Getting the future back

 

WTF ??  It’s like whoever wrote this doesn’t understand English or the meaning of words.

“Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future” is a cute line from a fun, sci fi  movie of the 1980’s.  The premise being time travel.  The hero is transported a few decades from his present, into the past.

We measure time in the sun’s passage across the heavens and the seasons’ change as we circle the sun.

We are in the present and if we knew the future, we wouldn’t go there.  Hence the popularity of fortune tellers.

Where’s the future supposed to have gone that they’ll get it back ??  We have enough difficulty understanding the past without dumping the future there and trying to retrieve it.

“Get Britain’s future back” is a meaningless jumble of words.  It reinforces my opinion that someone tells the Labour Leader something but he doesn’t understand it and so repeats it as nonsense.

Missions Statement

 

WTF is it with Starmer that he comes out with stuff like, he’s got Five Missions ??

A man may have a mission,  e.g. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it ....”
Or,  “We’re here on a mission from God.”  But he can only have one.  It makes no sense otherwise.

If you have more than one mission it’s because you are an institution, such as a  Church bringing the true faith to the heathen.  (i.e. the moral justification of the conqueror.)  That’s why California has twenty-one “Missions”.
But an individual only has one mission at a time.

Dunno if the guy is plain witless, or ignorant of his own language and culture. 
Whatever, he comes across at best as an ass.

The Strong and the Weak

 

Suppose, just suppose, that a strong state lay next to a weak state.  The strong state attacked the weak state, annexing its territory and interning its population in a camp.
Time passes and the strong state begins to build settlements in its acquired territory.

The internees witness this and protest they should be allowed to return to live on their land.  Their protests are ignored by the strong state.

More time passes and the internees see more development and settlement of their land.  They become louder in their protests and begin a campaign of weekly going to the fence which holds them in and demonstrating.  They appeal that the laws between nations prohibit their internment and settlement on their lands.
The strong state responds by stationing its army around the fence and taking pot shots at the protesters.  No other nation intervenes.

Over 21 months,  220 demonstrators are killed.  More than ten times that number have gunshot wounds.
It becomes plain to the dispossessed that peaceful protest is not getting them anywhere.
They will have to seek another strategy.

That, I propose, is why almost four years after the Great March of Return, the Al Aqsa Flood occurred.

Trouble comin' every day

London  Fri 14 Apr 23

I got the Council “Happy letter” through the door.  It led with the news that the residents’ association of some estate in Holborn had started a scheme for sending food parcels to needy residents.
WTF ??  WTAF ??

Why are they treating this like a normal situation to be negotiated ??  Why aren’t they outside their MP’s office or Parliament screaming ??

For its survival, a Govt needs to feed its people.  All that stuff about  “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy”. 
They must know about it if it’s being featured in the Council literature.  Not a squeak from them on the declining situation.



I went out.  On my way I came across a doctors’ strike demo outside UCH.
WTF ??  WTAF ??

Hospital doctors are on strike because their standard of living has dropped 25% in a decade. (Chancellor Osborne’s austerity, for starters.)
Nurses and other health workers are also holding strikes over pay.

It’s an extraordinary situation.  These are professions that never go on strike, they’re too essential.  This is the pass we have come to.

I walked the length of the demo with my fist raised in solidarity.



Down the back of Tottenham Ct Rd I discovered that Pollock’s Toy Museum is now an “Investment for Sale”,  or at least its site is.  It was a landmark
WTF ??  WTAF ??

I gather they’ve been at that address for fifty years.  Now they can’t afford the rent, though I puzzle who can ?? 
The big shops, and many of the smaller ones, are now gone from Tott Ct Rd.  Likewise Oxford St now has only Selfridges and John Lewis as department stores.  Its days as a shopping attraction are gone.



Rounding off my trip, a corner I’d passed earlier now had some camper bedded down.   It was 11.30 am.  They weren’t begging, they were asleep.

Poverty and homelessness have been “in yer face” for the last dozen years but it wasn’t good for the two decades before that.  A characteristic of all Govt’s in that period has been their consistency in failing to address the deteriorating situation.
 

A survey last Nov  found that one in six adults were living hand to mouth and one in four couldn’t find a hundred quid in an emergency.
Inflation is supposedly running at 10% but that’s diluted with domestic appliances and other stuff people without a hundred quid aren’t affected by. 
Their concern is the price of food.  It's what they mostly spend their money on.  Over the last year, dairy produce prices are up 60%, potatoes are up 60%, supermarket brand pasta 35%.

So one in four adults are getting financially hammered, just on buying food.


Start fretting about a rerun of the London Riots in 2011

"There's no way to delay that trouble comin' every day."

As Night follows Day

 

Night

Day

I didn't attend any of the Jubilee celebrations.  At a time of plague it seemed unwise.
So I was shocked at the pics of the crowds that weekend.  A million, or more, people cheek to cheek over several days.
You didn't have to be Nostradamus to foresee the consequences.


I'm wondering who authorised the above and like events.  If it was the Palace,  Her Maj must hate her subjects.  If it was the London Mayor, he must hate his voters.
If it was the PM and Downing St .... it was par for their course of ignorance and carelessness.

None of which excuses the responsibility of the attendees for their reckless venture into a plague pit.

It was a pain coming. It's been a pain going.

 

I broke a tooth.  I dunno when.  Yes, I was present at the time but I don’t catch everything. My eyes don’t see too well these days and I can be a bit absent minded.

A few weeks back, my tongue found that an upper molar no longer had a side, nor had it a middle.  The wall had collapsed and there was nothing within.
This took a bit of getting my head around .... as it were.

After a week of contemplating the inevitable I paced the neighbourhood looking for an NHS dentist.  All I could get was one who’d see me in a month.  I turned to Google and the phone.  It took me another two days. It can get wearing and it’s something very personal.

One number I was put through to a call centre in India !! 
Another I was put on call waiting.  “Your call is important to us.”  Obviously it isn’t.
111  I wasn’t prepared to queue for.
A lot of them didn’t do NHS despite their Goog listing.
One was ambiguous about it and had an online registration.  Fuck off.  This is the structure of my skull I’m worrying about, I need to talk to someone.

Eventually I found someone near Baker St who was prepared to see me in a week. 

So it came to pass,  I went over and found I was in the hands of a 4’10” micro babe with a  personality the size of a room. This instills confidence in the likes of me in a tight spot.   

I was laid flat and she had a look.  X Rays taken and it looked like it felt.  She said she could attempt an extraction but it was difficult and it might end up having to be finished in hospital.  Or I could opt for a direct hospital extraction, she didn’t know when that might be.  There’d be a wait.
I told her I was a “let’s do it now” kinda guy.  If she was up for it, I’d give  it a go.

I was booked in for a week later.  In the course of that week it began to give me gyp.

Psyched up, I trucked over for noon last Monday 16^th.   She was half an hour late. :facepalm:


We ran through the options again and I gave consent.  X Rays were taken (good ol’ Roentgen) and I laid horizontal.  I was numbed up, a process different to my last experience (15 ?? yrs ago),  a lot of pinpricks giving a quick, very local anaesthesia.
I was told to wave my left.hand if I wanted her to stop anytime.

I dunno what they did to hold my mouth open, couldn’t see a thing through the eye sheild I’d been given and I couldn’t feel it.   Anyway, she quickly got stuck in with her molar-grips.
 
She told me she was rocking it around to loosen it, and every now and then she would chant the mantra “keep breathing, keep breathing”.  I don’t know why, it was meaningless to me.  Why wouldn’t I ??   Mebbe it’s something they teach them at dental school to keep the rhythm going, like sailors sang sea shanties when pulling ropes. 

I’d no idea of time through this.  It all seemed very instant.  Some way in, I started to get jolts of pain and this was obvious so I got more numbed up. 
She was pressing hard down on my lower jaw, as if using it as a pivot or something and I had to wave my hand to tell her about this. 
It was getting a bit white knuckle.

We got to a point where she told me she’d got most of the tooth out but, as feared, it had fractured and the bit remaining ran deep.  She had another go and more pain.  She called in a colleague for consultation and, after more delving, concluded they couldn’t knock me out enough to keep me quiet and it was a hospital job.

She led me, in a shaky daze, back to reception where I put my X on some form then I shook her hand.  We’d just been through so much together.
When I got outside I realised I’d been too confused to put my mask on before going into reception.  Too late now.

Getting home I necked a couple of pain killers and they came up just in time for the pain foretold.
I looked at my copy of the paperwork and realised that I’d been on the table for 80 mins   Then I lay down, I was well jarred.


Yesterday I Googled how long an upper molar extraction would take.  Twenty to forty minutes.  Hey ho.