Heroes Not Zombies

The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it seemed to be a plea for a human approach to medicine, instead of a protocol-imprisoned one. I clicked “buy’ from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I do that quite a lot!). I then picked up a book from my bookshelf as I walked out of my front door. I wanted something to read on the train and I’d just finished reading “Popco” by Scarlett Thomas (VERY enjoyable). The book I picked up was “Pharmakon“, by Dirk Wittenborn, and I’d read a review of it in the BMJ about a month before, thought it sounded like just the kind of novel I’d like to read, and clicked “buy” from one of the amazon marketplace resellers (I told you I do that quite a lot!)

I settled down on the train and started to read it. I got to page 21 and this little piece of dialogue hit me between the eyes

“But how did you get it here?” “Friends in low places.”

The identical phrase. Twice in the same morning. No, twice in the same hour! What are the chances of that? Have you ever even come across that phrase before?

Spooky?

This story isn’t finished yet. Pharmakon is a great novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The following day, before leaving for work I was browsing through my rss feeds in googlereader and came across this astonishing video –

Go on, watch it. It’s amazing. It’s about how the Hubble telescope was pointed by scientists at a part of the sky where they could see nothing. Nothing at all. Just darkness. Watch the video to see what they saw when they looked where there seemed to be nothing……! Then I left for work, got on the train and continued reading Pharmakon. Page 95. Here’s what I read…..

Caspar tried to distract himself by looking out of the window in the direction of galaxy clusters not visible to his human eye

Well, I don’t know about you but it sent shivers down my spine. How does that work?