It appears to have been a slow news week in the global village. The Independent Newspaper (UK) managed an article on “The ten best dressing tables” and another headed “A Day that shook the world”, whose first sentence read “On 2 April 2005, the third-longest serving Pope in history died at the age of 84”. I might be missing something, but I imagine that even most of the folk currently calling for the guy’s beatification probably weren’t completely astonished six years ago when he popped his clogs at a frail 84. It’s tempting to conclude that isn’t a lot going on in the world, but I suspect this has more to do with our miniscule attention spans… once the wars, natural events and humanitarian disasters have been going on more than a week, we’ve run out of things to say that would hold our readers’ interest so it’s easier to fill the inches advertising dressing tables or eulogising dead pensioners (dressing tables?? do people still buy those?)
Our local paper "La Voz" (The voice) ran a back-page spread on the introduction of road-side breath testing in San Francisco. Apparently drink-drive laws have actually been in existence here since 1996 (the “apparently” says it all) so it is probably a fitting birthday celebration of its 15 years on the statute book that we are finally resourcing its enforcement. Anyway, the news is that road-side breath-testing is regularly confiscating between fifteen and twenty vehicles a night at weekends, which is pretty impressive given that the check-points are always in the same place; you’d have to be drunk to forget to avoid them. And the police are becoming accustomed to receiving death-threats by irate punters who consider it a violation of their human rights not to be allowed to drive their vehicles in whatever condition they see fit…. anyone who ever labelled individualism as a northern hemisphere characteristic might want to try living here for a year or two.
Meanwhile, we might not own a dressing table (or ever had to provide a road-side breath specimen) but life in the Frost household was quite busy last week between driving around the countryside trying to fix one set of problems for eight hours on Monday and a different set of problems for twelve hours on Thursday in between writing a sermon for Sunday, all on top of our normal weekly work-loads. This afternoon we had our seven-month antenatal check-up which we both passed with flying colours, so I can only conclude that B2F thrives on frenetic activity (like his brother), although I am personally looking forward to a slower routine this week. This evening Joni asked me what the baby in my tummy’s name was, so I asked him what he thought his brother should be called… “Toby… Thomas…. Henry…” We probably should think about finalising this decision before his list of suggestions expands to include Cranky the Crane or the Fat Controller.