I’m currently off work having suffered a meltdown of reasonably titanic proportions - I’d thought it nothing at the time, but it turned out my doctor reacted with more concern than I’d expected. Fortunately I still had a spare 5mg of wiggle-room in my antidepressant dosage, so I’m now on the absolute maximum dose. I’ve been ordered to avoid absolutely all stress. I can just about cope with one thing (i.e. one child) at a time. So I may as well update you on everything.
TWITTER
As the bar to the left of this blog shows, since getting ill I’ve been twittering like - well, a madman. I mainly seem to use it as a microblog, because it’s just about right for one thought at a time, but the creative potentials are pretty impressive - as you’ll see if you start following the likes of
@MKupperman, who has made me laugh out loud every day for a week. The dangers of following celebrities on Twitter only become clear when something like the Baftas comes up - suddenly all my imaginary friends are at the same party and I’m bombarded with wankiness. I think they’ve given my computer diabetes.
QUAKERS
I’ve been attending the Glasgow Quaker Meeting for a few weeks now and am largely sold on its ethos. There’s a big sign outside which reads “Thou Shalt Decide For Yourself”, and I’m enjoying being freed from some of the doublethink which is involved in my attending other churches. Not that the Quaker Meeting is a church, you’re not supposed to say church I don’t think. But anyway. The first meeting was like stepping into a warm bath, and I found the silence extremely difficult to emerge from. Subsequent weeks have been easier. The commitment to peace and social action is remarkably strong, and it’s making me finally start to see pacifism as something I might be able to embrace. At any rate, there are plenty of Quakers who’d fight if they felt the war was just. Hadn’t realised that. Hadn’t realised much. Every other person at Glasgow Quaker Meeting has a PhD, but that’s probably no bad thing. Quakers have always had women ministers. There’s been a Meeting in Glasgow since 1660. Just some random observations, but if it works out I’ll write more later. Rosie likes it a lot. I’m almost certainly doing the Quakers a disservice in my description.
WINDOWS
Due to circumstances beyond my control I have installed Windows Vista on my Linux box. The installation
was a horrible experience, largely because Vista didn’t believe I had a soundcard. It took me two weeks to find the proper drivers online (Ubuntu Linux, on the other hand, recognised and greeted the card with such warmth that I felt quite left out). I’m going to run Ubuntu (or, perhaps,
Qimo, or maybe both) in a second partition. The most entertaining advice I received while searching ways to force Vista to recognise my card was “retreat deeper into the motherboard and wait for winter.”