a fight over a toilet

Today (Friday) I found myself leaving a place before a fight kicked off that I would have been tempted to get involved in. The place? A public toilet. The cause? Queue jumping. Only in Britain could a fight kick off over such a minor issue.

Someone walked into the toilets and just barged right into a cubicle, ignoring the queue that had already formed. Normally if this happens, Brits are too reserved / polite / shy / downright cowardly to question it. In this instance, someone did point out to the offender that there was a queue. Normally if this happens, the offender would just look embarrassed, try to pretend it was all a mistake, and join the back of the queue. In this instance he not only refused, but gave some ludicrous half-justification along the lines of but I've just walked in before you so I'm in now and you can't do nothing about it. As this argument continued, I found myself tempted to play arbitrator. I then found myself feeling like Homer Simpson in one of those scenes where Homer talks to Homer's Brain and negotiates what to do next. There are some important differences - I have more than 3 strands of hair, I am not bright yellow, and I hope I'm less fat and less stupid than Mr. Simpson - but hopefully the image might mean something to you. This was the gist of the conversation:

Eldan: That guy's being a right arsehole - I should do something about it.
Eldan's brain: He's being stubborn enough that it will probably result in a fight - I could do without that, and it's not worth it for either a toilet cubicle or a minor point of principle.
Eldan: But I can't just stand by and watch while the other person, who self-righteous as he may be does have a point, gets a kicking just because he stood up for himself.
Eldan's brain: Stop trying to solve other peoples' problems. He got himself into this situation; it's his problem to get out of it.
Eldan: But he's small and stupid and arrogant and I'm big and have been practicing martial arts for 5 years and I could have him easily and he's asking for it...
Eldan's brain: Fighting = BAD. Objection overruled.
Eldan (as adrenal glands start to function): but... but... but...
Eldan's brain: But nothing. ABOUT TURN! QUICK MARCH!
Eldan's bladder: You bastard! I'm full!
Eldan's brain: I'll find a pub soon enough.
Eldan's legs: Ah cannae push it faster, Cap'n....

Anyway, in spite of having to dash in comical stylee for the nearest pub, and then annoy the bar staff by marching straight to the toilet and straight back out again, I think I did the right thing. The queue-jumper was an arrogant overgrown brat who did deserve a kicking, but it's not to me to provide it.

Oh yeah, and in case you hadn't gathered, I was feeling much better by the end of the afternoon than I did at the start of the day. I even did a little work.

posted @ 8:29 PM -

I decided not to go to work today because I woke up feeling awful. It's mostly cleared up now, but the stiff neck is still vaguely haunting me, and at first this morning I had a killer headache. If I lived near work I might be considering going in after lunch, but as it is I've been there 2 months and not taken a day off, so I may as well regard this as a day's unscheduled holiday. It's nice knowing that no-one depends on me on a day-to-day basis...

I think I needed this rest more than I was willing to admit to myself, because I keep dashing off on the weekend. I've been having fun, but one thing I haven't been doing is recharging my batteries in preparation for another week of long days. More fool me.

posted @ 7:54 AM -

This has been a slightly surreal evening. I've needed a restful evening at home for a little while, which is possibly part of why my body contrived to feign old age earlier in the day, and it has done me good. The bike ride home was murder on the shoulder, because the most painful thing was to look around, but there's no way one can cycle in traffic without looking behind frequently, unless one wishes to die. A long soak in the bath put that one right, as well as just being very relaxing. I haven't given myself enough time over the past week because I've been determined to work hard and socialise, and I'm not quite efficient enough with my time to get away with that.

What made the evening surreal was my flatmates' approach to redecoration and musical entertainment. One of them bought a second hand LP called Tijuana Christmas, which it was insisted I play, because I have the only turntable in thouse, and it all got a bit silly. The thing is, the music seemed to fit Carry On films, so instantly my flatmates turned into Carry On actors. Then Sarah started stripping the inside of their room's door. Cue closing of the door, and a series of noises from the inside that can only be described as reminscent of the Tasmanian Devil. Somehow this was strangely disturbing when we couldn't see the source of these noises, even though we knew exactly what was going on.

posted @ 6:28 PM -

hurrah! My flatmate / landlady has just signed up with an unmetered ISP. I'm still finding the slowness of this connection annoying after having got used to broadband in my last house, but it's still much nicer not having to worry about the charges I'm running up.

posted @ 5:54 PM -

The Morning News is running a wonderful piece about how the music stars how used be dangerous have all become tame, and somewhat, erm, lame. Though saying this makes me feel twice my age, I couldn't agree more. I've heard relatively few new bands who excite me over the past 5 years or so, most of my recent extravagant record shopping spree was for things released before I finished school (if not before I was born), and it really is a long time since any musician shocked me, or any successful musician managed to convey an image of being anything but a product.

I must go to more small gigs with bands I've never heard of - even when the music's not very good there's just more soul in those things, and that evidently counts for more in my book than the average CD buyer's.

Maybe this is the real damage that MP3s and easy piracy have done. I suppose I could be stereotyping too much, but I feel like the people who listen to interesting, diverse music are also the ones who know how to find it without paying, whereas the record companies are finding that neatly packaged products still sell because people with less imagination are more likely to actually buy it. On the other hand, people who discover obscure bands tend to be the ones who also value having the actual album with sleeve / inlay card as the artist intended, so I could be completely barking up the wrong tree.

posted @ 5:15 PM -

Shakespeare action figures

One final distraction on the way out of the building:

I know there's something a bit twee about blogs circular-referencing each others' posts, but please excuse me taking part for once. Scott responded to those social theory action figures I spotted the other day by reviving an idea he had had some time ago: Shakespeare action figures. Drop by to contribute ideas for more.

posted @ 11:46 AM -

I'm about to head home because I don't feel too well. A couple of strange cramps are making me walk like a cripple, and given that one is in my shoulder I figure sitting in front of a computer for more time will only make it worse. I'm hoping that a hot bath will sort me out, or at least that I'll wake up tomorrow feeling better.

Meanwhile, a few small titbits gleaned from the wonderful world wide web:

Nathan Wright sold his soul online.

A mysterious orb has washed up on a South Carolina shoreline.

And finally a more serious one - record companies have apparently started flooding file-sharing services with dud tracks in an attempt to make them less useful for piracy and get some free advertising. Seems like a cleverer plan than going crying to the courts or trying out technological measures that inevitably either fail or make their products less valuable to legit users (like the 'copy-protected' CDs that don't play in many machines).

posted @ 11:32 AM -

I'm going to visit my friend in Montréal this summer. I mentioned to a few people that I might, then I dithered, then I decided I wasn't going to, but I am after all. As Orbital would have it:

it's better to regret things you have done than things you haven't

posted @ 6:56 PM -

woohoo! Anthony Giddens & Michel Foucault action figures.

posted @ 1:38 PM -

The Oxford Internet Institute is conducting an inquiry into the provision of broadband services in the UK, hopefully to advise future government policy. They have published a set of questions to scaffold discussion on this, which are interesting. Any answers? There will be an HP response to this inquiry, so while I'm not directly involved, any good comments can be passed on.

posted @ 12:19 PM -

well, at least if Turkey had to be knocked out of the World Cup, let it be at the feet of Brazil, let it be an outstanding game of counter-attack after counter-attack, and let them have the honour of being the first team to only concede one goal to Brazil.

Oh yeah, thanks: we got it all.

posted @ 9:28 AM -

The naming of days

Apparently there is a movement afoot to declare September 11^th a national holiday in the US and call it God Bless America Day. I won't go into why this is such a terrible idea, because Michelle of a small victory has beaten me to it and frankly written a rather more articulate response than I would have come up with. In comments to that particular post, Miguel of feral living suggests that instead we should call it Holy Fucking Shit Day. I am seriously considering buying holyfuckingshitday.com (currently unclaimed) and donating space under that domain to anyone who wants to put sensible content up there.

Thanks to Andrea for drawing my attention to all this malarkey.

posted @ 6:46 AM -

Just in case anyone should ever accuse me of doing useless research, just remember: I could be making mathematical models to predict whether toast will fall buttered side down.

posted @ 7:18 PM -

I didn't actually set out to stop talking about football after England were knocked out, but I had devoted too much space to writing about it here, and too much time to reading about it. So, in brief: Saturday's games both went the way I wanted them to, and I started hoping for a Korea v Turkey final, but that's now proved impossible. Still, now that Turkey have got further than England for the first time ever, I am unreservedly a Turkey fan until this run ends. I can't help but think that will be in 14 hours' time at the feet of Brazil, but Turkey are still underestimated by most of the world, and I can still hope.

In slightly related news, Perugia have re-employed Ahn, having impulsively sacked him because he scored the goal that knocked Italy out. Sounds like the chairman saw sense once his temper cooled - this would otherwise have been perhaps the first ever sacking of a player for doing too well.

posted @ 7:15 PM -

Mental Health

When I was too young to really understand the implications, the Tory government of the time came up with the wonderful idea (I am disgusted by fewer of their money-saving initiatives than most of my friends, but this one really was absurd) of cutting the mental health budget by closing asylums. They have finally admitted that it was a mistake, but the statement misses the point and contains a not very subtle distortion aimed at concealing quite how awful the policy was.

I will deal with the distortion first, because it makes me quite angry. The statement speaks of mentally ill people who had fallen between the gaps of a system that by implication is supposed to be otherwise sound and to have served most people well. My experience tells me that this is simply not true - the system was so severely flawed that its failure to support thousands of people was built in, and must have been obvious to its architects.

When I was 16, and this policy was well under way, I did some work experience at a mental institution. On a day-to-day level it was actually quite a rewarding, pleasant job, and the people I worked with were little short of saintly, but the things I learned while I was there made it deeply depressing. In a parallel world, in which I had conducted this work experience before the Care in the Community programme came into being, I would probably have become a psychiatrist, but in this world it was clear that such a career would simply make me depressed sooner or later. Anyway, I learned two particularly important things on that job:

1. a shocking number of people were institutionalised in the first half of the 20^th Century with no mental illness (for things like having a child out of wedlock), and were made mentally ill by the institution, because these were places that fostered dependence and provided less mental stimulation than a prison


2. while it was clearly a good thing that people were no longer being condemned to that fate, there was no way that the existing patients could be expected to fend for themselves.

The officially stated aim of Care in the Community was to institutionalise only those people who couldn't fend for themselves, couldn't be catered for by day care alone, and had no-one able or willing to look after them in their own homes. The Victorian asylums were to be closed, and the small number of people who still had to be institutionalised were to be housed in the sort of smaller and far more pleasant facilities that groups like Mencap run. While this would save the government a lot of money, it would also improve the quality of life of all but the most severly ill patients, and wouldn't leave them any worse off, so it sounded like a pretty laudable plan.

The reality was rather different.

Initially people were selected for moving out into the community, on a sound basis of picking people whose disabilities were not entirely debilitating, and who had appropriate carers to take on the burden of keeping them well. By the time I became involved, the psychiatrist on site at this particular institution (which I understand is fairly typical) had already sent every patient who could possibly leave away. However, a decision had been made from on high to shut down the ward. If this was a matter of consolidation, and the remaining patients were to be housed elsewhere, it would not have been a serious problem. Everyone knew that this was not what was going to happen. The people were simply told they had no place any more.

Of the patients who were still in the ward when I worked there, most had serious brain damage resulting from birth complications. None could speak. Perhaps half could understand very simple, slow spoken language. Perhaps a tenth could walk unaided. Some had to be restrained because they were a danger to themselves and to others. What my colleagues told me was that many people as badly ill as these had already been sent home to their families, who must have suffered terribly themselves because such people need full time skilled care, not just a mother's love. The patients who were left were the ones who had no traceable family, and when the ward finally closed they would simply be left on the streets. Most would die within weeks, a lucky few would be taken in by the already swamped mental health charities, and the most able would live miserable lives as beggars.

And Liam Fox feels he can talk about a few falling between the gaps!?!

If his party wants to claim that anything has changed since then perhaps they could start by admitting how wrong they got things that time.

As for missing the point, the statement focuses on a very small number of high profile incidents of mentally ill people who should have been in secure hospitals committing horrible crimes. In another article in the same issue of the same paper, Dr. Fox alludes to the fact that the mentally ill themselves suffer because of their poor treatment by government, and that the stigmatisation of mental illness in this country only makes things worse. The trouble is, rabbitting on about the dozen or so people who have been killed by mentally ill people in the past decade obscures the fact that it is a very small problem, compared with the vast numbers (for reasons too complex to go into right now I don't buy the '1 in 4' statistic, but it's still a large enough number that you can count on it happening to at least one person you know) of people who will experience mental illness at some point in their lives, almost all (and I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but I believe it to be a fair statement of how bad we are at dealing with these problems) of whom will be cared for totally inadequately.

Meanwhile the current government is doing no better. They are still determined to revive proposals to preventatively detain people diagnosed as mentally ill (ironically bringing back the asylums in a new guise), nothing has been done to educate GPs about mental illness (many people just never get referred to psychiatrists when any psychiatrist would clearly see that treatment is needed), and the charity sector is still doing the government's work. I'll leave the last word with Lord Bragg, the president of Mind, another charity who do excellent work with the mentally ill: We can't just lock people up and forget about them.

posted @ 1:59 PM -

How stupid is Britain?

If someone approached you and said:

Right, so this is how the scam works:

We set up a PO Box abroad and print thousands of professional looking letters with the message that the lucky recipient has won a prize in a draw they never even entered, but they have to send an admin fee to us first before we can release the prize money for them. Then we send them to addresses in the UK, and the suckers will send us money, at which point we cash it all and just disappear.

Would you expect the scheme to work? I would have laughed in that person's face. I've also received a few such letters and thrown them straight out. Yet apparently so many people are falling for scams like that that the tricksters have become a hundred million pound industry. There really is no helping some people....

posted @ 10:40 AM -

Paul Ford is a wonderfully talented writer. I've just stumbled across his reaction to the WTC attack, which was rather more articulate than most, but most importantly (from my point of view at least) fairly accurately expresses how I feel when I get sucked into an argument about Israel / Palestine. I have embargoed that subject on my website (even this amounts to breaking my own rules), for a series of not very well explained reasons. The 2 paragraphs of ftrain starting from here might help explain why.

posted @ 7:48 PM -

I've had a good weekend, mostly in Brighton with some time in London too, and now an old friend is down from London, so I'm trying to leave work early today so I actually get to see him. Sorry about the lack of updates, but if I'm working a short day I really need to make it a short and productive one.

posted @ 6:55 AM -