Dinner time is resumed

Once upon a time there was a bright nine year old girl in a school in Scotland who decided to keep a daily blog about her school meals. It wasn't meant as a criticism of the meals at her school, more a daily record and comment on what she did and didn't like about them and with the added and very important aim of raising money for a charity called Mary's Meals which sets up school based feeding projects among some of the world's poorest children.
So far, so good but the blog was so successful and popular that it eventually came to the attention of the press and then the local authority, Argyll and Bute, got involved and decided to ban Martha from taking any more photos of her school meals as, they said, some of the catering staff  feared losing their jobs as a result of certain critical comments made in the press.
Fortunately, though, by the end of today, good sense had prevailed and the council had decided that to ban Martha from blogging about her daily school dinners was slightly akin to taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, so they've decided she can continue.
Of course, it's also possible that they realised that they were not exactly showing themselves in a good light by behaving in such a heavy-handed way. Whatever the reason, another blow for democracy and free speech has been struck and Martha and her blog live to fight another day.
(And I hope the dinner ladies at her school are much nicer than the witches who terrorised us at mine, back in prehistoric days!)

Corporeal matters

The other week, my Welsh tutor and I shared experiences of bad backs, of which we were both currently suffering. She said, "xxxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxxx xx" which was welsh for something along the lines of "As you get older, things never go wrong singly," but I am not able to reproduce it for you as my welsh is not yet up to that standard. However, I can see her point. Last autumn, after being summoned to my GP for blood pressure and cholesterol checks (I assume because it was my turn and they needed to tick boxes, certainly not because I had anything to complain about), I was then put on  Simvastatin and within a few weeks, I was having the first of my gall bladder episodes. Seeing on the internet that, if you have gall bladder problems, a statin other than Simvastatin is to be recommended, I mentioned this at my next GP visit (different doctor) and she changed my prescription to Atorvastatin.  

So, assuming all would now be well in the world of cholesterol levels, I sat back to await the call for the removal of said gall bladder, but, during the month that I have been taking Atorvastatin, I have had almost constant backache, joint ache and some breathlessness at times, so off I toddled back to the surgery to see another GP, who laughed indulgently when I told him the story of the change of statins and when I mentioned the breathlessness, told me that had nothing to do with statins and we then segued onto the question of my blood pressure (fairly OK at present) and I was referred for a blood test which I would be willing to guess is to test for under active thyroid. Anyway, at the end of the consultation, I realised I had not had time to mention the joint and back pains but they have not gone away and, this week, my thinking has been, "If I am going to be feeling like this and crawling about like a ninety year old, I would prefer to ditch the statins and take my chances." 

This I have done for now until Monday when I get my blood taken and hopefully get to see a doctor to discuss it further.

Years ago, I trusted doctors and the NHS but that was before all the 'improvements' which focus on money rather than patients, however Lansley likes to dress it up, and I do still believe in the integrity of individual doctors but I also think that the top-down pressures on them are perhaps sometimes too heavy to be resisted and, although I know that there are a lot of medical cranks out there on the internet beating their own drums, there is also a lot of literature about quite severe side effects experienced by some people on statins. So what I would really like, and so, I'm sure, would most other patients, is for doctors to have  time for a few minutes discussion on relative benefits and drawbacks before prescribing a medication, especially one  which is usually for life. No-one told me, for instance about the fact that grapefruit juice is a no-no when on statins and that alcohol should be avoided or that Simvastatin needs to be taken at night whereas Atorvastatin doesn't.

Never going to happen though, so most of us will continue to read up on the internet and struggle to come to our own decisions.

Neighbours

I have mentioned before that there are a lot of new houses being built about half a mile down the road from us. Some of them have been occupied for about eight months now. Today, walking past with Paddy, I noticed a woman in her front garden trimming a plant, when the woman next door came out and although the two were only about four foot apart, neither looked at the other and neither spoke to the other. Unless they have already fallen out and are sworn enemies, which is possible, I don't understand how people living side by side would not at least smile or pass the time of day, but it does support the various studies which have been done which have concluded that, these days, most of us don't have a clue about our neighbours.
Further on, workmen were hard at it on the foundations of the next phase of houses and once again, I was struck by how tiny they looked, especially as these are supposed to be three, four and five bedroomed houses which cost an arm and a leg. We live in a small, modern house ourselves and I am very happy with it. It is just about big enough for our possessions but not quite big enough for Keith to spread his aero-modelling all over the place; win-win as far as I'm concerned! But I certainly wouldn't like to be bringing up a family or even one child in it. Families living in the traditional semis built in the thirties and forties might not have had central heating and other features which we now take for granted but at least they had spacious houses and gardens. Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. Maybe the result of living in such close proximity in modern housing developments is that we 'pretend' that the neighbours are not really there invading our space so we ignore them. Well, it's a thought.