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Opening Salvo

You might be forgiven for thinking something interesting will appear here. It's unlikely you'll be forgiven, but, still, it's possible. And to set your mind at ease, post #1 is not that exciting. Of course, you can be the judge of that.

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Rage, rage against the piling up of shite.

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Ed's dead, baby. Borrowed, with thanks, from the Independent I was unsure whether or not to write a post, post-election, on my post-election blues. For the most part, this was because I'm sure that political commentators, bloggers, activists, and people with far more understanding of the political landscape and the effect that the latest result would have on the lives of those for whom the spectre of a Tory government was only a bad dream, a shade that haunted at night when the lights burned low and the wolves howled at the door, had already used all of the adjectives and metaphors of despair in ways far more eloquent than anything I might come up with. I find however that I must say something, even if it doesn't help matters, to explain to myself more than anyone else why it is I feel so miserable. I will probably have no right to bemoan a Conservative government - my country still has a socialist leader, in theory if not in practice - particularly as I did very littl

Back to you, sir.

It’s all a little bit exciting, if you’re me, which I am, to have revived something so Hanoverian as a literary feud! Such a back and forth brings to mind the savaging of John Rae by Charles Dickens post Franklin expedition (including the publication of Rae’s rejoinder in Household Words ), or the attacks by William Hazlitt on, well everyone. I only wish I had the intellectual vigour of a Hazlitt or indeed any of the great correspondents of the past, to be able to maintain a contiguous train of thought for longer than a lunch time, and to not to be interrupted and thus de-railed by something so mundane as a game of football. Still, to be galvanised at all in this age of short attention spans and antipathy to anything other than apathy is a miracle, and it is to football that, my wife’s scorn notwithstanding, I can give credit on this occasion. Swipe I set myself up for a pretty meaty swipe in retaliation for my retaliation previously . I sort-of lost the plot a little bit in places,