It might have escaped your attention but yesterday was actually National Sleepy Heads Day – well it is in Finland where seemingly the last person caught sleeping in a household is ceremoniously lifted from their bed and thrown into a sea or lake – always assuming, of course, that such a body of water exists nearby.
If not they will just have water poured over them.
Apparently all this is done because the person who wakes up last on National Sleepy Head Day is seen as being the laziest.
Seems logical to me!
The day is based on the Christian myth the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and is celebrated to honour the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which is a Christian myth about seven people who were accidentally locked in a cave for two centuries.
When the cave was re-opened in 450 AD they were somehow still asleep.
This led to Finnish people celebrating National Sleepy Head Day and teasing each other they would sleep for 200 years if they did not wake up in time.
The whole of the country celebrates the day but it’s especially a big deal in the town of Naantali where you have to get up before 7am on July 27 or you’re in trouble.
Sometimes I wonder if people are falling asleep here and fiddling while Rome burns.
Why do I say this?
Well it just seems to me that sometimes those in charge just have it all wrong. Sometimes it seems that common sense goes by the board.
Take for instance the police decision to question a man after a complaint from a neighbour resulting from “offensive noises” originating from the property.
The noises were actually the result of his 3-year old grandson, Charlie playing with a fart machine.
Now the police are, as we keep hearing, under much pressure these days so it must surely be a shameful waste of police time and energy for them to have responded to this situation in the first place.
Meanwhile in another part of the country you hear that a shopkeeper who has actually been robbed, and has the CCTV images of the miscreants, and even knows their identities, but is still told that the police are “too busy to deal with the matter”, strikes me as crazy.
Even more so when the shopkeeper is then warned by the same police, who are too busy to deal with the crime itself, that he must remove images of the CCTV stills taken of the actual robbery, from his shop as such photographs would be in breach of data protection laws.
Is it just me or is there “something wrong in the State of Denmark”?
I’ll get off my soapbox now and see you again tomorrow,
Scott
