Back in Blighty

4 March

We've been back in Blighty since Friday evening. I still haven't quite got my body clock back in sync. I got up at 5.30 this morning and sorted out a WiFi problem on our home network. Well actually I didn't sort it, I merely identified the problem. I have to solve it some other time. But that is a tale too boring to relate here.

When I left London on Friday 13th Feb, there was still snow in the back garden. By the time I reached Banngkok the following morning, it was 30C, and humid I only stayed for an hour before continuing to Taipei. Taiwan was warm too, mid twenties, but comfortable. Our trip to Ali Mountain was the warmest day and temperatures did make it up into the thirties again there. I'll cover the Ali Mountain trip some other time.

5March

How strange it is to come back to an office after just two weeks away. Several hundred emails were waiting in my inbox of course, and there was a back log of work to clear. I am sitting here awestruck by the pointlessness of coming to an office to produce pages of figures that surely no one will ever read.

I had a bit of a stampy in the weekly meeting this afternoon. Once again I ended up last to speak, and by the time my turn came half the attenders were gone, and I had only a few minutes anyway. I'm going to start refusing to go to the damn meetings if they don't change the format.

There was an interesting programme on BBC two this week. It was an investigation into why people are embarrassed by nudity. I was of course drawn to it simply because it promised nudity. It was however a well conducted investigation by the Horizon programme. It seems that Darwinism is not able to provide easy answers to a lot of questions concerning human nudity. For instance, why are we without fur? Nearly all mammals have fur. It protects the skin and insulates them. One theory is that our large brains require superior cooling, which is why we sweat much more than other mammals, and sweating doesn't work well with fur, so we lost it. This could be linked to why we stood upright.

But all that doesn't explain why we feel shame at nakedness. There's another theory that human children require an enormous amount of care for a great deal of time. It is therefore in the interests of both parents that they remain together to share the burden of bringing children up. Failure to do so may result in a decreased chance of the children surviving to adulthood and passing on the genetic payload you see. That would be why we tend to mate for life, or at least long periods. If this is the case, it sort of makes sense that some things that could be perceived as sexual, like flirting, or dancing naked in front of someone, might be embarrassing or shameful due to some genetic predisposition.

See, told you it was interesting - wake up!

They are talking about quantitative easing today. The interest rate has dropped to almost nothing, and it doesn't appear to be encouraging people to spend. Odd isn't it that they are doing things to encourage people to spend and make it less profitable to save. I thought spending caused the debt that created this problem in the first place.

I'm tired. I'm going to bed.