The man cave was empty for a while recently, but is now back in action. Not only is the weather improving and the man cave warming up, but the saga of my abdominal hernia, six months on, is over (TNC passim) six months since it first popped out. I had the op last week at the local private hospital – courtesy of the NHS – and it all went very well.
Someone met me at 6:30 am with a clipboard at the door. I was quickly escorted by a nurse to my private room where I waited for a very short time – during which I was able to do some work using the excellent WiFi – before being taken along to theatre. The nurse was slim, had natural-coloured hair, no piercings or tattoos and did not smell of cigarette smoke. I was so taken aback – remember I was until recently a Registered Nurse and taught nursing students – to ask her if she was a real nurse. The contrast with the lurid-haired, metallic-faced heffalumps that one sees in our local Royal Infirmary was striking.
It struck me that, frankly, there is no reason why the NHS could not be like this. After all, they seem to pay for a fair bit of treatment in our local private hospital. The initial capital outlay on the rooms and facilities would be high. But it is a one-off expense, and if we must sacrifice a few diversity and inclusion officers and close the Department of People, so be it. The ongoing costs for staff would be like running an NHS hospital, surely, and if some of the efficiency I saw here was introduced, everyone would be a winner; especially the patients.
I was duly knocked out, came round, and my pain relief delivered to take home. I got a lovely sandwich and a cup of coffee that tasted like coffee, and I was home for dinner. Unfortunately, my abdomen now hurts like hell and life, for a few weeks, looks like it will be ping-pong between the pain relief and euphoria of codeine tablets, and dealing with its most notable side effect – the bungs! Anyway, enough of my problems.
Travel tales
A fellow Hull resident, no stranger to these pages, is currently on Greek territory and his property on Crete (how the other half live!). Expecting to be held up at the border by the new ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorisation System), but no! The scanners were covered in bin liners and when he approached the young female police officer who was the living embodiment of the Greek border, he was simply waved through.
Turns out that Greece has held two digits (δύο ψηφία) up to the EU and decided not to subject UK citizens to the performative nonsense of scanning their passports. Good on Greece; way to go. One imagines that this may be a subject of debate in the European Parliament and, who knows, it may even come up in our own. Situations like this must put the Euro-fanatics such as Sir Queer Starmer in a bind (I have some medication for that, as it happens). Do they thank Greece publicly or do they insist that our own citizens are treated differently until the day they envisage when we re-join the EU?
Less than charitable
I have always had a healthy scepticism about charities ever since I sat on a UK Department of Health committee that was responsible for drawing up a research agenda for the NHS. That was a long time ago, I should point out, and long before the Covid-19 days, after which I was largely cancelled in the home counties for calling out the nonsense of lockdown and face masks.
My experience of the charity representatives who sat on the committee – The Stroke Association in particular – was that they were only concerned about their charity and their cause. If the whole agenda had gone their way, meaning that all the available research funding eventually went their way and fuck the other causes represented around the table, it would have been a good day’s work. I once ran an Alzheimer’s Society-funded research project; suffice to say I cancelled my membership of said society, and never gave them a penny again after the appalling treatment of me and my research team.
So, it was not surprising to read that Sharon Osbourne – the only person on the planet who could interpret what Ozzy Osbourne was saying – is no longer welcome at the homelessness charity Centrepoint. Her crime was to express support for the forthcoming Unite the Kingdom rally organised by Tommy Robinson. Quite how support for Tommy has any bearing on her work with the charity is not clear.
Centrepoint issued some drivel about the rally being ‘counter’ to their ‘values’ and how they support people ‘regardless of their background, religion or ethnicity’. It may have escaped their notice, but so does Tommy Robinson who is always surrounded by an ethnically diverse group of people at his rallies these days. Centrepoint continued saying that society must: ‘allow them to live without fear and to access the opportunities they need to start education or work and leave homelessness behind’. Strikes me that in cancelling mega-rich Sharon Osbourne they may have shot themselves in the foot on that one.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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