Season of Illusions

No more snow overnight, but the bits that remained had frozen solid, including large lump of ice on my car windscreen that required some concentrated chipping away with the scraper to remove. Frostbite is such a bracing way to start a Monday morning I find.

A slow commute this morning, for no particular reason other than that there was a bit of snow at the side of the road. It took most of the journey for my windscreen washers to defrost sufficiently to clear the accumulated grime too. Work was frustrating, with the image server containing all of our process maps being rather poorly. I really needed to do a bit of last minute testing on something before we send out the new release, but it looks like we'll just need to bite the bullet and go for it, and hotfix it later if needs be. Grumph.

I'm sort of in two minds about this season of Being Human (or B&Q man as it is now known in this house). It has taken seven episodes to bring all of the disparate narrative threads together with the requisite level of sturm und drang (and no small amount of gore, particularly in the scene on the train - yuck). All very dramatic, but I miss the cosy domesticity of the first season which was simply about the high concept of a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire sharing a house together and just, well, being human. Bombs and massacres and unlikely relationships and weird conspiracies and historical flashbacks sort of distract from that central conceit. Ah well, final episode next week.

D-day for the homeopathic lobby today, with a damning parliamentary report recommending that all NHS funding be withdrawn and the MHRA stop licensing arrangements. Apparently there are four homeopathic 'hospitals' dealing with around 50,000 patients, with the London one having had £20m spent in 2005 on 'refurbishments'. I reckon that means each hospital deals with just fifty patients in a day - no wonder they can give them such leisurely consultations. Given that the raw materials are nothing more than a bag of sugar and some water (and possibly a stray molecule of arsenic), one can only assume that the four million quid a year was being spent on pot plants and nice chairs for the consulting rooms with the rest being trousered by the homeopaths themselves. Lovely jubbly.

The most positive thing in the report though, is the emphasis on evidence and the use of proper randomised controlled trials with meta-reviews of different studies. Hopefully this will be seen as setting the benchmark for all alternative therapies, so that we can identify the ones that actually work and stop wasting money on the ones that do not.

Who could possibly disagree with that?