When do you not mind the rain? Ok, when its nighttime and you’re in, that’s fine. ‘Good for the garden’. And the (only) other time is when you’re supposed to be playing tennis but can’t find anyone to play with. Then the rain’s good. Because you (errrr, or ‘me’, probably) don’t feel you’ve missed out. As is happening as I write this. Because Spurs Paul, my longest standing tennis accomplice of modern times is, broken. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to. And he’s out of warranty. Long out of warranty. So I’ve broke that player, can I get a new one? Not today, apparently. They’re all taking kids to uni (it must be ‘that’ weekend) or mowing a lawn, fitting a kitchen, out for brunch or some other lame and pathetic excuses. I’d rather they were honest and just said: ‘we just don’t like you any more and would rather get fat in front of the tv than spend an exhausting hour with you, you total nob-end’. I think Spurs Paul should just man-up and hobble round the court, whatever his team of surgeons advise to the contrary.

Because doctors don’t know much really. Take macular degeneration, f’rinstance. Horrible condition in the eyes that affects a lot of old people. Leaves them eventually blind or near so, like my own dad, who has some vision left but not a lot. They give a course of injections (don’t ask, but the answer is a gruesome ‘yessss!!!’) of which there are 3 choices. One costs over 500 quid a jab, the second costs 800 quid a jab and the third, which they don’t use, costs 25 quid a jab and is allegedly better. I say ‘allegedly’ because although the drug is licensed here, that license is for a cancer treatment, not an eye treatment so they’re not allowed to use it in eyeballs. In case… errrr… in case… well, in case it seriously affects the obscene profit margins of the companies making the first 2 drugs. Obviously. The savings to the NHS would be about 500 million a year. So not much really. ??????

The makers of the expensive drugs, Novartis and Bayer, took an NHS trust to court for using the cheaper alternative but the judge told them to fuck off. Ok, I’d have told them to fuck off, the judge actually said ‘piss off’.

And I mention this because its really not unusual for the NHS to be acting in a silly and careless way with our money. Every politician talks about how much more money they intend to ‘give’ (read: ‘piss away’) to the NHS because its so underfunded. But the problem is NEVER to just throw more cash. The problem is that there are probably 100 examples of using common drugs at massive expense where cheaper ones might even be more effective. And a hundred times 500 million is… such a lot of money that Boris’s stupid allegation of ‘350 million a week extra just for leaving Europe’ becomes even more ridiculous than it always sounded.

The NHS needs to be made more efficient in this and many other ways. Then we wouldn’t need to put in any more money, taxes would drop, we’d all be healthier and richer and would take more holidays, maybe paid for by the new, super-rich health service. Santa would bring the tickets and I think its time for my medication. The cheap stuff though, that’ll do nicely.

Happy (pill) Saturday

A xxxx