{"id":3043,"date":"2021-09-10T17:12:17","date_gmt":"2021-09-10T17:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=3043"},"modified":"2021-09-10T21:53:33","modified_gmt":"2021-09-10T21:53:33","slug":"friday-10th-september-2021-day-543","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/09\/10\/friday-10th-september-2021-day-543\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 10th September, 2021 [Day 543]"},"content":{"rendered":"

After all of the excitement\u00a0generated by yesterdays’s celebrations of 54 years of\u00a0married bliss, today rather had the feeling of ‘the morning after the night\u00a0<\/em><\/span>before<\/em>‘ about it.\u00a0After we had got ourselves dragged into bed and seen a little of the late night news, then I got up to\u00a0write yesterday’s blog which might explain its slightly ‘offbeat’ character. So this morning, we were a little slow in getting up and getting going – and of course our domestic help calls around on a Friday so we always seem to have masses to talk about. \u00a0Eventually, though we did get going and had previously arranged to meet with our University of\u00a0Birmingham friend in the park – as it turned out, we were only half an hour late. There wasn’t time to pick up our newspaper (now confined to ‘<\/span>The Times<\/em>‘) and we spent about an hour and a\u00a0half chatting about all kinds of things. One matter which was absorbing our\u00a0attention, though, was a problem manifest over\u00a0practically the whole of the UK. This is how to have an adequate consultation with a GP when it is so\u00a0difficult to\u00a0have any face-to-face contact with a GP these days when the\u00a0default method of consultation is via a telephone\u00a0appointment. We were reminiscing with each other\u00a0that an old-fashioned GP in the former pre-COVID days could have gathered\u00a0all kinds of\u00a0impressionistic data from the moment you entered the room until you were\u00a0beckoned to sit down\u00a0in a chair adjacent to the doctor’s work station.\u00a0Now, I think it is true to say, that a GP is likely to be staring at his computer screen and wave you\u00a0towards a chair before entering the\u00a0opening gambit of ‘<\/span>what can we do for you today?<\/em>‘ \u00a0Just by chance, there is an article in today’s ‘<\/span>Times<\/em>‘ which is detailing how the senior coroner for Manchester is highlighting in ‘<\/span>Prevention of future deaths<\/em>‘\u00a0reports in which five cases of death over the last few months could have been avoided if face-to-face consultation had\u00a0taken place rather than a\u00a0telephone consultation. One of these cases involved the case of \u00a0a 99-year old resident of a residential home\u00a0who\u00a0had a telephone\u00a0consultation with a doctor who did not diagnose a broken\u00a0femur from which the patient could well not have died. These cases are no\u00a0doubt the prominent tip of a vary\u00a0large iceberg but when you\u00a0consider that for the past year and half a huge amount of ‘normal’ doctoring has been\u00a0squeezed out by the impact of the pandemic, it not surprising that mistakes will occur and diagnoses not be made on time.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When we go home (late) it was time for me to prepare what is now fast becoming a Friday lunchtime special i.e. fresh sea-bass bought from Waitrose<\/em> only the day before. Now that I know\u00a0exactly how to cook\u00a0these correctly so that the skin is nicely crispy and, once turned\u00a0<\/span>over, the flesh is nicely cooked without being over-cooked, we are really\u00a0enjoying our mid-day on\u00a0Friday treat. I\u00a0serve it with some capers (previously bought\u00a0in a jar), some fresh\u00a0lemon juice, garlic butter and purple sprouting broccoli. This is a dish which is both\u00a0extreme delicious as well as healthy so I am more than happy, having just established a Friday tradition, to carry on with it. To be honest, I used to make a\u00a0big fish pie about once a month with 4-5 different kinds of fish and then, having cooked it, save several portions for future meals but it does take quite a lot of preparation and I have rather\u00a0got out\u00a0of the habit of doing it in the last few months.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Today, after lunch, I went down on my own by car in order to pick up my copy of ‘<\/span>The Times’ <\/em>which I now intend to read rather more\u00a0assiduously now that I am bereft of The Guardian<\/em>. I did take the opportunity to pop into Waitrose<\/em> where I bought a\u00a0bottle of Cava and a card for my friendly Asian\u00a0newspaper whose\u00a0shop is\u00a0<\/span>just around the corner. When we were discussing our own forthcoming 54th wedding\u00a0anniversary\u00a0celebrations, \u00a0it emerged that he was due to celebrate 45 years of marriage on that most memorable of dates i.e. 9\/11 (as the Americans would put it, 11th September for us in the UK). In the past week, I did watch a documentary of how 9\/11\u00a0unfolded hour by hour as captured in air\u00a0traffic control messages (still quite laconic) and a lot of\u00a0footage shot on people’s cellphones (mobiles to us Europeans) that had never been broadcast before. I have no doubt tomorrow, twenty years after the\u00a0events of two airliners\u00a0crashing into the Work Trade Centre in New York, one into the Pentagon and one brought down\u00a0in a field in Pennsylvania, our airwaves will be filled\u00a0with all kinds of footage of the attack. One fact that I have just heard on tonight’s news that I did not know was that some 10,000 New Yorkers were\u00a0directly impacted by the collapse of the twin towers mainly though the release of toxic materials and a number of these developed cancers from which they subsequently died. I have seen one source that indicates that nearly 3,000 people died directly but that over 4,000 survivors and first-aiders may have died since 9\/11 itself.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After all of the excitement\u00a0generated by yesterdays’s celebrations of 54 years of\u00a0married bliss, today rather had the feeling of ‘the morning after the night\u00a0before‘ about it.\u00a0After we had got ourselves dragged into bed and seen a little of the late night news, then I got up to\u00a0write yesterday’s blog which might explain its slightly ‘offbeat’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3043"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3048,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions\/3048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}