"And then he said..."

How perfectly splendid - it appears that an RAF fighter pilot on secondment to an American squadron has been able to wave the Queen’s Regulations in the face of US officers who were trying to get him to shave off his handlebar moustache.

Flight Lieutenant Chris Ball is normally based in Scotland but is currently in Afghansitan on an exchange with a US Air Force unit - and he seems to have chosen to while away the hours not spent in the air by cultivating a truly impressive example of the traditional fliers’ facial decoration.

Photos on BBC Online show his transformation from the very picture of dour Sam Tyleresque modern professionalism to a grinning throwback to the chaps who scrambled from Duxford and Tangmere and Biggin Hill, and who grew moustaches to disguise the fact that they were so horribly, painfully young to be dying.

Is anyone really surprised that his temporary American superiors took offence? No reason has been given, of course - perhaps they feared terrorists were hiding in all that undergrowth, or maybe his commanding officer couldn’t get past the memory of Village People videos.

Whatever the reason, the decree came down from on high - the moustache must go. Goodbye Biggles, hello Top Gun.

Except Flt Lt Ball was having none of it. Perhaps inspired by the Ministry of Defence’s obvious approval of a Royal Marines moustache-growing competition in Afghanistan last Christmas, he reached for his rulebook and fought back.

And the USAF backed down, beaten off by a combination of Queen’s Regulation 209, which dictates that moustaches are fine so long as they confine themselves to the upper lip and no further, and a Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries banning local commanders from instructing exchange officers to breach their own dress regulations.

A small victory in the fight-back against creeping cultural imperialism - but an important one.

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News just breaking that the Tory shadow Home Secretary David Davis is resigning - not just from the shadow cabinet but from the House of Commons.

This will - of course - trigger a by-election in a key Lib Dem target seat. And the BBC report, sparse though it is, suggests that’s not just a side-effect of Davis’ decision, but the whole point of it.

This is what the Beeb’s report says at the moment (no doubt it will soon be expanded).

Shadow home secretary David Davis is set to resign as an MP, the BBC understands.

It is thought he wants to trigger a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden seat.

Mr Davis has been a passionate opponent of plans to extend the terror detention limit to 42 days.

It is thought he has privately threatened to resign if the Tories wavered on the issue. He will make a statement shortly.

There is absolutely no way in which this is anything other than desperately bad news for David Cameron, who needs this like he needs a hole in the head.

I’ve always thought Davis was one of the better sort of Tories, and was much struck by a joint TV interview he did with Mark Oaten about civil liberties when the latter was the Lib Dem home affairs spokesperson.

They were barely distinguishable in what they said, which at the time I thought reflected more on Oaten than on Davis. But now I’m not so sure.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that this is all pre-arranged with Nick Clegg and Davis is going to re-stand at the by-election as a Lib Dem?

Edit: apparently, it is. He’ll be an independent, unopposed by us.

Our not standing against him is a sensible decision - but will the Tories put up a candidate? Cameron is spinning it as a jolly brave decision by a jolly fine chap.

Quite the most bizarre day of my life, when I got up at four in the morning, drove to a frost-covered wood, and dug up a prize worth £100,000.

I remember sitting at home looking at the Cube I’d dug up - shiny, silvery and as heavy as two house bricks - walking away to do other things with the evening, but having to return to it again and again to check it was real.

And of course, at that moment in time, no-one knew it had been found except us and to everyone else the game - the first and, as it turned out, only season of Perplex City - was still on.

Well, anyway, that was a year ago and it’s old news now for most folk.

For a few, though, it’s still interesting enough for the anniversary to be marked with a series of interviews.

The first to be published was with me, and you can read it - and others - here.

The fear of going bald does strange things to a man - just ask Mark Oaten.

Thing is, there’s no turning back from it. Greyness can be dyed - or embraced as distinguished - while general creakiness and excess weight can be argued away with vague promises of the gym. Hair loss, however, is the end to your illusions of eternal youth.

In my case, I’ve spent the last couple of years cultivating a ponytail that reached halfway down my back. It’s gone now - sent to a charity that makes wigs for child cancer patients.

For the last month or so I’d been seeing signs that screamed ‘hair loss’. From the scalp pains and the variable depth on different parts of my head, to the slimmer ponytail and the dead hamster in the plughole each time I showered, it looked very much like the game was up.

My mum, briefly a hairdresser in her youth, disagreed. So did Beloved Other Half who, despite her fondness for radically short styles, still has more experience than me in possessing long hair. Both argued that hair can, and does, thin under the stress of length.

Nevertheless, I decided it was time for the ponytail to go. If the barber discovered acres of rolling space, we’d have an answer.

I’m now back living in my home town after 20 years away in Norfolk and London. The barbershop I used to go to when I was younger is still there, although the staff has - of course - completely changed.

Once, it was dominated by a cartoon Italian with long permed hair and a moustache, a twinkling smile, and a love for the ladies. Alas, it transpired that one of the ladies he loved was aged 14 and, faced with the police, he threw himself under a train. The young lad who cut my hair barely remembered him - he’d seen him for childhood haircuts but never worked with him.

These are the things that underline the passing years.

Has to be said, young Rez did a fine job on the hair. After checking three or four times that I did really want the ponytail cut off, he sheared it away. A brief look of panic crossed his face when I cried out “nooo, I’ve changed my mind”, but it was replaced by a broad grin when he checked in the mirror and saw from my expression that it had been my idea of a joke.

After a remarkably short time, and an even more remarkably small bill, I was shorn neatly and the ponytail, still secured by its hair band, was wrapped up in tissue in my pocket. He conducted a close inspection of my scalp and declared that no, I had nothing at all to worry about in the hair loss stakes. Not yet, anyway.

And the ponytail? That’s going to charity.

I have an ambivalent attitude towards cancer charities. Heroes during one close family member’s illness, villains during an in-law’s last months. However, I was determined that I’d do something useful with the discarded hair.

The Cancer Research UK page on the subject of hair donation is not terribly encouraging. But Beloved Other Half did some digging on those ol’ interweb things and came up with a charity called the Little Princess Trust (website / Facebook group) which was set up to provide wigs to children with cancer and other illnesses that cause hair loss.

Now, I’m not generally one for excessive pinkness. And I do tend to believe that little girls are better served by aspiring to be engineers rather than princesses. But there are times to be a grouch and times to shut up and embrace your inner sparkliness.

The Little Princess Trust was set up by the parents of Hannah Tarplee from Hereford, who died in June 2005 of cancer, aged five. It helps parents of children with cancer and other illnesses that cause hair loss to find and pay for realistic-looking wigs made from real hair.

And, obviously, the hair has to come from somewhere. Hence the donations page. The rules (lifted here word-for-word from their website) are simple:

1. Ensure you have at least 10″-12″ of clean, good condition hair.
2. Hold the hair tightly whilst cutting it and securely tie the follicle end of the hair ensuring all the hair is lying in the same direction.
3. Package the hair in such away that it cannot become tangled.
4. Send it to;
   
   Little Princess Trust
   43 George Road
   Edgbaston
   Birmingham
   B15 1PL

It turned out, when measured, that my ponytail was exactly twelve inches. So off it goes.

I think I’ll stay short-haired for a while now. It’d be sad to turn 40 looking like a member of Status Quo, after all. But its nice, and a trifle ironic, to reflect that my brief panic about getting old has resulted in an action that will - hopefully - help someone young whose battle is simply to get where I am now.

And straight in at number one in the ‘brain-numbingly stupid decisions of 2007′ chart is BBC Radio 1, for censoring one of the only decent Christmas songs ever written to avoid offence to listeners.

The essence of a stupid decision is that it achieves exactly the opposite effect to the one intended - and that can certainly be said of this bowdlerisation of the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, where any offence prevented by censorship is surely dwarfed by the offence caused by butchering the soaring vocals of the doomed Kirsty MacColl.

The BBC reportedly said: “We are playing an edited version because some members of the audience might find it offensive.”

Well, bollocks to the BBC.

It’s all a matter of context. Stick a fist under someone’s nose and call them a faggot or a slut and it’s offensive. Script a scene between two characters, one a self-deluding alcoholic and the other a dying junkie, and it can be art.

Doesn’t have to be, of course. Could still be offensive. But not in this case.

The Pogues are said to be amused. MacColl’s mother Jean thinks it’s ridiculous. And, according to BBC Online, Pogues fan Kevin Caswell said: “The lyrics are what make the song and if I were Mr McGowan I would ensure you were never allowed to play this poetic, touching and classic song.”

It’s not a corporation-wide ban. Radio 2, which during my youth was what you found when you looked in the dictionary under ‘bland’ and ‘inoffensive’, is playing the song in full.

And so is everyone else.

For it is a well-known fact that only five Christmas songs have ever been written which aren’t so toe-curlingly awful that the songwriters should have been taken aside as schoolchildren and advised to go into accountancy.

Of course, not everyone agrees on which five. But here, courtesy of YouTube, are my choices. Plus one bonus winter song from the movies that’s a delight to watch.

Number five

I was tempted to say John Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over) here, but let’s face it - as a song, it’s a bit of a dirge. Very worthy, but in the ‘anti war Xmas song’ stakes I’ll pick Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie any year.

Number four

I’m not big with the Christmas carols, but the vocals on this duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie are to die for. Little Drummer Boy, of course.

Number three

The perfect antidote to over-sentimental Christmas tosh - from 1981, Things Fall Apart, by Cristina.

Number two

A bit more jingly, but still from the early-80s school of sardonic seasonal slices of life, comes Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses.

Number one

Kirsty and the Pogues, naturally. What else? See it here live in all its uncensored glory.

Special winter bonus

Finally, from the movie Neptune’s Daughter, here are Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams performing Baby it’s cold outside. How about that choreography?

Look - it’s close, OK? Too close for the difference to be meaningful. And it may not actually be good news for Huhne anyway. But there has been a small but measurable swing to him from Clegg in the attention they’re both receiving among bloggers.

The turning point was the Calamity Clegg dossier, which rather underlines the potential downside of this - the mere fact he’s being written about doesn’t guarantee that nice things are being said about him. But didn’t Oscar Wilde once argue that it was better to be notorious than unknown?

If you feed both their names into the BlogPulse trends tool from Nielsen and ask it to compare what proportion of the chatter in the blogosphere is about each of them, the results are interesting. Here’s the graph:

You can see very clearly that, apart from the spike caused by the launch of Huhne’s campaign, marginally more attention was paid to Clegg during the first two thirds of the campaign. There wasn’t much clear air between them (compared with what you get if you add John Hemming to the mix, or even CK or Vince after the first ‘will they stand?’ flurry was over) but you could see a slight advantage.

And then came the day of the dossier - Huhne attracts more interest, for obvious reasons, but he managed to keep at least a marginal advantage for most of the time since then - although there’s a hint in the last couple of days that they may be even again.

So what does it mean? Not a great deal, probably, except that Huhne has once again managed to muscle his way into the forefront of people’s attention. How good a thing this is for him and the party depends on what they’re actually saying.

And, of course, neither are exactly setting the world apart compared with more important issues like Britney Spears:

“Taking Christ out of Christmas is like serving the Christmas turkey without the stuffing,” says Tory MP Mark Pritchard. As both a pagan and a vegetarian, I’ll have to take his word for it…

With time running out in the Lib Dem leadership election, I’ve finally thought of something that might make me vote – even though the one thing I’ve been certain of all along is that I don’t want either candidate in charge of my party.

When the election kicked off I was desperately hoping a third candidate would emerge so I wasn’t stuck with the unappealing choice between a candidate I didn’t rate and a candidate I didn’t like. Anyone would have done - John Hemming even - but no such luck.

Chris Huhne had failed to impress me as a possible leader during the previous contest. I seem to remember writing at the time that a grey man in a grey suit could never be a successful leader of a political party which needed to fight for every scrap of attention.

And since then I’ve learned from contacts that his press connections from his time as a journalist don’t necessarily represent a reservoir of stored-up goodwill that he can exploit. The broadsheet hack and ex-subordinate of Huhne who told me “a more self-contented man you will rarely find” didn’t strike me as itching to write positive pieces about how well the Lib Dems were doing under his leadership.

My problem with Clegg, on the other hand, stems from his manner - he flunked the all-important ‘first impressions’ test quite spectacularly when I met him and the famous charm that’s supposed to make him the great communicator simply repelled me.

Distilled to its basics, he seemed false - that deadly quality the Big Brother / I’m a Celebrity worshipping masses despise above all others (except being a nonce, or an asylum seeker, or the manager of the England football team).

Nevertheless, I was prepared to consider voting for him as leader when the contest started. I was aware that, while my objection to Huhne was based on his abilities, my objection to Clegg was based on a personal prejudice that others might not share. Plus, the press wanted him as leader and after what they did to Ming I couldn’t see the point in disobeying.

Not so now.

Clegg’s stuttered his way through the campaign, showing flashes of the qualities his supporters revere but no consistent demonstration of Messiahdom. Like the perfect ripe peach, he’s beautiful to look at but bruises dreadfully the moment he’s thrown to the floor and kicked around a bit.

Consider it this way: if Nick Clegg were a yachtsman he’d win every single fair-weather race handily, leaving his rivals trailing in his wake as he cruised nonchalantly into the distance with a glass of chilled white in one hand and a cute blonde on his other arm.

But in foul weather racing he wouldn’t make it to the first marker buoy before disaster struck and he sank like a stone, struggling feebly as he disappeared beneath the waves.

So where would Chris Huhne be, in that overstretched and laboured metaphor?

Not in the race at all - he’d be in a submarine underneath it, ready and waiting to torpedo the leader. One moment the hot favourite is sailing serenely along, the next they’re fatally holed below the waterline and Huhne’s sewing another bar onto his Jolly Roger.

It’s a talent he has, and he’s demonstrated it in both leadership contests so far. Campbell’s aura of gravitas - gone. Clegg’s reputation for communication - gone. It may not win him the race, but it leaves his victims fatally weakened and easy meat for the circling sharks of the press and the other parties to devour at their leisure.

Which is a pretty good argument to vote for him in this leadership contest, when you think about it.

And I am thinking about it, seriously. Because if he can do that to our chaps, think what he can do to the enemy.

From being ‘definitely not Huhne, but twist my arm and I might vote Clegg’, I’ve now moved to exactly the opposite position.

You see, the way I look at it, our next leader has just one task beyond the basic one of demonstrating the minimum level of competence to avoid the party being laughed at - and that’s to nobble David Cameron by fair means or foul.

The Labour government was crumbling long before Gordon Brown took charge of it - his task was to stick his thumb in the dyke and delay the inevitable for as long as possible. He’s in the process of failing, thanks in part to Twinkletoes Cable’s surgically precise brutality.

So that’s half the task done already, but if Cameron is still on the field of play at the next election it won’t help us as we’ll be hit from both sides: a resurgent Tory party and a Labour ’stop the Tories’ scare campaign.

Be clear on this: the threat isn’t from the Conservative Party as a whole - when seen in bulk they’re still the same mix of swivel-eyed loons and chinless nonentities they’ve been for years. The threat is from Cameron, who has the knack of making you ignore the rest of the party and concentrate instead on the handfuls of magical pixie dust he’s throwing in the air to obscure them.

Remove Cameron, however you do it, and there’s no-one to replace him. End result: ice cream and jelly for Liberal Democrats.

Based on his performance so far, Chris Huhne might just be the man to kick Cameron in the knackers. He won’t rely solely on the power of argument, and he won’t be content (as Ming told me he was) to wait for Cameron to self-destruct.

And I hate the Tories with such visceral loathing that I’m almost keen to see how he’d do it.

Based on his handling of Clegg, he’ll twist something Cameron once said into something it didn’t actually mean, and then dominate the agenda by endlessly demanding the poor sod clarify what he meant by it.

Instead of skipping gaily through the flowers saying “hullo clouds, hullo sky” like Fotherington-Tomas, Cameron will find himself tearing his hair out repeatedly denying he ever suggested that single mothers should have their children taken away from them or that a 15ft wall should be erected on the English-Welsh border.

The trouble with us Lib Dems is that, ‘dirty tricks’ bleating from by-election losers notwithstanding, we play far too fair with our opponents. While they spout nonsense about how ‘just one vote for the Lib Dems in this seat will let Margaret Thatcher / Neil Kinnock eat your babies’, we hop up and down feebly saying ‘um, excuse me, that’s not actually true’ and getting ignored.

If the only way to destroy Cameron is to lie, cheat, mangle the truth, hit below the belt and generally behave like a cross between Karl Rove and Ric Flair, then maybe that’s the way we should play it.

And one thing’s for sure - Nick Clegg’s not the right man for that particular job. Because if we’re about to march willingly towards the special hell reserved for bad politicians, we at least need to make sure the man leading us there is capable of killing, not wounding, when he strikes the blow that sends us that way.

So I’m really, really tempted to vote Huhne.

Except, even as my pen’s hovering over my naked ballot paper, there’s a part of me saying “No - it shouldn’t be that way”.

Maybe the political reality is that we need to play the man, not the ball. But I’ve never been very good with reality. I don’t want to live in a world where that sort of tactic is the right sort of tactic. And I don’t really want to endorse it with my vote.

So that’s where I am at the moment. And if you’re a Huhnista and you’ve read this far - leave a comment and give me a reason to vote for him.

Don’t base it on his policies, because I don’t care about policy. Both candidates passed the PPC selection process, so they’re ideologically sound and that’s good enough for me.

Don’t base it on his personality, because I don’t think he’s got much of one and I don’t particularly like what he has got.

Don’t base it on his ability to communicate, because if what you’re communicating is wrong then the better you are it the more damage you do.

Don’t base it on how I’ve got him all wrong and he’s actually a nice guy, because that will remove the only quality that makes him worth voting for in my eyes.

Instead, reassure me that he’ll be as lethal aiming outwards as he has been aiming inwards.

Because if I’m going to sell my soul to the Devil, I want to be as sure as possible that the reward will have been worth the cost to my idealism.

Off to hospital again yesterday (the Charing Cross, in Fulham Palace Road) for a check-up following my leg and elbow operations earlier this year.

This has been a long-running saga, dating back to at least early 2003, which came to a head this year when I finally persuaded them to get to work on me with a knife.

To summarise, some time in 2002 a numb patch appeared on the outside of my right thigh. In Feb 2003 a neurosurgeon diagnosed me with meralgia paresthetica and put me on a waiting list for surgery. He warned me it would take a year or so before anything happened. Over the next few months I had some conductivity tests (electrodes jammed into the leg) which confirmed the diagnosis, and settled down to wait.

After that, nothing happened.

For several years.

In late 2006, with the leg worsening and new problems developing in my left elbow, and a few other unrelated health things also worrying me, I got bored waiting and went for private consultation, first with a GP and then with a neurosurgeon, who stuck a rocket up the backside of the NHS and got things moving again.

More tests and consultations followed (mostly repeats of the 2003/04 stuff) then in July they finally did the cutting. Transposition of the left ulnar nerve and decompression of the right cutaneous nerve of thigh, for those who thrive on details.

I woke up after the surgery to mixed results. The elbow? Perfect. No more finger-twitching or numbness. The leg? Disaster. Much more numbness and a world of pain. Some very unhappy weeks followed, involving painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, horrible limping, sleepless nights, black despair and a walking stick.

Eventually, some of the numbness and most of the pain receded. It still hurts occasionally, but there’s variety in what type of pain occurs and it never lasts long, so that’s an improvement on balance. The numbness is significantly worse than before the operation, but I can still detect pressure, even at the place with least sensation, so I’m no longer worried about not knowing if I’m burning myself against a radiator or whatever.

And there’s more than a chance it will improve further over the next few months.

Which is where I was yesterday when I went off for what turned out to be the final stage in the saga. A quick five-minute consultation with a jolly woman I’d never met before and that was it - discharged, with an open invitation to contact them again if there was any deterioration.

A bit anti-climactic, actually. I don’t know what I expected, but this was something that had for a long while been a major part of my life (or, during the early years, something lurking on the edge of my attention, impossible to entirely forget) and it just fizzled out. On balance, I’m glad I had the operations done - the elbow was a success, the leg about break-even with hope for further improvement. But where was the full stop at the end, the handshake with the surgeon and the “good luck, old chap” to see me off?

I wasn’t sure what to do with myself afterwards. Having dragged myself down to London on just three and a half hours sleep and then waited around in a hospital corridor for a late appointment, it seemed too soon to go straight home again. On the other hand, I was dog tired, had nothing in particular to do, and wanted to be back before a workman arrived to fit blinds to two rooms in the house.

I pottered up the Fulham Palace Road, peering in through the window of the Spitfire Polish restaurant at the Battle of Britain memorabilia, then trailing around a bookshop with no great enthusiasm. Eventually I refuelled with a cheese and mushroom crepe and a coffee from a hole in the wall in the Hammersmith shopping centre and descended back onto the Tube. A train was just about to leave Kings Cross when I got there, so I was relieved of the need to think about anything and away I went. A brisk walk from the station and I was home in time for lunch.

It’s been quite a while now since we moved out of the flat we rented for nine years and into a house of our own - but for one reason or another we’re only just in the process of giving notice.

Today we were back there cleaning carpets and painting window frames - and we were reminded of exactly why we left.

Same killer motorway traffic a stone’s throw in every direction, same ghoulish upstairs neighbour looming randomly out of the shadows with her dog, same feeling of being under everyone else’s noses (partly, admittedly, because we have the curtains down for cleaning), same odd detritus of other people’s lives under your feet (discarded latex gloves in the car park tonight, close by where a couple can sometimes be seen sat in a car in the dead of night and where we once found a discarded condom wrapper - unsavoury thoughts follow inevitably).

But most of all, the same bloody moronic pounding thumping dance music through the walls and floors, like having your teeth drilled (trust me on this, I have a season ticket to the dentist at the moment), making you want to go downstairs, knock on their door, smile sweetly and say “excuse me, could you possibly turn your music down before I STUFF YOUR FEET UP YOUR NOSTRILS?”

And now I’m back home, at my desk in our office with a mug of hot tea, in the blissful uncrowded silence of the outskirts of an unassuming market town, thinking ‘ahhhhh… THIS is better’.

Which is probably why I’ve managed to write something again, five years and ten days since I first set up shop on DeadJournal.