Blue skies - dark days

Working at home today - colleagues in Brussels, London and Dublin report fine summer weather. Here at Seat Towers the roses are out and busy bees buzz around the lupins.

There are dark clouds - and this week's carnage in Mumbai and the general mayhem in the Levant has pushed even Iraq and Afghanistan off the radar. As last week's papers thundered about our mission in Afghanistan I finished re-reading Richard Holmes' Sahib: the British Soldier in India - his description of what service on the NW frontier and in Afghanistan was like in the latter years of the 19th century puts the current expedition into proper context. Columnists who bleat about current combat losses should read Holmes' treatment of the engagement at Maiwand in July 1880.