Tuesday, August 10, 2004

If all the World Were Paper ...

Listening to a random playlist from Windows Media Player.
(Currently Romance by Vaughan Williams)

The office ingress ambience is punctuated by many, many cries regarding the awfulness of the weather at the moment. Even our resident statistician (to degree level) has decided that this is an unusual summer and that we just have two seasons now. As you may know from previous entries, I quite like the rain though I don't like muggy weather that goes with it. A quick weather report for this morning is grey - headlights required - rain varying from slight drizzle to middling continuous. I have now realised that this is just talking about the weather and needs to be stopped before any more readers leave (or maybe just the one reader I have - you know who you are).

We went to Rufford Old Hall at the weekend to get use from our NT membership. This is a rather small and variously added-to building North of Ormskirk. Its main architectural attraction is the huge great hall that has everyone looking up. My daughter went round with the quiz that kept her interested. Even number-one son didn't fidget in his sling and seemed to be interested in something in each room. Not sure what that would be though. Final attraction for daughter was best part of an hour of close-up magic, which had me amazed despite my assertion that all magic is just tricks. I have to admit that I am far more impressed by a few sleight-of-hand tricks than David Copperfield making buildings vanish; you just know that somewhere, so many people must be in on the trick.

Apologies for this but the rain has just started again. It is heavy and wonderful, white noise at its best.

And now for some serious stuff. I read this article in the Guardian, with horror last week. Doctors still retain a lot of trust in society but for one (a young doctor I imagine) to report these feelings just shows that anyone can have immature, almost juvenile opinions even with all that education. The response should be read as well; the author puts my anger into far more eloquent prose than I ever could and is qualified to do so as well. As for any suggestion that Self-harmers are a burden on the Health Service, there are plenty of targets to attack before manifestations of mental illness; all the usual suspects. They could give us a war just to keep us amused. All of which makes me think of Newspeak for some reason. They think we are all blind. Which sounds very paranoid doesn't it? Time to go.

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