Quick Think of a Title.

Today has been my father's birthday. To celebrate he, my grandmother and I have been having lunch at a rapidly emptying restaurant in South Croydon right by the Mind in Croydon offices. As a consequence I am now rather drunk. You may have been alerted to this, the birthday not the drunkenness, by the barrage of hostile news stories. These have included the latest drivel on the NHS treatment of dementia patients and the Australian story about two twin girls who were joined at the head but have been successfully separated by surgeons.

As far as I'm concerned the most important event of the day was that I received another letter from Croydon Integrated Psychological Therapies Service (CIPTS). This letter claimed that CIPTS had not received a response to their letter of October 7th and offered me another appointment for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) on November 27th. The purpose of doing this is that CIPTS hope to discharge me on the grounds of non-compliance with offered treatment. Acknowledging that I have been in contact with them makes this more difficult. The problem for them is that I sent the original letter by recorded delivery so someone claiming to be from CIPTS has already acknowledged its receipt on October 17th. As soon as I received today's letter I fired off a quick email making CIPTS aware of this detail and advised them not to send me any further letters as they will be disregarded. I feel I should receive an award for showing great constraint by not allowing that sentence to read "they will be disregarded as the work of a complete idiot." Obviously this won't be enough for CIPTS so I will be resending the original reply.

Elsewhere the British Government has continued in it's attempts to re-sell the Afghan war to the British public. Alongside the staged anti-terrorist arrests yesterday this has involved Gordon Brown claiming that the war could end by 2010. This is remarkably similar to the claims at the start of the first world war when it was said that it would all be over by Christmas 1914. Brown has also announced plans to have a special NATO Summit on the war in London in January. This forces me to ask the question of whether he discusses these things with the NATO allies before he announces them or does he just announce them in the hope of embarrassing the NATO allies into attending?