Welcome to the madhouse (From The Northern Echo)

Welcome to the madhouse

2:45pm Friday 30th September 2011 in Sharon's View By Sharon Griffiths

LONGER hospital visiting hours so that relatives can be more involved in patient care? It’s an absolutely appalling idea.

Amazingly, and deeply depressingly, this dim suggestion comes from the Royal College of Nursing itself.

God help us all.

The last time I was in hospital for more than a day, I spent my time with the curtains closed and hiding under the bedclothes with my head beneath the pillow. I had been felled by an illness that made me ultra- sensitive to light and noise. Meanwhile, I was trapped in a mad house.

The patient opposite had visitors from the crack of dawn until last thing at night. There were always at least four of them, often more, with noises bred to carry miles across the ancestral grouse moors.

They could be heard even over the television blaring out above the next bed, where my neighbour was entertaining visiting grandchildren who much preferred to run up and down the ward shouting. Frantic with agitation, I eventually tottered from my self-imposed cave and rang the family to come and get me out.

I was much too ill to cope with hospital.

Hospital visitors might being a bit of joy to each patient but they bring far more chaos to everyone else.

They get in the way. They also bring noise, disorder and goodness knows what germs as they plonk themselves on the beds and make themselves at home.

The problem is made worse because as a society we have lost the knack of sharing space with any consideration for other people. Every person feels they have a God-given right to bellow at their friends, shriek into mobile phones and swear at the tops of their voices.

It’s bad enough to be trapped in a train with England’s finest. How much worse to be trapped, ill, in a hospital ward.

As hospitals are keen to get you home again as quickly as possible, most people in hospital are quite seriously ill.

What seriously ill people need is peace and quiet, cleanliness, calm and order.

They don’t want to be surrounded by visitors, however well-meaning, for more than an hour or so.

And they certainly don’t want to be surrounded and deafened by everyone else’s visitors.

That’s not health, that’s Hell.

What on earth is the Royal College thinking of?

Understanding pie

SUPERMARKET logic is beyond me. I bought a piece of pie in Tesco – a quarter of one of those large pies on the deli counter – and it cost £3.05.

“If you buy another quarter,” said the helpful assistant, “it will cost you £2.99 for the two.” So a quarter of a pie costs £3.05 but half a pie costs just £2.99. No, she couldn’t explain it either. Something to do with the bar codes on its bottom.

Still, I emerged with half a pie, of course, but utterly unable to grasp the maths. Tesco – twinned with Alice’s Wonderland.

Normality

LOVE the thought – relayed in a forthcoming biography – of the Queen browsing the Clarins counter at Singapore airport, apparently one of the few moments of “normality” in her very sheltered life.

To make it really normal, of course, Her Majesty and her lady in waiting should have skipped from counter to counter, trying all the free samples – three different eyeshadows, five different lipsticks, two clashing shades of blusher, all at once – and squirting all the perfume testers before exit, giggling. It’s never too late even for a Queen to get in touch with her inner 15-year-old.

Downton Abbey

LOVED the first series of Downton Abbey, watched the first part of the second series and have already given up in boredom and irritation at its total lack of subtlety.

Does that count as blasphemy?

It’s so cliched and hammy that I almost expect Blackadder to pop up at any moment.

Except even Blackadder ended its First World War episode with an ending so unexpected and powerful that it took your breath away.

There seems precious little chance of Downton ever doing that.

May the force be with you, Sue

CONGRATULATIONS to Sue Sim, Chief Constable of Northumbria who has turned down a bonus amounting to about £47,000. Northumbria is one of the best performing police forces in the country and the bonus was earned because the force met all its targets. Deputy and assistant chief constables are also due a nice chunk of money and have also turned it down.

Sue Sim has said that it is “inappropriate” to accept the bonus in a time of public spending cuts and job losses.

You could argue – and I would – that when you’re getting paid £157,000, as she is, that hitting targets should just be part of the job. And maybe it should work the other way round, with penalties for not doing the job properly.

Nevertheless, however much you earn, £47,000 is still a tidy sum to turn down. Many people would have pocketed it with a sense of entitlement and not a second thought. So well done to Sue Sim, her deputy and assistants.

If the books are balanced properly, they’ve probably saved the jobs of another policeman or two.

Rihanna and the farmer

COULDN’T you just love farmer Alan Graham? A film crew borrowed part of his barley field in Northern Ireland to record a video with Rihanna.

Rihanna in her very Rihanna-ish way pranced between the barley, stripped down to a tiny red bikini and when she looked as though she was going topless, Mr Graham intervened and stopped the filming. It was, he said, “inappropriate.”

Fair enough: his field, his rules. And isn’t it wonderful to find somewhere who isn’t knocked gormless by celebrity that they forget their own standards?

It couldn’t all have been a publicity stunt, could it?

I so hope not.

But, if not, well done to Rihanna too, who apparently accepted the abrupt ending of filming with good grace.

Her top-selling singles include Rude Boy and S&M. But I don’t suppose Mr Graham knew that when they asked him about filming.

Heaven's rate

RELATIVES on a short visit from Wales went on a day trip to York. Naturally, they wanted to visit the minster. The compulsory admission charge of £9 soon changed their minds.

Yes, of course, they appreciate that the minster needs the money, and that if you treat it as a tourist destination, you should pay as a tourist. But £9 each...

As a voluntary donation, they said, they would willingly have given a fiver each. As it was, they felt bullied, so didn’t bother at all. So the minster got nothing and also failed in its avowed mission to “welcome all in Christ’s name”.

I suppose they know what they’re doing and I guess there are plenty of people who will have skipped in and out and left nothing more an old threepenny bit in the box. But I still wonder how many more willing fivers they’ve lost at the expense of the enforced £9.

MIMA

MEANWHILE, over in Middlesbrough, the number of visitors to MIMA, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – where admission is free – has fallen from 158,000 in 2007-8 to 128,000.

Arts Council funding has doubled to £533,000.

No, I don’t follow that logic either.