Incredibly busy day at work and I’m still absorbing impact of the announced changes in immigration policy and law, so all I can manage is – cute!.

Please, no. (Sometimes it’s all about me. In one year and nine months, I can apply for indefinite leave to remain and it would make my life a lot easier if/when I got it).
“Immigrants’ rights to settle permanently in Britain will be drastically curbed as the government admits for the first time that the nation’s ‘hospitality’ has been tested by abuses of the immigration and asylum system.”
[blah blah there’s an election coming up blah]
“[C]ontroversy is likely to centre on plans to restrict ‘indefinite leave to remain’. Temporary workers who have been in Britain for four years with a clean record are more or less automatically granted the right to stay when their permits expire.”
(Observer)

I’m in heaven. An entire blog devoted to picking on Andrew Sullivan. (Via buggery.org)
Speaking of buggery.org, I keep meaning to talk about the point he raised about Survival/Invasion/Australia Day but I’m about to be kicked out of the office so I can’t right now.

I’ve just looked up the weather in Warsaw, where Min and I will be spending the weekend in a few weeks. A maximum of -3, overnight low of -12C. Great. Still, it’s 27/21C in Hanoi, and I’m going to be there in just over four weeks.

It must be the perfect job for someone – Island Manager.

Now everyone can speak like Brian Sewell! After seeing him at a lecture on art criticism, I wanted to have a dinner party where everyone had to speak like him, but it’s difficult to do it well.

I don’t know if it’s the twinkle in his eye, but there’s something about Paxman.

Interesting point of view on the kerfuffle over extended licences in the UK:
“The reputation [Australians] enjoy remains pretty much the same as when Barrington Bradman Bing Mackenzie landed at Heathrow in the 1970s and had his ice-cold tubes flogged from his Qantas bag by a Pommy bastard in customs.”
…
“It’s the exact opposite of Australia where, apart from Good Friday and Christmas, and unless that pinot noir enthusiast Bob Carr gets his way, we live with the unspoken reassurance that, somewhere, alcohol can be readily had. Here there’s a sense of genuine panic that you’re going to miss out.” n.c.a

“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.” Nice excuse, mate.