Early start to this morning but a lovely one with me, Davies and Scarlett all snuggled under a fleecey blanket watching Discovery Kids while it was still dark outside.
We’d arranged to pick my Mum up at 9.30am to take her to the local car boot sale with us but when we arrived it was not open today. No idea why, perhaps the field was too muddy with all this week’s rain. So we went back to Mum and Dad’s again. We had lunch and then Ady and I walked down into Worthing town centre to join in with the holding hands round the hospital show of support for KWASH fighting to keep the local hospital from closure – along with many others nationally. I went to Worthing hospital for several childhood scrapes and tumbles, my brother was a real regular there, Davies was born there and all his pregnancy scans were there and Tarly had her stitches there earlier this year. If it did close our nearest A&E (and let’s face it I’m assuming I’ll be spending a fair amount of time in A&E during Tarly’s childhood) would be either Brighton or Portsmouth – 15 miles and totally un-do-able in under half an hour on a good straight run one way or 30 odd miles and an hour the other way – a frightening prospect. And that’s a purely selfish concern for me and mine, not to mention the impact on the rest of Worthing who rely on the hospital and of course all the staff there. I may not be the biggest supporter of the Welfare state but of all the things I think are fucked up in this country the NHS is the most criminal in my opinion. Still, this is not a political blog and if I were to have one it would be where no-one who reads this would ever find it ;-).
We walked down into town, which was good as I’ve utterly failed in walking anywhere this week with my only additional exercise being the two flights of stairs in Merry’s house rather than the one set in my own. It was also nice to walk hand in hand with Ady – been a fair old while since we got to do that without children hanging off us. We popped into a hardware store to get some lightbulbs – two went in our house last night, don’t remember the last time I had to change one so some sort of bus mentality going on here clearly. 😆 Then we joined the huge crowds gathering round the hospital. By utter fluke we decided to stop near the entrance to the hospital which was where the Mayor ended up coming and joining the ring of people, so I was about two people away from holding hands with the Mayor – never one to do things by halves! 😉 The cheer went up to say we’d managed to make a circle, which happened simultaneously at the other hospital under threat in the next town – actually there were probably sufficient people there to stretch twice, if not three times round the hospital the crowd was that deep. And then we walked back to my parents again. Ady and I used to go out walking a lot when we were in our early years of being together, often on a Sunday and it was always a time when we’d chat away about hopes and dreams for the future, what we thought might happen to us in years to come and today was no exception. We planned how we’d spend a lottery win (you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear several of you would benefit :-)), why we’d like to move and where we might like to move to, chatted about money and our long term plans. For a while it was like being transported about 10 years back in time and I totally forgot we had children waiting for us back at home.
We got back for a cup of tea and then came home for the children to have an early dinner. We watched some of a nature programme with wolves hunting and killing which led to a discussion on food chains. Something we’ve never touched on before but Davies especially grabbed the idea of straight away and was able to offfer several examples of chains including some dinosaurs ones and some African animal ones and one including people (well some people, not the ones who eat lentils, obviously 😉 ). Oh and during lunch today Davies suddenly said to me ‘there’s six people here.’ To which I answered yes (me, Ady, Davies, Tarly, Mum, Dad) and he said ‘I didn’t count everyone, I just saw three people sitting along one side of the table and three sitting along the other side and three times two is six’. OK, not maths on any amazing level but given his little to no formal instruction or references to times tables etc I was pleased to see he does think about numbers all of his own accord and is playing with them enough for me to sweep in at some future given point and tell him what all his little bits of knowledge are called in ‘maths speak’.
So there you go, sentimentality about a building, exercise, my first glass of wine before 6pm (brought to me by Ady who clearly felt I needed it :oops:), some very basic maths and the early indoctrination of my children into watching animals tear other animals apart with their teeth. Another successful day in raising the small Goddards! 😆
good on you. our hospital march was yesterday morning, and the ******************[insert long swearword stream of your choice] managers refused to let the march onto the grounds for ‘safety’ reasons. also didn’t attend.
Maybe it was the managers’ safety that was the problem. Angry protestors + ********************** managers = new admissions to A&E.
This idea that capitalism is the only model for running things: schools, hospitals… But it’s like corner shops – the reason why they survive is because they’re convenient and nearby. You can’t pipe corner shop-ness in from far away, and there’s an obvious limit to how many you have in an area, so the simplistic approach to capitalism doesn’t work in this case.
People don’t want to choose between hospital X and hospital Y; they want the hospital nearest to them to be good. Ditto schools. Duh! They don’t want doctors and teachers to have to do accountantancy, they want them to make people well or to educate them. Duh!
Sorry – I’m going for a walk before I froth too much at the mouth.