Food for Thought

Interesting para from the novel By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham. Trascribing it exactly:

'Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing there best to live decent lives, there's nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take their family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they're good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big, dangerous ones; no heroism, no genius, no terrible yearning for anything you can't at least in theory actually have. If you were young, lank-haired, pustule plagued Pete Harris you felt you were always about to expire from the safety of your life, its obdurate sensibleness, that Protestant love of the unexceptional; the eternal certainty of the faithful that flamboyance and the macabre are not just threatening but - worse - uninteresting.'

Pension Plus

Some good news on the pension front today. They've given me a 5.2% increase on my pension, taken from the peak inflation rate figure of last September. Wasn't expecting this; I thought only OAPs got the September figure and the rest of us had to struggle by on whatever the (lower) April rate was. Won't exactly make me a Monaco tax-dodger, but every little helps.

Ah, Ecosse Ecosse......

Exactly one week ago I walked down to Rosyth station in shirtsleeves under balmy skies to go into Edinburgher. Now, I look out the window and heavy snow flurries blow randomly around like a flock of starlings and people huddle inside their warmest winter-wear.

Its official, Ecosse is just the weirdest country in the world.