Never mind details of rescue funds, Eurobonds and the like, moves towards a federated Continent are now unstoppable, says veteran Independent on Sunday correspondent

Mr Cameron, it must be said, is no slouch: in announcing that sanctions on Burma are to be not lifted but "suspended", he succeeded in saving everyone's face while at the same time throwing almost everyone off balance.

An earthquake's force has the caprice of a wild, giant child, flattening this and pardoning that, as if according to some mad moral scheme. But the tsunami allows no such cosy anthropomorphism: nothing within its compass is spared. Everything, excepting only the peculiarly rugged, is demolished, dismembered, pulverised, atomised, by nothing more awesome than the power of water.

He may have picked an odd day to go – the first day of the water festival, which heralds Burma's new year, when citizens joyously drench each other from dawn to dusk – but when David Cameron visits the former British colony on Friday, becoming the first British leader to do so since Anthony Eden, he will have much to talk about.

As long as you didn't lose a loved one, the sinking of the Costa Concordia has been almost the perfect news story, providing a spectacle of gigantic folly while confirming our fondest prejudices: the Italian nutter who drove his liner like a Ferrari, phoned his mamma when it started to sink, then scarpered for safety, leaving passengers and crew scrambling around in the dark. How very Italian!

There can no longer be any doubt that there is a group of people at the summit of power in Burma who are not merely toying with Aung San Suu Kyi and the West, not merely climbing through Washington-erected hoops in order to achieve short-term political and economic goals, but who have a vision of how their country should be run and where it should be heading that is radically at odds with the vision that has dictated policy for the past 20 years.

In September, a man nicknamed "Little Gandhi" was buried in his home town near Damascus.

The fall of the ultimate leader of a state – his execution, conviction or simply humiliation – is a dangerous thrill. The citizens who cheered the decapitations of Charles I and Louis XVI knew all about it, the surging, anarchic sense of power and vindication. The Egyptians who this year saw a supine, inert Mubarak wheeled into court, the Libyans who saw the Brother Leader butchered in the street like a rabid dog, knew that mood of wild elation.

Anyone who tinkers with liturgy is asking for trouble.

What is religion for? The Archbishop of Canterbury offered some ideas during his recent tour of Zimbabwe, when he challenged President Mugabe over the persecution of Anglicans there: it is about telling truth to power, whatever the consequences, he indicated, about the meek inheriting the earth, about justice.

Elation coursed through the Libyan street yesterday like a tsunami. Assia Bashir Amry, daughter of an exiled Libyan freedom fighter, caught the mood in her tweets. "OOOMGOOOMG I just saw Gaddafi's body video," she wrote. "My heart won't stop racing... I can't believe this day has come. My whole life I've waited, prayed, wished, this is it no words."

My son has just started studying philosophy at school and last week over breakfast he reminded me about Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In the dialogue, Socrates posits a scene worthy of Beckett: a line of people chained to the blank wall of a cave, able to see nothing all their lives but the wall and the shadows thrown upon it by a fire raging away behind them. For them, that is reality. What, the philosopher asks, if one man was unchained and dragged out into the daylight, and eventually became acclimatised to reality? If he then returned to his former, slavish situation, would he not be like one who was blind?

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