A Great and Noble Institution

Having just returned from an unexpected admission to hospital and four days on intravenous drips in an isolation ward, I'm too battered to blog much. But there's this: I was conceived two months before the NHS was founded and it has been there throughout my life and that of my son, indeed, it saved his life on two occasions. Yet again I was bowled over by the hard work, professionalism, cheerfulness, concern and sheer love shown by the people working at its front line. They represent the very best in human nature which is why they are undervalued, underfunded and underpaid in a world dominated by casino-consumer-capitalism, a system which represents the very worst in human nature, greed and envy.



And Daniel Hannan is the Smegma in the Lemon Syllabub of Political Discourse. But you knew that.

Too Little, Too Late

Broon's promise of regulating bankers' bonuses is just about 12 years behind the fair. And it will be worthless.

Reading The Entrails

Others can make what they will psephologically of the Glasgow North East result. This blog is looking at it as the people flicking the vicky at The Scum and its shameful personal vendetta against Broon. Hell mend the reptilian crew and their master.

'We Can't Stop Here--This Is Bat Country!'

Yesterday's post flagged up a memory from 1968. No work of any significance having been done by me to prepare for the first year examination in Humanity [as the older Scottish unis still called Latin], I decided on an all-night revision session to save the situation. Fortunately a friend, an American exchange student whose physician father had kitted him out with an astonishing array of prescription drugs, provided the benzedrine to keep me going. I still remember what was on the syllabus: Virgil, Fourth Georgic; Cicero, Pro Murena; Tacitus, Agricola; Horace, Odes III; Catullus. At 9 am I swanned into the examination hall, gowned and wasted, eyes like piss-holes in the snow and pulse going like a trip-hammer, but, mirabile dictu, I passed the exam. Never again.....

Unwanted Side-effects?

I have just completed a massive course of steroids designed to deal with one of the various chronic ailments with which I'm afflicted. Never have I seen such an enormous list of 'unwanted side-effects.' I imagine these are published at the behest of the pharmacorp legal team to see off any litigants and they are frequently unintentionally amusing. One favourite offered both constipation and diarrhoea, presumably on alternate days. The steroids list, all two sides of it, warned about possible mood changes and, being a male, Scottish, sexagenarian, I pessimistically posited increasing stages of gloom-ridden melancholia of Dostoevskian proportions. Imagine my surprise when I got the opposite and spent one day as a babbling reincarnation of Mr Alfred Jingle--"Heads, heads...!...five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother's head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking!" Thanks, guys, it was fun while it lasted.

Portland Opera's Production of Fidelio Act 1 Chorus and Act 2 Finale

This seemed apt.

'The Trees Are In Their Autumn Beauty'

It wasn't quite Coole Park but it did the job all right. Coming up out of Waverley Station about 9.15 this morning on a grey, dreich day, I glanced up and caught a flight of seven swans heading north, winging over the Gardens. It was so beautiful and so unexpected that it lifted the spirits instantly. Unlike Yeats, having 'looked upon those brilliant creatures', my heart is far from sore, just delighted that I was in the right place at the right time.