Right. I'm fed up of these Westminster types fiddling their expenses but denying that they need to have any external oversight. Indeed, they are denying that they CAN have any oversight external to themselves. 

The central problem here is that Parliament is "sovereign". It cannot, while it remains so, accept any independent outside scrutiny, only scrutiny from a person or agency that is appointed by itself. We don't trust it enough to trust anyone it appoints, so we both spiral ever lower into the depths of contempt and ignorance.

In very simplistic (and probably blasphemous, but what the heck - I'm an atheist) terms, it's like expecting God to submit an expenses claim. God is supreme - to what authority can He defer? In the UK constitution, Parliament is supreme, so there is no authority to which it can defer.

Parliament wrested that sovereignty over many years from the monarch, starting with Magna Carta. This was the right thing to do in the historical context, where a corrupt and unaccountable monarchy was doing things that, despite their corruption, were internally consistent with ownership of sovereignty.

As with MPs today, the problem was not necessarily that every member of monarchy was a corrupt despot, but more that the constitution did not prevent them from becoming one. In other words, it was the perception of what a monarch might do, more than a suspicion of what every monarch really does (spurred by some real abuses), that was at the root of the shift from monarch to Parliament.

Now we are faced with a Parliament that many of the people suspect of corruption. Analogously, we don't generally think that EVERY MP is chiselling, self-serving and only interested in the status quo, but we know that some are. Also, there appear to be no barriers to prevent any MP from behaving in that way, nor any effective punishments for those that do so. It is the suspicion of what all MPs might do, spurred by some real abuses, that is the root of the next constitutional shift I believe the UK needs.

Also, everything that Parliament is doing to clean its own reputation is internally consistent with ownership of sovereignty over itself, despite the obvious desire outside Parliament that it should be a servant of the people, and that it is badly failing in that role.

1. The first action has to be a formal recognition among the people that soveriegnty should now rest with us alone - not the monarch, and not our elected representatives (however they are elected) They work for us, not the other way around.
   
2. The second has to be formal recognition by parliament that it must defer its own soverignty to the higher authority of the people.
   
3. Then, we can have a proper constitutional convention to determine the future roles of people, parliament and monarch in the running of the country and the decision making processes that determine how that can happen.

Government can only happen with the consent of the governed, and it looks increasingly unlikely that such consent can continue to be given without root and branch reform. Parliament has long passed the point where it can reform itself, because the sovereignty that currently defines it is the very thing that prevents it from reforming itself.

So, I think the people should organise an electoral vote ourselves along the lines of:

"We, the people of the United Kingdom, no longer have confidence in the institution of Parliament to effectively represent our foreign and domestic interests, be they individual, social or commercial.

We demand the immediate recognition by Parliament that it must, on a timetable of no less than one and no more than five calendar years from the date of this vote, hand over political sovereignty to us, the people of the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, a constitutional convention must be convened over the same period to determine how this handover of sovereignty is to be effected, and how the soveriegn will of the people of the United Kingdom is to be determined and applied.

This constitutional convention must involve representatives from among the people, selected fairly and randomly, in the final decision-making capacity. The people's involvement must not be a purely consultative or advisory one.

All the institutions of the state - including, but not limited to: the legislature, executive, judiciary, and monarchy; the armed forces and security services; and all departments and tiers of government, both local and national - must be aligned with this peaceful and ordered handover of sovereignty during the course of this process."

Providing the turn-out was more than about 50% of eligible voters, a simple ballot of "Yes I agree with this demand" or "No I do not agree with this demand" would have no legal or constitutional force under current laws, but it would have such a degree of moral force that I don't think any British government or Parliament could ignore it without formally becoming a dictatorship.

It does, of course, mean we'd have to take some responsibility back for the way we are governed. The argument that "all politicians in all parties are equally useless, so there's no point taking part or even paying any attention to politics" would be moot, because almost by definition we would all become politicians ourselves.

Especially if part of the constitutional settlement was to make the people's final decision-making powers permanent, through some kind of jury selection system (as I've argued would be the best way to reform the House of Lords before now).

It's our democracy, not theirs. Let's take it back from them and make sure they can't mess about with it any more.

Think about the text in blue. Would you vote in favour of it or against it? And if you think it's worthwhile, tell your friends and send them here. Maybe this is where it all starts - it's as good as anywhere else, surely?

So, here we are.

I'm sitting here in the UK typing, while the minutiae of the US Presidential Primaries form the bulk of the broadsheet and non-tabliod TV news stories.

Shurely shome mishtake?

I mean, it's a big story - of course it is. But is it really the sort of story that the British media should be spending quite so much time on? Isn't there something else that could or should be given airtime? I don't know what that something should be, natch - if I did I'd be a news editor, not an armchair grumbler.

I can't help feeling that what's really going on - givne the way that the Democrats have so far dominated the coverage this side of the pond - is some sort of vicarious thrill that the GOP is going to finally "get theirs", as it were. No doubt they are, but I'm not sure the Dems are going to wave any magic wands and make the "liberal intelligentsia" feel all warm and cuddled.

Not least because it ain't the Yanks or the Neocons or any of our cherished lefty bogey-men that's fucking the dearly-held principles of woolly intellectuals like me (you know, like habeus corpus, freedom of information, the right to privacy, rolling back the worst excesses of consumerism rather than extending them into every sector of public life).

Nope. It's our very own Labour government (I draw a distinction between the NuLabs in Westminster and the party, because the party long ceased to have much influence over what happens in Government. We probably had more in Opposition.) that's doing all of that, and the Tories are, at least initially, unlikely to do anything to rock the boat.

Worse, they'll start undoing the few good things Labour has managed to do as soon as they've lulled us into the false sense of security we'll (by then) have, off the back of relief at getting rid of a tired NuLab government. 

They'll want to cut back on "waste", naturally. So bye-bye Arts funding, one of the few things that has kept the middle classes quiet these past 10 years. "Well, the country might be going to shit, but at least we can go and see Sir Iain on the South Bank/go to the National Gallery/etc." 

And the "waste" that's been pissed away on the Public Sector under NuLab (and there has been collossal amounts - not on "poltical correctness" or even on bureaucracy but straight into mostly off-shore company accounts under the banner of PFI) will be cut back. PFI contracts themselves will be untouchable (the fucking bloodsuckers made damn sure of that) so all new investment will be frozen.

Most of the management consultancy drones that are ruining every part of public life vote Tory, or at least they will if they sniff a tax cut on their MBA-bloated salaries, so they won't touch their gravy train. No, it'll be nurses, teachers, and other people likely to vote some way other than Tory that get fucked over, just like it was last time.

Give it a parliamentary term or two, and we'll be right back where we started. The whining classes won't be writing to the Daily Mail to whinge about the postcode lottery in NHS-funded plastic surgery clinics, and at-death's-door people won't be on the teatime news complaining that the NHS won't fund their homeopathic remedy of distilled water with an expensive label, or the experimental cancer drug that hasn't even been cleared for testing on animals yet, or the extra tuition for little Shanxi's recently-diagnosed syndromia madeupica ad explanitium ex being-a-little-shittico et obtainicum-mea-feei.

Nope. We'll be back to the good old days, when public sector complaints were about the rats running around everywhere and the fucking great big holes in the ceiling of the local clinic/classroom/waiting room.

Maybe then we'll be happy - the best bit about being in opposition is you can rant and rave and protest all you like and it doesn't do anything dangerous like change anything.

Then, when you get back into government, you can be utterly timid because you're scared that if you do what you really know you should, something will break.

...

Blimey. That was all over the place. I told you I was rusty...

Voters are disillusioned with party politics, but care as deeply about political issues as they ever did, leading to widespread contempt and further disillusionment for elected poltiicians. This is not controversial.

And the sort of peple who rise to the top in modern politics are pretty much the sort of people so convinced of their own abilities and views that they view opposition (from political opponents and public alike) is evidence of, at best, ignorance or, at worst, outright malice. Nothing outlandish here, either.

Witness Tony Blair's revealing comment in his recent John Humphrys interview that he has enormous respect for the British public and it has "been an honour to lead them". LEAD them? Does he not realise that the British public does not want the Prime Minister to LEAD us, but to SERVE us? Clearly not. I would greatly like to think other politicians think differently, but I fear they don't.

So from this perspective, it's not hard to see how ideas such as the half-arsed Lords Reform proposals or satellite-tracked, Big Brother-evoking (the Orwellian kind, not the crap TV kind) road pricing. Or the Iraq War, or before that, rail privatisation, the Poll Tax, or pretty much anything else you'd care to mention - it's a function of modern government politics, not of NuLab, especially. Hence the disillusionment I referred to.

So, if representative democracy is out of favour with the public, but the public do not want their views to be ignored, the only sensible reform to the Lords is to abolish it and replace it with a chamber that is not representatively democratic (i.e. elected through voting) but directly democratic (i.e. populated from the general public through random selection, just as juries are).

Deliberative polls have developed to the point where they can cope with complex and sensitive matters with at least as much dexterity as parliamentary or government committees. The expertise and experience of "the great and the good" which the peerage system supposedly preserves could continue, since it would be in the interests of the parties (both political, and interested) to send their best experts to present evidence and attempt to persuade each "legislative jury" (for want of a better phrase) to their point of view.

One such jury per parliamentary Bill would be about right; ending up with probably about the same number of people sitting at any one time as there are entitled to sit in the Lords or Commons.

A root-and-branch revision of all forms of jury service (the current judicial, as well as this new legislative type) would be needed. For example, make it sensibly rewarded (for those in employment, daily fees to match their current salary, some sort of locum professional support for the self-employed to keep their businesses running in their absence, a crackdown on employers who discourage their staff from serving, etc.), and stiffen the penalties for evading one's public duty

Security concerns are no concern - sensitive matters get looked at in closed committee by parliamentarians already, and they aren't a special type of person with an enhanced ability to keep secrets. They just sign the Official Secrets Act and know they'll be thrown in jail if they talk or write about things outside the closed session.

Add to this the forced removal of the whipping system from the existing Commons, and the redrafting of the Parliament Act (so the Commons has to defer to the "House of Juries", rather than having primacy as they do now) and you've got about the best possible solution for improving our system of government without completely tearing down the whole apparatus of state and starting again from anarchy.

How hard is that? It clears the Augean stables of the donations/honours system, it by-passes the party system the public say they don't trust, and it forces the general population to take some responsibility for their own government

In the UK, perhaps 2% of the population declare themselves as 'Muslim' in the Census. The population is now estimated to be just over 60 million, which equates to 1.2 million Muslims.

A vanishingly small percentage of this 1.2 million are suspected or known to actively plot againt the interest of the majority. The security services know about perhaps a few thousand individuals they suspect of being involved in these plots, moslty in orgnasiational or support roles - perhaps a few hundred of them might be actively planning to immolate themselves in attas on the wider public.

That's a lot of people to wathc, and (potentially) a lot of suicide bomb attacks; if they are all as 'successful' as the 7 July 2005 London attacks, the casualty rates might creep into the hundreds of thousands. That would be a massive problem, but nobody (not even the terrorists) imagines that every attack would succeed.

It's FAR more likely that the death toll in Britain from Islamic terrorism in the next five years will be about the same as it has been in the last five - less than 100 dead.

About the equivalent of a bad year's murder statistics. Or barely a day's road death casualties.

Yet, across our whole media (including myriad blogs, including this one, for fuck's sake!) barely a day goes by without one or more of the top stories being somehow linked to the 'problem' of Islam. If it isn't the uncovering of a plot, it's a bungled police operation. If it isn't a bungled police operation, it's an employment tribunal for someone who's supposedly been sacked for being a Muslim or sacked by a Muslim for not being one. If it's not an employment tribunal, it's a family court case where a mixed-race daughter has been abductd by her Muslim father. If it's not a child abduction, it's that the child has decided she wants to be a Muslim and disapproves of her moother's sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle.

If it's not this, it's a 'fake shiekh' sting where a reporter pretends to be a Muslim and tricks someone's real opinions out of them by feigning approval. If it's not a 'fake shiekh' sting, it's a former cabinet minister who is deaf in one ear saying that he sometimes asks his Moslem women constituents who wear a full-face niqab veil to remove it when they visit him in his constituency surgery because (surprise, surprise) he finds it hard to communicate with them when he can't see their lips moving, and moreover that he personally he doesn't like people wearing veils in public because (though he didn't say it in so many words) he thinks it's a bit rude.

If it's not that, it's a right-wing and generally hostile right-wing press spinning those comments into a variations on the old 'fit in or fuck off' anti-immigration paranoia (though, to give them some credit, Jack Straw, the former cabinet minister I mentioned, is smart enough to have known perfectly well what the likely reaction to his niqab story would be) .

And so on and so on et cetera ad nauseam. 

My questions are -  is this the way to persuade the 'backward Muslims whose civilisation hasn't moved on since the 14th century' that Western 21st-century secular democracy is a better way to live? And is it the best way to tell the secular majority (and, even among the British Pakistani and Bengali populations that form the majority of the 1.2 million British Muslims, over 50% are non-devout or entirely secular) what is actually going on in the country and the wider world?

So yes, I am sick of Muslims, but in a very particular way. I am sick of the way the rest of us are letting our whole national conversation be determined and driven by a few hundred criminal lunatics, whether we are atheist, agnostic, Christian,  Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan, or flipping Jedi.

I am sick of the way our civil liberties are being eroded willy-nilly in the name of protecting us from these fanatically religious bogey-men who are supposedly trying to destroy our way of life, when that didn't happen in reply to Irish Republican terrorism. 'Ah, but this is an entirely different and much more dangerous form of terrorism', they say.

How do you work that out, eh? Surely the only significant difference is that Islamic terrorists kill themselves at the same time as they kill us? Which, apart from anything else, means that they never ever get any better at it, because their first attempt is the only one they ever have. The IRA bombers got progressively better at it, because they got to practice. Veteran bombers could share their expertise. That, by definition, doesn't happen with Islamic terror suicide bombers, because they don't have the organised command infrastructure that allows them to share knowledge beyond posting to a website (which, by definition, have to be accessible to the public domain). And, obviously enough, they're dead after they succeed, so can't tell anyone what worked well and how they would do it differently next time.

Of course it is a more dangerous form of terrorism. It has to be, or else you would have no reason or excuse to assault civil liberties built up over centuries in it's name.

And, were I a Muslim, I would be heartily sick of the way that I was being demonised by all of this.

Of course, there are bad Muslims. There are evil, dangerous Muslims. There are loud, noisily self-righteous Muslims who use this constant drip-drip of hostile media coverage as a lever to try to recruit more  Muslims to their brand of noisily self-righteous hate-fuelled Islam - and I am sick of them, too.

 It's getting to the point where I think that most of the Muslim problem would simply vanish in a puff of newsprint if the media gave themselves a week off from reporting all of these tiny stories, linked only by the involvement of someone Muslim in them, as if they are all part of a grand over-arching zietgiest.

Not least because if they carry on doing that for long enough, it will be. Europeans have been panicked into a herd mentality that permitted industrialised hatred, and ultimately led to genocide, before. Within living memory. Have we learned nothing? Have we learned that the solution is NOTHING TO DO with the way the object of the fear, paranoia and hatred actually behave?

The we they behave is THEIR responsibility, not ours. The way WE behave is OUR responsibility, not theirs. THEY cannot MAKE us do ANYTHNG we do not want to do.

I strongly believe that the only we we can be manipulated is to manipulate our emotions, not our intellects.

Fear is an emotion, and we are being given lots of reasons why we are supposed to fear Muslims. (And it cuts both ways - Muslims are being given lots of reasons to fear the West, America, Christians, etc.)

We ALL need to wake up and look at what we are being fed. In whose interests is it to hate one another?

I know it - I'm not the world's most consistent blogger.

I need to be more conscientious about posting, rather than waiting until I have a burning need to post, or just for work to be slack/dull/in need of avoidance enough to get around to it.

My main hobby is drama, and I'm generally keen to participate. I do take time out on occasion, if the play in production doesn't grab me if if I know other commitments (work, holidays, etc.) will clash with it. But mostly, I am involved in some way and the continual practice makes me better at acting, directing, lighting or whatever it is I'm doing.

But I also enjoy drawing and painting. As solo pursuits, there's not the sense of obligation to others to make me pick up the pencil/brush that I get when I'm in a show. It's always possible to postpone. Then, when I do want to create something, I find I'm out of practice, and the end results are not as good as I know they can be.

Same with exercise - there doesn't seem much point in joining up to a team sport that I know I'd enjoy when I know I need to get my base fitness level up first (not least so I don't injure myself on the first outing). But solo sports, or gym work, are postponeable.

Such are the dilemmas that arise from a fundamental lack of self-discipline. Based on a lack of self confidence, I guess - if something is 'just for me', there doesn't seem to be as much point doing it as if I'd be letting someone else down by the omission.

Can any amateur psychologists out there think of ways to trick myself into drawing, exercising, etc?

Well, nothing happened.

The girl I blogged about in my last entry was off on hoiday abroad for a month shortly after we met. Plus, she doesn't live locally anyway.

Once I'd had my panicky moments of "does she like me?", and at least come to the conclusion that she doesn't hate me, I was out of touch for a month or more.

By the time she was back, the urgency to see her again had receded. There are two proverbs that are often employed for long-distance affairs - Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Out of sight, out of mind. I find a third proverb most accurately sums up my attitude:

Absence diminishes little passions, but strengthens great ones

I find that I get equally passionate about people (and about most things, in fact) in the first flush of interest, whether they turn out to be fleeting interests or lifelong obsessions. Time and distance are the only way I can tell the difference.

The older I get, the more I notice that other people - even those who know me well - don't seem prepared for such mercurial moods. I will rant and complain about something that is upsetting or annoying me at the time; it helps me to get over things. Indeed, that's usually why I rant and complain.

For example, an ex girlfriend of mine dumped me a month or two after we'd got together. I wailed and tooth-gnashed to other friends about how low I felt, how depressing it all was, how unlikely it seemed I'd ever get to meet someone I could form a long-term love with etc. And, yes, I bitched a little about the ex.

After a while, once I'd calmed down (the wailing and tooth-gnashing and bitching being the pressure valve that allowed me to do so) the ex and I remained good friends, and still are. The other friends, to whom I'd vented, remain cold, unfriendly and suspicious towards my ex now. I've spoken to them about it, and "find it difficult to forgive her for treating you (i.e. me) so badly".

I have replied that with hindsight, most of the venting was just because I was upset. Yes, objectively there was some bad-treatment. But it wasn't all one-way, for I know I did & said some hurtful things myself.

But I got over it, why can't they?

I thought that these two particular friends were perhaps especialy protective and/or literal-minded, but other situations with other people make me think I'm just a particularly mercurial person.

The stormclouds gather quickly, and lash rain and fury, but are gone just a quick. Similarly, the sun can bathe the landscape with a warm glow for a time, but the clouds always come.

Most people's moods are like this, I guess, but my emotional climate seems to be more in the mould of the four-seasons-in-one-day British weather than the hot-as-hell-for-six-months, spectacular-leaf-fall-for-a-week, cold-as-hell-for-six-months, spring-thaw-lasting-for-a-week climate that most other people seem to have.

It's not that I'm particularly moody; my default setting is a laid back but generally sunny disposition, if tinged with less tolerance for ignorance or stupidity than some people. It's just that, when I do veer to an extreme, it doesn't seem to last for long.

Even my closest and oldest friends seem to get caught out by these rapid outbursts (good ro bad) followed by rapid reversals.

Maybe because they are rare.

I'd love to meet someone who complimented me in this regard - whose moods were as mercurial, and whose baseline outlook was as laid back. That way, most of the time we could rub along in comfort; when she needed to scream at the injustices of the world, I could offer bemused support, and vice versa; and on the rare occasions where we both needed to blow up at the same time, the sparks would keep us warm for years.

But the advice I seem to get from friends (and books etc.) is more that maybe I just need to learn to bite my tongue more, and maintain my placid exterior even when I want to be declaring undying love or screaming undying hatred. (Both of which have, so far at least, tended to die within months, if not hours.)

Which seems a pity; the intensity is such a buzz.

Now here's the thing. This weekend I went up to London for a friend's 30th birthday drinks. The weather was hot and sunny. The beer was cool and delicious. A good time was had by all.

The birthday girl was an old flame. Not THAT old, as it goes - we hooked up on an internet dating site last year. We got to the point of sleeping together (which was nice) but it turned out she was having an exploratory fling / crisis of conscience with her long-term beau. He was (and is) pretty much her ideal man, except for a long-standing aversion to having any kids, and they were going through a rough patch while she came to terms with this. Anyway, they are now back together, and he was there.

Retrospectively, I can only describe it as a fling, though at the time my aspirations were for something much more substantial and long-lasting. Without the rosy glow of infatuation, and without wishing to do her (or me) down, it is a good thing that it didn't go any further than it did, and I think we're much happier apart than we would have been together.

Since we split up, we've stayed in touch, and on friendly, mutually platonic terms; hence my invite to the party.

I chatted away happily with my friend's mum, and an old publishing friend of hers. As the evening wore on, people swapped seats and chatted to whoever was sat next to them - which was a beer-fuelled, sociable joy. By about 9.00pm I was sat next to an old school friend of our host and getting on rather well, and flirting quite a bit too. Very pleasant.

Now, I'd gone up intending to get the last train home (ok, a forlorn hope, especially once I've got the sniff or the barmaid's apron in my nostrils) but as time started ticking towards me needing to leave, echoed by similar not-too-enthusiastic noises from the publishing friend, the funny lively girl I had found myself chatting to for the last hour or two said that she had a sofa bed in her hotel room that pulled out into two singles, and that we were welcome to use it.

It may be the drink, but I had the distinct impression that she was keener to spend more time in the pub (and, concievably, elsewhere) with me than she was with publisher guy, who she'd known for ages anyway. But regardless of that, we both agreed, and settled back into our conversations.

My own conversations were largely focused on the school friend, and hers on me. We chatted and chatted and laughed and listened and generally got on like the proverbial domestic arson case.

A few hugs and kisses were unselfconsciously exchanged - much to the apparent delight of birthday girl and, I was surprised to see, her fella. He seemed relieved that I was no longer any kind of competitive threat, after which point we found that we got on rather well too (though I didn't kiss him, nor he me). Or perhaps we both just relaxed more as were had more to drink, in our typically British, emotionally aloof way. (Any foreign readers out there? We British drink so much because our culture permits us very few opportunities to be open; and drink grants us the permission we deny ourselves without it. In case you didn't know.)

By the end of the evening, everyone was pretty lubricated. Speaking for myself, I was little more then halfway to being out-and-out drunk. I was certainly in no condition to drive, but I wasn't slurring my words or wobbling - unlike our publisher chum, who was doing lots of both. The whole party left the pub together. Birthday girl & her boyfriend, her school friend, publishing man and I went towards the hotels. Birthday girl & her man went to theirs, and we went to ours. It was all quite civilised, though perhaps she & I took a little more mirth from the publishing guy's condition than absolutely necessary.

So there we were tucked up in our three separate beds in the dark.

And a little hand reaches out for mine. (She's quite tiny, something I've always found attractive in a woman.) Lowered inhibitions are a wonderful thing. Some more kissing, trying not to wake publishing guy (whose snores made him easy to monitor). Me joining her in the large main bed. Nothing untoward happened, for a first meeting - I believe an American assessment of progress would be "second base".

Yesterday morning we woke up, back in our separate beds. Publishing guy was nowhere to be seen; he'd apparently disappeared, fully dressed, at about 3.30 am. Later on that morning we found out he'd awoken drunk in a strange dark room and decided he needed to get a cab home; I slept soundly through this, though my new friend was woken up by it.

As I'd intended to travel back the night before, I was without a change of clothes or any toiletries, so I just got dressed while she showered. We mooched around in the room for a short while, exchanging text messages with birthday girl to plan breakfast. We looked out of the hotel window across at a very sunny London. And hugged some more. We idly watched some morning news on television and chatted about issues raised. And snatched a quick kiss here and there (and it wasn't me making all the running).

Once dressed and packed up, we headed out to meet with BG and her bloke. It was already hot at 10.30 am. We chatted some more and went on to a cafe, where we met the others. After that, the girls went off to shop while BG'sB and I wandered to the riverside, chatted in a repressed British way (which, if you ARE repressed and British, can be immensely enjoyable, and was). Just as we were getting too hot and thirsty and wondering after the opening status of local hostelries, the girls returned.

My diminutive new friend needed to get a coach home from London, which meant a tube train journey in about 45 minutes' time. We went into the shade of the pub next to the station to pass the time, and then all got onto the train. BG & HB got off at their stop, and I accompanied the little one to hers. More hugs. A kiss goodbye.

Lunchtime on a hot, sunny Sunday in London with no particular rush to get home is a decidedly fine thing. I decided to start walking. Initially I headed for Hyde Park, aiming for Bayswater, an area I knew well from when I lived in London myself. This took good few hours, past Speaker's Corner. It's been at least a decade since I went past here, and the Islamist/Islamophobic rants that have come to dominate international debate have, unsuprisingly, come to dominate here too. It was too hot, and the arguments from both sides too stale, to want to stay for long, so I carried on to the Baywater Road.

For readers who don't know, the railings along Bayswater Road that separate it from Hyde Park have long been a place where artists (mostly painters, but a few sculptors) come to exhibit their work. By now the sun had moved behind the trees overhead, so it was a pleasantly-shaded mile or so of mostly very good art that I walked past.

I stopped for a long time to watch a fat Middle Eastern man with a pastel pencil draw a portrait of a young Asian man. The model's friend stood next to me. Neither the subject, nor his friend would have looked out of place shouting about injustice and te superiority of Islam back on Speakers' Corner, but here the focus was on the artistry - this guy was amazingly good. I have aspirations to this sort of portrait talent myself (I can do it, but not first time like this guy - I have to draw and erase multiple times to get to any kind of likeness, while he got pretty much every line right first time.) so it was really interesting to see the work in progress of someone who knows what he's doing.

I don't know how long I stood and watched - if I had to guess, about an hour. I only really began to focus on anything else when I noticed that I was hungry and needed to visit the facilities (as it were), so I excused myself and headed off towards Queensway and the Whiteley's shopping mall there, where I could *ahem* see some friends off to the coast and then get myself fed.

I decided on sushi. I didn't eat a lot, but enjoyed what I had very much. The miso soup was especally good yesterday. In between dishes, I sent a text to my new friend to thank her making the weekend so much fun and that I'd be in touch soon.

On reflection, I over-egged it by asking her to text me when she got home so I wouldn't worry. On one level - the one I intended - this was just polite concern for a (small) single women travelling for several hours alone. My feverish mind turned this into over-eager, intrusive semi-stalker oppressiveness since she nither replied to say "yes I will" nor texted me when she did get home. Which could mean she took umbrage at the impostion. Or that she secretly hates me and couldn't wait to get away. Or that her mangled body is lying in a ditch somewhere. Or (more gently) that she was just dog-tired after a hot sweaty coach trip after a fitful night's sleep and she forgot.

See what I have to put up with? I know I'm supposed to be casual and friendly, and neither clingy & desperate nor callously indifferent, but my mind WILL decide to run and rerun events over and over again to wring our every possible nuance and meaning. Maybe I just should avoid reflecting.

Then I went into a big bookshop and another hour or so whizzed by unnoticed as I leafed through their wares (a Hilary Swank interview in Vanity Fair - for a woman whose film career specialises in mannish-ness, she certainly scrubs up well - and then three or four of Frank Miller's 'Sin City' books)

I wandered to the cinema in the mall, but nothing grabbed my attention, so I headed to Paddington Station to see about going home. My next train wasn't for 45 minutes or so, so I bought a magazine, a doughnut and some water and passed the time.

The train home was hot and overcrowded (the one before had been cancelled, so two lots of passengers had to cram into one train. I did, at least find a seat, so I read some more. And stared out of the window, endlessly calculating the meanings and possibilities of the time I'd spend with my new friend.

I am improving - most of my imaginings were limited to will she want to meet up again, rather than where would we live and what would our kids be like - but it's early days and doubtless by date three or four, if we get that far, I'll be in full-on mental overdrive.

On past history, I'll be so wrapped up in the internal mental analysis of the relationship, I won't notice what's going on in the real world, won't really talk about any of it for fear of it scaring her as much as it does me, so she will get bored and/or irritated, and by the time I've passed through the mental firefighting and am ready to behave like a sensible adult (1-3 months on past form) she'll be mentally scripting the break-up.

I mean - look at this entry. I've spent the last hour re-hashing it all for public view (retaining enough composure to change names to protect the innocent, though doubtless if she Googles me tomorrow, like I've done at least twice today, she'll come across it on page two or three).

I've struggled to concentrate on work today because my mind has been elsewhere  (a pub and a hotel in South West London, to be precise. To be even more precise, some blue eyes, some lips, a very nice toned petite figure, and skin made black against white sheets by the darkness. *sigh*)

Responses are most welcome - be they constructive suggestions on how to make my mind just SHUT UP and go with my instincts, or predictions of how long it will (or won't) last. Especially from throat-stoppingly cute healthcare professionals in the West Midlands(?).