We'll be going to the polling booth again this coming week. About the only person I know who's excited about the prospect is my nephew Mick, who turned 18 this summer and has therefore become of voting age. The campaigning has been utterly lacklustre and uninspired, all parties basically focusing on and promising the same: no extra taxation on mortgages, no change to the current old age pension even if it's becoming far too costly for the present working population to sustain and more security measures. Even now, when you'd think they'd have better things to worry about, the cabinet is rushing through a bill to ban the burqa. I'm sorry, but I've never even seen a burqa in the streets of my hometown, and I daresay it's not a common sight in any of our other towns and villages, either! Meanwhile, no attention's being paid at all to 'Europe' (since the Dutch people returned a resounding no to the proposed European constitution a year and a half ago, the issue's been dropped like the proverbial hot potato by all our country's politicians and political parties), the environment, or water management (if we fail to perform a proper maintenance to the dykes that keep our feet dry, we won't have to worry about paying out too many old age pensions soon). And don't even get me started on the lack of investment in the educational system. Holland is dumbing down, and it's dumbing down at an appalling rate. All our truly talented people leave; we have a number of Nobel prize winners in the exact sciences, but all but one of them lives and teaches abroad. So excuse me if I no longer care what party wins the elections or who's likely to be the next prime minister. They're all the same and things won't get any better -- if we're lucky, they won't get any worse either, and we'll just keep chugging along as we have for the last decade.

Amazon's delivered my accidental purchase of the complete collection of the later 90s/early 00s dramedy series Cold Feet to my door, and I'm just as captivated by it as I was when it was still on air. But it is a bit strange, yet fun, to see that even if it's been just a few years since this was contemporary drama, there are some things dating it already. Take mobile phones for instance. Relatively rare in 1997/8 when the series began, and people asked to borrow someone's phone because in a group of six, only one person had one...one person moreover, who felt he had to justify the purchase of it by referring to the fact that his wife was heavily pregnant. And then the phone itself! Were they ever really that big? I mean, by this time, they'd already shrunk to hand-size, but nowadays, they're far smaller, and the heavy black rectangle featured in this first season looks huge in comparison.

I was going to try and create another icon this weekend, but I'm stumped: I don't know where to get any good pics from, and I'm not even sure what I'm looking for, so I've decided not to bother.

Quote by Nikita Krushev