“The time has come to talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings”. Lewis Caroll

So in the mail we got a booklet from the Home Front Command, explaining WHAT TO DO. So far only my rather precocious seven and a half year old has read it. From flipping through I know it has all sorts of lists, such as what sorts of food to have in, exactly how much of each type; lists of things to have in the “protected area”; how the kids could be expected to react (my daughter found this bit especially interesting) and so on. This morning, as I was coming out of the supermarket, I noticed they were selling plastic sheeting. For a split second I couldn’t understand what it was doing there.

A lot of people are much more fatalistic this time. R.T. says that anything that happens after his bedtime will not get him out of bed. I know Dad isn’t making any plans to change anything in his life. If I didn’t have kids I’d feel the same way, but I have to be responsible for them so I’ll have to go through the motions. I’d love to be able to hear an air-raid siren and just turn over to the other side and go back to sleep. But I won’t. I know I won’t. I read once about someone telling that, as a child in London during WWII, her mother refused to wake her up and take her down into the tube like everyone else when there was an air raid. Rather silly considering the amount of civilians who were killed during the Blitz of London, but understandable.

I hope the US is worried enough about our threats of retaliation to make sure we don’t get gassed. Not a pleasant way to die.

Here's Ehud Yaari on the dangers of going about the Iraq offensive in the wrong way. And here's an interesting David Warren commentary about Iraq, Israel and, of course, France and Germany. Moe saw it first.