OLNY SARMT PLOPEE CAN RAED TIHS!

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was
rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig
to rscheearch at Cmabdrige Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoantnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat lteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a
taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is
bcuasee the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istelf, but
the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yeah, and I awlyas tghuhot
slpelnig was ipmorantt!

St JAMES' UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, LEEDS [aka "Jimmy's"]. 1981-85. It is almost exactly twenty five years ago that I started my nurse training at Jimmy's in Leeds. At the time it was [and perhaps still is] the largest teaching hospital in Europe. There was an active Nurses' Christian Fellowship [NCF] group there which I got involved with and later went on to help lead. Later in life I had the privilege to help re-launch a group for Christian nurses called "Christian Nurses & Midwives" [CNM] but that's another story...check out http://www.cnm.org.uk/ if you're interested! I recall one funny incident as a student there; I was working on a ward and it was lunchtime. I was merrily serving out meals from a food trolley when one of the qualified staff sidled up to me and whispered in my ear that I was doing a great job but that she couldn't quite understand why I was ladeling chocolate sauce for the dessert onto the roast beef! I was so embarrassed! Of course, there were difficult experiences too. My most chilling memory was to watch someone die of bleeding oesophageal varices. Yet I look back on my time at "Jimmy's" with a lot of fond memories - the whole experience was very formative. Nurse training then was [and perhaps still is] one way of "putting an old head on young shoulders"! And the friends I made were an enormous support and help - more so than I probably credited them with at the time. We also had some great adventures together exploring The Dales, The Peaks and The Lakes. I made some wonderful friends there - people who proved better friends to me than I ever was to them. ---------------------------------------------------------- tagline: Peter Swift. St James's University Hospital. Leeds. 1981. 1982. 1983. 1984. 1985. School of Nursing. RGN. Student Nurse. Staff Nurse. RSCN. Nurse Training. NCF. Nurses' Christian Fellowship. ----------------------------------------------------------

WAYNE ROONEY'S
METATARSAL!

If I hear another word about Wayne
Rooney's big toe on the news I think
my intestines will erupt through my
thorax and throttle my brain in a
desperate bid to preserve my sanity!
Please let's keep some sense of
proportion about this business, there
are bigger news items out there surely!

I wish the England lads all the best - play
as well as we know you can - just don't
disgrace yourselves, that's all! And
that goes for the fans too!
That would be a result!

06:06:06 & the coming of
the anti-christ!
Am I missing something?
But doesn't this date come
around every century?!

BERTRAND RUSSELL:
interplanetary teapot.

June 2006's thought from my agnostic calendar is:-

"I think that in philosophical strictness at the level
where one doubts the existence of material objects
and holds that the world may have existed for only
five minutes, I ought to call myself an agnostic; but,
for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not
think the existence of the Christian God any more
probable than the existence of the gods of Olympus
or Valhalla. To take another illustration: nobody
can prove that there is not between Earth and Mars
a china teapot revolving in an elliptic orbit, but
nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken
into account in practice. I think the Christian God
just as unlikely." [Bertrand Russell].

I think Bertrand is trying to say it is impossible to prove
a negative - one cannot prove God does not exist any more
than one can disprove the interplanetary teapot theory.
Which is all very drole of course - and would be a perfectly
fair point...if he had left it at that. But he stretches the point
way too far, to breaking point in fact, and makes at least
one assertion which is patently false....all because he does
not understand agnosticism. [He makes a few other silly
points which for the sake of brevity I will let pass]. I have
to say in all candour that the notional challenge to "prove
God's non-existence" isn't one I've ever made [or heard
made] to a non-believer, probably because the subject is
far too important to leave the initiative with the sceptic.

Agnosticism is a perfectly sound position from an intellectual
point of view - but what Bertrand fails to grasp, as many do,
is that agnosticism does not work in practice. His apparently
casual move toward atheism is actually an imperative driven by
"the impossibility of agnosticism" [to quote Joseph Ratzinger].

In the real world one has to come down one side or the other;
to act as if God exists or to act as if God does not exist -
precisely because of the values involved one cannot be neutral.
And it is here that Bertie has got it so wrong - it does matter
in practice. How one views the world and ones fellow creatures
turns on the issue of God.

If it didn't matter I wouldn't be writing this - and presumably
you wouldn't be reading it!

tagline; Calendar of Doom.