Diggin' the Dancing Queen

I was saddened today to hear that six more of our soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. That said, I was also fairly angry with the BBC for the way that they reported the news. We’re told that the Taliban immediately took responsibility for the attack and that they were "very proud" of their work. We’re meant to think that this makes them animals for having a complete disregard for human life... But this is a war, and people get killed – and people try to kill people. People in New York danced in the streets when Osama Bin Laden died. The English army regularly kills Taliban soldiers and I’m sure they regularly get patted on the back for doing so. Frankly, if I were a Taliban soldier with nothing but an ancient gun to my name, and I'd managed to take out a massive armoured vehicle with a crude improvised bomb, I might be tempted to do a little dance if I considered the people inside to be my enemies. I don’t support the war in Afghanistan. I don’t think it’s achieving anything. I feel terribly sorry that soldiers have to go over there simply to be blown to pieces, but soldiers are trained to kill, and one of the bi-products of war is death.

I'm currently watching a documentary about David Walliams swimming the Thames. He was interviewed at the half-way point by Scott Mills and demanded Dancing Queen by ABBA be played on Radio One. There followed a shot of Walliams dancing like a lunatic around his hotel room whilst listening to the song. The image filled me with great joy!

You know those days when you have hundreds of emails, and just as you think you’ve answered them all, a hundred more come bounding like spaniels into your inbox? Well, today was one of those days, and it wasn’t until Fiona pulled me up on it, that I realised my short, pithy,  factual "I need this, this and this" responses were actually coming across as slightly shirty. It’s amazing how an email can be interpreted in so many ways. I must remember to watch the language I use in future.

The Hattersley films are being broadcast (or TX’d, as we say in telly) up in the North West during the week of 19^th March. I've been asked to go up to Manchester to watch the films being screened in the community centre, and then oversee the first one being broadcast on the telly. It’s very exciting, but also a little worrying to think that they’re going to be split up on five successive nights, which was, in fairness, what I signed up for. I sincerely hope, however, that they’ll make sense out of context on the local evening news and that people won’t think the BBC has gone mad!

Pepys was all over London 350 years ago; first in Westminster, milling around the Parliament buildings and then in Deptford at Trinity House, where Sir William Batten had a terrible coughing fit, which forced him to return home.  Having just got over whooping cough, I know how he feels.