Surprise, surprise, almost fake news and let’s get shopping

There are some weeks where people have just the most unfortunate of times. For example, there was poor Terry Brazier who went into Leicester Royal Infirmary to have a treatment involving Botox and got circumcised instead. As well as getting a heck of a surprise he did get an apology and £20,000 in compensation, but even so… 

…and then there was the sometimes outspoken BBC Radio 4 presenter of The Moral Maze, Michael Buerk who was at it again. Who can forget that this time in 2005, he declared that the ‘battle of the sexes’ had resulted in men being nothing more than ‘sperm donors’. Well last week he was back suggesting that obese individuals should be allowed to die early and save the NHS money. In a Radio Times article, he claimed that ‘the obese will die a decade earlier than the rest of us’, we should ‘see it as a selfless sacrifice in the fight against demographic imbalance, overpopulation and climate change’. He didn’t share the view that obesity was a national emergency because it was simply caused by eating too much (more of which later)…  

…then there was our Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock. Now true confessions, my heart goes out to him, he does try hard, but sometimes his enthusiasm for championing improvements can appear excruciatingly naive. Last week there was, at first, rejoicing in the announcement that new capital funds were available to improve our hospitals, only it turned out this wasn’t new money at all, but money owed to NHS Trusts from their own savings – see the fabulous Julian Patterson’s comments on the NHS Networks’ site – he captures the zeitgeist brilliantly. And Matt didn’t stop there. In what turned out to be a busy week for announcements and problem solving we next heard that the pension problem facing many high paid staff in the NHS had been resolved. 

The original notice confirmed that this only applied to doctors and surgeons. What a faux pas of the highest order. I don’t know how high the Ivory Tower is that some of Matt’s policy advisors live in, but they need to wake up to the real world. Health care services are now multi-professional with a huge range of different professions all contributing to high quality patient experiences and care. Sadly, whilst later in the day it was announced that the new pension rules would apply to nurses, NHS managers remain excluded. A word to the wise, you ignore the well-being of good NHS managers at your peril, and we already have a shortage of excellent managers.  

The crowning glory to Matt’s week was possibly his announcement that he was investing £250 million in artificial intelligence (AI) for health care. Unsurprisingly this announcement got an impassioned response on social media – there were those who claimed there was no such thing as AI yet, and others who thought the money might be better spent on ensuring that the NHS has coherent and joined up information systems capable of sending and using data across health and care sectors. Maybe next week will be a better one for Matt.

I’m not sure it will be for all of us. And I’m not talking about the British Summer, which is both as confusing, and unpredictable as it is enjoyable. Apparently according to the Indigo Wellness Index (which tracks the world’s healthiest nations) the UK is ranked only 16th in the world. Canada is ranked the highest, and I wouldn’t want to be emigrating any time soon to the Ukraine. And that’s before we have got to grips with the spectre of a No-Deal Brexit. Of the many ‘10 ways a No-Deal Brexit will affect you’ lists published last week I was interested most in what foods we might miss out on. It won’t just be those pungent, but delicious blue cheeses, or creamy cheeses such as Camembert and Brie we might miss out on either. In terms of cheese, all but 85 tons of the 108,484 tons of cheddar we imported in the last year came from Europe, and at least 98% of the UK’s butter imports come from the EU.

Now some 40 years ago I lived on a smallholding in West Wales. The house was a mile up an unmade road with tall hedges on either side. If it snowed, the lane would fill up with snow and become impassable – sometimes for days on end. It was during this time that I developed almost an obsession for being self-sufficient. John Seymour and Newman Turner were my heroes. So, as well as growing and preserving my own fruit and vegetables, keeping hens for eggs and goats for milk and cheese, I would cut and store enough fire wood to keep me going for months and create a tin food and toilet roll store.  I did this for many years, and even long after I had moved from Wales to Manchester. Indeed, I kept it up until my children pointed out the we have supermarkets that are open 24 hours a day and stock whatever we might fancy to eat whenever we might fancy eating it. 

Everything that goes around, comes around as my Mother would be wont to say. However, in this house we are well on our way to self-sufficiency once more. Our vegetable patch has come into its own, the chickens have started to lay in earnest and the goats are on their way. In the meantime, we are already making changes to our diet. Having signed up to the #WeActiveChallenge 2019, I decided that my three challenges would be to walk 200 miles throughout August, stop drinking alcohol and lose a few inches off my waist. The first two targets are going well, but I struggled with the third – that is until J told me about the RAG colour coding on all food stuffs. Up to that point I was completely unaware of the system. That is not the case now. It has to be said I am now a food RAG code evangelist! My vegetarian cooking repertoire has changed completely, and each meal is a surprise, but thankfully not quite of the same order as the unfortunate Mr Brazier’s!