I’ve been looking back through a few old posts and have noticed that I seem to be running to a pattern. I moan, I rant, I explain why things are chaotic and I discuss the shortcomings of other road users. For variety I sometimes describe how my wife bullies, browbeats or outwits me.
Once in a while I complain about my aches and pains, disparage the medical profession and denigrate editors.
I also have problems with technology. Considering that I have problems with such basic things as sleeping and the use of apostrophes, it’s hardly surprising that technology beats me. I say “beats me”… It doesn’t actually beat me; I have three sledge hammers in the tool shed so in purely physical terms I have the upper hand. I suppose what I mean is that technology confuses me into a state of near surrender, but if the machines ever get too cocky I have the ultimate sanction.
This is actually the start of a post I wrote two days ago. It wasn’t good enough, so I sidelined it, made the sandwiches, played Scrabble against the computer, lost again, and went to sleep.
Tonight I wrote the first few paragraphs of a much better post, and lost it. I’m not actually sure where it went. Here, we return to my earlier thoughts and review my comments on technology. The day when I hammer my computer flat is rapidly approaching.
I have therefore “improved” the previous attempt by throwing half of it away and grafting a few moans on to the end.
Today I spent much of my time in the shop entering cards for coin year sets onto eBay. If you consider coins dull, and I do, then the empty cards for making up year sets are, I promise you, duller.
I have had the results from my last chest X-Ray and it was OK, I do have a chest. This is handy as it gives me somewhere to keep my lungs, which, in turn, allows me to breathe, an activity considered essential for good health. It also stops your shirt getting messy. Imagine the laundry situation if your lungs were externally mounted.
Unfortunately I failed my last blood test. I do have blood, and it seems to be going round OK, but it seems that I need to talk to a doctor about it. I can do this on the phone but, there was a six day waiting list for a telephone consultation slot. I take it that there is nothing urgent about whatever problem their expensive testing machinery has come up with.
And that is why I find it reasonably easy to criticise doctors.
I now have a new date with the specialist and am hoping that in four weeks I may have a diagnosis. I bet they are going to tell me I have arthritis. I know this because it is following exactly the same path as my last outbreak. The difference is that it took just over a week to sort it out last time and it will have taken about eleven this time.
I have added a few coins to the end, as a relief from the hundreds of empty holes staring from the other pictures like hundreds of dead eye sockets. There’s a Battle of Hastings 50p, a Magna Carta £2 and moon landing £5 from Guernsey,
The £5, which is from 10 years ago shows early use of colour, which later became the garishly awful later use of colour. It doesn’t look the thin end of a wedge does it?.
Glad the chest x-ray was negative; sorry about the bloodwork, though.
The coagulation result was brilliant though – no retest for two months. 🙂
Phew! Read the other comments, and all I can add is the same is sadly true in the U.S. People want services but don’t want to pay for them. Nobody likes higher taxes but…
I don’t know if it is the same in the USA but we don’t need higher taxes, we just need people to pay what is due. Multinationals avoid paying billions.
Oh, yes! Same here. And much of the tax avoidance is perfectly legal.
Which makes you wonder if the legislators are being rewarded in some way. 🙂
Could be!
I am very sympathetic to your NHS grief as I have had some long waits recently but I reflect that as we live in a country where the thought of raising taxes to pay for decent services seems to gives politicians (and perhaps more importantly, newspaper owners) a severe fright, we can’t hope for much improvement. Voters also seem to want to have services without paying for them which doesn’t help at all.
I must admit that when I look at my payslip and a variety of invoices with 20% VAT appended my first thought isn’t that I’d like to hand over more of it for the government to squander on traffic cameras, wars and Boris Johnson’s wages. I also have a feeling that no matter how much we give the NHS it will all be swallowed up by new treatments, an ageing population (me) and the “obesity epidemic” (me again).
Most entertains. I’m amazed that there is a market in display cards, and appalled that you must wait 6 days for a phone consultation – mind you, I was promised one the next day some months ago – instead I received a follow up appointment date some time next year
The workings of the NHS are mysterious, to say the least. 🙂