under another sun

A lousy night's sleep, coughing again for a couple of hours. Sluggish this morning. Lorraine dropped me off at the station, and the train headed north through the thin scraps of snow. Read a short novel on the train today, Yasmina Reza's Desolation which was essentially the last monologue of a raging old man and was pretty good. Bumped into Mark Dawson just outside my office, he is working across the road and we said we'd meet up for lunch. A really annoying day at work. Waiting all day to be briefed, with nothing arriving. Bored, but frustratingly unable to get on with any of my own stuff. However I took a full lunch breaking, walking in the face-hurting cold. Went to Hyde Park, and walked by the Serpentine. Lots of noisy bright green parakeets, which seemed a bit incongruous in the last bit of the snow besides the native birds. Feeling somewhat frustrated by the end of the day. Good to be on my way home. Very cold in the wind coming up the hill from Preston Park s...

Thursday. Work mild-mannered again, but feeling a tad twitchy. A stroll around the Italian Gardens in Hyde Park at lunch, listening to a Start the Week podcast which discussed Robert Liston a Scottish Surgeon working in London in the 1820s, which made me feel sick. He was 6'2" and burly, apparently very good at sawing off legs, one he completed in 28 seconds. He was so enthusiastic, however, he cut the finger off an assistant, and splashed blood on a member of the audience (for there usually was a crowded audience) who died of fright. The assistant died of sepsis a bit later on, and the person they were operating on died too. It was, it was said, the only operation with 300% mortality. Not the most relaxing thing I've ever listened to. Talk about surgical theatre. Home at a reasonable rate, but trespassers on the line somewhere plunged the entire network into delay. Walked home from Brighton station, smashing my 10k paces limit with ease. Pat and Maureen at home, there...