Well I’m disappearing for a week to the mountains to engage in a little snowboarding….problem being that there isn’t much snow where I’m going.
The picture above is me last time around, honest. OK, it’s clearly not. It was borrowed from the lovely people here.

It’s nice, once in a while, to get some positive feedback – and even nicer when it’s from the kind of people habitually “shat on” (for want of a better phrase) by the media.
This morning, this email dropped into my inbox, in response to a feature on drugs outreach (see below) I have in the current Big Issue in the North:

“Just wanted to give you some feedback on the article. Thanks for doing a really good piece! John was really impressed and was very moved that he had been represented well, he rang me to say that it summed up the work we had done together over the past two years.
Some of the other vendors also expressed how good it was and were pleased to read a positive article on supporting drug users.”

The email was from Vicky Ward, a street outreach worker with Turning Point in Sheffield who recently won Home Office recognition for her proactive approach to her role.
Ward looks for her clients in the city’s squats and street corners because she realises that most of them are incapable of keeping appointments.
She was incredibly honest about the realities of working with people who the rest of society has given up on, as was John, one of her clients who I met. His story is tragic and fascinating: I have a huge amount more background that I’d love to use elsewhere, but I doubt many other people – or media outlets – are that interested.

This feature and the issues it raises couldn’t be more timely. This week, the UK government
unveiled its latest 10-year drug strategy which is typically hard-line.

While Ward talks about the need to promote harm reduction and hanging in there while addicts come around to the idea of making positive change, the authorities vow to cut the benefits of users who miss an interview with a drug adviser.

It’s a heavy-handed and ultimately doomed tactic aimed at forcing people into treatment – something anyone with a brain can see will never work – and one that will only result in more crime.
Why oh why don’t the professional strategists and bean-counters within government ever listen to people like Ward when they are drawing up these kind of plans?

Pauline Campbell, a local prisons campaigner I have dealt with many times, is being prosecuted over her regular protests outside jails where women have died.
Campbell, whose 18-year-old daughter Sarah died while on suicide watch at HMP Styal in Cheshire in 2003, has become one of the fiercest critics of the UK’s treatment of women within the criminal justice system and is not popular with the authorities.
I’ve written at length about the shortcomings of the way Britain deals with female law-breakers here and here, so won’t repeat it again.
To highlight the issue, Campbell – a trustee of the Howard League for Penal Reform – and her small but dedicated band of supporters hold a vigil outside the prison, days after each woman dies in custody. They’ve held 28 since April 2004. A shocking 41 women have died in custody since Sarah Campbell.
On several occasions she has been man-handled by police when trying to block entry to vans carrying prisons to and from prison, and a couple of times has ended up pushed to the ground.
Campbell, a former lecturer, has been arrested 15 times and charged five times so far.
The first three were dropped before trial, and the fourth went to trial in September but Campbell was acquitted. This time the CPS seems determined to make the charges stick.
On February 5, she was arrested while demonstrating outside Styal against the death of the young mother Lisa Marley, who died a week earlier while on suicide watch and on remand at the jail. This week she appeared at Macclesfield magistrates court – unrepresented – to answer the charge that she blocked the highway to a prison van.
She said afterwards: “In an emotional plea to the magistrates, I said ‘I have lost my only child at the hands of the state’. I then asked if the court would consider dropping the case against me, on the grounds that I am a grieving mother, and because the prosecution was a waste of the court’s time, and a scandalous waste of public money.
“The CPS prosecutor told the magistrates that the prosecution was in the public interest, and that the case would continue.
“After telling the magistrates that I regarded the prosecution as vindictive, I ended with my final comment to the court: ‘This case is a disgrace’.”

A Manchester academic with a strong interest in Pathfinder has started a blog in the lead-up to the publication of his new book on the subject.
Prof Chris Allen, of Manchester Met, has already ruffled some academic feathers with Housing Market Renewal and Social Class – several months before it’s even due to come out.
Chris gave evidence at the first public inquiry over the Edge Lane road-widening scheme in Kensington, Liverpool, over which indomitable grandmother Elizabeth Pascoe is currently taking on the authorities for a second time.The blog, and subsequent book, promises to be interesting for those who follow such matters.
He believes the working class people who are fighting the bulldozers have been “disenfranchised” in a number of ways – including a lack of true input into schemes and having to represent themselves at public inquiries, against large well-briefed legal teams.
Hardly surprising then that the outcome has been a foregone conclusion.

“The key players in housing market renewal…have access to ‘expertise’ to make their case and have been adept at using the media to denounce their opponents and get their ‘message’ across,” he writes.
“In fact the key players in housing market renewal are so adept at ‘information management’ that any criticism of the programme is usually immediately denounced in the media…” [Something I can personally attest to]

“Since [my book] has already been denounced as ‘vitriolic’ and a ‘diatribe’ (albeit in private) by people that have not even read the book, I expect the formal routine denouncement of my book to immediately follow its publication.
“But it will not go without response.”

Nothing like a good academic spat to keep people interested.

The comments thread on this blog has got to be the funniest thing I’ve read in months.
A Nathan Barley-esque 19-year-old has been given a column on the Guardian’s website to share his adventures while backpacking around Thailand and India for two months.

He is getting slaughtered in the comments section because:
a) his dad happens to be a travel writer who contributes to the Guardian and other national papers
b) he comes across as smug, spoilt and vacuous
and
c) he can’t write.

Putting him onto that site to write about his self-indulgent holidays, financed – by the sounds of it – by daddy’s gold card, was like throwing him into a pool of sharks. Highly entertaining though.
As I write, his piece has attracted 350 comments – which must be an all-time record for Guardian online. And it only went live at 9.55am today.

Nepotism is of course alive and well in many areas of work, but the media has to be one of the worst. How else would Peaches Geldof get to write her mindless drivel in the Guardian?
Sadly no one in my family works in the media, so most of my approaches to commissioning editors don’t warrant so much as an email response to say: ‘thanks but no thanks’. I just get the metaphorical – or should that be ‘virtual’? – tumble weed.
The upside? Retaining at least a modicum of credibility.

postscript 6.40pm on 15/2
So the comments section got closed down for that blog last night, after 475 posts, which must be the highest ever. Threads normally keep going for a few days at least, from what I can tell.
The travel editor responded with his own post today, which has failed to satisfy most of the paper’s critics and has already attracted 330 comments…
Max’s dad also added his thoughts, revealing that his son won’t be continuing his blog and that the whole family is very hurt.
While I do feel sorry for the lad, as some of the comment yesterday was very personal, I can’t help thinking his dad and the paper were really very naive if they didn’t anticipate this kind of response….hope he at least has a nice holiday after all this has died down.

It doesn’t happen that often but I’m actually feeling sorry for a government minister this morning. Oldham MP Phil Woolas is being criticised in some quarters for stating what many people believe to be self-evident: that marriage between first cousins isn’t really a good idea.
The problem is that he happened to have talked about it in relation to Pakistanis – a British community in which the practice is very prevalent. As are childhood birth defects. Something scientists believe is no coincidence.
Clearly it’s a sensitive issue, particularly when many self-appointed “community leaders” will themselves have married cousins. I actually thought it was illegal in this country, but apparently not. But it’s certainly taboo within the wider community.
Politicians expect to take flak and are thicker skinned than most. The reason I feel sorry for Woolas is that said critics are being particularly disingenuous by pulling out not just the racism card – but also the Islamaphobic one.
This kind of thing makes me cross. Perhaps he could have raised the issue more sensitively – because it isn’t nice to single out any one community for criticism – but Woolas appears to have gone to great lengths to stress cousin-marriage is a cultural issue and not a religious one.
I have a number of Muslim friends – some Pakistani and others not – and have talked about this with them. All say the same thing – that it is mainly those who hail from particular regions of Pakistan who prefer to marry within the family. I know several British-born Pakistanis who have done so. Bangladeshis, for example, don’t really go in for it.
Minority groups have many genuine battles to fight. But by dishonestly – and deliberately – dragging other Muslims into this debate, those who speak for the Pakistani community are doing themselves and Islam a massive disservice and reinforcing the prejudices against them that some in our society sadly already hold.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams really has stirred up a hornet’s nest over his Sharia Law comments, hasn’t he. He must have known what was going to happen if he waded into this one – such subjects are now impossible to discuss in a rational, intellectual way given the hysterical knee-jerk responses that British media and (guided by said media?) politicians are so prone to.
I must admit I have mixed feelings about this one – although I consider myself more educated about (and open towards) Islam than the average British person, I don’t know whether picking and choosing elements of Sharia in the way the Archbishop is suggesting is something it would even be theoretically possible to do, even if you wanted to.
As far as I understand it, most religions expect adherants to accept all their rules and teachings, even those that don’t sit easily with them. That has always been my problem with organised religion – I was brought up a Catholic but have never accepted the Church’s teachings on issues like homosexuality and divorce. Therefore I would never consider myself – or want to call myself – a Catholic, even if I practised in other ways (which I don’t).
Anyway that’s a total irrelevance. I’m not quite sure what to think about the Archbishop’s suggestions…I can see both sides of the argument and don’t feel qualified to have a real opinion either way. There’s some interesting debate on the subject here.
It’s a moot point anyway because it’s never going to happen – how could it in a country where policy is guided by a right-wing press agenda that has polarised debate to this extent.
What I do think is a shame is that Rowan Williams is being torn apart for even voicing the thought in the first place. There’s so little space for intelligent debate on anything that relates to Islam or Muslims or in fact anything controversial in this country, and anyone who tries is demonised by the self-appointed thought police.
My god, I’m starting to sound like the Daily Mail. Argghhhhhh sorry. Now there’s a scary thought.

postscript: The Bishop of Hulme said exactly what I think about all this when I spoke to him yesterday. But the comments beneath the MEN story once again prove that people won’t even take on board the context of the Archbishop’s talk. There’s a dangerous level of Islamaphobia in this country, even among those who should know better.

pps: The full text of the Archbishop’s lecture can be found here

Berlin….what a fantastic, fascinating, vibrant city. There’s history all around you – from what’s left of the wall (not much), to the bullet marks in many of the old buildings, to the soviet-style flats in the area of East Berlin where I stayed.
It’s a huge city but doesn’t feel cramped in the way that London does….the transport system is very cheap and very efficient…there is graffiti absolutely everywhere but little litter in the streets…people seem less wrapped up in materialism and fashion than they are in the UK and elsewhere…yet there is art and creativity and music all around…the bars and clubs are independent and from my short visit seemed a lot more individual than ours do.
I am a convert. It’s by the the most interesting European city I’ve been to (perhaps with the exception of Barcelona) and I’m looking forward to going back. I’d highly recommend it for a cheap weekend away.

I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t come up with anything interesting (or dull, for that matter) to blog about this past week. It’s not even that I’m particularly busy – more suffering from late January lethargy and just somehow not feeling very inspired.
Anyhow, I’m off to Berlin for a few days tomorrow, which I’m very excited about, and hope that a new city – particularly one with so much recent history – will be a good way to get my flagging , mushy brain working again.
Bis Montag…

Robert Fisk has written a harrowing account of one Iraqi family’s ordeal at the hands of foreign mercenaries, in today’s Independent.
What happened to the children of Marou Awanis, when she took 40 bullets from an Australian security firm, is a sobering reminder of the human tragedy gripping that country.
The family – who lost their father a few years ago but have relatives in the UK – boarded a flight to Jordan on the understanding they may be able to get British visas from our embassy in Amman.
They were turned away at arrivals – without even being allowed to speak to their uncle, who was at the airport to greet them.
And the response from their mother’s killers?

The Australian “security” company whose employees killed Mrs Awanis and her friend – “executed” might be a better word for it, because that is the price of driving too close to armed Westerners in Baghdad these days – expressed its “regrets”…
Westerners in Baghdad – especially those who kill the innocent – are once they are known, rich in regrets. But they are less keen to ensure that the bereaved they leave behind are cared for.

Nice. Makes you really proud to be Western.