Hello World

So here goes. Started frankly by accident, my online diary. Thought of calling it "45 and still unusual" but that would only do for the first 6 months....

I guess London is a fairly dull place to be writing from - most of the blogs I've read to date have been from Iraq. The allegedly Confucian curse "may you live in interesting times" comes to mind.

Still, we'll see how things go. Personal life may be getting interesting even if professional (local government!) and political life isn't.

Politically, my main interest at the moment is seeing how the Americans resolve the terrible situation they have created in Iraq. Has so much money and human life ever been spent to such counter-productive effect? The elections in nine days time will be extremely interesting. It seems pretty clear that the resulting constitutional assembly will be dominated by Shi'ite religious parties, surely not the effect Mr W has been trying to produce. I am sure the US will respond to this by trying to marginalise the constituent assembly - already they are tying economic assistance into acceptance of an IMF prescribed privatisation ecomony. How far the new Iraqi government will allow this to happen is moot - they are caught between the US occupiers on the one hand and the Ba'athist/Sunni Islamist resistance on the other so their room to manouevre is not great. A friend's partner has just left for Basra with the Foreign Office. It will be interesting to hear his news on his return.

That's it for now. Hopefully I'll learn how the blog-thing works better as this goes on.