Random Musings ending at Rantville

I’m now into week 2 of my 2 weeks leave before my maternity leave starts next week, trying to catch up on laundry despite the best efforts of the washing machine – it is a washer dryer, but the dryer is now on strike, this is ok really as we have an old reliable tumble dryer which we were given a while back by Jon’s folks.

Also bending down to get things in and out of the washing machine is getting harder and harder. In fact just trying to get dressed/undressed is difficult – try putting on a pair of socks with a large solid blob on your chest, it isn’t very easy – seems to amuse Jon however.

Yesterday we drove to Cambridge so I could have the last of my routine bloods done, the glucose test. This required my drinking exactly 265mls of lucozade and having three lots of blood taken an hour later.� We got stuck in traffic on Barton road, but this was inevitable given that it was around 9am. On our way back, we saw a parked driving instructor’s car – the driving school was called Toad’s which amused us hugely and we both went “Poop! Poop!” wildly on seeing it. We were some what disappointed that it had a picture of a bog-standard toad on it rather than Toad in his motoring garb in all his copyright-infringing glory.

So we returned home and Jon rushed off to work and I settled down to a dull day of reading BBC news on line and laundry. It seems that there are more and more maternity related articles turning up, or else it jsut seems that way. Last week it was discovering that in the ratings of maternity units across the UK, the one we are attending is rated as “Best”, this was good news. The others we could have gone for were rated as “Least well” and “Better”.� Also the trust with the consultant who we were very unhappy with was rated as… “Least well”

Now for some translation, the “Best”,”Better”,”Fair” and “Least well” ratings are the actual ones they gave. It reminds me of the rewording of “Failure” for students as “Deferred Success”.� This is just silliness. How about “Best”,”Good”, “Average” and “Poor – avoid if you can”. I really don’t understand this trend or need to dress language up to make it sound like we are dealing with levels of positives rather than the whole spectrum from downright rubbish to excellent.

This week the top article has been about the rise in births to migrant mothers and drop in birth to English born mothers in the UK, with one article having� a link headline of “UK paying for ‘migrant baby boom’”.

There is no indication that these women are in the country illegally and the main gist seems to be that where there is a large migrant population the maternity units have not the capacity to deal with the number of births. I’m not sure that I understand the need to point out that these births are to non-English born mothers, not too long ago we were hearing that the UK birth rate was dropping and we were facing into an Elder-Boom with not enough young people to fund the state pension etc. (but then again there never is)

Now, I don’t see why this article should have such a title, especially if these women and their partners are legal residents who contribute to NI and so forth. Perhaps its because I in fact fall into that group, granted I don’t live in south London. I wasn’t born in the UK, I do however pay taxes and NI, and our baby is being cared for within the NHS. Of course I could get into a rant here about the fact that our fertility treatment wasn’t and wouldn’t have been because of the local health board’s policy to not fund in cases male infertility, and if we had required IVF we could have had one cycle (which costs two times the treatment we did need) .

The up shot of this is that I am concerned that we will have an out burst along the lines of “all these migrants, coming over here, taking our jobs, with their work ethic, having children, with their work ethic….” and so on.

If people are willing to come over here and do jobs other people turn their noses up at, and do them well and with pride in doing a decent day’s work, and have children that they then raise to take a similar pride in themselves and their place in society, then they should be made welcome.

I prefer that to the school girls in Wales who don’t care about school work or skills and that they plan on having a baby (by anyone) and dropping out of school because it is “easier”, what kind of ethic or self-pride are they intending to pass on?