If it had n't have been for one of my Italian friends who has spent a long time on and off in the US, I would have in all probability gone to the end of my days, entirely ignorant of George Carlin. In the hour or so since I looked at the first Youtube link she sent me, I've taken the cool-aid. I'm a convert.

See what I mean: Ten Commandments and Modern Man

The things you hear that really matter not one whit and life would have passed on without them, but you heard nevertheless, and now they won't leave you.

Agree that's a complicated and infelicitous sentence in a way, yet that's what happened to me this afternoon.

I overheard a young woman say to her two friends at the table next to mine outside Sheffield's Millennium Gallery cafe, perhaps flippantly, perhaps even seriously - could after all be a nugget that she'd picked up from a magazine lifestyle quiz - that almost 60% of all couples who visit IKEA are quarrelling by the time they reach lamp section. Bloodbath by the bulbs? Interesting.

It's got to be anecdotal, and if there was any empirical data available, I'd be whizzing it straight off to Ben Acre's Bad Science column in the Guardian hoping he'd slice and dice it on the dissection table.

Of course, the next time I'm in an IKEA, I'll be on alert by the time I reach the Lamps.

A beautiful evening. Another hour or so lounging in Holland Park. But next year, I want to be in my own place with at least a balcony. Somewhere that I can walk to easily to bath in fresh air.

Something's happened to Holland Park's Parakeet population. They're not there. Vanished. They've been scratched off the canvas of the park.

Sitting in the Dutch Garden, I'd always glimpse a zap of lime green dash from tree to tree, or at least hear them squeaking and squawking.

And now, nada. So where are they? On holiday? Gone somewhere warmer? Pitched camp and headed for another part of town?

I'm going the other way to most of my friends and peer group; the older I get, the more liberal I become. However, this is in no way a binding statement, it ebbs and flows, flexes the way a muscle contracts and expands, depending on the situation, and my sense of natural justice, because it's in this area that my liberality is most tested.

Many wrong actions can be understood; some can even be excused in the specific sense that we know way some one did something, that the root cause was lack of education, or unintentional ignorance, or done in good faith, but then backfired.

The line in the sand - my line in the sand - beyond which people should not trespass, effectively the point where my liberality is replaced in a flash with the overwhelming understanding that punishment is called for and retribution demanded, was breached on Friday by the heinous, inexplicably evil and conceited (I'll explain what I mean by conceited in a sentence or two) Norwegian right wing extremist.

Can this man sleep at nights? Perhaps. There's probably a flush of toxic satisfaction coursing through him. But I don't want that, I don't like the notion this man may be at peace with himself, I want him to be haunted by this, tormented the way Lady Macbeth is, every moment, waking or otherwise, a nightmare.

Conceited? Yet again, the world has been set back and lives lost prematurely, savagely, through the arrogance of someone who feels he knows better. That they can sacrifice someone else for their illogical, paranoid aims. For them, we are but abstractions, nothing more.

How often have we seen this? Been made to suffer? The temerity is unspeakable. No empathy for others, not a shred. No sense, no feeling that others are not just flesh and bone, that they are, we are, each of us, a unique consciousness, and to be respected for that. That no one else can decide our fate, or sacrifice us on their mad altar.

I'd rather this man was pushed out of the police station, the door bolted behind him, and then made to walk into a shocked and bereaved Norwegian nation to face their anger.

How ironic, and probably predictable when you think about, that in all my travels to India, across Asia, throughout Central and South America, I was never bitten by a single mosquito. Other bitey things, yes, but never by anything from the Culicidae Family. Heard them countless times, seen them whine around other people, slapped the critters away whenever I've had to, but never has one dined on me.

So, to be bitten in Italy at the weekend, and bitten multiple times, in one of the world's most developed and civilised countries, has an ironic quality deeper than any echo sounder can probably pierce.

The Italian mosquitoes loved me; penny sized red weals all over, including to my embarassment, one on the tip of my schnoz. It's red enough to make me be seen in the dark.

Off for a week in Milan. I intend doing nothing apart from reading, writing, and thinking

Why has Rebekah Brooks hung on to her job and two hundred others have n't ? Answers on a postcard, please.

There's something nefarious going on. It's murky. Either she's acting as a firewall to protect James Murdoch from the toxicity that's billowing out because of this scandal - there's more than one suggestion going round that he knows more than he's letting on - or she has some hold over him, and so he dare n't get rid of her, or risk the whole house come down.

News International has been an intimidating, menacing presence for decades in Britain. The politicos, especially the Tories, have kow-towed to Murdoch abjectly, he's more or less had free reign to pull any levers he's wanted to; it's always the veiled threat whispered in the ear, that NI has some dubious story, or will concoct one, and then mobilise an army of outraged citizens on the back of that, and so they've all been too fearful to take him on, other than a few individuals and the Guardian.

That's been blown apart this week. There's no fear. It's liberation from media tyranny that's hobbled the British body politic for years. Nevertheless this man is too cunning, I can't see him being humbled by this.

I'm very proud of the Guardian's lone stand and tenacity in plugging way at this. I've been a Guardian reader since I was 18. It's the only principled paper in the UK

It's wonderful the NOTW has had the plug pulled. But it's little more than a human sacrifice; keeps the regulator appeased so Murdoch can absorb the remainder of BskyB. Money matters more than morality for News International. This is lip service.

All the prejudice and bigotry, the kangaroo court manners, the menace and veiled threats, the tyrannical behaviour, which make up the NOTW's call-sign, I'm convinced will get recycled into a Sunday version of the Sun. This thing is hydra-headed.

Still there's something of a Tahrir square like mood of celebration in a certain part of West London right now.

And as a Guardianista, there's only one way to end: it's the Guardian wot done it...

The fault line between Mammon and Morality has been cruelly revealed this week.

Even for a newspaper as synonymous with scandal, skulduggery and controversy, hacking into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl, has to be the worst thing the News of the World has done. Ever.

Nor does it stop there, wicked enough as that it is. More is being exposed by the minute.

The desire, the madness in fact, for profit, for bylines, for that inch further than the competition can reach, has fanned this immorality.

Aided and abetted by vile self-regarding newsroom braggadocio - some of those responsible regarded themselves as "Princes of Darkness" completely untouchable, beholden to no one. Able to do whatever they wanted and to revel in it.

It is as amazing, as it hideous, as it is heartbreaking for the victims. How could they? Employee behaviour takes it's steer from the management in every company I've worked at. Don't tell me it was rogue individuals flying under the radar here. Impossible.

What compounds the horror is that the News of the World's tentacles have extended into the Police now. There's a sense to me of veiled threats left by this newspaper for anyone daring to say no to this monster. Don't think about it, or if you do, expect the banner headline equivalent of a severed horse's head on Sunday. This is mafia newpaper ethics.

Unforgivable. But will Cameron actually do anything, other than mouth outrage?

It's a little after nine on Sunday morning and dimly, I'm catching the sound of Fontella Bass singing "Rescue Me". Somewhere there's a party yet to finish. I don't imagine it'll be soon, Fontella's now been replaced by Curtis Mayfield's "People get ready"

My kind of music, just not my time of day.

These are dark economic times, but London seems, in some areas at least, to running very strongly against the tide.

There is an incredible surge in building across all points of the compass; Stratford has the Olympic site rising up like a giant mushroom after the morning rain; the City is almost in some form building extremis, it's either raising skywards like the Pinnacle and The Shard, with more skyscrapers in between those, or it's coming down to make way for another. Builder's dust in the City is now as ever-present as sand in the Sahara.

We have a brand rail line in process of being threaded like a shoe lace around, through, and mostly underground London. The streets are going to be open trenches for years.

I love the sense of living in an ever changing urban landscape. Nothing's static. An ancient city still marching forward, contours and skylines altering by the second. It's still the urban jungle feel; what's going to behind that next corner.

Yet, even inside this whirling ball of dust, steel beams, noise, closed off streets, diggers and cranes, nature seemingly thrives and if it's anything to go by what I saw yesterday by the Tower of London, making a comeback. In the evening sky, I saw a rolling, moiling vortex of Starlings pirouette for several minutes over the Minories. I love those birds.