Back again

Back from Turkey having completely changed colour. Body darker, hair lighter, face rainbowed blue purple greeny-yellow (with freckles) due to a thumping black eye after being smashed on the head and rolled by a bizarre series of freak waves. Yes, in the Med. J was scraped and flipped over as well, but as he is 6'2 and I am 5'6 I came off worse. Went to hospital in ambulance with suspected fractured skull and broken shoulder having staggered bleeding from the surf as Turkish and English people on the beach rushed towards me like a scene from international Baywatch but all is well, just a lot of cuts and bruises and swelling. I am clearly quite hard to kill. And I still have five lives left.

Anyway,Turkey was great, chilled out, ate a lot of fish, and it was wonderful to see people I love. Back to find The War Against Terror ( T.W.A.T) has gone up several gears. Which is handy for the papers who were struggling to fill pages with with Big Brother evictees, Colleen's holiday stomach, why Pauline Fowler REALLY left Eastenders, and erm, the thousands disposessed and hurt/killed by bombs in the Middle East. Handy too, for Dr. John Reid , who gets to make a series of jaw-jutting announcements and shorten the odds on his being the PM's annointed successor by appearing on Sky every 3 minutes, whilst Blair in Barbados fiddles with copyright law issues for elderly popstar landlords and Cherie, presumably, burns.

The funny thing is, that liquid explosives are nothing new and if airport security have only just cottoned onto this, despite 9/11, then I'm duly flabbergasted. I'm also a bit surprised by all the new passenger security demands ( everything in clear plastic bags, no hand luggage, no Irn-bru/hair-gel/i-pods etc, which begs the question as to how on earth we are supposed to amuse ourselves if we can't burp our way through sinister-tasting pop/sculpt interesting quiffs/listen to M-People tracks whilst airborne. And I don't envy parents trying to amuse their nippers with a credit card, bunch of keys and packet of tampons for the duration of a transatlantic flight). It seems a tad..over-dramatic.

Before I flew to Turkey, well before this Top Breaking Terror News Terror Plot Foiled Terror Alert, all my luggage was x-rayed, twice, and my hand luggage was manually searched, and dusted for explosives. A chatty man waved a little wand thing over every product in my make up bag, after having a good rummage through my handbag. I was very interested in what he was up to. He explained that he was looking for explosive traces, and that ''some ingredients in ladies' makeup can produce an explosive reading''. (Perhaps the terrorists can learn from this and produce some killer combinations of ''blush explosion'' and ''full-blast mascara'' which when combined produces suitably dramatic effects. I think The Joker tried something similar in one of the Batman films). Anyway, the point being that security seemed pretty on the ball already. All these doom-mongering headlines remind me of the tanks at Heathrow business, ( what happened to that story?) and the timing just...well.. awfully convenient as Blair's inability to get a Lebanon/Israel ceasefire - despite ostentatiously delaying his holiday - and the Labour split as the refusal to condemn Israel's actions as disproportionnate ( you're telling me) whilst horrific reports come in each day from Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon have been engulfing the Government in yet more unwanted headlines.

Coming back from Turkey today on a 3am flight, 48 hours after after the Bottle Bombers Terror Plot Foiled Drama (TM) , I was able to carry hand luggage, ( which was x-rayed twice in Turkey) water for the journey, books, duty-free whisky and moisuriser - and still whizzed through customs in the UK having only been delayed an hour in take off. I had visions of having to camp on airport floors for days and being strip-searched and my luggage rifled whilst tens of thousands of travellers gnawed plastic sandwiches and quietened screaming toddlers around me. But it was all fine.

I'm glad that what appears to be a wicked criminal plot to cause a horrific-but-nonetheless- entirely-imaginable 4000 casualties has been thwarted. Well done to the alleged plot-foilers. I object, however, to puff-chested clench-jawed hardbitten soundbitten rubbish about ''the new and deadly threat'' from ''evil people'' who ''hate our freedoms'' and the need for more and more civil-liberty-busting measures being spouted at what politicians seem to think is a cringing, huddled population. I haven't seen anyone panicking. Despite the chuntering about ''a threat greater than Hitler'' and ''unimaginable casualties''.

This is not a war, it's a nihilstic misognistic macho stupid death-cult idea that attracts the adolescently angry intent on causing vicious criminal acts for political purpose, and it is unfortunately aided in its propoganda and recruitment by the results of a manifestly unfair UK/US foreign policy and bellicose rhetoric that fans the flames of extremist anger.

And we can all deal with it best by keeping calm. As pretty much everyone seems to be doing, bar some politicians and pundits. Who have a vested interest in reminding us that The Sky Is Falling Best Listen To Me

Matthew Parris on the money. And Holly does a great write-up of a meeting with one of the chief benificiaries of the current situation, saving me the trouble ( passport dramas prevented it before I left the UK).

And now I must go to bed, it has been a very long 24 hours with no sleep. Miff is even fatter than when I went away, she is asleep on the desk and J is asleep on the sofa. I need to crash too. But it is good to be back. How is everyone?