Happy New Year....

May seem a bit late to be wishing people a happy new year but given the winter I’ve had it is understandable. Besides, spring has always seemed a rather more logical time to celebrate the new year than January but I guess we can blame the Romans for that seasonal anomaly.

Anyway, the reason it only now feels like new year to me is that I have spent the past two months either in bed, at the osteopath, or painfully dragging my sorry ass round the house with much wailing, gnashing of teeth and general bemoanment (?) of my fate.  To cut a long story short, the bonkers workload of one particular project finally took its toll and my back muscles decided they were mad as hell and weren't going to take it any more. Managed to extricate myself from said project at the end of last year and am only now beginning to emerge from the whole experience. Moral of the story: 1) Never do a project you don’t really want to do but feel obliged to do because you have been specifically requested to do it and 2) Never assume that the people you are asked to work with know what they are doing.

I have only had one other experience of a job so stressful and awful that it made me ill  but that was over ten years ago and involved Palestinian negotiating positions so is a very different story! However, talking of the Middle East, I would like to extend a deep personal thank you to Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya for rescuing me from the cultural twilight of UK daytime TV. Despite revisiting a teenage obsession with Sci-Fi by reading the entire 4 volume Rama Cycle by Arthur C. Clarke, I still had a lot of time in bed with nothing but daytime TV for company so thank you also Al Jazeera, the BBC and Sky.

One other thing…. throughout this process I have discovered much more than I ever really wanted to know about the true nature of UK health care, both public and private. Observations suggest that the public sector is hopelessly addicted to drugs while the private sector secures numerous income streams by mercilessly exploiting the low fitness and body awareness levels of Gulfies with more money than sense.

So .. now planning to resume the projects that had to be temporarily abandoned and get fit again  ... ... in the meantime here's a brief summary of what I've recently learned. .