The Night Mail

[iL Dottore]

8 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 .

 

One other Flying Doctor service that should get more coverage is its Memory Lane trips - again free of charge:

 

"For people with a terminal illness or in palliative care, a simple chance to reconnect with their lives in their final days/weeks can mean the world. Flying Doctor Memory Lane is a free service that allows  people to visit a place of personal significance; to admire their own garden, to feel the breeze of the seaside, or to be surrounded  once more by loved ones, friends  and pets in a place they loved.

 

The custom-built Memory Lane vehicles enable people in end-of-life care to overcome access barriers, making it possible for them to visit  a place that holds meaning safely and comfortably. Their expertise in transporting people to health and wellbeing services means they are well-place to deliver on their commitment.

 

Memory Lane is a no-cost service and is entirely donor-funded and staffed by medically trained health care professionals who volunteer their time."

 

Coupled with the Voluntary assisted dying laws we have, that could make someone's last day a peaceful experience at a place they loved, rather than weeks or months later in agony or a drugged out haze in a hospital ward, surrounded by strangers and machines that go ping.

 

 

This is how end-of-life care should be managed!
 

I’ll be doing a version of this for Lucy and Schotty (Mrs iD and I have decided that when it’s time for them to go, we’ll euthanise them at home - together with their loved ones, amongst familiar surroundings, at peace, unstressed and not scared). And I expect that, when my time comes, I will discharge myself home and enjoy the pleasures of my life one last time.

 

Someone once wrote that death to modern susceptibilities is as pornography was to the Victorians: something you knew existed, but something you certainly didn’t talk about and avoided thinking about.

 

Unhappily, far too many people die in hospital - often after considerable expense has been taken to prolong their lives by a mere few weeks, if not just a few days. And in another interesting and provocative journal article, it was claimed that for every hundred pounds spent on your healthcare, over £80 of that £100 will be spent on end of life care - to little or no avail.

 

Unfortunately, both traditional medical training, and – especially – the law do not recognise that dying can only be managed and not prevented. Whilst letting a patient die does, on the surface, seem to be the complete antithesis of what a doctor should be doing, in reality successfully managing a patient’s death is as important as preventing death where it can be prevented (although to be pedantic, you are not preventing death, just postponing it to a more natural time).

 

The Victorian approach to death, considering it to be as much part of life as birth and marriage, was (and I would argue is) a heathy one. 
 

Edited June 15 by iL Dottore

[SteveyDee68]

Oh goody. They fixed the adverts. 🙄

 

So now, not only do I have to put up with wall-to-wall reporting on the general election and the European foot-the-ball competition, I get to see one - sometimes two (identical) - videos appear at the head of each page before some floating mini-advert appears over what I am reading, as welcome as a large bluebottle fly over your lunch.

 

Shall have to investigate getting a Premium membership (again), probably to find I can’t compete the process (again) 

 

*sigh*
 

Edited June 15 by SteveyDee68

[DenysW]

12 hours ago, SM42 said:

The usual way is to pump water uphill, but creating hydrogen sounds a good alternative. 

There's also a technology to liquify air, store it cold (77K or thereabouts, potentially for months) then release it through electricity-generating turbines. It's asserted to have about the same efficiency (about 70%) as batteries. A large-scale proof-of-concept site has just been announced.

 

However, all storage costs big money and, shades of the NHS, we-the-country have not funded it at a rate that matches generation.

[br2975]

Another 'Honours List' goes by, and still no mention for yours truly.

.

An O.B.E. for services to 'online shite-hawkery and sarcastic retorts' has failed to materialise again this year.

.

 

[Winslow Boy]

2 minutes ago, br2975 said:

Another 'Honours List' goes by, and still no mention for yours truly.

.

An O.B.E. for services to 'online shite-hawkery and sarcastic retorts' has failed to materialise again this year.

.

 

Maybe your not saying it to the right people. TNM'rs not included in that category obviously.

[AndyID]

17 minutes ago, DenysW said:

There's also a technology to liquify air, store it cold (77K or thereabouts, potentially for months) then release it through electricity-generating turbines. It's asserted to have about the same efficiency (about 70%) as batteries. A large-scale proof-of-concept site has just been announced.

 

However, all storage costs big money and, shades of the NHS, we-the-country have not funded it at a rate that matches generation.

I think it's important that the real long-term scrap and disposal costs are factored into the equations. A hydrogen "battery" is a lot different from a lithium based battery.

[Hroth]

19 minutes ago, DenysW said:

There's also a technology to liquify air, store it cold (77K or thereabouts, potentially for months) then release it through electricity-generating turbines. It's asserted to have about the same efficiency (about 70%) as batteries. A large-scale proof-of-concept site has just been announced.

 

However, all storage costs big money and, shades of the NHS, we-the-country have not funded it at a rate that matches generation.

 

Liquifying all the air on the planet will be the next Bond villains nefarious scheme, holding the world to ransom and leaving us all gasping for breath!

 

3 minutes ago, br2975 said:

Another 'Honours List' goes by, and still no mention for yours truly.

.

An O.B.E. for services to 'online shite-hawkery and sarcastic retorts' has failed to materialise again this year.

.

 

 

Not even a BEM?

Shame!

 

[Northmoor]

4 minutes ago, br2975 said:

Another 'Honours List' goes by, and still no mention for yours truly.

.

An O.B.E. for services to 'online shite-hawkery and sarcastic retorts' has failed to materialise again this year.

.

 

My sympathies.  My own services to mediocrity continue to go unrecognised. 

Never mind, I'll carry on working for another year (but not too hard, obviously).

[AndyID]

2 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Liquifying all the air on the planet will be the next Bond villains nefarious scheme, holding the world to ransom and leaving us all gasping for breath!

 

I wouldn't worry too much about that. The waste from using it is water.

[Oldddudders]

12 minutes ago, br2975 said:

Another 'Honours List' goes by, and still no mention for yours truly.

.

An O.B.E. for services to 'online shite-hawkery and sarcastic retorts' has failed to materialise again this year.

.

 

In my days at South Eastern Division, 40 years ago, it was easy to get the OBE. If you were unwise enough to be in the office on a Friday afternoon, inevitably a deputation of long-faced train-planners would descend upon you, seeking Solomon's wisdom about the cock-up that was about to bedevil the weekend engineering works. It was you they importuned as you were the Only Bu**er 'Ere - OBE.

[Happy Hippo]

41 minutes ago, br2975 said:

Another 'Honours List' goes by, and still no mention for yours truly.

.

An O.B.E. for services to 'online shite-hawkery and sarcastic retorts' has failed to materialise again this year.

.

 

Never mind Brian, at least you won't need to dig out a suit and suffer the IET in order go to the palace to collect your gong from Chaz and Cammie.

 

I really thought PB  was a dead cert for getting Paula Vennel's returned CBE...  Repurposed as the new award of Chief Bear Emeritus.

 

I've been declining gongs for years now:

 

The last one I accepted was a KCB* for failing to properly clear a barbed wire fence on the extraction from a covert raid on a Patisserie Valerie depot.

 

*Knackers Caught Badly

 

 

[polybear]

59 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

Maybe your not saying it to the right people. TNM'rs not included in that category obviously.

 

Obviously not greasing the right paws....

[Tony_S]

21 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

a covert raid on a Patisserie Valerie

When Aditi was studying at KCL there seemed to be a few  Patisserie Valerie on her route home. I always thought the supplied box was very large compared to the small cake she brought home for me. 

[Happy Hippo]

38 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

When Aditi was studying at KCL there seemed to be a few  Patisserie Valerie on her route home. I always thought the supplied box was very large compared to the small cake she brought home for me. 

It was full when she left the shop! (Or should I not have said that?)

 

In other news...

 

When we left to go on our break in Dorset, Morgan had arrived to do some work in the garden.

 

When we returned, he had laid a number of much needed slabs:  Both as an extension to a path to reach the new garden shed, and creating a solid work area outside of the woodshed which as you know is behind the garage.  The latter will provide me with an outdoor cutting area rather than having to use the driveway.

 

So I was in for a bit of a surprise when I went into the garage this morning, hoping to do some catch up work on Pantmawr North.

 

A bag of opened cement,  bags of sand, gravel and a cement mixer, plus lots of the required tools for slabbing where in the area where I'd hoped to be working.  

 

Since it's pouring down with rain, I can't lift it outside, so I'm forced to review my plans.

 

I suspect this will involve mulling it all over whilst gorging myself on cake: Purely to keep my morale high you'll understand.

 

 

[PhilJ W]

7 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

It wasn’t that long ago that the water available for people to drink, even in cities like London, was so contaminated as to make Britain’s rivers today look like pristine, pure, Alpine streams. Back then, E Coli* was the least of your problems, waterborne - and lethal - diseases like cholera regularly turned up.

When doing my family tree I found that one of my 3 X great grandfathers had a family, a wife and two young daughters who all died within a few months. The cause was cholera, further research revealed that cholera and typhoid was very common, appearing in different parts of the country annually right up until the 1930's. 

 

6 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

This is how end-of-life care should be managed!
 

I’ll be doing a version of this for Lucy and Schotty (Mrs iD and I have decided that when it’s time for them to go, we’ll euthanise them at home - together with their loved ones, amongst familiar surroundings, at peace, unstressed and not scared). And I expect that, when my time comes, I will discharge myself home and enjoy the pleasures of my life one last time.

 

Someone once wrote that death to modern susceptibilities is as pornography was to the Victorians: something you knew existed, but something you certainly didn’t talk about and avoided thinking about.

 

Unhappily, far too many people die in hospital - often after considerable expense has been taken to prolong their lives by a mere few weeks, if not just a few days. And in another interesting and provocative journal article, it was claimed that for every hundred pounds spent on your healthcare, over £80 of that £100 will be spent on end of life care - to little or no avail.

 

Unfortunately, both traditional medical training, and – especially – the law do not recognise that dying can only be managed and not prevented. Whilst letting a patient die does, on the surface, seem to be the complete antithesis of what a doctor should be doing, in reality successfully managing a patient’s death is as important as preventing death where it can be prevented (although to be pedantic, you are not preventing death, just postponing it to a more natural time).

 

The Victorian approach to death, considering it to be as much part of life as birth and marriage, was (and I would argue is) a heathy one. 
 

When my brother died of cancer 16 months ago they simply put him on palliative care only, just two weeks before he died. Strangely enough only a year before that  there was no trace of cancer.

[rockershovel]

22 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I REALLY like this idea.  Especially when they discover that the ambulance, A&E and overnight monitoring for concussion after they drank too much, fell over and banged their head - typical of thousands of cases the NHS has to deal with every week - cost the NHS about nine grand.

If nothing else it might silence those poisonous people who say it's all the fault of (a very small number of) foreigners abusing the system.

A classic example of British either/or thinking. 

 

Don't you perhaps think that BOTH might be a problem? Right now we have a system whereby a person with no right to be in the country, can present themselves for many, many tens of thousands of pounds' worth of treatment for a pre-existing condition AND conduct a lengthy court case at public expense, on the basis that the fact of having received that treatment constitutes their right to continue to do so AND be supported indefinitely by the taxpayer while doing so. I would seriously question that that was the intended purpose of the NHS founders. 

 

As to the notion of presenting costed breakdowns of the cost of treating sundry Saturday night misadventures to the sort of people who tend to pitch up in A&E, in the hope of appealing to their better natures... good luck with THAT. 

[rockershovel]

7 hours ago, DenysW said:

There's also a technology to liquify air, store it cold (77K or thereabouts, potentially for months) then release it through electricity-generating turbines. It's asserted to have about the same efficiency (about 70%) as batteries. A large-scale proof-of-concept site has just been announced.

 

However, all storage costs big money and, shades of the NHS, we-the-country have not funded it at a rate that matches generation.

So... these storage costs are added to the cost of generating power at the wrong time, at an excessive cost? 

[rockershovel]

I've lately been working on a drilled crossing under the railway at a benighted spot called Shippea Hill. I know rural British stations frequently bear little relation to their notional names, but this one seems to be the avatar of the type. 

 

Watching the trains clatter past on their low embankment, I notice that one type in use seems to be a four-car set which I take to be diesel-electric - the second or third car seems to be half-length power car. 

 

Anyone know what these are? 

 

*BR class 755 Stadler FLIRT, it seems. I can only assume the acronym means something else in Swiss? 

 

 

Edited June 15 by rockershovel

[rockershovel]

8 hours ago, iL Dottore said:

This is how end-of-life care should be managed!
 

I’ll be doing a version of this for Lucy and Schotty (Mrs iD and I have decided that when it’s time for them to go, we’ll euthanise them at home - together with their loved ones, amongst familiar surroundings, at peace, unstressed and not scared). And I expect that, when my time comes, I will discharge myself home and enjoy the pleasures of my life one last time.

 

Someone once wrote that death to modern susceptibilities is as pornography was to the Victorians: something you knew existed, but something you certainly didn’t talk about and avoided thinking about.

 

Unhappily, far too many people die in hospital - often after considerable expense has been taken to prolong their lives by a mere few weeks, if not just a few days. And in another interesting and provocative journal article, it was claimed that for every hundred pounds spent on your healthcare, over £80 of that £100 will be spent on end of life care - to little or no avail.

 

Unfortunately, both traditional medical training, and – especially – the law do not recognise that dying can only be managed and not prevented. Whilst letting a patient die does, on the surface, seem to be the complete antithesis of what a doctor should be doing, in reality successfully managing a patient’s death is as important as preventing death where it can be prevented (although to be pedantic, you are not preventing death, just postponing it to a more natural time).

 

The Victorian approach to death, considering it to be as much part of life as birth and marriage, was (and I would argue is) a heathy one. 
 

I think this comes from the passing from public life of the generation who knew about death from their wartime experiences, and the subsequent instillation of a sort of soft-headed magical thinking in the general population. 

 

I grew up with the ever-present background of my fathers' early death from his war wounds, and my mothers' chronic ill-health and eventual early death, totally worn out and quite senile in her early 60s.

 

O death, where is thy sting-a-ling? Her last years were an expensive Via Dolorosa serving no useful purpose at all. Her final passing was a merciful release and although I would never claim to be a devout man, the forms of my childhood religion a comfort at times. 

 

My daughter now works in the NHS and has a necessary coping mechanism for some of the things she sees; but she was quite panic-stricken by the orchestrated hysteria of covid. She developed a sort of automatic reaction, a furious rant about a colleague of hers who died with covid listed as a co-morbidity ... apparently it is totally unacceptable that a relatively young man (he seems to have been in his 50s) should ever die of natural causes. I don't believe she realises she is doing it; it switches on abruptly and she switches back to "normal" when she is done. 

 

One of my sons lost his mother-in-law as a consequence of the general abandonment of long-term outpatient care during covid. She wasnt a well woman but was quite stable; but the stress and interruption to her therapy were too much. That left him with the problem of explaining it to his daughter, then about 4. She now comes to me with questions about "is Nana Baa really gone to live in the stars?" to which I have no answer, being forbidden on pain of something unspecified but awful from dissenting from the "Party line". 

 

She says prayers now at meal-times, having learnt this at her C of E primary school and is rather coming to be aware of the contradictions. My daughter's self-righteous atheism doesn't help, when her children ask who their cousin talks to with her eyes closed. 

 

Im awaiting developments with interest. 

[iL Dottore]

37 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

*BR class 755 Stadler FLIRT, it seems. I can only assume the acronym means something else in Swiss? 

FLIRT is the acronym for Fast Light Intercity and Regional Train (and also “Flinker Leichter Intercity- und Regional-Triebzug - the original German)*

 

FLIRT is complete, modular, series of EMUs and DEMUs (see: https://stadlerrail.com/en/products/)

 

* when you say “Swiss” to refer to the language, are you referring to (Swiss) German, French, Italian or Romansch? (all official Swiss languages)

[SteveyDee68]

Just woken from a couple of hours’ sleep, being shattered after working this morning, went to pass comment and discovered a post sitting in the editor, so posted it.

 

Then thought it seemed familiar…

 

It was - I’ve repeat posted something from a few hours ago!

 

But why has the editor retained my last post when I had, in fact, already posted it?

 

Curiouser and curiouser…

 

Currently suffering from GOMS

Edited June 15 by SteveyDee68
Repeat post!!

[rockershovel]

24 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

FLIRT is the acronym for Fast Light Intercity and Regional Train (and also “Flinker Leichter Intercity- und Regional-Triebzug - the original German)*

 

FLIRT is complete, modular, series of EMUs and DEMUs (see: https://stadlerrail.com/en/products/)

 

* when you say “Swiss” to refer to the language, are you referring to (Swiss) German, French, Italian or Romansch? (all official Swiss languages)

* I neither know, nor care - since the point seems equally valid for all possible answers! 

[J. S. Bach]

22 minutes ago, SteveyDee68 said:

Just woken from a couple of hours’ sleep, being shattered after working this morning, went to pass comment and discovered a post sitting in the editor, so posted it.

 

Then thought it seemed familiar…

 

It was - I’ve repeat posted something from a few hours ago!

 

But why has the editor retained my last post when I had, in fact, already posted it?

 

Curiouser and curiouser…

 

Currently suffering from GOMS

I have had similar experiences; I just delete the contents and start a new post.

[SM42]

Nasty, often fatal, water borne diseases and other nasties I find fascinating. 

 

The fascinating bit  is how on earth did we get on before the great works of sanitation were built. 

 

How did iron age man cope?

 

How did we survive so long as a species?

 

While we are at it, how many did we lose in experiments as to what was edible and what wasn't ?

 

 

 

Andy

[AndyID]

19 minutes ago, SM42 said:

Nasty, often fatal, water borne diseases and other nasties I find fascinating. 

 

The fascinating bit  is how on earth did we get on before the great works of sanitation were built. 

 

How did iron age man cope?

 

How did we survive so long as a species?

 

While we are at it, how many did we lose in experiments as to what was edible and what wasn't ?

 

 

 

Andy

 

Polio was an interesting example. It was more prevalent in children who lived in homes with good sanitation.