On Lewisham Hospital, and doing my bit

Doing my bit, ,

I have been wondering lately if I have the power to change anything, anything at all in the big wide world, or whether I might not be better just battening down the hatches and giving my full attention to looking after those closest to me. I am forever reading stuff that makes me sad – and more often mad – for example I’ve written on LearnerMother about food banks, human trafficking and ethical clothing production – all issues that I want to have the power to change. I don’t have any power of course, so I do what little I can – I try and make ethical choices when I’m purchasing goods and services; I write about stuff so my readers get to hear about it, I sign petition after petition and I tweet/fb information about issues that I think are important.

Recently though, I have been wondering – is there really any point in this? Is my status update/blog entry/sponsored run/postcard to my AM/MP/MEP ACTUALLY going to change anything? When I open my email in the morning, I have found myself looking wearily at the messages requesting that I click onto a petition link, and thinking – will it matter? Will it REALLY matter if I don’t do this?

But then look what happened this week! The High Court ruled that Jeremy Hunt’s attempt to downgrade Lewisham Hospital is in fact illegal. Not just ill advised – a muppet without its eyes sewn in yet could see that  – but ILLEGAL.

Just in case you don’t know the back story, it goes something like this. Lewisham hospital is highly rated, safe, and performing well, and has recently had a much needed £22million refurb. The South London Healthcare Trust on the other hand (which does NOT include Lewisham) is suffering crippling debts from poorly structured PFI deals, and has had an administrator appointed.

The administrator knows that the only way for a hospital to make more cash is to see more patients. Clearly, there are some detection and therefore imprisonment ethical issues with poisoning the local water supply. Hmm, I hear you say, in that case, what is one to do when one requires more sick people to service one’s debt? OH YES! Close the A and E in the neighbouring Trust! Then all those poor sick folk will HAVE to go to Queen Elizabeth Hospital Woolwich, which just happens to be in South London Healthcare Trust – I say chaps, quids in all round! Of course some of them will probably die en route, being as it can take an hour or so to get there from Lewisham in rush hour, and a few more of them will probably die in QE’s A and E, since it will have to service three quarters of a million people. So a few less folk for ATOS to profit from deal with, but they’ll take one for the team I’m sure, so all in all, problem solved! QE Woolwich will be full to bursting! HooBloodyRah!

Sorry, went off on a bit of a rant there. But you get my drift – downgrading Lewisham isn’t about rationalising services, or restructuring a poorly performing hospital. Those things have to happen, and I understand that. This, THIS is about propping up a neighbouring trust and its bloody PFI, so the government does not have to dip into its reserves to solve the problem. And more importantly, it’s just completely crazy. One A and E for 750,000 people? Really? REALLY? How long will that last? Oh, until the Tories (please all the gods in the world ever) have lost the next election and then someone else’ll be blamed. Great.

Ok. Deep breath. Stop the ranting. Back to the point.

The point is that I became aware of this because Lewisham used to be my local hospital. (Actually, Greenwich used to be my local hospital, but then it closed. Services moved to QE Woolwich, funnily enough). Anyway. Lewisham is also my sister’s local hospital. They delivered my nephew and niece safely, they looked after my niece when she was very very poorly, and they’ve also looked after my youngest when he was a baby and became scarily and suddenly ill whilst we were staying with my sister. So when I heard that they were looking to downgrade it, and the completely outrageous reasoning behind the decision, I tried to become as involved as I could.

That wasn’t very involved, in the grand scheme of things.  I facebooked, tweeted, signed petitions, wrote to Jeremy Hunt. I wanted to join my sister and her kids on the demonstrations but dragging three kids on a return journey from Cardiff to Lewisham for one day was not practical or financially possible. So I did what I could, from here. And all the time I was doing it, I had a devil on my shoulder, whispering to me ‘There’s no point. They’ll win, they always do. Now stop imagining you can change anything and get back to looking after your kids’.

But guess what? ‘They’ didn’t win. We did. This went all the way to the High Courts of Justice, who decided that what Mr Hunt and the South London Healthcare Trust wanted to do was illegal. So they can’t do it. I know, I know, that this is not the end of the story, that there is already talk of changing the law to make this sort of pillaging legal, that there will be appeals. I know that this is only one hospital that I happen to know about because of my personal connection to it, and that there will be others in the firing line. And I also know that this does not solve the problems of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. So it’s not all good news.

I also know that taken alone, my actions would not have made a jot of difference.  And yet, taken as one of thousands, tens of thousands, they did. If I made one, ONE person aware of this, and they made someone else aware, and the chain went on, well who knows where the tipping point is. It doesn’t even matter where it is – the point is that it IS there, and you, and me, and every person who has signed something or sponsored someone or demonstrated somewhere are a tiny but crucial part of making it happen, of making the scales slowly but surely tip.

The lesson I’ve learnt this week about doing my bit, is that my bit, though it is tiny, microscopic even, counts. As does your bit. So – please don’t do what I’ve been in danger of doing. Please don’t ignore the causes that are important to you, please, please fight for what you believe in*. Because it’s only by doing that that we can all of us hope to stop the madness and the greed, and make a fairer world.

Thank you for reading.

 

*unless you are a Tory. In which case we need to have serious words about what you believe in.

 

 

On living la vida local – in Canton

Cardiff Stuff, , ,

I love living in Canton, and right at this point there is nowhere in Cardiff that I would rather live. I mean, sure, I would love a more spacious house, with a slightly bigger garden and not on the main road, but I would not want to move outside about 100 metre radius from where we are. I’ve had a few surprised faces when I’ve said this to people in the past, and it’s true that if I try to look with someone else’s eyes, I see Canton as a nondescript and traffic choked high street, populated with the usual suspects – charity shops, pawn shops, fast food outlets and pubs, not to mention the ubiquitous supermarkets. It’s scruffy, down and heel, and for many folk I suspect it’s just somewhere they have to pass through on the way to somewhere else.

But there is so much more to our little patch of Cardiff. For a start, we have an an impressive range of thriving independent shops tucked in between the ‘usual suspects’. Two greengrocers plus a fruit and veg stall; three (or possibly four?) butchers; a stationery shop with a sub post office, a launderette and dry cleaner, an electrical retailer, an exotic spider shop, a cobblers, two hardware shops (though one’s just about to close due to retirement), several opticians, various newsagents – my favourite one also serves home cooked pakora at the weekend, a wool shop, a couple of bakers. Lots of indie eateries – from the posh and expensive Purple Poppadom to the down to earth and mouth watering Falafel Wales; plus two independent gyms, a busy Community Centre, a library (currently being renovated), an arts centre/cinema, and a community garden which grows herbs and veg – which we get to pick and eat when there’s a surplus. All that and two parks, and then Pontcanna Fields just 5 mins away, makes this a pretty ideal place to live, I’d say.

 

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Picking purple sprouting broccoli for Sunday lunch from the Canton Community Garden, outside Chapter Arts Centre

 

 

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Fruit and veg on display at Laura’s, 158 Cowbridge Road East

It’s not just about the amenities though – what makes Canton special for me is the fact that it has a proper community feel about it. I haven’t come across this anywhere else I have lived, or perhaps I have come to a stage in my life where I notice and value it more. Either way, I like it. I like the fact that this morning, I’ve exchanged smiles with the regular early morning street cleaner whilst out running; I’ve waved at my optician and the guy in the carpet shop; I’ve had a chat with the site manager on the building site across the road from me; caught up with progress on the renovations on our local post office; had a laugh with the lady in the greengrocer about a game her other half bought from OUR shop a couple of weeks ago – and it’s not even 10.30am. Last week, without being asked, our postie broke probably about a million Royal Mail rules and dropped a parcel into my workplace for me, because he knew I wouldn’t be home to sign for it – and when my eldest wrote him a thank you note (it was his long awaited Skylanders game) – he wrote a note back! Which feels wonderfully old fashioned, and kind, and above all, local.

I don’t think you can put a price on this feeling of community, and I am not sure what makes it happen. I guess being in the same place for a while helps – I have lived in Canton for nearly 14 years now. As I mentioned before, there are probably stages in your life when you value the community around you more, and putting down roots and having kids would seem to be one of those stages – so perhaps it is that I am simply more aware of what’s around me, and that it could be found anywhere, if you look hard enough. Who knows.

But here’s what I do know – which is that I feel immensely lucky to have stumbled upon and settled in this scruffy, down at heel little corner of Cardiff. Canton, you rock.

 

On personal space

Family, LearnerMother, ,

I have been trying to kick back a bit at home lately, and not be constantly rushing around doing chores and admin. It’s all part of my trying not to sweat the small stuff, and generally trying to be a more chilled out and less stressy person to be around.

There’s been some good things about this – for example I have learnt that the world does not stop if I do not  empty the dishwasher the minute it finishes. (It does stop, a tiny bit, if the dirty dishes are not put in the dishwasher the minute the meal is over, but hey – small steps and all that.)

But one thing that is definitely NOT good about all this flipping chilling out is the vastly increased opportunities this gives my kids, big and small, to use me as some sort of human climbing frame. I mean what is with this constant bloody mauling? I cannot sit down anywhere, for one SECOND, without someone clambering all over me. I don’t mean coming for cuddles – I cherish the cuddling – it’s one of the best things about being a Mum. No, what I mean is the pulling at my hair ‘to see if it will get longer’, the fiddling with my earrings, the climbing on to my shoulders, the poking at my tummy to see if there is another baby in there (THERE IS EFFING WELL NOT), the sliding down my legs and demanding ‘giddy up horsey’.  If I happen to have the laptop, or the iPad, yes, those things that I saved up for, for bloody ages, and which, might I remind everyone in this family, are actually MINE, then without a shadow of a doubt there will be a head pushing its way under my arm or over my shoulder to see what I am doing, and if I am not doing it quick enough, then a hand swiping at the screen ‘to help, because I know how to do it quicker than you, because you’re quite old’ – yeah, THANKS.

Sometimes I wonder if there is some sort of magnetic force field around me. It does not matter how happily ensconced and absorbed they are, the nanosecond that my tired backside comes within an inch of a seat of any description (yes, this does include the loo seat – note to self – BUY LOCK)…as I was saying, my ass, a sitting device, line ’em up and it’s like one of those reversing sensors go off on my kids’ heads. BEEEEP she’s lowering herself BIPBIPBIP oh no, false alarm, she forgot her beer, BEEEP she’s back BEEEP it looks like we’ll have docking this time without any further hitches,  BEEEEP she’s braced for impact  BEEEEPBEEEPBEEEP and she’s down! And not one second after the P of the final BEEEP and they all appear, literally from nowhere, they just come out of the walls or something, ready for some pawing/pulling/poking action on whatever part of me they get to first. FFS.

This grates a bit, as the day goes on. Sometimes I get to the evening and I feel that if I come into physical contact with one more living creature, that I might actually implode. This is bad news for the cat, who waits till they’re all in bed before slinking in and demanding fuss from me; it’s also bad news for the Husband, though at least they can console each other whilst shooting hurt and mournful looks at me. As long as they are doing it from the other side of the room, that’s just fine. Get any closer and I might get violent.

Is it just my kids? Do they grow out of it?? Or should I resign myself to the fact that nothing, NOTHING, not even my elbows FFS, are mine any more?

 

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