Locked into a six-hour session with my computer technical support line for the second day running, I hit on a fiendishly efficient technical supporter called Fritz. He is from Hamburg, but works in Dublin. I ask him if his accent is not a disadvantage in his line of business. He replies that, on the contrary, his accent seems to make the customers respond more quickly. Placing me on hold, he switches on the music, which is German and classical. In this way, I am able to listen to the whole of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, including the applause at the end. When he comes back on the line, Fritz asks for the latest on Prince Harry and his drug problem. He says that in Dublin he is now known as "Harry Pothead".

If I were asked to summarise the difference between living in Paris and living in deepest Oxfordshire, I would say that in Paris I spent half the day sitting in my favourite café, reading books, while in Oxfordshire I spend most of the day trying to operate either a motorcar or a computer. Of these two, the car is more amusing but more dangerous. The English countryside is almost as beautiful as ever, but its roads are infested with homicidal and suicidal maniacs. This is particularly the case in our part of the sticks, which apparently has the highest road accident rate anywhere in the area covered by the local ambulance service. In the short time I have lived here, there have to my knowledge been six fatal road accidents within five miles of the house, which seems quite a lot. Needless to say, none of them were in areas policed by the government's tyrannical Gatso speed cameras, which tend to be sited in areas of higher traffic and revenue.

A petition is circulating in our village asking the authorities to install anti-speed bumps outside the village school. In the latest incident, the crossing-keeper was struck on the arm by a passing lorry while trying to help the children cross the road. There is a Gatso speed camera in the centre of the village, but it has been hidden where it can photograph traffic that has already passed the school, thereby minimising its deterrent effect and maximising its money-raising potential.

Opinion in this part of the country is shifting against the US operations in Afghanistan, even though they are supported by Jack Straw, VC, and the Vice-President of the World, Tony Blair (or "Laughing Boy", as he is disrespectfully known). This shift in opinion is less to do with the village's painstaking analysis of US military strategy than with people's despair over the useless bus service and the exorbitant cost of road fuel. The connection may not be immediately obvious, but there is certain to be some profound link that escapes the agile but superficial mentality of the urban media.

For me, the turning point came with the pictures of the treatment of the al-Qaida captives at the Guantanamo naval base. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will recall that Sauron, the Dark Lord, holds all but one of the Rings of Power and is determined to find the last ring. When he does so, no other force will be able to resist him. This, the Ruling Ring, possesses an evil force of its own that none can resist. The rulers of Washington obtained the last Ring with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the corrupting influence of total power is now becoming apparent in Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Convention. Or that is how it looks from Loose Chippings tonight.