I Never Told Them About That Three-Week Trip To Transylvania

Listening to - Abonecronedrone - Sheila Chandra

My colleague dripped blood all over the floor at the hotel where we gave blood yesterday and to his embarrassment, was pounced on by three nurses who thought he was about to faint. It looked like he was being decontaminated after some horrific chemical spill.

What exactly is a cliche as defined by Martin Amis? Sooner or later everything will become a cliche. This is like how eventually, every piece of music will have been played. Buried in the digits of Pi somewhere, there is every original construct, already fully formed. What is worse every construct is repeated an infinite number of times. There is no end to the cliches.

Apologies for not bothering to put on the acute accents. It just seems so fiddly to do. Maybe there should be a list of commonly used accented characters attached to the right-click menu so you wouldn't have to use the key sequences or the character map. Where do you write to for such suggestions? Talking of suggestions, giving blood yesterday made me think about those unfortunate accidents where an injection of some wacky drug (chemo of some sort) is given into the spine when it is only for the bloodstream. Surely there should be some sort of connector convention like the unleaded/leaded fuel pumps which could prevent this happening. Even better, as it seems simple to create a tacky Christmas card that plays some badly sampled tune, would it not be possible to put a warning message into the seal of the drug bottles? It would be activated on opening and would be triggered again every time the bottle was moved until it was destroyed. Drugs are expensive and surely this would add no real cost to that of production though I suspect the added cost to the end users would probably be bumped up as it would be hidden in the total cost.

I managed to work out enough yesterday to explain why time slows for a moving observer. My wife was quite happy to accept the bits that I couldn't explain sufficiently rigorously. But remember that Einstein himself simply postulated that light speed was constant for all observers without being aware of the Stuff Lorentz had worked out. So that's all right then.

I am getting very close to the end of the Philip Larkin book though still nothing has happened. It is strange to be drawn into reading this account of a life with no real trauma, the result of which was almost pure thought in the form of poems with no real view outside the poet's own mind. I go through phases of trying to change the whole main view of my poems (what a management consultant would call the whole paradigm - one day if you get a management consultant on his own after he has used the word 'paradigm' - ask him what it means) and they remain purely event and memory driven. Sorry about the long parenthesisation (and also that use of the word). I am going to use another terrible word now. Prior warning is given that the word shall be 'dichotomy'. I cannot get away from the strange feeling of the dichotomy between the normalness of life here and the seemingly huge events in other parts of the world. I suppose the cliched view would be that life goes on regardless of the death and destruction that we see. The fact that the victims of what the media sees as the most important events number only in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands caught up in the real biblical stuff of famine, plague etc, is proof again that an explosion which kills two hundred people is far more terrible than a curable disease which kills two thousand (and probably I should say two hundred thousand). I know all of the bombs (and I am doing the normal bleeding-heart liberal thing of making no distinction between a pack of Semtex wrapped around an alarm clock and a million-dollar cruise missile) are related to the wider issues which probably drag in the famine and the illness. But maybe if we treated the big things as important, the littler ones would probably go away. There will be no solutions. There will be no demonstrations - no demonstrations. No Truce.
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