The Waterside Inn, Bray

In the dark days before Britain discovered food, you would head into the countryside for a meal with all the enthusiasm of a Roman centurion venturing into Boudicca’s local for an afterwork pint. Dining options seemed limited to a clutch of dowdy restaurants and woodbine-scented pubs, all seemingly locked in an eternal battle to see who could get the most breadcrumbs onto the menu. It was not a good time to be a scampi.

Of course, times have changed. Celebrity chefs now rule the airwaves, controlling our minds with their talk of specially sourced ingredients, seasonal produce and fancy bread. Word of this culinary coup has reached all four corners of the land; Sweary Gordon has intimidated good food out of eateries nationwide, and out in the countryside there are crisis meetings of baffled ploughmen trying to work out where their lunchtime pickled onions have gone.

Down at the Waterside Inn, perched on the riverbank in the drowsy Berkshire hamlet of Bray, all this ebb and flow is greeted with the kind of supreme indifference only our Gallic neighbours can muster. Michel Roux opened his doors in 1972, turning out elegant French food with the minimum of fuss and fruity language, and the restaurant seems to have existed in its own gastronomic universe ever since. But times have changed in 25 years and we’ve booked a table for Sunday lunch to see if Roux’s formula has changed with them.

The answer is an emphatic non, as we discover stooping into the snug lobby and stepping back in time. The immaculate maître d' offers a charming welcome before gliding us through to the dining room, where our table offers the most picturesque view imaginable. The Thames drifts languidly past, taking with it a family of ducks, a swan or two and a canoist hell-bent on re-enacting the Poseidon Adventure. It’s the only evidence of strenuous activity in this lazy part of the world. In fact, it’s so relaxing here that the idea of food begins to feel like a bonus. Nevertheless, it’s three Michelin stars worth of bonus so we’re keen to get stuck in.

There is no shortage of waiters to help on that score: we stop counting at 14, all of them appearing and disappearing like unfailingly polite ninjas. A plate of delicious hors d’oeuvres materialises in front of us, including a tiny steak tartare that, in the bonzai era of Nouvelle Cuisine, would have been halved and served as a main course. There’s nothing nouvelle about my entrée though: the last time I ordered apple soup I was in a high chair and needed it to redecorate the kitchen, so the Velouté of Granny-Smiths and Scallops is a nostalgic choice. It’s a good one too, with the texture of heady truffle slices providing earthy contrast with the juicy scallops and sweet apple.

My main course, a pan-fried fillet of Angus beef, is cooked to perfection in a delicate anchovy butter and arrives perched regally on a bed of ratatouille that promises to be ‘sicilian style’. I’m wary as my only other exposure to sicilian-style things was the The Godfather 2, but it’s been a while since a courgette was implicated in an honour killing and it smells incredible. It tastes even better, with the sweetness of the red peppers tempered by a subtle tarragon tang, and it lasts about as long as as a Corleone at a toll-booth.

Technically at this point I should be trying to puzzle out what kind of alchemy is taking pace in the kitchen to make food so wrong, so light. I order dessert instead. When it arrives it’s the clearest evidence so far that The Biggest Loser is not must-see viewing in the Roux household. The Péché Gourmand Selon "Alain" et "Michel”’ — or, in English, ‘70,000 Calories of Pudding Action’ — is actually seven contrasting pudding-ettes, ranging from a molten, dizzying, chocolate sponge to the kind of rum baba Oliver Reed would have approved of. It’s a fittingly decadent way to round off a magnificent lunch.

The food here is, of course, exceedingly rich, and rich is what you need to be in order to pay for it. It is eye-wateringly expensive and I mean that quite literally. Ultimately, though, The Waterside Inn is more than just a layman’s guide to what it would be like to be Alan Wicker — it’s a reminder that, while fads come and go, good food cooked with skill and love is timeless. As Michel might say: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Palintology

"One of the things we have to change is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and their patriotism. The times are too serious for this patriotism playbook." Barack Obama

"This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign.Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit. Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he's worried that someone won't read them their rights." Sarah Palin

Last Thursday was a disorientating day for any foreigner glued to the US election campaign. One minute Barack Obama was basking in the hollers and cheers of 80,000 star-spangled liberals in Denver, fresh from accepting the presidential nomination and approving perhaps the silliest set design since Spinal Tap’s microscopic Stonehenge. Then Sarah Palin arrived.

Poor Obama must have been wondering where everyone had gone. On the face of it, this was the most bizarre vice-presidential nomination since Dan ‘The Potatoe’ Quayle, and the way the press told it the McCain team had found Palin flipping mooseburgers somewhere in the part of America that should be part of Canada. And that turned out to be her version of events too. It must be a devious ploy to win over the disenfranchised Hillary hardcore, wheezed blindsided pundits, ignoring Palin’s somewhat divergent stance on absolutely everything, not to mention the fact that in every publicity photo she seemed to be armed to the teeth.


All this before she’d even taken to the stage for her acceptance speech, which, as it turned out, was utterly brilliant and completely policy-free. Like Serial Mom meets The Deer Hunter, it took us from small-town Alaska to the Hanoi Hilton, via the sordid back-alleys of Washington. It was compelling, mawkish, thundering and sarcastic, and really needed one of those '60s Batman sound-effect boards to do it justice. “What does Obama actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet?” KAA-POW! “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer’, except you have actual responsibilities.” ZAAAAM! As you scoured the GOP’s speechwriting team for Jack Dee, you could just hear the unmistakable ka-plunk of Republican jaws, and reason, hitting the floor.

Five days and six trillion words of gleeful copy later and still no one’s quite sure what to make of Palin. VPs don’t win elections, they say, but then this is no ordinary election — for one thing, it’s the first time the incumbent party has attempted to run as challenger to itself. “Nothing to do with us, buddy,” the Republicans wheedle, while the rest of the world tries to figure out why there isn’t at least a hundred point gap between the parties. Americans like their politicians to pretend they’re not politicians, a stunt Palin has pulled off pretty impressively, but pretending not to be the government takes real concentration.

Exactly how free Palin turns out to be of the “special interests, lobbyists, big oil and the good-ol' boys” will be fascinating to discover. Leaving aside the hockey mum schtick, fishing, homespun wisdom and general piety, she's a politician and lobbying is as much a fact of political life as fundraising or, say, taking credit for scrapping pointless projects you'd approved in the first place. Just type 'John McCain' and 'lobbyist' into Google and start wading through some of the 2,600,000 entries.

Palin has a weekend of intensive briefing behind her now and is on the verge of her first interview with the national media on ABC. We'll find out what’s behind "the naughty smirk of the killer librarian", as A.A Gill puts it. Gill detects "the delicious hint of salty revelations to come," and, as the king of the salty revelation, he should know. We can only hope. If ever there was a strong argument to give moose the vote, Palin is it.

It's the kind of summer only a penguin could love, so the plan was to post some of uplifting, sun-kissed songs to dispel the gloom. Instead here's Johnny Cash and possibly the most beautiful cover ever recorded.

Star Wars 2: The Phantom Menace

Reagan's 'Strategic Defence Initiative' (SDI) was derisively dubbed 'Star Wars' back in 1983. If anything it was unfair on Star Wars because Darth Vader actually had a laser and it worked pretty well, while the success of SDI seemed entirely dependent on Soviet missiles colliding in space.

No-one is calling it Star Wars anymore. Today, Condeeleza Rice signed an agreement with Poland to station ten US missile interceptors in Poland by 2012. Subject to ratification from the Polish parliament, the US will have 'boots on the ground' in Poland, and the missile shield will become reality; a reality that will cost the US taxpayer upwards of $4.8 billion over the next five years.

The shield is being built to counter the threat of Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles, says President Bush. Except Iran doesn't have any ICBMs. To develop them it will need a nuclear capacity, a colossal pile of money and, ideally, Wernher von Braun, three things it currently lacks. What Ahmadinejād does have is the Shahab-3 rocket which can get to the shops and back, but looks a long way from being operational, as former UN weapons inspector Geoffrey Forden testifies. We know this because the last time they tested it bits fell off.

'Irrelevant', blusters Missile Defense Agency director, Lieutenant General Obering. "We can't wait until we actually see one of those long-range tests to begin to build the missile defenses," he puffs. Fair enough, but if Iran's weapons program is as advanced as the Bush administration would have us believe, surely it will be able to target Israel long before it can send them anywhere near Poland? And Bush has made it fairly clear that airstrikes will prevent that ever happening (as Pilger argues). So how does the shield reconcile with the doctrine of pre-emption, the one consistent principle driving an administration virtually principle-free?

Thankfully this will soon be Obama or McCain's problem, because with Putin in the Kremlin, the Georgian crisis still unresolved and the restoration of Russian prestige high on the agenda, this is a frightening situation. Bush's move is provocative and breaches the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, unbalancing the long-established principle of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction. Ah! Not so, says Obering:

"We talked about taking transparency measures with the Russians. First of all, we've invited them to our missile defense sites. But more importantly, we said, 'you're concerned about this being aimed at you and not the Iranian threat.' We will build the sites, activate them, test them, and then we will not bring them to an operational status unless the Iranian threat emerges. That was our proposal. We think that's eminently reasonable."

Somehow I don't think the Russians are going to buy that. You don't need to be Jack Ryan to realise that the line Putin's generals will be taking right now is that if the US can build ten interceptors for Poland, it can build 100. Dr. Strangelove would probably call it 'the missile interceptor gap'.

The shield make no sense — strategically, economically or diplomatically — so why then? President Eisenhower answered this question almost 60 years ago in his brilliant final Oval Office address. He warned the nation to guard against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex," which would develop a momentum of its own.

"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

It was a point made in Eugene Jarecki's 2005 documentary Why We Fight and made forcefully again by George Monbiot in yesterday's Guardian: "Federal Government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions." Missile defence, Monbiot contends, is "the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out."

Someone, somewhere has edged us a little closer to the edge for that extra spoonful.

Pilger on Hiroshima

John Pilger marked the 63rd anniversary of Hiroshima in the Guardian this week with a typically impassioned assault on US foreign policy, then, now and, presumably forevermore. For Pilger, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first names on a rap sheet of US nuclear bullying that takes us up to current attempts to cow Iran; in his words, Hiroshima was ‘a criminal attack on an epic scale’.

Pilger’s description of the aftermath is moving and macabre, echoing the harrowing testimony of John Hersey’s seminal account, Hiroshima, and laying bear the full horror of atomic attack. The fallout was literal, metaphoric and enduring: radiation-related cancer claimed lives for decades to come (cases of leukemia didn't peak in the city until 1951), while in the West dissenting voices were ruthlessly suppressed. Aussie journalist Wilfred Burchett raised questions of motive and morality in the Daily Express and quickly found himself ostracised.


The problem with Pilger's piece is that the logic is twisted and arguments second hand, borrowed mainly from late ‘60s revisionist historians. At the height of Vietnam, liberal American academics began to question not only war in Indochina, but the origins of the Cold War itself. The A-Bombs weren’t the final shots of the Pacific War, but the first of the Cold one, they argued. One, Gar Alperovitz, coined the term ‘atomic diplomacy’, indicting his country for sacrificing tens of thousands of lives to send Stalin a veiled message. In other words, an act of war driven by the considerations of peace.

Although it is true to say that the Soviet Union was a factor — and many would argue the Cold War was well underway by 1945 — this is spurious stuff. Pilger analyses the decisions made in August 1945 through the prism of August 2008 to create a picture of America as a nuclear monster, then and now.

But what is the link with Iran? What connects the Truman and Bush administrations? and where is the attempt to understand the American mindset in the summer of 1945? after all, this was a nation tiring of a Pacific conflict of monstrous barbarity, of bloodstained beaches and warships transformed into tangled hulks by kamikaze attacks. In June, US marines had watched open-mouthed as the citizens of Okinawa threw themselves off the island’s cliffs, preferring death to capitulation. As Pilger and Alperovitz have it, Japan was on the verge of surrender. As far as America was concerned, Japan was a nation for whom surrender had no obvious verge.

Truman did not wear the responsibility of atomic power lightly. He heard about the successful tests at Los Alamos soon after inauguration (only days before Stalin did), requesting of the press, "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."

Pilger's main evidence comes from an unlikely source: the US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946. “Air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender,” it claimed. Yes, but the US Strategic Bombing Survey, Curtis LeMay et al, had a fairly obvious axe to grind. And unless I’m missing something Pilger seems to be arguing that conventional bombing would have obviated the need for the A-bombs, which is bizarre and counter-intuitive. 97,000 people died in one fire raid on Tokyo alone. 67 cities were bombed. The suffering was immeasurable.

This is not good history and it’s not good journalism. In making these accusations, Pilger has a responsibility to demonstrate exactly what it would have taken to make Japan surrender, with evidence that extends beyond one eyewash report justifying General LeMay’s salary.

Hiroshima was a monumental human catastrophe and released the nuclear genie from its bottle, but to single it out as ‘murder on an epic scale’ in global conflict that cost almost 72 million lives is a terrible charge to lay at Truman's door. Was Roosevelt a war criminal for what happened in Dresden? What about Churchill? With Pilger there's a conspiracy lurking behind every conspiracy, which is particularly depressing because with PR increasingly a weapon of war, we need insightful, accurate journalism more than ever.


postscript
One question continues to be troubling, but wasn't raised by Pilger. The anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing fell on Friday, only 3 days after Hiroshima. with the shockwaves still hitting the Emperor and his advisors, and Japan's communications infrastructure collapsed, how could a surrender have been offered in that time?

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

More to the point, what the hell is a woodchuck? And while we’re on the subject, why would anyone want to sell seashells on the seashore, where they’re available for free? It’s not a viable business strategy. Not that I wouldn’t like to see someone take it to the Dragons Den, so we can watch Theo Paphites’ head explode.

Aside from the earth-shattering revelation that tongue-twisters are a bit contrived, this post was really supposed to be about Dangerous Jobs for Girls (Wed. 10pm), so back to the programme...

Dangerous Jobs is Channel 4's latest masterstroke, and more proof that if television really is the drug of a nation, as the Disposable Heroes once rapped, then C4 is ketamine. 20 minutes and you’re rocking in a corner, mooning unintelligibly about how much you love cheese.

Only part of the TV screen is visible from the corner of my living room, so I may have missed some key points here but from a distance it looked like some thrusting young turk at C4 had come up with the idea of sending three successful professional women to British Columbia to cut down a tree. Why? Because it was there? Because the Daily Express needed paper for its next 12 issues? A local squirrel had rigged the Big Brother voting?

Boringly, it turned out to be an empowerment issue, presumably a reaction to that well-publicised glass ceiling in the logging industry. It's a quite brilliant idea but for two things (1) there are already people who cut down trees — they're called lumberjacks, and (2) if it's about empowerment and all the participants are older than 17, why is it called Dangerous Jobs for Girls? Only Channel 4 can successfully empower and patronise someone at exactly the same time.

The real victims here are the lumberjacks though. this is merely the latest in a series of blows to their saw-wielding, moose-gnawing machismo. First Monty Python portrayed them as a bunch of wildflower-pressing, scone-buttering jessies, now a bunch of white-collared young guns turns up, demanding to borrow their helmets and have a go on the chainsaw. It if wasn’t so silly, it would be rude — after all, these people already have to wear plaid for a living, and risk life and limb on a daily basis, often literally. While we rant about the missing stapler, they risk going home in a box. Several different boxes.

The big question is, can Dangerous Jobs get even sillier? We can only hope. Deborah Meaden defusing unexploded WW2 bombs in Limehouse would be worth watching.

* Stop press: according to this month's Esquire plaid is IN. Lumberjacks are the new media execs.

For Your Eyes Only, Imperial War Museum

Tucked away among a wealth of James Bond memorabilia at the Imperial War Museum’s nostalgic For Your Eyes Only exhibition are the lilywhite brogues worn by Auric Goldfinger, part-time golfer and full-time megalomaniac. Ian Fleming’s villains were a rum bunch at the best of times, but few were more rum than Goldfinger, a man whose plot to undermine the price of gold was so diabolical and complicated you needed a degree in economics to understand it.

Nowadays Goldfinger would have set up a hedge fund instead, but those were headier times and Fleming’s fantastical tales were hatched in the breathless climate of wartime London. Many of the plots have more than a touch of autobiography about them: as a commander in naval intelligence Fleming divided his time between a covert commando unit codenamed ‘the Red Indians’ and concocting the mind-boggling schemes documented here. One, requiring loopy occultist Aleister Crowley to lure equally bonkers Nazi, Rudolf Hess, to Britain, was worthy of Goldfinger himself.

So where did Fleming get the inspiration for 007? Well, if you’ve come to find the real-life James Bond you may leave disappointed; For Your Eyes Only tantalises without ever answering the question. The suspect list is lengthy. Could it have been the dashing Patrick Dalzel-Job, one of Fleming’s Red Indians? Maybe Fitzroy McLean, SAS operative and fellow Old Etonian? Or even Valentine, Fleming’s decorated father? Valentine Fleming was killed on the Somme in 1917 when Ian was only nine and his obituary, penned by Winston Churchill, is a moving reminder of childhood loss.

The one person Fleming consistently discounted was himself, protesting that the only thing he had in common with Bond was a love of scrambled eggs. And it was true, especially if you overlook the Eton schooling, naval career, spying, gambling, fast cars, faster women and that silver Rolex Oyster.

There are plenty of other Fleming curios on show too, including the mahogany desk from Goldeneye, the Jamaican idyll where he spent three months each year. Sitting at this desk Fleming turned out his 12 thrillers, taking time out to snorkel, paint and perfect those scrambled eggs. The crystal seas were an inspiration for him and his villains, many of whom furnished themselves with a extra layer of fiendishness by living underwater.

Fleming was a doting father and on display are skilful sketches of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the character he created for his son in the days when a flying car wasn’t the last word in environmental terrorism. These touching rarities and the collection of private letters are a real highlight, offering insights into Fleming and his army of fanatical fans. The author replied to much of his fanmail, but even he may have been stumped by a letter from one Bond devotee. “I followed the address provided in your book to SMERSH’s headquarters in Moscow,” wrote the crestfallen fan. “But was disappointed to find a grocers at the location.”

Public Enemy, Brixton Academy, 23 May 2008

In a summer of unlikely ’80s comebacks — Shakin’ Stevens, Indiana Jones, the Conservative Party — the return of Public Enemy to perform It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back could be the most intriguing. Questions filled the Brixton Academy air: Could Chuck D’s party-hardy polemic still raise the roof? Would hip-hop’s court jester, Flavor Flav, still deliver the same lemon-faced lunacy? Had the group’s on-stage paramilitaries, S1W, made it past Customs?

It’s been two decades since Public Enemy’s masterpiece shook up the music world, unleashing a funk-filled production style owing something to James Brown and a bumper bag of samples that owed something to, well, just about everyone else. It managed to be a ferocious aural assault on the injustice of Reagan’s America and the perfect house party soundtrack all at once. But the record has never been performed front to back live before and you could sense a packed Academy wondering what kind of a show they was about witness. From the first thunderous beats of Bring The Noise, Public Enemy put pay to the doubters in seismic style. Next up: Don’t Believe The Hype, five minutes of floor-filling funk and one of rap’s high-water marks.

The group were short of their 1988 complement with Terminator X now the world’s only DJ-turned-ostrich farmer and the group’s svengali, Professor Griff, unavoidably detained by US emigration. The absence of Griff — a kind of rapping Alastair Campbell — robbed the night of a militant edge, but the crowd weren’t really here for the politics. They wanted the house party and that’s what they got: each track unleashed with the same furious energy that made Public Enemy such a force of nature. Flavor Flav prowled the stage, all agitated energy, grinning manically to point out that It Takes A Nation Of Millions had recently been voted number one rap record of all-time — “we couldn’t have done it without you, London!”

Flav’s partner-in-rhyme, Chuck D, may be pushing 50 but his fierce flow has as much conviction as ever. No more so than on Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, a sledgehammer indictment on conscription in the inner cities, given fresh currency by the Iraq war: “They wanted me for their army or whatever/Picture me givin’ a damn, I said never/Here's a land that never gave a damn about a brother like me."

Flav’s giant timepiece showed the album’s 57 minutes elapsing on the last beats of rabble-rousing anthem Party For Your Right To Fight but Public Enemy weren’t finished. More old favourites were dusted off, including Son Of A Bush, Welcome To The Terrordome and He Got Game; there was an impromptu anti-war protest and a stern word from Chuck D not to “let any rappers come here with less than the 90 minute show.” Kanye, Jay-Z — consider yourselves warned.

Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull

Twenty years on from Indy’s last crusade and the all-action archaeologist is back: a little creakier but still sporting the trademark fedora, whip and wry grin. It’s 1957, the height of the Cold War, and Dr. Jones and his cockney sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) are bundled from a car at Area 51, a secret military installation in Nevada. They’ve fallen into the hands of Soviet commandos led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) — a kind of younger, more fragrant Rosa Klebb — who wants the titular Crystal Skull as a powerful new Soviet weapon and needs Jones’s help getting it.

Several breathless getaways later, Indy hobbles back to campus to find himself at the centre of a McCarthyite witchhunt. Enter motorbiking rebel-with-a-cause, Mutt Williams, a Brando-lite played with assurance by up-and-comer Shia LaBeouf. The tearaway needs Indy’s help too, this time finding his mother and her companion Professor Oxley, held captive on the Amazon. In return he offers clues that could lead to the mythical Peruvian city of El Dorado and the Crystal Skull of Atakor.

The skull is an ancient Mayan artefact with the power to scramble minds and it certainly seems to have done the trick with George Lucas and fellow scriptwriter David Koepp (Carlito’s Way). What follows is a mind-bending concoction of anti-communist monkeys, Tarzan-style vine-swinging, killer ants and improbable waterfall plunges. Even old Indy flame, Marion Ravenwood, makes an appearance… could Indy be Mutt’s father? Could Mac be a double-agent? Do we care?

It’s a strangely uninvolving cocktail not aided by some zestless performances. Harrison Ford turns in his least charismatic Indy, while the usually luminous Blanchett is unconvincing as Spalko, with an accent that seems to alternate between the Kremlin and Cleethorpes. Her outfit of slate grey overalls, black leather gloves and fierce black bob doesn’t help: it’s not easy to ooze menace when you look like a motor mechanic on the way to an S&M party.

Lacking the tension provided by a truly sinister villain, the movie fizzles like a soggy sparkler and the presence of so many big name actors only refracts the storytelling in less interesting directions (does it really take the brilliant John Hurt to play Oxley, a mumbling cross between Professor Calculus and Worzel Gummidge?). More’s the pity because the first 40 minutes offer plenty of fun and glimpses of the Indy we know and love — a madcap motorbike chase through academia delivers him delightfully into, and then out of, the clutches of the Soviets — and a scene in a small town that turns out to be an H-Bomb test site is vintage Spielberg: funny, ghoulish and a perfect motif for the terror of the atomic age.

Sadly, though, where the first Indy films paid loving homage to matinée flicks of the ’30s and ’40s, this just feels like a money-spinning exercise. Gone at the smart lines and sharp wit, replaced with nonsensical blathering about ‘the space between space’ and an ending that gives the word ludicrous a bad name. It’s time to leave Indy to the cobwebs: this franchise has become a relic.

Rating: **

The Spleen-osphere

This is my first foray into the world of blogging and I feel like a lamb chop in a lions’ den.

Cyberspace is chock full of sociopaths. People whose mouths foam like an overpoured bubble bath and live in a state of almost spiritual rage. Reading newspaper blogs, I get a strong visual image of the reluctant hack committing opinions to the blogsphere with all the enthusiasm of a Great War tommy clambering out of a trench. Sure enough, moments later, the vitriol arrives. Anonymous, web lunatics with names like ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Stalker66′ funnel months-worth of life's frustrations into a few lines of Homeric rage.

During a travel journalism class at the LSJ a month or so ago, I asked our tutor about blogging and mentioned Max Gogarty. Max, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, was 19 and preparing for a Gap year trip to India. The travel editor of Guardian Unlimited in his finite wisdom asked Max to post blogs during his trip…he agreed, submitting his first on the eve of his departure. It was full of the kind of enthusiasm and navel-gazing you'd expect from a 19-year old. BIG mistake.

A day later the blog became a chasm: you needed to scroll for 5 minutes to reach the bottom of the bile. Most was aimed at Max, some at the travel editor and plenty at his Dad who had written for the Guardian and was accused of nepotism most foul. A sample post: “I get up every morning at 6am, haul myself onto the tube to travel to my godforsaken job, where I sit for 9 hours before heading home for gruel and bed, only to repeat it all the next day. Can I have a blog too?” — that was one of the more supportive posts.

I hadn't realised my tutor was Paul Gogarty, Max’s dad. He didn’t mind talking about it but looked harrowed. He’d had nothing to do with Max’s commission but said he had plenty to do to get his son to come back again. He also posted a piece on the site a day or two later, begging posters to go easy on his son and pointing out that he'd had nothing to do with Max's commission.

…of course, that’s the extreme end of the blog spectrum and lots of comment is not at all pathological. But, to paraphrase the old aphorism, it ain’t hard to tell between an anonymous poster with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.