What a grafter, running back and forth at his end of the Emirates Stadium for the whole night, the big screen showing veins popping on his forehead from the sheer, crowd-pleasing effort.

No, not one of those overpaid kids who play for Arsenal. I’m talking about Bruce Springsteen, who at nearly 60 can still manage a goalscorer’s knee-slide.

My wife and I, who had last seen him at Wembley 20 years ago, were lucky enough to get tickets at the last minute when a friend of a friend wasn’t able to go.
Nobody works a crowd or himself as hard as Springsteen did for two-and-a-half hours last night, from the mellow mike-to-the-crowd chanting of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out to the joyous, air-punching encore, when an audience most of whose speediest days were behind them bellowed that “tramps like us, baby we were born to run”. The urge was still there, even if the capability was gone, and Springsteen drew it out.
The man who sang so understandingly in Night in 1975 of those moments when the “boss man’s giving you hell” has long since taken over the running of the firm, but he flogs himself as hard as ever.
He remains committed in other respects, too, though he’s generally happy to let his songs do the talking. About halfway through the set, he played Livin’ In The Future, that cry of a disillusioned patriot from the latest album, Magic:

“My faith’s been torn asunder,
tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound
of somethin’ righteous goin’ under?”

He introduced it with a couple of sentences about “extraordinary rendition” and the suspension of habeas corpus – surely the first time any player’s used those words in front of an Arsenal crowd…

Being frightened to death is one thing. Being able to communicate that fear in prose, so that your readers are almost as frightened on your behalf, is something else. Richard Grant did just that last weekend, writing in the Telegraph Magazine of his encounter with the bandits of the Sierra Madre.

The neatest phrasemaking of the week came last night on Channel 4 news from Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, commenting on the difficulties facing Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister, he said, is now reduced to the Travolta-Micawber Formula: staying alive in the hope that something will turn up. And Finkelstein had the generosity to acknowledge that the coinage wasn’t his but a friend’s.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that immigrants to the United States should watch only English-language TV so that they can understand the language and news of their home state.

  On the contrary, argues Joe Mathews in a piece in the Washington Post this week: political leaders should be encouraging Americans to switch off English-language TV and learn Spanish – “the language of civic-minded news”.

  The sharpest coverage of state and local issues — government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care — is now found on Spanish-language TV. These outlets tell their viewers more about how the state and the region work, they are more persistent in demanding explanations from public officials, and their reports routinely include more interviews with more sources from more perspectives. The Spanish-language TV broadcasts are, for lack of a better word, more American.

“You haven’t been to visit us for a while, sir,” the immigration officer said, flicking through my passport last week before letting me into Seattle.
I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t been made to feel overly welcome on the last few trips, even when I was simply transiting the US en route to Latin America. But I think she would have given me a sympathetic hearing. She had two qualities that were lacking in many immigration officers even before 9/11: friendliness and a sense of humour.
Her colleagues were similarly helpful. If one queue seemed to be moving more quickly than others, they lifted the ropes between queues to let passengers change lanes. Two of them, one mature and avuncular, the other young and brisk, wandered along the queues, offering help to anyone having trouble with the forms. They did the job without barking. If Seattle can do it, why can’t they all?

What pictures come to mind when you hear the word Nicaragua? Not, perhaps, a scene like the one above, though this photograph, which I took from the fort of El Castillo on the Rio San Juan, is a truer representation than most people’s preconceptions.

The country is trying to rebrand itself, or rather brand itself, to appeal to tourists, and casting around for a slogan that will do the job.

“Contra to expectations” certainly summed up my experience, and was the headline we used on my piece about the country last year. But given that the Contras were the enemies of the Sandinistas, and that the former leader of the Sandinistas, Daniel Ortega, is Nicaragua’s current president, I don’t think that suggestion is likely to get very far. Any better ideas?

The case of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman kept in a cellar for 24 years by the father who abused her and fathered seven children by her, is both horrific and extraordinary. The manner in which it has been reported, though, is entirely predictable.
“Sedate town is stunned by news,” a headline in The Times said. The story underneath began: “There was an eerie silence in this sleepy town yesterday as its 23,000 inhabitants learnt from the television news of the horrors said to have been perpetrated in their midst for almost three decades.”
Why are the towns in which such things happen always “sleepy”? And, given the frequency with which “sleepy” towns provide a setting in the media for atrocity, how do reporters still manage to find anyone who is “stunned” any more by anything that happens in them?

There’s an excellent piece by Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books on Obama and Clinton:

So we’re down to arguing over the character and style of Clinton and Obama, rather than – tut-tut! – ‘talking about the issues’. But in this case, character and style are issues because they supply the best available clues as to how each candidate might set about forming an administration and handle the business of government.

George Bush’s ways with the language are beginning to rub off on his Secretary of State. Yesterday, after it emerged that State Department staff had improperly accessed electronic passport files of the three American presidential candidates, Condoleezza Rice declared that she was going to “stay on top of it and get to the bottom of it”. Which, I wonder, did she mean?

Leo Hickman’s The Final Call, which I have mentioned before, is now out in a new paperback edition. Well worth a look if you have any interest at all in what can be done to make tourism a positive force rather than the “pernicious disease” Hickman finds it to be in so many places. Have the publishers decided that the book will only sell now if there’s a woman in a bikini on the cover? She wasn’t on the original edition…
Fred Pearce’s Confessions of an Eco Sinner (review copies of which have been in abundant supply — see “Multiple sins”, below) is another thought-provoking read. It’s the story of “a globalised consumer” travelling to the source of the stuff he has come to take for granted: the cotton in his shirt, the phone in his hand, the coffee in his mug.
  Pearce, a regular contributor to New Scientist, Geographical and The Ecologist as well as the Telegraph’s Earth Channel, had long taken the greenness of trains for granted. Then, prompted by ads for Virgin Trains and Eurostar, he began to question his assumptions. He writes:

“An express coach carrying twenty passengers emits 37 grams per passenger-kilometre, compared to 50 grams for an average train averagely loaded. Coaches are the greenest way to travel. At the time of writing I haven’t seen any big posters advertising this fact. But they can’t be long delayed.”