Monday

Monday I saw the consultant at Dulwich who deals with osteoporosis. She reviewed the medication I'm taking, and prescribed bendroflumethiazide for fluctuating blood pressure (which I had been taking before the operation, but was replaced by a beta blocker in King's). Systolic had varied between 91 and 187 in the previous few days, and so far the spread since resuming the bendro etc has been 110 and 164. Unfortunately one of the known side effects is that its a diuretic, and I already have a problem having to get up several times during the night.

Monday evening we took JW and Maite to the theatre to celebrate his birthday. We saw Enron, which is coming to the end of its run but still attracting full houses. What I found most extraordinary was that Arthur Andersen, which was one of the 'Big Five' accounting firms, collaborated with the top Enron management in practices that were bound to result in disaster. Presumably the law has been tightened up in the US since then, to make it impossible for unscrupulous corporations to indulge in similar forms of accounting trickery.

What I didn't realise, and the play doesn't say, was that the consulting arm of Arthur Andersen split off at the beginning of 2001 as Accenture, now a Fortune Global 500 company, with over 190,000 employees in 200 locations in over 120 countries, generating net revenues of US$21.58 billion in its last financial year. Somebody should write a play about that.