All the News that is fit to print

I realise that I have been somewhat tardy over the last month in posting to my blog, and so as this morning I don't have anything important to do I thought I would do something important and file a new post.

The last month has been rather busy what with starting to plan the wedding, and sorting out my new job, entertaining friends and hanging out with my best friend on his brief stop in London.

I am only one week away from finishing my current job, and I can't wait for it to end. The people are really nice, but I am just extremely bored and am not doing anything I haven't done before. The new job will stretch me professionally as I will be doing new things with new people.

The last four weeks has seen me do a lot of cooking, and in fact I had five people over for Friday night last night. The three courses were very well received, as were the three bottles of red wine! The one thing that would be a nice addition to my kitchen is a dishwasher, but there just isn't room for one and so I have to wash up 12 wine glasses by hand. I don't mind washing plates - I just just am not keen on wine glasses. Don't ask me why!

Talking to someone at work over the cash for honours affair would suggest that the civil servants are in the clear, and it really only involves Labour Party operatives. What I find slightly galling about the stance taken by several MPs in all the main parties is that they were more than happy to take money from their central offices during the election, and yet now are claiming that the Labour party is corrupt. General elections are expensive, and the American experience shows that the first thing a party does once a new campaign finance act becomes law is to hire a room of clever lawyers to find the loop holes. I don't know what the answer to the issue is, as I don't believe in state funding for political parties. Perhaps the best of worse option is to raise the limit, declare all donations over £500 and have an independent body such as the electoral commission scrutinize the spending.

Whilst having lunch with my boss yesterday he asked me what I made of faith based schools. A strange left field question, but my view is that whilst they at times do provide a better standard of education than non-faith based schools, they also result in the ghettoisation of schooling and this has to out weigh any educational standard. There isn't an easy answer to the schooling issue, but the more I think about it, and the more I look at my boss's attempt to get his second child in to the same school as his first child, the more I think that school vouchers are part of the answer - albeit to a slightly different question.

And finally on to the topic of conversation for part of last night's dinner party - the death of Anna Nicole Smith. After much high brow and low brow discussion the consensus view was that it was just a tragedy that someone with a young child died, and that the famous for being famous issue tapped into a wider society focus on big brother reality type television shows. At this point more wine was had by all and we ventured up on to the roof of my apartment block to look at the London skyline in the mist.