Harsh words are seldom the best medicine
……………………….
Tuesday 3 March, London
>> Last night my wife writhed and pleaded for mercy as an old digestion disorder gripped her midriff, scrunched up her insides and tossed them aside, no mercy.
It was a pitiful sight and I’m not that good at sympathy. When she screamed for me to get an ambulance I nearly said, “Shut up! Stop whining! Deal with it!”. But not only would that have been unnecessarily hurtful, it wouldn’t have worked.
So I gently persuaded her to crawl in agony from the bathroom (where she’d sat for 30 minutes with her head in the toilet) to the bedroom.
She somehow hauled herself into bed, instructed me to put her socks on and later accepted the offer of a few sips of water.
Twelve hours later she was sitting up, glued to her iPad, demanding a cup of weak tea with two sugar lumps.
>> I awoke to find I had a new follower for this blog. The notification by email gives you the chance to check out your fellow blogger’s work.
This I did, and the first posting on Pobept’s front page was about a dog rescuing a lost 3-year-old.
On closer inspection it seems that the toddler and Buddy, the “loyal pit bull”, actually got lost together. In some woods, somewhere in Suwannee County, Florida, USA. “Far, far away”.
Police located them, but Buddy’s protective instinct kicked in and he sure as goddamn wasn’t gonna leave the helpless tot to the mercy of strangers.
Buddy turned nasty on the rescue workers. They dangled a bone in front of his nose, Buddy sniffed a golden opportunity to cement his celebrity, and everyone lived happily ever after. Lassie couldn’t have done a better job.
>> My task for today is to try and make some storage sense of this.
>> An email from Camper tells of the new line of women’s flip-flops, designed by Kiko Kostadinov.
They look like mini popadums juxtaposed with two plastic straps. The design fault for me lies in that ominous cavity. If you are on the beach it will fill with sand. When you eat it will collect crumbs.
Then another fashion trend popped into my inbox.
>> The Morning Star is running a series of articles supplied by the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. The series title is ‘Full Marx’ and today’s piece is about “financialisation”.
This is the switch from economies once driven by the manufacture of goods to ones powered by the creation and distribution of capital as defined by the financial services industries.
“Today profits come increasingly not from the production of goods but from the buying and selling of financial securities and the interest payments they accrue.”
It goes on to describe how the financial sector, at one time playing second fiddle to manufacturing and agriculture is now the top dog and sucks in everything around it.
>> The paving stones down by the swimming pool on the Golden Lane Estate are up again. I think if they ever fix the blighted area properly, I will miss the mini lake that forms whenever it rains. Sometimes I even imagine children fishing in it, bored with plain old paddling.
Pop Quiz… Name That Tune
“Years ago
I was an angry young man
And I’d pretend
That I was a billboard”
TITLE……………………..
ARTIST……………………..
>> Read yesterday’s diary.
BillyScraps 