The day started at a fairly reasonable 09h30. I could have slept in far longer, but with dad here thought I ought to make an effort so set an alarm. Of course, that made the day quite long - for a Saturday - with the result that I feel as worn out as I would after a day in the office.

I made breakfast while dad battled my iBook to send an emails to Buenos Aires where a significant time lag guaranteed they’d be left on the server for several hours to come. The morning slid by fairly swiftly. We watched CD:UK and Top of the Pops (which dad assures me they now have in France - same name, same logo) and I picked out snacky recipes for tomorrow evening. Settled on pasta and drove out to Sainsbury’s to buy the ingredients, dad in tow.

He was bowled over by what you could buy there. He spent ten minutes or more looking through the cheeses, a wide-eyed fifteen in the fruit and veg aisles, and almost as long among the olive oil and dried mushrooms. And this is someone who lives in Provence - surrounded by olive groves and mountains practically rotted to the core with fat, flat mushrooms, cooling themselves in the shade of citrus trees.

He assures me the best of the French produce is exported straight out of the country, and the crap kept back to feed the locals.

I had kind of planned the day so we’d leave home around 12h30 and arrive at Bluewater by one. As it happened we left at 14h30 and after fighting through roadworks arrived some time after 15h. It was long enough, though, and by the time we’d looped it twice I was ready for home. Still empty-handed, but that’s no bad thing.

Hoping to show him that in spite of last night’s back, crack and sack waxing episode British TV does still have at least one or two programmes worth watching, I sat him down in front of Chicken Run the moment we got home and made tea and toasted cinnamon bagels. He grew up on a chicken farm and apparently the production-line mentality isn’t that far from the truth.

Since he arrived yesterday evening I reckon I’ve watched a month’s-worth of my regular TV quota.

To the cinema after dinner - having just read a story on the BBC News site about how Washington DC cinemas are pretty much out of business with the locals convinced they’re going to be gasses in them - to watch Catch Me If You Can. Very well told. It’s easy to forget you’re watching Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio - a good thing, I’d say.

Well I may not have been up before the birds but it certainly felt like it - perhaps merely before the bees - so that I could clean the flat from end to end in readiness for dad’s arrival.

I did pretty well, and avoided the temptation, in my sleepy state, to throw things into obscure cupboard corners or under coffee tables. Hoovered, washed up and bleached the bathroom, then headed out to work.

A day of meetings and biscuits, and cups of tea. Opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of the week with the team while we watched the Friday afternoon movies on the net and ate jelly beans from the jelly bean machine sent in by a PC manufacturer trying to make amends, then took the long walk back to Euston Square and on to Liverpool Street to meet with dad at 19h as arranged.

Except he wasn’t there.

He’d called me from Victoria so in spite of a four-hour delay on his flight I knew he’d made it safely into the country.

So I sat there and read The Times and the Guardian which I was glad I’d remembered to download before leaving the office, and I pulled my coat ever tighter around myself in a pitiful attempt to keep out the cold. It didn’t work, and I didn’t have any money on me to buy a coffee, so I was quite glad when a fat man sat opposite and blocked the prevailing wind.

I gave up at 19h45 and jumped on a train home. I arrived to find a message from dad on the machine. He’d been delayed on the Circle Line. It had taken almost two hours to get from Victoria to Liverpool Street - a journey that should take no more than 20 minutes on a bad day.

Seems we’d missed each other by mere minutes and after a wait of his own he too had given up and boarded the 20h15, due for arrival any minute. I drove back out and picked him up, then returned us both home for a dinner we were well overdue.

I think the evening was quite an eye opener for dad - in terms of British TV, at least, which he insists gets trashier every time he returns home. We started with Graham Norton - fairly mild - then a several-weeks-old episode of Sex and the City, which he’s never seen before. Ten minutes in he confessed to not having realised it would be so ‘explicit’. I guess it was, too, but you kind of get immune to it after a couple of series and nobody I know thinks it’s explicit any more.

After that, The Salon, which was a first for me, too. It was perhaps not a good thing to watch with a parent. It’s a simple premise - fly on the wall documentary in a London beauty salon. Had it just been haircuts he could probably have coped. I think what really put him off was the 24 year old guy having a back, crack and sack wax.

I suggested at that point that we switch off and head for our respective beds.

For the first time since dad has been coming to stay it has struck me how much things have changed. It’s not so many years since I was visiting him every other weekend and sleeping over in an unfamiliar bed. And tonight, as I was getting ready to jump under the duvet and type these words it struck me that our roles have been completely reversed. Here he is, sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere belonging to me, and here I am checking that he’s got everything he needs, that he knows where the bread knife is so he can cut the loaf for toast in the morning, and cooking his dinner.

Short years pass quickly.

Quote from John Simpson’s book Strange Places, Questionable People, from his time in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War:

I went back to Baghdad after a week or so and stayed on for two months … I grew to love it, and to sympathise with it, too: Iraq seemed to me like a hijacked plane, being flown to an unknown destination. A man whom scarcely anyone wanted as their president was holding a gun to the pilot’s head, and the passengers and the rest of the crew were terrified to say a word or to stop him. The fact that British industry, with the enthusiastic encouragement of the British government, had supplied the hijacker with his gun and the bullets for it made it all the worse.

Suddenly it’s late on Thursday night, which means dad arrives in less than 24 hours. The flat needs hoovering, washing needs to be done and the kitchen needs to be cleaned. It doesn’t help he’s meeting me at the office tomorrow so we can travel home together - no chance for a sneaky clean after work.

Yesterday was not a good day for riding the tubes. Or the buses come to that. The Central Line is still out of action and it looks like staying that way until the end of March now. So, it was the increasingly familiar trek to Euston Square, which turned out to be closed. As was Kings Cross, which had been sealed off with Police Line tape, flashing lights and inappropriately parked cars.

The streets were a seeting mess of confused commuters chattering into mobile phones about road blocks and closed stations and explaining to better halves that they had no idea when they’d make it home.

With no sign of anything other than the exclusion zone growing any time soon I set out east on foot, cutting down Grays Inn Road past ITN, which I’ve not seen since my last show on LBC. Back then it was a drizzly Sunday afternoon and most of London was away from the city. Last night it was a raining cold evening and the road was at a standstill. A long line of empty buses was parked up along the kerb, disgorged of passengers, while drivers stood out in the road, in spite of the rain, with their engines switched off and their car doors open.

Everywhere, the talk was of bombs. Quite natural, I suppose, when there are 1,500 troops and 450 armed police at Heathrow at the moment. When I (eventually) got home I switched on LBC News to catch talk of military jets patroling the skies of the city. That was much later, though, as I still had a long walk ahead - a couple of hours all told. I wish I’d known about the closure before I left and stayed in the office a while longer, or taken a more direct route home.

I’d made plans to gym with Kevin, which of course fell through. I’d sent him a text to rearrange and missed the one he sent back saying OK, so traipsed around to his after all and found his house shut up and deserted.

All I wanted was a bath, so after the abortive trip to Kevin’s front door I came home to defrost soup and ran a deep, hot bath that I soaked in as the soup slowly cooked. Ate it in front of Sex in the City which after a lacklustre start has evolved into a stonking penultimate series.

Was interrupted by a pizza delivery for a Simon Timms, apparently at this address. Strangely familiar name, but I sent the pizza away anyway.

So, after a bad journey home last night I should have guessed it would be crap this morning, too. Something to do with emotional breakdown or signal failure or something similar at Baker Street had shut down three quarters of the tube network and the entire population seemed to be out on the streets. Enough drivers to have kept the city finances in the black for a year if congestion charging had been introduced a week early.

It took a good three hours, an hour of them spent on a freezing, static bus, to get from Chelmsford to Soho. Whoever hinted that by the 2000s home working would be a reality was a cruel teaser.

Finished shopping for dad’s birthday presents at lunchtime, trawling Old Compton Street with Emilie and Kathryn. On the deskbound return trip we passed through Soho Square where a pigeon was wearing a plastic bag the way a bike courier would sling his satchel - over its head, onto a shoulder and then down across its body and under a wing.

Emilie did her best to creep around the Square and pick it up, but it flew away before she could get her hands on it. It landed on the other side of the grass where a rather less careful passer-by stamped on the bag and trapped the bird - precisely what Emilie had avoided. Anyhow, the bag was taken off and it flapped away, and about 50 other pigeons followed on behind it, clearly keen to gossip.

Susie came in mid-afternoon for tea and so we could wish her a happy birthday. We gave her presents and a cake full of fruit from Patisserie Valerie. We lit sparklers and write happy birthday in the air, and filled the office with sharp, bitter smoke.

Met up with Kevin for a gym session after work, to make up for missing out yesterday evening. It turns out he wasn’t out at all when I knocked - just tucked up in bed watching TV.

It was my first real gym session - as opposed to swimming - in several days, and it certainly felt like it. I’m feeling quite creaky now, but then I’ve done Tesco, too, since then which may have contributed. Nevertheless, we had a good workout and then sat in the sauna for 15 minutes to soften up the joints.

It turns out that, in spite of knowing each other eight years now and never ever been short of things to talk about week after week after week, not only did I not know Kevin’s last name, but he didn’t know mine either. Very strange.

Well, if there’s something good about the closure of the Central Line, which looks like it may stay shut for some time to come, it’s the fact I’m getting to know the streets north of Oxford Street far better than I ever have done.

Every night I walk from the office to Euston Square by a different route and the map in my mind is starting to connect. Just three or four weeks ago I could get hopelessly lost north of Soho - especially north west - but now it’s almost like second nature.

It also means I’m doing double exercise, as I’m gyming every night after my walk. I’m concentrating on my swimming, and over the last two weeks have increased my lengths by 50% while keeping my swim time the same, which I guess must mean I’m swimming 50% faster.

Bizarrely, it’s zapping my appetite when I thought it would make me ravenous, but I guess not being hungry can’t be a bad thing. Next time I’m near some scales, I’ll weigh myself, but as I was already several kilos underweight I’m not overly worried what it might reveal.

Beyond that, a frustrating day. Long meeting from eleven until well after lunch, then repetitive and unproductive phone calls most of the afternoon. I was quite glad when six came around and it was time to run home.

Europe could have a very bright future ahead. With America seemingly intent on smashing up the existing world order through the discrediting of both Nato and the UN, Europe might finally loose itself from the reigns of its transatlantic overbearer and become a superpower in its own right.

America, not surprisingly, is rattled. Following the end of the cold war, which American commentators can often be heard chalking up as an American ‘victory’, the US found itself as the world’s only superpower - at least on a temporary basis. Even the most amateur of part-time statewatchers could see that very soon China would be rising to take Russia’s place and as every day passes that eventuality gets closer and ever more certain.

And so America was prepared for that. What it was not prepared for, though, was a Europe that could and would think for itself. Rumsfeld’s comments on ‘Old Europe’ state quite clearly how the Administration felt about its continental allies, and hints at its chagrin at their seeming reluctance to chant the American mantra.

Now France and Germany have proposed a credible alternative to immediate all-out war against Iraq. The Guardian reports:

The Franco-German plan, revealed at the weekend, would triple the number of UN weapons inspectors and back them up with surveillance flights. One unconfirmed report said thousands of UN troops would be sent into Iraq to support the inspectors.

But in The Times:

An extraordinary schism opened up in the Western alliance yesterday as Washington flatly rejected a Franco-German plan to avert war by pouring UN weapons inspectors — and troops — into Iraq.

President Putin of Russia last night backed the plan to turn Iraq into a de facto UN protectorate, due to be published on Friday, but President Bush and his leading officials bluntly declared that the United States would go it alone if the United Nations Security Council refused to approve military action.

Had this been proposed six months ago - or perhaps even six weeks ago - it might have been seen to be the answer to America’s demands for exhaustive checks on Iraq’s alleged, and denied, weapons of mass destruction. But apparently that’s no longer the case. In the Guardian, the previously quite measured Colin Powell is quoted:

Tripling the number of inspectors doesn’t deal with the issue. This idea of more inspectors, or no-fly zones, or whatever else may be in this proposal that is being developed is a diversion, not a solution.

America sees this as an unnecessary interruption and hindrance of its goals. Bush has warned that the UN risks rendering itself irrelevant. From Forbes:

U.S. President George W. Bush kept up pressure both on Baghdad and the U.N. Security Council at the weekend, saying the U.N. must move quickly or be deemed irrelevant.

Of course, the UN is moving quickly. It is moving as quickly as it can to avert war. The trouble is, it’s not moving in the direction in which America hoped it would. Instead, it is moving in reverse, which to American minds must be worse than not moving at all.

But of course, much of Europe is closely tied to Nato - another means through which the more peaceful European powers can fight the creeping American desire for war.

Turkey, being in the front line and a key American ally naturally sees itself as being a target in any potential war against Iraq in which it offers America assistance - something America has requested on several occasions. And so Turkey quite naturally requested assurances from its Nato allies that they would come to its aid in the event that it found itself under attack and the US suggested that missiles be positioned in key Turkish locations to enable a fast response.

France, Germany and Belgium blocked the move, seeing objection in this area as yet another hurdle America would have to overcome on its march to war.

It was a clever and logical move, but one that angered the United States. In the words of the BBC:

US ambassador Nicholas Burns said the alliance faced a “crisis of credibility” after what he called a “most unfortunate decision” by Turkey’s three Nato allies.

Notice yet again that it is everyone other that America that is putting the world at risk. Three European countries are causing Nato’s “crisis of credibility”; not, apparently, the US which is putting so much pressure on the organisation that it seems it may crumble at any moment. Two European countries (France and Germany), along with Russia, are the root of the crisis of relevance facing the UN; not, apparently, the US which is objecting to any move that might advance the cause of peace.

But if the true motivation of America’s relentless drive towards peace is a desire to prove its place in a rapidly changing world - a world in which it sees its position of solo superpower being threatened not only by China but by the European Union - then it is going about it the wrong way.

The more America pushes Europe, the more confidence it instils within the emerging confederation this side of the Atlantic. The more harm it does to the ‘relevance’ of the United Nations, the more national groupings will be like the European Union will be encouraged to govern themselves on a continental, rather than global level, and the more harm it does to Nato, the more Europe will find itself relying on the European Rapid Response Force, an idea traditionally loathed by America.

The Christian Science Monitor reported in August 2001 on comments made by Dan Coats, US ambassador to Germany:

Coats … warned that if Germany doesn’t increase its military spending, there’s a “great danger” that the European “rapid-response force” will be a “hollow force.” It would lack the “necessary infrastructure with training and equipment to be an effective fighting force unless it is supported by a sufficient budget.”

If Nato dissolves in the coming months, it is surely inevitable that the necessary funding for a European Rapid Response Force will come through.

So, a pan-continental governmental overseer akin to the United Nations, a pan-continental army and, at last, the confidence to be counted as a unified body distinct and separate from America could mean great things for Europe.

Britain, though, must decide. Is it part of that growing European Union, or an increasingly threatened and paranoid United State of America? Choose wisely and it has a bright future ahead. Choose poorly and it will be an island in more ways than one.

The crises facing the world can be defused through two simple manoeuvres. First, the UN can do precisely what the US has asked of it - it can move quickly to save itself becoming irrelevant. That’s not to say it should move in the direction the US requests. It should, instead, follow the Franco-German peace plan and fill Iraq with UN troops, turning it into a UN protectorate the US would never dare to bomb, and in which the development of weapons of mass destruction would be a practical impossibility.

Second, the UN should be relocated. Its headquarters in New York do more harm to its image than good. Increasingly the UN is seen as an underdog of the United States. Perhaps if it were not based in that country the US would feel less confident in its bullying tactics. It would in turn make the organisation more open. It is a mere few months since George Bush addressed the organisation in person, but his opponent, Saddam Hussein, and future opponents such as Kim Il-Jung and the like will never likely be able to do that for fear of what might happen the moment they step onto American soil.

A relocated United Nations will not only be stronger and more representative, it might be the only form in which it can survive.

A day of photos on Friday. The first two copies of the new issue of the magazine arrived in the office. The design looks fantastic. It’s clean, bright and sharp. My picture, though, I’m not so happy with. Now that I can see it on the page, in full quality, rather than just as a low-resolution preview on the screen, I’m fairly convinced it’s the wrong one. I shall have to talk nicely to art and get it swapped out before I write next month’s column.

Spent the whole of the afternoon in the studio with S and K taking more photos. K was being an admirable hand model; S was helping position the lights exceptionally close to my face. I’m sure I have a tanned left cheek now. Being several thousand watts each they are unbelievably hot and towards the end of the session the camera was starting to get decidedly unhappy about the temperature. Even the props we were using - made of sturdy plastic - we starting to flex and droop.

Was glad when it was over and I could retreat to the comparative cool of the outside world and ride home on the bus - the tube, had it been running, would have been far too hot.

Ate late, watched trash and fell into bed around one; fairly reasonable, but not ideal with a vet visit scheduled for Saturday morning.

Anyhow, I made it on time, stopping off at mum’s on the way to pick up both her and the cat. The vet did the usual poking and prodding (of the cat) and a jab and a pill, then released us with a bill and a punctured moggy, to return home and eat breakfast.

I faffed around at mum’s for a while. We drank a lot of tea, and sat in the conservatory for long enough for my car to get blocked onto the driveway with the arrival of the TV repair man. He spent half an hour trying to shift the thing around the room in search of some mythical serial number he insisted would be on the back of the box and most certainly not on the instruction manual.

In the process he managed to break the stand.

As it turned out, the number was on the manual after all. He said that was most irregular. I’m inclined to disagree.

Waited for him to leave then after another cup of tea came home to compute. Installed OpenOffice under OSX, which was a scary experience. Lots of threatening looking instruction messages.

Was distinctly unimpressed by the result. It looks identical to the Linux version, of course, running under an X11 emulator, which I guess is kind of the point, but even so it would be nice if it took advantage of some of the OSX niceties. Put it safely to one side and switched back to AppleWorks once it was complete, for looking at later on, then got on with Kevin’s web site. Fairly pleased with the results by the end of the day. Logged off with a sense of satisfaction, then mooched around to see Trevor, Jon, Boris and Miss Ginny for a last dinner before they head off on their respective holidays.

A very lazy evening; we sat around until 2h chatting and drinking and munching on mints, all the while my feet getting more and more twitchy from the drink. Little did the cats know that as I sit here typing this from the warmth of my duvet, they’d be shivering in a cattery in Boreham while Trevor and Jon jet off towards the Equator.

So, to bed a while after that - I forget the time - and a predictably late start this morning. In fact, only out of bed in time to catch the Politics Show on BBC1 doing a hatchet job on Newscastle, so I’m guessing it can’t have been far off time for lunch. It was raining, anyway, I know that, so sat indoors all cosy and warm as the drops splattered against the window, and worked on some designs.

Listened to Wes Butters, the unlikely new saviour of Radio 1, churn out his first chart show. He did well. Chatty, relaxed and kind of what you’d get if you cross-bred Scott Mills and Steve Penk. Very much in the Radio 1 style. The show itself, though, with live music and a terrible plodding half hour album chart at the beginning, had lost much of its life and vitality, which is a shame. It could see the independent alternative pull even further forward, regardless of the fact the commercial countdown has little to do with what’s being bought in the shops.

Then again, the credibility of the ‘official’ BBC alternative is equally flimsy. Being based on units shifted it doesn’t take into account the fact that a CD priced up at 99p will sell millions while a regular

From The Guardian yesterday morning:

British security sources last night were quick to distance themselves from Colin Powell’s claim that the murder of the special branch officer Stephen Oake in Manchester was linked to a leading al-Qaida terrorist harboured by Iraq … Security sources last night said there was no solid evidence to support Mr Powell’s allegations. One referred to “jumping to conclusions”, and suggested that the US was making a leap too far.

And from the transcript of Tony Blair’s interview on Newsnight last night:

BLAIR: …what Colin Powell was talking about yesterday is correct. The poison factory in northern Iraq, not strictly under the control of Saddam, is run by operatives that have people in Baghdad and the stuff that they are producing there which includes ricin and other poisons we believe is being dispersed throughout the world.

Not quite an out-and-out backtrack, but certainly a confusing blur.

Meanwhile, The Guardian has produced an excellent Flash guide to possible terrorist targets in the UK. The final slide, which shows the likely effect of a very small dirty bomb in the centre of London, makes sobering reading.

I woke up at half one. AM. The room was dark but for the eerie red glow of the time projected onto my ceiling. Immediately, I was convinced that a very good friend (for the life of me I can’t remember who) had been looking for a place to sleep and I guessed they must have ended up on the settee, and felt guilty for leavign them to fend for themselves.

So, I shot out of bed and peered into the lounge but finding no body there stepped back into the hall and pushed the lounge door closed.

Quickly.

Over my foot.

And took the skin off my toes.

Right away they started to bleed, and I hopped into the bathroom to find plasters to stop them; not easy in the dark. For the next half hour I lay in bed as they throbbed themselves back to sleep and I slowly followed on behind. In pain, but happier now I knew the flat was empty but for myself.

Tonight, at the gym, I took off the plaster. A deep red scar - almost black - had sealed the cut, but as I swam I could feel the skin peeling back and forth with the flow of the water and the feeling - purely psychological - was even worse than the original event.

I soldiered through and did two lengths beyond what I’d achieved on Tuesday, while cutting two minutes off my time, then slunk into the steam room where I sat until the discomfort had eased.

In the Times today:

Under the scheme, councils will be able to take over the management of properties that have been empty for six months or more. They will refurbish it if necessary before offering it for rent through a letting agent or housing association. The council will reclaim the cost of refurbishment, after which rent money will go to the owner of the property… The move is one of a range of government measures to tackle a housing shortage.

So, what happens to house builders who cannot immediately sell the houses they have built? If they are still on sale after six months because a drop in the housing market means the builders can’t recoup their costs, will they be forced to rent them out, making them an even less viable purchase? What would the outcome be? Less houses built, I suppose. So, back to square one then.