One of the interesting features of this type of vacation is the road trip nature of it. Sometimes I take vacation all in one place, or maybe two, and other times keep on movin'.
This is one of the latter and already just a few days in, there has been considerable change of scene and different locations. At the moment, its been a combination of sea, lakes and hills with small towns mainly with mediaeval times in their backgrounds. As the journey progresses there will be mountains and cities as well, but even after few days, it starts to become difficult to remember the exact sequence of travel. I can see why people keep journals.
And the journal I've cracked into whilst travelling is the Alistair Campbell extracts related to the Tony Blair years. I'd decided to dislike this almost before I started it, but have actually found it quite interesting and strangely human in the way it describes things. Campbell has a reputation as a spin meister and presumably ther has been some fairly careful editing of the content of the diaries, not least to stay legal in what is said.
Nonetheless, the amount of minor detail, dealt with in a clipped journalistic style, suggests that large chunks of the text must be fairly accurate renderings of what actually happened. Being a day by day account, it would be quite difficult to retrospectively doctor the entire storyline, particulalrly where so many different events overlap.
I'm only on about page 100 at present-just past the Blair visit to Clinton at the White House, but admit, to my slight surprise, that I'm enjoying this story of the yet to be elected Tony Blair and his band of politicos as they try to make a plausible bid for power.
I'm not sure whether there are lessons being learned, but I do expect that Campbell's journal will become one of the defining descriptions of the Blair years.
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