Last Friday was my birthday. Steph and I had a great day. I took the day off work. We went for a walk in the woods with Nika, saw Return of the King (for the third time--it gets better each time I see it), baked chocolate cake and ate too much.

Come Saturday, my cold kicked right back in and laid me out. I'd thought it was over, but no such luck. I was useless all weekend. Now it's sunk to a cough that won't go away. To cheer things up, I'm having another wisdom tooth out today, if I can stop coughing long enough, and a filling in the neighbouring tooth. I've been dreading this all week. I can still vividly remember that cracking, creaking sound as the dentist pulls out the tooth, and the taste of blood in mouth for days afterwards. Actually, I'm trying not to think about it.

All of this has thrown out our writing schedule. Added to the fact that I'd written as much as I knew about my novel and I now have to plot completely the last third means that I haven't made much writing progress in the last couple of weeks. I've done most of a short story, but that's all. In a week or so, when I've shaken off this cold and my teeth aren't bugging me, I'm going to put my head down and aim for the end of the novel.

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I am getting so fed up with the British government. Normally I would keep my political rants to my political journal, Elysian Fields, but I'm getting too irritated. We have a labour government, supposedly a socialist government, yet you'd never guess that from the way they act. Now, I'm not a socialist, but my ideas on social policy coincide with socialist ideas fairly frequently. They're not coinciding with the actions of this government at all.

Look, the whole purpose of the creation of the Labour party was to support workers and prevent abuses of them. That's the whole raison d'etre of the Labour party. So why, we have to wonder, have the government come up with a policy that says citizens of Eastern European countries, who will soon be part of the European Union, will be able to come and work in Britain, but they won't be entitled to any of the social security benefits that those from Western European countries are. So, they'll pay their taxes. They'll pay their National Insurance contributions. But if they get sick or if they lose their job, they're screwed.

This is simply a frightened government pandering to the racism of the tabloid newspapers, who have been running ridiculous stories about how Britain will be overrun by "floods" of migrants desperate to use our health service and take our social security benefits. (They conveniently forget to mention that British people can go to European Union countries and use their better health services, higher benefits and so on.) The tabloids said exactly the same thing when Spain and Portugal joined the European Union, but of course it didn't happen.

If the government believe that pandering to these extreme views will somehow prevent them being expressed, they are simply being foolish. It just encourages their opponents who sink to much greater depths and wallow there.