Festive cheer

Apologies for the period of hiatus, but it's been an energy-sapping festive period.

First, i found myself working both Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, updating a website which contained virtually no news. In these times in which journalists are treated as the least valuable commodity in the industry, there was no food, little extra pay, and barely a scrap of tinsel.

I could have coped with that, but for James Brown's death on Christmas day. For maybe the first time ever he got his timing way out of whack, ruining my day and rendering my copy of 'James Brown's Funky Christmas' forever unlistenable.

I needed cheering up by now. Cue the farcical execution of Saddam, which if you haven’t seen it already, turned up on YouTube about 3 hours after my blog entry predicting it would.

Excuse the rant, but I have just one more thing to say on that: If the Iraqi authorities had really cared whether or not proceedings were carried out in a dignified and humane (ha!) manner, would that mobile phone footage really have come out?

It’s what you might call an anticipated accident, and it is sickening to feel oneself compelled to watch the end of a man’s life, no matter what he may have done.

All of this made for a pretty depressing few weeks. So, i'm countering this by heading off to Rwanda tomorrow to work for an organisation called the Great Lakes Centre for Strategic Studies (more of which to follow).

I'll be working with journalists out there in the hope that my experience of sitting at a desk until 2 am trying to make a headline fit into 15 characters will somehow prove useful to them.

Check here to see how it goes.