I am, slowly, recovering, I think, from the traveller’s diarrhea I suffered a week ago. Wednesday was the worst day, and I haven’t slept in the bed since Saturday morning. I’ve been sleeping on an exercise mat in the front room, padded with towels. It’s closer to the downstairs loo, and it wouldn’t disturb HWMBO, who has been a real brick through all this.
Anyway, while I did get up a few times last night (perhaps TMI, I suppose), I have been relatively stable today. This is all no thanks to the quack. I went last Monday, she diagnosed giardia as most likely, gave me a prescription for the medicine for that, and said to call her if it didn’t work. Well, it didn’t. So I called her. Twice. Left messages, She didn’t call me back. I left a stool sample for analysis, and that hasn’t returned. I’ve been dehydrated, uninterested in food until today, and close to despair several times. I wept Wednesday night for an hour.
So now, what to do? I feel that the office staff at the GP’s surgery is probably not very efficient, and I expect that she never got the messages. However, HWMBO has also gotten the runaround from the staff there, and I’m starting to think it’s time for a change. There is another surgery up the road that a lot of St. Matthew’s people use; I’ll canvass their level of satisfaction with the service they get there, and whether they are open for new patients, and decide whether I need to change GPs.
I haven’t said much on the London bombings yet in this place. I appreciate all the calls and emails I got from people worried that I or HWMBO had been injured or killed in the events. I do have a couple of observations.
First, I am so very proud of our Mayor, Ken Livingstone. He has said exactly the right things, he exudes a level of love of the city and of Londoners that it would be difficult to find in some other mayors of large cities, and he is passionately committed to helping us cope with this and anything else that fate throws in our path. Even though I’ve never met him, I get this sense that he personally is committed to my welfare as a Londoner, and that he’d go the extra mile to do whatever was needed to make me safe. I’ve not had that feeling in other cities where I’ve lived. Ken is that rarest of politicians: he loves us and our city unconditionally and not for his own gain. I hope he stays in politics after 2008 when his term ends.
Second, our civil liberties will indeed be under threat in the future from this event. The police and MI’s 5 and 6 have cooperated for years in tracking and neutralising threats, and have said all along that the events of yesterday were inevitable. If the new security regime we’ll be living under only includes more CCTV cameras, I’m not so concerned about that. While Big Brother may be watching me, it’s unlikely that anyone will review the tapes unless something has happened in the vicinity. This event will be used to justify even more tight controls on where we can do, with whom we can associate, what we can do, and the like. While it’s unlikely that any sort of airport-like security can be introduced on the Tube, who knows? The problems of screening 3 million people a day, some of whom enter the system through an open door rather than a staffed gate, would be almost insurmountable. And, inevitably, there would be a slip-up when you’re screening so many people every day, and something would eventually happen. So this won’t happen. ID cards will not assist in this case; the fact that there is a database won’t help police on the beat much as it’s unlikely they will have instant access to the database. In any case, a project of this magnitude (a database of 60 million people with god-only-knows how many separate pieces of information attached to each person) is unlikely to be supple enough to use or cost-effective to implement.
So what will help? We could ensure economic opportunity in our poorest neighbourhoods and among our poorest communities. This will ensure that jobless and idle people will not become enraged at the UK for purely personal economic reasons. We must also ensure that people who espouse extremist views, no matter where they originate, are made to stop. This includes the BNP, fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and any other fringe group that advocates curtailment of life and liberty of another group. We must continue to examine our involvement in Iraq, and ensure that we withdraw at the earliest possible opportunity. We must also ensure that we do not engage ourselves in another adventure of this sort without a proven, public, and personal threat that can be verified–we are not in the business of changing regimes for the sake of liberty. For goodness’ sake, we can hardly preserve it here!
For anyone reading this who is contemplating a visit to London, please come! We are open for business and for pleasure, we are a world-class city with some of the most historic sites in the world. HWMBO and I would love to show you around (and we may even have guest facilities). People here, yesterday notwithstanding, are as safe or safer than they are in their own cities and countries.
PS: After spell-checking this entry, I discovered Livejournal’s suggestions for replacing the word “HWMBO”. To wit: HOMEBOY, HBO, HMO, GUMBO, JUMBO, HOBO, HOMO, DUMBO, LIMBO, RAMBO, BIMBO, COMBO, MAMBO, HEMP, HOB, MOB, HEB, HEM, HM, MB, HEBE, HERB, HEME, HUMOR, HEMS, HOMOS, HUMP, HYMN. How can we add HWMBO and save ourselves from this dreck!!!