Yet another new blog

I swear to you I saw a meme on Facebook tonight that said something along the lines of: "Doctors should be paid to get people off medication, not for putting them on medication." But, of course, this is Facebook we're dealing with so when it dawned on me (a minute later) what the meme said, I couldn't find it again. This is personal to me - and many others. If you or your partner or your child suffers from a chronic illness - say asthma, diabetes, a heart complaint, Parkinson's or depression - medication is a must. And it needs to be taken regularly for it to have any effect. There are plenty of us in this situation. I had a stroke when I was 35. It took a while to get a diagnosis. At the time, I was given one basic medication: Propranolol. It regulates the heartbeat, reduces anxiety and cuts the chances of having migraines (it was during a migraine that I had the stroke and man, I was anxious about it afterwards). Since then, I've been prescribed med...

I don't know how we get by day to day in Scotland. We're so incompetent. Our health service is a shambles, education is a mess, crime is out of control, the government is in a constant state of crisis. How do I know this? Well, most political parties, TV, radio and almost all the newspapers tell me so. And all this despite the fact Scotland is subsidised to the tune of billions of pounds a year by Westminster. Except none of it is true. If you imagine working in the NHS means you go to work every day trying not to listen to the constant criticism of your work, of course that's not what happens. You go to work to do the job you were trained for, make the best of the conditions you work in, look after your patients and your colleagues and go home after your shift - knackered. And do it all again the next day. Same with teachers and police officers. That's why so many young people go on from school to university in Scotland. It's why the crime rate in Scotlan...

It seems to me in the past few weeks, I've been passing on more and more jobs in Scotland via my Facebook page. I pass on jobs because - well, you just never know: there might be someone out there looking - or with a relative or friend looking - for work in Scotland. In the past couple of weeks, I've passed on adverts for jobs in finance, education, the theatre and medicine. These are obviously academic jobs. But I've also posted jobs as drivers, baristas, hotel workers and fire officers -  equally specialised but in a different way. There are also apprenticeships going. Now I'm getting a bit worried. January is usually a 'dry' month for jobs. Are employers getting smarter at advertising and choosing quiet periods to advertise? Or are we now entering the period we've all been dreading, when EU citizens have given up and started to go home thanks to brexit? I meet EU nationals all the time in my day to day life. They work in the shops, deliver my gro...

My pal got a right telling off at the weekend on Facebook from his son. He's not good at keeping in touch and when he tried to correct this by sending a friendly informative message to said son, it only got worse: he posted information about his movements on Facebook for the next few months. For the whole world to see. Security-wise. that's a no-no. Another friend has never got over the days of mobile phone shorthand. You know the style: 'I wnt u 2 no I'm ok. How r u?' She has never got the hang of prescriptive text on her phone. Nor can she handle Messenger on Facebook. My friend's husband took months to understand Facebook (I'm not sure he does even now), despite his techno-savvy daughter going to the house and organising a couple of seminars with him. I don't think she got to the point of calling him 'thick', though I wouldn't be at all surprised. These friends are what I will call elderly - although they will be dead annoyed tha...

Most of the time I was working in education, I was a member of the EIS. Paid my dues every month for, I reckon, 30 years. Went on strike a couple of times, as required by the EIS. I only ever had two occasions to call on the EIS for help. The first was in 1995-6, when Strathclyde Region was being broken up into 12 separate local authorities, and it looked like those of us who worked in the education support services had never been thought of. Some colleagues were okay: they had worked in their local area and slotted into a job in the new local authority for that area. The rest of us, well, it was a bit of a free-for-all. Those who had been around longest got first claim on a job in the local authority they wanted. My local authority was Argyll & Bute, which was, as we say in these parts, skint. It still is. There was only one poor soul working on our behalf in the whole of Strathclyde. I phoned him. He told me at length that he'd no idea what was going to happen to him ne...

Just before I retired, the M77 to Ayrshire was started. I say started because the M77 still only goes from Glasgow as far as the Fenwick cut-off. Good sliproads, decent flyovers. I notice it's having to be re-surfaced in some areas, which means it's well used. Mind you, Fenwick Moor still isn't the best place to be stuck if the weather changes and I'm not sure what the action plan is for dealing with snow even after all these years of closed roads and stranded motorists. After Fenwick, you're back to the nightmare of poor roads that can't handle the kind of traffic that uses them on a daily basis, roundabouts where national and local traffic meet in a daily horror show of congestion - and frequent accidents. Today someone sent me a video of the proposal to improve the M77 down to Maybole. Sadly, in the video I see roundabouts. Big roundabouts. Clearly places where local and national traffic is going to meet. Still, I hope this improvement...

I'll bet in every Media Studies course, there's a lecture entitled: Idiotic comparisons and how to use them. You've seen these on the telly news, though they're so daft you may not have registered them. They look like this: A young (usually female) presenter stands in front of a bridge and says: "This bridge is the height of 4 double decker buses." Or the same young presenter stands in front of the same bridge and says: "This bridge is the length of 3 football pitches." Myself, I never use buses or football fields to measure things. Mainly because I've no idea what a bus or a football pitch would look like when compared to a bridge. The comparison is just meant to be impressive, I think, or maybe there are people all over the UK who can relate to these descriptions and it's just me that's left thinking: Whit? Then there's the unit of outrageous cost: An older, usually male, presenter stands outside Westminster or Holyrood...