prayer inspired by gordon brown

god give me the strength to do what i feel is my mission to do,
and god give me the wisdom to realise when i'm not up to it,
and should leave.

dissertation

subject: the syrian elites
target: 10,000 words
status: 4,325 words (with bibliography and footnotes and title page, but who cares) and 10 pictures
deadline: 15 september (but really next week because i have other things to do!)

who has time for a blog?

duffy, warwick avenue

my tube station in london.

topical kitchen utensils

celebrating the knife culture prevalent nowadays in most kitchens.

my boyfriend is still a programming god

my boyfriend is a programming god!

tax for tits

calling on all blessed women with a bust size my side of DD (DD? tiny!). who also shop in m&s. said m&s is now charging more for our size bras. around 2 quid per item. not yet per breast. i say - boycott them! or join the busts 4 justice group on facebook. the feeble argument is that more material = more cost = higher retail price. but when was a clothes size 20 more expensive than my size 12? although you can lose weight, but we know that big jugs are passed down to us by our mothers. so we are supposed to swallow nothing less than a tit tax. is that how m&s want to beat the credit crunch? or their abysmal performance?

how much DDR is in britain?

don't you just love the 'have your say' section in online papers. i read them regularly and find that i enjoy vox populi more than the journalistic article they refer to. not because they speak the truth, but because they are so radical. radical also in the horrendous to imaginative spelling of words. (it is all true what they say about teaching english in this country. not enough pride in their mother tongue to even teach or learn it properly.)
but i digress. one of the best for people's comments is the times online. someone there compared britain to the DDR. aka east germany. i grew up in east germany, and i must say that in recent months, i thought an uncanny need to compare britain to my socialist fatherland. it's true, there are striking similarities: what did we call the large medical centres that hosted all kinds of general and specialist practitioners? poliklinik! we had the abv, a neighbourhood 'community' police officer (usually a good-natured, middle aged, bald man with a bit of a gut, sometimes a nasty stasi-spy) that kept an eye on people. just like those cctv cameras in london. east germany, too, had an overblown public sector, and as an outlet for frustrations with the authorities, big and small, you could write an 'eingabe'. see the petitions page on the british government website. there was positive discrimination, only children of the working classes were favoured for public sector jobs and student grants, not ethnic minorities. and don't get me started on 42 days... micromanagement, too,was rampant in my old DDR, another thing that nu labour shamelessly copy.
but is britain the better east germany? well, would you want it to be?