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We all breathed a sigh of relief when John was safely back in his compound after his Brighton adventure.
No-one is absolutely clear how he escaped nor how he ended up in the same room as the Prime Minister which the doctors had warned us about though in the end it all went well and no-one really believes that it was the confrontation with John that put Mr Blair in hospital.
The whole adventure was a bit of a lesson to us and just goes to show how you can never be off your guard though it was something Ron Neil didn't think about in his otherwise excellent report. As it happens, it was "Ephraim" - who is a little better now and spends most of his day slumped in the wing chair by the patio door, the better to disperse the top end of his personal bouquet - who alerted us to John's escape. At least, he would have alerted us if a) we could understand what he says and b) felt able to believe that which we do understand since he still has this habit of half hearing things and half repeating them so you can never be sure what he's said nor whether it's true. Anyway, "Ephriam" suddenly sat up and started pointing out to the Blue Peter garden, muttering stuff but it didn't seem on the face of it that anything was amiss and so we all carried on watching "Monarch of the Glen" until Sarah's mobile phone - ringtone, a digital realisation of the Carpenters' hit "Close to you" - went off and she got the news and sent the saintly Ed out to check by prodding the compound's nocturnal shadows with an episcopal staff he was breaking in for a friend.
Actually, Sarah was in two minds about John's return and when the Today odd-job man, Lord "Melvyn" Bragg, came back into the kitchen for a cappuccino after securing John back in his restraints she was particularly mean with the froth. She is anxious about her pumpkins. She's been tending and caressing them with a shy demure pride and watching them grow from near imperceptible buds to the plump and mature giants they are now, ripe for the attention of Hallowe'en revellers. Or will be in two week's time if John can be kept off them.
But is any of this true?
A question that has been seizing the more showy of the show offs in people of the media since the death of Jacques Derrida.
Of course, none of us on Today had heard of M Derrida until we got a phone call from Stephen "rive gauche" Sackur in Brussels who told Jim to get on down to WH Smith and get in all his books before there was a run on them otherwise we wouldn't be able to keep up with the Guardian letters' pages. The saintly Ed was a bit cross because we were in the middle of a fascinating symposium on Heraclitus at the time but he realised the mood was against him and offered to give Jim a lift in the minicab he drives at night in case they were heavy like French books often are.
Mark Coles does not drive a minicab and is not troubled by la repetition d'une premiere in the way the French can so easily be. It is for this reason that he brought to us truths - of fact and of reason - ranging from Clare Teal's introduction as "the new Ella Fitzgerald"
to Cliff Richards' reintroduction as a country singer.
Or something like that.
Craig Murray also does not drive a minicab though as he conceded on Friday's programme he might soon be.
Mr Murray was our man in Tashkent and it seems that his telegrams back to London detailing the apparently inhuman habits of his host didn't get him the house points he expected. Instead, he has had his security clearance withdrawn and with it the possibility of future employment in Tashkent or anywhere else for that matter.
But according to the books Jim and the saintly Ed brought back, one item this week would have been right up Jacques rue. The first was the debate between Tory David Davis and Labour's Caroline Flint over Tampere Two.
Here were two people who cannot both have been right. No one here knows who was and, as Jacques would have put it, a phenomenology of history would have to answer the question "how is a truth possible for us?" But if a truth is to be truth, it must be absolute, independent of any point of view (unless, of course, we are God, in which case the question is meaningless). Phenomenology seeks the origin of truth, and it locates this origin in an inaugural fact which by definition can only occur once. We do not think this was an inaugural fact.
Fortunately, there is still Chekov and Mozart though Micheline Wandor and Michael Billington clashed on Wednesday over the skittish proposition that the Russian had ruined the last century of western theatre.
Whereas James McConnell and Stanley Sadie argued over whether the Austrian wrote his music in the style he did on account of suffering from Tourette's syndrome.
Which brings us back to John and his second escape in three weeks. This time he got as far Broadcasting House where he jemmied his way into a studio where Jenni Murray was having tea with John Lloyd. After chasing the author of "What the Media are doing to our politics" around the cake stand a couple of times they settled for a verbal set-to.
Meanwhile Sarah took the opportunity of John's absence to tend to her plumping pumpkins unaware of the eyes of handyman "Melvyn" that followed her every move from the dark secrecy of his shed.
Kevin
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