The FT and the WSJ are the new Funny Pages

Grotesque notion that Iceland should find themselves compelled to approach those vultures the IMF. I know they had a flutter and lost, and so theoretically all is fair at the poker table. But the IMF? Telling proud Norse folk that they should "...like, totally cease social provision, deregulate their economy, flog off their natural energy and marine resources wholesale at bargain prices to a favoured multinational and offer their daughters and cuter sons up at auction..." etc. No, that's not right, and about halfway through tomorrow morning I think that nation will remember that for them there is an alternative.

Viking, being also a verb, is like riding a bicycle, only more so, I would imagine, in that once it's in your genetic inheritance the skill and instinct comes back in a trice. Remember the Cod War? No, I don't either, quite, but all I've read suggests they gave us what for.

The solution is close at hand. Iceland, may I offer you London? The Thames is navigable for container ships as far as Tilbury, gunboats and lighter craft can probably get as far Richmond with no bother, depending on the tide. Don't worry about the Royal Navy, they're still tied up out east. Army ditto. As for the cops, ha, ha. Your opposition will consist of some overweight wheezing PCSOs and numerous catatonic security guards. Short work for the halberd and axe.

You won't need all of it, just the juicy bits. I'll draw you a map, like the sort our tourist board gives to visitors. Chelsea's on the river, Knightsbridge up the road, you're welcome to it. You already have most of Regent Street. Take the lot. Just let me know when you'll be dropping by so I can be out of town for the weekend.

I like go-arounds, they give me a thrill in my pancreas.

I was almost on top of it, the giant hoarding-sized advert, over a WH Smith and a Leonidas, I think. More correctly, it was almost on top of me.

On the poster a men's shaver, with a fold-out LCD screen. This was in Terminal 4, and it didn't, for more than a full minute, seem unreasonable that such a thing should exist. Now I can't remember what it really was.

It was very early in the morning. Perhaps terminals really are termini, where everything ends. Purgatory will be supplied with Harrods concessions, Sock Shop, Tie Rack, Zara, false Irish bars, mutant electronic goods outlets, internet at one Euro for five minutes.

Imagine despite having, at the direction of the Archangel Gabriel, taken your jacket, belt and shoes off and put them into the x-ray machine, the gates of Heaven emit an accusatory bleep as you attempt to pass through. Cherubim and Seraphim give you the pat-down looking for house keys, a chunky watch, stray coinage. But there's nothing for it, something in you is ferrous and it's downstairs for you, they can't be too careful these days.

My plane taxied with such conviction, and so far, parallel to the A5, outrun by cars and lorries, that it resembled an escape attempt. Only by remaining ground-bound can an aircraft evade its destiny, but where would it go? And what would it do when it got there? Change its name, have its KLM-blue sprayed over, get a job as a bus? Could it ever lose itself in town the size of Hoofdorp, this only lonely bird of its species?

Nederlands a.u.b., I need the practice

I know enough of the language now that not every person who sells me coffee instantly switches to English. Perhaps they are more indulgent these days. I understand the simplest exchanges.

Street parallel to Overtoom, late afternoon. Two children, a boy facing a girl on a bicycle. They are about seven or eight years old, the bicycle is scuffed and blue.

He says: 'Annie... Annie, I...'

He is looking at the girl, but also around and about, the way children will. She is staring intently straight ahead, as children sometimes do. His hand is tentatively on the crossbar of the bike. She does not answer him.

He says again: 'Annie...'

She shouts: 'Let go of my bicycle!'

By now I've passed them, I don't see their faces and I don't look back, but I hear him say: 'Annie, it is my bicycle.'

Communication of a kind, or a humble contribution to London Fashion Week

Some time ago I was the guest of, among other creatures in the household, a mostly magnificently white cat (I say mostly, he was equipped with a dark coloured tail so as to be located easily in snowdrifts, etc, and a Gorbachevian patch on the forehead for aesthetic purposes). He resided with his sister, an elegant mute with an eating disorder blending bulimia with an appetite for electrical wiring. I believe they originated in Bushwick, or thereabouts.

Anyway, this feline was in the habit of shedding his brilliant raiment about the place, liberally, as a means of self-expression. Irresistably adherent, this fur of his, so all visitors carried out into the world his traces, and thus his fame spread, by the medium of subway and taxi seats and the general crush of the crowd.

I'm only reminded of this as I found a pair of jeans today that for several years had escaped the attentions of the lint roller kindly despatched to me by his human companion. They are, in theory, black. But, in practice, due to my dear acquaintance, not. Sentiment dissuades me from attacking them with adhesive rotary contraptions. I'll wear them as they are, almost a furry beast in their own right. I'll be sure to sit down a lot on public transport and in pubs and people's homes. The coating of fine white hairs on my own clothing won't be much dimished, but enough of their number will transfer to the garments of others. I'm just a humble disciple and courier, really.

There is no need to apologise, for the pain has somewhat abated

Last night, walking home, about two-ish, smell of something like creosote in the air around Portland Place, as if RIBA and the BBC had just redone their garden fences for the winter.

On Baker Street, Indian couple, looking lost, asking for directions to the night buses, I think they expected them to all be in one place. Turned out they wanted to get to Wembley so pointed them up to Marylebone Road, but really wanted to give them the cash for a taxi. They did look so very young and disorientated and the 18's a bit sht at the best of times and probably doesn't improve with an N prefix, but I couldn't think of a way to offer.

A fox was zig-zagging in and out of the pillars at the front of the Swiss embassy, I'm sure it was doing it for fun, a sort of nocturnal slalom. It will look good on their CCTV tapes.

On the Large Hadron Collider

There was always the hope, this morning, that it would go mildly wrong and the scientists would turn on Andrew Marr and offer him up to the gods as a placatory sacrifice. Of course I don't believe for one moment that today was the first time they had tried it out, the thing's probably been up and running for ages. To begin with there would have been a lot of faffing about, with dialogue boxes popping up saying 'cannot find drivers for new hardware', and they'd have lost the set-up CD that came with the thing (and you can imagine how much packaging there'd be to go rooting through). Then there'd be a good twenty minutes phoning the helpdesk in Mumbai at 2.19CHF a minute, who would finally tell them to do something really simple like switch off the anti-virus or the screensaver.

Sorry to be banging on about this, but it looks as though I shall have to have that meeting after all. Anyone who has read Orwell's account of being called upon to shoot a Burmese elephant will understand my feelings.

I know there are consolations. My father had high hopes for his runner beans next year and, though he would not say so aloud, his carrots. I may yet see 'Whistlejacket' restored to its rightful place in the National Gallery. I've got about thirty-five quid to get through on my Oyster card. There'll be a big new Waitrose opening on the Edg Rd in December, just where Woolies used to be.

But then, but then. Palace have got off to a really poor start this season and prospects aren't good. I've still got to get around to arranging some arcane bank account thing. Lots of laundry needs doing, and most of what is clean needs ironing. Have been invited to a friend's wedding in October, really they're both fine people but I'd rather not. And, again, that meeting.

So if it can still go proper tits-up, preferably between now and about half-three tomorrow afternoon, I wouldn't entirely mind.

That's enough of the knockers, let's be proud

How inspiring it is that the weekend's olympic hand-over hand-job was sponsored by Visa. That's Visa, the credit card company. It's how we're going to pay for it, whack it on the plastic then next month put it on another, keep shifting it card to card, we'll be fine. Then one February HM Treasury will forget to do the necessary because it's a short month and we'll be up for late payment charges and the full sum and before you know it there'll be geezers round to take away Britain's every last lamp post, paving slab and house brick. There'll just be lots of households sitting on mud with nothing left but their 32" plasma screen tellies and SkyPlus dishes, the bailiffs can't take those away, it's the law.

The last major infrastructure project we delivered on time and under budget was the Bridge on the River Kwai. And then we had the Japanese Imperial Army providing project management services.

Never mind Paula Radcliffe exhibitionistically taking a crap for the edification of the public on the Embankment. If you want a vision of the future, take what my friend saw from the bus the other day: imagine a middle-aged balding man in a Hackett shirt and shorts using his mobile to video a kid in a knock-off Moschino t-shirt getting mauled by his own Staffie in a pool of blood outside a Favorite Fried Chicken. Forever.

Maybe you know her

She's quite small, though sturdy. Often she bumps into things, just as often is bumped into. Sometimes she breaks things without meaning to and she holds her pint glass in both hands until she gets about half-way down it.

She has our full attention, because she tells these stories so well. This one's about the last time she got dumped. She says something like:

'...she puts on this big responsible voice and I think oh, here we go.'

And she makes a facial expression that I can only describe in words as that of a person who has no choice but to be slapped very hard across the face with a large wet haddock and is trying to prepare for it as best they can.

Which is hilarious there and then, we're all pissing ourselves, and then she makes more of her ex-girlfriend's voice, hangs her head like someone getting told off, it's so funny.

Then walking home it doesn't seem so funny, in fact it's bloody tragic. If it had just been a humourless whinge I'd have forgotten all about it, but after the falling about laughing it seems so unfair, this always getting knocked over in the playground.

E.M. Forster 'The Longest Journey' (1907)

"He passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value."

Konferenz

Part of the conference centre site is under construction, creating diversions around hoardings. The diversions are well sign-posted and curve about as if a product of intentional landscaping. Posters on the hoardings, images of the town itself, three miles distant. You are here. You are not here.

Along the pathways the human components move. Purposeful, encumbered by bags or trundling wheeled cases, alone or in groups. In the morning.

Inside the centre, the rooms, the coffee, the awful coffee. Sessions spawning break-out sessions like raiding parties into subdivided rooms, returning with flipcharts, those bloody flipcharts.

The coffee, indigestion. The flipcharts, enervation. The taxi from the airport, indifferent disorientation.

Lunchtime. Two delegates have strayed from the building and have found their way to the station. They look longingly at the shop, with its newspapers, chocolate, fruit juice, basic stationery and distress purchase items. Then they look at the OV-chipkaart gates, open for now but potentially thwarting their path to or from the shop.

Light rain outside, early dusk, the windows of the main hall indigo. Except for one on his feet, the inmates feel the drowsiness of cats. They fiddle fretfully with personal communication devices.

Then the last handouts. Feedback forms. Autumnal shower of exhausted post-it notes.

Release.