'Artless git

Now that my debit card's gone, I keep seeing things I'd like to purchase. Oh well, it's good for what passes for my soul, and as one of you pointed out, I can catch up on the books I've bought. I've almost finished the Eric Gill, so perhaps something lighter and fictional next - though I really want to buy some (of the more demure) Gill prints now, despite having no wall space.

My collection of framed prints and posters are in the office. I have the Reds exhibition poster (a historical one on the Communist Party of Great Britain, staged at the People's History Museum in Manchester), a Tree of Literature in Danish, 6 CND reprints of their early posters, a brilliant dayglo 1970s poster of Angela Davies, a limited print of David Jones's Cara Wallia Derelicta (Gwalia Deserta) and a stunning batique of a yacht in the rain, done by Bev, my old fencing coach. I remember a patronising academic telling us penniless postgrads that we should be investing in prints and we all laughed at the idea of having money for art… I'm also really keen on Clifford Harper's work - emotion beautifully muted.

President Strangelove, I presume?

Just back from a swim (good job I have flexible work hours). Despite possessing the hydrodynamic qualities of a brick with an eating disorder, I managed my 40 lengths of backstroke in 27 minutes, so I'm feeling triumphant. And sick.

I see that everybody's jumping up and down about Ahmedinejad's re-election (if such it is). Plenty of people are screaming that Iranians shouldn't vote for a man hellbent on nuclear weapons. Er… isn't that what the UK has done every four years since 1950? That the US electorate has done since 1945? Etc. etc. I happen to be a CND member - and all the NPT-compliant states have signed a treaty committing them to abolishing nuclear weapons. Just as I do absolutely nothing to help, so do the big states. Worse than that, we allow India, Pakistan (mmm, stable relations), Israel and several other states to have them without any commitment to abolishing them.

What steps have we taken to abolish them in our own countries? Well, Obama's actually talking about reductions, but that's about it. The UK is about to spend £20-30 billion we don't actually have, on replacing Trident. Apparently, the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people in a few minutes isn't quite enough. We need more, bigger, missile to deal with… er… those pesky guerillas in Afghanistan. No, that isn't right. There's a definite threat from, well, someone, which can only be dealt with by turning entire cities to molten glass, whole civilisations to rubble, sterilising huge chunks of the earth's surface. It's just that I can't think of one right now.

Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons? They're caught up in an insane race with Israel. The intellectual justification's very simple. It's all about having a huge, barely metaphorical penis. When Labour MPs and others objected to Britain pursuing a nuclear weapon in the 1940s, Aneurin Bevan, the British Foreign Secretary, clearly saw the ability to kill millions of people as a replacement for the British Empire, a justification for Britain remaining a powerful state rather than becoming a calm, civilised Scandinavian-style democracy: without nukes, he said, 'you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber'.

So there you have it. Without a nuclear weapon, Iran is another weird country holding the oil we all depend on. With it, they can negotiate on a slightly more equal footing. I know this is the politics of the madhouse, but we're all inmates…