the corner office

The poor Queen has had to cancel some gigs on account of her being unwell. Of course, 'unwell' in this case means the queen has gastroenteritis, or as it was known in SA, 'gastro' (*)

Anyway. The 6 year old in me can't help but snork about the fact that the Queen has the trots but the 60 year old in me wonders why on earth we need to know quite so much about the cause of the Queen's current indisposition. Then I actually read the article and I noticed something:

symptoms include vomiting, fever and stomache ache

You're missing a pretty serious symptom there, BBC.

Regardless of how ignorant the public might be, or how ignorant the BBC and the Royal Physician might think or wish the public to be, there are some afflictions best endured quietly and without the rest of the world knowing about them. If I were the Queen I'd be all 'off with his head' and insisting that next time, the Royal Physician's newly appointed successor should jolly well step out of Her Majesty's chamber and pronounce 'bad case of influenza', or 'severe migraine', or 'tropical fever,' or hell, even 'brain tumour.'

Anything but the truth, St David's day or no.

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(*) which is why I find myself uncomfortable whenever going to a UK 'gastro pub'

Back from holiday in Somerset. A great week, as always far too short. Highlights:

• we stayed in a converted gaol, slung up circa 1693. The cottage was beautiful, but in keeping with the 17th century charm, all the interior door frames (even through false walls) were just over 5' high, and by the end of the week the top of my noggin was a patchwork of cuts and scrapes and bruises. As I said to Ronwen, 40 years of expecting to walk through doorways upright and unscathed does not magically evaporate within a couple of days, no matter how much blood you've lost.

• got to see Glastonbury, and Glastonbury Abbey. The abbey grounds are amazing and the numerous ruins that remain are beautiful. Glastonbury is apparently some great vortex of ley lines and stuff and so the bits of the town around the abbey are a mass of shops flogging the esoteric and spiritual and occult. Woo. The town is very nice though and we visited a proper aufentic British tea shop which made awesome cheese scones.

• we visited Bath. I got to see Bath in September last year, so I was quite the show-off about knowing where we were and what there was to see, but the missus one-upped me and knew exactly where we needed to go for lunch. Bath remains one of the most beautiful and architecturally fascinating cities I've ever seen.

• we went to Wookey Hole, which is a cave complex and if the spelling isn't obvious enough, has nothing to do with intergalactic hairy teddy bears. Caves themselves pretty cool (but not perhaps as deep or hard core as the Sudwala Caves, say). The other side of the caves had a circus museum (inter alia) and one of the weirdest 360 degree mirror passages I've ever walked through.

• Longleat Safari Park and Longleat House. The safari park is pricey, but the day was well worth it. One of our car's windscreen washer nozzles remains in the rhesus monkey enclosure. Little buggers. Apparently lions are completely unfazed by zero-degree temperatures. Who'da thought? A heap of wild animals, and then to the 'adventure park' which included a tour of parts of Longleat House and a real live hedge maze.

• a plug for the Oakhill Inn in Oakhill, which we visited for a most excellent lunch after our nth unsuccessful attempt to eat at the much-recommended place up the road (fully booked, busy painting, closed because so popular don't need to be open 7 days a week, &c &c).

• we were planning to see Stonehenge on the way home (having last been there when Leo was a few months old). It was freezing cold and windy, and we got halfway across the parking lot before our child informed us in no uncertain terms that he did not care for the present atmospheric conditions and fully intended to moan non-stop until we were back within the warmth of the car. I, for once, was quite in agreement with my son's prognosis for the expected enjoyability of proceedings, and quickly agreed that it might make sense to return to the place in summer when it was a bit warmer. And so we went back to the car and came home.

• there wasn't any snow while we were in Somerset, but there have been flakes falling (but not sticking around) on and off since we got home on Friday. A fine and fitting way to end a late-winter holiday.

Also noteworthy is that I finally got a new cell phone before going on holiday, only to find that our village was in a valley and had no reception. My phone takes great pictures, but somewhere along the line the 'upload' functionality for my blog got broken, so no pictures to accompany this post (yet). Some snaps will make their way to Facebook as the new toy makes it all but unavoidable for me to get my social networking groove on.

Here:

I think research in moral reasoning is important because understanding why good people do evil things is more important than understanding why evil people do evil things.

After Snowpocalypse there's still snow about, but it's not sticking around for long (sadly).

It seems to have snowed on Friday, although nobody noticed. I popped out to grab takeaways on Friday night. Hrm, that car looks a little iced up, thought I. Then I noticed the snow on the ground on the Chislehurst high street parking lot, and a dusting amongst the trees as I drove through the common.

And now it's been snowing non-stop since about 5 this afternoon, and apparently due to keep going until morning. Partly sleet as well, and it doesn't seem to be settling.

I've realised that the problem is that after some of the awesome snow dumps we've had over the past few years, you end up chasing the dragon, so to speak. Yes, it's snowing, and it's amazing, but ooh-remember-that-time-in-2010 when the snow came down so thick and heavy that you could hear the rustling as it came down and landed, and ooh, I remember when Len and I were out building snow houses and it came down so thick and fast that the missus almost got stuck in Petts Wood, and we were out helping cars sliding along the roads, and ooh, remember a few years back when I walked to the train and it was knee deep, and the snow was still thick a week later, etc etc etc.

Like I say, chasing the dragon. But sitting upstairs and looking out the window, there's a street lamp across the road, framed between the trees, and in the immediate bit of air around the light, you can see the snow flakes coming down, and it's one of my favouritest views, ever.

Update: it snowed through the night, I walked to work while it was snowing, I saw snow falling out of my window the whole morning. There was even a hint of snow drifting down on the way home. It hasn't built up but I can live with that. Lovely.

The horse meat revelations; two things come to mind:

1. ignorance was bliss

2. meat products will become more expensive

The child's PlayStation time is rationed with a big sand timer.

Today:

"Dad, when a game is loading, can I pause the sand timer, because I'm not doing anything?"

(kid has a point, but...)

"You're still staring at the TV though, aren't you?"

"I won't face it"

It's a sad day indeed when I am so used to snow that I can't be bothered to blog about it. It's bad enough that I let the short flurry in December go unmarked. Then two weeks ago the forecast was all 'waaah snow' and we were all like 'waaa snow' and then it snowed and everyone was like 'waaa! snow!' and then it melted 5 minutes later and it looked like that would be that. And stuff.

Then along came last weekend and we were finally blessed with Snowmageddon (of course the missus says she prefers 'Snowpocalypse' because strictly speaking Snowmageddon could only happen on Mount Megiddo and not Sarf East London, but what can you do?) So it started snowing last Friday and I have a window seat at work and I got to enjoy seeing the stuff slowly accumulating all afternoon. And of course being a dang fool I only left work pretty late regardless and then battled the suck that is SouthEastern Rail who were falling to bits because that's what SouthEastern Rail does when things start looking intemperate. Although in fairness most people had had the sense to bugger off home earlier to avoid the inevitable suck that is SouthEastern Rail on a snowy day, and so I didn't battle to find a seat on one of the trains which wasn't cancelled and was only a bit late.

And so it snowed overnight, and then there was snow on Saturday, and we went out and played in it, and it was wonderful. And then there was more snow on Sunday, and it was even more wonderful, and we played outside some more, and we went for a walk in the parklands nearby, and it was even more more wonderful.

Then came Monday and the schools were closed and the weather forecast said MORE SNOW but it didn't come, and the entire week there have been misleading hints that it might snow, and occasionally a few grains of the stuff will descend, and one morning there was a slight dusting. And the train service has begrudgingly returned to normal in the last day or two.

So sadly for us in the balmy South East, things seem to have run their course. Still plenty of the stuff on the ground, but the battle is lost, the ice remaining on the paths is mush, the forecasts say it's all coming to an end.

Well, it's been great while it lasted. Any hope of more this year?

A conversation:

"What's the big deal about doping?"
"I think the argument is that performance-enhancing drugs are bad because they give you an unfair advantage"
"What, like having a good sponsor or being born in a first world country?"

(and it wasn't even me asking the question)

Lance Armstrong sounds like a nasty piece of work, and even more so after the Oprah PR exercise (is nonfession a word? How about nonpology? They should be), but what I dislike most about the whole affair is the fact that people paint the whole doping thing as a great moral issue when it's so obviously not. One cup of coffee with breakfast is fine, a caffiene tablet isn't. There's no clear-cut line between cheating and not, between having an unfair advantage and a fair advantage.

All you've got are a bunch of people defining lines - arbitrary and oftentimes ridiculously byzantine lines - and then daring people with crazy incentives and extremely competitive dispositions to find ways to bump, bash, nudge and squeeze around the hazy lines separating the awful "cheats" from the "great athletes."

2012 in a nutshell:

• I fell off my bike. It hurt. I had an operation. I'm better now.

• I got another degree.

• I turned 40.

• I worked too hard.

To be honest, I think 2013 is an ugly number. A bit bleh. Doesn't have a nice ring to it. But I've always chosen 13 as my lucky number, and since this is likely to be the only year 13 I'll ever see, I'm not going to let aesthetics get in the way of things, and I intend to make the most of it.

Happy new year!

We have a lot to learn from the 1970s, and not just because of the insane degree of tonsorial liberty our parents allowed themselves: