dem panic

A knocking on the door at 6:15 Tuesday morning got me out of bed to find two burly men in black outside. They looked like bouncers but, being on the wrong side of the door, could only have been bailiffs. They asked if I was Mr. Mudrovic (the previous tenant), and when I said he'd gone back to South Africa they apologized for bothering me and returned to their car. It all seemed too easy. How did they know I was telling the truth? At that time of the morning I don't know who I am. It's lucky that I didn't just say yes.

It seemed in retrospect like a credit crunch phenomenon - this big dramatic thing that, finally, doesn't seem to have any real impact on you. Certainly the previous tenants seem to have escaped the effects of the crunch, at least temporarily. I'm wondering (judging by the amount of mail we get for them) whether they might not actually have caused it.

This happened just before the work 'awayday' to (near) Stratford-on-Avon. Taxpayers will be pleased to hear that there was no suckling pig, just a lump of chicken plunked down on a pile of vegetables, underneath which was potato so thin it was like a section sliced off to be examined under a microscope. If it even was potato. The next day's lunch was preceded by a presentation on organ transplantation. A lengthy discussion on brain stem death (BSD). A picture of a 'split liver'. So nobody was very hungry.

Meanwhile the flu pandemic has moved up a level, to five. There don't seem to be enough levels for this thing. Six is the full-blown thing itself; seven is 'post-pandemic'. Surely, if only for the media's sake, a couple more notches would have made things more interesting. At least, from my privileged position within the NHS I can inform you that an official set of guidelines on when to panic and how to do it properly is about to be issued, plus there's a new series of TV ads in which Gok Wan tells you how to look good while panicking.

So there's no need to panic.