Long time, No see.

I spend far too much time writing apologies on this blog, and it's all my fault. I seem to have this habit of getting stuck into the blog and writing something, religiously, every day, and then running out of puff and letting it slip for months. Okay, in his poem "A Psalm Of Life" that rather forgotten poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, uses the phrase, "let the dead past bury it's dead" and I think that is a good starting point. So a new start today, a new year's resolution, (yes, but it is the new year starting on September 1st), I intend to write something, however small, every day. Let's just see how long it lasts.

I was unimpressed by the following item on his morning's news. "The German manufacturer of the drug thalidomide that caused thousands of babies to suffer congenital birth defects has issued its first ever apology - 50 years after the drug was withdrawn. Gruenenthal Group's chief executive said the company was "very sorry"".

I get quite hot under the collar about apologising for things that happened a long time in the past. The Pope apologising for the actions of the Inquisition in the 16th century seems bizarre to me. We cannot apologise for the actions of our forbears several hundreds of years ago. We did not commit the attrocities involved. But somehow, leaving it 50 years to apologise for Thalidomide is perverse. They knew what they had done quite immediately, but they ignored it, presumably so that they could try to avoid responsibility.

No, I regret to say that I am far from impressed by the actions of Gruenenthal.