Good Morning

So, it’s Monday 2017.

I remember in recent years people saying it’s possibly the most depressing day of the year but this seems to change quite a lot, with other days rated as more depressing depending on which study was the flavour of the month/ capricorn rising…hmm..

I started mine after having had a good sleep and an excellent but tiring weekend, so felt pretty refreshed and set up to tackle a new week aplomb!

Not many people like Monday mornings but over the last 3 years I had come to dread them because I had been on call pretty much for 3 years up until mid way through last year.

Consequently, I was perpetually anxious and expected a phonecall at any time from the second I woke up to say one of my team hadn’t showed up to the moment my head hit the pillow, when someone might ring to say the heating had issues/ the computers weren’t working or just because someone had forgot something that only I could help with. I do wonder whether people are like that outside their jobs or if they just come to rely on others at work to make their own life easier…surely not, that’s me being cynical, ahem.

Anyways, it’s Monday but I feel pretty good. All the Xmas excess has taken it’s toll on my belly but hey! It’s January, there are 11 more months to get to the gym…

Sure the NHS was falling apart, my sister has been telling me this was going to happen for months now. It was all over the papers and TV last weekend.

But I saw it as a turning point!

Finally, people would wake up, the government has to act now I thought…we’ve all seen the “will of the people” in action, now the NHS would benefit from that surge of compassion and sympathy for our dedicated medics, nurses, carers, ambulance drivers and support staff! I was sure it was the start of something good, I had gone to sleep thinking about those unfortunate enough to have been stuck at hospital, in what looked like 19th Century conditions.

I turned the TV on and switched to ITV for Good Morning Britain.

Fuck

Immediately, I was confronted by Jeremy Hunt and Piers Morgan! Two hideous creatures playing some sort of grotesque Punch and Judy show for the benefit of who?

Morgan’s ego?

Hunt’s need to be THE most smug twat of all time in the face of a groundswell of negative opinion about his divisive campaign of stealth and now, overt privatisation  of the NHS?

All major outlets would then regurgitate this as some sort of showdown between a politician and a determined investigative presenter.. erm.. please.

Well, I’ve seen more savagery at the local Greggs when they run out of sausage rolls!

Apparently, Emergency departments in the UK are overrun by people who are not really ill..? According to Hunt this is his strategy for dealing with people dying in corridors. Blaming the people who are using it. Eh? Excuse me?! What?

I had woken up to Reality 2.0 or maybe 3.8, who knows…the bounds of normality and what utter nonsense we are expected to ingest without question changes so much these days is beyond me.

I half expected the following news to tell me Cameron is to promote his memoirs riding a black face pig through the streets of London whilst having his manhood tugged by Boris singed God Saves… okay maybe that’s Reality 4.0, 2018 then…

I had half eaten my porridge by this point, so switched to BBC Breakfast in an effort to minimise the damage already done by these ignorant cockwombles.

What was I thinking? Why don’t I learn?

Always go for the repeats on C4, they are hardly ever relevant and are comfortable and safe, like the North American TV equivalent of prozac… You tell ’em Ray! Jeez, that mother of yours…Will Niles Crane ever get with Daphne? (again…).

But no, I turned onto BBC Breakfast. Three minutes later I had been told that pretty much all nursing homes in UK were run by heartless bastards who wouldn’t let an old man keep his dog in one!

I mean come on?!!! What a set of uncaring gits? Separating an old man from his only real friend, a little black dog. Aaaw 😦

It was pretty cute, the old man was pretty upset.

But hold on a second, I worked in a nursing home… we weren’t allowed any pets for residents but the residents were treated with love and respect, had a laugh with the staff and generally managed to get through the day, grateful they weren’t stuck in a hospital.

Yeah but no pets? How awful!

Actually, no. The amount of effort that goes into keeping older people in a nursing setting clean, hygenic and away from the risk of infection is immense. Carers and nurses all over the country wage a battle against detritus, crumbs and normal bodily functions every day.

Imagine having to clean up after a dog that shits all over the place and barks at people with degenerative brain disorders like Alzheimer’s.

I mean, it’s not rocket science is it?

Besides, the CQC (cough, apparently the first C stands for Care, ahem) would rip you to pieces!

Where I worked we got a black mark for having a less than a millimeter of a gap between a floor covering and the wall. We had to get special strips for all the floors whilst funding increased less than the cost of the staff and new materials needed. So, adding pets!?!? Come on, really?! You might as well ask carers and nurses to strap mops to their feet and have them constantly shuffling around cleaning constantly, nonsense.

Utter nonsense. Both channels presenting basically, fake news, heavily opinionated items and I hadn’t even had a cuppa yet! Fuck it.

I turned it off.

It wasn’t even 8:15 am.