The National Health Service’s new clothes

I’ve been rather irritated by the current disinformation campaign of the Republican Party in response to Barack Obama’s health plans. As far as I’m aware there are no plans to create a National Health Service, so holding up the UK as an example of what can go wrong is highly suspect.

I’m equally bemused by the response of most politicians in the UK who’ve rushed to the defence of the NHS; fighting to proclaim their love is true, that their love will last. Love is blind. It won’t be long before one, probably over-compensating Conservative, starts singing to the tune of all nurses are angels and all doctors are God. Absolute drivel – though I’ll admit to having met a few doctors who acted as if they were God. I'm presuming those wearing the rose-tinted spectacles have never had to wait a year (sometimes more) for treatment, or been misdiagnosed with Parkinson's disease and only after TEN years had the treatment corrected; this happened to my mother. Nor have they been victims of the 'postcode lottery' of NHS treatment after moving 20 miles, and in the process happening to move from one health trust that would fund treatment to one health trust that wouldn't; this happened to my wife.

The NHS is a glorious principle in which I whole-heartedly believe, but those holding it up as a paragon of virtue are about as useful as 'death panel' comments from Sarah Palin, or the idiot Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan describing the NHS as a 'sixty year mistake'. Slightly sinister, though hardly unexpected, is the response of Health Secretary Andy Burnham who described Mr Hannan's comments as unpatriotic. Do my comments make me unpatriotic too?

What a difference a week makes; 168 little hours

At the end of one holiday it’s cliché to comment that one feels like another but… perhaps I should take two weeks out next time around. So what difference does a week really make? I’ll tell you; four films, two guinea pigs, a couple of days out and the BBC iPlayer… and I really regret the guinea pigs, though I had little say in the matter. However the BBC via their iPlayer enabled me to catch up on back episodes of The Street, and a week where I can watch a few films, all for the first time, could never be classed a write-off.

I have a weakness for American sports dramas though I am guilty of neither appreciating the sport nor understanding the rules. Baseball is a statistical cul-de-sac, rounders with a bigger bat, yet we have The Natural. Basketball is despite the points utterly pointless, yet we have Hoop Dreams - one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. American gridiron football yesterday provided me with Friday Night Lights. Living in the UK I can’t vouch for accuracy, but it felt real. It helps knowing that this particular film was based on a real life season of the Permian Panthers, the football team of Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. Elements are shot in a documentary style yet it also includes the formulaic father-living-on-past-glories and the cocky-yet-likable athlete who you know is going to come undone. Perhaps the best sports dramas are really human dramas. It’s rather like an intelligent compassionate love story set in Paris; I can’t vouch for accuracy but if it feels real it doesn’t make me feel so bad - sometimes quite the opposite.

A corner of a foreign field

Today has been tremendously tiring in a way that only office moving days can be. I didn’t sleep well last night just thinking about it. This and an unexpected mid-year goal appraisal, which was as much a fear of the unknown as anything else, has left me exhausted.

In the end the update was better than expected. A couple of tasks I didn’t particularly care for were removed and another couple added; they are a part of what my job has become. You do it to the best of your ability and see what happens.

My new desk may be smaller, the space tighter, but it’s all about location isn’t it? Considering I work in Wales the flag, a decorative addition from a colleague, might seem a bold move… but it works for me. It’s back to normality tomorrow or just as soon as I can figure out what that is. There’s a lot of new work; on my optimistic days it’s a challenge and on others it’s the perfect recipe for stress.

When I got home this evening my daughter showed me some photographs she’d found in the spare room.

There’s one of Mummy with long hair and one of you with black hair...

You’ve got grey hair now, Daddy. You look like Granddad...

Today was one of the better days.

It’s the end of the world as we know it

Approximately 1600 years ago the world ended. I’ve often wondered if Ammianus Marcellinus, alive at the time of the catastrophic defeat of the Roman army at Adrianople, lived to witness the formal division of empire into East and West. Did he live long enough to see the sacking of Rome only 15 years later, and if so how did he feel? How does anyone cope with the end to their world?

Speaking of work, it’s been rather mad today. I’m tasked with supporting products on which I have little knowledge yet bizarrely… it’s also been rather fun. I think that’s the word - I guess I like the challenge. It’s quite a rush when after many hours you fix a problem; and rather sad that it’s not diminished in the slightest by the thought that with a little more knowledge you could have solved it much quicker. There’s a long and winding road ahead and perhaps enough to keep me interested, dare I say employed, for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of improbabilities, I’d rather like to see the Moon this weekend but finances (I don’t have any) will probably dictate otherwise. I’ve some time off work in a few weeks; if I’m lucky it will run until then. There’s a pile of unwatched DVDs at home crying out for my attention. If I’m really lucky I’ll be allowed to watch those too.

Speaking of science fiction, my PC decided to auto-install IE8 this week. My first completely unscientific impression is that it is indeed better, faster, stronger… but not good enough to win me back from Chrome.

So you want to be starting something?

Well I’ve blogged for a while, but not very well and not here. I created this blog a few years ago but immediately ran into the problem of having nothing meaningful to say. I still don’t have anything useful to offer but as I reasoned before, I’m not going to let this stop me… although I did. Instead I posted the occasional iffy poem before finally taking the plunge last week and… customising my page.

Now customising pages is something else I can’t do particularly well. After many hours tweaking the CSS, I finally came up with something I really liked which, after randomly browsing some other pages, became something I could just about live with. Tomorrow it’ll be something I wish had never happened.

But all I’ve really done is duck the issue – if you have a blog you have to… blog. I can’t vouch for the quality but one advantage of having a blog that no-one reads is that it doesn’t really matter. And if I write often enough who knows… maybe I’ll manage something passable once in a while. Of course one of the drawbacks of having a blog that no-one reads is that no-one will ever know.

Game over, man

“How are things?” you might ask.

To which I’d reply “Lieutenant Gorman has just seen his ship crash, most of his platoon wiped out by Aliens and arranges a meeting the following day to discuss any concerns the marines may have...”

Pop star uses bad language, crowd has orgasm

Lest I sound like some Daily Mail anti beardy-weirdy tree-hugging lentil-loving pinko-hippy type, I ought to say up front how much I enjoyed Glastonbury this weekend. I didn’t go of course. The idea of me trying to survive in a tent overnight, let alone three, is ridiculous. Instead I relaxed on the sofa, navigated my way through the various BBC interactive channels and caught up on their website.

I wasn’t taken with Bruce Springsteen, I fell out of love with him a long time ago, and Blur were a little rusty, seemingly desperate to get to the end of some songs with some band members quicker than others. Franz Ferdinand suggested the crowd had carnal knowledge of their own mothers and, judging from the resultant roar of the crowd, they may have been right. I liked their set but, even with the more electronic sound, I’m beginning to find them a little predictable.

There was a whole load of stuff I hardly dare admit I hadn’t heard before. White Lies overcame the cheap suits, lyrics such as “and all we heard was lies about the truth” and my short-lived mean-spiritedness; enough to persuade me to buy their album. Pendulum were loud enough to damage my hearing with the sound muted and were huge fun to watch. There were Doves, who I’d heard of but until now never listened to… and I finally discovered why Lady GaGa is “whack”.

However my favourite thirty-or-so minutes came from The Specials who managed to induce a big cheesy grin throughout their show. Terry Hall has understandably filled out a little and appeared to amble around the stage, leaning forward earnestly every so often; then I remembered he’d always moved that way. My favourite song, “Friday night Saturday Morning” didn’t really work, but that’s a minor quibble.

There was a lot of great music. Even acts such as Status Quo take on a new light when your seven year old daughter starts jumping up and down… though I may attempt to steer her in other directions next year. If I could stay in a hotel I’d take her…