Liberal Burblings

Archive for November, 2009

An hilarious clip from the David Letterman Show, featuring Robin Williams on Sarah Palin.

You know the sort of thing – it happens all the time. After a happy holiday at home with your family, you feel like a breather at 2.25am and get into your car and drive out of your property. Then, all of a sudden, you find that someone has very inconveniently built a pavement and a fire hydrant, and planted a tree on the side of the road just outside your pad…..like about thirty years ago. So, naturally enough, you drive into them. Easily done.

Fortunately help is at hand. Your ever-faithful wife had the forethought to follow you out of the house, in case of this very eventuality. She also had the presence of mind to bring with her two golf clubs just in case there was an accident so that she could release you from the car by smashing the rear window – which she duly does.

You know the sort of thing. Happens all the time.

It really would take an arch-cynic to introduce into this idyllic picture the phrases “heated domestic”, “accusations flying” and ”hell hath no fury”.

That would really be too cynical.

I hope Tiger Woods recovers well from injuries, which are described as minor.

This week has been a good week for further breaking down the taboo of depression as an illness. Fern Britton is in the news for admitting (although it seems she originally did so years ago) taking anti-depressants. And there was a fantastically good programme on BBC1 called Mind Games: Depression in Sport. I recommend watching it on iPlayer if you haven’t seen it. 

The list of sports people mentioned in the programme, as having suffered from depression, was long and star-studded: Frank Bruno, Serena Williams, Stan Collymore, Kelly Holmes, Paul Gascoigne, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Marcus Trescothick… Add to that list the likes of Fern Britton, Stephen Fry, Robbie Williams, Spike Milligan and even Churchill and perhaps the penny might finally drop that depression is an illness which hits anybody and which people cannot “snap out of” anymore than you can “snap out of” a thyroid problem or diabetes.

It is was particularly good to see Marcus Trescothick on the programme. He was looking veryrelaxed and happy. It really is brilliant that people like him are now talking freely about depression. Santa has been asked to put his autobiography, Coming back to me in my stocking.

One particular thing which Marcus Trescothick repeated several times struck a chord with me, based on my, mercifully mild, experience of depression ten years ago. He said several times how important sleep is to him. I think sleep is one of the most under-regarded good fortunes we have. We often wake up in the morning not actually realising how awesomely fortunate we are to have had a good night’s sleep.

It’s one of things. You only realise how precious sleep is when you have actually lost it for a while – i.e not been able to sleep night after night after night. But, from myexperience alone, I would say that if you are having trouble sleeping for a few nights in succession - get help. It could be a sure-fire sign that you are suffering from or heading towards depression.

…Just sighing upon taking a break from a mammoth task I have set myself: to put 450 digital photos in albums of the physical old-fashioned type.

The other day I looked through a few of our old fashioned photo albums from before the days of digital photography. It made me realise how important it is to assemble family photos in a physical album, how it makes it so easy and enjoyable to look at them years later. Otherwise, they are rather inaccessible and, potentially, lost on the computer.

However many slide show gizmoes are created (and we have quite a few), you can’t beat curling up on the sofa and leafing through an old photo album.

The task I have set myself has turned out to be relatively huge. I have painstakingly gone through ten years worth of hard discs, CDs and Floppies to assemble the best 450 photos in one folder. I then uploaded them (relatively quickly) to Snapfish and splashed out on a monumental printing order. The bulky package arrived a few days later and this morning, with the house empty (because it is a surprise Christmas present – don’t worry they don’t read this nonsense blog) I was able to lay out hundreds of piles of photos in categories.

One advantage of having the photos on the computer is that it is relatively easy to put the photos in chronological order.

Oh, and I now swear by those “Self-adhesive” albums where you lay out your photos on the page and then pull over a plastic see-through sheet which is part of the album. It makes them look great but the stickiness is not permanent so you can easily rearrange the photos time after time. And they are relatively quick to lay out with photos.

The result is looking good, now I am halfway through.

But my goodness, how random is my digital photo collection? Gone are the old days where you just had a pile of chemist’s packets with the photos neatly stacked. So, for example, I’ve ended up with 18 photos of my offspring playing a flute with a clown (an event which, I think, lasted about one minute) but, try as I might, I cannot find one single photographic record of an entire two week holiday in Tunisia.

Such is life!

If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are.
Miguel de Cervantes
Spanish adventurer, author, & poet (1547 – 1616)

Example 1:

I read on Matthew Harris’ blog that Newsnight are featuring a major piece on Michal Kaminski tonight. The reporter (sigh of relief – it’s not Michael Crick – not that he’s not excellent – but attacks on the Tory party ought to be done by someone else occasionally – he’s political editor now anyway), Andrew Whewell summarises the film here. I take my hat off to Mr Whewell. He seems to have done a fair job, judging from the summary.

Obviously you can get into hair-splitting debates about Kaminski. (Indeed William Hague, the prize muppet that he is, has – and how ridiculous is it that someone aiming to be UK foreign secretary is arguing the toss about events in far-off eastern Europe sixty years ago?!). But the fact remains that the man is ultra-right wing and has a history of being on the fringes, if not the centre, of racist causes. And the party of Heath, Clarke and Churchill is led in Europe by this man. It is disgraceful. 

Example 2:

LibDem Voice highlights a Guardian report of a case involving the Tories’ Communications director:

A News of the World reporter who suffered from a culture of bullying led by former editor Andy Coulson, who is now David Cameron’s head of communications, has been awarded almost £800,000 for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination.

I recommend reading the report. It’s enough to make your hair stand on end. All I can say is congratulations to Matt Driscoll for having the courage to stand up to News International.