pumpkinstrokemarrow

First there was an how awful piece about the plight of families who are awaiting removal from this country. Some of whom are being accommodated in a secure facility in Sussex with 29 staff to look after up to 9 families. Now this is all very sad, but I do not see what else we can do. It is generally thought reasonable not to allow all and sundry to come and live in this country. Given that there are plenty of people who want to do just that (some of them from parts of the world which have had the benefit of our military adventures), we have to have control, control which is inevitably rather unpleasant in detail. But to try and maintain some kind of reputation for decency, we allow the special case of asylum to people who are apt to have a bad time if repatriated. But special cases have to be policed and some people who apply are going to be refused, perhaps on the grounds that they are just trying it on. They are just wannabee economic migrants. It is a bit hard on the younger members of the family, but if a family come here under false pretences, why should they expect a soft landing? They are going to have to be held in a secure facility while we arrange for their removal. At a time when we are hard put to find money to throw at home grown baddies, how much can we afford to throw at the extras? And if they really don't like the idea of a secure facility, they could always get a flight home before it came to that.

One would have more time for the Guardian if they gave a bit more air time to the difficulty of being nice about all this sort of thing.

Then there was another how awful piece about the propensity of old people with unpleasant conditions & diseases to do themselves in, possibly because not enough has been done in the way of palliative or other sorts of care. Towards the end, to be fair, it does give a few lines to the thought that doing themselves in might be an entirely reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.

What surprises me about all this is that there are so few health related suicides, not that there are so many. National Statistics say that there were of the order of 500,000 deaths in England & Wales in 2010, of which something less than 5,000 were suicides, of which perhaps as many as 10% had something to do with health. So numbers are very small compared with the number of people taking their time, perhaps in a drug induced fog, to die of something unpleasant. The good news is that I have now downloaded the relevant Demos report (see http://www.demos.co.uk/) to my Kindle, where I find that it can indeed read pdf files. Not the greatest with such a small screen but readable, and more likely to be read than if I were simply to leave the thing, along with sundry other worthy reports of the same sort, on this PC.

So today we revert to the DT to read on the front page that we have sent in the chaps from Hereford to assassinate the former head of government of Libya. The very chap with whom Mr. Blair was hobnobbing not so very long ago. I think it would have been far better if we had not. As Wellington is said to have observed to an artillery officer at Waterloo who thought that the Emperor of the French was just about in range: 'it is none of my business to be taking pot shots at my opposite number. My business is to win the battle'. Different standards at that time.

But at least that brushed away the remnants of a disturbing dream about the best way to deploy MS Excel to build the biggest and best database ever about ichthyosaurs. Inter alia, a record for every ichthyosauran fossil ever turned up. Would this record be a worksheet or a line in a worksheet? Should I have one worksheet or several? Should I have one workbook or several? Should I used Windows file management facilities to help things along or should I try and contain things within Excel? In short, all kinds of detritus from my days with databases called into play. Interestingly, no thought about collaboration, either in the construction or in the use of the thing. A very private venture.

But as the remnants were brushed away, I was left thinking that the data normalisation that was all the rage twenty years ago is maybe not as easy as we thought then. It is very hard to confine any one piece of information about a complicated something to just one place in a system; important things have a nasty habit of popping up all over the place.