Monday Musings

I was extraordinarily bad-tempered - posting-wise, at least - all last week.  I put it down to the heat.  Coming off of another sweltering and largely sleepless weekend, I've started this week not so much bad tempered as just plain tired.  Even the cooler temperatures today have done little to assuage my exhaustion.  But perhaps my exhaustion isn't just physical - everything going on in the world at the moment and being relentlessly beamed into my living room via the TV, web and newspapers, from Gaza to Ukraine, is enough to weary anyone's soul.  To make things worse, I've been foolish enough to keep looking at some of those crackpot conspiracy sites - the way they filter all the ongoing tragedies of the world to somehow fit in with their own twisted perspective has gone from being mildly amusing to downright depressing, not to say outright offensive.  I'm not going to rant on about them again here, I've already given them too much of my time, (although they have given me enough material for at a least a couple of forthcoming stories for The Sleaze).  Besides they've covered the same ground more than adequately here over at Cafespike.

Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that I'm too knackered to write a proper post this evening.  In fact, the main thing on my mind right now (as it has been all day) is the need for me to actually get around to organising my Summer leave from work.  The end of August/beginning of September just can't come quick enough.  The main decision I made today is that I'm going to take advantage of those ten days of annual leave I carried over from last year and take three full weeks off and hope that the good weather holds.  All I have to do now is to make it official.  Then I can look forward to sitting on the beach and watching the ships go by, (my patented relaxation technique).  I'll undoubtedly do other things, but that will be the first thing I do.  Then, hopefully, I can return to the fray feeling refreshed.  Although I suspect it will take more than a few weeks off of work to sort out my current malaise: I'm increasingly unhappy with my role as part of the establishment, the whole direction of what were once the UK's public services and my own recent failures to act in accordance with my own principles.  But apart from that, everything's great!