Glastonbury for Geriatrics?

Thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Hay. Lisa Jardine and Roy Hattersley the highlights. Before I went someone asked: "What sort of people go to the Hay Festival?" Now that is a dificult one. It would certainly be easy to categorise them as elderly Guardian readers -- easy but not correct. A single definition is not possible but there are definitely "tribes": a small dungaree brigade, a lot of linen suits and summer dresses, intellectual power-brokers with BlackBerrys and important calls to publishers, literary groupies and a lot of families. If anything drew them together they were there for the same reason as me, the chance ot spend some time out of the normal rush to listen, think and talk -- books, ideas, politics, food and weather.

Festival Fun

Off to the Hay Festival today. It's always difficult to choose which day to go and which events to book on that day. I hope I have chosen well.

Excuses...

We have had "it was all within the rules", then "it was all cleared with the Fees Office". Now we are being told that MPs have been suffering from "lapses" of judgement, no doubt there will soon be the confessions that they were struck by "moments of madness".

On the whole I am well aware of human frailties and sympathetic. Of course we all make mistakes. But for years now citizens have been suffering from an onslaught of bossy, punitive government and other authority. In its predatory way excuses are not accepted. We are continually reprimanded and usually fined -- for late tax returns, by speed cameras, for not displaying parking permits on the "right" side of the windscreen. Petty bureaucrats proclaim zero tolerance on all manner of misdemeanours. You are too fat to foster a child, you stole some sweets when you were a kid, even though you are an Old Age Pensioner you can't buy booze without ID. Try asking for clemency here, try proffering simple human error, try explaining your momentary lapse of judgement, try common sense... The citizen has to be perfect under the tyranny of ever more dysfunctional authority. And I haven't even touched on the many more serious incursions on our civil rights and freedoms that we cede every year.

MPs have willingly overseen this sea change in the relationship between state and citizen under Major, Blair and Brown. Why should we forgive them?

Drunk Magic Arsenal

Zaharani is my enthusiastic chef when I am in Zanzibar. He is also one of the star strikers in the football team. Back in 2005-6 I sponsored him through The Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar Catering and Hotel Institute. He graduated with flying colours. When I am there he loves the run of a good kitchen and the budget to buy things like meat and eggs.

Among his mates Zaharani is known as Juju which gives you some idea of what he does when not cooking. As a msungu I can't ask too much about that side of things. If he's away the others say "he is doing Swahili culture" as fine a euphemism for witch-doctory as you will find.

Anyway he called last week to ask if I could buy him an Arsenal shirt with the number 4 and "Jujubwai" on the reverse. If my interpretation of local slang is correct this means something along the lines of "drunk magic" -- strange as he doesn't drink. That I did today and took the shirt in to a man in Llanelli market to get the name and number stencilled on. The man with the machine didn't recognise Jujubwai from the usual Gunners squad: "There again mate it is Arsenal, they have some funny ones."

The Call of Africa

My friend Stephen is off to Africa today. He is taking his teenage son to Senegal and Gambia. I am very jealous, a bit of African heat and chaos would go down well just now. I hope that he keeps us posted on his blog. Stephen is, by the way, a member of one of the world's most exclusive clubs -- he represents 50% of this blog's followers!

Stephen also does proper writing and has an interesting assignment for a newspaper while he's in Africa. His work will start on the premise that the movement of people out of Senegal today is greater than at any time during the Atlantic slave trade. It shocked me. Historians, economists and African nationalists have used slavery's mass forced migration as an explanation of many of the continent's ills. If that left a wound that still festers two or three centuries later, what can the current migration be doing, econmically, socially, culturally? Worst of all perhaps, because this is an illegal traffic we know next to nothing about it. Today's Atlantic "cargoes" are truly the most invisible of people -- in Africa, in transit and at destination. There are not, yet, the equivalent of slave narratives. In the communication explosion of our time where are the Twitter feeds from these people?

Stephen will investigate. I look forward to seeing the results. But ultimately it is here in the destination countries where we must really work to understand and document. These are the people that clean our offices, buses and trains. They are the nocturnals, the cogs so deep in our economic machine that we never see them. I would love to hear their stories but I suspect it is easier for me to heed my own call to Africa than listen here in the West.

Spud You like

I have been feasting on Jersey Royals and now the first Pembrokeshires. Lightly boiled with a little butter and fresh herbs from the garden nothing could be nicer. Mint and parsley are the traditonal accompaniments but I have also been enjoying them with chives, chervil, marjoram and lovage (the latter only in small quantities). I am quite happy to eat these sweet little spuds as a meal in themselves.

Faith in Politicians Restored...?

Yesterday at 7.30 I got off the tube a few stops early and walked into Westminster. Cast in the misty gold of an early summer morning it was difficult to believe this village – and political Westminster really is a village – was home to the skulduggery and shameless greed we have been watching unfold over the past fortnight.

The 45 minutes with Hilary Benn further lightened my spirits. Here was a humorous, honest, committed man untainted by the expenses scandals. We were able to have a good banter about the troubles but there was also no doubt about his senses of serious purpose. It is probably the family heritage but here was someone who still embodies the old fashioned idea of real public service. No doubt there is an ego there, there has to be, but it is subservient to the real task of getting things done. Not getting things “done” for self-promotion, ghastly KPIs or to win a dodgy bonus. Just getting things done because it’s the right thing to do. How refreshing.

My rosy glow lasted about as long as the May sunshine on Westminster. By the time rain was lashing Big Ben I was listening to Hazel Blears and just beginning to understand the complicated world of floating duck houses.

Manchester Maasai

Juma tells me that he has been celebrating Man Utd's Premiership success since Saturday. "Party, Party bwana". Fun all round except perhaps for the goat population...

Amiable Loony

I received my copy of Peter Hitchens' new book yesterday. It is a great pleasure to read good old fashioned polemic. It is a guilty pleasure to enjoy the doom-monger in chief's more absurd theories. It is a surprising pleasure to find I agree with about 25% of what he writes. However I can't help laughing out loud at his notion that because New Labour cabinet members hummed along to the Internationale at Donald Dewar's funeral they were closet Marxist-Soviet-Trotskyite stooges. All of the above with £2000 flat screen TVs perhaps.

The Lord of Darkness

Andrew Sullivan wrote an excellent piece in the Sunday Times yesterday. He examined Dick Cheney's high public profile of late. Seeing so much of the former VP is surprising. After all Cheney was the consumate eminence grise, so grise in fact to have been invisible in all but the innermost Washington power suites. Sullivan concludes that his energetic public profile just now stems from fear, fear that he is going to be judged badly by the political elite, the American people, history or perhaps even a judge and jury. Rock on.

I remember a very enjoyable lunch I had back in early 2001 with Peter Jay , amongst many other things, the former British ambassador to Washington. It was just after the Bush inaugration. Peter has infinitely more knowledge of US politics than I will ever have. More to the point he has had real experience -- he remains a friend of Jimmy Carter. However I discussed the incoming Bush administration with him as well as I could. I proffered my observation that Bush seemed so incapable that surely it was Cheney that would run the show. PJ disagreed. He said that people always argued this if they didn't like the President. The VP wasn't a powerful post in any real sense.

I haven't asked Peter if he still thinks that. I will. I don't blame him at all nor claim any prescience. I don't think anyone could have predicted the arrogance coupled with incompetence of the Bush regime. It simply broke all the rules of past behaviour. One of the manifestations was a VP running his own "dark side" administration. We are only learning about it now and I guess there's a lot more to come out.

The Fees Office Excuse

The guilty ones are trying to divert the tide of blame towards officials at the Fees Office. "I acted within the rules" is no longer acceptable as an excuse. The public won't buy it. But they are still whining on about having agreed their misdemeanours with the Fees Office.

I wonder. The officials they discuss these things with are relatively low-ranking civil servants. The one thing you can say with certainty is that MPs are expert in arguing. They have all spent years, decades even, getting their point of view across. They have fought in debating societies, smoke-filled rooms, on doorsteps and many, as lawyers, in the courts. It seems to me a rather unequal battle pitting these professional arguers against expenses clerks. To then blame the clerks for losing aforesaid argument really is low.

Let us hope their tide-turning is as effective as one King Canute's.

BNP

I received my BNP election leaflet this weekend. Full of happy smiling white British people -- except as it turns out the wholesome British subjects were actually posed by American and Italian models.

In a darker fantasy I imagined there actually were some BNP MPs and they got caught up (as no doubt they would) in the expenses scandal. So far the bogus claims have been, most reassuringly, running along party lines -- Tories clean their moats and stay in their Pall Mall clubs; New Labour MPs are obsessed with very expensive flat screen TVs; old Labour buy bookshelves; and the Lib Dems go for trouser presses and scatter cushions.

So what would we see from our BNP representatives? Swastika bedspreads, skin-whitening cream, extra tight lederhosen or perhaps entertaining evenings with Max Moseley...?

Masoudi's Underwear Crisis

A call from Masoudi in Zanzibar. He is a young man and an old friend who I am sponsoring through catering college at the moment. "Hamna chupi bwana" he tells me which is "I have no pants". Now this may sound like some naughty come-on but...

... actually the reason he rings me is that he has a problem. No decent pants. Underwear in Zanzibar ranges from the unreliable to the useless. Western pants therefore are one of the most tradable items in the modern missionary's armoury. It is clearly an emergency otherwise he wouldn't ring. Perhaps he is on a romantic quest or maybe he has to change into his chef's kit in front of his peers so wants to show off real Calvins. Anyway I had better jump to it and dispatch some forthwith.

Man Utd v Arsenal

Today's match will divide my village in Zanzibar. There's a very strong Arsenal following but the ubiquitous Manchester fans are probably not far behind in numbers terms. Zanzibaris take team allegiances very seriously.

I am sort of grateful that I lost my mobile yesterday.

Last night and The Wire

I spent a very enjoyable evening with old friends in Brixton. We ate and drank well and talked late in the night -- an academic, a scientist, senior civil servant and me. As the glasses and then bottles emptied we covered a heroic range of topics -- the collapse of politics, Berlin, India, the science of happiness, depression and therapies, swine flu and the periodic table.

Later in the evening we discovered we were all Wirers and a sort of relief wave rose over the table. It was a bit like -- I imagine -- the way they used to say "Gentleman you may now smoke" - we at once relaxed and livened into talking about a shared passion. I cannot remember any TV show doing that for years. They asked me, as someone who has a connection with the media, why Britain can't produce anything like The Wire. I bumbled some suggestions but didn't even manage to convince myself. I must have a think.