Thu, 23 Jun 2005 17:43:53

| Thursday 23rd June 2005 17:43MDT | → |

Just come back from RHS Wisley gardens. We were last there in winter when everything was dead. This time there are many signs of life, though I suspect there aren’t quite as many flowers as there could have been - mainly because summer has come late this year. However, bf enjoyed it and it was poptasticly hot. I concentrated so much on putting sun cream on my face and neck that I forgot my arms and now they’re toasted. Oh well.

Yesterday we had a power cut at around 6pm. According to EDF Energy’s helpline, it was a bizarrely selective outage that affected only certain parts of Guildford and surrounded areas. We were just about the start cooking some chicken breasts for dinner when everything went phut. Somewhat annoying as the chicken container had just been opened and I have an electric cooker. In the end, Daryl was unaffected and hadn’t eaten so we decamped to his house and bf cooked a flavoursome chicken meal for us all.

BTW It turned out the power was only off for two hours, so fortunately nothing frozen was lost. I’ll be interested to see what the cause was (surge in the use of fans and airconditioning?).

I can well appreciate Darren Barefoot’s comment about supposedly independent media just being a euphemism for ‘left wing’. In fact, it’s usually more far left than just left - exhibit A being Indymedia which is only ‘indy’ in the sense that it’s apart from mainstream commercial media. Otherwise it’s a variation on Newton’s third law applied to journalism - an equal and opposite reaction to the bias of the right-wing media we know and love. In fact, in Indymedia’s case, it doesn’t even qualify as journalism and covering the supposedly ‘uncovered stories’, rather than being a back-slapping exercise for the latest ‘bring down the capitalist state’ protest. I don’t see it effecting real change as it represents everything wrong with those on the left: long on rhetoric and short on solutions.