Thoughts of a carer

  '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...

  It’s affecting my mental health! I wrote a few weeks ago about the effects that caring for Viv has had on my mental health. One of the biggest problems is dealing with the huge behemoth that is our National Health Service; people who have few interactions with it may find it easy, but Viv has a medical record file that stands six feet tall or more, and that causes problems. + + +  I had one of my breakdowns this morning. About 8am I ran around the house, screaming; banged my head as hard as I could against the downstairs loo door; ran out into the garden, even though I was only wearing nightclothes at the time, swearing at the top of my voice (and it's a cold, grey December day) December, and then ended up sat on the stairs, weeping.  The cause of this drama? Viv had mentioned that her hearing in her left ear was worsening. She’s totally deaf in her right ear, due to a tumour, and it was loss of hearing that first identified that, back in 2014. The saga we have had sinc...

Barely a day goes by without a government minister exhorting us all to ‘have a booster’; at times, they almost resort to threats - ‘Get a jab so you can enjoy Christmas’, or something similar. Sorry, Boris and co., I won’t, at least not for a long time. + + + I’m no anti-vaxxer. I’ve had the flu jab annually for the last decade, including one this year. I even had the AstraZeneca vaccine in March and May this year, for  a number of reasons, including: I was keen to see the end of the ‘pandemic’, and had naively understood that Matt Hancock had said the plan was to vaccinate as many of the over-50s as possible, then we’d all get our freedom back; maybe he did say that, and, like much of everything else this government has done, he later did a u-turn; I was worried that there would be some things I might want to do that I wouldn’t be able to if I was unvaccinated - i.e. I didn’t trust the authorities not to introduce vaccine passports;  I fell into the trap of thinking that the ...

  I was reading The Daily Sceptic recently and came across the following comment, from a reader who styles themself ‘Karenovirus’: The other day I was watching Michael Palin's travelogue Pole to Pole; in episode 3 he is in Leningrad trying to buy some vodka. Someone explains that first he must obtain a ‘kiewpon’ from the Casa Kiosk (I had witnessed similar in restaurants in Kiev and Odessa a decade previously). Fortunately for Michael a passerby sells him a coupon (in the way that someone might illegally pass you a parking permit with some time left on) and nobody else batted an eyelid. This might seem like a minor transgression but it actually struck at the heart of the Soviet system in which full employment was achieved by having three people to do one person's job. Reading it, I realised that life in the UK is now almost as absurd as it was under the Soviet system. Parts of our national infrastructure are supported by teams of people that, well, seem to need to pass you to ...

  Introduction Prior to March 2017 I would walk the footpaths, pavements and other routes around my home town, and elsewhere, without thinking that there was any kind of problem with them. If there was an obstruction, I’d walk around it. It took a major ‘life event’ for me to see things differently. It was in that year that my partner, Viv, was struck down by a mystery neurological condition, one symptom of which was that she was unable to balance or control her legs. Following a spell in hospital she was discharged, and, after some rehab, by June that year we were equipped with a wheelchair; I could take her out to enjoy some aspects of everyday life that we both had previously taken for granted: the fresh air, shopping, going to friends’ houses, even the odd trip away, with the wheelchair folded up and fitting well in the boot of our small hatchback car. Prior to receiving the wheelchair, my only experience of ‘pushing’ another human in a wheeled conveyance had been some twenty-f...