Tuesday 16 August 2011

A little lack of perspective...

Talking to a friend of mine who had just got back from the States. She'd been over there to visit someone on Death Row who was due to be executed (she's a member of a group or charity that does this sort of thing). By the time she got there, after years on Death Row, his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment and while being very relieved about this he also felt short changed - he missed the life on Death Row with its special privileges, extra exercise, better TV rights, fame, notoriety, etc.etc....there's no pleasing some people.

Another friend of mine had the job of looking after a summer house in Spain. It belonged to a very clever women in charge of a large university department. She was also a famous feminist who flew around the world giving papers and talking on woman's rights and other women's issues.

But she also resolutely avoided paying my friend, a working mother with two children and a worse than useless husband (he's finally and thankfully disappeared). Then a great bush fire swept across the area and my friend (still unpaid) ran down in the middle of the night and amidst the inferno, opened up the hoses and dowsed everything and everywhere in water, stopping the encroaching flames burning the summer house down - but it was a close run thing.

When the famous feminist, who owned the house, turned up weeks later, she complained to my friend about the water bill!