Bad Start

Bad start to the day. I'd walked half way to the station before I realised my fly was open. Then, when I sat down to read my book, I found it wasn't in my bag. I must have left it on the breakfast table, dammit. The book in question is The Kite Runner, as I'm sure I have mentioned here before. I'm about half way through it now. I'm finding it very difficult to like the central character. I'm sure one is supposed to feel sorry for him. But I just see him as pathetic and cowardly. He's eaten up with guilt, which is entirely self inflicted, and he's totally obsessed with himself. I like his father much more.

I'm going to start hobby electronics again. I got quite into it when I was a teenager. Somehow it got sidelined when I was at college. I'm bored with wasting my evenings in front of the internet or television. I could be inventing something useful like a teleporter or an anti gravity field generator. I need to get into PIC controllers.

There is a hysterical story all over the news today about Harriet Harman. Harriet is deputy Labour leader, party chairman, and leader of the commons. She's also in trouble over accepting dodgy donations during her deputy leadership campaign, but that's another story altogether. Today she is in the news because she went walkabout in her own South London constituency wearing a bullet proof vest yesterday. I can only conclude that either she thinks the streets are so dangerous that we all need kevlar body armour, or that she feels so unpopular that just she is likely to be shot or stabbed. Either awy, it wasn't a good PR move.

She is now frantically back-peddling and using a variety of extraordinary explanations for this disastrous move. She has said it was like wearing a white hairnet when visiting a meat factory, and that "It was just a courtesy, there was no security issue whatsoever, it was almost like wearing the kit when you go out with the team". Personally I like her comment about it being no different to wearing a hard hat on a building site. John Humphreys on the Today programme on Radio 4 helpfully pointed out that one wears a hard hat to protect one's head from falling objects and that one doesn't need a bullet proof vest on the streets of London unless one is worried about injury.

A number of papers are reporting on Nick Clegg's interview with some trashy boys mag, about the number of women he's bedded. I really thought this was an April Fool's joke. Surely the leader of the Liberal Democrat party can't be that crass can he? Well I can only assume that this is genuine because it appears in so many places. If it wasn't for the fact that Harriet managed to steal so many column inches this morning, I'd say Clegg would be hung out to dry. It's going to turn into another William Hague baseball cap if you ask me.

Talking of April Fool's jokes, the Sun is reporting a UFO sited off the Welsh Coast, the Telegraph has announced the discovery of a colony of flying penguins, and apparently the Guardian reported that Carla Bruni is being recruited as a style advisor by Gordon Brown. That damn woman is never out of our papers.