NHS 10 year plan

The NHS is 60 years old so what a good day to publish a 10 year plan (Stalin would be impressed, he kept himself to 5 years).

I've read the reports of the proposals, better accessibility sounds good although I think it will be a struggle to run 8am-8pm surgeries. One paper I read gave an example of how blood tests are currently done, 1/2 day off work to get a form from your GP, followed by another 1/2 off work to go to a hospital to have the test. So the taxpayer actually funding this hardly gets an efficient service.

But then there are gimmicks, "dashboards" of stats to show what a hospital is like. As with so many other professions when will we learn that quality is so difficult to measure, and in trying to measure it you can affect it (as people chase targets and game the system - they always will).

Walk: Hambledon

Went for a 4 mile walk around the outskirts of Hambledon a small village a few miles north of Denmead.

Hambledon itself is the disputed birth place of cricket and has a historic cricket club (the MCC of it's day I'm guessing). The walk started off through a church and then over some fields which look across to an impressive hill landscape.

Continuing through a small copse, another field, and a steep tree covered climb called dog kennel lane. Crossing some fields you could see Portsdown Hill. The walk finished with some country lanes back to Hambledon village.

Book read: The Gambler

A short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky the troubled 19th century author. I'd read Crime and Punishment and this was not quite in the same league. The characters and their traits are good, as is the backdrop of the random chance of gambling. But I never felt it was particularly focused in telling a story - reading about the book on Wikipedia it seemed to indicate the book was finished quickly to pay gambling debts!

Walk: Southwick to Portsdown Hill

A couple of my friends have started to do some local walks at the weekend in preparation for a coming walking holiday in Wales. We started this walk a couple of weeks back and did the Portsdown Hill to Southwick part but got lost trying to go back on the second part of the walk.

The guide book we were using was a bit imprecise so this time armed with a map we tried to redo the second part of the walk.

It was mostly a success, some very nice countyside on the outskirts of Portsmouth. We made one wrong turn which added a couple of miles to the 5 mile walk. This turned out to be a blessing as it allowed us to do all of the Wayfarer's trail. This then led onto Purbrook Heath road and past Southwick house. The final part of the walk was a hill climb back to the top of Portsdown.

I hardly knew all this countryside existed and it's hard to believe you are less than a mile from one of the densely populated cities in the country (Portsea island).

Train Documents

I find it hard to believe the recent documents left on the train are accidental. It feels more like hard pressed civil service types wanting to expose the goverment. Still if someone managed to leave our Iraq or Afghanistan policy recommendations I'm sure it could do with an airing in the press, just in case it gets over filtered on it's way up to senior ministers.

Suppose these are just genuine mishaps it probably does point to this thing is happening all the time and now the media has become a bit over sensitive to it. Like the personal information problems earlier in the year it doesn't fill me with confidence that someone can even leave the office with this information, it is after all "national security".

Credit Perception

In just a few short months we've gone from the extreme of having people falling over themselves to sign you up for a mortgage or other form of debt to an extreme shortage. Quite strange and indications of a tough rest of year. Add to that the oil and petrol prices and things are not looking quite so rosy for the UK economy.

Increasing debt, repossessions, and presumably rising unemployment and business failure. Have we just had it too good for too long, and now this is the payup time? Would things have always been this way had we not had historically low interest rates.

One thing I'm pleased about, it's the banks who are feeling the pinch first. They are going to have to get used to lower profits for years to come, and many are now forced to devalue their stock with share issues. It has been a long time coming but the economy is going to go back to valuing cash and not credit.