Damn colds! I am in the fourth week of real stinker that won’t go away despite massive doses of vitamin C and increasingly large doses of cough medicine, more about that later. The news seems to have been filled with the shortcomings of our wonderful government and what can only be described as an alarming ineptitude to deal with matters of finance, party donations, border security and our armed forces to name just a few. It does make me wonder what will turn up next and how long this government can hang on to power. It only seems like a short time ago that I stayed up all night to watch a historical landslide election take place that was supposed to have given us all hope and renewed faith in British politics. That was in 1997 and all that Faith, hope and tolerance has been slowly eroded and washed away. Pete Townsend summed it all up in his song, We won’t get fooled again. The last words are “Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss”.
Another alarming piece of news this week is that an English supply teacher in the Sudan has been jailed for 15 days for allowing the children in her class to name a class mascot Teddy bear Mohammed. Apparently this is a huge insult to the Islamic faith. It should be noted that she herself did not name the Teddy bear, it was put to a vote and the children themselves chose the name. However it is the teacher who has been jailed and will have lost her job and then be deported at the end of her sentence. Mercifully it was only a teddy bear and not a farmyard animal. The outcry at beasts of burden being named Moses, Jesus and Mohammed does not bare thinking about. It is not just the British government who are eroding faith, hope and tolerance; it would appear that religion is now getting in on the act. It makes me rather glad I chose to be an atheist. Sudan is definitely off my list of holiday destinations.
Work has not restarted on the house but the good news is that I took delivery of a PS3 at the weekend just gone. Commander Riker and Miss Décolletage, the Revellers, BBB and Teech as well as the Bean Counter attended the grand unveiling and set about plugging leads and cables into all sorts of sockets to make the damn thing work. In fact I probably had the cream of the UK’s computing and gaming brains in attendance to set it all up. This is probably just as well as I don’t know any nine year old kids to do the job for me. Technology is a marvellous thing for the young and the older I become the more convinced I am that it is only for the young. I am still grappling the intricacies of my newest mobile phone. Half of the facilities I do not need and will probably never use. I sometimes yearn for the days when we had bakelite phones that would merely ring when some one was trying to contact you instead of belting out mind numbing ring tones. Despite all of this my MP3’s, MPEG’s and my DVD’s now look and sound wonderful. I just wish it was all easier to use instead of having to have four remote controls at my disposal.
Back to the cold from hell. I am now four weeks into what has turned out to be the worst cold I have ever had. Nothing seems to shift it or ease the symptoms. I have perhaps single handedly contributed to the destruction of half a rainforest through the use of paper hankies in a month. In an effort to stem my destruction of the ozone layer I have taken to drying them out on a radiator to be re-used and I have discovered that you can re-use them up to four times before they disintegrate. I have gone through copious quantities of vitamin c and gallons of fruit juice in an attempt to rejuvenate my immune system. I have taken to using increasingly large amounts of cough medicine to ease my aching throat. I have also discovered that there is a limit to how much cough medicine you can take at any one time. This was accidental and completely unintended however I had my breakfast and then took a particularly large draught from the bottle, it saves having to wash a spoon afterwards. I woke up on the couch some nine hours later wondering where the day had gone. I guess a lot of people must have wondered where I had got to as well as there were messages on my answer machine and a lot of missed calls on my mobile. I am not sure many people will believe me when I tell them but I will just have to rely on an ever decreasing amount of faith hope and tolerance.