Boadicea's Chariot

….of the things crap epidemiology – and lightweight, grant-farming epidemiologists aided and abetted by the media which publishes scare stories written by liberal arts graduates who would not recognise a Risk Ratio if it leapt up and gave them a Liverpool Kiss – say give you cancer. Read the List

Epitaph for the eighties?  ‘there is no such thing as society’

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

Margaret Thatcher

Love her or hate her, but in this instance she does have a point. What is society?  My thanks to Amicus for  posing this question.

There has been some discussion, both here and on MyT, about ex-soldiers who are unable, for whatever reason, to re-settle into civilian life. Here is an organisation trying to help some of them. Please take a moment to sign this petition:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/HelpSOTS/#detail

With the ever growing number of forgotten ex service personnel whose lives have been affected by homelessness it is time for the government to step in and help. We all think they deserve better after going through the traumatic experience of war.

The Soldiers Off The Street Organisation have come up with one solution with the following: Read about the potential solution

I was sitting in the smoking lounge this morning, drinking my first coffee of the day – I’m actually a tea-drinker, but that is another story – and chatting to a few of the company’s drivers.  One of my team, a recently graduated management trainee, was also in the lounge with some other colleagues.  She came to my office with a query a little while after we had finished our coffee break and, in conversation, asked me why I had chosen to sit with ‘those drivers,’ rather than her and the others of the team;  ‘They speak such awful Russian, you are learning bad words.’ Read more

I felt this little post was needed to explain a point in my next post. My current contract is with a tobacco  company. Shock. Horror. In the headquarters, where I have my office, there are lounges on each floor where employees can go, drink coffee, socialise and do the business that often gets done better informally than in the formal business process. On each floor, one lounge is a smoking lounge and one is non-smoking. Employees therefore have the choice and do choose, without any interference from authority, whether to drink their coffee with smokers, or without.

As a matter of interest, the proportion of smokers and non-smokers in the company reflects the proportion in the general population – I have found this to be generally the case in all of the places I have worked with the company, E/W Europe, the States, S. America and Asia.

I have no objection to bans on smoking where appropriate – I do not smoke in my own house, for example – what I do object to is the compulsory nature of blanket bans on smoking in places which you can choose to enter, or not – pubs, clubs, restaurants and so forth. (I do not include public buildings or public transport.) The community I work in shows that it is quite possible, and reasonable, for people to make their own choices without the imposition of centralised controls and the bureaucracy of rules, regulations and intrusive inspectorates that such controls entail.

Today, possibly because they thought it was hip and the sun was a little bit on the warmer-than – normal side, the couple next door invited people around for a few bevvies  – and that ‘traditional – even-if-it-was-imported’ UK main event, a barbeque.

Now, I am a good neighbour ordinarily. I don’t know any of the people who live in my locality and I like to keep it like that. It isn’t because I have delusions of being a man of mystery, far from it. Dealing with people and a multitude of problems as I do every day in my professional capacity, I just want to pull the drawbridge up on a weekend and let the world do what it wants so long as it doesn’t want to include me. I am – as has been pointed out to me on many occasions – the world’s only anti-social social worker. Continue reading “Here comes summer…..”

We had sailed from Holyhead with a ‘scratch’ crew as, having just returned from a deep-sea job, most of the regular crew were on leave. Even though I was one of the crew on leave, I was summoned to make up the deck crew, others more sensible than me having taken their leave and gone on holiday – far away from Holyhead. Not that I minded back then. I was single – and bored.

The job we had been given was to connect up to a coaster drifting without power in the Western Approaches. It was a ‘contract pull’ – that is, arrangements had been made between the coaster’s owner and our outfit on a fixed fee basis. We’d get a towing bonus out of it – which was pennies when compared to a decent tow deep-sea but it also meant that for those of us on leave, we’d get a ‘double banker’. The outfit would have to pay us double for forfeiting our leave. Continue reading “O’Mara’s Epiphany”