What are we to make of the disquieting information that Ehud Barak’s favoured pastime, when not waging war, politicking or dressing as a woman, is the dismantling and reassembling of clocks?
‘That’s really creepy,’ I said to the wife, when somebody on Newsnight mentioned it while we were watching it in bed. ‘It makes him sound like Sylar.’
Sylar, of course, is the super-powered serial killer from the hit US series Heroes. Prior to discovering his powers, he was a watch repairman. These days, he can fling you across a room with a twitch of his hand, shoot flames from his palms, and use a finger to open your skull like a can of soup.
‘Not so,’ said the wife, who was reading a book, but had heard enough. ‘Sylar is a professional. This sounds like more of a hobby.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘So he’s like Proposition Joe.’ Proposition Joe, as you will know, is one of the big league gang bosses in that other hit US series, The Wire. He smuggles and deals coke and smack, arranges hits, bribes lawmen and, as a front, runs a small clock repair shop on the East Side of Baltimore.
‘Again,’ said the wife, without looking up, ‘a professional.’
‘But it’s only a front,’ I said. ‘And he looks like he enjoys it.’
‘Still not the same,’ said the wife, and I suppose she was right. And musing on this, as she settled back into her book, and Jeremy Paxman went on to be really quite unreasonably rude to poor old George Osborne, two things struck me. A bit like two gongs, if you want to keep the theme suitably clockish. The first was that I really ought to stop trying to understand the world in terms of character synopses from hit US TV series.
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