Wednesday was far and away the busiest and perhaps the most exciting day of the trip. At breakfast at the Royal Gardens Hotel, I met Mina Al-Oraibi (above), the Current Affairs journalist for Asharq Alawsat, an international, pan-Arab daily. I had seen Mina on the BBC’s Dateline London program many times, and knew her to be a sharp thinker whose experience with two cultures could add a lot to the article. Well, I got even more than I expected. Mina is a native Iraqi who now has dual citizenship in Iraq and the UK. Her father is a diplomat who fled Saddam Hussein. She had a lot to say about living in a repressive society, and what she expects from a democratic one.
After breakfast I hopped on the Tube and headed to East London to meet Johann Hari, left, the columnist for The Independent. Johann is another person I first encountered on Dateline London, but more recently I’ve been able to follow his column on The Huffington Post. He is a lucid writer and an original thinker, and a fun guy to talk to. He greeted me by giving me an introduction to the East London terrain over which we were crossing: “Jack the Ripper prowled here, the Kray Brothers murdered someone in that club over there.” Johann is an enthusiastic backer of CCTV; he thinks freedom doesn’t merely mean freedom from the state, but freedom from the depradations people perform on one another, and he’s convinced CCTV helps the police control that. He says he’s not fond of having his picture 
taken; someone seeing his photo in the paper wrote to the editor congratulating him for hiring a columnist with Downs Syndrome.
After speaking with Johann, I went to Leicester Square for a late lunch at The Ivy with Menno Meyjes. Menno, right, is a Dutch film director and screenwriter who now lives in England near Bath, and about whom I wrote in The New York Times when his film Max appeared in 2002. Menno is a real humanist, and I’m 
glad I sought out his ideas. “You can’t blame the police man for wanting to be a better police man,” he says. “But why are we so complacent about our rights?” After lunch, Menno showed me ten minutes of his new film Manolete, about the great bullfighter, which will be out in the spring. The film has a rich, luxurious look; Adrian Brody is a twin for Manolete, and Penelope Cruz seems to be at her Peneope Cruziest.
I capped the day at the Grange Hotel in Holborn, having drinks with Brendan O’Neill, above, the editor of the website Spiked, and a prolific contributor to newspapers and magazines throughout the UK. He hates CCTV. “It’s creepy,” he says. As a citizen and as a free man, he objects to being watched.