Sorry, but its going to be a bit of a random post tonight. I’m not inebriated or anything, it’s just that an Indian summer has broken out down here, and this plus a day spent pruning fruit trees is not conducive to thought as the shadows lengthen. Also, there are a lot of quite amusing snippets about.

Over at the Telegraph, there’s a lively debate going on at the blogs about this latest early humanoid skeleton that’s turned up. Tom Chivers has written a piece about so-called ‘transitional fossils’, and one of those smart-arsed commenters with whom we must all deal just called his piece “absolute twaddle”. So Tom answered ‘What would qualify as a transitional fossil for you then?’, and the next threader got in with ‘Prince Charles’. Well it made me laugh, anyway.

But not as much as the output from the latest G7 meeting in Marseilles. ‘We are committed to a strong and coordinated international response to these challenges’ said the final communique – except that the coordination was so strong, they couldn’t agree about whether it was a communique or not. Instead, in the end it was called ‘terms of reference’. Referring coordinated terms strongly to the global crisis is a novel approach, but I don’t see it working.

Parallels about angels on a pinhead, splitting hairs and fiddling during Rome’s conflagration don’t really cut it as descriptions of the G7. I think the comment by one delegate at the Reuters site tonight summed it up quite well: “The communique was at the insistence of the French but in practice it’s meaningless. We can’t even agree on the problems, so how can we agree on an analysis?” Now you should be afraid.

But the Arabs at least can celebrate, because the West’s enthusiasm for their Spring overcomes any and all fears about eurobanks: they decided to increase the value of loans pledged to the countries of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan to $38bn from $20bn agreed in the Summer. Given Egypt’s behaviour towards the Israeli Embassy yesterday, I can’t wait for Winter.

Talking of w*nking, apparently at the GQ Awards earlier in the week, George Osborne decided to have a go at being a stand-up. He cracked a gag about pages sticking together (trust me George, I’ve heard it before) and then, undeterred by the embarrassed silence pockmarked only by groans, the Chancellor dug himself deeper with further jokes about the onanist habits of teenage boys. It was, I’m told, skin-creepingly awful.

The insensitivity of your average Nob is worrying, especially when they appear to have hijacked the Conservative Party. On the whole, however, the more time passes, the more I tend to see Camerlot as a collection of mainly below-par Nobs. The Prime Minister, so media sources continue to tell me, remains convinced that most people think he’s a nice bloke. I cannot imagine why: his every attempt at humour gives away what he really thinks about the rest of us. Having started out in 2006 seeing him as a smart politician who might get things done, I have come to regard him as empty, corrupt and – after the 2010 Election debacle – something of a loser.

Finally, tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the Trade Center towers. I watched a programme last night outlining how every class of New Yorker – surely the most cynical, hard-bitten species on the planet – pulled together in remarkable ways to provide comfort and medical assistance to massively traumatised victims. In our contemporary world, there is a ghastly tendency to overplay trauma, but in this case, what these victims had suffered borders on unimaginable. I include in ‘victims’, by the way, those unfortunate enough to watch human beings throwing themselves to certain death. I watched it on a TV screen 6,000 miles away and it gave me, without question, the most desperate sense of guilt about voyeurism I’ve yet experienced. God knows what it felt like to be there.

But this evening, I listened to former President Bush’s address on the eve of the anniversary. Although he has to be the world’s biggest target for easy laughs, for me George W Bush is about as funny as chemotherapy, and as deep as a stream of urine. Dubya’s speeches make George Osborne’s onanism gags look politically correct. And so it was that listening to the address, I found myself entirely unsurprised by his braindead reaction to 9/11 at the time, and the man’s complete lack of awareness about what a pointless and murderous chain reaction he helped set off. Iraq was about as logical a target for retaliation as Finland, and only a labyrinthine collection of lies and hype persuaded the British people (including me) to support the invasion.

Bush’s excuse was having a Dad in search of revenge, and a tertiary case of congenital stupidity. Anthony Lynton Blair has no excuses at all for his actions. I think it very likely that he is deranged.