sweet effay

The Little House’s garden is looking less flat than usual with an incursion of moles:

I hate moles. We’ve always had the odd one, but my next door neighbour used to trap them (when he wasn’t poisoning the squirrels that is), so it wasn’t too much of a problem. Unfortunately he has since died, so it’s down to me to try to defend the old homestead. I set the dog on them, but he’s bloody useless; in fact he can’t even keep the rabbits and squirrels out. I’ve stuck smokes, gorse, and God knows what else down their runs, but they don’t give a toss. I send the Little effay out to run around and jump on the hills, but the moles just stick their heads out and tell her to keep the noise down. An ancient Norfolk resident (I’m best mates with all the old men in the village) told me that the thing to do is wait outside with a spade until you see activity, then drive the spade into the hill and toss everything into the air. Apparently moles are sensitive creatures and being hurled up like this gives them a heart attack. I wouldn’t know; I just get soil all over my head.

Still on the subject of vermin, I very kindly spent the best part of an afternoon going through Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Tony Blair, so that you don’t have to. The verdict? It’s true, the two documents are perfectly consistent, it’s just that the shorter document isn’t an accurate précis of the former. Let us clarify with an example:

The phrase

Tony Blair is the Prime Minister and he took us to war in Iraq

is perfectly consistent with the phrase

Tony Blair is the Prime Minister, although he seems to think that he is some sort of absolute ruler who can dispense with the Cabinet and manipulate evidence in order to take us into an illegal war in Iraq for which, we can but hope, history will vilify him

in that they do not contradict each other. However, the meaning of the second is significantly different from the first. So it proves with the Attorney General’s advice to our beloved leader.