We (the UK) are/is short of money. This is the fault of the banks/improvident individuals/the previous, Labour Government. The present set-up is trying to cut the deficit by cutting everything else, most notably spending on welfare and most most notably, Housing Benefit. (For those that don’t know, this is a central government grant locally administered to help people on very low incomes pay for their rent.)

The general view, fostered by government, is that people on Housing Benefit are living on benefits generally and are not in work. One idea behind cutting welfare spending is to ‘get people back to work’ although they may never have been in it. Housing Benefit is without doubt the most expensive chunk of the welfare bill.

London is the great problem – London and its environs (meaning anywhere within commuting distance). Prices are high, very high, and recession notwithstanding, going up. So are transport fares. What isn’t going up is the minimum wage. People are told: if you can’t afford to pay the rent, move to somewhere cheaper. So they do. And then can’t afford the travel costs to where the work is. Meanwhile the rents go up some more.

Because too many people were allowed mortgages way beyond their capacity to repay, banks/building societies are now proportionately less willing to lend at all, and you have to have an enormous deposit even to apply. But you don’t have this because you are paying out huge amounts of rent to your private landlord so you can’t save. The landlord is having a great time: housing legislation is all in his/her favour; so many people need to rent (because they can’t buy or because there is not enough social housing) that landlords can charge what they like - and get it.

Housing Benefit has been drastically cut and anyone living in a private rental in London etc now has to top it up a lot to pay the landlord – but they may not be able to do this because they don’t earn enough. What to do?

There is one possibility that could be considered, but isn’t being: cap the amounts private landlords can charge. Oh, but, goes the government response (I imagine). If we do that, no one will want to be a landlord. In that case (say I), house prices might go down, the people who would like to buy rather than rent might be able to afford to, landlords will have to set their rents to what tenants can afford, Housing Benefit won’t be under the pressure it presently is and the shortage in the market will be eased…a bit. Tell me this is wrong, someone? 

Let's put aside for a moment the possibility (very likely) that our (my) memories (I have only one - ah, no, I mean only one system of memories to forage about in) are getting feebler because we don't use them: by this I mean that our mobile/cell phones remember contact numbers and Google remembers everything else.

Over and above this we seem to have been persuaded that if it's recent it must better than if it isn't. Newer books/articles/discussions on anything are by definition superior to preceding ones because, I suppose, if they are newer all the knowledge that came before will have been included in the latest gobbet, we think. Even if that were so, there remains a problem. It isn't all about information. There are insights that someone may have had in the past that you can only find...in the past. And in paper books.

Example: this morning a friend came round (oh, okay then - an ex-husband) and we were chatting about whether there is actually a Qur'anic injunction against alcohol (what else would one talk about first thing in the morning?), and I suddenly remembered a wonderful opening passage in a biography of Stalin. The author, Alex de Jonge, provides a geographical explanation of who drinks what, why and what effect it has on them. Witty, insightful, true. I ran up to find the book, showed my ex the passage and we gggled over it. But you can't find it on line: books that have not been digitised are still needed. Though, wait, Let me check...

...Damn! All the same, it doesn't quite have the economy and neatness of de Jonge's original disquisition.

By the way, apropos injunctions against alcohol. Don't ask me if the translations are accurate. How would I know? Blame Google...

I remembered something today (don't ask me why because I haven't the faintes idea). It was a while ago, during a summer when the sun shone enough, or the rain held off enough, for me to go walking along the Thames path. I had gone a little further than I intended and realised that the railway station I wanted to get to was possibly more of a walk away than I wanted. I didn't even know if it was the same side of the river as me.

There were no signs (why should there be) telling me how far off the station might be, but there came a young woman, striding happily and not looking exhausted. So I stopped her and asked, 'Sorry to bother you' (I am a Brit after all, 'but could you tell me if the station is on this side of the river?' 

She put a finger to her lips as she considered the problem. Looked up the river and down, and said (in a lovely Irish accent), 'Well, I couldn't say. But I do know the bridge is on this side.'

For those few who follow this (how odd! Thank you), there's an update to Books, Music and the Digi-World 

There’s a standard phrase they use in the media here for the Egyptian-born Abu Hamza – the radical Muslim cleric, they call him. They then tell us that he is one-eyed and has hooks for hands, because his original ones were blown off by a mine when he was fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan (and was therefore a Western ally at the time). I say hooks for hands but that is an exaggeration – by one hand. One hand has a hook and one doesn’t. But if you read the Daily Mail which, to be fair, doesn’t call him a radical Muslim cleric but ‘the hate preacher’, he has two hooks. But then two hooks are scarier than one.

Now that Abu Hamza has been extradited to the US to face charges of inciting terror, he has had his prosthetics removed for his first court appearance. He asked to have it back. According to the Guardian the judge said ok. According to the Mail he was turned down. The BBC website equivocates. It doesn’t tell us.

The reason for taking the stainless steel hook away – and it really is a scary looking thing, just what you’d want your favourite villain to sport – is that it is a security risk. Another prisoner apparently attacked a guard, I can’t remember what with, but hooks are potentially lethal. But I wonder if there might have been another reason for de-hooking the hate preacher.

Let me go back 21 years to a small country most people aren’t interested in, but which I am very fond of. I was visiting Czechoslovakia just after the Velvet Revolution and a man who had been one of our family’s dissident friends had just become National Security Adviser to the new President, Vaclav Havel. This man, Jiri Krizan (this is annoying: my version of word hasn’t got the right twiddly bits to get his name right), gave our young daughter then aged 9, a tiny candy-floss pink toy tank. Why? I mean, why was it pink?

There was a famous tank that had been parked up on a plinth in Smichov (another absent diacritic) ever since 1945. It had been the first Soviet tank into the country to liberate Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. For decades no one had paid it any attention, other than using it as a way of telling out-of-towners how to find their way around, as in, you go down the road, turn left by the Soviet tank, then…

But once the communists imploded, the hatred for everything Soviet bubbled over, and in a very Czech way this was expressed by someone creeping out one night to spray-paint the tank candy-floss pink. No tank in pink looks remotely threatening. It might try, but really it doesn’t. (Havel, the figurehead to end all figureheads of Czechoslovak anti-Communists, but also a very reasonable man, pointed out that the particular tank that had been targeted was a friendly, rescuing one,  that should be distinguished from the 1968 occupying ones. He ordered the tank be re-painted in its usual battle fatigues. This was done. The following night the tank was re-pinked. Havel gave up and had the tank removed to a museum, leaving behind an empty plinth with pink paint splashes on it.)

Why am I banging on about this? Only that a Soviet tank painted pink and a Muslim bogeyman minus his stainless steel hook(s) have both been symbolically de-fanged. Or castrated. Whichever you prefer.