Posts tagged with Miscellaneous

Stilton, the Chief Pongo at the General Medical Council, is pleased. In 2010, his Gestapo took on more cases, and spiked more doctors than ever before. His network of field spies, the Herr Medical Directors soon to be mantled Responsible Officers, are reporting ever greater numbers of medical dissidents to GMC-HQ. Only two years ago, a mass spiking event took place, with the introduction of medical licences to practice. But that mass spike will pale into trivial insignificance next year, when the greatest spike-fest of them all starts. Revalidation is, as they say in managerial and political circles, due to be rolled out, in 2012. Those doctors who manage to escape acute spiking will be rolled over repeatedly by the heavy steam-roller of revalidation. Doctors, once real life and 3D, will find themselves flattened two dimensional cartoon characters, with not even a shadow of their former selves left to relieve the barren new landscape of 360 degree multi-source blowback. Small wonder, then, that Stilton is so pleased.

The Today programme’s resident grumpy old bull, John Humphrys, took a charge at Prime Minister David Cameron this morning, and ended up with his horns stuck in wood, and his tail between his legs. Cameron, in excellent patroniser-in-chief form, ordered Humph back to school. Humph, unable to extract his horns from the wood, acceded. “I will go back to school,” he said, adding petulantly as only Humph could, “and I will choose my teacher”.

Dr No has for some time been bemused by the media coverage of the Alternative Vote (AV) referendum, and, less bemusingly, by the public’s apparent lack of grasp of what is, all said and done, not a difficult a concept to grasp. Certainly, the jargon does nothing to help: ‘First Past the Post’ is nothing of the sort – there is no post, just a brutish my-pile-of-votes-is-bigger-than-yours battle, while the ‘Alternative Vote’ is a first past the post race – the post being 50% of cast votes; but the procedure, serial elimination of the candidate with the least votes, and allocation of those voters’ successive choices until one candidate passes the 50% post, is comprehensible. Or at least should be comprehensible – unless, that is, one is, as Cameron described Humph this morning, the BBC’s ‘lead broadcaster’, a remark which on paper gains the added thrill of plumbic insult.

Today is Remembrance Day. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we remember those who shall grow not old, those who age shall not weary, for they died in the service of their country.

Today we also learned of yet more health service failings, of suffering and death; of lessons unlearnt, and lamentable failures, among older patients undergoing surgery; older patients, a few of whom no doubt fought in Flanders and other fields, and lived, only to be deserted in their late hour of need by the country they had served.

Sometimes Dr No has wacky ideas. One of his favourites is that all of time has already happened. Like a film in a can, it is all there, beginning to end; and, like a film, we see it sequentially, frame after frame, and that is what gives us the illusion of movement, and of the arrow of time. Sometimes he goes a little further; and, seeing the film strips lying in coils side by side on the reel, wonders whether we might, just might, if the conditions were right, be able to read the film not sequentially on the strip, but radially, on the axis of a spoke, and so be able to see, perhaps even move, backwards and forwards in time.

Lady Bracknell would have known exactly what to say. “To lose one case, Mr McCracken, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.”