JOHNVAGABONDAGAIN

One year. In spite of his increasingly transparent delusions – the word ‘failings’ is far too gentle – Vladimir Putin has not been defeated and the war drags on. They said the Great War would be ‘over by Christmas’ after only a few months of fighting but it took four weary years with countless white crosses and the flower of Europe’s manhood lost to bring the madness to a close. When I was at school, we had a war museum containing artefacts pillaged from battlefields. I still recall seeing a German helmet from WW1 with a neat entrance hole where the wearer’s temple would have been and a gaping occipital exit. As the song says, when will they ever learn? A German language film loosely based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 bestseller ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ (in German, ‘nothing new in the West) captured the terror and futility as it tracked the progress of German volunteers in the last year of the war and won seven BAFTAs, including Best Film. It’s a chilling, difficult watch not...

It's been a while. Here I am, ashamed and guilty. I have been editing, examining and doing odd jobs here and there. On examining, once again, flushed with success and repetitive strain injury, my team has done sterling work, setting another battalion of the young into their next adventure at university - few real problems this year. It 's emotionally a bit flatlining - one works for days on end, dreaming of little red marks on a computer screen. Then, nothing. It takes its toll. Imagination, even here, looks dun-coloured and wan, since I find myself asking the unanswerable. Was I fair, always? And, what now? The grind of the surf gives way to the freedom of the ocean where I get to think new thoughts or even process old ones. Also, do I have anything very original to say? Everybody has written about transgender rights, school shootings, Putin's war and the absurd Partygate. So, what else could be written about that's really unusual , really edgy, really...different? Per...