what a productive day even if i cant feel my toes cos my flat is so cold.

got hair cut and euros purchased and borrowed guides to lisbon - i am almost ready to go. Altered my paper as well in the light of a new and interesting article ive just read. looking forward to it nad portuguese seems like a curiously different language - obligarto, brilliant!

also finished the next draft of chapter 3 of the book: there will be 6 chapters plus an intro and conclusion and my plan is to get the 6 written (3 down so far) then add new material in the summer and edit the 6 before writing the conclusion then the introduction in august/september ready for submission in october..well that's the plan..

i typed up the minutes of our house meeting , wrote a stiff letter to an idiot who is annoying people here , and updated our members pack (no NOT those sort of members..) so its more friendly (I think)

oh and I switched my phone from payasyougo to contract w/o losing the number

and i feel quietly relaxed and unstressed ready for a day back at the funny farm tomorrow - meetings meetings and more meetings, but hey my barnet looks trim once more and its a lot warmer in lisbon than it is hereD

im getting increasingly annoyed at the reporting of fidel castro's 'retirement' from politics. nicky cambell on R5 this morning was scathing about cuba's human rights record and anti-revolutioanries are queueing up to slag off the regime. castro's revolution kicked out a deeply unpleasant right wing pro american and corrupt governemnt in the 50s. the revolution has killed many and locked up many and human rights IS an issue in cuba for sure..but castro has brought many benefits to his island in terms of health care and education and has had to do all this in spite of intense antagonism from america. and lets just pause a moment and consider the good old US of A.

how many times are we prepared to let america back unpleasant regimes (the contras, saddam first time around, the mujahadin against the soviets and many more), for how much longer are we happy for them to torture people in guantanamo bay, or to invade places they dont like (from greneda to iraq) or to ignore international agreements (kyoto) and to export their capitalist 'revolution' to the rest of the world (macdonalds)? lets face it the USA is not very democractic (remember florida folks?), it is an extremely unpleasant culture where schoolchildren murder each other in gun battles, it is home to some extremely unpleasant religious bigots who think that their beliefs (their 'faith') allows them to kill surgeons who perform legal abortions, it is run by obscenely rich political families and it thinks it has the right to tell everyone else how to live. after 9/11 it also believes it is the only country in the world to suffer from terrorism - a terrorism that it did so much to create. dont forget either that america all but wiped out its indiginous peoples for financial gain - it is capitalism in national form while cuba is communism in national form. give castro a break, he's not perfect (far from it) but neither are the chinese, and america (and us) are quite prepared to do business with them and let them host the olympics. hypocrites