pumpkinstrokemarrow

Newsreaders are something of a dislike on sight category for me. It rankles with me that people who read what is put in front of them should be paid so much and should regard themselves as important - although I grant that reading what is put in front of you with any style is a lot harder than it might look - and also that it might involve fairly unsocial hours. People who chatter on air and people who interview other people on air are chucked into the same bucket. So, Jeremy Paxman qualifies, sight unseen. So, in fairness, I record that there was quite a decent article by him about the state of broadcasting - an abridgement of a keystone lecture in Scotland - in yesterday's Guardian. The thing that I bring away is the difficulty of saying something sensible or worthwhile when you have to scream to make yourself heard above the incessant clatter and clutter of today's media.

He also had the audacity to say that members of the great British public can talk an awful lot of twaddle and that sometimes it would be a good idea to tell them so, rather than giving them fawning air time.

And broadcasting is not all bad. Some branch of BBC has been putting on some films - three that I noticed - from Israel which made a very welcome change from our usual ITV2&3 fodder. One involved a Mossad assassin (I still wonder why we gave asylum to a retired KGB assassin and then made a great fuss when his former employers did away with him) who gets sqeamish about his trade. Along the way we are reminded that some Israelis at least worry about the same sort of issues vis-a-vis the Palestians as we do. So maybe there is hope yet.

I was also led to ponder about how one would feel if one learnt that one's parents had done something dreadful in the past and had hidden it away. I think it would do something fairly dreadful to my self esteem. So much for being rational. Oddly enough, there was a peice a few day's later about the granddaughter of the infamous Himmler and how she coped. Sadly, I forget how - although I do remember that there was something about how his immediate family did know what he was up to and did think that he was doing a good job. I suppose the only way forward would have been for her parents to have faced up to and to have been very ashamed, in public, about what their father had done. Not always the way forward though: there are some crimes - albeit in an entirely differant league - which I think it is better to bury and forget. Not helpful to keep raking them over.

On this suitably solemn note for a Sunday, off to the allotment. Time to see what the pumpkins are up to. What is happening to the many flower shoots on my pet pampas grass? Time to see if the new bamboo is flowering (something which the stuff that pandas eat does once in a blue moon, with catastrophic results, if I remember correctly).