Monday 17 March 2008

Free Tibet

The whole world is watching...


The Free Tibet Campaign is still updating its website with photos taken by protesters today. Here's another one:


They must be very, very scared.

There are reports of people protesting outside Chinese embassies around the world today. There is no embassy near me, so all I can think of to do for now is to copy these images here. If you happen to live in London though the embassy is at 49-51 Portland Place, and will probably be very busy tonight.

The editor of the Guardian has written to the embassy about media censorship, which might be a good basic letter for the rest of us to change a bit and also send - names, addresses and e-mails here to send to. I'd probably leave out the phrase "henceforth unfettered" if you don't want to sound like a Guardian editor.

Personally I think I might give them a ring tomorrow on 020 7299 4049, although if I had access to a fax machine I think it would also be quite good fun to repeatedly fax those photographs of dead protesters to all the embassy fax numbers...

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Sunday 16 March 2008

Real England

Hooray! Paul's new book Real England is out very soon, and small bits of it are readable now. They are currently unfortunately only available in the Daily Mail, which leaves me with a dilemma - can I really bring myself to link to the Daily bloody Mail?

I actually stole a copy yesterday before I realised I could read it online - if I'd been caught I wasn't sure if I'd be more embarrassed about shoplifting or about wanting a copy of the Daily Mail. Anyway, there will be more of it in the Mail on Monday, you really should read it and you really shouldn't buy the Daily Mail, so I'm just going to point you at it once.

That's it, I'm not going to do it again until it's in the Guardian, and then only if there aren't any "Fly to Prague for 20p" adverts next to it.


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Sunday 9 March 2008

Fallen Tree

I went for a walk the other day about half a mile up the road from my house, and saw this:


Down at my end of the road police tape usually means either a recent shooting or a massive car crash, but at the posh end in Roundhay the police apparently isolate the public from fallen trees, presumably in case anyone fails to notice a huge tree trunk of maybe two and a half feet diameter and bruises their knees by walking into it.
Both the tree and the wall are probably about 100 years old. Somehow that's an impressive but not completely unimaginable length of time, and I stood for ages just looking at this massive dying tree, wondering things like how much it weighed, what the place was like when it was a little sapling, and how terrifying it must have sounded when it fell.























Certainly puts a few other things into perspective, anyway.
























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