If we could reduce all of the variables in modern British society into symbolic form and express their inter-relationships by integral calculus, the limits of the function would be bounded by the lowest common denominator and the highest common bullshit factor.

Why is so much so awful and our expectations so pathetic? What about all those marvels that don't work? All that 'progress' which is regress in disguise? All that which should be satisfying and inspiring which has become crass and insulting?

Our economy is locked into a search for growth which our resources can not sustain, driven by a service economy in which there are progressively fewer in other modes of employment to sustain the services. Opportunities for building dignity and self respect in this economic ourobouros are sacrificed to 'labour flexibility' on the post-Thatcherite altar - and as the economic underclass become labelled and stigmatised as a social underclass (and therefore by definition in the prevailing mythos a moral underclass) we ensure that the problems which political rhetoric vows eternally to vanquish become institutionalised and endemic. Generations of children who are born carrying within them all the wonderment of living are both literally and metaphorically undernourished and denied the opportunity to find their potential in a free society.

When I was a student first time round, between 1977 to 1982, I found myself expressing the occasional radical opinion here and there. Nothing too dangerous of course, I'm too much of a coward for that, but the odd CND march and an evening in a cage at the end of Princes Street for Amnesty International spring to mind (together with the American tourists who, regrettably, played directly to stereotype by asking me to assure them that I wasn't a communist).

After a while the gloss wore off as my idealism was soured by encounters with the dogmatists of radical politics who generally were (and remain) at least as intolerant and rigidly conformist as those whom they villify. At an intellectual level, quite apart from the ways in which my personal beliefs had changed to reject theism, my reading of radical theology came to an abrupt halt when I realised that there was nothing much radical about it at all but just, as Gunther Grass would have it, the dispensing of the blood of Christ in Hegelian bottles, and of a pretty nondescript vintage at that. I could never understand why all those white, anglo saxon, presbyterian lecturers got so excited by books which essentially presented a narrow Catholic theology in the language of undergraduate Marxism. Anyway I daresay most of you won't be interested in that.

These days, after a long hiatus, I'm starting to get shirty again. Some things which annoy me are petty, some are obscure, some are like standing on the summit of Everest and railing against the Cosmos. No matter, in these pages I plan to rant and reminisce, probably more than is sensible, about anything which takes my fancy at the time. You are, of course, welcome to contact me and argue back.