And then sometimes you get to talk with a guy who is a trauma room military doctor back from a hospital in Afghanistan, someone to talk with about London chefs, Hestor Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver, and a mutual regard for mountain scenes come up, and where I had a children's book about Sir Edmund Hilary and Everest, this guy has been to the top of a big mountain. Just passing through, going back to the UK.

"It's not so much about the good versus the excellent versus the absolutely brilliant," this chap says, "it's that the people you dealt with were nice, that makes it a great place."

He tells me about health care in the UK. The little sign on the desk between patient and doctor, a disclaimer, saying the doctor is fallible, quite. Politics, we talk. He sees the gross profiteering, the port where Iraq's oil gets shipped--there's no flow-meter on the pumps whatsoever. The GIs are supplied with all the Budweiser, Tabasco, lobster, steaks, whatever, so everyone's happy.

There is little choice, it seems to me, sometimes, but to be an artist. Maybe that's what Kerouac was saying in the oft quoted, Roman Candle People passage at the start of On The Road. Which means that it is natural and healthy for one to, rather than go out and find some profession that plugs a hole in a dyke, or that assumes more on the side that people won't be shot with bullets at the end of the day rather than that they will, rather just be an artist, a representer of nature and humanity.