Carnivore Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

At night...

Spent the morning pumpkin carving with Ruaridh. This was my pumpkin, showing what happens to naughty turnips...

Here are Ruaridh's and Morgan's:

The trouble with TomTom is that — from time to time — it can lead you into all kinds of interesting situations. Here's a case in point. We'd been out for the day castle spotting in Northumberland, and were heading from Etal to Warkworth. Now as we came through Alnwick (full marks to TomTom so far by the way), we weren't able to go along the High Street, so we diverted via Denwick, rather than heading down to the A1068. Now, you see that minor road leading down from Denwick to the 1068? That's where TomTom told us to go. So we went.

It started off fine — narrow, I'll grant you, but fine. But as we got down to the bottom of the road, the last mile or so looked like this:

200 m to the junction, originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

Let me offer you a close-up...

But, it's not icy, we have reasonable ground clearance in the Touran, and it's a long way reversing back to somewhere we can turn around. And at this point, it's only 200m from the junction. So we keep going.

But when we get back onto a real road, the car's struggling, and we hear an odd noise, so stop, and take a look-see. And look and see:

Which lead to an interesting wait in the middle of nowhere (actually, in the car-park of these guys, who kindly let us use their phone, their loo etc), while waiting for Green Flag to pick us up. And take us next day to Kwik Fit who charged us nigh on £200 for 2 new tyres.

So, thanks for asking, I had a bit of a Curate's Egg of a birthday.

So I'm sure you remember the big kerfuffle about foreign ex-prisoners not being deported from a month or three ago. And how Big Hard Dr John was going to personally track them down and sling them out of the country. All (approx) 1,000 of them, but 43 of the most serious ones in particular.

This was so high a priority task that a special taskforce was set up to set up networks of informers, knock on doors in the middle of the night, bundle people off on unregistered flights to unacknowledged prisons in regimes with a laissez-faire attitude to death squads and so on.

You might therefore think that — given this was such a high priority of public safety — we could rest assured that a newly vitalised Home Office would complete the job. Ah but no. No, no no. It turns out that the Snatch Squad has been disbanded already, having failed to deport perhaps half of the 1,000 total, and to find 1 in 6 of the most serious offenders.

Which raises an interesting question — now that the Eye of Sauron (aka the editorials of Murdoch owned newspapers) has moved on, can we infer that the taskforce was never more than political window-dressing?

(Hat-tip: lebwog)

A long time ago, back when I was at school, I was given some rather good advice about putting forward an argument: always state your assumptions. Now, I'm not sure where the current crop of junior Home Office Ministers went to school, and I'm loth to point fingers at his former employer, but it looks as if Liam Byrne didn't learn this lesson, or promptly forgot it when he entered politics.

For Liam has seen the polling on the cost of ID cards and has come up with a whizzo scheme for reducing the cost from the likely £300 a skull: let's just glue together the existing data the Government holds.

Shame it's the very definition of a house built on sand, eh?

Togged up..., originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

It's amazing how the time flies, but today is Morgan's 1st day at school. Wasn't he only just born the other day..? Seems like it.

As I'm sure you know, I spend more time away from home than I'd really like, which means I don't get to do my fair share of bedtimes. Now Morgan & Ruaridh both love bedtime stories, so I wanted to give them the Daddy experience while I'm away.

Last year I bought a low end microphone that records straight onto my iPod with the intention of recording some stories for them. But I never had time until now. And I thought I'd share them with everyone, so I now have a Bedtime Stories Podcast for your delectation and delight.

Morgan's Preschool Report from his Nursery (which is attached to the Primary School). Can you believe he starts at real school in August..?