I may well be very fortunate with cold/snow over the coming week. The snowfalls from the easterly look like kicking in just after I get back to the North East, so hopefully no disruption to the train journey. And then the upcoming northerly looks like the sort of spell where it would definitely be better to be in Tyneside than in Norwich, as the warmer air will be further south. Could get a hefty spell of snow cover from this.

It is uncertain how long this cold air will hang around for. Until around 27th/28th December would be most ideal as it would mean a white Christmas, and after a 10-day cold snowy spell I would most likely not be averse to a pattern change to warmer weather- especially if temporary, like the one near the end of December 1981.

An interesting article on the death of the Christmas party:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8409155.stm

Interesting because I've had a few Christmas dinners already! But the article makes a point that it cannot easily explain- and I can:
[quote]He believes it's happened because the media suggests it is inappropriate for companies to throw parties, using terms like "squander".

"There's a perception that spending on events like Christmas parties is somehow wasteful. The point I try to make to people is there's no such thing as good or bad spend, there's just spend in the economy from one part to another. I find this distinction bizarre," he says. [/quote]

The distinction is quite simple actually. If it's pleasurable, it's deemed non-essential. If it's work-related, or a health and safety issue it's deemed essential. This is becuase of a perception that we all "need" to work and be healthy and safe in order to fund ourselves and make a living, but we don't "need" to enjoy ourselves. The fundamental flaw in this is that the whole point of making lots of money is so that we have a larger "pot" to tap into in order to raise overall quality of living. So if it's essential to have lots of money in order to fund this, why is it non-essential to enjoy ourselves even though the latter contributes even more directly to well-being than having lots of money does?

I'm afraid the above is a significant factor in why we are having so-called "nanny state"-ism. If a minority abuse a work-related activity in a way that presents a risk to health and safety or money, since work is deemed essential, people look at the issue objectively and look for ways of addressing this abuse that do not curb this essential activity too much for it to be justified. But if the activity is pleasurable, it is deemed non-essential and thus curbing it altogether is considered justified even for the sake of negligible risk reduction. Arguments like "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" and "the minority have to spoil it for the majority" can then be trotted out whenever anyone complains.

This is my biggest area of contention with the philosophy of free market capitalism- it's not the market freedom in itself, it's the tendency to measure attainment purely in financial terms and ignore social factors and we end up free [i]financially[/i], but not [i]socially[/i]. Somehow, we need to engineer some kind of "social capitalist" system that measures well-being in terms of the broad spectrum of socio-economic factors that contribute to it, rather than just money and health & safety.