Journal Entries
A National Insurance Joke
Posted Aug 7, 2012
I just rang HM Revenue and Customs about the £30 they're chasing me for since I cancelled the direct debit. The man I spoke to told me it's paid in arrears, so even though I ceased to be a self-employed partner, the £30 is still payable. Since the docs reckoned I might last somewhere between a year and 18 months (that estimate was given to me about 3 months ago) with this cancer, I asked whether I could draw any pension. He said I couldn't draw a state pension under any circumstances until I'm old enough, ie in about 9 years and 9 months, but they might let me off with the £30 if I write to them explaining the situation. If I don't write to them, they'll keep on chasing me for the money.
You couldn't make it up, could you? I've paid into the system all my working life. I kept working through my illness - kept paying my tax and national insurance - and didn't claim anything from the state (though I did attempt to make use of the NHS, but that's largely staffed by dangerous idiots that made me wish I hadn't), and now they get to keep the lot. The mafia would be well impressed with such a system. They didn't even have to keep or invest the NI money for its original purpose. They took it on themselves to use it as another tax that could be p!issed up the wall on any passing whim.
I'm not going to write to them to beg to be allowed to keep the £30. They can chase me if they like. If they have to accommodate me and feed me in prison, I might get my money's-worth.
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Latest reply: Aug 7, 2012
Ooh! There's Bats!
Posted Aug 4, 2012
Haven't seen bats flying around the house for years. I think there are two or three of them - hunting flying insects. And it's fairly cold and wet out there. So happy to see them! I love bats
I hope my brother's s*dding 
, Ruby, doesn't get them. She was snatching swallows out of the air yesterday.
How exciting
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Latest reply: Aug 4, 2012
Can this really be legal
Posted Aug 4, 2012
It must be somewhere between 10 and 15 years since my brother moved to this barn-conversion. It's got a bit of land with it. Upto a few months ago a farmer used Bill's 10 acre field for his sheep, for free. But then they had a falling-out - it wasn't enough that he got to graze his sheep for free for over a decade, he also wanted Bill to pay for the water for his sheep. So anyway, the man removed his sheep and Bill rented the field to some nice ladies for their horses (5 horses I think), which they came and took care of daily - feeding, poo-picking, visits from the farrier, vet etc. Bill recently semi-retired and thought it was about time he started thinking about alternative sources income. Those nice ladies left and he advertised the field to rent.
A woman turned up with 25 Welsh ponies, saying Bill's field was absolutely ideal for them. Bill knows nothing about horses or ponies and just assumed that people must love their horses the way we love our dogs - and would know how many could be sustainably kept on so many acres and wouldn't lie about it. This turned out not to be the case though. The woman simply dumped the ponies and hasn't lifted a finger to look after them since. They were thin and hungry, some have hooves that have grown into long, curled "slippers". There are about 9 stallions amongst them - all in-breeding with their mums, grandmas, sisters, daughters etc - all fighting over the mares and fillies, gashing each other and the mares with their lethal hooves. A new foal was born two or three weeks ago. While Bill was walking through the field with a neighbour (a lady who's kept Welsh ponies herself) a few days ago, one of the fillies aborted. According to the lady, this was probably because she was far too young to be shut in with stallions - too young to breed.
Once the grass had been eaten, the ponies started battering down the fences, braving the electric boundary, to get out and get to food. They galloped down the roads and through the woods - a hazard to people, traffic and themselves. Some brave folk from the next village spent from about 8pm to 11pm chasing the last lot through the streets, borrowed halters to take them to a field where a lady agreed to accommodate them for the night, then led them back along the road from that village to this, the following day. That couple don't know anything about horses except that they kick and bite and can do you a grievous injury if you're not careful. The lady who accommodated them with her own horses, was horrified by the state they were in and concerned that her healthy horses might catch some disease or worms from the ponies. I texted the awful brute who owns them, to tell her what had happened and all she said was that she resented the implication that her ponies might be diseased. Not one glimmer of gratitude for the people who rounded them up and secured them, or the lady who risked the health of her own horses to take care of them for the night. In fact, the lady contacted the loathsome owner on facebook to enquire about the escaped ponies, after they'd been returned to Bill's field, and the owner threatened the lady with the police, believing she was trying to steal them.
Bill demanded that she come and feed them, poo-pick, separate the stallions from the females, call in a farrier to trim the long hooves, get a vet to treat their gashes, worm them and so on. She said she would come over and fence off the stallions, then she was going to get a vet to castrate the stallions, then she was going to come over with "her" farrier. None of these things happened. Each time she and the farrier or vet were supposed to come, they either didn't turn up or she phoned with some lame excuse.
The RSPCA lady was angry - but apparently impotent. She couldn't do anything until the horses fell over and couldn't get up again, so she advised Bill not to do anything to help them. Of course, once they were in a sufficiently poor condition to fall over, the RSPCA could prosecute - but then the RSPCA would have to put them out of their misery, because they wouldn't have the resources to accommodate and take care of them.
Horses have to have passports and chips now. That's the law. So Bill's demanded to see the passports. The woman hasn't responded to that demand. So he contacted DEFRA ask whether they kept a database of horse and pony owners and passports etc. No. Apparently all sorts of people/organisations can issue passports and you can't find out anything. He asked what DEFRA do when horses don't have passports or chips. Nothing. They told him to contact Trading Standards. Why Trading Standards? (forget logic) - So Trading Standards told him to contact the police. He got an automatic reply from them.
He's feeding the ponies and picking the poo himself. They were going to be up to their knees in sh*t if he didn't and starving too. It's a full-time and expensive business. No wonder the pointless parasitic owner doesn't want to do the work that's required to keep the animals healthy. Apparently, she's been playing this game for about 15 years, according to a local horse charity that were trying to discover where she moved them when she left the field of her last victim.
To me, it just seems unbelievable that she can keep getting away with it - but the RSPCA lady told us that this situation is replicated all over the country. DEFRA hasn't the will to enforce the law on passports and chips. Extraordinary!
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Latest reply: Aug 4, 2012
The NHS should come with a health warning
Posted Jun 7, 2012
Over the last couple of years some people have got into the habit of sending me newspaper articles. They used to be about bees and fibromyalgia... I still get those, but now they can be about cancer and the NHS too. The most recent was a couple of pages from the 5th June issue of the Daily Mail, where a doctor lady with a very similar type of cancer - "small round cell" - (only hers sounds far worse, having spread further) to mine, laid out her experience in diary form. Most of her experience of the actual disease didn't ring any bells with me. For one thing, she's far more upset about it than I am. She cries a lot and I've yet to shed a tear over it. But hers sounds incredibly painful - which I find terrifying. That would certainly make me blub. And then she's only 30, poor little dab, and she was just enjoying a nice life when this disaster suddenly happened to her. I'm 56 and, for the last decade and a half, finding life to be a crock of the brown stuff.
But her experience of the treatment... that did ring bells for me.
Just done a search and found the actual article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2154683/How-having-terminal-cancer-better-doctor.html
It was the part where she says her consultant knows she "thinks cancer doctors flog their patients, especially the young ones, with horrendous treatments until the last possible moment despite incurability" that got me nodding in agreement. Of course, she's a doctor, so her opinion carries a bit more authority than a mere patient, with only their own isolated experience to base a judgment on. I owe her. I was going through the hated chemo in order to prevent incontinence (that was the *lie* they told to trick me into it), but also to keep my brothers happy. Now my duty's done and I'm not having any more treatment. The 4th cycle of chemo was supposed to start next week, but I have a treatment review first and I'll have the satisfaction of telling them NO! And if they get very pushy and pressure me, I'll say yes, but then ring my MacMillan nurse from a safe distance and tell her to tell them I lied just to get out of the office and away from their overbearing methods of persuasion.
Since I last wrote about this in a journal, I've had a couple of alarming run-ins with the NHS:
1) The last (3rd) cycle of chemo. I got a mad nurse. An absolute nut-case. The same nurse deals with you all day when you're in for chemo. This one, as soon as she learned I needed a pillow behind my back to make sitting all day bearable for the trapped nerve in my spine, kept coming over to say she might have to take the pillow away for another patient, if another patient needed it. These pillows are scattered all over the chemo suite, for patients to rest their arm on while the needle is being inserted, ready for the drips. I'm the only one using the pillow for their back. Everyone else has discarded their pillow after the needle insertion. She doesn't need my pillow for another patient. Then, I ask her about the anti-sickness medication I'm supposed to be taking home with me after the treatment. She fetches my notes, looks through them and tells me there's nothing written in them by my Dr about anti-sickness treatment to take away. I ask another nurse to have a look. The other nurse finds the note straight away and says she'll show Gosia. The nut-case returns and says that although my Dr has written in the order for anti-sickness drugs to take away, she's on holiday and the Dr standing in for her hasn't written anything. So what, I say. My Dr wrote it in. Let me have them. "You should have made her write you a prescription, then", she says, "she hasn't written one". This refusal to let me have the anti-sickness medicine went on all day, right up until about 10 minutes before I left (I was the last to leave) then I asked her how to spell her name, so I could take up the matter with my consultant. At that point, she stopped pratting about and got me the medicine. Now I'm pretty sure that the only reason that insane woman is working in the chemo suite, is that she enjoys other people's suffering and she likes to make vulnerable people as miserable as possible.
2) My white blood cells refuse to recover after chemo, so they keep sending me home to wait for an improvement and telling me to come back next week when I turn up for chemo. This time they decided I should get a 5 day course of growth factor injections, to get my white blood cells to increase a bit quicker. The district nurse was to come over and give me the jab. Only they sent her to the wrong place and they didn't give her signed authority to give the injection. I did see her the once, when she told me I'd have to inject myself and showed me where to stab the needle into my abdomen - then I was left to my own devices with the collection of syringes. Sticking needles in myself was horrible. I hated it. I did it every day for 5 days and dreaded every one of them.
Now that's it. It's confirmed: the NHS is exactly the hellish, pointless organisation my instinct told me it was. And I'll do everything I can to avoid it in future. If the pain gets unbearable, I think I'll go out and get hypothermia or drown myself, rather than risk another encounter with that bunch of evil clowns.
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Latest reply: Jun 7, 2012
Now what's happened to h2g2
Posted Jun 7, 2012
It's taken me ages to get signed in... and then my page turned into one with that nightmarish new skin where you can't find anything and nothing works. Have they been fiddling with all the knobs?
Discuss this Journal entry [7]
Latest reply: Jun 7, 2012
Tibley Bobley
Researcher U170471
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