now wash your hands. now wash your hands. now...

Now that instances of swine flu have been reported within the organisation in which I work we're being advised on how best to avoid infection. But given the number of times I'm expected to wash my hands each day there'd be hardly any time left to do what I'm actually employed to do - such would be the frequency of traipsing back and forth from the toilet.

So we're being recommended to wash our hands...

• every time we use the lavatory
• when starting work and before leaving for the day
• before and after eating
• after using the PC or telephone
• when someone nearby coughs, sneezes or blows their nose
• after shaking hands with someone
• after handling money
• after using a vending machine or visiting other shared areas

Conceivably I could be wandering the corridors to the toilet upward of 30 times a day. Makes a change from working I suppose...

dead? or just sleeping?

I keep seeing crash-landed bumblebees, more than I can ever remember before. On a daily basis I seem to come across 2 or 3 on the pavement on my walks to and from work. Sometimes more.

Are they dead? Or are they just sleeping?

Banksy versus Bristol Museum

Finally got to see the show last week but because I was entertaining a friend on a trip to Bristol, and coupled with the fact that it was one of the hottest days in recent memory, our trip was a brief one. This was the only photo I took - I'm planning to return in the near future and get there for opening at 10am.

Over a month into the exhibition large queues continue to form at weekends and even during midweek we waited ten minutes or so to get in, only to queue again once inside.

Shortly after it opened M, whose cousin works at the museum, was lucky to be shown around before opening time and had the whole place to herself! Outrageous...

I enjoyed what I saw of the show and it's great to see so many people attending an exhibition at a museum (over 100,000 in early July). I read somewhere that the Tories are thinking of reintroducing museum admission charges if they get in at the next election - while I disagree with that policy the council would have boosted their coffers nicely from this exhibition.

For anybody outside Bristol still thinking of taking a look there's an excellent guide here.

x2

Don't think I've ever seen two rainbows at once before but that's just what we were treated to as we drove through the Somerset countryside last Friday evening...

ideas

Last Wednesday we went along to a talk by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine in the US, who was in town as part of the excellent Festival of Ideas. Over the course of an hour he spoke about the ideas behind his two books, The Long Tail: how endless choice is creating unlimited demand and the recently-published Free: the future of a radical price: the economics of abundance and why zero pricing is changing the face of business.

Over the past couple of months we've also attended talks by Alain de Botton (the pleasures and sorrows of work) and Susie Orbach (bodies) as part of the festival and on every occasion so far, much as the speaking part has always been interesting, things really seem to get going when the audience put forward their questions: a teacher at a college spoke revealingly about the superficial nature of her female students; a woman seemed to temporarily disarm Alain de Botton with her views on housework; and last week Chris Anderson, in response to a question, made me think when talking about how quality depends on relevance. Thankfully, it's been nothing like my sixth form college lectures where, when thrown open to the floor, heads everywhere looked down and everyone nervously shuffled down in their seats...

The festival has been running since 2005 and originally formed part of Bristol's bid to become 2008 Capital of Culture. The bid failed but the festival went ahead anyway and will continue into next year when the theme will be Science and Technology.