A Day in the Life

I have just finished reading "Brave New World", Aldous Huxley's account of a future society where human beings are no longer born, but genetically "produced" and socially conditioned so that they fit, unquestioningly, into the roles given them. So, there are those who are "manufactured" to be less intelligent and so perform only menial tasks, where others, the so-called "Alphas", are engineered to be more intelligent and therefore take on more demanding roles. What is important, however, is that they are all conditioned to be "happy" in their allotted roles, and none envy either their superiors or inferiors. Indeed, the status quo is maintained by keeping the populace distracted with almost enforced sexual promiscuity and the promulgation of a drug, "soma", which seems to induce an unthinking state of pleasure. However, into this scenario comes Bernard Marx, an "alpha" who begins to question the nature of his so

So, there I was, sitting in one of the cardiology wards at the North Staffs General Hospital, stripped down to my underpants and wearing one of those NHS gowns which give the whole world a wonderful view of one's, erm, rear end. As I sat there, I began to wonder just why I had ended up where I was, waiting, along with other heart patients (who, by the way, were all invariably older than me) to have a pacemaker fitted into my heart. OK, so I have to acknowledge that I have had a problem with my heart since birth; what is known as a heart block, which has resulted in me having an unusually low heart-rate and an occasional defect in the way my heart beats. Despite this, though, I had had none of the usual problems that appear to go along with such heart defects, such as blacking out or breathlessness. I had also started exercising and was losing weight (around four stones in all) and was feeling generally healthier than I had done in a long time. So, why, I wondered, had my cardiologi

I don't know whether it's me, but I have come to notice something of a trait in the blogs I sometimes read. Many of them are from that beautiful country that is America, or as F. Scott Fitzgerald once put it, the place where "man must have held his breath" when first surveying its vastness and beauty. I find America a fascinating place- after all, it is home to most of the movies that I watch, the books I read, the television I routinely ingest. I would love to visit the place, and find its populace, from my own limited experience, to be a charming, friendly bunch. So, when it is that something goes awry with America, I feel it. Just, it seems, as the rest of the world feels it, or, as the old axiom goes, "when America catches a cold, we get the flu". So you will forgive me for pointing out something that I feel is unhealthy in the American psyche of today, an unhealthiness that is indeed reflected in blog land, and that is, what I feel to be, a pernicious o

So, I got a little tired of the look of my blog. It was, after all, very basic and when I looked on other blogs I couldn't help but envy their little gadgets and pictures and twisty- turny moving things. OK , so I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to computers, but I think you might agree that this is something of an improvement on the look of my last blog. I have added a few gadgets together with a new template which has a suitably psychotropic-looking background. I suppose I like the warm colours of this particular template, and being an expert (sort of, in fact, not at all) on the psychology of colour, I know that yellow is an "emotional" colour, inspiring feelings of warm fuzziness, as opposed to say, green or blue, which are supposed to invoke calm, but in my view seem a little cold. Speaking of computers, though, I must add that on Monday evening the Pathways Group had a night out to a pub in Stoke where there was something called a "social media surgery