Funny. I’ve just been in hospital for the day. Seems it’s a false alarm, or at least not what I thought it was. This is slightly annoying on one trivial level, because I’ve spent the last month spending like there’s no tomorrow on the warped basis that there may be no tomorrow. I’ll now have to get used to £10 bottles of wine again. What a difference a zero can make. Add a few more zeros and you could write a good film script about someone that spent borrowed money on a similar basis and then had to make it all back again – fast.

On a more serious note I now agree with someone who said that it should be compulsory for all adults to spend 24-hours in a public hospital, especially A&E. It gives you a perspective that’s rarely available elsewhere. You could see this today. People came into the ward in the morning and by the afternoon their lives had totally changed. What they thought they were – and were going to be – had totally changed in the space of a few hours. I don’t think that anyone could take selling something like tinned soup seriously after something like that. You’d surely have to do something more meaningful.

I also liked the sense of equality. Also the fact that the exposure of human flesh to others somehow bared your soul as well. There was a strange connectedness with strangers. A conviviality that’s somehow often lacking elsewhere. Maybe we all need to get semi-naked more often.

One thing I did manage to do during my blissful, but occasionally tense, six hours in distraction-free limbo-land was finish off Future Babble. This is really a rather good book, especially if you are involved with any kind of long-term forecasting or planning. I especially liked this quote from Alistair Cooke, from the 1970s I’d guess: “In the best of times our days are numbered anyway… and so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world’s crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place. The opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.” Amen to that.

A runaway milk tanker may hit me tomorrow, but, if not, things should vaguely start to getting back to normal. I’m also fired up about writing something of real substance for a change. I doubt that this will be the blog, although given enough time you never know. It could be What’s Next, but I feel a new book is coming on. The result, of course, be junk, but I’m getting a feeling about something that’s widely felt but rarely said.