Guardian

There was a rather striking picture in yesterday's Guardian of people strolling about on the roof of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, that vanity project of our once loved leader, Tony Blair. The image left is not quite as striking, but it does give the idea.

An image which left me wondering how I, as a sufferer from vertigo, would do up there. I am very bad at standing at the edges of things where there is only a handrail between me and the drop, be the handrail ever so substantial. Even worse when there is no handrail. Sometimes bad on staircases in stairwells. On the other hand, I am usually OK in aeroplanes and I was OK for the first couple of goes on the Millennium Wheel. Usually OK inside tall buildings with lots of plate glass windows. So would the illusion of solid ground under my feet be enough to keep me out of trouble on the roof of the big tent?

All this diverted me from my irritation with the lengthy lead in the Journal section written by a lady MP, moaning about the lack of provision for lady MP's who are expecting or who have young children. I dare say she had a point, but one might think that MP's had more important things to worry about just now than the expenses payable to MP's who have to hire child minders in order to carry out their constituency duties.

Next thought was that maybe we should change the rules so that people can be an MP on a job-share basis. A lot of the work, at least of rank-and-file, working MP's, might be thought to be rather well suited to that sort of thing.

Next thought was that we often complain about the legislature churning out far too much legislation, far too much for the rest of us to keep up with, with the subsidiary complaint being that a lot of it is intended to sit on the shelf until activated on the whim of the minister of the day. So a good thing about this Brexit business is that government has more or less ground to a halt and the flood of legislation has dwindled to a trickle, at least for a while.

Rather more depressing was the article at the end of the Journal about how we are in hock to the Saudis, who apparently foot the bill for about one third of our large current account deficit and who, in consequence, now own large chunks of the UK. So the story from the Saudis is that you help us with whacking the Yemenis or we will pull the plug on your trade deficit, which would do very bad things to our standard of living, at least in the short term. Help here including not just selling the warplanes involved but also keeping them up and running, irrespective of where they might be running to and what they might be doing when they get there. Not much doubt about which way Johnson would jump on this one, but what about Corbyn?

Depressing that we should be so dependant on such people.