Snake oil salesman, your end is nigh. Find a new line of work...you're obsolete my poor-hearted babies, out of touch with what really heals. Mother nature's got a cure for aching hearts, wounded souls, for the fried and frazzled. Yes, this works, or as I ought to properly say these work. I know. I've benefited. Pre-packed, portable, no complicated Latin name either, and certainly not taken with water every four hours. I'm talking here about Cats.

A tonic on four legs...pick-me-up wrapped in fur...Big pharma has nothing as efficacious...not a thing. Proven too...evidence you ask ? Aloof, solitary, secretive, and these creatures promote good health ? Here's the story

So true, so very true. I've no cats of my own (there's not room to swing one where I live which is why; and that's another reason for me to buy a new flat. Need space) nevertheless I've stayed in houses where the owners have them. Maybe it's something in the air, osmosis, something so subtle it's virtually invisible...don't know, but I've inevitably dropped from high gear into low then to neutral and calmness whenever one of their cats has ambled into sight.

Wonder what would happen if all of these frantic City dealing rooms each had a couple of cats strolling around ? Now that would bring a bit of sanity back to matters....or would it ? Maybe the dealers are simply incorrigible and can't relax under any circumstances...at least not without illegal help.

In order to buy a property you need to sell one; that's the usual run of things, unless that it is, you've got alternatives, basically a surplus pile of cash sitting quietly somewhere unused. I don't have the luxury of the latter, so if it's a-moving I'm looking at, then it's the former or nothing. And in the odd linear style of things that need to be done: I have to get my place ship-shape, or at least attractive enough to win the eye of an estate agent.

Start small, build gradually, that's my motto. Break a task down into small parts, move from one to another then another and before you know there's space. Bite-sized achievements. And so far, it's working. Flat looks bigger already and that's just simply picking clothes up off the floor. If I can start cleaning things...

It's the time of year now when I dust down an old enthusiasm that's becoming as venerable and as predictable as say the Druids celebrating Spring Equinox at Stonehenge. Perhaps it's the lightening evenings, the promise of longer, balmier times that makes my nose twitch, ears prick up, and a hefty intake of confident promising to everyone that, yes, this is the year, no, it really is, when I'm going to sell my flat, hoist anchor and move to somewhere larger and more salubrious.

I can only imagine that most of my friends silently tune out the moment they hear me pipe up that: "I've been viewing places...seen a couple, one was n't bad...but nothing to really get me going...". Must be like groundhog day for them; Spring's truly here, he's been talking about moving....

Presumably, the same emotion is experienced by the myriad of estate agents in Chiswick (that's the area I've been looking over for property for years - I know the streets better than any cabdriver and certainly better than anyone who actually lives there). The Estate agents door swings open, they look up from their desktops, or slide a quick glance whilst buttering someone up on the 'phone, and there I am, the regular herald of Spring.

I do look at places -some years, hundreds, a handful other years. It's even reached the point where I imagine what it'll be like living in one. But that's as far as it's ever got; typical man, can't commit. And I can't.

As a keen student of the latest business jargon, I offer for your delight and delectation - Negative Brainstorming. For those times in your business life when you want to conjecture what would (will in most cases) go wrong with the new product bucking at the stable door to be let out, or that unruly system change, you hunker down and negatively brainstorm. If there's ever a companion piece to that other yukster bus-speak buzz word, Going Forward, it's this.

"It does n't get any better than this..." was how a friend in the US described Barack Obama's speech on the great touchstone subject of America - Race. I agree; this was a speech that really few politicians have the candour or courage to consider, let alone make.

The easy life approach would have been honeyed words, ringing rhetoric and likely no more; credit to Obama, he sedulously avoided this, the usual default, and faced this taboo topic head on. Spelling out the all too easy deniable realities cleanly, carefully and confidently carries weight beyond that of a politician striving office, this is possibly the wake-up speech for America. Tough talking, honest talking, about the raw nerve of American life pulls it all back in to focus; how else do you heal if you don't know what ails, or worse you actually ignore it.

This speech is one of those rare speeches that has a life beyond the simply the day it was made: I expect at the very least to see it anthologised, as I furthermore expect it to coax people to confront realities and work out ways to overcome them, and surely it pushes Obama a little nearer the nomination.

Here it is in it's entirety:

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain.. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U..S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS..

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding..

This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough.. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

I'm bleeding money. There's a hole in my wallet, got to be, money's dripping everywhere, and not staying where it should. Another inch on my salary...that's all it would take.

I don't have kids, but if I did and I was asked to suggest maxims to live by then then it would be these sentiments, the powerful words of the Italian novelist, Natalie Ginsburg, who wrote that children should: "not be taught the little virtues, but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbour and self-denial; not desire for success but a desire to be and to know". It's never too late in life to come across such energising observations. I've been cheered all day since stumbling across them. Serendipity - thank God for it.

I like to use a lot of words when, really, just one would do the business. Drown with adjectives, spray with verbs, douse 'em in nouns, finally sprinkle with polysyllables, and trust to the heavens that whoever it is listening or reading leaves impressed (minority of instances), or flicks on that blank-faced stare before saying what was that all about?

Thumb that dictionary and release those imprisoned words that's my mantra. But when I baffle at least it's the volume and word order rather than the obscurity of the words themselves that are the roadblocks to any kind of understanding. You have to wade through the treacle here.

Will Self is the obverse: great penmanship, delicate sentencing...that lexicon though...where's that come from ? There's capsule sized review of his on the back of The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane that's laudatory - it's a great book and nothing less deserved - where he's acclaimed it as "...a beautifully modulated call from the wild, that will ensorcell..." That will what ? I've never heard that word. Put a hit counter on that and I doubt it'll rack more than a few score hits in as many years. You could probably infer from the sorcell bit that's it suggesting otherworldly charms (it does mean that actually), but why not just say it's bewitching, strangely endearing ?

Confound with a snowstorm of words, or just one hard to fathom. What a choice.

What makes a great street? Why do some streets soar and swoop with incidents and stories and etch themselves into untold numbers of consciousness whilst others don't?

And it's glib to say that it's down to location: heart of the city streets can be as cold and unrewarding as we would automatically expect a street near a canal or tucked away on some quiet industrial estate to be.

But it's a fact: some streets have it and others don't - heart-racing, chest-fluttering excitement that's seeped into the stones and buildings and soaked up by thousands, millions of people paying homage to a great street, wandering it's surfaces, dazzled by it's stories told and yet to be.

Where are the great streets ? Those sirens luring us from all points of the compass, calling, pulling, imploring...I have a list of favourites, and in no order of precedence, they appear merely as they come to mind:

• 2nd Avenue NYC, especially that slice between 56th and 44th street; the buildings are low in stature for New York; yet enormous in character, buildings that seem to have popped fully formed out of an Edward Hopper painting but with vivacity and life. The sky is always different over this street, always; cobalt blue modulating to a milky white at the edges.

• Beale Street - Home of the blues

• Champs Elysee - a glissade, virtually perfectly linear, bright as Capri sunshine during the day, bathed with elegant light during the night. A cascade of brake lights and horns and a never -ending jumble of people. I love it; I love being surrounded by humanity.

• Oxford Street - loathe it...yes, of course I do...but find some way of tearing me away from it. I'm sunk into the tar of the road, it's my footsteps pattering on the pavement hour after hour.

Now for a lesser known. Then should the term great street be solely the mark of a major thoroughfare, great is subjective, it's what you make of it, and here's my other great street:

• Kensington High Street - no other street in London has as much of me in it's DNA as this. Every paving stone holds a memory, every twist and kink in the street an adventure. My life in London unfolds along this street like a never-ending film. The sacred flame of my happiest ever time burns here along this street in a small wine bar. Unforgettable.

What are the great streets is as crucial to now and understand as it is to explain what makes them what they are. What are yours?

You have to judge things ooh so finely on the tube: know where to stand to get a seat, know which carriage is the nearest the station exit, and of course, just what to do if a pregnant looking woman enters.

The latter is the hardest, there's a series of internal questions that need to be worked through: are they really pregnant when a seat is really what they want, (or may not - one heavily pregnant woman once thanked me for offering up my seat, but " ..if I sit down then I'll never get up again, so I'll stay standing but thanks anyway..."); or are they actually overweight and don't want attention drawn to that; then again, could it simply be a case of bulky clothes, how the folds drop and so on, so they seem pregnant but they're actually not.

Let's skip the wheat from the chaff sorting and look at what happens on the tube, what's the reaction? Usually there's a man rising and then a pregnant woman settling a few moments later on to a warm tube seat.

But the experience is n't as straightforward, there are variation, different tube lines seem to have different approaches. District line trains rolling in from genteel west London usually have a brace of elegantly attired suits slipping off their seats and offering them up with a flourish and a steadying arm; the Hammersmith and City can be a sulkier line in many ways, a creative, bohemian sulk by the way, artist in extremis sensibility, but once they've pushed their shades down and twigged there's a mum to be rocking on both feet and looking weary, then they'll pop out of their seats and point to the free space. No words, gestures only. Central Line, my favourite; the moment, the very instant a pregnant woman steps into the carriage, men zoom out their seats like a row of champagne corks going off. Even if she only had sex last night and the egg's still busy fertilising, Central Line men just seem to know.

Despite the drought of postings (explanation in today's other post), I have been putting pen to paper whenever possible. Here' ssomething I drafted for an IMDB forum.

"Tempting, without doubt, to think of UNTRACEABLE as a high tech variant on Silence of Lambs, but don't fall for it. Too easy and wrong. Could n't be a greater difference

Hannibal Lecter, is better considered as almost an aristocratic killer; charming in his extraordinarily malevolent way, slyly humoured, and mannered enough to choose fine wines. A very private sociopath, he is the chess player of murderers. I cannot imagine him courting attention. His playpen is the battle of minds. A villain from a time before instant fix celebrity, before Reality TV and before the internet created the possibility for twenty four hour global voyeurism. And this is where I think a number of commentators on this thread have lost themselves expecting UNTRACEABLE to retread the road that Hannibal walked.

UNTRACEABLE is one of the best - and watched properly - most thoughtful discourses on the shadow side of the internet. A baby-faced killer uses the thing he knows best - the internet - to shock a world and at the same time make them complicit in his own crimes. A cyber-killer who encourages spectacle. How twenty first century can you get ! This is the dark side, the very dark side of social networking and the inherent voyeuristic creepiness of millions. Seems strange to say but there can't be that many steps from voting someone out of the Big Brother house to this.

This is a narcississtic age intoxicated by the notion of quick celebrity. UNTRACEABLE is where it meets the anti-matter of warped thinking and sadism. It had me riveted in my seat, and sweat stains on my shirt. For a movie to work for movie, it needs to make me think. This really does because the ingredients for the world it posits lie all around...and how frightening is that...

In terms of the specifics: Dianne Lane got it just right, nothing overwrought in her performance, played it very well. Punchy, well handled script. Good movie. Put it on your to see list"

Hold on, folks. I've not forgotten you. Just that I've been staying elsewhere for a few weeks where there's no decent internet connection. Believe me, my fingers have been twitching; there's stuff I want to post.