Dancing about architecture.

OK, here's another one.

A quick recap of the rules for those who weren't here last week: I provide a description of a band or other flavour of musician. You then guess who I'm talking about, in the comments. There is no grand prize. Sorry. Budget cuts.

Bored Cockney lass meanders through ancient reggae collection.

Peer pressure.

I reckon that Jackie should blog a controlled-conditions blind-taste-test showdown to the death between Marmite and Vegemite. It'd be like The Ashes series for brown salty condiments. If you agree, go and harness The Raw Power Of The Web by telling her so. We can force her to do our bidding because she is a new media marketing guru so has to do what random people off of the Internet tell her else her career be doomed.

Money.

One of Natalie's correspondents, JEM by name, writes rather sensibly about the Euro:

The euro may have been assembled in a flawed way — I agree — but that is not to say that the idea of a common currency is of itself wrong in principle.

After all, if it's better for each country in Europe to have its own currency, how much better it would be if each county in the United Kingdom had its own currency too... or each town... or each street... or each house... After all, why should the Central Bank of 25 Typical Street hand over control of the 25 Typical Street Groat to the Central Bank of Typical Street and their Typical Street Groat?

... After all, what is money? A national totem? No, it's just a medium of exchange: a tool.

Damn straight.

So here's my cunning Euro policy what I would enact was I in charge.

I would legalise the use of the Euro in the UK but I would maintain the pound. I'd stick a cap on what banks could charge their customers for switching between the two currencies and allowing them to deal in both with minimum effort, and perhaps a cap on the maximum time they could keep money in limbo between currencies when a customer asks them to change it. (In an ideal market, that wouldn't be necessary, but British banks act as a cartel whenever they get half a chance. Unfortunately, they need the occasional legislative kick.) I'd require British businesses to accept either currency — though they'd be allowed to offer incentives if they wanted — 10% off if you pay in Euros; that sort of thing. And that's it.

Those people who hate the Euro wouldn't have to use it. Those who love the Euro could use it as much as they liked. The rest of us — which I reckon would quickly become most of us — could just use whichever was the most sensible at the time. We'd get lots of the economic advantages of having the Euro, with few of the disadvantages (I reckon — I'm not an economist). The public would generate money out of nothing as they'd start to watch interest rates closely and switch currencies whenever profitable. And everyone in the country would get much much better at mental arithmetic. Lord knows the schools aren't teaching it to them.

It's the law.

Here we have an interesting legal conundrum. It would be illegal for me to name a woman who has made a false accusation of rape. However, it is perfectly legal for MPs and Lords to do so in Parliament. Furthermore, should they do so, it is legal for Hansard to quote them. So a certain woman's name is on the Web right here: last Thursday, Lord Campbell-Savours called her "a serial and repeated liar". As well as the damage she has done to her victims' reputations, she has succeeded in getting one man, Warren Blackwell, jailed for three-and-a-half years. Lord Campbell-Savours reckons she should not only be named, but done for perjury, too. Quite right. As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, women who do this do untold damage not only to their targets' reputations but also to every genuine rape victim.

Anyway, back to the legalities. The reason for this apparent paradox is helpfully explained over at The Anglo Saxon Chronicle:

Lord Campbell-Savours was able to do this because he is protected from legal action for comments made in the House of Lords by Parliamentary Privilege.

That Privilege is granted to him in law by the provisions of the Bill of Rights 1689, which states: That the freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of parliament.

That's pretty clear wording.

Mr Chronicles has decided to go for the law with a full frontal approach: he's named the woman, as the Bill of Rights clearly says he is every bit as entitled to do as Lord Campbell-Savours, and is daring the authorities to prosecute him. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Good luck to him.

But I'm going for a slightly different approach: merely demonstrating that the law, even if enforced correctly, is useless on its own terms. I mean, look at this post. I haven't broken the law; I haven't named this bastard of a woman; and yet I have legally linked to Hansard, who have legally published the transcription of Lord Campbell-Savours legally naming her. This is ridiculous.

Dancing about architecture.

This might be a new feature, and might just be a one-off. Depends how many I can think of and whether everyone hates it.

I shall provide a snappy, music-journalistesque description of a band or popular beat artiste. You may then, excitingly, use this Web-log's modern commenting facility to guess who the hell I'm talking about. If I'm any good at this, it won't take you long. First person to get it right wins a prize, that prize being the knowledge that they were the first person to get it right.

So, here goes.

Slade team up with Chas and Dave to work on the Bugsy Malone soundtrack.

How to kill fewer patients.

Six days to go till I become a dad. Excellent.

Back in March, I mentioned one of many problems with the NHS:

NHS hospitals are now insisting that no patients be allowed to administer their own medication, and that includes diabetics giving themselves insulin. When a diabetic is admitted to hospital, they are expected to give their insulin to the staff and rely on nurses to check their blood sugar and inject their insulin. This is a Bad Thing.

In our experience, the trouble is not merely that your average nurse or even doctor knows very little about diabetes, but that your average doctor or nurse is so keen on ignoring or overruling their absent colleagues. So, when you're on a hospital ward, the advice of your diabetic specialist consultant who's been treating you for years really carries no more weight than the opinion of the duty nurse who's known you for twenty minutes, because the nurse is there and the consultant isn't. This isn't a huge problem when you're injecting yourself, because you can in turn choose to ignore the idiotic advice of the ignorant nurse and do what your consultant advised you to anyway. But that, apparently, is no longer allowed. The people who don't know what to feed you, how much insulin to give you, or whether to put you on a glucose drip are now solely in charge of feeding you, injecting your insulin, and deciding when to put you on a glucose drip.

It will come as a surprise to no-one with any experience of the NHS to learn that this approach has so far killed two people in Northern Ireland alone.

Vic, my wife, is diabetic, so, as you might imagine, one of the things that has been worrying us both about the impending birth is her being killed, put into a coma, or otherwise badly damaged by a nurse giving her an insulin overdose. It's not as unlikely as you might hope. We've had first-hand experience of exactly the arrogant idiocy I was writing about above. A couple of years ago, she was admitted to hospital the night before a minor operation so that she could be put on a glucose drip — you have to fast before being given a general anaesthetic, but fasting, obviously, is dangerous for diabetics, so they get brought into hospital the previous day so they can be given a glucose drip and have their blood sugars controlled without eating. This is entirely sensible. On being admitted, Vic was faced with a ward nurse who refused to give her the glucose drip on the grounds, when you get down to it, that she thought she knew better than the surgeon, the anaestetist, and the diabetic consultant, and it was her opinion that mattered because she, unlike them, was there. The drip was the only reason Vic was even in hospital — were it not for that requirement, she wouldn't have come in till the following morning. So the nurse in charge refused to give her the only thing she was in hospital to receive. The next morning, unsurprisingly (to us), Vic had a hypoglycaemic attack — ideal preparation for an operation. I'd love to say that this experience was a one-off, but it wasn't. It's the norm.

So the prospects aren't good, even before you take pregnancy into account. Pregnancy, you see, does a couple of things to diabetics: firstly, you need lots of extra insulin to convert sugar into a baby's body; secondly, your insulin resistance increases dramatically — a lot of non-diabetic women, in fact, become temporarily diabetic during pregnancy. Both these things mean that your insulin dose increases — by the end of the pregnancy, by a factor of about three. What this means, for those of you who don't know much about insulin, is that a heavily pregnant diabetic woman is injecting herself four times a day with what would usually be a lethal dose. As soon as she gives birth — within minutes, in fact — the required dose goes back down, not only to what it would be usually, but, as sugar is now being converted into milk instead of stored as fat, even further down that that.

So, you have nurses who know sod all about diabetes and are arrogant enough to overrule the instructions of diabetic consultants and the protests of experienced patients, in charge of giving insulin to a diabetic whose required dosage was about thirty-six units a couple of hours ago but who would now be killed stone dead if injected with even twenty units, whose ideal dosage is far lower than anything that has ever been recorded in her medical records, and who, on a drip and having just given birth, is in no condition to resist being given the medication. Really, it's amazing only two people have been killed.

So it was a great relief to us when, earlier this week, Vic's diabetic consultant told us that he has "an arrangement" with the nurses and midwives at our hospital whereby his patients are allowed to medicate themselves. He says they're all under strict instructions to allow his patients to inject their own insulin and to bow to their expertise over what dosage they should be taking. If there's any argument, we're to tell the nurses to call him, and he'll tell them that the ideal dose is whatever Vic says it is. Which is great.

For his patients.

For this is sheer luck. If we had a different postcode, Vic would have a different diabetic consultant, who might not have decided to overrule NHS policy and whose patients would therefore have to run the gauntlet whenever they went to hospital. If we move house, even if our new location is perfectly convenient for visiting the same consultant, the NHS might still insist that Vic be assigned to a different clinic, and there'd be sod all she could do about it. They did actually try to change her consultant a year or so ago, due to a bureaucratic reorganisation, but luckily that one was semi-optional — "semi" because they don't tell you it's optional unless you protest, as Vic did, thank God. This is how the NHS works: thanks to her address, Vic's chances of surviving next week are slightly higher, and her chances of not being a victim of negligence or malpractice are much higher. All the diabetics in our area who simply accepted that reorganisation when they were told about it — that's probably most of them — do not have that advantage.

I did rather get the impression that the two deaths are something of which the consultant is well aware, though he didn't mention them. He did tell us what the reaction used to be when his patients attempted to refuse to take the insane dose of insulin that a nurse was trying to give them: the nurses would call for a houseman to come and harass and bully the patient into taking the dose. The attitude was that patients who refused to take their medication were bad, and needed to be told off; patients who asked nurses to double-check with diabetes specialists were just being difficult.

Think about that. I don't know the details of those two deaths, or of the other deaths in other parts of the UK brought about by the same NHS policy. Maybe the patients were asleep, or senile, or delirious, or otherwise unaware. Or maybe they knew that the dose they were about to be given would kill them, and so kicked up a stink, and appealed for a diabetes specialist to give a second opinion, and did all they could to stop it happening, and were calmly and professionally overruled and sedated so that the nurses could get on with their job.

Like I said, knowing that we will not be subject to standard NHS policy on this issue is a great relief.

Quite a long time.

A friend of ours today received the results of a medical test they had done four years ago.

Bastard.

I stand by all my previous comments about that bastard David Blunkett. Because I was right:

David was certainly furious. He was also hysterical. He directed me, without delay, to order staff back into the prison. I told him that we did not, at that time, have enough staff in the prison to contemplate such a move but that many more staff were on their way from other prisons. I insisted, however, that although I was determined to take the prison back as quickly as possible, I could not, and would not, risk staff or prisoner lives in attempting to do so. He shrieked at me that he didn’t care about lives, told me to call in the Army and “machine-gun” the prisoners. He then ordered me to take the prison back immediately. I refused. David hung up.

I'm one of those people who believes that prisoners have fewer rights than the rest of us and should not be mollycoddled; prison shouldn't be all that nice a place to be. I don't, however, think that Home Secretaries should be allowed to gun them down. Call me picky.

Wow.

It is distinctly possible that this is the best blog post ever.

A rather difficult personal issue in 1985/6 saw me disappear into the underbelly of Glasgow, emerge driving a minicab at night in Peckham, S.E. London, then reappear, with a surprising number of extremely colourful acquaintances, working for a spy equipment shop in Mayfair. I left and set up my own "security" business in the Borough, just south of London Bridge, in partnership with an ex-armed robber called Tom.

You can probably picture the next couple of years: bug sweeps, body armour, unofficial meetings with the Foreign Office, ex-SAS soldiers, hidden video cameras... and there were less predictable things ...

 

The real problem with Americans.

As you might have noticed, there's always a lot of talk about what stupid insufferable imperialist uncultured arrogant fat violent ignorant parochial bastards the Americans are, and I disagree with it for two reasons: firstly, because it's not particularly true (apart from the fat thing, but, as I've said before, the food over there's just so fantastic that anyone who lives in America without getting fat is, frankly, stupid); and, secondly and far more importantly, because it distracts from the real problem. For yes, there is a real problem, and no amount of arrogantly and stupidly invading countries like Iraq and Germany and Japan for no reason at all while eating hot-dogs could ever come close to the sheer awfulness of what that bloody nation insists on inflicting on us.

Americans think Chevy Chase is funny.

Just think what a great film Spies Like Us would be had they cast anyone else in his role. Anyone at all. Ava Gardner would have been an improvement.

As if that weren't bad enough, it turns out that Americans love that Chevy Chase thing, whatever it's supposed to be, so much that they just can't do without it. And his recent and blessed lack of film appearances has therefore created, rather than a gigantic sigh of relief, a gap in the market.

Step forward, Will Ferrell. Great.

I was very pleasantly surprised by how good Wedding Crashers was. It was excellent, in fact. I was really enjoying it till Will Ferrell entered and, even with just a tiny cameo role, proceeded to shit all over the film. Like Chevy Chase, not only is he not even slightly amusing at his best, not only does he nevertheless inexplicably exude the smug certainty that he is the funniest thing alive, but he also has no ability to appear even vaguely realistic. It is impossible to maintain any suspension of disbelief while watching a gurning twonk who might as well have the words "Look at me! I'm in a film! Acting!" emblazoned on a large puce hat.

I have a request. I do not wish Chevy Chase dead — that would certainly be unreasonable — but the fact remains that, one day, contrary to the impression given by the look on his face, he will die. Chevy, when you go, could you take Will with you? Cheers.