Truth, like love, is hard to pin down

A new series of progs on Ch4 kicks off with Peter Osbornes Reckoning, candid and well made on a miniscule budget, reflections on the factional war ravaging Iraq, like a sandstorm, swirling with desert ghosts. A political a maelstrom born out of tribal feuding, centuries old, embroidered with tales of kangaroo Shia courts and blind hatred, of raging militia gun-battles in Sadr City and Basra, the Sunni-Insurgent axis in the western deserts. In one hit, Osborne deftly blew away the gossamer threads of a new democratic Iraq.

So insightful and rigourous was his report that I felt awakened from a dream, that I too had fallen foul of a tendency to suspend our disbelief. It's one thing to oppose the war, it's harder to digest the sordid details of the dystopia that follows in the wake of the supposed Shock and Awe. Far easier to anaesthetise yourself with the fictive reports of the embedded, the networked and the second-hand. No a more pertinent and incisive despatch would be hard to find.

Nic Cage singing Love Me Tender, sitting here in the pale blue velvet of the USB lamp, wondering if I should text H. We blew-up this weekend, like a car that stammers and sputters with the sudden onset of winter. A weekend of frosty mornings, outside in, gently thawing afternoons, all culminating in a showdown on Shoreditch High Street, where else... But it was far from all bad - shot through with spectral winter-wrapped moments at Somerset House, Brick Lane and The Golden Harte. We got up earlier than usual, and we spoke our minds, and as is sometimes the case we sometimes got ourselves misunderstood in the process.