Why bother?

Have you been stung by exorbitant bank charges?

You're not alone - banks rake in an estimated £4.7bn a year from fees such as £39 for a bounced cheque and £28 each day an account is over its authorised limit.

But amid record-busting profits at the high street banks, a fightback has begun.

Consumers are winning back hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds in illegal charges.

 

All well and good but what of those who have paid their bills and managed their affairs properly to ensure that they do not go outwith the terms of their bank accounts? It seems like that knowledge and effort was not worthwhile. We could simply have not bothered. Can I have compensation for the wasted time and effort due to banks putting illegal restrictions on my account?

I thought not. Chavere ergo sum ;-)

Death

Post-Enlightenment thinking can't deal with death yet it is the only certainty we all face. Modern philosophy is based on empiricism and reason. You cannot define, categorise and explain something that you cannot fully report on. How is it after you die?

Dealing with the death of a loved one is looking into infinity, and an infinity defined by loss, absence and despair. There isn't an equation or a report that can deal with that. Ever.

You experience it relatively – in front of you is an infinite darkness, so what are you relative to that? Anything relative to infinity is nothing. You stand on the edge of a cliff above an infinite abyss and there is nothing inside you.

Your reason is gone as you can't explain this. There is no plan, no design, no route through this.

The only way forward is to step back from the precipice and walk along the edge of the emotional abyss until the infinity fades, a path appears on the other side and you can get close enough to that future that you can step across.

The one thing you cannot do, you must not do is let the emptiness consume you, because then you will float down into the abyss yourself. That is an easy path and A quick one. But there is nothing for you in that abyss. The future lies on the other side of infinity – an infinity that only fades with the healing of time.

Scorpions

The Scorpion and the Frog is a fable of unknown author, though often mis-attributed to Aesop. The story is about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming the two of them. When asked why, the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's my nature."

It is often quoted to illustrate the purportedly insuppressible nature of one's self at its base level.

The government's flagship policy to revolutionise welfare by paying private companies to find jobs for the unemployed was in crisis last night as firms said there were too many people out of work - and too few vacancies - to make it viable.

Responding to warnings that his reforms will not work without major changes, James Purnell, the work and pensions secretary, has abandoned plans to announce the preferred bidders for the multi-million-pound contracts this week. This follows demands from the firms involved for hundreds of millions more in "up-front" cash. A crisis meeting between top department officials and the bidding companies was cancelled on Friday after Whitehall announced a "short pause" in the tendering process.

Colin Birchall, chief executive of Pertemps People Development Group, which has been bidding for eight contracts under the "flexible new deal", agreed that the government will have to release more capital at an earlier stage to satisfy bidding companies: "We need to review where we are, because we have a results-driven contract. Because the programme has become larger, the requirement for capital outlay from each company will be greater."

In a further twist, ministers have also been told by the industry that companies which decided last year not to bid for the contracts on the basis that there was not enough up-front cash on offer, may launch legal action against the government if it now offers more generous terms to existing bidders but refuses to start the entire tendering process from scratch.