Which brings me to the other kind of racist, who is much more loathsome. This kind of racist doesn’t admit he’s racist. He thinks he’s not racist; he thinks he’s just trying to talk about matters in a calm and rational manner, which unfortunately is denied to him because the ‘PC Brigade’ will come and take us away in their big pink diversity van.

You couldn’t make it up.

Actually, I count a good half dozen of my close friends who would rather like to drive that van. Is there a rota we can sign up to? Parp parp!

Looking out of the kitchen patio doors this morning I saw a house mouse that at first I thought was long gone, its body curled in the sad, pathetically protective crescent of the small creature in death. But after a while it began to twitch, and then started crawling round in a limping circle, its eye still closed. I thought, it must be nearly dead; but almost an hour later it was still occasionally making movements, one side of its body clearly in trouble. I conferred with K, and accepted that something had to be done.

I don’t know how something could cling so tenaciously to live and then die so easily. As I lifted up its body on the hoe that I had just merely patted it with, intending now to carry it to the depths of our garden and drop it far out of sight and reach, I saw claw marks on the side of its body that it had kept closest to the ground.

It had behaved as though the wounds were an embarrassed secret, rather than something inflicted almost certainly by one of the local cats that we usually find so cute. One of them must have toyed with it briefly, but before delivering the final blow had been scared off: maybe merely by us opening the curtains that morning.

I’ve spent much of the weekend struggling with and tearing away at the bamboo that our embittered, witless landlady had planted, in order to simultaneously dessicate the garden and (growing with the speed of leylandii) complicate our relationships with our neighbours in her poisonous absence. At the end of each day I’ve been covered in tiny raised weals, and an intermittent rash from the sap of the ivy that binds the whole living trellis together. My arms have ached and I half-twisted my elbow twice. But none of that physical effort was as difficult as raising a hand to the mouse. It’s hard, being city-bred, continuing to find the tooth and the claw just as powerfully lovable as the whisker and the tiny, scrabbling hands.

I have CD difficulties. K. still prefers putting physical CDs on to using something like iTunes to play through the equivalent album: I don’t understand that completely but do I sympathise; sympathy in this case takes the form of leaving my CDs available in the living room. That way, if I’m not around or if there’s some reason we can’t use the old iMac, we can always reach for the original metal disc. I rationalize this as coming from the same principle as burning CDs from my downloaded music: media is in such a transitional phase right now that “backup” physical copies are still important.

Still, my CD collection consists of around 250–300 albums and some 50-80 singles. Some of those albums are annoyingly wrapped in cardboard sleeves, a marketing gimmick I’ve never quite understood, as the packaging doesn’t seem to add size or generally content to the purchase (hardback-sized packaging of tiny computer CDs is in part a psychological trick to make them feel in the hand like something worth paying hundreds of pounds for). Worse, albums like Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space aren’t CD-shaped at all, designed like a bubble pack of pills, consisting of a single dose. Thanks a lot, Jason Pierce. At least it wasn’t the limited edition twelve-mini-CD pack.

I’ve stripped off those cardboard covers (not throwing them away, of course: yet) and spent a good hour or so working out precisely what CDs I own. My old A–Z collection has now been bedded down like an archaeological layer, with a newer A–Z on top of it consisting of the last few jewel-case plus de-covered jewel case albums from years past. On top of that is a layer of a few random large-case singles, which are convenient to store in the few remaining slots in my album storage. And alongside it are all the tossy odds and ends, squashed and stacked inside an old 386 PC case.

Finally I think I know where everything is. K. will be so pleased when she comes home. Once she works out where everything is too. She’ll come round.

It’s been more difficult since I resolved to only buy downloadable, DRM-free music: not only do I no longer have the offbeat encyclopaedia of Witney’s Rapture informing my music choices, but avoiding DRM-ruined and CD-only releases limits my choices somewhat. But, as in music, formal structures need not be limiting.

Yesterday, after much umming and ahhing over music from other sources, other possible artists etc.—much as I would have indulged in with high-street browsing—I bought three phenomenal albums from Play.com (7digital.com is also available).

The first was Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü (buy). Every muso and his aloof, sneering electronic dog cites Bob Mould’s 1980s hardcore-punk semi-vehicle as a seminal influence on modern alt-rock (Nirvana, Pixies), but I’ve never sat down and listened do them. Zen Arcade is mental, a concept album consisting of somewhere between twenty and two hundred thousand two-minute wonders.

Hüsker Dü are certainly namechecked in Michael Heatley’s will-this-do Peel biography, along with everyone from Queen to the Queen, but I don’t think they ever played a session for the man himself (perhaps Peel thought they had, as he was confusing Bob Mould with Billy Bragg). They’re also quite hard to find on great-quality YouTube, but here’s their Love is All Around from their Eight Miles High EP:

I saw Martin Simpson play Truck XI this year, and my brief single moblog comment doesn’t really do the man justice. I would have twittered more, but generally I can’t type straight with my heart in my mouth. If Little Fish are two people sounding like four, Martin Simpson is one person and his guitar pulling the same trick.

His most recent album Prodigal Son (buy) is, on first hearing, strong and rich. It includes Simpson’s versions of Duncan & Brady and Little Musgrave (I can’t quite get over folk’s complete acceptance of the cover version, but these are both ace), and the gutwrenching Never Any Good, which he performed at the BBC Folk Proms shortly after Truck this year:

My final purchase yesterday was Kala by M.I.A. (buy). M.I.A. very much sits the furthest from my comfort zone of these three, but the brilliant Adam and Joe show on 6Music is dragging me kicking and screaming towards jungle, hip-hop and (whisper it!) world music.

The standout—by which I mean most accessible to fearful white men like me—track on the album is undoubtedly Paper Planes, which is gaining traction on the airwaves in the US, and diss videos from buffoons. Here’s what M.I.A. told Fader Magazine about the song.

[The sample of the gun reloading and then the cash register ringing] was a joke. I was having this stupid visa problem and I didn’t know what it was, aside from them thinking that I might to fly a plane into the Trade Center - which is the only reason that they would put me through this….

… I was going to get patties at my local, and just thinking that really the worst thing that anyone can say [to someone these days] is some shit like: “What I wanna do is come and get your money.” People don’t really feel like immigrants or refugees contribute to culture in any way. That they’re just leeches that suck from whatever.

So in the song I say “All I wanna do is [sound of gun shooting and reloading, cash register opening] and take your money.” I did it in sound effects. It’s up to you how you want to interpret. America is so obsessed with money, I’m sure they’ll get it.

Peel would have got it; he was getting this sort of thing back in the 1980s, only he was getting The Smiths at the same time.

When I first began cycling a hardcore roundtrip to work (2003–2004 was the year of my Headington–Abingdon commute) I felt over the course of that single year the raindrops getting splashier, and the environment I was passing through becoming somehow less hospitable. It’s easier to ignore that sort of thing in a car: positive feedback at work on the small scale.

I stayed home on Tuesday as the weather looked too wild to cycle in. At around 3pm, when the thunderstorms finally rolled in, laminae of rain were being torn off the Cotswold-gradient sloping roof of an outhouse behind the nursing home. Each layer of water retained a centimetre-thick diffuse integrity, as it curled up and whirled over to our garden, only to collapse and shower it with a secondary storm of rain. The wind was essentially yanking rainwater back up from where it had settled, to hurl it down somewhere else: the water cycle at work on the small scale.

Windier, weirder, harsher. We’ve got about a hundred months. Put out more anoraks.

Less of a music event and more of a jam-and-pickle one, there’s homegrown produce and refreshments on sale. As I don’t have an allotment there, my excuse for going will be helping with the Give Coal the Boot campaign. £1 entrance and funds go to (I think) local mental-health charity RESTORE.

Come forth, supporting conservation:
Make your boot-shaped silhouettes.
Then leave with fruits of preservation,
Jars of jam and ripe courgettes.

The new song of summer 2008. Goldrush would be proud.

Conducted to the ladies, at the Ship Inn, Dobbin assumed a jovial and rattling manner, which proved that this young officer was becoming a more consummate hypocrite every day of his life. He was trying to hide his own private feelings, first upon seeing Mrs. George Osborne in her new condition, and secondly to mask the apprehensions he entertained as to the effect which the dismal news brought down by him would certainly have upon her.

When Dobbin tries to convince Amelia Osborne’s brother Jos of the necessity for preparing for flight, should the worst happen and both Dobbin and George perish in a defence of the city against the French, he’s silent once again about his love for Amelia, and Jos—misunderstanding his concern—treats him with the contempt to be reserved for a coward. Poor Dobbin, it seems, is to be forever considered deficient in the topsy-turvy world of the Fair, because he disguises his own feelings while making plain his intentions: the precise opposite behaviour from that of the book’s main character Becky Sharp. His hypocrisy saves him, both as a human being and from the fates that befall others in the book.

Some time ago, musician and commentator Momus discussed accusations of hypocrisy following his own publication of articles on his espousing of a relatively leftfield and post-consumerist lifestyle:

… The hypocrisy mindset pays too much attention to people’s personal lives and too little to their programmatic or ideological outlook. If someone is a visionary, or is trying to solve a widespread problem, it’s likely that his personal life will reflect the problem whereas his policies will reflect the solution. It would then be pretty stupid to accuse him of saying one thing and doing another — especially if everyone were pretty much in the same boat, at least until an alternative infrastructure is set up. A charge of hypocrisy might well be a pre-emptive strike designed to stymie future solutions to universal problems.

To be accused of hypocrisy, then, is in part to receive acknowledgement from your accuser that, at least on a logical or rational level, they’re starting to lose command of the argument, and are bolstering themselves in other registers, those of emotive rhetoric. An accusation of hypocrisy, levelled against suggestions of a morally strong course of action, is an affirmation of that course’s strength.

While that doesn’t help flush that rhetoric out of the ears of everyone listening to them, it does give you a range of arguments with which to fight back against those accusations. Monbiot happens to be one of the best writers of the well-paced paragraph since Victorian authors bloated them beyond all recognition, and Thackeray himself might be proud. He might approve of the message at the end of George’s recent piece too:

Sure we are hypocrites. Every one of us, almost by definition. Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions. Greens have high aspirations - they want to live more ethically – and they will always fall short. But the alternative to hypocrisy isn’t moral purity (no one manages that) but cynicism.

In reality it is people like Julie Burchell – who is incidentally far richer than almost any green I’ve met – who treat the poor with contempt. So that she can revel in what she calls “reckless, romantic modernism”, other people must die. But at least you can’t accuse her of hypocrisy: she cannot fail to live by her moral code, because she doesn’t have one. Give me hypocrisy any day.

Stylistically, that might seem a little too obvious to Thackeray, somewhat inflated and emotive. But then, he might admit, that’s Captain Dobbin and all those other “hypocrites” for you: meek when insulted; grandiloquent when angered; but, ultimately, utterly compassionate towards their fellow man.

There’s currently a peaceful demonstration and climate workshop camp being run near the proposed site of the coal-fired white elephant at Kingsnorth. The site’s owner is reportedly more than happy with the demonstration. However, on the way in, people found themselves stopped by the police, who confiscated guy ropes, compostable toilets, emergency radios and crayons. Presumably in case any of their children ate the crayons, tripped over the tent ropes, and then puked over the toilets while listening to the radio.

Later on, having got a bit bored and antsy, the defenders of the law seem to have donned riot gear and stormed the site. Thereupon they began randomly smashing people in the head and spraying them pepper spray. Once enough peaceful protesters were bleeding and broken, they refused ambulances access to the site until they presumably left all their guy ropes, compostable toilets and portable defibrillators at the gate. Luckily, no crayon-related injuries were sustained during the intense, unwarranted attack, so they were clearly doing something right.

The mainstream media were witnessed entering the site, so it’s odd that the BBC homepage isn’t currently abuzz with angry protests against random, unprovoked assaults on British citizens. Still, I do wonder who’s going to be the next cricket captain: don’t you?

Knowing so many talented people (it only really hit me when so much was on display at once) and seeing them putting out such exciting work—not to be too lovey about it—is a real joy. But it can be a bit depressing too. Afterwards I felt for some time like I ought to raise my game, but: playing at what? Finely-tuned griping?

Call Me Dave should never have trusted his bike to a bollard, I admit. But to describe the weird assemblage of dogleg-height metal rails outside the Tesco’s in question a “perfectly serviceable rail” in the context of securing your bike requires a stretch of the imagination that I’m unable to make.

You might manage to secure a bike to it if you had some genetic condition that meant you were only three foot tall and had to endure the mockery of using a child’s tricycle owing to your tiny frame. Having never met the Camster in person I couldn’t comment on that: they can do wonderful things with Photoshop these days, like making wee little folk look like giants, and preventing their bizarrely reflective faces from causing lens flare. Or you could just about reach the rails if your bike was actually a yuppie foldup scooter, which seems entirely more in character; if that were the case, though, and if I were its owner, I’d just be praying it got nicked.

In fact, unless perspective is entirely off in that picture, my insurance-mandated bike lock won’t reach from that rail to my frame, and if I were to pass the lock through just my wheel then I’d probably return to a charrming and eccentric Dali-watch artwork of a bicycle, that I’d have to drag to the nearest cycle shop for replacement spokes.

The question becomes: how far would El Camion have had to go to find decent bike parking? Maybe if nearby cycling provision hadn’t almost certainly been (a) rubbish and (b) far less than the average provision at supermarkets for cars, then cyclists such as Camo’ might have been able to secure the very mode of transport that everyone’s meant to be encouraging them to choose.

Mind you, Melty Head’s constituents have quite obvious form for such almost wilful neglect of public and leased space, in terms of encouraging bicycle use. Provision at the Sainsbury’s and Waitrose in Witney is appalling, the former hamstrung by the stylistic requirement of having big fat wooden verticals that you can’t secure a wheel to, and the latter consisting entirely of a few dozen wheelbenders: both of these assembled insults to good cycling sit in the looming tarmac shadow of hundreds and hundreds of car parking spaces. I can’t imagine the planning meeting for either development would have even discussed it in anything other than a token manner, though.

The actual municipal provision in the town is the most lacklustre and insufficient that I’ve seen of a somewhere its size. There’s pretty much nothing other than a couple of sets of wheelbender racks; both bent and jiggered in places; both dismally in the way of pedestrians (but of course out of the way of cars); both hidden like embarrassed afterthoughts, plonked behind respectively the chip shop and Sandwich de Witney. Yes, Sandwich de Witney. Still, at least local council tax is so low, right? Stops the benefit scroungers stealing parking spaces for our SUVs, right? God bless true-blue Wod-see!

Still, however discouraging the local Tory attitudes are to any fool trying to travel round in anything other than enormous disguised urban tractors with all the handling of a moose on quaaludes, I can’t really agree with Jonathan Calder when he says in the context of anti-theft measures:

“Who wants to own a bicycle at all under such circumstances?”

because, well, I do. I did. I owned a literally Giant GSR, covered in masking tape, for years and years, until the tape dried out and fell off and the bottom bracket started tearing its own threads out at around eight thousand miles.

Owning a bike to me is like owning legs: I’m not that fussed if they’re hairy. I don’t mean that I’ve got a hairy bike. But if you demand the choice of a beautiful rather than smooth-running vehicle as a prerequisite to your velocipedophilia, then you’re missing the point.