A Very Happy Christmas to All Our Readers

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Special good wishes to any people who are surfin the blogs today because you have nothing else to do.

Steady as she goes

One more day. Here's one to hold the line:

We never thought that we would die
those times the sun crept
blood pink into a wintry sky

Baby Jesus Bunny in the Headlights of Santa's Slay

Father Christmas is driving a great shiny green SUV well over the speed limit and I am a baby rabbit immobilised in his track, paralysed with fear. With me is baby Jesus and Santa is going to get us both, we will go pop like a brace of pigeons under a lorry as the great Xmas tyres compress our ribcages, bulging our eyes out and then blood everywhere turns into berries on the green holly paint of his SUV motorised sleigh. Rudolph is on top of the sleigh, head lolling upside down, blood dripping from his nostrils.

The angels told the shepherds, who do not watch sheep in December in Palestine, that Baby Jesus was a liberator but not literally from the Romans, we should pay taxes to Caesar which includes joining in the consumption-fest unless you want to be a kill-joy. And we should render unto God what is God's, although nobody is quite sure what that should be apart from the obvious which is that we should be a bit nicer to each other, taken for granted that, no problem, I'm nice to everyone, it's them who have the problem, nowaddimean, but then what? Should we kill the unbeliever, or tolerate him/her?

Let us rephrase that, because toleration is weakness: when should we kill the unbeliever? Right now simply because s/he is an unbeliever, or later when they threaten us with WMD which they are not allowed to have although we have them but that is different because we had them first and we are Responsible and we have white skins (although the Chinese can get a bit brown in the sun, but then so can we). And anyone who has WMD must be Responsible because they get to sit on the Security Council, and anyone who has no WMD must be Irresponsible even to think about wanting to have them.

Anyway, back to Baby Jesus. Herod wanted to kill him because Baby Jesus was a Threat so he killed all the baby boys which was just Collateral Damage no blame there then. It was a pre-emptive strike against the Baby Jesus Terror Threat which would have destroyed Civilisation As We Know It. The Wise Men were Magi not Magicians because Magic is a thing of the Devil and so is the Easter Bunny because that was a Celtic Easter Hare God associated with Cerridwen and Beltane nothing to do with the midwinter Solistice.

So have a happy turn of the year. Don't worry, you don't have to break the bank and get hung over, the sun will get warm again all by itself. And rabbits get run over every day, that's life. Too many of them anyway. Pests, brought over by the Romans.

Men in Black - Strangled by official millstones

I helped catch a fraudster last week. I was going to tell you what happened but thought better of it because of (a) patient confidentiality and (b) sub judice rules. So we have to pass on the interesting bit, and move on to the depressing bit - giving a statement.

These two geezers from the counter fraud office with NHS tags round their necks took one hour to write down what I could have typed in 10 minutes and dictated in 3 minutes. That's 3 hours of professional time for 2 pages of illegible block handwritten scrawl written down by the Bad Cop of the pair. At least he used a pen: most policemen have a 2" stub of pencil. They had "policeman" written all over them, and when I commented on this in an effort to establish a bit of human contact, the Good Cop said "Something like that". I gave him a second to elaborate, which he declined.

So I spent the rest of the time wondering who they had been before they became NHS Counter Fraud Officers. They did not look anything like Customs, who are usually quite jolly. Nor "Intelligence" Services, who usually, in my experience anyway, have obsessoid character disorders and often wear bizarre hats in a kind of plea for help. These two certainly had the look and psychological feel of policemen - as evidenced by the fact that they made me feel as if I was the miscreant, not the citizen without whom they would not have got their man. I even had to allow to the evidence given to be used in a disciplinary proceeding against me. "Just routine, you understand Richard".

I used to get on really well with police. I recall once being at a CND protest outside a Tory party meeting in Bristol (complaining because the Tory had not spoken out against the French nuclear tests) and the Tories called out the riot police. This caused us to decide (outnumbered three to one as we were) to leave quietly, and as we crept unobtrusively past the rows of shields and helmets, one of them said "Hello doctor, didn't expect to see you here". One of my patients.

Anyway 3 hours of professional time spent in writing down evidence on a fraud, and there were scores of other doctors that this alleged fraudster had visited. Hundreds of hours of professional time wasted in statement taking by means of old technology, and days tainted by bad vibes.

Maybe it wasn't as bad as that. Maybe I have just become psychically sensitised to people with NHS tags round their necks.

And every time Blair shouted "Fire!"

On the ID card issue, (which is big in the UK at the moment) I stand firmly on the side of the debate that says "Who could object to them, unless you have something to hide?"

With one proviso. The state that issues the cards must, like Matilda's aunt, have a strict regard for truth. Otherwise they could simply write "Known Terrorist" into the data on my card. Or "Terrorist Suspect". Either way, every time I went to the bank, I would quickly surrounded by wailing sirens and men in black pointing their rods at me.

So the big question is, "Does the Bliar Government have a strict regard for truth?".

And the answer of course has to be a resounding "NO".

And even if the answer were to be a quiet "Yes", the next question would be "And can we expect every Government in the future to have a strict regard for truth?"

Again the answer is "No".

So that's it then. No ID cards. Next!

The Help America Recount Fund

Click the title above. Because America needs help. It needs help in counting votes. It needs help in knowing how to manage democratic elections.

Whoever you are, wherever you live - Canada, Britland, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Mozambique, Ukraine, Iraq - help bring democracy to America.

An unscientific leaky coincidence

So. This water filter business. You have to filter out the chlorine (and all the rest of it, but chlorine is the main thing, and bottled water is a ridiculously expensive and resource-wasting way of doing it, and jug filters are expensive and can get infected, so a filter for the drinking water tap is the one). I chose a simple mains filter thing where you have to change the filter twice a year (cost 30GBP each time).

It came with instructions and I fitted it as per. There was a line tap which clamped on the copper mains water tube, then you screwed something in so that it pierced the copper tube and the water went off down through the filter, et Robert est votre oncle, as the French would say. And so to bed.

About 3 o'clock in the morning I woke up and thought "I know, I will just go down to the kitchen."

When I got into the kitchen, there was a hissing sound coming from under the sink where I had fitted the line piercing junction thing. A jet of spray was firing up out of the junction. It had only just begun as I walked in, because there were no pools of water on the kitchen floor at all. So I turned the water off at the mains, went back to bed and sleep and the next day asked the Man to come in and do a proper job.

Quite a coincidence eh? Not often I wake at 3 a.m. (not then anyway - happens all the time now, since the Great Clearout), and even if I do wake, the words "I will just go down to the kitchen" are not often the first on my mind.

It must have been that the leakage began in a very tiny way, and made a noise in the pipes, and the sound of the very tiny leakage must have been conducted back through the central heating to the radiator by my sleeping head, and it was that that to woke me up. That must have been it.

Or a complete coincidence, of course.

The thing about the coincidence explanation is that it is unfalsifiable, and therefore unscientific.

No way to do science

Annoyed to read an editorial in the British Medical Journal yesterday on the health effects of drinking water, concluding that bottled water is no different healthwise from tap water, and costs 1000 times as much. The cost bit is true, but the "expert" who wrote the article in a respectable medical journal is clearly ignorant of the fact that tap water is of necessity chlorinated, that chlorine is an oxidant, and so drinking chlorinated water will create a relative paucity of the vital antioxidants in our system. High antioxidant levels are protective against heart disease, cancer arthritis and aging. So tap water is not good for you. You have to filter the chlorine out at the point of use.

I recommend the Fresh Water Filter Co Ltd because it is simple and straightforward and they once gave me a free filter when I sent a patient their way. But careful how you fit their junction. Of which more later.

The old BMJ is reacting against the non-scientific garbage that gets put about by water enthusiasts, but this Hegelian process is no way to do science. My profession reacted in the same way against manipulation. Osteopaths once over-claimed for their craft, asserting that they could cure the soft bits as well as musculosketetal conditions. So medics said manipulation is total phooey. Wrong.