The Möbius Strippers Union

I have reason to be visiting someone in hospital at the moment - nothing desperately worrying - and I was struck by how typical this hospital actually was. The view from the windows was of nice, clean buildings, the atmosphere and ambience suggested calm efficiency and the technology was visible, reassuring and unobtrusive. I half expected Jim Dale to come round the corner as I negotiated the air-conditioned bridge from the car park to the main hospital. It was comforting when all we usually hear is that the NHS fails at this and that. I know that there are arguments about cost, red-tape, mistakes, cleanliness but this hospital suggests that things are going in the right direction. The NHS should be outside party politics.

Under-the-bus Instructions

I do not like making personal attacks anywhere but inside my head but it is this point that will lead you to accept that at the moment my head is full of the worst possible names for a certain MEP, a man with a bucket full of axes to grind and no way of doing it than through clever, swinging-in-the-wind, rhetoric. The lies about the NHS put about by vested financial interests in the US are the worst kind of class-warfare I have seen for a long time. Comments like "I have never used the NHS and would like a refund." are patently absurd - even if you went around with that tattooed on your forehead, all NHS medical staff without fail would still pick you up from the gutter and do what was necessary to patch you up. Of course the NHS could be improved but so could any health care system. Without skillful management, administration always swallows up more than its fair share of resources. I imagine that the problem we have in the UK is that while the medical staff are highly trained, the admin staff are not really ingrained with the plain attention to detail that is required to be a doctor or nurse. Emptying the front line NHS of frivolous demands will go some way to freeing up resources for the people who really need it. The NHS is a brilliant but flawed icon. I support it and I hate to see it used a punch ball for the medical equivalents of the financial experts who still seem to be in charge at the moment.

Wave After Glorious Wave of Deja Vu

A fact to start with - though obviously you can dispute the source if you feel like it. The World Health Organisation (WHO?) put health care in the UK at the 18th best in the world while that in the USA at 37th. Life expectancy and mortality rates in the UK are marginally better than the USA. I start with this because of the campaign against the NHS as part of the opposition to Barack Obama's proposed health care reforms. Please don't take my temperature anytime soon. I'll just go back to my hovel and die of something treatable. I wonder if there is an operation to stop one's knuckles dragging on the pavement.

Just got my next Moleskine just in time to catch the filling up of the previous one. The problem is that the only thing going for the contents is sheer quantity as it does not live up to the beautiful pages you can find here. I just cannot draw or lay anything out artistically thought I suspect that a large proportion of this inability is my extremely short attention span. I do so like Haribo Tang fastics. Don't you?