Snow joke, the way we react to weather
Widdecombe
IWASN’T so much snowed in as snowed out. Having been filming in London all week, the news from Dartmoor was of closed roads, large drifts and vehicles stuck all over the place. My neighbours were out with spades trying to dig out stranded motorists. Schools were closed and all public transport at a halt. So I opted to stay on in London. It was a responsible but very reluctant decision.
I love Dartmoor in deep snow when kids are tobogganing and my log fire is crackling. Only recently I was almost lamenting the run of mild winters and now that joy has come I am hundreds of miles away!
That view however is the luxury of the healthy retired. For people trying to get to work, visit hospitals or take children to school deep snow in this country is a nightmare as it is for the emergency services. Yet other countries manage much worse year on year and laugh at Britain.
Part of the explanation for our helplessness is precisely that we have such levels of bad weather only occasionally and therefore it is not worth the investment in snow ploughs and other equipment which those in colder climes take for granted and use extensively.
When they buy cars they buy for rough winters and their railways are similarly designed, whereas here we expect largely temperate winters with just occasional really heavy snow and ice. Indeed we have been thrown by just a week of it.
The other part of the explanation is a sadder one. We are now enslaved by the compensation culture, whereby one injury on a station platform or in a school playground can result in a huge financial penalty so it is not very surprising that heads close schools and the trains do not run.
Common sense fairly screams at us to face up to it and limit the runaway bus which compensation has become but government after government THE news that Ashya King, the child whose parents snatched him from hospital to take him abroad for treatment, is now pronounced cleared of cancer should cause the medical profession in this country to search its own soul with humility but sadly there is no evidence it is doing so.
Three years ago Brett and Naghmeh King defied doctors, who believed that the child, who was suffering from a rare brain tumour, could not benefit from being taken to Prague where there was a world-renowned hospital specialising in proton therapy. They simply took him out of hospital shirks the task. While on the subject of snow, this is the time for neighbours to lay aside British reticence and make sure they call upon the elderly to see that they are and fled the country. So utterly convinced were doctors of their own righteousness that the parents were pursued by an international police hunt and thrown into jail while the poor sick child was put in a Spanish hospital under armed guard. How kind, how caring, how very compassionate. How proud the doctors must have felt.
Matters having reached such a pass, a High Court judge allowed the family to proceed to Prague after all while doctors still insisted the parents were wrong and indeed that they had reduced the boy’s chances of surviving by 30 per cent.
The treatment worked, Ashya is THE Marie Curie charity has come up with a new twist for its daffodil appeal this year. I was invited by a company called Hotter Shoes to wear a pair with a daffodil motif. I declined because I have difficulty getting shoes which fit, being what is best described as a two and three-quarters. Yet it is a good idea because whereas daffodil badges can be thrown in the bin after the day is over people keep shoes and therefore I suspect reminders about the wonderful work this charity does will keep surfacing on feet all through the spring and summer. all right and do not need anything.
It can not only alleviate minor misery but also prevent suffering and indeed even save lives.
ASHYA KING AND WHY PHYSICIANS SHOULD SEEK TO HEAL THEMSELVES
clear of the tumour and leads a normal life and crucially now the NHS refers other children for the very treatment it was so sure would not succeed.
Yet no lessons appear to have been learned. Doctors fought hand, tooth and nail against Charlie Gard being taken to the US and by the time the legal processes had been dragged out (as the course of justice in this country always is) the American specialist said Charlie was beyond his help.
In both cases the parents were not proposing to take their offspring to some remote witch doctor practising magic in the middle of nowhere or even seeking alternative medicine but were instead wishing to have their children treated at world-renowned hospitals by pioneering medics.
I have no doubt at all that doctors believe utterly in the decisions they take and that they act on their best judgment but it is time they accepted that best judgment does not mean infallible judgment. They can – and sometimes do – get it wrong, while supposedly ignorant parents, their judgment deemed distorted by understandable emotion, can – and do – get it right.
Congratulations to Brett and Naghmeh King.