Gradual return to normality ...

The Aaronovitch column from hell has been written ... unfortunately, it was written by Nick Cohen which makes it off topic for us, even though it is quite the kind of repulsive passive-aggressive crap that motivated us to set up this blog. Nick Cohen, quite literally, hopes that the bombings will act as a "wake-up call" to us, the dinner party liberals ("social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come"; in my world, social success at the dinner table goes to the man who isn't a cunt, but there you go). And Nick does actually think that we (as in, not him) had it coming, you see; if only we'd listened to Nick (and Dave) and stood foursquare behind Tony Blair we'd be sipping mochalatte on the Circle Line right now. Fucker. He also repeats a hoary old misquote about Karlheinz Stockhausen, btw, so any fans of music concrete who want to stick the boot in, the Guardian Reader's Editor is Ian Mayles.

Aaro, himself, in a col for the Saturday "Faith" section which is a bit difficult to link to but is available through the search function on the Times site (he also wrote a book review which we found unobjectionable) is more or less sticking to the terms of our ceasefire agreement; he puts out a boilerplate para. about George Galloway being a knobber for bringing politics into sport, but does so with a certain lightness of touch that's missing from the Cohen atrocity. It also looks to me as if Dave's heart wasn't really in that one; it's not so much a hymn of hate to grouplets of the 1980s, but rather an attempt to bring the "Faith" section readers, who may not be regulars of the Tuesday comments section, up to date with Dave's views on the subject of George Galloway.

To be honest, Decent Dave is finding it a bit difficult to get going on anything these days, including the exercise bike down the gym (this is a lift from the hard-to-find column, by the way, not a nasty personal remark from me). He seems to be fighting vainly the old ennui at the moment; not hard to see why given that he is part of the same global media organisation that saw the bombs and thought "time to buy". More on Tuesday, I'm sure but so far I think that Dave has had a good few days.