Busy Monday stuff!

Today, a bright and sunny day, I got up and went to the dentist for a check-up. This involved a torture session, otherwise known as “scale and polish”. We pay £20 or so for the dentist to torture us. All in a good cause, of course, putting off the possibility of dentures some time in the future. Long ago, when my younger sister was born, my mother took advantage of the NHS free dental treatment for a mother during the first year of her child’s life and had all her teeth taken out and dentures fitted. Later in life she said it was the worst decision she ever took but at the time it seemed the right thing to do. That may well be so but at least she got her free treatment. Will that free dental treatment for a year continue for mothers of the country votes the Tories back in? I nearly wrote “if we vote the tories back in” but that would imply that I might be voting for them!!

Having undergone my torture session I went to catch a tram into Manchester where I was going to try once again to nail the Christmas shopping thing and then meet my eldest granddaughter from work. I feel quite flattered that my 22-year-old granddaughter is willing to meet her grandmother casually for coffee after work!

On the way in I earwigged on a conversation on the tram. This is what you do if you are an inveterate nosey parker. I listened to the banter going back and forth about voting or not voting Labour in the forthcoming election. These were people who said they had voted Labour all their lives - one had been a Labour councillor, for goodness sake! - and were now contemplating voting Conservative. Somebody else was eavesdropping as well, for we both chimed in when bus-passes were mentioned and the possibility of them being taken away, and we both declared that voting the Tories in was a pretty sure way of losing that privilege, among others.

That was when the conversation got into small-world territory for the ex-councillor starting naming people I knew, people I had been friendly with in the past, people whose children had been to school with my children. I think we all agreed in the end that we don’t want any more years of Tory austerity.

And I went on and did my shopping and met my granddaughter. We then went on to meet her mother, my daughter, and her in-laws for more coffee and a chat and some admiration of the small grandchildren we have in common.

Eventually I made my way home and found this on the news online:

 “Boris Johnson has been accused of not caring after he repeatedly refused during a TV interview to look at a photo of a four-year-old boy forced to sleep on the floor at an overcrowded A&E unit, before pocketing the reporter’s phone on which he was being shown the picture.
In an ITV interview during a campaign visit to a factory in Sunderland, the prime minister was challenged about the plight of Jack Williment-Barr, who was pictured sleeping under coats on a hospital floor in Leeds as he waited for a bed, despite having suspected pneumonia.
Johnson refused to look at the photo and, out of camera shot, eventually took the phone from the reporter and put it in his own pocket.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, responded by tweeting a video of the exchange with the message: “He just doesn’t care.””

Enough said! Tomorrow is another day! Maybe the PM will run away from another confrontation situation.