Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

Reasons not to enter the diplomatic service, number 23: When discovering where someone lives, one responds: "Oh, the ones that flood?"

But I almost compensated for it by loading her two films, which she couldn't do. I have also finally learnt to open the spirals the films are loaded onto. And on the third film, remembered in time to put it back together properly.

It's very odd working in the dark: my eyes stay open in the hope of light, except when I have to think about spatial things, when I shut them, which I do when there is light. Due to a lack of tutor time (she was tending to a paperjam in light-tight printer) we developed the films largely on our own, guided mostly by the instructions on the bottles and my memory.

Oddly enough, it worked (I even remember the Fairy at the end). It wasn't helped by asking how much concentrated developer we needed, and being told it's one in nine, when the labelled reads 1+9. Fortunately we made that mistake with the fixer in our first development, so I check this time round.

Although I do wonder about people who know full well that I am me, I did a science degree, and I can be fairly competent at most things, and yet persist in asking, when I volunteer to make up the necessary solutions, including getting them to the right temperature, and get a string of comments such as "are you sure?" and "will you be alright with that?"

Come on, there's lack of confidence, and there's incompetence; these are not the same.

Strangely the two of us developing films were the only people who had done the homework, which now means the homework has been extended for week. People complained they had 72 shots to get through, but they also had two weeks to do it in. So it's not at a great rate than before. One of the films was even easier to get through than normal, as we had to take two images of each item of interest. After all what is the point of paying to do a course, and then not bothering to do an integral part of it?

And as I've just been far too distracted by the photography I borrowed the picture from [click the picture for the source], I'd better give up now.

I've just heard on a television programme on in the background, that confidentially rules mean that a patient's HIV status is not recorded on their medical notes. Which means doctors only know if a patient has been pre-diagnosed with HIV or AIDS if the patient tells them. I find this shockingly incomprehensible. How can the people responsible for treating a patient's health not be allowed to know about the health, or factors capable of radically influencing the health of a patient?

I knew South Africa's government has an odd attitude to HIV and AIDS (they claimed for a long time that HIV and AIDS were unrelated), but I hadn't realised just how ridiculously damaging this was on a local level.

So I'm going to stop now to watch this programme.

Anyhoo,