Apricot Season

I learned at my last job that any legislation becomes interesting if you look at it for long enough, and if you also happen to be sealed in a lawyer's basement for eight hour stretches with nothing to look at but other legislations. In the same respect, any story becomes interesting if you spend enough time prying apart the banalities from the technicalities and peering into its humane core. If your friends find it difficult to pay attention as you describe the view through this slender chink, as I have tried to do with the CRIRSIITESBPO story, it is because they lack a journalistic spirit of enquiry, or are numbed by their daily grindstone-nuzzling as stage actors, human rights lawyers and new media creativity managers.

CRIRSIITESBPO - which is anagrammatically pretty close to "CHRISTE, THIS BORES" - can and should be interesting. In fact, it holds a dread fascination for me as I research it, speaking to physicians on the phone and transcribing what they tell me. I grip the earpiece between my ear and shoulder, slouch into my chair with the broken back, and scrabble at the keyboard which I have to reach for inside a secretive crevice in my desk. As the conversation develops, and my wrists begin to throb, my lower back protests, my eyesight dulls and fuzzes, and before I know it, I am fast asleep. I then snort and doze through the rest of the conversation, while phrases like Reflexive Sympathetic Dystrophy and Myofascial Pain Syndrome assume a warlike personality and scamper up and down my body, whooping and laying waste to various bits of it. When I wake up, I am anxious and twitchy, and unable to understand any of what I've typed. My point is, as a result of all this CRI stuff, I've been looking at my PC with hot suspicion and antagonism, but I need its services to be done with the goddam story. It is like reading The Hot Zone in an infectious diseases ward at AIIMS.

I wish I knew more about the circumstances under which the Workmen's Compensation Act was drafted. Its primary aim seems to have been to protect maritime and shipyard workers of every possible description, not excluding lock-operators, the crew of jolly-boats (don't know what they do but it sounds like a good time) or of sea-going ships navigating under sails alone (in the event, presumably, that they get too agitated about sighting land and tumble out of the crow's nest). Pending further research, I will credit this to the English being a maritime sort of people. They probably thought the old salts deserved a bit of the Port-Out-Starboard-Home treatment, since occupational injuries reduce so many of them to peg-legs and hooks-instead-of-hands.

Seamen all get listed, so do railway employees. This kind of detail is necessary because Schedule 2 is the list of persons included in the definition of workmen, and thereby covered by the Act. All persons. It is not easy to list every element in a complex set (as opposed to just describing the set by criteria for inclusion, or even better, describing the absolute complement of the set by criteria for exclusion). I dont understand why legislations always seem to want to do this (I encountered the same problem with the Ministry-draft of the Assisted Reproductive Techniques Bill, which wanted to notify each and every technique clinics could use, rather than specifying clinical standards). When the elements are quick-changing, the list quickly becomes an anachronistic curiousity, which is the main thing that makes law interesting. Don't let lawyers tell you it is the legal first principles - tha is just a sign that a lot of Latin coming your way fast. A fortiori, it is funny lists and schedules.