home for a bit of perspective, then off again...

So I got back yesterday to find Reuben and James had arranged all their empty drinks cans on the kitchen floor to form the shape of the Microsoft pointer arrow. Also, the news told me, some lady had put a cat in a bin, everyone was astonished that the X-Factor producers had duped them with auto-tune, and William Hill was taking bets on what the Camerons would call their new baby.

I suddenly had a sinking feeling about the world. In Pakistan right now, thousands of children are dying in their own filth because there is no clean water. One fifth of the country is underwater. That's like Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, West and East Sussex and most of Kent being suddenly submerged. In Niger, 100,000 people are homeless and starving. Many of them will simply die, unnoticed and unremarkably forgotten. It seems even the World Food Programme recently had to cut its food distribution to 40% because of a 'funding shortfall'.

A funding shortfall? We're betting on whether a baby will be called Marnie or Enid! Or who can stay the longest in a plastic house... and if that's not our cup-of-tea, we've got the opportunity to flick over the TV and laugh our socks off at people with self-esteem issues singing in front of a panel of gargoyles.

Gargoyles with a personal fortune of something in the region of £200m between them, I might add. Don't tell Steve Brookstein. He'll choke on his coco-pops.

The other piece of news that unfolded as I drove up the M5 was that a Catholic priest had been strongly suspected of organising a terrorist bombing in 1972 and had gotten away with it because the Catholic church had 'struck a deal' with the police and the UK government. Way to go there Catholics... The current Bishop of Derry came on the radio to explain the church's position, and he fell over himself, trying to explain that it was almost forty years ago. Nine people lost their lives, many more were injured - and Father Jimmy Chesney, we're told, the man with traces of explosives in his car, the man who parked a bomb outside a shop where an eight-year old girl was washing the windows, was 'moved to another parish in the Republic.'

I do wonder who's going to stand up for justice when the best people for the job are actively fighting against it. The scary part is that I thought Father Ted was satire. Then, when I see the news reports of pot-bellied children surrounded by flies and desperation, and muddy floodwaters scourging through a collapsing village while men can only stand and watch, I can't help wondering what I'm doing...

-

Well, after my long journey home from Devon, it is nice to be back in sunny Reading. And by sunny, I of course mean, overcast and depressing. Within the space of about four hours I had been dragged in to stress and anxiety once again. I do it to myself I think.

So today, I'm off to Swindon for the next bit of my holiday. Yes, Swindon. First Swindon and then Pembrokeshire - which has a lot more seaside.

Hmmm.