Category: General

So today I had a cheerfully productive day. I went for a walk, got and fitted a new headlamp bulb to the Prius*. The old one appears to have been a posh xenon blue bulb, the new one was, of course, a bog-standard one. Hopefully I won’t notice too much in the way of dimming, because I sure as hell have no desire to repeat changing it.

That done, and myself fed, I set to on the greenshed. I call it a greenshed because it’s quite definitely not really a greenhouse. It’s more an agglomeration of windows in a frame made from old pallets.

So long ago I can’t even recall when, we collected a bunch of old windows from a guy who’d saved them when they were stripped out of his (parents?) house with the intention of building something…and never had. So we loaded them, with some difficulty into the Volvo and dragged them home, enabling us to fail to build something with them. We stacked them outside. They’ve been in a variety of places outside. Bottom of the garden, top of the garden… Eventually I put them under the deck where they have sat, gradually getting grottier and grottier.

Anyhow, today I declared, was the day to start making the Greenshed, because the pea plant we planted is attempting to escape the clutches of the container in which it has been planted. This weekend I have plans involving pots and potting compost for the seeds which have made with the growing.

Aaanyhow. So I started clearing the space. As you may have noticed when I made the doors for the under-deck space, there’s a teensy bit of crap in that corner.

So I started by sorting the wood that ‘may be vaguely useful’ from the ‘completely rotten and/or filled with nails and screws that should have gone to the tip ages ago’. Most of it’s now down the bottom of the garden lying in wait for a deeply exciting trip to the tip. Then I used some of the wood from my trip to a local very-nice-company-who-let-me-take-pallets-away a few days ago…

I’d already stripped them down to a small, convenient (and obviously safely located far from the gas fire) pile of timber…

I then spent a lot of time mocking things up, measuring and faffing around.

Finally I laid into the wood with my delightful Makita jigsaw. I really should be using the chop saw, but I lent it to a friend…**

Sadly I didn’t actually take a photo of how far I’ve got. I’ve created a frame for the windows (quite proud of that as it seems to be a pretty good fit. Especially given the unsquareness of the wood I’m using. I’ve also created the front and back of the base. I now need to create the base-sides, the back of the main (glass) section and the roof glazing. All of this is made from random windows, so it’s a bit entertaining getting it all to fit.

I am now contemplating getting a better cordless drill. We have the craptastic ‘Challenge’ Drill which went from fully charged to completely discharged in about 14 screws. Given that I want a new battery pack for the power saw (having managed to force some charge into the battery I found that the saw does indeed work, albeit only briefly with the battery that I’ve got). I’m contemplating forking out for a semi-decent decent cordless drill… which might be a nice addition to our collection of things.

* Dear god, how do large-handed mechanics cope with modern cars. It was entertainingly challenging to get the bulb in between the fuse box and the headlamp casing. The first bulb disappeared down into the engine bay after I got it out and I seriously started to debate the possibility of leaving it there after nearly wedging my had in one of several gaps I used to get it out.

** I could have used the tablesaw too, but that would involve getting it out from under the pile of chaos. More and more I want a ‘workshop’ and a separate garage.

gabrielsaunteredvaguelydownwards:

“voting for ukip is a protest vote!”

that’s nice

what happens when they get into power

is everybody going to sit in awkward silence in their living rooms, clutching the daily mail in one hand and a rich tea biscuit in the other as they silently mouth “i didn’t mean it”

it’s too late

sirens sound

nigel farage kicks your door down

he pins you to the chair

“i heard your great-grandmother was polish” he snarls

in the distance, a dog howls

So as the Con/Dems continue their march towards entirely privatising the NHS whilst proclaiming loudly that having private companies run big chunks of the NHS is entirely different to privatisation, because it’s still free at the point of use (leaving ‘at the moment’ left distinctly unsaid), I was struck by a brief thought.

When people complain about an experience in private health systems, they tend to say “This doctor (or doctor’s surgery) sucks”, or “this insurance company will rip you off” or “this hospital’s terrible”. The difference I see with the NHS is that people tend to generalise. A bad experience leads to “The NHS is terrible”, and a good one to “The NHS is the best thing ever”. And it’s neither. The NHS is, I think, a fantastic thing. It’s not a perfect thing, not by any means. It’s clunky, and overrun by a plague of managers (bonus points to the Con/Dems for making that vastly worse). It’s bureaucratic, often not even vaguely ‘patient centred’ and sometimes slow to respond to changing demographics or demands.

But it’s a thing with a really good core, and a, and corny I know this sounds, a wonderful core principle. That healthcare should be available to everyone regardless of their ability to pay.

But despite all being one ‘thing’, each hospital has reinvented the wheel so many times. In my agency nurse I see everything from the great to the terrible. I see hospitals where I would take myself and I see places I wouldn’t take a dead dog. I see places that are organised beautifully, and trusts who couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up. But every place I go, people assume that every other hospital is the same, because people don’t really understand how independent each hospital is. How targets and procedures are tweaked. How the management of each site is completely different.

The NHS is an incredible thing as a whole, but if you have the misfortune to be near a crap GP with a less than great hospital then your only experiences will be terrible; thus the opinion that the NHS sucks. And worse most people won’t change their GP (even if they do suck, unless they really royally upset them), so they just get lousy experiences repeatedly. All of this is incredibly difficult to get over – really the only way is to drag these underperformers up, but I’ve no idea how you do that without throwing money at the problem.

Meh.