The good, the bad and the goldfish ...

Strange how hard it is to think of a title for a post on a day when actually little happened - though I did do some things that really needed my attention, and this is good ...

The weather turned appalling in the early afternoon. It's been raining torrentially since then - in fact since about 10 minutes after I got home for lunch after being out. They said on the forecast that it wasn't a cold day, but the heating came on quite noticeably all by itself in mid-evening, which made the house feel reassuringly cosy in a way it hasn't all summer, and when I looked out just now before locking the door, there was this hissing sound of the water pouring down.

Before the flood, I was out visiting a friend. It was a spontaneous thing, really - a quick phone call and off I went to sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee and find how many of the things that were bugging me were her irritants as well. Not the least of these was the beastliness displayed in various forms on social media by people who would consider themselves better than that, the sweeping thoughtlessness and self-absorption displayed under the guise of humour or - almost worse - common sense. It was great to let it all out, better still to laugh about it. Before I left, we pottered out to look at her wonderful garden, which I remember as a bit of a wilderness when she moved in a couple of years ago. The loveliest thing is that there is a pond in the middle of it, which she cleared and reinstated single-handed in the spring: it now has goldfish in it was well as lilies and I'm blipping it in honour of a day redeemed.

I walked back as vigorously as possible, because knowing the weather forecast I felt pretty sure I'd not be out again. I was right. Instead, I filled in the pre-arrival form for the hotel we're planning to stay in when we get away and then got on with writing a sermon I've been planning for when we come home. After that, I just had time to finish an online Sudoku and do three Duolingo lessons before dinner - though I did feel the need of a few Pilates exercises just to make up for all that sitting at the computer.

Meanwhile Out There the news isn't good, and a scientist from the Sage committee is warning that the UK is on the brink of losing control of the virus. In other news, the Westmonster government has put out a paper recommending the use of vaccines without the full testing and approval customary for such things. There's a faintly terrifying section on the kind of people who might be expected to adjudicate over blame if things went wrong - "it would be possible to have as the ‘objective bystander’ any reasonable person – the man or woman in the street.
The challenge is whether, in this particular context, it would be better if the ‘objective bystander’ was someone with specialist knowledge of the subject matter in hand – ideally both technical understanding and experience of what may be very difficult issues.


Over to you, friends, to see what you think. You've got a week to think about it, apparently ...