The racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on 17 May 1959 is the centre-point of this book, but it spins off in a lot of other directions. No one was ever convicted for the butchery but Olden makes a strong circumstantial case that a painter and decorator called Pat Digby wielded the knife that killed Cochrane. Digby denied that he was the culprit, and had he not died from a heart attack four years ago, then stringent British libel laws would have forced Olden’s book to take a very different shape to the one it has now. There is no smoking gun in this case, although this book suggests Digby’s bloody knife may still lie hidden under some Notting Hill floorboards.

My impression is that I’m not the only person to have found that Web 2.0 is proving less interesting these days than it was five or six years ago. I don’t think this is simply because for my social (networking) circle the novelty has worn off. It has more to do with the fact that the web is less chaotic than it was and corporations have learnt how to better use and control social networking. Friendster fell out of favour because it kicked out fakesters (those that refused to use their ‘real’ identities) and it was continually crashing due to lack of server capacity.

I’ve already written about my experiences of producing the first season of the Mister Trippy blog at MySpace. It is obviously a little early to write about the second season in any depth since this is its closing post. There is also less need to write about Mister Trippy season two because I’ll be leaving the posts up rather than taking them down as I did with not only with the first season of Mister Trippy, but all my MySpace profiles (to protest about the platform’s support for US imperialism), in Spring 2008. Having produced posts for the first Mister Trippy season daily, I found it far easier to blog every other day in this second season (except for the first month, which was daily).

Having recently read Phil Baker’s The Devil Is A Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, I was moved to revisit the Hammer film adaptations of Wheatley’s novels – The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) and To The Devil A Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976), both of which ‘starred’ pseudo-aristocratic plonker Christopher Lee_._ The first flick is an ultra-conservative thriller with some occult trimmings that looks absolutely pathetic when compared to what was happening in horror cinema at the time. It is of the same vintage as early post-modern classics like Succubus (Jess Franco, 1967), Rape of the Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1968) and Night of the Living Dead (George A Romero, 1968), but looks positively antediluvian in comparison.

Over the past year I’ve devoted a number of blogs to my first cousin once removed Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones. Having talked to various people about Ray and located assorted print references to him made after he’d retired from being the greatest cat burglar in the world, I thought it was time to dig back into the past. Old newspaper reports of Ray’s court appearances verify much of what he had to say about his life, clarify various matters, and show that more recent accounts of his famous jail break have been distorted by those retelling the tale. Doing a quick search through national newspapers, I found no reports of Ray’s boxing career, and the earliest press coverage I could locate was dated 8 March 1940.