Seriously.

Look, let me take the long way round, okay?

US politics is pretty bare knuckle. I mean, sure, it’s not Ukraine, where you can get poisoned with organophosphates. But it’s rough and tumble.

So, over here in the UK we’ve been watching the grand bedroom farce of Peter Mandelson, George Osborne, and Oleg Deripaska, in which Nathaniel Rothschild was so annoyed at the bad manners of one of his guests in going public with private conversations that he took him over his metaphorical knee and spanked him. (You should really read the letter. It’s a corker.)

Ultimately, this whole thing is a row over a faux pas. George Osborne is in trouble because he used the wrong fork on purpose.

I feel this way because, after some wrangling and tangling, I was able to put in a “don’t cache this” robot thingy so that when I edit my blog the old version doesn’t stay around like a bad smell, and to check that it was all working I ran a search for “Harkaway’s Occasionalities”.

Google offered me “Harkaway’s Occasional Cities” instead.

I don’t know yet what an “occasional city” is. I just know that the idea sings in the weird-edged jagged caves at the back of my brain.

Poetry of a search engine. Nice.