You may be at risk...

I write this after a quick visit to my doctor’s surgery for my annual diabetes check up. In concept this is the NHS being proactive. Or so the Government would have us believe. In reality I don’t get to see a doctor any more because, as my diabetic nurse put it today, “the doctor can’t cope with the rise in diabetics at the surgery, so I see them all now.” She reassured me that should she, a non-doctor, discover any complication she would of course refer me to a doctor. Comforting

On the notice board I discovered more proactivity. I’m quoting directly from a poster now:

“If you've ever had sex you may be at risk of having Chlamydia - use our free postal kit to find out” It then directs you to a website: www.haveyougotit.nhs.uk

Think about that for a minute: if you’ve ever had sex you may be at risk. That’s well over 70% of the population potentially walking about with, what we used to call, “a dose” (obviously my estimate doesn’t include Susan Boyle or Dot Cotton, though, come to think of it Dot did have Nasty Nick didn’t she?). I urge all of you who have ever moved beyond a fumble behind the bike sheds to apply for your kit. Then visit my new website www.noihavenotgotit.com where I offer lots of advice on what to do if you don’t have it.

But, why stop at Chlamydia? What about:

“If you ever cross the road you may be at risk of breaking a leg – use our free hopping on your damaged leg kit to find out. Visit www.shitmylegiskillingme.com

Personally, I’m fed up with being told what to do, or not do, by the Government. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, exercise, don’t eat fat but eat your five a day – don’t ever have sex. LEAVE-ME-ALONE and get on with fucking up the country.

Oh, shit, I can feel a rant building. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this but what is the point of all this Government? We have over a million more public sector workers now that we did in 1997 – what do they all do? The Government spent (our money, I might remind you) in excess of 1 billion pounds on public information advertising last year. Think about that a little harder. Do you have any concept of how many civil servants and politicians it takes to spend 1 billion? It’s astronomical: it takes teams of them. Teams write the tender documents (with the help of platoons of external consultants), an army trawl over the tender responses, managers manage the whole process and accountants turn up because it is now compulsory to have at least a 3:1 ratio of accountants to workers. Once all is agreed it’s unpicked by a legion of lawyers forcing the process to be repeated a million times. Bill for spending 1 billion: 200 million.

Meanwhile I’m forced to see a willing, but under-qualified health worker, because the NHS solution to chronic illness is to remove it from doctors’ workloads.

Oh, bugger I’m angry now. Did you know each politician costs us, on average, (excluding duck houses) over £500,000 per year to maintain? There are nearly 700 of them and the average parliament is 5 years – bung in some pension contributions. Total cost: over 2 billion pounds, or half the annual defence budget.

No wonder people don’t vote, they can’t afford to.

But, don’t despair because I have a solution: replace politicians with a combination of reality TV, lifestyle programmes and soaps. They are extremely cheap to make and very popular with people most at risk of catching Clamydia.

Reality TV like Fussy Eaters can be used to highlight how ugly people are who don’t eat anything green. Property Ladder can provide us with the fundamentals of economics by explaining (as it does every week) that you can’t convert a crumbling barn into a pension nest egg on a budget of £100 and a wife who really believes they’ll definitely be in by Christmas. Eastenders can be used for advice on health matters, relationship counselling, anything to do with a dose, marriage break ups, affairs, unemployment, marriages to ex-wives sisters, homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, rape, murder, gender reassignment, prostitution, shoplifting and running a cafe where all the customers have the right money for what they buy all of the time.

All we need now is 2 million civil servants to start the tender process…

Positive thinking...

My late father, a man of few words and even less money, would often mutter ‘hang ‘em’ under his breath while watching the news on the telly. It didn’t much matter who they were, or what they did, if they made it onto the news they were guilty and therefore ripe for the drop. Actually, I am being unfair to him. For minor crimes, such as being young, he would advocate the return of National Service.

So I wonder what he would have made of the man splashed across the front page of my local paper who was caught driving whilst disqualified on his way to doing some unpaid community work. The community work, together with a driving ban was the result of a previous conviction for dangerous driving.

On the basis that he only got in his car because his lift let him down his (free) defence lawyer successfully argued that he had ‘poor problem solving skills,’ happily ignoring the fact that he, within seconds of being stopped, made a decision to solve the problem of inevitable police custody by jumping over a barbed wire fence and legging it across a field.

The enlightened magistrate sent the man on an ‘enhanced thinking course.’

This is an interesting concept, and I’m thinking about what minor misdemeanour I might undertake in an effort to enhance my own thinking, which, it has to be said, is prone to the odd meander. But in my game that can often work to your advantage.

It’s true to say that my writing work is progressing nicely. I’m getting a reasonable amount of commissions from editors, in fact recently an editor contacted me to write a feature. This is a rare event in the world of freelance writing and a first of many, I hope. I was recently appointed to the writing roster of Tiger Tales, the in flight magazine of Tiger Airways (based in Singapore) and Lonely Planet are considering me as a contributor for the next edition of their Thai guidebook.

Still, sadly, little progress on my book, but I’m pestering agents and one day one of them is going to give in…

At current levels of activity I could happily make a living entirely from feature writing - providing I go and live under a bridge and live off bulrushes.

As I find bridges a little draughty I have always supplemented my income with commercial writing – you know the stuff, websites, press releases, that sort of thing. It’s a challenging form of writing because of the constraints of language and format that are often imposed by clients. Sometimes you have to get the whole ethos of what the company does into one sentence – I like that sort of challenge.

In fact I like it so much I’ve collaborated with some other like-minded souls and set up a company to develop this side. You can go and visit www.wedothewords.com if you want to read more about what I’m prattling on about.

It might just enhance your thinking…

No Smoking Please, We're Scottish...

It appears that my financial situation is about to take a turn for the better, and for this amazing turnaround in the Millard fortune I have to thank the Scottish. The Scots, in my view, are a much maligned race which I think has something to do with the impression that they love Scotland so much but rarely live there.

This, of course, is a complete fallacy. If you’ve ever travelled North to that beautiful country you’ll know there are loads up there – the poor ones and my friend Andy (a man whose stature is only exceeded by the size of his bank balance). Which brings me to Dundee. Hitherto the only thinking time I had afforded this ancient citadel was its connection with cakes. Until this morning.

This morning I discovered that the NHS is paying Dundidians (or should that be Dunderheads?) not to smoke. If you’ll excuse the pun: what a wheeze. In return for not lighting up you get £12.50 per week. But how does this affect me? Well, I once drove through Dundee and therefore must qualify for residency on the basis I’ve spent more time there than most Scots. I’ve also never smoked. On this basis Dundee owes me somewhere in the region of £32,000.

I already know what I'll spend most of it on. Sadly, the lion's share is earmarked for a parking company called CP Plus (I have yet to discover what the Plus provides) who suggested I might like to empty my bank account for having the temerity to park in a service station for over two hours. Clearly this misdemeanour should be punished, after all, there was only approximately 1000 empty parking spaces around mine and if 1001 cars arrived at the same time, which I understand is a regular occurrence at Pease Pottage, I would have been depriving a needy, law abiding citizen of a space. I can’t tell you how guilty I feel.

These organisations are euphemistically called Car Park Management companies and like wasps and cockroaches appear to serve no purpose other than making people recoil in hatred and disgust. Here is an excerpt from their website:

‘When it comes to parking enforcement issues, we emphasise the positive. We prefer to work through encouragement and prevention, identifying parking abusers and persuading them through a range of strategies not to re-offend, rather than primarily focusing on punishment and penalties.’

Their persuasion using a range of strategies manifests itself into a parking ticket that arrives on your doormat two days later. Not focusing on punishment translates into an A4 page of threats with an ever-ascending scale of charges if payment is not made within 20 minutes of receipt of the letter.

While I was attending a meeting in an effort to make a living and add to the economic well being of this country by purchasing all manner of goods and services from Moto the service station company that employs CP Plus, they we’re surreptitiously photographing my car for photographic evidence in their blackmail plot and planning to divert my money out of the economic system. Thieving shysters.

Bugger, I’m angry now – and I can’t even have a fag to calm me down…