Stress from London

Firstly apologies where due. I did some research today, and called PC World who explained the W means you can write over old stuff and were fine. I spent the afternoon testing and eventually discovered the whole batch of 10 discs was buggered, as a decent disc I had already not only burned perfectly, but at 48X speed. Besides the mysterious crashing of windows (about 4 times now) and the internal error bootup message with no information as to source the burner is working.
I presume the error is connected with the new software, and though I've frozen and scrambled the data many many times from new software I've never had a total system crash in windows 98 or XP till this little sod arrived. The discs have to go, while I'll get the same ones I had already I still have the ridiculous wait for service at the notorious returns desk, which I've used literally every time I've used the shop. Never again. Local shop every time now where the same person takes the money and gives advice and service. What the hell can they do to make dvds not work? Anyone have ny theories?

Otherwise it's been a standard week, lots of rain, very little business and not as much sleep as I need. I said to my mum that it seems that mental and physical power seems to be given evenly to most people, and the more of one they get the less of the other, and I could see myself slowly becoming like Stephen Hawking... The trouble was I was being serious. If I'm this worn out at 46 it's clearly not age related, my body has just decided whatever I've been through was too much for it and it would rather live in a distand community with servants looking after its every need. London in the 21st century is different from 30 years ago and more. Everything is harder. If you travel anywhere it takes longer, and god forbid when you need to use a public service like the council or doctors the waits are third world in many cases. We used to watch the news in Africa or the old Soviet Union and feel relieved we had everything so easy. The differences are closing. We're slowly dropping and they're partially improving. At worst they'll stay the same and the west will catch up. My supervisor said Londoners are coming down with more and more stress related illness, as overcrowding affects most animals with the desire to move or thim out the population by murder.

If you live in a distant place with everything in a small community there are few chances for stress of that sort. Most needs are within a short distance and easy to get to. PC World is a distant memory from your trip to the city 5 years ago and you couldn't buy anything there as it would take 10 hours to return it at a cost of about £100 travelling the next day when it didn't work. Crowded noisy eating places would be impossible if the population wasn't big enough to generate a crowd. Those hillbilly diners they have in films where the inbred locals play pool and goose the waitress and the sherriff went to school with you is the sort of place that appeals to me. Not the people but that sort of hangout. Like an extended family. I suppose Wales may have a few places like that but they only talk Welsh to exclude the foreigners from going there. But England (apart from Cornwall which is very similar to Wales) is never far from urbanity. Few far flung towns aren't isolated enough not to need a weekly trip to the big smoke somewhere with its multi storey car parks, shopping malls the same as those 7000 miles away in California and one way systems. The island is simply too small for those small communities which survive independently of nearly every other place unless you're dying.

If such places existed in England I'd be on the verge of considering it, though as I'm single would never fit in as I tried in Oxford and realised everyone was quite happy with who was there and didn't need anyone new at 30. I'm sure Oxford's gone a similar way to London, as everywhere else seems a smaller clone. Woking, Lewes, Luton, just little copies with sleazy piss covered concrete walkways just like Wembley Central, no on-street parking, blocked road entries everywhere, and huge superstores on the ring road for the sheep. IKEA are slowly spreading from the original one shop up the road from me to insidiously loom over every town with more than 250,000 by the end of the century. OK, I actually like IKEA and half my furniture is from there, but the uniformity is mind numbing, and when I saw the same shops in Miami as Brent Cross in 1995 I realised if you wanted to go shopping anywhere on earth you'd probably have the same choices now wherever you were (except Britain, who only gets the fag-ends as we are a smaller market). That comes from working in a sports shop and discovering they only sell the most popular (as in bland) stuff here as it's not worth selling any more.

Basically London was tolerable till maybe 1990 or so, but it's not the place I'd change but the time. I stayed in the same place but the place went downhill. Where are the victims of overcrowding supposed to go? If it's hard fitting in 50 miles away I'm not going abroad. America wouldn't have me and I won't even start on any of the other options. People get stuck on the North Circular for hours when it's closed three times this week due to accidents and think it doesn't addect them. But the second, third and subsequent times it happens they slowly start feeling not quite right. Then it's got them, and they'll be on the way to catching me up. People are all human, and whatever you think not immune to stress. It just takes time to show.