When I want your advice I'll ask for it

Oh what fun. Just when you thought we actually had got rid of the NuLabour nanny state do as I say bollocks up pop BlueLabour with a tick-the-box-your-government-knows-best bullshit scheme where all NHS staff have to lecture you to promote "Good Health"  every time you have the misfortune to come into contact with you.

Now we all know this is going to be a box ticking exercise like the last lots' "Quality of Outcomes" shit. As an example of what will happen here I give you Mrs Dracunculus. She was at the doctors today, routine visit for a long standing complaint just to review, make sure its not getting worse, check the ongoing medication and tweak as necessary. Now she gets five minutes of the doctors time in which he has to do this and she informs me that five minutes was fully used. But in the future three of those five minutes is taken up with a stern lecture from Dr Mopp about how the glass of Sauvignon she likes of an evening will make her sodding tail fall off so what's he going to miss about the actual problem he was being consulted with in the first place?

What we have here is the underlying problem of the NHS. It was set up with the noblest of motives; free at the point of use so all citizens would be able to have their serious medical needs attended to and we would be free of the spectre of people dying for want of seeing a doctor. But since its founding its grown to way, way more than that simple basic service, and we're all partly guilty of making it suck. Over the generations we've demanded more, more, more from the NHS. We want every sniffle and cold treated, every illness given immediate and the best treatment, the treatment of ridiculous conditions (you can get a sex change on the NHS for fuck's sake) and the system simply can't cope. Accordingly the government step in to lecture, harangue and bully us into whatever bullshit they can come up with to try and keep us "healthy" and out of the doctor's surgery. We allowed the NHS to change from a backstop into a state monolith that seeks to control our "healthy choices" because they feel they have to just to stop the whole edifice collapsing in a mountain of debt and unpaid bills.

I'm quite aware that the Cuban Habaneros and that bottle of Malbec aren't good for me thanks. It's my choice and when I want your health advice I will ask for it. Oh, and I have BUPA so, state, kindly sod off.

I can't believe it's not yellow chemical gloop

You probably saw reported on the news yesterday that another self appointed health-fascist by the name of Shyam Kolvekar has decided that his job of heart surgeon paid for out of my taxes is far to time consuming and interferes with his game of golf or rug-butting at the mosque or something and that butter should be banned.

Yes, that butter, you know the yellow stuff that comes out of cows, the stuff that mankind has been making and consuming since we first domesticated Daisy and Buttercup.

OK so there's the predictable backlash from the Daily Mail, the usual suspects in the blogosphere and, well, me.

Ok so he's never going to get the ban is he but it's an event with a quantum probability of close to 1 that some wanker in government is going to go "we need to discourage people from eating butter for their health so we are going to put a minimum price on cow products like butter, cream and the bullshit that spews from my mouth" of course like the minimum price on alcohol that's surely coming it will not be too punitive, yet... but once they have it, and they will, just watch it ratchet up year on year until the only way to get something tasty on your toast is to keep your own cow - assuming you can and the EU haven't made that next to impossible thanks to tons of restrictive legislation. Of course it's all for your own good.

The reason these twats get away with spouting this ordure is, I am increasingly convinced, that we have the NHS. You see as the state provides healthcare the state gets a say in how we, as individuals, manage our health. What they forget is the I fucking paid for the NHS though the 50% of my sodding income you take from me by force so if I want to eat a packet of sodding Lurpack washed down with a bottle of 12 year old Glen Cirrhosis then you can fucking well treat me using the hospitals and doctors I bastard well paid for.

Well you could but there's no way I'll let you as I'm not being treated in your MRSA ridden pits staffed by nurses who barely speak English and got their qualifications by sending away five corn-flake packet tops. So despite having to pay for the NHS I have medical insurance so if something happens at least I stand a chance of leaving the hospital without having acquired several opportunistic infections.

Anyway, back to Dr Bansturbator, he has 18 holes to play at Wentworth Park so let's not keep him waiting. Tell me doctor who are you working for...

Mr Kolvekar's comments were issued by KTB, a public relations company

And KTB are also the PR Company for?

a public relations company that works for Unilever

And besides soap and toothpaste what do Unilever make?

Unilever, the maker of Flora margarine

Riiiight.

But there's no link...

a KTB spokesman said there were no financial ties between the consultant and Unilever and he was not receiving any payment. 'These are his views,' added the spokesman.
The surgeon timed his comments to coincide with the Food Standards Agency's campaign to promote the virtues of low-fat milk.

So why the fuck is he not saying "try your latte with semi-skimmed, it tastes nearly as good"? Of course there will be no direct link, no big fat wad of cash, but it's a bit of a coincidence don't you think.

Fuckers, torch the lot of them.

Gordon Brown's Kidneys

Apparently the state want to own your corpse after you die. Well rather they wish to strip it of any useful bits to give to whomever they choose once you croak. So now even when you die the taxes don't stop as they literally take a pound of flesh from you.

Now I've no problem with organ donation. I carry a donor card and am on the register as "help yourself to any bits that might be handy, I'm not going to need them any more." and it's nice to think that physical bits of me will live on when I'm not around - and to whoever gets my willy you are going to have a *great* time with that, but probably best not to ask where it's been.

What I do think whiffs though is that the state just thinks it can do whatever the sweet fuck it wants with our bodies. This is yet another example of how governments, this government in particular, has got it's relationship with citizens arse first. Let me explain this to any politico reading this in nice simple terms. We appoint you to do things which are best accomplished collectively rather than individually: enforcing property rights, defence, that sort of thing. In order for this to work we give up a minimal set of liberties to you. What we have not done is hand over all our liberties to you for you to hand back to us piecemeal as and when you see fit.

So my body remains my property and once I have breathed on my last moron or one of those pesky knights manages to land a lucky shot my body will pass on to whomever I fucking well want it to. It does not and never will be the property of the state.

Maybe I should add a clause in the organ donors register that nothing of mine may be given to anyone who has stood for political office.

Dr Dragon

"She's in VF, 10ml adrenaline stat. Shock at 150 Joules, CLEAR!"

Well not quite... but I am now operating an intravenous cannula and administering IM injections which given my previous medical skills were more or less limited to going down to the chemists and buying a packet of ibuprofen is a pretty neat skill to acquire over a weekend.

However it's a skill I wished I hadn't needed to acquire as Sunshine (my Irish Draft mare) is sick. Started on Thursday with her just standing about and not eating which isn't like her and in the evening she didn't touch her feed which is not at all like her but she wasn't in any obvious discomfort so it wasn't colic (for you non horsey people colic = über badness) and as the vet was coming round on Friday morning for a routine flu and tetanus jab I left it. Following morning she didn't eat again and I noticed she wasn't drinking so now it's getting serious. Anyway Dr Horse shows up, has a listen and sticks a thermometer up her bum and she's got a temperature. "Hmmm..." goes Dr Horse, "Hopefully it's just a virus and will go away after a couple of days but there's something not quite right here, I'm going to do a peritoneal tap. Does she like clippers?"

"No idea, I've never clipped her."

"Well let's see... "

...click...

...whirrrr....

..."WHINNY!!"

Five minutes later when we had treated our wounds and Dr Horse confirmed that despite pain to the contrary your green scaly friend has not sustained a broken back when Sunshine had tried to get out of the open top stable door via a dragon who was in the way we figured that, no, she doesn't like clippers one little bit so it's time for snoozy drugs.

In goes the needle (which she's fine with).

"What's this then, ACE?"

"Might as well piss in her ear, that's the one we give to owners because it's hard to screw up," he's a proper bluff northerner is my vet, "this is detomindine."

"How long before it takes effect."

"About 30 seconds, hold her head up"

Ever tried to hold up a 570kg horse's head when she's determined that all she wants to do is lie down and have a sleep? In the end I ended up propping it up using a combination of my shoulder and the door whilst playing with her ears to keep her vaguely conscious.

"She seems sensitive to it... might have given her a bit much."

"No shit," grunted the little dragon who had enlisted some flappy wing action in an attempt to keep from being pressed into the stable floor.

Anyway we shaved a bit off the belly fur, needle in the tummy and took a sample which he said looked OK and whilst we're at it filed a couple of sharp points off her teeth, took some blood and give a couple of antibiotic injections plus some pain relief and the apparently obligatory vitamin injection vets are contractually obliged to give at each visit and then make up a bucket of warm isotonic stuff that looked and tasted like flat lucozade, shoved a tube down her nose (that's apparently how you get a tube into a horse's stomach) and poured it in. After all that she started to wake up. Mind you I think I would have done if someone had just poured a bucket of lucozade up my nose.

So off Dr Horse goes to the lab and after another hour Sunshine is wanting out of the stable and is, at last, eating and drinking again - vet says that would be the pain relief.

About 6pm the phone goes.

"You know that peritoneal tap I took and I said it looked fine."

"Yes."

"It isn't; white cell count is elevated at 8 and the lab found some proteins, we're culturing it for bacteria now but we're looking at Peritonitis. She's had a gut perforation."

"Arse"

"I'll be round tomorrow morning at eight."

So tomorrow dawns, Sunshine is scoffing away just like normal and Dr Horse starts preparing to fit an IV cannula. "Now I'll show you how to maintain this."

"Hang on," I say, "I'll get Mrs Dracunculus, she was a nurse before she started poking loonies for a living."

"Now it shouldn't come off," says Dr Horse once the medical staff of Emergency Ward 10 are all assembled, "I'm going to put a couple of sutures in and superglue it to her neck."

"Superglue?"

Out comes a tube of Heinkel's finest adhesive.

"Yes. Works a treat does this." and indeed he glues the top of the cannula to Sunshine. Now that's going to be a laugh come Friday and we have to get it off!

Mrs D however is swapping intravenous war stories with Dr Horse and talking about flow rates and tissue scarring and drawback and all sorts of other medical stuff, turns out that there isn't that much difference between humans and horses when it comes to this sort of stuff and he gets Mrs D to flush everything out and put the first dose of Gentomycin in. Mrs D however whimps out when it comes to the IM injections though as it seems to involve thumping horse bottom before shoving the needle in and being such a soft hearted thing she can't bring herself to do that although I pointed out shoving a needle in probably huts one hell of a lot more.

So it falls to the newly minted veterinary surgeon Dr Dragon to start giving injections. Vet does the first one just to show how it's done and Sunshine doesn't even flinch, then comes my turn. What you do is palm this huge fuck off sharp needle between thumb and forefinger, whack the horse's bum a couple of times with the heel of the hand, turn hand and push needle in. Seems straightforward so off I go and the needle stops after about a centimetre and Sunshine starts dancing round the stable.

"Keep pushing!" yells Dr Horse, I do and in it goes.

"Should have told you that you'll get resistance, sorry."

So there we are. Up at 6 this morning to give injections before dashing off to work but Sunshine seems a lot perkier although she's starting to get very wary when we turn up at her stable with lots of white tubes.

Still, I invested in a big bag of bran so she's getting nice warm bran mashes every evening to make up for it.

Will keep you all informed.

And what's the grumpy angle here? Well apart from being grumpy I have a sick horse you haven't seen anything like the grump I'm going to have once I start getting the insurance company to pay the vet's bill.