Cogitated & Digested

The exam has been and gone. Some elements went well, others not so. Touch and go as to whether success will be mine.

I find out at the end of the month. In the meantime I am preparing for my new job in August and the purchase of a house. It's been a bit protracted but hopefully completion is in sight.

Looking forward to getting stuck in with the renovation and home building.

All going well with BlueLight

And I'm disappointed that all the political machinations of the last few months have come to nothing.

Hopefully this means that after summer things will get interesting.

9 days away from my final exam. Still eerie, don't actually believe it is so close.

Revision is getting harder and harder. It's practical - how you examine and answer questions.

Soon it'll be finished. Am I prepared? We shall have to see.

Fingers crossed (but I think I'm relying on that...)

A busy few months. Had a nasty bug these last few days and I've belatedly been catching up on my favourite blogs.

I'm going to try and update a bit more frequently.

Hope you are all well!

I hope that the expenses revelations will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. For decades people have felt more and more isolated from those that represent and those that rule. Now is the time to get onto the real nub of the issue - the failure of politics.

The system - not just expenses but the way we govern and are governed - is defunct.

It is time for wholesale reform. Thinking of what people have suggested, here are some of my proposals.

House of Lords
Currently has 738 members on an mixed appointed basis. This can easily be reduced in number and be fully elected. Terms of five years.

House of Commons
Reduced to 500 with a two member constituency. Elected by single transferable vote from an open list. This keeps the constituency link but also has a more proportionality. A problem has been safe seats with MPs sitting for donkeys years - they become embedded. There should be no more safe seats from a party political point of view, but good MPs should still be able to be directly chosen.

David Starkey tonight suggested having a directly elected Prime Minister who appoints a cabinet, separating the ones who make laws from the ones who vote them through and removing whips.

What do you think?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

More than I thought...

Although I smirk that the Health and Safety police have to think again, if some people are stupid enough to do this they deserve to die.

Kudos to the first person who can come up with a cocktail for this.

Today was the final postgraduate exam. The closest thing that I can describe it is as like a driving test - but for a specialty so I guess an advanced driving test.

As such the main key is to conquer your nerves. Regrettably, that didn't happen and whilst I don't know the result as yet, I'll be utterly flabbergasted if I get a pass.

So disappointing. Though the day was saved whilst waiting for my connection home with two young lasses - who can't have been more than 14 - who'd attempted to travel from Lichfield to Stafford but ended up on the wrong train.

Excuse me, where are we?

Warrington, I say

Where's that?

About half way between Liverpool and Manchester

That's why everyone sounds strange. Focking hell we're in so much trouble, my curfew is at 1030pm, I broke it yesterday as well! Kayles, ring the home!

There ensued some amusing discussion with a couple of us in the room about taxis to Stafford and a bit of banter. It was quite sad really, in the end they did look like young kids who'd gone too far from home, no matter how much they smoked or acted up or what she was bailed for. I hope they got back alright. I wrote down which trains they needed and how to get there.

By the way, the picture is an album meme as per
Juzzy.

The street outside my house is to get CCTV, one at each end of the road. I'm not entirely sure where the camera closest to me will be, but it'll be darn close.

Apparently the cameras are to deal with "low-level nuisance over the last few years and because it is felt that it can prevent crime".

I've been here 18 months and I haven't particularly noticed anything.

I actually feel more unsafe now than before. I'm not sure why - is it because I have missed this "low-level nuisance" or is it because of the greater surveillance of, not only criminals but the general populace too?

With councils using anti-terror legislation to conduct their enquiries, I feel it may be the latter.

1) The older I get, the less organised I become.
I'm sure it's not meant to be that way - surely you grow up and get better at things like that? Take this Seven Things Thing almost a month late. And my revision. I peaked at 16 for my GCSEs - a miracle I've got as far as I have. I'm also now less tidy - which irks me - and I'm now more of a hoarder.

2) I'm afraid of the barbershop
I don't like going. I know what to ask for now but it took me years to work out how to ask for it. It's probably due to the soup incident at the age of four. Plus, I don't like sitting in front of mirrors which can be a bit of a nuisance in some restaurants.

3) I'm also afraid of being the sole customer in shops
I rarely go into shops if I am the only customer, or if I do I minimise time there. I think I'm scared I'll be accused of shoplifting or, worse, the shop assistant will come up to me and ask if I need help.

4) I get angry once every six months.
Obviously things irk me from time-to-time but I do think I'm quite placid/laid back. What will be will be. However, twice a year I will get absolutely livid for often no apparent reason. I'll just be in a foul mood. Mutter to myself and charge round the house or listen to music loudly. It'll last a couple of hours then it's done for the season after next.

5) Ducks are the complete animal.
Cute as babies, enthralling as couples waddling along the road, utterly delicious after an hour in my oven.

6) I don't collect anything (number 1 accepted of course)
But if I did, I'd collect clocks and maps. I love the elegance of a classical clock-face and the beauty of the mechanics of the mechanisms. And maps are fascinating records of nature and man's effect on the landscape.

7) We concentrate too much on difference
When you see the poor and the rich, the Western and Eastern, the good and the bad die every day, you know that the fundamental difference between individuals is zero.

While browsing today I noticed, to my mind anyway, this incendiary piece in the Daily Mail.

According to the new statistics, published yesterday, foreign-born people make up one in nine of the population of the UK as a whole.

However although the figures from the Government's Office for National Statistics show an increase in numbers of foreign born people they still fail to record the true impact of immigration because they record their children as British rather than second or third generation immigrants.

Source: One in nine people living in Britain now born overseas as 300,000 more foreigners settle in the UK

So I'm not British, though I was born in the heart of the Midlands and have probably spent less time abroad than your average family who may spend a week abroad in Spain etc a year. Not to mention those with homes aborad. Nor are Harry or William because their grandfather was born abroad. That foreigner Winston Churchill as well with an American mother no less.

What about the old empire? Do they count as British? In which case my family has been fully British since 1815 and not just the Welsh side of it.

You see, it's not that easy.

I know I shouldn't rise to this trash but it should be challenged. And it does make you feel alive.