The Cutns-Monte Act

I'm not sure how many of you have come across this little know piece of US legislation. It appears that both Obama and McCain voted for it. It was passed several years after a Mr Cutns Monte was cleared by the Federal Courts for buying a house with someone else's credit card. He still lives there to this day. Apparently this is every American's constitutional right. I think we can therefore hold both candidates responsible for our current plight...

Crime in Transit

Southampton’s Ford factory will cease production of the Transit van by 2011. Oh sad day, some cry, the vehicle that built Britain is being sidelined. But will the loss of the Transit have an incidental effect on the crime rate? Is this a subtle way to clean up Britain? The introduction of the Paracetamol 16 piece blister pack is believed to have cut the suicide rate by 25%, so maybe taking the vehicle of crime away will deter the potential criminal. In my professional life, the only vehicle that ever seems to come up in court – often including those that pull up outside court to unload the accused – is the ubiquitous Transit. It wasn’t a beige VW Transporter driver that tried to anti-Tebbit Dave Cameron off his bike with a well-timed shove. White Van Man is one thing – one of Britain’s more stagnant characters – but he’s small fry compared to Blue Van Man. We are a nation of van-driving murderers and our chief weapon is being revoked. As a classic 1973 Transit owner, I may mourn, but as a lawyer and a Brit, I’m glad that the blood-bath is over.

Officers have said they want to trace the owner of a blue transit van which is thought to have been seen in the drive of the pensioner's home last Wednesday.
A total of 500 blue Transit vans and over 180 Range Rovers were traced and eliminated during the course of the enquiry. … "However, we still need the public's help in tracing a white Transit-size van which was travelling in Sanderson Road behind the blue van we have now traced.”
His car was forced to a stop by a white transit van before two men got out of the van and opened fire.
Torbay Police are hunting a light blue Transit van in connection with the disappearance of a Paignton man nearly 5 months ago.
4 days later a blue transit van that was believed to be the same van that abducted Jenny was spotted by CCTV in Birmingham.
Danielle was seen talking to a man in a blue Transit van shortly after leaving home the day she disappeared.
Detectives say they have been able to pinpoint the time of death to within 36 hours and widened their search for the drivers of a blue Transit.
A suspicious blue Transit van was seen around the playing fields on Monday morning and could be linked to the burglary.
The married father of two had gone into the shop to buy a newspaper, but emerged to find his blue Ford Transit was being taken, the spokesman added. The vehicle then struck the victim a glancing blow before running him over.
Twenty years ago, on a dark November morning, a gang of five armed robbers were sitting in a stolen blue Transit van on the Heathrow trading estate, waiting for their "inside man" to turn up [... but let's not forget the Transit's dodgy axle problem ...]. As the robbers filled up the battered Transit with this windfall the vehicle's axles started to bend.

So, since my last blog I read the following in an article about women in Farc. It got me thinking again about the Revolution and god:

Another recent deserter resorted to particularly dramatic measures in order to return to the family she had left behind when she joined Farc. Sitting in her mother's sparse sitting room in a Bogota housing estate, she looks every inch the typical city girl: manicured nails, carefully groomed hair, white trousers. Amalia now has a respectable job in a travel agency and keeps her guerrilla past a secret from her neighbours. When she went to the camps, her two-year-old daughter was sent to live in Bogota with her grandmother but, after two-and-a-half years, Amalia could no longer bear the separation. 'I was given the task of looking after an airstrip, and I saw my opportunity,' she says. She got on to the plane with her gun and told the pilot he was being hijacked. 'He went very pale and did what I said.' On the journey to freedom she read her horoscope in the newspaper El Tiempo. 'It said I was about to start a new cycle in my life. I remember thinking how true it was.'

I bet no one realised that day that El Tiempo's astrologer was writing about an escaping female guerrilla. This is what El Tiempo says about me today:

VIRGO

24 de agosto a 23 de septiembre

Tu talento recibe mayor expansión y es posible que puedas encauzar con mejor precisión tus proyectos. La inteligencia y calma, que empleas al hacer tus negocios; se convierten ahora en la llave secreta del éxito.

Or is it actually addressed to another Farc member about to employ her intelligence and calm to organise a successful kidnapping. Who knows?

Is God a Marxist-Leninist?

And so another day, another painstaking journey across google earth in a virtual hot air balloon in search of a likely plot of land for my Plastics Injection Moulding Company. I don't think I've mentioned my dream yet. Briefly, I managed to get our money out of Bare Fanny Sterns (or whatever it is) before the crisis which Gordon tried so hard to avoid. So it's sitting in a bank looking for somewhere to go. Since I was a child I have loved plastic of all shapes and sizes. In fact one of the nicest things about it is you can mould it into nice shapes of nearly any size. And before any of you write to tell me about my carbon footprint these days you can use recycled plastic and even honey. And that's exactly what I will do. I will turn recycled plastic into Habitat chairs and Save the Children Toothbrushes and create a Foundation for Underprivileged Children with Human Rites. (Geddit? future?)

But I need a place to build my factory where labour costs aren't too high. Hence google earth and my desire to share with you an interesting place I found today. It is a district in Binh Duong province in Viet Nam called Tam Uyen. As you can see it has lots going for it. The most interesting claim was that made on the 'Natural Conditions Page'. The land density numbers and relative moisture are good by any standards, and actually fall in the range I am looking for. But what about the other claim? That God hardly does anything there. I, as a practising Catholic, find that hard to believe. I know Viet Nam is a Marxist Leninist Country, and strictly speaking, they aren't really believers. But that would be more of a reason for God to visit the place, not stay away. And so I am forced to ask myself - and you, dear readers - is God a Marxist-Leninist? Please vote.

Snatch, Clean and Jerk

I swim (see last post). I swim well. Sometimes - as some of my bar colleagues have discovered - too well. But, my real sport has always been the Men's 56 Kg weight lifting. There is something about little men lifting several times their own body weight that I find inspiring. Tony never came close to qualifying and I don't hold that against him. But Liam. As a young lad well within the weight threshold he chose to go out drinking rather than make use of the No. 10 Gym. As mothers we get used to shattered dreams, but I think my sons' lack of interest in the sport was particularly hard to take.

Without subscriptions to certain channels which Tony won't let me have it's almost impossible to watch 56Kg events, particularly with a schedule as busy as mine. But I still love to watch the little men and the Olympics is a break in my cloud. A sunshine of big muscles on little arms. An opportunity to see, in the flesh, what my sons could have been. What a tournament we were treated to. Men from Indonesia, North Korea, China, Viet Nam and other countries with little men lifted and lifted and lifted. And then they lifted some more. And finally, when the chalk dust settled and the dumb bells stopped bouncing we had an Olympics 1,2,3: China, Viet Nam and Indonesia: Little Men with Muscles on a podium. What more can a barrister ask for?

I am a baffled triathlete

Talking of queer water, I took part in a relay triathlon on the weekend. I did the swimming leg, 1500 metres up and down the Royal Albert Dock opposite City Airport in East London, another of my charity commitments. My crawl is a bit rusty and it was one of those times when you think why am I doing this? Tony couldn’t make it to cheer me on, but some of the kids did but to be honest my goggles had misted up and I had an earful of diesel so it made no difference. A friend just told me that his great-grandfather used to be a diver in the docks, in an old-fashioned dive suit with huge bell helmet and folk pumping on the dock side. He used to check the hulls of ships for problems. I had been hoping for such a fellow, or a Victorian waif perhaps, yelling – oi miss, I’ll do yer leg fer arf a crown – but no such luck, although this is clearly good news for the rights of children in Britain. If I'd had a suit I would have walked across the bottom of the dock, though I'm not sure there was one. And wouldn't those ancestors of ours have looked on in bafflement at the site of waves of hatted, suited swimmers voluntarily circling buoys in filthy water. Now I am a little achy and a tad sorry that I shall probably have to do the whole thing myself next year.

Sheep worrying: the death of an institution

When I married Tony in 1980, we both thought such a move a little passé like most institutions, but there was something irreconcilably romantic about it. I honestly thought that ours would be the last wedding – that that was the end of it – people have been marrying for so long, I thought it would just die out. I imagined future people as partners, like in law firms. Of course I kept my name, as many lawyers do, but also because Booth is my name and a nicer shape. When you pour water, there is sonority in displacement, as travelling volume meets still volume, and picture the magic of ‘oo’ against the plainness of ‘air’. Well, I have been to so many weddings in the last few years and I was beginning to get a little mystified as to what was happening – so many young women metaphorically spontaneously combust as their fathers give them away like dowry cattle and then they are robbed of their monikers. How refreshing then, that in the Czech Republic I recently glimpsed how transgressive a union can still be. When the registrar, already a fish out of water, or a bureaucrat in a hippy commune if you prefer, made the mistake of introducing the new Mr and Mrs His Name. Well both bride and groom baa-d like sheep and I was reminded of the White Queen. I am sure you recall the chapter in Through the Looking Glass where, in pursuit of her shawl, the queen finds herself at the counter of a shop and begins to bleat, 'that’s bee-tter, beeee-tter’. Alice must buy something from the sheep’s shop, but given knitting needles she finds they turn into oars. There is something ‘queer’ about the water, and when back in the shop, the egg which she has decided to buy retreats from her grasp. The registrar seemed a masala of retreating egg, caught crab, and wool. Perhaps all there is left to do is spontaneously combust.

Something must be done...

Sometimes life is so hard for young people. Take for example recent reports of a young female accountant from Quang Tri province recently admitted to Cho Ray hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. She reported symptoms of self combustion - burned hair and skin. She is one of several self-combusting young people in Viet Nam (mostly women, mostly accountants). So far none have actually combusted, but it is time the international community did something before the problem gets out of hand. If you feel strongly one way or another please participate in my poll.

Ronaldinho...

A football match between Viet Nam and Brazil, a preparation for the Olympic Games. The government paid Brazil $600,000 to play. I love Pato, the young man with the white boots. I had to go. Tony said no. But I went. I bought a ticket from a tout. The official price was 300,000 VND. That's what I paid; the luck of a human rights lawyer. And so I sat in the seats of the gods. What a game. The VN kicked the BZ (see picture). The BZ kicked the VN. National pride, such a wonderful thing. Around me they wondered: why are we so small, so weak, so short. They were the words I understood. At the restart I tipped the lip: near post save, off the post. So close. So far. It ended. What a game.