A million things.
You may have seen the item posted last tuesday. One should never post drunk. One should also check that thing done early in the morning with a slight hangover (that is deleting said item) worked. Oops. Is not that I don't stand by some of the things I said. But it wasn't measured. And it was very reactionary. Oh well. If you didn't see it - good.
Anyway, first things first - tuesday was an rather extra-ordinary day. A. and I had to go and visit the midwife in the afternoon. So I escaped from work and we walked up to the clinic in the sunshine - when we got there the midwife couldn't find the heartbeat and decided we should go for a scan. Not overly concerned (Sproglet had been kicking on the way to the clinic) we leapt in a taxi and up to the hospital.
In the waiting room the radio was on. Than announcer says: "Two planes have hit the World Trade Center" and on comes Richard Marx. That can't possibly be true I thought - unsure of what I was listening to I left it at that.
In the scan - all was well - and I discovered that we are having a Boy. Wow. I will never get over scans - seeing sproglet fidgeting about in there. Mental. Anyway sproglet now has a name: "Milo Macfarlane Williamson". Cool uh?
As you can imagine the rest of the day was spent in a mixture of joy and stunned shock. The only source of info in the office was a radio tuned for some reason to some talk sports program. Talk sports presenters are not the people to do this kind of reporting - they where getting very over excited. At one point one of them actually said to the other "You are suffering the stress of reporting a story of this magnitude to the nation". It was very surreal - if the show had been presented as a satire there would have been a lot of complaints.
Its very hard to relate to the events of tuesday. I (like everyone else) have seen millions of skyscrapers explode and planes crash - films are full of this kind of thing. New York has been the seen of thousands of disasters - from crashing asteroids to giant dragons (Godzilla). As the week has gone on though the human stories have come to the fore - at this level of scale its easier to be touched. A number of times watching CNN (which A. has watched for nearly a solid week) I have found tears in my eyes unexpectedly.
On one level its hard to find sympathy for the whole world being effected like this :- thousands of people die in conflicts every day - killed for other peoples causes or victims of stupid unthinking hatred. Yet of course it doesn't happen to us: safe in our rich western world. With our areoplanes and office blocks and television. That it should come to this before we turn round and say: "How can this happen?".
Its intriguing to watch Bush react - he is a president I didn't want and his policies on science and IT are very wrong in my opinion. And yet I find my self recluctantly admiring him - listening to him reasuring preparing for what sounds like a measured and sensible response. Of course there will be the a direct attack on Afganistan - how could there be anything less? I don't condone it but I find it hard to see how an act like this could not be followed by direct action to show it will not be tolerated. Bush sounds though like he means more - a cleaning up and a tightening of world security. I wonder if it can be done and if Bush is capable of doing it. With the prevelant world mood - considerably more stability is probably an acheivable goal. So of course is an horrific world war. Time will only tell.
One of the things will happen will be a dramatic erosion of our civil liberties - the electronic spying programs (Carnivore etc.) will all now be accepted calmly. Again only time will tell if this is a price worth paying.
Of course life doesn't really stop and at work the release is nearly ready. This release has been a little mundane (although very important) - the next has a lot more meat to it so should be more fun.
There are lots more things but I think that is all for now. I can feel my creative juices rising strongly again - not sure whether its the impending move (this flat is not good for creative work - I have done very little here), fatherhood or the changing world. No matter which - watch this space. Things are
afoot.
We begin to live.....
in interesting times.