To blog or not to blog

I’ve been somewhat remiss in not having blogged for quite a while now; I think my muse has finally succumbed to the need for hibernation, and with the cold weather who am I to deny? And to be honest, there hasn’t been any major event of interest worthy of its own journal. So today I will aim for a catch-up of what has been happening and share with you the few insights that the last few months have brought.

I last left you  with our house in disarray as we were in the middle of having our boiler replaced. All went remarkably smoothly, despite having chosen to undertake this challenge when the country was colder than the chiller cabinets in Asda, and still in a state of panic due to ‘the coldest winter since the last time it was this cold’.  But despite the ‘idiosyncratic’ nature of the old heating system, and fears that every pipe would explode under the pressure of the new one, all went to plan and we now bask in the comfy warmth of consistent heating, a thermostat that actually works and the savings of not having to heat a huge tank full of water every time we wanted to take our coats off indoors. Let’s hope the fuel bills reflect all our efforts and at least we can enjoy the smug inner- glow of knowing we are now several shades greener with smaller carbon footprints.

I talked also last time of our Residents’ Association and the fated pool, which was leaking faster than a cabinet enquiry and in need of much TLC (aka money).  The various interested parties did indeed meet and, as expected, we spent a good few hours in heated debate, name calling and tantrums the like of which I have not witnessed since primary school. We really were back in the realms of, “My dad’s bigger than your dad”, “You kissed her behind the bike sheds”, “He stole my sweeties” , “…’cos…”, “I don’t want to play any more”, “I’m telling on you” and, “You’re smelly so there”. The playground bully demanded most of the attention (and our dinner money), employing the tactic of just repeating the same thing over and over and at increasing volume, then staring with an “I’ll get you” menace at anyone who challenged that point of view. When the representative from the Management Company tried to answer questions he was pelted by verbal eggs, and the incontestable argument of “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”  before he could actually make his point. And reason was thrown out the window long before the bell went for the end of play time and the various gangs skulked off, presumably to either set off stink bombs in the lifts or at least nick off down the 7-11 for some fags and a bottle of Lambrusco.   Needless to say, nothing was resolved, progressed, or promised and our pool remains as empty Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard the day before her child benefit’s due.

I have also suffered the annual indignity of the ‘birthday celebration’ which, for anyone over about 20, serves only as a reminder that you are just another year closer to oblivion, that your mortal coil is showing grave signs of rust and that your allotted ‘Three score years and ten’ [*] is sounding much more like a marketing ploy than any sort of promise.

* [Figures based on recent  Bureau of Statistics survey in association with Hello Magazine and Laboritoire Garniér – sample of 32.7 people surveyed, 8.92 responded and of the responses, 83.4% said that they were not dead. Oh, and 8 out of 10 cats prefer not being dead too, which is like, over half but they have nine lives anyway so what do they know?]

I tell you, I think myself lucky to get to the end of the week, let alone having any aspirations to reaching retirement age. Which is a shame as I think I’d make a very good grumpy old man and have no problem at all with being a burden on all around me. I’m practising slurping soup, afternoon napping, wearing slippers and complaining that music is too loud, but the TV too quiet and pointing out random things that were better when I was your age. Of course, with medical advances average lifespans are increasing and with stem-cell research we’ll soon be able to re-grow any bits of us that drop off, fail or turn to mush. Soon enough we will become real life examples the indestructible stars of the cartoon world. No plummeting  anvil will stop us. No head-on collision with a rocket-powered train will derail us for long. Falling from a mountain precipice into a near-bottomless ravine, with an enigmatic ‘pfuutt’ of dust to mark our demise, will not in fact mark anything but our exit stage left in the direction of the nearest Acme Stem-Cell and Burger drive-thru. “A new left leg Sir? Certainly, and would you like fries with that?”

I mention this on the anniversary of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1997) and a recollection of the amusement that I felt back then at the negative propaganda and scaremongering that surrounded all things genetically modified. We would all soon be growing third ears and x-ray vision! We’d be creating designer babies by the crèche-load and mutating into human-triffid monsters. But that was such a knee-jerk reaction when you consider that we have been playing around with genetic manipulation since the first farmers realised that certain types of crops grew better than others, and that they could breed fatter livestock with better pelts if they only mated the ‘best’ of their animals.

We have been cross-breeding plants and animals for thousands of years, to steer production towards the characteristics we felt desirable at the time. We breed grain for certain conditions or for its resistance to certain disease. A cultivar by definition is a cultivated variety of a plant that has been deliberately selected for specific desirable characteristics (such as the colour and form of the flower, yield of the crop, disease resistance etc.). When propagated correctly the plants of a particular cultivar retain their special characteristics. THAT is old school, Ladybird book of Agriculture, Farming for Dummies.

Travelling on the train last Autumn I was struck by how much shorter the wheat seemed to be in the fields we passed, compared to what I remember from a few decades ago, as farmers have bred short-stemmed varieties much less susceptible to wind damage.  This is nothing new – agriculturalists pick the crops most suited to their needs and prevailing market forces. We used to call it ‘cross-breeding’ – these days we opt for the more sinister connotations of ‘genetic modification’ but what difference does it really make if the process happens  over a few generations in a field or a few months in a laboratory? The end result is the same. As are the risks and the benefits. If we are going to survive as a species we will have to embrace these technologies, find ways to increase yield and grow crops in ever-more inhospitable environments.  We can’t afford to take some hippy moral high ground based on ignorance and a fear of the latest buzz word. It is stem cells today, was genetic modification last week and cloning a fortnight ago, but they all amount to the same thing: a scientific development to which the public have a pre-programmed reaction – fear. These days social network sites are blamed for sparking public outrage, but the process has been happening ever since mass communication allowed viral spread of such hysteria. It is just a bit quicker with Twitter. We seldom stop to consider how much the media colours our opinions on all matters from politics to science, the weather to Cheryl Cole’s relationship challenges. I remain undecided whether we need quite the amount of ‘news’ with which we are bombarded, especially when that news is heavily weighted with opinion and commercialisation. And I wonder if this doesn’t sometimes negate us from the responsibility of making up our own minds.

When we are told that “Thousands sign petition to stop embryonic stem-cell research” are we not then almost incited into adopting a similar opinion? It is easy to get enraged with the rest of the mob.  Sometimes just reporting a thing is an act of influencing opinion. We used to call it propaganda and we used it as a weapon.

This dalliance with genetic engineering isn’t something limited to food supplies either. There are plenty of examples through history of our experiments in Eugenics – the selected breeding of humans to try to improve the race. The obvious example is, of course, the Aryan experimentation programs of Nazi Germany and the killing of disabled (or otherwise ‘broken’ people) through involuntary euthanasia. But similar thinking has been applied in countries across the globe, from Australia to Japan, Scandinavia to the USA. We do it every time we terminate a pregnancy on the grounds of likely disability or illness. Even going back through time the writings of Plato and his stories of Atlantis are based around the concepts of Eugenics, with the Atlanteans  representing a Nordic super-race at war with the Athenians. (And there is some suggestion that Hitler was trying to recover the genetic purity of Atlantean blond-haired master race.)

Taking a wider perspective, it could be argued that any medical interference is unnatural and a disturbance to the order of life. Be that through medicines to prolong life to prenatal embryo scanning. How is the mother who decides to abort a Downs child any different to the farmer who plants wheat which has been cultivated for its yield, or indeed the child who is inoculated against polio? What about the patient who accepts a heart transplant or chemotherapy for cancer? What about the couple who can’t conceive without medical intervention – I remember the frenzied news reports of the first test-tube baby, although the practice is commonplace today and hardly newsworthy. These are all meddling with the natural order but all provoke different emotional responses – usually depending on how close we are to the discovery. The mark of civilization is surely how we deal with these things and how we ensure that they are focused for good. And we WILL come to terms with cloning, genetic modification and stem-cell organs because these things can never be un-invented. Pandora has a very leaky box. We can’t go back, we can’t undo the research so surely better we embrace it and look to the future with open eyes and considered safeguards rather than drive the experiments underground?

Maybe I am biased – after all, I have taken many medicines in my times, to prolong my life (some of them were tested on animals, all of them were tested on other people), I have eaten bread made from cultivated corn (but I have not yet mutated into some horrendous carnivorous UK version of Audrey II), I have chomped on a steak or two which were undoubtedly sliced from farmed cattle (yet I show no signs of growing horns, hooves or a second stomach), I have grown carrots known to be unaffected by fly, and, heaven forbid, I have even eaten battery-produced eggs.  When I was a kid, if someone in the neighbourhood contracted mumps or chickenpox they held a ‘party’ with all the local children attending to try to catch the disease – these illnesses are much less dangerous in pre-adolescence than if contracted in adulthood and offer some degree of immunity if caught as a child. Is that not just a primitive form of stacking the medical cards and trying to outsmart nature? I have taken inoculations against tetanus and to allow me to travel to foreign lands without fear of dying of some local pox. I’m guilty of having chosen both the seasonal and swine flu jabs, preferring that to the potential ‘natural’ risk of death. Not content with that though I have also been guilty of using ocular enhancements, removable devices to correct my failing vision, without which I would almost certainly have fallen off the aforementioned precipice in my near-blind state to land at the bottom of the ravine with a billow of dust – which is just as well as there are so few Acme stem-cell drive-thru establishments in Salford. I was born prematurely, in a time when the chances of survival were much lower than they are today and practices were barely one step up from casting spells, pointing bones and sacrificing baby lambs to appease the Gods of midwifery. Without medical intervention I would not be alive. The same can be said of my battle with cancer. If the natural course of events had been unhindered I would not be here now. As an individual I guess I make a mockery of Darwinian Theory – I’m certainly NOT the fittest by any measure, but in that there is also some hope – as a species we are finding ways to adapt, to survive and to overcome the current challenges we face; this starts at valuing and preserving the life of an individual and is then expanded exponentially to benefit the whole race.

In historical terms, a few centuries ago someone who administered potions to cure the sick was seen as a witch, a Sharman, one who conjured magic and fear. Then they became apothecaries, chemists and medics and held in the highest esteem. Our attitudes change as benefits are proven. So too will they change with body-part replacements. After all, we have organ replacements now, and even whole face replacement, as macabre as sounds to our current sensitivities. But how many of us would refuse the surgery if we found ourselves in need? Moral high grounds are very dodgy places to build an ideology.

I have not yet commented on the other factor which comes into play as part of the argument for or against scientific advancement. Sooner or later someone will raise an objection on the grounds of religion, usually citing arguments that we should not try to play God, or that what we are doing is sacrilegious and a corruption of God’s will. I guess the stance taken by Jehovah’s Witnesses is an extreme example, with their religious refusal to undertake life-saving blood transfusion treatments. My religious views are no secret but I wonder how a Jesus known for having found a way to feed several  thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, would object to us looking for modern equivalents. This also was the man who healed the sick, drove out madness, returned sight to the blind and raised Lazarus from the dead. Surely there can be no serious religious argument against medical research and if we are guilty of interfering in God’s great plan, then so is his son.

On the subject of Jesus, i was amused to read that Elton John has recently expressed an opinion that Jesus was in fact gay. Wake up Elton – that conspiracy theory has been going around since people were first nailed to trees for being different! I assume you are basing your argument not just on his sense of compassion and taste in open-toed sandals but also for the fact he spent most of his life getting pissed with a bunch of twelve other blokes and singing Tim Rice Lyrics? Way to go Elton. That is almost as funny as the hype and fanfare which preceded the live episode of EastEnders last week. Was I the only person in the country to be completely underwhelmed?

Why all the fuss? What was SO special about the BBC broadcasting live television? After all, it isn’t so many years ago that ALL television was live. I wonder what percentage of new output from the BBC is live – a fair amount I would speculate, when you consider news and current affairs programming, sports, coverage of major events, political debate and even phone-in shows. Live drama is hardly a new concept – THAT has been going on in theatres for centuries. Combining drama with a live broadcast isn’t new – look at the early soap operas, sketch shows and so forth. Okay, so drama is faster paced these days, but current technology, sets, lighting should all be able to cope with that. And EastEnders was far from a totally slick production – I noticed camera goofs to rival anything seen on Acorn Antiques, and it was very clear where spacing shots had been written in to allow for time slippage. Did I see Miss Babs loitering behind the bar in the Queen Vic and was that Mrs Overall poised just off camera with a plate of macaroons and a fresh mug of coffee?

Still, as Marion Clune, AA producer [*] once said: “We professionals notice – Joe Public never clocks a darn thing”

[* Thanks for the correction!]

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No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that our world was about to end. As men busied themselves about their various concerns, worked and studied like the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of night, forces vast and cold and unsympathetic regarded our planet and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.

I was there the day that England fell. I, alone, bring witness and hope that someday, somehow, my words will be read and understood.

Lingdale in the 1940s

Our mystics had foreseen it, bent over their charts and globes, reading the signs, interpreting the ancient symbols but we ignored their warnings. Age-old lore told that this had happened before, many moons ago, in the days of our ancestors, but the wisdom of the elders was lost and we would never know what magic they used to survive, to withstand the menace, or how they endured the darkness to carry on the human race.  Their stories were legend, tales of how communities came together to face the danger, sharing food and shelter, managing to survive without the comforts we take for granted in our modern age. That was in a time gone by, a time of wonder and comradery and now our scientists and philosophers spoke in hushed tones of something terrible on the horizon, a gathering of forces beyond any man’s control. But we had closed our minds and dulled our senses, never really believing it could happen to us.

As the night drew closer, slowly and with the inevitability of a ticking clock, a great darkness descended and it began. It came from the sky in the North, devouring starlight and eradicating the winter moon. Our eyes turned to the heavens and our hearts filled with dread. The beast approached and its breath froze the land to iron, a frosty harbinger of the terror yet to come. We felt it sting our skin, bite at our clothes as we huddled together in terror. Some of the younger ones were excited, they thought it all a big adventure, never guessing the torment that lay ahead.

As the world was bathed in a milky light we turned our eyes to the night above, and gazed in wonder at the advancing menace. Some of us were gripped in awe and fell to our knees in prayer as it all began. The Parson gave thanks for our deliverance, for surely Armageddon was at hand. He threw himself to the ground and made the sign of the angels, praying for deliverance.  The Artillery man stood helpless, knowing that no weapon would offer even the slightest protection.  Our healers and leaders scrambled amidst preparations which were woefully inadequate. And in our stupor we found ourselves paralysed, unable to take action to protect ourselves, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide as the devastation rained down upon us.

Word passed around, from community to community, messages sent, warnings given. I was there, like everyone, capturing the scene, recording the events and trying to warn those at the edge of the destruction, willing them to get away while they still had time. Save yourselves! But of course there was no retreat for there was nowhere to flee. How stupid to think there was any escape from this almighty threat.

We heard reports that London remained free, and many set off in that direction, only to perish on the journey. Small pockets of resistance, brave souls against the forces unleashed upon us. We knew that we would never make it to the capital; the roads were blocked and travel was treacherous. And even if London stood today, it was only a matter of time. The London Eye would close as surely as we closed our minds to the destruction falling on us from above. News came in of small groups, families, friends found huddled together, trying to gain shallow comfort from shared body warmth, and physical contact as the blackness closed in around them.

For hours it continued, through the depths of night, relentless, and as the morning came those of us who survived the first attack gazed out upon a changed world. All that had been familiar was gone; all that we had known was buried. Nothing was recognisable. The places of our childhood wiped from view, our lands lay smothered, our homes buried beneath a shroud of despair. No crops would grow in our fields and our factories lay desolate and empty. Those weak of will had raised effigies to our invader, trying to appease the spirit that wreaked havoc among us. All around vehicles were abandoned, as their drivers had made a final run for safety, their tracks just visible as another wave of destruction swept overhead. In the distance a light, a sign that someone may have survived the night. But it guttered and died, along with our hopes.

As I write this now by the dying light of my final candle, I know I only have enough rations to last a few more days. I doubt I will survive much longer. A while ago I thought I heard a signal on the radio, but that has faded now and I know I am alone.

Lingdale in the 1940s

There was news of some survivors near the coast, but I doubt that their story is any better than mine. I have family in the Northern Wasteland, but they will have perished as reported conditions there were worse still. The last contact I had just brought news of their suffering, isolated without food and struggling to survive, terrible conditions deteriorating every hour. I heard the locals had fought to keep a track clear, so that vital supplies could be shared, although by now the community will have fallen, unable to withstand the onslaught but brave to the end. If only we had learned the lessons from history, tried to understand how our ancestors had coped. Maybe the outcome would have been different, but instead our world ground to a halt, falling apart, unable to function.  We remember those heroes who fought on against the odds, warmed by the flame of self sacrifice: the men of medicine who tried to calm the wounded; those who battled on in our power stations, trying to keep the fires burning; farmers in the fields.

Yet, in the stillness there remains a beauty and I see a lone creature out hunting in the wilderness. Life, of a sort, goes on. And while our own race may not survive to live and love, to sing and sigh, to dream and dance, perhaps somehow our world will recover. We may never really understand the forces that bore down upon us over these fateful days, and it is too late to wonder what we could have done differently, what actions we could have taken, what preparations may have been effective. The summer sun is fading as the year grows old, and darker days are drawing near. The winter winds will be much colder… oh, hang on a second. The sun is coming out. I think there’s a thaw on the way and the snow is melting. Ooops, false alarm. As you were.  Business as usual. Don’t know what the fuss was all about really.

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One of my biggest regrets in life is that I wasn’t aware of the Apollo moon landings. I’d just turned two at the time and have very few recollections from that period of my life, well beyond a sticker of The Magic Roundabout on the end of my cot and Mum’s very large Swiss Cheese plant which had delusions of becoming a Triffid and was probably the inspiration for Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. I have a vague memory of the layout of the house where we lived, but I suspect that is more from photos I have seen than any actual first-hand recollection. But the moon landings must have been so exciting. (Feel free to add your preferred conspiracy theory here – if you don’t believe they actually took place. Flag blowing in a wind that couldn’t have been there, horizon too close, wrong level of light reflection off the lunar surface, Michael Jackson killed by Martians, Loch Ness monster now residing in Area 51 bunker etc… )  The point is that for once there was something happening that captured the imagination of the plant. Maybe I have a somewhat sugar-coated view of what it might have been like, with the entire world watching to see Apollo 11 blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre; a world for once united. As a species we seem prone to unite at times of tragedy, disaster or the occasional pop person popping off, so when we come together to witness something good then that has to be a positive moment in human history.

Today marks the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and I suppose provides an interesting check-point in how far the world has come – or hasn’t come! They say that we have more computing power in a digital watch than they had on board the lunar module, and I suppose that is the biggest change. The power of the information age with instant communication and all the benefits and problems that are associated. The Internet and mobile phones, which everyone has these days and nobody could possibly live without! How did we cope? I suppose we also have a better understanding of our planet, its resources and its fragility and it seems at last that we are recognizing that we need to get our act together to resolve some of these bigger issues. I’m no Greenpeace tree-hugger but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (see the link back there?) to realize that we can’t rely on fossil fuels forever, even if we found a way of extracting their energy that didn’t screw the atmosphere. Oil and gas are finite resources; they won’t be here forever. Nuclear technologies are touted as much cleaner; they don’t pollute the atmosphere in the way that burning coal does, but what to do with the radioactive waste? That has always seemed to me to be the dilemma with nuclear fuel – spent plutonium rods are not something we want hanging around.

The trouble is, there are several ways to look at things, and the world is lead by the people who have a commercial perspective. In simple terms, the process runs like this:

From a commercial perspective, every element needs to be commercially viable, from acquiring the raw materials as cheaply as possible to dealing with the waste with the minimal amount of cost. And in the nuclear industry the cheapest way to dispose of the waste is to bury it, at sea, in caves, or even, as some have suggested, to blast it into space. But as a process that sucks. Who in their right mind can think that it is a good thing to manufacture any product that is going to result in a waste material that is so toxic, so long lasting and so, well, ‘indisposable’. Well, the people who control the budgets I guess, but ultimately the consumers too; we want cheap. Look at the outrage when petrol prices went over £1 a liter. But cheap isn’t right. And therein lies the dilemma. We all want cheap power but it seems the cost of that is not so much economical as ecological. What we need is a process where the final part of the production line produces either safe waste or, better still, none at all. Take out the commercial aspects and a system that produces so much toxic waste as a by-product should never get the green light. But it is the financial aspects that take priority in all such matters, and who cares if the planet is uninhabitable in 300 years? But I’m a hypocrite I use electricity. I like my gadgets. I fly abroad. We’re a way off the perpetual motion machine yet, but there ARE alternatives. I personally really approve of wind turbines. I don’t find them offensive in any way. OK, so they change a landscape (not I didn’t say spoil), but not in the way a power station does. We HAVE to look to renewable. We live on an island, we’re surrounded by coast, and wind and sunshine and all that energy that just needs tapping. But again, it needs investment and a willingness to embrace change on a big scale. I thought we were moving in the right direction as a country, with our efforts in recycling. We do what we can to recycle, but even that has gone tits-up. A few years ago the council used to collect and recycle:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Cans
• Jars
• Bottles Glass)
• Bottles (Plastic)
• Plastic bags
• General plastics with the recycle mark on them (egg boxes, spread cartons, yoghurt pots)
• Domestic waste.
• Garden waste (if there was space in the domestic waste bin, but nothing more than that. We compost all vegetable waste, food peelings, egg shells and garden debris anyway)

They introduced new wheelie bins a couple of years ago and now they take:

• Paper
• Cardboard
• Plastic Bottles
• Domestic waste.
• They also have a garden waste bin which you can request, but we compost anyway.

How is that progress? We WANT to recycle, but half the stuff they used to take now goes in as landfill. I know recycling costs money and the recession has meant that the end-users are not buying the recycled materials (we hear of magazine mountains), but the recession won’t last forever and surely we could stock-pile the waste so that when business picks up we have a plentitude (and thus, theoretically, using recycled materials would be relatively cheap?). I guess it is good I’m not a politician or a leader of industry, as I am sure things are not as simple as I’d like to think are!

I’d love to put up solar panels (we face south so it’d be ideal), or even a wind turbine, but they are just too cost prohibitive. Even with grants, we can’t afford the initial outlay – especially now that I’m not working. But wouldn’t it give the failing building industry a boost if there was a scheme to equip older properties with energy-producing devices? I had a look on the B&Q website today, Argos and Homebase too; you used to be able to buy a wind turbine from them. Can’t find the product in their catalogues anymore. I’d hoped that there would be demand for these sorts of green energy generators and that this would drive down prices but it seems the opposite has happened. As I said, I’m a hypocrite, I want to be green but I want to do it in a way that is easy and cheap, But for me and my present situation, easy and cheap is the only option available to me. Unless someone wants to donate a winning lottery ticket?

We grow some veg, but not enough to make any impact, although we are considering turning over part of the back garden to provide a small veg patch. We wash clothes at 30C, dry on the line whenever the weather permits, or else on a clothes horse (I can’t remember the last time we used the dryer). We don’t heat water during the summer as the dishwasher is more efficient for cleaning pots than it would be to heat a tank of water, and it uses less water. Similarly, the shower only heats what is needed, when it is needed. We have an energy monitor that tells us exactly how much power we are using at any time. At the moment I’m burning up 3.7p per hour. We have got that down by ensuring that nothing is turned on when it need not be, not leaving things on standby, using energy efficient light bulbs and even having automatic shutdown on things like the computers and printer. We’re saving to try to get our old boiler replaced with a combi version, as the current installation pre-dates Noah. We WANT to be green!

I don’t suppose a small veg patch in the back garden will save the planet, but if it means we can cut down on some of the packaging and air miles associated with at least a little of our food, then it is worthwhile. I don’t care if my carrots are curly or my peas are not of uniform size. There’s something special about eating your own produce anyway. If only I can deal with the bloody slugs! I know, God’s creatures and all that, but why can’t someone come up with a clean energy system that uses slugs! Bloody things. They munch their way with gay abandon through plants I have been nurturing for months. They perforate my peas, they pillage my potatoes, they rape my radishes and bugger the beetroot. I hate them. There is NOTHING loveable about a slug. You never see them in family units so I’m assuming even their mother’s don’t love them. And it makes no difference how many hundred of the buggers I catapult over into the tennis courts (actually, by now, it must be quite hazardous playing tennis over there, for all the splattered slugs, but that’s someone else’s problem – Wimbledon and me are not likely to become acquainted!), the slimy little shits just come back ten-fold. At least snails have shells – slugs are too bloody lazy to even grow those. They can’t even pick a gender and stick to it – the bloody things are hermaphrodite and they can live for 15 years! They serve no useful purpose other than as food for those further up the chain, but it seems that round here they are on nobody’s menu. They LOVE slug pellets, well the pet-friendly ones we are reduced to using because of the cats. I’m going to try the ‘tub of beer’ trick, but honestly, we’d need a brewery for the infestation I face every day. Honestly, I feel like I’m under siege here.

Maybe I should start up a ‘National Slug Catapult Tournament’, with prizes for the person who can project their pest the furthest. What do you think? Possible 2012 Olympic sport? Hermaphrodite hurling. I had thought about engaging Chinese-people-next-door in conversation and asking them if their brat had heard about the new craze for slug racing. I’d let them come round and collect as many slugs as they could, then take them to school for playtime fun. (How do you start a playground craze these days? Are any of the Blue Peter presenters on Twitter I wonder, could drop them a hint and maybe they’d do an article…Or even an appeal! “Send a slug to the Somalia” or “Molluscs for Malawi”– could work. I’m sure they are a rich source of vitamin something and they have a high liquid content which could provide a viable source of drinking water if each package of 10,000 slugs was sent with a mangle…) I have a couple of other ideas too – I wondered if Chinese-people-next-door might be persuaded that Lancashire hot pot is made from minced slug, and is what they should eat if they want to be a full part of our community. Or else (and I think this might be less successful) I could come up with a medical use for them and give something back to the NHS… Do you think maybe they could be trained to suck blood like leeches? Or, maybe their slime has healing properties. I may package them up in little bags with condoms to give out at Manchester Pride, on the grounds that a properly farmed slug can produce ample lubrication for even the most intense man-on-man action. “Never be caught in a tight spot again; always carry your handy slug-o-matic lube dispenser!”

And if all that fails, in deference to the historic events of 40 years ago, how much do you think it would cost to send the horrible, useless, grungy, spineless little bags of snot to NASA and get them to sling-shot them into lunar orbit on the next mission that passes that way? On second thoughts, they’d only turn round and evolve and come back to Earth for vengeance. Oh my God, what if Neil Armstrong had trodden on a slug on his way out to the launch pad and took slug DNA to the moon? Actually, didn’t I see something like that in the glass box on Torchwood???”

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July duly descends and we enter the second half of the year with gusto, or a grimace, depending on how well you are coping with the heatwave. Yesterday was a humid, muggy day, too hot to handle. But what am I doing talking about the weather when there is so much else to cogitate? So we mark the passing of the first six months of 2009 and welcome the sextet which stands before us. As apparently has been the custom in many years past. For the first day of July seems to be a day for new beginnings: Way back in 1916 the Coca-Cola company introduced the coke formula that is still used today. Makes you want to start singing, “I’d like to buy the world a coke…” That said, some may recall that on April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola, amid much publicity, attempted to change the formula of the drink with “New Coke”. Follow-up taste tests revealed that most consumers preferred the taste of New Coke to both Coke and Pepsi, but Coca-Cola management was unprepared for the public’s nostalgia for the old drink, leading to a massive backlash and the company gave in to protests and returned to the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic on July 10, 1985. Coke is also widely credited with creating the contemporary imagery of Santa Claus, but I guess that thoughts of Christmas need to be locked firmly away for a few months yet.

1 July 1937 is also a date of note as on that day Britain started using the 999 emergency phone number. In the UK you can also use the pan-European version, 112. So why 999? Well, this was mainly because of the design of public coin-operated phone boxes, which already allowed you to dial 0 without inserting any money (0 for operator services). It was relatively easy to convert these boxes to also allow the preceding digit, 9, to be dialled for free. Also, at the time, the digits 2 – 8 were used somewhere in the UK as the first number in a subscriber’s code. I remember as a child I was shown around the telephone exchange in our home town, Newmarket. I think it was on Station Road, where it intersected the High Street. I guess this will have been somewhere round 1974. Our phone number was just Newmarket 3554, my Grandparents were 4038. The exchange was, as per any vintage film, banks of plug-boards with flashing lights and teams of operators, all women, with headphones, mics and remarkably big hair-dos. The depths of the building contained acres of clicking machinery, cogs, wheels, miles of wire; a long way from our wireless network and digital exchanges these days. I have very few nostalgic memories of Newmarket, but that is certainly one. Remind me later and I’ll tell you some others. But I must just mention the fact that I lived next door to the National Stud! (And THAT is a guaranteed route into an inferiority complex!)

Today also marks the anniversary of the introduction of the Sony Walkman. I think I had a cheap equivalent, the size of a brick, guaranteed to chew up and spit out any tape you cared to feed it, with a battery life slightly less than the average cassette album and sound quality so poor that people for yards around benefitted from better acoustics than the person wearing the headphones. I remember making mix tapes and recording the top 40 off the radio. There was an art in pressing STOP a millisecond before Jimmie Saville or whoever jumped in with “That was Black Lace sliding down the charts to number 11 with ‘Agadoo’”. I had no means to edit, beyond actually splicing the tape (and yes, I DID do that, with a razor blade and special cassette-wide sticky tape). We had none of this digital malarkey, no graphic equalisers and pitch control. You sat there with your C60 tape in your Mum’s recorder with a plastic microphone banged up against the “music system’s” speaker, watching the cog-driven counter and hoping that you’d been clever enough to zero it at the end of the tape. Stereo? Yeah right! We were pleased to get the same mono signal coming out of two speakers! I remember nearly wetting myself with joy when I bought my first cassette player that had a 5-pin DIN socket and meant that I could connect it straight into the ‘gramophone’ and record “LPs” straight to tape without the need for a mic. This was high-end, high-tech, hi-fidelity! I remember one of the first albums I bought was “The Sounds of Star Wars” by The Sonic All-Stars (Nothing to do with a blue hedgehog, I promise). I still have it in the loft!

Which brings me neatly to a quick birthday mention for Dave Prowse – in my early youth he was the Green Cross Code man, reminding children everywhere to cross the road when they saw a little man flashing. He is probably more widely seen as the chap who played [the physical] Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy – see the link there? You’d almost think I planned this crap! That was back before episode IV was renamed “A New Hope” and all nine instalments of “The Journal of Whills [the Whills eventually turned into The Force]” were planned. I make the ‘physical’ distinction because Mr Prowse was indeed the man in the black mask, but his voice was never used. He was over-dubbed by James Earl Jones on account of DP having a distinct west-country accent. “Luke, you are my son, my lovely”… Attacking the rebels on an Imperial Combine Harvester whilst drinking Cider?

Happy do-dar-day to dead Di (did Di Die with Dodi?) who would have been 48 today. I could write pages about Di and the events leading up to the funeral, which I found absolutely fascinating, not least of which being the public reaction and subsequent out-pouring of imagined grief. To digress for a moment though, my best friend at the time, Malcolm, who is sadly no longer with us, was in hospital at the time of the ‘incident’, having open-heart surgery. I’ll never forget his fury when, still pumped full of morphine, he woke up after the op and heard about the deaths and plunged into a massive sulk, proclaiming, “Today was supposed to be about ME! Nobody’s talking about ME! They come into my room and they don’t ask, ‘How are you, Malcolm?’, they say, ‘Have you heard the news about Di?” I don’t think he ever forgave her for stealing his thunder. Now I like a good conspiracy story as much as the next man, in fact I’m quite enjoying all the ones surrounding Wacko Jacko at the moment. But Di did, and does, seem to offer opportunities for such questions to be asked. Let me ponder a couple of things. How was Di recognisable? Her hair and her fashion. Put her in a frumpy frock, dye her hair brown and cut it differently and she would not stand out from the crowd. Stage a tragic accident and whip her off to a remote chalet in Switzerland, with enough cash to keep her quiet and a promise that she could see her kids whenever they holidayed in the Alps. No conclusive photos of the crash. Sealed coffin. Discredited driver. The power of one of the richest families alive. Just a thought. And my second consideration is that of the parentage of young Harry. James Hewitt? You tell me!

My final thought for the day, as I wilt in the heat (I was going to say ‘melt’ but will restrain myself in deference to 20% of the Jackson 5, who must, by now, be looking decidedly waxy) is that on this day in 1997 we returned Hong Kong to China. Britain gained control of Hong Kong at the end of the First Opium War in 1841 – gotta love those opiates! Actually, when I was ill in hospital, morphine did nothing for me. The nurses kept saying things like, “we’ll give you a double-dose and you’ll be asleep in seconds” and I just lay there for hours waiting to feel any benefit at all! So Hong Kong is no longer a British colony. How’s that for a Chinese Take Away?

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The room was dimly lit as I was led in and told to lie down on the bed. Dark shadows, figures moving in and out of the half-light, strange items of equipment the use of which I could barely guess; trying to figure out their purpose sent a shiver down my spine. I’d find out soon enough. Restraints, ready in the event of a struggle. Quiet. Just the sound of my heart beat, the blood pulsing through my body. Fear rising, threatening to take a hold of me. I swallowed and tried to control my breathing, knowing there was no way out. I’d wanted this. I’d made my choice. Now all that was left was to submit to the inevitable.

From behind me strong arms held me down, pinning me to the bed. Firm, muscular arms, pressing my shoulders, keeping me still, showing me that to struggle would be futile.

And then I saw Him. He stepped from the shadow, silhouetted by a single bright light. His features were obscured by a heavy mask but His eyes spoke for him, telling me that He would enjoy this, that I was His plaything, that His will would prevail.

A click, a whirr, from somewhere in the distance the sounds of equipment coming to life. My fear was tangible, a cold, biting terror of the unknown. A screen came to life too far away for me to see clearly and I realised that He was going to record my ordeal. No doubt He did the same with all His victims, cataloguing their pain so He could watch their suffering over and over. What twisted mind stood before me? How had I come to this?

And then He spoke. His voice as dry as a corpse, menacing, commanding, the voice of a man in total control. “This will not be…” He searched for the word, selecting just the right phrase to prove His dominance and send another wave for dread through my shaking body. “This will not be…comfortable”. A satanic glint in His eye. The confidence of someone who knew what they were about to do.

“Is this your first time?” He asked, His voice so cold yet edged with the stain of anticipated pleasure. I nodded and He leaned closer, so I caught the foul stench of His breath. His eyes flicked to a nearby tray which carried an assortment of syringes, needles and a tourniquet. “I could give you something to make it easier…” He rasped, indicating the spread of drugs. His hand moved to the largest syringe, loaded with a thick, yellow liquid, some potent sedative no doubt, used to incapacitate His victims, keep them quiet so they didn’t scream. His eyes sparkled with a mischievous gleam and He pushed the tray away. He finished His thought, “…But then you’d not remember. Let’s try it first without the drug.” I tried to pull away.

Behind me, another voice, this time from the one who was holding me down: “Don’t struggle. You’ll only make it worse for yourself…”

A gag was placed in my mouth, forcing my jaw open. Tears welled in my eyes and my vision blurred. But I kept still, trying to be strong, trying to force the fear back down to the pit of my stomach. The lights were turned down more, darkness now apart from the single point of brilliance, casting sharp white light which pierced the black, giving terrifying glimpses of the equipment He had laid out before Him -the tools of His sinister trade, items not out of place in a medieval torture chamber, the cold glint of metal in the harsh, painful light. Another wave of fear crashed over me, carrying me with it in a maelstrom of nightmarish panic. “Be still!” I tried to steady my breathing, concentrating on the rise and fall of my chest, blocking out my thoughts of the horror that awaited.

The hands still pressed my shoulders, imprisoning me as effectively as any rope or chain and yet more ominous when applied by another human being. He stood, for a moment blocking the light, His back turned to me, withdrawing something, revealing it slowly, almost worshiping it in its sleek elegance. As He turned back I saw that in His gloved hand He held His tool and my heart skipped a beat. The pounding in my ears grew louder as blood coursed through my body and He stood with His instrument of torture in His hand. It was so much longer than I had expected, thicker too, and He seemed to be stroking it, caressing its length, playing with it. “I’m going to put this inside you,” He said. “Are you ready?”

I had no choice. I had thought I wanted this. I thought it would give me answers. Now all I wanted was for this waking nightmare to be over. I was in too far, I was not ready for this!

He pressed closer now, His body touching mine, getting ready to penetrate me, to force me to submit to His fiendish will. I was drenched in sweat, the damp envelopment of pure terror as adrenalin rushed through my veins. He was so close now I could not focus and I felt strong hands grip my jaw. “You might gag,” He said, “when it touches the back of your throat. Everybody gags.” I could hear in His tone the pleasure He drew from my plight. I wished He would just get on with it, instead of teasing me, playing with me, heightening my fear and making all my senses fire with anticipation of what He was about to do to me.

And then it happened. I felt it enter me, filling my mouth, making it hard to breathe. So big! So much more than I had thought possible. I couldn’t take it, it was too much! I gagged, wanting it out of my mouth, tears rolling down my cheeks. From behind, a voice: “Try to relax. Don’t resist. Breathe.”

The man, now in absolute control of me, looked down and spoke in little more than a whisper. “You need to swallow.” His command was absolute. I had no choice as He thrust forward, pushing deeper and deeper inside me. I tried to gulp it down, taking it all, totally unable to defy his will.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Seconds seemed like minutes, time lost all meaning as I drifted beyond sense in that hell. I was aware of His movements as He pushed harder, pulled back, changing position, thrusting forward and then withdrawing slightly, a perpetual rhythm, in and out, in and out, exploring my very essence, laying bare my inner-most secrets, revealing me in the most intimate way.

And then, when He had reached full satisfaction, He withdrew completely, wiping His tool as He pulled it out. I could see in His eyes that He was spent, that the encounter was concluded.

The lights came on, blinding, disorientating, and I was released.

He removed his mask and smiled, knowing we had shared something that I would never forget. And He spoke once more, as I sat up and the truth of what had happened began to coalesce into reality. His words filled me with joy. “I could see no abnormalities in your upper digestive tract, nothing to worry about there at all. There is no sign of ulceration, it all looks fine.”

The doctor went on to say that there was still quite an amount of food in my stomach which after six hours of fasting would normally have gone, and suggested that I may just have a slow digestive system. This is probably caused by some of the medication I am taking but explains my nausea. A change of pills will probably help.

The burley nurse helped me to my feet and told me I had done extremely well, especially without sedation, and checked that I was alright. Half an hour later and we were home, having a cup of tea.

So, that was my gastroscopy – it’s fun, you should try one!

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“We’re all following a strange melody
We’re all summonsed by a tune
We’re following the Piper
And we dance beneath the moon.”

Let me tell you a story, you have heard it before no doubt, as a childhood fairytale, a rhyme or song. About a town in Germany, on the banks of the River Weser. A town plagued by vermin, an overwhelming infestation of rats, destroying the crops, eating the food supplies, killing livestock and bringing disease. And a townsfolk at the end of their endurance, starving, falling ill, unable to rid their town of this invasion of rats. You know how it goes: a stranger appears and offers to help, to remove the rats, to end the problem. His price is high, he wants payment in gold, but what use is gold when you have no food, when your water supply has been contaminated, when your world is being destroyed? So an agreement is reached and the mysterious man takes up his flute and as he plays the rats are mesmerised and slowly start to follow the sound, down the streets, past the fields, towards the river, where eventually they all drown. When the Piper returns to collect his dues the town’s people refuse payment, after all, their problem has been solved, the rats are gone, and they have no incentive to give up their gold. Later, when all the adults are worshiping in church, the Piper returns and plays his tune again, this time spellbinding the children, leading them away, over the hills and valleys, where they are imprisoned and left to die in a mountain cave.

So why am I blabbering on about a fairy tale? Am I notably deficient in the marble department today? Have my screws been loosened? Indeed not! You should know me better than that by now. For today is the anniversary of the day when 130 children were led out of Hamelin, never to be seen again. What’s more it’s a BIG anniversary – 725 years. I’m guessing that today is not the day to be a flautist wearing pied clothing in Germany! They say there is truth to the story, albeit allegorical, although the actual events are open to debate. One proposal is that the Pied Piper was a psychopathic paedophile who kidnapped 130 children from the Saxon village and used them in “unspeakable ways.” Another relates the story of a plague that wiped out the infant population. But I like connections, links, the way experiences sometimes merge and so I choose to believe the more commonly accepted version in which some scholars suggest ‘the children of Hamelin’ means the people of the town, and that this is a story of mass migration, tempted by the lure of land and prosperity in Eastern Europe. And the connection I mention? Part of the ‘Eastern Europe’ in question was undoubtedly the land which we know today as Hungary. So maybe Gerda and the other people we met in Budapest last weekend are all distantly related to the children of Hamelin. I think I prefer that outcome to the paedophile version.

I have also this week been thinking about humour, not least because last night David and I had tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo Theatre. I’m afraid the iPhone didn’t cope too well with the spotlight and all you can really see is what looks like a blob of luminous ectoplasm. Sorry. I tried. But he was very good though. I love live theatre, be it music, comedy or play. There is a connection that you just don’t get elsewhere. We really must make an effort to see more shows. Comedy is especially good for the soul. I was quite ill yesterday, in a bad mood, and of poor humour, but I’m really pleased we made the effort to go to see Russ (I feel I can call him that now), as it did make me feel better.

They say laughter is the best medicine (admittedly probably not when you have stitches) and I can see why. In fact we have a whole linguistic code built around humour which I find fascinating. We often say, “In good humour”, meaning “In a good mood” or “being jovial, funny” and in fact the etymology of the word ‘humour’ is fascinating. We borrowed it from Latin, meaning liquid – it is the same root that gives us humid. The ancient philosophers believed that four liquids entered into the makeup of our bodies, and that our temperament was determined by the proportions of these four fluids, or humours, which they listed as blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile. The humours were themselves associated with the elements – fire, air, water and earth. (Blood has the qualities of being hot and moist, so is associated with air, whilst yellow bile was linked to fire, and an imbalance caused the patient to be hot and dry, and often ill-tempered!) These humours were supposed to be in balance and an over-proportion of one would cause certain behaviour. Someone with an excess of blood, the sanguine humour, is generally light-hearted, fun loving, loves to entertain, will be amorous, irresponsible, is affected by flights of whimsy and heated passion. Whereas someone with an abundance of black bile is melancholic so can become introspective, overly pre-occupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world, thus becoming depressed. Hence, “In a black humour” or “Black Mood”. Medieval medicine was concerned with returning balance to the humours.

I’m reminded of the Blackadder episode in which Edmund falls in love with Bob, and goes to visit his doctor for advice. The recommended ‘course of leeches’ would probably have been pretty close to the actual prescription at the time, as they would suck blood and reduce the associated humour.

We watched “Supersize Me” at the start of the week with Sue Perkins (she who I mistook for a brand of cigarettes – superkings), where they talked about medieval food and started me along this line of thinking. In accordance with the humour theory, most plants, food substances, and commonly found house items were specified as either cold, hot, dry, or wet so that they could be used to modify the amounts of humours within a person. The word ‘humour’, therefore was associated with imbalance and oddness, so eventually it took on the meaning of a humorous person, or a crank. Finally we adopted the current meaning of laughter, fun and good spirits.

My humour is being tested today though. Next door (not the invading Chinese army, but Chris and Debbie who we like), have had the decorators in. I’m not speaking euphemistically – we don’t know them that well to be able to predict menstrual cycles – that would be just too weird! Uhhhh I feel dirty just at the fact you had those thoughts! And anyway, Debbie is away in the States at the moment, obviously leaving Chris in charge of renovations. It appears to me to be a couple of women who arrive each morning and I hear talking about “getting it primed” and “giving it a good rub down” when I’m outside in the garden. Jeez, maybe it is me who has applied the decorating assumption here! Maybe when they talked about stripping they didn’t mean wallpaper! Maybe “That hole needs filling” has a different connotation to the one I had thought. “Don’t drip on the shag” “I’m going for another roll” “Wash it under warm water before it dries” “Of course it will go stiff if you leave it out all night” – HELP! It’s an orgy!

I digress. That is not the reason for my disgruntlement. (Not that I was aware of having been gruntled in the first place). It is this: The decorating dungaree dykes have, for the past three days, parked their car outside the semi (again, not a euphemism). But rather than straddling the curb, half on the road and half on the path, they have driven right up the path and are parked half on our lawn! Here, look!
The cheek! And this means that I can’t cut the grass. Each day I have had that in the back of my mind as a ‘must do’ job. And I’m thwarted. The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have spotted Chinese-Woman-Over-The-Road’s knicker display too – top right of the photo. You might need to click the image for the larger version.

I can’t let today go by without mentioning Michael Jackson who died last night. It would be very easy to poke humour at him, make accusations of paedophilia (even to the point of drawing connections with the story at the start of this entry – he DID record a song entitled “Ben” about a boy who befriends a giant rat! Weird how things connect!) I won’t question his mental state or his grip on reality – you will have your own views on that. I grew up when his music was big (or bad?), and I guess I never really got into him (STEADY! Minds out of the gutter!). That’s the thing though, he was like Marmite, you either loved him or hated him. Still, at least Marmite has managed to stay brown!

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A quick roundup of events today before I start my main thesis. We’re quite happy today as we have tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo tonight. You know who I mean, don’t you? No, not the “Titter ye not” guy from Up Pompeii – that was Frankie Howard. Certainly not Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine Howard (or is that Sree from Big Brother at the moment?). Howard Jones, 80’s singer/songwriter: no! Russell Howard, off the telly, does stand-up, always on Mock The Week. Floppy blond hair. Well, him. So that should be fun. Whilst on the subject of comedy quiz show whores, happy birthday to Phill Jupitus too. Never sent him a card, but there again he missed my birthday this year, and didn’t send for my bonkday yesterday either.

It is also George Michael’s birthday. He’s gone to pot recently, bless him. I heard he’d invited all his mates to join him in a mass debate in a cottage in Devon, but hardly anyone came and most of them couldn’t give a toss. Still you gotta have faith.

It is also the anniversary of Juan Peron being elected President of Argentina in 1972. Damn – if we’d still been in Budapest we could have done a re-enactment. I’d look good on a balcony.

And a mention of note too for George Orwell, he of Animal Farm, and 1984 fame. He’d be 106 today and probably feeling double-plus-un-good at the prospect of no longer being able to keep his aspidistra flying! Mind you, in this temperature pretty much anything is likely to go droopy!

And what the heck is going on? I’m not happy. I feel a strongly-worded letter of complaint coming on, but I’m not quite sure who to send it to. Something is seriously amiss, and I demand a full enquiry. Do these people not understand that we have rules in England? We have certain expectation of what is right and what is wrong. Ways of doing things. How things work, or rather don’t work.

Let me explain. This is the first week of Wimbledon. And what does that mean? Torrential rain. All week. And what do we get? Glorious sunshine! Yesterday it was hot enough outside to melt aluminium! NOT wet enough to start investing in ark manufacturers! Come on, this is just not done. It’s not British! Every year, without fail, the first week of Wimbledon is a complete wash-out.; so much so that this year they have built a fancy new retractable roof over the centre court. That’s the bit that really rattles my cage though. We have a tradition to maintain here. You see, what is supposed to happen is this:

We plough unfathomable amounts of money into a large engineering project (ideally something that the vast majority don’t want but we have committed to anyway). We then take forever to plan and start construction, run almost instantly into financial difficulties causing further delays, have to bring in outside help and finally deliver a project over budget and late. The final few points of perfection require that the end result is either useless, dangerous or at least just doesn’t work. That is the glory of being British and applies to pretty much any building project much bigger than a loft extension, small conservatory or garden pond (although all of these present their own opportunities).

Our land is riddled with examples – you’re probably already thinking of the Minnellium Dome (sic) and the facilities for the 2012 London Olympics which look set to cost at least £6 billion, rather than the £2.4 billion first quoted. Brilliant! It’s not just the English though – recall for a moment the wonderfully troubled Scottish Parliament building, which cost ten times its estimate and was delivered three years late. The new tram lines supposed to be completed in Edinburgh for 2010 are already months behind schedule and projections suggest they will be millions of pounds over budget.

The privately-financed Channel Tunnel opened a year behind schedule in 1994, at a cost of £10bn – more than double the original budget. All right and proper. That is what we expect to happen. Even looking around my own region I see the Manchester skyline now jagged with the half-built carcasses of new blocks of flats, which were committed prior to the credit crunch and now do not have the funding for completion.

Of course sometimes we get it wrong by getting it right. The shining example of this being the Millennium Wheel – which was only intended to see out 2000 and never meant as a permanent installation. By rights it should have fallen down by now, so someone screwed up big time! That said, in its defence, it WAS late in opening and missed the Millennium celebrations by three months and was regarded as a political embarrassment. Now the re-named London Eye is the capital’s biggest paying tourist attraction – something of a blot on our landscape of failure, but nevertheless costing a king’s ransom in maintenance (£12.5 Billion has just been set aside to replace the ‘pods’), so I’ll let it off on a technicality.

The new British Library opened in 1997 at a cost of £511m. It was three times over-budget – and construction work had overrun by five years.

Not wishing to be racist, I can’t miss out the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff – only ¾ complete when the first game was played there – ‘wet paint’ notices in the dressing rooms I should think. “Please don’t use the showers, the tiles aren’t set”. Amusingly, during its construction Welsh football and rugby games were hosted at Wembley; a favour that Cardiff was able to return when the new Wembley Stadium plummeted behind schedule. I used to work for an organisation who supplied IT facilities for Multiplex, the construction company behind Wembley, so their lack of progress was a matter of some interest to us. In the end, the contractual wrangling in respect of late payment charges and additional funding were a tangle of loose ends, crossed wires and general mayhem akin to the worst knotted mess you might find behind any British home TV/DVD system! But that is what happens in the UK. Hell, these things have implications beyond sport or entertainment or even the comfort of our politicians – we have a whole workforce of lawyers to keep in employment too. What would happen to them if things just started to go to plan? Specialists in conveyancing, procurement law, arbitration and conciliation all out of work. Can this country cope with a deluge of pin-striped tramps called Tarquin, in des-res cardboard box houses (constructed to the highest degree of health and safety legislation I’m sure)?

We know where we are when things go wrong. It is built into a very being. It’s who we ARE. We are known the world over for our stiff upper lip, it’s iconic. We built an empire on it. People go for collagen injections just to maintain it! But you don’t need a ‘stiff upper lip’ when all is running according to plan. We’d loose our national identity. Civilization as we know it would fall into the entropic void.

Back to Wimbledon via the minor digression of a Tweet from Sue Perkins last night that made me smile: ”When will the incessant she-grunting of Wimbledon be over? I play a spot of swingball, and I don’t mind saying I’ve never come close to a full throated hog-yodel, even on a tricky backhand.” Perfect attitude. In any given year Wimbledon serves but a few genuine purposes:

1. To provide a source of endless humour, often involving Cliff Richard, Lesbian tennis players or excessive grunting – maybe all three. (By the way, could Transvestites enter the mixed doubles by themselves?)
2. For those who go to complain about the price of the strawberries, and those who don’t go to complain about those who do go and then complain about the price of the strawberries.
3. To provide another opportunity to demonstrate how the Brits have a singular talent for inventing a game, sharing it with the world and being shit at it. (Still, at least OUR world championships are open to people from abroad – which is more than can be said for the Americans!)
4. As an unfailing guarantee of rain

And it is point 4 where the problem arises. No rain. So no goddamned opportunity for the roof to fail. I know they tested it, but things always go fine in tests – dress rehearsals are all well and good but no use if the actors all get swine flu for opening night! What they need is a real, live, critical application of the roof, so it can show its full lack of potential. Not some drizzle but a storm of biblical proportions, so heavy that the centre court fills up like a huge bucket before the 3000-ton roof can be coaxed into place, drowning thousands amid the flotsam and jetsam of flailing ball-boys, Robinsons Barley drink bottles, empty Pimms glasses and John McEnroe’s collection of sweaty wrist bands. Or, failing that, just as soon as the roof is fully deployed, the sun comes out and we discover that the translucent ceiling acts as a massive magnifying glass and burns Princess Michael of Kent to a crisp. (Do you think she’s known to her close friends and family just as Mike?) .

We finished the roof on time, so we’ve got to redress the balance somehow. It just isn’t meant to go so smoothly. It’s not meant to work. It is meant to be an unmitigated disaster. Poor show Wimbledon: It’s just not cricket!

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I read my horoscope this morning, don’t know why. I don’t really hold much truck with them anyway and have a few theories of my own. I think they are usually cleverly written to be so generic that you can find significance in them even though there is no direct correlation to the prediction and your life. It is usually things like, “Take care when meeting new people today – things may not be quite as they seem” or “Your energy will build today but try to not do too much or you’ll end up tired”. Meaningless or just stating the bloody obvious. That isn’t to say I don’t think there could be some practitioners out there who are able to tap into deeper forces, but I doubt the newspaper predictions are anything more than random phrases generated by a computer! Take by way of example my reading for today: “You could easily slip into an old relationship pattern as the Moon in your 7th House of Partners conjoins the karmic South Node of the Moon” – Well I’m bloody glad I knew about THAT before I tucked into my boiled eggs!

Here’s a thought to run up your flagpole and see if it flies proud and erect or hangs limp and flaccid: I wonder if we’ve not made an error in one of the basic assumptions of astrology. We read our stars and make predictions based on the date and time of our birth. But it seems to me that the more relevant date (but harder to prove) is that of our conception. Stay with me – I’m trying to take a more scientific approach here. I was born in February, although I was premature and really should have made my grand entrance into the world in March, had I gone full term. I was probably conceived in June. The date I popped out was random, could have been influenced by many factors, Mother eating a particularly spicy radish, driving over a vicious pothole in the road, a funny episode of “The Liver Birds” or heaven forbid, Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell, Martha Longhurst and Hilda Ogden caught up in an edge-of-the-seat drama centring around a pint of milk stout and a pressing need to riddle clinkers and scythe pots! Anything could have set her off. But the date that I was conceived is absolute. Mr Sperm met Miss Egg at a fixed point in time (I’m assuming he brought champagne, flowers and at very least a box of Milk Tray, but knowing my father it was probably a couple of Dahlia heads he’d plucked in passing from mother’s garden – mother always kept her garden very tidy!! And maybe a half-eaten spam sandwich).

So, and here we come to the clever bit, I was conceived in June, in the Summer. Now that was way back in the days when we had proper summers, with knotted hankies, cricket on the green, sun loungers that would remove your leg as soon as look at you, knitted bathing costumes and a complete ineptitude for getting skin cancer no matter how hard we damned well tried. Hose pipe ban? Bahhh – it wasn’t summer unless the lawn had turned into a grassless, cracked expanse of compacted dirt more arid that depths of the Gobi Desert. So there’s this poor little embryo stuck inside my mother, suffering from the gestatory equivalent of boil-in-the-bag, being force fed the muffled tones of Dusty Springfield, Cliff Richard, The Mamas and The Papas and bloody Ken Diddy Men Dodd and a diet of cheese fondue, Prawn Cocktail and Babysham. Then, to add insult to injury, just as I’m starting to grow into a perfectly-formed mini-me and cognitive processes are starting to develop, BANG, it’s Winter, the temperature plummets and I go from par-boil to freeze-dried in less time than it takes to harvest a decent batch of stem cells! My point in all this is that the prevailing conditions, temperatures, pressure systems, socio-economic climate and so forth must all have had an impact on the embryonic me, and will have played some small part in governing the design of the resulting sproglet. Yes, we inherit much from our parents through genetics and behavioural models but surely the conditions of our gestation are influential too? And if that is the case, then our birth date is of less significance than our date of conception. A baby conceived in a torrid summer holiday romance and consequently being born in the winter will have undergone a different sequence of external conditions to a baby conceived at the office Christmas party. And yes, there ARE population peaks nine months after Christmas and the Summer Holidays (or similar vacations in other countries) – give people a few days off work, a couple of bottles of Tesco’s vin de plonk and hey presto, the human race has another statistic to ponder.

Maybe we should be paying more attention to the astrological significance of our conception dates and not our ‘wombic evacuation’ anniversary. In which case, by my reckoning, I was conceived round about 43 years ago to this very day. Why are you not singing “Happy Bonk Day To You”? Where’s my Bonkday cake? I expect a card!

Although, if I extrapolate just a step further, I guess that would make my star sign ironic in its predictive abilities and painfully appropriate. June 22 to July 22: Cancer!

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Back in Blighty, buggered, bewitched and bewildered after Budapest, and now being Bill Bryson! Hungary was not at all what we expected (although we didn’t know what to expect really – just not what we found). We had a good time though, and Budapest was fascinating.

Flight out delayed by an hour – points failure at Brent Cross or some such excuse. Maybe the wrong type of leaves on the runway or inappropriate catering conditions. But no matter, as we had to put clocks forward an hour anyway so had absolutely no idea what time we were supposed to land at Ferihegy. I really don’t cope well with temporal displacement! Great views of the Danube as we flew in – decidedly NOT blue though. I guess “On the banks of the Muddy-Brown Danube” doesn’t sound quite as romantic. Transfer to hotel uneventful but I was nagged with a strange feeling that I had seen the architecture somewhere before.

Some consternation at hotel reception. Two men wanting a double room? Flap, panic, gibber away in Hungarian assuming that we had no idea what they were saying. But, “Are you sure? A DOUBLE? But they are both men! They must mean Twin. No, it says here, Double. They must be homosexualists. Yikes!” has pretty much the same body language anywhere in the world regardless of native tongue! Much frantic phoning around to “Check that your room is ready” and eventually we got a key card. It was quite funny, especially in light of the fact that Hungary has passed legislation which means that starting from July 1, 2009 same-sex couples can enter into registered partnership, as per the UK. The law gives the same rights to registered partners as to spouses – just don’t ask for a double room in a five-star hotel! It was a stunning building though - marble everywhere, very plush.

We had nibbles and corporate small-talk that evening, it being a work gathering with David’s fellow ‘achievers’ – the vast majority of whom were sales people from other sectors of the business. I was happy; plenty of olives, nuts and bread sticks. Strange pointy ‘biscuit-cum-pastry’ things for dipping into the guacamole – we worked out later that they were triangles of deep-fried pancake! The meet-and-greet was on a terraced balcony onto which our bedroom’s French Doors opened – which was handy and meant we could liberate a couple of bottles of water without having to pay the £9 for the one they left in our room!

Breakfast on Saturday was fabulous – pretty much anything you could want was there from full English to Continental, fruit, cereals, breads, omelettes cooked on demand and even champagne for Bucks Fizz (still making my mind up about Bucks Fizz!). Can’t fault the catering in the hotel at all.

We were then taken on an organised coach tour around the city, hosted by a local guide called Gerda (pronounced the same as in iron Bru), who was very amusing if only in the fact that she didn’t have a good word to say about her home country! We were deluged with lots of stats (everything of significance is 96m tall, has 96 steps or lived to be 96 years old), saw lots of statues (mostly of people with beards, and that’s just the women) and did lots of touristy gawping. Gerda shepherded her flock with a folded umbrella raised high – the significance (or rather error) of this will be explained later.

The main historical lesson seems to be that whenever there has been a war, skirmish or general disagreement, Hungary has picked the wrong side. I guess I had an image of the country under Communist rule, as would most people of my age, but Gerda was keen to point out that this is only a very small period in their history and they have been invaded by plenty of other people besides the Ruskies!

Remember I said I had a feeling that I recognised Budapest? Well the forint finally fell (see what I did there?) and I drew the connection: Evita! They filmed many of the crowd scenes and the funeral procession in Budapest. They shot a lot around Hero’s square – I guess it made a change for the shooting to be film and not guns! I’d like to claim that we have followed the same route as Madonna, but I doubt she was actually IN the coffin as it processed up the main boulevard – probably busy catalogue shopping for a new baby/husband/leotard/mansion.

Our guide was full of anecdotes, mostly self-deprecating, but quite fun. For example, when the Opera house was built they hadn’t really thought things through and come the first performance it turned out that a third of the audience couldn’t see the stage. Another third couldn’t hear. But the Mayor was not to be thwarted and decreed that those seats could be sold at a discount to deaf and blind people! Now that’s lateral problem solving for you. The coach took us past the zoo where they boast a pair of hippos who have, against the odds, bred in captivity – leading to much frivolity concerning happy hefty horny Hungarian hippos. Maybe if Gerda hadn’t pronounced it “hee-pohs” we might not have been so infantile!
We also learnt that Hungarian people put their surname before their given name and that Curtis Tony’s family was from there. Not sure how the naming convention works for people with a middle name – I suppose it’d be Pooh The Winnie! Struggling to list many famous Hungarians – Zsa Zsa Gabor was born in Budapest and Johnny Weissmuller (for me the quintessential Tarzan in the same way as Tom Baker was the best Doctor Who). Musically there is Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt, but beyond that I’m struggling to name many names. Not surprising I guess in a nation of people that seems to have always been pretty constantly revolting!

The city is split into two areas – Pest, the flat, commercial/residential area and Buda, the old, hilly, castle district. We coached over the Danube to Buda where the main party went on a walking tour to the royal palace. We opted out – I’d already done a fair amount of walking and couldn’t cope with too much more. We had a little meander around and took a few photos – the funicular railway and a panorama of the riverside – a series of photos that I then stitched together to make this one:

We had to meet the main party to head off for lunch together. By this time it had started to rain. Gerta appeared with her attendant ducklings in tow and headed off at breakneck pace for the restaurant. Remember her tour-guide umbrella? Really not much help in the pouring rain when hundreds of other people suddenly produced identical brollies and made more problematic by the fact that she went trotting off at a speed way beyond my abilities. So we were left lagging and stumbling over the very uneven cobbles. Made it eventually though, but in quite a bit of pain which was exacerbated by the next part of our ‘experience’. Before the meal we were shown the champagne cellars – dug into the hillside under the restaurant and down about five sets of stairs: The underworld in more ways than one!

The rotund and ruddy vintner took a major strop when David and I both turned down a free glass of bubbly. I think he would have been less shocked if we’d dropped our trousers and called him Mary! To call this a ‘tour of the cellars’ was really stretching the point. We stood in a group and looked at some upturned bottles while he showed us a presentation cupboard containing bottles of bubbly signed by famous people who had visited (but I think he had trouble remembering their names and pretty much only managed Antonio Banderas – during Evita filming I guess – and a couple of obscure Hungarian musicians with names that even HE couldn’t pronounce). Then we hiked all the way back up to ground level (I’m assuming up 96 steps) for the lunch. I was somewhat frazzled!

The food was, I think, supposed to be representative of Hungarian cuisine. We had a lovely Hungarian Goulash soup, followed by chicken breast with cheese-stuffed pancakes. The pancakes were unusual. I’ve made them as part of a savoury dish before (rolled up and filled with bolognaise and then covered in cheese sauce) but never presented in this way. This was followed with yet more pancakes, this time stuffed with apple and ice cream. Everyone else in the party was well-plied with wine and, to their credit, the restaurant provided David and me with plenty of soft drinks. Coffee strong enough to strip the enamel off your teeth concluded the meal.

We headed back to the coaches although this time they were parked at the foot of the hill and so we had more steps to descend, which, following the rain, were slippery and for me somewhat treacherous. The coaches took us back to the hotel and we had a few hours then to freshen up and dress for the evening. David had a cheeky nap and I did the ironing!

So now I have to confess to something about which I feel extremely foolish. Anyone who has been following my blog, or indeed my Twitter updates, will know that we went on a special shopping expedition to buy me some new post-chemo trousers so I’d have something smart to don for the formal meal. Guess which muppet packed the wrong trousers!? I confess: t’was me. A year ago I bought some new trousers for work, and they were a perfect fit (SO unusual for me). A fortnight later, thinking along the bird-hand-bush lines, we went back and bought a second pair. However I never actually wore them as that was just before I was rushed into hospital. So they were hanging in the wardrobe, still with their shop tags on. I guess that when packing I grabbed the trousers which were still tagged, thinking them to be the most recently purchased pair. Wrong! Thus, I’m standing in a Budapest hotel room with a 28” waist enjoying the unparalleled spaciousness of 32” trousers! Now an extra 4” can be problematic in any country let alone a place far from home with very little chance of there being a branch of M&S within easy tottering distance. Luckily the hotel provided complimentary sewing kits and so with anguished fervour I set about making alterations. I managed to botch a compromise where the trousers didn’t actually just fall down, but also where there was not so much gathered fabric that they looked like they were pleated. Well, there’s a limit to what you can do in 20 minutes with a yard of thread, a flimsy needle, no scissors or thimble and inadequate mood lighting. That is to say the lighting was inadequate, not my mood. I had plenty of mood. Mood to spare in fact. Anyway, the trousers looked and functioned ok provided I kept my shirt only loosely tucked in and my hands in my pockets when walking anywhere. So – trousers round ankles or hands in pockets looking like I’m playing with myself? I love these win/win scenarios!

We were due to walk to the restaurant for the evening meal but it was absolutely tanking down and so the organisers sorted coaches. That was fantastic of them and must have been a challenge at short notice. We were eating at a place a few hundred yards down the road but we’d have been drenched. As it was, the one-way system seemed to take us miles around the city – I mean it, we must have done a few miles to cover a few hundred yards walking distance. I think those brave souls who did walk must have considered it a real possibility that we’d ‘done a bunk’!

Now, the next time you pop over to Hungary, as I know you do every few weeks, you really must see the Café New York “Deep Water” – what an amazing place. A combination of gold, crystal, marble and cherrywood, with every vertical surface and ceiling decorated with plaster mouldings and classical paintings. We are talking serious neck strain just from trying to take in the decor. One can never have too many cherubs!

The food was lovely and paced at a speed that allowed me sufficient time to eat slowly and not end up being sick. I have to admit my worst nightmare was that I’d have one of my unannounced and instantaneous stomach upsets; cherubs with chunks is not a decorating style the place was likely to welcome! But I was fine. Didn’t eat everything but that was through a need to limit my intake and not any complaint with the food. We all noted that the main dish was heavy on meat and minimalist in terms of veg, but Gerda (our ebullient coach guide) explained that is the Hungarian way. It seems that traditionally meat was cheap and plentiful to produce whereas veg were not – although I can’t see how a cow is easier to farm than a potato. That said, the steaks, although beautiful, were only just a step up from actively grazing. I’m sure mine let out a little moo at one point! It certainly still had a pulse.

The wine drinkers were all a little perturbed by the very small measures they were given, although glasses were topped up whenever they asked. And they should consider those who did not drink wine and were offered no alternative beyond a jug of water that was already on the table. That really is my only criticism: with our not drinking wine, it would have been nice if David and I had been offered an alternative. It was a very enjoyable night and the rain had stopped when we left the venue so we walked back to our Hotel which really wasn’t far away at all. Others went on to various clubs, casinos and dens of iniquity but neither of us is big on that sort of thing and we were happy to head back for some sleep.

Sunday turned out to be a miserable, wet, grey day. Our transfer to the airport was at 4pm so we had time to kill – and kill it we did, slowly and with determination . We had a damp stroll up to the main tourist street, Andrássy út, and then took the [second oldest in the world] underground metro system to the river. Sadly the weather was just too miserable to do very much; we would have liked to take a boat cruise along the Danube to see more of the waterfront architecture but that would have been pointless with the conditions deteriorating.
We did poodle around a bit, dodging the worst of the rain and sheltering under trees wherever possible. It was a shame as some of the buildings are stunning. There is a mix of styles; Baroque, Classicist, Romanesque, Gothic and Art Nouveau – plus a few ‘carbuncles’ that probably seemed a good idea at the time but on hindsight are out of place and jarring. I gather that there is a big Venetian influence too and at one point there were plans to have a network of canals running up the middle of the main streets – instead they now have trams, which don’t have quite the same romantic appeal as gondolas! On reflection I wish we had booked in for a spa treatment on the Sunday, as the city has a number of thermal pools and that would have been a great experience – well, better than being rained on anyway.

Back at the hotel via a quick meal in a local cafe and some more rocket-fuel coffee, we met up with the others flying to Manchester and headed out for the airport to be gifted with an hour’s delay. Add to that the fact that we had to lose the extra hour we’d acquired on the trip out and we were well knackered by the time we arrived home. Still, this time last year there was a very real chance I’d not make it to the end of the week, let alone be well enough to travel abroad and for that I count my blessings. Reality bites deep and hard. ‘Chinese woman opposite’ is still flaunting her knickers in the bedroom window. Cats still need feeding. Garden demands watering. Washing out on line and then it rains. Cooking. Cleaning. David’s back at work tomorrow, but despite all that it is good to be home.

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What of today?

Well I’m sure you will want to join me in wishing a very happy birthday to Delia Smith. Do you think she makes her own birthday cakes? Half-baked, over-egged, whipped but not beaten, slightly soggy bottom, a bit crispy round the edges, well past the best-before date but turned out ok all things considered? And the cake will be nice as well. I should also mention Paul McCartney who was born on this day too – although carbon dating has yet to reveal which century BC we’re talking about. Heather Mills was once a model? Oh come on! She’s no Naomi Campbell. Or does she have Airfix stamped on her back? Maybe by ‘model’ they mean like the ones I made as a kid out of Play-Doh and which bore no resemblance to anything that has ever actually walked this Earth. [Reaches for tub of Play-Doh kept forever to hand in case I need to be transported instantly back to my childhood with a single sniff] And my birthday honours list would be as incomplete as a jigsaw bought at a car boot sale if I didn’t mention Paul Eddington, born today, had a Good Life and went on to become Prime Minister. The Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister shows were, in my opinion, British comedy at its best. Sharp, intelligent, witty, beautifully performed and such superb observational comedy, proven more-so by the fact that they remain astutely accurate and shockingly relevant even today.

Take for example:

• Head of MI5: We can’t have unfounded, arrogant press speculation. That’s the last thing we want.
• Hacker: Even if it’s accurate?
• Head of MI5: Oh, especially if it’s accurate.

Must watch the DVDs again. They just don’t make comedy like that these days.

I want to make amends for the anti-American comments I made a few days back (about how they were much more palatable when stampeding across the prairie shooting each other with bows and arrows, in black and white). To wit I shall ponder for a moment on the fact that today marks the anniversary of the day that American air pioneer Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She was not the pilot on that flight though. I’m assuming she spent the flight wandering up and down, smiling inanely, asking, “Tea? Coffee? Would you like anything from the Duty Free Trolley?” – who knows?! She didn’t make her own solo transatlantic crossing until 1932. Presumably she’d got bored with pointing out directions to the Emergency Exits, located her, here and here. She should perhaps have paid more attention during the safety announcements and may have known that the straps on the life jacket pass behind your back and tie in a bow, like so. It could have made all the difference since in 1937 her plane disappeared without trace. She might have survived if she’d removed her stiletto heels, put on her own life jacket (before helping anyone else), tugged on the oxygen mask which dropped from the ceiling and, at very least, known that there is a whistle for attracting attention.

I mention this because at about this time tomorrow David and I will be in the air en-route for Budapest, so matters of aviation are paramount in my mind. Whilst I do not have a current copy of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (my iPhone being the nearest approximation available) I do recall what it says on the subject of how to fly:

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.

That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

I’m guessing Amelia got confused and didn’t realise that ‘failing to miss the ground’ is, for the sake of this thesis, exactly the same as ‘failing to miss the sea’. Or maybe she was just distracted by a damn good in-flight movie, some 1930s chick-flick featuring women who wore dead foxes round their necks and smoked French ‘tabs’ through 16 inch cigarette holders and slick-back haired men in suits with creases so sharp you could cut cardboard and moustaches manicured to within an inch of their lives. Must have been a bugger getting the organ into the cockpit [Matron!] though!

Still thinking of things that fly, It is funny how time flies (like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana – Groucho Marx, but currently being quoted by Wogan every half hour on the telly) or “tempus fugit” if you want the earliest Latin version, which actually translates as “time flees” and is often mistranslated due to the similar phrase tempus volat hora fugit (”time flies, the hour flees”). See, you learn something by coming here, even if you don’t bally well want to! This shit doesn’t just happen you know, I research and everything! Focus, Adrian, focus! Where was I, yes, time flies and it seems that the trip to Hungary has approached at breakneck speed, leaving me with the penultimate day’s packing ahead of me. Clear the decks boys, I’m going in! I’ll need the spare room clearing out so I can make piles. I’ll need the scales readily available to check luggage allowances at 15-minute intervals. I’ll need my electronic list to hand. I’ll need you to anticipate what I need you to bring, but not a second before I require it. I’ll also need you to know that since I asked for you to get ‘the blue one’ I have decided that ‘the red one’ would be more appropriate and you’ll need to have anticipated this. I’ll need cups of tea bringing. I’ll need the itinerary to cross reference to my list. Get me 20ccs of Morphine. Damn, I’m flat-lining. I’m going into shock! Quick! Quick! I’m losing it! IV Adrenalin, STAT!

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