There Is At Least One Sheep, One Side Of Which ...

The Kitchen Dalek is getting agitated. It appears to have lost its ability to fly - or perhaps it is an early Stair-Phobic model. It wheels around the table but comes to the edge and rocks back and forth as if contemplating leaping to its end on the floor.

Several times last night, while I sat rapt (or maybe vegetating) in front of the telly, I thought of really big things that certainly needed writing down. If only I could be bothered to traipse all the way upstairs to get the notebook. Look at me - saving the world - if only I could remember how it went. I did manage to write something down this morning though I am not sure it really counts as anything that important. I was daydreaming about living happily without having to worry about loads of interactions with society. I don't mean being anti-social in a sit-at-home sort-of-a-way but just not having to worry about the ups and downs of day-to-day living. The trouble with this daydream is that the only way it can come about is by being sectioned and locked away in some horrible psychiatric hospital which is not something I would want to experience. I would also suspect that the criteria used to decide who gets so incarcerated are different from the days when you could be locked up for simply having loose morals - and quite rightly so - that they are different I mean - not being locked up for looseness. Maybe it is an irony that now society is so complicated that mental illness in the form of stress and depression is so much more common, that the chances of getting put somewhere to get away from these triggers are so much lower.

Of course what really should happen is that society should be made less pressurising. Kids should grow up in blissful ignorance of things like league tables and income tax (though not maybe rice pudding) and yet these days they end up getting the shakes at simple maths tests. At primary school I only ever got homework in the form of a project to be completed during the summer holidays. Now my daughter gets an hour a week, often on something the class has been tested on blind beforehand. I suspect that the red-tops image of the partying teenager may be a myth. Kids have been going through school pushed and pushed into doing dry tasks to achieve Government targets using a curriculum that seems to have less variety than a book of log tables and they end up gibbering adults, determined to work hard and get on for the sake of getting on.

All this "trying not to look at what I was trying to remember" has made me recall what I was thinking about that I should have written down. It was nothing at all really - just a simple restatement of the realisation that Extremism on both left and right is the joining up of the two ends of a big political circle. I suppose the only difference between Fascism and Communism is that one allows its torture to be outsourced while the other sets up a cooperative to do it. Having said this, the largest Communist country has realised that it needs to control its free-market - or it doesn't ... or ... err ... not sure what it believes in now - just keeping itself in power I suppose. So we have a free vote in the west and in this country most people can't be bothered to use it - do you know where your voting cards are? - while there are people being killed in other countries for the right to vote.

I've just had a further thought about China. I do seem to remember that they do have some limited democracy at the local level - whether any decision that falls outside of state edicts would be allowed to stand is another matter. Isn't China just too big to have any chance of full democracy working? Then again it works after a fashion in India. I'm not sure what the turnout is but I bet they appreciate the right more than we do. All of this is of course a wasted distillation of the disparate fragments I have managed to read regarding the various democracies and other political systems. Actually, it's a pointless exercise in filling up, a thought I also had about yesterday's entry but I suppose it helps to unravel my own thoughts.

There does seem to be a big gap between what I am able to express and what I actually think. I have felt superior to many people commenting on various news stories because it seems that they are unaware of how big the world actually is. People seem to think that one example of something they agree with or wish to propagate in society is enough to prove that it is right. I repeat a favourite phrase of the minute - The plural of anecdote is not data. However, I have also seen this phrase used by people as an introduction to something that they then go on to rant about as if data was indeed the plural of anecdote. Like saying - "I don't mean to be rude ... " or "with respect". This may all be part of the idea of "Enlightened Ignorance". Don't get dragged into the arguments because they are often only conducted by the extreme supporters of either side. I recently read about a debate on the death penalty where the participants were simply allocated to either camp - pro or anti, and it made me growl that is was thought that any reasoned argument could come out of this. Indeed the narrator's own argument consisted of simple statements of facts about death penalties in various historical and geographical contexts followed by a blurry non-sequitor that seemed to suggest that his heart was not in the argument he had been forced to defend. Indeed there was no indication whether he actually was pro or anti.

All this leaves me in my own blurry state, but isn't that the way of all but the most confident of people? I tried to be like de Bono for a while and to state that I was right and everybody else was wrong - but that is impossible and makes one out to be a total jerk.

This hat is really snug - not too tight mind - just right. An ideal hat - a superior hat - a hat one could grow old with.