I sometimes find it hard to think of titles

Wednesday.

Always the hardest day of the week. Except for Monday of course. And Tuesday because that's when I have my afternoon tutorial where I get extremely lurgied. And Thursday, because that's when I have epidemiology, where the information rate is about 1 bit per half hour.

This week has been just one of those weeks. Not one of those dramatic weeks where everything goes wrong and supplies you with a rich vein of dinner-party-stories for the rest of your life about the time you drove your car through your bedroom wall because you dropped hot coffee on your crotch when you were parking. Just one of those weeks where you drag yourself through it and don't have much enthusiasm for anything, and the dross builds up just out of your peripheral vision but you can feel it looming, ready to topple on you, and you think to yourself sometimes, what the hell am I doing this for?? And you can't think of an answer but you haven't got the enthusiasm to think of an alternative so you just carry on flopping the next foot down in front of the last.

My theory is that people were much happier before cars were invented. Cars have turned the world into a place of easy gratification and multiple ambition, where you zip frenetically from place to place grabbing this and grabbing that, always on the go. Sure, they're useful when you need paprika at 9 pm, but maybe they've blinded us to something more important than late-night paprika. We've forgotten how to walk.

Walking has a lot going for it. Not only does it get you outdoors and exercising, which are both good things, it also reinforces in the most concrete way possible that life is often about just trudging onwards. Sometimes you can see off in the distance where you're going to - sometimes you can't and you have to take it on faith. Either way, it's going to be a while before you arrive, but if you stop you'll never get there at all, so you just keep on walking. It's moral education for the car-less masses.

Plus it's great day-dreaming time. Anybody need some paprika?