Friday, August 14, 2009

Went to see the Walking With Dinosaurs live show at the Milenium dome at the weekend. Not for my own benefit, you understand – it was Ethan’s birthday present and as Lisa’s his Godmother…

It was basically robot dinosaurs running around an arena while an actor playing the part of a time travelling palaeontologist tried to enthuse the audience about footprints and fossil dung… But really good despite that. The dinosaurs were surprisingly well done – and were very nimble for remote controlled animatronics. We were a long way up, so didn’t get much of a feeling of scale, but Ethan enjoyed it.

The dome itself never ceases to disappoint – Ethan thought it could do with a bit of colour. I thought it could do with some transport links as we and 20,000 others tried to get on the only bus back to civilisation. We’d taken the boat on the way in, but it was chaos – an entire wedding party was left stranded on the quay. Having been told they had tickets booked, they arrived to find there was no room on any of the boats into the city. We eventually got home using a creative combination of bus, train and taxis…

Anyway – our 3rd wedding anniversary was this week – apparently the traditional way to mark this is with a gift of leather…. Though I’m not sure quite what’s intended by that.

We marked it with a meal in on the night, and we’re having a night out together on Saturday – which will be nice.

I’ve just heard today of the debate that’s sweeping America about the future of healthcare and how bad the NHS is. As far as I can see, free universal healthcare is what they call in the US, a no-brainer, but regardless of the rights and wrongs of the new plan, I’m frankly astounded by what passes for debate - how the kind of laughable inaccuracies I’ve heard today manage to replace proper argument in the US, I can’t imagine. Hearing the level and quality of argument over this issue, I really have to take my hat off to anyone who manages to remain thoughtful and level headed in that environment.

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