Friday 25 February 2011


Don’t miss that dental appointment

NOW here is a piece of news that you can all get your teeth in to. Everyone has got to eat so dental care is very important, particularly in an era when NHS dentists are not quite as thick on the ground as they used to be.

So you’d think that people lucky enough to be registered with an NHS surgery would try and hang on to it like grim death, but not a bit of it. One surgery I know of has developed such a serious situation with people not bothering to turn up for appointments that it has been forced to take action.

The balance was tipped when 299 people ignored appointments in a single month. The effect on the surgery can be imagined with staff left idle at the whim of patients and time being wasted which should have been spent caring for people’s health never mind the loss of income caused by the no-shows.

Now patients are being warned that they are facing a different sort of filling. If they miss two appointments in one year they will be de-registered from the surgery and their place given to new dental patients looking to join an NHS practice.

So the message being drilled home seems to be that patients ignore an appointment they make to a valuable community resource at their peril.


Now wash your hands please ...

IN the glorious nanny state in which we live there is no subject too small and no action too minor to escape advice from authority. The powers that be are keen to avoid being sued for any hint of negligence which might attach to them if they haven’t pointed out glaringly obvious things such as you might fall if you walk down steps.

My latest contact with this overkill of official information came in a community hall where there was a notice pinned up advising people using the toilets to wash their hands afterwards.

Not only is there nothing wrong with this but such hygiene is to be actively encouraged, but what I found a bit of an insult to people’s intelligence was what the notice went on to discuss in some detail. Believe it or not, there was then line after line about the correct way for people to wash their hands!

Key advice stressed the importance of paying particularly attention to the heel of the hand, it talked about... well, it doesn’t matter what it talked about. The fact is that if we now need explicit guidance on how to wash our hands then there really is no hope for us.

What next, perhaps instruction on the correct way to walk to guard against excess heel wear or the correct way to breathe to avoid unduly damaging our nostrils? Surely the best thing such notice writers could do would be to stop writing notices to help reduce the damage to people’s patience.


Even Santa needs a holiday

IT is enough to beggar belief but I have just seen the first advertisement for Christmas! Santa Claus has barely put his sledge in for an MoT and already holiday companies are urging us to book trips out to see him in Lapland next winter.

The Great Man was furious when I contacted him about what was happening.

“What the elf are they playing at?” he bellowed.

“Don’t they know I’m on holiday? It’s bad enough that we can’t land properly on roofs because of solar panels, that the quality of sherry and mince pies left out for me has declined and that so many children now seem to spell Christmas with a “K”.

“Rudolph and I can cope with that, but I won’t have our precious holiday interrupted.

“Surely travel agents can wait until after Easter?”

So all you eager beavers of the travel world, rein back your enthusiasm a bit please because Santa and the rest of us would like a clear break between one Christmas and the next.


Enjoy your break - don’t get shot!

A WEYMOUTH couple were looking forward to a cruise holiday on the Nile to see some of the historic splendours of Egypt. So they were quite pleased when they met someone who had already been on several such cruises.

The man was obviously knowledgeable and gave them all sorts of advice including a suggestion that they try and get seating on the starboard side of the boat. The couple were a little mystified at that comment since, as far as they could tell, a seat on the port side of the boat would give them a much closer view of the river bank and all the sights it might offer.

They queried what the man had said and asked why he wasn’t suggesting sitting on the port side. The man replied: “You are right, it is a better view from there but sitting on the starboard side makes it a much harder shot for snipers!”

The couple said they did enjoy their holiday… but they sat on the starboard side!

1 comment:

  1. I just say about it everyone has got to eat so dental care is very important with it we being our smile with right treatment ,so we can go for weekly checkup of dentist clinic,thanks.

    ReplyDelete