A few things to do with security.

First there was talk of the UK withdrawing from the European convention on human rights. Now I read that Britain will no longer support search and rescue operations to prevent migrants and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. It seems that Foreign Office ministers have quietly announced that supporting such operations just encourages more people to attempt the crossing. 

What happened to humanity? 

It goes along with reducing benefits to "encourage" people to find work and discourage them from relying on "hand-outs". I'm quite surprised they haven't shut down food banks to make people be more self-reliant and find other ways of feeding their family. All of this at a time when UNICEF reports child poverty on the increase in the developed world. The proportion of children living in poverty in the UK has gone up from 24% in 2008 to 25.6%. In Greece it has gone from 23% to 40.5%. The USA is up to 32% and Spain 36%. What are things coming to? 

The writer Doris Lessing once imagined a future society where the rich live in walled communities while the poor marauded round the country in gangs, scavenging for food and occasionally attacking the rich enclaves. Is this what we have ahead? 

Talking of walls, I hear that bits of the Berlin Wall are spread all over the world. This is not just the keyring-sized pieces that you can buy in German airports. No, huge segments have been sent all over the place and are sometimes given to visiting foreign dignitaries. Five pieces of the Berlin Wall are in South Korea, 30 kilometres from the border with North Korea, a kind of symbol of hope that the country might one day be peacefully reunited. 

I like the tales of bits of the wall getting lost. In May 1998, they were going to present a segment of Wall to Bill Clinton during a presidential visit to Berlin. However, a previous meeting had overrun and Bill Clinton was unable to attend the presentation ceremony. So the German embassy agreed to present the bit of wall in the US. And so the chunk of brickwork was transported from Berlin to Hamburg and then shipped to Baltimore. But then along came the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the presentation never took place. The piece of wall remained in storage in Baltimore and eventually vanished. I imagine someone coming across it during a storage inventory and thinking, " This is a scruffy looking chunk of masonry. Let's throw it out!" A piece of history gone for ever! 

All of these walls and measures taken to keep people out or in or just secure gets me thinking about my running. It might be dangerous. Runners could be a security risk. On Monday a young man was out running in Leeds when he ran into David Cameron. He reckons he didn't see him but just saw a lot of men in suits and was continuing his run, weaving in and out of people, as you do if you run in an urban environment. The next thing he knew he was tackled to the ground, handcuffed, arrested and stuffed into a police van. An hour later they "de-arrested" him. That was the term used on the radio in my daughter's car where I first heard this story. She tells me this is police terminology meaning that he was released without being charged. I suppose she should know these things; her fiancé is a policeman, after all. Anyway, I think I will stick to running on bridle paths where I am unlikely to come across politicians and their security men. 

I wonder how much money is spent on these security measures. I read today that one of the tourist sights in London is Tony Blair's residence. You can recognise it because there are policemen with machine guns around it. Really? There are advantages to not being an ex-prime minister. I don't have to worry about stuff like that. Does Cherie take them cups of tea and coffee like we do around here for workmen? 

Presumably the Blair residence is also surrounded by CCTV cameras. They seem to be everywhere. Apparently police have released a CCTV image of a man who stole a double-decker bus and then went on a seven-mile joyride through the streets of south-east London. He appears to have just walked into the depot and driven out in the bus, which he drove around for a while. Then, when he had had enough he parked it a bus stop and walked away. Did he do it for a dare? Is he terminally ill and driving a bus is on his bucket list? Did he do it on impulse, simply seeing the bus there and getting in and driving it away? Or was he testing security measures at the bus depot? 

Like the mystery of Bill Clinton's bit of the Berlin Wall, this conundrum might never be solved!