A thirty minute drive through dark country lanes, some scary oncoming traffic moments and finally, heart racing and white of knuckle, I arrive at The Bull public house for a winter meeting of the Mid Kent Bee-keeping association.
I was a bit late, so I walked in midway through a talk being given by Brian (a retired bee-keeper/lecturer) about how to breed queens.
After a trip to the bar (served by a cachexic youth, pink tracksuit chavette in attendance on a bar stool) I settled down to what I hoped was the tail end of a short lecture on bee-keeping techniques.
Two hours later, and I felt like a Vietnam Vet who had seen too much. Looking around the room I realised I was not the only one.
What did I learn? I now know that you can ‘De-queen’ a hive (or colony) and then put in a few young larva or eggs from another colony and the bees will bring them up as queens.
I found out that you need to remove these immature queens before they hatch or else the first one out will kill the rest.
I also found out that ‘de-queen’ is a euphemism for ‘kill’.
In fact it turns out that bee keeping is all about death. Death and manipulation. Maybe this is where we get out deep rooted cultural fear of ‘the men in white coats’.
Once the talk was over, I watched the various officials of the association (treasurer, secretaries etc) vie with one another to prove that they all knew more (or had more to offer) than Brian. This strange posturing was all done in a strangely passive-aggressive way: “Now, I am sure that Brian would probably know better but…”
Brian, I am happy to report, took all these challenges to his superiority with grace. Then he destroyed the pretenders to his throne with a couple of well chosen bee-related put downs.
I was left with the rather trite impression that the queen bee had fought a subtle battle, and won.
The most vociferous of his opponents left soon after with half a dozen members of the association to go and hang of the branches of a near by tree, before looking for a chimney to make a permanent home in.
Or not. Actually they called the raffle and all went home. You can, after all, take bee analogies to far.
I got something published (albeit in a free paper).
Below is what The London Paper (one of the ones they hand out at the station) printed on Wednesday in ‘The Columnist’ section.
Today is the twenty first day of an experiment to answer the question ‘Can I live without television’
Television has been my constant companion since I was a teenager. I have happy (well, not unhappy) memories of spending an entire school summer holiday watching back to back episodes of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. My dad recorded the series for me on our, top loading, steam powered VHS recorder. Each day I could watch the entire series twice. From this you can gather two things - 1- I am, to this day, word perfect with the first two episodes and 2- I had no friends.
TV has seen me through the boredom of my student days, the peaks of my first proper relationship and, inevitably, the troughs of my first proper breakup.
I am now 36 years old, have been married for eight years and have recently started having a nagging feeling that I may be watching too much telly. It’s safe to say that barely a day would go by (or even an hour of my non work life) without tuning in and switching off.
So my experiment is to see if my life would be better without the delights offered by Freeview. Would I be able to survive without UKTV History and the strange looking ‘almost made it’ presenters on News 24?
At first I struggled to find activities to replace the tube. Local news papers figured mightily in my evening routine - its amazing what they find to fill an edition of the Kent Messenger.
Just recently however, I have found that my wife and I have been having conversations. I am sorting out little jobs I would normally try and cram in at the weekend.
Without my daily dose of telly I have started feeling a strange disconnect. This feeling of being slightly outside of the bottom end of popular culture goes hand in hand with my sense of superiority over those who must keep their daily appointments with Eastenders, Loose Women and … actually I am now struggling to remember another popular program… Bargain Hunter?
Last night, for the first time, alone in the house and with the still, cold bulk of our unused box balefully staring at me from the corner of the room, I realised that it needed me more than I needed it. That I am, if not free, on the path to freedom.
Then I picked up the Maidstone Advertiser and read all about a brave pensioner and her battle with Tesco followed by a heartwarming story concerning a cat and two fish it didn’t eat.
The cat was called Mr Christmas.
Strange to say that some small part of my happiness might be bound to such things, but the SMS vote attached to each days’ column showed 100% of the people who felt it necessary to text their opinion to the paper, liked it!
My (almost) completed compost heaps - made from some pallets that I ‘found’ near Ikea.
They may have to move in the future if we get chickens, but they will do for the moment.
The first of the raised beds is in and ready to go. I found an endless source of horse manure near by - so should be able to do something with the clay soil we have here.
Village life can be a bit scary. While I was in here buying bananas (not sure which farm grows these in Kent) several people came and went - none paid! It seems they operate some kind of ‘account’ based system. Suckers - I can see loads of free food in my near future.
When I was still a registered nurse and regularly donning rubber gloves to do unspeakable things to complete strangers for a living, I used to get really annoyed when non-medical people would tell me that what the NHS needed was the return of the matrons. I dismissed it as unqualified nostalgia for simpler times. It was my opinion that such views were generally held by people whose only real experience in working on a ward was watching Carry on Doctor.
I’ve changed my mind.
Obviously I don’t think we should turn our back on advances in practice - egg white and oxygen will not cure pressure sores (bed sores to you “Carry On” viewers).
Draconian as it sounds, here are the things that nurses stopped doing that maybe someone should enforce.
Uniforms not worn outside of hospital
hats
Hair to be worn off the collar (ie tied up)
No jewellery (except a wedding ring)
daily and weekend cleaning lists. (Nurses used to clean much of the ward equipment and sign of a list to make sure it was all done
Enforce visiting hours - no more than two visitors at a time
Patients not allowed in bed during the day
You are probably think that these kind of rules already exist in hospitals. I mean, cleaning and smart dress is common sense no? Wrong. The problem is, nurses are now professionals.
When I trained (class of ‘92) we were the last year to learn the so called ‘traditional methods’. The students who came after us took their lectures in a university. They were ’supernumerary’ - which is a fancy term meaning ‘don’t do any actual hands on nursing care’.
This new style of training is all part of the nurses obsession with becoming a ‘profession’. In recent years, nurses have complained that they are not treated as equals to Doctors and other professionals. The solution (proposed by government and embraced wholeheartedly by nurses) was to pursue the American system of training, which turns out highly qualified ‘professionals’ who would take more of a managerial role on hospitals. The actual dirty work would be done by Health Care Assistants (HCAs), who would in turn be educated using the new NVQ system. This whole endeavour was called Project 2000, and the fact that it had been running for 10 years in the USA and had been judged a failure didn’t stop nurses from being hypnotized by the glamour of degrees and diplomas.
Nurses have a huge inferiority complex that they try and salve by collecting qualifications and awards. They have been so busy massaging their own fragile sense of self worth with bits of paper that they haven’t noticed that standards of nursing care have gone through the floor.
The remarkable thing is that, during my working life as a nurse, we were constantly implementing new measures and ‘tool’ to evaluate the effectiveness of nursing care (using ‘models of nursing’ and other great buzz words), and yet, inexplicably, none of these research based changes in the way we practised nursing actually improved the overall health of our hospitals.
Those nurses most adept at getting on courses and training seminars, those with the most letters and ENB qualifications attached to their professional portfolio were soon able to achieve what all nurses really wanted. A way out of nursing. The floated to the top of the nursing hierarchy, doffed the uniform and donned the cheap suit to take up tenuous positions of power along side the doctors and other management.
A few nurses have stayed behind. These people were hard working, caring (remember when to be a nurse was to care?) and experienced individuals. However the system that rewards bits of paper, employs private firms to cook the food, clean the hospitals and staff the wards destroys the conscientious, hard working traditional nurse. You will meet these real nurses sometimes (even in hospitals) they almost always look tired and beaten.
Nursing (and by extension the NHS) is fucked. I don’t think it’s too late to retrace our steps to the point where it all went shit-shaped and try and fix it - but I don’t think this will happen. Nurses are still to blinkered to realise what they have lost, to in-love with their ‘professional’ status and to inclined to spend their time stabbing their colleagues in the back to do anything about the mess they are in part responsible for.
I’m sure that there are plenty of nurses who will read this and say - “Well I guess this person is bitter about ” and dismiss my opinion thus.
Bollocks to you - nursing is the way it is because of nurses. I wish I had the money to go private.
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