I wonder if Britain will be any safer in the hands of this man? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, they say.

May 23, 2007 (Wednesday)
Warsaw (Poland)

BACK to London today. . . Canada wants fingerprints. Now, how on earth can a normal citizen get his fingerprints taken, short of busting a shop window?

May 24, 2007 (Thursday)
London (England)

BACK to Trafalgar Square, then to Savile Row police station; they inform me fingerprinting can only be done by Scotland Yard, by appointment, and give me a (wrong) phone number there. Briefly into the Burlington arcade to order new brown shoes. B. tells me a man behind her in a supermarket said, "You are certainly well preserved," which she took as a compliment, then analysed its portent. (Perhaps he knew her from years ago, I shall tell her.)

May 25, 2007 (Friday)
London (England)

WE are now in the thick of home hunting all over again, and we are certainly considering living outside London as an alternative. Jessica's school is in London, which is a major obstacle. I do not want her to change schools again.

As for Himmler, I am slowly grinding on, halted at the moment by [...] I am going through the hoops -- right now, I have to get a set of fingerprints for the Canadian government so they can confirm I have no criminal record there. What else will these geniuses think up?

B. "has bad news", she announces (I wish people would not do that). Scotland Yard cannot run the fingerprints until June 2, but I leave the UK on June 1 for a while. This is a serious snag and I do not see a way round it. They say they are inundated as foreign employers now all call for fingerprinting.

May 26, 2007 (Saturday)
London (England)

JESSICA comes at 1 pm and we look in agency windows in Mayfair. One bit of good news: Sussex Police in Brighton confirm they can do my fingerprints during the coming week.

May 27, 2007 (Sunday)
London (England)

I WRITE to Dr Herbert Schaller, right, my successful lawyer in Vienna, before breakfast, to get something off my mind:

Der Ausgang der beiden Prozesse Zündel und Rudolf war ja zu erwarten, Sie haben aber nach wie vor tapfer gekämpft und können nicht alles wie bei mir gewinnen, wenn auch ich wegen der Inhaftierung etwa 300.000 euro eingebüßt habe -- verlorene Wohnung und Eigentümer, Verträge, Flugkarten USA, usw.

Ich schreibe Ihnen heute allerdings in der alten Gelegenheit, Burschenschaft „Olympia". Von dem „Jura-Studenten Christoph V." habe ich seit der Trennung vor dem Studentenhaus kein Wörtchen gehört; merkwürdig stimmte schon damals, daß als ich ihn eine Stunde später anrief - er war ja angeblich in Gewahrsam - er sein Handy noch bei sich hatte und benutzen dürfte! ... Er hat auf keinen Brief geantwortet, und ich neige nunmehr zu der Ansicht, er war überhaupt kein echter Student, und die ganze Sache wurde ja nur von den Behörden vorgetäuscht, um mich aus irgendeinem Anlaß nach Wien hereinzulocken.

Genau diese Befürchtung habe ich jetzt gebildet in dem anderen Fall, als ich im Sommer 1993 zu einem Vortrag vor Studenten in München eingeladen wurde - von einem gewissen Stephan W., einem Freund des berüchtigten Ewald Althans. Bei dem ausgemachten Treffpunkt, im Möwenpick am Stachus, erschienen allerdings nicht die Studenten -- was bei mir erst jetzt einleuchtet! -- sondern die Staatspolizei mit Ausweisungsbefehl und, so vermute ich, auch einem Haftbefehl, zu dessen Ausführung es nicht mehr kam, da ich rechtzeitig, Unbill witternd, verduftete. Der einladende Student damals hieß Stefan W.; seine Hände waren immer naß beim Händedruck: ekelhaft, wie er vor Angst immer schwitzte.

Althans entpuppte sich später als bezahlter Verfassungsschutz-Spitzel, der Stefan war es wohl auch. Traurig, daß die Demokratien mit solchen Typen und Methoden arbeiten müssen.

Ich bin immer noch ohne Wohnung -- die alte ging ja nach meiner Inhaftierung verloren -- wir hoffen aber im Laufe des Sommers unter Dach zu kommen.

Wednesday I shall go with Jessica to Brighton; she is on half-term, and I have to get police fingerprints to send to Canada... It all costs a fortune and it is very, very silly. Scotland Yard in London was too busy to do the fingerprints so I have to travel down to Brighton.

I write all evening until 11 pm on Sobibor for the Himmler biography. It will need trimming.

May 28, 2007 (Monday)
London (England)

I AM still a little worried about that Höfle intercept. It does seem to have been discovered at a most convenient time in the Great Debate.[Postscript, 2.6.07: A reader informs me today that Hermann Höfle worked after the war for the American CIC, and actually killed himself on August 21, 1962 in the same prison building in which I was held until last December in Vienna].

More work on typing up the handwritten memoirs all evening -- the Sikorski scandal.

May 29, 2007 (Tuesday)
London (England)

BY train to Brighton with Jessica, the tickets cost £18 in total, very good. Brilliant sunshine on the south coast. Jessica chats garrulously all the way. Taxi to the police station, ten pounds. Sixty pounds fee for the fingerprints I need for the Canada police check. We eat disgusting seafront food, soak up sunshine in the sunny windy weather, and Jessica prances off down the pebble beach for a while. We catch the 5:49 train back to Victoria Station, studying house and real estate magazines for southern England; not much is for rent. Jessica is real fun to be with, and hoity-toity sometimes. She constantly reports back to B. her movements by cellphone, which is very impressive. A pleasing day out and all missions accomplished.

May 30, 2007 (Wednesday)
London (England)

I SEND this letter to my old law firm Frank & Co, whom I had to fire while in was held captive in Vienna:

You are holding my files on my claim against DLA / Baker Tilly. ... You indicated that you do not believe your firm let me down in my absence in prison. The less said about your partner Mr S. and the reasons for his complete inactivity therefore the better... I consider your final account was in the circumstances disproportionate, as you know.

(Only later did I learn that their Mr S. had decided to change into Mrs S. during these months, and was undergoing the necessary surgery.) And then people ask me why I don't like to use professional lawyers!

I WRITE to the Manager of the Royal Parks: "I would like to commission a memorial bench in memory of my daughter Josephine, to be placed in Grosvenor Square; is this possible? She lived a few yards away in Duke Street from 1968 and she played as a child and often spent her hours in the Square."

June 1, 2007 (Friday)
London (England) -- Z. (Belgium)

THE Cockney cabby chats with me for the fifteen minutes to Waterloo station, and I clock up yet another Englishman who never asked to invade Iraq, and never asked to be immigrated into either. So much for "democracy". Today's Daily Telegraph has an Op-Ed article, which suggests that that newspaper has also woken up and smelt the Black coffee, though it puts it ever-so-delicately.

At Waterloo station, I board the 7:42 am express to Brussels-Midi. Steely white mercury vapour lamps light the platform. It looks like the setting for the final shoot-out in a Jerry Bruckheimer film. The lighting in the Vienna Josefstadt prison was positively warm and girly in comparison. The fare is only £29.50, which is impressive; less impressive the airport-style baggage checks, and total body search by a very intrusive security guard before we are even allowed onto the platform.

The usual eight words from me: "We have Israel to thank for all this."

That sh*tty little country, to quote again the former French ambassador, is becoming the most hated in the world. Over a hundred thousand British university lecturers are again organizing a boycott of that country's "academics". Their Israeli opponents are squealing about free speech.

I understand; uh, no, I don't. Given the way that our democracy works, it is about all that ordinary people can do, short of hiring planes and unemployed bomber pilots (for leafleting missions only, of course: like Neville Chamberlain's RAF in 1939).

THE train gradually picks up speed as we leave London, and is finally gliding through the countryside at 300 km an hour. Through the Channel Tunnel for the first time. There is no sensation of speed at all, and we lose all sense of where we are, England, France, or Belgium.

For the time being it is Little England, because unfortunately there are ten or fifteen office workers in the rows directly in front of me, mostly English females in their thirties, of the binge-drinker sort, on a business outing to Belgium; their "team leader" is standing in the aisle for most of the trip putting her team loudly through tests and games of some unintelligible sort.

The train slips into the tunnel almost unannounced, and emerges into France twenty-five or thirty miles later. Quite a memorial to Margaret Thatcher's years in power -- although it has its downside, the rats and other immigrants of dubious quality trickling from one country into the other. It compares well with the "achievements" of Mr Tony Blair and his loathsome gang of stunted dwarfs.

John H. is waiting for me and drives me over to his recording studio first, a glittering and impressive complex, behind a very unprepossessing, rusting, slaughterhouse-type façade. His son John, and grandson, also John, are introduced to me. A vegetarian health snack there, then we drive on to Z., arriving around midday.

We talk about Gordon Brown (right) and John mentions the odd chin-swallowing tic that our blessed future prime minister has. So he has spotted it too.

"He seems to be getting it under control," says John, but I comment that the entire British press has so far been too decent to comment on it, even as they very decently overlooked his little blunder a few years back, secretly selling off four hundred tons of Britain's Gold reserves when the market had just hit bottom and was about to rebound.

I remarked on his facial tic some years back, and wondered what a clinical psychiatrist would have to say about it.

Certain brain defects, excesses of dopamine for example, generate uncontrollable tics like this. At Question Time, while everybody else was usually looking at the prime minister, I used to watch Brown, sitting next to him: he displayed the most remarkable grimaces and body movements, with flailing arms and shifting positions, that again suggested something odd was happening.

I wonder if Britain will be any safer in the hands of this man? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, they say.

Leg hurting; the prison muscle-damage has still not repaired. John H. walks a lot, an amazing display of vigor for a man of 79. I buy a Telenet Internet card to use a neighboring hotel's WiFi for one hour, as there are no Internet cafes in this town; it costs ten euros ($15); it doesn't work. So I pay twenty euros for 24 hours' subscription to Telenet Belgium. This is getting ridiculous. Then I find that Telenet does not recognize my existing T-Mobile UK subscription here, although under the agreement terms it should.

Online finally around 8:20 pm. Ars Polona claim to have paid money back to my account on May 30. Yes, right. After the Warsaw press started calling them!

9:15 p.m I phone B. from a phone box, next to a life-sized statue of a naked man piddling into the fountain below; what an odd sense of humor the Belgians have. She says that the Bolger legacy has been transferred to us, the confirmation came in the same post as a school fees bill for Jessica which, as expected, exactly wipes it out.

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A reader writes about Gordon Brown's tic

Das Scheitern des »kleinen Eichmann-Prozesses« in Österreich: 21. August 1962: Selbstmord des Salzburger SS-Sturmbannführers Hermann Höfle im Wiener Straflandesgericht

 

SC writes on Sunday, June 3, 2007: "You ask what a clinical psychologist would say about brown's tic - what about brown's finger nails, bitten down to the quick? Surely the soon to be crowned pm must know that nails chewed with such ferocity say an awful lot about the chewer. Doesn't brown have the self discipline to stop his neurotic nibbling?"