To mark the birthday, I am planning to go to Highgate Cemetery on Sunday morning and upon reaching the grave of Karl Marx a minute of silence will be observed for all those who have perished in the name of his evil notion that the choice is between capitalism and Communism. The episode will end with a pint in The Flask and a discussion of this futuristic scenario:

One hundred years from now, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are resuscitated from their cryptogenically frozen state. Gorbachev logs on to the Economist and bursts out laughing.
"Why are you laughing?" asks Reagan.
"Because it says here that United States is now a socialist federation," Gorbachev explains.
Reagan calls up the Financial Times and laughs even harder. "Why are YOU laughing?" asks Gorbachev.
Reagan explains: "It says that everything is quiet on the border between Poland and China."

Meanwhile, Austria has to deal with the fact that Austrian life, sometimes, has nothing to do with the idyll of the Alps. As in most modern societies, many people live in awful relationships, are lonely and are subjected to violence, often, sexual violence. There is no love in their world. And how does "official" Austria respond to this? By producing the likes of Klingendes Österreich, in which this character wanders around the country, dressed like he's living in the 19th century and speaking a type of faux peasant dialect. In this kitsch Austria, the only thing in the cellars is wine. A horror idyll.

By the way, it was rather tasteless of Ireland's Sunday Business Post to devote the lead story of its property section to explaining how to convert a cellar into living space. "But the humble basement has become a swanky space in many London homes, with owners digging down instead of trading up in order to find more space." What kind of Lebensraum do these people have in mind exactly?

From a club Q&A with Peter Norton, here are some gems of gardening wisdom.

Q: Top tips for domestic lawns?
A: "Cut it regular, fertilize, and when it's dry, water it for plenty of moisture."

Q: Do you have any vices?
A: "Just my pipe and the odd Guinness."

Q: What's you favourite tool in the shed?
A: "My fork, without a doubt."

Q: You mention Storm troopers in your rap. Are you a fan of Star Wars?
A: "I was talking about storm troopers in the war but I do like the film. I like Mel Gibson and his Lethal Weapon films."

Q: Did you play football in your youth?
A: "Yes. I was the right half for Empire Paper Mills FC who I used to work for. I also looked after the pitch."

"These are the days it never rains but it pours," Freddie sang. And Michel de Montaigne wrote: "Let us disarm death of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, 'Well, and what if it had been death itself?' and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves." That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn To Die.

It was, of course, Katrina and the Waves. Reacting to her win, Katrina said it was the second landslide victory in a week. You see, Tony Blair had won the 1997 British general election two days previously. Eerily, our trivia joust was taking place at the same time as Gordon and Ken were getting a hammering in the local elections. Surely some kind of omen, eh?

Anyway, the ascent of Labour in 1997 marked the beginning of the end for Katrina and the Waves. The band never reached the same heights again and Katrina Leskanich went on to a solo career. But in that funny way in which memory works, all that talk of the band, and the bubbly, and the Champions League, and a recent visit to Merseyside, soon had me humming their 1984 song Going Down to Liverpool, which was covered brilliantly by The Bangles, who were so big in the mid-'80s that they could afford an extraterrestrial, emotionless, unmusical chauffeur.

"Hey now, where you going with that UB40 in your hand? / I said hey now, all through this green and pleasant land." All Brit trivia nerds will know that this was a reference to a form issued by the Department of Health and Social Security for claiming the dole. It meant Unemployment Benefit Form 40. And then there was this reggae band...

Hot off the presses is The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter and it contains a public exchange that is said to have taken place between McCain and his wife, Cindy, during his 1992 Senate bid. At one point, she teasingly stroked his hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

So, McCain was in Iowa on May Day and an incident during his campaign rally in the Polk County Convention Complex produced this headline from the Des Moines Register, "McCain fields audience question on whether he called wife an expletive". Roll the video...

The man who asked the c-word question, by the way, is a Baptist minister.

It is his judgement on foreign affairs — absolutely nothing to with his municipal remit — that is the greatest wound on London's civic life under Livingstone, however. The Mayor has welcomed to London Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim cleric who praises suicide attacks in Israel. Livingstone defended these comments with the preposterous and inflammatory claim that Palestinians have only their bodies with which to "fight back".

This sort of intervention matters because a London mayor represents a huge, cosmopolitan capital city. Many of the contentious international and communal issues on which Livingstone comments are replicated in tensions within London. A civic leader, especially in London of all places, ought to exemplify the principle that there is a single category of citizenship that transcends national and religious divisions. Livingstone does not do that. His is a face of left-wing politics that stands for communalism, populism and administrative incompetence. By rights, his time should be past."

Ken's a liability for London, no doubt. Let's hope that the city's voters today will send him packing.

According to one theory I heard in London, a Johnson victory would present Cameron with a bonus beyond party momentum — the breaking of the "posh barrier." The theory holds that the willingness of London voters to support someone as posh as Boris Johnson would indicate a willingness to turn the national government over to Cameron, who is even posher. Cameron is the first Conservative leader who could be described as "hideously privileged" (his own words) since Mrs. Thatcher, the grocer's daughter, turned her back on the swells 30 years ago. He went to Eton and Oxford, where he appeared with Johnson in a Bullingdon Club picture that surfaced last year; the members, most of them Old Etonians and all of them dressed in tails, were posing for their annual group shot shortly before a dinner that concluded abruptly with a potted plant being thrown through the restaurant's window. ("The party ended with a number of us crawling on all fours through the hedges of the botanical gardens, and trying to escape the police dogs," Johnson told the Telegraph, in one of his signature confessions of man's imperfectability. "And once we were in the cells we became pathetic namby-pambies.")

In his most acute observation about Johnson, Trillin notes that "He does not live in Chelsea, but in Islington, an area that is popular with journalists and other such run-of-the-mill strivers." Talking about Chelsea and strivers, will the outcome here tonight influence the outcome there tomorrow? Splitting our bets, Rainy Day is backing Liverpool and Boris.

Despite the earnestness there, Ken and his pals have made hay with "Cancel the guilt trip ", which Boris penned for The Spectator of 2 February 2002: "The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more... Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. ... the British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right... If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. You never saw a place so abounding in bananas: great green barrel-sized bunches, off to be turned into matooke. Though this dish (basically fried banana) was greatly relished by Idi Amin, the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited... The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty." Boris gave quotations to fortune there, but the article itself contains much that is humane and, in light of the current angst about food supplies, and Africa's inability to feed its people, much that is honest. Tomorrow, the race as seen from afar.

But Boris is a lucky man because Londoners are tiring of Ken, just when the mayor seems to tiring of the grind. And then there's the tide of public opinion, which is flowing away from Labour. Some national polls now put the Conservatives 13 points ahead of Gordon Brown's party. The Tories are the largest group in the London Assembly and control more boroughs than Labour. Boris may be the beneficiary of all this. All he needs now is to convince those who dislike Ken to vote for him. And he has been beating the drum: "But here's old Ken — he's been crass, he's been insensitive and thuggish and brutal in his language — but I don't think actually if you read what he said, although it was extraordinary and rude, I don't think he was actually anti-Semitic." Tomorrow, here, black and white and read all over.

I am A Victim Of The Telephone

Always the telephone linked to all the hearts of the world beating at once
crying my husband's gone my boyfriend's busted forever my poetry was rejected
won't you come over for money and please won't you write me a piece of bullshit
How are you dear can you come out to Easthampton we're
all here bathing in the ocean we're all so lonely and I lay
back on my pallet contemplating $50 phone
bill, broke, drowsy, anxious, my heart fearful of the
fingers dialing, the deaths, the singing of telephone bells
ringing at dawn ringing all afternoon ringing up
midnight ringing now forever.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

"When I lift the soupspoon to my lips, the phone on the floor begins purring..." Forty years ago, Allen Ginsberg foresaw the ubiquity of the phone. There is no escaping it anymore. Not for a week. Not for even a day.

expiate (verb) To make up for; atone for.
"During those ninety days he came to terms with himself. He decided that he could not expiate the sin he had committed against an innocent man until he had undertaken a great and heroic task of redemption."

Did you know that San Franciscans flocked to their city's Dolores Park on Easter Sunday for the "Hunky Jesus" competition run by a gay group? "But the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence insist the contest is all part of their mission to 'promote universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt'", wrote Dan Emerson in the Sydney Morning Herald. The sheer absurdity of it would have brought a wry smile to Bill Buckley's lips.