Randomly Selected Article or Link

I'm sure it could be so construed. Buying small vials of an oil like substance from Palestinian Arabs.

Try it. It's great stuff. And if you're so inclined you can also ponder whether any of the trees listened in to the sermon on the mount, or something.

Clearly not one for your hand-luggage though.

Secretary of Defense designate. Knows all about waging war in Iran-Iraq. He was implicated in the arms to Iran scandal. No doubt then he was probably privy to the actions of the CIA in assisting Saddam's troops to target chemical weapons on Iranian troops.

Nice. Now's the time for Saddam to spill.

The Telegraph is reporting that the US backs Lord Ashdown for Afghanistan role:

US backs Lord Ashdown for Afghanistan role
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul and David Blair, Diplomatic Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 04/12/2007

The United States is backing Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader who served as the international community's "high representative" in Bosnia, to be the United Nations new "super envoy" to Afghanistan. The proposed role would see Lord Ashdown being charged with uniting the efforts of both Nato and the UN in Afghanistan. Nato officials are understood to support his candidacy for a job with exceptional power.

Can anyone doubt the talents of the man, or the esteem in which he is held around the world? But, given the history of foreign intervention in Afghanistan, could this one be a bridge too far for any international statesman? It's a pity he's probably already too old to be in the running for General Secretary after Ban Ki Moon has done two terms though.

It's scary to think that twenty years have flown by since Big Bang. When I was doing my A levels a couple of years before I had ignored all the advice of my tutors and applied for the wrong Oxford college (New) in the wrong year (their first year taking women) to do the wrong subject (English) and didn't get past the entrance exam (in the last year people a whole year older than me were allowed to take it after their A levels).

I got offered a place at Durham in the New Year, however, but not satisfied with the idea of living on a student grant (remember them?) I tried to get what used to be called "industrial sponsorship". Doing English, the only people who would entertain the idea were Marks & Spencer's graduate recruitment program, and then only to be a Human Remains officer, so I gave up on that idea.

It was the year of a young copper trader who made the headlines on the London commodities exchanges having become a multi-millionaire at 21 and I spent the whole of my summer term not reading the Aeneid, not caring about the Paston letters and not revising W B Yeats, but writing to any firm in the city I could find an address for asking for a job. I so wanted a wardrobe of chalk-stripe suits and red braces!

I wrote to money brokers, futures trading firms, lots of commodities brokers of course, and one Stock Exchange firm (already the Stock Exchange seemed quite an old fusty nineteenth century institution and not really the place for a young turk to be dealing in sad old imperial age companies' stock). The money brokers liked me, but they wouldn't give me a job because, they said, if we put a non-graduate onto the phones to American bankers with their liberal arts HNDs they would laugh at them.

The one stock exchange firm I had written to, a stock-jobbing firm called Pinchin Denny & Co, did have a scheme for taking on post A-level youngsters, and so in September 1985 I headed down to the big smoke with nowhere to live and a salary of £3,500 per year.

I was utterly miserable. It has clouded my image of London ever since. I used to get drunk for hours in the Bishop of Norwich, or the Long Room or some such, because all the people I knew in London were my co-workers and to go home and then go out to meet them later meant a 90 minute trip "home" to Wembley, and then probably another 90 minute trip out to Wimbledon or somewhere they lived. So it was far easier to get blotto before going home.

I remember, well, I don't actually, getting so drunk one night that I rode the Northern Line up and down all night until it dropped me off at High Barnet (I was trying to get to Balham where I had moved to share the most god-awful flea pit with two or three other young "blue-buttons" after my Wembley landlord had got pissed off with me abusing his hospitality) and I got sat next to some weirdo with a knife on the night bus back into town - apparently one of our settlement clerks had seen me on the tube about half eight somewhere near Tooting and had tried to wake me up to no avail!

I remember one night I was guardian of the company mobile phone. We were so sophisticated in those days there were these dodgy geezers who sought to put one over on us jobbers who dealt in stocks that had dual listings in London and New York (my "pitch" was chemicals so we had lots of them - ICI, Glaxo, Beechams - remember them?) by "arbitraging". They traded shares from us out of hours when we couldn't see what prices were being made inn New York and what the exchange rates were doing - and flogging them again as "ADRs" in New York - this was even before those Reuters pagers that would give you stock tickers and forex prices. Some Ozzie guys from Smith Brothers saw me with the phone and decided to have some fun with me. They wanted to borrow the phone to make a quick call. The phone bill for three minutes to Australia was more than my pitch's entire book profit for the day and left the four kilo battery with about ten minutes talk time left on it!

Anyway, in April 2006, Morgan Grenfell (remember them?) took over Pinchin Denny in preparation for full deregulation in the October, and gave us blue buttons a thousand pounds raise to go with our yello buttons. I was still utterly depressed, so now was a good time I thought to move back home. At least I could live with mum for free in Glasgow and there were some good brokers there I could join, and I got a job with Laing & Cruickshank's Glasgow office.

If memory serves, the day of Big Bang happened to coincide with the closing date for applications for the British Gas privatisation issue and Laing & Cruickshank flew me down to London with a huge bag of application forms to get them into the Midland Bank (remember them?) in time for the close. And I decided to go and see my old Pinchin Denny colleagues on the Stock Exchange floor (they remained on the floor for a while which was bizarre - all the brokers had gone home to their offices and Chinese walls while most of the jobbers tried to do screen trading on the floor itself - well it did work in Glasgow!).

Several had moved firms. It was a year of lots of moves. Staff, whole teams, were poached as the new corproate owners of Stock Exchange member firms tried to build up their presence, and of course salaries had taken off. The guys I left six months earlier on £4,500 were now on £20,000 plus (at nineteen years old remember). Several had got flash company cars as golden hellos and so on (though nobody, but nobody ever drove to work in the city that I can remmeber!). And I had taken a small cut to go and live at home and was still on £4,000.

Oh well. I could have retired by now I guess. As it is, it was 1998, I think, when I finally got up to twenty grand a year. Maybe my philanthropy would be easier if I had made myself a million by the time I was twenty. Maybe I would just be one of those rather arrogant loadsa money ("I could buy and sell you before breakfast") types. Maybe I could be Tory shadow chancellor by now...:) (One of my colleagues from that 1985 Pinchin Denny intake, a chap called Tom Harris, did stand against Jenny Tonge I think in 2001, having been a Wandsworth Tory councillor for a while already I think)

The worst decision of my life? I don't think so. But it would probably have been nice to have an Oxford degree and a few million quid stashed away somewhere.