Hi there, pop-pickers. A fairly standard day at work today. Only three left now - Huzzah. Owing to my working at a tedious job, I am, naturally, doing that thing where time is divided into portions, so that an eight-hour shift comes to be a series of mere minutes, or at least tends towards that result. For example, half an hour after my first break tomorrow, I should be halfway through the week. Halfway through the week? Well, by Jove, if I did the first half, I can dashed well do the second. And so on and so forth..

Ooh Pizza.

Where was I? Oh yes, illness. Dad is/was feeling poorly today. He's gone to bed now. In his own words it's "just a cold", but I am all too familiar with the wearisomeness of just-a-colds. Poor Dad. Matt, who I had a lift from this morning went home halfway through the day feeling ill just after eating something. Poor Matt. I felt ill yesterday, after he drove me into work, but his driving was much more respectable today. He passed his test (first time) last Tuesday, see. He's a nice guy. He spent some time in a young offender's institute. I forget why, if he did tell me. He told me another time that when he gets mad, he gets mad, so it was probably something to do with that, but he seems fine generally, as I say. Wow, this paragraph kinda loops back on itself, being loosely about institutions and illness. Last illness up is mental illness - on the minibus back, Shane and the driver had a long conversation about Broadmoor. Our driver plays some of the inmates of Broadmoor at table-tennis annually. I didn't quite catch how he got that gig, but I gather he is in some local team that they asked to come along. Shane was very inquisitive, asking about whether they had any cannibals there, whether or not it freaked him out and such-like.

I'm feeling a bit callous today. Hopefully this is a sign that I'm not as callous as all that really. But you know how it is. There's war in Iraq - did you hear about that? It's on the news and everything. And people die, and they sound like statistics, regardless of the ceremony which "our boys" get on returning and those aerial clips they show of military targets being destroyed with scrupulous accuracy. The Iraqi Information Minister's rather pathetic broadcasts even serve to diminish the notion that civilian casualties really are happening because of the ludicrous hyperbole of invaders being left as corpses at the city walls. And then there are the criminally insane, of whom we know because of Silence of the Lambs and Twelve Monkeys, who are forced to live, by an unfortunate quirk in their psychological make-up, lives entirely apart from the public and from hope of a cure. And you can only feel grief in the abstract, not so fully and authentically as God can and does.