A Times journalist just described Tory party members as 'lizards'. Apparently we talk too much about broken Britain, and crime, when what we should be doing is celebrating the swimming results from the Olympics (apparently it's not possible to do both). He ends his piece by telling us The lizards may get their new government. Fellow lizardsactivists: dismiss from your minds the horror of your thoughts about that boy who fell from a Hackney towerblock, as he tried to climb away from those unbroken Britons who were chasing him. Of course there was a gap between losing his grip and hitting the ground, when he knew what was happening to him. Of course thinking about that gap makes you feel sick. Of course this death isn't even the latest gang-related murder in Britain - Ahmed Benyermak died last Wednesday, after all. But come come. Move along please. Nothing broken here. (I can't help but remember those others with concerns that lizards might take over the government.)
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One thing I’ve loved about this summer’s weather has been its utter predictability. No, really. You don’t need to pause for thought when a friend asks you round for a barbecue. You know it’s going to be cold and you’ll need a raincoat. Saves a lot of fussing. We went to the Innocent Summer Fete in Regent’s Park the day after Alex Deane wrote about it on CentreRight. After an hour of being soaked to the skin, and only fleeing from under the (non) protection of a tree when lightning threatened to strike, we gave up and squelched home. Pah. You can stick yer fruit-pulp-based health refreshments where the sun don’t shine (i.e. Britain).
So I have that un-British characteristic of being made gloomy by rain. It gets me down, man. The summer’s weather has left me, well, under the weather. I wonder if that’s a particularly British idiom? The only other language I’m halfway good at is Italian but I can’t translate phrases: I doubt that sotto il tempo is correct – under the time? I must ask Lisa. [Time passes]. I asked her: no, there isn’t a direct Italian equivalent, which cheers me up, somehow. She offers mi sento a terra (I feel down on the ground), which makes sense if you live in the sun-kissed foothills of the Alps, or, even more appropriately for an Italian, I think, mi sento le ruote sgonfie: I’ve got flat tyres.
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One of the many reasons I know I’m only a political amateur [drop the adjective – Ed] is my inability to get excited at the thought of reading non-fiction for pleasure or even self-improvement. The rightwing web this summer has pulsed with fervour about works on ‘nudging’. It’s, like, we’re not like telling you not to drink alcopops, man, we’re just, like, making it bloody hard work to get the top off, yeah? Then one day the entire citizenry wakes up and goes I can’t believe we used to drink that rubbish. Get me a ticket to the Innocent Summer Fete, my good fellow.
It made me think of motorcycling, but not in a Zen-type way. Much of an advanced road-riding course on a motorbike involves constant inspection of the road’s vanishing point, where the distant curve of the tarmac and the hedge beside it combine into a visual singularity. The skill is to hammer yourself towards that point as fast as you can (usually with a former policeman screaming in your earpiece Faster! Faster! For God’s sake faster, you ****!), until the point where the road meets the ditch starts hurtling towards you, at which stage you might want to ease off the throttle a little. Might not 'nudging' be at the vanishing point of contemporary political thought, the singularity where right-wing and left-wing ideology must ultimately meet? [That's it, you're fired - Ed]. I don't know mate. Pretty obvious behavioural psychology, dressed up as dernier cri theory, I find it a bit depressing (maybe because I'm under the weather, of course). Might we not as well outsource social policy to Coca-cola’s ad agency? Time to ease off the throttle, a little.
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What books did you take on holiday? Apart from Nudge of course. The novel this year which has stayed longest in my mind – and I’m writing this on a train so I can’t cheat by checking the bookshelf – was The Road Home by Rose Tremain. It is an account of the travails of Lev, a Russian who comes to London to make some money, and who discovers a talent for cooking. Well it’s about a lot more than that, of course. Have you ever read a novel and found yourself falling slightly in love with the protagonist? Rose Tremain’s book had a bigger impact on my thoughts on immigration than all the newspaper articles in the world. I could be in love with almost everyone, in the words of my favourite song. Indeed you could, and this has consequences in the world.
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Just in time to save me from bank holiday torpor, Mr K’s niece and nephew arrive from the south west, and demand a visit to the Trocadero, to see ‘Ripley’s Believe it or not!’ exhibition. 
I imagine most parents have heard of this; I had not. It was sold to us as a fascinating sequence of fantastic facts about the world. Like the British Museum? I asked, to stony silence. We’re very close to the British Museum, I tried again at the entrance, appalled by the animatronic display of a fat puppet screaming out a pop song at deafening volume. Step into my rip-off exhibition, baby. We coughed up the 120 quid it costs to take four adults + two children into the fascinating sequence of fantastic facts, to find: a very large wooden rocking-chair that you may gingerly rest upon (see photo, right, for details); a hall of mirrors (this was quite good), and lots of portraits of famous people constructed from non-standard material (including the pièce de résistance: Diana Spencer’s image, constructed from fluff ‘reclaimed’ from the innards of the artist’s sofa. I’m not making this up). No binding narrative holds the collection together, most of which is plastic replica, with hyperbolic annotation (This is what a shrunken head would look like, if it was real! But it’s not!) rather than original. You do get to watch a video of a man smoking a pipe through his eye, which I’m rather astonished hasn’t been banned under some ordinance or other. The children loved it, of course. When it comes to nudging, they wrote the book.
