Is it any wonder?

...that the News International corporation should have stooped so low as to hack the mobile phones of murder victims, giving families false hopes that their young ones were still alive.

The surprise perhaps, is that it has taken this long for the rest of the media to rise up against Murdoch (although there are some dissenters who fear for the "freedom" of investigative reporting), after so much scandal, over knows goodness how many years. The Milly Dowler case is the straw that broke the camel's back.

I can't feel any huge amount of rage towards Rebekah Brooks, as she is very much one major cog in the wheel of an enormous, monstrous machine, which has encompassed governments (including the present one) as well as once respectable newspapers.

The only good of writing about this now, is that hopefully a thorough clean-up of the whole sleazy mess is made. It would be too much to hope for the end of tabloid journalism.

You're as young as you feel

40 this year (coming soon - Manhattan Diary commemorating the event!), and yet as I stood waiting for a bus this afternoon, beside a steep wall along Mersea Road, I climbed up and sat on top of it, just like when I was a kid at school.