It's tougher than I thought, keeping this editing business going alongside the blog. But I'm deteremined to crack it...so apologies for the long periods without posts, and do please come back and see if I manage to stick to my guns this time.

I simply had to link to Daniel Finkelstein's superb piece today on the ludicrous G20 protestors:

I think that they have looked back at 5,000 years of human history - at pestilence and famine and disease and degradation, at genocide and civil war, at fear and loathing, at bigotry and ignorance, chauvinism and dictatorship - and concluded that our biggest problem is... shopping.

Extraordinarily, the problem is not that we aren't doing enough shopping - thus leaving people poor - but that we do too much. I have struggled to get to grips with the idea - and maybe I am doing them a disservice - but I really think the notion that they are advancing, once stripped of all their posh words, is this. I go to the shop and buy a new television. The archbishops think that this impoverishes my soul, the G20 protesters think I am destroying the planet and exploiting the workers, and Oliver James thinks that I am making myself mentally ill.

Do read the rest. It's actually a rather profound piece.