Firing on All Truncated Cones

I'm off the tablets and back on track. My shoulder hurts a little bit still. This morning I tried to cradle the handset of the phone in my shoulder while trying a shift and click and that really hurt to the point of audible screaming. The good result from this is that I now have a rinky-dinky new phone with handsfree and headset so no more leaning into the handset.

Loads of things to try and remember from the last few weeks most of which will have vanished by the time I get to blog them. I couldn't really concentrate on anything for long enough to actually read anything though I did manage to complete the Telegraph crossword twice (The cryptic one - yes - honestly). The drug induced lethargy meant that I relied on the (£2.50 per day) Hospital TV screen which hangs above every bed getting in the way as the nurses make the bed. Nurses deserve double pay. Every time I shuffled past the situations vacant boards on the way to get the paper, I got annoyed over how the phlebotomists who so skilfully took blood from me every day seemed to get paid about half what the average manager was getting. I almost thought about hanging up a petition suggesting that the salaries were swapped. OK, its not wonderful economics and I will get accused of over-simplification but it never seems complicated when several thousand troops are required on the other side of the world. It is of course another matter equipping them with the required equipment like food and clothe but maybe that is outside the scope of today's returned idiot rant.

Made a point of staying up to watch the Imagine programme about Lucien Freud yesterday and accidentally got drawn into the history of anaesthesia on Channel 5. This was presented by the real Doctor Phil Hammond who had been a guest on Have I got News For You? who has a knack for keeping a serious show amusing wothout being inappropriate. I particularly liked the story about the famous Surgeon Dr.Liston who could amputate a leg in 28 seconds. Unfortunately he once took off two of his assistant's fingers as well. Both patient and assistant died of septicaemia making it the first operation with a 200% mortality rate. I am sure the Freud thing will be on BBC four again soon and I did the see the Edward Hopper programme in hospital last week.

The new PJ Harvey Album is very different to Stories From the City - Stories From the Sea - back to the early form almost and maybe that is a deliberate ploy to try and get back to being a bit more on the edge rather than just a slightly weirder corporate artist. There is a strange feeling of the difference in the length of the tracks that I have not noticed on any PJH album before. You know how some albums have these little short songs every so often which break up the flow. Well this is one of those. Not that it suffers because of it.

My reading has gone off track. I got through a lot of magazines which I normally skip purely because they were in the hospital shop - Q and Empire - two editions of each. Back home at the weekend I walked into the village and returned with two books from Oxfam. One was another of the Odhams Press science and technology books from the forties in the same series as Britain's Wonderful Airforce and one was Day of the Triffids. Now the opening of this is terrifying and utterly plausible. The behaviour of the human world gone blind in one go is described in a way which I imagine is so accurate that it seems that Wyndham has had some vision of a true happening. I'm half way through already and cannot stop. The real world seems to retreat while reading it, leaving me actually present in the hell of the story. If they did not get you to read this at school then read it now and know a real alternative history for the world.

Things are much better now and just the nagging doubt remains.