I see young girls with old faces. I see good girls in bad places.

I'm through the last few weeks of travelling. Early morning drives or taxis to airports, trying to catch up on sleep on nasty cheap flights, up late drinking beer and pontificating about work. In short, not listened to much or read much.
Cara's third birthday party last weekend, I put together a play list which I thought would appeal to 3 year olds - Yakety Yak, Hey Good Lookin', Green Onions, Hey Ya, Wipeout, Everybody Wants to be a Cat, Charlie Brown etc. Which Lorna thought was a self indulgent middle aged male thing, but I thought added to the party.
(Unsurprisingly, almost expectedly) dodgy cover aside, I am enjoying Sweet Warrior, the new Richard Thompson album (which the record man on the market - who is pretty good on all things Folk Rock - was flogging on Saturday, as I knew he would, 2 days before the release). And there seem to be plenty of Thommo fans in St Albans judging by its' prominance on the stall. I do lose superlatives for Thommo, and owning so much by him, it's easy to forget the good albums, and the great songs on average albums. First couple of listens are favourable. His Iraq war song Dad's Gonna Kill Me was pretty widely promoted ahead of the album. Genuinely scary, but I don't think it will reach the pantheon of great RT songs. Take Care The Road You Choose might though. A great anti-love ballad. This man can do bitter. When you follow that with Mr Stupid, and you're into the well-worn tracks of Shoot Out The Lights and Razor Dance.
I'm reading Bad Men by Clive Stafford Smith, about his experiences acting as a lawyer in Guantanomo Bay. I guess it won't be read by too many people who might change their minds about torture and detention without trial as a result. But his account of the torture (or "Human Resource Exploitation") experienced by one of his clients in Morocco after a CIA rendition flight did not help me sleep last night. I know that I would confess to anything in the face of torture. But if your thoughts about torture extend no further than a 30 second segment in 24, to even imagine 18 months of systematic abuse out of the eye of the media in a Rabat prison is horrifying enough. To think that the "confessions" extracted by such methods have been used to attack civil liberties at home, both in Europe and in North America, and certainly contributed to the decision to go to war in Iraq only increases the horror. Not to say the disgust when you read Tony Blair's comments in the Sunday Times that, as a society, we are "misguided and wrong" to have chosen to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first.
A different type of horror in Shane Meadows latest - This is England - on Sunday night. A really impressive film. Most of the reviews I had read had rightly praised Thomas Turgoose's performance as Shaun. But Stephen Graham's performance as Combo is central.