Nothing doing

The New Year starts not with a bang, but with a whimper.

I got up this morning with a headache. Perhaps this is a symptom of caffeine withdrawal. Perhaps it was leaving the heater on all night and dehydrating myself. What it wasn't was from booze - haven't touched a drop since half a bottle of champagne as the fireworks went off at New Year.

On the positive side, I did read the rest of The Man Who Saved Britain, a book I picked up in the Page One bookshop in Taipei 101. I'd thought it was going to be a commentary on James Bond, but it was something much more sophisticated than that; it charted the decline of Great Britain in the post-war period, pointing out the many ways that Fleming's creation acted to accentuate or mitigate this.

For a time (mainly when I had stopped being a small child, and actually watched Bond films again) I realised that most of them were pretty bad. The Man Who Saved Britain reinforces this, pointing out the many idiocies in the productions and the well-known demented appetites of Bond (seventy cigarettes a day, anybody?) along with the Colonel-Blimpish attitudes of Fleming, reflected through his protagonist. These things are quite amusing and ridiculous. What is in some ways quite depressing is the mirror raised up to Britain itself, pointing out all the stupidity and evil that the nation inflicted on its inhabitants and on the rest of the world whilst its Empire held sway. It's not often that you have to examine the recent history of England, but on consideration, the British do appear to have done little to be proud of, but at the same time kept a nonsensical feeling of pride about their achievements. I already knew from reading Len Deighton's non-fiction that the idea of Britain as an industrial power was largely a myth from much earlier than anyone would like to countenance, but Winder really makes it clear that Britain was no more than a tin-pot republic (but with a monarchy); if we'd been somewhere in South America we'd have laughed at ourselves, but instead we overlook our failings on a massive scale.

So that was cheering. On the other hand, I had an omelette for lunch that was pretty good, although I'm not sure if that contributes to me becoming incredibly fit and strong. We shall see. Perhaps the power of the egg will guide me to victory.

Other less exciting things: took Ubuntu 9.10 off my netbook because the launcher is just far too damn slow, and installed 9.04 instead. Now my webcam works again, and the launcher is much snappier. Which seems to be a common issue for those of us with MSi Winds. For the rest of you, that's probably just very dull and geeky. I also found a plug-in for Lightroom to incorporate GPS data into all of my photographs, which I'm excited about but I expect most people won't be.