A Few More Links ...

To the Social Affairs Unit blog, where among others the great Dalrymple wields the pen, and to David Warren's essays.

Dalrymple needs no introduction, while David Warren appears to have done it all - schooled in Lahore, Bangkok and Canada, youth spent wandering the East, acquiring 'non-leftist politics and religious beliefs' - doubtless among other things. We do however have in common the experience of squatting in Vauxhall - though he spent his days studying Aristotle while a few years later I studied Assembler.

To this august duo add Adrian Harris' visual art blog, because he's got some nice art links, he's from just up the M5 in Worcestershire, and he links for some reason to me.

He also has a link to this powerful and scary New Scientist story - from one of the few survivors of the Chernobyl control room.

"To get a clearer idea of what had happened we walked outside. What we saw was terrifying. Everything that could be destroyed had been. The entire water coolant system was gone. The right-hand side of the reactor hall had been completely destroyed, and on the left the pipes were just hanging. That was when I realised that Khodemchuk was definitely dead. The place where I was told he'd been standing was in ruins. The huge turbines were still standing, but everything around them was rubble. He must have been buried under that. From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot because of gamma rays ..."