31 May 2018 (Thursday) - This n That

Again finding myself awake rather earlier than I might have been I was watching “Gotham” at six o’clock. Not a bad show really…

I then sparked up my lap-top and looked at Facebook where the world and his wife were seemingly shouting “look at me - I’ve got fibromyalgia”. What is it with sufferers of fibromyalgia that they seem to want to tell the world that they have it?

I had the usual haul of emails too. Again someone of whom I’d never hears was asking to join my LinkedIn network. This time I actually had a look-see at this person’s profile. This person had “a demonstrated history of working in the market research industry” and claimed to be “skilled in Online Moderation, Focus Groups, Market Analysis, Ethnography, and Brand Equity”.

What does any of that mean?

My piss boiled as I listened to the morning news. Apparently the National Health Service has over-spent by about a billion quid over the last year. 

The reason for this overspend wasn't inefficiency or waste, it was "increasing demand". And so consequently we don't have an overspending health service; we have an under-funded one. Mind you I say "under-funded" - the funding is farcical really, isn't it? People just turn up and (pretty much) get what they want, don't they (we)?. 

For example, my left leg gives me gyp from time to time. At some stage in the next ten years I will wander up to the nearest hospital and get a new knee joint put in for for free. Or that is it will seem to be free to me. It will actually cost me and all the other the tax payers tens of thousands of pounds.

Free health care for all isn't free at all. It is rather expensive. Perhaps the time has come to fund the NHS by some sort of national insurance (!) or health insurance. Or decide *exactly* what will and what won't be funded?

But not until I've had my aching joints replaced though, eh?

I stopped off at Sainsburys in Aylesford for some petrol. It has gone up in price tremendously recently, and the stuff is now four pence per litre cheaper in Aylesford than it is in Ashford. Probably just as well bearing in mind I am boycotting the filling station on the ring road.

Work was OK - there were rice Krispie cakes this morning. I like those.  And we had a full-blown tea party this afternoon for a colleague who is retiring.

As the day wore on I got a text from my dentist. They had just had a cancellation - did I fancy an appointment tomorrow morning? I would have done had I been able to. But I wasn't. Getting texts about cancellations from the dentist is a new thing. I wonder what other revelations my new dentist has in store - and I've not even had me first appointment with the new fang-quack yet.

Once home I walked the hounds round the park. Some walks are uneventful; today’s could have gone better, but we were seriously delayed with seemingly everyone wanting to stop and fuss the dogs. Treacle wasn’t having any of it, but Fudge lapped it up.

Oh – and "Stormageddon - Bringer of Destruction ^TM" has gone down with chickenpox…

30 May 2018 (Wednesday) - Bit Dull

I was sleeping *so* well when Treacle decided to stage a woofing fit at half past five this morning.

I got up and over brekkie watched last week’s episode of “Gotham”. I was mildly disappointed. Like with most fiction I find I can accept the most implausible of plots and situations *if* the characters are believable. But with two of the major players being utterly at odds to how they had behaved in the last three seasons of the show, today’s episode didn’t do it for me. Particularly so when the continuity was so bad that the scene outside the old courthouse went from broad daylight to darkest night in the time it took to speak a sentence.

With my Fudge fast asleep on my lap (he’s been very soppy these last few days) I got my lap-top to have a look at the Internet. Not a lot had happened on Facebook overnight really. I had a few emails though; Hayley Murphy and Finn A Barrett both wanted to join my LinkedIn network. (I wish I knew what the attraction of my LinkedIn network was). Two more of the worlds top one per cent of geocachers had been (seemingly) randomly selected. I had notifications of jobs for which I would probably never apply, and Amazon were again suggesting I might be interested in stuff I had already bought from them.

Where would we be without the Internet (!)

As I headed through the rain up the motorway the pundits on the radio were lambasting Roseann Barr. Having been brought back to the telly after many years, she's suddenly been dropped following her having made racist slurs on Twitter.

She's very apologetic (isn't everyone after the event) and is now claiming the whole thing as an obscure side effect of the sleeping tablets she's been taking. The pundits on the radio were saying that the real victims of the piece were the hundred or so people employed to create her TV show but who now have gone down with her.

Personally I never thought she was very funny. In my experience people liked her show because they felt everyone else liked it. I've always felt that Woody Allen is much the same. I simply don't find him funny at all, and the only people I know who find him amusing do so because they till me he must be funny because he is so well-known.

I've never understood the lemming-like way in which people choose their TV viewing. I can remember being a fan of the Garry Shandling Show many years ago. A chap with whom I used to work watched it once and hated it. But a few months later he started liking it. The TV critics in the Guardian newspaper had given the show a favourable review, and so because they liked it, so did he.

I did my bit at work, and again struggled to get home; the traffic was so bad. "er indoors ^TM" was home before me and had taken the dogs round to the park already.

Over a rather good bit of dinner we watched the first episode of the new season of “Humans”; Trying to explore issues that pulp sci-fi thrashed to death over fifty years ago it isn’t a bad show… but could be so much better.

Today was rather dull…

29 May 2018 (Tuesday) - Sink Hole

Over brekkie I finally got round to watching the episode of “Gotham” that was broadcast a couple of weeks ago. I wish I could remember what was going on in that show.

I quickly sparked up the lap-top to have a look at the Internet. Not much had happened overnight which was a bonus. Dull is preferable to squabble.

As I drove to work the pundits on the radio were interviewing some official from the government of Rwanda. The UK government gives them sixty-four million quid a year in foreign aid, and they are now giving half of it to Arsenal football club to buy advertising for their tourist industry on the players’ shirts. The Rwandan official got rather aggressive when it was pointed out that market research had shown that the sort of person who looks at Arsenal FC football shirts isn’t the sort of person who would consider a holiday in Rwanda.  She took the line that their money is theirs to spend how they like, and the fact that we gave them the money in the first place was a matter of the utmost indifference to her. She got very aggressive when the interviewer asked about her government’s record on human rights, and seemed to imply that Radio Four would be better all round if the interviewers lived under the fear of torture if they should offend their betters.

Up till this morning I was all for foreign aid…

I got to work; I skipped a tea break to have an eye test. Having an eye test at work is far more convenient than going to SpecSavers and it saves quite a bit of cash too.

My eyes are unchanged since my last test. And I’ve had mt prescription emailed to me. I won’t lose that quite so easily as I lost the paper prescription.

Getting home from work was a nightmare. A huge sink hole has opened up in one of the roads in in Maidstone and seemingly every car in the Maidstone area was on the M20 this evening. It took me as long to drive the three miles to junction eight as it usually takes me to drive the twenty miles to junction nine.

And when I got to junction nine the traffic was queued back half a mile up the motorway.

I drove on to junction ten and arrived there at the same time as the thunderstorm.

I was forty minutes late getting home; "er indoors ^TM" was over an hour late.

The plan had been to go round to Arden Drive for the gathering of the clans; but several people had cried off, "er indoors ^TM" was running late, and the storm had unsettled the hounds. I didn’t want to leave them.

I wonder what’s for tea…