Sitting Ducks
Watch out for those buses, man! You could like fall in the road and they'd run right over you.
I know local newspapers are an easy target. In my formative years we couldn't wait for Thursday when the Surrey Mirror (known locally as the Surrey Error) hit the streets, and all the hilarity that ensued. The Error is still responsible for my favourite sandwich-board headline of all time, and I've quoted it so often I'm now not sure whether it actually existed or whether it was just a figment of my imagination. Anyway.
Tragic Steamroller man dies a hero
will take some surpassing. Although the one on the left comes a close second.
But I digress. I came here to moan about the Islington Gazette. Two subheadings from this weeks issue caught my eye.
Baby Unit Faces Axe - The Whittington Hospital's maternity unit – where Islington's X Factor winner Alexandra Burke was born – could be axed.
I mean, I know we live in a society obsessed with celebrity, but perhaps the fact that 'The City Of London Maternity Hospital' was founded on that site in 1750 and has been supporting the pregnant of London for the last 260 years would perhaps stir the outrage slightly more than the loss of an amateur crooner's birthplace?
(Actually, it wasn't called 'The City Of London Maternity Hospital' until 1918. When it was founded in 1750 it was called 'Hospital for Married Women in the City of London and parts adjacent and also for sick and lame outpatients'. Snappy.)
This morning's second headline of annoyance reads:
Campaigners have won their battle to stop strippers and naked table dancers from performing at the former headquarters of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn.
I know that the Islington Gazette and its owners Archant (formerly Eastern Counties Newspapers but obviously in need of a rebrand into something insipid and pointless) are big blue flag-wavers, which is perhaps a foolish approach in an area so staunchly socialist, but this sort of guff is just hastening the rapid demise of the local newspaper industry, which is already on its knees and gasping for breath. The Islington Gazette itself managed to shed over a quarter of its readers between 2008 and 2009 and is now flogging just over 6,000 copies a week. In an area with a potential readership in the hundreds of thousands, it's a bit pathetic. These feeble attempts at sleight-of-hand digs at local politicians and drawing obscure celebrity connections show the local newspaper for what it is - desperately out of touch with its area and the people that live in it.
(Incidentally, I can't check the links to the stories above, as the website is down.)
The Internet’s Force For Good
Baby. Chilled.
I would just like to commend IanVisits to everyone. Not only does he provide a superb service to Londoners, cataloguing the best of the lesser-known events around the city and emailing them to everyone once a week for free, he writes engagingly and has proven to be a really nice bloke by dropping by this blog and pointing out a way of me recovering the majority of my inane ramblings easily and without pain or stress. So, thank you Ian. You are a straight-up genuine nice guy.
The blog got damaged by a dodgy security update. What can you do? Everything got wiped.
Sadly, I couldn't recover the comments on those pages that got lost - many of them I really wish I could ... so many kind, genuinely lovely remarks on the arrival of my son, and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles that my beautiful wife overcame to ensure his safe delivery. She is a medical miracle. In the week since we almost lost her, she spent a total of four days in Intensive Care, three days in the maternity ward, and precisely 7 days later I find myself at home dealing with the biggest avalanche of shit from a tiny bottom that I could have ever imagined. And it makes me the happiest man alive. I have written a song called 'Drowning In A Sea Of Sticky Poo' which I plan to sing at his 14th birthday party.
I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Boring, aren't I. I cannot begin to describe the gratitude I hold for the staff of University College Hospital - from the Belgian Professor who came in at 3am on a Sunday morning to advise the team on a technique for identifying rogue bleeding using a chemical injected into the bloodstream and then picked up using radiology to identify the points of escape, to the wonderful consultant who drove the whole thing forward, shouted and cajoled and borrowed and significantly achieved whilst keeping me informed and helping the situation to be, for me, just that little bit easier to handle, to the anaesthetist who was with us through contractions, c-sections, epidural, resuscitation and visited on a daily basis to remind us that it was the scariest experience of his professional career ... the midwives and nurses both in Intensive Care, Maternity Critical Care and plain old Maternity who monitored our every flickering improvement and made things as comfortable as they could be ... everyone should be (and many have professed to be) proud of what they achieved that night. And if ever there was an advert for a health care system that relieves the pressure and concern of transaction and allows professional health care staff to do what they do best, then this was it. Expect me to be at the front of the parade protesting against conservative plans to dismantle the NHS.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled ramblings.