Though the starting point for most reviews of Glenn Gould's playing is the word eccentric, (which, of course, I cannot dispute), there is great vitality, clarity, and freshness, to my ears, in a lot of his playing. His piano recording of Contrapunctus IX from the Art of Fugue, struck me as being particularly perfect. Some of his recordings are slow — too slow — but I think it is fair to say that he looked to push the character of a piece, as he saw it, to its limits. Contrapunctus IX came across as the perfect meeting of Bach's unprecedented skill in highly structured yet imaginative composing and Gould's evident instrumental and music talent in giving a demonstration of this structure in action. The three-dimensionality (or four-dimensionality) of this piece in particular is brought out by Gould's faultless and unobtrusive recitation of each individual line of counterpoint. It is clear that Gould brought much constructive innovation in his approach to Baroque music.

The snow here this past week revived in me for a short-lived moment the childish fascination of seeing a covering of white. But I've had enough of the winter now. The window in my room is big, old, and single-paned. Twice in the last week I've woken up to find that my room, despite being centrally heated, is subsisting at a mere twelve degrees. I know I hate the heat of the summer, but when you're fed up with the cold, being too hot doesn't seem to bad. Winter always feel so solitary. In the summer everyone is out lying on the grass, and having sex, though not necessarily on the grass. The sun makes everyone happy, in their own ways. It makes me happy because it gives me an excuse to eat Twister ice creams. I need some more sunshine to cheer me up. Then I will go for long walks and, if I pass my driving test, long drives too. Come, ye months of springtime, and hasten quickly on...

I finished exams yesterday. I'm ill today. A heady-fluey-runny-coldy thing. I've phoned in sick for work, which is good. I think I might have a low temperature because I don't seem to be able to keep warm. I'm sitting here in my duvet with the heating on! It's all worth it for a bit of a rest and time to do some website stuff, though. It feels like the first time I've slobbed around on the computer, designing websites and messing around with desktop icons, since I was about 14. It all seems like yesterday, but it's going on for six years since those heady early teenage years. Everyone I speak to about it seems to agree that the period of your life from age ten to fourteen seems like a total blank. I always seem to perceive more knowledge of my childhood, in terms of memories, than my teenage years. Perhaps the brain blanks them out to spite the psychiatric industry.

By the way, Freshlysqueezed is back. I've decided it'll be a good place to publish some of my better essays, along with anyone else's, if they want them put there. I'm sure it'll help some poor feak and weeble ex-Poly student to string some incoherent argument together. (Update: Freshlysqueezed.org went offline shortly afterwards!)

Four bus journeys, two fifteen-minute walks, a knackered umbrella, and an ill-attended funeral later, I'm back at the house sat in front of the blow-heater drying my trouser legs out and brushing the snow off of my shoulders as I watch the blizzards coming in from the north. The snow was beautiful, relatively untouched, and crisp underfoot this morning; crisp in a way that only snow can be crisp. Then it warmed up a little through the morning, it started raining, it turned to slush, and now it's snowing again. It'll probably freeze now and become lethal. A young Blackleyite attacked me with a snowball and I applauded him sarcastically. Earlier, an Asian father walked past me, filming his children in the snow, and said, "You have been framed!", which amused me.

The question being put to most interviewees consulted about the newly published Hutton Report is, 'Do you think it is fair?' and the answer is coming through as a qualified, 'Yes.' The fairness of the report is not so much at issue as its remit: how it was determined, who it was determined by, and why it has gone as far as it has, and no further. As many figures have pointed out since 1.30 this afternoon, the report contains no judgment on the wider questions of the formation and accuracy of both the weapons dossiers, which, had Hutton wished, could have fallen into his remit. And why not? The inquiry would never have been taking place had Dr David Kelly not raised questions about the motivations and premises for military action. Who, then, can say that those matters are of irrelevance to an inquiry into Dr Kelly's death? It seems curious that the inquiry examine in depth one minor failing of a highly reputable, independent, and well-respected news and broadcasting organisation whose reporting to most people's ears is as balanced as it could possibly be, and then come down harshly thereupon, while simply neglecting any investigation of the subject at the heart of the report. In many ways, this inquiry, and saga as a whole, has succeeded at taking many different items out of their proper context and re-telling the story in a very different way. Andrew Gilligan's report was indeed flawed, but he made his apologies and retracted certain portions of what he had said. However, his report has been systematically taken out of the context of a wider discussion that was ensuing at the time, and continues today, and it seems inappropriate to judge it outside that context.

In any case, the situation today is not changed by the whys or wherefores of what is now a completed inquiry. Nevertheless, the following questions remain:

1. Where are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? This question is in danger of being sidelined in the same way it has in America. As cliched as it is becoming, it is important not to allow this to happen. The government took Britain into war on this individual and direct premise: Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and is concealing them. If this premise is shown to be inaccurate, as has been suggested by David Kay, former leader of the Iraq Survey Group, and by the U. N. Weapons Inspectors who were in Iraq last year, then serious questions must be asked about how the intelligence, which was portrayed as so absolute and reliable, got things so badly wrong. As Robin Cook and others have pointed out, weapons of mass destruction - by which is meant, technically, nuclear weapons - do not just disappear. They are betrayed by aerial analysis in the form of regions of radiation. Nuclear weapons require factories, and big ones at that. Nuclear weapons require locations for storage. The United States have mapped every square inch of Iraq in considerable detail. Nothing - nothing at all - has yet availed. In passing, this question is not intended to sideline the question about whether it was a good thing to remove Saddam Hussein in any event - that is a different question which I will come on to shortly.
2. 2. Why was the U. N. marginalised in the run-up to war? Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction would not have been enough for the U.N. to sanction military action. This would have been more likely had Iraq continued not to co-operate with weapons inspections; however, they did not. Indeed, it was the U.S. that forced U.N. inspectors to leave, not Iraq. Iraq was complying with U.N. resolutions before the war. So why was the U.N. marginalised? It seems that Iraq could not win, whatever it did regarding weapons of mass destruction. It seems increasingly that it did not have such weapons anyway, so how could it prove this other than allowing inspections to resume? U.N. inspectors reported good co-operation, but only complained that the C.I.A. were giving them co-ordinates to investigate, and that, when they got there, there was nothing but sand and desert for miles. Any explanations?
3. 3. Why 2003? There is no good reason for invading and occupying Iraq in 2003 that was not there in 1993. So, why 2003?
4. 4. Whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, was war right anyway? Some are now claiming that whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not, it is an objectively good thing that the war has happened and that Iraq is rid of Saddam Hussein. This may or may not be the case, and I don't see it as particularly important in the context of U.S./U.K. domestic politics. However, if the motivation of the U.S. and U.K. to go to war would have been there whether or not there were weapons, then this should have been stated before the war. Because otherwise, it becomes conceivable that the story about weapons of mass destruction, put out in a period of heightened public sensitivity to the perceived terrorist threat, was nothing more than a smokescreen to avoid the more challenging moral debate of whether it is right to go around bombing countries because we don't like their leaders. If this were the case, then the country, and more importantly, perhaps, parliament, was denied the opportunity publicly to debate this question, which, in a supposed democratic Western model, is a very serious shortcoming in public information and trust. Unfortunately, I feel in the depth of my stomach that there is a very complex web of both deliberate, institutional, and inadvertent deception which has probably cost a good man his life - along with the odd thousand in Iraq, but we won't worry about that.

"He was in many ways a private man, as is his wife. They don't go blabbing to people. I'm quite angry that he said David was a hard man to manage, as from what I can see David simply wasn't managed.

"David belonged to this breed of people who are parachuted into Whitehall - they are not politicians they are not civil servants they are scientists, they are a different breed. David was not a happy man this past year, he felt that his scientific wisdom was not being taken into account. He felt he was useless and that he wasn't being given the respect as a bearer of facts that he should be. He felt lost. He had devoted a decade to this.

"He has all his life been a really dedicated public-minded man. He wasn't managed by the MoD - they consigned him to an icebox of indifference."

—Julie Flint, friend of Dr Kelly

I should really be revising, so I am writing on my weblog and looking out of the window at the allegedly clean and crisp day, though I cannot reliably assert its beauty and sunniness, given that I am indoors. Stuart is asleep, having done his last exam this morning. My last one is on Thursday, and then we will mostly be drinking copiously to relieve the accumulated tension of the winter months, revision, and multiple funerals.

It looks like the government will win tonight's top-up fees vote, which, on reflection, is probably a good thing. The sick and twisted side of me would quite have enjoyed seeing the prime minister squirm and plunge the nation into political turmoil, but in practical terms it would have done no-one any good. I would not have too many problems with seeing Blair squirm at the Hutton Inquiry, though, since the damage would probably be limited to him, Geoff Hoon and a few intelligence figures; the government could probably hold on to authority and it may even prove to be a positive period of rejuvenation for a government that I'm certainly pretty bored of. No, ignore all that... I'd just enjoy the drama.

"Let's go to Whitworth Park!" said Klepto and I together when the snow was falling thickly upon the green and pleasant pastures of Longsight. A snowball fight would probably be unwise in Manchester's second most notorious district for gang warfare. Grenades and rusty nails would almost certainly be concealed at the centre of apparently innocuous missiles. Shrapnel wounds would follow; Whitworth Park would have been much safer.

I made a list of the topics for which I have anything like decent notes for Thursday's exam. The list is three items long. It should be twelve items long. Never mind.