Family is for life, and for Christmas
The Doctor is NOT on call!
GPs want to abolish home visits because they reckon they’re too busy to go out to the frail and elderly.
What in God’s name could be more important than attending to a sick, elderly person who can’t get to the surgery? What are they supposed to do, die?
I know GPs are busy but theirs isn’t just a job. They also have a duty. And a big part of that duty is taking care of the elderly.
Dr Andy Parkin proposed this shameful move (thank God he’s not my GP) which is to be discussed by the British Medical Association. That’s the same organisation which under the last Labour government negotiated a contract that got them out of evening and weekend working and is the major cause of the current chaos in A&E departments.
The BMA reckons too many able-bodied people demand home visits when they’re perfectly able to travel to the practice.
Well, say “no” to them. But what kind of doctor says “no” to an 80-year-old who can’t get out of bed?
Probably doctors like Andy Parkin.
■ GERI Horner, formerly Ginger Spice, has spent the past four years writing a novel. (My pal novelist Amanda Prowse manages one every three months and they’re all best sellers). Anyway, the 47-year-old, who married Christian Horner, millionaire boss of the Red Bull Formula One Racing team, wants to rewrite her legacy: “I want to be remembered as a writer,” she says loftily.
Tough, Geri. You won’t be. Like it or not you’ll go down in history as the cheeky, ginger-haired Spice Girl in the Union Jack dress.
Unless of course the book is hideously bad (and if it’s taken four years, it’s hardly flowing) and she’ll be remembered as the Spice Girl who couldn’t write.
JUST 18 months into his marriage and the estrangement is almost complete. Because this Christmas Harry and Meghan aren’t just turning their backs on Wills and Kate, but on the Queen and the entire Royal Family. For the first time ever – apart from the year he missed because he was serving in Afghanistan – Harry’s not going to Sandringham for Christmas.Which isn’t just selfish, it’s damned insensitive. Because while we all pray Her Maj and the Duke have many Christmases to come the fact is the Queen is 93 and Philip is 98.
But the Sussexes seem determined to ignore the realities and responsibilities of their royal role and do whatever they feel like, no matter how it hurts or affects others. The Queen loves her entire family to be around her at Christmas – and it isn’t much to ask considering the lives her position and her wealth have afforded each and every one of them.
Even Princess Diana, when she was estranged from Charles, respected the Queen and royal traditions enough to insist Wills and Harry go to Sandringham even though it meant she’d be alone. Why can’t Meghan and Harry stop behaving like sulky teenagers and let the Windsors get to know Archie?
I get that Meghan wants to share Archie’s first Christmas with Mum Doria. But they will already have spent Thanksgiving with her and wouldn’t Doria be blown away by Christmas at Sandringham – an invite I’m sure Her Maj would be delighted to extend.
Or are the Sussexes just making yet another silly point: that Christmas at Sandringham, along with many other royal responsibilities and traditions, just doesn’t matter to them?
It’s hard not to conclude that Meghan has played a huge role in Harry’s decision to stay away. So, is the game plan to totally isolate him from his family? Is she so selfabsorbed she didn’t realise that becoming a royal, with all the wealth and privilege that affords, involves compromises and responsibilities? Doesn’t she understand that, because he lost his mum so early in life,
Harry needs his family more than most? Surely Meghan of all people understands how painful family estrangement can be?
Does she really want that for her husband and son? Harry often speaks about “now that I have my own family” but it needn’t be – shouldn’t be – just the three of them against the world. Apart from her mum, Meghan has nothing to do with her family and Harry is moving further and further away from his. Can this really be good for Archie? Of course they adore him, but, growing up, he’ll need his extended family. Or will his “family” just be an everchanging line-up of Hollywood A-listers?
THIS Christmas could have been a time for Archie’s cousins to get to know him, for the Windsors to spend time with him. It could have been an opportunity for Harry to mend fences with his brother.
Instead this childish pair have chosen to snub the Queen – and everyone else. And the negative publicity they knew this would produce will just fuel their self-indulgent whine that they are victims of a nasty press that doesn’t understand the pressures they’re under (of being waited on hand and foot in the Queen’s country mansion?)
The pair of them need to grow up and realise not everything is about them. Christmas at Sandringham is about the Queen and if they respect nothing else about royal life they SHOULD respect her!
A BUNCH of academics from County Kildare’s Maynooth University are examining the status of Kylie Minogue as a cultural icon: “We’ll also be looking at Kylie’s status as an older pop star and what it means to negotiate age and femaleness in the pop industry.”
Seriously? Is this how academics fritter away taxpayers’ money? And when these academics have loftily opined (fit only for that scholastic tome, Chat Magazine?), what earthly difference will it make to anything?
FERGIE says she wants Poldark star, Eleanor Tomlinson, to play her as a young woman in the TV drama The Crown. And, for her in middle age, she fancies Julianne Moore.
Without being too cruel, has the Duchess looked in the mirror? The only thing she has in common with these two beauties is red hair. Fergie needs to remember the reason the public (initially) fell in love with her was that she was a thumping great farmy Sloane without beauty or sophistication but who looked like a shed load of fun. She was never movie star material. #GetRealFergie
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AFTER a zillion years in this job, you think you’ve heard it all about diva celebrities. But no. It’s been revealed that Robbie Williams refuses to apply his own deodorant and has someone else do it for him. He claims it’s a superstition and that it was “quite a while before I realised it wasn’t normal”. Tosh! And while I have no evidence for this, I just have a feeling that Robbie Williams is a big “sweater” which makes the whole thing doubly disgusting!