Vacuous

Every time I think Prof. David Nutt has reached the very pinnacle of stupidity in terms of utterly facile things to say, he somehow manages to pull something so utterly vacuous out of the bag, that I have to reevaluate the man. According to yesterday’s Independent he is once again calling for the legalisation of narcotics. That’s no great surprise, he’s been doing that for years. But he now appears to have abandoned his usual argument of alcohol, and horse riding being far more dangerous that class A drugs in favour of a new, and even more insane idea.

He is now calling for a relaxation of control on recreational drugs so that he can study them in order to ascertain whether they should be controlled. I’ll tell you what, lets also legalise rape and murder so we can study those too. In fact, I know, lets just abandon all regulation of everything and then we’ll really be able to work out where we are. The man is a lunatic. Nutt claims that the current stance on controlled substances is “the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo”, and furthermore, drugs policy is being driven by “politics, not science”. Seriously, is he suggesting that drugs are not a political issue? And as usual, he seems to ignore completely the anti social aspect of drug use.

I can’t help wondering if this knob head has been experimenting on himself with controlled substances, and if that is the case, he’s not really doing anything to confirm to me that they aren’t frying his brain.

***

I was forced to approach ticket staff at the train station this week because I had lost my season ticket at the weekend. You’d think that replacing a lost season ticket would be a relatively cheap and painless process. Turns out you’d be wrong. Such is the morale problem within the ranks at First Great Western, and their seeming determination to do as little as possible to actually help their customers, it’s nothing short of a miracle if you can achieve anything without threats of legal action.

When I approached the bored looking, middle aged woman in the ticket office on Saturday to ask if she could arrange a replacement season ticket because I had lost mine, it appeared that actually speaking to me was just too much effort. Instead she opted for a combination of shrug, sigh, eye-rolling, and vague head shaking. I did pause thinking that she might expand verbally on this, but it was not to be. I was thus forced to employ sarcasm and tell her, “now, that’s not true is it”, and she confirmed that there was in fact a form I could fill in and submit to apply for a duplicate. Again there was a pause. Stupidly I had expected her to actually give me the form, but no, apparently it wasn’t obvious that I’d want it, so I had to ask her if she might possibly trouble herself to give me one.

Sadly, my request for a form meant that she had to get up and walk across the room, and that appeared to offend her somehow, because I received a look that seemed to originate from somewhere in her cervix, before there was another deep sigh and she heaved herself out of the seat to go and find one. I was then forced to watch the huge effort required for her to fill in the top section of the form herself.

It doesn’t stop there. After I had completed my section of the form, I had to submit it to HQ. It was then returned almost immediately with an a rubber stamp. I then had to give it back to bored middle-aged-can’t-be-bothered-to-speak-to-you woman, who was then authorised to push a button and generate a new ticket. Now I have to try and get a refund for the two extra tickets they made me buy in the interim. I wonder how they will complicate that.