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April 23, 2017

My election notes. E-Day – 46

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Here we go again, and we’d better get used to it, political parties engaging in something I call manifesto clickbaiting. A proposal that has about as much chance of becoming law as they do of forming the next government. Something that will both hopefully – for them, if not us – dominate the news agenda. And act as a political dog whistle to people who are undecided or wavering;

UKIP is to include a ban on the full veils worn by some Muslim women as part of its general election manifesto, its leader Paul Nuttall has said.

Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show Mr Nuttall said wearing a burka or niqab in public was a barrier to integration and a security risk.

Although this proposal might be seen by some as the state suggesting what can and can’t be worn by women – which some religions do very well on their own without the the state getting in on the act – worse was to follow;

Mr Nuttall also told the programme that he wanted to prevent Islamic sharia law becoming “a parallel legal system in this country”.

“It cannot be right that we have court or councils in this country where the word of a woman is only worth half that of a man. That has no place in a liberal, democratic, functioning Western democracy,” he said.

But he said that Beth Din, Jewish rabbinical courts, would not be affected, because they had been established for centuries and the Orthodox Jewish population was falling.

So there we have it. If something has been established for long enough, that’s OK, is it? Really? Is the permissibility of things now, according to Ukip at least, based on how long they’ve been happening? By that yardstick – and there seems no other logical interpretation – because I’ve always eaten my bogies that’s OK?

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April 23, 2017

My election notes. E-Day -46

mainToday is a day of two polls, which together illustrate how political polling has as much credibility as shampoo adverts.

Today there is a poll in the Daily Mail that carries the shock news that;

Theresa May’s hopes of winning a landslide election victory suffered a major blow last night after her poll lead plummeted to 11 per cent amid the row over her tax and pension plans.

A Survation poll for The Mail on Sunday put the Conservatives on 40 per cent, followed by Labour on 29 per cent and the Lib Dems and Ukip level on 11 per cent.

It means Mrs. May’s lead over Jeremy Corbyn has nearly halved in four days: a poll immediately after she called the Election gave the Tories a 21-point advantage.

However, there is another poll, first published on the Guardian homepage as a top story, but now relegated to the politics page announcing the equally shocking news that

The Tories have more than doubled their lead over Labour to 19 points since Theresa May called a snap general election last Tuesday, according to a new poll that suggests theConservatives are heading for a landslide victory on 8 June.

Confused? Possibly, if one only reads the headlines and the first paragraph of each story. Although the Guardian to be fair does point out in the second paragraph:

The survey by Opinium for the Observer, conducted on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, puts the Tories on 45% (up seven points compared with the previous week), while Labour is down three points on 26%.

To be fair? Sorry, I meant to be vague. At least the Daily Mail put the Guardians poll in a slightly more understandable context;

Last night an Opinium poll, taken before the tax, pensions and overseas aid row, put the Tory lead at 19 points.

So who to trust? It’s a tough one! But earlier on I mentioned shampoo adverts? You know, the ones on the television that claim that 93% of women agree that this shampoo is the best shampoo in the history of ever? And for a few seconds you think ‘ Wow! 93%. That’s impressive.’ But then reason and logic kick in. And you see that buried in the smallest possible writing is the revelation that only 200 women were asked if they agreed. And you wonder how such a big claim could be based on such a little sample. Who, for example are these women?

And then you start to question the validity of ALL polls, realizing that the sample of people questioned in survey is low – in both cases above less than 2100 – and remembering that at the last election in 2015 pretty much every poll got it wrong!

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April 22, 2017

My election notes. E-Day -47

The last couple of days have required some deft footwork from Phillip Hammond, the man who puts chance into Chancellor. In refusing to rule out an income tax increase and increase in VAT yesterday, he was probably remembering the humiliating climb-down over plans in his budget to increase National Insurance Contributions for the self-employed. Unfortunately, the last Conservative manifesto explicitly stated that they wouldn’t. Hence the climb-down and his reluctance to make any pledge that might bedevil him later.

If only Teresa May had been as cautious and had been paying attention to Parliamentary debates and what her Ministers say. When asked about her commitment to protecting the triple lock – introduced in 2010 and which guarantees that the state pension will rise by the rate of average earnings OR the Consumer Price Index OR 2,5% whichever is the highest- she said yesterday:

 All I would say to pensioners is just look at what the Conservatives in government have done.

However she stopped short of any pledge that she could be held to, which is an electoral gamble because pensioners are the demographic most likely to vote but against that but pensions amount to a whopping £92 billion of the welfare budget. And the population is ageing, meaning not only are there more pensioners, but those that there are are living longer.

But on Thursday, – the day before she invited pensioners to examine the governments record – in a debate about pensions, the issue of annual uprating of pensions for pensioners who’ve emigrated came up. At the moment where you move to depends on how much you get. Some have theirs annually uprated, whereas some have them fixed at the amount the pension was worth when they left. Which depending on where they’ve emigrated to, could be a substantial amount indeed. Richard Harington, the Pensions Minister uttered a stark reminder of exactly where this governments priorities lie.

The governments position remains consistent with that of every government for the last seventy years and the annual cost of changing a long-standing policy will soon be £0.5 Billion which the government believes cannot be justified.

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April 21, 2017

My daily election notes. E-Day – 48

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One of the less edifying effects of Teresa Mays decision to call a snap election hasn’t been to cause the Labour MP Clive Lewis to postpone his marriage – his honeymoon was booked for June 6th – but rather what in parliamentary terms is called the ‘wash-up’.

Basically the ‘wash-up’ puts me in mind of schoolchildren with an essay to complete who, because the sun is inviting them out to play have left it until a few days before the essay is due in to start writing it. With a panic they realise that their answer will inevitably involve lots of detail to digest, understand, consider and formulate a coherent answer. But far too much detail than the time available to them allows. So they do the only thing they can do. They cherry pick details and pad those details out. Or at least they hope they cherry pick.

That’s the problem with cherry picking, one isn’t always certain that the only the sweet cherries have been picked; if one does it in a rush, then in all probability one will end up with some sour ones. As a way to write an essay it’s not ideal.

But as a way to create legislation it’s insane.

The Finance Bill 2017 will be rushed through the Commons and the Lords so it can be enshrined in law before parliament breaks. Whilst there are some important tax blah in it, the bill runs to 700 pages. Time means that only the most important will make it in to a slimmed down bill for parliament to pass into law. It also doesn’t allow for any scrutiny or for someone to say ‘Hang on, you’ve left all these things out and left that in. Explain you’re reasoning’

It’s as if the Dangerous Dogs Act fiasco never happened

Until tomorrow.

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April 20, 2017

My daily election notes. E-Day – 49

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In the run up to the election, I’ll be temporarily suspending my recent blog writing apathy in favour of attempting to write a short blog every day of the campaign and my thoughts on it. I’ve always been inordinately fascinated by politics and it’s potential to effect transformative change for the betterment of both the individual and therefore society.

But as I wrote in back in 2014

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

In a later entry, I promise to outline my theory that anyone who understands how a family operates – the dynamics and tensions that are at play, the ever shifting balance of powers between the parents and the children and the temporary alliances built on need – can understand politics. Anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated. I promise I will outline my theory in another post, but now is not the time.

 

The time is now however to speculate on the possibility that the retiring Labour MP Andy Burham is related to Captain Black, him off of the Mysterons? Are some unseen hands pulling his strings?

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April 1, 2017

Is Amandan Aibreain a modern day Peter Rachman?

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The inevitable doesn’t just happen. It only happens to be inevitable when one is able look back and correctly assess and interpret the conditions that allowed it to happen. Then, and only then, does it become inevitable. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, because it allows us to make the same mistakes, except now they’re re-packaged so they seem something new and modern. As H. L. Mencken observed “ No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

The housing market in London, were, if it was house, be condemned. Actually, no it wouldn’t. The house would be bought by a property developer, knocked down and in it’s place would go shiny new flats to be bought by foreign investors. As Lex Luthor notes in ‘Superman Returns’ “ They ain’t building any more land” (Which isn’t strictly true. Ask the Dutch.) But the point still stands, land is at a premium, demand for housing far outstrips supply, so much so that in increasingly desperate times, people will do increasingly desperate things.

So it comes as nary a surprise to learn of a Harry Potter-esque scenario, whereby a bed under some stairs was offered up for the bargain price of £500 a month. Mind you it was in Clapham. Or that people are sharing bedroom space with complete strangers because the rent for a single occupancy room is so high. Even a room with a bunk bed is called a ’twin room’. At £295 per person per month. Communal living is making a comeback as young professionals seek to negate the prohibitive cost of living in London like a rabbit in a hutch.

Barnet House, an 11-storey office building, could be converted into 254 studio flats, if an application by building leaseholder Meadow Residential is approved by the council.

Around 95 per cent of them would be smaller than the national minimum space standards of 37sqm, with the smallest being around 16sqm.

That is around 40 per cent smaller than the 28 sqm average Travelodge room

 

So, therefore it comes as no surprise to learn that Amadan Aibreain has submitted plans for a three new capsule hotel. Capsule hotels are nothing new. They first appeared, as I understand it, in Tokyo where space is at a premium and only the wealthy can afford those premiums. Essentially a capsule hotel offers a bed and amenities the more you pay, the better they are. So profitable have these been that it was it didn’t take long before one of these opened in London. The Z hotel boasts that;

 The building is a designer conversion of a Victorian townhouse, within a prominent block of mixed architectural styles. Inside, you find 106 rooms set over 8 floors. And it places you in Lower Belgrave Street, just off Buckingham Palace Road, and a stone’s throw from Victoria Station and the local theatres.

But the catch is that the Z hotel is only intended for short stays and ever the entrepreneur, Aibreain was quick to see a gap in the market. His ‘novel’ – some might say – ‘immoral’ idea, is that for the majority of the day the room is empty. Thinking that no one wants to pay for something they will not use, his bright idea is to offer rooms available to be rented in blocks of hours throughout the day. As he says “I was in a hotel in Bucharest years ago and it struck me that I only spent 8 hours of every day sleeping in the thing, the rest of the time it wasn’t used and it struck me, what if one could make better use of the time I wasn’t using it, making it more cost efficient”. There is no limit on the duration of the stay either.

Essentially, he sells use of each room in blocks of eight hours. Amazingly, it has proven to be a success because it seemingly gets around the problem of affording rent in London. He already has one in Canning Town with a further three planned for elsewhere in London. His hotels offer a place to sleep and not much else, but then I suppose with most things existing only in a digital format nowadays, the idea of having a large record collection, books, photos, videos is more a generational throwback to the past – all of these can be stored on a laptop or an external hard drive. So what is the compulsion to surround us with stuff? And more pertinently, can one afford the space to have it with you? I write this whilst looking with some irony at my own large record collection, proudly amassed over the years and it truly is a mass. Although it isn’t as much as a mass as I would have liked.

But to get back on topic Amadan Aibreain reminds me of nothing more than a modern day Peter Rachman, a landlord who came to notoriety in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s by renting out properties to the desperate that were squalid to but for an extortionate rent.

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March 11, 2017

News just in..

5966154-3x2-940x627After my last post, which was read by less people than Elizabeth Taylor had husbands, I thought I’d really mine the depressing angle by writing about my depression. In the usual course of events, I wouldn’t write about my depression not out of feeling guilty about it or some other nonsense, but more that writing about it potentially exacerbates it. But as the events of last Sunday night did a fine job of doing that, I needn’t worry too much on that score.

So then to Sunday night which proved that yes, whilst it may well be good to talk, the outcome resulting from it depends on to quite a large degree on whom one is talking to. Ideally they are not only an active listener – by which I mean one who not only pays attention, but also indicates they are doing so by referencing things one said earlier on – but also possess an intuitive emotional intelligence – knowing the difference between a long pause to collect one’s thoughts and silence, etc. My mother has many fine qualities, but being encumbered by emotional intelligence isn’t one of them.

And it sometimes happens that when I’m about to set off to visit my mother, the ‘black dog’ might start barking; the ‘black dog’ being what Winston Churchill called his depression. The former doesn’t induce the latter I hasten to add. Anything can set me off. And because my mother doesn’t – for reasons known only to her – wear her hearing aids, my partner has to ‘phone up and cancel the visit with a vague excuse about me not being up to it.

Last Sunday was different. I know well that my mother views such excuses with disdain and thinly veiled contempt, not least because of her sudden and inexplicable interest in wholly irrelevant things when I do arrive following a cancelled visit. Discussing people I don’t know doing things I have no interest in. Not turning the television off. Or worse still, turning the volume off on the television but blatantly watching it with the subtitles on. So even though the ‘black dog’ was barking loudly, I decided to go, in order that she could see for herself what a good thing it is for all concerned that I don’t visit on such occasions.

After perfunctory greetings, it was down to business as usual; her talking about things that interest only her, at length and with mind numbing detail. If one were cynical, one might almost suppose this was deliberate; a ploy to prevent one from perpetrating a conversational hijack. On and on it went. Finally I said that when my partner ‘phones and says I’m depressed. It doesn’t mean I’m a bit grumpy. It’s quite serious. I was in the middle of giving a watered down version of how bad it can get – because she is my Mother – when she said, “Oh, I had no idea you were depressed.”

After a few seconds spent digesting the sheer idiocy of this statement I asked her in what possible universe would one not be depressed in my situation? How could someone wake up after a month in coma only to discover that the person they were exists only in the past tense, as a fading memory and not be depressed? To discover that ones life was now an existence, something to be endured not enjoyed? (Granted, yes, there have been good times, but they are massively disproportionate to the time spent accruing them.) To find that one couldn’t walk, had a speech impediment and now had fine motor skills that were as much use as a lead squash ball? How does one begin to explain the enormity of regret I have about waking up from the coma in the first place? The regret I have the dreadful and ongoing impact of the ‘Law of Unintended Consequences’ has had on others? There is so much regret and anger – at me for being in this situation – that one might have thought that possibly, just possibly, someone who’d known me all off my life might consider that such a turn of events wasn’t exactly what I’d planned. But then I remembered who I was talking to. This, after all is the person who when she was a nurse would always want to be there when patients who’d attempted suicide by taking a overdose would wake up after a stomach pump. Not to offer them counsel and a warm smile. But rather to see the look of disappointed frustration on their faces because she found it amusing.

I’m not making that up. I wish I was. She boasts of it. She admits that she’s emotionally detached. She is one of those women who, for whatever reason, isn’t maternal. Don’t get me wrong, I love her to bits, but she makes Leonard’s mum seem touchy feely.

So in retrospect, expecting her to have anything approaching a humane reaction to what is a human reaction to an inhuman circumstance was perhaps overly ambitious. Mind you, I’ve learnt that saying ‘Keeping sanity at bay’ is a sound bite that satisfies most enquiries as to how I’m doing. Hardly anyone asks why.

Perhaps it’s because they know they should ask, because it’s the right thing to do now, isn’t it and people just love being well thought of? Perhaps they think asking with a concerned face makes them appear a better person? Or perhaps because they don’t have the requisite amount of time that the answer warrants?

Or perhaps they fear that if I start, I won’t stop.

 

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February 28, 2017

Are humans like the aliens in ‘Independence Day’? Or are we breeding ourselves into extinction? Or both?

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**THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILM OF THE DAN BROWN BOOK ‘INFERNO’. IF YOU PLAN TO SEE IT, BUT HAVEN’T YET, STOP READING.**

Last night my partner and I watched ‘Inferno’. It came as no surprise to me to discover that a film based on a book by Dan Brown wasn’t going to be all that exciting. But the most audacious aspect for a mainstream Hollywood film was it’s central thesis. At the start we see the villain giving an internet talk spelling out the problem of global over-population. He addresses the consequences for the planet of this if it remains unchecked. But having seen seen the problem and being a billionaire, is in a position to do something about it.

We find out that he’s created a virus that will wipe out half of the worlds population. The film features on the race to find the bomb that contains the virus before it explodes and releases the virus. Two things leapt to mind, firstly, if you had conceived and thought things through with such impeccable logic wouldn’t you just release the virus? And secondly – and most importantly – was villains plan so villainous? If half the world’s population were wiped out, would that be such a bad thing?

Why is it that human life needs to be sustained? Do all preventable deaths need to be prevented? Rather than smoke less, drink less and exercise more, we should be doing the very opposite. Our life expectancy – in certain parts of the world anyway – has increased well beyond our planets ability to sustain the amount of us. Every second there are four births to every two deaths. It took until 1804for the global population to reach 1 billion. And 2 billion by 1927. By 1974 it was 4 billion and by 2024 it is predicted to reach 8 billion. And it’s only going to increase.

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Are we just the very worst kind of hypocrites, advocating, then justifying and then implementing culls – population control by killing – of other species? Sometimes it is claimed that such drastic action is warranted on the grounds that the current levels of other species population growth would, if left unchecked, present a very real threat to the survival of that species. Yet it seems to me an incontrovertible fact that the species in need of culling, certainly from the planets and our continued existence is Homo sapiens. And that’s assuming that breeding ourselves into extinction is a bad thing. As this five-minute video makes clear, the planet would do just fine without us.

And when one considers ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ – the point at which humanity goes into ecological debt – and how early it is getting every year, the only rational conclusion is that more humans are only going to exacerbate this problem, because the primary goal of capitalism is to sell us things, this treadmill of consumerism will never stop. Until we exhaust the planets resources that is. We are like the aliens in “Independence Day’ who use up all the natural resources of a planet, strip it bare and move on. But unlike the aliens, we can’t go anywhere else.

In all but one important respect humanity is like an elderly person who is doubly incontinent and wearing an adult nappy, we made the mess and will have to stay in it. Only no-one’s going to clean up this mess for us, We have to. But don’t show any signs of doing so. And it’s not as if we were unaware that we were causing the problem. We knew. We knew what needed to be done but didn’t do it when less controversial measures were needed, so only drastic solutions remain. The situation reminds me of the Japanese resuming hunting whales for ‘scientific reasons’. In what possible universe is that a good idea?

So it was with an air of resigned frustration that I greeted that news that President Trump in one of his first executive orders was to withhold any U.S. government funding from any U.S. overseas agency that either gave birth control advice or provided abortions. One might be forgiven for thinking that he might have had more urgent matters to attend to. Possibly? Or was he taking his cue from the Chinese, who’ve announced an end to their ‘one child only’ rule. Or from the Catholic Church which opposes birth control?

Yes, things are bad.

So here’s a solution. But first of all, we need to establish some givens in order to accept the hypotheses that there is a problem before we can think about a possible solution. First of all, are there too many humans currently alive for this planet to sustain? And can governments support this? The United Nations isn’t sure,

Whether the growing numbers of older persons are living their later years in good health is a crucial consideration for policy development. If the added years of life expectancy are spent with disability, then demographic trends could portend substantially increased demand for health care. If the onset or severity of ill health is instead postponed as life expectancy increases, then the pressures exerted on the health system by a growing population of older persons may be attenuated. So far, evidence of trends in the health status of older persons is mostly limited to high-income countries and points to different conclusions depending on the study or context, making it difficult to draw clear conclusions about the fundamental questions.

And the more people there are, the greater the amount of food needed to feed them. As Thomas Malthus in his ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ of 1798 observed that “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. (1,2,4,8,16, etc). Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. (1,2,3,4, etc) A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew (sic) the immensity of the first power in comparison to the second.’

Therefore, if we take the films ‘Logan’s Run’ and the much under-rated ‘Soylent Green’ as our inspirations, both of which offer a rather unedifying view of a distant and not so distant future. In ‘Logan’s Run’ no one lives past 30. In ‘Soylent Green’ which is set in a not too distant future, because the present and future are black and white and only the past is in colour there are corporate run euthanasia centres where people go to, well, what else could you do at an euthanasia centre? They then turn the dead into a meat substitute, what else. So to my way of thinking anyone over 75 has a civic duty, nay, a social responsibility and for the survival of our species not to go on living.

This isn’t as heartless as you might first imagine. What would they be missing out on? Age related diseases like dementia or Alzheimer’s. Or a stroke? Gradual infirmity? The list goes on, but the point is, who on earth would want to miss out on all that?. Additionally, if one knew one wasn’t going to see 76, might not that focus the mind and prevent one from the tyranny of tormented regrets about wasted years?

And at the other end of life too many babies are equally a detriment to the survival of the species. Actually, no they’re not. They’re worse. An older person would have consumed less of the planets resources because – in the West at least – there was less in their lifetime for them to consume. But now there are more people, and even if they each consume less per person, because there are more of them, consumption will necessarily increase. And they’ll have children. And the wheel keeps turning. Until it falls off. Some have argued that having children is the single most catastrophic act for the survival of our species a human can do. These views might seem extreme now, but remember how most of the environmental issues that have engendered behavoiur modification sounded forty years ago?

The facts don’t lie. Neither do they allow room for sentiment. If we believe that culling is both necessary and desirable for the survival of other species, we must first look at our own.

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October 6, 2016

When a care agency cares too much…

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Earlier last week, I was surprised to learn that my care agency was channeling the spirit of Public Enemy, most specifically their song “Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos”. In it, Chuck D angrily exclaims, “I got a letter from the government the other day / I opened and read it, it said they were suckers / they wanted me for their army or whatever/ picture me giving a damn I said never.” Although to be fair it wasn’t a letter they sent me but an email and they weren’t asking me to join the army, but notify me that I owed them £20.

This exorbitant sum is alleged to have been incurred in November of last year. Why it has only come to light now and furthermore, why they are troubling me for this when I am not in a position to prove either way if the alleged debt has actually been incurred, is something I can’t say. But what it does allow me to say is that it reveals some unpleasant things about my care agency and also some of the harsh working practices prevalent amongst UK employers.

The first question that springs to mind concerns the money. My care agency charges me £21 an hour for every hour worked, of which £10 is a management fee. According to their latest inspection by the Care Quality Commission, they have 500 employees. How many of these are office based and how many are care workers isn’t clear. However, let us work on the assumption that 50 are office based. (And that is being generous, given that their management style takes seriously the Dolly Parton line ‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”)

Anyway, assuming that each employee works 20 hours a week – yes, I’m getting to that – this means that those 450 staff work a total of 9000 hours a week, which when multiplied by £10 works out at £90,000 a week. And that equates to the princely sum of £4.6 million a year. I haven’t mentioned that the hourly rate – and consequently the management fee – increases with out of hour’s work (7pm -7am), weekend work, the Christmas or Easter holidays and other bank holidays. Although to be fair, not all of the staff will be working all of the time – my figure of 20 hours isn’t plucked out of thin air; rather it’s based on what numerous care workers have told me over the years – and that within that figure the agency has to pay office staff salaries and other legally mandated employer contributions on the earnings of their staff. Nonetheless, someone somewhere is making a tidy sum and that someone isn’t any of the workers.

Because the workers hourly rate is just above £10 an hour.

A couple of months ago, one of my care workers was looking for another job when her boyfriend spotted an advert on Gumtree for the agency offering a higher rate of hourly pay than she was currently receiving. One would have thought this would have raised immediate hackles and that she would have voiced her displeasure loudly and at some length, but this illustrates two of the many the shameful working practices at work in Britain today. First of all, the workers at my care agency are employed on zero hour’s contracts. There is no guarantee of work and consequently, if one raises their head above the parapets one fears that they won’t be offered any. This is helps instil a docile workforce. The precarious nature of their situation is exacerbated by them working alone, never collectively. Consequently this means that they can’t organise themselves to voice collective dissatisfaction at their treatment or conditions. Although there is always the possibility – however remote – that they are happy with the way things are

Some months ago, another of my regular care workers Simon was away from work because of an illness that rendered him incapable of working for some weeks. During this time, he received no sick pay whatsoever from the agency. And when they do work, they only get paid from the time that their shift starts; they don’t get any travel time and therefore it is presumed that travelling across London doesn’t incur any expense or is subject to any delay.

Cancellations are another problem for me, inasmuch as if you cancel a shift more than 24 hours in advance the worker doesn’t get paid. Worryingly, it seems that I that I am unique in giving my care workers plenty of notice of my intention to cancel but doing so so they got paid. (Admittedly, my generosity is helped by the fact that it isn’t my own personal money I’m being so profligate with, it’s money given to me to fund my care by my local authority.) But numerous care workers have benefitted. Until, that is, one got promoted to an office job and promptly pulled up the drawbridge behind her. At the next review of my needs I was castigated by her a manager for doing so despite me highlighting the dilemma for the care workers; either have a relaxing day off and get paid or do the days work, she was adamant that workers wanted to work.

With hindsight I should’ve called her out on it and rebutted her trumpery moonshine by pointing out the terms and conditions the managers expected their workers to tolerate, the managers themselves wouldn’t tolerate.

And they hassle me for £20? As ‘Public Enemy’s’ Flavor Flav would say ‘Do they know what time it is? I ain’t going out like that!”

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August 25, 2016

On being careful of what you wish for…

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I write this sitting in the garden of my house, all warm sunshine and delighted squeals emanating forth from Little Miss Sunshine in the paddling pool in what otherwise should be a glorious late summer idyll. Instead of which, I’m doing a remarkably good job of hiding the naked terror that has bedevilled my every moment since 04.06 this morning.

At 04.06 I awoke in a sweat, which wasn’t a cause for concern as it had been an uncomfortably warm night. What happened next however,  was. As I lay in bed, it seemed as if my whole body was gripped by a sort of seizure. Sort of, because I don’t know exactly what a seizure feels like, but this was what I imagined one to be, and it wasn’t an experience I wished to repeat. But I was to. My whole body was gradually enveloped by a creeping kind of pins and needles type numbness, which lasted for long enough to scare the proverbial out of me.

Naturally sleep eluded me from this point, suffering from the terror  which only someone experiencing unexpected sensations at very late o’clock can know. These sensations occurred twice more, each time ratcheting up the terror. Throughout the rest of the day, I’ve styled it out – putting on a brave as face as someone with depression can – so as yo avoid questions. It’s amazing how effective answering an enquiry as to how am I, –  “98% carbon” – is, especially when you want to convey a sense of normalcy is, given it’s the same answer I always give. Either that or ‘Keeping sanity at bay”.

Anyway, I’ve had recurrent pins and needles in my left arm and leg throughout the day. And not exactly tightness in the chest, but noticeable discomfort.  Was this real or imagined? This has happened before, although nowhere near as bad as last night

But in most extreme case of being careful what you wish for, it’s now 06.50am on Saturday 26th September and I’ve been awake since 04.45am, scared to go back to sleep. What occasioned this was me waking up and then feeling a cramp like sensation in my lower left leg, from the calf down. Waiting for it to abate almost immediately, it hasn’t. There is still some tingling, not pins and needles exactly but noticeably there. Pointing my toes up towards my body is something I can do but feel instinctively – why and how I know not – that I shouldn’t. Mindful of the fact that others are sleeping in the house, I’ve gingerly attempted to put some weight on it. It doesn’t feel as strong as the right one, but then I am in a state of heightened anxiety, a state, which has to be said, is in no way helped by occasional twinges in my upper left arm. At least I think they’re twinges.

As I say, I scared to go back to sleep and not just because my Mother had a stroke last year. Am I having a minor one or am I thinking too much? Is my left arm tired just because it is tired or is it something else entirely? Is the slackness on the lower left side of my mouth something real or imagined? And more importantly, why am I writing this, when my time might be put to better use?

It’s not that death scares me, more the moment itself, that one knows one is going to die, that the lights are going to be turned off.

Anyway, off to A&E to see what they make of it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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