Yes, you read that correctly.

92

Do you watch CSI at all? No? Well, in a nutshell, it's this: William L. Petersen does the wonderful Manhunter in 1986, has a miserable run for the next fourteen years, and then returns as the head of a Vegas-based Crime Scene Investigation unit with very watchable results. (One imagines his agent weeping tears of frustration throughout the latter part of the 80s and the whole of the 90s before leaping into the air in 2000, phoning his client at 2am and whooping, 'Bill! Bill! It's forensics, Bill! That's what we've been missing. I'm calling Jerry Bruckheimer right now.')

So anyway, in CSI you are presented with the aftermath of an incident and you have to identify the guilty party or parties. Are you up for trying this yourself? Now? OK, then.

Suppose there are three people in your house: your partner (urbane, sophisticated — think 'David Niven in a Banana Splits T-shirt') and two smallish children (blond, elusive, cunning). Your partner is sitting in the dining room reading a book, your children are in the living room playing a game called 'Scatter every single toy we possess across the floor and then go upstairs to jump on the bed'. After a few minutes, you wander into the dining room, sigh at the chaos and tidy up. You then go off to do something else. When you return to the living room a short time later you discover that the children have strewn the place with toys yet again.

You are William L. Petersen and you must apportion blame. Do you:

A) Get the children downstairs and tell them that if they haven't tidied up the living room within the next ten minutes then you're sending them to be raised on a farm in Iowa.

B) Go into the dining room, stand in front of your partner with your arms threateningly akimbo and roar, 'The children have messed up the dining room — again… and you're sitting there reading a book!'

Eh? What is it to be, William?

If you chose 'A' award yourself two points. If you chose 'B', award yourself 'insane'.

Now, the thing is — and, if you'll forgive me, I'll relate this to Margret a little here — one might easily put this kind of thing down to 'poor targeting'. One might think that the discrepancy between whoever is responsible for something and the person she's actually shouting at about it is merely the artifact of some kind of loss of footing on her mental walk from the crime to the culprit. The flaw in that notion, however, is that she always ends up shouting at me . If it were poor targeting, then — occasionally — it'd hit someone else, right? But, nope, that's not the case. If Margret had been in charge of the invasion of Iraq, every single missile would have struck me in the face. In fact, Margret is probably the only person to have attended both pro and anti-war rallies in the run up to the conflict. If you examine press photographs, you can sometimes pick her out — off to one side, holding a banner that reads 'Bomb Mil'.

The irony being, of course, that this still makes her policy less ill-considered and asinine than the one that actually advised the invasion of Iraq.

Ack — just lost the whole of the Midwest there. And I was doing so well up to that point, wasn't I?

OK, I'm off on holiday, shortly. Well, I say 'on holiday', but we're going to the west coast of Ireland, so I probably mean 'to get thoroughly soaking wet and wind-blasted'. In any case, do not expect an update until I return. You'll all just have to do some work, I'm afraid.

………

93

Everyone been productive in my absence? Yep, that's what I thought, and I'm proud of you. See? You can do it. Don't use me as a crutch — you have great reserves of indolence within if only you have the courage to tap them. Go up to your boss/supervisor/team leader/capo today and say in an unwavering voice, 'I am on a sponsored slack, and you're paying, and the charity is me.' You just need to believe in yourself. Let go of my hand… and fly! Nothing is beyond the power of love! Etc.!

Right, now that I've healed everyone's spirit, let me tell you about my holiday and, flowing from it, the Doctrine of Proportionality. I know many of you are high school graduates, or read the Daily Mail, or have that copy of Encarta that came with your computer somewhere in the house, and so you are perfectly familiar with the selection of notions that first began to be assembled under the heading of the Just War Doctrine by St Augustine. So, please, don't think that I'm being insulting if I explain what I'm talking about a little. It's merely to bring the stragglers up to speed — some of whom might be very young, were exposed to high concentrations of lead in the womb, or be running a large country. Basically, the DoP is a very old principle of Just War which states that acts must not be out of proportion to the provocation or the needs of the situation. A very fine concept, I know you'll agree. And how do I know you'll agree? Because you're not Margret, that's how.

I'm walking up a gravel track leading away from a beach in Ireland when I'm called back down by First Born. 'Mama's crashed,' he shouts after me — loudly, but strangely without alarm or surprise. And, indeed, crashed she has. A car was parked on the beach, and she's run into the side of it. It's the only other vehicle on about two miles of near-deserted sand. Given the desperate situation in Ireland right now (because the Americans aren't visiting since September the 11th), it's probably not far off being one of only four or five vehicles in the whole of County Kerry: and Margret's managed to hit it. Quite frankly, the precision of this makes landing a man on the moon seem very small beer indeed.

There's a dent in the door of the car, but it's nothing drastic. There's no one around, however, so, rather than risk leaving a note with our details under the windscreen wipers on a very windy beach, we start searching for the owners. Eventually we find Man, Woman and Small Girl.

Man is shirty and annoyed. 'How on earth did you manage to hit it?' he snaps, 'there was enough room.' He clearly isn't familiar with the philosophical concept of 'The bottle is already broken' as applied to my girlfriend. The more pensive of us there are calm because we are aware that, the moment that construction of a vehicle pretty much anywhere in the world is complete and it comes off the production line, then it's going to be driven into by Margret. The only question is "When?" Anyway, I'm not very taken with Man; as with all of you, I'm sure, the two things that I find very unattractive are bad manners and a superficial grasp of aetiology. He appears to have the the arrogant belief that Margret crashed into his car, specifically — rather than Margret crashed into his car simply because it was there. What state are we going to be in if everyone Margret crashes into takes it personally, eh? Thus, because Margret is offering to pay for the damage, and apologising profusely, and it's only a very, very minor dent, and, well, Margret is my girlfriend, I'm standing there trying to support her and meet his graceless display with quiet gravitas.

'Mil,' you may well be saying, 'you pretty much lost the option of playing the "quiet gravitas" card the day you dyed your hair fire engine red.' However, that's actually a minor issue in this case. My failure is far more spectacular. The reason I was walking back, rather than travelling in the car, was that the beach was good for surfing so I'd been body-boarding all afternoon and I am wearing a wet suit. No one, my friends, can pull off gravitas while wearing a wet suit. The simple fact is, there are only two occasions when one can be completely naked except for a black, skintight neoprene outfit into which (as everyone is unspokenly aware) you have peed several times in the past few hours — partly because a person has to pee, but also, as one must admit when one truly looks into one's soul, because (as everyone is unspokenly aware) of the delightful rush of warmth that surges throughout the suit when you do so. One of these occasions is a party at a particular private members club in London which is well-known to the police, and the other is when surfing.