Mark Steel's Blog

A new series and rabbits and Chas 'n' Dave

A few weeks ago I began the awkward business of starting work on a second series. This is always a frightening moment, as you’re told when the recordings are being held, and when the tickets are going out and when it’s being broadcast and you’ve got nothing, absolutely nothing. It seems possible, or even probable, that on the night of the first recording I’ll walk on stage and say “Good evening. I’m afraid I couldn’t really think of anything. I hope you haven’t had to come far. I’ve brought a box of Quality Streets to share so I hope that makes up for it a bit.”

Somehow the start of a second series is more daunting than the first. I reckon that when Dickens started writing his first novel he set off with a carefree demeanour, unaware of all the complications that awaited him. But years later, after a deal was signed, he’d sit there with a blank sheet, thinking “What the fuck is there to say about Christmas?”

The series is called ‘Mark Steel’s in Town’, for Radio 4, and I have to go to six more towns, and do a show about that town to any of its inhabitants that come along. The last series ended on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, where amidst the quarries it turns out there’s an insistence that no one says the word ‘rabbit’, as this is deemed extreme bad luck. At first I assumed this was a quaint jokey custom, like the law in Hereford that you can still fire an arrow at a Welshman if he’s in the church courtyard. But as I went round the place it turned out they mean it.

The local historian, whose book on the island was otherwise splendid, referred to ‘underground mutton’. When the Wallace and Grommit film ‘Curse of the Were-rabbit’ came to town, all the posters had to be re-written to read ‘Curse of the Were-bunny’. Kids have been sent to detention for saying the word (so if a kid says it and the teacher barks “WHAT did you just say?” they’d be better off replying “I said ‘cunt’, miss.”)

The marvellous part is how quickly you become tuned to this fear of a word. You sense the horror in the same way you know not to say ‘fuck’ if you’re on live radio, especially on Thought For the Day. So at the end of the show I said I felt the series had been a celebration of community, and for that reason we should finish on an old-fashioned sing-along, of a classic old Chas ‘n’ Dave song, and I started singing the chorus of their Rabbit song, the bit that goes “Oh she won’t stop talking, why won’t she give it a rest.”

And they gasped. The Weymouth people and the immigrants to the island shrieked with anticipation, but one of the islanders stood and thrust his middle finger, with a rage that reminded me of the Serb militia under Milosevic. I glanced at the producer, who gave an expression that suggested it might be advisable to not do the ending we’d planned.

“Oh come on Portland”, I said, “This is a show about bringing towns together, I’m not really going to ruin the whole series by coming to Portland and enraging you all by saying ‘rabbit’.”

And the middle finger man hurled a pound coin at me with impressive force, so that if I was a footballer my team would have been led off the field.

Once it had all calmed down, a waitress from the restaurant that was attached to the theatre told me she’d been warned she could be sacked for saying the forbidden word. And an elegant man in his seventies wearing a silk cravat told me he was delighted with how cross the word had made some of them, and then walked across the restaurant and started playing ‘Run Rabbit Run’ on the piano.

So now I’ve got to find the craziness in a new batch of towns. But whereas for the first series, a bit of me imagined this was just a bit of fun and no one would actually listen to it, this time I know that some people will. For example, a butcher in Lancashire told me that after listening to the show about Skipton, he and his wife went on a weekend break there.

This is the sort of power Nigella Lawson has, when she mentions gherkins as a possible side dish and the following day the world supply of gherkins is bought by five past eleven.

The first of the new series is in Dartford, the Kent town alarmingly near to the town of my upbringing, the charming Swanley. So I went to the library to take a glance at some of their local books, and an endearing bubbly man came over to tell me he’d heard the first series and ask what I was doing there. And when I told him I was doing one of the programmes in Dartford, and the date of the recording, he said he wasn’t sure he could come because he’d recently broken up with his wife and wasn’t sure when he was having his kids and then he burst into tears while lying on the table.

So I sat with him for a bit in a pathetic attempt to console the poor man, and I have to hope my programme wasn’t somehow the trigger for his divorce.

The recording is this Friday, 15th January, and to add to the tension I know at least thirteen of my old school mates will be there who, as much as I know this can’t be true, I’m convinced will still all be fifteen.

I’ve also visited the magnificent Cheshire town of Alderley Edge, where Alex Ferguson and Wayne Rooney and Andrew Flintoff live, along with Aston Martin showrooms and an off license that sells more champagne than any other in Britain, and about sixty beauty salons and a charity shop full of stuff from Gucci and Prada that doesn’t have the prices on its clothes. In the Post office, amongst the cards in the window that would normally say ‘Pram for sale’ or ‘Carpenter available – no job too small’, was an advert on a card that said “Ring me if you need a butler.” I think by the time I’m half way through the recording there, I’ll be wishing for the amiable charm of the rabbit moment.

Tickets for the recordings are available from the BBC ticket unit, which has a website, I believe. And they will be in Dartford on 15th January, Wilmslow (by Alderley Edge) on 12th February, Dumfries on 26th February, and then in Gateshead, Penzance and, if you fancy it, the Orkneys, sometime in March.

Also, it seems the BBC is making the first series available to download in March, which is as technologically advanced as I’ve ever felt since my Dad bought a TV that could get BBC2. The shows will go out in March and April, assuming that I’ve written the bloody things.

Don't ask me

A number of people have pointed out, with good reason, that the last pieces I've put on here have no paragraph breaks. I have no idea why it's happened, given that I'm barely capable of switching the computer on in the first fucking place, but I certainly didn't write it like that.

I get irritated by as much as a missing apostrophe in a text message so I can't tell you how shame-riddled and guilty I feel. As internet crime goes, this is only marginally less appalling than whatever it was Pete Townsend did.

Someone, somewhere, will sort it out one day soon. Meanwhile I'm off to confession.

[sorted (ed)]

My mad four minutes nearly ended the ceasefire

In August 2009 I was asked to do a show at the Andersonstown Sports Centre, as part of the West Belfast Festival, an annual event that first took place twenty years earlier as a cultural wing of the Irish nationalist movement. Andersonstown is the most unyielding of the nationalist areas, at the far end of the Falls Road, and back then an evening of culture was almost certain to end with a room full of people standing, with moist eyes and glasses aloft as they sang along to a ballad that went something like

"Twas in the year of eleven-seventy three that brave ol' Tomas 'O'Hara,
Was shot with an arrow fired from the men sent o'er by Henry the Second,
And the spot where Tomas lay slain,
They still call today,
The Tomas O'Hara car accessory shop."

But since the ceasefire the Festival has become an event involving glossy pamphlets and literary figures, and tickets booked through agencies and chicken tikka wraps in the dressing room. And to emphasise the point, the patron of the festival is Danny Morrison, a leading member of Sinn Fein, believed by many to have once held a senior position in the IRA. At one level you have to assume this means he gets his way, and if there's an argument on the committee it ends with Danny lowering his voice and saying quietly "I say we put on 'Taming of the Shrew'," and the decision is agreed.

I stayed with a Protestant friend in East Belfast, someone with no allegiance to Unionism whatsoever, who told me she'd never been to Andersonstown, and wasn't sure of the way, pointing vaguely and saying "I think it's over there somewhere" as if she was guessing the direction to Libya.

So I booked a taxi and the driver said "Are you sure you want Andersonstown?" with such astonishment I wondered if I'd said 'Atlantis' by mistake. And then an 'Alright, if you say so' look, as if I'd said "Take me to the Dignitas centre in Switzerland please."

The Andersonstown sports centre, it turned out, hadn't been designed with comedy shows in mind, and was one of the most unsuitable venues possible, somewhere behind a bottling plant and a hospital's stroke unit. The sound bounces and echoes across the volleyball courts like the tannoy announcements in a supermarket, and there's a constant chatter of people squeezing past tables to queue at the makeshift bar. On this night the queue for drinks consistently hovered at around a hundred people, and groups sat round tables getting drunk and loud and drunker and louder as the first three acts went on and the time I was due on got later and later. Eventually the room was awash with a tsunami of chatter that was so slurred, by the time most words had ended the beginning of the word had already bounced back off the wall to where it started.

As the compere began to introduce me, three hours after most people had arrived, around two hundred people sat in the middle, looking as if they were waiting for me to start, while the other eight hundred shouted 'Hey Kieran, they've run out o' fucken' Grolsch' across the tables, threw peanuts at each other, and shrieked with laughter as they and fell over, like in a Hollywood depiction of eighteenth century sailors on a night in a tavern.

So I went on stage and surveyed this splendid testimony to disorder, aware that I might as well try to do a show to a flock of geese, and a few of them shouted "Fuck off you fucking Brit." I battled, pointlessly, for maybe three or four interminable minutes, while a core of supporters in the middle yelled at the rest to keep quiet and the rest made it clear they wouldn't and probably couldn't. Maybe, I pondered, the two groups would start fighting, it would spill out onto the street, the troops would be called back and this comedy show would result in the breakdown of the ceasefire, and for the next hundred years rival factions would fire at each other and paint murals of me sloping off the stage.

"I used to come here when the war was raging," I said, "And you were always friendly then. I think I preferred you how you were."

And then I went backstage to collect my things and leave, and as I left the dressing room was greeted by someone I vaguely recognised. "Mark," he said with a ripe Belfast baritone, "I'm Danny Morrison, trustee of the festival, and I can't apologise enough for what went on tonight."

"It's fine, Danny," I said.

"It's not fine," he argued, adding "Mark, I'd like to speak to you about what happened there. Will you come into this room with me for just five minutes."

And it was so hard not to smile, at the thought of whether in the past, there were people Danny had made a similar request to, who might have been slightly nervous about what could happen when they got in that room.

So we went in the room, and Danny said he was disgusted by the behaviour of the audience, who had no discipline and were "racist, there's no other word for it - racist against you for being British."

"Maybe a few of them were," I said, "But mostly they were just drunk." But secretly I thought "Of all the people asked to follow Danny Morrison into a room, I bet this is the only time the reason's been to receive an apology for the Irish being anti-British."

Politely, wth great charm, Danny offered to organise a taxi to take me back, and to accompany me until it came, so I didn't face any more revelrie from the crowd who were now stumbling outside.

In a way the frustrations of the evening were signs of how positive the change in Belfast has been. Because it was just a show that went haywire, no different to how it might have happened anywhere, for the familiar reason that a community was encouraged to come to an event and get drunk.

"Where are you going?" said the taxi driver, incredulous that anyone from Andersonstown could possibly suggest the journey to the Newtownards Road in Protestant East Belfast. And he puffed and said "Jesus" a few times and tried to figure out which way was East.

But eventually I got in, and relayed the events of the night to my host, who just said "Oh dear, that's a bad night when the safest option is to stand alone in a car park with a murderer."

A bit late

I’m not finding it easy to keep up. You’re supposed to write things on your website every few days, explaining your thoughts on whether Ryan Giggs’ becoming Sports Personality of the Year will help Labour recover in the polls, or why kettles don’t last so long these days. And you’re supposed to twitter every few minutes, with messages like “I’ve just seen a car”, or “I might have a raspberry later”, but I’ve managed to go six months without writing anything on here, and every day of that time I’ve thought ‘I must put something on my website today’, and then failed.

So I’m going to start with last summer, and try to catch up, though I’ll probably fail again, in which case I’ll be six months behind forever, like the very early days of Pathe news. Or I’ll fall further behind until I’m commenting on the prospects for a Prime Minister that’s now dead, or how I’m excited by a radical new band, the lead singer of which is now General Secretary of NATO.

So - to start with I had a week in the utterly splendid city of San Francisco; a place that illustrates more than any other that America is the best of worlds, the worst of worlds. On the morning of Independence Day I had breakfast with my son and daughter in a diner, with at least a thousand glittery balloons and Gene Vincent rattling from a jukebox, and the rushed diffident waitress held her notepad while looking away from us and asked if we wanted our eggs sunny side up and everything came with pancakes and she called out “Hey, extra hash browns for table nine”, and I thought ‘This country is marvellous, you’d need a heart of stone not to forgive them for Vietnam and Hiroshima’.

Because whatever else the place is so enthusiastic. Even when they’re bored they’re bored enthusiastically. A taxi driver, hearing my daughter ask where the famous hills were, said “You want hills – I’ll show you hills,” and sped up and down the ridiculous terrain, on a free ride, as if it was his personal roller coaster that he’d just finished building and he couldn’t wait to show it off. The tramps are enthusiastic, eager to relate how they’re going to get their ass together if only you give them the dollar they need to get going. A huge bus driver, whose stomach squeezed and moulded itself around his steering wheel let us travel free, saying “I don’t charge tourists.”

Anyone uninitiated would think “This country just can’t help but be overwhelmingly helpful to foreigners. I bet this place would never harm anything abroad.”

The celebrated Haight Ashbury lives up charmingly to its stereotype, its shops full of bongs and exotic pipes and contraptions designed to puff hash into five separate orifices at once, and now there’s a board game called ‘Weed’, in which the idea is to go round getting as wrecked as possible. Presumably if someone gets a card saying ‘Miss a turn’ they head off into a trance, take no further part and they’re the winner.

At one end of this street is the glorious Amoeba Record Store, that is literally the size and layout of a large supermarket. Except the signs hanging above the aisles say ‘Funk’ or ‘Middle-Eastern hip-hop’ instead of ‘Beans’ and ‘Ethnic sauces’. You get a basket as you go in, as if you’re getting your groceries, and you need someone with you to say “STOP – you must STOP now”, or you’d pick up more and more basket and then book a 35 hundredweight van. As it is I came away with about fifteen records, which, compared to all that was in there seemed pathetic, the equivalent of going to the Souk in Marrakech to buy a packet of Polos.

And we cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge, and went to the baseball where my daughter spent the game on a giant coke bottle that’s a slide, an innovation I suspect is some years from being installed at Selhurst Park. But the event I was there to speak at was a weekend put together by the International Socialist Organisation, and was itself wonderfully infectiously enthusiastic. It was held at a Mexican women’s centre, in the poor and Mexican part of the city called The Mission, and as we arrived around one hundred Mexican women stood outside waving placards and yelling slogans demanding something or other. “How brilliant”, I said to my son, “There’s a protest already.”

“Yeah but what you don’t know Dad”, he said, “Is they’re yelling ‘We don’t want that Mark Steel speaking in our building’.” About nine hundred people came to this event over the weekend, a figure which always makes me feel two thoughts quickly in succession – 1) Blimey, that’s impressive for a socialist event in California – 2) Hmm, it still leaves quite a bit of California to win over though.

But there was a joy to the event that seemed to leave everyone who went with a sense of realistic optimism. Much of this is due to the direction the country has turned in. Five years ago it felt the place was under the eternal relentless rule of Bush and his co-signatories to plans such as the Outline for Universal Totality of Subservience or whatever. So Obama’s election has created a sense that change is possible.

But also there’s something about the left in America that seems more inviting than the British left. Maybe this is because they seem, and this is a most peculiar phrase to say about any sort of Americans – more humble. For example I went to one talk about how to create an opposition to a media dominated by rabid outlets such as Fox News. And there were people who ran independent radio stations, and a student who’d been to Palestine to film people in Gaza, and someone who’d gone to live in a homeless camp and written their experience as a blog, and the whole thing seemed so disconcertingly positive. Unlike when events are put on by the British left, no one got up to castigate anyone else for taking the wrong line or felt the need to gently correct anyone, or say ‘While you were under fire in Ramallah you should have made more effort to argue a socialist perspective’.

There was a sense of everyone pulling together to somehow construct a coherent opposition, the room full of people exchanging e-mail addresses and arranging activities, and it was an unrecognisably warm sensation compared to the embitterment that flows through so much of the British left. Or maybe the Americans just can’t help being sentimental. So on Independence Day, which happens to also be my birthday, I was about to begin my talk on Tom Paine, the corset maker from East Anglia who went to America and inspired the war of independence. But the person introducing me said there was a quick announcement before I began, which I assumed would be about fire exits or a set of lost keys or something. But instead my daughter emerged from the back of the room holding a cake, and made the announcement which went “Today’s my Daddy’s birthday.” And then they all sang Happy Birthday. And then I had to do my talk. The cruel Californian bastards.

Oo - a new series

The most exciting part about travelling, you would think, is things are different. This is even better when a place behaves exactly as it's meant to. I was overwhelmed with joy on my first ever morning in New York, when a stranger in a cafe yelled 'Fuck you asshole' at me for no apparent reason. It was glorious, like arriving in Brazil and being immediately dragged into a carnival by a woman with fruit in her hair.

And within Britain I find it thrilling that you get out at Birmingham New Street station, after a ninety minute rail journey from London, and they're all talking like that, different. And in Oldham they eat pie and red cabbage and in St. Helens they play rugby league, and everywhere has slightly difference reference points, creating that warm feeling of slight discomfort, as you're not quite sure what's going on, which makes a journey exciting. Which is why if you went to the South Pole and it was quite warm you'd want your money back.

So that, I suppose, is the premise for my radio show 'Mark Steel's In Town'. We started in the North Yorkshire town of Skipton because I did a show there last year, and thge place excelled itself at living up to a comically dour Yorkshire stereotype. I did one line that I'd done that week on television, and about twenty people yelled "You did that ont' telly." Then a woman called out "We don't like yer jacket - it's RED." So I retaliated with "I was just trying to bring a bit of colour to your otherwise grey miserable agricultural lives," and they liked that, before launching into more and more insults. Then, when I said I'd seen a road sign for Keighley and wondered whether that was their rival town, it went all quiet and in a chilling voice one woman said clearly "Keighley - is a sink of evil."

And yet the whole place looks like the sort of town where they film dramas for Sunday nights on ITV. So even at the curry house, you expect a farmer to come in and say "Ee I'll have a steaming hot bowl of your finest dopiaza please Betty love. And with extra chillies, I shall need warming up after inseminating that ewe." And at the brothels of Skipton they must go "Not the full session tonight Elsie love, I have to be up at dawn to take calf to vets at Otley, just 'and relief if that's a'right wit' thee love."

Then, after choosing Skipton for this reason, it won the award for High Street of the Year, largely, it seems, for resisting the tsunami of chain shops that have engulfed almost every town centre. And to allay any fears that it might not be the right place to start the series, when I arrived at the theatre, which is in fact the cattle market, a farmer was stood by the door in a thick green jumper and very muddy boots. "I like yer bag, love" he said to the producer.

"Thanks," she smiled.

"Now all yer need to make it perfect is to fill it wit' bricks an' chuck it at Prime Minister," he said, and walked off.

Looking through the history of the place it's clearly been dominated by cattle. The mist and perennial damp made the land unsuitable for much vegetation so early settlers relied on livestock, and this distinction has driven the place ever since.

In the eighteenth century there was a famous market every Monday, in the High Street. According to W.H. Dawson, editor of the Craven Pioneer "The filth and odours of massed animals could be almost unbearable, so dangerous to public health."

Around the same time there was a circus, which advertised "For the first time in Britain come and see Tipster, the world's first clairvoyant educated talking horse."

That's how hard to please they are in North Yorkshire - it has to be an educated talking horse - otherwise they'd go "I shan't trouble myself with going to see stupid talking horse. Albert went down and asked it if he'd read much Russian literature, he said 'I can't say as I have, just snippets of Dostoyevsky', well I don't call that conversation, I shan't bother going."

Skipton is a funny place, I think, because it's different. But every time I allow myself to think these shows will make sense to most listeners, I remember a night in Winchester. It was while I was doing a show about the French Revolution, and I tried to find some way in which the town I was in was connected to those events. In Winchester, it seemed, the town was transformed because hundreds of wealthy priests fled France, and came to England as posh refugees, and many of them were put up in Winchester Cathedral.

So I did this thing about how locals probably complained "Bloody Catholic priests coming over here, you don't hear English round here no more, it's all bleedin' Latin. And they get straight out of the back of their lorry, go down the Town Hall and get given transubstantiation for free. My daughter's been on a waiting list three years, not been given so much as a fucking wafer..." And I did a bit about this ugly statue of Alfred the Great they've got there, and about the twee shops near the theatre, and the people queuing up at the cathedral. And as I was leaving a middle-aged man approached me and said "Mark - lucky you were in Winchester tonight ay, seeing as you've got all that material about Winchester."

And he must have believed, that the next night I'd do all that again, while the audience muttered "Why does this mean anything to us, given that we're in Belfast?", on account of how I hadn't noticed that places are different.

The role of the teddy in a holy jihad

No column in The Independent again this morning, as they weren't overly keen on the issue I was writing about, which is connected to the Viva Palestina convoy of trucks, that left London on February 14th to deliver food and medicine to Gaza.

The convoy was financed by collections throughout the country, which were enough to fund 110 vehicles on a journey to across the channel, through France, Spain, across North Africa and hopefully through Egypt into Gaza. This, you might imagine, is the sort of charitable venture that would be publicised across the media as a chirpy feelgood tale, perhaps involving a regular feature on Blue Peter and at some point resulting in Cat Deeley squealing 'The response has been AMAZING, you've been ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC'.

But in the tradition that anyone's permitted to carry out crazy wacky acts as long as it involves charity, the police decided to contribute to the event with a spectacular lark. Early in the morning, on the day the convoy left, they arrested nine people on the M65 under the Terrorism Act, who were on their way to Hyde Park, where the journey was due to begin. They blocked off an entire section of motorway, and grabbed their suspects with what was described in the local newspaper as "Dozens of police cars, vans, 4x4 vehicles and a helicopter."

The first I knew of this episode was from that afternoon's BBC news, on which it was the main item. Which is as you might expect, with nine suspected terrorists being pounced on by an operation that included a helicopter. To be fair, the BBC journalists didn't have to work too hard to find the story, as the police informed them in advance, and in addition, by a splendid coincidence, a press photographer happened to be on hand to record this successful swoop.

Maybe this is how the police plan to fund themselves from now on. They'll follow the practice of celebrities and stage their events so they can be sold to OK and Hello. Major criminals will find themselves lying on the floor in handcuffs, while a photographer claps his hands and calls out "That's lovely, now can we do the arrest one more time while the Inspector stands just behind kissing his wife, and then have a profile of the murderer's assistant on a sheepskin rug in front of a coal fire."

The news reported that the terrorists were on the way to join the Viva Palestina convoy, which straight away seemed a little peculiar. Why would terrorists be on the way to join such an event? What would they be planning to attack? The convoy of trucks heading for Gaza? And what sort of Jihadist terrorist would say "I know how we'll move around without being noticed - we'll drive down the motorway in three vans with Palestinian flags flapping from the windows and a fucking great 'Viva Palestina' logo painted on the side."

The story was reported in almost every Sunday paper, with headlines such as “Galloway’s Aid Convoy linked to three terror suspects”, in the Mail on Sunday. And they had the effect of reducing contributions to the charity by eighty per cent, as the astute might have been able to predict. But the nine men, six from Blackburn and three from Burnley, were questioned, and the lorries, which were full of children's toys, were searched. And presumably the head of the anti-terrorist squad stood there throughout saying "Check that Bratz for semtex." By the next morning six were released without any charges, and a few days later the other three were released as well, the police appearing to be duly embarrassed to the extent they've paid the fares so the wrongly arrested men could catch up with the convoy, which by now was moving into Algeria.

The local councillor for the arrested men in Burnley is Wajid Khan, described how they were “Well respected men in the community, seen in a positive light.”

Presumably then, all the broadcasters and newspapers who considered it a major story that the police had successfully pulled off this anti-terrorist operation will now make it an equally prominent story that the arrests had no validity whatsoever. Apart from anything else there must be many people who saw that story, and are wondering why they've heard nothing about it since, assuming a bunch of terrorists have escaped and are running round on the loose. They may even indulge in some investigative work, which will show that three of the arrested men are defence witnesses in a separate trial, which may, or may not be a coincidence.

So you can't help be suspicious that the arrest of people volunteering for charity may be connected to them being Muslims, and being associated with Palestine. If not it's going to mean Comic Relief this year will be chaos, with Richard Hammond and Lenny Henry spending the whole evening making announcements such as "Now we're going to meet the wonderful children of St. Josephs junior school in Kidderminster, who've raised two hundred and sixty-four pounds with a sponsored cartwheel race. So here's Alan Titchmarsh to speak to them from their high security cell in Belmarsh."

Tear gas and a touching moment

There are moments in life that signal you've reached a new stage and nothing will ever be the same again - death of your first pet, the first time you hear your dad say 'fuck', your first curry, that sort of thing. One of those moments happened at the recent demonstration in support of the people of Gaza.

It was the end of a process that began in the days before the march, after I told my twelve-year-old son it was taking place, and he said "Cool - I'm going on that." He'd been on marches before, but as a result of me dragging him on them for my own convenience. For example when he was three I took him on a march demanding an increase in the minimum wage, which he enjoyed so much he repeated the most popular slogan of the day over and over again for the next week, so that at random moments in the street he'd yell "You can stick your three-pounds eighty up yer arse." This also meant that if he met a relative who gave him some money, there was the dread of what might happen if they gave him exactly three-pounds eighty.

But the reaction to the Gaza demonstration was clearly different. He wanted to go, compelled by the mix of urges that drives anyone to take part in such an event, rather than because the alternative was to stay at home until discovered by social services. And once there, all the marks of demonstrations that become cliches to those of us who've been on countless processions, to him were captivating. "Look dad, a man in a Tony Blair mask with a placard saying 'war criminal'. That's BRILLIANT!" Which was wonderfully infectious, because I had to accept it was BRILLIANT!, just as when your daughter's two and says "Look daddy bus bus," you become equally excited about the existence of this bus, rather than reply "Alright it's only a bloody bus. If you see a zeppelin let me know but a fucking BUS."

It helped that it was a vibrant freezing raucous frosty day, and the march rumbled with youthful enthusiasm, so that it smelt of teenager. But then we got to these vast gates that policed the road to the Israeli embassy. Hundreds of people stood around these gates, calling and gesticulating, and occasionally lobbing the thin strip that once formed the backbone of a placard. At this point I wondered whether it might appear a little frightening to my lad, but he said "Oh for God's sake, they're not going to break down the embassy with balsa wood." Then he added "Come on dad, let's get to the gates."

"No I think it's safer to stay here," I advised.

"COME ON," he insisted, and we shuffled through the squashed crowd to get nearer the front. "Why don't we all invade the Israeli embassy?" he asked, and whoever was stood next to us answered "Because the Israeli embassy is better protected than Buckingham Palace."

"Well then let's invade Buckingham Palace," he said.

After a few minutes I asserted parental authority and we carried on up the Bayswater Road, round the corner and back past the other side of the road with the embassies. Here the march was completely blocked, so several thousand were stood around becoming agitated, unable to proceed through a police cordon towards Trafalgar Square. Then a line of riot police slid gently into position, all identical in their helmets, shields and truncheons so they looked like a line of aliens in an old computer game.

'I'll calmly suggest we leave', I thought.

"COME ON DAD, LET'S GET GO TO THE FRONT AGAIN" called my son.

So I explained that, although there was nothing to worry about, it was probably best if we left. "People in Gaza are getting bombed and all you want to do is get home to get WARM," he objected.

Then a steward told me the police had used tear gas up the road, so they were advising anyone with kids to leave.

"But Daaaaad," complained my son, "Let's get near the front", and I found myself making the most ridiculous response, saying "Alright - you can have FIVE MORE MINUTES," as if this was a dispute about bedtime, and he wanted to watch a bit more of Terminator.

It was as daft as if I'd looked into his eyes and said "Right, you can throw three lumps of rubble and THAT'S IT - no more than three, DO YOU UNDERSTAND. And if I see you throwing four we won't go to the anti-arms trade march at all - IS THAT CLEAR?"

It was the moment I realised he was experiencing the enthusiasm of protest, the optimism of resisting apparently invincible power, the belief that injustice can be dealt with NOW NOW NOW, without the inevitable blunting of that confidence that comes with age. I was the cautious one, he was the fiery one, from now I'd be told off for being too safe and too warm and too conservative by my own son, I'd had one of those moments. I bet the Israelis never considered they'd cause all that before they started bombing Gaza.

WHERE'S MY COLUMN GONE?

Given that it takes me several months to collect together the documents needed to get my car tax, I'm amazed that anyone manages to assemble the hundreds of bits required to produce a newspaper every single day. Then something happens, such as John Updike dies, and the newspaper gets someone to write something about him, and right in the space where my own column was destined to appear. Couldn't he have hung on for a few more hours and buggered up someone the following day? So, for anyone pining, this is what would have appeared had it not been for John Updike's genuinely untimely death.

The BBC are right. If they broadcast that appeal for food and medicine to be sent to Gaza it WOULD be taking sides. The Israeli Defence force could legitimately say "We've gone to enormous lengths here to kill people, then you go and help to keep them alive. How do you square that with your remit to be neutral?"

So the BBC needs to look at other areas in which its 'impartiality' could be called into question. To start with they'll have to scrap 'Crimewatch', which clearly takes the side of the murdered against the interests of murderers. Maybe they could get round this by having a new balanced Crimewatch, in which the police plea for witnesses to a crime, but then the presenter says "Next tonight - have you seen this man? Because Big Teddy and his gang are desperate to track him down and do him in for ringing us up earlier. So if you have any information please call us, where Nobby the Knife is ready to talk to you in complete confidence."

It's impossible to be entirely neutral about anything, especially with an appeal for money. Appeals are made for injured veterans of the Second World War, but I don't suppose they'd take them off air if they got a letter to Points of View saying "Dear BBC, I'm a Nazi war criminal but I pay my license fee just like everyone else, and as such I was appalled by the biased images of the Battle of Normandy used to promote your financial appeal. There are two sides to every story you know, and I thought you had a promise to be impartial. So come on BBC, us Kommandants watch television as well!"

Appeals have been made for victims of wars in the Congo, Darfur and Bosnia, keeping people alive and thereby undermining the aims and efforts of the armies who tried to wipe them out. But if the current stance carries on, from now on if anyone feels their block of flats collapsing on them they'll think "I hope this is an earthquake and not an invading army or we won't get a penny via the BBC."

Aware of the frail logic of not showing the appeal, the BBC have made some even stranger statements to justify their decision, such as claiming they couldn't be sure the money would 'get through'. Ah yes that must be it. If only Gaza was like the Congo or Darfur, where the Red Cross can pop along to the village cashpoint machines, draw the money out and get Janjaweed or Hutu militias to help them search for two-for-one bargains in the local Somerfields.

Luckily for the Middle-East, the American government has been less squeamish about this question of impartiality. For example in Bush's last year he sent Israel 2.2 billion dollars worth of military aid, and there's no record of anyone saying "This couldn't be seen as breaching our impartiality in any way, could it?"

The problem is that when viewers are confronted with scenes of misery and destruction, they're bound to ask what or who caused this, and if it was done deliberately. So the BBC couldn't remain neutral. Either they allowed the appeal that would lead to those questions being asked, or they refused it, in which case they're suggesting they shouldn't aid the relief of civilians who've been bombed, starved and slaughtered, as on this occasion their plight can be justified. And it's decided this time to be biased not towards the impoverished but towards the impoverishers.

Or maybe they've been under such a barrage of complaints lately they just panicked that in the middle of the appeal the presenter might say, "Oh and by the way, I shagged David Attenborough's grandson. Anyway, back to the lack of clean water."

THE YEAR ISN'T QUITE RUINED YET (Part 1)

Amidst the coverage at the start of the year of all the bombing and lying and murdering and justifying and slaughtering, there was a splendid moment on Wednesday morning on Radio 4's Today programme. The genetics expert, Professor Steven Rose, was introduced to talk about some new discovery that means we can identify the bit of the brain that deals with morality, which have been called 'morality spots'. "How can we know about these spots?" he was asked. And with posh English academic authority he said, "Well - we could study the brains of the Israeli cabinet to see if they had no such morality spots whatsoever."

It was an oasis of sanity within the dual assault on the senses of orchestrated Israeli carnage, and global excuses for such destruction. One group of people is hemmed in without electricity, medicine or provisions for a year, and fires rockets that kills four people. The other, with an almost incalculable arsenal wipes out 600 in ten days, few of which are directly connected to military action, obliterating mosques, schools or whatever they fancy. So almost every world leader puts most of the blame on the people being slaughtered. It's as if there was a report on a gang kicking an old aged pensioner to bits, and then quotes from presidents saying "We call upon this old man to promise never to cough again in the direction of this gang, as soon as he comes out of his coma."

For example, the Israelis blow up a school, which has United Nations flags around it, killing dozens including children, and somehow blame HAMAS, like a wife-beater who growls "I don't want to hit her but she MAKES ME, 'cos she turns the telly over while I'M WATCHING THE RUGBY." And the world's leaders agree with them. Or, in Gordon Brown's case, say "This is a humanitarian crisis," as if it's an act of nature, a type of earthquake in which colliding tectonic plates force Apache helicopters to randomly devastate a housing estate.

If you hope the school incident was a one-off, Amnesty International reported that "After the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night, soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the Soumani clan to gather in a house owned by Wael Soumani around dawn on Sunday. At 6.35 a.m. on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled, with appalling loss of civilian life."

And far from this being 'regrettable', the predominant attitude within the Israeli establishment is that of the biggest selling daily paper in Israel, Yediot Aharanot, which gleamed "The attack was a stroke of brilliance...the element of surprise increased the number who were killed."

The deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai said of the Palestinians "They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves." And 'shoah' is the Hebrew word for holocaust, as he clearly knows.

The evidence for the Palestinians' continuing viciousness is their use of underground tunnels which, apart from being used to bring in food and medicine, have become a route for smuggling arms. So if this is the main area of contention there must be an obvious route for a compromise. Israel should give HAMAS half its F-16 fighters, half its multi-billion pound annual arms budget, mostly provided by America, half its missiles and destroyers and tanks, then the Palestinians may well agree to abandon their practice of smuggling guns through a tunnel.

And yet somewhere deep down in this atrocity-fest is a glimmer of hope. Because while the Israeli war machine has no difficulty in keeping global leaders onside, they no longer seem able to win over the general population. In America, a poll suggested only 31% of people who voted for Obama support the Israeli action, which may eventually have at least some impact on the new president. The demonstrations in Britain this week have been bigger than any on this issue before, and Steven Rose type comments are voiced with little complaint, where once they would have invited inevitable mayhem. Within Israel itself there have been several thousand people on demonstrations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

There's a sense that Israel has lost the argument, betrayed the sympathy it once claimed as its right. The wonderful ticket collector at my local station, who regularly causes people to miss their trains with his amiable and often furious banter, called out to me yesterday "MARK - MARK - MARK - WHAT ARE THESE BASTARDS DOING?" Then he quoted from a magnificent Robert Fisk article, spat with such venom about something Blair had said, and the queue before him grew and grew, with no re-start to the selling of tickets in sight. "WE NEED TO OVERTHROW THEM," he yelled, " and the posh woman in front of me said "Bloody right we do."

All this is very different from how it once was. In 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, killing thousands of civilians, or when Ariel Sharon allowed 1,700 refugees to be massacred in the camps of Sabra and Chatila, it was hard to get anyone in the West to take notice. Now there's a bit of a space - to shout in railway stations, crowbar cutting comments into interviews about the brain, or maybe even go to Saturday's demonstration, 12.30 at Hyde Park.

Notes from a tour (Part 1)

One of the most brilliant aspects to touring a stand-up show is you get to realise how small Britain is. And yet it didn't used to be this size. When I was a kid, we'd go on holiday to Ilfracombe, and the preparations for the journey would take a month. For several evenings the table would be covered with maps as my dad planned the route, so that anyone looking in through the window would have assumed our reason for going to North Devon was to impose a military occupation of the place. My mum would contact a variety of people on the issue of the most suitable transport cafe on the A3 at which to stop for breakfast. The day before the journey involved a frenzied routine of preparing the car, buying the right type of fizzy drink, consulting weather reports and exclaiming 'There MAY be scattered showers in Dorset but they're saying that won't be until the evening so we should miss them so we're lucky', visiting the chemists for Phensics, Milk of Magnesia, plasters, travel sickness pills, and an assortment of ointments as if the map had suggested the quickest route was up the Amazon, making sandwiches in case we got hungry before we got to the transport cafe, alerting the neighbours to how we'd be leaving at twenty to six in the morning to avoid the traffic through London so they needn't be alarmed at seeing someone set off at such an unusual and potentially upsetting time, checking for a ninth and final time we'd cancelled the papers and milk, then getting to bed at seven to make sure we'd be up on time. The next morning we'd check everything four more times, then as we pulled away the neighbours would wave in their dressing gowns and my mum would clap her hands and exclaim "Right - we're OFF", with the same mix of achievement and anxiety I imagine General Sherman conveyed when he set off with his army to attack South Carolina.

Now, if I had a show in North Devon I'd spend twenty minutes choosing some CDs, and probably get back the same night to take the kids to school the next morning. So I try to retain at least some sense of wonder at the unique, the idiosyncratic, the personal quirks of each place I visit on a tour that propels me across the country.

KENDAL

This time I started in Kendal, a beautiful Lake District town where even the High Street smells of cow pats. There are still enough independently non-corporate human slightly tatty cafes, clothes shops, off licenses and toy stores to leave the ubiquitous forms of WH Smiths, Greggs the bakers, The Link and so on in a minority. And when I was there, as if to live up to a stereotype specially as they knew I was coming, a huge banner across the High Street announced the forthcoming mint festival. But a few yards from this banner, a pub called Dickie Doodles displayed an itinerary of forthcoming bands playing in its basement, the next one being 'The Vicious Bastards', with a picture of an unfeasibly angry skinhead with no shirt and a tatoo on his forehead thrashing a guitar and bellowing something with unrestrained venom. We can't know what he was screaming but I doubt it was "I'll be exhibiting a mild and fruity mint cake at the festival which begins, don't forget, on September 9th."

The show was in a theatre converted from a brewery, and as it was a new show, afterwards I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, because no one had got up after twenty minutes and announced "I'm sorry Mark, but this is incoherent gibberish. As spokesman for the audience, I'm afraid we've all decided to pop up to Dickie Doodles. If we're quick we should catch The Strangled Sheep, who last year were support band for The Vicious Bastards."

I may have been helped by the local paper. Usually it seems a bit too easy to read out the trivial parochial headlines from the regional papers. The last time I did this, I think, was in High Wycombe on the week the Queen Mother died, and their paper boasted "The Queen Mother was known as a fan of Buckinghamshire. She visited Aylesbury in 1948, and came again in 1997."

But as I was walking onto the stage for this first show of the tour, I saw the front page headline on a paper discarded by the lad doing the sound, which proclaimed "PHOTO TAKEN OF BIG CAT."

What must have gone on in that editorial meeting?

"Has ANYTHING happened here this week?"

"Someone I know took a photo of a cat."

"Hmm, not bad - but it needs an angle."

"Well it's quite a BIG cat."

"Is it? Now THAT'S a story. Get every reporter on the case - I want interviews with relatives of whoever took the photo, a statement from the cat's owner defending animal privacy, a comment from a local vet on what causes some cats to be a bit bigger than others - this baby could end up as the lead item on Newsnight."

SHREWSBURY

Shrewsbury can appear a bit posh, with its vast public school that boasts of Michael Heseltine being amongst its ex-pupils. Right next to the school was the football ground, which made me wonder whether the local supporters were the only fans in the country to chant in Latin: "You're Turdius and you know you are," that sort of thing. But even lowly Shrewsbury's ground has been knocked down, to be replaced with an out-of-town soulless mini-stadium that's incorporated into a sterile retail park. Soon local darts teams will be told they'll no longer have their matches in the public bar of the pub, as they've been relocated to the Unilever Arena, five miles away in a car park behind PC World, and when not used for darts, the board is somehow converted into a Nando's.

The last time I was there, I was put up in The Prince Rupert, a hotel named after the commander of Royalist forces in the English Civil War. I think that for a moment I pondered the possibility of refusing to stay there out of Republican principle. But they had a full-size snooker table.

At some point during the second half of the show it occurred to me that it was somewhere near Shrewsbury where that millionaire went berserk on his farm a couple of weeks earlier. There was nothing I could do about it - the words just came bounding out with no forethought - "Hey, the class struggle's easy to fight round this way isn't it? You don't have to do a thing and the rich just kill each other." I think I achieved a local record for the greatest ever collective gasp in the town. But they seemed to get over it quite quickly.

PORTSMOUTH

Lovely venue, the Wedgwood Rooms. It's more suited to music than comedy, with its informal seats, its mixing-desk area in the middle, its tarnished black walls covered in posters for past gigs and its slightly sticky student-unionish floor. Then on the way home I was caught by a speed camera for doing forty-three miles per hour in an area with a thirty miles per hour limit. Now THAT'S rock and roll.

My Favourite Day

It's a few weeks since it happened now, so I've calmed down a bit, but I'd maintain it was one of the highlights of my life.

From around the age of eight I've listened to Test Match Special, developing the insiders' knack of decoding the narrative, not just the cricketing jargon but the references to each others' nick-names and foibles, mostly a product of public-school juvenility that seemed quaint and hilarious.

I especially adored John Arlott. Firstly I was fascinated by his voice, a croaky Hampshire drawl dredged from the bottom of the throat, and slightly breathless as if he was commentating while running up stairs. He seemed more serious than the others, often saying things like "and the ball's picked up by John Edrich, just inside the shadow cast by the House of Commons," as if he was aware the game must always be kept in its proper perspective. As I got older I realised he followed those ethics with some courage, as an implacable opponent of apartheid, which placed him in a small minority within the English cricketing establishment. .

Arlott was also magnificent on television, because he couldn't see the point in any unnecessary words. When he was commentating on Sunday League cricket the sound would often stop altogether for ages, as if he was thinking "What's the point in telling you where he's hit it, you can SEE that can't you?" Once I remember the batsman was clean bowled, but still there was nothing, not even an "oo." The batsman left the field, the new batsman took his place, still there was nothing and I yelled "MUM - THE TELLY'S BUST," while giving it a nineteen-seventies telly-whack on the side. Then, just as the bowler was about to bowl the next ball Arlott muttered quietly "And he's bowled him."

By some quirk of commissioning Arlott was booked to do a television series which involved him in conversation with intellectual England captain Mike Brearley, while sipping wine in front of stacks of musty second-hand books. It was around the time the SDP had been set up by David Owen, and Brearley was a supporter, so one week Brearley asked Arlott whether, in a society in which class structures had been undermined etc. etc. we had to accept new forms of shifting something or other, and wasn't the SDP a valiant attempt at responding to this and creating that. And after about three doleful minutes of this Arlott poured a glass of wine, sniffed it in no hurry, sipped it, said "Aah, Australian red 1965 - very good wine for politics," and that was the end of his answer.

For most of my life as a cricket fanatic, Test Match Special was the only port of call for vital Test match information. In my first job, as a messenger delivering documents around London in the summer of '76, I'd carry parcels in one hand as the other clasped a portable radio to my ear to bring me the commentary, and in the blinding sun I'd think "And this is WORK - woo hoo."

There can't be a single year since 1968 that I couldn't identify through memories of Test Match Special; a group of us in the squats, foregoing the usual nocturnal debauchery to sit entranced as England beat Australia by three runs; hearing Caddick take four wickets in an over to bowl out the West Indies for 54, on the way to my partner's scan while pregnant with our daughter; desperately scrabbling for odd moments of commentary in between takes, as we filmed my programme about Oliver Cromwell, while Australia survived with nine wickets down for a draw at Old Trafford. So a few weeks ago my stomach went into a pulsating knot of excitement and anxiety, because I'd just been asked to go to Edgbaston the next day to be the lunchtime guest on Test Match Special.

I travelled up with my son, and we were shown into the commentary box, the actual box with the perfect view from where the sounds are made, and there they all were. I'd met Henry Blofeld once before but even so it seems remarkable, when you hear him close up, that he really speaks like that. A bit of me expected him to step away from the micropohone at the end of his stint and go "Thank fuck it's lunch, I'm fucking knackered talking like that all bleeding morning."

I tried to adopt a certain poise, that wouldn't betray the volcanic anxiety of being half an hour from the interview. Then it started to rain, and the covers were brought on, and a few seconds later Jonathon Agnew turned to me and said "They're taking an early lunch so we might as well do the interview now." Aaaaagh. I wanted to say "You can't just bring a momentous occasion like this forward by half an hour, that's as if Mission Control at Houston had said 'We might as well go half an hour early as we're ready' to the astronauts on Apollo 11."

So I was in the chair, with Bill Frindall (the veteran resident scorer, famous for his autistic knowledge of statistics) still furiously writing figures on a sheet. Was he scoring the rain? Or maybe he was marking my interview. And in twenty years time, when someone in the commentary box vaguely remembers me being on, Bill will interrupt "He was the lunchtime guest at Edgbaston in 2008, performing two impressions and receiving 3.7 laughs off the crew."

"Well my goodness," said Agnew near the start of the interview, "It says on my sheet of paper here you were a punk?! A punk eh?" Only on Test Match Special would anyone still be shocked by a musical trend that ended thirty years ago. There's almost nothing, you realise, that isn't too modern for these people. If they were interviewing a classical violinist they'd say "Oo my word, classical eh? Well it goes to show cricket can appeal to the young and trendy, though we're all rather attached to fugues and madrigals in here, aren't we Henry?"

But we chatted for half an hour, about the Kent team of my youth and the impertinence of selling the TV rights to Sky and comics who liked cricket but mostly I had to restrain myself from yelling "Fuck me, I'm on Test Match fucking Special."

And then my son and I spent the rest of the day hovering around the sort of room where, at one point, in my vision were five England captains at once, including David Gower, who flitted in and out with a sardonic smile, as if he's perpetually thinking "I can't believe I've got away wth pursuing this ridiculous game instead of dealing with the real world for so long."

But none were as entertaining as the magnificent Geoffrey Boycott, who walked straight up to my son and with crisp authority said "And what do you do? Do you bat or bowl?" Because it can't occur to Geoffrey there's any category of human being that doesn't do either. If you stuck him in the middle of Ecuador he'd go straight up to an old woman on a donkey and say "And what do you do? Do you bat or bowl?"

My son threw him a bit by saying "I'm a wicket-keeper," so Geoffrey replied in an instant "Well you want to get out there now because England's wicket-keeper's RUBBISH." And we were into a real live sketch, perfectly written and wonderfully acted, involving what would happen when Boycott met an eleven-year-old boy. I wrote down the perfect lean dialogue as it happened and I've been repeating it in my live show.

Alec Stewart, on the other hand, is disconcertingly engaging and generous, to the extent that at one point he said to me the ridiculous words "You'd know that, as a batsman." As if I should say, "That's right Alec, because we're both alike aren't we, in that we're batsmen. Sure, not all batsman are identical, so for example you're style was to score more runs for England than anyone in history whereas I'm more of the type that misses nine consecutive balls off a bowler who's fifty-seven and recovering from a hernia operation, but we're batsmen, you and me both, Alec."

But for this one day I could pretend I was part of the heirarchy of the cricketing world, because I was on Test Match Special. I'm aware, of course, of the contradictions here, in that Test Match Special is a colonial hangover, redolent of empire and the dominance of public school. But somehow, and I've no idea why, even if you've no interest in cricket, if you couldn't find anything to admire in Test Match Special, and be manically excited at the prospect of being its guest, I'm not sure you cou're the sort of person who could entirely be trusted.

Sir Geoffrey rocks

For a while I've found the extent to which the most unlikely figures speak out against the Iraq war inspiring, but also slightly disconcerting. I accepted Jimmy Hill, and Burt Bacharach and Joanna Lumley and Eminem. Then I saw an interview in my local paper with Leo Sayer to advertise his show at the Fairfield Halls, and in the middle of a question about his seventies perm he informed us that George Bush was a war criminal. This was now like a puzzling dream, where you wake up gibbering to your partner that you were in a canoe with Eddie Large who was yelling "I can't sell my gooseberries because of that bloody illegal occupation." Would we get as far as Roger Whittaker releasing an album called 'Whistle Against the War' with Des o'Connor in the background reading extracts from Robin Cook's resignation speech. Even more remarkably, while I was driving to do a show at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Trade Union Festival in Dorset, I was listening to the Test Match commentary. And Jonathon Agnew was complaining that the security had been so tight it took him an hour to get into the ground. So out of nowhere came Geoffrey Boycott, who sneered "We've Tony Blair to thank for that."

"I'm sorry Geoffrey," said Agnew, with a hint of "WILL you keep quiet" but Boycott asserted "Tony Blair's to blame for that. He was told if we went to war with Iraq it would increase the risk of terrorism but he wouldn't take any notice."

"Well," said Agnew, "I think it's the terrorists to blame really," mumbling as if he had a dozen producers yelling into his earpiece "SHUT HIM UP - distract him by suggesting he was weak against left-arm spinners or something."

But Boycott held firm, which was how British radio broadcast for surely the first time ever the sentence "We should never have invaded Iraq in the first place that's pushed out gently on the off side and there's no run."

I've suggested before that the Labour Party, supposedly a party of the left, now finds itself on the defining issue of our times militantly to the right of Jimmy Hill, two ex-Presidents of America, Joanna Lumley, Zoe Ball, the ex-President of France, ninety per cent of Spain, Chris Eubank, Brigadier Hewitt, almost every living Arab, Burt Bacharach, the Liberal Democrats, Leo Sayer and the Pope. But who amongst us, even the most poisonously cynical, believed on that day when Labour were elected in 1997, that this government would end up being chastised as too right-wing, pro-war and up America's arse on Test Match fucking Special.

Mister postman, look and see, have you a hammer in your bag for me?

Do things like this happen to other people? To me they seem normal, but I'm often told they're not.

A few days ago I left my phone charger round someone's house, so it was posted back to me. But the postman delivered it at a point in the morning when I was out, so when I got back it was jammed into the letter box, in a parcel. I pushed it one way, then the other, then ripped off the package so only the charger was left, utterly immovable, impervious to any shoving at all. So I tried whacking it out with my cricket bat, but the bat was too big to swing in the area behind the door. Then I remembered my daughter had been given these kiddies' golf clubs, kiddie size but proper metal ones, as if they were designed for blasting phone chargers that were wedged in letter boxes.

So I chose my club carefully, and could almost hear a commentator mumbling "Ooooo he's going for the putter - brave choice." Then I stood by the front door ferociously swinging this thing, but even on the occasions I connected perfectly with the charger it didn't budge at all (although the sports fanatic in me thought 'Hmm, I'm pleased with the way I timed that one').

There's a moment in a crisis like this one where you panic, and contemplate the consequences if the problem can't ever be solved. I could get a new charger, but what would I do with the door? How would I get any post? Was there a way this could go that would end up involving the fire brigade? Could it result in the whole street being condemned and all my neighbours being put up in temporary accommodation at a DSS hostel? So I went to the sorting office, where I know all the staff, and they all started laughing. Then someone got the manager and, being a manager, he only giggled politely. But he got a hammer and came to the house where the two of us bashed and shoved the bastard thing, occasionally getting excited because it squeaked a millimetre sideways. Passers-by were infuriatingly English, allowing themselves a puzzled glance, then marching on, perhaps assuming this was an experimental form of anger management called 'Letter box aggression therapy'.

After about half an hour it surrendered and popped out, probably because all the bashing had increased the size of the letter box by about three square miles. You feel such a moment of triumph in that sort of situation, you want to lie on your back and yell out an exhausted groan like Nadal after the winning point against Federer. "Here you are," said the manager nonchalantly as he handed me the liberated charger, and he gave me an "I don't know - honestly" look, as if it was MY fault. But maybe it was. Because perhaps things like that don't happen to anyone else. I don't know.

Still, I bet you won't get service like that if it's all privatised. Or there'll be a 'jammed charger hammer tariff', or you'll have to ring a call centre that goes "If the jammed object is perpendicular to the door frame press seven."

Then a couple of nights ago I was walking home when two local postmen ran out of the pub they were in and yelled across the street "Here Mark, got anything stuck in your letter box mate. Haaaaa haaaaa." I almost felt like a celebrity.

Start spreading the news

There's never a way of saying this without sounding slightly pretentious, but I've just been in New York for a few days. And like every other time I've been there, it seemed the whole place was playing at being New York. As I came out of the airport's automatic doors onto the road, a shortish man of about forty, with an unnecessary moustache who looked like the teacher you had whose name you can't remember, began striding up and down past the queue for taxis screaming "What the FUCK is wrong with this fucking place - I was FIRST IN FUCKING LINE there," his suburban voice almost snapping as it failed to carry the ferocity he was trying to load onto it. "This place is full of FUCKING ASSHOLES," he told us, and a part of me thought he must be employed by the tourist board to greet visitors with the New York experience. He couldn't be real, any more than if you arrived in Tel Aviv and a bloke with a beard in the taxi queue started singing "If I were a rich man diddle iddle iddle um."

But while New York must be the loudest screamiest place in the world it's possibly also the friendliest. People yell at you because they're interested in you. They talk to your kids in the lift and make them feel important. On the subway, when my kids were squabbling, a black man in blue overalls told me in a deep voice "Hmmm, she annoys the hell out of her big brother right, and makes him mad, and there's times when he wishes she'd never been born. But if anyone laid a finger on her there ain't nothing he wouldn't do to protect her." So I returned his warmth with a smile, but a bit of me felt this must be Morgan Freeman practising at being a wise grandpa.

Because often in New York you find yourself thinking "Oh you don't really mean that." A twitchy woman with hair poking in several directions was talking manically to her friend in a diner, and I tuned in at "I'm telling you - he's a MARXIST. He's a black JFK." Then the waiter arrived. "Are YOU voting for Obama?" she asked. "No," mumbled the waiter, disinterested. "Then I'll let you take my order," she cackled, triumphant.

But they can't mean it. In the taxis there are screens showing adverts, and one of them is for a centre that organises yoga for dogs. That's to say yoga, but for fucking dogs. And there are these dogs, in this big hall, lying on their back and sitting in slightly odd positions as encouraged by their owners, who presumably are under the impression that the dog is clearing its mind of all the stress that's built up from being a dog in New York. So you half expect the next advert to be for insect insurance, with a reassuring voiceover asking "Do you worry about ants? In today's crazy world you never know when they might get injured and fall behind in the line carrying crumbs. Well now those worries are over." Or it will say "Do the stones in your garden seem lifeless? Then brighten them up with a massage. Our highly trained pebble masseurs specialise in de-knotting the clogged up anxiety that collects in a stone's 'antagonism zone'."

One morning I was watching one of the customary sugary pairs that front the news channels, when the woman said "And we'll be looking at the disastrous consequences that can follow some plastic surgery." Then came a clip of an interviewer leaning earnestly towards someone you couldn't see, and saying "So one morning you woke up with four breasts." Then back to the studio where the pair put on their distraught look, and one said "More on that shocking story later. But first here's Anthony with the sport."

So New York can't help but make you laugh. But that's tested if you try to go up the Statue of Liberty. In a rare attempt at prior organisation I booked up tickets in advance, which is the only way now that you can go up the statue, rather than just visit the island. But you still have to queue for about forty minutes at a security check before boarding the boat, as a series of officials in purple jackets yell at you - "REMOVE all watches, cell-phones, camera equipment and other electronic devices and PLACE THEM IN THE TRAYS PROVIDED, REMOVE belts, jackets and any metallic equipment..." and you wonder if you've joined the wrong queue and you're being shipped out to Alcatraz. Eventually you're searched, far more thoroughly than at an airport, and this entitles you to get on the boat. Then at the island you have to join another queue and do it all again, presumably in case someone's managed to get there without going through the first check, perhaps through a series of underground tunnels. But this time they're far more stringent, so the queue moves slower and the yelling is more ferocious. You daren't even turn your head away as they're likely to bark "DO YOU THINK THIS DOESN'T APPLY TO YOU, ASSHOLE, NOW GIVE ME TWENTY PRESS-UPS."

After about an hour you make it to where you have to deposit all your belongings in a locker, which you operate by placing two fingers on a machine that takes your prints, then giving it a dollar. Then there's another queue until you're ushered into a plastic doorway that looks like the thing that beams you up in Star Trek. Then you move one pace forward and an automated voice snaps "Air puffers ON." There's a wait of around two seconds, which is just long enough to ponder whether air puffers is a term that sounds so innocent but then so is waterboarding, then there's a big 'Whooosh whooosh' noise and a bloody great puff of air comes up from underneath and goes up your trouser leg as if it's the thing they used to make that scene with Marilyn Monroe.

By now it's clear there's nowhere in the Western world in which there's less liberty than at the Statue of Liberty. My son said "If immigrants still came here by boat they'd look across at all this as they were passing and shout 'Can we go to Canada instead'?"

And yet somehow it still seems funny. They CAN'T mean it. On the subway going back we must have had six friendly conversations. Then, in the clammy stifling bustle of several thousand people trying to get out of the station, everyone pressed against five other people like when you're leaving a massive rock gig, the woman in front yelled "Some ASSHOLE'S PUSHING me, well FUCK YOU." And I thought about the equivalent in London, which would be a disgruntled sneer of contempt and a muttered 'Do you mind', and realised the New York version was much more engaging, and it just made me laugh.

Eloquence on the net

The internet can be marvellous for the ego. I came across a forum discussing myself a while ago, where a supporter of George Bush wrote "The only way I would find Mark Steel funny is if he was being stabbed to death with shards of Aids-infected glass." And I was quite proud. What an achievement to annoy someone that much, so that even if he saw someone stabbing me to death with shards of glass he'd growl to my assassin "Have those shards got Aids on them? NO! WHAT - are you his FAN or something - then go away and don't come back until they HAVE. Because I want him to catch Aids AFTER HE'S DEAD. So he won't even be able to go the doctor."

Still, in my naivety I dared to hope my own website wouldn't be a venue for this brand of discourse. Especially not when the abuse is still aimed at me. And not from Donald Rumsfeld or the Burmese military but someone who says he's in the SWP. Apparently, because I'm no longer a member of the SWP I've "betrayed all the principles I've ever stood for", and I'm a "TWAT." And in between these musings my correspondent complains that I haven't replied. It had never occurred to me before that people distributing abuse were sensitive about receiving a reply. The next time any of us hears someone slumped in a pool of Special Brew yelling "WHAT you fucking looking at yer fucking shit," we must remember to say "I refute your allegations sir but wish you a good day nonetheless," or we'll hurt their feelings. Or maybe my new friend was thinking "AHA, he has no comeback to my 'TWAT' line - my polemic truly has him foxed, the traitor."
It's possible I'm being unfair and the 'TWAT' person is seven. But there are a couple of points I feel like making. Firstly, this person insists I've "Joined a reformist party", which justifies him being so cross. There are a number of objections to this line of arguing, but one of them is I haven't joined any party, or anything else. (Now maybe he'll reply to this by calling me a TWAT for joining the board of Halliburton or the Girl Guides or something).

The other point is that all the while I was in the SWP, if anyone had addressed another socialist in this way, other members would have politely suggested they use a tone more conducive to a genuine discussion. But calling people TWAT now seems to be the official tone the SWP uses for anyone it disagrees with. I will, shortly write my reasons on here for parting company with the SWP, before getting back on to being rude about the people we SHOULD be opposing - the arms dealers, the privatisers and such characters.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to call me a TWAT, I can put you in touch with the people who want me stabbed with Aids-infected shards of glass, as they could probably teach you how to be much more eloquent and imaginative with your anti-Mark Steel prose.

Review of a fine book

One of the most uneasy feelings you can experience is when someone claims to speak for a group you're a part of, and comes out with something excruciating. Someone you barely know might put an arm round you in a pub and yell "We South Londoners are the world's best at pulling chicks, aren't we Mark," and you're left muttering 'Well er oh blimey'.

As a member of the far left I would often be embarrassed by another member making a speech that included something like "Us revolutionary socialists want nothing less than to literally rip the heads off every living parasite of the bourgeousie and fling the rotting corpses to the dogs."

But nothing can compare to the experience of being a Jew who doesn't approve of the antics of Israel, or the ideology of Zionism. Because the great trick that Israel has accomplished over its sixty years has been to reach a point where it globally claims to stand for all Jews. To be against Israel is to be against Jews, so opponents of Israel's etiquette are derided as 'anti-semitic'. One snag resulting from this tactic is how to label the many Jews who vociferously oppose the antics of Israel, so the answer is they must be 'self-hating Jews'.

This is why it's such a liberation to read 'If I Am Not For Myself', the new book by Jewish socialist Mike Marqusee. It's a joyous meander through history, theory and personal memoir, that bounces from a section about the book of Amos in the Old Testament, (who turns out to be one cool multicultural prophet), to an account of his grandfather's journey from dedicated socialist to devout Zionist, then onto Mike's upbringing in New York, and his later experiences in London.

The memoir begins with a poignant account of Mike's introduction to the term 'self-hating Jew'. He was immensely proud of his father, not least because he'd travelled to Mississippi with the civil rights movement, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan were murdering white activists as well as blacks. But one day, at his Jewish Sunday school, there was a talk given by a lad who'd fought in the Israeli Army that had crushed the Egyptians in 1967. The language the soldier used to describe Arabs, referring to them as animals who used the street as their toilet and so on, reminded Mike of the drivel aimed at black people by racists. But when Mike mentioned the incident to his father, he got the reply "I think there's a bit of self-hatred in you there."

The account that follows performs the marvellous service of disentangling Jewishness from Israel. And that means countering an idea that many Jewish organisations repeat as an incontestable fact. For example, Mike quotes a new sabbath prayer added to the repertoire of the United Synagogue, that goes "Heavenly Father: Remember the Israel Defence Forces, send blessing and property upon all the work of their hands."

And yet this is an account that celebrates the Jewish traditions and mannerisms that formed his background, revelling in words like shtetl and yiddishkeit, while remaining forever inclusive. The accounts of the customs, the food, the language, and the arguments made me wish I'd been Jewish; maybe because in contrast to my own stifling semi-suburban upbringing everything in this New York Jewish environment seemed to matter.

But nothing mattered more than the fault-line of Zionism, the belief that Jewish safety was bound up with the security of a militaristic Israel, kept in place by the requirements of a militaristic America. Mike recalls how he learned about the holocaust, saying "The teacher explained in a quiet voice that the lesson of all this horror was that 'never again' should such a thing be allowed to happen. I assented with my whole being, it seemed the most undoubtedly truthful big truth I had ever heard.... Back then I thought it meant 'never again' to anyone, anywhere, not just never again to the Jews."

This is an account that aims higher than just to counter the defenders of Israel, it also seeks to explain how so many people, including many spirited opponents of injustice, somehow ended up accepting and justifying the horrors that Israel routinely carries out in the name of the world's Jews. It does however include the story of a friend's Jewish nephew who, when accused of being a self-hating Jew by a Zionist student, replied "I don't hate myself. I hate you, you fucking bastard."

A fleeting glance at recent events will illustrate that the state of Israel, and the Zionist cause that created it, have proved something of a nuisance to many Arabs. But this book displays a further consequence of the Jewish state; that by creating a notion that someone can only be properly Jewish if they align themselves to a nation that acts with such contempt for humanity, and that depends for its existence on the American establishment responsible for atrocities from Vietnam to Fallujah, Israel is also an insult to Jews.

'If I Am Not For Myself' by Mike Marqusee is published by Verso.

The evidence mounts that some things aren't fair

Hmm, I've written this article for this week's Independent, about a case that should have had masses of publicity but has had hardly any. So there I am feeling smug at redressing the balance and I'm informed this evening that the good people of the law won't let it be printed. So here it is - my illegal article - oo, it must feel like reading Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1962.....

There's a trial currently taking place in Belfast, that seems to explain plainly how nothing makes any sense. It revolves around a factory owned by the arms company Raytheon, which was set up in Derry soon after the IRA ceasefire. John Hume, who'd just won the Nobel Peace Prize was among those who announced the opening of the plant, welcoming it as a result of the 'peace dividend'

So at last, now the men of violence had agreed to give up their weapons, the area could attract a peaceful company with a turnover of seventeen billion dollars from making weapons. Clearly, all the while the IRA were decommissioning their arms, most of us misunderstood this process. Because the government reports must have gone "They possess 100 rifles, 10 RPG 7 rockets and a shed full of semtex. If they want to be taken seriously this isn't NEARLY enough; they need Tornado bombers and a car park full of tanks - we can't deal with these amateurs."

For example, when Raytheon won a contract to develop a new missile system for the Israelis in 2006, a spokesman boasted they would "Provide all-weather hit-to-kill performance at a tactical missile price." Next they might have adverts, that go "Hurry hurry hurry to the Raytheon springtime sale for lasers, tasers and civilian-erasers that will make flesh sizzle through snow, sleet or drizzle WITHOUT making a casualty of your wallet."

Despite this, the government in Northern Ireland welcomed the new plant, claiming they'd been assured it wouldn't be making weapons. To which a reasonable response would be 'Right - they're a weapons manufacturer - they supplied weapons to, amongst others, the Indonesian military junta - this might, if you were cynical, suggest they make weapons. Or what do you THINK they're going to be making - FAIRTRADE FUCKING CUSTARD!'

Eventually it was admitted they were making guidance systems for missiles, and so for a while there was a pretence these were being employed for peaceful reasons. Perhaps the systems were being attached to wasps so that a central controlling network could guide them away from picnics.

But then it became clear they were being used by the Israelis in Lebanon, and there was outrage in Derry when in 2006 one such system guided a missile into a block of flats in Qana, killing 28 people, mostly children. A few days later the local anti-war group, including the journalist and civil rights activist Eamonn McCann, decided to occupy the Raytheon building as a protest. A group of nine got into the plant, and as a gesture they threw a computer or two out of the window. Eventually around 40 police arrived and, as Eamonn describes "They smashed through the doors wearing riot gear, many holding perspex shields, some pointing plastic-bullet guns. They inched forward while the officer in command shouted 'surrender'. We continued playing cards."

And as I know Eamonn I can imagine him later that night in the police cell muttering "Tonight did not go as planned at all - I was SURE no one would beat my pair of queens."

Then came the official outrage - they'd wilfully broken the law, destroyed property etc. etc. So maybe whether an act of destruction is considered illegal or not comes down to the value of the objects destroyed. And computers are worth a fair packet, whereas a house in Qana can probably be picked up for next to nothing, especially with the current housing slump!

Perhaps the activists went about their protest in the wrong way. The more official approach might have been to leave Raytheon alone, but announce the local Co-op was making weapons. Then they could have produced a dossier to prove it, containing snippets from the internet about how the manager had been buying uranium from North Korea and smuggling it into the fridges in packets of fish fingers. Then they could have flattened the place, and when it turned out there never were any weapons they could have said it doesn't really make any difference.

Last year the group travelled to Qana to meet the families of the victims of that missile, and they described the trip, not surprisingly, as the most moving experience of their lives. But while it's all very well feeling compassion for dead civilians, someone has to consider the feelings of that poor computer, so this week their trial began. Because opposing the bombing of civilians with missiles made as a result of a peace process can land you in jail, whereas organising international support for bombing those civilians gets you a job as peace envoy to the place that was bombed. It's obvious when you think about it.

I only hope that as the computer hit the ground, in its last moment it flickered 'You have performed an illegal operation'.

Wahoo

Here's a story about two phone calls from Mark Thomas, comic and alarmingly vibrant anti-arms campaigner.

Last summer he rang me and, barely able to contain himself with anarchist enthusiasm he asked me to take part in a comedy benefit at the Hammersmith Apollo. The cause was linked to the endless shipments of arms that had made their way from British companies to the government of Saudi Arabia.

The fact that this trade took place at all was an outrageous scandal, especially when you consider the excuses given for the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, in which Blair would twist his brow with a gargantuan furrow and almost weep as he described how he couldn't sit back and do nothing about these dreadful regimes. With Afghanistan he even justified it by talking about "That regime's appalling record on women's rights." Unlike Saudi Arabia of course, which is a cauldron of modern feminism. No Saudi prince is without his complete collection of Virago feminist novels from the nineteen-seventies, and Riyadh market is one long street full of t-shirts with slogans like 'A woman needs a man like a bedouin needs a fish'. And they're so kind to women it's the only place where a woman incurs no extra penalty for drinking and driving - because they get jailed for either so they might as well do both at the same time.

Billions of pounds worth of arms were merrily supplied to this foul regime by British companies, most of it underwritten by the Export Credit Guarantee arrangement that means the government will reimburse arms companies for their lost profits even if their buyer goes bankrupt, or is overthrown by some ungrateful bunch who don't see the virtue in a dictatorship that executes people in the street. But - here's the brilliant thing - that wasn't the reason for the benefit - indeed if the only misdemeanour committed was the arming of a murderous tyrrany it would hardly have registered as worthy of note.

But it turned out that over a period of ten years or so, companies such as BAE Systems had bribed Saudi officials to secure their deals, and the figures mentioned involved a billion dollars. This alarmed even sections of the British establishment, the sort who'd say "Steady on there - we all supply murderers with Tomahawk missiles from time to time but best to keep the business above board, old chap," and the Serious Fraud Office were sent in to investigate.

And then they were told not to.

Having compiled a sackful of evidence to make their case, the New Labour government that excited so many when it was first elected with its pledge of an "ethical foreign policy" called it off "In the national interest." No one's that ethical I suppose.

I remember seeing Michael Portillo on the television that week, supporting this decision on the grounds that "We have to be a bit grown up about these things." Because the law has to be flexible. Just as traffic police can't arrest every driver on the motorway who drifts into driving at seventy-three miles an hour, we can't be such sticklers for the letter of the law that we investigate every billion dollar bribe concerning Tornado bombers - think of all the unnecessary paperwork.

So the Campaign Against the Arms Trade decided to launch their own prosecution, and the benefit would be to raise the money for such a stunt. And a stunt was what it seemed to be. It was a brilliant stunt, imaginative and audacious, but they obviously weren't going to seriously overturn a decision of such magnitude with their own legal action. Every comedian has a litany of tales about disastrous benefits, in which you're asked to drive round the house of the organiser's mother as that's where he thinks he's left the microphone, or where opposing factions of the cause start punching each other while you're on stage.

But when they work they can be magically uplifting, and this one contained an indefinable spark that made it one of the most exhilarating of all. The three-thousand five-hundred tickets were sold well in advance, there was a brilliantly produced pamphlet about the arms trade on every seat and the evening crackled with joyful indignation. The best cheer of the night went to the speaker from the campaign so the gig, and therefore the cause received publicity from almost every national newspaper, and most people seemed to float out afterwards, like football supporters whose team has just won for the first time in twenty games.

It wouldn't mean the government's decision to abandon the investigation could ever be reversed of course, but it boosted the spirit of everyone who wished it should be. And yesterday Mark Thomas rang me again.

He was outside the court and he'd just listened to the judges condemn the government's actions as unlawful, and agree with the case of the campaign that had been paid for by that benefit. In his excitement one damning remark from the judge ran into the next one and it was impossible to decipher all the details but the most important detail of all was obvious - WE'VE FUCKING WON.

Of course none of this means the people responsible for this trading in death and mass bribery will necessarily face the justice they deserve. Nor will arms dealing, including the illegal type, cease. But it's a huge embarrassment for the companies and for Blair. Last night on Newsnight, Malcolm Rifkind, ex-Tory Minister spoke at unfeasible length in tortuously legalistic terms about how wrong the judgement was. The party of law and order thinks it's dreadful that anyone should be investigated for billion dollar-bribes. The politicians who lean earnestly into the camera and squeal that we must must MUST be tough on kids who carry knives or other weapons are adamant that it would be ridiculously idealist to try and prevent illegal dealing in vast arsenals to rotten dictatorships. But the other lesson is for our side. We can make a difference.

The stunts and actions of individual campaigners have a greater impact now than they ever used to, because where once they were seen as eccentric fools, now they meet with the support of a large section of society. The millions who marched against the war, and millions more enraged by the war and the arms companies that make such wars possible, have transformed the way in which campaigns such as this can make an impact. Juries are reluctant to find against demonstrators, local papers take up causes and thousands cheer at benefits, which in turn inspires the people leading these campaigns.

No one knows which unsold grape brought down apartheid. And no one can state exactly how much arms dealing will be prevented by this decision. But it makes the world a marginally better place, and should be celebrated properly.

Perhaps we can get everyone who was at the benefit back together and this time we just all get pissed.

I'm after your advice.

Amongst the boom industries of recent years, involving mobile phones and sugary bacardi drinks and search engines are bailiffs. There are thousands of the bastards, sending out letters packed with language that once would have only been used in The Sweeney. But now you'll get letters saying "Dear dear dear - the last instalment of council tax was due on the ninth, and by my reckoning it's now the tenth. Tell you what, that hamster of your daughter's would fetch a couple of bob at the shampoo-testing plant. So you'd better pay up - and remember, you're a big man but you're out of shape. Alright. I said ALRIGHT!" And that's from someone like Saxmundham Parish Council.

So last week I received a letter from the good people of Iqor, a bailiffs employed by British Gas, in connection with a bill at my old address, and is the fourth such letter I've had SINCE THE BILL WAS PAID. I rang the number, as I did after all the other letters came, and went through that procedure where you have to administer your own chilling abuse, waiting for fifteen minutes and then navigating their instructions. With that technology at least they could give you the option of choosing your style of vindictiveness, so it could go "If you wish to be spoken to in the style of a surly bouncer, press one. If you wish to be addressed in icy monotone Kommandant, press two..."

The fact that I didn't live at the address, or that the bill was paid in full two months ago was all treated as if I was trying to wiggle out of my responsibilities on technicalities. They could only withdraw the threat to remove my goods if they were advised to by British Gas, they said. So - after a long long wait for British Gas to answer I was told the bill had indeed been paid, but they'd "requested" the bailiff stop the action, so if they were continuing with it "there's nothing else we can do." Maybe this is the method governments will use in future, when they want to have a war with a country but can't find a reason "We've looked at your records and realise you've not got any weapons of mass destruction but the trouble is we've already sent the army. We've requested them to stop but if they continue invading you there's really nothing else we can do."

So I ask to speak to the manager but he's not there but he will ring straight back - at the very most in an hour. I say I don't believe this and I'm told this is being extremely obstructive and unhelpful because "I've given you my word, Mister Steel." So the next morning I ring to ask why no one rang back, I'm left on hold for seventeen minutes, and altogether it takes me two hours to locate the bloke who was definitely ringing back, when he tells me he was on a training course, with no more hint of apology than the Queen would use if you got through to her and asked why she hadn't called you the previous evening.

The bailiffs "shouldn't" be writing me any more letters, he told me, but I suggested he should contact them again to make sure they didn't, and send me a letter confirming it, so I could present this to the bailiffs should they pop by. So then he got even frostier and slightly quieter, and I wondered whether he was going to say "Hmm, hmmmmm, you pay the bill, but you show me no respect. You ring me up but you don't even call me the Gasfather." Then he used lots of phrases like "I've already told you Mister Steel," and "That is not our procedure."

And through all of this, to one side was a copy of The Independent, the front page telling of British Gas enjoying record profits and record complaints all at once. Eventually my new friend told me he would send a letter that "Should get to you in four days," but he just couldn't - COULDN'T get it there any quicker.

I asked what he thought would be reasonable compensation and he said the absolute maximum they could pay out in any circumstances was fifty quid. So if they instal a faulty pipe in the Taj Mahal and blow the whole place up, when the Indian government rings up to complain they'll be told "Look, I've TOLD you Mr. Singh, fifty pounds is the most we can pay in any circumstances. Now that is the procedure, please refrain from being obstructive."

He's even sent an e-mail offering fifty quid, but it seems a bit inadequate to me. So what should I do? Do I accept the fifty quid, or get stroppy and insist on more. Whatever the final amount I'll send it to some charity or other, hopefully there's one called 'Help out Old Aged Pensioners Who've had their Gas Cut Off by those Shit-heads from British Gas', but as there might not be I'll make do with Age Concern.

So - it's up to you - vote for whether I should accept or reject the offer, by next Monday morning.

The banker has offered fifty quid - but what's it to be - deal or no deal?

Just post a comment saying 'deal' or 'no deal' and I'll await your verdict. Democrat primarys? THIS is the real thrilling vote of the year.

Launch of new site

This is Mark Steel's new website where he will be keeping you in touch with what he's been up to as often as he can.