Lyds poses with Harry (and TomTom)Lyds’ birthday party went swimmingly as she entered her third decade. TomTom offered me a lift there and back in his brand new Toyota Prius (the hybrid car) which is highly cool and a remarkably smooth ride. Thanks, TomTom! My navigating seems to be improving despite the significant handicap of not actually driving. We integrated amicably with Lydia’s schoolfriends Madeline and Emily who both go to the other place (Oxford) and enjoyed a lovely barbeque courtesy of her brother Malcolm. Discussion varied over the course of the evening from post-exam egging to the finer points of the second best tango sequence on film, but people succumbed to sleep early on and disappeared to their respective beds at around 1:30am. Contrary to the (understandable) nocturnal reputation I’ve gained, I was up at 9:00 the next morning chatting to the birthday girl’s parents over breakfast, with the rest of the gang surfacing a little later. Rav gained points in his absence with a well chosen “wench” card for our ex-K-Bar wench.

V For VendettaSo it turns out that the man shot by police in Stockwell was not only unrelated to the bombings, he was a perfectly innocent, slightly scared Brazillian electrician who had five rounds blasted into him while he was lying on the ground according to eyewitness statements. This is perhaps a scarier occurance than the explosions themselves, since the police are going to be around all the time and are we supposed to expect this sort of jittery trigger-happy action as part of their general duty? And this is the government Britons seemed to feel they had no choice but to re-elect…

Now is the perfect time for the release of the Wachowski brothers’ new film, V For Vendetta with Natalie Portman. Based on Alan Moore‘s graphic novel of the same name, it is set in a fictional future where Germany won WWII and Britain has become a facist state. The bleak picture of the future government is, however, eerily familiar and I have a feeling the film will strike a strange note for the modern viewer as those in power keep the public cowed into submission by the notion that they need their totalitarian government. The story itself follows V who engages in a morally ambiguous campaign of anarchy against the authorities.