Sunday

Don't ask me why - but I'm watching a documentary about psychopaths - we're on a section about so called workplace or 'industrial' psychopaths. We've all met them, I've met legions.

The sun came out today - I ran around the back of the house opening doors and windows to let the light in and try and raise the ambient temperature.

Went into work to help a client write a pitch/proposal presentation. Well, that's not strictly true - we have the work - we now need to try and persuade the client to brief us properly so we don't waste obscene amounts of time trying to prise it out of them during the work period. This is an increasing problem. Another one is being asked to produce creative as part of a pitch - we just lost a job because we refused to do that. It was to create publications for a lot research  - essentially it was the same concept as asking an academic to write their conclusions as a way to decide if you want to fund the research. Ethically and professionally wrong.

I spent some more time in the garden early today. I had to fix something I got wrong last week. I don't know if it's something to do with the way I am or just plain stupidity - but I can frequently do something for all the right reasons after a great deal of very careful thought - and manage to get it totally wrong. This has been a pattern that's repeated all my life. Last week I used some large galvanised tubs to plant a load of shallots. I went to a lot of trouble to mix the soil and compost carefully and planted them in appropriate rows with the correct spacing in each tub, about 40 all together. I decided to site them on the kitchen patio as it's quite well protected from the elements and a bit of a sun trap. I was quite pleased with myself. Yesterday after clearing the garden I realised that the correct place would be near the compost bins at the back. The tubs were too heavy to lift so I had to carefully dig out every bulb, remove the compost from each tub and bag it up - put the tubs in their new positions, refill them and carefully replace all the bulbs. Stupid. I don't really understand why I didn't do that in the first place. It's all deatail with me, I've never been able to rocess the bigger picture.

My friends little boy was taken ill yesterday. He's about 5. He started vomiting in the afternoon - developed a very high temperature and become floppy and unresponsive, blurring his words. They called the NHS line to ask if they could get an out of hours doctor. 10 mins later they had a call from out local A&E - were given a time slot later that evening to bring him in, and he was seen straight away by a consultant. It was just a very severe viral infection and he recovered quickly after fluids and some basic medication - he's much recovered today. The care and attention they were given throughout was exemplary. When my mother was a child and you had to pay to see a doctor - she was quite happy to tell anyone that her parents would not have called one out unless she was at literally death's door. Just another reason we need to preserve the NHS.