Morning:
8°c
What's the Persian for schadenfreude? I don't know, but I imagine that in between cursing infidels, oppressing his people and grooming his silly beard, Iran's supreme lunatic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had a jolly good laugh at our expense this weekend.
That's because pictures captured from Facebook and published in a Sunday newspaper showed Britain's incoming MI6 boss, Sir John Sawers, in all manner of shockingly compromising positions.
I mean, can you believe it? In his spare time, the sons-of-dogs' chief spook, ultimately responsible for snooping on Iran's plan to bring the Middle East to the brink of nuclear war, mugs for the camera! He throws a Frisbee in his pants! He wears an amusing hat!
It's all clearly blackmail material, prejudicial to our national security and plays directly into the hands of terrorists. Isn't it? Actually, no.
It's completely banal, all the cringey snaps have been taken down now, and if MI6 can't cope with this sort of thing, then could they please say so now, so that I can scratch my plans for a potato patch in the back garden and start building a fallout shelter instead?
What Frisbeegate really illustrates is the rapidly changing shift in attitudes towards personal privacy. And the fact that a great many of us have lost any desire whatsoever to
defend it.
Facebook and Twitter are wildly successful because they allow you to bang on about every facet of your brilliant life to a live audience. Constantly.
We actively want Big Brother to be watching us because being famous — even if that fame is limited to the 136 friends who receive hourly messages announcing that you have thrown a pirate at them — is great. Even when you are married to the head of MI6.
All this notwithstanding, as a historian I find the rise of social networking sites and the proliferation of nothing-held-back electronic communication extremely exciting.
I have heard some scholars moan that as people stop writing to each other on the “permanent” medium of paper, we are losing the historical archives of the future.
In reality, the reverse is true. Electronic messaging is a great deal more permanent that we tend to think. A confidential letter can be burned after reading.
But it is virtually impossible permanently to delete something once it has been published on the internet. Facebook pictures, blog entries, Twitter updates, even webmail messages are all cached, stored and squirrelled away in unseen archives.
Future historians will have to learn the dark arts of snooping through hard drives and hacking into servers if they want to recreate our age.
But when they do so, they will be privy to historical information that we can only dream of. Spooks in pants is just the beginning.
Dave as Wat Tyler: I think not
Last week David Cameron predicted “riots in the streets” if Gordon Brown's “deceit” over spending cuts won Labour the general election.
Having written a history of the Peasants' Revolt, in which medieval Cheapside was bathed in blood following a suicidal fiscal policy and widespread political corruption, I have been looking out for the Wat Tyler of 2009.
Somehow Dave doesn't fit the bill. Can you imagine him leading a baying mob of angry Londoners down Whitehall, dragging Gordy and Lord Mandelson out of No10 and serving them up to the wrath of the people?
I think not. But who else is there? No politician I can think of wants to stick their neck out at the moment, for fear of having their head lopped off.
Forget tennis, this was rugby's Thermopylae
I'm afraid the final days of Wimbledon rather passed me by. There was a sporting event of far greater drama than Andy Murray putting a Simon Fuller inspired PR gloss on his meek dismissal from the men's singles.
In Johannesburg on Saturday the British & Irish Lions larruped South Africa 28-9 in the final Test match of one of the greatest series of rugby union in living memory.
Though the Lions lost the series 2-1, theirs has been the moral victory.
Even when all but pride was gone, they continued to battle a bad-tempered and graceless enemy, who were superior in physical size and resources but never equal in spirit.
This was rugby's Thermopylae: the Lions were King Leonidas's 300 Spartans; the Saffers, Xerxes's ogrish hordes. (Especially the suspended Bakkies Botha, who seems to have been deposited by the gods of history into the wrong century altogether.)
Now for the Ashes. Can England and Australia's cricketers put on a show to match the 2005 series? If they do, expect even more outlandish historical hyperbole from this direction.
• In just 12 days I will be a married man. (Ladies, control yourselves: your tears will only blot the newsprint.)
My fiancée and I are still bickering about the choice of song for our first dance. Almost every tune we like turns out to be a paean to doomed love. So far rejected: Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me by The Smiths; We All Fall In Love Sometimes, as performed by Jeff Buckley; and perhaps most improbably, I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues by Elton John.
You Never Can Tell by Chuck Berry seemed a good compromise until the suggestion was mooted that we attempt the Jack Rabbit Slim's twist dance from Pulp Fiction.
Anyone who has seen me dance will know I am more St Vitus than John Travolta. Would that I had even two left feet to work with.
Dan Jones is the author of Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, published by Harper Press.
