A colleague was off to a meeting. It turned out that she’s a school governor, and there was a meeting at the school to go over the details of the second round of redundancies being made at that school. Apparently it was going to be terrible and heartbreaking (I imagine it would be!), but there was nothing anyone could do about it. I naively suggested that there might be something she could do; namely not vote for the redundancies. But that wasn’t possible. You weren’t allowed to be a governor unless you voted for what “they” wanted to do. I asked who “they” were, but was met with a confused stare. “They” would seem to be the people who run the school. I thought that was the governors…?
One of the chaps at work was relating his worries; his girlfriend wants them to get engaged. This couple have been together for ten years, have bought a house together, have had two children together, but he absolutely refuses to get engaged to the girl. What’s that all about?
And then on the way home I heard something on the radio which put my sad life into perspective. Wei Jinpeng was until recently a fisherman on the Yellow River . He’s given up fishing. Instead he retrieves human corpses from the river and then sells them to the grieving relatives who come looking for the bodies of their missing loved ones. Charging three hundred pounds a time, and retrieving about a hundred bodies a year, he’s found something rather more lucrative than fishing.
The radio article was rather vague on the details of how there comes to be so many corpses floating down the Yellow river . Probably just as well…
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