Where I’ve been

Basically I’ve been in bed most of this week, with a nasty case of diarrhoea which suddenly appeared on Saturday evening as I was about to go to bed. I’m almost finished a post which *insha Allah* will appear tomorrow. Other than that I’ve been too weak to do pretty much anything although my strength is returning.

A couple of unrelated issues, though:

(1) [This story](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4901398.stm) about how men who beat their wives and then “show genuine signs of remorse” could be spared a jail term under new proposals from the Sentencing Guidelines Council. This is for the most part a very bad idea, because wife beaters are not men who slap their wives or partners during rows, but domestic bullies who do what they do for kicks. Having received many a phony apology from bullies at school, apologies are ten a penny from these people and have to be treated as such.

(2) Does anyone watch *House*, the medical drama? I can’t stand it, but I watched it this evening because my family do and I wanted the company. At the end, having prodded a young supermodel for an unexplainable illness, they discover that she has [Androdgen Insensitivity Syndrome](http://www.medhelp.org/www/ais/), meaning that she has XY (male) chromosomes but her body is immune to testosterone, meaning that she develops externally as a female but retains testes and lacks a womb. When House (Hugh Laurie) diagnoses this, he walks in and begins referring to the girl as a he, causing her obvious distress. Would any doctor do this nowadays? I had always got the impression of House as a brilliant but awkward but basically good man, but this showed him to be nothing but a callous, unprofessional ass. I know it’s not real, but I hope it doesn’t happen in real life.