Loose ends.
I have a couple of loose ends to tie up today:

Left handed mouse use.

In a post titled 'Sinister', I related how my right hand was in pain due to mouse use. My solution was to switch my mouse settings to left handed and give the right hand a break. This I did for three weeks and the pain went away. I've since switched back to right hand use, as I'm naturally right side dominant. It's easy to switch your settings over and I highly recommend that anyone experiencing pain in one hand does this. Don't ignore it.

The new A40 poker club, known as 'The Western'.

In a piece titled 'My vision of poker is different', I mentioned that I would report back when I had visited the club. I can claim to have seen it, but can't say that I met any of the management. On a drive back from High Wycombe to London one morning, I decided to drop in and see whether anyone was about at 10am. I parked underneath the club and walked through the entrance. There was nobody at reception, so after shouting 'hello' a few times I walked upstairs and looked for anyone who could show me around. I met a kitchen worker who didn't seem to think that anyone was about. I told him that I was a player who knew most of the people behind the club and was visiting out of interest. He didn't try to get rid of me, so I continued walking around to check the place out.

The gaming action is on two floors. When walking onto the first floor, one enters a sort of ante room. On the right are two doors underneath a sign marked 'Kalooki'. Peeking through the windows I could see a room full of five-sided tables; about twenty I would guess. On the left hand side was a poker room. I went through and saw five kidney-shaped dealer tables lined up next to the windows on the A40 side of the room. There was a cashier on the left and eight large round self-deal tables. There was a whiteboard on the wall, like the one at the Victoria. I saw lists for pot-limit games, but no columns for limit poker.

Going upstairs, I again entered an ante room. This time the room on the right hand side contained two full sized snooker tables. The room on the left was another poker room. There were five dealer tables, also on the A40 side of the room. The room seemed smaller than the one downstairs, so I walked to the end and found a door under a sign marked 'salon prive'. Inside were two large poker tables. The chairs were a bit smarter than the ones in the rest of the club and there was a drinks cabinet containing spirits.

I might be mistaken, but I don't recall seeing a bar anywhere, nor a dedicated area for eating food. I suppose that they plan to bring food to the poker tables so that games don't break when people are hungry. I should stress that the place is very nicely appointed. There are leather sofas to recline on while waiting around. There is more space for players - in sharp contrast to the Victoria's poker room, which feels decidedly cramped. It's ideal in many ways, except that it doesn't seem to have any action going yet and it's not handy for people who don't drive.

Three years on.
It's three years since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. You may see many pieces covering the anniversary in the newspapers this weekend, but for my money, the best coverage you'll find comes from Mark Steyn. Check out his Spectator piece here:

Click here.

It requires registration (annoying but free).

To get an example of just how well this man sees things that others simply cannot grasp, I quote this brief extract from the article:

"these days who's really `superior'? An old-fashioned European army -- Belgium's, say -- is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through routine innovations like email, cell phones and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Moussaoui told his instructors, he didn't need to learn how to land); boxcutters cost a couple of bucks; add in a few rental cars and motels, and that's it. For around $150,000, 19 not especially talented terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated.

That's what I call asymmetrical."

Bullseye! Please read the whole thing.

Back to live poker.
I had a bad day online on Monday and decided to go to the Victoria for a game of hold'em. For some reason I hadn't been to the Victoria for nine weeks. I think it's because I know that it's possible to have big losses there and I don't like that while I still don't have a big bankroll. Nevertheless it was a pleasure to be back, as I won close to #500 on the night and have won every day since. The decision not to play online has left me with far more free time during the day and I've done lots of little tasks that needed doing around the house, which I never seemed to get done while the computer was on.

I've also enjoyed the human side of live play a lot this week. Last night for example, I saw Michael Greco (previously 'Beppe' in Eastenders) sitting next to Craig Grant. They were deep in conversation. It was one of those moments when I wished I had a camera on my person. It would have made a great caption competition. We can all imagine Craig saying 'So I auditioned for the part and it would have been mine but then Leslie Grantham got it at the last minute'.

My table was fun too. Especially when one of the dealers told Vicky Coren that she was getting grey hair. Someone else told her that he'd noticed it on TV and she got totally paranoid, rushing up to Hugo to show him her roots. This sort of levity seems to be more common in hold'em games. During the years when the Vic was all omaha, I don't recall it ever being this much fun. Right now the place is absolutely buzzing. There were five hold'em games last night. I remember when they couldn't get one!

Who would have thought that there was such a demand for hold'em? Oh I know, I did! I said for ages that there was a large player base that knew hold'em from seeing it played in tournaments, yet couldn't get into playing poker for money, because the cash games were all omaha based. Sadly the stupid dealer's choice nonsense still goes on in most provincial clubs. This is tragic, as the message from the Victoria could hardly be more obvious - offer properly sized hold'em cash games and people will be beating a path to your door.

Decision making.
My closest friend, Dominic Bourke, has started his own blog recently. It concerns betting on horse racing, a subject about which I know close to nothing. If you have any interest in how he evaluates his bets check out his site at www.anyutadva.blogspot.com. I am sure that you will learn a lot, even if you have punted on horses for years.

His most recent post however concerns the BBC television programme 'Crisis Command'. I recommend reading his review of Sunday's show because it illustrates the profound lack of understanding that many people have when faced with situations in which all the outcomes are bad, but some are less bad than others. Many people simply cannot grasp that an outcome in which a small number of people die is a good result, if the only alternative is an outcome in which many more people die. Consequently when forced to take action that will involve the certain death of a few people, they will often refuse to do so, thereby risking the deaths of a great many more.

Check out this must-read article:

Click here!

My vision of poker is different.
A new poker club has opened in West London and I'm not sure what to make of it. I have always longed to see poker blossom like this and the new club, which I haven't yet visited, seems to fit my vision of the ideal card room in several ways.

The most important thing is that it's not a casino and thus won't treat poker as the poor cousin of other games. The fact that the game is treated like this in the casino industry has held it back for ages. Casino card rooms are run with the objective of keeping costs down rather than increasing profits. That's why you don't see dealers offered in the cash games in Brighton or earlier starts in Walsall. They are also prone to close on the whim of a new manager. It's extremely frustrating.

The next most important thing is that the club is on the outskirts of London, away from high city-centre rents meaning plenty of parking space and a greater chance of profitability, provided that people turn up to play. So far, so good.

The problem though is that I can't see what the club is going to offer. The Victoria is still busy with its pot-limit cash games and thrice-a-year festivals. The Gutshot club is busy with its small competitions and cash games in central London. What will make people go to somewhere so far out west in preference to their present haunts? Is there really enough demand for a third club? As things stand I don't think so, which is why I think that it should go for broke and aim to appeal to a totally new customer base. I mean one that isn't already accustomed to playing poker at a UK casino or at Gutshot.

Ever since I first went to the Concord Card Club in Vienna, I have wanted only one thing for London - a clone of the same operation. It's unusual in Europe but any American would instantly recognise the Concord as being similar to one of the Californian card clubs, like the Bicycle, Hustler and Commerce, to name but a few of them. These clubs operate 24 hours per day and cater to thousands. They are like football pitches.

Why are they so big? It's partly because there are more people interested in poker in the US, but it's also because the American card rooms have limit poker, a version of the game that is far more beginner friendly. Limit poker prevents newcomers from going broke on their first hand and allows them to get more play for their money. A good player will just as surely beat a bad one at limit in the long term as in the pot-limit game, but the bad player is much more likely to come back to the limit game. It's the difference between making a living shearing a sheep and slaughtering one. Too many British players want to be the butcher rather than the shearer. It's one reason our card rooms are smaller.

But how could the new club get that sort of business going? I don't know. I'm reminded of the so-called `Irishman's answer' : "I wouldn't start from here". The current starting position is that the existing player base of the UK is mostly uninterested or hostile to limit. Some admit to enjoying it on their holidays to the US, but many won't play it even then and instead scour Vegas and LA looking for pot limit or no limit games. It's partly because they don't enjoy limit hold'em. That's their business, but it shouldn't put them off the limit betting format, as there is a great deal of fun to be hand playing seven-card stud, omaha hi-lo and seven-card stud hi-lo as limit games.

The growing popularity of no-limit hold'em caused by television coverage and internet take-up is another barrier. The world is now full of 18-year old boys wanting to play no-limit because it's a `man's game', whatever that is supposed to mean. Setting yourself all-in on or before the flop, so that you can't be bluffed out on the river by a scare card is considered manly now. I've thought about explaining that `real men leave themselves with decisions to make on the last card' as a counter-argument but to date haven't summoned up the energy to make the point.

But I digress. I hope they have a business plan to draw in newcomers who don't have preconceptions of how poker should be played and who are receptive to the idea of limit poker. But I fear that this aim, while understood by the club's owners, won't get the priority attention that it deserves and will be put off indefinitely. Instead I can see the temptation for them to go for the quick `land grab' to be had by announcing a tournament schedule with guaranteed prize pools, which would quickly fill the club with the same people who turn up to the ?20 and ?30 comps already held in UK casinos. Such people may turn up in numbers when guarantees are offered and could provide a quick source of income, but won't be a long term source of serious profit. They have little intention of playing the game for much longer after being knocked out. There is also the problem that tournaments cause immense short term pressure on parking space. For a 7.30pm tournament, you can be sure that half the field intends to arrive at 7.25pm. Although the club has a lot of space for cars, its entrance from the A40 is rather sudden and not that wide; not somewhere I would want to have lots of cars all trying to cram in at the last minute.

Will the club go in the direction I propose? I doubt it. I seem to be totally out of step with what everyone else wants, or at least with the views of those who form popular opinion. For example, take this from Jesse May earlier this year: "The game of poker today is large field tournament poker". Got that? Those of you who play online sit'n'goes for six hours a day and the thousands of you who play cash games online or in the bricks-and-mortar clubs aren't playing poker really! You don't count. Hell, you don't even exist as far as the media is concerned.

I'll let you know what I think when I finally visit the place.

Big Brother Five and the future of Britain.
I didn't comment on Big Brother this year and didn't have a bet on it either. After last year's decision to send Cameron to South Africa, a move that helped propel him to victory, I didn't want to expose myself to the whims of the production team. But although I made no bets, I did watch a little of it from the middle onwards.

The show itself is still amazingly boring, but I thought that it illustrated a point worth making about the future of Britain. Imagine that in 20 years time, the producers decide to make a version of the show featuring the children of those who were in it this year. Who could participate?

Well Nadia won't be sending any kids to the Big Brother household; it's biologically impossible. Marco, the effeminate homosexual is not likely to be a father. Nor is Dan, the gay man who only sleeps with straight men. Kitten was firmly lesbian when we last saw her.

So who does it leave then? Victor maybe, if he can find a woman who can understand a word he says and is prepared to tolerate his aggression and self-importance. Perhaps Vanessa, Emma, Shell, Michelle and Becki. Some of them claimed to be bisexual and none are mothers. They could still have families but by historic standards, several of them are actually leaving it late.

Perhaps Jason could be a Dad, but he's already thirty and still seems far too preoccupied with his own body to have much interest in anyone else's. Stuart has a serious chance with the ladies, so that could produce a kid or two.

Did I leave anyone out? Ah yes, there's Ahmed, the asylum seeker made good (funny how people who come to this country can spot opportunity while so many of us who were born here see only obstacles). I felt quite sorry for him, stuck in the house with the other vacuous morons. It must have come as a serious shock to him that none of them could even start to have a serious conversation with him. That's what made him so unpopular.

He's already got six children. Of course he's 44 and has had more time than the others, but it's six more than half of them will ever have. So when the producers of this "2024 Children of BB5 Special" have to go casting for contestants, they have got six mini-Ahmeds to start with. Will they be like the children of the others? Not likely. If he teaches them to place their faith in the Koran, they will most likely be slightly disapproving of homosexual behaviour, opposed to the idea of changing sex and traditional in their expectations of the roles of men and women.

I know it's a crude demonstation, but I think it serves as an interesting microcosm of Britain's future. The indigenous British are not breeding to replacement level. It's happening all across Europe too. France is now close to 10 per cent Muslim , it could be over 50 per cent Muslim in as little as 50 years. In Amsterdam now, the most common name for baby boys is Mohammed. In the Netherlands overall, by 2020 the majority of children turning 18 will be of Muslim birth.

I can't help worrying slightly about this. I am an atheist. I don't want any religion, certainly not one that hasn't undergone any sort of Enlightenment, intruding on my life. I want gay people to have the freedom to life their lives the way they see fit, even though it's not for me. I want gambling to be legal and available to all over 18. I want abortion to be legal.

And I see all of this being endangered by a growing section of society who will reject my values.

_ DY at 3:12 AM BST

Updated: Friday, 13 August 2004 3:30 AM BST

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What Sklansky says about tournament bankroll requirements.
In my last post I mentioned an essay by David Sklansky titled 'Is your wallet fat enough for tournaments?' and said that it should be required reading for anyone wishing to play them seriously. Since most people won't ever get around to reading this article, I shall present its key findings to you, but I still stress that it's worth getting his book 'Fighting Fuzzy Thinking in Poker, Gaming and Life'.

In an effort to discover the sort of bankroll required by a professional tournament player, Sklansky did a computer simulation of a skilled player who plays in 200-runner competitions which pay, for sake of argument, 16 places. The rake on each tournament is 3.5 per cent ($1,000 entry +$35 registration fee). This player's skill is such that he is good enough to get into each paid position exactly twice as often as the rest of the opponents.

On average, over the course of 100 competitions, this player would earn $200,000 on an investment of $103,500 (by having two wins, two second prizes, two third prizes and so on). It can be seen that this players expected return per tournament is $965.

The simulation then had 1,000 such skilled players play 1,000 tournaments each (i.e. one million tournaments played in total). How did they get on?

The good news is that all made money, but the variations in their performance will astonish you. While the expected win was $965,000, one player had won only $110,000. Fifty won under $500,000. One player did not go into profit until he had played 684 tournaments!!! Fifty needed 175 events to show a profit.

The rest of the essay talks about how to employ this information to calculate a bankroll requirement and I don't want to say any more, lest I be accused of plagiarism. The essential point is that there is a vast variation in the success of players of exactly equal ability over hundreds of tournaments. It is hardly appealing as a way of life once you know this.

Many players have a flutter of success when they first start and then spend years slowing losing their bankroll back. After a while you notice that so-and-so, who was the 'new kid on the block' last year, hasn't been seen for a few months and is rumoured to have gone back to working. The reality is that he was nowhere near as good as he thought he was. If you are to have a chance of beating the tournament scene, you should have a huge tank of money, a skill level far higher than the one used in the simulation and nerves of steel. It might help if you can keep your expenses down to less than $40 a day and play in tournaments where the registration fee is 3.5 per cent or thereabouts, if you can find one.

Good luck.

The Camel bites back!
Keith 'the camel' Hawkins has written about me in the latest entry on his blog. It follows the previous post that I made on this site, as well as comments I left on his. I take issue with some of what he says, as I shall outline below, but before I do, I would like to stress that I really like him, even though I don't completely understand him. Keith is one of poker's nicest players and I wish him well in all he does. So much so that I wish he would improve his health, so that we who like and love him can be more sure of enjoying his company for decades to come. When I wrote what I did below, I thought I was helping him to identify his strengths (online heads-up matches) and deterring him from wasting his time and money on big-ticket tournaments, where though equally strong, he faces a far higher level of opposition, as he so often reminds us.

With that in mind, I quote his latest piece about me with comments from me in italics:

The problem with David Young
I like David. He is an old fashioned British eccentric. But, I cannot deny he has pissed me off. Firstly he questions my sanity with my decision to give up heads up matches on Pokerstars and then he continues to criticise me in his blog. He asks "I'm baffled. Is he after money or recognition?".

I think that this is a fair question to put to anyone who doesn't have the security of a fixed salary. It's easy to be distracted by trophies, ranking points and the glamour of the travelling pro's lifestyle.

The problem with David, and anyone who has read his posts on the Hendon Mob forum will agree, is that he seem unable to see things from anyone elses point of view. I guess it is a problem alot of privately educated people suffer from.

I have not been privately educated since 1982, when I was 13. For my secondary education, I went to the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe. It's a state school. I will cover the point about seeing others points of view in another post later this week.

He decides what his view on a subject is going to be on a subject and then stands by it through thick and thin. I don't think I've ever seen David admit he's wrong, let alone be swayed by an argument.

On this very website I wrote an apology to Guy Bowles. It was only a couple of months ago. I don't intend to rehash the whole story but the essence is that I totally misunderstood something he said. Further down this page you can also see where I have quoted an email about Nicaragua from Ruari Patterson. In this instance he felt that I had not given a full or fair account of the history of the Sandanista revolution. In fact, I had not intended to, but he pointed out that I had left an one-sided impression and so I quoted him in full on the subject to provide balance.

David is a cash game player.

I do play tournaments too, but not at Keith's level for sure. Then again, not many people play tournaments at his level. I play a reasonable tournament game and would probably be a winner at them if I were to play more. However, they are a very unreliable way to make money, a point that is well made in an excellent essay titled 'Is your wallet fat enough for tournaments?'. I cannot stress enough how important it is for any aspiring tournament player to read this essay. It appears on page 136 of 'Fight Fuzzy Thinking in Poker, Gaming and Life' by David Sklansky.

In order to be a good cash game player you have to be ruthless, you need to want to take the last penny of your opponent. If you have an ounce of sympathy it can come back to haunt you by the recipient of your sympathy taking all your money.

This is complete nonsense. The risk of leaving your oppponent with chips with which he can later hurt you is a tournament concept and not one that applies in cash play. In tournaments it's a total disaster if you leave someone with chips that they later use to beat you. In cash play, your opponents can always replenish their stacks anyway and if not they are replaced by new players with more money. I don't understand what Keith is saying here at all. It looks like an ad-hoc rationalisation shoehorned in to support a pre-existing belief that cash-players are somehow more cruel than tournament players by some sort of Darwinian selection.

Playing cash games for a living is very much like having a job. You need to put the hours in in order to overcome short term variations.

And so must you in tournament play. I'm quite sure of this.

I gave up work for alot of reasons, but one of them was to break out of the routine. Playing cash games (and heads up matches) for a living is the ultimate in routines. I am also convinced playing cash games all the time affects your personality, you can become hard, aggressive maybe even greedy. (Obviously this is a sweeping generalisation and there are many exceptions to this).

I play poker primarily for pleasure and I get little satisfaction from cash games or heads up matches. Obviously I want to make a living out of the pastime and that is the aim. But, I would prefer to make my living doing something I enjoy.

There is nothing wrong with any of this. In fact laziness is my primary motivation in playing poker for a living. I hate the idea of working for other people. I've done it before and I'm in no hurry to do it again.

David, please don't judge me by your standards. I don't want to make a fortune from poker. If I did, I certainly wouldn't be persuing the path I am. I am happy with my decision and if that means you question my sanity, so be it.

Keith, I respect your desire to spend your time only doing things that you enjoy. For me, that's the best definition of success! But some elaboration on your previous post was required. Otherwise people might wonder why you submit requests to be staked in large WPT tournaments, when most us would rather back you in heads up $1,000 SNGs on Pokerstars on the basis of your own words! Good luck in all you do, David.

The Story of the Weeping Camel.
Keith Hawkins writes of his dissatisfaction with his tournament results this year in his new blog titled
The Camel Ruminates.

After pointing out that luck plays a big part in the short term, he goes on to say that he feels that his play in large tournaments has deteriorated in large part due to playing a lot on Pokerstars. He explains: "I am playing there far too regularly. I do very well in the heads up matches at $1000 and $500 levels. I win nearly 2 from 3 and have made very good money for the last few months."

Winning two out of three heads up comps at those levels implies a per tournament win rate of almost $333 and $166 respectively. But he wants to stop playing them in order to better at big tournaments, where as he always points out, there are many excellent players.

I'm baffled. Is he after money or recognition?

The case of Sion Jenkins.
I've never been happy about the conviction of Sion Jenkins for the 1997 murder of his step-daughter Billie-Jo. I normally reserve judgement on criminal cases because I know that what one gathers from the media may not be an accurate reflection of what was heard in court, but this case bothers me because it seems to have been based on very little.

As I understand it, the main evidence against Jenkins was that there were traces of blood on his jacket and that he had been angry with her earlier that same day. On their own, these two facts don't seem to amount to very much to me. Families often argue and the fact that he had her blood on his clothing is entirely consistent with his explanation that he found her bleeding after someone else had battered her. There is also the report of a mentally disturbed man known to have an obsession for sticking bits of plastic up his nostrils being seen in the vicinity on the same day. Traces of bin-liner were found in Billie-Jo's nose.

I would like to see clear guidelines from the police on what I am supposed to do if I find someone in the sort of condition that Billie-Jo was in. Now that mobile phones are commonplace, my first instinct would be to call the police and get the victim to speak to them while he/she is still alive in order in part to clear me. but that only works if they are still capable of speech. Having seen what Jenkins has gone through, I'm tempted to stay well away lest I come into contact with blood, skin or hair that could later be used to convict me. That's sad really, as my first concern should be to give whatever aid I can rather than establishing my innocence.

See here for the story.

I know I shouldn't have a view on this but I can't help hoping that Jenkins is released. I think he's been the victim of an appalling miscarriage of justice. It's for reasons like this that I'm reluctantly opposed to the death penalty. I have no moral objection to it in principal at all, just a fear that it would one day lead to the execution of an innocent man who might later have proved his innocence.

Sinister.
I think that my right hand is suffering from excess computer use. This is no joke. I've had a bruised feeling in one of the fingers of my right hand for some time now. I also notice a feeling of strain in my right forearm. I mentioned this at the Victoria yesterday and got a variety of responses. Jim (Celtic Tiger) Britton said that I was probably not taking my hand off the mouse while I used the PC. I think that he's right. Others told me that I was getting Carpel Tunnel Syndrome.

One chap even explained his theory that it was caused by Optical Mice. This rings true for me, as I noticed things getting worse after I got an optical mouse. His theory is that users move their hands differently with an optical mouse, in a way that causes more strain on the wrists.

Midway through my afternoon at the Vic, I held my right arm in the air with the elbow high and the hand hanging down to show everyone that my little finger was shaking uncontrollably. Luckily it didn't last long.

So I am experimenting with using the mouse with my left hand now. I've changed the mouse settings so that the index finger does most of the work. Apart from the odd bit of typing, like this, I'm letting the right hand do nothing.

I will let you know how it goes.

Happy 4th July to any American readers.
At least there's one anniversary I can remember. I totally neglected to celebrate the first birthday of this site. On June 11th, Sleepless in Fulham became one year old.

Nicaragua continued.
I have had some feedback about my last post. Ruari Patterson writes:

"I'd like to take issue with your piece on Nicaragua on your blog. You make some good points but the lack of context and ommissions are shocking. You completely neglect to mention that the Sandanistas overthrew an extremly brutal decades-old dictatorship and that their opponents, the Contras, were drawn largely from that dictatorship's murderous National Guard. You make some good points about the Sandanista's own human rights abuses but you present them as if they were on a par with those of the Contras, which no serious human rights group would accept."

I was not planning to write a full history of Nicaragua. I started the story in 1987 because that was the year that I became aware of the left's strong passion for the Sandanistas during an open day at Hull University. I wasn't trying to omit anything. What Ruari says is quite true however. He continues:

"You also write as if the only election thr Sandanistas presided over was one they were forced to hold as "part of a peace deal" with the contras; in fact the Sandanistas won a 67% majority in an election in the early eighties which though accused of being flawed (the opposition alleged that government domination of the media worked against them) was widely regarded as straight.

I must confess that I was either unaware of the election that they won or had read somewhere that it wasn't free and fair. My own fascination with the subject comes from one of my favourite websites. It's a blog called www.deanesmay.com. Dean Esmay shares many of my views now but was a registered Democrat and quite left-wing in the past. In one of his entries, he explains that it was the election of UNO that triggered his move to the Right. You can read the entry here:

http://www.deanesmay.com/archives/001264.html

It is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the subject; just his personal reflections.

Ruari continues:

"The fact that they then peacefully conceded power in the second election in the late 80s, which there is no reason to believe they would not have held regardless of the peace negotiations, is glossed over. Do you think Somoza or the contras would have done the same?"

I'm too young to know whether Somoza would have done the same. From what I've read about the subject, the answer is no. I totally agree that it was to the Sandanistas credit that they did hand over power to UNO.

Ruari concludes:

"The left-wingers you disdain may have been misguided in their total support for the Sandanistas but they were defending a movement that overthrew a corrupt and violent dictarship, held two elections in its tenure of less than a decade and abided by the will of the people when it lost the second, bringing democracy to the country, not to mention saw literacy and life expectancy rates soar during its period in power, against the remnants of a military dictarship that had never shown any appetite for political freedoms or introducing democracy. That the movement has long outlived its usefulness is not particularly contraversial, but from your piece anyone would think it was a left-wing mirror image of Somoza or the contras that achieved nothing, which is absurd."

I won't add much to that. I'm glad that the people of Nicaragua are free of both the Somoza regime and the Sandanistas. There is one thing on which Ruari and I agree - that it is genuinely fascinating that Nicaragua was such a hot topic for several years and is now virtually never mentioned at all. In my last week at University in summer 1990, I rented a Camcorder and interviewed many of my fellow students. One of them, a mature student named Jake, who had been studying South-East Asian studies, was very left-wing (despite being a close friend of mine). One of the questions I asked him in the interview was 'How will history judge Ronald Reagan'? His reply was that he would be regarded as a war criminal for what the Contras did. Last month Reagan died and I read many pages of analysis about his life. Nicaragua barely featured in any of them.

If I could fast forward through history.
I have often argued about the benefits of the American invasion of Iraq, but lately I'm finding it hard to have an original thought on the matter. I'm sure that what is being done is for the best in the long-term, but it annoys me that it will take years, not weeks or months to be proved right.

To illustrate what I mean, I want to go back to February 1987 when I went to Hull University for an open day while in my last year of school. As I entered the Union building I saw a large banner that declared that it was 'Nicaragua Awareness Day'. Hardly anyone ever talks about it now, but back in the mid to late 80s, the fate of Nicaragua was a very sensitive topic. The US, under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, was supporting a group of disparate guerrillas called the 'Contras', who aimed to overthrow the left-wing Sandanista (FSLN) government of Daniel Ortega. There were horrible stories of atrocities committed by the Contras.

I liked Hull a great deal from that visit and ended up going there to do a degree in Economics and Business in the autumn of that year. For most of the three years that I was there, Nicaragua remained a hot topic of the internationalist left-wing undergraduates. They considered Reagan to be a war criminal. They openly supported the Sandanistas. In 1990, as part of a peace agreement with the Contras, the country held free elections. The Sandanistas lost to a coalition named "UNO". The people had spoken. Far from being the wonderful beloved patriarchal figure that many Hull students thought, Ortega was in fact widely hated by Nicaraguans. The Sandanista death squads had terrorized the Indian populations, regularly tortured, terrorized or killed dissidents and shut down newspapers and radio stations critical of the regime. Of course that didn't stop some students from wearing their FSLN T-Shirts. I approached one of them in the library and noting his choice of attire only days after the Sandanista defeat, I mentioned that he was supporting a political party that had been rejected by the Nicaraguan people themselves. He replied "UNO's falling apart".

He was in denial. Violeta Chamorro, the UNO leader, remained president until 1996. Daniel Ortega has run for president three times since 1990 and has lost every time. The people of Nicaragua continue to chose right of centre parties who favour free trade with the US. In 2003, Nicaragua along with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador agreed on a free trade agreement with the US. In January this year the World Bank decided to erase 80 per cent of the debt that the country owed to it. Nicaragua is still poor, in part because it took a battering from Hurricane Mitch in 1998, but it seems to be on the right track, and this is of course why you have heard absolutely nothing about it for years.

In fact it might surprise you to know that with the exception of Cuba, every country in the American hemisphere is now a democracy and that most are choosing free enterprise and open markets. The left, while correct to have pointed out the atrocities committed by some of the Contras, was completely wrong in its support of the Sandanistas, but never says sorry. Instead it has moved on to attacking the 'Neo-cons' over Iraq.

Iraq, with its oil wealth, has at least as good if not better chances than Central America. I'm sure of this, but right now there are still thugs, many of them foreign, who don't like the prospect of the Iraqi people choosing their own destiny. These insurgents have shown that they have nothing to offer the Iraqi people but death and misery. They never make any claims about how their violent actions will improve the lot of the ordinary people, because there is nothing that they can say. In time, when more and more control moves to the new government, they will lose what support they have. They are losers and the form book shows that losers keep on losing. However, many in the West are sceptical and expect instant results. That I can't offer. I ask only that people cast their minds back to how life was in Central and South America a quarter of a century ago and contrast it to how it is now.

Blink and you'll miss it.
Somebody must have hated writing this:

World's tally of refugees falls.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has reported that "The number of refugees and displaced people around the world has fallen by 18% to just over 17m - the lowest level in a decade". Notably, more than half a million people returned to Afghanistan.

Buried in the middle of the article, we find "Large numbers also returned to Angola, Burundi and Iraq. What? Iraq? But I keep reading that it's a shambles and that it's a country under oppressive US occupation. How can people be going back home there? Don't they read the Independent?

Well done to the BBC on keeping this uncomfortable little fact buried so well. Can't have good news coming out, can we?