from the perspective of a number of satellite news channels, Sky, BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Iranian Press TV and the Russia service RTN. Unsurprisingly Press TV provided undiluted Iranian propaganda, though RTN was little better and the accounts it provided of the Syrian uprising coming straight from the Russian foreign ministry, libelling the Syrian protestors in the process. Aljazeera provided amongst the best coverage, its reports nuanced and making real attempts at objectivity. The channel was on the hate list of the Bush administration and indeed if you believed everything said about the channel from those quarters you would think it the TV arm of Al-Qaeda, which many on the right in t...