Kings of the Wild Frontiers
2002-04-04 || 10:30 a.m.

I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamt I was at an archeologoical dig and we had unearthed a Saxon warrior. I wasn't me exactly. I don't know who I was. It was somewhere in a small town by the sea. The thing was that this warrior had not been buried in the customary fashion and so we wanted to rebury him. First of all we had to get permission. Once we had that we had to dig the grave as it would have been dug at the time. This involved scooping the earth out in a sort of uterus shape - narrower at the bottom and wider at the top but vertical; not horizontal. Then the skeleton (dressed in warrior clothes with shield etc) had to be eased into the grave.

Weird or what? I wonder what it means. If indeed it means anything at all. Grim probably. I reckon it means that I constantly have to fight. I'd like to be protected but this would be suffocating and I have to rely on others to do stuff for me: I'm not in control of my life. Easy peasy this dream analysis stuff eh?

On a totally different subject I have just finished my bottle of 'chesty cough' medicine. So now all I have to do is seal it up, put a stamp on it and address it to: Gordon Brown, 11 Downing Street, London.

This is a protest at the drug companies (currently an American thing but shortly a law is to be passed here too) that offload their unwanted, out of date, short dated drugs onto developing countries and call it a 'charity donation' thus enabling them to claim tax breaks. The sick thing is that they claim they are doing a good thing, helping countries in trouble - famine, war etc - but actually they are only doing it for their own benefit. You get a situation where they may have made a loss on a drug that didn't sell well and it would cost them millions to dispose of in the correct manner so instead they 'donate' it, at this point they have still made a loss but they are not now going to have the cost of the disposal. They then get a tax break which can actually lead to a profit! The country they are claiming to 'help' then has the disposal problem and you will get the picture when I tell you that stuff donated can be things like silicone breast implants. Very useful. Apparently Malawian doctors have been using them as paperweights.

So, if you are in the UK send all your medicine packaging to Gordon Brown in protest at this. It is an unwanted, unsolicited donation of the type his government are planning on introducing to others with this new law. It could be different. The World Health Organisation has a charter that can be incorporated into the law that will enable companies only to donate medicines on lists and ones that have a shelf life of at least a year.

In my opinion, if I worked for a pharmaceutical corporation, I would give them the medicines free and I wouldn't claim any tax breaks for it either and I'd insist on it being anonymous.

That's why I don't work for a corporation.