OK Commuter....

...Never have I quite gotten my head round precisely what it is Bro. Charles does for his living. He can - and indeed does - talk at great length about the desperate iniquities of the entire health and social care systems, which - so he would aver - only he is best placed to fix root and branch.

That much is more or less clear. We all know it doesn't work as it should. But it is rather a large leap for any sibling to believe in the soi disant heroics of a Bro. (howsoever cherished of course) as the White Knight come to rescue us all. (More of a Don Quixote if you ask me, but breathe it not abroad!)

And as for the technicalities of it all - processes and systems, strategies and policies, dynamics and behaviours - well veritably I glaze over as he rants, much as one did back at seminary when Dean 'Fruitbat' Wilfred would go so on and on about the theological intricacies of the latter part of the Albigensian heresy. (All very well if you're up with the lingo of course, but pretty deathly if not I find.)

Yet with that caveat it is good to hear from the urban-doomed Bro. from time to time, and on that note this just in from him:

"The last time I commuted for a living was last century, that distant time when Blair was largely blameless we thought and Radiohead seemed so, so cool. I hated it then and I abhor it now. Blasted new contract, however, requires a daily slog through the so many undone dead of whom Eliot wrote so chillingly.

But you know what Bro? I could almost weep sweet tears of nostalgia. Not of course for the beastliness of it all - the shove and the push, the suppressed anger or the flat despair, the train with no seat at the end of a long, baking, aching day - but for the wondrous, vivid recall that there was actually a time before.

A time before one lived daily with the bugbear of the beast and its pain, a time when life-limiting illness was something out there not in here. (You know what I mean and have no need of repeated detail.)

In its significant if illusory way I have been returned to that past that cannot be, it feels as if the Garden has been re-opened and one has been asked back inside - just a day tripper, a visitor, tourist perhaps but I have been there, where it never seemed I could go again.

OK Commuter?"

Needs a good holiday one suspects does the Bro. Not sure a week in the The Wolds is quite the thing, but I shall offer.