The deceitful face of hope and of despair

I was thinking about calling this post "Leaving on a jet plane", which seems appropriate for a number of reasons. I've been suffering from jetlag all week, having arrived back from the UK on Sunday. Jetlag does strange things to your mind, not least because it involves (often) being inadvertently awake at 3am which as you know is the worst time to be awake if you don't want to be.

Yes, jetlag is that contemptible middle class affliction, so you may say I deserve no sympathy (and the cure for jetlag is not to fly); but what it really feels like is suffering from a week-long hangover complete with all those feelings of disorientation, intermittent self-loathing, miserabilism, and helplessness. After the plot to blow up planes mid-air was uncovered this week, my 3am preoccupation was how angry and impotent I feel about the fact that although clearly UK foreign policy is a powerful impetus for nihilistic religious maniacs with murder in their hearts, Tony, and I voted for him in 1997 (or at least, for the lickspittle David Lamy, in whose constituency I was living at the time), persists in his egomaniacal self-serving refusal to bow to anyone's advice, no matter how sensible, at the cost of the lives of hundreds of Lebanese civilians to date, a third of whom have been children.

That last fact puts my own silly preoccupations into perspective.