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Well, it’s been a fair while, so it has. Longer than it should have been but needs must when the Devil vomits in your kettle*. Firstly, I’d like to thank all those who left comments and were generally concerned. I probably ought to give you a quick rundown as to what happened…

Those of you who have been successfully cloned with elephants will recall that I dislocated my thumb a (long) while back, put it back in and thought that would be that… but as you may also recall there’s a phrase about best laid plans… I actually managed to yank the tendons into the middle of who-knows-where until they started to feel like they were burning and all swelled up. So, I was basically told that if I wanted it work properly quickly (or again) I’d have to stop using it. Have you ever tried not using the thumb on your right hand- and hence your right hand? Almost impossible. It also becomes very frustrating very quickly… bizarrely when it felt alright to start doing stuff again I discovered I couldn’t actually remember how to handwrite. Seriously. Took several days.

The whole episode was, in hindsight, a minor inconvenience…

Just as I was starting to think what my next post should be my sister’s youngest (my 3 year old nephew) was rushed to hospital having contracted Meningoccal Septicaemia" (or Bacterial Meningitis for short). In the first few hours after diagnosis it was a close race with death. He then spent a couple of weeks in Cardiff ICU before being moved to their High Dependency Unit and ultimately transferred to Swansea for skin grafts, dialysis, etc. So, the whole family switched onto a war footing. The good news is that he has made a remarkably speedy recovery- suprising even the medical types- although there’s still a long road to go. Initially he wasn’t expected to make it through the night; then he was expected to survive but lose his feet, fingers, kidneys and need extensive skin grafting to knees, legs and elbows… now, he’s getting to keep his feet, even his toes; his kidneys started working again; the skin grafts are taking well and he’s only lost three fingers on his right hand. Now, he’s even been released back home and is learning how to walk again and sending everybody insane with a non-stop diet of Fireman Sam, Ballamory and The Midnight Garden- proof that psychedelics are rife in the TV industry???- if they made these programmes in drink form they’d dissolve teeth on contact and be banned across Europe and all fifty states of the Union! So, things were bad; now they’re not so bad and looking better daily... and make my minor thumb problem seem entirely trivial.

…and now I’m (maybe) back… what next? Well, I’ll tell you I’ll probably be increasingly misanthropic, snarly and ranty and eventually convince you all to hate me. There’s a lot to snarl about: the world’s turning to shit on a daily basis, nobody seems to have an iota of sense, people become more stupid; democracy evaporates on a global scale; television has abandoned all pretence to being interested in the audience and now treats them with a mix of paternalistic pity and thinly veiled contempt and finally unfettered free-market capitalism is increasingly appearing to be to the human race what myxomatosis is to rabbits…

So, one last thought to conjure with…

A while back young Master Oli spoke about the downgrading of language (such as ‘excruciating’); as did Matthew Parris many years ago in The Times (the way politicians have devalued ‘pledge’, ‘promise’, etc. to the point where they have become meaningless). What about ‘nightmare’ and ‘hell’- as in ‘my diet hell’ or ‘my cellulite nightmare’- so, given that having to diet or a little cellulite are considered a nightmare or a hell what word is left to be used to describe counting the seconds, watching over a son fighting for breath while a resuscitation team hover in the background, and while blood blisters form all over the child’s limbs, body and face until he’s unrecognizable and turning black, as people do with frostbite? Is the epithet ‘nightmare’ or ‘hell’ suitable for that- or is it just not up there with diets and cellulite? Tricky isn’t? But let's get serious we don’t get to have ‘living hells’ or ‘nightmares’- we’re just little people. After all celebrities, well, they have it tough don’t they?

Not that I'm angry...

*I thank you Messrs. Curtis and Elton…

My Little Empire

I just had another look at the second from last post and realised how terribly Victorian it all sounded. Like some long dead explorer’s diary entry…

‘…a strange and terrible melancholy has settled over all since we finished the last of Oates for our morning repast. I fear this could take some explaining back in the Mother country. Will have to think of something heroic to put in journal… and something new for the pot…’

So, the melancholy has lifted a touch and so on and so forth. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Time to stop whining.

The good news of the week has been the announcement of the new Bond Title, ‘A Quantum Of Silence’ (for those who live under a rock… on Mars… or just have better things to do). Which must have made everybody smile and scratch their collective heads in equal measure (for more ribaldry see here). And there’s a date posted for Portishead 3 (14-04-08).

The sad news of the week, though, has to be the death of the talented Heath Ledger. While Batman 2 has been filmed and, presumably, will be released on schedule, this does lead to the strong possibility that Terry Gilliam’s film The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus is in jeopardy.

Shiny thing of the week has to be Bjork’s Declare Independence Package. The first physical single from her latest LP. The package bears a striking similarity to a Babushka Doll… I’m not sure I’ve managed to get to the heart of it all yet!

For good or ill, UCT now has a full story which is currently (and hastily) being typed up: whether it’s any good is another matter entirely but it does have some characters and a purpose; and a beginning, a middle and an end which are all probably plus points in the general scheme of things….

…and my Gran found an old photo of my Great-Great-Grandfather taken, we think, in the 1890’s. He looked somewhat like Elgar with an enormous moustache. This sort of thing (direct-ish contact with history) always appeals to me. He worked in a pin-mill apparently (i.e. a mill that made steel pins of various sizes from lengths of steel wire).