Still Life

I must say I find it strange that in the 21st century the cure for fractured vertebrae is to lie still in the hope that they heal up. There is apparently an alternative of injecting plastic into the broken bits but that seems unappealing.

Anyone who finds themselves dependent on rolling news broadcasts will immediately notice how they seize on a topic and won't let go, however uninteresting it becomes, like a puppy with an old shoe it has found. One of the worst of these was the Sky News coverage of the Oscar Pretorius trial, a minute-by-minute coverage of tedious legalisms and nothing serious (we know he shot her, the question is why).

Then we had the Ukraine, of course, and Prince Charles saying Putin was behaving like Hitler. Charles was wrong, of course: firstly he should have kept his mouth shut (he surely can't seriously have thought a woman he had just met would respect 'a private conversation'?). He was also wrong in that the crisis was caused by Hermann van Rompuy and Baroness Ashton's naive foreign policy, not by President Putin.

And there was Astra Zeneca. In the first place it would be hard to describe this as a British Company: the great majority of its employees work in other countries, the great majority of its shareholders are foreign institutions, its Chief Executive is French and its Chairman Swedish. Then there is the madness of the Government intervening. I own shares in Astra Zeneca and I don't want the likes of John 'Vince' Cable telling me who I can sell them to. Supposing a Russian oligarch offered you an excellent price for your house, and then this whining ballroom dancer appears and says you can't sell to him because he may be horrid. B****r off!, is what I say.

Then there were the elections....