I put the event shelter away yesterday evening as I wanted the lawn to get the benefit of the forecast overnight heavy rain... it didn't come. Last night the weather forecast gave over ninety per cent chance of heavy rain from four o'clock onward this morning. I let the puppies out to bright sunshine.
Once they'd done their thing they went upstairs and looked at me from the top of the stairs. I carried them and dumped them on a sleeping “er indoors TM” whilst Treacle glared her indignation at me. I made toast and watched another episode of "The Sandman" featuring a sadly non-lesbidaceous Jenna Coleman (which was something of a disappointment)
As I drove to work through a very dry and bright morning it was obvious there had been no rain up the motorway at all. And my piss boiled as the pundits on the radio were talking about the so-called "blood scandal". At first sight this blood scandal is terrible; people have been given all sorts of infections through transfusions of infected blood and blood products. But when you look a little deeper into the matter...
Much of the infected blood came from America where the less salubrious members of society were being paid for their blood. And so the habitual intravenous drug users could finance their drug habits by selling their blood. Why did the UK use American blood? Because UK residents don't donate (not sell!) anywhere near enough of the stuff.
This morning it was announced that all the victims are to get interim payments of one hundred thousand quid each. There was an interview with one such victim this morning whose life was blighted when a blood transfusion in 1975 gave her hepatitis C. Now there's two issues here...
Firstly blood transfusions aren't given lightly. There must have been a clear and serious reason for that transfusion.
Secondly hepatitis C wasn't identified until 1989. Is it reasonable to accuse the NHS of negligence when they were trying to help and had no knowledge of a disease which wouldn't be identified for another fourteen years?
And they wonder why fewer and fewer people want to go into healthcare as a career…
I got some petrol before work, then went in to Sainsburys for this and that. In a sign of our times there wasn't anyone on the tills so I had to use the self-service checkouts. But there was an interfering busybody member of staff who wouldn't leave me alone as I tried to scan my shopping. She wasn't at all impressed when I suggested we went over to a proper till where she could do the job that she is paid for and that I was trying to do for free.
And so to work where I sat by a large window and spent much of the day watching for the forecast rain. By mid day the weather forecast had an eight per cent chance of rain for mid-afternoon, and that was when the torrential rain came. I say “torrential”; after two minutes it had gone.
I’m reliably informed that other parts of the country had massive amounts of rain today, but I didn’t see any.
Mind you there was cake, so the day wasn't entirely wasted.
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