My letter to my cardiologist, who seems to be leaving me to die…

And, dear god, am I getting sick and tired of writing letters, trying to stir the useless bastards of the medical profession into action, before they kill me through neglect.

I last wrote to this guy, who I’d initially tagged as one of the good guys, on March 14, explaining that if he wanted me to attend for tests, or anything else, that I had only a very narrow window of activity on a good day – I simply cannot be at the beck and call of the appointments office, that’s never going to work. But at much greater length, in much more detail, and more polite!

Result, total silence for 6 weeks. That, when I have a condition which is going to kill me sooner rather than later, simply is not fucking acceptable.

So I’m sending this tonight or tomorrow night** – or whenever I

These bastards want us dead…

And by us, I mean the chronically sick and disabled.

Doctors back denial of treatment for smokers and the obese, says the Guardian, going on to say that “Survey finds 54% of doctors think the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment.”

Smokers I have little sympathy for – you made that decision, in the face of all the evidence that it’s not just seriously harmful to you, but to everyone around you, so I’m sorry, but you get to live with the consequences. And had I not lived, worked and socialised among smokers for most of my life, until the ban, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as ill as I am now, so sympathy is in very short supply.

However, a lot of people

Please note…

The post entitled “…and a light stew of chickpeas and roasted peppers and a chilli kick.” is now, due to a technical cock-up, on this link

Apologies for the inconvenience. Comments which have been left at the original, which is now something else entirely, thank you WordPress, have been copied across.

Ron.

“…and a light stew of chickpeas and roasted peppers and a chilli kick.”

“…and a light stew of chickpeas and roasted peppers and a chilli kick.”

I read that line in a Jay Rayner restaurant review last week and, I thought, I can do that.

OK, it may require a little creativity, but hell, at the risk of being immodest, I can do that too.

Mind you, I was, last week, accused of being immodest “about everything” when I happened to say that, when it comes to writing, I don’t do false modesty, which is true. I know exactly how good I am; I know my weaknesses as well.

And I suppose it’s true that I don’t do false modesty about anything else either. There’s a reason for that

Morons at HTC Technical support…

I wrote to HTC tech support. I said:-

Since your last update, HTC Sense is telling me that my SIM is registered to a different phone. Not true – it’s the same SIM and same phone I originally registered with. It won’t let me log in to my account.

It suggested I create a new account. I did, and it said that account already existed, so I tried to log in.

Chronicles of the Heart, Part 33…

Since my GP has no interest in checking to see whether I’m still alive and, if I am, what condition I’m in, and my cardiologist has apparently been abducted by aliens (hopefully doing unspeakable things to the useless sod!), I’ve made an executive decision and doubled my heart drug – just one more rung on the self-medication ladder.

I’ve been taking Candesartan for about a year, at 4mg a day. It’s a pretty nasty drug, it has to be said, but there’s no denying it’s effective. What it’s mainly been effective at,

Democracy – what democracy?

At a national level, government of the people, by the people, and for the people has been a myth for a long time. Maybe it always has been. Oh, the Americans have enshrined it in their constitution, and doubtless some still fondly believe that’s what they have, but there, as much as anywhere else, it’s meaningless; the masses are governed, and the wealthy elite govern. In the past, in other countries, it might have been an intellectual elite, but it’s always been an elite of some sort, almost always rooted in money.

Just like here, which is how we came to be saddled with a

Addendum to Never mind the Jubilee – this country is going to hell in a handbasket!

It’s been suggested that the British people have no stomach for a republic, or for the revolution, political or actual, needed to bring it about. I’m not so sure.

As a former, small-r, royalist, I’ve felt for some years that I’ve been defending the increasingly indefensible (when that deranged old bat signed away the welfare state and the NHS it was the last straw), and when you look at the bunch of borderline nutters and no-hopers in varying degrees of line for the throne, I think support for the monarchy will

Never mind the Jubilee – this country is going to hell in a handbasket!

Note: Handbasket is the correct term. It is absolutely not handcart!

***

This country’s monarch provides – in theory at least – the last bastion against government extremism by withholding the royal assent from potentially damaging legislation.

While it has become traditional in the UK for the monarch to effectively rubber-stamp legislation, the power of  veto still exists** – all that’s lacking is the will to use it.

**It resides in the monarch’s Reserve Powers not used since 1708, which is no reason why they can’t be. Those same powers can also be used to dismiss a Prime Minister, and if ever one deserved to be shown the door, it’s Cameron, not least because of his lies, but also because he has no mandate whatsoever for the damage he’s inflicting upon the citizens of this country, and because of the increasingly apparent corruption in his government.

Now, though, with the Queen having blithely signed away the Welfare State which her father signed into law, via the NHS bill, not to mention

Osborne – liar or just plain incompetent? Or both…

It’s not that long ago, shortly after being told we were effectively on our uppers, that we loaned Ireland £7bn of money we hadn’t allegedly got – anyone expecting that back any time soon?

And what was it? £11bn plus – I seem to recall seeing