Lying London Cops get off with a caution - so did Britain's greatest traitor.

Another disorientating day in lovely London town. Damp and mild with bright blue patches around the islands of creamy clouds. Last year, some policemen that guard the House of Commons were found to have fabricated evidence against a senior politician - indeed, one of them pretended to be a member of the public who had overheard the politician swearing at the police and calling them ' effing plebs'.

But all is well in ours the best of all possible police forces. The policemen were let off with a caution by their bosses. They did not intend to lie, concluded their bosses, merely to be misleading or ambivalent.

That's alright then.

Back in 1962, the bosses of MI6 realised that one of their senior spies, Kim Philby, who ran the anti - Soviet desk, was in fact working for the Soviet Union.

They decided to have a quiet word with him to ask him to desist.

If he agreed, he could retire with a pension. The only condition being that he must not do it any more. But he bolted for Moscow before this generous package could be unveiled to him. Talking of Moscow, Beria, Stalin's KGB boss must have wished he had worked over here. The Russians have a more robust approach to treachery, real or imagined. Ask alexander Litvinenko, or his widow anyway.

The link here is obvious. In the UK, the powerful, from wherever they draw their power or however high or low they are, are usually exempt from the sanctions that underpin the legal system for the rest of us.

We are with John Lennon : just give us some truth

Strange goings on in London : Romeo and Juliet, Blue Jasmine and Woody Allen and Estate Agents in disgrace.

There is something wrong in London. The trees are still wearing their green summer frocks. Our winter jackets are out and on but only because we mistakenly think that winter is here at last. Late autumnal gloom should have settled on every soul but there are baffled smiles playing on our lips. More perplexing still is that an English film of Romeo and Juliet is playing, no, grinding, in cinemas in London and it is stultifying, tedious, ridiculous, turgid, risible, depressing, boring and painful to watch and hear.

The English are supposed to be good at Shakespeare. They are supposed to be proud of him. So we wonder why Shakespeare's prose and verse has been hacked away and replaced by bland modernisms. Of course artists are free to experiment with Shakespeare, but surely the idea is to bring something new or different when you do. If the result is that the audience begins to suffer from rigour mortise while watching it then something has gone badly wrong. The centre cannot hold......a vacuous male model of a Romeo kept pouting at the audience. He was pale, anaemic and bloodlessly vain. She was podgy and frumpy. On the big night, he kept his underpants on and she her bra and nightie. Their love lacked any heat or passion. It was literary and fey, foppish and tired. Even the soundtrack sounded insincere. We didn't care when Tybalt was stabbed. He was a pantomime baddy. Benvolio had never been in a fight in his life. A bag of flour could have been cast for all the main roles and it would at least have made us laugh.
This production didn't squeeze a single tear out of us or even the glimmer of a smile. Nurse is supposed to make us laugh, She made us wince when she said to Juliet that she '...certainly had good taste in men'

This review is written more in sorrow than in anger, but also by way of public warning : life is short, and none of us knows what may befall us on the morrow. So don't waste your time on this lifeless corpse of a variation on a theme by Shakespeare.

You could, however, spend an enjoyable hour and a half with Woody Allen and his new film ' Blue Jasmine' - deceit, lies and betrayal are all involved, and they wreak their havoc on the lives of all of us, and Woody knows how to remind us of this with characters and a story that make us feel, phew, there but for the grace of God go I.....

We finish by hanging our heads in shame. Estate Agents in London are covertly but blatantly discriminating against Afro-Carribean applicants for rental accommodation. The BBC caught them red handed. Can you imagine how angry you would feel if someone decided to lie to your face just because of the colour of your skin and a stereotype created in the 1950's. Civilisation rests on flimsy foundations, even here, in one of the finest and most civilised cities on earth.

Even in the rain

Something good going down in Deptford, London SE, something to make you free

A wet and drizzly day in London town. The sun is tired and anaemic, its rays failing to push through the damp lid of pale plastic cloud that rests over our heads. We take so much for granted. We assume certain things are true but they turn out not to be. Life began in the depths of the earth, not in a warm chemical pond on its surface. Oil and gas are not the residue of rotting plants after all, but are mixed up in the geological furnace close to the centre of the earth. Not many people know these new things, and it will be hard for us to throw out the old ideas, but we must. If we don't know where we came from we can't get to where we are going.....ask old Oedipus about that one....

...so, we decide to go down to Deptford, where the great jazz man, rapper, hip-hopper and freedom fighter has his jazz - rap - opera The Legend of Mike Smith running in The Albany Theatre.

Soweto Kinch 

Soweto Kinch is a brilliant rapper and a great saxophonist too, and his theme is that when we are free we are most truly human, and when most truly human we are creative and good - but to be free we need to be strong, because the seven deadly sins are snatching at our souls every day, ripping away our humanity and aiming to leave only the bestiality beneath, quivering ugly and twitching naked and salacious....all this insidious intent tucked away behind the logos, brands and advertising of the so called free market.

Tyrone Isaac-Stewart

But we can be free. We can let others be free. Let them sell their wares. We just have to know what's going on and where we came from and where we want to go........let's talk about it, sing about it, play jazz about it....this should be on the school curriculum.

Ricardo da Silva, Soweto Kinch, Tyrone Isaac-Stewart at the fabulous finish of the show

A long time ago, in Deptford,  Peter the Great lived, learning how to build ships for his Russian Navy. He was there because Henry the 8th built his Navy here. These men were great bastards, tyrants of the worse sort. And Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's younger rival and admirer, was stabbed to death in 1593 in a pub here too. But now something good is going on down in Deptford. Get yourself down there to see it at The Albany Theatre.

And have a look at Deep Hot Biosphere (The myth of fossil fuels) by Thomas Gold. It will open your mind about where we came from.

Read more about East London here 

Hannah Arendt, the movie, stand up comedy in Soho and at the Conservative Party Conference

Elena and I, now married and blissful, have settled back into London life in Barnes, down by dat ole man river Thames, -  he must know somethin', he don't say nothin' he jus' keep rollin' along.

We were amazed to see that someone has made a film about Hannah Arendt, the late great political theorist and one of my heroes from an early age, well, 18, since I read her brilliant book called ' On Revolution', which I recommend to all humans interested in the fate of the world.

The film was gripping, thought provoking, moving.

There was intelligent dialogue, witty conversation, the intimation of mature, affectionate and passionate love between men and women but a complete and refreshing absence of any explicit sex or violence.

It was, however, all about violence and evil, the evil represented by Adolf Eichmann and his role as the man in charge of deporting the victims of the Holocaust to the gas chambers.

If you want to witness courage and independence of mind, and you wish to be inspired by these qualities, please go and reward the producer and director and all involved in this brave and beautiful project. It's on in London now.

Last night, by way of a change, we went to see my best friend's son, Sean Cannon, play support in his new career as a stand -up comedian.

He had a good Edinburgh, and last night at the Soho Theatre he had five funny minutes in support of the main act, which we thought was so bad we shall refrain from mentioning his name in case it offends or we just weren't in the mood for his brand of comedy.

Go and see Sean Cannon. He has his own style, a blend of memoir, confessional and observation of the culture around us that leaves you feeling uplifted as well as amused, more of a proper meal than the chinese take-away that a lot of stand - up provides.

Talking of comedy, impossible not to laugh at the sight of David Cameron, our Prime Minister, trying to look and sound as if he has a dream, a vision for Britain that he feels passionate about. He's on the side of hard working people now, (because they will pay back the bankers' losses faster), so he's going to kick you if you haven't got a job, and that's going to make the country great again, full of hard working people, a land of opportunity for people who work hard enough to send their children to private schools, the sons and daughters from which run the country.
We have  Conservative aristocracy, a Labour aristocracy and a Liberal - Democrat aristocracy, and we get a choice every five years as to which set can have the time of their lives running the affairs of this wonderful country, its wonders being made by everyone here except that lot who pretend to be in charge.

Ah well, easy for us to criticise.......

Kate Middleton about to birth an heir, a bad film, a bad and good culture, robot drones......

Only in London - A Sikh in an antique with female accessory photographing Elena photographing them!

The night air was warm enough to cook up a riot and we decided to take refuge in a film at The Coronet, on Notting Hill Gate. It was Tuesday, which is discount night, so we got in for seven pounds in total. It didn't matter what the film was, or so we thought, but it was so bad it did matter.
A film director should never bore the audience but Sophie Coppola managed to induce rigour mortice in us.
Superficial, over - privileged inarticulate American teenagers feeling sorry for themselves - not a pretty sight or sound. We were forced to listen to them speak: Cool, oh my God, check it out, I love it, like, so cool, shut the .........up bitch. And that's it, honestly, plus the names of their Gods, the brands of clothing they robbed the homes of celebrities for. Then we were forced to watch them break into one celebrity home after another and drool over the contents before they spirited them away in a cloud of cocaine and dope.

If there is hope for the world, it is not with these soft headed victims of consumer culture. Perhaps we should protect children from the dark arts of advertising and publicity? These kids didn't stand a chance against the endless bombardment of their empty heads and loveless hearts with brand propositions posing as a reliable route to the pursuit of happiness.

But America is not just a moronic inferno - Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and space entrepreneur is a dynamic refutation of everything the feckless and feral youth of this movie represent. He is determined to rescue the human species by making it possible to colonise Mars. He is already on the brink of supplying re-usable space rockets to get us there and has done what everybody thought was impossible by succeeding with private space travel.

The same culture encouraged both of these extremes. The worry is that Elon, or Steve Jobs and the other titans of computer code need this vast and vulnerable army of semi-conscious consumers to keep the system afloat while they prepare the rescue plan.

Meanwhile, the drone robots continue to practise as the policemen of the future in the skies of America. One of them went badly wrong yesterday, crashing as it landed in Florida. These are real robots. They are not flown by robotic humans from a basement somewhere. They fly themselves. and when they finally get the hang of it - watch out. The skies will be full of them, and some are bound to malfunction and missile you out. Game over.

Patriots patronise St Mary's Hospital as Kate labours to produce an heir. The Royals are allowed to spend more time in maternity wards than their subjects! A woman we spoke to wanted to know why Kate didn't go to her own hospital instead of filling up ours. Good point.

Back here in Britain, the nation is agog at the prospect of Kate Middleton's imminent birthing of an heir to the throne. It seems that most people though, want this unfortunate infant - you can't choose your parents - to get a proper job when it grows up.

This priceless image free from the internet. 

 Bad luck. Surely this marks the end of the line for the mystery that is monarchy. Behind all mystery and privilege lies mendacity and malfeasance. They don't want you to look in because if you do you'll find something unpleasant, like Prince Charles and his 'voluntary' tax contributions and non - payment of corporation tax on his 'Duchy Originals' - I don't like the sound of them myself. Organic underpants, no thanks!

A sausage roll on another sunny London day, then a few pints and something strong to smoke......

For us, the day got off to a good start.

The sun blazed down from on high and we rolled and rattled along on the Hammersmith and City line to Hammersmith, on our way to Brentford, where way back in 1642, during the civil war, the parliamentary forces fought like devils against the royalist cavalry of Prince Rupert. Our boys - parliament - were eventually beaten back, but no matter, as the royalist fops were thrashed the next day at Turnham Green and democracy won in the end.

How different it all is now.

Back then, muskets, pikes, cannon and swords were weapons that mangled us at close quarter.

Now, the mighty US of A sends its Drones across the skies to search and destroy, firing their missiles down on houses far below in hapless Pakistan, without knowing who is within.

Yesterday it was reported that a Drone had killed seven ' suspected' militants in a house in Waziristan.

'Suspected' but not certain. Why is there no outcry from us, from Cameron or Clegg or Miliband?

Nobody cares that's why. There are no votes in it. These men are not statesmen. They are pastry chefs, serving up delicacies to their overweight people - it was Aristotle who characterised democratic politicians thus. We're beginning to think he had a point.

Meanwhile, and before the Drones from Iran or somewhere arrive over our usually cloudy skies, life must go on, and life is better with a good sausage roll, and there is none better than Patrice Lardon's.

Patrice is as French as French can be - straight out of central casting : jolly, happy and helpful, he makes the best sausage rolls in London, and a range of other pastry type delicacies. Check him out on Facebook under Lardon's Catering.

Later, we take refuge from Obama's foreign policy at The Star and Garter, the best pub in Soho, a fine and proper London boozer, no grub, no cocktails, no waitresses, just good beer and spirits.

Out friends let us smoke their unusual home made cigarettes.

We experience pleasant feelings of a vaguely out of body type and float home like a pair of drunken drones.

Summer's here at last and London lives outdoors again..tattooed and talented

Elena's Mum enjoying her day out in the sun on the way to the Russian Orthodox Church nr Hyde Park

The sunlight streaked across the streets, instantly transforming every building, plant, tree, flower and face. Once there were frowns, now there were smiles. The leaves on the trees waved back at heaven saying thanks be to thee, to thee, and we felt ourselves just carried along on the running tide heading down to Hyde Park.

There, people were peopling, canoodling, cuddling and playing. Families were happy families, lonely people felt as if they belonged after all and children saw how young their parents were and how even younger were their grandparents.

It was impossible not to feel like the luckiest people in the luckiest place on earth, this demi-paradise, this sceptered city, this London of all the peoples.

And it was sad to think that in that other great city, Cairo, they are shaping up for a fight, unable to find a peaceful way of solving the endless argument : the ways of God or the ways of men. God seems to have left economics alone, but his spokesmen on earth have a plan anyway. It doesn't seem to be working, though, for the men that have to make it work, and they want to be listened to. We hope that skulls won't be cracked and that peace prevails. Come on God, intervene, don't just sit there!

The Russian Orthodox Church in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge.

And then came Kamila.

Kamila Pavlova has a head turning tattoo on her back which tempted us to ask her about it, but we ended up discussing her business plan for her new career.

Kamila is a surgeon, from the Czech Republic, and she has been working in the great hospitals of London : Guys, St Thomas's and Bart's, putting ordinary mortals back together again with plastic surgery.

We bowed down with deep respect.

But alas, the labyrinthine structure of the NHS, its tortoise promotion scheme, it's Ariadne's thread that must be pulled through to get a promotion, has left Kamila frustrated and she will leave to go into private practise soon.

Check her out (no pun intended) as she is as charming as she is skilled and clever, and she will make you whole again, using all the arts of the plastic surgeon.