Went for my usual walk round Battersea Park at lunch, as I have every day this week. The Park has unsurprisingly, been busy so far this week – full of people out enjoying the sun. Today, despite the generally OK weather (sunny patches through cloud, slightly cooler than the last couple of days), it was empty. Not just slightly less busy – empty. The only people I passed were a mother and child, a couple of people walking their dogs, and another couple of people from the Dog’s Home walking their packs of dogs. (One of the dogs from the home had no hind legs, and was instead strapped into a contraption that gave it rear wheels instead, allowing it to pull itself along by its front legs, like some living version of those old children’s toys. I managed not to laugh out loud, but only just.)

But aside from that, the place was deserted – there wasn’t even the usual collection of joggers. What does everyone else know that I don’t?

I thought it was important to let you know that I want to help someone else to live after my death by donating my organs.

Every year hundreds of people die while waiting for a transplant. If I can, I would like to help.

I have therefore added my name to the NHS Organ Donor Register which is a list of people willing to become donors should the situation ever arise.

I registered my wishes via the UK Transplant website. You can find out more about organ donation on their site.

http://www.uktransplant.org.uk

Thanks to thepaintedone for pointing this one out. I’ve been meaning to register for this for years, and never gotten around to it. Never occured to me to check if I could do it on-line. So now I have, and I encourage you to do that same, and paste the message above into your own journal to encourage others.

Edited to add: And, of course, let your next of kin know you’ve done it, as well…

I bought a book called Shopped the other week, about the rise of ths supermarket, and the effect it has had on British food culture, and British shopping life. I’m only fifty pages in, and already I’m swearing off shopping at places like Sainsbury’s and Asda ever again, although my Mum will be pleased to hear that Marks and Sparks gets off lightly (which also makes me feel rather better about my shopping habits).

Anyway, I just wanted to commend it to your attention.

I would like to draw your attention to this and this. The second one, I admit, is less credible, since it’s just an LJ post, but I think that true or not, the real horror is that I have no trouble believing it of the US authorities. One might argue that the second guy did commit a crime, and therefore he really can’t complain too much, but y’know, it’s worth comparing his experience with that of someone like Erwin James an inmate of the British prison system, who recieved a life sentence for murder, if memory serves. It’s not the fact that the guy has to do time that bothers me – it’s that he did it in a system that seems designed to grind people down, rather than rehabilitate…

I would hope that none of the Americans on my friends list are planning on voting for Bush in November, but what bothers me most, I suppose, is that thought that I don’t seriously expect things to get better under Kerry, I just expect them to stop getting worse. That these experiences will keep happening to people who don’t deserve them, but at least there won’t be new legislation passed allowing worse. And I wonder – is this resigned acceptance to the idea that the status quo is the best we can hope for an inevitable consequence of growing older, or is it just me getting even more fucking cynical?

Well, I knew that getting my new tattoo was going to hurt more than my last one – this one is on my chest, the last was on my arm. Even knowing that, though, I wasn’t prepared for quite how much more it was going to hurt, or the interesting varying sensations of pain in different places, which was probably worse than the intensity – just as I’d got used to one sort of pain, we’d move one to stabbing a whole new bit of me repeatedly with needles, and I was in a whole new place of ouch that I wasn’t quite steeling myself for.

Those of my friends with backpieces/work that goes across the spine – how did you manage it? Because right now, I’m revising my plans to get a backpiece done, since it turns out that I am a big girlyman.

Also, I feel really wierd with one side of my chest shaved.

But if you’re a Pixies fan, and have tickets for anything they’re at over the summer, you’re in for a treat. They utterly fucking rocked. If you’re a pixies fan, and don’t have ticktes, then you have my sympathy.

If neither option applies to you, then you’re just some kind of freak, obviously.

Wedding lovely. Seeing friends even better. Huge thanks to everyone I saw up there for the pleasure of your company, and in Paul’s case, also the use of the spare bedroom. Massive apologies to the enormous number of people I completely failed to catch up with. I’m going to try and come back up for a longer break in October, so I’ll make sure to see you then.

And now, the sleeping.

I am both bored at work, and bored of that “nice adjectives to go with you name” thing.

A	Antipyretic
L	Loricate
A	Apodictic
S	Saponaceous
D	Dentigerous
A	Ambisinister
I	Inquorate
R	Remontant

[Update notice Black Ink has new content.]

A good weekend, although I’m in some pain now. Ran the first installment of the game, and I think it went well. Shunted some material out of it, which is probably just as well – I knew I wanted a long session for the first one, but it would have been of murderous length if I’d kept it all in. There’s time for strange machines and peculiar symbolism later on. Out of curiosty, do any of the roleplayers on my friends list have any means they use to estimate the length of time that a given amount of material will run?

And then, clubbing, for which I am paying today. Ow. Still a little confused as to why my wrists ache worse than my shoulders, but there we go…

In other news, I’m in Edinburgh for the bank holiday weekend, and will be available for, y’know, social engagements. I’m busy Monday night, and I’m not likely to be free til late on Friday or Saturday, as I’ve got family wedding type things to do, but if people are likely to be out late (11pm+ at a guess) then I’m happy to join the fun at that point, and I’ve all day Sunday, and Monday daytime free if anyone would care to clog my hours up…

So, burge came up with this last night:

Let’s call it the “Little things in life” meme.

List five little things which make you happy/satisfied/give you pleasure. Don’t go for the obvious ones like second-hand bookshops, warm baths, icecream, wanking, seeing a band live or whatever. Odd little things, which give you a little frisson and make things better, even if just for a moment.

And I think it’s ace. And that you should all do it. So get on with it.

My list:

1) The tube map.
2) Walking by the Thames.
3) The random shuffle function on my iPod.
4) Blue LEDs.
5) Music with a fiddle in it.