I agree with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Fenton Tower aka Archie's House

It's a sunny day here, and from my window, as I type this, I can see Archie's House. For those of you who do not get this reference to popular culture, Archie is a character in a TV series called Balamory. Balamory is mostly situated, for the purposes of location shooting, on the isle of Mull. Go there and you will believe that nothing else of cultural value has ever happened, for the shops in Tobermory/Balamory are full of trinkets designed to capitalise on the the show.


I say this to make the point that there is a very flimsy veil between reality and fiction sometimes. I do not live on Mull by the way. Archie's House, for reasons I do not know, is really a castle on the Scottish mainland. It stands on the summit of a rolling hill and commands a view for miles, which is what castles generally did as a defensive measure. But anyway, I can see it now. Archie's House, resplendent in pink, in the sunshine.

Perhaps I should talk about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and my provocative headline, for of course, I generally hold this woman to be mephitic.

The bit I agree with her about is this. She writes in The Indy:

At the end of the long coffee-drinking evening, most of us seemed to feel that helping rebels in Libya was necessary. But the real passions were raised over what the West does next. Their movers and shakers cannot go on cultivating hideous leaders and then turning on them when the winds change. They embrace Saudi Arabia and in the same moment shoot down Libya. Such hypocrisies will no longer be swallowed by people who are now globally connected. 

Somehow I feel myself agreeing with Yasmin. Perhaps I should visit Archie's House and give myself a reality check.