The holiday comes to a close and you come to the conclusion that you've got just about nothing done. But at least you've managed to offend one or two people, which could be considered an achievement. Those days when the hours just slip away and you wonder what the heck it is you've been doing. Answer: sitting there on the net chatting, surfing and otherwise performing activities that are as useful as twiddling your thumbs.

Been reading Houellebecq again of late. Having covered every conceivable topic of controversy, outrage and disgust, he moves onto the touchy subject of middle-aged man's lethal attraction for barely pubescent girls. Western civilisation, as he puts it, offers everything and delivers nothing. Which is as true of sex as anything else, with ever younger girls being tarted up and put in front of cameras to appear in magazines informing ever younger girls of "style", early teens and tweens in heels and short skirts and midriffs and sticky make-up, while the judiciary and media become more and more indignant in their howls for the incarceration/ chemical castration/hanging/birching of perverts, monsters and other individuals who act on their more primitive desires. There are those who may say that Houellebecq is no better than pornography. One crucial difference. Pornography is basically a lie, depicting as it does a succession of women enjoying things that no human could possibly enjoy. Houellebecq, on the other hand, holds up a grim beacon of truth about such topics as pornography, sex tourism, adolescence, middle age, racism and other things we'd usually prefer not to be reminded of.

Indeed they are tense times we are living in. Couldn't really be any tenser. Just about everyone it seems is paralysed by fear, one way or another. It's amazing anything happens at all. Whatever does happen, people don't seem particularly happy making it happen. The war on terrorism is over and it looks as if the terrorists have won. Right-wing shockjocks, politically correct whingers, neurotic mothers, visionless conservative politicians from both parties, dead-head accountants, corporate functionaries and all the other people who blanche the colour out of our lives. Yes they've terrorised us. In fact they are us and we are them. And no hint of resistance to it that I can detect. We keep voting for the same conservative visionless politicians. We keep supporting the system that is dragging us to the cliff's edge. The more perilous the situation gets, the less inclined we are to do anything about it. Maybe it was just the same in the third century in Rome too and all.