Foyle’s Jazz café in Charing Cross Road has fine music, free wireless access and very good coffee. Indeed, here's a couple of observations from that very location:
1. Few were genuinely surprised that no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq; but how curious that the allies, having a perfectly good reason for conducting the war (the principled opposition to fascism) should have chosen to confect, for public consumption, a manifestly spurious one.
2. A friend of mine suggests a new left blog, using the following formula:
a. There will be occasional analyses of safely canonical texts from the Left tradition.
b. He will, however, carefully eschew any Marxist or even radical left analyses of the contemporary world. No mention of class, inequality, exploitation, imperialism; most conspicuously, capitalism will be spared any thoroughgoing critique.
c. Most of his energies will instead be devoted to chasing a spectral entity called the ‘liberal-left’ as it manifests itself, especially, in X newspaper, and in decrying the ‘pseudo-left’ as manifest here there and everywhere.
d. He will be comfortable with his citation on the blogrolls of various right-wing groupuscules and assorted reactionary ranters.
e. He will defiantly maintain that he is the authentic custodian of radical thought.
I told him that although I would support his venture I could hardly commend its originality.
N.B.
Those of you who saw in the above formula a “neatly comic comment on what the left-hand side of the World of Blogs is often like”, give yourself a pat on the back; others weren't so fortunate, and are still earnestly pondering what I was 'up to’.