mockney piers

While people ponder over that one.. Lesson two: the double literal. Quite simply two words that are synonyms of each other in some fashion. Get the word that links them and you have your answer. Something like left drink? (4) port a decent rule in cryptics is think laterally when given a word, avoid the obvious connotation and gomfor a more obscure one. Flower often means river, main or drink something to do with the sea. In this case it is just a drink so what a setter will do is distract you with a setence that hints at an alternate more obvious meaning or a question mark thus making the double literal into an image of someone getting up or leaving a pub, when actually it's a very straightforward double literal?

Same here. I'd never ever have got it on me tod without a least enough letters to have a good crack at the word and work backwards.

That's one of the classics Simon, like HIJKLMNO (5) A wonderful clue though, tis true.

Been a while since I've seen trouble t'EDT. ED still a very quiet area in terms of trouble compared to jus about everywhere else though. I'd say new towns are the worst. Pity the reveller in Stevenage or Croydon :-/

Oh sorry, I did post gold star to he Irishman, maybe my fat fingers then deleted it. Sorry!!

Hmm, crash course, might be nice for the crypicites among us to post the tips and tricks. It is a completely learnable skill. I tend to find I get a gut feel for an answer then play with the clue and see if it fits. Lesson one: anagrams. Among the most common of clues. You'll get a key word that means it's an anagram. Confused, mixed, muddled, awry, shot, basically the list goes on. Then you'll get some often incongruous looking clue words that supply the letters, then the literal. The three parts can exisit in any order in the clue. So typically: cheese made badly (4) = literal, clue, key. 'made' are the clue letters 'badly' is the key, in this case meaning anagram cheese is the literal of your answer, in this case obviously Edam. About 70% of clues conform to the above strcture though rarely in quite such a straightforward manner.

The respect for beliefs thing is a tricky one. I'm generally inclined to live and let live, but where does one draw the lines? Alot of people were upset by discussion of Michael Jackson, they didn't believe he did those things, and requested we have some respect for their opinion and feelings which was just annattempt tomsuppress debate because it made them uncomfortable? If someone I know is going to neuter themselves before dying to transcend to a spaceship, should I try to intercede or respect their beliefs? I believe a Jehovas Witness may allow themselves to die rather than get transfusion, but the state will intercede on behalf of their children rather than respect their beliefs and wishes. Padre Pio as a family member is of course harmless, but when the pope thought he was a fraud shouldn't that at least ring an alarm bell somewhere, and as someone pointed out, this unquestioning belief and respect is exactly what has allowed so many priests and nuns to conduct their culture of abuse (I think taking abuse on a large sliding scale from bullying through to sexual predation, the report says that one in four Irish children is thought to be affected) to continue in a culture of impunity. I don't see how pointing out the parallels in the psychological equivalence is disrespecting faith, merely pointing out a valid point of few surely? Ill refrain from bringing heopathy into this though... ... ... ...doh!!!

"Brits and Russians are all trying to make Afghanistan a safer place, just goes to show no one will probably get it right, but are going to try their hardest to do right by the afghanistans" no winking smiley? This is clever use of irony isn't it I take it. If not try "the great game" on wikipedia for starters. I think you'll find the well being of the afghans isn't paramount.

You mean you started a controversial thread and didn't read it? Isn't that known as flaming? ;-P

Nope. A little more lateral.

It was indeed epic. Pi (a bitty iffy for goody goody) in EC (the city), big myth. I have a couple left to get but left my Private Eye at work. Fun for the morrow. Ooh, this was a good'un Dick you hold in your hand (7,3)

Yeah I thi k your first answer feels right, it's a bit close to a literal clue though isn't it, double meaning of sh?t being the only crypticity about it. Ta anyway. This one feels easy but nowt springing to mind Goody-goody found in the city area? A big myth (4) _ _ _ C

Sh?t street trader (4,6) _ _ _ _/P _ _ _ _ _

"As for the Saville Inquiry, whilst it was announced in Jan 1998, first submissions were not given until March 2000. The Good Friday Agreement had been in force since April 10th 1998." Well quite, so it was part of the negotiations resulting in the good friday agreement. Had it not then come about, such bad faith almost certainly would have been a stumbling block in continued co-operation would it not? But we definitely digress. As I said I don't think this is about Iraq per se, but about scrupulous governance.

Because the Catholic church isn't Christianity (though obviously it like to think it is). It's criticising an organisation, not a concept or a religion or its adherents. It is not the same thing at all. It's like criticising the Finsbury Park mosque for not dealing with the Islamists that almost took over there. That isn't criticing islam, it's criticising a place that permitted preaching of hatred within it's doors. Likewise criticising the actions of Israel's government casts no aspersions on its citizens, and is most certainly not slating Judaism. In case you hadn't noticed it's a secular democracy.

Errant nonsense vinceayre, strawman after strawman. If you said that the Israeli government was allowing building of settlements in contravention of international law and was guilty of systematically bombing civilians that that government was criminal then yes, you'd be right. Nooone is saying that Catholics are bad, or that all priests are bad, but when the body politic of the church has systematically supressed knowledge of and protected those who committed wrong-doings, indeed moving them to places where the abuse continues then you can say that it is bad, and it is certainly criminal. If the chairman of Tescos had moved employees that they'd discovered had been beating up its customers* without informing the police, then doing it again when they beat up customers in the new store in the new town then I'm sure they'd go to jail. Torture and killing used to be Catholic church policy and was so for quite some several hundreds of years; and believe you me it only changes when it is forced to, not because it wants to. *a slightly silly comparison, but it works to all intents and purposes

so true 'bout now, Wimbledon come to mind! I loved the footage on match of the day, at 4-0 up at 60ish minutes with Burnley clearly getting back into the game, of a west ham fan looking at his watch nervously, and my thinking you and me both mate!!

Of course it didn't 'bring peace' but it was an integral piece of the jigsaw that brought about peace, not in the least showing that the British government was approaching the peace process in good faith and willing to ask itself hard questions when demanding hard decisions from those in the political process in the province. Wounds are always opened when speaking of difficult things but there was a remarkable involvement by many of the leading characters and hard matters addressed which I thik has only helped the process to move onward. Overlong and expensive perhaps, but cheap at the price. With somewhat less beer inside me I'll be a little less impassioned about why I think we need an enquiry, and why Iraq itself is almost irrelevant to the tale. Yes I'd love to see Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfovitz etc in a court of law, preferably Washington or even the Hague, but we know no such thing will ever happen. It is the state of our politics that I worry about, and no matter how much spoken of or printed about the subject so far, all we have is a weight of evidence that supports the speculation about why Iraq really happened and how much our politicians lied to us. Peter Oborne says it far more eloquently than I In other words it has become morally imperative to lie not just because they think they will do, but in order to do the right thing. The thing is they rarely seem to do the right thing, and this isn't a politics that I believe is healthy for this country. Iraq was just the biggest episode, but New Labour (and the new conservatives are willingly now following this same philosophy in order to gain power, the true successor to Blair as Cameron called himself) have applied this to everything they do. They talk about the need for a debate then distract with sound bites. They will then do whatever they want and lie in order to achieve it. I want this systematically exposed and written down. I want every mendacity documented in black and white. I want those who demurred in order to protect their careers to sit there and squirm so that politicians know that by doing the wrong thing in future their day in front of an enquiry will come. It may not have the power to impose punishment but I certainly want all those involved to have their day of shame, and if it's one piece of the jigsaw that allows the electorate a genuine part in the political process of this country without being patronised and misled then amen to that. If the best we can say of ourselves is that, like Silverfox, we werent duped and saw through their pathetic dissimulation, then that's not a political process to be proud of, I'd like it to be better than that. phew, no wonder i didnt manage that on an iPhone with 4 pints inside me.

Yeah, are you sure he wasn't a civil service truancy officer making his feelings clear ;) seriously that would have made me seethe for days. He'll get his comeuppance though.

I'm sure that's a film you're describing now!!

"It followed up with a low alcohol beer called nanny state" he he, lovely

I quite like Marr he's a very affable chap and his histories are entertaining if occasionally for the wrong reasons as noted. I must say though his prime ministerial interview at number ten was the weakest political interview I've ever seen, it was more like a PPB!! Mind you Private Eye REALLY has it in for him at the moment for using court injunctions to squash news stories (not that I'm particularly keen to find out who hes been boffing in all fairness)

I think I may indeed have gone to fat in saying it's rotten to the core, I should have said it's rotten at the core. Constantine was on reflection the worst thing that could have happened to Christianity in the west. Had he just converted and granted freedom of worship then we probably wouldn't even have a vast institional church as we know it today. The moment it became powerful and rich it effectively began to betray all the Christian principles it claims to uphold. I say rotten ar the core because it has been since it's inception and is intrinsically so. That's not to say I'm blind to it's achievements, the architecture, the patronage of the arts, the music (one of my most sublime experience was to listen to the monks sing to God in a tiny monastery in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Spain). But the catholic church, unlike it's eastern orthodox or Armenian or Coptic cousins was very much a temporal and secular power and has done a huge number of bad things to maintain or extend it. I'm not just talking about conversion by the sword in the new world or the inquisition or the auto de fe, it's not just hundreds of years ago. Cooperation with the Nazis as the lesser of two evils against communism, the explicit support of Franco etc the hiding of the abuses is not an aberration but very much part of the way it operates, the continuity of the church precedes all other priorities. Martin Luther understood this. It's why there was a reformation.

I sincerely doubt he felt threatened, but you were pretty rude and flippant yourself, or were you being 'amusing'?

A bit new labour of you. No the church doesn't have systemic childabuse. It's not a part of it's make up, but it has time and again covered it up. That is actually criminal and the agenda is on the part of they who will do anything to protect the reputation. The crime os not on those who expose it.