Five years

What in the blazes is happening to Britain? The news about the tabloid phone hacking didn't really come as much of a surprise to me on the scale of really low things that people in that business have done, then suddenly it all boiled over and the News of the World was shut down. I thought that that was just a rebranding in disguise to make sure that nobody responsible actually lost anything over it, but then the chief executive Rebekah Brooks resigned and was later arrested in an undeservedly polite fashion. And the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police resigned, too. Now someone who spoke out against the paper has been found dead in not-suspicious-at-all circumstances. And the worst part of it all is that none of the news panel shows are around to cover it just now - Merton and Hislop are away until much later in the year, and Dara O Briain just missed the chance by a week.

Today, it's five years since I was let into America. I'm not really sure I have much more to say about that, other than that I've gone from arriving with a suitcase full of clothes and two hard drives to owning a house and car (or at least, about five of the stairs and three quarters of a steering wheel, with the rest still the property of their respective banks) in a fairly reasonable amount of time. I wish I could say that either the country or my life have started to make any more sense to me since I arrived, but they really haven't.

Not that I could escape now even if I wanted to - I don't have a valid passport any more, it expired at the end of June. I'll need to get around to renewing it - given the state it's got itself into since I left, that country needs me.