Fatigue, Disasters and Religion

The rest of the week was busy and I ended up working late on Thursday and Friday. I shall be glad next week when Barry is due back from his leave.

Most of the evenings were spent following the news in Louisiana or commenting on blogs. Charlie Foxtrot had a post that evoked a sharp reply from me for equating ‘the USA’ with ‘the entire world.’ However as I saw the news developing, I actually rewrote the comment to delete the slap, not wanting to be callous when America was obviously dealing with a major tragedy.

However, Mark Maness in his LeftFieldPerspectives post really got my goat and earned himself a rather uncharitable reply. I really ought to do a post on the subject of the widening cultural gap between the US and Europe as I think that is the root of many misunderstandings that develop between us. We need to stop thinking of Americans as just Brits with a strange accent and realise that they have quite a different mindset to the British.

Last night though, there was limited blogging as I was pretty exhausted from the long week. We were supposed to be hosting a poker game, but only a few people were expected and John M called off during the day, so I postponed it to later in the month with a certain amount of relief! In the end we ate take-out pizza and watched this week’s episode of Lost before getting an early night.

Today Brett is at a Chorus meeting all afternoon. We had lunch down in Wimbledon and then I browsed the shops. I ended up in Waterstones and picked up three books; A History of God by Karen Armstrong, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus by Geza Vermes and The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Not my usual fare and, to be honest, fairly random selections on the basis of their book-jacket info and the fact that I know of Dawkins, all stimulated though by recent blog commenting: I became involved in a little to-and-fro on the comments section of this post and thoroughly enjoyed the mental stimulation of researching my replies, so with this new-found academic vigour I figured I’d read up a little on the subject instead of just Googling relentlessly to find my answers.

So that’s what I’m off to do now; open a non-fiction book for the first time in quite a while! Wish me luck.