A council named sue

‘CRACKPOT councils are wasting thousands of pounds . . . by suing THEMSELVES over parking tickets,’ was how the Sun saw it. And it really is as barmy as it sounds. At least half a dozen councils are known to have issued tickets against their own vehicles – and then refused to pay them. My own local council, Islington, took one case to the parking appeals tribunal, won and then asked for costs to be awarded against itself. The adjudicator Gerald Styles refused on the ground that the council could not ‘act wholly unreasonably or vexatiously against itself’.

The Sun sees all this Alice in Wonderlandish absurdity (great film, by the way, but Tim Burton’s scriptwriters can’t match Carroll) as straightforward evidence of what it used to call ‘loony’ local authorities. Actually I think it has more to do with the madness of running public services as you would profit-maximising private enterprises. If you contract out parking ticketing to companies with more interest in making money than keeping the traffic moving, they will employ traffic wardens on pay structures that depend on them issuing as many tickets as possible. And if you insist on ‘internal market’ accounting procedures that force one council department to pay another if it so much as uses a paper clip that isn’t part of its inventory, the reductio ad absurdum of this neoliberal accounting arcadia is that they will end up suing each other to sort out any differences.

Michael Foot: Labour's saviour

Two posts on the same day about people dying. And with spring definitely poking its nose up outside, it doesn't seem right.

He's not often given credit for it, but for better or for worse, Michael Foot saved the Labour Party in the early 1980s. Any other leader would have steered so far to the left or right as to have fractured that already fragile coalition for good. Foot held it together at a time when one false move could have lost it for good.

Whether or not that was a good thing in the long run depends on your view of the labour movement, all that it was and all it has become. Apart from that, I've nothing to add to what Neil Kinnock put so eloquently here.

‘Why ever have you come back here?’

My mum and dad’s neighbour died at the weekend. They’ve lived next door to Gerda and her husband, Fred, for 30 years, long enough for Gerda to remember my mother’s mum, who died in 1983, and for her to have known my daughter as a toddler. At 88, she was a crucial half-generation older than my parents. A young woman at the outbreak of the second world war, she became a part of that vast movement of people who were refugees by its conclusion.

In our last conversation, she told me again (we had spoken of it several times before) about the long trek through occupied Germany that took her back to her home village in Silesia when the war ended. Her mother’s reaction when, exhausted after a journey of more than 100 miles into the Soviet-occupied zone, Gerda finally knocked on her door was to say to her: ‘Why ever have you come back here?’

Gerda was one of the very few Germans I ever met who was an adult during the war and willing to talk freely about it. She told me once that Hitler had been ‘all right in the beginning’, saying that he had provided jobs and stability. We were never going to agree about that, but like many Germans she had paid a heavy price for her youthful acquiescence to the Nazis – including, though she never spoke about it directly, at the hands of the Soviet victors.

The transfer of most of Silesia to Polish sovereignty after the war meant that her family joined the eight million Germans who were uprooted in the east. That she was able to find a home and acceptance and to raise a family in England with an English husband always struck me as a fine example of reconciliation and tolerance.

She died of lung cancer, after an illness of just a few weeks, which adds poignancy to the fact that so many of our chats took place when she was having a fag outside at the back. I’ll miss her and the personal connection she provided to an important part of my own and our continent’s past.

Spring in the air

Thirty miles in two days, all of them run in cold, sleety, driving rain. I ran 17 yesterday in full fell running gear and still felt uncomfortably cold on the ridge above Berhamsted, where I was participating in one of the Gede Valley Harriers' London Marathon training runs (five quid to enter, tea and cake at the finish and some of the coldest, wettest, most seriously appreciated marshals in the country). I've rarely experienced lowland weather quite like that, and the stretch of the canal towpath where the puddles merged seemlessly with the canal itself was something else.

Today's a bright, sunny, blue-skied morning in London, though. The birds know that spring is about to burst upon us, and you get the feeling that as soon as the temperature rises a little it's going to arrive like a sprinter, not an old-boned, feeling-the-cold crock of a distance runner like me.

The nice guy comes first

If there's one capitalism-red-in-tooth-and-nail aphorism that I'd like to expunge from the English language, it's that ugly, untrue US apeshit about 'nice guys come last'. It's been wheeled out again over the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama, where Bridge's withdrawal from the England team has been taken as an indication that, unlike Terry, he hasn't got it in him to succeed at the highest level and Terry's 'mates' have been letting it be known that he was always regarded as something of a 'bottler' in the dressing room.

Forgive me for just a little whooping and cheering yesterday, then, as bottler Bridge gave tough guy Terry a lesson in dignified, focused and disciplined football while the ex-England captain continued with the schoolboy calamities that increasingly characterise his current form. Nice one, nice guy.

All we are saying ... is give us some cash

Sean Lennon has been getting his knickers in a Twitter over criticism of the use of his father's image in those Citroen car ads - the ones with the badly synched actor's voice purporting to be John. Sean's mum Yoko authorised the use of the clip of John, even though the only advertising campaign he ever endorsed in life was the one for world peace in 1969.

Sean reacted to being told that he and his mum were 'a talentless pair of leeches' who had 'sold out John's name' by approving the ads with a ferocious series of ripostes via Twitter:

'Lennon fans don't ATTACK his widowed family. His widow and her son. How offensive is it to REAL fans, to publicly attack his wife and child?'

'You are speaking to his flesh and blood. You're a "peasant as far as I can see".'

'When dad died, it was Lennon fans who saved me with their love and support. You are not them, you are just another asshole.'

The best response, I thought, was from the fan who posted the message to Yoko: 'Imagine, three years with 0% interest, isn’t that how the song goes?'

Vertical rush

One man went past me wearing what looked like ski boots and I heard a rumour that the fastest finisher had got to the top in 3 mins 53 secs. If so, that's not far short of four steps or 30-odd inches a second.

Still I was pleased to get to the top of Tower 42, the former NatWest Building in the City, for Shelter's Vertical Rush event before breakfast this morning in 8 mins 52 secs. That meant I missed my friend Fiona's offer to double my sponsorship if I did it inside eight minutes, but she cheated by having me shift heavy boxes of magazines around north London to tire me out yesterday.

I've never been that high in London before, except in a plane, and the view from the 42nd-floor champagne bar (minus the champagne, alas) is certainly worth seeing. It's no longer the highest point in the City of London, however, as I discovered looking out of its windows. The adjacent Heron Tower (pictured), still under construction, has a few steel girders going higher still, and when it's finished it will be 100 or so feet taller than Tower 42.

You can sponsor me for doing Vertical Rush and the London Marathon in aid of Shelter here.

Football owes me

Forget about that £170 billion budget deficit that the banking crisis has lumbered us with. 'Premier League clubs owe a staggering 56% of Europe's debt,' says the headline on today's Guardian football pages. 'A Uefa report has revealed that 18 Premier League clubs owe £3.5bn in debt, more than the rest of Europe put together,' the story continues.

Get a grip, you football subs (as in editors, that is). The 'rest of Europe's debt' is an awful lot bigger than that.

Vanessa Redgrave, the prince and that curtsey

It was disconcerting to see Vanessa Redgrave's deep curtsey to Prince William at the Baftas. She didn't quite kiss the ground on which he stood but an inch lower and she would have got her nose dirty.

'Is she taking the piss?' asked the person with whom I was watching her receive this year's Academy Fellowship. 'I don't think so,' I replied as the woman who was once the most famous Trotskyist in Britain turned to young Billy and fawned: 'I would like to say, your Royal Highness, how much I admire your father for his intelligence, humility and kindness.'

Was this really the same woman who for years was one of the leading lights in the Workers Revolutionary Party, and who created an uproar at the 1978 Oscars with an acceptance speech (for best supporting actress in Julia) that laid into 'Zionist hoodlums'?

An interview with Redgrave in the Daily Telegraph before the Baftas suggested that 'like the Prince of Wales, her high-mindedness comes from her status as royalty – in this case theatrical'. That may explain her affinity with the royals, despite her reputation as a radical. So too might the pioneering example of Princess Diana in her support for AIDS charities, since Redgrave's first husband, Tony Richardson (the father of Natasha, Redgrave's beloved daughter, who died in a skiing accident last year), died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991.

But did she have to curtsey quite so low?

Out of the comfort zone

Every so often in life it's good to do things outside your comfort zone. Today I signed up for something that is so far outside mine that I'm announcing it here to make sure that I don't try to sneak out of it later.

I've decided to do this year's Trans-Britain Ultra event in September. It’s a six-day, six-stage ultra race starting near Gretna Green and finishing in Ruthin, Wales, via Cumbia and North Yorkshire, covering 156 miles and five (or is it six?) peaks along the way.

I feel exhausted just typing the details. Oh, and did I mention that you carry all your gear (apart from a tent) on your back?

I’ll be doing it to raise money for a charity, Teach Africa, which works with teenage girls from the slums of Nairobi. The race organiser, Steve Adams, set it up in 2005 and I have a personal interest in supporting it because I lived in east Africa for a time during 2002-2003.

I also have a personal interest in another charity that I’m doing a double challenge for over the next couple of months. I was homeless for a time when I was younger and became very actively involved in squatting and other housing campaigns. I went on to work in short-life housing for a few years and edited the housing charity Shelter’s magazine Roof for a short time at the beginning of my career as a journalist and writer.

This Thursday (25 February) I'm doing the first leg of a double sponsorship challenge for Shelter. Vertical Rush involves running up 42 floors, 900-odd stairs, to the top of the highest building in the City of London. Two months later I’m using my oh-so-precious London Marathon place, held over from last year when I had to pull out due to injury, as the second leg of the challenge.

You can support my Shelter fundraising here. More about Teach Africa later.