Page 123
T. Gracchi has just tagged me with this meme. Rules:
- Pick up the nearest book
- Turn to p.123
- Find the fifth sentence
- Post the next three sentences
- Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
Unfortunately, the nearest book to me at that moment happened to be this, and p.123 doesn’t actually have five sentences on it. But I keep 6-8 books on the go at any given moment, and went for the most physically proximate of those.
You don’t know how lucky you are - the next nearest was a bloodsoaked tech thriller about a anthropological pathologist..
Page 123.. (props it open with a First Capital Connect booklet).. fifth sentence… post the next three… here you go..
In 1922, the special spa trains to Scotland that had run during the War were discontinued, now that “it is cheaper to visit a French or Swiss spa than to make the journey to Scotland,” as a medical journal noted. “Let there be no mistake about it,” said one London society doctor, Continental spas were superior. “At the best of these establishments [on the Continent] treatment is carried to the nth degree.”
Given the calibre of my readership, I know I don’t have to bother giving you title and author.
Tag five people.. no point in tagging people who consistently ignore this kind of thing, and in all honesty my blog-reading of late has become confined to (1) people who are good enough to comment here (2) tech, science and money group blogs, most of them based Stateside. So I’m going to tag former bloggers - writers and thinkers from British blogging’s early golden age before the whole thing split down party lines. It’s highly unlikely any of these listed will see this, let alone reply in the comments, but stranger things. Naming the Dead, then:
- Tom Hamilton
- Scott Burgess
- Marcus (from Harry’s Place)
- “Junius”
- Blimpish
Now to lapse back into silence.
April 27, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Hey don’t lapse into silence! Thanks for answering the meme!
April 28, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Pity about Blimps and Scott, wasn’t it? Will they rise to the bait of the silliest “meme” I’ve yet seen. No coincidence, I suspect, that “meme” is spelled me, me.
April 28, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Now Worstall is reduced to maundering on about some mutt. Dillow has opted for the idiocy of rural life. Dr Crippen has adopted an unreadably small font. Megan McArdle has somehow managed to replace her excellent commenters by a dreary bunch of humourless muppets. The cheerful conversation of Blognor Regis’s comments section has perished. Woe, woe and thrice woe. I blame that Gordon Brown.
April 29, 2008 at 7:28 am
Well, Mr. Regis has been legitimately busy; Dillow, the less said the better; Tim Worstall’s old site “may damage your computer” which is at least witty; can’t speak for Megan but I was under the impression that Crippen was hanged many years ago.
For me, the rot set in a long time ago. Step one was the arrival of Crooked Timber. People forget what a good blogger Chris Bertram was before then. But there was no excuse, certainly not the usual blogging “tongue in cheek” get out, for his recent Cuba post any more than there was for Dillow’s foul Class War one. Step two came when the nascent Tory blogosphere threatened an interesting political and philosophical debate - and then came out en masse for Davis.
It’s often asked why British political blogging doesn’t reach the same heights as its American counterpart. I’m afraid that the answer is simple. We’re just not up to it.
April 29, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I gave up Crooked Timber not because I found their political views wrong-headed - though I usually did - but because so much of it was ill-written. It reminded me of an old friend’s advice to his bairns: “You can study the sciences and meet the triumphs of the human intellect; or the humanities, and meet the triumphs of human intuition. Or you could study Social Science.”