Love Has Brought Me Around

It’s a sad day and a low time of year.  When living and working in towns and cities, we don’t have much time or opportunity to study the skies. We forget how the seasons lift us up and pull us down.

Yet surprising things can help us through the lows.

For me a new love came into my life quite unasked and undeserved.

It was my granddoggie.  I never did anything to merit his adoration. I didn’t feed him, except on the odd mercy mission when his family were held up in traffic. I didn’t keep the roof over his head or take him for walks in wintry weather.

Yet he just loved me. When I came to the door he would rush from wherever he was comfortably snoozing and go into an ecstasy of tail wagging and welcome whimpers. When I finally sat down he would leap onto my knee. It was a source of huge entertainment and amazement to the family.

Of course I loved him in return.

He’s old now and he was never particularly clever, but he was long-suffering and forgiving. He put up with all the silly costumes the grandchildren made him wear, the endless idiotic tricks they taught him.

Even now in his more tetchy, less energetic old age, he welcomes every day in the world with cheerful anticipation.

Here he is, forever puzzled but patiently accepting of the strange things life throws at him, trying to lick up a frozen puddle in the park.

Yes, in unexpected ways, in life’s bad places, love has brought me around.

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Vacancy -Monster Fighting Change Agent Required

On “turning things round”

Before Florence Nightingale, “nurses” enjoyed a deservedly dodgy reputation.  Dickens, always plugged into the popular culture of his time, knew what he was doing when he created the ghastly Mrs Gamp and her dreadful friend.

Caring is a role that brings with it a very dark side. It is dangerously easy to take advantage of the weak and the sick.  It is so simple to blackmail or terrorise them into silence and acquiescence. 

The vulnerable quickly learn that, to get even half decent treatment, you have to be “good”. And good is always defined by the care provider as giving your  “carer” an easy time.

It was bad enough in the past, with gin-sodden, slovenly Mrs Gamp, but now we seem to have created something even worse: a whole monstrous system which is based on not giving the care provider a hard time.

Whether it be the Hospital Trust or the Local Authority or the judgemental Social Work Department, we little people are blocked from attempting to criticise or question. As patients, clients or employees, we are expected to be “good”: to be quiet and compliant; to accept without complaint every idiocy of chaotic administration; every petty cruelty of poor organisation; the endless esteem-sapping disrespect and indignity.

Because otherwise we know we’ll suffer, in body, pocket, mind or spirit, or any combination of the above.

Now Florence Nightingale was a ferociously determined and successful change agent, but she also had a good few things on her side. She was well connected, with privileged access to people of power and wealth. She had a highly successful market image, a sympathetic press and popular support. She was not a little person.

How are we little people going to fight our newly created monster?

I’ve seen institutions change, but it’s a big ask, as they say nowadays

1. You find a leader with determination, endurance and integrity.
2.  You get a board/cabinet/party/pressure group to back her/him.
3.  You get rid of the bad staff by (a) making them work (b) dragging them through disciplinary procedures, tribunals etc.
4.  You promote and reward the good staff, so that the balance of power & influence in the workforce changes, with good practice becoming the norm.

A big ask indeed! We’re going to need a monster fighting change agent, to battle alongside us little people.

Any good politicians out there any more?

Anyone with principles and a bit of backbone?

Situation vacant.

The Pub That Time Forgot 2

On the importance of individual choice

Fed up of Saturday stuck in the house, Wisegrannie & Grandpa ventured out into the biting wind (by London UK standards) & headed for the pub that time forgot.

An important part of traditional English local pubs was always respect for individual choice.

After you had served your probationary period (which could vary between weeks and months depending on the pub’s locality and clientele) when you walked in, the person behind the bar would greet you by name and say –

“Evening ……… & …….. , usual?”

Thus indicating that not only were you known as an individual, but your personal preferences were remembered as important and worthy of respect.

This afternoon a friend of the family was helping out behind the bar. She was unaware of all the intricacies of this demanding situation, but was doing well. She gave Grandpa a straight glass for his half (European translation – small beer) because Grandpa holds the traditional English opinion that beer glasses with stems are for female customers.

But then one of the long established regulars came up with an all time winner in the personal preferences stakes. As she was on the point of pouring out his pint, he called out to remind her of his particular individual choice.

“No, not that one, dear! I have a glass without any writing on it!”

Better Pens Than Mine

This week I’ve been listening to Dickens again in my audiobooks. I listen when I wake up at night and get bored. Usually they send me back to sleep, but this time a passage woke me up instead.

It was this extract from The Old Curiosity Shop

” Grandfather, what was that you told me? That if they knew what we were going to do, they would say that you were mad and part us? Grandfather, these men mean to carry us before some gentleman and have us taken care of and sent back.”
“How, dear Nelly, how? They will shut me up in a stone room, dark and cold, and chain me up to the wall, Nell – flog me with whips and never let me see thee more.,”

Dickens was writing in 1840.

This week in England, Thomas, 20 years old, died. He had learning difficulties and had been in an Assessment and Treatment Unit (ATU) miles from home. He had been abused by carers in the past and, when admitted as an emergency to hospital this week, had unexplained carpet burns on his back. His family had been desperately trying to enable him to be cared for in his own community, not separated from the people he loved.

This week a report was also published giving details of the thousands of people with learning difficulties kept in ATUs. Many far away from home, cut off from their families. Many existing year after year, never going into the outside world. Many, it gradually comes to light, ineptly and cruelly treated.

The report’s authors were writing in 2014. 

When I googled The Old Curiosity Shop one commentator described it as a melodrama, too exaggerated for reality…

Thomas, fighting for his life

The avoidable deaths of two young Learning Disabled adults in institutional “care” in the UK last year jolted me out of comfy retirement into social media campaigning. (#JusticeforLB and #JusticeforNico).

The learning disabled, the dementia impaired, the frail elderly, the mental health patients in “community care” are routinely neglected, abused and sentenced to unnecessary, untimely death by the mismanaged, overstretched, underfunded system in the UK today.

Government at best stands by looking solemn and “learning lessons”, or at worst actively blocks change and punishes whistleblowers.

Another case today. Another suffering family. Another tortured child.

A whole load more

Today I planned to go to a CPA meeting as an advocate. Thomas is living in a specialist setting miles away from home and against his own and his family’s wishes. Lots of people are working together to support the family to negotiate an impossible system that is blocking every attempt to get Thomas close to home.

This weekend his family noticed unexplained injuries. On top of that he was struggling with a chest infection that they knew was serious. Families know that stuff, born of years experience of loving and caring for their son, and we all know how important it is to listen, don’t we?

It seems that the lessons learned, Death by indifference, Connor Sparrowhawk, Nico Reed….. a list too long to name each individual, have not been heard.

Thomas collapsed on Sunday night and was given CPR. He has sustained massive brain injury, his heart and…

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