flu jabs & Easter sermons

The 'flu jab last November certainly worked - I've had one of its mutant variants five times since I was given it, far more indispositions than even I would normally expect in less than half a year, and it makes you wonder.  So far, and obviously,  these annoying infirmities have not been terminal (as influenza can be), but it would be interesting to see if there was any correlation between last year's 'flu jab and the above-average incidence of respiratory afflictions among, as far as my limited research suggests, those who had it, especially males above 60.  Not, of course, that the NCP, sorry, the NHS would be interested - they're too busy making funds meet    

                                          (wait for it, wait for it...)                         

                             their inflated salaries & jollies in the sunshine, if the drug companies don't cough up enough of the £££££££££s (which, to be fair, they usually do, which is why your prescriptions cost more than your car if you’re under 60.)

 

Well, I was due to give a talk to the Life Long Learning Conference in Preston yesterday, but had to pull out, having been laid low by either a)  mutant 5 of the 'flu jab, or b) a passing tsetse fly, to the extent that I retired to bed at 11pm on Tuesday and awoke at 05:15 on Thursday, damp and somewhat woolly of mind and trembly of limb, incapable even of tending my collection of prize radishes, let alone addressing a gang of senior citizens whose mental acuity could probably cut granite faster than a diamond chainsaw and who could probably finish Azed in less time than my measly 45 minutes or so and then move on to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem and demolish Euler's Conjecture before lunch (and you’re wasting your time, folks - (Sir) Andrew Wiles beat you to it by 14 years.)

[At this point, my dear wife marched in during one of those mercy interludes in Coronation Street and demanded to know how it was possible to link the foregoing preamble to the main thrust of this post, viz Easter sermons - she had read the note I always write to myself at the bottom of a post, then expunge:  "stop waffling and get to the point."  I and  J*hn M*rt*m*r would have got on like a house on fire.]

The point is, of course that (Sir) Andrew Wiles is English, and Englishness was the subject of an address by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, at the Sunday Times Literary Festival in Oxford on 4 April this year, and if you didn't read it in your Daily Telegraph you can catch up on it here.

And rattling good fun it is, too.

There was some very good stuff preached (praught?) at Easter this year - the year when capitalism imploded and your local neighbourhood bobby got so frightened of maiden aunts and elderly newspaper vendors that he simply had to beat them up so as to restore public order.

The Easter sermons are not yet on the diocesan web sites (press officers off to the Bahamas after the terrible stresses and strains of Holy Week?) so in the meantime you'll have to do with the Church Times.  No access to the archives unless your wallet is deep, but here's today's front page:

front page of Church Times 17 April 2009

And now I shall return to my cot and my flujab-induced hallucinatory dreams.