Merry Christmas Joe

when johnny comes marching home again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
he's coming by bus or underground
Hurrah! Hurrah!
a woman's eye will shed a tear
to see his face so beaten in fear
an' it was just around the corner in the english civil war

it was still at the stage of clubs and fists
Hurrah! Hurrah!
when that well-known face got beaten to bits
Hurrah! Hurrah!
your face was blue in the light of the screen
as we watched the speech of an animal scream
the new party army was marching right over our heads

alright

there you are, ha ha, i told you so
Hurrah! Hurrah!
says everybody that we know
Hurrah! Hurrah!
but who hid a radio under the stairs
an' who got caught out on their unawares?
when that new party army came marching right up the stairs

when johnny comes marching home again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
nobody understands it can happen again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
the sun is shining an' the kids are shouting loud
but you gotta know it's shining through a crack in the cloud
and the shadows keep falling when johnny comes marching home

Joe Strummer, 1952 - 2002.

We could have done with someone like you right about now.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear

Part of the Iraqi's 12000 page dossier has been leaked, the part saying which corporations sold them equipment. Full story here. This is of course old news, but its rather odd that the US press has pretty much avoided this one, are they really censoring themselves so heavily in the name of patriotism?

Round up

Lots to cover in this entry, since its a while since I blogged and I've been a busy boy, so here we go.

I left the last entry in Arnhem, and heading for Delft. On arrival Delf was great, great pancakes, great market town, what I'm assured is a fantastic museum and the Prinshof, where William of Orange lived and was eventually assassinated. These days its an art gallery - home to many old masters and well worth a visit. We ended the evening at Maria's old student fraternity, home to many, many, many cheap beers. Mercifully some wiser heads talked me out of my plan to drink every variety of beer I hadn't tried before....

The next day featured many things, including a relocation back to Amsterdamn and shopping for Christmas presents, but is notable chiefly for the amount of raw meat I was forced to ingest. Starting in the morning with the breakfast of fillet americain (raw beef paste) on bread, served with raw onions, salt and pepper and including a brief encounter with one of Amsterdamn's rare 'non excellent' snack foods - raw herring. This is not sushi folks, you take a fish, you gut a fish and then you eat it. There might have been some salting involved in the mean time, but all that nice wrapped in seaweed, choice cuts, beds of rice and wasabi stuff that makes sushi fantastic was missing. raw herring is in my humble opinion, just as bad an idea as it sounds.

The final full day in Amsterdamn was all about art. We headed into the massive Rijksmuseum which is home to many of the best paintings ever produced in Holland. That means wall to wall Rembrandts and Rubens. A while ago I waded my way through 1000 pages of the Phaidon History of Art, and in the Reijksmuseum I got to see an awful lot of the paintings it had mentioned. Compelling, fantastic stuff.

After that it was time to board the ferry and head back to Newcastle, for a nice family christmas and a chance to catch up with old friends.