Keep Quiet and Carry On

Krakow Botanical Garden, July 2016

There have been a few posts about the insignificant minutiae of my not-very-interesting recent life, and I feel I should address more weighty matters - politics, the NHS, the state of the nation, or at least something new about diabetes. But I seem to have taken a conscious step into the stage of my life that could be described as 'The Apathy Years.' I have probably lived more than half my life and I have no children, which means that I have much less investment in the future than those who wish the world to remain viable for future generations. It's not that I want to bring on the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but I have deliberately become decidedly less vocal about how things should be. This feels very strange, and often takes quite an effort.

For example, meetings. I mentioned a recent meeting which was part of a bigger project that is being 'managed' in a way that I think is very inefficient and likely to be ineffective. But it's not my job to manage the project, and nobody asked me anyway, and I don't understand half of what they're talking about most of the time. In the past I would have been bothered by my lack of knowledge and the inefficiency and poor management and therefore the potentially sub-optimal outcome, now I sit quietly and think 'Oh, well.'  Let it go, let someone else worry about it. If it turns out bad, I'll deal with it. I don't understand it anyway.

Partly this is because of the EU Brexit vote. I voted to Remain and was devastated and astonished and despairing and thunderstruck and furious and disbelieving when I woke up to find that Leave had won. It was like the feeling of reaching for where your wallet should be, and finding it gone, and realising that it isn't that you just put it somewhere else, it really has gone, and now there's all the card cancelling and re-applying for your driving licence and sadness that the lovely photo you kept there has gone and you'll never see it again.

But I've got over it. Yes, I'm still really angry about the result, but here we are and what will be, will be. The UK and the EU and their population may be better off or worse off, and there will probably be a bit of both, and I think we've all learned something about how divisive a referendum can be and how our 'leaders' behave. And the sun will come up tomorrow and there will be another day and we're going to have to get on with it.

This somewhat lackadaisical approach is seeping into all sorts of other places where once I would have stormed and ranted and raised my voice in protest and tried to make a difference to achieve what I thought was 'right', or 'better'. Or at least I might have spoken up to query something that didn't make sense. But now I keep quiet, and it is an effort, but I do it because it makes for a much easier life, and I am older now and I realise that I wasn't particularly successful in changing the world when I was in a job designed specifically to do that, so perhaps I should just take it easy.

Here's another example. People who are unable to take any nourishment by mouth are fed through a tube into the stomach or jejunum, and generally the feed is manufactured to be 'nutritionally complete'. It has become clear that this completeness isn't quite complete, particularly for electrolytes such as sodium and chloride. When this was described in a recent meeting I had to make an effort to refrain from suggesting it might make a lot of sense to add a little salt to the water that is being put down the tube. Let it go.

Another colleague was commenting on the parlous state of the NHS which is now perpetually on the brink of failure and sell-off and privatisation. For example, the retinal screening service in our Trust is now provided by an external company. She suggested that if we are auctioned off we ought to do some sort of management buy-out and take over the shop. Again I kept quiet, thinking that if we are auctioned off it might be a good opportunity for me to retire. I'm getting much better at this 'keeping quiet' business. This must be what it's like to get old.

On the other hand, in the very small zone of 'where I work 90% of the time and the people I work with': the nurse who has been absent for a year has now retired and we are hoping to recruit two new nurses within the next six months. The nurse who has been covering three jobs has done a magnificent job to keep things going, but we are looking forward to being able to do new things with more staff, although it pays to keep a lid on expectations because until contracts are signed there are no guarantees that the nurses we have been promised will actually materialise. But there is the prospect of some new initiatives, and I am looking forward to that.

And then there's the Very Low Carb Lifestyle website. I didn't have to do it and nobody was pressing me for it, although I did include it in my last Personal Development Review (normally you don't get permission to do things unless they're in your PDR). So there is still a little bit of 'wanting to change the world' left inside me. And when a rep from industry came to see us to talk about various projects they are planning, I came over all enthusiastic and suggested that I might contribute to one of them (this is the least likely thing to actually come about). So I haven't yet quite internalised the 'Keep Quiet' approach. Old habits die hard.

P.S. I apologise for invoking the tired phrase 'Keep Calm and Whatever' in the title of this post, but it does reflect what's in the blog post better than most of the blog titles I come up with.

Turbulence

Back garden in May 2015

It's coming up to the end of the year, and I have so many treats to look forward to in the coming months. A walking holiday, a whisky tasting, the annual Lola II and Mr M Film Festival, a posh dinner that's already arranged, lots of badminton, maybe some running, the international badminton competition in Birmingham, skiing in France - and all of that in just the first three months of the new year.

The national and international news contrasts with my anticipated pleasures. The floods are terrible, but the international refugee situation and our 'interventions' are unbearable. It has reached the point where I can manage to listen to no more than half the news before I have to switch it off. I've always been somewhat of a pessimist - or a realist, as I tend to rationalise my outlook. Humanity in its individual form can be uplifting or depressing, but as a population seems to me to have little to recommend it. Looking beyond the small range of my personal contacts, towards those who wield 'power' either in politics or religion or business, reality looks bleak to me.

I may be wrong, but I think there might have been a golden age last century when integrity was a trait that was admired, if not rewarded. There was a sense of right and wrong. To be sure, people still suffered pain and poverty, but role models existed and there seemed to be something to aspire to. Now that I'm pondering the matter, it is possible that my upbringing sheltered me from some of the seedier aspects of society, but I believed that there was some depth to thought and behaviour, where now everything seems so shallow. I can't tolerate most broadcast and print media any more. The majority of politicians now seem to be overtly corrupt and self-serving, where they at least used to be ashamed when their misbehaviour was found out. The current government brings back vividly the strength of my loathing of the Thatcher government and its values of greed, rewarding of privilege, and disregard for anyone unlucky enough to be stupid or poor. You pay rich people more to get them to work harder, and you pay poor people less.

One thing I didn't understand at that time, the mid 1980's, was how society has to be political in order to function, The truth has little value; the end justifies the means. If your business is precariously balanced so that you might succeed or you might fail, the last thing to do is be truthful with your customers, suppliers and employees. Tell them about your predicament and suppliers and employees will fear they may not be paid; customers that they may not receive the goods. All will desert you and you will most definitely go under. No, you have to pretend to be successful, and then you stand a chance, but if you then fail you are blamed for not being honest with those people who would have made certain that you would have failed if you had been honest. This applies not only to businesses, but to societies, economies and markets.

The Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seems to me to be a man of principles. I agree with many of his views, and if his own party and the media supported him he could be Prime Minister. But they will not, his truths would be shouted down, his every move would be sabotaged by his own party as well as the opposition. And this certainty makes me sad: that human nature requires politicians to mislead and distort and 'spin' in order to prevent us destroying them. I do not like the human race very much as a population, although there are individuals that I like very much.

Sometimes I am glad that my life is time-limited, while at the same time wondering what will happen in a hundred, two hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years. Will we find a way to harness nuclear fusion to power our future? Will we self-destruct in a cataclysm of nuclear armaments? Will the population exceed the capacity of the Earth? What would the first Homo Sapiens have thought of how we live today? Or the people living at the time of the Roman Empire? Did they wonder how people would live in a thousand years?

So much for my existential musings. On Tuesday I went out to buy things from Halfords because I had been given a voucher for 25% off, and I managed to buy the things I wanted, which is very unusual. On the way I noticed that Clarks were having a sale and I found and bought a pair of shoes that were exceptionally comfortable (E width fitting) for a bargain price. Then I had a very sad telephone conversation sitting in the car in the carpark before going into Sainsburys for a few things and knocking a bottle of red wine off an end-of-aisle display where it spectacularly shattered on the floor. A very nice member of staff was on the scene in an instant, allowing me to apologise before making my getaway towards the bakery section where I bought myself a gratuitous cream cake as consolation. All this in the space of 60 minutes.