KEY POINTS:
What a brilliant summer! It is now a matter of dragging myself back into news awareness and working my way back into the game.
All I know of news in the past month is that the Israelis have thrown their toys out of the cot and there are
sharks everywhere. Every time I picked up a paper I saw a shark, one of them with a gaping mouth right next to a boat in the middle of Hawke's Bay. I thought, looking at that picture, that more impressive even than the shark was the presence of mind of the person who took the photo. That was a very scary, big old shark.
We had a lazy time at the farm. I did not really plan any definite reading this summer. I persevered with and managed to get into Anthony Beevor's The Battle For Spain, but it lacked passion and atmosphere.
I had a lovely afternoon reading a book I bought ages ago, Grinning with the Gipper, a collection of the stories, the wit and the jokes of Ronald Reagan, written word for word as he told them.
He used his little tales to illustrate and explain policy and to explain his then-revolutionary beliefs about the size of government, the waste of it and the need for lower taxes. His stories and his manner of presentations show the genial graciousness of this President, whom the left regarded as a fool. This is the President who said there was no limit to what a man could do or where he could go if he didn't mind who took the credit.
But one afternoon, I put the Spanish Civil War book down and repaired to my library, my man den, from which I plan to do many of the Saturday morning programmes on NewstalkZB this year, and started to rearrange the books, to try to put them into some kind of order.
As I did so, I came across the book that created huge interest when it appeared in the mid-90s, a book I bought when it came out and which I had never got around to reading. This was Gitta Sereney's magnificent Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth.
Albert Speer was a young man from a well-to-do family who became a Nazi in his 20s, although not a shouting, thuggish one, who fell into Hitler's circle shortly after he gained power. Hitler appointed him his architect, charged with rebuilding Berlin in the manner that every thousand years or so megalomaniacs seem to want to undertake.
Then in 1943, still in his mid-30s, with things going to hell in a handcart for Germany - Hitler saw something in the young Speer and made him Armaments Minister.
Speer was smooth, cold, extremely good-looking, had a phenomenal memory and a genius for organisation. What he did with the armaments job was historic.
Even with its cities and factories bombed to smithereens by mid-1944 or early-1945, Germany's productive capacity was stunning. Much of it was happening underground, hidden from the bombers.
One great cave discovered later was some 1554m long and five storeys high. Above this chamber were metres of concrete and above the concrete was a planted pine forest. From this space came the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first jet fighter.
The trouble for Speer was, of course, that this production was achieved with millions of imported slave labourers, people ripped from their communities all over Eastern Europe, people in rags, in the freezing cold, working without a break for many hours for days on end, people fed garbage, without sanitation, dying of typhoid, starvation and dysentery, wives and children eventually carted off, never to be seen again.
Speer seems never to have seen anything wrong with this, indeed, seems hardly to have noticed it, so hard was he working, he said, and so important was the job he had to do.
He escaped the hangman at Nuremburg but they gave him 20 years in Spandau, during which time he came to feel the guilt of the damned.
He always claimed he never knew about the Jews being gassed and that he never really noticed Kristallnacht.
Sereney's book stole my holiday. She drew me for days on end into that incredible, unfathomable time, and into the minds of those weird and ghastly people.
As the book drew me deeper, I had an amazing feeling of quiet, as if submerged in Ballard's submarine, miles beneath the sea, watching in silence as a piercing light peeled away the thick darkness to reveal the terrible, ruined corpse of Titanic.
I found myself cut off from my wife and friends, unable to communicate the sheer complexity of the bizarre world of inhumanity and insanity Sereney was showing us and the disturbing questions she was addressing as she explored Speer's mind, and what he really knew or did not know.
* * *
I was reading this against the background of the fearful thumping Israel is giving the people of Gaza. With Bin Laden now piping up for a holy war against Israel who knows now where it will all lead.
The world is sick of it all, sick of what The Economist cover last week called, "The Hundred Years' War" that goes on and on.
Hamas does not accept Israel's right to exist, which is stupid. Because of this, Gaza stays broke.
And with hundreds of thousands of crowded people living in refugee camps on less than two dollars a day, evil gets to work.
On the other hand, for a long time now, the Palestinians have been sending rockets into Israel daily, random rockets falling anywhere.
Do that to Israel and eventually Israel will bite back hard and you cannot blame her.
The best thing I read this week was a quote from the Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim in last week's Spectator: "Palestinian violence torments Israelis and does not serve the Palestinian cause; Israeli retaliation is inhuman, immoral and does not guarantee security."
What I know is that if you are rich, you must be generous and if you have power, you must be compassionate.
One thing is certain. The Iranians are stirring it up and providing the Palestinians the ordnance. And if you want to understand modern Iran, may I recommend a book Richard Griffin sent me before Christmas, All the Shah's Men, by Stephen Kinzer.
It tells the story of the American coup that ousted the Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 and restored the Shah. Mossadegh had crippled the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later BP, which was plundering the country, virtually thieving its oil. He wanted a better price for his people.
The arrogant British, high-handed to the end, refused to compromise. Churchill persuaded Eisenhower to flick Mossadegh. When the Ayatollah arrived in Tehran in triumph in 1979, 26 years later, many among the jubilant masses in the streets carried large portraits of Mossadegh.
The book's principal assertion is that in the 1953 coup lie the roots of Middle East terror. The tragedy of Mossadegh is that he was the only truly democratic leader the Middle East has produced, excepting Israel.
Despite all this, it was not a dreary summer. And if I allowed myself to be drawn into strange and serious contemplation, it was probably because of nicotine deprivation.
Deborah and I gave up smoking on New Year's Day. Not a cigarette for more than a fortnight now. Not bad for a man who has smoked more than 20 a day for 40 years.
The patches definitely take the edge off it but the most important thing, I think, is the attitude change. We have simply decided we are going to be non-smokers. Already I have noticed what a filthy habit it is, but one must not allow hubris to speak too soon.
And so back to work.
My new producer and I spent a happy couple of hours this week choosing the opening music, the regular theme music, for my new Saturday morning show.
We listened to many tracks designed for the purpose and when we found the one we wanted, we both recognised it at once. That is a good sign. Music is so important, even in talk radio.
A piece of music can be not only attractive to the listener, but can help you to define a programme's tone. It can even tell you once and for all what it is you are trying to do. Our music is quite rocky and funky. We can't let ourselves get old, can we?
