Fickle Finger Finally Fixed: On Friday, I got my finger repaired. I was beginning to worry, because it was approaching a week and when I called the scheduling clerk at the Hospital on Thursday, I was told that it would probably be another week before there was room in the surgery queue. I could almost feel my finger starting to knit together in the wrong way, so this seemed like bad news. But he called back later in the day to tell me to come in the next morning. I got there and at 7:00 they announced to a room of waiting people that the wait to be treated could be as long as twelve hours. So getting into surgery by 11:00 and out of the hospital by 12:30 seemed like a victory.

The whole thing could have been so much worse. I really cannot complain at all. And it was a good way to get a look at the operation of the National Health Service. The care was a bit slow in coming, but it was ultimately good. It was pleasant to avoid having to spend time on insurance and how you are going to pay when all you want is treatment. (We are not covered by NHS, which I think is due to the type of visa we have, but no one has even mentioned money to me yet. I assume that they will eventually catch up with me.) And things must be far less litigious here, since I was largely spared signing my life away and getting pages of written warnings and instructions. The delay in getting surgery was only annoying for me, but you could see how this could be a real problem for someone who needs to go to work every day. These delays is a drawback to NHS, which otherwise seems to work pretty well

Another Political Update: On Wednesday, PM Cameron succeeded in getting the authorization to begin bombing Syria. If you are really interested in this story, the basics are covered very well in the New York Times and similar papers. So I thought I’d limit my comments to some side things that might not have been reported:

• Public support for the bombing had been dropping over the prio week, down 11% to a pretty even split, which may have pushed up the timing of the vote.
• Since Corbyn lost control of his Labour Party and had to allow his members to vote their conscience, there was no question that the motion would succeed and the big issue was how many would desert him. The final answer was 66. More than some predicted and less than a few other had predicted, but it might have been worse fo rhim.
• The day before the debate and vote, Cameron suggested that those who opposed the bombing were “terrorist sympathizers”. This was probably a political move aimed at reminding the voters that Corbyn had supported Sinn Fein and other radical groups in the past. It was a dumb move that was universally decried, even by his supporters. He effectively ceded the moral high ground by making the issue political and was faced with endless demands that he apologize or withdraw his remarks during the more than ten hours of debate.
• The debate went on for so long, even with the result preordained, that the Speaker had to limit the backbenchers to 3 minutes each. There were a number of good speeches on both sides. Cameron was OK. Corbyn seemed disjointed to me, but maybe that is just his speaking style.
• Each side had good points to make, which is why public opinion was so split. The conservative argued that we are already bombing ISIS in Iraq anyway, the bombing is legal, we are supporting our ally, France, who asked for our aid, we should not let others do our work for us and if there is a chance that the bombing might protect British citizens, it must be done. Those opposed argued that, even if all that was true, there is no plan beyond simply dropping some bombs (Cameron doesn’t seem to have any coherent plan as yet), there is no reason to think that a few UK bombs will really make any difference and they might kill more innocents, shouldn’t we first be working with our allies to come up with something comprehensive and what is the big rush?
• So the real drama was really whether the Labour party was splitting apart. And this dramatic theme came to a head at the end of the evening when the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, Hilary Bend, gave one of the final speeches, a really wonderful one, which was the precise opposite of everything Corby had said and which got a rare ovation from both sides. After that, the actual vote was an anticlimax. (Later in the week, Corby got a little good news when Labour won a by-election. It was traditional Labour seat with a great local candidate, so winning wasn’t that big a deal, but Corbyn sensibly treated it as a personal and party triumph.)

San Bernardino: While the debate and vote was going on in Parliament, the BBC would cut in once in a while with an update from the latest mass shooting, this time in San Bernardino. It was an odd counterpoint to the civilized and actually very thoughtful debate that was going on. The British, quite understandably don’t know quite what to make of all of the US gun violence. Here, the big concern is knife attacks, which have killed a relatively small number of poor and young people. (It is reminiscent of “West Side Story”, whose violence seems almost quaint today.) It seems like these shootings are happening with increasing frequency in America. I have a theory that the fear-mongering in the Republican primary is stirring up and giving the crazy and hateful a feeling of empowerment and justification. In the end, this one had elements of terrorism, although it sounds like it might be more complicated than that, so maybe the trigger was the Paris attack rather than my theory (or maybe a toxic combination of the two).

Other thoughts: I’ve been watching a British police drama called “Whitechapel”. It seems to involve mostly serial killers and is very dark and intense. One of the cool things about it is that is filmed right in our neighborhood, so there is an occasional scene each episode occuring somewhere we have been. I think it has been shown in the US on the BBC cable network. I love it and have been viewing past episodes, but it is too violent for Judie.

I never understood ugly Christmas sweater parties until the past week or two. There are an endless number of ridiculous Christmas sweaters for sale everywhere you look. Clearly, someone is buying these things.

We heard a wonderful sermon at the New Unity Unitarian Church on Sunday (the Minister prefers to call them messages and they are perhaps shorter than a typical sermon) on the subject of Hanukkah and terrorism and purity vs. love. It is supposed to be posted on the church website at some point. If so, I may provide a link at some point.

The took our curtains away for re-lining and for some reason they weren’t returned for weeks. It hardly mattered because the sun virtually never breaks through the clouds. It isn’t particularly cold or wet (unlike Scotland). It is just relentlessly gray.

We are preparing for the family visit. James is the first to arrive–next Sunday morning.