Thoughts of a carer

  (This was written before ‘Dancing Bloody Nurses’) *** For the fifth time in just over a month my partner, Viv, and I spent nearly an hour last Tuesday trying to arrange to chat with a GP. We had to subject ourselves to the dial, redial shenanigans at 8am, along with hundreds of others, and the local phone exchange was jammed - a daily event hereabouts. We persevered and got through after half an hour, before having to queue and wait, listen to recorded messages and be put on hold for another ten minutes or so. The reason for this was that Viv had had some hospital tests on Saturday, and, Tuesday being the first working day following that, we needed to chat to the GP to arrange next steps.  In any sensible healthcare system our family doctor would have called us anyway to discuss the results of hospital tests; in ‘our NHS’, you have to go through the 8am process of ritual humiliation first, then wait at home to be called. Soviet Russia was not the final bastion of obdurate ad...

  My mum enjoyed her 90th birthday last December. She’s led what many would consider a good life; worked hard, saved a bit here and there, and brought up me and my sister. A few months ago it became apparent that she couldn’t manage any more in her shared-equity ‘retired person’s’  bungalow, and moved into a care home. My sister and I have Power of Attorney, and we’ve been helping her manage her affairs. The sale of her old bungalow back to the local council went through in February, so we looked around for ideas on what to do with the proceeds - a small six figure sum.  Mum had an ISA at her bank which had built up to a good five figure sum, but otherwise no savings accounts. This included National Savings, which surprised me, for I thought everyone had one or two Premium Bonds, but I didn’t worry: my thoughts were that we should use her ISA allowance every year, and buy her the maximum amount of Premium Bonds (£50K), where her interest, or prizes, would be tax free....

  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...

  There are some things about the healthcare industry in the UK that are Soviet in style; that may seem a strange suggestion, but the bureaucracy of the NHS bears more than a passing resemblance to that created by Lenin, Stalin and co up to the 1960s.. You can’t have what you want, be told something personal to you, or buy what you know you need, directly; you must go and see an often very well remunerated official to get a bit of paper to allow you to then buy whatever you know you want or need, or to find out something that is very specific to you, which in some ways might be no-one else’s damn business.  We hear every day that the NHS is collapsing, even that we must shut ourselves away ‘to protect the NHS’.  Hospitals can’t admit any patients, and doctors can’t see anyone unless they first speak to them on the phone (that itself being an example of what I’m getting at); actually, it's all very 1970s Russia. If we needed a prescription from the GP to buy a loaf of brea...

  '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...