pumpkinstrokemarrow

Followed up by a rather less satisfactory experience. Tiring of regular tea with milk, spent an afternoon on Sea Dyke Fujian Oolong. First half pint made using a few fresh leaves, subsequent half pints made by adding simply hot water to the leaves from the previous half pint. Good drink, but despite the economy with leaves wound up a bit hyper.. Did not feel quite right and did not sleep quite right. Spent half the night half awake pondering about moving a closed string around the surface of a torus - and towards morning more complicated shapes. Maybe a bit feverish; maybe the weakness brought on by the tea had let in a bug.

The the following night, last night that is, slept OK but had some rather odd dreams. Images which were plausible but wrong in some way. For example, a waitress's (white) apron which appeared to be inappropriately dirty but which, on closer inspection, turned out to have been carefully embroidered in black with a variety of insects of a variety of shapes and sizes. Which looked like dirt from a distance.

This may have been a form of déjà vu as I woke up to read that the mother-in-law in waiting to the heir apparent in waiting used to work as a waitress on an aeroplane. Would not have been allowed in his grandfather's day. A throw back, I suppose, to the days when upwardly mobile knights competed for the honour of being the monarch's bread knife.

I also learned that one of the indices of happiness in Cameronland is to be the speed with which one can down load a film over one's broadband connection. Being to do this fast enough to be able to watch the thing in real time is, it seems, now deemed an essential of civilised life. Something to be included when computing the proper level of single parent benefit. All of which brings the statistician in me back to life. How do we make proper allowance for several people in the same village wanting to down load at roughly the same time? What will be the proper way to weight and average scores over the country? Is it fair to give the same weight to someone living in Benbecula as someone living in Sutton? On the one hand, someone living in Benbecula might have a much greater need for films, there being little else to do. But provision in Benbecula is clearly much more expensive, now that they are thinking of closing down the missile test range there. Who but a statistician is going to be able to say what the right answer is?

PS: the good news is that the SNP is fighting hard for the retention of all Westminster funded military bases in the Scottish homeland. And they are thinking of insisting that only true born Scots serve in such places.