Finally, the days of sitting at a computer, copying and pasting data are over! I've started to ring round the hospitals, looking for specific contacts; which means that I actually talk to people instead of myself!

I had a band concert tonight, in fact we're off to Birmingham to play in the finals of the Festival of Youth at the symphony hall tomorrow; this was a bit of a warm up gig. We do this every year, and it's really one for the very young ones and their parents. This means that we all sit through an hour of kiddies playing Acapulco-bloody-bay until we come on and run through tomorrow's routine.

I am looking forward to tomorrow, it's always nice to get out into Birmingham and away from Market Drayton for a day! Here's a picture of my Tuba in the cupboard, I would have taken one at the concert; but I'd have had to ask the permission of every parent in the place, there were too many youngsters for that to happen! I'll try and find something good tomorrow, no promises though...

On the way home, we fell in behind a small white van on a roundabout (the size down from a Transit) and all was fine, until I looked into it's back window and saw a man there! He was just lying there, eyes open but not moving; staring straight at us looking blank, his face framed by the van's rear window. It was so disturbing, we really thought it was a body! I wanted to get a picture of him, but we were off the roundabout in a flash.

Otherwise, it looks like Gordon Brown has decided to scrap Tony Blair's plan of super-casinos.
I'm actually very happy about this, although the jobs won't be created and the planned area will not get re-developed, I don't think that we should be promoting gambling as a nation; this project was backed by the government! It always seemed strange to me that a government who never hesitates to bang on about 'political correctness' and 'moral justice' should advocate one of the great destroyers of lives, gambling! I see this 're-think' (i.e. binning) as a wrong that has been righted.

Of course now everyone thinks that the government is a shambles and that they don't know what to think; the truth is that we no longer have the same government. The party name has remained, everything else has changed; Brown's religious background would have probably put him against gambling, and he has done what he thinks is right now he is in power! What's so wrong about that?