Thoughts of a carer

  It's been a while since I added to this blog. I’d like to write more often, but being a carer has its challenges - your priority has to be those you care for. Since my last update I’ve had extra caring work come my way; my mother moved into a care home in September, and I’ve been busy getting her settled in, and helping with some of her financial and administration work.  I’ve also been involved in my late stepmother's estate, and these new challenges have made me consider the contrasting attitudes that different generations seem to have, and to contemplate how these differences have arisen, and whether modern attitudes actually represent an improvement on those in the past.   *** My father didn’t talk much about  the war. Like many of his generation, he witnessed some pretty horrible things - I know he saw burning enemy tanks with German soldiers stuck inside ( 1) , and he was also involved in the clean-up at Belsen. I do, however, remember him saying, on mor...

  'Health is more important than Finance' How far does that apply? The UK, already suffering ‘lockdown by stealth’ after pronouncements by various media-appointed ‘experts’ on what is going to happen,  is now apparently on the verge of a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown to ‘Save the NHS’. What about saving the economy? We are led to believe that everything must take second place to Public Health, no matter what the consequences - to the point where the government does not even undertake an impact assessment before bringing in a non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) recommended by a scientific advisor. But there are costs - we have seen them over the last couple of years; huge government borrowing (which we shall all be paying back over the next fifty years or so), a broken economy (inflation moving up - RPI now 7.1%, interest rates are going up too), society seems to be falling apart (for example - tragic deaths of children who missed the protection a normal education could provide...

In the 1980s I worked in an office on the South Bank, over the road from what is now the Tate Modern. Around the corner there was a depot of the London Borough of Southwark's street maintenance team, and it seemed at the time that some of their workers used to practice road repairs outside our office building, for it was always being dug up.  I remember well the discussions amongst us engineers, scientists and statisticians, wondering for how long the pneumatic drills were going to continue.  'They must have a new batch of recruits', I remember a manager saying in September one year, about the time milkround recruits were joining us. 'It may seem ridiculous that workers are paid to dig holes and then fill them in, but that's how they train'. No one was quite sure whether he was taking the mickey or had inside knowledge of Southwark council (who, at the time, were very left-wing and regularly mocked in the press), but he was making a good point.  Workers need to ...