Weds 6th January

Oh dear, as I type this I'm slowly feeling more and more as if I'm incubating a very nasty cold. I think tonight's the night for an early night, complete with Lemsip. As it is I've been dosing myself with echinacea since about 9 o'clock last night. Ah well, come snow, come colds.
I've actually just been feeding the birds. I've put out a small plastic dish of water on the bedroom windowsill, and scattered a bit of bread with chopped grapes, melted honey and a dash of olive oil. I've got a packet of bacon out of the deep freeze and I'll cook that tonight so that I can add it to the mix for tomorrow - they'll love bits of rind, and I know somewhere I've got a packet of salad seeds, I'll have to hunt that out. All the nuts I've got in the house are salted, so they're no good for the birdies at all. I've actually seen a tiny little tit of some variety out on the hunt, and a couple of robins around, so there's clearly a big demand locally for that bit extra to get them through this cold spell. Next time I go to the shop, I shall remember to get a packet of lard, and then I'll put together a bit of the old Blue Peter bird cake. They do so love that stuff.
It's extremely cold and the snow and ice hang on. However today on the tv we have the spectacle of the South of England coping with 10 - 18 inches of it, which arrived overnight and constitutes a total emergency. I suppose when the most snow you usually see is a heavy frost, this is a bit on the special side. And just to throw a little political speculation into the mix, Hoon & whatsername have launched some sort of lets see if we can destabilise the Labour Party even further. Just what you need before an election, and I'll bet Cameron's cackling away like a witch from M*cB*th. And incidentally, by the by, what's all this about recognising marriage within the tax system? You know, you just know, that this is some means that they will find to ensure that whatever benefit they will produce from this will be included in the working partners' pay packet. And 9 times out of 10, that means into the man's pay packet. Now that's a truly Conservative act.

Last night I watched a documentary on the Amanda Knox business. Got to say this was interesting, but somewhat hard to actually figure as such; most crimes have a form of internal logic to them that sort of tells you what happened. People behave in certain ways, the patterns of their internal psychology - and of course, I've never met this woman, nor, I think, anyone particularly like her. But nevertheless, some of the described behaviours attributed to her appear to be very odd indeed, and as such, indicate that all is not as straightforward as might appear. It's also very difficult to figure out what is actually real about this case - the press appear to have done a real number on her. The one thing that really stands out about this though is the extent to which the victim of this has disappeared from view; Meredith Kerchner has become the invisible woman in all this. All one can be really sure of is that a young woman met a particularly awful death in a foreign country where she should have been safe; Italy is not the land of the outer darknesses. It might be 'different', but she should have been safe. I feel that she's been badly let down by the justice system over there, because it appears to have colluded with the images that the press has been busy creating of this young American woman, to create a sort of super salacious spectacular, where everyone gets to be a 'star' and the end result - the punishment of the truly guilty - has been sidelined in a rather grubby way. I'm not saying that I believe that Knox is innocent, I suppose what I'm actually saying is that I don't know, and given that they had this big trial, etc etc, you should have more confidence in the produced result of all that than I actually do. I think there are enough questions left over at the end of it to bring the verdict into doubt. Which is really sad for Italy, but then you have to question whether one ever feels really comfortable with any other justice system other than the one you've grown up with? Is there something 'other' about even a country as physically close to us as Italy, a fellow EU country, one where you or I could decide to go and live at a moments' notice? Has Knox become a lesson in the philosophy of otherness? There is so much about this that fascinates, that appeals to the hidden gossip inside us all, the modern obsession with celebrity - it's a parable for our times. I have a deep urge to say that there's a great book waiting to be written about this, in fact is probably being written as we read this, one that might even speak to us all about the culture within which we live - and I find that slightly disturbing. After all at the very root of this is a dead girl; one dead girl and one imprisoned, one a true victim, and one usurping the victim. What does it say about me that I watched this, that I too was gripped, and fascinated? That I find myself writing about Knox when I want to express solidarity with the child that died? In all of that programme, despite stating clearly that Kerchner had been subsumed by the trial of Knox, I learnt nothing more about her, about why she had chosen to go to Italy and study there, I learnt nothing more about who she was as a person. We learnt nothing about the grieving of the family, although we did get Knox's parents making brief statements about how sorry they were for them, how awful this death had been. I suppose that at least they did manage to include this, but the omission of more information about Kerchner, the very missing-ness at the centre of all this, if it had been filled, might have provided more answers than we presently have.