As I scoffed brekkie there was something that amazed me on
Facebook. The goat sanctuary has a new
goat – “Callie”. The poor thing was found tethered on a roundabout
leading on to the local motorway. Who would do such a thing? If you’ve got a
goat you can’t cope with (for whatever reason) why not take her straight
to the goat sanctuary? It strikes me that it is less arse-ache to take the goat
there than it would be to sneak about at night when no-one is looking and
messing about on roundabouts.
I also saw the Wherigo I wrote yesterday had gone live, and
three people had downloaded the cartridge in the first half-hour. I’m hoping
people do this one properly and don’t try to cheat; I’ve put in so many red
herrings that it is quicker to do it properly than check out all the bogus
locations. It bothers me when people cheat at the Wherigos – the whole thing is
a fun little game to play on your phone. The geocache at the end is just an
added bonus if you like that sort of thing. There are those that do, and they
do the Wherigos pretty much right away. After a while those using the cheat
programs come along just to get their geocache count up. I wish they wouldn’t.
Some chap went round Kings Wood doing my Wherigos last week
– reading his written geocache logs it is plain he did them properly and
laughed out loud at them. Which is what I intended.
I Munzed, got Wordle on the fifth attempt, and took the
dogs out. I went outside to see that winter had officially arrived. In my world
the first day of winter is the first day at the end of the year when I have to
scrape ice from my car. Scraping didn’t take *that* long, and we were
soon on our way.
We drove to Orlestone today as it is closer to home than
Kings Wood and makes for a shorter walk. Our usual walk round Kings Wood is
four miles and takes an hour and twenty minutes. Our walk round Orlestone today
was a mile and a half and took thirty-five minutes. Mind you I had a minor
melt-down when I looked at my watch at the end of the walk. The same walk round
Orlestone used to take an hour when Fudge used to dawdle and pootle round with
everyone else waiting for him. Without Fudge along these days we walk the same
route in half the time.
I had this stupid idea that being so cold today that the
mud would be frozen and the dogs wouldn’t get filthy. Sadly it wasn’t, and they
did. We had a warm shower when we came home.
I set off to work. Being at Pembury today for the late
shift I drove through the -hursts and the -dens. It was a very pretty drive,
marred only by the lorry which had got itself wedged at the sharp corner at
Goudhurst church. Luckily I didn't have to backtrack that much to find an
alternative route.
As I drove the pundits on the radio were talking about the
supposed failures of maternity services in the UK.
It turns out that most of the problems come from all the
expectant mothers having this starry-eyed idea of how a perfect birth will go.
Sadly very few of them seem to have realised that having a baby is a dangerous
game. Furthermore everyone is allowed choice in their treatments these days, so
wannabe mothers are leaving decisions about medical intervention too late when
things are going iffy. And then rather than realising this, the media continues
to blow the relatively few tragic cases out of proportion and make no mention
of how many births happen without incident (lots). And consequently
there's a recruitment crisis in midwifery. Who's going to study for years for a
job which has a decent chance of getting you crucified in the papers?
And so more and more mothers are looking outside the NHS to
have their baby. Often with a
doula. There was an interesting interview with the UK's head doula.
I say "UK's head doula"; actually there
isn't one. A doula is someone you pay to be your birthing partner who has
absolutely no medical qualifications whatsoever. From what was being said some
are good and some act as though they are consultant gynecologists and cause
quite a few problems themselves.
It turns out that people are very happy to go running to
the papers every time the NHS is involved with a tragedy, but those who've
employed doulas tend to keep quiet when it all goes pear-shaped. And can you
blame them? It would seem that having turned away free expert medical care,
they've paid good money to an unqualified quack.
The UK's wannabe head doula being interviewed was some
woman who was trying to form a professional association of doulas. She wanted
written standards of practice for them all. But as she said with no legal
control of them, there is nothing to stop the rogue ones taking the money and
doing what they please.
I get so cross with this sort of thing. What I do is
legally controlled with all sorts of checks and controls. Why isn't doula-ing?
“er indoors TM” had given me
orders not to come home without tea bags (on pain of death) so I stopped
off at Tesco to get some.
I got cross there too. Dozens, if not hundreds, of
customers were blundering about quite literally crashing into each other with
only one (me) seemingly aware there was anyone else in the shop.
I got to work and did my bit. As I do. I must admit I
wasn't keen today. Periodically I looked
out of the window and saw it wasn't raining. There was so much at home I could
have been doing, and yesterday when I'd been at home it had been hossing down.
Another reason I wasn’t keen was that I was on a late shift
at Pembury. By the time I’d scraped the ice off the car and navigated my way
home through pitch-black lanes it was gone ten o’clock.
