None of us can escape our past

During these terrible days as COVID19 locks down the world, I have been thinking a lot about what may cause some of those in power to react in the often disturbing ways they do when faced with dealing with the pandemic decimating their countries.  These thoughts have been triggered by a comment I read today by Philippe Sands in the Guardian newspaper who was discussing his latest book, The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive.  He writes that he was at the International Court of Justice listening to Aung San Suu Kyi trying to justify the Myanmar military’s actions against the Rohingya community, and asks, “How could she not see the facts as others did?” Answering himself, he wonders whether the reason may lie in her relationship to her father, the previous ruler.  He then transfers this thought to the son of the man who was in charge of the extermination of the Jews in Poland during the war, including members of his own family, and wonders whether this son has learnt to accept his father’s appalling actions as “a way of being able to live, a means of survival”.

This made me think of Donald Trump, as I tried to apply this understanding to his inability to empathize in any way with another human being.  I then tried to relate my thoughts to my knowledge of the five elements.  I have always believed that Aung San Suu Kyi is of the Metal element, and can see that her need to maintain her father’s legacy, possibly added to the effects of years of enforced isolation, may indeed be her “way of being able to live, a means of survival” that somebody not subject to Metal’s yearning for an absent father may be unable to understand.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is, I think, of the Wood element, at the opposite point of the five element circle.  Do his words and actions show a Wood element which is pathologically out of balance?  We know that Wood is the child among the five elements, and it is significant that a speech expert described Trump’s way of talking as “oddly adolescent”.  There is definitely something frighteningly childish about him.  Perhaps this can be traced back to a childhood in which his mother apparently played little part, his brother saying that the children rarely saw their mother.  Since we know the emotion associated with the Wood element is anger, it is not surprising, therefore, that this is the emotional atmosphere in which Trump feels most at home, quite happily stoking up anger in all who surround him, like a child indulging in tantrums.  It is terrifying that somebody with more power than anybody else in the world should be the least able to exercise any self-control. 

But perhaps, like the other two examples I mentioned, Aung San Suu Kyi and the son of the prominent Nazi, this is his “only way of being able to live, a means of survival”.  And perhaps this applies to us, too, for how each of us lives our life can indeed be said to be our only way of being alive, and a means of survival, though we hope with less extreme consequences for the people around us.

The taking of "selfies"

The following is a quotation from a book I am reading at the moment.  It is a detective story, and its author has many interesting insights into life.  The book is called Death in the Tuscan Hills by Marco Vichi.  Here he is describing somebody who is leafing through a photo album.

 

He retired to the kitchen with a box of old family photos…..Photos were ruthless.  They showed moments lost for ever, people long since dead.  They were an attempt to cheat death, a painful illusion, and looking at them made one more aware than ever that time was a mystery.

 

After looking at them all one by one, he closed the box of memories with a sigh.”

 

Perhaps, indeed, people’s recent mania for the constant taking of photos, usually of themselves, rather than giving themselves time to observe life at first-hand through their own eyes, is part of an attempt to ”cheat death”, to re-assure ourselves that we are alive.  I observe with some incredulity and much sadness this endless taking of photos, the living of life at one remove which this represents.  So many pieces of electronic equipment, such as smart phones with their numerous gadgets, now put a barrier up between people and the world around them.  I wonder what effect this is having on our personal relationships.

 

I was also saddened recently to hear that, far from connecting people to one another, as Facebook is intended to do, it can have just the opposite effect, that of isolating people.  I have been told that young girls can now spend hours alone in their rooms taking photo upon photo of themselves until they are satisfied with the one they eventually feel is good enough to send out to the world as their image of themselves.  This is more a case of a disconnect from the world rather than a closer connection to it.

 

 

A new world order perhaps?

I find it exhilarating – both fascinating and appalling – to be a witness to the enormous events of the past few months, now culminating in Trump’s triumph.  These events are called seismic, because, like earthquakes, they burst out and demolished much of the old political order.  First we had Brexit, and now we have Trump (Brexit, Brexit plus plus as he himself said).  Brexit was bad enough to deal with, and many of us, me included, are still unable properly to deal with it (which is why I now wear a badger proudly proclaiming “Brexit does not mean Brexit”, to be obtained from Joy Gerrard at www.visibleanger@gmail.com, who very kindly designed this at my request).

Being appalled by what is happening in this country and the US is, in my view, easy – but to see this as forming part of some kind of important trend in the history of the world is much harder to envisage.  This only became possible for me after I heard Madeleine Albright, the US Senator and former Secretary of State, giving a very illuminating talk on the BBC Today programme yesterday.  Among other things, she said that “the social contract has been broken.  People are talking to their government with 21st century technology,  the government hears them with 20th century technology, and answers them with 19th century technology.”  I interpret this as meaning that there is a huge disconnect between how we are now governed and how we need to be governed in this new world of ours.  And what can be seen as the protest votes of all those who supported Jeremy Corbyn or voted for Brexit or have sent Trump to the White House are all signs of this huge disconnect.

Perhaps we are now seeing the last dying struggles of the old order, in which the money and power of the elite 1% has dominated over the feelings of inadequacy and abandonment of the remaining 99%.  Seen from this viewpoint, the triumphs of Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexiteers and Trump represent a powerful uprising of those who feel dispossessed and marginalized against an established order which has so far always favoured the advantaged, a sad symbol of this being the mantra of “austerity” imposed for many years upon the disadvantaged in many countries from Greece to this country.

Maybe, then, what we are seeing happening now are the death throes of one world order and the inevitable birth pangs of another hopefully more enlightened one.  It may be fanciful of me to hope that this is so, but hope is what we need when what has seemed to be a dark pall of despair has hung over us for so long.  We need now to hope for a breakthrough to a better world which will build itself slowly on the ruins of the breakdown we are witnessing today.

This is why I like to read the blog written by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek Finance Minister., to be found at https://yanisvaroufakis.eu, because he and those working with him throughout the world are endeavouring to make the case for a new world order.  This gives me hope that there are enough people out there not content just to complain about the state of the world but to do something about it. ,

"1 of the 48%"

I am still reeling from the result of the referendum.  And I don’t agree with many people’s passive acceptance that “Brexit means Brexit”.  It certainly doesn’t, or at least only if we, who so violently oppose cutting ourselves off from Europe, tamely accept that it does.

So I am on a personal mission to fight what I consider to be the good fight.  I have bought some badges supporting the EU, one of which I now wear proudly everywhere.  It says “1 of the 48%”, and has already provoked an argument from a “leaver”, but also much support from others.

And then I make sure that I buy a copy of the New European, which calls itself a “pop-up newspaper”.  It appeared within a week of the referendum, and gives a very healthy European slant to the news.  Originally, they said that there were only going to be 4 weekly copies, as a brief protest against the referendum result, but we’re on to copy 3 now and people are buying it, so I hope it changes its mind and carries on.

I also heard Paddy Ashdown talking on the Andrew Marr programme yesterday morning about a new group he and many others are bringing together called MoreUnited (www.moreunited.uk ) which, as he put it so persuasively, is there to give voice to the voiceless, those who don’t want to belong to any political party, but feel fervently that Britain should not cut itself off from its international roots.  It wants to campaign strongly against the idea that we have to go along with the idea of Brexit, rather than ensuring that we continue to fight against it.  So that’s another cause I decided to support.

And finally, to my own surprise, as somebody who has always been a floating voter, not attached to any particular party, I have thrown caution to the winds and have joined the Liberal Democrat party, because they are the only party who has said that they will base their plans for the next election solely on fighting to remain in the EU.

So it’s been a politically rather hectic few days for me, my pro-European feelings strengthened even more by the terrible events in France and Germany.  This is surely not the time to withdraw into an isolationist shell, as though we are trying to tuck ourselves out of sight in this corner of Europe.

 

Oh England! What have you done to yourself!

I am devastated by the results of the referendum, as is everybody I know.

The most appropriate comment I heard during a dreadful night spent listening with increasing horror to the radio and watching TV was that of Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal leader, when he said: "God help this country!"

Designer bicycles

We seem to have entered the age of the “designer” everything.  There are, I am told, designer prams, much admired and sought after by the rich, with names such as a Ferrari or a Mercedes pram, and thus presumably designed by these car manufacturers like racing cars.  Not only these, but today I noticed a snazzy bike at the front of the shop window of an upmarket handbag shop.  Presumably designer bikes will soon be, or are already, the next must-have for those with too much money to spend.

I remember the days when we wheeled our children in easy-foldable pushchairs which did not clutter up shops or buses as today’s indecently cumbersome prams with their large wheels do.  This was before the time when prams, and now bicycles apparently, demanded the attention of special designers to attract customers.  I don’t always think back nostalgically to the old days, but some things really did feel simpler then.  Perhaps we were still so shell-shocked from the war that we were delighted just with the simple possessions available after a time of great deprivation.  We certainly felt it was wrong to spend money on useless luxuries, even if these were available to us.  It is these that now fill our shops.

Alittle bit of unexpected cheer

I am watching with fear as the world, which often seems never to learn from its past, hovers yet again on the brink of another financial precipice, with the rich making sure that they get richer whilst the poor only get poorer.  And I can hardly bear to look at a newspaper or listen to the news because everywhere I see the desperate faces of asylum seekers risking their lives, and often losing those lives, in an attempt to escape the horrors of wars.  I can understand what being a refugee is like, although at one remove, for half my family, my mother’s half, was Austrian Jewish and many of them were forced to flee to this country before the second World War, most escaping the concentration camps only because my English father could vouch for them.

And then I think of all those rich and influential people sitting around behind police barricades in five-star hotels in Davos, flying in and out in their private planes, to discuss from a distance what to do about the poverty in the world.  And the gap between their world and the world outside seems to grow ever wider.

It is sometimes too much for me, and I have to take refuge in reading all kinds of escapist literature, my favourite being detective stories, where good always triumphs.  I am particularly fond of the gentle old-fashioned English country village kind, which takes me back to the nostalgia of a simpler life, with echoes of my own childhood.

I am cheered, though, by hearing that at last this country will be doing something about the hordes of unaccompanied children who live in appalling conditions just a few miles over there in the camps in Calais, a prey to child traffickers.  It seems as though one or more thousand will be allowed in.  And high time too!

...............


There is a happy postscript to the blog above which I have just read in today's Guardian newspaper:  "Teachers flood Dunkirk school for refugees with aid offers".

This is a heartening story of the school a teacher and friends have set up in the mud of a refugee camp in Dunkirk, of the success they are having in teaching the refugee children, and of the many other teachers volunteering to cross the Channel to offer their help.  Hoorah, hoorah!

Two laments for the end of an era and one happy thing

I start this blog with my laments.  The little café, Stefano’s, which I would pop into daily on my way to the clinic, and which I wrote about in my blog of 29^th March, has now closed and been taken over by what looks like a very much more upmarket place.  I think I can no longer call it a café, but would describe it more as a small patisserie.  And my favourite espresso has nearly doubled in price.  Stefano and his Italian family seem to have been the last survivors around here of a time when small family-owned businesses ran a one-shop enterprise.  Now the coffee chains, such as Starbucks, with their standardized fare, are taking over everywhere, perhaps understandably in view of the rents charged.  Even this new little patisserie has other branches elsewhere in the up-and-coming areas of London.

My second lament is for the puzzling substitution in train announcements of the good old-fashioned word “passenger” by the word “customer”.  I wonder who decided that this change was necessary.  Did a group of railway executives with nothing better to do solemnly sit around a table to discuss the merits of the one word against the other?  And why change it at all?  When I hear “passengers” I always thrill slightly to the thought of all those large ocean liners, like the Queen Mary, or indeed the Titanic, or people climbing aboard The Great Western  or the Orient Express.  When discussing the Titanic disaster, is anybody likely to ask, “How many customers were lost?”  The word now only reminds me of the money I paid today for my rail ticket to a much less exotic destination, Sussex.

But to relieve the slight gloom of writing about these two rather sad things, I tried to think of something good that has happened to me, and came up with quite a few examples, none more heartwarming than a little incident that occurred in the street a few days ago.  There was a different Big Issue seller from the usual one outside my local supermarket, and I thought I recognized him from seeing him somewhere else.  He smiled at me, and said, “You may not remember me, but you’re the lady who called to me to come across the street in Bond Street some time ago, so that you could buy a copy from me.”  Now I recalled that this must have been over a year ago.  So he had remembered this small act of kindness from all those months back.  Perhaps too many people treat Big Issue sellers as nuisances, and walk on by, and too few as people, trying hard to put their lives together.  We smiled at each other like old friends, and I walked on with my heart a little warmer. 

How sad it is.....

As I get older, leaving many years trailing behind me, I am aware that nostalgia for the past creeps up on me more frequently than it used to.  There are so many things now which are different from what they were, and though some of these differences are undoubtedly good (though here I have to stop and think hard without for the life of me being able to come up with even one example), many more appear to my ageing sight to represent losses which can never be made good.

A small, apparently insignificant, but to me important, example of this is something which happens every morning.  As I make my way out to pick up my newspaper and indulge in my early morning coffee in one of the many coffee shops around here, I step over the wet pavement outside the front door of a block of flats, and exchange good morning greetings with a young woman who is busily washing down and sweeping the front step and pavement outside clear of any rubbish.  She laughed when I told her that this piece of pavement is probably the only one now in the whole of London where the age-old practice of making sure that the pavements outside our houses are kept clear for passers-by by their owners still takes place.  Now we leave all that to the road sweepers.

And just as we leave it to others to clear the pavements outside our houses, so we now leave many other things to others, without concerning ourselves with whether in so doing we are making others’ lives harder or more unpleasant.  I notice that if there is something like a cardboard box in the middle of the road, nobody crosses over to push it to the side away from the traffic.  I remember my father stopping our car regularly, and getting out to remove some rubbish or a large stone to the roadside, because, he told us, “A bicycle or motorbike might not see this when it gets dark, and come a-cropper.”  The present reluctance to get involved extends to people stepping over any obstruction on the pavement, often at some inconvenience to themselves, rather than pushing it aside to the gutter.  Let alone how very rare it is for somebody to lift up a bike which has fallen over blocking the pavement.

It seems that more and more people are reluctant to put themselves out in any way, as though walking round obstacles is always preferable to removing obstacles.  Is this increasingly selfishness, inattentiveness (everybody talking into their mobile phone – or taking selfies!) or a fear of litigation, in case their actions cause problems?  Whatever, as they say, it seems to me to be a sad indictment of modern life that less and less people are concerned for the wellbeing of others and apparently more and more engrossed in their own.

But am I merely another example of an older person saying that “things were better in the old days”?

Being an unashamed Luddite*

The world gets more and more bizarre to me, and more and more in thrall to all the computerized gadgets being invented by the day to satisfy some never-satisfied appetite for the new.  I live near an Apple store and have seen the queues building up outside its doors on the days some new gadget is put on sale.  Presumably each of these must incorporate some additional feature considered essential by its buyers, a symbol of conspicuous consumption if there ever was one.

I am at the opposite end of this spectrum of a desire for new computer gadgets, having been lent an iPhone a short while ago only to hand it back when I could never learn its uses, and retreated back to a mobile phone apparently so outdated as to be out of the dark ages, - and only used by me for emergences.  And then only reluctantly because I need to put on my spectacles to see what I am doing, which means ferreting around in a bag, and then, because of my bad hearing, being unable to hear the person I am trying to contact because of all the traffic noise. 

Admittedly I am not a neutral observer of the computer scene, particularly, as happened recently, when I am sitting close to somebody in a coffee shop who is engaged in simultaneous computer-driven activities.  For there I am enjoying my morning coffee with my book open in front of me when a young woman rushes into the café, plonks herself down opposite me (and the tables are quite narrow and intended for groups of people sitting closely with each other), talking all the while on her phone.  With one hand she holds the phone against her ear, with the other she fusses around in her bag to get out her iPad.  Talking all the while and passing the phone from ear to ear as she tries to open her computer, at the same time somehow she manages to interrupt herself for long enough to place her order with the waitress.  The she starts tapping the keys on her computer rather frantically, whilst taking off her coat.  By now I am watching fascinated by her ability to multitask – to talk and to type and to take off her coat, but then comes the coup de theatre.  Her coffee and a plate of toast arrives, and somehow to my amazement, by dint of moving the phone to which she is still taking from hand to hand, or holding it by her shoulder against her ear she manages to release one hand enough to pick up a knife and butter her toast, admittedly rather clumsily, but still sufficiently to be able to snatch at it, interspersed by gups of coffee, all the while still talking on the phone and tapping on the computer.

By now I am so jittery myself from all these frantic movements opposite me that I decide I have had enough and leave. I saw her again a few days later, still frantically engaged in all the same activities. Not once has she even exchanged a glance with me or the waitress serving her.  She is in a networking bubble all on her own.

I wonder what this is doing to her Earth element, as it tries to take in and process the information pouring in to her through phone and computer, as well as the food and drink which is there to nourish her.  I can visualize this poor element desperately trying to carry out its work, but not sure what to do first.  It certainly didn’t help my own Earth element, which couldn’t process what I was watching and had to leave.

 * A person opposed to new technology

 

 

The curse of the mobile phone

I have written before about the way in which I think the use of mobile phones and other electronic equipment is having a negative effect upon human interactions.  I am reluctant to condemn all these new inventions because in many ways they are miracles of human invention, but it is hard for me to see their good in a world now increasingly peopled by automaton-like figures peering into their screens with never an eye raised to acknowledge the presence of those they are passing by.

If you become used to allowing the demands of the mobile phone to control your life in this way, I wonder how this will affect human interactions in the long term.  More and more people now appear to be compelled by their insistent ringing tones to give mobile phones priority over everything else to the extent that they allow them to interrupt whatever social interactions are taking place at the time.

I was reminded of this at a restaurant I went to last week, where the owner said that she was quite happy for us to sit on as long as we wanted after we had finished our meal, because she was so pleased to find people who had not spent the whole of their meal shouting into mobile phones, as her other guests often do. She is appalled at the way these telephone conversations are conducted at high volume without consideration for other diners, but said, “I can’t tell people they mustn’t use their phones because I would lose too many customers if I did”.  Recently I heard the story of an irate diner, who, plagued by the incessant loud mobile conversation at the table next to his, had simply got up, grabbed the phone and thrown it into a large bowl of flowers where it bobbed about helplessly. “You’ve spoilt my meal, “he said, “so now I’m spoiling yours”.  I certainly often have a strong inclination to follow suit, but I’m not sure I have this man’s courage.

There appear to be very few people left who would still consider it rude to interrupt a conversation with a friend to answer their phones.  And if we increasingly ignore those that are physically close to us as we respond to the demands of those disembodied voices on our machines, what effect will that have on human relationships in the future?

Why the need, too, for so much hurry?  We have become slaves to these tiny machines.

How much reality can we stand?

I have always loved the quote from T.S Eliot’s The Four Quartets:  “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”.  And am particularly aware of the truth of this as I prepare to plunge into today’s newspaper, dreading yet another dose of all-too painful reality as I read what is going on in one country on the earth after another, and my heart bleeds for the people fleeing destruction with nowhere to go.


There seems to be nothing but misery in the world wherever I look, except when, with relief, I happen upon a TV programme showing some sport.  Recently it has been the Commonwealth Games and a cricket Test match which, to my and everybody’s surprise, England won.


I think watching sport on TV keeps me sane, a form of extreme escapism which lightens the weight of the world upon my shoulders.  And soon, an eagerly awaited event, golf’s Ryder Cup.  It happens to coincide with my talk at the British Acupuncture Council conference at the end of September, but having now learnt how to watch TV on my i-Pad, I will be able to catch glimpses of it at intervals between some more serious acupuncture input. 


Perhaps already I am slightly less of a technophobe than I was when I wrote my blog on August 14.

I am a technophobe

I am frightened of modern technology and the speed with which it changes.  In the old days hardly had I got used to the old VHS tapes when I had to learn how to use CDs,and now there are DVDs and smartphones and tablets and all manner of ways of listening to the radio and TV, or downloading programmes I have missed.  To me, it’s a bewildering array of complex bits of equipment, all of which need to be plugged in somewhere to be charged or to be connected in strange ways I don’t understand.   And all of which, I am told by younger people as they manoeuvre their way seamlessly through it, are apparently there to make my life easier.  This is not to mention social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, which adds yet a further dimension to what I could do. 


In the past I have always called upon family and good friends to help me navigate my way through what I see as very choppy waters, but surely it is high time for me to confront my fears and at long last learn how to use my iPad, which I’ve had now for more than a year, rather than looking at it apprehensively each morning as I dutifully charge it up before putting it aside unused for another day.  


So today I have finally decided to contact somebody who call himself a computer geek and provides a one-man support system for people like me.  Dare I lift the phone to ask for help, or will I leave it for another day, as I have left it for so many days?


As they say: “Watch this space”!

 

 

“Let’s control technology”

Heard on the BBC Today programme this morning, music to my ears. 

I feel at the moment that I am doing the reverse, as if I am held in the clutches of all different kinds of technology whose secret machinations I do not understand.  I have spent many, many hours trying to untangle the intricacies of how to get my books into ebook format (the comparatively easier part) and then on to Kindle (fairly easy) and Apple i-bookstore (incredibly complex – still unresolved and requiring even more work at deciphering what is needed.  Thank Heavens for Guy!).  And then at the same time as all this, incomprehensibly from my present viewpoint, I have added my names to LinkedIn and Facebook, and have streams of emails pouring in apparently asking me to do all sorts of things I don’t understand.

So today I am taking the day off from all this technology, and instead am off to play piano duets for a blissful hour of Schubert and Mozart, before wandering on to Tate Britain to look at an exhibition there, or just sit in their café with a lovely book I am reading.  And since everybody knows I never look at my mobile phone unless in an emergency, for the time I am away from home I will be beautifully free from any contact with anybody demanding anything of me. 

As the lovely man on the Today programme said, “We should be managing technology rather than it managing us”.  Amen to that!

(Though, of course, I am using technology to post this blog!)

A puzzle

Yesterday I saw something that puzzled me and at the same time made me laugh.  If you have read my blog of 14 February you will know that I am increasingly irritated by the use of the dreaded “-ing” word in all those meaningless mission statements posted everywhere.  So I find myself looking around me as I walk along to see if there are any new examples on which to vent my anger.  Imagine, then, my surprise when I walked past a large removal van yesterday and saw, in large letters covering almost the whole side of the van, the words:  “If you can’t convince them, confuse them”.  No "-ing” word there, but I walked, on confused myself, wondering what on earth this meant.

The van was blocking a narrow road and I wondered whether the “can’t convince them” was directed at traffic wardens determined to put a parking ticket on the van.  Maybe the removal company was encouraging its drivers to confuse the traffic wardens if they weren’t convinced by arguments.  All very mysterious, and at intervals during the day I would return to the puzzle to try and work out its meaning.  And each time I did this I would start to smile, surprised at having encountered something slightly surreal on the side of a very ordinary removal van on a very ordinary street.

Has anybody reading this any suggestions as to what the writer of this message could mean?

Some things that irritate me

I’m just back from a teaching trip to Europe, and as I passed through Gatwick Airport I was irritated once again by the dreadful creep of the word “Your” in front of every advertisement for a company.  Apparently Gatwick is now “my” airport.  The blame for this must be laid at the door of Marks and Spencers, who some years back, when things were going badly for them, suddenly had the bright idea of designing a logo which said on all the packaging “Your M & S”.  At the time I thought this was a clever PR trick, seducing us all with the implied intimacy of a long personal association with M & S.  But it has now become so ubiquitous that it has become a cliché, and should be dropped.

The other cliché I have grown to hate is the use of the gerund, that part of speech I can still remember from parsing English and Latin sentences at school, the dreaded “-ing” word.  It appears everywhere now in all the meaningless slogans called “mission statements” which even the acupuncture world was not immune to.  My school was asked to provide one as part of its accreditation programme and I came up with the words, blissfully free of the gerund, “An ancient form of healing for a modern world”, which I’m still proud of, and which still represents, in a kernel, the truth of what I do.

Every company apparently now feels they have to attach to every advertising hoarding some banal statement such as, “building a better Britain”, “working for the community”, and so on and so on.  They are all utterly meaningless, and yet the practice seems to be growing by the day, and should also be dropped. 

The worst example I have so far come across is one I glimpsed on the side of a van, obviously that of some kind of gardening company involved in smartening up people’s window-boxes.  It said, “Fusing people, plants and flowers”.  Instead of window-boxes, the image that came into my mind was that of a beautiful Botticelli painting of some young woman, in a flowing gown, her hair entwined with roses, and enfolded by flowers, not, I imagine what the gardening company wanted me to think of.  At least this beautiful image took my mind of the banality of the words which had prompted it.

I’m waiting for the dreaded day when I will see, blazoned above a hospital entrance, my two pet hates combined together, in the words “Your hospital, caring for a healthier world”.