Luncheon sausage

Thanks to our resident office Kiwi for the title of today's bloggage. Since it's a quiet day, there has been a degree of discussion about what luncheon sausage (as it's known in NZ) actually is.

Our friends at Wikipedia have done some legwork on this, but it's damned difficult to find any pictures of the stuff anywhere on the net.

Anyway, it seems that NZ butchers give the stuff away free to kids to eat in sandwiches. No wonder the whole of NZ has bailed out and come to London. The taste of a greasy Caledonian Road kebab after a night out kicks nine kinds of crap out of whatever the hell it is they're giving away on the streets of Wellington.

Incidentally, it's known as 'polony' in South Africa, which may or may not be racist anti-Poland talk. Polony isn't half as good as biltong spread by all accounts; the thought of this has got our resident saffies (from both sides of the boerewors curtain) salivating wildly.

On the subject of food, there seems to be a creeping nazification of the nation's youth. Whereas German children of the mid-1930s were persuaded to inform the authorities if their parents didn’t hate Jews enough, the UK is raising a generation of enviro-foodie fascists. Can I present any evidence to support this? Well, some.

• Exhibit A: the weekend before last, when I was staying with friends in the deepest West Country (amongst other things listening to a live rendition of "Combine harvester" whilst tucking into a Cornish pasty - you've gotta live the rural dream), a five year old told me in no uncertain terms that 'only stupid people like crisps and chocolate'. Pass the grated carrots.
  
• Exhibit B: my 16 year old cousin yesterday expressed outrage that her history teacher had thrown a, *gasp*, blank sheet of paper into the rubbish bin, not the recycling bin. Apparently this was in an effort to illustrate the worthlessness of Weimar-era currency. Still, my cousin then made up for it by telling me that Chris 'n' Gwyn's kid's first word was 'houmous'. My personal objective is to ensure that both of my children's first word is 'luncheon sausage'.

Enough sausage, pasty and houmous talk.

My week long absence is explained by my being struck down with a disease of advanced middle age, which you needn't know about.

Our great NHS is a source of mystery to me - in some places (five star hotels, for example), you always get great service, because the system is designed to benefit the customer. In other places (I'm thinking Argos, which, incidentally, means 'slow' in Greek), the service is crap, because the system is designed to benefit the people who run it .

The curious thing about the NHS is that it's so fiendishly complex and dysfunctional, it seems to have been designed with neither the end user or the people who run it in mind. The patients, sorry, 'customers', hate it. The medical staff are exhausted and baffled. No one seems to benefit.

Anyway, I've been referred by my (brilliant) GP to a specialist, which now involves something called 'patient choice', much beloved by that nice Mr Blair. Under the old, inefficient system, I would have been referred by my GP to the specialist in the nearest hospital, who would have sat on the letter for three months then claimed never to have received it, requiring the GP to re-refer me (this is also a handy way to keep waiting lists in check).

Under the shiny new online system, called 'Choose and Book' (which has paid for a couple of hundred thousand shiny new Mercs for IT consultants up and down the country), nothing will ever be the same again. I simply log on, look at the available appointments online, compare average waiting lists in each hospital, pick a time, and book it. Simple as that.

Well…

Having got over the initial hurdle of not having a user ID or password (the receptionist probably broke the Data Protection Act and contravened someone's Human Rights by divulging this information over the phone), I managed to log on, to find out the following:

• my nearest hospital refuses to treat me because it doesn't have enough staff (slamming and locking the door is a great way to 'manage' a waiting list)
• the other two 'available' hospitals don't want to use the online system. So they don't. So it seems that you can neither choose nor book.

Goodbye to £6.2 billion of IT investment. Hello to phoning both hospitals and waiting in massive queues before they 'lose' my appointment sometime in November and oblige to start the whole thing again.

Let's hope it's not serious.

On a lighter note, the latest Muse album is great - give it a listen.