A pox upon Mat for this.

What I was doing ten years ago:
Staring in blank futility at a computer screen, whoring myself to bastards. No, sorry, that was this morning. Hang on, it was ten years ago as well. Yes.

Five things on my To-Do list today:
- See a penny and pick it up
- Boil my pants
- Finally make sexy chit chat with that lollipop lady
- Finish the application to MI6
- Find out where that smell’s coming from

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Tesco have got buy one get one free packets of custard creams.

Three of my bad habits:
- Grocery shopping in only a cock-sock
- Jumping out of people’s wardrobes dressed as the devil
- [THIS ENTRY REMOVED BY COURT ORDER]

Five places I’ve lived:
- My mummy’s tummy
- In a state of denial
- I’ve spent a year living Staines
- I’ve spent 37 years living in stains
- In that cold, dark, empty space inside all of us

Five jobs I’ve had:
- Painting Christopher Hitchen’s kitchen
- Unblocking Saddam Hussein’s drains
- Serving Robert Mugabe’s wasabi
- Babysitting Hu Jintao’s huge twin cows
- John Prescott’s proctologist

Five books I’ve recently read:
- So You’ve Decided To Form Your Own Death Squad
- The Toilet Cistern Vodka Handbook
- It’s Not Your Fault: Blaming Others For Everything
- The Anal Trauma Pop-Up Book
- Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus

Five people or communities I’m going to tag:
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- Peter Rabbit
- The Muslim Community
- The 1966 World Cup winning side
- Jesus

I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t mix with Catholics of a certain age or if it’s the sign of an increasingly heathen nation or if I had a particularly twisted religious upbringing, but I never meet anyone these days who’s heard of, or participated in, the veneration of the cross.

One of my indelible memories is of attending the Good Friday service at St Joseph’s church in Blackpool aged about six or seven. There’s nothing like having to kiss the feet of a life-sized crucified Jesus - perfect in every bloody detail - to instill the requisite religious awe required at this time of year. Or terror, as I now call it.

I can’t remember what I got for my sixth or seventh birthday but I can still see and feel myself queuing in the aisle to kiss Jesus’s feet. My heart thumps like it did then. The altar boy had a cloth and wiped Our Lord’s instep after every kiss. No anti-bacterial spray in them days.

Are there any other recovering Catholics out their who want to join my group and help each other through it?

Hi, I’m Justin and I’m a Catholic.

Remember the Riverdance, the ferry that went down in a storm near Blackpool a while back? The seagulls had a field day with some of its cargo which was more palatable than that of the Ice Prince at Worthing.

My Dad’s been following its progress which seems to consist of it slowly and stubbornly settling into the sand. I went have a look myself a few weekends back and I can’t see, short of leaving it or cutting it up, what they’re going to do.

Here it was on February 13:

And here it is today:

Here’s another law of politics: all public service tends towards infantilisation. It’s a law in two parts.

I have a seven year-old daughter. She’s not particularly tidy. Most days her bedroom looks like how I imagine how Daily Mail readers imagine how Eastern European migrants live. You see, she can and does make the most stupendous mess without the help, input or consultation of anybody.

But when it comes to tidying that mess? Ah, that’s not a job for a single person at all. No help is begged in making the mess but much is begged in its reversal. There are tears and shouting. A team effort tidies the room but a few days later…

And so it is with government. Or at least this government. Think of all the messes it has made in the last eleven years. Now think of how little clearing up has actually been done. How much mess has been edged away from, swept under the rug of media manipulation and generally ignored? Because all public service tends towards infantilisation. Someone will be along at some point to clean up for them.

The second part of the law involves respect for property. My daughter has a cuddly sheepdog toy called Charlie which is her most treasured possession. She’s always losing him in the house. Panic ensues at bedtime.

I always know where my keys, mobile, money and mp3 player are because I remember where I left them. Even I’m bored at the sound off me giving this lecture. But does it go in? What do you think? My back hurts from all the looking under the sofa I do for that sodding dog.

And so it is with government. Or at least this government. Think of all the important, important stuff it’s lost over the years. Laptops, laptops and more laptops. Data, data and more data. Dignity, dignity and more dignity.

The latest is military ID cards. Eleven thousand have been lost in the last two years.

Like my daughter, the government know just how important these things are to them but will they learn? But does it go in? What do you think? The loss is blithely announced but nothing much else seems to be done. And then there’s another announcement. We rarely even get a ’sorry’, not that that would do much good.

Sorry, as I’m also bored of lecturing my daughter, carries an implicit promise to improve one’s behaviour. It’s not merely a placatory or assuaging device to smooth things over until the next crisis. Sorry’s no good without an attendant change in behaviour.

Because all public service tends towards infantilisation. Lost your laptops, data disks and military ID cards? Here’s some money to go and buy replacements. It’s an adjunct to the magic wallet theory.

Now, all this would be more forgiveable if the government didn’t itself treat us like children. The whispered conversations behind closed doors. The ‘this is for your own good’. The ‘do as I say or go to your room’. The ‘do as I say, not do as I do’. Being infantilised by the infantile is demeaning.

It’s like hearing a disapproving sigh at your behaviour from a seven year-old. Trust me, I get it all the time.

(Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy)

Ah, but what flavour was it, true believers?

It says ‘used to’ but I still do occasionally slip on the old tights and cape and go out and give him a slap. I don’t see him that often any more, if truth be told, not since his mum got ill. And then there was that unpleasantness when we were seen in the park together. Two men in tight clothing rolling around together in public is frowned upon in this less innocent age.

I’ve calmed down a lot since reaching my thirties anyway. It’s more cats stuck in trees, VAT fraud and dog mess these days. Evil never sleeps.

Talking of long versus short, how about this:

Elderly and disabled people in England are increasingly being denied social services, a report says.

In 2005, I gave up smoking, oh how I miss it. In 2008, I’ve yet to have a single alcoholic drink. It’s proved easier than I expected, I’m not missing it, actually enjoying it and part of me wonders if I’ll drink again.

And then I read the above and I think, what’s the bloody point? I’ll have a thousand Camel Lights and a Jeroboam of Absolut, please landlord.

Those of us found wanting by the Blairite meritocracy don’t want to be any more of a burden to our children than anyone else. Conversely, maybe paradoxically, I think my kids should work for themselves and not expect to inherit anything. Which is just as well, really.

My legacy to my kids will - hopefully - be shit-hot bullshit detectors and coping strategies for life in a world where simple compassion seems to be going the way of the dodo. They will, it seems, inherit one thing however. Me, aged 75, to look after. Soiling myself and drooling and frightening their kids all because I was selfish and gave up fags and drink in my mid thirties.

I’ve been tagged with a meme by the dastardly Mr Teabag. This one involves citing seven things of which I am in favour, in order to disabuse people of the notion that I am a ‘negatavist’ of popular legend.

Mr Challinor also provides an excellent list but rather shoots my fox when he says:

Any miserabilist with a modicum of low cunning can disguise a negative as a positive by subtly darkening the shades of meaning.

A shame. Apart from describing me to a tee, he’s ruined my planned strategy. The first thing was going to be air-dropping pro-war journalists and bloggers on Basra - they can have their glorious liberation but they have to fight for it themselves.

Now I feel compelled - by Challinor’s fine example - to play nice: a rather harder proposition. Here goes:

1. This.
2. This.
3. This.
4. This.
5. This.
6. This.
7. This.

I don’t usually tag but I like this one - it’s positive. So, those under no obligation are: Jim, Tim, Mike, Rachel, Eugenides, Bookdrunk and Mahmoud.

I love technology, I really do. I’ve got my iPod, digital camera, DVD player, bittorrent, mobile phone, tiny remote-control helicopters, blah, blah, blah. We really do live in the future. I first listened to the Beatles’ White Album on my parents’ radiogram some time in the early 1970s. Now, I carry those songs around in my pocket.

And now I’ve got my PVR - Personal Video Recorder. It’s basically a Freeview tuner bolted to a hard disc drive. You set the timer for a programme using the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and the box records that programme onto the hard drive for later viewing.

Except, what’s the point of an EPG that says a programme starts at X o’clock and ends at Y o’clock when the programme doesn’t start at X o’clock and end at Y o’clock? Or rather, what’s the point of a broadcaster who can’t begin and end a programme at the advertised time? It’s just as well bomb disposal experts aren’t so cavalier about time keeping. Imagine Olympic sprinting if everybody could start when they bloody well liked.

Video Cassette Recorders were clunky and the playback quality was naff but at least it would have recorded the end of ‘Three Men In Another Boat’ the other night and not cut out just before Griff Rhys Jones finds out how much his boat is worth. (I’m not proud I recorded TMIAB but I quite like Dara O Briain and it was the visual equivalent of Horlicks that brought my heartbeat back down to a safe level after having been to see I Am Legend.)

If I have to endure another session of tears from the kids because the PVR has clipped the end of Doctor Who or Robin bastard Hood, I’m going to find the home phone number of the Director General of the BB-shitting-C and phone him every time it happens so he can endure the lamentations of my children as well.

Like a government that was never going to be able to clean up the street of Basra when it couldn’t even scrape the dogshit off the streets of Brighton, surely we’re unlikely to see the cure for cancer (and, more importantly, jetpacks and flying cars) until we can get a television programme to begin and end on time?

No, it really isn’t:

Prince William is to train as a pilot during a four-month attachment with the Royal Air Force.

How come this military dilettante gets to fly helicopters and I don’t? It’s not like he’s going to make a long term career out of it or be allowed to be a decoy for Exocets like his uncle. After several flight hours in this baby, I reckon I could.

This is like those unpaid journalism internships at places like the New Statesman that you can’t afford to take unless you’ve got a rich daddy to foot the expenses, isn’t it? The great and the good just keep on getting greater and gooder, the bastards.

I’d quite like four months learning to fly combat aircraft and then I can realise my long-held ambition of carpet-bombing Hove job centre, the scene of so many miserable months for me back in the century.

(Actually, it’s now an architect’s offices so I can’t. What I’m actually going to do, when I’m rich and famous, is buy the building and have it pushed brick by brick up the fundament of then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett.)

Well, then. Nearly over for another year. Hope you had/are having a good one. They say Christmas is a time for giving and my liver is giving me gip. In return, I shall shortly be giving it a holiday.

Anyway, Mammon was very good to me this year. A shiny new camera and not one but two tiny remote control helicopters.

One of the highlights must surely be the present from my mother-in-law. One of these babies - a Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet.

I’m 37 next birthday but my partner’s mum always pitches her presents at my level of arrested development with frightening accuracy. The remote controlled thises and thats. The Star Wars DVD box set. The enormous model of the Starship Enterprise that also doubled as an FM radio.

While tottering around the house in my helmet issuing quasi-fascistic grunts, I noticed this message stamped on the inside:

‘WARNING! This is a toy. Does not provide protection.’

Which makes you wonder about the kind of person who might consider using the Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet as a hard hat and therefore require said warning.

‘You be careful when you’re up on the roof adjusting the television aerial.’

‘It’ll be ok, I’ve got my Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet.’

…or…

‘Fancy a spot of pot-holing at the weekend?’

‘Too right, I’ll dig out my Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet and I’ll be as safe as houses.’

Surely, the warning message should be left off the helmet, you know, for the good of our species. We could have a whipround and buy one for, well, you know.

I’ve gone off the idea of being cremated when I die. I really want a Viking funeral but I’m pretty sure there’ll be a local by-law outlawing them.

I like George Monbiot’s idea and fancy being buried in the roots of a tree. It’s a kind of reincarnation - my molecules become the fruit and the leaves which are then eaten by caterpillars that then become butterflies. Or die of alcohol and cholesterol poisoning.

But then I read something like this…

The average cost of dying in the UK is nearly £6,000, research has shown.

…and think, sod it, just put me out for the bin men. Two and a half big ones just to drop my carcass in a hole in the ground? You can spend 98 quid on a death notice in the local paper and £149 on a funeral notice but the number people attending your send-off will be largely dictated by the weather.

Six grand? I’d rather my missus spent it on attracting a decent and reliable stud muffin who was nice to the kids. Nah, not really. I demand she commissions a forty foot statue of me that glows in the dark.

Being both physically too weak and mentally too apathetic in the last few day to escape it, I’ve found myself taking another spin on the witless, churning carousel of popular culture that is daytime television.

And, like last time, I’ve been inexorably drawn to the music channels. For instance, I’m fascinated by that clash of the cultural titans that is ‘Ayo Technology’ by 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake and which is being endlessly looped at the minute:

Apart from the video being some kind of stalker or sexual harasser’s instruction manual, it was this lyric that caught my ear:

I’m tired of using technology, why don’t you sit down on top of me…

Now, I’m jaded and cynical to a singular degree but doesn’t that translate to:

Hello, I’m sick of looking at pictures of mucky ladies on the internet, please help me…

Similarly, I’m gripped by the poetic and emotional shallows plumbed by erstwhile Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger’s Baby Love. Couldn’t they have tried just a little harder? I had to drag myself upstairs to administer the antidote of Northern Sky by Nick Drake.

I know her song isn’t supposed to be a hymn to the ages and isn’t even really aimed at people who like music but I have a three year old with a better grasp of emotion, soul and, yes dammit, diction.

Looking at the video for the song, it seems to be aimed more at people who prefer more furtive and solitary pursuits. I suspect Ms Scherzinger’s management have shares in Kleenex as a financial safety net should her ‘pop’ ‘career’ stumble.

One of the advantages of living in a modern society, as opposed to say, Athens in 500 BC, is our flexible approach to refuse collection.

Brighton City Council, for instance, have taken to the not unreasonable policy that, should your wheelie-bin be full, any excess refuse bags placed beside the wheelie-bin will be ignored by the refuse collector and left to rot. (And yes, I do sort through my garbage like a starving racoon to separate out the glass, plastic and paper).

That is why, at 3.15 AM this morning, I was woken by the sound of not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE urban foxes having a violent and protracted Mexican stand-off over the (double-bagged) chicken carcass I put out yesterday. A truly unique sight, I hope you’d agree.

Now, I love foxes. There are loads of them round here (clearly). Amazing animals. I spent a very pleasant hour watching the five little pranksters foxy-boxing, howling at the tops of their little lungs and generally trying to tear each other to bits.

But when you knock on the window and all five brazenly stare up and don’t move, their minds clearly fixed on the prize, you have to wonder how far we - and specifically the abject Brighton City Council - have progressed since the Cretans invented the landfill site in 3000 BC.

And that’s why I’m knackered and feel like I want to thrash a council representative this morning.

(See also Seagulls. This year’s incessantly squawking and rutting contingent seem to have finally buggered off from the roof. Looks like we’re going to have to give the seven-year old the ‘where do babies come from’ chat before they come back as I suspect my ‘oh, she’s just giving him a piggy back’ excuse is wearing thin.)

After the knives and paedophiles of previous summers, this year’s sun-stroked moral panic is shaping up to be cheap alcohol.

Booze turns people into arseholes apparently. Let me say something. I’ve been drinking for the best part of twenty years. I love to drink, I love being drunk and - this is unintentional, shamefaced machismo, by the way - I drink like some people breathe. In all those years of being drunk, I never hit anybody; never slapped the missus or the kids. I never stabbed anyone, robbed anyone or raped anyone, intimidated anyone on the bus home or harassed women. Nor has anyone in my social circle or they wouldn’t be there.

If you ask me, it’s not alcohol (cheap or otherwise) that makes someone an arsehole. It’s being an arsehole that makes them an arsehole. Let’s address the societal factors that cause arseholism, shall we?

But no, they want to raise the drinking age and put up the price of cheap alcohol. That’s collective punishment, isn’t it? Creeping prohibition. The idea that you can price somebody out of drinking is ridiculous anyway. They’ll just look for cheaper ways to get pissed until they’re drinking god knows what.

It’s the same with cigarettes. I gave up smoking not because it was bankrupting me (although it slowly was) but because I read some truly terrifying articles about lung cancer and its survival rates in this country and decided I really didn’t fancy it.

Now all I need is to read in stark terms about what all this cheap Stella Artois is doing to me. I’ve looked, I really have, but nobody seems to want to talk me out of my bibulous lifestyle. Putting seven pence on a can really isn’t going to put me off. Or anybody else, I would have thought, other than the pocket money crowd who, if regulations were enforced, wouldn’t be drinking anyway.

(And if life in this country was less shitty, particularly for those trapped on the work-bed-work-weekend-pissed-work-bed-work treadmill, fewer people would feel the need to be arseholed at every opportunity.)

Update: As ever, John Band is the voice of reason.

And so, to Devil’s Dyke yestereve to witness The Perseids, the annual meteor shower created by the Earth passing through the tail of the comet, Swift-Tuttle.

The shower’s unalloyed cosmic joy and beauty was somewhat tempered by the accompanying shower of idiots on the ground. There was the berk who thought it a sensible idea to set up his motorised telescope using a torch that blazed with the power of a thousand suns. He took an age and then it turned out the telescope’s batteries were flat. Then there was the stupid guitar-toting hippy who nearly trampled us because he was walking across the ground with his eyes shut.

Lying on our backs, as the majestic arc of the Milky Way wheeled above us and the shooting stars leapt through the sky like tigers defying the laws of gravity, the soundtrack to the spectacle was provided by the man some way off to our left who complained incessantly. His stiff neck, the evening’s temperature and the fact that he was only getting a mere one meteor a minute as opposed to, presumably, an aaargh-my-eyes Day of the Triffids style spectacular.

When we got back to the car we found that, in the darkness, we’d laid the blanket on top of a massive dog egg. Never before had I longed so hard for the heat death of the universe.

Half way through my allotted three score and ten and I’ve only seen a miserable 271. Time to blow the dust off that Werner Herzog box set I’ve been resisting all this time.

And where’s Hudson Hawk? If Buckaroo Banzai makes the cut, where the hell is Hudson Hawk?

John Konichiwa, may his name forever live in infamy, has tagged me with another damned meme: to list eight random facts about myself. Or should that be ‘facts’? You decide. One of the following is not true. But which one?

1. I once kissed popular British comedian Frank Skinner.
2. Thanks to the incompetent dentistry I was subjected to as a child, I have only 26 teeth.
3. I used to quite like fishing. Until I actually caught a fish.
4. I want this played at my funeral. My Viking funeral.
5. The actor Michael Jayston once came up to me in a restaurant and praised me for getting my two year-old daughter to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.
6. In the past, in order to impress girls, I have tried both vegetarianism and Leonard Cohen. I took to neither. (Vegetarianism and Leonard Cohen, that is, the girls were very nice. Well, one was.)
7. A few years ago, while going ‘commando’, I opened the door to a man in a wheelchair. My flies were inadvertently undone and we saw eye to eye.
8. This is my fourth regeneration.

Spreading the misery, then:

1. Tim Ireland.
2. PDF.
3. Jim Bliss.
4. Clive Nosemonkey.
5. Eugenides.
6. Robert Sharp.
7. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
8. Pond.

Back from the travels - very nice, thanks, apart from the Little Englander wankers cluttering up the place. More of them later, possibly.

Have, however, returned to chaos: family illness, financial armageddon and about a kerjillion emails (I really must unsubscribe from the insanely, worryingly prolific Reuter’s Carnage Alerts some time). If anyone’s emailed me, hold hard - I will get back to you eventually.

Plus - a comedy classic this - Gary the guinea pig turned up his toes while in the care of friends. We hardly knew him. Haven’t broken it to the kids yet - any past experience on this would be gratefully received. A memorial service is being held in his honour tomorrow. No flowers by request.

And remote blogging via Twitter. What was all that about? Bollocks, that’s what. Twitter, in short, is bobbins. I swear to God that contrary to appearances most of the posts were not made while I was drunk. Never again, on my oath.

(Twitter, that is, not drinking. Obviously).

My six year-old daughter’s just been complaining that whenever I make up her lunch box for school, I ‘always’ make her jam sandwiches. This is a filthy lie clearly aimed at undermining my position as most popular member of the household.

Only when I have a particularly stinking hangover - and can’t face lingering over the preparation of food - does she get jam sandwiches and that’s happened about once in the last month. But she obviously only remembers the disappointment of the less exotic sandwich over the glee of a more exciting comestible.

And so, as you do, I got me thinking about the Prime Minister’s legacy. Has it all been endless jam butties? Sure, we’ve had the egg mayonnaise of Northern Ireland but what about the Quorn and cream cheese of Iraq? The rest is jam, isn’t it? Jam yesterday, jam today and jam tomorrow.

There’s a breakdancer coming into my daughter’s school tomorrow to strut his stuff. Naturally, YouTube was the first port of call to show her what it’s all about. Just had to share.

This guy is a freak, obviously.

And this guy’s brains were obviously coating the walls of his skull once he’d finished.

Update: Aw! Look at him go!

It’s Hutton’s Chase Me’s birthday:

Been doing this nonsense for three years now, and where’s it got me? Nowhere. It has simply widened the circle of people who think I’m a dick. That’s all it has achieved.

And isn’t that, in a final analysis, what it’s all about? Nobody called me a ‘cretin’ or ‘filth’ or ‘you cunt’ before I was a blogger.

Yay, blogging!

I bought a straw cowboy hat on Brighton beach today. It’s made me inordinately happier than five years - on and off - of blogging ever did.

I see Oliver Kamm is once again defecating on the medium through which he made his modest reputation as a writer.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

The ‘Oliver Kamm is the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy. His blog is at…’ sign-off was my favourite bit. Blogging is bobbins, please look at my blog.

Ah, I remember Oliver when he merely used to get stroppy about the difference between a ‘faction’ and a ‘fraction’ (as in the ‘Red Army…’). ‘The stupidest blogger alive,’ was how he described Ryan of Beatnik Salad over the affair, not poisoning the debate at all. Happy days.

I met Kamm once. It was at the lunch where the bloggers who were christened ‘the new commentariat‘ by the Guardian were summoned. (I was invited, inexplicably, all other bloggers in the country seemingly too busy being civil to each other and engaging in intelligent debate). Oliver turned up late and immediately launched into another tedious and protracted diatribe against Noam Chomsky. The starters were therefore cold so Tim Ireland and I finished all the wine between us. True story.

I believe Oliver lives near me although I’ve never bumped into him. Since that day I’ve kept an eye out for him so I can mess up his hair, push him into a patch of nettles or roll him in dog muck in the park.

My beloved The Friday Thing was put to sleep today. It is no more. It’s proved impossible to run in any viable manner and so the decision was made to close it.

This makes me inordinately sad and not just because I’ve been one of its writers for the last year. I feel genuinely bereft. I was a devoted reader from almost the beginning and will miss very much its freewheeling wit, cynicism and imagination.

If you’ve never read it I suggest you get across there and have a swim in the archives. I defy anyone not to get something out of TFT’s five years of consistent brilliance.

Self-referential and out of context as they may be, I’m reproducing my final TFT pieces on Chicken Yoghurt to complete the set and to prove that ‘I did that’. (You can read the rest of the stuff I wrote for it here.)

I’m very proud to have been asked to write for TFT. It’s been a personal highpoint for me and I think I’ll go along way before I feel the same pleasure and satisfaction again. I worked hard at trying to match the quality of the writing that had made me such a fan of it. I hope I came close on the odd occasion.

It’s melodramatic, I know, but a bit more fun went out of the world today. Cheer me up, somebody?

Bored and following this post from Chris, I’ve discovered the wonders of Twitter. It’s blogging via your mobile phone as far as I’m concerned.

You send up to 140 characters via text message to a given number and it appears on your Twitter page. Something to keep me amused for a bit.

Those who wish to can receive a Twitterer’s posts via their mobiles or Instant Messenger. A little jiggery pokery lets you post your ‘tweets’ on your blog as well - see in the sidebar on the right under ‘out and about’.

I think I might liveblog my trip to the pub tonight. Bet you can’t wait.

…shock and awe started this time four years ago?

Tim Ireland wants to know what bloggers were saying for themselves on March 20 2003.

I was blogging at ‘Bar Room Philosophy’ at the time, a blog I kicked off in January 2002. The blog is now long gone but thanks to the wonders of the interweb, the post I wrote on March 19 2003 was preserved by the Wayback Machine.

The post I made on March 28 was better, after having been on Brighton beach watching the West Pier burn down.

I was a proper Stopper back then. My marching days didn’t last very long though. Trying to get away from combat-booted policemen, breaking up a march for having the temerity to deviate from its route, while pushing a two year-old in a buggy made a coward of me, I’m sorry to say. And then seeing George Galloway speak in the flesh put me off the Stop The War Coalition altogether.

I was very fond of BRP and I’m sorry I closed it. Through it I became friendly with a few people who I still know now, including Tim. Some of them are still blogging and I’ll tag a few of them (Jim, Nick and Rochenko) to carry on this meme, if they don’t mind. I think this is rather a good one.

So, what did you post on 20 March, 2003? (Or on as near to the day as possible.)

• Jim Bliss
• Rochenko
• Nick Barlow
• Daniel Davies
• Backword Dave

Doesn’t have to be a blog entry; it could easily be in usenet or in a forum.

Update: Rochenko reminisces.