Archive for October, 2004
Damn I’m freaked out.
There I was scraping wallpaper off last night quite the thing. It’s taking ages because it’s layer upon layer of wallpaper with the occasional layer of paint for good measure. My spare room is more like an archeological dig charting wall decoration fashions going back to 1949.
I started one wall and was pleased to see that I’d found some text under the wallpaper. I myself have left silly messages beneath flooring, behind wallpaper or within cielings for future historians to ponder on, so I was chuffed to find an ancient message of my own.
‘Home? What Home?’, was the cryptic and disturbing message.
I scraped some more, further down and unveiled another message.
‘In case Henry scares them’.
I continued scraping the rest of the paper off. By the time I was almost finished, I had unveiled a feint blue painting. A naked woman was reclined on a sofa. Behind her, a faceless figure was just visible, only really visible because of his prominent top-hat. Behind him was an even feinter, naked and smiling figure.
The complete message was also visible,
‘Children keep out’
‘In case Henry scares them’
I scraped some more, and over to the left of the wall I found a big skull next to the word ‘HENRY’. The skull seems to be sitting on some kind of bony mass and the feint image of more skulls behind him can just be seen.
So I stopped scraping off wallpaper and had a cup of tea.
October 13th, 2004
Aah, isn’t that random MSN message toy great?
flossie_potts randomly said: So, you think it is terrible that vomit was not cleaned up for hours but you can vomit your stupid childish graffiti all over websites? For what purpose?
flossie_potts randomly said: And NO! It is definitely not ART! It is childish destruction.
For the last damned time, listen up people. Graffiti the web does not actually destroy or graffiti anything. It only shows up graffiti if you view the site through the graffiti site.
Stop and ponder for a moment. Is it at all likely that one website is able to easily alter the contents of another? It isn’t. It’s very unlikely indeed.
As for being childish - yeah it is. Great, innit? 
So what did I do at the weekend? It was a weekend of games and alcohol. Saturday was poker at my house, and it was a big poker game indeed. All the more money for me.
Sunday was spent at my parents house trying to teach my brother how to play poker. He’s a crap player, which means I’ll invite him along to the next game. I need the cash. He still has a hangover from the days of playing made-up kids rules poker when we were ten, and it took a long while to convince him that he is still playing it all wrong after all these years.
Sunday night was spent at Alex and Rebecca’s house where Alex supplied a damned fine chilli-con-carne, but ruined everything by doing it all in completely the wrong pan. Everyone’s night was ruined and we all went home looking for a chippie.
Kidding. We all played balderdash and came up with the plots for a large number of films that really do need to get made as soon as possible.
Biggest news last - baby has started kicking. This news is both very exciting and strangely freaky at the same time.
October 12th, 2004
The front page of the News of the World the other day (I’m not sure what day - it wasn’t my paper, I just kinda picked it up out of a pile) had a big feature on MRSA in Glasgow Royal hospital. Frankly it was pretty scary stuff. An undercover journalist who spent a few weeks there working as a cleaner found traces of the bug just about everywhere, even on the mops she was using which should really only have contained disinfectant. It was mostly due to the lack of care of staff who knew what they should have been doing, but didn’t really bother.
My missus had a long stay in hospital lately and it’s terrifying to say that everything in the story’s exposé struck a chord.
She was in the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley, on the outskirts of Glasgow where the standards of hygene were, in a word, low.
A patient vomited in the shared toilet in the morning and it wasn’t cleaned up until late in the afternoon. Spillages on the floor of the ward were not cleaned up for days.
A cleaner came into my wife’s room and used one damp cloth to wipe the sink, the toilet and her table that she eats from, and in that order. And I mean just wipe. My wife ended up cleaning things herself using cleaning materials brought in for her by her sister.
If the bin was emptied it was a good day.
My wife entered the ward at the same time as a student nurse who was having her first day there. She told about how she’d asked what she could be doing, being all keen as you would be on your first day.
“Just chill” she was told. And they all did.
It’s a very unpopular viewpoint to say that hospital staff are lazy. They are known as people who have some of the hardest work, and who get paid some of the lowest wages. Hospital staff are also only human, and when human beings get paid shit wages to do shit jobs, they tend not to care very much about the job. This is a bit of a disaster in a profession where caring is what you’re meant to do.
I can honestly say that the nurses on my wife’s ward were some of the most obviously unmotivated staff I’ve seen. I can also honestly say that the toilets in McDonalds were much more carefully maintained and cleaned, and probably a hundred times more safe to use.
I could tell you more, but seriously - you don’t want to know it.
October 4th, 2004
