Hospital Food

These are just a few observations from having been a patient in a NHS hospital twice for a week on each occasion in the past 5 years.  It is now called Croydon University Hospital, but still remains known to us as Mayday.

1.  I think that "Hospital Food" has been given a bad name, and whatever they do, the public will continue to consider it poor, no matter how much individual hospitals improve it.  We have become a nation of food snobs.  On these two occasions I have enjoyed the food.  The trouble is, if you say it is good, people raise their eyebrows and imagine that you don't eat very well at home.  In fact, I do, having a good cook for a husband.  And, luckily, one advantage of advanced age is that you don't care what people think.

2.  There are enormous difficulties, one being that, with short stays, you are likely to get the food ordered by the previous occupant of the bed.  I don't see how this can be avoided.

3.  If old people are asleep, someone tends to fill in the form for them, and, afraid of ordering too little, order too much.  I noticed in Mayday staff waking them and encouraging them to eat, but it's almost impossible for a hospital to provide carers with the time to coax them.  They waste so much.  Also, the servings are too big and discourage them.

4.  If you are ill you are likely to have a poor appetite.  If you don't feel like eating when you get the menu sheet and order little, you are encouraged to order more in case your appetite returns.

5.  Many ethnic minorities so much prefer their own home-cooked food that families bring it in for them.  I don't know if they also order from the menu.  Possibly some do and that gets wasted.

6.  On my latest stay in Mayday a researcher came round and asked me if my meal times were ever interrupted by nurses or doctors.  I said no, but if they were wouldn't mind, considering myself there to be cured and their time more important than one meal for me.

7.  Does it really make sense, even, in the long run, financially, to have a branch of Burger King as part of the restaurant service?  The sight of a very overweight patient in  his pyjamas eating there was a very disturbing one.

I wonder if it would be possible to have a trolley on each floor and patients could ask for what they want from it according to how they were feeling at that moment?

I am old, but NOT a grumpy old woman

I was disappointed to have this blog referred to as that of a Grumpy Old Woman.  I am very conscious of the danger of becoming one of those, but try, about each development I complain of, to offer an alternative way of behaving.  It seems to me that negativity is the curse of Britain at the moment and we shouldn't complain without offering something different, otherwise we should just shut up.

David Cameron and morality

Of course David Cameron is right - in our search for money we have lost sight of morality.  But why does he call them "Christian morals"?  Primitive societies had their moral codes long before Christ appeared on the scene.  Small societies depended on acting as one and had to be able to totally rely on each other's dedication to the common good.  We have moved far, far away from that and in fact seem to be prone to even more outrageous crimes as the years go by, such as the super-rich refusing to pay the taxes which provide them with the amenities which even they need from the state (water, roads, sewage,etc.) and those who don't mind incapacitating hospitals or railways by removing the copper wiring that keeps them going.

We are in dire straits now, but all we see is politicians allocating blame to each other.  It's too late for that, what is done is done.  But it seems even the Coalition can't stick together.  It is so ugly and useless to see the party leaders insulting each other.  Let them recognise that the situation requires a combined effort of them and us to redress it and start by giving the lead with a bit of co-operation.  Party politics was forgotten about in WWII.  Why not now, when the danger is equally great?  I don't suppose the French, cross as they are at the moment, are about to invade us, but we are in danger of our own society disintegrating around us. Of course we are all to blame in allowing the situation to get so bad, and we shall all have to pull together to reverse it.   But who will lead us?

The ants manage to act as one in a crisis.  Are we really the "lords of creation"? 

A Remedy for Cramp

Solving political, social, financial problems is complicated.  Here is something that isn't.

Cramp is very, very painful and tends to wake you up at night, the  more so as you get older.  Years ago, reading The Oldie in a dentist's waiting room, I came across this remedy and my husband and I have used it ever since.  You just put a real (not plastic) cork in the bed.  It doesn't sound in any way scientific, but it works.  Since real corks are disappearing fast in favour of plastic or screw-tops, perhaps it's a good idea to start collecting a few?

One night we both had cramp and discovered that, having changed the sheets, we had forgotten to put the cork back.  This was something we only found out in the morning - no question of it being psycho-somatic cramp!

I am most grateful to The Oldie for this

My friend and I have been meeting regularly for lunch, every few months, for a great many years at a comfortable Victorian hotel.  This time there was a gap of almost a year.  Too long!  The shell is still there, the inside is transformed into something much more up-market, colder, sharper, smarter.  We had our lunch there, but for the last time.  Our tradition is broken.  No doubt they won't mind.

We had the habit of meeting in the foyer, but gone are the welcoming arm-chairs, and I was faced instead with standing beside a huge placard announcing the imminent opening of a Champagne Bar until my friend arrived - luckily straight away - we are the punctual generation!  We set off towards "our" restaurant, but immediately noted that it's no longer for us.  Glossy, expensive, it's not where we want to be.  We repaired to the Brasserie, but that, too had a chichi look.  Obviously the sort of place where you "wait to be seated" but nobody came forward for a while, and then without apology for the delay.  The menu was full of pretentious phrases describing the food - the calves liver was said to be "seared", sounding an inappropriate way of dealing with it!  The service was rather slow, but we didn't really notice staffthat, until afterwards when somebody approached us and asked about it.  Not wanting to get the waiter in trouble we said it was acceptable, but I missed the opportunity to say that service is the essence of a pretentious restaurant, and it is no good spending lots of money on decor if you are going to stint on staff.

This was even more evident when, wanting to have coffee in the lounge, we discovered it was unaccountably closing at 4 p.m., though an important-looking man did summon a scarce waiter to bring us some in the corridor.

Of course, as everywhere, the toilets are superb.  But they were perfectly adequate before.

Money seems available for everything except what matters most, people!  It is the way you are treated that makes you want to come back.  But I suppose I haven't got it right.  All those marketing managers can't be wrong, can they?

What is it that all parents learn to do but no governments seem to think of?

In spite of the belief of the grumpy British at the moment, we are a very advanced and successful society.

We do all sorts of clever things, staff some of the world's best universities, build nuclear weapons and harness nuclear power, perform heart and liver transplants, run high-tech factories, have drinking water come out of our taps, transport millions of people every day on public transport, maintain a sewage system, provide electricity nation-wide and do lots more besides which we take for granted.  But there is one enterprise that is considered too difficult for us.

Most parents, when faced with a child saying "I'm bored" find a task for them to do.  According to age it can be help mash the potatoes, clean the bathroom, sweep the front path, tidy the toy cupboard and find something that can be taken to the charity shop for a younger child.  Sometimes it even enjoys the task, even learns a new skill and wants to do it again.  At the very least, the devil didn't get a chance to employ those idle hands.

But Governments, faced with a million unemployed youth and a country crying out for a general tidying-up, seem unable to harness those forces.  The advantages would be manifold:

1.  Not letting young school and college leavers get in the habit of not having to get up in the morning.
2.  Giving them a feeling that they are needed.
3.  Our neighbourhoods looking more cheerful.
4.  Even if cleaning and cutting back greenery and painting aren't considered skills, they really are useful.
5.  Learning to work in groups to do a task together.
6.  Improving relationships between different ages in society.  The public, seeing a group of youngsters, would not immediately assume they were "up to no good" , and even be afraid of them (Heaven help us!)- might even thank them for the work they are doing!

This should NOT put street cleaners out of a job.  To my mind they are some of the most useful public servants and I am grateful every Tuesday when ours comes round to tidy us up.  But there are plenty of corners they can't, even aren't allowed to reach.  One is just round the corner - some garages set back from the road where rubbish regularly accumulates, to the despair of the owners.  The youngsters could, even, with permission, tidy up the front gardens of those who are too old or too feckless or don't know how to do it themselves.

Is saving the planet more important than the financial crisis?

Lord Prescott sounded unexpectedly statesmanlike when, speaking from the meeting about global warming which is taking place in South Africa, with scant media attention, he said that if we do not take the health of the planet more seriously we shall, in a few years' time, think of the euro crisis as a pin-prick - or words to that effect, I only heard him on the radio and have not seen what he said in print.  But it is what I have been thinking.

No need to go on about wastefulness - we all know its extent - and the government wants us to go out at Christmas and buy more stuff for the sake of "growth" instead of, sensibly, saving for the rainy days which are on the way when the cuts bite more deeply.  (By the way, literal rainy days are to be wished for.  Is it global warming that is causing us to have a DROUGHT?  In England?  In winter?)

Well, one little example of daftness has just come home with my husband.  He is 79, all male, and not into glamorous underwear, but his last 2 pairs of underpants (£5, "Mega Value") come in a most beautiful box!  I am a collector of lovely boxes for re-use, and am grateful for this one.  It is made of strong cardboard and has an inner drawer which slides out as smoothly as one in an expensive bit of furniture.  But can we really justify cutting down trees to provide this bit of nonsense?  We are meant to be the rational beings on the planet, but we aren't thinking.