Behind the World’s Biggest Bike Shed

Never having indulged in Facebook (for obvious reasons; as JuliaM puts it with admirable clarity, ‘Facebook and teachers - like matter and anti-matter’), it was something of a surprise to be asked about a recent celebration by someone who had seen me in candid pictures taken and posted by one of the guests, a mutual friend, who had also included a picture taken in front of my house. Not being signed up, I couldn’t be tagged by name, but I was still clearly recognisable to anyone who knows me by sight.

I appreciate that this makes me sound old-fashioned, but this felt like a major invasion of privacy. While I might equally well, in the past, have figured in printed photos shown to friends or colleagues, appearing in digital form online and reliant on someone else’s privacy settings makes me distinctly uncomfortable, particularly given the inclusion of my home (with associated geolocation).

I’ve long been uneasy about putting images in the public domain (so much so that, along with a handful of other die-hards, I refused to obey the Head’s diktat requiring individual portrait photos for the school website - I know how good some teenagers are with photoshop). It seems petty to be annoyed about it - and a snap of bunch of fifty-somethings chatting round a lunch table is hardly going to cause a sensation - but I do feel there is a principle at stake here.

This attitude is presumably incomprehensible to youngsters who, seduced by the lure of social media and the world of the influencer - not to mention numerous attention-seeking celebrities constantly pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in the public domain - are constantly aiming for maximum online exposure. Unfortunately for them, the internet is an unforgiving place; put a picture of your youthful indiscretions online (or have one posted by someone else) and there’s no telling when it may come back to bite you.

There’s a good deal of sense in the words of a wise Headmaster (rare, but they do exist) who advised pupils not to post anything online which they would not be happy to see on the side of a bus driving down the High Street the next day. Sadly, staffroom anecdotal evidence suggests many teenagers take a very different attitude: in the words of one world-weary colleague, “It’s a full-time job trying to stop them putting their tits all over the internet”.

From long professional association with them, I’d argue that teenagers should be equipped with a sign on their foreheads reading ‘Under Construction’ to remind people - themselves included - that there is a great deal of essential rewiring happening inside, not least in the areas governing risk-taking and self-image. Once upon a time, unwary and over-bold adolescents might end up inside a sabre-toothed tiger; these days, they may well find themselves exposed, so to speak, on a global stage.

If Twitter is, in the words of the Tavern’s Wise Woman, ‘ the world’s biggest lavatory wall’, then the world of social media provides the digital equivalent of the school bike sheds as the scene of myriad nefarious activities intended mainly to show off to one’s peers and enjoy the thrill of breaking rules - with the significant difference that what happens there could now be available for all to see.

Time will tell whether this becomes a problem with future employers or partners - and the undiscovered country ahead includes the thorny question of how tomorrow’s children will react to seeing in glorious technicolour what their parents got up to in their salad days - but I, for one, am glad there’s no record out there of my irresponsible youth.

#ISawGoodyProctorWithTheDevil

 Writing in the Telegraph this week, Charles Moore describes how younger employees are holding the whip hand and effectively controlling the output of publishing houses, where their refusal to work on books of which they disapprove is effectively silencing authors whose works do not conform to the current orthodoxy.

Despite their junior status, these staff members are potentially wielding a formidable weapon against their superiors. With the example of JK Rowling looming large, the prospect of falling victim to a mass social media campaign is clearly enough to make those in charge bend to their will and turn down books younger employees deem ‘offensive’. A recent victim was Nigel Biggar’s ‘Colonialism: A Reckoning’: 

The author’s crime had been to attempt a balanced judgement of empire, especially the British Empire. The very idea of such a balance [...] had earlier been denounced by academics worldwide, including 58 from his own university. “OMG. This is serious shit... we need to SHUT THIS DOWN,” the ringleader of his opponents had tweeted.

The same undue influence is being exerted in Britain’s museums, where directors told Moore that their institutions tweeted support for Black Lives Matter because they “could not ignore the opinions of talented young staff”. The ‘talent’ in question. I suspect, has less to do with intrinsic ability than with their prowess with the very same communications technology they are using to censor our heritage and culture - and more:

It is nowadays common for staff groups within the civil service to criticise government policy, publicly and unrebuked, although the job of the civil service is to serve the elected government impartially. If a young employee decides to take offence, that seems to trump other considerations.

As Moore points out, this is getting alarmingly close to Mao’s Red Guard*, putting power in the hands of indoctrinated youngsters too inexperienced and solipsistic to be open to reason, empathy or compassion. By giving power of veto to these junior employees - many of them the product of universities which have effectively become echo chambers for left-wing ideology - the institutions of this country are setting a very dangerous precedent indeed.

*If you haven’t already read it, I thoroughly recommend Jung Chang’s ‘Wild Swans’, which includes chilling descriptions of the vicious Red Guard persecution and abuse of teachers and other ‘intellectuals’.

A Mammoth Task

The hiatus since the last post has much to do with the content of this one; in a recent search, I stumbled across something which I think worthy of comment but it’s taken a while to work out exactly how to approach it. The scale of the thing is so horribly daunting that it presents a major challenge to convey its nature in a mere handful of paragraphs.

This is, inevitably, the result of the number of people likely to have been involved in its creation; for anyone who has ever wondered what it is all those dozens of NHS Diversity Officers and Coordinators actually do, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you...*drumroll*... the NHS Northern Care Alliance Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Calendar 2022.

This document - which runs to 28 pages and is presumably the result of many weeks of work (and numerous meetings-with-biscuits) - 

...‘has been developed as a resource for NHS staff to demonstrate a visible and supportive role which is committed to respecting and celebrating diverse communities, cultures and faiths.’

On the face of it, a calendar giving the main religious festivals of the year including fasts and observances sounds like a useful idea (especially in a medical setting) and I can say from experience that staff booking appointments aren’t always aware of public holidays. However, the compilers of this magnum opus clearly saw this as a mere preamble to the main event, a plethora of obscure celebrations, awareness days and campaigning opportunities ambitiously intended to:

 Promote equality, diversity and inclusion

 Break down barriers and foster an inclusive environment

 Avoid wastage by ensuring appointments are scheduled accordingly

 Ensure key events do not clash with major festivals.

 Encourage wellbeing

All very laudable, I’m sure, but any member of staff hoping for a quick reference guide has to wade through a bewildering cornucopia of colour coding - orange for Buddhist, blue for Christianity, purple for Judaism etc - and irrelevant and inconsequential detail - since when was St Hilary’s Day a major festival? Why did they feel the need to dedicate a third of a page to the benefits of Dry January? And how many patients or staff intend to observe the Summer Solstice or World Humanist Day?

Anxious not to overlook even the slightest opportunity for virtue-signalling, the authors have given explanatory paragraphs for National Hijab Day, Gipsy, Roma and Traveller History Month and the bafflingly named International Day of Happiness (plus, of course, LGBT and Black History Months respectively) along with a bewildering variety of other causes. It is, in fact, so inclusive that any helpful information is completely smothered by a wealth of extraneous (and painfully self-righteous) froth.

And there’s one aspect which may have escaped the compilers completely (or perhaps not). In all my dealings with the NHS, I do not recall ever being asked about my religious affiliations (or lack of them). When the calendar says that out-patient appointments should not be scheduled for Pesach, Nirvana Day or Chinese New Year, do they mean only for those wishing to celebrate? And if so, how do they know?

Far more likely, I’d suggest from bitter experience, that an indifferent desk clerk will look at the calendar and simply avoid making appointments for any day marked with a circle, which, in October, would leave a grand total of six weekdays free from significant events - even though those circles mark, among others, the International Day of Older Persons, World Menopause Day and Halloween.

The overwhelming impression given by this epic work is of a bloated and unwieldy Diversity industry within the NHS intent on proclaiming and justifying its existence. If ever there were a case for the speedy construction of a Golgafrinchan B-Ark, surely this is it!

                                ————————-

I’ve often thought it odd that we should have all these weeks or months attached to particular issues, as if they somehow matter less at other times. To quote Tom Lehrer (again):

It’s only for a week, so have no fear; 

Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!

‘My, my, my...’

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the past days over the WRFU’s removal of ‘Delilah’ from the official repertoire list. It’s a topic on which a lot of people have had much to say - Longrider and JuliaM and their readers, for instance - but one of the most sensible opinions publicly expressed on the subject came from Feargal Sharkey - former Undertone turned environmental campaigner and clearly an intelligent and reasonable chap - who pointed out that these isles have a long-standing tradition of murder ballads which served both as entertainment and cautionary tales in days gone by.

I’d already raised the historical existence of such songs myself in a comment, but I admit I hadn’t considered the cautionary aspect. As Sharkey implies, the song is neither condoning nor celebrating the murder; inescapable retribution is on its way and the killer, craving forgiveness from his victim, is about to pay the price of his deed. There’s a lot of it about; crimes of passion and their consequences have inspired everything from grand opera to backstreet ballad-sellers, not to mention a large number of folk songs and, in latter days, Country and Western staples. 

That the lyrics are, like any tragic plot line, intended to entertain rather than provide an endorsement of such behaviour or insult to real-life murder victims seems to have been obvious to generations of our predecessors; even the German author Thomas Mann - a stolid heavyweight in literary terms - exercises a certain wry wit in his description of children learning a song about Rudolf ‘who drew a knife, drew a knife, drew a knife and thereby came to a nasty end’ presumably not unconnected with the golden-haired girl of an earlier verse.

If you are resolutely po-faced about something which even Thomas Mann considers a fitting subject for humour, your sense of proportion has surely long since headed for the hills - a condition I like to think of as ‘guardianitis’ or ‘Witch-finder General’s knee’. I suspect that at the root of it lies a desire to obliterate and censor as much of our cultural heritage as possible to make way for their own restrictive values and a joyless society of complacent drones.

That being so, we applaud the fans - and Sir Tom Jones - for the continuing performance of a  cracking tune. There’s only one downside; if my own household is anything to go by, the abundant news coverage has almost certainly instilled an all-encompassing National Earworm on an unprecedented scale and we’ll find ourselves repeatedly humming it for weeks to come - all together now: “My, my, my Delilah...”

SInce a bit of Tom Lehrer never goes amiss, here’s a charming little number on a not entirely unrelated theme;

‘Fame... what you get is no tomorrow’

Either my television is playing up or the candidates on BBC 1’s ‘The Apprentice’ - at least the female ones - have undergone some strange facial metamorphosis; there are so many trout-pout lip-fillers and peculiar brow-lines on show that it looks like an advert for the SeaLife centre or an episode of Star Trek.

Other people have taken to social media to suggest that the obvious ‘tweakments’, elaborate personal grooming* and general demeanour of the contestants are more appropriate to ‘Love Island’ than a to process to select Lord Sugar’s next business partner - an impression borne out by the words ‘Reality Entertainment’ which appear on screen at the end of the programme.

The programme was always intended to be entertainment first and foremost - Wikipedia defines it as a ‘talent game show franchise’ - but the wanton cruelty of tasks where the participants are set up to fail (not least by being unnecessarily turfed out of bed at 4am) and made fools of on national television has, by series 20, weeded out all but the most arrogant, delusional or cynically fame-obsessed.

While the winner gets a business investment from the man himself, any candidate who makes it onto the show has the chance to achieve media fame - the Holy Grail of our time. From the Mail’s sidebar of shame to guest spots on TV via Instagram and TikTok, there are a myriad opportunities out there to find followers and monetise your status once you have established yourself in the public eye.

It would be interesting to know how many of these wannabe entrepreneurs have previously applied to appear in other reality shows. In a culture where a significant number of children surveyed say their main ambition is to be famous, as if it were an end in itself, I should not be be at all surprised if they had tried other options before. After all, the stakes are high; it would appear that sponsorship deals and lucrative endorsements beckon on every side once household name status has been achieved.

I wonder if there is a limit, a number of ‘celebrities’ beyond which the whole system overloads and breaks down. At present, it appears that the appetite for celebrity gossip is insatiable and that every new reality show will bring a fresh crop of potential Z listers to the ranks of the famous, but surely it can’t go on for ever - not least because there is surely only so much sponsorship or product placement to go round.

We are closer than ever to Warhol’s prediction of fifteen minutes of fame for everyone. If I were a more cynical and mercenary type and wanted to solicit a business investment from Lord Sugar, it would be for a TV production company, a year or so hence, specialising in ‘Where are they now?’ features on all the hundreds of reality show ‘celebrities’ who, having had their brief mayfly moment in the sun (or The Sun), will have sunk without trace back into obscurity.

*Though we have yet to be treated, as in the last series, to the bizarre spectacle of a sleeping  candidate’s hair extensions neatly laid out on the carpet beside her bed like a docile pet; O tempora, O mores!

(My thanks to Bucko at fuelinjectedmoose, whose comments on the previous post inspired this follow-up ramble.)

Expecting Squid Pro Quo

Some years ago, this blog celebrated the butcher from Orpington who, in keeping with the macabre theme of the occasion, obliged a group of zombie-costumed Halloween trick-or-treaters with genuine animal hearts and other assorted innards, to the outrage of their parents (“I was so angry they had been made to touch raw meat”).

I said at the time that it was a bit like going on the ghost train at the fair and then complaining because the ride was genuinely haunted. The same simile sprang inevitably to mind this week with the numerous tales of woe from contestants who had put themselves forward for the real-life version of ‘Squid Game’.

While the original series was a sharply satirical and well-made depiction of how far a group of people can be driven by desperation and mercenary greed, it takes a special sort of warped mind to contrive a real-world version - albeit without the mass murder element - and recruit contestants from among the general public.

Forty years ago, Clive James encouraged us to laugh at the extremities to which Japanese game show hosts pushed their unhappy victims or the exhaustion of American dance marathon competitors; now celebrities being showered with maggots or ‘Touch the Truck’ endurance contests pass without comment in our own TV schedules.

In such a climate, it seems excessively naive (or disingenuously compensation-hungry) of contestants to be surprised or shocked that filming a show derived from ‘Squid Game’ would involve a degree of discomfort, yet a number of them took to the tabloids to express their anger at being woken at 3.30 to spend a day outdoors in the cold playing Korea’s version of Grandmother's Footsteps. 

A particular grievance seemed to be the time taken to set up a camera shot, as if it had completely escaped them that they were taking part in a television programme. Despite their suffering, however, the $4.56 million prize fund seems to have provided sufficient incentive for most to stay put: 

 “Even if hypothermia kicked in, people were willing to stay for as long as possible because a lot of money was on the line. Too many were determined not to move so they stood there for too long.”

Even though Netflix explained that, as well as making the contestants aware well in advance that they would be playing in cold conditions, they provided them with warming facilities and thermal clothing (oh, to have had such things on winter games afternoons at my Northern school!) and that there had been no serious consequences from the cold, one disgruntled participant compared the scene to a ‘war zone’ and said they were ‘dropping like flies’.

I may be mistaken, but I thought that was the whole idea.

Starting them young...

With the day of strikes upon us, a snapshot of how things are done across the channel; at today’s protests against the proposed pension reforms in France, the CGT union launched its new initiative for children, ‘Ma premiere manif’’ (‘My First Demo’).

According to 'Le Dauphiné libéré':

Children are invited to visit the union’s official vehicle to collect a pack containing a certificate of participation, along with games and a colouring book to ‘help children and parents enjoy their day’.

Meanwhile, in the UK, teaching unions, having urged their members not to help schools or parents with planning by giving advance notice of their intention to strike, are now encouraging children to make banners and put together food boxes to sustain their striking teachers on their (long) march, a concept so far beyond irony that we surely need a new word for it. 

Although some of the damage dates from the activities of left-wing teachers half a century ago, the death knell of modern teaching sounded in the early nineties, when two Cs at A level were enough to get you into teacher training and the NUT set about building the militant super-union behind today’s mass walkout. Fuelled by the anti-elitist attitude that saw better-qualified subject specialists hounded out of many state schools, a culture has grown up in which pupils appear to be, for some at least, a means to an end, rather than their raison d’être.

Now it looks as if, along with their efforts to destroy the education system from within, the unions are soliciting a public show of support from those who will be most harmed by their irresponsible and cynical actions. There must be a technical term for this sort of thing, but I have a horrible feeling it is likely to be in Russian, or possibly Chinese.

WFH: Won’t F***ing Help

Over the past few weeks, some of the older members of Clan Macheath have had occasion to contact a variety of organisations by phone, including banks, boiler manufacturers and electricity suppliers.

By choice or necessity, our elders eschewed the internet and called the customer service telephone numbers provided by the organisations only to receive a variety of unhelpful responses from staff who, as far as they can ascertain, were working from home.

There were several helpful clues to indicate this, from the background sounds of of televisions, washing machines and noisy children to “I’m just putting you on hold while I let the dog out”, followed by a five minute silence. One caller was baffled by an irregular repeated pinging noise until, with the help of speakerphone, a visiting younger relative identified it as social media notifications and ‘likes’ from a nearby phone, which presumably explained the operator’s frequent lapses of attention during the conversation.

All of this suggests an environment less than conducive to concentration and focus on the customer’s needs and a lack of responsibility, an impression which is borne out by the repeated abrupt ending of calls mid-conversation. After calling back - and giving her details in full - for the third tIme, one of our tribal elders asked the operator point blank whether they were paid and assessed by the number of calls they took rather than whether the issue was resolved; the answer was yet another hang-up.

All in all, the overall feeling is that these home-workers, freed from the supervision of the office, are simply time-serving; nominally putting in the hours while paying very little attention to the requirements or needs of the customer - how else could one explain the cheerful complacency of the representative of a heating firm who, during last week’s cold snap, happily told an eighty-four year old with no heating or hot water that she would send someone to look at the boiler in two weeks’ time? 

It looks as if the practice of ‘driving customers online’ continues to permeate the business world; in any other circumstances, would employers be willing to allow their customer-facing staff to behave like this? (In the private sector, that is; the phenomenon of the self-indulgent time waster is sadly all too alive and kicking in hospital administration, social services and local government). Even when a call has been referred upwards, the managers seem unwilling to make much effort to help.

These days, customers who seek help via a phone line rather than online are likely to be elderly or unable to use a computer for reasons such as visual impairment or arthritis; to provide them with a second-rate service at the whim of inefficient and unhelpful home workers seems more than a little cruel.

The Long March through the teaching unions

Two years ago, when the Association of Teachers and Lecturers completed its merger with the National Union of Teachers, I returned my membership card and cancelled my subscription in protest.

There was an interesting precedent for this; half a century earlier, my father did the same thing with his union membership when a teachers’ strike was called. Aided by a number of like-minded colleagues, he rearranged the timetables and took on extra lessons and duties to ensure that the school stayed open and pupils, particularly those in exam years, received as much of their normal education as possible.

To anyone outside the profession, it may seem odd that either of us belonged to a trade union in the first place. However, as I have mentioned before, union membership was, until the recent emergence of an independent and apolitical service, the only way to gain access to expert legal protection and advice in the case of allegations of professional misconduct - a necessity when your job places you at constant risk of accusation based on the unsupported word of a child or teenager, however far-fetched or malicious.

Joining the profession therefore effectively meant signing up with a union. With the avowedly militant NUT and NASUWT available, those who instead chose the relatively genteel Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association, as the ATL was known until 1993, almost certainly did so because its policy of no strikes and minimal political activism was the best match for their own beliefs and opinions.

Unfortunately for these principled and peaceful souls, their good nature was to be taken advantage of in a cynical and manipulative coup. Starting in the early nineties, a concerted power grab by left-wingers led to the union’s first ever strike, affiliation with the TUC and finally the ‘merger’ - effectively a takeover by the much larger NUT - to create Europe’s largest teaching union. It is a virtual certainty that Labour supporters like General Secretary Mary Bousted, the hard-line Corbynite who masterminded the merger, joined this non-striking union with the specific aim of converting it into a militant organisation (in Bousted’s case, actually moving from the NUT in order to do so). 

Sadly, the apolitical stance of most ATL members was no match for the warlike ambitions of Bousted and her cohort; very few ever bothered to attend meetings or vote in union ballots, giving her and her associates an easy route to the top and to full control of policy. Even when their union’s very existence came under threat, a paltry turnout of 25% for the merger ballot suggests that three quarters of them just closed their eyes and hoped it - and she - would go away. Instead, they found themselves trapped in Bousted’s new super-union which, within a year, was demanding the restoration of flying pickets and the return of the closed shop.

It’s hard not to feel a deep sense of betrayal at this imposition of militancy on those of us who rejected it on principle at the outset. I am surely not alone in saying that neglecting pupils for political reasons goes against everything I believe about the importance of my chosen profession. I could understand taking part in a demonstration during the holidays or at the weekend, but to use children’s education as a bargaining chip seems to me despicable - to say nothing of the impact on parents in low-paid jobs obliged to take unpaid time off work if a school closes.

The NEU ballot turnout was 53% - a scant 3% above the legal threshold - suggesting that many of those apolitical ATL members are still out there, even if they are now so outnumbered by militants that their votes - or abstentions - can have little or no impact. For the sake of a generation of pupils whose education has already suffered considerable disruption, I hope that, when the strike days arrive, they will uphold the once-proud ethos of the union they originally joined and, in Churchill’s immortal words, keep buggering on.

Now every man (and woman) is an island

Had you been a fly on the wall in a certain library in Southern England some thirty years ago, you might have been startled by a heavily pregnant woman slamming a book down on a table with a most unladylike exclamation.

The book was a then fashionable guide for new parents and I had just reached the chapter on childcare, which suggested that a mother could return to work as early as six weeks after birth; ”You may be concerned”, it said loftily, “that your child’s caregivers do not have your level of education or language skills, but these worries are unfounded; studies have shown that this will have no long-term detrimental effect on your child’s development.”

The book did not, as far as I could see, offer much information about these ‘studies’, or what evidence they provided for their findings, but it was clear in its message that ‘quality time’ at weekends more than made up for a baby being farmed out for the majority of its waking hours (in educational terms, at least). Breathtaking intellectual snobbery aside, there was something disturbing in its complacent assertion that, while the child may repeatedly cry or show distress when left at nursery or with a nanny, this should not prevent the mother from returning to work (the same advice appears on today’s NHS information website).

The Shadow Education Secretary’s recently announced plan to make childcare available for all children from the age of nine months is another manifestation of the belief that children will thrive away from their mothers from a very early age. What concerns me about her arguments are that, while she cites mothers who ‘have to give up jobs they love’ because of a lack of childcare and the need for single mothers to be able to work, she makes no mention of the effect on the child.

Raising a child is - or should be - a huge responsibility. Every experience and every new piece of knowledge will contribute to the adult it will eventually become. I find it hard to understand how a mother would willingly - or even cheerfully - pass her infant over to the influence of relative strangers for almost the entirety of its weekday waking hours rather than be there herself to oversee its development and provide comfort whenever necessary. In any case, children under 3 naturally suffer from separation anxiety; it seems inhumane to override this by making the mother’s interests paramount.

Staying at home with a baby or a young child can be frustrating, boring and lonely at times - we were never meant to rear our children in isolation and some mothers may need support in the form of mother-and-baby groups and help to access the activities on offer - but it also means that the parent is a constant presence and a source of continuous reassurance when the child’s brain and emotional behaviour patterns are developing at their fastest rate. We may have invented smartphones but we still respond to the same pheromones and biological cues as our ape ancestors; for a pre-verbal child, being deprived of its mother’s presence for hours at a time on a daily basis must surely have a detrimental effect.

In fact, that effect may now be making itself evident. The generation born around the time that book was published (and Harriet Harmann was boasting about the number of UK working mothers with children under 5) has turned away from the institution of marriage to a startling extent: in 1976, 90% of men and 80% of women under 30 were married, while by 2019, the figures stand at a third and a quarter respectively with a further decline predicted for the future. Meanwhile, England and Wales last year passed the landmark point of a majority of babies being born out of wedlock.

Admittedly many more people are willing to embark on long-term relationships without marriage but there does appear to be a shift towards serial monogamy and away from commitments surviving long enough to rear children. The knock-on effect of universal childcare policies may turn out to be a solipsistic society composed of individuals whose formative experiences have left them unable to sustain stable relationships in adult life and a resulting manifold increase in state subsidies for single parents.

Spit and Spatter

A recent exchange of comments at Ambush Predator’s place led to the discovery of the above phrase being rather vividly used by staff at a chimpanzee sanctuary to describe the primates spitting water or throwing their faeces at humans.

The latter, while generally an expression of frustration or emotional turmoil, has apparently become a common form of attention-seeking behaviour among captive chimps, encouraged by the shocked reaction of onlookers, or a means of retaliation when their keepers deny them something they want. Some chimps have even been observed defecating into one hand and carrying it around until a suitable opportunity presents itself to attack the chosen target.

In other news: ‘Harry says royals ‘stereotyped’ Meghan’, ‘Harry accuses Prince William of attacking him’, ‘Harry brands Queen Consort ‘dangerous’ and ‘a villain’ ‘(...continues ad nauseam)

On the subject of poo-flinging chimps Prince Harry, I’ve been giving more thought to the parallels with George, Duke of Clarence (him of the butt of Malmsey). Like Harry, Clarence seems to have harboured an increasing tally of petty grievances and a growing sense of entitlement (albeit less likely to have been fuelled by lavish consumption of hallucinogens and weed). By the time of - I think - his fourth rebellion, Clarence had subscribed to the theory that his elder brother was the illegitimate product of an affair between their mother and an English archer during his father’s absence, and that Clarence himself was therefore the rightful king.

While it would be out of the question for Harry to traduce his sainted mother - the ‘grandma Diana’ who was allegedly (if somewhat implausibly) the subject of Archie’s first words - it is not impossible that, if he continues in his current irrational vein, we may yet see a narrative emerge from ‘sources’ not too distant from Montecito that Diana’s first child died at birth and William was smuggled in to preserve appearances, making Harry the legitimate heir to the Crown (and incidentally explaining his ‘special bond’ with his mother).  

Having himself benefited from the covering up of some of his more egregious activities, Harry would surely be willing to believe that even something of that magnitude could be hidden and, sadly, the social media generation seem bent on undoing centuries of education and Enlightenment and returning to the open-mouthed credulity of medieval yokels at a fair. With so much to gain for so many vested interests - particularly with a mixed-race heir in the next generation - it’s all too easy, in today’s climate, to imagine the idea gaining traction on the other side of the Atlantic.

Harry’s repeated broadsides looked at first like an extreme example of sour grapes but, as he continues to bombard his nearest relatives with metaphorical shit while still clinging to the rank and titles conferred on him by an institution he claims to hate, I am starting to wonder whether the ultimate aim is to manipulate public opinion in the UK, relentlessly besmirching and bespattering his family until his brother’s position becomes untenable - after all, Harry and Meghan must be well aware that it was the abdication of an older brother that made his great-grandfather king - or until some other factor comes into play which places Harry firmly at the head of the line of succession.

In which I mysteriously appear out of nowhere

It seems that we are, at last, to have all of our medical data collected in one place with the expansion of a new system to cover all NHS regions, meaning that -  at least until the next solar flare event/cyber hack/system failure - there is the hope that fewer pieces of important information will slip through the gaps.

For example, when one of the venerable ladies of Clan Macheath was recently bitten by her cat (little Sammy [or ‘Spawn of Satan’ to the rest of us] was decidedly miffed at having spent a week in the cattery), she phoned the surgery to check that her tetanus boosters were up to date. 

After trying several times to fob her off - “We don’t deal with cat bites in the surgery; you have to go to A&E” - the receptionist grudgingly agreed to look. “You haven’t had one,” she reported back,”There’s nothing in the file”, which is odd, given that Granny has travelled extensively and visited the same surgery many times for travel vaccinations, including tetanus. The record of these jabs seems to have disappeared into the ether, possibly forever. 

What is more disturbing is that my origins seem to have vanished in the same way. During a discussion with her GP, my mother discovered that her records said that she had never had children, despite our having been registered at the same surgery from early childhood. As the relevant section of her file was completely blank, the doctors had wrongly assumed that we were adopted and - with potentially dangerous consequences - made clinical decisions based on that assumption.

Now, it’s true that I made my entrance rather unexpectedly in the wild, as it were, and bypassed all the usual hospital formalities, but that’s not exactly unheard of and I suppose that someone must have made a note of the fact somewhere. A few decades on, however, as far as the NHS is concerned, I might as well have been found under a gooseberry bush.

It is to be hoped that this new record system, unlike its myriad mutually incompatible predecessors in the public sector, manages to coordinate information into a coherent - and accurate - whole. Unfortunately, I know from early temping experience that data input and filing, being neither well-paid nor prestigious, doesn’t always attract the most conscientious, competent or careful of workers. 

If it is set up and maintained efficiently, the new system could help to prevent some, at least, of the administrative mishaps I listed in ‘10 Ways the NHS is Killing People’. However, as long as information continues to be lost and the system equates absence of evidence with evidence of absence, mistakes will inevitably be made.

Perhaps this is the kind of thing that will be tackled by Midlands NHS trust’s £115k ‘Director of Lived Experience’, but I’m not holding out much hope.