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It’s been a varied weekend. The one constant has been the glorious blue skies and bright warm sun. Paul came around on Saturday morning and we walked into town. I needed some random bits and bobs, but nothing heavy and it would have been sacrilige to use the car in such great weather.

There was a bit of wind rippling the surface of the river and bobbing the thousands of daffodils back and forth. Out of the sun, though, there was still a cold bite to the air.

So, we plodded around the crowded shops - seemingly everyone was out avoiding the war on TV - and dithered over stopping for a coffee when we were done. Everywhere was so full we skipped it in the end, though, and took the long slow walk along the river and back across the fields towards home.

I sat down in the window where the sun was shining in and worked through the afternoon. Very pleasant. Why can’t all working days be like that.

Around to Trevor and Jon’s in the evening before heading out for pizza. There was a mild cat crisis that delayed our departure as Boris ran out of the front door between Jon’s legs and straight across the road. We had extra drinks and further nibbles and waited for him to reappear over the back fence. Eventually he did and was foolish enough to come over for a tickle.

So, we mooched into the west end of town and sat by the window where we could watch the bottle-blonde girls totter along on their rediculously tall high heels, gripping at the bottom of their belt-like skirts to stop them riding up.

The west end of town is not a nice area, but it is a great pizzaria.

Then again, the time I took dad there some drunk young guy ended up urinating up the window, thinking it was a wall..

So, after food and then coffees back with the cats, it turned into a late night, and so today started as a late morning. I skipped breakfast in anticipation of an enormous lunch at mum’s with Sal and Dan and certainly wasn’t disappointed. By the time we’d finished we pretty much all felt we’d had enough to last a month and ended up flopped in the lounge watching the Dating Channel on Sky. This has to be one of the funniest channels going. Non-stop back-to-back personal ad videos from people who really should have waited until they were sober before stepping in front of the camera.

Highlight had to be the guy who said the best thing about going out with him would be that he is go ‘gorgeous’ you’d always be worried your friends would want to shag him. And the worst thing would be that he’d be shagging all your friends.

Is that really a winning tactic?

Hmmm…

Left late afternoon to come home and work on sites for tonight’s Through the Night piece. I was going to do something along the lines we usually do for the slot, but it seemed a bit flippant considering the current situation, so here are some interesting alternative things about the War.

First, if you want to know what it going on in Iraq and how the people are coping, what better way of doing that than reading the online diary of an Iraqi civilian. He lives in Baghdad and is posting several times day about the bombing, trying to find food, the Iraqi TV output, the restrictions on travel etc etc.

Today he is counting down the hours until the B52 bombers arrive after they took off from England. It all sounds a bit depressing but he has spirit in his writing that makes it really quite positive. Today he has written:

The most disturbing news today has come from Al-Jazeera, they said that nine B52 bombers have left the airfield in Britain and flying ‘presumably’ towards Iraq, as if they would be doing a spin around the block. Anyway they have 6 hours to get here. Last night was very quiet in Baghdad. Today in the morning I went out to get bread and groceries. There were no Ba’ath party people stopping us from leaving the area where we live, this apparently happens after the evening prayers. But they are still everywhere. The streets are empty only bakeries are open and some grocery shops charging 4 times the normal prices, while I was buying bread a police car stopped in front of the bakery and asked the baker if they had enough flour and asked when they opened; the baker told me that they have been informed that they must open their shops and they get flour delivered to them daily. Groceries, meat and dairy products are a different story. One dairy product company seems to be still operating, not state owned, and their cars were going around the city distributing butter, cheese and yoghurt to any open markets. Meat is not safe to buy because you wouldn’t know from where and how it got to the shops. Anyway we bought fresh tomatoes and zucchini for 1000 dinar a kilo which would normally be 250. and most amazingly the garbage car came around.

Elsewhere, the web is awash with high resolution satellite photos, which are far better quality than anything you see on TV. For example, this picture of Baghdad. Click on it to enlarge it, then scroll around the window that pops up. It shows the Memorial of the Unknown Solder and the Sijood Palace with its peacock-shaped gardens along the Tigris River (lower left). The Sijood Palace was the first Presidential site to be inspected by U.N. authorities under U.N. Resolution 1441.

And here’s a slightly smaller one of Kuwait City

The news we all woke up to this morning was the fact the Americans had shot down a British plane using a Patriot missile. How do Patriots work, though? The Guardian has an excellent click-through animation that explains everything.

For a more diverse view of the war than what we are sometimes given by the media, which of course has to make sure it follows certain broadcasting laws and can only deal with fact, not supposition, then there’s the Warblogs portal

Not a bad collection, I thought, so I saved them as my bookmarks, had a swift wallow in the bath as I listened to yet more rolling news, then headed out to Chicagos to meet Kevin and buy him a birthday drink. By the time he arrived he’d already had several, and Nicki, who was clutching every static object in site to save herself from falling over, had clearly had several more.

It’s probably not a good place to go if you’re in that state as unless you confine yourself to walls and bannisters there’s not that many static things to hold on to. Several times a rather energetic guy in a shirt that could blind at fifty paces came close to having my eye out with his elbow, and his high kicks were enough to bring down the lighting rig. Still, it was fun and suitably loud and we did the usual shouting and listening routine, never really catching what each other said.

We discussed facial hair. I caught that much, at least. My office project - a thin vertical stripe on top lip and chin - is a week old and so at the half way point now. It’s barely showing. Kevin, who has apparently done the same before confessed to having the same problem - light hair - but always got around it by blackening things up with mascara.

To be honest, if that’s the alternative, I’d far rather it stayed the way it was.

I left shortly before temporary deafness set in.

As I sit here typing I’m listening to the radio. An American talk show host, guesting on the BBC, is arguing with a caller. She says America isn’t doing enough to solve the Palestine / Israel conflict. He says what do you expect us to do - America has been trying for 30 years and you can’t expect us to solve a fight that’s gone on for thousands of years. Hmmm… And there was me thinking Israel was only founded in 1948.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2003 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.