Well, for such a troublemaker, George Bush certainly seems to be popular. Or at least his press clipping make it look that way:

Tony Blair joins Rudy Giuliani and Laura Bush in a standing ovation during President Bush’s address — The Daily Telegraph

Bush was greeted at the lectern by enthusiastic applause and a standing ovation — OnCampus magazine

Introduced by the Rev. William Jones as a “very, very special guest,” Bush received a standing ovation from the predominantly black congregation — MSNBC

President Bush received a bipartisan standing ovation when he declared in his January 28 State of the Union address that his goal was “high-quality affordable health for all Americans” — Covering the Uninsured

“The president did a magnificent job tonight,” said Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who like all of his colleagues in the Senate rose to a standing ovation many times during Bush’s 30-minute address. — Inquirer

It goes on and on and on. Ever wondered why? Perhaps The Mirror has the answer:

George Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs wouldn’t guarantee a standing ovation. Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome… Mr Bush’s every appearance in the US is stage-managed, with audiences full of supporters — The Mirror

Relive Bush’s most popular stage-managed moments through the comfort of Google.

A telling excerpt from an official statement emanating from Estonia:

This man is loved in Great Britain and hated in greater continental Europe

Who could they possibly mean? Tony Blair? Unlikely. George Bush? Even moreso.

The full quote reveals all:

This man is loved in Great Britain and hated in greater continental Europe. When commenting on the [Eurovision] Song Contest, Wogan will leave no stone unturned regarding the organizing country, the presenters and their outfits, the songs and the final results of the show. He considers it funny and so do the British, who have started to watch the Eurovision more and more every year because of his ironic remarks… booze has its affect on Wogan, who becomes more and more intolerable as the show develops.

Full story on the Baltic-based City Paper site.

It’s strange how empty the flat feels without the cat. I took her back mid-afternoon, and in spite of the fact she only arrived on Friday evening, and spent most of her time hidden neatly away behind the settee, I’m already missing her. She was none too happy about being loaded into her big purple pet voyager (probably on account of the fact it does nothing for her cat-cool), as demonstrated by putting a well-aimed claw into my chest, but other than that she was very well behaved, and all but silent all the way home.

I spent most of the day working. She spent a fair proportion of it alternating between sitting in her settee hidy-hole and brushing herself up against my legs. I drank way too much tea, then broke mid-afternoon to drink it rather more sociably with Trevor and Jon, Boris and Miss Ginny.

Oh, and cake, too, for no other reason than the fact that Trevor and Jon had been driving past a Waitrose.

Did a feature on movie mistakes on Through the Night this evening (in honour of last night’s trip out to the cinema). Was pleased to discover that Russell Crowe-fest Gladiator made one of the most foolish cock-ups of the lot, putting saddles and stirrups on the horses when in fact they weren’t invented until 185AD (the saddles and stirrups, not the horses). This has to be beaten only by the crate of oranges under the table in the market scene of The Sound of Music, which are marked up as coming from Israel. Except, of course, Israel didn’t exist back then.

Perhaps it was just that it had been built up too much, but I found The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers a disappointment. That’s what comes of seeing it tonight, when the whole world and its wife has already seen it and either told you or written on the web how good it was. Sure, the effects were great, and the battle of Helmsdeep was, of course, a magnificent piece of cinema (although I have to admit to being more impressed by the breaching of Saruman’s dam), but the story was slow and the humour surrounding Gimli misplaced. I was also disappointed that they stopped before bringing in the spiders and didn’t even deal with Wormtongue throwing Saruman’s ball out of the window.

Far more entertaining is Saruman’s online diary:

4 March 3019: Damn those stupid Ents! They’re making my life hellish. I woke up choking around three this morning, and found the room full of smoke; I thought I’d been smoking in bed again, but no! The damnable trees have flooded the Ring! They poured water in for hours; it’s been flooding all the basements, the factories, breeding-pits, storerooms, armouries, dungeons, playrooms, everything! The Downward Passage has been flooded all day. I’m trapped in here like an ant. It’s only been the last few hours that I’ve been able to open a window around here.

I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get all this repaired.

This is really making me sick. And there’s nothing to eat around here; just some cheese and crackers, and the cask of wine I had waiting for the victory celebration. I knew I should have kept some more food in the Tower! Dammit, the hunger’s making me lightheaded. I’ve been chain-smoking all afternoon; it clears the stench from the flooding, and takes my mind off the hunger.

Still, I guess it was an entertaining way to spend three hours, but I preferred the first installment.

That was the end of the day, though, and I’m sitting here with the expansive trumpetary music still slowly circling my head as I sip spearmint tea. It’s actually been a fairly long day, that started with a call from dad, packing his bags for his annual Marsailles - Madrid - Buenos Aires flight.

He has perfected the skill of calling just after the alarm has gone off but before I’ve fully woken up so I never catch it before the machine picks it up, which means I end up running into the lounge before he rings off. Doing that this morning scared the cat who still isn’t totally happy about the noises in the flat. She keeps growling at the front door, and at the footfall noises coming from the flat above. She retreated to beneath the settee and stayed there the rest of the day.

She was just starting to poke her nose back out again when Mark arrived for tea and cake. I’d been working all morning, so it was a welcome break, and we spent a good three hours flopping around on the settee talking about anything and everything we’ve missed in the last two months. I can’t believe it’s that long since we last saw each other, and neither could he.

I showed him my new photos and he said I should try and sell them, which is encouraging.

I was making a third round of drinks when he received a doom-laden phone call - the kind of call the police call an agony call - and threw on his coat and shoes.

As he ran out the door I wished him luck.

So the last few days caught up with me. I woke up late yesterday morning, having slept through the alarm, and rode the train to London with Midnight Weatherman. It’s always nice to do that - we can catch up on missed gossip - but the downside is that whenever it happens it means I’m going to be over an hour late arriving in the office.

I slunk in quietly, sipped at my tea and deleted my spam, then remembered the chocolate I’d brought back for the team and added it to the pile of treats from California, Portugal, Spain and Taiwan that have arrived in the office after press trips over the last three or four days. We’re clocking up a fair few thousand air miles between us, but it’s surprising we’re not all as fat as pigs.

After that, and an all-afternoon meeting the day fairly flew by, so that before it felt like even lunchtime we were gathered in the middle of little our editorial area and heading out together, early, for BRB on Gerrard Street to celebrate the mag’s redesign.

It was just gone half five when we arrived, but it still took a good ten minutes to be served. K and I drank Cosmopolitans, like Carrie in Sex in the City (not that we’re easily influenced by pop culture). Most yummy. I forget what was in them. Absolut Citron, grapefruit, something and something, poured over ice and served in a short glass with two fine straws. They went down far too easily and were swiftly replaced, only to be followed as the evening progressed, by wine, more wine and eventually champagne from a seemingly never-ending supply of bottles.

Much of the night was spent shouting at increasing volumes over ear-splitting music. We munched on pizza, hammered the bar tab quite mercilessly and took almost 100 incriminating photos of the great and the good of magazine journalism (and the waiter with the lovely strong arms). It didn’t feel like that many at the time, but when I got home, having missed the train I wanted by ten seconds and finding myself stranded for the next thirty minutes on Liverpool Street concourse, I downloaded them all, squeezed them up and loaded them onto a clandestine site for office consumption this morning.

Looking back on them, bleary eyed, with a throbbing head and ears that still rang, I did consider whether making them all (internally) public was a wise idea at all, but then the only ones who’d see them were at the party anyway and, in most instances, in the photos doing something they’d rather forget.

Not surprisingly, nobody made it in on time this morning. I was there by half ten, and was far from being the last, and much as I’d expected pretty much everyone had forgotten their worst excesses, until we relived them through a browser, the whole team crowded around my desk.

Unfortunately I couldn’t hang around long, as Ems and I were slated to be out of the office testing all day testing kit. We took a tube to Waterloo, and walked along the South Bank, past the London Eye and as far as the Tate Modern. As we walked, though, and paused every few minutes to test out the kit, we looked up at the sky, and every time we did it seemed only to have got darker and a little less friendly.

We pulled our coats tight around us, but as we reached the Tate the clouds started to spit, and within a minute it had turned into a full-blown downpour. We ran inside, soaked, the hole in my trainer already letting in plenty of water. My feet and socks were soaked, and already, in the short time we had been out in the rain, it had crept through my jacket and sweatshirt.

We mooched around inside the galleries, waiting for it to pass, spending a lot of time down on the turbine hall floor staring up at the immense red sculpture, Marsyas, that fills the whole space. 150m long, and half the height of the 4.2 million -brick building, it is like two enormous fallopian tubes, deep-blood red and open at each end and in the middle. If you stand beneath it in the dead centre it feels as though you are being landed upon by a spacecraft. Strain to peer in through the 30m wide openings at either end and it looks like the petals of a giant orchid. Stand half way along one of its arms and you are nothing more than a spec of human life beneath a vast piece of art, bigger than an entire office block, longer than a school playing field, and made up from over 7km of PVC. (There’s a detailed description of how it was built here.

It is, without doubt, the most impressive piece of art I have seen in my life. Better, even, than Damien Hirst’s carefully dissected cows.

The rain showed no sign of letting up, and the cafes in the gallery were full, with people queueing out of the doors. So I put on my hat and Ems wound her scarf around her head and we went back out into the rain and east along the river until we found a pub where we stopped for a disappointing lunch. The only consolation was that the warmth of the pub dried us out, but when it came time to leave again our coats were still wet through, and within minutes we were soaked again - before we even went back out into the rain.

We made for London Bridge, stopping in at Borough Market along the way, where headless hares hung from meat hooks beside deer and turkeys that had suffered a similar fate. All still had their skins and fur, and the site of them hanging there above a slowly growing puddle of blood was quite off-putting.

So we returned to the office, saving what remained of the testing until Monday morning, and sorted our mails. Some more of the team had arrived during our absence, and looked at the pictures of the party. We drank tea and talked about last night on and off until it was time to go home. I made a swift exit, due at mum’s for dinner at 20h so I could pick up Jessica and bring her home for the weekend. Snappy cats and newly-walking visiting 1-year-olds are an unwise combination.

Of course, she didn’t much like being shut up in her cat box and she wailed all the way in the car, but she’s here now, and seems settled and now that she’s found her food and litter we’ve even had a little purr.

It’ll be fun having her around for a couple of days, but I’m sure I’ll not want to take her back.

Berlin is like a set of oversized clothes, far too large to fit its inhabitants. Whole streets that in London you’d expect to see crowded with people can be deserted, only the traffic keeping them alive.

It remains a fascinating place, though. At turns beautiful, ugly and spectacular, and somewhere I still barely know, let alone understand. After two late nights, two flights, several meetings, too much food and a long, tedious journey home in the cold and the dark I am too tired to write much now. I will fill in the details in due course. In the meantime, four photos.

After much driving confusion, the evening is spent at Chicagos, which in Chelmsford passes for being sophisticated on account of it having some neon. “It’s Raining Men” is playing. Loud.

Kevin: I never used to like this song until Jerry did it.
Nik: Jerry Hall?
Kevin: Geri Halliwell!

I’ve been off the scene too long.

Spent the whole of yesterday working on my get rich not very quick idea, steadily progressing through most of my CD collection and a large swathe of Radio 4’s output - both live and archived on the net. By evening, when I’d been sitting there nine and a bit hours, watched the sun go down and heard countless news bulletins, my legs were aching and my mind was filled with thoughts of economy class syndrome, blood clots and imminent death.

Calmed down in the bath with the lights off, the candles lit, and a steaming mug of Jaipur Orange tea.

The night was slated for a quiet evening in alone, the first time in weeks, and an early bed. In the end, I was still up at gone two this morning, snapping away and Photoshopping the results. I got rather carried away with my lighting and texture effects and am very pleased with the results, but it rather threw my plans out of whack and I ended up sleeping in until 10h this morning - so much for an early start.

Flopped around in my robe for a while, snapping more pics, and fretting at the state of the flat. In the quest for the best pictures pretty much every piece of furniture had been moved in the lounge and the lights were balanced on boxes and crates to get then pointing where I wanted them.

Called it a day some time around lunchtime, when I started to get hungry and realised there was no food in the flat, so showered, dressed and ran out to Asda for supplies. Jon called on my way out of the door and we arranged for a 15h30 meet, so I bought muffins and then spent the next hour and a half putting the flat back the way it should have been.

Got quite into it and ended up bleaching the kitchen from top to bottom and doing the same in the bathroom. The difference between how the place looked twelve hours ago and what it looks like now is quite unbelievable (and gratifying).

It was only going to be a flying visit, but Jon and Trevor (and Paul, too, in the end, who had been on the verge of crying off on account of illness, so it’s a good job I bought extra cakes) stayed for a couple of hours. We listened to the chart show, which I’m still not convinced works - it’s on for 45 minutes before you even get to number 40 - and talked about holidays - the one Trevor and Jon have both come back from, and the possibility of the four of us heading off somewhere (likely Florence or Rome) at the end of June.

They left around six and I texted Kevin to see if he fancied a trip to the pub later to make up for my quiet night in last night, then sat down to hunt out links for tonight’s Through the Night feature. Decided on mangled English as the theme, in honour of heading out to Berlin again tomorrow, where I know they sell loo roll called Happy End.

So, first stop the Engrish site, which is an absolute gold-mine of abnormalities. My particular favourites:

• A rather extreme and terrifying safety warning from a child’s toy.

• Nonsense on a t-shirt (”Lovable black cat, count me is your friend. Can you really do everything I wish I could to Billie-Jean.”)
• …and of course who could do without the indespensible Horny Remover?

The net has its fair share of mad food, too.

• How about a refreshing bowl full of Swedish Bra?

• Or the rather unsavoury-sounding Coq Fromage (cock cheese)

And some links to random UK placenames:

• Dancing Dicks

• Spunkie
• Buttock

I don’t think I dare suggest a trip to Wankers Corner.