The Nuclear Arms Debate

This week's update of the website is a day late. Since January we've been having our main bedroom refurbished - new ceiling, floor stripped and sanded, new double glazed sash windows. And yesterday the wardrobes came, three of them, in huge boxes which I have to unpack and check before attempting to put them up. So the catalogue went out of the window while I toiled at the bedroom front.

The picture on the home page, reproduced here, is one we took of Dubrovnik when we had a holiday there thirty years ago. The Minceta Tower from which it was taken is high up on the walls which go way above the town. The bit of the town where you see the church (whose name I now forget) was originally an island just off the coast where the first settlement of Ragusa (as it was then called) began. The town spread to the mainland and eventually the channel between the two parts was filled in and became the main street. Ragusa's great rival was Venice, at the head of the same Adriatic Sea. Dubrovnik and the islands near it were a lovely place to visit.

Disgracefully, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Tory Party voted in last night's Commons debate with Tony Blair's government to renew our nuclear option. Nuclear weapons are immoral and anyway our small and relatively insignificant country should not try and bolster its position in the world by playing the great nation. I am glad a hundred Labour MPs had the sense and decency to vote against the bill. As for the Tories, their vote shows that despite their much vaunted new green and sensitive face they are still the same beneath it all.