Spirits have rather risen in London of late, with alfresco Olympian bonhomie breaking out all over town, and I figured it was high time to nudge down my doleful post of last month. Here’s a happy photo instead, taken from a friend’s houseboat on a warm evening last weekend. Capital!

As if London’s feelgoodery weren’t fortune enough, I’ve just had a stroke of personal luck. After several weeks of silence, I heard yesterday that the government of Myanmar/Burma has agreed to let me into the country to research a report about its progress (or otherwise) in safeguarding the rule of law. That decision didn’t come a moment too soon, because I’m booked to fly out tomorrow afternoon, but the important thing is that it came – and now that the door’s been opened, I’m curious as a cat to squeeze on through and look around. I’ll not blog while there, as internet chatter is apparently liable to be misconstrued by the authorities . . . but there’ll be plenty of opportunities in the report to reflect on whatever I find. Meanwhile, to keep things ticking over, here’s a video of the panel discussion on America’s anti-Islamic panic in which I participated last month, and here’s the first paragraph of a (paywall-protected) piece on News International’s phone-hacking exploits that I recently wrote for the London Review of Books.