Gone are the days when the world went quiet over the summer as the work shut down for the school holidays. The advent of 24-hour news and the scrutiny of social media has left us with a silly season that's barely ironic. August does provide a slight respite and I recently caught up with a friend who no longer works in local government, but had an interesting take on its current position. She described it as like the opening of Winnie the Pooh. For the uninitiated, it goes: 'Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. 'It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.'
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