And still the Peel tributes just keep on coming. Television in the UK has been liberally peppered with celebrities queuing up to pay homage to the man who – as if to prove a point – actually had a rubber stamp he’d made up to sign his letters with: John Peel – the world’s most boring man. [Listen to this post]

And yet they re-screened the first episode of a series he did called ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ in which Peel visited the town of Oxford and sat in to listen to a few bands rehearse and talk about their music. My favourite was the experimental DJ duo who scratched “records” made of wood, circular saw blades and sandpaper. Peel may not have been the most interesting man around – but he was always the most interested.

So I think perhaps it’s apt that the world returns the favour – even if it does turn out to be the longest obituary since Diana.

Now – one of the biggest problems of journalism – if not THE problem of journalism – is the question of balance. There’s an understanding – an expectation even – that the news should be impartial, fair, unbiased and above all, balanced. “There are two sides to every story”, is the cliché that every reporter with a sense of duty, ethics and integrity will cling to.

The trouble is, life’s just not like that. Nothing’s that simple. Stories aren’t two dimensional objects that you can just flip over and see from the other point of view. Issues are not moments in time that can be held up in isolation and examined in 3 minutes at the top of the hour – or in a half page spread.

Every news story has, of course, a history – and it relates to and is influenced by many other factors both newsworthy and mundane. It has, in other words, context, implications and determining factors.

The death of Yasser Arafat at the end of last week is one of those news stories that highlights this problem. To give you an indication of both the historical context of the story, and also how terribly old I rapidly seem to be getting, when Yasser Arafat was rising to prominence as the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation – the PLO – I was busy being born.

So throughout my life, Arafat’s raised significant problems for Western journalism because for long periods of recent history he represented the face of terrorism in the west. The killing of Israeli Olympic athletes and the seemingly steady stream of suicide bombers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip – all roads, and certainly all journalistic paths, led to the Palestinian leader.

And yet here’s the guy with the Nobel Peace Prize for kicking off what looked to be one of the most promising turnarounds in the history of Middle East tensions. And now here he lies in a French hospital – still a country under a degree of suspicion for not being terribly helpful when the US and UK wanted to form a Coalition of the Willing that amounted to more than just Bulgaria, Estonia, Uzbekistan and… was it just me who spotted the irony here… Afghanistan.

It’s a tricky story to cover, in other words. Yasser Arafat’s dead… how sad is it appropriate to be?

Well, President George Bush navigated the complexity of meaning in the Palestinian leader’s passing with spectacular skill by describing it as ‘a significant event’ – no doubt a senior scriptwriter’s attempt to redraft the phrase ‘wow, look what happened’.

But media balance is only really needed when you’re the only game in town. The New Zealand Herald, I seem to recall, was the newspaper most aggressively pretending to faithfully represent reality – but here in a town where I can select from the dozen or so major newspapers on a daily basis, there is a bit of room for editorial slant.

And usually there is slant. Every event attracts comment from every side – from ‘Brit Heroes kick ass in Falluja’ to ‘Illiterate, undertrained cannon fodder sent to their meaningless deaths in war-ravaged streets of Falluja’. You see? Same story.

But with Arafat’s death – it’s too complicated. All you can say is that here is a significant event. A human being with a degree of power, died of very human causes as an old man. Wow – look what happened.

But enough of world news. Let’s blow something up. About a week ago, I heard rapid fire overhead in the little village of Moseley. No – actually not Moseley, just up the road in nearby Edgbaston. Somebody’s storming the cricket ground, I thought – until I remembered Guy Fawkes night – or as it’s called here – Bonfire Night.

Here’s what surprises me. In Britain, fireworks are aptly named. They deploy fire, and they really work. Sky rockets are sufficiently powerful to be purchased over the counter from the nearby corner store, deployed from the moving car of a teenager, shoot across the road and break through the kitchen window of a fourth floor flat, and then in one spectacular explosion take out all the crockery, the appliances, the windows and the cat of the very frightened old man who was in the adjacent living room at the time.

But, you see, you don’t just light these things off on November the 5th. Apparently, you start on the evening of November the 3rd, and just keep on blowing them up until after Ramadan finishes with the festival of Eid, which, by the sound of the munitions outside my house about now, is just about winding up.

So despite the fact there are Muslims in the street setting off explosives right outside my house, it’s kind of a fun time to be in the UK right now. Especially in multi-ethnic Birmingham.

But here’s what makes me homesick: I want to go to the Flying Nun Quiz on the 24th. I thoroughly enjoyed the last one and I’m gutted to miss this one. I hope it’s being recorded for posterity and I hope I get a copy.

I’ll just sit here and listen to the new Chills album or watch the new DVD when it arrives shortly (hint hint) and I’ll have a quiet drink myself.