There are still social dinosaurs roaming Britain. Read on and discover the Priggosaurus. My advice to this bride to be is don't marry into this family. Not unless you love being at loggerheads with your mother in law forever and a day.

Becoming the POTUS requires innate capabilities that are really only seen in a comic book superhero, and this which I've always known, but was re-emphasised in a Radio programme last night, an inextinguishable Midas touch. Money has to flow ceaselessly, or the campaign withers.

As with every thing, that's not the full list, there's a trinity of requirements needed; the two above, and ingredient X.

Pinning down exactly what it is might as well be like herding cats. Nigh impossible. You have it or you don't is about as a good as an explanation I can give.

Barack Obama has it, and if was an American I'd vote for him in a heartbeat; the full package, gravitas, intelligence, grace under pressure, splendid oratorical ability.

Maybe that's it just there, partly pinned down the fugitive ingredient X. Perhaps.

But I can't see anyone else amongst the gaggle of people flexing in the wings hoping for their turn in the Presidential lime light, who have anything near ingredient X. Bachman and Palin have charisma, Romney for his part has experience, but they're all sans ingredient X.

As far as I'm concerned the 2012 election has Barack Obama's name all over it. Finest candidate by far.

London has been a furnace this weekend. Two days of face to face encounters with great roaring blasts of hot air and a tormentingly hot overheard sun.

I've done things that metaphorically I would n't do, meaning I've forsaken the sunny side of the street for relative mint cool of the shade. Had to. I was baking like a brie yesterday particularly.

Even if it has been two days of walking on hot coals, I've made it to places I don't normally go to, including Tooting, which I only knew of in relation to a beloved French teacher I had who came from there, and from what I saw yesterday, it must be one of the most multi-cultural places on Earth.

After Tooting, came New Malden, London's Koreatown; it really is too, not a handful of shops and lonely restaurants lumped generically by the local media on one of their periodic ethnic safaris, it is as Korean as any place I've seen in Korea itself.

Somehow I then made it to Chelsea Bridge and ran into the Chelsea cruise, a slow drive-past of lovingly restored British cars of the sixties and seventies, Ford Anglias, Escorts, Granadas, Minis, and a static parade of iconic American cars: Chevy pick-ups, Moby Dick sized Lincolns, Impalas, Mustangs. All beautifully painted, all handsomely refurbished, and throaty enough when the engines kick to bring tears to any petrol head or Americophiliac like me.

Before my legs split like matchsticks carrying an elephant, I made it to Battersea Park. To my eternal shame this park is one I'd only visited once before, possibly in the late eighties or early nineties. The park is a dream: a magical Peace pagoda by the river, with resplendent Buddha figures serenely watching London at play and rest. and where last night and again this evening, I saw people in complex, probably painful lotus like positions, meditating.

As I left this evening ( I had to go again to confirm it was as entrancing as I remembered on Saturday - it is) there was sound of a tenor sax floating into the trees and over the Thames. It could have been a movie; the protagonist walks away under the spreading shade of the trees, content and at one with everything

Christopher Hitchin, who is fast catching up with Bellow as the writer whose books I feel compelled to press everyone I meet into to reading, or if they don't then take me off their Christmas card list, has an article in a recent Vanity Fair on losing his voice to the pernicious cancer that's stolen it's way into him.

But, as is the case with the Hitch, there's always much more; and this is an article on how to talk, how speech influences prose, and the utter joy of those deep, memorable conversations that happen between friends.

How do we realise the value of a transcendental conversation? When the likelihood of one occurring again fades, even jeopardised, or worst of all, recedes into an ever diminishing point, until there's nothing but darkness. That's when. Absence, not presence.

Hitchin's quotes a wonderful piece of verse to show this. It's from an adaptation of Heraclitus by the Victorian poet, William Cory

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

Is n't that great? I tired the sun when I was a student and still do thirty years on

It's twenty six years, almost to the day in fact, since I first saw the E Street Band break across a stage with the energy of a cavalry charge, the stamina of stream engines, and a joie de vivre that by rights ought to be bottled and handed out as tonic for the down-hearted. They were electric.

That concert was memorable for all the right reasons. I had never been to a stadium sized concert before, and this was at the old Wembley. The venue was brimming with thousands, all of us fizzing with eagerness the way champagne does in that nano-second before the cork's pulled.

I was very tired. I'd only had a few hours sleep that morning after finishing a Friday night shift at the restaurant I worked at; so too worn down to manage hours of standing, I persuaded the friend I was with ( a Canadian I think) to find somewhere we could sit.

Eventually we flopped on to a pair of seats, a few rows above the tunnel and one row below a slightly raised tier. This, we clicked moments before the gig opened up to Bruce counting the band in, was the Royal Box, and popping at the seams with Rock Royalty: in there was Sting, Ringo Starr, and George Michael, who was absolutely in the zone, head-banging and singing his heart out.

No doubt there were probably other members of the Rock Royal family in there, but it's just these I remember.

Next to me was a man on his own wearing a long, vibrant bandana, who I was initially sceptical of, too much the rock wannabe about him, I thought. Then I forgot all about him; the E Street experience does that to a person.

I only clocked him again when he moved from his seat and disappeared in the intermission between the band closing their set and the expected crescendo of encores to follow. I imagined he'd be heading out to Wembley Park station before the crowds poured out. Except I saw him again, this time striding on to the stage with the rest of the band for the encores. I'd been sat next to Steve Van Zandt.

That memory has n't gone, it's blurred a little around the edges, put that down to edge and distance from the event, but what I've never forgotten from that, or the other seven times I've seen the E-Street Band in full flight is that sense of utter exhilaration, every nerve intoxicated, every sense alive. Swashbuckling licks and riffs played by a band, never anything but at the top of the game, not their game, I mean the Game.

Today, I woke to hear the motor of the band, it's dynamo, Clarence Clemons had died. RIP. Those sax solos will never leave me.

I'm still dazed by the horror of the photo I saw in yesterday's Guardian. Something that I had n't spotted yesterday was that the man who had brought about this slaughter was actually taunting those around him, brandishing the victim's body parts like perverse trophies. What a nightmare world, we're in.

Up till the moment I began flicking through the Guardian magazine, I'd been toying with the idea of somehow exploring the notion of the epiphany.

A friend from my Saturday morning yoga class had got me thinking on these lines this after she'd said that the moment she realised she had to move - her epiphany in other words - came without warning in Holland Park. That same afternoon, she went to the estate agent and the ball started a-rolling.

Revelation to revolution in one day. So that was what I had in mind to write about; that sign, that moment, the flash of light. Then, I opened the Guardian magazine and stopped.

Inside was an incredible article, which even putting aside my true Guardian loyal reader's mantle I don't think any other newspaper would have the courage to publish, and certainly not without some gratuitous gesture to say how daring they were. A gesture I've seen too often which replaces any impact with basking self adulation of how brave which ever paper it is believes itself instead.

The Guardian is n't like that.

This article was numbing. Stupefying. Photos taken by front-line photojournalists, briefly captioned, of shattering scenes of horror from the wars that stain this planet. There's one I can't shake. A black and white shot of a glazed killer with a knife gripped between his teeth in the manner of a cartoon pirate, but this was diabolical, bandoliered with bullets, and taken in one of those traumatised West African countries, Liberia or Sierra Leone, which have been tortured and tormented by war and death. Riven with savagery. Bereft of mercy.

This man - this pure killer - has an unfathomable madness, something deeper and wilder than blood lust about him. Gripped in one of his hands he's holding a severed hand like a sportsman might hold a trophy; in the other, and I'm still horrified by this, he's clutching the genitalia of whoever it is he's slaughtered. It is unimaginable.

The rhetorical questions have to stop. There's no point any more in theorising emptily why people do this. It has to be fought. And this is where I've had my epiphany: I'm rejoining Amnesty International.

This must be THE website that every Brit has secretly dreamed of. You want to know where the rain is, then go here - Rain Today Perfect. Thanks to my Anglo-Swiss work mate for pointing it out to me this afternoon.

It's only a few weeks since I volunteered to be interviewed on a middle aged man's experience of well...middle age.

Sat in front of a softly spoken, occasionally questioning, American psycho-therapist, I talked for almost an hour about this life period I'm in travelling through.

Good for the person listening as he needed this for a research project; good for me to be able step out of the daily cacophony and put things into perspective. I've perhaps a more ordered and sequenced mind than many, but that's not to say the cataloguing does get out of order from time, and an opportunity like this can only help.

I had mixed reasons for putting myself forward: intellectual curiosity, what would I learn not just about me but from the situation itself; an actual psycho-therapist's study offers the chance to sink deeper into the world of leather couches, Freud and those nervy, worried characters that live in Saul Bellow's world. Call it empathy.

Then, there was a sense of altruism. The need to leave something, however momentary, behind something that another in years hence might draw from, maybe nourishment, even hope, or just weary recognition that the place they're in is the the place that so many of us have walked through.

The desire to leave a trace behind after I've gone is very powerful for me. I live on my own, have no kids, no immediate family so there's not the chance of a familial memory being passed along if only for a few generations.

But that's not one tenth of it for me. It is for me the need to leave footprints in the sand that hold their shape after the first wave has swept in, the one which traditionally sweeps away all evidence of who passed.

And it has to be a foot print that someone can benefit from, whether it be the sense I referred to in the last paragraph, or simply from someone reading this blog. Something lives on. Rumbles on if I take up the cue of the thunderstorm that's edging over West London right now.

Let's get the preliminaries over and answer any lingering questions that might be there since the Girl in Damascus furore broke. My blog. Is it really mine or is it a half baked vanity project and exercise in self love penned by a show off doctoral candidate with no sense of empathy ?

It's mine. Every word scraped out of the blank page of a laptop is brought to the surface by me. Wriggled into sentences by me. Spell-checked by me. All mine.

Plenty of late nights this week getting home late from various things: yesterday the baffling, yet compelling in meditative way, Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, that focused on the mundane and routine in a small Calabrian town, but transformed for me at least the art of charcoal making into something fascinating; then this evening an avant garde music concert, a soundscape as it was termed, and it was, a melange of indecipherable voices, running water, bird song and off time percussion, which took place in Covent Garden's Swiss Church.

So I've had my cultural vitamins this week along with this booster I found in a BBC online article on Carl Jung; "The afternoon of life must have a significance of it's own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of Life's morning"

I love the pithiness of that statement. Unforgettable and incontrovertible . So why have n't I seen it as a tee shirt slogan then?

Chiswick may be one of the most middle class areas in London, and possesed at times of it's own brand of ennui and sharp-faced moodiness - Arlington Park, the fictional suburb in Rachel Cusk's marvellous book of the same name, deftly sweeps up like leaves in a breeze the same deadening sense of frustration and inner terrors that throbs under the skin of this real-life suburb, but all that aside, Chiswick is a riot of nature. It's bursting with vitality.

It's been a cavalcade of sphinx-like foxes on the lawns of Chiswick House; fist-sized insects whirring through mid-evening skies; swallows darting and weaving, before tucking themselves under house eaves; the ubiquitious legions of squawking, charging parakeets; then a dainty pair of married Goldfinches skittering from bush to bush down the street; and Swifts cavorting and tumbling in endless arabesques; a fat, round water vole hurtling as fast as it's tiny piston like legs could take it into the undergrowth by Chiswck House lake; even a timid mouse popping it's head in and out of a piece of tubing. I have been dazzled.

Not a corner turned without something unexpected. Urban safari on my doorstep. Beat that.