6 March 2021 (Saturday) - Before the Night Shift

I had a reasonable night’s sleep. It would have been better had one of the dogs  (Treacle?) not spent much of the night stomping about the bed and had er indoors TM”’s phone alarm not gone off randomly. Still – better her phone alarm than my car alarm.

Over brekkie I had a look-see at the Internet. There was consternation in a Facebook group about the TV show “The Tomorrow People” which is (was) a child’s TV show from nearly fifty years ago. The chap who had set the group up has spent a lot of time posting endless photos and screen shots and trivia, and with no warning at all Facebook pulled the lot. I suspected that it was because of what the Facebook bots perceived as a breach of copyright. Someone else (seriously) claimed “Facebook is doing a massive purge of "Liberals" in revenge for the Biden victory”.  The chap who set the group up says he’s had an argument with someone who has reported him to the Facebook Feds for supposedly using a fake name, and that’s why Facebook deleted pretty much everything. Oh well… Facebook is useful, but it isn’t perfect.

 

There were also several memes spreading on Facebook about how we should demand a pay rise for the hard-working doctors and nurses and how the current one per cent pay increase offer is unfair to nurses. As always the pharmacists, art therapists, physiotherapists, transfusion practitioners, cleaners, cooks, biomedical scientists, podiatrists, speech therapists, cardiographers, gardeners, dieticians, porters, secretaries, med lab assistants, biochemists, radiographers, O.D.A.s… got overlooked by the masses. Not everyone working in a hospital is a doctor or a nurse…

There are those who feel this is a petty distinction… Bearing in mind the lessons of history I wouldn’t be surprised to see the nurses get a substantial pay rise whilst all of the other groups get sod-all, and the public be ecstatic because “the angels” got what they deserve. It has happened before.

 

Despite it being rather cold I had a little pootle in the garden. I got the gnomes and things off of the gravelled areas and moved a potted plant. But this wasn’t any old potted plant; plant and pot together were probably heavier than me. They took some shifting. I shifted four tubs of dog dung, shifted dead leaves from gravel and then had a look at one of my water features. On 15 May 2007 (one use of writing a diary!) I dug out about a cubic metre of soil so I could sink an old oil-drum sized plastic tub which would act as a reservoir for a water feature. In the meantime I’d forgotten just how huge that plastic tub was. It was only when I’d pushed away all the shingle around it that  remembered, and when I remembered I realised my plan for today was a non-starter. I had thought to revamp the water feature with a much smaller reservoir above ground (which makes it easier to get to the pump). But getting out that underground reservoir would be too much like hard work. I put it all back as it was. If nothing else that water feature now looks better for having had a little tidy-up.

 

We came in to find the postman had been. We had a letter asking us to complete the census. That wasted fifteen minutes. There had been quite a lot of whinging on Facebook recently about how the census is done on-line. There was a phone number which people could use to request a paper version, but we are in the third decade of the twenty-first century…

 

I went to bed for the afternoon where I couldn’t get warm. I got up a while later convinced that I hadn’t slept at all, but er indoors TM” had taken the dogs to Great Chart and I’d missed that so I must have had some kip.

I’m off to the night shift now…

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