We're back from Sweden. We managed to negotiate things so that everyone got to do everything they needed to do, so Elinor went on her school trip, but just left a bit early to get the ferry


It is a shame that the route from Newcastle to Sweden is finishing as we've enjoyed cruising off to Scandanavia. The new route is to Norway which is a new and exciting place to visit, but having had a look at holiday cottage prices it is also significantly more expensive.

If you do happen to be in Goteborg a great place to visit with kids is the Universeum. We've been twice now and it beats any other natural history/science museum I've been to.
You can watch their huge aquariam on a live webcam on
http://webcam.universeum.se/view/view.shtml
There can't be many museums with their own rainforest!

The perils of late night film watching

Just the other week I was complaining to someone at work about the tripe that they show on TV nowadays. 'All I want', I said, 'is non stop Pride and Predjudice'..and that sort of thing really. What with the recent stresses of hospital trips etc I've been having a challenging time unwinding of an evening, and my other half doesn't appreciate me reading into the late hours as my preference is to read in bed, and his preference is to sleep there.

Turns out my colleague has a large collection of all sorts of books and DVDs and the next day the following DVDs appeared on my desk.
1. Pride and Prejudice - the recent film version rather than the BBC one
2. Bride and Prejudice - the Bollywoodesque version
3. North and South - the BBC TV adaptation of an Elizabeth Gaskell novel and plotwise really a version of victorian Pride and Prejudice

So late at night, when everyone else has gone to bed. There I am glued to the TV watching these films. Bliss.

I heartily recommend watching all three. But I do have a warning for the North and South viewer, the full two DVD set is 233 minutes long. So, if like me, you start watching it at 10.45pm don't be surprised when it is 2.30am that you finally get to bed. Plus if you think Colin Firth has a good glare (you know what I mean), he is but an amateur compared to Richard Armitage in North and South.

I'm currently experiencing an aversion to accounts. This would be all well and good if I wasn't an accountant. Trouble is I'm in procrastination mode. So one day very soon I'll need to do a very late night to catch up.

Deadlines are looming...arrgh...so is half term!!!!

Fortunately most of my paid work is for IT consultancy services . But if I don't sort out the small print on a couple of CT600s soon I'll be writing very grovelling letters to HMRC (see hmrc.gov.uk and try and find the 'don't panic page' , there isn't one, neither is the 'my dog ate corporation tax return' excuse going to work).

Long distance hospital commuting

The daily trips to Sunderland have finished for the moment as my mum has now come out of hospital. Having had a wonderful operation day her recovery was not quite so straightforward and she lost a lot of blood, eventually requiring a transfusion. So it turns out the anaesthetist was correct, and that really the operation was the least of it!

It is a relief to have her home as the 50+ mile round trip for visiting became quite tiring after a week. I believe it is important to visit every day for a number of reasons, 1. it shows the hospital staff that someone cares about the patient, 2. it hopefully cheers up the patient, 3. it gives the visitor a chance to see what has changed in a 24 hour period.

In this case between Thursday and Friday the major change in my mum was that she went from pink to grey, stopped eating and couldn't stand up. Quite drastic.

I can understand why the NHS has chosen to create regional centres for certain treatments. What I don't understand is the point at which treatments become so expensively specialist that they need to be centralised.

As usual the human impact of trekking 26 miles to the hospital for the appointment, and then the 52 mile round trip to visit seems to have been overlooked. If I wasn't able to drive it would have taken hours for us to get visit. Totally impractical if it was just my dad, who doesn't relish the opportunity to discover the delights of Sunderland every day.

I wonder how many people feel isolated and overlooked in this current centralising service? When I was younger I worked in organisations that centralised, then decentralised. It is possible to generate very good arguments for cost savings and efficiencies on either side. Believe me, I used to do the figures, you really can prove this stuff either way. I also saw staff burst into tears with the stress of it all.

In 5 to 10 years time the NHS will happilly decentralise again, in the interests of patient care I expect. In the meantime all this change is so very costly and wasteful, if this is not immediately obvious in cash terms it is very obvious as soon as you become a patient and have to try to work out where you are in a very complicated system.

I also received a recruitment email today advising me that there are lots of opportunities due to the recent regionalisation of the NHS. So how exactly does that work? You reduce the number of organisations but you develop vacancies? Obvious isn't it, the staff who didn't feel like being merged, and who had enough length of service, have taken pay-offs because they don't want to travel to the new regional centre. Hmm so very efficient. All those one-off costs going through the books.

I truly hope that this centralisation stuff is central government stupidity again. Otherwise the regional people need to give themselves a good talking to for a lack of common sense and humanity, both towards their own staff and the general public who have little choice but to be NHS patients at some time.