Organic cucumber? Nein danke.

Donner und blitzen! It can't be easy being a German Green. No sooner have they got the possibility of a nuclear free fatherland on the horizon and they go and start poisoning themselves with organic cucumbers. Gott in Himmel! I knew that from this organic scheisse no good would come.

Ratko Mladic. The unacceptable face of humanity.

The arrest and possible extradition of Ratko Mladic has caused a media revisiting of the break up of Yugoslavia and the dreadful bloodletting of the 90s. At the time I struggled to make sense of what was going on in the region. I tried to figure out what it was that could bring the "South Slavs" to want to wreak such unspeakable horror on each other. One mystery was why the inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina were always known as Serb, Croat or Muslim; rather like referring to the British as English, Scottish or Methodist. But the real mystery was how the legacy of competing empires and religions could so distort the collective humanity of so many. I don't think that I am any closer to understanding any of this but I am convinced that people like Mladic are the subject of a deviant psyche and that once they have gathered enough followers around them they can bring untold misery to the rest of us. If there is a fault line in society such people are capable of driving in the steel wedge of fear and violence until they tear people apart from each other.

It would sound like the worst kind of trite leftist rhetoric to say that we need to recognize each other as members of a class rather than a religious, ethnic or national group; but it's true none the less. Not class in the crude economic or cultural sense, but rather the two classes of those who control - and those who are controlled.

I hope that Ratko Mladic is extradited, stands trial and spends the rest of his life under lock and key. Not just as retribution for the countless lives that he ruined but also that we may better understand how such deviant and essentially shallow individuals achieve power on the backs of the foolish and the timid.

Bell Epoque

Surely the two best things about The Guardian, some would say the only things worth bothering with, are the resident cartoonists Martin Rowson and Steve Bell. I have been a fan of Steve Bell since the early days of if... and before that his work for Time Out and The Leveller. His mad eyed Thatcher, equally mad eyed Blair and the hapless Major with his underpants over his trousers all went some way to raising a smile during the grimmest of political times. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the preview of the new Steve Bell exhibition at the Cartoon Museum last night and it really is well worth a visit. In real life Bell is a good natured Falstaffian figure, but once he grips a pencil he gives no quarter and no member of the ruling class can expect to be treated as anything other than totally risible. It was a packed house last night but not a politician to be seen - I wonder why?

Slutwalk.

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All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.

If like me you think that television should both inform and entertain, and that the best programmes should leave you feeling that that was an hour well spent, you will have really got off on Adam Curtis' All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace shown on BBC2 last night. Like his previous series The Trap and The Power Of Nightmares this was TV as it should be.

Ryan who?

Be they footballers, politicians, even bankers, I rarely throw stones at people regarding their sex lives. Powerful old stuff the sex drive and all any of us can do is commit to doing as little harm to others as possible. But honestly, it's one thing to be a world famous sportsman and decide to wing it and get in the knickers of a glamorous minor celeb that the Red Tops are all over like a rash - but don't expect not to be found out.

Woodlands and the three card trick.

I have recently been camping in the New Forest and, if you close your eyes to the second homes and rip off local shops, it's a beautiful place to spend a few days. The Forestry Commission manage over half of the New Forest National Park and, as with the other woodland under their control, seem to do a great job. But for how much longer I wonder? When Cameron proposed the privatisation of our national woodland he fell foul of just about everyone from Chris Knight to the Countryside Alliance and in the face of an outraged protest movement quickly shelved the whole project and did his best to assure us that he was never in favour of such a daft idea in the first place. Watch carefully though. Like some street grifter who's patter diverts us from the slight of hand as he invites us to find the lady, so Cameron will use our NHS "reform" induced state of shock to slip through woodland privatisation. Woodlands, health, Olympics, Royal Weddings, welfare, workfare. There are so many cards to try and keep an eye on. Make no mistake about it - nowhere produces a polished conman quite as well as Eton