Highlights of the week

Immensely entertained this week by the phrase, used in anger, of 'mad as a meataxe', uttered from the mouth of Kiwi Heather. Of course she enunciates it as 'med as a mite-axe', which only adds pith and vigour.

It put me in mind of an 80s associate, Mad Mike C*x. This white bloke with a skinhead was an afficianado of deep dub reggae who used to frequent multi-ethnic blues clubs with a meat-cleaver down his sock. I was very fond of Mike- a diamond geezer... most of the time.

But these freezing days I'm a telly sloth, but not without reasonable selection and attention. A viewing highlight was last night's C4 'Time Team' on the Salisbury Plain complexes, and particularly the road and river connections between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge. This was dynamite for me, and will be in the future an archaeological classic, IMO. The forensic remains of wooden postholes allowed the archaeologists to reconstruct that there was an... Andy Goldworthy sculpture... of oak timber beams erected in a beautiful concentric ring within the massive enclosure of Durrington Dykes.

A manmade oak timber forest, an architecture, with who knows how sculptured, pigmented or tented adornments, and all organic and perishable. It's still in the land of the living, where organisms are born, live and die. Three km away as the crow flies, lies Stonehenge, the solid stoney home of dead, concrete, looming, immortal ancestor spirits.

I'm extremely attracted to the hypothesis proposed by Prof Mike Parker Pearson that Durrington Walls and Stonehenge are related ritual sites, going back to approx 2,500 BC, representing a linked spiritual, alchemical and psychogeographical journey between the land of the living and the dead. I lapped this up.

Other highlight, just today- Greenpeace disruption of Tony Bliar speaking on nukepower at the CBI. Is it contravening the Terrorism Act to write that this was an exploit that captured the media, and made a public impact?