Yesterday I took a prescription from the physiotherapist for Phil to our local chemist’s shop in the village. They told me they would need to order the ibuprofen gel on the prescription and that I should call back today to collect it. So when I took our grandson out for a walk and to play in the park we hung around until after the chemist’s shop finished their lunch break and went to collect the stuff. “Out of stock”, they said. And that was pretty much it. No useful suggestion. So I took the prescription back and vowed to try elsewhere tomorrow.
Now, it’s not the first time that this particular establishment has failed to order items successfully. Back in August they kept me waiting for several weeks for some items. In the end my GP emailed the prescription to a different chemist’s shop, where they obtained the items in a matter of days!
In the current case I find myself wondering how hard it is to obtain ibuprofen gel. Surely it’s not a rare item. But maybe it has to be imported from Europe! Is this slow service another Brexit “benefit?
Here’s Caroline Lucas, from yesterday I think, on Brexit and our Prime Minister:
“PM Rishi Sunak was one of the biggest Brexit backers. “Brexit was the right thing for the country”, he said at #PMQs today.
Seriously?? Here’s what Brexit has done for our country. Less trade, less business investment, less productivity, lower wages, higher food prices, a grave shortage of health & social care workers.
Brexit wasn’t just the wrong thing for our country. It was a bloody disaster.””
Higher up the social ladder things seem to going a little awry again. Things seemed to be going all right last week at a luncheon for the Order of Merit:
“It is a question that must have plagued those attending King Charles’s first luncheon for the Order of Merit on Thursday – what to wear while eating partridge pie with the new monarch.
For the 85-year-old artist David Hockney it was simple – his signature checked Savile Row suit, a knitted checkerboard tie … and a pair of yellow garden Crocs. As a fan of the great outdoors, the king was delighted. “Your yellow galoshes!” he remarked. “Beautifully chosen.”
I suspect our king may one of the few people around who confuse crocs with wellies, and one of the few who still talks about “galoshes”. It’s a term I’ve not heard much since my childhood - contemporaneous with the childhood of the king, by the way.
Maybe it’s one consequence of living a life not exactly totally sheltered but still largely separate from the mass of the people. And that may explain the wheels rather coming off the meet-the-people reception hosted by the queen consort on Tuesday when an 83 year old former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II repeatedly asked Ngozi Fulani, the founder of the charity Sistah Space, where she was really from.
As she asked Ngozi Fulani where ‘her people’ were from, I reflected that, of course, in certain circles your ‘people’ does not really mean your race but your family. But even that bit of linguistic generosity does not explain or excuse the old lady’s determination to discover where in Africa Ngozi Fulani came from.
It’s the kind of question my son in law, whose parents are from Hong Kong, used to be asked by drunks when he was a policeman and tried to stop drunken fools from being more foolish than necessary. And it’s no more acceptable from an old posh lady than it is from a drunken fool. In both cases it may be down to ignorance and in both cases it’s ridiculously condescending. Especially as the old dear apparently moved Ngozi Fulani’s hair aside so that she could read her name tag. Perhaps Lady Hussey should have been given a pension and a nice place to live quietly when the queen died, instead of continuing to carry out “duties” for the royal household at her rather advanced age.
That’s all.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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