Grumpy morning thoughts

Not much blogging today. I'm going to hold tutorials with my research methods students, then go home to bed as I'm still feeling rotten. I shall eat poached eggs from my mum's hens and drink the champagne my dad gave me for going home to do some stats for him. There now isn't anything I don't know about the incidences of keratoanthoma in North Staffordshire…

I'm also a bit depressed about Northern Ireland. I'm a Republican in the Irish and wider senses, and supported armed resistance to the old undemocratic statelet, which operated as a South African style colonial entity. What the CIRA and RIRA are doing isn't collective self-defence or resistance, it's atavistic thuggery designed to attract respect from disaffected teenagers with limited horizons. Popping the occasional peeler doesn't bring about a united Ireland (though nor does the current political process, which seems indistinguishable from Britain's 19th-century India policy).

I finished Jim Crace's Pesthouse yesterday. It's very moving, and draws on lots of American cultural myths. It's also clearly an inspiration for Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Both, being literary authors having a holiday in dystopian future writing, have the skill to resist filling in the gaps: we don't know the reasons for social and political collapse, or the 'big picture' - all we get are the effects on two people struggling to survive.