Just whom are our politicians working for? Most of us appreciate the NHS, which is free at the point of delivery.

When we need medical help, a nurse, doctor or paramedic will be there for us, we are told, and unlike Americans, we do not have to suddenly produce our health insurance papers while we are in the throws of dying. However, it has been reported that our politicians, whose job it is to safeguard its people, are in fact conniving to dismantle the NHS and turn it into a private enterprise.

Why? Who will that help? Certainly not us. Politicians bleat that the NHS is no longer affordable. If they start dishing out our money to ever-increasing committees for medical procurement who have to employ private companies to provide the health care needed, then it may well be unaffordable.

However, at the moment, it has been reported that we spend less on our NHS than the other countries in Europe, and that it has been rated as one of the best in the world. So if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Doctors

Then of course, we can’t ignore the doctors’ plight with the junior doctors striking, trying to get a stringent contract altered.

It’s another case for our politicians ignoring those they are supposed to serve. What happened to the ‘forty-hour week’?

It certainly doesn’t seem to apply to junior doctors in hospitals. Why not? Not affordable, huh – then what has happened to all the National Insurance money we have paid out over all these years?

We should not be punished for politicians who have squandered the money on things other than health. If it had all been invested wisely, I suspect there would be no issues with ‘affordability’.

GPs

However, I haven’t heard of any GPs working 86 hours a week yet – or am I mistaken? Reports I’ve heard from locals that they cannot see a doctor for a MONTH seem quite incredible.

Dissension among the ranks

Then, another GP has decried the strikes. No matter how bad the situation, he believes that doctors should not use patients as ammunition in any fights they have with their employer.

He says that commitment and dedication to the job seem to have been lost. I can’t help agreeing with him to a certain extent.

There are other ways to challenge your boss: negotiating is one way. Voting with your feet is another, although this may be happening already for one head of department reported he had to do weekend work himself on his own because no junior doctors would work that weekend.

Are you SURE you know where your ancestors are buried?

Like many others, I have always wanted to know about my ancestors.

On my last visit to my birth place, Tasmania, I went to Cornelian Bay near Hobart and saw my ancestors’ graves and proved that my grandfather was not a bigamist as documents seemed to indicate.

Then I read recently that a man in Hobart was digging up his garden when he found a skull. After the police came and forensics stepped in, it was proved to be human.

Apparently, the garden was once a burial ground and the bodies had been moved to Cornelian Bay. Someone is obviously missing a head, but who?

Fraud

There are so many scams out these days and they are getting cockier by the minute. The foreign voice telling me there was something wrong with my computer did not bat an eyelid, as it were, when I suggested what she was doing was fraud and asked for her phone number.

I should be able to report her but without her contact details how? Recent reports suggest that £27 billion pounds was lost through fraud in 2014.

When quizzed, the National Crime Agency said they were working closely with the newly established Home Office Joint Fraud Task Force to strengthen their response to reports of irresponsible/criminal websites.

Don’t they know we do not want a ‘strengthened response’? We want them to catch the blighters, close down their operations and put them in jail, or put them to work to redeem the cash they extricated from the innocent.

On a happier note:

Apparently the flying hoverboard is here and it is unlikely to catch on fire. However, don’t get your parachutes ready yet, it is only in the early stages, looks like a brick, only goes one foot high and can only run for six minutes before needing to be charged again.