I have just bought a new blender. It is so well protected for health and safety reasons that nobody with any kind of difficulty in their fingers can open it. Therefore it is quite useless. Surely, this is a perfect example of health and safety going mad.

The "Nature" of Teenagers

Having observed a particularly callous act of a teenager towards her parent, a 50-year old observed, with an indulgent smile, that it is in the nature of teenagers to hate their parents.  He does not even know that, although there were always, of course, people aged 13-19, they did not exist as a group until they acquired purchasing power.  In the 1930s they existed only in USA, the first country where large numbers of parents were well-off enough to give their children substantial pocket-money, and they were called "bobby-soxers" from the short white socks they all wore.  Here we just became adults the minute we left school, wore adult clothes, and were expected to contribute to the family budget.  Some of us hated our parents and even voiced that feeling, but, except for the very rich, we knew we had to contribute to family welfare, or go off and be independent.  There were no teenaged "passengers" and no question of settling back in with parents after some other project had petered out.  This led to greater self-respect and understanding of what society is about.  It is about everybody pulling their weight.

There is no such thing as a Human Right without a corresponding Human Duty

The phrase "Human Rights" consists of two words.  The meaning is that if we are human we have a right to certain necessities that animals do not have.  But if we are human we also have duties that animals do not have.  There is no such thing (except for babies or the totally mentally incapable) as a Human Right without a corresponding Human Duty. All of us with a right to be cured by the NHS have a responsibility to the whole organisation to keep it in working order to the best of our ability and not lay unnecessary burdens upon it.

How doctors, as well as patients, are destroying the NHS

We have come to think that every minor ailment must be treated and doctors must prescribe.  They can no longer tell you to wait a bit and you'll get better. 

Because I am 85 and am constantly being told to report chest pains, I duly went to see my GP, after a few days of pain in the left side of my chest, quite sharp sometimes and of course imagined I must have something wrong with my heart.

I was reassured to be told that it is muscle pain, and felt better already.  I would have been quite ready to go home and take paracetamol when required, but she insisted I have a cream and codeine!  I got the cream at the pharmacy, but refused the codeine, which I consider OTT for the amount of pain I have.  Then when I got home I discovered the cream, too, is analgesic only.  Just to reduce the pain.

Over-prescribing is happening all the time, and we don't even know the cost of these unnecessary drugs.  I know that some patients won't leave the surgery unless they get a prescription, but even when I resisted these were forced upon me.  We are really being turned into a nation of softies.

University-trained nurses are not "too posh to wash" says Willis Commission. Of course they are.

From my experience of trying to get young people to help me with the garden, I think they are all too posh to get their hands dirty at all.  From the youngest age they are taught that it's wrong to get dirty.  Their clothes are too nice for them to be allowed to play in the sand.  Hospital nurses are no longer expected to do much personal care for patients.  When it comes to old people who cannot manage to deal with their own bodily functions a very different kind of carer is needed.  He or she is imbued with an understanding and empathy with the elderly, perhaps acquired from their own family experiences, perhaps because they just happen to be born with those particular qualities.

There comes a moment when treatment is no longer useful, or wanted, just to be made comfortable as we await the end.  It is perfectly reasonable to want to be allowed to die when life has lost its pleasures and its meaning.  Why should we be chivvied out of that acceptance?  We need to grow up about death and allow the elderly to express their preference for it.  This is not a feeling of defeat, just a feeling that one's life has come to its end and we need to be cared for by somebody who does not find wiping our bum for us disgusting and does not make us feel terribly lonely by refusing to accept that death is near.  Those people deserve to be paid just as  much as trained nurses.  Of course they never can be.  But their satisfactions come from something deeper than money. 

Traffic Experiment in Kensington - common sense to be used instead of traffic lights.

It is encouraging so see the success of the removal of all traffic lights, lines on the road and even the
separation of pavement from roadway on a long stretch of Exhibition Road in London.  Instead of obeying instructions, drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are expected to use their own good sense and treat each other with respect.  It sounds too good to be true, but evidently it is a system increasingly used in continental cities, and accidents are substantially reduced.  The area certainly looks much more attractive without all the road signs.  It would be great it it could be a pilot scheme not  only for traffic but in other areas of our lives.  Our brains and common sense are being eroded by nonsensical bureaucratic laws, making us act in a way that goes against all our instincts, e.g. cases where police or firemen are not allowed to put themselves in danger, and a member of the public has to do so instead in order to urgently save a life.   

Children and computers

My grandson, who lives far away, came recently and was able, most cleverly, to get my scanner to work even though I hadn't used it in the 10 years I've had it and it had become obsolete.  He did the equivalent of looking for a part for an old car on the internet, and finally found the old-fashioned software needed and got the thing to work.  What he did was unimaginable to me.  If I had had to pay somebody to do that it would, of course, have been much cheaper to buy a new one.  As usual, he was in a rush, and, in the process disconnected my printer and neither of us noticed until he had gone home.  He said, "Grandma, get any kid down the road to fix it" and I did just that and a 15-year-old came along and did it without too much trouble, and it wasn't a question of plugging something in somewhere, it involved a lot of mysterious key-work.  Some of this skill is taught at school, some is just a willingness to use trial and error.  I am dead scared of pressing any key on that basis - never knowing what horrors might unfold.

Younger and younger children are acquiring this skill and it's wonderful to behold and they learn a lot of facts without having to go to libraries.  But I think it gives them a rather unfounded sense of superiority, so they think there is nothing at all to be learned from their elders.  Their ignorance of every-day things is sometimes staggering, cooking the simplest of food that can't go in the microwave, knowing where the fuse-box is, how to find the candles if the lights fail, that you can smell food to judge whether, even though it's pas its sell-by date, is still perfectly safe to eat, that biscuits, for example, can be a bit soft but won't kill you.  One was idly picking my blackberries and throwing them on the ground as he chatted on his phone.  I asked him to please not do that - he was welcome to eat them, but not just to throw them down.  He didn't know they were edible!  Sewing on a button is a forgotten skill.  Because I love it, I still, or rather, again have an open fire.  The coalman told me that the staff at a pub which had newly re-opened its fireplace asked him to stay and light the fire for them because they had no idea how to do it.  Computer sense has replaced common sense.  But we do need a bit of the common kind.