Sorry for the long silence – I’ve been prepping for my trip to St Andrews, where this afternoon I’ll be giving the Neil Smith Lecture.  Over the years I’ve given lots of lectures named after people I knew (if I knew them at all) only through their writings, and this is the first time I’ve given one named after someone I knew – and cared so much about.  There is a wonderful phrase in a commentary on Marx’s humanism (and humanity) and his critique of alienation, which talks about ‘man in the whole wealth of his being, man richly and deeply mentally alive’.  Needless to say I can’t track down the source when I need it – Ollman, maybe? – but I’ve never forgotten those words (or at least their force) since I read them years and years ago.  I can think of no other phrase that captures Neil so perfectly.

Still lots to do, but I have added the final version of my general essay on drones, ‘Moving targets and violent geographies’, to the DOWNLOADS tab.  It will appear in an edited collection in honour of Allan Pred, edited by Lisa Hoffman and Heather Merrill, but I’ll also re-work it (and no doubt extend it) for The everywhere war so, as usual, I’d value any comments – preferably by e-mail to avoid the spam filters.  I’m flattered by those e-marketeers who think that my blog is a likely medium to flog everything from Viagra (well, not quite so flattered at that) to Louis Vuitton luggage, but thanks to those filters they – and perhaps you, dear reader – are out of luck…

And while I am channelling Del-Boy, another wordpress service lists the search terms that people use to navigate their way to the blog, and I’d particularly like to know what the person who was searching for – how do I put this? – a highly specialised type of basket apparently made in Vietnam made of Geographical imaginations.  I don’t expect they’d have found it on Louis Vuitton either.