Sometimes I wish I'd stayed ill...

It takes a while to get back into the swing of things. I'm scanning photos and listening to recordings from my outings earlier in the year. Nothing earth-shattering to report as yet. The recordings are hard work. Hours of night-time sounds coming through earphones are a sure way to get your attention to wander and a very good way to put yourself to sleep. There have been occasional perk-ups but the voice turns out to be me muttering something, the screams turn out to be a cat, or a cow in the distance. Storing up too much data and trying to go through it all afterwards is a very bad idea.

Then, yesterday, I had to go and buy a new keyboard because I sprayed coffee over mine.

Our country is involved in two wars against people who have never threatened us. The soldiers who are fighting those wars are underequipped and when they get home they are treated like dirt. That's not what cost me a keyboard.

We are in the middle of a financial crash that is going to go deep and hurt very hard. One of the worst-hit banks (HBOS) is where most of my money was stashed until I spent a few days moving it. The government have decided to fiddle with the world of finance, about which none of them know anything, and are making it much worse. That didn't cost me a keyboard either.

People are being arrested for littering and convicted in the absence of evidence, and they are denied the chance to prove they weren't even in the country at the time of the alleged 'offence'. Meanwhile, violent criminals are set free because the prisons are full of people who drop litter, overfill their bins and park in the wrong place. That nearly cost me a keyboard, but not quite.

Guns are banned, having a knife in your pocket on the street is banned, and yet gun and knife crime continue to rise. The youth are out of control and uneducated to the point where they know far more about drug use than they do about spelling. Electricity and gas prices rise by double-digit percentages every few months and the government insists on building inefficient windmills while the power stations are falling apart and all our nuclear energy generation is now owned by the French. None of those things cost me a keyboard.

What destroyed my keyboard was the news that, while the country crashes and burns around our ears, our government is spending its time wondering whether a catholic should be allowed to be the King or Queen of Britain.

It might well be an important question to some, and indeed I might weigh in with an argument or two at another time, but wouldn't you think that there are more pressing concerns than which church the Queen visits once a week?

What's it like in America, and does anyone over there have a spare room and an exceptionally tolerant attitude?