Things I have enjoyed recently

 Spending time with my son

Teaching medical students.

Political history books by Tim Shipman

Star Wars Skeleton Crew

Scooby Doo (with my son)

A good curry last night

Audible audiobooks

Here comes the guillotine podcast

True Detective series 4

Void Rivals comic book

Kids parties, Christmas and a week off work

 Life is short.  It slips by in flashes of months and years.  I can't pause it, I can't slow it down, no matter what I do.  It progresses, relentlessly.  The base way to deal with it is being here and enjoying it.  Enjoying the little bits of it and the big bits will hopefully take care of themselves.

Life goes in a direction and I think it is the right one.  

Sometimes it's nice to write just to write.  I never have the time..  

Post-op recovery 2

Further surgery yesterday to repair things after the operation in January.  I think the anaesthetist was better this time as pain control has been better and I didn't have the horrible dry mouth and urinary retention again.  This operation involved more tissue damage and recovery is meant to take a bit more time.  I'm on antibiotics and I've been given some stronger pain killers to use as needed. 

I'm going to be bored over the next few weeks before I can go back to work.  I'll need to find other things to distract me and take it easy.  I need to avoid heavy lifting which can be hard with a two year old in the house.

I will see how much Netflix I can tolerate.

Post-op recovery

 2021 turned into 2022 fairly quickly.  Life continues to be busy.  My son is now 2 years old and is a constant source of joy.  The poor wee fella has chicken pox just now which is a bit miserable but he continues to be stoically cheerful.  His main interests are Bing, his soft toy Froggy and scribbling on things with his crayons.

I'm off work for a couple of weeks as I had scheduled minor surgery at the start of the week.  It was under a general anaesthetic (third time I've had one) and fixed a chronic problem at least partially.  I might need a further operation later in the year but I can already see some improvement.

I had the joy of a couple of hours of urinary retention when the general anaesthetic was wearing off.  Between the morphine, the glycopyrrinium as well as pain and local anaesthetic I couldn't pee for a bit and my mouth was dry as a bone for a few hours afterwards.  I felt fairly good for the first 24 hours, probably on a lasting high from morphine and propofol but the pain kicked in later on.  I lost a fair bit of today just sleeping and painful.

Watching the decline of the United Kingdom on Sky News led by Prime Minister Johnston, hoping he doesn't start a war with Russia because he can't follow his own rules or say no to a party.  I will never understand why people have voted for such a shambling garbage bag.

I've been reading Val McDermid books and watching the Book of Boba Fett on Disney+.  The episode today was amazing.

Dystopian reality

 Over the years I've read a lot of dystopian science fiction, I've watched the movies and I've read the comics.  I never dreamt that I would be living the reality in 2021.  This morning I was out in the freezing cold queuing to get my first shot of the COVID vaccine, wearing a face mask.  I got on buses that were near empty and saw crazy people hanging around central station.

It's fucked.  On top of this, Donald fucking Trump continues to be the president of the united states of america, at least for the next couple of weeks and he basically incited an attempted coup that involved the storming of the capitol building in Washington D.C. by a bunch of freaks including fucking Ariel Pink.  In the UK we have an evil Tory government with Boris Johnston as out prime minister and cunts like Jacob Rees Mogg causing as much badshit as they can.

10,000 people in the UK have died with COVID-19 since Christmas leading to a grand total of 80,000 deaths related to a new disease in under a year.  Shit is majorly fucked up.

I miss my dad and some of my friends who are dead but in a way I'm glad they don't have to live through this shit.  I'm ok, I have a comfortable middle class existence but Scotland right now is fifty shades of bleak thanks to idiots voting for things like Brexit and the Tory party.

I hope the vaccine works at least a bit.  Not sure if anything will fix the damage to the UK after Brexit and COVID.  Hoping for Scottish independence but suspect that is unlikely.

Life under lockdown

Because of my job I still have to go to work every  day.  I use public transport and for a while it was frightening.  It's probably a bit less frightening now as I've become numb to it, to a certain extent but there is still dread.  It's important not to become complacent.  This virus is bad and it can fuck you right up.

One person that I knew, our old neighbour, has died.  She was a great lady and it's sad.  Other than that a couple of my patients have been seriously unwell with it.  The virus has a multi-system effect, messing up coagulation, causing blood clots everywhere as well as a cytokine storm type effect as well as the lung problems.  It can fuck you up bad.

I've read a lot of dystopian fiction and we aren't quite there yet but we have witnessed a failure of Johnson-led UK Tory government.  The current projection is ov 50,000 excess deaths.  Many of these are in the elderly and disabled which will give the austerity driven Tory party their jollies. The virus is ripping through care homes, killing old people..  The pseudo-clown our English compatriots elected as Prime Minister was ignoble enough to catch the virus himself after shaking hands with everyone on a COVID ward.  What a fuck nugget.

The reason for his short stay in iTU has been a source of much speculation but Johnson has lost weight and he doesn't have the fortitude for method acting so I suspect the fucker was actually sick.  However, in the face of 50 thousand deaths that were potentially avoidable my sympathy for this devil is limited.

There is little that I can write that has not already been written about this shit show.  Brexit will proceed like a runaway locomotive and the UK will hit a wall and pretty soon we will be the 53rd state of the USA.  Eating chlorinated chicken, steroid filled steak and paying through the nose for health insurance while the disaster capitalists in the Tory party are laughing all the way to their offshore banks.

Newspapers saying that teachers should be heroes.  Why should a teacher risk death to teach maths to a bunch of disinterested secondary school kids?  Why should a care worker die due to a lack of PPE?

Alexander Boris Johnson fiddles with himself while the UK drowns in its own stupidity.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum

The UK is in a sad place.  Our country is being run into the ground by warring factions of the elite Tory party claiming they represent the 'will of the people', egged on by an incompetent Labour party. This time, next year we will have been stripped of our european citizenship, making us poorer both financially and culturally.  We are going to lose a lot because of some posh arseholes playing games with democracy.

The rest of the world is laughing at Britain.  Fintan O'Toole has just written a great book about it.  Watching from the sidelines, the ego-death of a faded imperial empire is pretty funny.  Much was made of the British stiff-upper-lip and the 'keep calm and carry on' meme and this has all been exposed as patent bullshit.  Britain flaps around like a headless chicken or a dying animal, demented and brain damaged, just wanting to be put out of it's misery.  The country is full of angry, angry red faced people, shouting, unhappy with their lot, looking with someone to blame and settling on the EU which they can't quite conceptualise.  They just know it is foreign and stopping Britannia from ruling the waves.

The EU has protected many of us from unfair employment practices, protected us from working too many hours and giving us benefits like maternity or paternity leave.  In America, you get fuck all in terms of holidays or maternity benefits.  Or health care.

The NHS will go after Brexit, another unintended consequence of the will of the people.  If we want a trade deal with the USA, the health care monopoly of the NHS will have to go.  I fear for the future some times.

In recent days the government have started putting out adverts about the need to apply for settled status in the UK.  This even affects children born here to European parents.  This will hurt some of my friends and colleagues.  It's a jingoistic disgrace, bringing to mind Germany in the 1930s.

Fuck me, our country is in a mess.  All we can do is vote but in Scotland your vote and your voice mean little.  Scotland is impotent in the UK.

I'm lucky in so many ways and hopefully I will be cushioned from much of what happens over the next few years but I meet many people who will be directly impacted.  I'm sad for them.

The land of your forefathers

I'm lucky in that I grew up with a strong sense of identity.  My parents told me about my family history, I knew my grandfather well and I spent time at the places that were important in the family history.  I spent time in the wilds of the west of Scotland enjoying the rain and the wildlife.

My partner has some non-Scottish heritage and she had never been able to visit the place in Italy where her family came from.  Sadly, her father never got the chance to take her and her mother had never been.  Last week we were, as a family, on holiday about 60 kilometres from the village and we decided to go there.  I'm really glad we did.  It was amazing.

We decided to club together and get a taxi to take us on the drive to the village and wait for us as we did some sightseeing.  Initially we went to the local tourist office and picked up a bunch of maps and leaflets.  We didn't know much about the area but it turns out that it's an alpine ski resort that is very busy in the winter.  We then managed to find the church where her grandparents were married.  It was a beautiful building in the middle of town and we were able to go in and look around.

We had an address for the building where her nona (gran) had lived as a child.  Thankfully the village was small so we managed to find it.  I also managed to find a bunch of really cool wee lizards which is always enough to keep me happy.  My partners' aunt had managed to give us the phone number for a second cousin, who as luck would have it, had the day off.  After a quick phone call distant cousins were introduced and we had a guide for the next hour or so.

The Italian cousin drove us to another, older church, decorated with a fresco of the danse macabre, that stood within the village graveyard.  It was beautiful, well kempt, with family gravestones adorning the walls of the graveyard.  We found one of the family stones and it had a photograph of nona, beside her siblings.  Sadly, the stone for nono's (grandad's) family had been moved and we couldn't find it.

Outside the graveyard was a war memorial.  On it was the name of my partners great uncle who had died during the first world war.  He was 21.  I was reading a kindle book on world war 2 history which has been driving home the insanity of war and this brought some life to it.  I was also reminded of my dads cousin who died during the second world war in Burma.  In the beautiful alpine surroundings of this village at the foot of the dolomites why would anyone want to leave and die for rich men?

Tourist season had just ended and we sat down to eat a late lunch in a local bar.  I had some cheese and cured beef with bread.  It was a hot day.  Unfortunately we had to get a taxi back to the resort but we were ecstatic with this brief look into family history.  We will go back at some point and stay for a week.

I know how I feel when I stand on a certain beach in Kintyre and watch the seals with the wind blowing so loud I can't hear.  I wish I could stay there, in that old house above the stables, beside the sea, but that is not my house and I cannot have that life.  The choices I have made have given me a different life.  I also know how I feel when I stand at the top of the hill at the croft on the island in argyll and I wish I could be there too but my life is in the city and the populated areas but I know where part of me came from and I know that it was not perfect.  I hope my partner felt that way when we were in the alpine village and we will go back and explore it more.

Homebuilding

I've not updated the blog too much over the past month or so.  I've been busy doing domestic stuff.  We bought a house a few months ago and I've been busy trying to sort out things related to that.  I'm not a practical person.  I'm actually fairly clumsy and I can mess up any DIY project, no matter how small it is.  For that reason we've been getting in tradesmen to do most things.  Thankfully, through friends, family and contacts we have been able to get most stuff done.

I know I'm a lucky man and I'm happy.  Life has challenges but for the most part things have worked out for me.  I've worked hard over the years but I have almost everything I want in life and I have everything I really need.  It's important to remember that not everyone is as lucky as me and life is harder for most people.

I'm lucky that I was born and grew up in Scotland.  I'm lucky that I got an education and managed not to fuck up much along the way.  I'm lucky that I've got a job that pays the bills.  I'm lucky that I met a woman who is willing to put up with me.  I've had good friends who sadly have had different paths in life.  I read books, I watch TV and I think about things.  Most of the rest of the world has problems we don't have in the UK.  Living on an insignificant island at the edge of Europe has some advantages.

Around the new house I've seen foxes, squirrels, frogs, grasshoppers and about a million wasps.  I lived in a slightly dodgy part of the city before this so the wildlife makes me happy.

Morrissey, where did it go wrong?

I first became aware of Morrissey when I was about ten.  I saw album covers by the Smiths (specifically Meat is Murder).  I liked the cover of Meat is Murder as it had a man wearing an army helmet which I thought was cool.  At the time I was only starting to listen to music and I liked Metallica and Anthrax.  If I heard the Smiths then I was not immediately stricken.  I remember an aunt asking me if 'I liked that Morrissey' because 'he was miserable'.  Obviously I said no.
?
I guess I started to like the Smiths a few years later when I heard This Charming Man and How Soon is Now?  The music was good, the lyrics were funny, Morrissey seemed like a troubled young man, a bit of a social reject.  You could feel sorry for Morrissey.  He was misunderstood.

But, around 1992, he started to do odd things with flags.  He seemed to be a bit too keen on sidewalks.  He was disco-phobic.  It got worse.  National Front Disco.  What the fuck? It progressed. More and more stupid comments.  A slightly odd autobiography that should have been edited.  Views that became more jingoistic, more English nationalist, more stuck in the past, more gammon, more racist.

Now he defends the leader of the EDL and comes across as a racist Brexiteer.

The Smiths were good but Morrissey, where did it go wrong?  What scared you?  What changed you?   Why are you afraid of the other?  Are we not all the same?  What would the New York Dolls think?

Morrissey, where did it all go wrong?

this week

this week I have

1 - watched season 2 of Jessica Jones on Netflix
2 - watched the Death of Stalin
3 - worked many hours in a way that may benefit society
4 - had a panic one morning when I lost my house keys
5 - sent my mother flowers a few days after Mother's Day, knowing it would surprise her
6 - looked at several houses
7 - tried to teach myself immunology
8 - taught people stuff in a way that I hope will benefit them and society
9 - spent time with my favourite person
10 - read an entertaining book on my Kindle
11 - caught up with an old friend and planned a trip to a part of Scotland I've never visited
12 - planned a day trip to London for work

there are things I could have done better and things I did fairly well.  I spent some time worrying about some stuff that I couldn't change. I spent some other time working on things that may be useful.

I've been listening to the Fall a bit too much and listening to Danzig a wee bit

Will the NHS still exist in 10 year time?

The NHS is a great British achievement, possibly one of our greatest ever.  It's a noble attempt to help everyone in the country, a socialist dream, treating each as they need and through tax/national insurance, taking from each of us what we can give.  The ideals of the NHS are what life should be about.

Sadly, I think it's fucked.  And I think it's being fucked on purpose.

International health care providers having been eyeing up the NHS and the UK as a potential place to make a profit for a long time.  The UK is a rich country with a fairly low spend on healthcare per head of population.  We, the UK, as a nation, could afford to spend more on healthcare.  We just choose not to.  We spend money on shiny things like Brexit and nuclear weapons instead, as our elected representatives choose to fulfil the masturbatory fantasies of our right wing lunatic fringe instead of looking after the health of the nation properly.

New and better treatments for previously untreatable diseases are becoming available.  The BBC news today carried a story about a potential good treatment for Huntington's Disease, one of the most horrific neurodegenerative conditions in existence.  This will not be cheap.  We now have several good treatments for melanoma and multiple sclerosis.  We exist in a health utopia but it is an expensive health utopia.  Rightly or wrongly, the pharmaceutical companies who help develop these drugs want to make a profit and the NHS has to pay.  But the NHS does not have enough money.

The public expects more from the NHS and healthcare than it did in the past.  The NHS is a monopoly provider in the UK.  For 99% of the population there is no good alternative to an NHS hospital in the UK if you have a medical emergency.  Out population is living longer, partly because of the NHS, and our older people are more frail with advanced age.  Frailty results in more hospital admissions and more costs.  The NHS is challenged by it's own success.  Without more money it is doomed.

Brexit has fucked the pound so European doctors and nurses who work here now earn less money.  The jingoistic shite involved with Brexit is deterring European doctors and nurses from coming to work here.  The UK does not train enough doctors or nurses to properly staff the NHS and Jeremy Hunt has done a lot (in terms of Junior Doctor contracts and removing bursaries from nursing students) to deter people from wanting to work in healthcare.  At the end of the day, who wants to do a 12 hour nightshift in A&E where drunk people swear at you and try and punch you if you are being paid fuck all for it.

The NHS is being defunded into the ground by a bunch of right wing money heads.  Artificial targets are being used to punish hospitals and cost more money.  There are multiple layers of useless managers, almost like onion skins in their ability to make you cry.  And yet we can waste money on Brexit and nuclear weapons we can never use.

For the NHS to survive it needs more money or rationing.  We will probably end up with a co-payment system or some sort of multi-tier service that will divide the rich and poor.  Out ancestors, who fought world war 2 will be spinning in their graves.

If you voted Tory or Brexit, pat yourself on your back.

Guns are bad

I grew up with guns in the house.  My dad enjoyed shooting as a hobby.  He took me shooting with rifles and pistols.  We had airguns that we would use when we were in the countryside. On one occasion, many years ago, I even got to fire an AK47.  My dad used to spend a lot of time in gun shops, chatting to the owners and other customers.  He grew up in the countryside and spent a lot of time shooting.  I think he even won some prizes for shooting in competitions.

As a young child, I enjoyed it.  To a young boy, guns seem cool.  They are macho.  Soldiers, policemen and heroes have guns.  Han Solo had a gun, the Transformers had guns, Action Man had guns, GI Joe had guns and the Punisher had guns.

As I grew older I became less fond of shooting and guns.  I came to realise that guns essentially have one purpose.  Guns exist to kill things. Guns exist for hunting, to kill animals in 'self defence' or for other reasons and to kill people.  Theoretically guns may exist as a deterrent, to prevent crimes or violence but they still have the underlying dark function of making death.

I thought some of the people at the gun clubs were a bit weird and a bit boring so I stopped going to shooting things with my dad.  I developed my own interests, I became more interested in other concepts and more suspicious of weapons.  In some ways I became more interested in pacifism although I do, sadly, accept that in some cases wars and violence become necessary.  However, should guns really be easily available to the general public?

In August 1987, a man called Michael Ryan used a hand gun and two semi-automatic rifles to kill 16 people before he killed himself in a town called Hungerford.  The following year the law was changed to make several types of rapid fire guns illegal.  At this point I think my dad became slightly disenchanted with his hobby but this was a 'lone wolf', an isolated nutter.  Guns were still available.

Sadly, things got worse.  When I was in first year at University, in March 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a 43 year old suspected paedophile used 4 legally held handguns to kill 15 young (5 or 6 year old) school children and their teacher before killing himself.  16 more people were shot.  This happened in about 5 minutes.  Again, gun laws in the UK were tightened and after the Cullen report private ownership of most hand guns in the UK was made illegal.  My dad had a few hand guns and he got rid of them.

I think Dunblane really  sickened my dad.  He grew less fond of shooting as a hobby.

Since 1996 there has only been one mass shooting in the UK.  This was in 2010 in Cumbria, when Derek Bird, a licensed firearms owner, killed 12 people and injured 11 others.  There have been 4 major terrorist attacks in the UK since 1996.  Arguably these attacks could have been much worse if the terrorists had access to legal firearms.

I think that gun laws have made the UK a safer place.  Thankfully we are a small island and it is difficult for bad people to easily get guns in the UK.

The UK now has 0.23 gun deaths per 100 000 population per year.  The USA has 10.54 gun deaths per 100 000 population per year.  Honduras has 67.18 gun deaths per 100 000 population per year.

The USA has the most guns per head of population in the world (based on wikipedia information).

Overall, I think that tighter gun laws reduce deaths from guns.

I grew up with guns, my dad had a lot of pleasure through using guns for sport. Sadly, if guns are available bad people use guns to kill people and good people are more likely to accidentally hurt themselves or others.

That's all I'm going to say.

UK politics

What a mess.  I've spent most of the weekend laughing at the hung parliament that Theresa May created.  Political arrogance has resulted in egg on her face and much less of a mandate for the 'hard Brexit' nonsense she was demanding.

May is now trying to run a minority government with the DUP after spending a lot of time talking about the alleged 'terrorist links' of Jeremy Corbyn.  The hypocrisy is blatant.  Tories will do anything to stay in power and because of that they will soon betray May and replace her with their next new hope.

Unfortunately we are stuck in the Brexit process.  A sensible government would try to delay or cancel the process but I fear that the Tory party under May is not sensible.  Time will tell.

art classes

learned how to paint over a photo in art class today.  much politically motivated fun ensued

things we have lost

I lost a lot when I lost my dad.  I guess one the biggest thing I've lost now is the possibility of shared experiences with him.  I've lost the possibility of talking to him about stuff that I know he would have liked.  Not big stuff, just small stuff that would have entertained him briefly.

His last few months were slow and he couldn't do what he wanted to do.  He missed out on a lot of things that he would have enjoyed, even in that short time.  It was immeasurably sad.  What happened to my dad could happen to anybody.

I guess a good thing to do is stay healthy and live life as much as you can.

Jerusalem by Alan Moore

I've just finished listening to the audiobook of Jerusalem by Alan Moore and I'm a bit blown away.  I chose to listen to the audiobook because of the sheer size of the book.  The hardback is 1200 pages long and I think the word count is more than a quarter of a million.  The audiobook is 60 hours long but at least I could listen to it on the train, in the bath and while I was doing housework.  The audiobook narration also helped me get through some of the more challenging sections such as the bit about the daughter of James Joyce.

I will read bits of the book again.  I will dip in and out.  I really want someone to write a book about this book and I look forward to character guides and websites becoming available on the internet.  What a ride!

I wonder if Jerusalem is a reworking of Big Numbers, his abandoned collaboration with Bill Sienkiewicz.  That work was to be set in Northampton and the plot was intended to rotate around the building of a new shopping centre.  Even if the two works were not destined to tell similar stories I am sad that we don't have the complete Big Numbers to compare with Jerusalem.  I will need to dig out my old copies and have a look.

I was also reminded of Voice of the Fire.  This is not unreasonable as both books mythologise Northampton and are written by Alan Moore.

Moore deals with life, death, existence and time.  The book is funny and full of supernatural elements.  There are moments of horror and you worry about what fate will hold for the characters.  The narrative is also complicated by multiple viewpoints and multiple identities for some characters.  A few diagrams and annotations would add a lot to this book and I feel that multiple re-reading will pay off (although a kindle copy will probably be much more portable).

This book could be Moore's best work.  It's a different beast to Watchmen.  At times he appears to have thrown everything into the mix, possibly even the kitchen sink.  At one point the KLF even appear, burning a million pounds.

Much of the book is thinly veiled autobiography.  Alma Warren is a cypher for Moore, sharing the same year of birth, the same eye problems and much of the same style and characteristics of Moore.  Her brother Mick shares a name and a year of birth with Moore's younger sibling.  Melinda Debbie, artist and partner of Alan Moore is a character in the book.  I believe that other parallels with the reality of Alan Moore's family history in Northampton exist.

Should you read this book?  If you have the time and patience, yes.  It is rewarding.  I got a lot from it.  It resounded with me emotionally and it cheered me up a bit shortly after the death of my dad.  I wish he could have read it.  The audiobook is a good way to tackle the book.  People will pick this apart for years.  I know I will.

putting together bits of a life

I'm thinking a lot about my dads life now.  He did a lot of stuff.  He worked hard in some areas and he achieved a lot.  I have learned more about him over the past couple of weeks and some things about my mother too.  I wish he was still here and I had a chance to ask him some questions.  None of these questions would have been life changing but it would have been good to have talked more.

We often don't talk enough in life.  It's often down to personality.  Sometimes people can talk too much and share too much.  Like most things you want to get somewhere in between.

There are many viewpoints on a life.  Many people have different opinions on how things have been and on how events happened.  In truth we are all unreliable narrators thinking we are movie stars when we are really just bit part players in the world.  We pick our own truths.  That's probably OK when you are remembering your dad but maybe a bit less OK if you are the president of the USA.

We've done most of what we need to do to prepare for the funeral.  Hopefully we will give him a good send off.

This blog is now 12 years old

I started writing this blog in Coventry in 2005.  I am now writing it in Glasgow in 2017.  I am older and the world has changed in some ways.  It's always difficult to say if things are better or worse.  Back then we had terrorism in London and a government that was doing things I don't like.  Right now we still have a government doing things I don't like.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In 12 years I have managed to do a lot of stuff.  In 1999 or 2000 I decided that I wanted to do some stuff and now I have almost done everything on that list.  I do not see myself as career orientated but I have managed to get myself where I want to be.  Beyond that, I have found a great partner and I've been with her for a couple of years now.  I hope that we will achieve a lot of other stuff together in the future.

I was talking with my partner last night.  We both wish we were 25 physically but we both enjoy the stuff that maturity brings you.  Experience helps you deal with life.  Life does get better in a lot of ways when you get older, if you are lucky.  As always I see myself as lucky.

Sometimes one contemplates the future.  We look at our parents and we see what has happened to our parents and we are scared.  We don't want the same stuff to happen to us but we know it might.  It is important to remember that our parents are a lot older than us and that our futures, if we are lucky, may not be written in our genes.  I don't think I would ever want to know my future.  If a blood test could predict my future I would not want that blood test.  There can be a freedom in not knowing the future.

Now that I'm older I like the sun more.  I crave daylight and sun.  I crave green places and the outdoors.  I like watching the sea.  Sometimes I even like rain.  In Scotland we never get much sun.  I am lucky that I have been able to see so much of the world.  I hope that stupid politicians do not stop the younger generations from seeing as much of the world as I have.

Next week I'm going to see some sun.  If I'm lucky I might even see some whales.

Idiot wind

When Dylan wrote Idiot Wind I wonder if he had glimpsed the future, peeked into the world of my adult years.  I look at what has happened to our world and I don't know if I should laugh or cry.  Our road went wrong at some point and now we are here, running like headless chickens into an uncertain future.  We have gone off the rails and no-one is trying to get us back online.

What is the root cause that has pushed us into this swamp of stupidity?  Was it television?  Was it crap newspapers?  Was it the internet?  Was it Facebook and porn?

I don't know.  Root cause analysis is not my strong point.  I will just ascribe it to the beating of a million butterfly wings.  Chaos theory.

So, how do we cope with this?I guess we just focus on where we are and what we do in life.  We try to be intelligent in a small way, a focused way.  We should try to do the tasks in front of us well, with quality, on a day to day basis.  We should do as good as we can, everyday.  I accept that this is not easy.

Sometimes, if we are lucky, we can look around and see people do things well. A writer, a musician, a painter, a doctor, a cook.  Producing something that helps us.  Producing work that is good, a lighthouse of quality above the rocks of shite in this modern world.

I like to sit and watch water.  Rivers, lakes, seas.  The water may be calm or rough but it represents a connection with the world as it stretches between continents, filled with hidden and uncertain life.  Great beasts hide in our oceans and are never seen by mankind.

I love the story of the whale found, in the polar seas, to have a 200 year old spearhead in its flesh.  Fuck you mankind!  You cannot dominate all the creatures of this world.  Some born before you will always outlive you and there is nothing you can do about it. No matter how much 'power' you have in the human world, no matter how many buildings bear your name.

I don't like to be in the sea myself.  It is a dangerous place.  I just like to watch from safety, dreaming of a communion that will never be possible.  Dreaming of meetings of minds that will never be possible.  Knowledge that I will never access.

I would love to talk to the whales.  I suspect that they are more intelligent than us.  Their way of life, their freedom, their battles and their losses.  Free for the most part, if they can avoid mankind.  I wonder what they dream of.  Do they think of us?  Do they discuss humans? Would they be interested in human life?  Would they care?

Imagine aliens coming to earth.   Would they have more in common with us or with the whales?  Hopefully they would be more like the whales.  If they are like us, we are in trouble.  Especially if they were to listen to the idiot wind that comes from the mouths of our leaders.

Hot air.